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For developers, Android is becoming more of a consumer-oriented platform, while iOS has taken the lead in business, according to a new survey.

The next generation of application development is starting to emerge. Frameworks act as a catalyst for building applications. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is helping accelerate application development as it abstracts the stack that  developers usually have to build themselves. With integrated systems, the idea of application assembly is emerging with solutions such as IBM’s PureApplication System.

Active Endpoints symbolizes this trend with Cloud Extend Mobile. It’s a platform with a wizard like “mind map” framework that is used to build and deploy mobile apps that respond to voice and touch.

Today’s SaaS and enterprise apps are built for the PC. In Salesforce.com for example, there may be multiple pages with multiple fields that a field worker needs to fill out.  That’s unwieldly on a mobile device. Instead, a  sales person will often use a laptop or desktop to update the CRM or sales force automation system.

With Cloud Extend Mobile, a sales person can update from the field on a mobile device using voice or touch to do the inputs.

Active Endpoints is initially launching CloudExend Mobile with Salesforce.com.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say a sales person decides that she needs a quick way to update Salesforce after a sales call. She opens the CloudExtend Mobile App from the Salesforce.com App Exchange and uses it to create a mind map of what she wants to do. She can make it for herself, an associate or her team. She can add logic to it such as asking about the outcome of a meeting. For example, there could be a yes or no question such as: “Are there new opportunities?”

Once completed, the app, is deployed and can be used in the field on an iOS or Android smartphone. Users may update their meeting with the app by voice or touch.

Active Endpoints represents a new form of business process management software (BPM). It competes in the same space as Intalio and old stalwarts like IBM.

I like the app building process that comes with mind map technology. It shows how we are changing the way apps are developed. The complexity is increasingly abstracted. CEO Mark Tabor says Cloud Extend Mobile woud be a fit in a PaaS environment. I can see that, especially as we move closer to a time in which we build apps with components more than code.

I do have some reservations about Cloud Extend Mobile . Often it is the power user who uses this service the most. You need to build app libraries that anyone can use. It’s best for a well-organized team with a management who see the value and will make sure the sales workers use it. Otherwise, it’s a cool app that reminds me of mind map tools that I have used to automate Web searches and distribute photos and such to multiple places. Once you get it right, it works beautifully. It’s just a matter of getting to that point.

General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz have given $4 million in Series A to stealth startup Parlay Labs we’re hearing, with General Catalyst leading the round.

The newest member of the groundswell of enterprise communication startups, which includes TCDisrupt winners Yammer and UberConference, Palo Alto based Parlay Labs wants to “reinvent the way people are communicating at work” according to its website.

While it’s difficult to parse exactly what this may mean, I’m going to make an educated guess and say they too are trying to improve the extremely broken conferencing space which, as anyone who’s ever been on a conference call can attest, is extremely broken.

Parlay Labs is the first post-acquisition project from Docverse founders Shan Sinha and Jeremy Roy. Acquired by Google in 2010, Docuverse was a digital library of documents which eventually ended up bolstering Google Cloud Connect. Sinha ran Google Enterprise Apps until he and Roy left Google a month ago to focus on Parlay.

The company has a strong engineering team, comprised of other Ex-Googlers in addition to people from Apple, Microsoft and the MIT and Stanford-educated co-founders. They’re going to need it. From what we’re hearing, the team is experiencing “aggressive growth” and is hyper-focused on refining the product before its public launch.

App migration and management startup CliQr Technologies has come out of stealth mode with a goal of helping enterprises move their apps to public and private clouds, the company announced today.

One of the more pressing problems for enterprises that are interested in tapping the power of the cloud is the hassle of moving well-established local apps to the cloud and managing them there. CliQr can help move in-house or third-party apps from your company’s server to public clouds from Amazon, Rackspace, or HP, or private clouds maintained with VMWare or OpenStack. By the end of the year, the company said it will offer integration with more providers, including Microsoft Azure and SoftLayer.

And the company won’t charge anything for the migration of an app. Instead, it will charge for use of its CloudCenter management software for the app, Gaurav Manglik, CEO of CliQr, told VentureBeat.

CliQr boldly claims that it can improve the price-to-performance ratio between five to ten times more than other cloud migration tools. Pricing will mostly be on a company-by-company basis.

“We see ourselves as helping both SMBs and enterprises,” Manglik said. “But our primary focus is on moving in-house enterprise apps to the cloud.”

Mountain View, Calif.-based CliQr has 10 employees and has raised just less than $1 million in seed funds from investors including Google Ventures and Foundation Capital. Manglik told us the company is also in the process of raising its first round of funding.

Photo credit: Stokkete/Shutterstock

Filed under: cloud, dev, enterprise, VentureBeat

Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley rival has also been winning a bunch of this turf — YouSendIt. Today, the company is backing up its position with some new stats, and a new chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse.

He’s coming off a two-year stint as the head of consumer products at AOL, and a previous five years heading up consumer and enterprise apps at Yahoo. He also has roots as an investor and entrepreneur, so this move is going back to that.

YouSendIt, meanwhile, says it has 98% of the Fortune 500 companies on it in some form (Box says it has 82%, for whatever this comparison is worth). More importantly, there’s quality revenue in this type of business. YouSendIt has nearly 600,000 paying customers on top of 30 million registered users; revenue has correspondingly shot up from $24.4 million in 2010 to $39.3 million last year. Those numbers are also very competitive with Box and other sharing services, from what I hear.

Garlinghouse — who will be on stage at Disrupt New York next week to share more details — says he’s particularly excited about some other data points. Registered users have gone up 71% from the first quarter of 2011, while the paid subscriber growth in the first quarter of 2012 beat the same period the previous year. The company isn’t sharing its revenue run-rate at this point, but these numbers indicate it is going up faster than ever.

All this is a big new public view of YouSendIt, which began life way back in 2004, and has managed to grow with little publicity (although TechCrunch has been on the case for years). One way it did this, as Garlinghouse tells me, was a cleverly placed link in email users would send each other. First a user uploads a file and shares it, then they send an email telling the recipient to go get it on the company’s hosted page. But, the email includes a link that says “click here to register and we’ll store it for you.” At some point after users register and start using the service, they’ll hit the paywall.

Garlinghouse is replacing six-year chief executive Ivan Koon (who is widely credited for building the guts of the business). Going forward, the new exec will be doing what some of its rivals have excelled at, which is creating an extremely simple user-facing product, and pushing the company’s brand in public.

Editor’s note: Mitch Lazar is CEO of Taptu. He Founded CNN and Cartoon Network Mobile. He was a former journalist at CNN and one of the co-founders of CNN.com. Prior to joining Taptu, Mitch headed Yahoo! Mobile Europe.

Staying on top of your game and understanding the competitive landscape is essential to winning in the modern business world. A huge component to staying ahead of the curve is keeping a close eye on competitors in your market, which entails maintaining a watchful eye on industry news. Some companies turn to expensive news monitoring services to keep track of their respective industry, but in reality there are more viable options. Emerging tablet news and information services like Flipboard, Pulse and others are proving an incredible companion to business and consulting executives in staying current with industry changes occurring around them.

Jeff Cavins, CEO of Fuzebox, recently wrote in Business Insider that the explosive uptake of tablet computers is fueling the growth of what he called the new “iPad economy.” Cavins said: “The iPad is shifting the way businesses function, changing how executives interact and transforming the economics of today’s business operations.”

The iPad economy is a growing reality across the globe, and businesses are turning to enterprise apps to help them succeed. Simple RSS readers are used to condense multiple streams of content from a variety of sources into single channels, granting users access to diverse content all in one place. Some applications have further simplified news aggregation by using innovative search technology that goes beyond the function of RSS readers to deliver richer streams of highly targeted information to business users – a critical asset to businesses large and small.

Better Search and Filtering Offers Essential Time Savings

Improved search and filtering techniques make it simple and easy for a business to set up a Web-monitoring service. Google News and Google Alerts were an early step in the right direction, but anyone who monitors news on a daily basis knows that these services don’t always give you the news you want when you need it.

As users continue to adopt tablets as a primary reading outlet, there is a huge opportunity to create real-time, targeted news experiences. Apps like Zite, which was bought by CNN in 2011, aim to learn about users’ interests through the stories they read, and provide related content based on those preferences. News-reader apps give users the power to create their own streams of content based on keywords to offer analysis of the topic across any genre of content, keeping them constantly updated in the ever-changing world of business.

Recently we have seen innovative companies like Wavii launch to further personalize the way users get their news, and as this vertical continues to mature, we should see more sophisticated technologies making their way onto tablets.

By utilizing apps that filter and search, tablets are changing the way news is channeled and consumed. Best of all, once streams are set up, they can be shared business-wide or between colleagues so the wheel never has to be re-invented.

Gesture Based Information Consumption Increases Efficiency

Touting efficiency, news-readers give users the opportunity to scan hundreds of articles in a few moments and immediately delve deeper into the most interesting content. News-reading services do all the heavy lifting by aggregating the stories that match your interests, giving you more time to spend reading the news you care about rather than searching for it. The same way Evernote helps you save your daily thoughts and ideas all in one spot, news-readers concisely track what’s going on in every field that interests you.

Beyond increasing efficiency, news-readers also allow for easy sharing of any stories of interest with your community of colleagues or friends. Every blog and news site has its own way to share stories you enjoy with friends, but they are not always convenient for users. Tablet apps make sharing simple, while still driving traffic back to the original source.

Bookmarking Makes for Easier Follow Up

When browsing a vast number of stories every day, it’s often hard to keep track of the important ones, or to flag them down once you’ve flipped past. Easy in-app bookmarking tools such as Pocket or Instapaper make for a better overall experience because returning to a piece of interesting news is simple. Creating your own playlist through bookmarks is intuitive, as is sharing that list with colleagues, which is an asset for group collaboration.

Apps are abundant, but the ones with the potential to make a difference to the business world are those that improve productivity, efficiency and knowledge sharing. Discovering and utilizing these gems in a marketplace that has become a sea of apps is a difficult task. Apps like news readers set themselves apart by providing essential tools for businesses and adding value to help them win in their respective vertical.

Fresh off its first acquisition and $85 million in new funding, Yammer is debuting a number of product improvements in a new release for its social network for enterprises. The company has added universal search, premium groups, official content, Yammer embed, a new Office 365 integration, and updated mobile apps. Yammer is also announcing that it has surpassed five million corporate users and increased headcount to more than 300 employees

As you may know, Yammer has evolved into a more comprehensive, Facebook-like platform for social networking within the enterprise. Beyond being just a communications platform, Yammer now includes applications such as polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas and more. An activity feed aggregates stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and allows users to follow content. The next step of this evolution is adding actual business functionality such as editing and file syncing to the platform.

Universal Search allows business data from any enterprise application to be accessed in Yammer’s search engine. The feature uses Yammer’s existing Activity Stream API, so third-party content from any activity stream integrations automatically appears in search. As we’ve reported, Salesforce.com, SAP and Microsoft SharePoint data can all be added into Yammer’s activity stream, and now is searchable. Selection of a third-party record in search seamlessly opens that system in a separate tab.

The API contains features to respect the permissions of the underlying applications, so only employees authorized to view a record can find it. And search results are type-ahead based on a relevance algorithm individualized to each user and categorized into People, Groups, Files, Pages, Topics and Applications. Additionally, files, pages and conversations are full-text searchable.

Another new feature in this release includes an upgrade to premium groups, with increased file storage limits and advanced admin controls. Admins can change group privacy settings, mark content as official and read-only, make group announcements, or delete any member’s messages, files and Pages. A new tier of Premium Groups offers teams and departments the ability to upgrade their Yammer group without paying for the whole company. Previously Yammer only offered admin functionality at the network level.

Yammer is ramping up content sharing with a new Share button, which allows conversations, files and Pages to be cross-posted from one group to another or to start a private message about a file, Page or conversation. A new Email File button enables employees to email third-parties such as customers and partners a secure, one-time URL to view a file or Page. The link cookies the recipient’s browser and can only be used once to ensure that only the intended recipient can view the content. Viewing rights can be revoked at any time.

Embeds are now turned on for every Yammer group. Appearing next to every group feed, a embed code can be copied and pasted to add a Yammer feed widget inside any business application. Only logged-in users logged can view the embedded feed; otherwise, they are prompted to log in. The embed widget automatically sizes to fit the available space. A new webpart for Microsoft Office 365 allows users to embed their Yammer feed directly into Office 365. And Yammer is launching a new connecter for Microsoft Access.

Yammer is also updating its iPhone and Android with slide-out navigation and an improved UI with in-line file thumbnails, access to more file types and a cleaner design. CEO and co-founder David Sacks tells us that while this release is comprehensive, the summer release will have twice as many new features, including OneDrop integration. He adds that this is thanks to the rapid hiring of engineers.

A job listing that appeared on Research in Motion’s website reveals that the BlackBerry maker is looking to hire developers for an undisclosed enterprise app to be distributed through Apple’s App Store.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate the freeing of Heather Harde, the health of realtime, the obsolescence of Office, and the gamification of deep enterprise apps. It never ceases to amaze how some people rescue defeat from the jaws of victory, but Techcrunch’s loss of its business leader is our gain.

As @scobleizer shows on his undulating realtime screens, Techcrunch past present and future continues to be at the bleeding edge of the social wave. Just as Microsoft continues to box itself into an innovation-free corner and give disruptive energy room to thrive, so too does AOL watch value flow from editorial through the technologies it uncrunched and onto the social mobile platform. As the crowd of another era shouted, the whole world is watching. The revolution will be streamed.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate the freeing of Heather Harde, the health of realtime, the obsolescence of Office, and the gamification of deep enterprise apps. It never ceases to amaze how some people rescue defeat from the jaws of victory, but Techcrunch’s loss of its business leader is our gain.

As @scobleizer shows on his undulating realtime screens, Techcrunch past present and future continues to be at the bleeding edge of the social wave. Just as Microsoft continues to box itself into an innovation-free corner and give disruptive energy room to thrive, so too does AOL watch value flow from editorial through the technologies it uncrunched and onto the social mobile platform. As the crowd of another era shouted, the whole world is watching. The revolution will be streamed.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor