Poor Reed Hastings. If only he hadn’t tried to split Netflix in two, his personal stake wouldn’t have plunged $640 million. It was just one of many floundering attempts by Hollywood and its partners in the past decade to navigate the digital world.

Who would have thought Rupert Murdoch’s 2005 acquisition of MySpace would turn into a disaster? Or that a Finnish game company would become a Hollywood sensation via a flock of angry birds?

PHOTOS: 2012 Digital Power 50

At any time, it seems impossible to know who’s got the juice. Right now, the entertainment industry largely is operating out of fear — witness its attempts to get Congress to back the Stop Online Piracy Act, which in many ways would curtail Internet freedom.

Digital revenues remain pennies on each dollar, but if this year’s CES — where the hottest items are web-enabled televisions — is any indication all that could change overnight.

Which is why, instead of playing defense, Hollywood might do well to pay attention to the innovators listed below. Each has found a way to make digital technology work for them in what still is essentially the Wild West, as in, still yours for the taking.

Steve Ellis
CEO, WhoSay

“Plenty of websites post celebrity photos, but the celebrities don’t get any of the benefits,” says Ellis, 40. That’s why he created WhoSay, which hosts free, easy-to-update online content for invite-only celebs like Tom Hanks, Enrique Iglesias, Stan Lee, Steve Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow and Rihanna. WhoSay stars collectively boast 570 million fans across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other platforms, and their pages draw 10 million unique users each month. All those eyeballs, he says, will be worth money one day through endorsements, advertising and e-commerce, and WhoSay will split the revenue with its celebrity partners.

The deal will allow the members of Hollywood’s newest social media hub, who include Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria and Rihanna, to have complete control over which content they share with their fans via the mainstream media, CEO Steve Ellis tells THR.

WhoSay, Hollywood’s newest social media hub, has teamed up with the Associated Press to give its members the option to provide their exclusive, personal photos and videos to AP Images for licensing to major media outlets worldwide.

Under the agreement, each time WhoSay members create new photos and videos, they will be able to make that content available for licensing via AP Images, the AP’s commercial photo division.

AP Images also will provide photo services at events upon request to WhoSay members, who will own these images while giving AP Images the ability to license them.

“At WhoSay, our members create thousands of unique and authentic images every month for their fans to enjoy,” CEO Steve Ellis said. “By partnering with AP Images, we’ll be able to give our members the option to personally participate in the mainstream media marketplace, where they already generate such enormous interest and value.”

The members get to choose which content gets licensed to the AP.

“It’s totally within their control,” Ellis told The Hollywood Reporter.

Asked whether the clients will receive money as part of the AP arrangement, Ellis replied: “To the extent the AP ends up licensing images for fees, our clients are able to participate in that, yes.” But he didn’t provide further details.
The members get to choose which content gets licensed to the AP.

WhoSay, which launched last year, was co-founded by CAA; Amazon, Greylock Partners and High Peaks Ventures are investors.

WhoSay’s member list, which currently numbers at nearly 1,000, is comprised of actors, athletes, recording artists and other famous personalities such as Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Kristin Cavallari, Jordin Sparks, Lindsay Lohan, Sofia Vergara, Rihanna, Nikki Reed, Paris Hilton, Bravo’s Andy Cohen and Snoop Dogg. Celebrities can join by invitation only or request to become a member.

The site was designed to allow its members to upload their own images and videos to WhoSay and then post them to social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and China’s Tencent. The draw is that the celebrities can have a more direct connection with their fans in the social media arena while also retaining legal ownership of their content.
So far, all of the response to the AP deal has been positive, Ellis said.
“They know they have the unique ability to create interesting content, and that’s powerful stuff,” he said, adding that WhoSay is looking to add more options of a similar nature for its clients.

Separately, AP and WhoSay also have agreed to allow AP journalists to use the WhoSay platform to post their self-shot photos and videos on their pages and distribute them onto social networks. The AP is starting with 20 journalists and may expand to include others.

“We continue to look for new ways to innovate in the social media space, and this agreement does so in the photo marketplace and with our journalists,” said Lou Ferrara, the AP managing editor who oversees the agency’s social media efforts.

As seen on PRWEB

Zipmark, a pioneer in mobile and online payments, today announced that it has secured $2M in Series Seed funding led by Village Ventures and Contour Venture Partners and supported by NYC Seed, High Peaks Venture Capital and the New York City Investment Fund. The New York City based company provides a direct and easy-to-use online payment platform that offers secure, Check21 compliant digital checks, and brings sophisticated check-processing infrastructure directly to billers and their customers.

“Our goal is to modernize the checkbook—to reduce the amount of time and money it takes to make a check payment, eliminate the possibility for bounced checks, and take all risk out of the equation for payer and payee alike,” said CEO and co-founder Jay Bhattacharya, former SVP at Citi Ventures and co-founder of Mobile Money Ventures (acquired by Intuit in 2011). “Improving the payment and collection process is a huge opportunity for any company that bills its clients, such as real estate managers and utility companies where inefficient collection practices can be detrimental to the bottom line.”

Zipmark’s state of the art platform accepts secure payments from any bank, thrift or credit union checking account without onerous fees or long delays, charging 1% for each transaction with a cap at $5 regardless of the payment amount. With each transaction, Zipmark helps businesses and their customers lower payment processing administrative costs and eliminates the additional labor hours that result from bounced checks. The Zipmark Biller API can be easily integrated into traditional web payments, offering a lower cost alternative to credit and debit cards. Zipmark’s iPhone app enables users to make payments for items such as rent, fees or subscriptions directly from paper invoices via QR codes.

“Zipmark is the first online payments company to dig beneath the user interface level and change the way money moves at the settlement level, correcting inefficiencies inherent in the current system,” said Matt Harris, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Village Ventures. “For a company in this space to succeed, it is critical to have a CEO with a strong financial background, which Zipmark has in Jay Bhattacharya. Co-founder and CTO Jake Howerton brings the technical vision to make the concept a reality.”

With the cost of credit and debit transaction fees as well as NSF (non-sufficient funds) fees on the rise, there is a significant need among both small and large businesses across many industries for a more efficient electronic checking payment solution. Zipmark has seen overwhelmingly positive results in its pilot program with NYC real estate company Sunshine Suites: after only four months, ten percent of Sunshine Suites’ tenants have begun paying their bills via Zipmark, significantly reducing payment processing fees for the company. In addition, because of reduced costs and no risk of bounced payments, Sunshine Suites was able to eliminate convenience fees for tenants.

Ticketfly, Inc., the fastest-growing independent ticketing and social marketing platform, announced today at the International Music Festival Conference in Austin, a comprehensive festival ticketing solution designed to increase operational efficiencies and revenue opportunities for promoters, while improving the festival going experience for fans.

The Ticketfly solution combines Ticketfly’s next-generation ticketing and social marketing platform with best-in-class festival technology specialists to offer a fully-integrated, end-to-end festival ticketing solution, including:

- Centralized contract and events logistics management
- Custom, feature-rich iPhone and Android mobile apps
- Secure and reliable RFID authentication
- Ride sharing transportation services
- Online, mobile and onsite box office functionality
- Industrial-grade scanning technology
- Integrated social marketing capabilities

“While the festival industry is booming, so is the complexity in operating these large scale events,” said Dan Teree, Ticketfly Co-Founder, President & COO. “Festival organizers are forced to cobble together often incompatible, non-integrated technologies at significant cost. Our goal is to reduce this friction by offering festival promoters a true end-to-end festival ticketing solution, saving them time and money while greatly improving the festival-going experience for fans.”

The Ticketfly festival ticketing solution brings together the best technology and service providers in the industry, including:

Aloompa Aloompa is the premier smartphone application provider for the top US music festivals, including Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, and the CMT Music Festival. Ticketfly and Aloompa have partnered to seamlessly integrate event data and provide mobile-ready ticketing capabilities that promote sales while reducing the need for data replication.

“We’re extremely excited to be partnering with Ticketfly. Integrating their social marketing and ticketing capabilities with our mobile apps will help our clients sell more tickets and create a richer mobile experience for fans.” — Drew Burchfield, Founder of Aloompa

DataFlow Workspace Copyright The driving force behind the operations and data management of most major US festivals including Austin City Limits, Burning Man, Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, and Coachella, DataFlow Workspace provides an easily customizable platform to manage festival event production. Ticketfly will allow DataFlow Workspace to better facilitate ticketing and access control for VIP packages.

“Ticketfly understands the need for a comprehensive approach to ticketing. It’s not enough to get them through the door, there’s an entire ticketing operation within the festival that requires diligent access control. Our combined solution will more tightly control costs and thus increase profitability for our clients.” — Robby Black, CEO of DataFlow Enterprises

DoStuff Media DoStuff Media provides a completely customizable website platform tailored specifically to the festival space. Clients include Lollapalooza, Moog Fest, and Austin City Limits, as well as the New Orleans Jazz Fest. Through this partnership, Ticketfly clients will gain access to a sophisticated festival website platform, coupled with Ticketfly’s advanced social connectivity and analytics.
“We’re committed to partnering with the best and Ticketfly’s growing festival business is a great opportunity for DoStuff Media. We’re excited to combine these two very powerful platforms into one incredible offering.” — Scott Owens, CEO of DoStuff Media

Intellitix Known as the industry standard for RFID access control and cashless payment systems for live events, Intellitix activated over one million RFID tags at festivals including Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands, Electric Zoo, and Austin City Limits this year. The non-exclusive Intellitix integration with Ticketfly will provide event promoters with seamless access to critical buyer behavior while managing fraud and unwanted resale.

“This software development allows Ticketfly to offer our next generation RFID solutions such as secure access control, social media integration, and cashless payment. This is a fantastic step in continuing to make Intellitix a ubiquitous platform that benefits all promoters and music fans.” — Serge Grimaux, CEO of Intellitix

Zimride Zimride is the fastest growing ridesharing application used by the largest universities and corporations. Their clients range from Facebook to Lollapalooza. With Ticketfly, event organizers will be able to offer concert-goers a way to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint while building a greater sense of community.

“As we expand into the event space with partners like Lollapalooza, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews Band, we are excited to work with Ticketfly to vastly improve the fan experience. The ability to marry Zimride’s ridesharing solution with Ticketfly will save fans and venues millions of dollars on transportation costs while creating a new community for fans to meet before and after the show.” — Logan Green, Founder & CEO of Zimride

About Ticketfly

Ticketfly is the fastest-growing independent ticketing and social marketing platform in North America. The Ticketfly platform provides next-generation ticketing, website, social marketing and analytics tools that enable event promoters and venues to drive ticket sales, build community and grow revenue. Ticketfly was founded by the team that first brought event ticketing to the Web. Recently, Fast Company named Ticketfly one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Music and Billboard called Ticketfly one of the Five Hot Digital Music Companies to Watch. For more information on Ticketfly, visit www.ticketfly.com . Connect on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ticketfly , or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ticketfly .

As seen SAI
Written by: Alyson Shontell

Cities spend a lot of time and resources developing help lines and community management systems. If you live in New York, you’ve undoubtedly seen its multi-million-dollar 311 system for connecting the public with government services.

PublicStuff, a New York-Based startup founded by Lily Liu, is a much cheaper solution. It is a platform for submitting requests in your city in the cloud; it utilizes social-media so tickets can be filed and tracked in real-time.

For example, if you see something that needs to be fixed on your street, in your apartment building or on a campus, file a ticket on PublicStuff. Complete the form, hit submit, then check your email for the request confirmation. PublicStuff guarantees the request will be seen by the right people and get completed. Requests can be filed online or on your mobile device.

Today, PublicStuff is announcing that it has received funding from Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital and High Peaks Venture Partners.

By Nancy Gohring, IDG News

AT&T on Monday announced plans to offer a new service, called Toggle, that will securely run enterprise apps like email on any Android phone a worker chooses to buy.

The service will run on technology developed by Enterproid, a company that just last week received funding from Google, Qualcomm and Comcast.

End users with Toggle will see two separate personas on their Android phones. One includes enterprise-grade email, calendar, contacts and messaging apps and a browser, all of which can securely access corporate data. The other is the open Android platform, where users can download and use any app they please.

Any corporate email service that uses ActiveSync can be delivered to the phones.

IT administrators will have access to a Web console that lets them manage the service. They will be able to manage which employees have access to which company resources, remotely delete or add business applications to the devices, and remotely wipe corporate data stored on the phone.

AT&T will sell the service to enterprises but will allow them to apply it to phones running on other operators’ networks. The service will work on phones running Android 2.2 or higher. It requires an application on the phone, which IT administrators can push out to users, and works in coordination with a hosted backend system.

While the service only works on Android phones now, Enterproid is developing a client for iPhones and may target other operating systems. In a couple of weeks it also plans to offer the service directly to end users and enterprises under the Enterproid brand.

Enterproid hopes its technology will appeal to people who would like to choose their own device to use at work but who don’t like the idea of their IT department potentially accessing personal information on their phone. With Enterproid, “people can still download what they want and browse what they want. They can SMS whatever they want about their boss and be reassured that the company has no insight,” said Alexander Trewby, vice president and co-founder of Enterproid.

Enterproid is also continuing to build an SDK that will let developers create other applications using Enterproid’s secure system. The company expects to begin offering that around the end of the year, Trewby said.

AT&T said its Toggle service will become available before the end of the year.

Enterproid’s technology is not the only one that aims to address the conflict between people who want to choose their own phones and enterprises that want to make sure those phones don’t open security holes when used to access corporate data. VMware, Red Bend and Open Kernel Labs are all developing types of virtualization technology to separate enterprise apps on phones — particularly Android phones — that are susceptible to malicious apps.

Enterproid, the developer of a platform that allows professionals to maintain completely separate professional and personal profiles on a single Android device, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Comcast Ventures, with Google Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures participating.

Called Divide, the platform allows users to create a completely separate profile on Android devices that includes enhanced security, access control, remote wipe capability and a set of enterprise-grade versions of applications like email, a web browser, instant messaging, and SMS. Users can switch back and forth between their professional and personal profiles but no data can cross the division, so that no business content is compromised in the personal profile.

And Enterproid comes with a bunch of useful tools, including the ability to segregate voice and data usage for work, or hand a child a phone without the risk of the child accidentally emailing or calling a contact.

Enterproid’s Divide also allows users to manage devices from the cloud. Lost devices can be remotely located and wiped with corporate data being erased on the entire handheld. IT administrators can also reset passwords, and lock corporate profiles. Additionally, Divide has built-in expense management tools to help identify roaming devices and display network operator usage data.

Divide is available exclusively for Android phones and tablets but the startup plans to extend the service to iOS and Windows Phone 7 platforms in the future. The app is currently in private beta and will debut soon for download on the Android market.

Andrew Toy, CEO of Enterproid, tells me the platform is capitalizing on what he calls the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend. He explains that more and more employees are frustrated by having to carry around two separate smartphones, one for work and one for personal use. Enterproid solves this pain point, makes mobile computing more efficient and gives companies the ability to still maintain a secure mobile environment.

Google Ventures partner Rich Miner agrees that Enterproid is the future of enterprise mobile computing. “When you have one smartphone, you don’t want another phone,” he tells us. “Enterproid is leveraging the technologies now offered by these new sets of devices and creating a mangeable wall between enterprise and personal.”

Founded by former Morgan Stanley, MTV and Smule execs, Enterproid is working with carriers and manufacturers to develop partnerships, which will be announced soon, says the company. The startup is also releasing an SDK as well. The new round will be used to extend engineering capabilities, expand distribution internationally and launch additional global partnerships.

Today HPVP announced the launch of its new ambassador program.

The ambassadors are a whos-who of founders, CEOs and community organizers in the New York ecosystem who are great folks & close friends of the firm.

Here’s a list of who’s involved:

• Dave Whittemore: Co-Founder Clotheshor.se, President of CVC & NYVC
• Vin Vacanti: CEO & Co-Founder Yipit
• Shane Snow: Co-Founder Content.ly, Mashable Contributor
• Jesse Middleton:  Founder Guyhaus, Co-Founder WeWorkLabs
• Dan Leahy: Co-Founder Savored
• Eddie Kim: CEO & Co-Founder SimpleReach
• Brad Hargreaves: Co-Founder General Assembly
• Steve Cheney: Biz Dev Group.me, TechCrunch Contributor
• Tony Bacigalupo: Mayor New Work City
• Yoni Agraman: Product Manager Yahoo!, President NYUVC

The ambassadors have a pretty cool role.  They will be the gatekeepers to exclusive events, enabling them to help other entrepreneurs access the venture capital community.  We also think this community will prove to be a powerful support network for HPVP portfolio CEOs, other founders that are friends of the firm and each other.

Congrats to all of the ambassadors!

A start-up that counts megastars like Tom Hanks, Steven Tyler and Ellen DeGeneres among its active users now has a high-profile Silicon Valley investor: Greylock Partners.

In an interview last week, Greylock partner David Sze said he thinks a celebrity content management system will be a big business. “It used to be when these platforms first started, the top users were always digital stars — the Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble types. If you look at it today, there’s an amazing shift going on — it’s all general celebrities and the scale is order-of-magnitude multiples of when the tech stars were dominating the system.”

As I’ve described it before, WhoSay is a social media tool for celebrities, aimed at “helping them manage their social media presence and making sure photos and videos are posted on a page the stars themselves can control and eventually monetize.”

For instance, here’s a picture of Tom Hanks’s refrigerator, via an embed code that allows the actor to maintain the rights to his image. Hanks also used WhoSay last week to bitch about how RSS feed readers of Gawker’s headline about his new movie might think he was actually dead. (Tom Hanks knows what RSS is?!)

Greylock has one of the most extensive venture capital portfolios of the leading social Web companies, among them general and open platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Airbnb and Tumblr. WhoSay, by contrast, is a much more specific publishing tool.

WhoSay — which was incubated by Creative Artists Agency but operates independently — had already raised $6 million from investors including Amazon and High Peaks Ventures. Greylock is adding an undisclosed amount into a previous Series B round.

Click here to see video.

High Peaks Venture Partners has been an active seed and early stage investor across New York State since 2004. The firm has made twenty-five investments across its two funds, partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs and marquee co-investors on a range of opportunities in the web services, digital media, software, and fin-tech markets.

With a rapidly growing NYC portfolio and a new seed-focused fund, High Peaks opened an office in Union Square in 2010, and strengthened its NYC presence with the addition of Associate Rahul Gandhi in early 2011. With the addition of Mark Davis, the firm continues to increase its focus on the New York City market.

“New York City has steadily increased as a focus of High Peaks since we founded the firm in 2004, but now, with the addition of Mark to our team, we are doubling down on NYC as the center of our geographic focus.” said Brad Svrluga, High Peaks co-founder and General Partner.

“High Peaks is rapidly becoming one of the pre-eminent early-stage investors in New York City. They are knowledgeable, nimble, and flexible, and they understand what it means to be a good partner to both co-investors and entrepreneurs. Their reputation with the entrepreneurs and investors they’ve partnered with is exceptional, and from what I’ve observed firsthand, very well deserved. I’m very excited to join their team and to help them support New York,” said Mark.

In addition to his new role with High Peaks, Mark is also the CEO & Co-Founder of Kohort, a High Peaks portfolio company. He brings a unique blend of entrepreneurial and investing experience, and greatly enhances the firm’s operational expertise. In addition to being an entrepreneur, Mark is an active supporter of the New York startup ecosystem through his blog mpd.me and the communities he founded: the Columbia Venture Community and the New York Venture Community. Prior to co-founding Kohort, Mark was a venture capitalist at DFJ Gotham Ventures in New York City, where he played a key role in numerous investments including AdStruc, Medialets, SailThru, Seamless Receipts, Yipit and others. Mark is also an angel investor in Warby Parker.

“Mark is a perfect fit with our firm’s culture. He’s got an incredible work ethic and commitment to the NYC tech community. He is deeply passionate about entrepreneurship and spends much of his time helping founders navigate operational challenges and fundraising – not to any specific financial end, but because it’s what he loves doing. Supporting entrepreneurs and helping their companies succeed is what we’re all about, and it’s absolutely what Mark is all about,” said Brad Svrluga. “In addition, Mark’s operational experience as an active and successful entrepreneur in his own right, only enhances our ability to deliver on our focus of doing whatever it takes to help the entrepreneurs we back to succeed.”

SCHENECTADY, NY — Union Graduate College has named a well-known business executive to lead its growing MBA program. Bela Musits will join UGC as Dean of the School of Management starting September 1, 2011. Musits, 57, is a founding partner of High Peaks Venture Partners. Headquartered in Troy, the firm has raised more than $60 million for investment in start-up technology companies.

“As a highly successful and well-regarded entrepreneur, venture capitalist, corporate manager and project engineer, Bela Musits brings real world perspective and proven business acumen to Union Graduate College’s School of Management,” said Dr. Laura Schweitzer, President of Union Graduate College. “With Tech Valley on the verge of explosive growth, we wanted a Dean with a fresh outlook. Bela’s entrepreneurial instinct, hands on experience and passion for teaching are the right combination to create new opportunities for our students, programs and institution.”

With more than 30 years of teaching experience, Musits has served as an adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Babson College, Schenectady Community College as well as Union Graduate College. At RPI, he directed the Incubator Program for five years. And as an engineer and researcher, Musits worked for General Electric Global Research and the IBM Corporate Research Center. Musits eventually left engineering to launch a successful technology start-up that went public in 1996.

“As an adjunct professor, I have been impressed with Union Graduate College’s MBA program and jumped at the opportunity to become more involved,” said Musits. “Helping a high-quality product reach its full potential – that’s what I do, what I thrive on. And that’s the approach I’ll take as Dean. I am honored and energized by the challenge – and look forward to getting started.”

At Union Graduate College, Musits will lead a growing MBA program with more than 300 students. Enrollment at UGC’s School of Management climbed 5% last year and it recently renewed its “gold standard” in MBA accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). UGC has the only program in the region that has also achieved accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation Healthcare Management Education (CAHME) for its MBA in Healthcare Management.

Union Graduate College joins other MBA programs, such as University of New Haven and Boston University, who have recently tapped business leaders to serve as Dean of a management program.

“Bela Musits is an innovator – well-respected and admired throughout the business community,” said David Buicko, President, Galesi Management and Chair, Center for Economic Growth Board of Directors. “Naming him Dean of the School of Management is a coup not just for Union Graduate College but for all of us invested in economic development. I look forward to helping him succeed in his new role.”

Buicko is chairing Union Graduate College’s “2011 Scholarship Scramble” golf tournament at Eagle Crest Golf Club in Clifton Park on September 16, 2011.

Upon joining Union Graduate College on September 1, 2011, Musits will step down as Managing Director at High Peaks, remaining a Venture Partner at the firm. He will continue to spearhead university technology commercialization efforts.

“As one of our founding partners, Bela has been instrumental in helping High Peaks Venture Partners flourish, identifying and growing important new technology companies across New York State,” said Russ Howard, Managing Director at High Peaks. “As he begins a new chapter in his career, we know Bela will use his unique skills and talents to nurture collaboration between the academic, entrepreneurial and business communities for the benefit of the entire region.”

Union Graduate College is one of just a handful of institutions across the country devoted exclusively to master’s level education. UGC opened a brand new campus in 2009, located in downtown Schenectady. In addition to management, the Graduate College offers master’s programs in education, engineering and bioethics.

Clifton Park, NY – August 9, 2011 – Apprenda, the deploy anywhere Platform as a Service (PaaS) stack for .NET, today announced it has closed a $10 million Series B round of funding. Led by Ignition Partners with participation from previous investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and High Peaks Venture Partners (HPVP), the new capital will be used to accelerate the product roadmap, while also expanding marketing and sales for Apprenda’s innovative private PaaS and framework. Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition, will join the board of directors.

“Apprenda has a growing customer base and a scalable business model to help grow into an extremely profitable business as they are solving a key need for enterprises,” said Artale. “This is an exciting time for Apprenda as they are rapidly expanding and have an incredibly talented management team and group of engineers. I look forward to working closely with the team as a member of the board of directors.”

According to recent analyst predictions, PaaS spending will increase 113 percent by 2014, reaching nearly $460 million. In the past year, Apprenda has experienced significant market traction with over 2,000 new installations of its deploy anywhere private PaaS.. As a new breed of cloud-enabled application infrastructure software, Apprenda empowers these organizations to embrace and leverage the full power of cloud computing, multi-tenant architecture and highly efficient grid execution to deliver business critical applications faster and at a dramatically lower cost.

“We are pleased to have the continued support from NEA and HPVP and welcome the new support from Ignition,” said Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda. “Since the company was founded, the market for .NET has dramatically increased and we’re eager for the amazing possibilities this new round of financing offers us. We are also delighted to have Frank bring his industry expertise and strategy to the board.”

Supporting Resources

Follow Apprenda on the web at:

• Apprenda blog
• YouTube
• Twitter

About Apprenda

Apprenda is the deploy anywhere Platform as a Service (PaaS) stack for .NET. As a new breed of cloud-enabled application infrastructure software, Apprenda empowers organizations to deploy their own PaaS and framework for developing, delivering and managing the entire lifecycle of their .NET-based applications on any infrastructure. By decoupling applications from infrastructure and providing developers with a self-service, multi-tenant cloud application platform, Apprenda enables organizations to achieve enormous cost savings and faster time to market. For more information visit Apprenda’s website at: http://www.apprenda.com.

Savored, the restaurant discount and discovery site formerly known as Village Vines, tells Business Insider that it is partnering with dinner reservation company OpenTable.

Starting today, OpenTable will have Savored 30% Off Deals on its San Francisco Bay Area homepage. It will expand the deals to other markets in the next few weeks.

When users book one of the Savored tables, they’ll be able to pay $10 up front and receive a 30% discount on meals. The discount process is seamless: as soon as a reservation is made, the restaurant is notified. Savored estimates the average OpenTable diner will save $40 per 4-person meal.

Savored, which has hundreds of thousands of members in 10 major US cities, can benefit from the 20,000+ restaurants on Opentable and its extensive audience. To date, Opentable has seated more than 200 million diners.

“We believe that by working together we can enhance the experience and benefits for both restaurateurs and diners,” says Matt Roberts, CEO of OpenTable.

Savored was founded in 2010 by Dan Leahy and Ben McKean. It has received $4 million in funding from Hearst, High Peaks Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow, family and friends. Other partners include MenuPages and Zagat.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurant-discount-site-savored-joins-up-with-opentable-to-give-30-off-meals-2011-7#ixzz1T7nEU5FI

When Rihanna, Keith Urban, Demi Lovato or “Glee” star Darren Criss tweets a photo, the link will likely point to a site called WhoSay, rather than to more widely-used photo sharing sites like TwitPic, Yfrog and Plixi. Where the photo is being shared makes little difference to the musicians’ fans, but it makes a big difference to the stars themselves.

WhoSay was founded in March 2010 by Steve Ellis, with a goal of returning ownership of celebrity content back to the stars. The service is by invitation only, authenticating the identity of every of every celebrity on the site.

“Celebrity clients in general provide value by definition of who they are with their content in the digital space. But in many cases that value is not returned to the client, to the celebrity — it’s leveraged by other folks for their own benefit,” said Ellis, who started Pump Audio, now owned by Getty Images, after his own recording contract ended a decade ago.

“The idea was that maybe there was a way of helping our clients manage the constantly changing new and mainstream media environment,” he continued. “And so what it turned into then was really how best to give our clients a set of tools that would help them manage, for the long term, this relationship with their fans through all media outlets.”

Soon after Ellis left his job at Getty, he was contacted by associates from Creative Artists Agency in California. “CAA were the folks who called me essentially looking for a solution to the sort of overall issue of digital,” said Ellis. CAA were hoping that, given Ellis’s background in music, photo sharing and copyright, he could solve the problems that famous clients were having on social networks. Many celebrities were losing the rights to their own photos and videos, giving the licenses away for free to sites like Twitpic as soon as they uploaded content.

Despite CAA’s minority stake in the company, “We are in no way exclusive to any agency,” said Ellis. “We have many clients who are not CAA clients and we service our clients in the foremost manner across any management firm, any agency, any publicist, any service and any label.

“WhoSay is now owned in part by CAA, Amazon.com and an independent venture firm.

With WhoSay, celebrities can share their text updates, photos or videos via a website or a mobile application, and have the choice of sending it to any or all of their social media platforms. The copyright of this content belongs to the celebrity, and an individual copyright claim is stamped at the bottom of each photo put on the site.

“It’s important for us to establish this connection for our clients to their fans because we do anticipate this content moving beyond purely what we consider the internet screen now,” Ellis said, explaining that all web content will soon be available, “with internet-enabled televisions and everything else, very easily on every screen.”

The one thing that WhoSay is not is a new social network. There are no search features and it is difficult to even access a celebrity’s account unless you are directed there from one of their other social pages. Ellis said that consumers have enough social media choices, and the WhoSay team has no intention of ever allowing consumers to make accounts on WhoSay.

“Frankly they don’t really need the services that we provide,” he explained, “and there are a lot of very specific features built into our service that really only benefit someone who is of a high profile.”

The small company has only 18 employees, stationed in New York, Los Angeles and London, but because WhoSay works with Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, its pages are seen by millions of people every day.

“At the moment, our clients are connected to over 550 million social media fans,” Ellis said. “They have a great deal of reach and a great deal of influence.”

And at the moment, WhoSay has not yet monetized that influence, but that may change in the future.

“There is no fee for our service and at the current time,” Ellis explained. “We are not engaged in commercial activity. There will be some announcements coming that will talk about the options we will be providing our clients. . . . Those kinds of opportunities will be around brand and advertising integration and around commerce.”

Ellis said that the company would soon be expanding the options available to their celebrity and musician clients, connecting to additional international and mainstream social media platforms.

Have you noticed that lately an increasing number of tweets from famous people are tagged “via WhoSay”? What is this WhoSay app — and if it’s good enough for Steven Tylerand Tom Hanks and Eva Longoria, can you use it too?

Not unless you’re famous.

WhoSay, it turns out, is a sort of HootSuite for the stars, helping them manage their social media presence and making sure photos and videos are posted on a page the stars themselves can control and eventually monetize.

I spoke with WhoSay CEO Steve Ellis yesterday about his 18-month-old company and what it has accomplished so far. First, the start-up basics: Los Angeles-based WhoSay has raised $6 million from investors including Amazon and High Peaks Ventures. The premise for WhoSay was developed at Creative Artists Agency but now the company works with all sorts of talent agents and managers. Ellis himself previously sold his start-up Pump Audio to Getty Images.

The WhoSay product, which has been out for nine months, has hundreds of users, and they collectively have 570 million social media fans across Twitter and Facebook and get “multiple tens of millions of page views per month,” said Ellis. More than half the content posted on the service is uploaded directly from WhoSay’s various mobile apps.

WhoSay doesn’t offer a public index of all its clients, though it’s obvious who’s using WhoSay since the pages themselves are all public at WhoSay.com and their tweets use the URL shortener Say.ly. Other users include Ellen DeGeneres, Dwayne Johnson, Diane Keaton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Silverman, Cristiano Ronaldo, Shahrukh Khan, Steve Martin and Katie Couric.

Online, Data-Driven Real Estate Company RealDirect Raising $2 Million in Funding
Series A Round Will Help New York’s Web-Based and Data-Driven Real Estate Brokerage, Which Launched Last Year, Expand Team, Technology and Services

RealDirect (www.RealDirect.com), a next-generation real estate technology company and brokerage, announced today that it is raising $2 million in Series A funding, led by GSA Venture Partners, with additional investments from Bendigo Partners, High Peaks Venture Partners and others. This round will be used to build out the growing team and technology behind RealDirect’s proprietary web-based platform. It follows a $650,000 round of seed funding that closed in Spring 2010.

Launched last year, RealDirect is an alternative real estate brokerage that helps clients buy and sell residential real estate through a web-based, data-driven marketing and sales platform, with the assistance of a licensed real estate consultant. Currently operating in Manhattan and Brooklyn, RealDirect plans to expand its areas of service to additional markets across the New York metro area through the end of the year.

“I decided to start RealDirect after selling my own home a few years ago and realizing that the technology behind the seller side of a real estate transaction had not yet caught up with how consumers are using the web to search for properties,” said Doug Perlson, a former real estate lawyer and co-founder and CEO of RealDirect. “It’s incredible to look back on how much we’ve accomplished in such a short time.”

“In the year since our initial investment, we’ve seen RealDirect go from an innovative real estate marketing and sales concept, to a high growth business,” said Brian Hirsch, a member of RealDirect’s Board of Directors and managing partner at GSA Venture Partners, a New York-based early stage venture capital fund and lead investor in both rounds of RealDirect’s funding.

Jarrett Lilien, former president and COO of E*Trade and founding partner of private investment firm Bendigo Partners, added, “With an increasing amount of data and tools available online, RealDirect satisfies a need in the real estate market similar to how E*Trade and other online brokers give consumers an alternative in financial services. My partners and I strongly believe the market for consumers having more control over their real estate transactions is about to take off.”

RealDirect’s RealDirect for Sellers is the first Internet-based, data-driven real estate platform that leverages advancements in online advertising, web analytics and interactive applications to allow New York City homeowners to efficiently manage the marketing and selling of their home. Sellers sign up online and build a profile of their home to get a RealPrice estimate – an accurate pricing estimate of how much to list their home. Users can then decide to list their home for sale and choose either “Owner-Managed,” where they pay either a monthly fee of $395 or a 1% commission at close, or “Agent-Managed,” where a RealDirect agent manages the entire process for a 2% commission to RealDirect. Clients are able to choose the commission they are willing to pay buyer’s brokers. The platform uses listing and market data in real-time to make recommendations along the way to the seller and their consultant.

On the buyer side, RealDirect provides prospective buyers with two-tiered guidance in managing their apartment search. RealDirect for Buyers gives users access to dynamic tools, including a unique Buyer Profile that helps clients better understand their living needs. At completion of the profile, the buyer will receive a synopsis of what is important to them, broken down into three categories: “Must Haves,” “Wish List” and “Deal Breakers.” RealDirect then provides the buyer with a list of the 5-10 properties that best fit their needs. The list will also periodically flag a listing as a “RealBargain” if data shows the property to be a particularly good deal. In working with RealDirect, buyers have the opportunity to earn a 1 percent rebate check on the sale price of a home at closing. For more information, please visit RealDirect.com or call (877) 514-7087.

New York City-based dining deals site VillageVines is now Savored. In addition to the name change, it launched a redesigned site, is doubling its cities to ten, and added Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow as an investor and board member. The company raised $3 million last January.

Savored focuses on high-end dining discounts at top-rated Zagat restaurants. But the model is slightly different than your run-of-the-mill daily deals site. Members pay $10 per reservation, and get a flat 30 percent off food and drinks. Unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, merchants get to keep everything after the discount instead of splitting that with Savored. Savored makes money by charging $10 per reservation (so the deals are only appealing at restaurants where it is worth paying $10 to get 30 percent off).

Another difference with the bigger daily deal sites is that Savored is a lot more flexible. “We don’t have sky diving, we don’t have spas and salons,” notes co-founder Daniel Leahy. Restaurants can pick the times that their deals are available, as well as limit the size of the party that can take advantage of the deal. Savored makes it easier for them to drive traffic during slow hours. Members make reservations on the site just like they would with OpenTable (pick a time, restaurant, and how many diners) and 30 percent is automatically taken off the bill.

In addition to New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, LA, and Washington, D.C., Savored is expanding to Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, and Denver. Leahy expects that Savored will be able to drive $25 million in incremental revenues to restaurants this year.

Written by Alexia Tsotsis
As seen on Techcrunch

Q&A platform for video VYou is announcing today $3 million in Series A funding, lead by RRE Ventures and Highland Capital Partners and followed on by High Peaks Ventures, Broadway Video Ventures, Kevin Wall, David Tisch and Rick Webb.

Gunning for a media play, the New York-based VYou recently partnered up with Hearst Newspapers, MTV/VH1, Simon and Schuster and the Newark Peace Summit in order to help these brands better connect with their audiences. In the daunting shadow of YouTube VYou, which allows users to converse through brief snippets of video, will have to be nimbler and more niche in order to gain a competitive foothold in the user generated online video space.

Since its November launch VYou has accumulated over 20 million views and 30K user sign ups. Founder Steve Spurgat tells me that he doesn’t liken the company to a Quora or Formspring for video, but in fact chose the video element because it was simply the fastest way to achieve his ultimate goal of advancing how people communicate online, “My initial approach to this company was to create more intimacy in how people communicate, video was just the by-product.”

Spurgat plans on using the new financing to focus on rolling out key product features and building out the tech team, “We’re very lucky that VYou is an incredibly easy sell. The key is for us is to build a great product and let it sell itself.”

By Jeremy Beiler
As seen in NY Times

When Tom Hanks posts a message to Twitter leading his 1.8 million followers to view a photo, perhaps of him in a candid moment on a movie set, they are sent to a special kind of site, one that gives him and other celebrities new control over their presence on social media.

While most people on Twitter use a service like TwitPic, Yfrog or Plixi to share photos with their friends and followers, for celebrities, these services can come with strings attached, as they gain ownership rights to uploaded photos and can sell ads alongside them. A company called WhoSay — a little-known start-up with a clientele that is anything but little known — offers similar services, but grants ownership of the images to the stars themselves.

Operating in “stealth mode” since last year, WhoSay runs from the Los Angeles office building of the Creative Artists Agency, which represents a Rolodex of household names, including Mr. Hanks. His WhoSay site includes “copyright Tom Hanks” branding and a stack of fine print at the bottom asserting his legal ownership of all content, placed against warnings of “fines and imprisonment” for improper use.

WhoSay has about 15 people on staff, with offices in New York and London in addition to the one in Los Angeles, said Steve Ellis, the company’s chief executive. Creative Artists and Amazon.com have minority stakes, among other investors, he said.

The company’s client list, by invitation only and not limited to Creative Artists, includes Kevin Spacey, Jim Carrey, John Cusack, Bill Maher, Johnny Knoxville, Chelsea Handler, Eva Longoria, Spike Lee, Enrique Iglesias, Katie Couric and more. In addition to photo and video hosting, the company’s services include automated copyright branding and a private mobile app that loops in publicists, allowing the celebrities’ Facebook and Twitter updates to be easily controlled by a staff .

By devising ways to protect, manage and eventually make money off celebrity activity on social networks, WhoSay aims to change how famous people behave online.

“We work with people who are constantly being utilized by third parties for the wrong reasons,” said Mr. Ellis, who spoke by phone and sent statements via e-mail. The company was formed, he wrote, “to give celebrities and other influential people a set of tools to allow them to manage and control their presence in the digital world.”

WhoSay seeks to protect against situations like one in January, when Plixi, which hosts images, even made a deal to broker and sell photos uploaded by celebrities through a British news organization. “Celebrity traffic to our site represents 10 to 15 percent of all of our traffic,” said Sean Callahan, a founder of Plixi.com.

“They help keep the service going and make it a profitable venture,” he said.

But sharing profits with the celebrities was not part of the plan, and Plixi quickly reversed the deal after the company was contacted (directly, not via publicist) by a displeased celebrity — Mr. Callahan would not say who.

Celebrities using WhoSay, however, can bypass Plixi (or even Facebook and Twitter) to share content. Instead, they use the company’s secure software to create an update, which is then automatically pushed into their social feeds. For fans, the end result is not noticeably different. For celebrities, it changes a lot.