GraphLab, the open-source distributed database, has received $6.75 million from Madrona Venture Group and NEA for its machine learning technology used to analyze data graphs for recommendation engines.

Developed five years ago at Carnegie Mellon University five years ago, the open-source data analysis platform takes semi-structured data that describe relationships between people, web traffic, product purchases and other data. It then analyzes that data for services to provide online recommendations.

Graph databases, similar to Graphlab, have increased in use as more data needs correlating to better understand its meaning. Wikiepdia describes graph database in the context of graph theory. It applies mathematical structures “used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices or nodes and lines called edges that connect them.”

It’s the ability to make the connections between billions of nodes and lines that forms the basis for making recommendations.

Dr. Carlos Guestrin is GraphLab’s CEO. He is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington, who developed the technology at Carnegie Mellon. He says it is GraphLab’s flexibility and better machine learning capabilities that makes it better in comparison to other data analytics tools such as Mahout, the open-source machine learning technology.

GraphLab has gained adoption in the market. It is used by a number of consumer services to drive millions of transactions. Pandora and Walmart Labs are cited as users of the technology.

(Graph image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s Sundar Pichai spoke to Wired in an interview published today ahead of Google I/O this week, describing what it’s like to be taking the helm of both Android and Chrome going into the annual conference. Pichai took over for Andy Rubin, who stepped out of his role heading up Android back in March.

These days, he says not much has changed around his thinking about Chrome and Android, but he did have some statements about the open nature of Android that rang more sincere than most statements from Google execs on that aspect of the business, which is usually referred to as an impossibly good thing.

Open Is Great, But…

Pichai reiterated the company’s general love for the “open” nature of Android, but he also brought up the very real ways in which it limits Google’s ability to provide a consistent and recognizable experience to all users of its mobile OS.

“Here’s the challenge: without changing the open nature of Android, how do we help improve the whole world’s end-user experience?” Pichai told Wired when asked about the biggest challenge facing Android. “For all your users, no matter where they are, or what phone or tablet they are buying or what tablet they are buying.”

It was a theme that Pichai came back to again and again, when discussing how Facebook Home has changed the OS experience at a basic level and what Google felt about that. He said that Facebook Home is “exciting,” while disagreeing diplomatically with it from a central philosophical standpoint, explaining that he believes people aren’t at the center of the experience in his mind. Once again in relation to Facebook Home, Pichai talked about the challenges of providing a universal experience to users.

“We want to be a very, very open platform, but we want a way by which end users are getting a good experience overall,” he said in the interview. “We have to figure out a way to rationalize things, and do it so that it makes sense for users and developers. There’s always a balance there.”

Finally, Pichai talked about the different issue of forking Android entirely, and discussed how Google feels about that.

“In general, we at Google would love everyone to work on one version of Android, because I think it benefits everyone better,” he told Wired. “But this is not the kind of stuff we’re trying to prevent.”

This is possibly the most frank anyone at Google has been about how the company views these tangential efforts. Google accepts them, because that’s the nature of the open approach it took when it started out with Android, an approach that helped it win over carriers and OEMs looking to do more than just provide an interchangeable vehicle for another company’s software and services. But Google is also frustrated by them, in that they splinter its efforts, ultimately resulting in Android fragmentation.

Google And Samsung = Microsoft And Intel

On the subject of the supposed Samsung/Google rift that many in the media suspect may be developing, Pichai echoed the company line and said that Google isn’t concerned about Samsung’s prominence in the overall Android ecosystem. He basically said that Samsung has been instrumental in helping push the technology forward for both companies.

Samsung’s relationship with Google is like that of other “long stable structures” found throughout the industry, Pichai said, pointing specifically to the relationship between Intel and Microsoft. Microsoft and HP would be another key example of a long-prosperous combination that never destabilized because of one party craving too much influence over the other. One could argue that the Android ecosystem is a different beat, with Samsung having much more power than any one partner that Microsoft ever had, but that’s hard to quantify.

Google I/O May Be Light On New Stuff

Pichai also seemed keen to take the wind out of people’s sails regarding what’s coming up at Google I/O, which takes place this week Tuesday through Friday in San Francisco. He said that the event will be very much developer focused, especially since it’s not timed around any major product announcements.

“It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system,” he said to Wired. “Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.”

Rumors suggest we might see an updated Nexus 7 and possibly a Nexus 4 with new features like LTE connectivity, but those could be considered minor enough.

Chrome And Android

The biggest takeaway from Pichai’s talk with Wired was that he clearly loves both of his children equally. He resisted multiple attempts by Levy to pit the two against one another, and to point one as unnecessary in the face of the other. Pichai didn’t seem like a man running two horses with the intent of picking the winning one late in the game; Chrome and Android both came off as equally worthy pursuits that Google intends to continue for different but equally valid purposes. That could be why we’re hearing that Android-powered notebooks are on the way, as well as Chrome-powered tablets.

It’ll be interesting to see if Pichai gives both equal billing at the Google I/O keynote, too, which takes place at 9 AM PT on Tuesday morning. We’ll be there covering the action, so tune in to see how it shakes out.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As a man who spends most of his time in his attic, it’s nice to hit the open roads, feel a little wind in your hair, and run over crack vials as you motor through downtown Manhattan. That’s exactly what I did yesterday as when I tried to ride an Hero Eco A2B Metro electric bike from Bay Ridge to our offices on Broadway, thereby cementing my love for electric bikes and this electric bike in particular.

The Metro, made by German manufacturer Hero Eco (formerly Ultra Motor), is a brutalist electric bike with a built-in battery and maximum speed of 20 MPH. It has pedals and a 7-gear shifter so it is technically considered a moped and does not require a motorcycle license and a built-in limiter ensures you don’t go roaring down the streets on this 80 pound machine.

The company has had these bikes in the US for a few years now but they are working on a complete rebranding – although the bikes will remain the same. You can see the brand new bikes on this absolutely awful webpage they’ve made. This particular model costs about $3,000 online but the build quality is excellent and the equipment – from the fat Kenda tires to the Shimano shifter – is acceptable enough. I noticed some bad reviews on Amazon complaining of damaged motors or tires and, although I didn’t experience these issues over the past week, I cannot speak for extensive use. In my 15 mile ride I saw solid performance and no skidding or fishtailing while accelerating. I did, however, experience a low battery and riding this thing home, even for a mile, on pedal power wasn’t great.

The bike is bit big but it’s still thin enough to ensure you don’t get entangled with other riders in tight paths. I found it worked great in tight quarters and, because it is in actuality just a bicycle with a hub motor, the other cyclists didn’t give me that much of a stink eye.

I’ve avoided looking at electric bikes of late because most of them look like motors strapped to 10-speeds. This is far different and, if I were to describe it in any way, it is the exact opposite of those foldable city bikes folks are riding. My kids, in fact, have taken to calling it Super Bike.

Hero Eco is finding its footing right now and also has sub-$2,000 models available, including their own version of the folding electric called the Kuo which retails for $1,599. The company is also now calling itself HeroEco and was formerly called Ultra Motor, so you may see a bit of confusing until their full rebranding.

What are you paying for? Well, you’re paying for a solid, welded frame, solid components, and excellent acceleration. The range isn’t too shabby and for a bit more you can add on a second battery for 20 miles of range. I could also imagine a user removing the governor – though I’m sure Ultra Motors doesn’t condone this. This isn’t a sport bike. I could really see it more as a bike for folks with a 10-15 mile commute who want to hit the open air a little and don’t want (that much) of a carbon footprint.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.

The “Collaboration Has Been Fantastic”

As Google’s VP of Engineering Linus Upson and Alex Komoroske, Google Product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told me yesterday, the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem. Komoroske noted that when it comes to working with the other companies involved in the WebKit project, the “collaboration has been fantastic.”

This decision clearly wasn’t made lightly. Indeed, as Upson stressed when I talked to him yesterday, “management asked a lot of hard questions” about this move, but in the end, the decision was made in order to reduce the technical complexity of evolving Google’s rendering engine in the direction the team wanted to go in.

Blink: Speed And Simplicity

Specifically, Komoroske noted, Chromium’s multi-process architecture is very different from the rest of WebKit (Chromium is the open-source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS). Having to integrate Google’s way of doing things with WebKit and what the rest of the WebKit partners were doing was “slowing everybody down,” Komoroske said.

As an open-source project, both Chromium and Blink are open to outside committers, though as is typical for these kinds of projects, they’ll have to be nominated to become project members.

For now, WebKit and Blink pretty much look the same, but Google expects that they will evolve in very different directions over time. Komoroske, for example, would like to run iframes in different processes, but that’s something that’s very difficult to do with WebKit right now.

For now, though, developers won’t notice too much of a difference as most of the work will focus on internal architectural improvements. Google says, for example, that it will be able to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat.” Over time, Google says, this will results in a “healthier codebase” and lead “to more stability and fewer bugs.”

The WebKit project was started by Apple after it forked the KDE project’s open-source KHTML engine for its Safari browser. In an unusual move – and after a lot of back and forth between the KHTML team and Apple – Apple announced in 2005 that it would open source WebKit, and Google then adapted it for its Chrome browser. Interestingly, Google actually used a forked version of WebKit in the early days of Chromium but later reconciled its fork with the rest of the project.

In this context, it’s worth remembering that all of the different vendors who currenly build WebKit-based browsers already implement it very differently (and often use their own JavaScript engine, too).

Google’s Role In Developing WebKit Today

Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59), followed by a number of other companies, including Blackberry, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Adobe and Netflix. Google is also currently responsible for the vast majority of commits to the WebKit repository, so it’ll be interesting to see how the Google exit from this project will affect WebKit as a whole. As a Google spokesperson told me today, the Blink team members can still contribute to WebKit “if they desire,” though it’s probably a safe bet that few of them will have the time and energy to do so.

What About Opera, Which Just Switched To WebKit?

A few weeks ago, Opera announced that it would stop developing its own engine and switch to WebKit, too, by adopting Chromium as the basis for its browsers. It’s not clear what ramification today’s announcement will have for Opera, but we’ve reached out to the company and asked for a statement.

When Opera made this move, many developers feared that we’d soon face a WebKit monoculture (especially on the mobile web). Now that Google is developing Blink, we can probably expect the pace of innovation to pick up again. Indeed, Komoroske told me that Google expects that its move away from WebKit will also help other vendors to develop WebKit faster, given that Google’s own implementation of the engine was very different from that of other vendors.

Update: Opera just sent us the following statement: “”We are happy to see that the web is becoming ever more open and accessible for developers. It is a fast moving platform that needs continuous and rapid updating. After some discussions with our counterparts at Google, we are looking forward to contribute back to the open source project that is Blink, just as we would to any other open source project we feel could use our input.”

Why “Blink?”

Why did Google call the new rendering engine Blink? Upson told me it’s obviously supposed to signify how the focus here is on speed and simplicity. Browser developers, however, also tend to have a tendency to have a bit of fun with their names. Chrome, for example, is all about making the “chrome” disappear as much as possible and Blink, he told me, is meant to remind people of the good old (and annoying) blink tag the Netscape Navigator introduced in the 90s.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As you probably know, raising money from individual seed and angel investors has become an incredibly popular practice among tech startups in recent years. Many of these seed investors are brand names in themselves, having amassed significant social clout through their years in the tech industry and ostensibly making enough money along the way to invest in up-and-coming startups that they deem worthy. These days, many hot companies fuel all their early- to mid-stage growth through these more casual “seed” funding set ups, rather than by going to traditional venture capital firms.

But what many people don’t realize is that Sand Hill Road VCs have been very quietly getting into the seed and angel game in their own clever way. As PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy reported last year, a number of well-known individual angel investors are actually working for traditional VC firms as “scouts,” investing money that isn’t their own. After that article, Sequoia Capital was the first VC firm to come out and admit that they indeed did have a stealth scout program — but since then, little more information has been forthcoming.

That is, until today.

Sequoia Capital is now raising an official dedicated fund for its scout program, TechCrunch has confirmed. This morning, the firm filed regulatory documents to the SEC for a new investment vehicle called the “Seqouia Capital U.S. Scout Seed Fund 2013.”

While the documents do not specify how large the fund will be, we’re told that the firm is targeting a relatively modest eight figures — tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions like Sequoia’s general VC funds.

For the past four years, Sequoia has been quietly running its scout program on a “pay as you go” basis with money from its main VC fund — and it seems to have been a big success. Word is that Sequoia now has dozens of scouts who have led investments in more than 100 companies. Now that the model has been validated, Sequoia seems to have decided to finally create a dedicated scout seed fund that its limited partners can support directly.

A clear cut fund, but a stealthy team

But while this is a big step toward codifying Sequoia’s scout program and bringing it more out into the open, don’t expect it to come much more out of the shadows. The identities of Seqouia’s scouts will still be kept secret, I’m told, and the investments they make will still be attributed to each individual, not to Sequoia itself.

It makes sense that this arrangement is what’s preferred by not just the scouts, but also by the startups in which they invest. The scouts get to use Sequoia’s deep pockets as their own, while the startups get backed by Sequoia without having to worry about the potential of “negative signaling” at the Series A level.

It’s an interesting mix of transparency and secrecy, but it is something that seems to be working for now. It’ll be interesting to see if other VC firms with scout programs will follow Sequoia’s lead and start operating more in the open — and how long the scouts involved can keep their big-money VC affiliations on the DL.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another victory for hackers and a blow for the security of open source systems: OpenX, the online and mobile advertising company that announced a $22.5 million fund raising just last month, says that it is closing down its OnRamp open source ad serving platform, after the service was hacked on February 9, and the company determined that it would be too risky and costly to continue using it securely.

The news was announced by OpenX on its public forum this morning, along with a longer explanation for the decision — however it looks like the decision to close down the service was noticed by at least one blog yesterday.

In brief, OpenX cites the effect on publishers and advertisers using the OnRamp platform; the fact that hacks of all sites are on the rise; and the “virtual impossibility of ensuring the continued security of OnRamp in an environment of increasingly sophisticated and powerful intrusions that exploit open source software.” It also makes a reference to the cost of trying to defend against something like this again in the future. Because of all that, “we have decided that we will no longer host and operate the OnRamp service,” the company writes.

OpenX does not say how many publishers and advertisers will be impacted by the decision; nor does it detail what information the hackers may have obtained when they infiltrated the site on February 9. We have reached out to the company to ask.

Unlike OnRamp, other services from OpenX like OpenX Market and OpenX Enterprise are paid; these will continue operating as before.

Except for a support page, links for OnRamp have disappeared from the OpenX site. However, OpenX says that it will reactivate the interface again today at 5pm so that customers can “view the status of their accounts and copy relevant information needed in order to transition their ad serving to another provider.” Advertising, however, will no longer be served. On March 22, OnRamp will be “terminated permanently.”

Although OpenX lays the blame squarely on the vulnerabilities of open source in a hackers’ world, it also makes the case for open source still being a worthwhile thing: “We have been long and proud supporters of the open source movement and we are deeply saddened that our OnRamp contribution to the movement must end due to this criminal activity,” the company writes.

This is not the first time that open-source-based services have been noted for being more vulnerable to hacking and malware. The same has been said of the Android mobile operating system for a while now (one of the more recent developments here).

Update: A reader asked me whether the fact that it was a free product influenced the decision to close down OnRamp. Without knowing hard user numbers it’s hard to say whether it was really a move to try to push more people to paid services, or whether the free OnRamp was cannibalizing the revenue-generating services. What is true is that, if OnRamp was free to use, then it woud have been hard to justify a move to making huge investments into making it more secure, if hacking had debilitated it and posed a security threat to those publishers and advertisers using it. On top of that, a hacked OnRamp represents bad PR for OpenX as a secure platform for serving any ads.

Full announcement below.

OnRamp, a free ad serving service based on open source code, was subjected to a serious malicious hacker intrusion on Saturday, February 9, 2013. After further review of the intrusion, other recent attacks on the service, the effect on our publishers and advertisers, the recent increased frequency of malicious hacking activity directed against technology companies of all types, the possibility of future intrusions through this open source service which could continue to jeopardize OnRamp customers, the virtual impossibility of ensuring the continued security of OnRamp in an environment of increasingly sophisticated and powerful intrusions that exploit open source software, and the resources we would be required to expend to maintain the security of the service, we have decided that we will no longer host and operate the OnRamp service. OnRamp, because it is based on open source software, has been subjected to attacks of significantly greater frequency and force than any of OpenX’s other products, including OpenX Enterprise and OpenX Market, which continue to meet high standards of security and reliability, and continue to operate normally.

We sincerely regret that the actions of a limited number of bad actors have forced us to terminate a service used for many years without cost by our valued customers. In order to facilitate customers’ transition to another service, we will be reactivating the user interface, but not advertising delivery, of OnRamp at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, February 12, 2013. Through the user interface, customers will be able to view the status of their accounts and copy relevant information needed in order to transition their ad serving to another provider. OnRamp, however, will no longer deliver advertising. The user interface will be available until Friday, March 22, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, at which time OnRamp will be terminated permanently. We will post additional information in the days ahead to assist customers with the transition. If you have any particular questions regarding your OnRamp account, please email us at hosted-support@openx.org.

We have been long and proud supporters of the open source movement and we are deeply saddened that our OnRamp contribution to the movement must end due to this criminal activity. We are grateful to our customers for using OnRamp for their ad serving needs, and apologize for the inconvenience caused by this necessary action.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

UPDATED: According to Willow Garage’s blog, the company will not shut down, but change its funding model:

Willow Garage has decided to enter the world of commercial opportunities with an eye to becoming a self-sustaining company. This is an important change to our funding model.

The success of the PR2 personal robot and of ROS will continue. There are close to 50 PR2 robots in the world and Willow Garage support of the platform will not diminish. And of course, ROS, as an open source platform, will continue independent of our business model choices. In addition to Willow Garage, its supporters include the Open Source Robotics Foundation and all the other contributors in the ROS community (academic, industrial and individual) who have made it the platform of choice for Robotics.

Willow Garage, the robotics maker that created the PR2, will likely shut down within the next few months, reports IEEE Spectrum, citing multiple sources within the company.

The decision to close down Willow Garage was announced last Friday, according to the report. Though the Menlo Park-based lab has not yet confirmed the news, IEEE Spectrum notes that much of the income generated by Willow Garage products is actually made by Willow spin-offs, like the Open Source Robotics Foundation, Industrial Perception, hiDOF, and Suitable Technologies.

If Willow Garage does indeed shut down for good, it’ll be a big loss for the personal robotics field. In December, the San Jose Mercury interviewed two of the lab’s research scientists, Kaijen Hsiao and Matei Ciocarlie, about their project Robots for Humanity, which seeks to improve the lives of severely disabled people. Achievements included working with a quadriplegic man to control a PR2 and have it perform simple tasks in his home. The TurtleBot, another one of Willow Garage’s creations, is a low-cost, personal robotics kit with open-source software that was designed for educational and research purposes.

Willow Garage has been emailed for comment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Open Garden, the TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2012 Battlefield finalist which allows users to share their wireless data connections with others, is today announcing its first partnership with another software company, TextMe, a mobile communications app with over 8 million users. The deal will allow users of TextMe on Android tablets the ability to text and make voice or video calls using their tablet, even when they don’t have a Wi-Fi connection present.

If that sounds pretty wild, well, that’s because it is. Open Garden’s founders have a history of working with disruptive communications technologies – co-founder Micha Benoliel previously worked at Skype; Stanislav Shalunov worked on Internet 2 and BitTorrent; and Greg Hazel was previously the lead programmer of the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent.

In May 2012, the team announced Open Garden debut on Disrupt’s stage. The proprietary, patented technology crowdsources connectivity, by connecting those without internet connections with those willing to share their bandwidth. The details of how these mesh networks work – at least as much as the founders were willing to share – is described here, if you’re interested in additional background. The free app currently works on Android, Mac and PC, though it may eventually have to introduce a credit system in order to address freeloaders who surf, but never share their own connections when available.

Of course, on mobile devices like smartphones, you generally have a network connection – a 3G or 4G signal –  available to you, which makes the technology more interesting as a way to boost connection speeds by bundling your cellular connection together with the connections other Open Garden users are sharing.

However, where the service makes even more sense is on tablets, as many users have opted for Wi-Fi only devices, and lack network access when taking their tablets out of the home or workplace.

That’s where Open Garden can be an advantage, assuming it can build up its user base and gain significant traction. On that front, the startup is doing well so far. A month after its launch, the company announced reaching 100,000 users. In September, following its raise of $2 million in seed funding, it had grown to 250,000 users. Today, co-founder Benoliel tells us that Open Garden has close to 1 million users who have installed its app.

He tells us that the app benefitted from being featured in Google Play, and the software is more stable now, which has driven the downloads higher. “We needed more users to debug and improve the application,” he says. “It is a mesh networking app, and the best way to test it is to be live.” They’ve now passed that initial hurdle of needing enough users to test the app in order to improve it, which in turn brings in more users. The network effect is starting to kick in.

To use the service with TextMe, you have to have both apps installed on your device, but no other specific configuration is necessary. “If the tablet has no Wi-Fi connectivity, Open Garden automatically routes the traffic through the 3G or 4G connectivity of the phone or another Open Garden user with connectivity,” Benoliel explains. “There is no user intervention, all is done in the background seamlessly.”

Of course, if no Open Garden devices are around, then there’s no connectivity, as there would have been otherwise. Benoliel says the service has been tested with text, voice and video so far, and it works. Unfortunately, I don’t personally have an Android tablet on hand for testing purposes, so your mileage may vary, I suppose. It’s worth pointing out that TextMe, though highly rated on Google Play, occasionally has its own issues in terms of call quality and performance, as all mobile communications apps do sometimes. It may not be immediately obvious whether any issues you may encounter are on Open Garden’s side, or TextMe’s side of things if they occur.

TextMe and Open Garden are available as free downloads in Google Play.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Open” this, “open” that: It seems like everything is “open” these days. Well hello, people, Bill Gates’ gravy boat has run aground. It’s time to get out the Starship and fly in those open clouds.

Hokey? You bet your SaaS this is hokey. But come on, take a look at what happened last week at the Open Compute Summit. The gods have said: “We are really going to mess with your shit now. You’re going to open that hardware up. Otherwise, you will never see the data heavens. Get some soul in those machines. It’s time.”

So who better to talk to than OpenStack Executive Director Jonathan Bryce? OpenStack is the open cloud OS. It’s the software counterpart to the Open Compute Project and its world of open hardware.

Bryce took some time at the Open Compute Summit to lay it all out: OpenStack, Open Compute and how the two relate. The cloud is opening up. Listen to Bryce explain it in the video above. You’ll see that those data rockets won’t be built by a few, proprietary wunderkinds. It’s different now. Borgs working at the mother ship won’t take us to the data heavens — communities will.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Internet-of-things startup, SmartThings, this year’s winner of the Dublin Web Summit’s startup competition, has closed a $3 million seed round. The round was led by First Round Capital and includes contributions from SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks.

The startup is building a platform for developers to connect everyday objects such as door locks and lights to the internet, allowing the physical objects to be controlled and monitored via apps and other digital interfaces — hence its talk of an “open physical graph”.

Individual smart object systems — such as the Philips Hue lightbulbs — are already popping up in the marketplace but SmartThings is aiming to build momentum behind an open platform approach, allowing multiple device makers to sit within the ecosystem, and multiple devices to be powered by the same core smart hub. “It will take a significant ecosystem and the participation of many of these innovators to realize the full potential of the physical graph,” it notes.

The startup said it now has more than 1,000 developers and makers signed up to its way of doing things. Growing that community is going to be key to SmartThing’s success. To increase support for its platform, SmartThings plans to use a swathe of the seed funding to launch the first SmartThings Developer and Maker Competition — to reward “innovation on the physical graph” — noting

Based on community feedback and more than 1,000 developers and makers that have signed up on the SmartThings platform, we’ll be choosing 5 key themes representing the most exciting areas of innovation on the physical graph. In each theme, we’ll be awarding a winner for the best software developer / SmartApp, and the best hardware/device maker. In April 2013, we’ll announce the overall winner.

The competition will be judged by a panel that includes First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Matt Williams, EIR at Andreesen Horowitz, Loic Le Meur, David Tisch, and Alex Hawkinson, CEO of SmartThings. Winners will receive cash prizes — with $100,000 in total prize money, including $25,000 each for the top app and top new connected Thing — as well as “investor exposure, media coverage, manufacturing and design consulting and be[ing] featured across the SmartThings customer base and ecosystem”. SmartThings said it expects the amount of money in the prize pot to increase further in the near future via inbound sponsorship cash.

SmartThings has previously secured $1.2 million via a Kickstarter campaign, and is partnering with Instacube — to allow the cube to display notifications for things like visitors arriving or leaving the lights on.

SmartThing’s release follows below

SmartThings Announces $3M seed round and Developer/Maker Contest to Drive an Open ‘Internet of Things’

At SmartThings, we believe the next and perhaps most life-altering evolution of the Internet will be the creation of the physical graph; the digitization, connectivity and programmability of the physical world around us. Whether you call this the Internet of Things, sensor networks or home and life automation, the implications for how we live, work, and have fun are profound. At our core, we also believe that for the ecosystem to be healthy, it must be open. An open physical graph is the only way to bridge the innovation, inventions and brilliance of the many device manufacturers, hardware makers, developers, and everyday people who are working to change our lives today and in the future.

SmartThings sits at the center of this open ecosystem. We provide a platform that enables developers and makers to build smart and connected devices, an interactive and mobile user experience for consumers to manage and install apps into their physical world to make it behave more intelligently, and unique combinations of SmartThings and SmartApps packaged to solve real world problems, out of the box, with no professional installation required.

We appreciate the immense support we’ve received to date in making that open vision a reality. Our Kickstarter backers embraced this vision and made us the second largest technology project of all time, and the largest Internet of Things project by more than 2x when we closed. This momentum continued across the globe with SmartThings winning the Spark of Genius award at the 2012 Dublin Web Summit against a field of over 4,000 original startup competitors from 36 countries.

Today we’re announcing 2 significant events in our continued success and progress in bringing the open physical graph to the world.

The SmartThings vision is a big one. But it’s clear the world is ready. The entire Le Web conference in Paris this week is based around the Internet of Things, and new projects aiming to connect our physical world are emerging almost daily. It will take a significant ecosystem and the participation of many of these innovators to realize the full potential of the physical graph.

Fortunately, some of the best and most dynamic investors and entrepreneurs out there believe in our vision as well. Today we’re announcing the successful close of a $3 million funding round lead by First Round Capital and including SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks.

This is the perfect group to both help us in our direct growth and to make investments in the ecosystem of developers and makers who will create a breathtaking array of connected devices, intelligent and learning applications, and breakthrough innovations.

With this funding, and in direct support of the open ecosystem vision, today we’re also announcing the first SmartThings Developer and Maker Competition. Based on community feedback and more than 1,000 developers and makers that have signed up on the SmartThings platform, we’ll be choosing 5 key themes representing the most exciting areas of innovation on the physical graph. In each theme, we’ll be awarding a winner for the best software developer / SmartApp, and the best hardware/device maker. In April 2013, we’ll announce the overall winner.

The judging panel for this contest includes First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Matt Williams, EIR at Andreesen Horowitz, Loic Le Meur, David Tisch, and Alex Hawkinson, CEO of SmartThings.

Winners will receive cash ($100,000 overall including $25,000 each for the top app and top new connected Thing), investor exposure, media coverage, manufacturing and design consulting and be featured across the SmartThings customer base and ecosystem. You can learn more about and sign up for the competition at build.smartthings.com.

We expect this to be the first of many competitions driving an explosive growth in innovation on the open physical graph. Thank you so much for your continued support. Together we will create an open physical graph and a smarter world!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch