“It’s absurd for Congress to vilify businesses like Apple for wanting to minimize their tax code just like every other American rightly does,” tweeted uber-Libertarian Senator Rand Paul, lashing out at his Senate colleagues for ‘dragging’ Apple CEO Tim Cook in to defend his company’s tax policies.

On the eve of Cook’s much-hyped testimony, a Senate investigation released a scathing report, accusing Apple of cooking the books and engaging in shady tax-dodging practices, to avoid repatriating $102 billion in offshore cash to avoid a 35 percent U.S. tax rate.

“Instead of doing the right thing we drag businessmen and women in here to berate them for trying to maximize their profits for shareholders,” Rand continued in another tweet.

“The ability to pay taxes of less than 2 percent on all of Apple’s offshore income gives the company a powerful financial incentive to engage in convoluted tax planning to avoid paying U.S. taxes,” notes the report from Senators Carl Levin and John McCain of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (for a more detailed explanation for how Apple dodges billions in taxes, see our previous post)

Paul was rightly furious for the tone of the accusations, which blamed Apple for skirting its obligation to the U.S. government. “This is a vendetta against American companies for trying to maximize profit,” he said. ”I want to see one company come before here and tell us that they’re goal is different from Apple’s, that their goal is to maximize their tax burden.”

Noting that thousands (if not millions) of U.S. citizens hold Apple stock directly or through pensions, Paul argued, “When we want to punish Mr. Apple. who are we punishing, we’re punishing ourselves.” Indeed, Apple would be hosing the everyday shareholders if it didn’t maximize its profit through some very convoluted offshore tax strategies.

However, Paul’s transparent theatrics fell short on his solutions, which included a passing mention to a “repatriation holiday.” Back in 2004, the U.S. government gave a juicy tax repatriation holiday to incentivize bringing foreign holdings back to the homeland. Yet, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, that money didn’t go into research and development. Indeed, many of the companies cut jobs, instead funneling their new domestic coffers into providing dividends to its shareholders.

Now, Paul and others could argue that lower taxes, overall, would stimulate investment in innovation, but he shouldn’t be so glib to the very real implications to a tax repatriation holiday.

The actual testimony has been far more diplomatic than the report, which lavished Apple with kudos. “I. Love. Apple…I harassed my husband until he converted to a MacBook,” gushed Senator Claire McCaskill.

Former presidential candidate and Senator John McCain, for his part, joked, “What I really wanted to ask was why the hell I have to keep updating the apps on my phone.”

Cook, himself, briefly lobbied for two solutions: a simpler, reduced U.S. tax code and a “single digit” repatriation tax. While such a tax solution is up for debate, the most compelling statement was made by Senator Rob Portman to Tim Cook, “you don’t need more tax lawyers, you need more innovators.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for “defensive purposes.” Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself.

Here’s how Twitter defines “defensive purposes”: “Defensive purposes means that you can defend yourself should another party try to initiate patent litigation against you or your customers or users. Under the IPA, it also means that you can use these patents against anyone who has sued others offensively in the past (up to ten years).”

The first patent to get the IPA treatment is Loren Brichter’s pull to refresh user interface interaction, which was built into Tweetie, the Twitter app that was acquired by the company and adopted as the official client.

Basically, Twitter is saying it’s not going to go after companies that are using pull to refresh, or other parts of Brichter’s patent, within their app. If someone were to claim to have created the functionality first, only then would Twitter defend itself.

Twitter has also announced that two other companies, Biz Stone’s Jelly and the Lift task tracking app, will also be adopting the Innovator’s Patent Agreement. With so many ideas running around, there should be no reason why the first person to successfully file a patent should hold the power to make everyone’s lives miserable. At the end of the day, all companies benefitted from Brichter’s work, and it’s been nice to see Twitter not going after anyone else for replicating parts of it.

When the IPA was announced last year, Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger had this to say:

This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

Using patents as a shield will hopefully slow down the rampant patent trolling that has plagued the technology space for the past ten years. Twitter, Jelly and Lift promise not to be trolls, and that’s a good thing.

You can read the full IPA draft here to see if it’s something your company would want to adopt.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BrandYourself is expanding its efforts to take on the big names in the online reputation market (particularly Reputation.com) with the launch of a new version of its service.

The company started out as a fairly simple self-service tool for trying to improve your presence online, for example by creating a website and other content to push down undesirable results when someone Googles your name. (It has become increasingly focused on Google results over time.) The basic service is free, but BrandYourself charges $10 a month for additional features and usage.

With BrandYourself’s freemium, self-service product, it seemed to be serving a difference audience than Reputation.com, but now the newer startup is challenging its more-established competitor in a direct way. With a recently-launched concierge service, users aren’t just presented with a list of to-do items for improving their Google results — they can also pay BrandYourself team members to work with them on a strategy and actually do the work for them. So if, say, you don’t have the time create and maintain your own personal website, BrandYourself create and maintain one for you. And co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron said that where Reputation.com can cost thousands of dollars per month, BrandYourself’s concierge services can cost as little as $200 or $300.

Why the dramatic price difference? Ambron insisted that it’s not because BrandYourself delivers lower-quality, cheaper work — he showed me one of the websites created for a BrandYourself customer and it did look like a real personal page. In contrast, he showed me content that he said had been created through his account with Reputation.com, and it was basically just an empty template. (I emailed Reputation.com to discuss how the company saw itself stacking up against BrandYourself, but I did not receive a response.)

The big difference, Ambron said, is that existing online reputation services are built around a model of high acquisition costs and low retention rates — they pay for a lot of advertising to attract customers, and those customers don’t stick around for very long, so the companies have to charge high rates. BrandYourself, on the other hand, can treat its free tools as the marketing funnel for its paid version and concierge service. Plus, Ambron said that with lower prices, customers can use BrandYourself on an ongoing basis.

“We’re really trying to fix the online reputation space, ” he said. “Until it was only meant for rich people and it was notoriously ineffective.”

In addition to the concierge service, BrandYourself is launching a new interface that makes it easier, among other things, to submit links that you want to promote in your Google results. And there’s a new report card showing users BrandYourself’s score of their current search results, the progress that they’ve made with the service, and details about who is actually visiting your BrandYourself website.

The company says it has been used by more than 200,000 people. It has also raised more than $1.5 million in funding and is now based in New York City.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Apple has a good deal of cash. And, in the Valley, the startup ecosystem — for many reasons — wants to see Apple spend that cash. As their cash pile continued to grow as their stock price and market cap soared, Apple’s inability to provide robust software services combined with opportunities to expand their reach through acquisitions has become a fancy parlor game which includes every stripe of public and private investor imaginable. On top of this, pumping even a small percentage of cash pile into acquisitions could provide another pool of much-needed liquidity for founders and investors alike. While it all makes sense on paper, part of what makes Apple “Apple” is that they operate how they want to — not how the market wants them to. Recently, in response to a variety of pressures to do something, to do anything, Apple announced a two-part share buyback. There are many explanations for this financial strategy, and while the Valley may have their own armchair financial analysts with a Twitter account, I reached out to some friends who actually work in technology banking or at techonology-focused hedge funds and asked them to send me a paragraph on their perception of the move. Because of the world these folks work in, I’ve reproduced their answers below anonymously, as they are not permitted to publicly share their opinions on such matters:

Technology Investment Banker: With the amount of cash stock piled by Apple, and mainly overseas, it was only a matter of time until the water would break, especially with activist investor David Einhorn ruffling feathers. Apple did something very standard and not uncommon, but on a large scale the way Apple likes to do things. At the end of the day I feel Apple’s actions represent the following four points: (1) Increased Shareholder Value: There are many ways to value a profitable company but the most common measurement is Earnings Per Share (EPS). If earnings are flat but the number of outstanding shares decreases. . Voila! . . A magical increase in period-to-period EPS will result; (2) Higher Stock Prices: An increase in EPS will often alert investors that a stock is undervalued or has the potential for increasing in value. The most common result is an increase in demand and an upward movement in the price of a stock; (3) Increased Float – As the number of outstanding shares decreases, the shares remaining represent a larger percentage of the float. If demand increases and there is less supply, then fuel is added to a potential upward movement in the price of a stock; and (4) Excess Cash: Companies usually buy back their stock with excess cash. If a company has excess cash, then at a minimum you can bank that it doesn’t have a cash flow problem. More importantly, it signals that executives feel that cash re-invested in the corporation will get a better return than alternative investments. This is definitely a positive sign for the company going forward. Customers and investors should feel confident with these events transpiring that Apple will continue to deliver value to both parties respectively.

Technology Hedge Fund Principal: Since Apple has around $150B cash on the books (70% of which is foreign), it’s clear they need to do something with this cash because it’s just wasted sitting on the balance sheet earning low interest rates. People have assumed the market would respond well to Apple making acquisitions, especially in software and services, particularly in cloud and mobile software. While they have reaped the benefits of profits in mobile hardware, the value going forward is at the application and services layer. Other hardware manufacturers are catching up, if they haven’t caught up already. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to have an appetite for these types of acquisitions. Another option is to buy back shares, a proven way to deploy cash, though doing so sends a signal that they are a mature (read: not growth) company. Tactically, buybacks can decouple EPS growth from new product lines, and Apple could see 2x its buyback investment in earnings growth as a result. Ultimately, Apple has withstood significant pressure from the investment community to do something with the cash, especially as growth has slowed. (Venture arms, since you asked, are not an effective use of capital for a corporate player; I see the share repurchase as a much more responsible use of proceeds.

Hedge Fund Partner #2: Apple had four basic choices of what to do with their cash, remembering that apple has a duty to its shareholders: (1)  Do nothing (status quo), which makes zero sense. given that they have ~$145Bn in cash and are adding ~ $40Bn in cash annually assuming zero growth earnings earning; (2) Strategic acquisition or expansion, though Apple will be hard pushed to effectively put either their cash hoard or future cash flows to use to do this; (3) a one-time special dividend and increased annual dividend; or (4) a share buyback (or various form of it). Only options #3 or #4 made any sense to me and I assumed it was only a matter of time before they did something. #1 is out as they are would not be meeting their shareholder responsibility and #2 is out simply because of scale.

I see the share buyback as positive for three key reasons: (1) Apple stock is currently very cheap. My back of the envelope calculations conservatively value them at $500-$550/share, so they are effectively leveraging and creating additional shareholder value here until the multiple recovers to fair value. What’s more is that management knows a lot more than what we all do, so they should be able to calculate their own value in two to three years fairly well, and I assume they saw this as a positive. (2) Because Apple issued bonds to finance the deal rather than using cash, this way they will not need to repatriate taxable offshore cash to perform the buyback and they will likely get a bond rate the crazy low prices. Bottom line, they are saving shareholders cash, although at some point they will need to find a way to address the offshore cash, so perhaps they are waiting for another tax holiday. And (3), assuming the market reacts rationally, a buy back signals that managements believes in stock and the story and believes that this will generate returns that will outperform for long-term investors, something that a cash hoard did not address at any level and effectively generate returns far in excess of what could be achieved in any other safe manner.

More often than not I do not like share buybacks. often management does this to boost their own salary bonuses (EPS biased etc) or simply follow bad advice and follow the investment banking herd, but this time I liked Apple’s share buyback at this share price and multiple and applaud the debt financing way of doing it, I would have applauded it more if they had also issued a $40 special dividend.

Hedge Fund Partner #3: The view is Apple has stopped being an innovator. While they were at the forefront of technology, people bugged them to use their cash for a dividend or buyback and they could say “no” because the stock price was going up on leading edge innovation. Once Jobs passed away, Tim Cook hasn’t been able to keep that going, and if anything they are now playing catch-up to Samsung or even Google. When you aren’t innovating and you have $150B in cash, a board has to find ways to keep investors happy and one tactic is to conduct a massive buyback. Showing they are returning money to shareholders, creating a new base if “capital return” investors rather than growth investors. It’s all a game to prop up the stock price, money is cheap because of Bernanke, so it’s an easy way for them to please shareholders without much cost to the business. In general, I think that Apple is falling behind and trying to figure out how to regain their lead, and I’m not sure if its possible any time soon.

Technology Stock Investor: They’re doing the buyback because: 1) they have an unprecedented amount of cash ($140+ billion) that’s earning nearly nothing; 2) the stock is down nearly 40% from its high and shareholders are angry; 3) the stock is cheap on every financial metric, signaling that buying shares is a good use of cash if you believe in the long-term growth of the company.  The company does not appear to want to do a large acquisition or massively increase its capital expenditures.  They don’t “need” to hold that much cash. So the company had a very inefficient capital structure ($140+ billion of cash and no debt). Equity investors (who, in the end, own the company) sooner or later demand to get returns on their companies’ cash. Capital markets are competitive, and if management doesn’t give investors great reasons to own their stock, investors will go somewhere else. AAPL is facing slowing revenue growth, margin pressure, and uncertainty about their next major product line. A management team that is perceived as unfriendly to shareholders is another reason for investors to sell the stock. The buyback is a big gesture by management that they understand their shareholders’ concerns, in addition to likely being a good investment.

Photo Credit: Eddi 07 / Flickr Creative Commons

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook shares down 31 percent since IPO 1 year ago – Facebook shares closed today at $26.25, up $0.12 from yesterday but down 31 percent since the company’s initial public offering on May 18, 2012. Despite a new focus on monetization, particularly on mobile, Facebook hasn’t instilled confidence in investors in its first year as a public company. Many of its recent products, such as Gifts, Graph Search and Home, have launched to mixed reviews. And with all still in limited release, none has emerged as a clear source of future revenue. Still, Facebook has gone from having no ads on mobile to having mobile account for about 30 percent of all advertising revenue in the first quarter of this year.

Facebook’s company and CEO rating up since IPO – Facebook has earned a 4.7 out of 5 rating on Glassdoor, a social jobs and careers community where employees can anonymously share information and reviews about their companies. That average is a slight increase from its 4.6 rating during the 12 months prior to its IPO. Approval of CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also up. He received a 99 percent approval rating among employees, a four percentage point increase from his 95 percent approval rating during the 12 months before the IPO. Facebook saw a small decline in its senior management rating, but still holds a 4.0 (very satisfied) rating over the past 12 months, compared to the 4.3 rating it held pre-IPO. In the last year, the average base salary for Facebook software engineers increased to $119,262, up from $112,193 the previous 12-month period.

HTC slashes ‘Facebook phone’ price to $0.99, may discontinue product – HTC has cut the price of the First — the phone it launched with Facebook Home preloaded — from $99 to $0.99. According to BGR sources, HTC will actually be discontinuing the line soon, likely after in-store display contracts expire. The price cut is meant to move as much inventory as possible before being returned to HTC. The Facebook Home software, however, will still be available for select Android devices through Google Play.

Facebook launches site for academic publications – Facebook this week launched “Research Publications at Facebook,” a site for research papers published by the social network’s employees. The site is open to the public and includes a number of papers on engineering and sociology topics, such as “Self-censorship on Facebook” and “Storage and Performance Optimization of Long Tail Key Access in a Social Network“

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through Winklevoss Capital, are part of the growing group of venture capitalists who have taken a keen interest in Bitcoins. Last month, it was revealed that they personally own roughly one percent of the currency, having purchased the equivalent of some $11 million. And now, the Winklevosses tell TechCrunch they have invested in Bitcoin in another meaningful way — by leading a funding round for a startup in the space.

BitInstant, a New York City based startup that operates an online platform for buying and selling Bitcoins, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Winklevoss Capital with the participation of other strategic investors including money services veteran David Azar. The investment was closed this past fall, but the Winklevosses are just now publicly announcing it in the lead-up to the Bitcoin Foundation’s 2013 Conference being held in Silicon Valley this weekend.

BitInstant, which has a full-time staff of 16 led by CEO Charlie Shrem, has emerged as a key player in the nascent Bitcoin market: The company already processes approximately 30 percent of the money going into and out of Bitcoin, and last month alone facilitated 30,000 transactions, the Winklevosses said in a phone call this week. The funding is meant to allow the company to further scale up its staff and product as it angles to become the go-to site for Bitcoin transfers.

The Winklevosses say they were attracted to invest in BitInstant in large part because of its leadership. CEO Shrem is the vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, and CIO Alex Waters previously worked with the core developers on the original Satoshi Bitcoin client. “Charlie has been in the space for a very long time, and he has an impeccable reputation among Bitcoiners. He knows everyone in the space and everyone in the space knows him,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “One of the most exciting things about people who are into Bitcoin it’s that they’re a really passionate community, and Charlie is a passionate entrepreneur. He would be in that category of someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps Bitcoin.”

Speaking of that community, the world of Bitcoiners does indeed have an interesting edge to it: There’s an underground vibe that seems like it would contrast with the more traditional East Coast prep style of the Winklevosses. In our phone call, Cameron and Tyler said that they’re intrigued by the current feel of the Bitcoin space — and its potential for becoming a bit more structured in the coming years.

“We’re definitely pretty fascinated by it. The classic issue with Bitcoin is that it’s very early days,” Tyler said. “The entrepreneurs in the space are very impressive, but it takes really two areas of expertise: One is technology, and the second is understanding money services and regulation and all those things that are important for sustainability. Most entrepreneurs and companies we see in the space have the tech down, and they’re super strong there, but in terms of being buttoned up and looking like an average bank, it’s hard to couple both of them together. We think that BitInstant and Charlie do a fantastic job of doing both.”

This marks the third big-name funding news for Bitcoin startups in just a few days. Earlier this week Adam Draper announced that half of the companies in his next Boost.vc accelerator program will be focused on bitcoin, and yesterday Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $2 million investment in Bitcoin processing startup BitPay. It will be interesting to see how the Bitcoin space in general evolves as even more buttoned-up types and traditional money managers get involved.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPayl Mafia.

The Atlanta-based startup says that it was not planning to raise any money at the moment — it announced an initial raise of $510,000 only in January. That was its first outside funding after being bootstrapped internally. However, the company also says that it couldn’t say no, considering who was asking:

“We were not looking to raise any capital until later this year, but we could not ignore the opportunity to have Founders Fund involved with BitPay,” Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, notes in a news release on the deal. “There’s no single investment firm we would rather have on our team right now than Founders Fund.”

Nevertheless, it looks like the extra money will be used for hiring: there are currently two jobs open for node.js developers “who are excited about bitcoin.” BitPay is also looking for a UX designer. There will also be more investment in its platform and further product development.

Founders Fund partners know a thing or two about payment platforms — given their past experience as founders and senior execs at PayPal and other companies. Their interest in BitPay comes from the fact that it, and bitcoin, in general, appear to be growing like wildfire.

“BitPay’s ambitions have been global from the outset, and at Founders Fund we have been impressed with the company’s tremendous growth as they sign up hundreds of new customers a day, turning the potential for opportunity into a reality,” said Brian Singerman, a Partner at Founders Fund, in a statement.

When we covered the company’s first raise in January, we noted it had already signed up 2,100 businesses that were using its platform to process bitcoin payments. In April, it added nearly that many again: 1,900 merchants, and they are now processing $5 million per month in bitcoin transactions covering areas like electronics, precious metals, “and other low-margin products.” The promise of using bitcoin over dollars is lower fees, and companies are seeing “a large increase in profitability by accepting bitcoin payments,” the company notes.

In addition to Founders Fund, Max Keiser’s fund Heisenberg Capital, a London-based fund focused on bitcoin companies, is also involved in this seed round. It comes as a number of other VCs are also jumping into the bitcoin landgrab.

The terms of this most recent round were not disclosed, the company notes, “although 100% of the existing seed shareholders exercised their pro rata rights to maintain their ownership percentage in BitPay.” Previous investors in BitPay included Shakil Khan (the Path and Spotify former head of special projects, who has also launched his own bitcoin information resource, Coindesk), Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland and Roger Ver.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you can’t program, the future’s looking bleaker and bleaker. And if you can, learning to manage other code monkeys could get you promoted. Office-as-a-service provider RocketSpace’s new RocketU is a tech professional education program aimed to aid engineers no matter where they are in their career. RocketU offers rookies and programming veterans alike a way to get an edge in the job market.

There’s been a bit of a hubbub lately that there is actually no shortage of tech talent in America. “For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable.”

Yes, the United States is graduating a ton of engineers. But startups and tech giants don’t want just any engineers, they want 10X code masters and visionary innovators. That can take more than a degree from a well-known university, and a lot more than some random Codecademy tutorials. It can take hardcore training in the latest programming languages, and understanding of how to cobble code together into great products.

That’s where RocketU comes in.

The program comes from RocketSpace, a plug-and-play office space in San Francisco that houses 130 startups and the 600 employees. It handles leases, bandwidth, firewalls, and security so founders can concentrate on their companies. With room to house classes, startups to introduce graduates to, and a well-known name in Silicon Valley, Rocket U could be a smart extension of its business.

Develop Yourself

RocketU will offer a variety of courses, ranging from immersive 10-week developer bootcamps, to 3-week deep dives on advanced scripting languages and architecture, to 3-5 day professional development classes for techies. RocketU classes will be held at the RocketSpace campus with experienced teachers, and most coursework will happen there so you don’t have to worry too much about homework. The classes are on a pay-as-you-go structure, but require admission through a serious application process.

Michelle Berry, the SVP of RocketU, tells me “the main differentiators are that we’re offering programs beyond the initial developer bootcamp, to make sure we’re providing skills throughout the career life-cycle.” She explains that long-time programmers can choose between training as expert individual contributors or as managers. After graduating, RocketU students get help with placement in tech jobs, including the startups RocketSpace houses.

RocketU’s first full-length class will be a $10,000 10-week dev from July 22 to September 27th, and will focus on Python, Django, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, WebSocket, and jQuery. It will also teach databases, servers, team coding, and interview skills. The pre-requisite for admission beyond its application process (which closes June 9th) is a computer science or equivalent degree – or – two years of coding experience – or – completion of RocketU’s two-week Coding & Web Fundamentals crash course that runs just before the bootcamp.

RocketU will be competing with other educational programs like the well-established Dev Bootcamp, plus The Flatiron School, The Starter League, and an array of online learning tutorials. To win out, it may need name-brand professors, and an image that’s more independent than RocketSpace. Right now it’s website looks more like an off-shoot than a serious learning institution.

Still, the climate is right for RocketU. To land a job at a high-potential startup or found one of your own, you can’t be rusty. You could work a job you’re not thrilled about to slowly siphon off skills, but it might be worth paying to get them taught to you directly. You want to be a ninja? Hit the dojo.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Walmart, via its Silicon Valley innovation lab @WalmartLabs, announced today the acquisition of two startups: cloud computing newcomer OneOps and the software development shop Tasty Labs, from Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. Tasty Labs offered two services Jig.com and Human.io – both domains which are now redirecting to Walmart’s acquisition announcement, along with that of their corporate parent.

Walmart declined to disclose deal terms.

OneOps developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that Walmart explains will enable it to “significantly accelerate” its PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies. The company offered developer tools built from the ground up for those who host their applications on cloud services like Amazon’s Web Services, for example, as well as Rackspace and HP Cloud. Developers could publish to any cloud, and seamlessly port their apps elsewhere as needed, eliminating lock-in.

The company offered a library of predefined building blocks to quickly bootstrap an application, which could be visually assembled in its interface. A variety of categories such as content management (ex. Drupal, WordPress), e-commerce (ex. Magento), enterprise portals (ex. Liferay), and more were available.

OneOps was named one of 12 Hot Cloud Computing Companies Worth Watching by Network World, and was a finalist at the GigaOM LaunchPad Competition.

“Walmart is looking to create a best-in-class global eCommerce platform to power ‘anytime, anywhere’ shopping for our customers. The Platform team has been working tirelessly to build the tools to help our developers deliver big site changes faster,” explains Walmart Public Relations Director Ravi Jariwala in a statement. “We are innovating on a very large scale, and OneOps brings us tools that will allow us to move even faster toward a global platform.”

Meanwhile, Tasty Labs was founded in 2010 by a team which includes ex-Mozillian Nick Nguyen, HousingMaps creator Paul Rademacher, and Joshua Schachter, who was best known for founding of of “web 2.0″‘s finest: the social bookmarking service Delicious. The company had raised $3 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and other unnamed angel investors.

The startup launched its first product Jig.com in 2011, which was described as a “marketplace for needs” – meaning users would post “I need…” and others would respond to help them. The following year, it debuted Human.io, a micro-task service operating in the space general space. This application targeted businesses with small requests – like wanting to know how many people were in line at a store, for example, or getting people to take short surveys on their phone.

Schachter once described Human.io as a way to “build tiny little microapps and distribute them to a mobile client.” He said it was a combination of things the team loved: “Mobile, Mechanical Turk, MapReduce, and Twilio.”

Going forward, Tasty Labs staff will join Walmart’s Product and Mobile teams, Walmart says, in an effort to build out the company’s e-commerce platform.

Walmart Labs is known for snapping up early stage startups to test new ideas in e-commerce some of which eventually get folded into the company’s e-commerce site and other online operations. In the past, it has acquired startups like Kosmix, OneRiot, Grabble, Small Society, and others. Kosmix’s Social Genome technology was used in an earlier @WalmartLabs creation known as “Shopycat,” a social-gifting platform that debuted just before the 2011 holiday season, and Kosmix later formed the basis of a new search engine named “Polaris” which now powers Walmart.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve heard some suggestions that our extreme fascination with Google Glass is more a symptom of desperation for some kind of genuine gadget innovation than anything to do with the product’s merits, and a new gadget from Sony (via The Verge) has me wondering whether or not other companies are flailing about for something novel. Sony introduced a new 13.3-inch e-ink prototype reader device today, which seems new but also remarkably old and washed up all at once.

The device is called Digital Paper, and is a flexible 13.3-inch display that uses the battery sipping e-ink tech we’re used to in dedicated e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. The large display is more like the one you’d find on a MacBook Air than the one on a typical e-reader, however, which is one of its most unusual qualities. Big-screened e-readers don’t exactly have a super-successful track record, you might recall, as the Kindle DX was seen by most as an overly expensive, overly large iteration on the core Kindle concept, and two offerings in the category that were even larger from Skiff and Plastic Logic hit the deadpool prior to even launching at all.

Sony wants to change things up a bit with a capacitive touch panel and stylus to give users plenty of input options for a change. That’s bound to come in handy for taking notes in class, as this is aimed at the education market and will be entering trials at three Japanese higher ed institutions over the course of the next year. But even with a pen strapped to it, it’s still a big, dedicated e-reader, and it’s hard to see that offering much value for users in a world full of much more feature-rich, multipurpose devices like smartphones and tablets.

When the e-reader first debuted as a product category, it made sense, in that it was a bridge device for users who had grown up with paper books and were looking for a format that closely mirrored that experience. But now, for students especially, devices and digital media are a long-accepted fact. Digital natives don’t need devices that harken back to older tech, even if they do offer longer battery life and a format that may or may not be easier on the eyes, depending on which study you trust.

Education has shown a keen interest in devices like the iPad and Kindle Fire, and Sony is barking up the wrong tree with an e-reader device as an attempt to appeal to that market. Still, if nothing else it should be interesting, which seems to be the main thing driving consumer device innovation these days.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch