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Appcore, a company with on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, has landed a $6 million round of Series B venture funding, showing that on-premise deployments can still play a role for enterprise IT.

Private investors, including some of Appcore’s first customers — Iowa-based telecommunications companies — led the round. A previous investor, Telephone Acquisition Co., also contributed. The investments brings the company’s total venture funding to $11 million and will go toward bringing on more business in North America and Asia.

Founded in 2008 and based in Des Moines, Iowa, Appcore has gained experience in renting racks and delivering software and cloud-based applications — one app provides off-site disaster recovery — to telecoms that already provide their customers with television, internet and phone service. Last year Appcore started expanding its market to other industries, said Jeff Tegethoff, the company’s president. Along with the Des Moines headquarters, the company has operations in Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and New Zealand.

Appcore delivers its package “anywhere in the world in about 30 days,” Tegethoff said. On-premise deployments can help customers cut latency and protect data, and those advantages have proved more appealing to customers than public-cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, he said.

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Anaplan, whose web-based sales- and financial-planning applications rely on in-memory database technology, plans to announce Tuesday that it has closed $30 million in Series C venture funding, and an additional $3 million will be announced later as part of the Series C round.

Anaplan will use its new funding to expand its customer base, improve its products and build out more data centers, said Fred Lalayaux, Anaplan’s president and CEO. Currently Anaplan runs one data center in Virginia and one in the San Francisco Bay Area. More will come online later this year in Amsterdam, Las Vegas and Singapore, he said.

Lalayaux acknowledges an abundance of competition. But he believes the company can deliver answers to simple business questions more quickly than in-memory databases from legacy vendors such as Oracle and SAP, while also providing employees with fresh information more quickly than Microsoft spreadsheets and databases. And smaller cloud-based financial-planning companies, such as Adaptive and Host Analytics, can’t predict the implications of complex problems as well as Anaplan’s software, he said.

Anaplan has racked up around 60 customers, including McAfee, Pandora and Salesforce. The new funding could help Anaplan chip away at still more of the market.

As Anaplan expands its own infrastructure to support its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, it has begun talking about building a custom appliance for its own data centers and possibly for clients to have on premise as well, Lalayaux said. On the software end, he said, an application exchange for users to share among themselves is in the works.

Meritech Capital Partners led the new investment, and previous investors Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures contributed as well. With the new funding, Anaplan has raised a total of around $49 million.

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I was recently perplexed when I received a request to speak to a group of senior managers about reducing complexity — mostly because I had worked with their company fifteen years earlier on the same subject; and they had since developed a reputation for being good at simplification. Why did they want to revisit what was already a core competence?

Once I met with the senior management team, the answer became very clear: Whatever institutional knowledge about simplification that had once resided in the company was now lost. Over the years, despite a number of well-meaning efforts, the focus of senior managers had shifted, the original training had been forgotten, and many of the messages on the subject had become empty rhetoric. In fact, astoundingly I was one of the main repositories of institutional memory about how to master simplification — an external consultant who had not worked with the firm for a number of years!

Although this is an extreme example, it’s not unique. Organizations spend a lot of time and resources developing knowledge and capability. While some of it gets translated into procedures and policies, most of it resides in the heads, hands, and hearts of individual managers and functional experts. Over time, much of this institutional knowledge moves away as people take on new jobs, relocate, or retire. Knowledge also degrades when a new senior executive or CEO introduces a different agenda that doesn’t build on earlier knowledge, or contradicts what was done previously. And knowledge disappears even more rapidly when a firm reorganizes or merges with another and there is a subsequent reshuffling of the cast of characters.

Most large organizations today regularly experience these dynamics. The result is that the informal, people-based institutional knowledge that is so critical to organizational effectiveness seems to have a shorter and shorter shelf life. As one colleague commented after visiting a long-time client that had gone through three mergers and multiple CEOs: “It feels like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ The names of the department are all the same, but the people act differently.”

So what can you do to overcome the rapidly accelerating loss of institutional knowledge?

First, build an explicit strategy for maintaining institutional memory, even in your own team. Don’t assume that it will happen by itself. On the contrary, if you don’t pay attention, the knowledge base of your team or business unit will potentially atrophy.

Second, as part of your strategy, identify the few key things that you want every member of your team to know or be able to do — and figure out how to turn this from an implicit assumption to an explicit expectation. You might for example, build the mastery of this core knowledge into the onboarding process for new team members, and have refresher sessions as part of your off sites or leadership meetings.

Finally, use technology to create a process by which your team continually captures and curates institutional knowledge — to make it a living and evolving body of useful information that is accessible to people as they come into the organization. Intel for example has an internal wiki (called Intelpedia), which gives employees a way of both capturing and accessing important terms, procedures, historical incidents, and more.

In this day and age of Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia, everyone knows that an individual’s memory is fragile. What we often don’t recognize is that organizational memory is much the same — and if we don’t actively preserve it, we put ourselves at risk.

Full disclosure: I love Amazon Prime, and I’ve been a faithful subscriber for the past three years. That being said, there’s definitely some room for competition. eBay already provides some in the form of eBay Now, but Google may be throwing its hat into the ring soon.

TechCrunch reports that Google may be launching a new service called “Google Shopping Express” in the near future. The service would help Google capitalize on its Google Shopping service to provide fast shipping to customers shopping through said service.

It’s noted that Google’s recent acquisitions of BufferBox and Channel Intelligence point to the company starting up something like the rumored Shopping Express service. The former would be useful for its delivery locker service, and the latter said that it’s “focused on making it easy for consumers to find and buy products online.”

Google could pose a major threat to other online shopping services if it’s able to get the rumored service off the ground. It could expand BufferBox to more cities to make instant delivery more accessible, and cheaper, to more consumers than the competition. It could also rope in a bunch of retail partners so that it has the same wide selection consumers can find on Amazon or eBay.

A major obstacle, however, will be the price. Same-day delivery isn’t exactly cheap so Google needs to have a good pricing scheme in place to convince shoppers to go with them instead. TechCrunch’s sources say that the service would only cost $64 to $69 a year. If it could pull off same-day delivery all year at those prices, Amazon Prime may not look so hot in comparison anymore.

Twitter has announced that it will no longer continue supporting TweetDeck on iOS and Android devices. Twitter says that this is due to a desire to focus more on its web applications and the Chrome-based version of TweetDeck. As a result, the mobile versions of TweetDeck are scheduled to be discontinued in May 2013.

Recently we wrote about Twitter denying a token extension request for the Falcon Pro app that allows users to access their Twitter accounts with some features not present in the native Twitter app. While TweetDeck isn’t a third party app, since it is owned by Twitter, it seems to be another effort to force consumers to utilize the native apps on both iOS and Android platforms.  What are your thoughts on the discontinuation of TweetDeck on iOS and Android? If this affects you, let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: TweetDeck

Come comment on this article: Twitter to discontinue TweetDeck in May 2013

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that three people have been arrested in connection with the theft of an 82-foot yacht earlier this week. The three people, all of them over the age of 50, were arrested on suspicion of grand theft and conspiracy.

The yacht, named the “Darling” was found grounded on a sandbar off the coast of Pacifica, California on Monday. Pacifica is a suburb on San Francisco.

According to the chronicle, the owner of the boat reported it stolen after seeing it featured on the news. What had been a rescue then turned into an arrest and police surrounded the boat, ordering its passengers to surrender.

The yacht was reportedly stolen from a harbor in the North San Francisco Bay. The trio’s joyride would have taken them underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and miles down the southern coast. The Chronicle report states that pizza boxes and beer cans were found on the ship.

Previous rumors pinpointed March 7 for the release of the Verizon LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (SCH-i925). Samsung just dropped us a line confirming the date and the price will be $599 for both in stores and online. It’s basically the same Galaxy Note 10.1 WiFi-only version we reviewed last year, but with the addition of Verizon Wireless LTE connectivity. It sure is a hefty price to pay, but the good news is you won’t be on a contract, and if you’re on their Share Everything plan, you can can simply add it for only $10 extra per month.

Come comment on this article: Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 LTE to be available March 7

Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, married Ri Sol-ju in the middle of last year. Now the couple has reportedly had their first child.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Sol-ju secretly gave birth to her first child late last year. The news comes from South Korea who have reportedly confirmed the birth though North Korea isn’t talking.

So why is North Korea not wanting the world to celebrate in their glorious leader’s new child? According to some foreign policy analysts, the country didn’t announce the birth because the child wasn’t a boy. That being said, nobody’s sure as to the sex of the child at this point though.

If the baby is a girl, it’s unlikely that she’ll be put into a position of power in North Korea. The Free Beacon notes, however, that North Korea is slowly turning into a family dynasty so nothing is off the table. They note that Sol-ju may even have more power than initially thought as she has been seen having considerable sway over decisions made by Kim Jong Un.

It’s not known when Kim Jong Un will announce the birth of his first child, but he can’t hide it forever. It’s likely that we’ll see some news of it this year. Until then, start preparing for all the Baby Kim memes.

[Image: Kim Jong Un Looking At Things]

Most press junket interviews are incredibly boring. Celebrities sit in one spot with movie art in the background and talk to a variety of reporters, answering the same boring questions over and over. Throw in a rookie BBC Radio reporter and Equire’s sexiest woman alive, though, and you have some of the most awkward flirting seen on YouTube.

BBC Radio this week posted the interview, between Oz The Great and Powerful star Mila Kunis and Chris Stark, a reporter who claims the confrontation is his first celebrity interview. When Stark begins to make things awkward by voicing his fears, calling Kunis “hot,” and soliciting reviews of his interview skills, Kunis takes control of the moment. The conversation quickly shifts to drinking, sports, and nude wedding dances.

Before watching what could be the most interesting Mila Kunis interview ever, it’s worth noting that Kunis describes her condition as “deathly ill.”

Despite selling less than 5,000 models over a decade, India’s little electric car company that could, Reva, is now doubling down on its hopes that a market for electric cars in India will emerge. According to the New York Times, Reva — which is now partially-owned by Indian giant Mahindra — plans to launch an electric hatchback that seats four called the E20, and is also building out a charging network.

Mahindra Reva plans to assemble the E20 and build the charging technology in its new 32,000 square foot factory in Bangalore. That factory is supposed to be able to build 30,000 cars per year. Unlike the company’s poor selling, and micro-sized REVAi, the E20 will be roomier, has a 62 mile range, and has a plastic, light-weight body.

Part of the reason Mahindra Reva is now launching this new car is that the Indian government has announced it will offer support for electric cars. Last year the Indian government announced a $4.13 billion plan to boost the production of electric and hybrid vehicles, with an eye-widening goal to have 6 million green vehicles on its roads by 2020. Reuters reported back then that 4 to 5 million of these vehicles are expected to be electric and hybrid two-wheelers (scooters, commuter cars, electric bikes).

Reva founder Chetan Maini tells the New York Times that the company is expecting the government to provide a rebate of at least 150,000 rupees ($2,790) to each E20 buyer. The E20 is supposed to be at least 10 to 20 percent more expensive than a comparable sized gas-powered car.

There’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the electric car market in India. Low cost two-wheelers dominate the roads, and customers that are willing to spend a premium on vehicles want higher end luxury cars that are a symbol of status. That’s why the low cost Tata Nano never took off.

Still, the massive population and its rapid economic growth, combined with government support, could some day be a game changer for electric cars. The question is, will it be Reva and the E20 that will change the game?

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Do you like to receive free pens and soy sauce in the mail? Well, you might be in luck — provided you’re willing to take to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media sites to describe your experience.

In a recent twist on content and social media marketing, companies like Johnson & Johnson and Kraft are sending out samples and asking consumers to complete “missions” based on the products they receive. One recent example, known as “the Juicy Bird Mission,” asked partipants to brine their Thanksgiving turkeys with Kikkoman soy sauce and describe the experience online.

The concept is the brainchild of Social Media Link, a startup based in New York that offers brands access to its community of “influencers” as a way to amplify their marketing messages.

According to CEO Susan Frech, 300,000 people have signed up to be “influencers” on the company’s Smiley360 site and more than half of them have completed at least one mission. Potential participants are screened by an email survey and those selected receive a product and mission card in the mail. Out of curiosity, I asked Frech to partake in a mission and soon after I received a package containing this:

The attached mission card asked me to give away one of the pens and to use the other one to try my hand at a four-color picture. My mission also asked me to ‘like’ Bic on Facebook and to upload my handiwork to the internet. I failed. But it looks like some of my mission compatriots persevered:

I confess the whole process felt odd to me, but I may not be typical. According to Frech, 75 percent of participants are women (“chief purchasing officers” in brand speak) and many live outside metropolitan areas.

In any event, Social Media Link is faring well. Frech says the three-year old company is profitable and that it has run dozens of missions for major brands with deals valued near six figures. The company has also had social hits, including for the “Juicy Bird” soy sauce Mission, when thousands showed up at an hour-long “Twitter party” and caused a hashtag to trend.

For the participating brands, Frech says the appeal of the campaigns is the chance to reap social media buzz among a user’s community and, on some occasions, to test out new products.

The process also offers a way for brands to get positive reviews without falling afoul of FTC rules that require marketers to disclose if they have received any form of payment. As part of Social Media Links’ “mission” rules, participants can write what they like but have to state they have received the product for free.

(Image by Franck Boston via Shutterstock)

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As Austin preps for the annual influx of geeks, tweeps and marketing chic known as South by Southwest Interactive, I’d like to offer our visitors something more than just the parties and panels associated with the event. Why not also try to meet up with a few startups that might not be on your radar, or who should be on your radar?

That’s why for the three years (2012, 2011 and 2010) I’ve prepped a list of the 10 startups you should meet at SXSW, focusing mostly the on startups that I think are going places, have awesome founders or have a great idea or technology underneath. Austin has deep roots in semiconductors and enterprise IT, but has some talented mobile entrepreneurs as well. So many of these startups will have a more enterprise or data-heavy flair; which should be just fine, since that’s what the venture capitalists are funding these days.

Without further ado, here are my picks in alphabetical order. Of course, feel free to share your own faves and comments below.

Aumanil: This team employs data scientists in the service of marketing. While that’s nothing new, the company’s service is one that’s becoming more prevalent — namely crunching customer data and interactions (in Aumanil’s case in online games) to determine who the most valuable customers are for your business and when and how to reach out to them so they keep spending.

Continuum Analytics: This big data startup has been around since 2011 but this year scored a $3 million grant from DARPA to combine scientific databases with those more common in the business world (a.k.a., multidimensional arrays and relational databases, respectively). The company is creating several open source projects for dealing with massive amounts of data in ways that don’t require higher level programming skills.

Icon.me Online business cards are this gray area of opportunity where some people see irritating contact mining schemes (a la Plaxo) and others see a chance to make connections into a form of self-expression (a la Moo). With Icon, CEO Kent Savage — an old hand at creating enterprise companies — is walking the link between personal expression and professionalism. It makes money selling upgraded features and will also try to interest corporations in buying its digital business cards.

Lynx Labs: There are two Kickstarter-famous companies on this list, and Lynx is known for the creation of a “camera” that takes measurements and models of objects and translates that picture into a rendering that a 3D printer can understand. So, if you like something, you snap it, the Lynx camera makes a rendering, and then you can ship it to a 3D printer. It’s the missing link for the age of personalized manufacturing — and a potential nightmare for intellectual property lawyers.

Javelin Semiconductor: It wouldn’t be a list form me without some chip startup on here, and Javelin has a compelling power amplifier chip that’s inside certain Samsung handsets. The company’s chip, made using traditional manufacturing processes, helps reduce battery consumption and the cost of silicon on the phones it’s on. And Samsung is a big win for a little chip firm.

RideScout: While the city of Austin preps for a legal showdown with ride-sharing company Sidecar, a local startup called RideScout (formerly known as GoingMyWay) has launched a similar app that hooks people up via their Facebook accounts with rides. But the real value in RideScout comes from its ability to integrate other transit information, from bus schedules to other ride-sharing services into its application. So instead of a random stranger, you can also choose to grab a cab or a bus.

SuperMechanical: This is the company behind Twine, a popular Kickstarter project that connects your physical gadgets to the internet. Yes, you can use Twine to get your washing machine to tweet, but this company has several other ideas for creating connected objects, so why not try to talk to them and see what else they are working on?

Taskbox: Email overload got you down? I know there are a bunch of apps out there trying to solve this problem, but for people who love to turn their inbox into a testing ground, check out Taskbox, the iOS app (they are looking for an Android developer) that tries to take email — a desktop-oriented app — and make it mobile friendly. The company’s goal is to eventually help take the many source of requests for people’s time and attention and turn it into a task list where your list items come from voicemails, texts or even Twitter. It sounds daunting, but so is managing your life across so many platforms.

Toopher: Requiring two pieces of information, such as a password as well as a fingerprint scan or a physical credit card and a PIN number, are all good examples of two-factor authentication, but translating that level of security to the virtual and mobile world can irritate users. Toopher adds security to mobile transactions using location as the second element in two-factor authentication, which may be irritating if you’re on a sudden trip in a foreign city, but in general makes for less friction with better security. The company raised $2 million last November from Alsop Louie and others.

TrustRadius: The stealthy startup pitches itself as Yelp for enterprises, and it has some local investors pretty excited. The idea is interesting, and the TrustRadius CEO Vinay Baghat started Convio, an Austin startup that made software for the nonprofit sector. In 2010 Convio went public and was later acquired in 2012.

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Last June, I raised a few eyebrows when I told attendees at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio (aka Rio+20) that “accountants would save the world.” But I meant it. To get all businesses involved in solving the world’s toughest problems, we must change the accounting rules.

Why accounting? During my time as CEO of TNT N.V. we created a partnership with the UN World Food Program (WFP) — at that time the world’s first between a for-profit and the UN agency. A transport company like TNT is a typical beneficiary of globalization. At the same time we live in a world where every six seconds a child dies from hunger despite there being enough food in the world to prevent it. So TNT brought its logistics skills and committed its people’s time to help the WFP reach the victims of droughts, famine, and natural disaster. Our professional support made the WFP function better. But we got returns on our investment as well: Our employees were proud of the company and eager to participate; the disaster areas provided some of the best training on how to solve complex dilemmas; and of course the reputation of the company improved tremendously. There is no doubt we benefited from this.

But we weren’t capturing any of it in our financial reports. We were building social capital, but we didn’t have a way to tell our shareholders &#8212 or be held accountable to keep doing it. Similarly, you don’t have to be an energy company or pulp and paper producer to focus on those resources; all companies use water, energy, and paper. But few are held accountable.

That’s why we need to ensure that corporate reporting makes clear how a company is making its money, not just how much money it has made. For every robust, time-tested measure of return on financial capital, we need another for social capital — the economic benefits that derive from cooperation among groups, and yet another for natural capital — the supply of natural ecosystems (think forests, oceans, mineral deposits) that we turn into valuable goods or services future.

Make no mistake, I am a capitalist: Someone who puts capital to work, and wants something back. But where we’ve lost the plot is that we only demand — and manage — a return on financial capital. In order to address current economic crises in a systematic way, we must begin to demand a return on social and natural capital as well. That’s where we need to change the rules of the game.

It’s true that since the advent of the Global Reporting Initiative in 2000 companies have begun to include evidence of sustainability in their annual reports. But many corporate reports describe sustainability as a “journey” with no explicit destination. Furthermore the non-financial parts of reporting today are not rule-based, making it impossible to compare performance across industries — and many times even within them.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), where I am president, is taking steps to address this. We are a membership organization consisting of over 200 companies worldwide — including all of the Big Four accountants. We’ve started a program on reporting and investment that will collaborate with The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (as in Prince Charles) and the International Integrated Reporting Council to make sustainable performance concrete, measurable, comparable, and linked to scientific priorities. We will focus on both internal sustainability reporting for improved risk and performance management, as well as on external disclosure as a driver for more accurate valuation of companies and improved allocation of capital market investments. We will also convene a forum for CEOs and accountants to discuss and develop large-scale solutions for finance and reporting and are exploring the possibility of developing a world-class training program for CFOs on sustainability.

If the world wants to address our many challenges — if business wants to restore societies’ trust — business must be more transparent and acknowledge that the resources we exploit or conserve and the social benefits we engender or lose, must be factored into a company’s value and thus into day-to-day management. This is not a matter of incremental change, but a radical transformation. And it’s the accountants who will lead the way.

This post is based partly on a speech Peter Bakker gave at The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Forum on December 13, 2012. A copy of the full speech, as well a video, can be accessed here.

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If you’re in a sophisticated IT shop, you’re already familiar with IT outsourcing. Your knowledge of this market gives you a leg up when you’re shopping for a service provider. You already have a bank of the right questions to ask.

But what happens when you’re moving an application to a cloud environment? The fact that a shared, multitenant environment will host your application introduces a whole different set of questions to ask. As part of the due diligence process, you’ve got to identify a wide range of capabilities you require from your cloud service provider.

How do you do this? Look to the online Intel Cloud Finder tool. This tool incorporates knowledge we’ve gained from working with Intel IT and our service provider partners to identify best practices in cloud environments and the characteristics of enterprise-grade cloud solutions.

When you visit this site you are first asked questions to define your required and desired features for your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. You don’t have to come up with a list of questions. We’ve done that for you.

When you complete the search process, the tool compares your responses to the services available from a select number of reputable IaaS providers worldwide and returns matching results. With the click of a mouse, you can learn more about the providers and reach out to them to take the next step.

Billy Cox is the general manager of a new, emerging software business at Intel.

The Washington Post on Tuesday launched BrandConnect, a sponsored content platform that “connects marketers with the Washington Post audience in a trusted environment.” The content appears on the Washington Post home page, among regular articles, and is denoted by a blue box that says “Sponsor Generated Content.” With the new platform, the Washington Post appears to be the first national newspaper to open up to this type of content on its website.

“With BrandConnect, marketers become the content creators and get premium placement through our site,” Steve Hills, president and GM of the Post, said in a press release published at Poynter. “We are excited to create a way for marketers to create enhanced visibility, while maintaining our position as a trusted source for content of all kinds.” According to Digiday, which first reported the news, marketers will create the content in some cases but WaPo will “also offer serivces via its advertiser team. Editorial resources will not be used.”

The first client is CTIA – The Wireless Association, whose post is here. The post’s headline is “Revving Up Mobile Economies” and is about an app called Mobile Main Street, developed by West Virginia University. CTIA has been promoting Mobile Main Street since December. According to the release, CTIA “will provide weekly content through blog posts, video case studies, and infographics related to wireless communication.”

Sponsored content — also known as native advertising — has been the subject of a lot of debate recently. BuzzFeed, for example, uses sponsored content as a substitute for traditional advertising, while the well-known blogger Andrew Sullivan has questioned whether it’s ethical (Note: We’ll be discussing this at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York, via a panel called “The Future of Native Advertising: Blurring Ads and Content,” with BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg and others).

The Atlantic ran into trouble in January when it published a sponsored post about the Church of Scientology on its website. After massive criticism, the Atlantic pulled the post and updated its guidelines for sponsored content.

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