MediaFile

Palo Alto Networks, the network security company, that modernized the firewall with its web application inspection took a look at what people do at work by analyzing Internet traffic in over 2,000 organizations.

Seems a lot of people watch videos.

In fact, Palo Alto’s semi-annual application usage and risk report says the bandwidth used by streaming video more than tripled to 13 percent from 4 percent in December 2011.

And that’s before the Euro 2012 Soccer Championship, the 2012 Olympics and the U.S. elections.

Apart from productivity issues and more money spent — a third of every dollar — on enterprise bandwidth for streaming video or filesharing — it opens the door for security breaches.

What has been dubbed ‘likejacking’ is essentially when a piece of malware gets downloaded as a user clicks to watch a video link forwarded by a friend.

Blue Jeans Network, a small rival of network equipment giant Cisco, is taking John Chambers by his word.

Cisco CEO Chambers’ mantra that video is the new voice all depends on how easy and simple it is to start a video call.

Blue Jeans, which claims it is the leader in making video services work together, says its new browser access technology does just that. (http://bluejeans.com/works-with/browser.)

Do consumers want a more social side to video? Some $8 milllion to Chill, an online-only video service that works via Facebook, says they do. The cash comes from venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talent firm William Morris Endeavor, and others. Chill allows people to watch videos and comment on them in groups, live. The cash should help it grow faster, while the relationship with William Morris, a new investor, should help it reel in more content partners, a spokesman said. Its current partners include celebrity-news service TMZ and TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live, it said.  About 18 million registered users have signed up with Chill, and around 10 million are regular visitors, the company said.

One year after its launch, Blue Jeans Network has expanded the reach of its interoperable videoconferencing service and secured a third round of funding worth $25 million.

The company’s goal: making video meetings as functional as a pair of blue jeans.

Users of the service can access a meeting through Skype, Google, Microsoft Lync, Polycom, Cisco, traditional phone and now directly through their web browser. My interview with the Blue Jeans Network executives was a perfect test of Blue Jeans’ interoperability, with the four members of the conference on Skype, Polycom, a web browser and a landline phone.

BOULDER, Colo. -- One of the most resonant talks I heard at last week's Big Boulder conference was also one of the shortest. In about twenty minutes, Brad Feld, who is without exaggeration the godfather to the Boulder startup community, explained exactly why it is that Boulder feels like a town on the verge, and why it's teeming with startups. A lot of it has to do with Feld himself.

It's not just that Feld is a co-founder of Techstars, the nationwide startup incubator that got its start in Boulder, or that the college kids -- and lately, mid to late twenties startup veterans -- flock to Boulder in hopes of getting a few minutes of his time to discuss their ideas. It's not just that Feld's Foundry Group scored big with an exit on Zynga, though that credibility certainly helps. And it's not just that he picked Boulder as some magical perfect place to be a startup Mecca. In fact when I asked him why he moved there from Boston, he said, laughingly, it was because, "my wife told me she was moving to Boulder." He figured he had better go along.

"Happy warrior" is usually a phrase reserved for politicians on futile crusades, but the four principles that Feld talked about that make Boulder a burgeoning startup locale are ones that he seems to embody, not just talk about. And as to my earlier post, wondering where and whether Boulder needed a billion dollar startup (or founder) to justify itself, Feld more or less shrugged it off. If that outcome is a natural result of the principles Feld sees as key to keeping Boulder a great place to found a company, then great. If it's not, I get the sense no one, he least of all, would mind very much.

Palo Alto start-up Freshplum hopes to take the guesswork out of digital commerce by using analytics software, data science and math to help companies make decisions like how to price merchandise. 

After a month under wraps, Freshplum announced Tuesday that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures, as well as a number of current and former executives from Facebook, Google and PayPal.

The company was co-founded by Sam Odio, who formerly worked at Facebook after his photo-sharing start-up Divvyshot was acquired by the social networking giant. The other co-founders are Nick Alexander and Michael Yuan.

AOL has finally decided how to distribute the pile of cash it received from Microsoft when it sold the software titan the majority of its patent portfolio for more than $1 billion, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, who reported its will be in the form of a buyback. The announcement is expected later this week, Swisher said.

An AOL spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The patent sale was one of the big sticking points for the activist hedge fund Starboard, which failed in its attempt to gain  seats on the AOL board during a proxy fight that played out in mid-June.  One battle of many was over who first had the idea of selling the patents–Starboard or AOL. Throughout the spring both sides made their case: AOL had said it was already in the process of auctioning off its patents way before Starboard starting amassing a stake in the troubled Internet company. Starboard alleged it pushed AOL to liquidate the majority of its patents.

Either way, shareholders win.

Swisher cited sources close to the matter that said AOL ultimately went with the buyback after talking with shareholders and because it made the most sense from a tax perspective.

The two speakers from Twitter -- Ryan Sarver and Doug Williams -- had just left the stage at Big Boulder, a data conference I'm attending in Colorado, when Twitter, the service, went down Thursday. Neither of them have anything to do with keeping the service up and running, but the restless audience probably still would've thrown the hotel-provided notepads and candies at them if they could've. Such was the level of dissatisfaction about the Twitter platform's outage yesterday -- and let's face it, any day a service we rely on goes out, even when the crowd in question doesn't consist of users and consumers of social big data, and the odd journalist.

The outage may have been poorly timed for Sarver and Williams, but the incident speaks to a larger problem the companies represented in this room are facing: building on top of social platforms.

Consider Zynga. The high flying gaming company, built primarily on top of Facebook's Open Graph, has faced record lows in its stock as investors have lost some confidence in the company's ability to continue growing. Or consider just about any other company, social or not, that is trying to reach its fans and customers in the social media world.

Silicon Valley start-up Swipp says it has raised $3.5 million in funding from venture firm Old Willow Partners, an early investors in Groupon. It will use the cash to develop and launch its first products sometime in late fall. On the subject of what exactly those products will be, Chief Executive and co-founder Don Thorson was cagey. But it seems like he’s aiming to create a social network where it would be easier for consumers and merchants to analyze or make money from data than on say Twitter or Facebook.

“With (so many) people connected we should be able to do so much more than just tell each other where we’re having lunch,” said the executive, adding that conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter are “pretty cool stuff but not meaningful data. The bigger the network gets the smarter it should get.”

A basic Twitter search of a particular hot topic like a service price increase or a new product can already give a snapshot of how people are reacting, But that’s not enough for Thorston “We think that’s just a really 1.0 way of being able to extract information,” he said. With Swipp “you’ll have quantifiable data on that topic.” For example, it could figure out what percentage of comments were complaints and what percentage were positive.

By Mauro Whiteman

Apple iOS gamers who miss the Pokemon monster-battling adventures of their childhoods may come one step closer to fulfillment today with the release of an updated version of MinoMonsters.

While Pokemon’s console-based games aren’t available on the Apple operating system, plenty of imitators are. MinoMonsters, also the name of the company that develops the game, wants to become the clear leader of that group, says CEO Josh Buckley. So far, he’s raised more than $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capitalists.

The updated title includes gameplay that brings it closer to the game it aimed to emulate by adding evolution of monsters, new boss encounters and more monsters. Pokemon, the wildly popular videogame franchise for Nintendo’s Game Boy and other platforms, boasts more than 600 different monsters with the challenge for gamers to “catch ‘em all.”
“Millions of gamers have been waiting for a Pokemon-like title to hit iOS, and we believe this release brings us much closer to that hit,” Buckley said. Now 20, he was the youngest graduate of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator that has spawned companies like accomodation service Airbnb and file-sharing service Dropbox.