| Sponsor Post: Want to Stand Out in the Bay Area? Make the "Hottest Companies in San Francisco" List Editor's note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. It can be difficult to stand out from the crowd as a startup, especially in the Bay Area. Startups are sprouting up every minute and begging for the attention of VCs and journalists alike. But who are the real success stories? Who will we see around in five or 10 years?
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Jolicloud Becomes Joli OS, Announces Cross-Platform Apps Jolicloud, the company whose online operating system was doing personal cloud computing long before Google's Chrome OS ever existed, is today announcing several major changes to its core products. First, its cloud-connected operating system will be rebranded, changing its name from "Jolicloud" to "Joli OS," in order to avoid confusion with the company's other product, its online desktop. The online desktop, a Web-only version of the Jolicloud interface, lets you access your personal files, folders and Web apps from a browser. Now that desktop, currently a Chrome Web Store app, will come to a number of new platforms, including additional browsers, the iPad and Android devices.
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Adobe Releases Flash to HTML5 Conversion Tool Today Adobe is launching an experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool called Wallaby. The tool takes content created with Adobe's Flash Professional and converts it to HTML5, the latest revision of the Web markup language. HTML5 is supported in most Web browsers, but, most importantly, it's supported on Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, where Flash is banned.
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Warner Bros. Brings Movie Rentals to Facebook, Starting with "The Dark Knight" Facebook's position as the destination site on the web and the tab you keep open in your browser all day long may have got a little stronger last night when Warner Bros announced last night that it was becoming the first Hollywood Studio to offer its movies for sale or rental via Facebook. You'll be able to use Facebook Credits to buy or rent movies, without leaving the Facebook page. The first film available is Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight." The cost to rent this blockbuster is 30 Facebook Credits, or $3. You'll get access to the film for 48 hours, giving you an opportunity to play and pause - and of course still post to Facebook - during the rental period.
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Meet LiquidSpace: The Airbnb of Office Space Over the last year, I've worked in countless noisy coffee shops and dropped in to various co-working spaces. And I'm not alone. Analytics firm Forrester reported that there were 375 million mobile workers worldwide in 2010, with many of them working out of noisy, concentration-breaking locations where client meetings and phone calls were nearly impossible feats. LiquidSpace is launching just in time for swarms of mobile workers to descend upon Austin next week for the SXSW conference, and it hopes to do what it does best - help users to "find a great space to work - now."
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Will E-Book Prices & Restrictions Lead to E-Book Piracy? Last week, Random House agreed to the agency price model, the last of the top six publishing companies in the world to do so. The move allowed the publisher's books entry into Apple's iBookstore, something that Steve Jobs touted on stage during the iPad 2 announcement as giving customers a better, more complete e-book catalog from which to shop. But as many customers have noticed, that more complete e-book catalog doesn't contain a lot of price variation. Indeed, the agency price model lets the publishers set the pricing for their books (rather than allowing retailers to determine the price) and, according to a story in The Guardian, investigations are underway in Europe to determine if the agency model and its highly uniform pricing structure may actually constitute price-fixing and the work of an illegal cartel.
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You Had a Good Run, OId Stamps: SMS Codes for Postage Coming to Europe Sticking a stamp to the front of an envelope could become so last century, if a logical plan in Europe ends up spreading as far as it could. Danish letter mailers, beginning April 1st, will be able to send an SMS to that nation's Postal Service and receive a short code back, confirming that they have paid to mail a letter. They'll write that code on the envelope and then the post office machines will scan that, instead of a stamp. Sweden says it's working on a similar system. It makes a lot of sense, presuming of course that people continue to mail letters on paper at all. It's also a little sad. Of course such news likely represents just one more move towards the eventual collapse of many different types of transactions into an act of mobile e-commerce based on a strong relationship between a phone owner, their mobile carrier and a third party in any type of transaction.
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6 Tech Companies That Raised Venture Capital Today: Which Will Change the World? (Poll) There was a whole lot of money passing between hands today and we want to know which of these freshly funded companies interests you the most! There's a motley, but exciting line-up featuring companies that will help us find storage space, keep us from using our phone as we drive for work (I'm so guilty of this!) and a buzz-worthy new group messaging app. Join us as we dive into today's world of venture capitalism.
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Opera Opens Cross Platform Mobile App Store Opera Software, the Norway-based browser maker, announced the opening of its Mobile App Store today. The store, which the company launched in conjunction with Appia, the "largest open application marketplace in the world," will provide apps to Opera's mobile browser users across a number of platforms. According to the company, the store has already been a hit and its placement in its popular mobile browsers should ensure that it continues with this success.
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China Responds to Mideast Uprising with Huge Increase in Security Budget While countries as disparate as Armenia and Mauritania react to the reality of change in Tunisia and Egypt, China continues its crackdown. After blocking terms like "jasmine" (for the Jasmine Uprising) and even country names like "Egypt" from online searches, it began a campaign of arrests and harassment of protesters, and possible future protesters, in its major cities. Now, in a material indication of its priorities, China has released its budget expenditures at the start of its new parliamentary session. For the first time, the country's spending on internal security, including online censorship program and tools, has passed the yearly budget for the army and all other defense organization.
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