Today has been quite a roller coaster ride for Yahoo — the company put days of reports and rumors to rest this morning when it confirmed that it would acquire the social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and now CEO Marissa Mayer has confirmed that Yahoo’s New York employees will now be moving.

They’ll all soon be working right around the corner from Times Square in the same building that used to house the New York Times (229 West 43rd Street, to be more specific).

The move is meant to unite the nearly 500 Yahoo employees that are currently split among three existing locations in New York City, though Mayer made it very clear that the newly acquired Tumblr team wouldn’t be folks roped into working out of the central office — David Karp and the rest of the team will continue to work out of their 10th floor office near Gramercy Park. This whole thing is reminiscent of Mayer’s edict that saw the end of remote working for long-time Yahooligans. In a memo issued by Yahoo human resources head Jackie Reses back earlier this year, it was revealed the brass though that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

While that’s unlikely to be the case here, Mayer has shown herself to be a vocal proponent of the sort of work that can be done by bringing employees together, and it seems the Yahoo New York team is only slated to grow from there. Just before New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the podium to deliver a few remarks, Mayer noted that the space the team will soon move into can hold an additional 200 or so people, and a post on the official Yahoo Tumblr account (that was fast) indicated that the company wants to pump up its New York staff “by up to 60 percent.”

Of course, this isn’t the only news that Mayer and company have in store for us this evening — some prominent Flickr signage means that there’s some product news in the pipeline as well.

UPDATE: Mayer just pulled back the curtain on the new and improved Flickr, and it is awesome.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything except using Facebook Home. Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation.

Whacked: LazyPete. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure.

Backed: Idae. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable Field Notes. The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your Fisher Space Pen. And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner.

That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy.

Backed: Meteor Grip. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.”

That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AirWatch, the startup that helps businesses manage security and more on employees’ mobile devices, is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million, led by Accel with participation also from Insight Venture Partners. The funds come as part of an expanded Series A round, originally for $200 million, which the company announced with a splash in February during Mobile World Congress. This Series A is the first outside money raised by AirWatch, and values the company at just over $1 billion, according to sources.

Both AirWatch’s CEO, John Marshall, and Ryan Sweeney, the partner who led the round at Accel, tell TechCrunch that this latest expansion of the round was made at the same valuation. It comes just weeks after rival Good Technology raised a $50 million round and is preparing for an IPO.

As with the earlier $200 million, this latest injection will be used to help AirWatch build out its business, add more services, and quite possibly make some acquisitions along the way.

Marshall declined to say what areas acquisitions might be in, other than to note that they would be strategic investments to expand product lines and customers. “I think we will look very carefully at adjacent technology or tuck-in acquisitions,” he told TechCrunch. “I would not want to answer [who they are]. The three companies that I am looking at right now are all doing different things, and I don’t want to tip off our competitors.”

One area where AirWatch sees a particularly bright spot is in what Marshall refers to as “containerization of content,” in which services exist not just to manage whole devices but to be able to make more sophisticated services to partition and control particular services, such as a specific suite of enterprise apps or even one particular area of data. “The largest portion of our business is still in the enterprise mobility management space, including devices as well as apps,” he said. “The growing part of the business is around being able to secure the content in a digital locker. We see a lot of growth in extending that out within our customer base. I can’t emphasize how important this is in our strategy.” It will also lead AirWatch further also into desktop services, supporting not just mobile devices and platforms but the services and PCs used to run things when workers are not running around.

The funding, and AirWatch’s moves to grow, are signs of a consolidation afoot in the area of mobile enterprise services, specifically around mobile device management and the larger “BYOD” trend, where workers are following larger consumer trends using smartphones and tablets to do everything online, and are increasingly bringing in their devices to the office to help them work there, too. Up to now, there have been dozens of companies working in this space, both big (like AirWatch and Good) and small.

“We think this market is going to play out quickly,” said Marshall. “There are haves and have-nots, and we want to be the market leader and continue increasing that separation. Consolidation is absolutely on the cards.”

He also says that will play out not just in terms of services and winning business but also in terms of funding. “The VCs are getting pretty smart and are realizing that the winners are shaping up. That will cut off capital for those players who are not in the leading pack. Some will be acquired, and some will disappear.”

Indeed, Sweeney at Accel agrees on the investing front, but adds that the company is also gearing up to look for more mobile enterprise investments going forward.

“We’re actively looking in mobile enterprise,” he told TechCrunch. “This is the largest investment we’ve made in mobile enterprise to date but [the trend of] folks bringing phones and tablets from home to work and leaving with your PC in your pocket are still growing, so we think mobile enterprise will be a growth area for 3-5 years for sure.”

Marshall says AirWatch is currently adding 500 business per month, which would put its current client base at around 7,500, with some of the bigger names including Delta, Lowe’s; United Airlines; Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); Skanska; PepsiCo; Henry Ford Health System; Mount Sinai Medical Center; Best Buy and Abbott Laboratories. The company boasts four of the top five global Fortune companies; the top four global energy companies; six of the top 10 global airlines; six of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies; seven of the top 10 global consumer product companies; five of the top 10 global luxury goods companies; two of the top three global hotel groups; nine of the top 10 U.S. retailers and three of the top five U.S. medical device companies.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Peer-to-peer ride sharing is one of the hottest — and most controversial — markets in the current tech startup world. And one leading player in the space, SideCar, is looking to hit the gas pedal on its growth amidst all the hubbub.

The San Francisco-based SideCar announced today it has hired two key tech executives to join the company and focus on product development and revenue generation: Gregory Boutte, most recently VP of eBay’s electronics and motors divisions, is joining SideCar as Chief Revenue Officer, and Robert Wong, most recently VP of product at Hulu, will serve as SideCar’s EVP of product.

In a post on SideCar’s company blog, CEO Sunil Paul said the two new execs “will help us build our brand visibility and prepare for global expansion.” In a separate press statement, Paul had a couple more comments about what each new hire brings to the table:

“Gregory has a reputation for leadership and execution. His depth of experience in two-sided marketplaces and international operations will be key to Sidecar’s global acceleration. Robert is known in the industry as a product executive with the strategic and tactical expertise to take a breakthrough idea mainstream. Both these hires will play an essential role as we grow our business and rideshare community.”

The company launched its service nearly one year ago in June 2012. At the moment, SideCar has active operations in eight markets — San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, and Washington, D.C. — and, like other transportation apps, has battled its fair share of regulators along the way.

There are certainly a lot of question marks about how ride-sharing will evolve in the months and years ahead, as local governments work out their responses to the new transportation landscape. But the fact that companies like SideCar continue to attract talent from other established areas of the tech industry is a big vote of confidence that it’s a market that is here to stay.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Auvik Networks, a Canadian enterprise networking startup co-founded by repeat entrepreneur Marc Morin (co-founder of now-public Sandvine and of PixStream, sold to Cisco); David Yach, a former CTO of BlackBerry’s software division; and ex-Sandvine product manager Alex Hoff, is today announcing that it’s raised it first round of outside funding: $6 million from Celtic House Venture Partners, Rho Canada Ventures, and BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, along with more contributions from Auvik’s founders, who have been backing it internally it to date. Auvik is part of a wider trend of companies working in software-defined networking, in its case developing a cloud-based platform for enterprises to manage IP networks built out of hardware from multiple vendors. Auvik has yet to release a commercial product: that will only come at the beginning of 2014, according to Morin, who is the company’s CEO.

“We’ve been focusing on the core technology and bringing the product out and bring it to market,” he told TechCrunch, noting that this round is being led by investors that were also strong backers of his previous startups. “This should be enough until launch.” The plan, he says, is for Auvik to support “all major hardware.”

To match how Auvik plans to disrupt traditional networking, Morin says that Auvik will also be priced in a disruptive way: there will be three tiers — See, Tell and Do — ranging from free of charge to a fee of about $12 per month, covering such things as community membership, and data collection, through to configuration services, 24-hour support and deeper analysis.

Enterprise startups continue to remain a focus for VCs, even as their attention gets distracted by the buzz around the next big thing, be it bitcoin or 3D printing.

One of the reasons is because there are still so many areas left to tackle in the space, cluttered as it is with legacy IT services and hardware.  It is here that Auvik sits. Up to now, businesses (especially those that are big enough to have multiple locations, but perhaps not big enough to have huge IT support groups) have had to deploy people to reconfigure networks physically, partly because it’s difficult to get hardware from different vendors to “speak” to each other. Using an API-style approach by way of the open-standard OpenFlow, the idea is that Auvik will become easy for anyone, not just IT engineers, to reconfigure and control how a network operates.

“Networking has been about hardware and boxes, but the focus now is on how people use software to control things,” noted Morin. “No one should have to configure routers and switches anymore.”

While a lot of the early emphasis will be on operating devices and users on a company’s network of desktop devices, the plan is for this to also include the many mobile devices that are also becoming more powerful and more used by workers. This is one area where Yach’s expertise, which spans not just BlackBerry but also years at Sybase, should come in handy.

Morin says that at the moment Auvik counts companies like SolarWinds and Meraki (recently acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion) as among its competitors. But he contends that Auvik will be taking a different approach from them. Tackling the idea of multi-vendor architectures — a common occurence at many medium-sized companies — Auvik is trying to make it as easy as possible for non-engineering IT people to use its platform, also a crucial priority for the size of companies that it’s proposing to target. “The real promise is a dramatically simpler way to configure how an application can be run.”

The other important point is that Auvik says it will, for the first time, provide a cloud-based way for enterprises to go deep into how their networks are controlled.

He uses the instance of a finance group’s network access as one example, with the idea that these people may log in on more than one device. “Say you want to put a policy on the finance group so that they can go straight to the finance server, and you want to enforce that, but the network doesn’t identify users, just IP addresses,” he says. “Using our platform, you can now join these up and change network configurations based on that, and modify it during the day as users log in and log out. Network management has been around for a long time, but it hasn’t had a very deep level of abstraction for how it works.” Morin says that most of the capabilities of hardware are never exploited by medium-sized companies, and so its service will aim to take advantage of that well, extending the life and functionality of that equipment.

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

A handwritten note is becoming a lost art in the age of email, Facebook, SMS, and more messaging apps than you can count. But if anything, that rarity has only led to increase its value and perceived thoughtfulness, even as our penmanship skills decline. Today, a startup called Postable is bringing back the “handwritten” note with a service that allows you to type in handwriting fonts, then print to high-quality card stock.

Postable got its start back in 2011, when co-founders and lifelong friends Scott Potash and Jesse Blockton grew tired of all the thank you notes they had to painstakingly handwrite. However, instead of immediately launching a service that took thank you card creation to the web, they first decided to target one of the bigger hurdles with building such a service: the fact that people don’t have each others’ mailing addresses anymore.

In March 2012, the team launched a free, online address book service. “The easiest way we thought to get people’s addresses would be to ask them to give them to you,” explains Blockton. “It’s just a simple, friendly crowdsourced address book.”

This original service, which became popular with brides, new parents, and others about to send out a lot of thank yous, provided users with a custom URL (www.postable.com/name) which they could send out to friends and family along with a personal request for mailing information. Recipients would click the link, fill out a form, and later the complete address book could be downloaded in variety of formats, including Excel, as a text file, or they could just print labels directly.

This free service grew to “tens of thousands” of users, though the company won’t disclose exact figures.

Today, the second phase of the plan comes into play, as Postable launches thank you cards. At launch, there are around 100 different cards to choose from, sourced from 24 different indie designers with whom Postable has a revenue sharing deal touted to be at “double the industry standard.”

When you go to type out a card on Postable.com, you can select from one of 12 different handwriting fonts, or 10 different stylistic fonts, if you’d rather not try to give your card the appearance of a handwritten note.

The cards themselves can be printed on a few different card stocks, including Crane’s Lettra, cotton paper, and a “brown bag” recycled card.

The service itself has also been designed to make writing out your notes as easy – if not easier – than doing it by hand. After you click on a recipient’s name, Postable autofills the “dear so-and-so” portion of your note, for example, and the spacing and font size automatically adjust as you type.

Cards cost $2, plus standard postage, which is often less than the “real” cards you buy individually at the store. However, frugal shoppers know they can find packs of lesser-quality thank you cards for less at any drug store – so Postable may not work for those pinching pennies.

A number of services have stepped in to make letter-writing and card-sending more convenient for those of us whose cursive skills are largely forgotten. For example, services like Red Stamp, Sincerely, Apple’s Cards, Lettrs, Inkly, and many more help fulfill this need. But some of these services come at the space with a mobile-first mentality, in the form of an app. Postable is a bit different because it’s not targeting the one-off note jotted on the go (though that’s supported), so much as it’s going after those who have a mountain of cards to send – such as after a wedding, for example.

That tends to work better on the web, with a larger keyboard to type upon. That being said, Postable plans to release native apps in time. But for now, the service works well on iPad in the browser.

By the end of the year, the company also plans to offer a broader selection of styles and support for different occasions beyond just the “thank you” note.

Based in New York, Postable has raised $500,000 from friends and family.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding a capital raising and trading platform and an equity crowdfunding portal, the 26-year-old again finds himself back in the Draper wheelhouse: Early-stage finance.

In the summer of 2012, Draper launched his third venture, Boost.vc, a San Mateo-based accelerator that offers housing (in an on-site hotel), office space, mentorship and seed funding as part of its 12-week incubation program. But by today’s standards, considering the glut of startup accelerators that have emerged over the last two years, what was once an attractive model now almost sounds run-of-the-mill. I’d argue, and Draper would agree, that accelerators can provide more value for startups over the long-run by focusing on a particular vertical.

Today, Boost.vc is taking its first (experimental) step in that direction by focusing on one of the hottest verticals in the tech industry: Bitcoin. About three months ago, the decentralized, ungoverned currency became “an obsession,” Draper says, and since then, it’s been the focus of his blog, meetings and now, in part, his accelerator. Boost.vc will be dedicating half of its second batch (seven startups total) to companies building products and technologies around the Bitcoin ecosystem.

When it comes to Bitcoin, Draper unabashedly wears rose-colored glasses, calling Bitcoin “one of the most exciting innovations happening in the world today.” While the kind of endorsement might give some pause, Draper isn’t alone. Last month, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew penned a post for TechCrunch explaining why VCs “love the Bitcoin market.” Liew himself has been a champion of Bitcoin and its incarnations, having recently backed OpenCoin, the developer of open source payment protocol, Ripple, for example.

Now Liew and other VCs are ready to ante up and continue to put their money where their mouths are by helping to establish the “Boost Bitcoin Fund.” The Fund, Draper exaplins, is a follow-on or “start” fund for all Bitcoin companies that graduate from the accelerator program. Each of the fifteen companies in Boost’s cohorts receives $15K in seed capital (in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake), but with the new fund, Bitcoin startups will receive an additional $50K investment upon completing the program.

The fund is anchored by Lightspeed, Rothenberg Ventures, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and Beluga founder Ben Davenport, all of which have begun to invest more aggressively in Bitcoin startups. Draper says that the team began to toy with the idea of a follow-on fund when the founders decided to accept seven Bitcoin startups into its summer session.

In floating the idea for a Bitcoin Start Fund to the investment community, the team was surprised by the warm reception that followed. In fact, Draper says, the capital came together in a week. With the Bitcoin movement continuing to gain steam, both entrepreneurs and investors are eagerly jumping into the space and testing new ideas in hopes of finding business models that will stick.

True to form, Draper says that the Boost.vc team is fully “committed to pushing Bitcoin toward becoming the next digital frontier.” Even if, as part of that experiment, the eight startups not focused on Bitcoin have to look on with envy as the other half of their cohort pockets an additional $50K at the end of the program.

Not only that, but as part of moving to commit (half of) itself to the vertical, Boost.vc will be bringing in “a number of Bitcoin-focused mentors,” including Davenport, who has recently dedicated himself to the space, along with additional speakers, experts and investors.

As a testament to the growing interest in the Bitcoin market, the digital currency now has its own conference, Bitcoin 2013, which is scheduled to take place this weekend in San Jose. Naturally, the conference will also play host to a Bitcoin-focused hackathon, and Draper tells us that Boost.vc plans to pick one of the seven startups that will participate in its program from the field.

As to the program: Applications for Boost.vc’s second cohort are being accepted on a rolling basis, with a final deadline of June 1st. The program will kick off June 24th, concluding in a demo day in the middle of September (the date has yet to be set). Those interested in applying can do so here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Until now, you’ve had to track your free storage on Google products separately. It was just another thing that Google hadn’t brought together to make it easier on users. Today, the company announced that you’ll now have 15GB of free storage to share between Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. Google Apps customers are getting a bump for Drive and Gmail to the tune of 30GB.

This falls in line with what Google has been pushing along with its Chromebook laptops — one huge cloud to manage all of your stuff. The company says that with this change in approach you’ll no longer be limited to a 25GB upgrade for Gmail, meaning if you grab more space for your Google products, it’s shared everywhere.

Also, it’s a push for unification and a nice shove for the “Drive” brand, which now serves as your online hard drive for everything…not just documents. It’s easier for consumers to get their heads around thinking of their email being stored on their “Google Drive.”

Here’s a look at the updated dashboard to check in on how much space you have left, which should be rolling out soon:

Here’s a look at the existing dashboard, which doesn’t push the 200GB option like the new one does, and still lists the 25GB upgrade, which also bumped your Gmail storage up. Confusing, right?

This approach will help Google onboard new Android users as well, as it’s much easier to grasp one number that applies to storage, much in the same way that Apple’s iCloud works. For example, when a new Chromebook user opens their laptop for the first time, they’re given free Drive storage, but that approach isn’t complementary to the rest of Google’s services.

The storage will be important to those uploading photos on Google+ though, which wants you to share your full-sized images, specifically if you’re a photographer. It’s easy to run out of space after sharing a few hundred of those. For Google, this makes upselling storage much easier, especially if someone is heavy on uploading photos and not so much filling up their allotted email storage.

The sweet spot for Google would be to get as many users to invest in $9.99 for 200GB a month as possible. This is more space than most will ever need, but the comfort that comes along with not worrying about running out of space is worth the 10 bucks for most. As Google continues to unify all of its products, that extra space might come in handy. For enterprise App customers, it’s one less thing to worry about when managing an entire team’s worth of accounts.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Grotech Ventures, the Virginia-based VC firm behind LivingSocial, HelloWallet and others; is announcing the raise of its eighth fund, Grotech Ventures II (“GV II”), with $225 million in committed capital. The firm says the fund was oversubscribed by more than 10 percent, and was raised from both existing and new limited partners. GV II bringsGrotech’s total capital under management to $1.3 billion across all funds.

Grotech makes investments across all sectors, including digital media; social, mobile & cloud computing; enterprise and infrastructure software; security technologies; consumer internet & ecommerce; as well as energy and healthcare IT. Typically, the firm wants to be the first institutional money raised. Investments range from rom $500,000 to $5 million.

The firm past bets include HelloWallet, Invincea, LivingSocial, Logi Analytics, LogRythym, OpenQ, Optoro and Zenoss. As firm founder Frank Adams explains, Grotech will only invest in companies where one of the partners has a “deep domain knowledge in the space.” As for what the new fund will be put towards, Adams says he is focused on :markets underserved by other early-stage investors.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch