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High Street Partners, a developer of business software and services focused around international expansion, inked $8 million in new financing. Baird Capital led the round, which included participation from Sigma Partners and Gold Hill Capital.

PRESS RELEASE
High Street Partners (HSP), the leader in business software and services designed to simplify international expansion, today announced an $8 million round of financing, led by institutional venture capital investor Baird Capital, along with Sigma Partners and Gold Hill Capital. This is the largest investment round that HSP has raised to date, and the proceeds have been earmarked to accelerate the launch of newly developed applications within its cloud-based software platform, HSP OverseasConnect®.

“With these proceeds, HSP will be dramatically enhancing its ability to go to market with the full solution set all organizations need as they expand and operate overseas,” said Larry Harding, Founder and President of High Street Partners. “HSP uniquely supports the entire spectrum of Finance & Accounting, Human Resources, and Legal requirements arising with an international business.”

This expansion round of financing will further spur High Street Partners growth. “We have a wonderful partnership with HSP’s management team,” said Benedict Rocchio, Partner with Baird Capital’s Venture group. “They have done an excellent job supporting their clients’ international needs with a solution that really resonates with Finance and HR executives in the middle market. We believe the company is well-positioned for continued success as the preferred partner to help companies grow their businesses globally.”

“HSP solutions help customers focus on driving their business,” Harding points out. “Our software, services, and proprietary content allow them to manage and control their international operations more effectively. We have extended the capabilities of HSP OverseasConnect beyond the core accounting, document storage, and expense reporting applications hosted on the platform today, and with the advent of HSP Global Payroll, we offer the first true SaaS application in the market.”

HSP Global Payroll allows customers to manage payroll in any country in a secure environment architected in accordance with global data protection requirements. It offers unprecedented flexibility and full compliance with local statutory requirements, completely from the cloud. “HSP Global Payroll is a cost effective solution whether you’re meeting the payroll needs for a single in-country employee or a significantly larger local presence,” Harding said.

“HSP is strengthening its cloud-based solutions in a unique way,” said Paul Flanagan, Managing Director at Sigma Partners. “Their business has grown tremendously, and we’re excited to continue to support the company as it pursues a rapidly expanding market opportunity.”

Combined with HSP Overseas Direct® managed service offerings, the HSP OverseasConnect platform provides solutions appropriate for the entire lifecycle of international expansion, from planning, set-up, and implementation services, to standard finance and accounting (“F&A”) outsourcing, to local statutory compliance and corporate secretarial (“CoSec”) services. Says Harding, “HSP offers the full range of solutions customers need related to their international operations. Some customers may choose to utilize only our technology platform, others only some or all of our managed services, and for others both solution sets are what best meets their needs. In all instances, HSP Advisory Services are available to provide guidance and expertise designed to deal with the inevitable complexities and challenges, of all kinds, that are apt to occur at any stage of the process.”

About Baird Capital
Baird Capital makes venture capital, growth equity and private equity investments in strategically targeted sectors around the world. Baird Capital’s venture team invests in early and expansion-stage technology-enabled services and healthcare companies. Having invested in more than 260 companies over its history, Baird Capital partners with entrepreneurs and, leveraging its executive networks, strives to build exceptional companies. Baird Capital is the direct private investment arm of Robert W. Baird & Co. For more information, please visit www.BairdCapital.com.

About Sigma Partners
Founded in 1984, Sigma Partners is a leading early-stage venture capital firm. The Sigma team uses their deep operational experience to provide entrepreneurs with practical strategic counsel through every phase of company growth. With over $1.5 billion under management and bicoastal offices, Sigma invests in innovative technology startups across the United States. Some of the market leading companies in which Sigma has invested include Atria, Aprimo, Acquia, Internet Security Systems, Initiate, m-Qube, Nasuni, Octane, Rethink Robotics, Storage Networks, Tradex, Vermeer, Vignette, and Vlingo. For more information, please visit www.sigmapartners.com.

About Gold Hill Capital
Gold Hill Capital is a private venture firm focused on providing debt and equity capital to expansion stage, technology companies. Gold Hill works with companies to deliver flexible financing solutions. Gold Hill is headquartered in San Jose, CA with an office in Boston, MA.

About High Street Partners
High Street Partners is a premier provider of international business software and services. Its mission is to help companies capitalize on their international growth opportunities by simplifying the management and control of international expansion and operations. HSP’s signature solutions include HSP Overseas Direct®, an integrated service bundle which incorporates all required recurring services, including international payroll, expense reimbursement, cash management, vendor payments, bookkeeping, quarterly and annual tax filings, and local statutory compliance, and HSP OverseasConnect®, a cloud-based application for the aggregation and management of accounting, finance, HR and legal requirements across multiple geographies and lifecycles. Both solutions are offered with a full suite of custom Advisory Services. HSP provides a single point of accountability for customers spanning a range of industries and sizes: from those making their first overseas hire, to larger, publicly traded companies managing multiple subsidiaries on several continents, to top universities and research institutions operating in dozens of countries. HSP now has 15 global offices, including Annapolis, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Miami, New York, San Diego, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo.

The post High Street Partners Inks $8M appeared first on peHUB.

The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer commended his budget to the House of Commons last week to help create a country that “wants to be prosperous, solvent and free.” Discussing Greece, Germany’s Angela Merkel said “The top priority is to avoid an uncontrolled insolvency, because that wouldn’t just hit Greece, and the danger that it hits everyone, or at least a number of other countries, is very big”

Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman wrote recently “the less solvent you are, the more sovereignty you have to give up.” In recent years Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Cyprus have flirted with national insolvency, been termed ‘insolvent’ by the markets, and many have had to relinquish some of their sovereignty as a result.

You are insolvent when you can’t pay your debts. Households and firms have struggled with insolvency for centuries. Insolvency is usually a balance sheet concept based around the valuation of assets. When the value of your assets is less than the value of your liabilities, you are insolvent. Usually you work out a repayment schedule with your creditors via a restructuring process.

For countries the notion of national insolvency is a newer, and potentially very misleading, idea. Countries aren’t corporations. Technically almost every country would be insolvent if if was asked to pay all of its debt using its available assets. All governments in practice secure their national debts on their abilities to levy taxes. You can’t really repossess a country, in fairness. When a sovereign borrows too much, it either pushes the debt into the future by rolling over its debt, or failing that, defaults on some or all of the debt. The history of sovereign debt is in fact the history of sovereign default. Defaults tend to happen, in bursts, about every 30 years or so. But before the current crisis, very little attention was paid to this idea of national insolvency. There are very few mentions of national insolvency during the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, for example.

In fact national borrowing on the modern scale really only began around the seventeenth century. Before that in the monarchical era, so-called “court bankers” provided cash-strapped sovereigns with loans and quite often served as royal tax collectors and handled other fiduciary matters for them. Monarchical debts, when they were paid, were usually paid at the people’s expense. For example the land now known as Pennsylvania was given by the Crown to William Penn to repay a 16,000 pound debt. With the passing of the monarchical governance structure, responsibility for a nation’s debt moved from the rulers to the ruled. Henceforth these were the people’s debts, issued by a national bank, the Bank of England — in return for the privilege of producing its own banknotes — on behalf of the people, to their elected rulers.

I believe the analogy between national finances and insolvency is damaging. If politicians and policy makers believe their country is, literally, insolvent, then they behave differently towards their creditors. For politicians of debtor states, suddenly vast privatizations make sense, because of course you’re selling some of your remaining assets. Suddenly the will of the people of the debtor nation becomes secondary to the will of the nation’s creditors. Suddenly democracy is an expensive irrelevance in the face of an overwhelming technocratic desire for a speedy, and market-friendly, solution. There are many examples, but two come easily to mind: Europe’s fury in 2011 when then-Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou threatened to put his country’s bailout terms to a referendum, and more recently when the Cypriot parliament refused to pass a law which would levy a deposit tax on ordinary citizens with less than 100,000 euros in the bank. When the deal to bailout Cyprus was finally done, the Financial Times reported markets rising as “the plan does not need approval from the Cypriot parliament.” Super.

Creditor countries calling the tune by which debtor countries dance is not a new invention. But using the language of insolvency to do so is new. So when and why did it happen?

The single European currency project, in depriving member states of the ability to issue their own currency, has created the conditions for something close to national insolvency when economies slump. With high debt-to-national output ratios, current account deficits, fiscal deficits, and, putting it mildly, shaky banking systems, the debtor countries of Europe look very much like insolvent firms to the markets. Their sovereign power to issue currency is gone, meaning only painful deflation through the wage channels are possible. Leaving the currency union is very, very costly. The solution is national austerity. Indeed, in some cases, like Cyprus, Ireland, and Italy, the banking systems are so big relative to the rest of the economy as to make the sovereign itself almost vestigial.

The saving of the banking system and the system as a whole is the prime concern of Europe’s policy makers — typically representing the interests of creditor countries — but what will take its place? A more or less autocratic system of coercion is the logical outcome of these policies. They come from using ideas like national insolvency to reduce the grip a people have on their sovereignty.

But there is no asset valuation concept in the founding documents of any nation state; nor should there be.

Nexus phones were never complete spec beasts as in one or two items always seemed to trail other high-end devices. The Nexus S had a mediocre CPU, the Galaxy Nexus had a horrible camera, and the Nexus 4 didn’t offer an LTE option. While most high-end phones in 2013 will probably sport a 1080p display, this week’s rumor says the Nexus 5 won’t. In fact according to a tipster, it will be more compact than the majority of upper echelon phones, featuring a 4.5-inch 720p display. The display itself will cover 88% of the phone, which would be the most of any phone.

According to Phone Arena the tipster told them the Nexus 5 will put a bigger emphasis on the camera instead. This isn’t really all that surprising when you consider Vic Gundotra’s comments last month about how Nexus devices will have insanely great cameras in the future. To top things off, last week we heard that the next Nexus phone will have Nikon-branded camera module that will sport a “triple camera sensor.” Of course this same report said the Nexus 5 would indeed have a 1080p display. Back to the camera, the tipster says that the Nexus 5 will come with a 9MP CCD camera, which is a little bizarre since most cameras come with a CMOS sensor for speed.

The rest of the specs include a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor as well as a 2,800mAh battery. Last week’s report said it would have a 3,140mAh battery, but the processor wasn’t mentioned. I don’t know about you, but I would love to finally see an “insanely great” camera on any phone.

source: PhoneArena

 

Come comment on this article: Nexus 5 to be all about the camera, will be more compact, and will skip the 1080p display

#GivingTuesday began with a simple question: On the heels of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, could we trigger a new day of giving after two days of getting?

People all over the country came together to answer that question with a resounding “yes,” and social media certainly helped us get there. But what really fueled #GivingTuesday was not technology tactics or whiz-bang applications; it was a mindset built around four principles, ones that can apply to many organizations seeking to use social media to create change.

A bit of background: We launched #GivingTuesday in September 2012 and just 75 days later — four days after Thanksgiving — Americans in all 50 states came together to inaugurate a new “opening day” for the giving season.

The community that got behind #GivingTuesday grew beyond our highest expectations. Over 2,600 partners took part — from multinational companies to local nonprofits. The campaign was endorsed by The White House and Bill Gates, generated more than 800 media features and mentions in outlets like CNN, Washington Post, and CBS News, and our hash tag trended No. 1 on Twitter. The results? A range of donation platforms reported online giving increases of around 50% and partners reported excellent results in everything from volunteering initiatives to matching campaigns to food drives.

Our vision is to grow these efforts so that one day #GivingTuesday becomes as well-known as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. For 2013 — mark your diary for December 3rd — we’ve set a goal of 5,000 partners including some of the nation’s top corporate names and leading funders. And we’re already hearing about incredible campaigns in the works across the country.

So what has led to #GivingTuesday’s progress? And how can other social purpose organizations use social media to transform their work? What’s worked for #GivingTuesday is having the right mindset:

1. Think movement, not initiative

Rather than setting out to execute an initiative, we focused on growing a movement. #GivingTuesday came to life here at the 92nd Street Y in NYC. We worked closely with the United Nations Foundation and then brought together a “posse” of leaders from Stanford University, Mashable, The Bridgespan Group, and more. Support grew in concentric circles, each ring of activity bringing more communities into the cause and into conversation with each other until we had created a network across the country.

2. Think upload, not download

#GivingTuesday always wanted to avoid the “download” mindset, telling groups what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. We focused much more on people’s increasing desire to “upload”. From the start, our web and social media strategy was based on how people could make #GivingTuesday their own, from becoming a “Social Media Ambassador” to helping spread the word to getting their own organizations involved as partners.

The big opportunity — which was critical for #GivingTuesday — is to craft the right unifying theme that motivates people to tell their stories. A great example of this is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean-in” movement, encouraging people everywhere to start and join lean-in circles and share their experiences online. The most powerful social organizations aren’t just content-creators, but also context-creators.

3. Think current, not currency

We thought of #GivingTuesday not as something one could “own” but as something with a flow of its own. The movement bubbled up, flowed, ebbed and — thankfully, just at the right moment — surged. That isn’t to say that we couldn’t try to influence its direction a little, or alter its current, but it was never something we could fully control.

This is perhaps the most challenging (and exciting) element of a project like #GivingTuesday. To connect with the broad power of social media communities, you have to give up your desire for top-down control.

4. Think tools, not rules

We believe that the more people who have an authentic stake in the campaign, the more successful it can be. The core function of the #GivingTuesday team is to empower: To provide the right resources to support the community and champion its efforts.

One of the most powerful moments of the campaign was seeing #GivingTuesday spokespeople, none of whom we had ever met, appear on morning shows across the country. All of them were members of the community who had taken a central set of talking points we provided and made them their own.

For some, it has been a little surprising that the catalyst and incubator for #GivingTuesday is the 92nd Street Y — a 139-year-old Jewish cultural and community center that reaches out to serve people of all backgrounds (founded in 1874 as a Young Men’s Hebrew Association). However, the movement is a natural extension of what we’ve been doing for over a century: creating and growing communities.

The challenge ahead, for any organization trying to create movements at scale, is not simply to master social media, but to learn to shape and support social communities. This will require not just new toolkits, but new mindsets.

Please join the conversation and check back for regular updates. Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and give us feedback.

Dell’s board acknowledged Monday morning that it received two more buyout bids and vowed to consider them in the best interest of shareholders. As has been reported over the past week or so, The Blackstone Group and Carl Icahn prepped their own bids to counter a $24.4 billion (or $13.65 per share) offer put together by company founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners to take the company private.

Icahn, who owns what is thought to be about 6 percent of Dell shares,  is offering up to $15 per share for a $2 billion piece of the company. the Blackstone-led group is offering $14.25 per share. All Things Digital has more here.

Both Icahn and Blackstone offers are for a controlling stake in the company, not the whole thing. They would leave some shares to trade publicly.

The gist of Dell’s statement linked here is:

“The Special Committee, consisting of four independent and disinterested directors, has determined, after consultation with its independent financial and legal advisors, that both proposals could reasonably be expected to result in superior proposals, as defined under the terms of the existing merger agreement. Therefore, each of the Blackstone and Icahn groups is an “excluded party” and the Special Committee intends to continue negotiations with both.”

Michael Dell founded the company nearly 30 years ago and built it into what was at one point the world’s biggest PC maker and a huge power in servers as well. He stepped down as CEO in 2004 but  re-assumed that role three years later.

The company’s problem is that, like rival Hewlett-Packard, it missed the boat in tablets and smartphones at a time when those devices started to outsell laptop and desktop PCs. Over the past few years, though the company has added a lot of software, storage and cloud computing expertise via acquisitions of companies like Quest Software, Boomi, EqualLogic and Compellent. It also bought more services expertise by acquiring Perot Systems.

Michael Dell himself owns an estimated 16 percent of the company.

The bidding war signals that at least two parties see the Dell offer undervaluing the company.  Whether the rival buyers would keep the company intact or sell off the piece parts down the road remains an open question.

The Wall Street Journal blog outlines several scenarios that could play out.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• A near-term outlook for big data
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

After the disappointment that was The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, series fans will have to place their hopes on the second season of Telltale’s excellent adventure series. While fans wait, Telltale will be bringing the first season to a new platform.

IGN is reporting that The Walking Dead will be on the PlayStation Vita before season two of the acclaimed adventure series hits consoles and PC. This isn’t the first portable version of the title as the adventure series came to the iPad last year, but this is the first time we’ve seen the series on a dedicated gaming handheld.

Speaking to IGN, PlayStation’s Director of Product Planning and Platform Software Innovation Don Mesa says that The Walking Dead is a perfect fit for the Vita:

“Again, a good example is with The Walking Dead. We think that the emotion and the immersive experiences you’re going to get there, wherever you’re sitting, if you’re in your living room and playing on your Vita or sitting at a café or at the bus stop and playing this, you get that shock or fright. I think that’s going to be important. That’s what we want to deliver as you’re playing.”

It’s not known what changes will be made to the Vita version of the title, but it’s probably safe to assume that it will feature many of the same touch controls found in the iPad version.

About two years ago, when Google was in the early stages of the Panda update, it launched another means of helping users get more quality results in front of them. This one, unlike the Panda update, left it more up to the users, giving them more control of their own. That was the domain blocking feature.

The feature has now been killed. Late last year, people were noticing that the feature wasn’t working. Now, Google has officially acknowledged its demise.Google says in a message on its Inside Search site (via Search Engine Roundtable):

The Blocked Sites feature is no longer available. To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google. You may also download your existing blocked sites list as a text file.

Google doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation as to why they killed the feature. Most likely, it wasn’t being used a whole lot, and really, isn’t the feature kind of an admission that Google is not getting results right?

At least for those who want to continue blocking sites, Google provides an alternative. That’s more that Google Reader users got.

Prepublication Now Available

Statistics on research and development (R&D) are important indicators of innovation, the transfer of ideas and knowledge, which in turn are key drivers of economic growth and R&D expenditures are one indicator of the generation and diffusion of knowledge. A key aspect of the role of research and development in the process of economic growth is that it generates spillover benefits. Given the contribution of R&D to economic growth and, consequently, its role in policy decisions, NSF began to measure it in the 1950s. Although the idea of measuring R&D seems straightforward, there are complexities to carrying it out. To its credit, for more than 60 years NCSES (and its predecessors) has collected and produced consistent statistical tables and graphs on domestic R&D expenditures, producing the statistics in a timely fashion. Underlying the publication process are the efforts undertaken by the agency to overcome the complexities of definitions and various efforts to address issues such as missing data and international comparability. National Patterns of Research and Development Resources is a compendium of five annual surveys. Each publication in the series integrates and synthesizes the data from these periodic surveys of R&D expenditures by U.S. R&D performers in order to analyze current patterns of R&D activity in United States in relation to the historical record and to the reported R&D levels of other industrialized countries.

The steering committee identified seven topics for presentations and subsequent
discussions at the workshop:
(1) the purposes and uses of National Patterns;
(2) advances in international comparability of the statistical outputs in National
Patterns;
(3) the nature and estimation of R&D expenditure data for nonprofit organizations;
(4) the benefits of collecting and reporting on additional variables relevant to R&D
funds;
(5) improving communication in National Patterns;
(6) potential methodological uses of administrative records for R&D estimation; and
(7) the use of small-area estimation techniques for estimating R&D amounts for small
domains such as states crossed with industrial categories.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Behavioral and Social Sciences | Policy for Science and Technology

Network TV star Pauley Perrette was officially divorced from her first husband in 2006, but her marital troubles have only seemed to continue.

TMZ is reporting that Perrette’s ex-husband, Coyote Shivers, has violated his restraining order. The musician has been charged with violating a court order and violating his probation, which he was placed on for sending “harassing” emails to Perrette’s lawyer.

The violations stem from an altercation between Shivers and Perrette at a sushi restaurant in L.A. last month. The two argued, though Shivers has stated the run-in was an accident. Shivers could face up to 18 months in jail if convicted.

Perrette has landed roles in numerous TV shows and movies, such as The Ring and Almost Famous, throughout the 90s and 00s. She currently stars in the hit CBS Show NCIS, on which she plays Abby Sciuto, a forensic scientist.

Shivers is a musician who has played with bands such as Sharkskin and The Dave Rave Conspiracy. He is also an actor, and is best known for his roles in the movies Empire Records and Jonny Mnemonic.

(Image Courtesy Angela George/Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps poor marketing is holding back Wii U sales for Nintendo. As Spike TV’s GTTV host Geoff Keighley noted on Twitter, a new campaign from Nintendo is using flyers to show just how awesome the Wii U is.

Except, instead of going after console rivals Nintendo decided to aim its attack at its own, older-generation console the Wii. To be fair, the Wii is probably the strongest competitor to the Wii U, yet the consoles treat gaming very differently. The Wii is a family, group console, bringing people together, while the Wii U essentially lets you take your single-player game where ever you want, even if a family member wants to watch a movie with you.

To display the Wii U’s strengths against the many shortcomings of the Wii, Nintendo’s flyer shows a side-by-side comparison. Though the two consoles do share a few features, the Wii’s dots are clearly less awesome than the Wii U’s check marks. As we all learned in elementary school, dots < check marks. Obvi.

Luckily, Nintendo has made it so you can rip one of these flyers right off the wall and take it home with you. Maybe you can post it up in your bedroom, just over your Wii, to remind yourself that you should probably (not*) upgrade. Perhaps you can just store it away in your desk for later reference when someone asks, “What the fuck is a Wii U?”

Because, to be honest, not many people know about the dual-screened Wii U console, despite the fact that it was announced at E3 last year. Again, Nintendo marketing hasn’t really been killing it.

For instance, let’s take a look at this Wii U commercial.

To start, I’ve never actually seen this commercial air on TV. Secondly, a good deal of this ad is dedicated to non-gaming activities, such as drawing, watching TV, weighing yourself, browsing the web, and video chatting. Because, you know, that’s why people buy gaming consoles. It has nothing to do with Netflix, Hulu+ and a complete gaming experience.

But let’s not forget, Nintendo’s awful marketing isn’t a new thing. Remember the Nintendo 3DS commercials, with that girl from Glee and Selena Gomez, I think? If you haven’t seen it, it’s essentially a famous blonde girl sitting in a diner like a hipster trying to draw a piece of pie. Again, Nintendo clearly knows its market: girls who draw pie.

Again, if you find yourself forgetting that the Wii U is better than the Wii, or if you find yourself forgetting that the Wii U exists, march on over to your nearest airport or mall and grab yourself a flyer.

*Here’s our review of the Wii U.

[via Kotaku]

Here’s our review of some of today’s noteworthy links for the networking sector of the data center industry:

Zayo and Internet2 bring 100G to the north. Zayo Group announced its partnership with Internet2 to add substantial new capacity on Zayo’s fiber route from Chicago to Seattle. The system will have greater than 4 terabits of overall capacity to support Internet2’s new 100G network. Set to be completed in the spring, the infrastructure will extend the capability to reach the nation’s leading research and education network’s 100G services to universities and research centers in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Washington, and Wisconsin. The project will provide new 100G national backbone paths between Internet2’s core routers in Seattle and Chicago, reduce latency for time-sensitive applications and increase capacity for global innovation with partners throughout the west and Asia that connect through Seattle. “This project demonstrates Zayo’s commitment to building strong strategic alliances with the research and education community and our investment into our extensive fiber footprint,” says Zach Nebergall, vice president of Wavelength Product Group at Zayo. “Internet2 is helping to bring substantial amounts of additional capacity to the research and education community via its partnerships.”

CenturyLink Deploys Ciena 100G.  Ciena (CIEN) announced that CenturyLink (CTL) recently utilized its converged packet optical platform with WaveLogic coherent optical technology to modernize and upgrade its network that spans more than 50 metropolitan locations across the United States. With the upgrade CenturyLink can offer 1GE, 10GE, 100GE and equivalent wavelengths, utilizing Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform. The 6500 platform will also offer integrated packet switching which gives CenturyLink agility in the delivery of groomed Ethernet services to its enterprise customers. “CenturyLink understands the increasing need for scalability, capacity and high-speed network services for today’s business requirements,” said Pieter Poll, senior vice president of national and international network planning, engineering and construction, CenturyLink. ”Ciena’s converged packet and coherent optical technology allows us to provide speed and capacity improvements to our international and domestic regional networks, creating a true, end-to-end 100G network to deliver today’s bandwidth-intensive services and applications.”

Level 3 to build data center in Bogota Columbia. Level 3 Communications (LVLT)  announced the construction of its newest data center in Bogota, Colombia, as a result of increased demand for IT services among its customers. This new, 500 square-meter Premier Elite data center, designed to support managed services, will provide onsite technical staff, high levels of availability, enhanced security and high power density cabinets and suites. ”The Colombian market shows a growing demand for colocation, housing, hosting and value-added services,” said Luis Carlos Guerrero, sales vice president for Level 3′s Andean region. “The trend to outsource these services to a trusted business partner – one that will support the customer in its expansion strategy – is crucial for companies today so they can focus on their core business.”

Extreme Networks solutions tested by EANTC. Extreme Networks (EXTR)  announced that its high performance cloud and Mobile Backhaul Ethernet switching solutions were among the first to be tested by European Advance Network Test Center (EANTC) for Carrier-focused Software Defined Networking (SDN), MPLS and Hybrid Timing combining Synchronous Ethernet (Sync E) and IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). EANTC’s final test plan for the SDN/MPLS and IPv6 testing was rigorous and included 51 test outcomes with 19 of them making fresh paths to SDN testing. The SDN OpenFlow tests highlighted Layer 2 & 3 forwarding, OpenFlow topology discovery, failure recovery in OpenFlow, and policy based routing. ”Extreme Networks continues to deliver first to market and high performance SDN and Mobile Backhaul Ethernet solutions for sophisticated multi-tenant data centers and mobile 4G networks,” said David Ginsburg, CMO for Extreme Networks. ”Our successful completion of the EANTC organized testing in Berlin in 2013 further validates our ability to support the network architectures required by new carrier service offerings.”

For those of you who love Twitter and wish to have influence on the network, the sad fact is that you’ll probably never be verified. No matter how hard you try, Twitter isn’t likely to contact you directly, expressing their wish to add that little blue check mark next to your name. Sorry man, it’s just not going to happen (for most of you).

The best you can do is to live vicariously through Anil Dash, who sat down with the Kondabolu brothers to discuss the process, and it’s a pretty entertaining watch.

[Hari Kondabolu via The Next Web]

The T-Mobile UNcarrier plans that were outed last week and over the weekend are now live, although it won’t be formerly announced until tomorrow. It appears they are calling it Simple Choice, and it gives consumers the choice of buying a phone at full retail and paying a lower monthly rate for service. Full retail generally costs $500 to $700, but T-Mobile will let you make a down payment of around $99 and pay off the remaining portion as part of a monthly payment of between $15 and $25. Isn’t this a reverse way of  subsidizing a phone?

The best bang for the buck appears to be the unlimited talk, text, and 500MB of data for $50 per month. This one will be for those that aren’t data hungry as you will get throttled after 500MB, but tethering is included as well. If you need more data, you can just buy it in increments of 2GB (up to 12GB) for $10 extra per month. Things get a little complicated with the unlimited no throttling plan in that you can get unlimited talk, text, and data (no throttling) for $70. Sounds like a deal, but only 500MB of tethering data is included. If you need more data for tethering, you can buy the same 2GB increments for $10 per month.

It seems a little complicated, but I guess it comes down to if you really need tethering or not and if you really need unlimited. One one hand, you can get unlimited, talk, and 2.5GB of data (and tethering) for $60 or you can get unlimited, talk, data, and 2.5GB of tethering for $80. If you think you can live with 6.5GB, but you really need to utilize tethering, you could get the throttled plan for the same $80. You will be capped at 6.5GB, but you will get more data for tethering. Carriers just love giving you choices and complicating things at the same time don’t they?

 

Come comment on this article: T-Mobile’s UNcarrier Simple Choice no-contract plans now live

Apple (AAPL) is certainly a long way from being doomed but that doesn’t mean the company is still firing on all cylinders like it’s done for most of the last decade. Case in point: Fortune has surveyed several Apple analysts and all of them expect the company’s next quarterly earnings report to show a decline in income compared to the same quarter last year. Granted, Apple’s second-quarter earnings last year delivered a hard-to-match $12.30 earnings per share, but the projected decline to the $10 range would still mark the first time since 2003 that the company has posted a year-over-year decline in earnings.

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Tiny smartphone thermometer accessory Thermodo is on a funding roll, and it hopes to keep things going with new backer levels that it has shared exclusively with TechCrunch. Two new colorways are in development for funding milestones, as well as Windows Phone app support, and now third-party developer are revealing that they will be working with some specific third-party apps.

Thermodo will debut new stretch rewards at the $250,000, $300,000 and $400,000 funding levels, including a limited edition red and green version of the Thermodo itself, as well as a commitment to Windows Phone support. Robocat, the startup behind Thermodo, also announced three new backer levels today, which include a variety of different combinations of existing rewards, all of which is clearly designed to further propel backer interest and help it continue to raise its total funds ahead of the project end date, which is 15 days away now.

Developer interest is the most important piece of the puzzle from the perspective of making Thermodo a device with wide appeal. It has an admittedly limited feature set after all: it tells the temperature, and that’s it. But with broad developer and platform support, it starts to become much more than just a simple weather app accessory, since it can be used with apps that incorporate a wide set of data to serve different kinds of purposes.

Thermodo is working on partnerships with a number of developers are a result of the Kickstarter success they’ve had so far, Robocat founder and lead developer Willi Wu explained via email. “Many developers have expressed great interests in integrating Thermodo in their existing apps or make new apps, including Jake Marsh of Conditions app, David Smith of Check the Weather app and Moshen Chan of Living Clock app,” he said. “We are also looking into collaborations with developers on Android and Windows Phone.”

Robocat is trying to rack up the big bucks for Thermodo, and doing a good job so far. That’ll mean it will face a bigger challenge when it comes time to ship, but the company seems confident in its ability to do so.

Developer training company Pluralsight, which has long helped professional programmers improve their technical chops, is turning a bit of its attention to kids.

As momentum builds behind bringing computer science to younger students, Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard said his company wants to do its part for the cause. And, on Monday, the Salt Lake City-based company released a couple of free online courses teaching elementary, middle and high school kids how to code.

“We feel that the world needs to raise awareness of the importance of being more technical with computer science at an earlier age,” he said.

As a star-studded video released last month by Code.org emphasized, the country needs more technical talent. Less than two percent of students study computer programming — and 90 percent of U.S. schools don’t offer programming. Meanwhile, programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs, according to the non-profit.

More startups, including Kuato Studios, Tynker and Hopscotch are beginning to take on this problem directly with games and kid-friendly programs that teach the basics of coding.

But for Pluralsight, which is a subscription-based business, the new kids’ courses represent more of a goodwill- and loyalty-building effort than a new revenue source, Skonnard said. Its first courses focus on MIT’s programming learning environment Scratch and the programming language C#, but Skonnard said it plans to grow its library of kids’ courses, and expand outreach to schools, over time.

Pluralsight partnered with the non-profit Teaching Kids Programming, led by developers Lynn Langit and Llewellyn Falco, to create the C# course and Skonnard said both new courses were designed to be more interactive and attention-based.

The company, which launched in 2004, claims more than 200,000 subscribers and, earlier this year, raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners.

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BuzzFeed hopes its viral cat fare can go toe-to-toe with Britain’s own raucous tabloid culture. On Monday, the fast-growing American news site formally launched a customized, UK-version of its homepage, which will feature content like “43 things British people know to be true” alongside sponsored stories that promote UK brands and events.

Never one for understatement, BuzzFeed is promoting the launch with a London event and an animated flyer that shows Queen Elizabeth II riding a tweaked-out corgi dog against a Doctor Who style background:

This is BuzzFeed’s first international expansion and comes after it received nearly $20 million in new funding early this year. According to editorial director, Scott Lamb, the UK site will start by offering “great pop culture content” that represents BuzzFeed’s roots. He explained the strategic goal this way:

“Social is global. We already had a solid audience in the UK, a place that embraces Twitter and Facebook in a huge way, so it made sense for it to be BuzzFeed’s first foray into international waters.” A report from the Next Web says the UK content will come from a four-person team based in London. Meanwhile, a BuzzFeed spokesperson told us that the largest proportion of BuzzFeed’s overall traffic was coming from the UK early Monday morning.

BuzzFeed’s expansion comes at a time when UK and US press outlets are increasingly entering each other’s markets; Britain’s the Daily Mail and the Guardian, for instance, are making a concerted effort for American readers.

BuzzFeed also appears to have brought its trademark native advertising across the pond in the form of “stories” like “15 Kinds of People You Will See at Ultra,” a photo-feature produced by an energy drink maker. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has long argued that this form of advertising, which can be distributed across social media, is more effective than traditional internet display advertising.

As it dips its toe into Britain, BuzzFeed is also expanding aggressively at home with more long-form content and plans for a business vertical.

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Mirantis, a startup which has made a name for itself by mixing and matching the best OpenStack components from multiple vendors into cloud solutions for customers, is now making its own library of configuration and deployment tools available to the masses, under the Apache 2.0 license.

“We are releasing the secret sauce — the automation library — that we used to set up some of the largest OpenStack adopters — Paypal, Webex, The Gap and others,” Mirantis CEO Adrian Lionel said in an interview.

According to Mirantis VP Boris Renski, the big automated payment provider has massive infrastructure of about 15,000 physical nodes and another 65,000 or so physical nodes for parent company Ebay.

“They have a very large VMware vSphere footprint but, at this, point they want to go beyond just vSphere virtualization and implement orchestration – [they want] agile, cloud infrastructure to accelerate their time-to-production cycle on new apps and website features and they want to standardize across the board,” Renski said.

PayPal, like other companies in the same boat, can go in one of two directions, he said. It can invest more in VMware and standardize on it — by buying vCloud Director — or it can go the open-source, open-standards route.

“With the project we are involved in, they are making giant strides towards the latter. The work is not 100 percent done and there is still a chance that it won’t succeed. They have several thousand instances running on OpenStack and several production workloads today. The plan is to go to 10K physical nodes by summer time.”

If everything continues to track well, he said, they’ll roll OpenStack across all of Paypal and possibly eBay infrastructure and do away with VMware, he said.

Paypal itself was more circumspect on its plans. Asked about its OpenStack plans, Saran Mandair, senior director of platform engineering and operations, said via email that the company is committed to collaborating with the open-source community to drive innovation:

“It is working with Mirantis to leverage OpenStack to help transform our global infrastructure into an agile and open cloud platform … Our OpenStack project uses the Fuel library by Mirantis, which has dramatically accelerated our OpenStack deployment with robust, production-grade architecture while giving us the flexibility to tailor OpenStack to our needs.”

But a spokeswoman, unsurprisingly, said the company will continue to use VMware as well.

VMware, which is actually now a member of the OpenStack Foundation, will, of course, also continue to plug the vSphere- and-vCloud-Director tandem to companies with existing workloads. And, earlier this month, it also said it will host its own public cloud infrastructure, which is also based on its existing vSphere code.  The company said it is committed to customer choice.

Most onlookers, however, still see VMware vCloud Director as a closed and expensive ecosystem that OpenStack itself was set up to depose.

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Despite having a less than stellar holiday season, Nook is still soldiering on in its attempts to combat Amazon’s Kindle dynasty. It’s latest move may just help bring more developers to its side.

Nook announced today that in-app purchasing will soon be a reality on Kindle HD and HD+ apps. The Barnes & Noble subsidiary will be working with Fortumo to provide developers with all the tools needed to implement in-app purchasing in apps while also providing developers with real-time insights on revenue.

“We are thrilled to bring in-app purchasing to Nook with Fortumo for our community of developers so they can foster a profitable relationship with their customers, while also providing our Nook customers with a more in-depth app experience and an even wider selection of popular apps,” said Claudia Romanini, VP of Nook Apps, Nook Media, LLC. “We look forward to adding thousands of more apps that feature in-app purchasing over the coming weeks and months to expand Nook’s already wide array of digital content offerings.”

This latest addition to the Nook development environment brings the Nook HD up to par with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other Android tablets that have offered in-app purchasing for the past year. It’s also an important addition to the Nook development environment as it encourages more developers to bring apps to the platform. As we all know, any hardware is only as good as its apps, and the Nook definitely needs more apps, especially revenue heavy games, to survive in the highly competitive tablet market.

In-app purchasing will be available to developers starting in the first half of April. For more details on how to start offering in-app purchasing in Nook apps, check out the Nook developer portal.