Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 10™ has been selected as a finalist in the Server and Storage Technology Category for TechAmerica Foundation’s American Technology Awards, “The Termans,” which bestows the only national “Best Of” awards that recognize all technology products and services across the technology industry. Nominations for The American Technology Awards, “The Termans,” were vetted by industry experts and TechAmerica Foundation leadership. These awards were named after Frederick Terman, who is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.

“We are thrilled to be recognized by the leaders in the technology industry as the best backup and recovery solution in the server and storage technology category, ” said Izzy Azeri, senior vice president and general manager, Americas at Acronis. “Being named a finalist in the American Technology Awards is yet another indication of our hard work and dedication to creating a product suite that helps small, medium and large organizations to simply automate backup and disaster recovery processes across physical and virtual environments, in a single solution.”

Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 10™ offers features, ease-of-use and functional richness beyond the scope of any competing product on the market. The Acronis advantage centers around patented disk imaging and bare metal restore technologies that manage all backup and disaster recovery activities in Windows and Linux environments. After a disaster strikes, Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 10™ restores servers, workstations or laptops to the same or different hardware or to virtual machines, providing highly flexible disaster recovery and migration options.

Acronis continues to be a leader in the server and storage technology industry, becoming the first to deliver a product that provides the two elements of file-based backup and system-level recovery in a single, affordable, and easy-to-use solution with Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 11™, which will be available in June 2011.

“This year we saw a number of nominations from many companies new to the competition,” said Dallas Advisory Partners Founder, and TechAmerica Foundation Chairman, David Sanders. “We congratulate all of this year’s finalists, and look forward to celebrating their achievements with them at the Technology and Government Dinner.”

Nominations for The Termans are vetted by industry experts and TechAmerica Foundation leadership. Individual Terman Awards will be presented for products and services in the following categories:

• Aerospace & Defense
• Clean Tech/Green Tech
• Cloud Computing/Software as a Service
• Consumer Electronics/Computers and Peripherals
• Cyber Security & Authentication
• Health & Medical Technologies
• Internet Services & E-Commerce
• IT Services & Consulting
• Semiconductors & Electronic Components
• Server & Storage Technology
• Smart Grid & Smart Instruments
• Software
• Technology Manufacturing
• Telecommunications

The winners will be presented on June 15 at TechAmerica Foundation’s ninth annual Technology and Government Dinner, which has been a premier Washington, DC networking event bringing hundreds of industry, congressional and government leaders together at one venue to celebrate the partnership between industry and government. For more information, please visit http://www.techamericafoundation.org/technology-government.

About Acronis
Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis.

About TechAmerica Foundation
TechAmerica Foundation educates executives, policymakers, opinion leaders on the size, scope, outlook, and impact of the technology industry and on policies that enable and promote technological innovations to advance prosperity, security, and the general welfare. Launched in 1981, the Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit affiliate of TechAmerica, which is the leading voice and resource for the U.S. technology industry. The Foundation disseminates award-winning industry, policy, and market research covering topics such as U.S. competitiveness in a global economy, innovation in government, and other areas of national interest. It also organizes conferences and seminars to explore pertinent issues with government and industry representatives and to share the Foundation’s findings. Learn more about TechAmerica Foundation at www.techamericafoundation.org.

If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.

That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.

New classroom technology would let schools hire fewer, better teachers … and pay them more money.

“The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking,” Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.

Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea?

THE WEB LEAGUE

Universities have been called walled gardens. But ten years ago, some elite colleges opened a crack the ivy walls to let the Web in. MIT launched OpenCourseWare [OCW], a free online database of undergraduate and graduate courses taught at MIT, including lectures, tests, and discussion sections. Around the same time, Yale, Stanford and Oxford teamed up to form AllLearn, an alliance that offered eight- to ten-week e-courses to thousands of students from around the globe.

In the last decade, OCW has grown into a global consortium of hundreds of universities with thousands of online curricula that you can browse and download for free. Meanwhile at Yale, after the AllLearn alliance disbanded in 2006, President Richard Levin teamed up with art history and classics professor Diana E. E. Kleiner to find a new way to put Yale courses online.

“We wanted to make a contribution to the world,” Kleiner tells me. “So we recorded a selection of the most popular Yale courses, and put them online for free. That become Yale Open Courses.” Where OCW specialized in syllabi and lecture notes, Yale focused on high quality video that made users feel like they were sitting orchestra center at a lecture theater. Three million unique visitors have visited the Yale website, with millions more checking in through YouTube and iTunes U, Apple’s online warehouse of lectures, slideshows, and audiobooks from more than 800 universities around the world.

Yale lectures have even become supplemental material for AP classes across the country, Kleiner told me, suggesting “a real hunger for these lectures beyond our expectations.” Her stories of students emailing thanks to Yale for 5’s on AP exams suggests a future where the nation’s best professors create instructional videos for classrooms across the country.

It’s a vision shared by Joel Klein. “One of the best things we could do is hire fewer teachers and pay more to the ones we hire,” he writes. And technology would get us from here to there:

If you get the best math professors in the world–who are great teachers and who deeply understand math–and match them with great software developers, they can create sophisticated interactive programs that engage kids and empower teachers. Why not start with such a program and then let teachers supplement it differently, depending on the progress of each student?”

Kleiner reads from the same script, if more cautiously. “If the best economics teacher in the world creates a course that is better than any other, would there be merit in having that course be the only course?” she asks. “Maybe, but you would still need teachers. There’s no substitution for personal education.”

Having the world’s best economic teacher virtually instruct every economics class would represent a winner-take-all revolution in an industry that has largely ignored cost efficiency and scalability. But even in this budget conscious world — especially in this budget conscious world — teachers and administration will be alarmed if a few brand name institutions tried to take over the job of teaching the world.

A great education is a eight-lane two-way highway between teachers and students. College lecture videos? They’re just a one-way street.

OUR POST-CLASSROOM FUTURE

The solution for some tech firms is to innovate from within the ivy tower. “The major universities are using technology built in the 1990s,” says Josh Coates, CEO of the new college software program Instructure. “We’ve built an open platform for students and teachers to interact.”

Taking on Blackboard and other so-called learning management systems, Instructure is an open source platform working off programs like Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re a teacher rescheduling a midterm, Coates told me, you could open a calender, drag the midterm to a different date, and the system would automatically send a text, Facebook message, or email, depending on how students wanted to interact.

If Instructure is trying to change education from the inside out, Silicon Valley is working to change education from the outside in. It’s not just Peter Thiel, the outspoken PayPal investor who’s using national magazines as platforms to lob bombs at higher education. It’s also constructive start-ups like Udemy, a website that lets anyone in the world build an online course with video sessions, readings and or virtual classroom sessions.

“It was a big step for the universities like Yale and MIT to open up their content,” says Gagan Biyani, Udemy’s cofounder. “They proved that people want to learn. But filming somebody teaching isn’t disruptive.”

You know what’s disruptive? A math genius creating a full online course — with YouTube lectures, downloadable readings, interactive practice questions, and a global community of students commenting throughout. The closest person doing this on a massive scale is Salman Khan, whom Bloomberg Businessweek called the “messiah of math” for his Academy (that word, again) combining video lessons like the one below with interactive questions to chart students’ progress.

“I like Sal, but he can’t do everything,” Binyani says. “There’s so much more that people want to learn about. That’s why we’re trying to enable these experts to create these online courses.”

WAITING TO DISRUPT

Even an online interactive Roman architecture class that is worthy of Yale is not Yale for one reason: its students are not graduates of Yale University. The difference between college and any education (even a great education) is a degree. If Udemy offers a college-worthy education without the degree, can it really change college?

Biyani says yes. “It’s tough to foresee a world where a college degree from Yale is equivalent to something you get online,” he conceded. “But I could see a college degree from Devry University [a for-profit school] considered a lower quality than an education from a truly great online institution.”

Colleges rarely think about efficiency, because all the signals tell them to spend more money on fewer students. Theoretically, the most efficient school would give the highest quality education to the most people for the lowest price. In reality, national rankings reward universities for rejecting the highest number of applicants, teaching the fewest number of students per class, and spending the most per capita on resources. That doesn’t mean colleges are failing. It means the system suffers from an incentive to be inefficient.

“I have a vision for where this is going to go,” Biyani tells me. “The price of college is going to fall, and the Internet is going to cause that fall.”

He pauses and adds, “The rest of it is really difficult to figure out.”

Here in Boston, we fret about losing tech talent and leadership to the West Coast. So today, let’s celebrate the return of one of our own.

Michael Schreck has joined Boston-based digital publishing firm Zmags as its new CEO, as of earlier this month. Schreck, a prominent investor and entrepreneur, has spent the past eight years in the cultural wasteland of Orange County, CA, as CEO and managing director of Equity Pacific Group, a private equity shop. Before that, he made his name in Boston as a co-founder of a number of startups including m-Qube and Upromise, and a co-founder and general partner at venture firm General Catalyst Partners. He originally came to town in the early 1990s to work at Monitor Group and then attended Harvard Business School; now he’s moving back.

These things come full circle. Ten years ago, Schreck was helping recruit big-name CEOs to run companies. Now he is the big-name CEO.

But why Zmags? My colleague Wade wrote about the company back in 2009, when it was best known for its platform for publishing digital magazines (hence its name). Over the years, Zmags also has been focused on digital marketing—helping brands design and develop interactive catalogs for the Web and mobile devices. The firm started in Denmark in 2006 and moved its headquarters to Boston in 2008. This month, Schreck succeeds former CEO Jens Karstoft, a co-founder who is staying on as vice president of strategic innovation.

Zmags is also rolling out a new digital merchandising and e-commerce service today, called CommercePro. The basic idea is to help brands optimize their catalogs, marketing materials, and shopping analytics across iPad, iPhone, Android devices, Web browsers, and other channels. A key feature: the new software lets consumers make purchases directly from within a Zmags catalog or magazine (on a Facebook fan page, say), and also helps brands keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

“You can imagine it, architect it, test it, and get the data back,” Schreck says.

It sounds like an intriguing opportunity for Schreck (see left), who has some deep perspective on digital and mobile marketing. In the early 2000s, he helped start m-Qube, which grew out of a previous startup called Proteus Mobile. Back then, Schreck says, the question was, “Is texting going to be big in the U.S.?” Major wireless carriers thought no—that consumers would leap-frog to an enhanced messaging system—but m-Qube stuck with its plan, keeping mobile-marketing content simple and short via SMS. But marketing via text messages severely limited what brands and marketers could do on mobile devices.

What’s changed in the interim? In a word, the iPad/iPhone. Schreck calls it “the great leveler—nobody could imagine that device [iPhone] until it appeared in our palm.” Schreck’s epiphany for his new job came to him during a boardroom meeting with a bunch of public-company CEOs. Apparently it’s a faux pas to have your laptop open during such meetings. But “we all had our iPads out,” he says. “It was weird, I’ve never seen anything like it.” There were different age groups represented in the room, from junior to senior execs, he says. “It was everybody. You could have an iPad there, it was this sort of information appliance. You couldn’t have a laptop. I thought, ‘This is amazing.’”

Indeed, according to Jeff Glass of Bain Capital Ventures, who worked with Schreck on m-Qube, the three biggest changes in mobile marketing in the past decade are: consumers using their phones for data; device capabilities allowing for a rich experience; and carriers no longer dictating what can be done, “which allows for more scalable business models but also a lot more competition,” Glass says.

(Interestingly, Schreck is not so bullish about the future of mobile apps as a marketing strategy. “Trust me, I’ve downloaded 200 apps to my phone. I look at five every day, and the others are not part of my daily life,” he says.)

Schreck connected with Zmags through his VC friends, and was impressed by its potential. “Now that you’ve introduced the iPad, expectations have changed. Brands have to rise to meet that moment. Giving me a mobile Web page isn’t going to be good enough,” he says. Now it’s about providing rich media—engaging videos and interactive content—that can drive consumers to buy your brand. “Now, all those things you imagined—offline content, online, the best content—you can put into the Zmags digital experience,” he says.

Zmags is profitable and has more than 100 employees worldwide, with about 40 in Boston. The company has raised a modest amount of venture capital (around $7 million) from investors including Northcap Partners and OpenView Venture Partners. Its last financing round was a couple of years ago, so the obvious question is whether Schreck is coming in to raise a big round.

Schreck declined to comment on any specific fundraising plans, but he did say there has been a lot of interest from VCs. Yet he knows to be very careful taking money. Companies are “raising insane amounts of capital because they feel they need to deal with these trends,” he says.

Of course, Schreck knows all the VCs in town, so he probably won’t have much trouble if that’s the way Zmags goes. “He’s a magnet for talent,” says Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners, who worked with Schreck on Upromise around 2000. He adds that Schreck knows how to start, build, and scale companies—especially consumer- and brand-driven businesses—and is a “shrewd investor.”

It certainly sounds like Zmags is thinking big. “We’ve got to figure out how to be effective,” Schreck says. One of the company’s greatest challenges is to “cut across cultural and linguistic barriers to serve [global] customers,” he says. If the firm were to go the VC route, he adds, “You’ve got to align the vision really tightly with the venture capital principal. They have to believe it as much as you do, because there are going to be moments of doubt.”

SIGMA Marketing Group, the customer intelligence-driven, direct and digital marketing services firm, has enhanced its industry-leading solutions by partnering with global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget. SIGMA becomes a reseller partner of ExactTarget, further expanding its integrated suite of solutions.

“Customer intelligence has to be incorporated into every aspect of your messaging and ExactTarget will help us deliver those messages on the customer’s terms.”

In a year marked by steady growth, SIGMA has taken another step to build value for clients by adding this best-in-class service, and will provide the marketing insights and guidance to help maximize the benefits of ExactTarget’s marketing technology.

“As we build our clients’ relationships with their customers across all channels, ExactTarget stands out as a great partner to profitably focus messages to the right prospects at the right time and in the right place,” said Martha Bush, senior vice president of strategy & marketing at SIGMA. “Customer intelligence has to be incorporated into every aspect of your messaging and ExactTarget will help us deliver those messages on the customer’s terms.”

“SIGMA Marketing Group has grown its business by helping clients improve their existing email marketing programs to save time, increase efficiency and boost ROI,” said Jim Kreller, vice president of channel partners at ExactTarget. “As one of our newest reseller partners around the globe, we look forward to working with SIGMA Marketing Group to introduce more clients to the power of ExactTarget.”

About SIGMA Marketing Group

SIGMA Marketing helps clients like Xerox, Nationwide, AAA and Citizens Bank engage with their customers through Analytics + Strategy + Technology. We turn data into customer intelligence and innovative marketing solutions — online and offline — with direct and digital solutions that focus on multichannel marketing strategies, data and technology integration, web analytics and sales enablement. SIGMA builds long term customer relationships and drives Marketing ROI. Visit us at www.sigmamarketing.com and at our Fifth Gear Analytics blog: http://fifthgearanalytics.com.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email-marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub^TM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages, and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture, and Webtrends, among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot, and Wellpoint, Inc.

The volume of venture capital flowing into Indiana-based companies has picked up this year, a report says, with the state attracting seven times more investment in the first quarter of 2011 compared with the same period of 2010.

The $68.6 million invested in Indiana companies through the first quarter comes close to approaching the $79.3 million total that venture capital firms invested in the state in all of 2010, according to the most recent PricewaterhouseCoopers/ National Venture Capital Association report.

There also have been some significant investments since that period ended, including the $30 million landed last month by Indianapolis-based e-mail marketing firm ExactTarget Inc.

Some local investors say the rising total indicates a shift in Indiana’s investment landscape. Others say single big-dollar deals, such as the $53 million infusion into Indianapolis-based consumer ratings service Angie’s List Inc., skew the picture.

But they agree the growth in investment — in many cases from coastal firms — has a snowball effect in terms of luring more outside dollars to the state.

“At some point, these VCs start comparing notes, and folks say, ‘What’s going on in Indiana?’” said Kristian Andersen, an entrepreneur and partner in Indianapolis-based Gravity Ventures Inc.

State firms were faring well in attracting venture capital before the recession. Indiana companies raised roughly $232 million in 2009, ranking the state 20th in per-capita VC funding, at $24.43.

Last year, the state ranked 31st in per-capita funding, at $4.39, well below the national median of $10.59, according to data from the Ohio-based State Science & Technology Institute.

This quarter’s funding upswing in Indiana was accompanied by a 13-percent national uptick in venture dollars compared with the same period in 2010. At the same time, the number of deals nationally decreased about 6 percent, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/NCVA data.

Deals in Indiana increased to eight in the first quarter from three in the same period last year.

That’s still a relatively small number of deals. Venture-capital hotbed California, for instance, had 270 deals in the first quarter.

Don Aquilano, a managing partner at Indianapolis-based venture capital firm Allos Ventures LLC, said the small deal volume makes it hard to discern a trend in the funding.

“I think we happen to have a stable of very compelling companies here that have been built up over the last 10 years or so that are commanding these significant fundraising rounds from both local and coastal investors,” Aquilano said.

While that’s a good sign, he adds that more local venture capital dollars are needed to get additional companies to a point where they can attract coastal investment.

The Angie’s List infusion from Massachusetts-based Battery Ventures and Indianapolis-based Cardinal Equity Partners was by far the largest in the first quarter.

Among the other investments were $10.5 million invested in Carmel-based Dealer Services Corp., which provides products, financing and services to automotive dealers, and $2.1 million to Carmel-based tech firm ChaCha Search Inc.

Helping companies such as Angie’s List and ExactTarget lure such large investments is the fact that they’re profitable. And they could continue to attract sizable sums, Andersen said, as long as they hold out on having an initial public offering.

Such investment overall has a positive impact on what it takes to get more venture capital to the state.

“All of this money that’s fueling the growth of these companies has direct implications on our ability to attract and retain talent,” Andersen said. “The more of that talent that moves here in response, the more that cycle perpetuates.”

In the beginning of May we wrote about how venture capital firms and their employees are leveraging Twitter in an effort to attract talent, brand themselves, expand their reach and visibility, and offer thought leadership — ultimately working to attract deal flow. We then used Klout (a service that has emerged as one of the winners in the online influence scoring space) to rank the online influence of leading venture capital firms in Boston. Several VCs followed up with us after publishing the article, asking us to do the same for individuals within those firms.

We pulled Klout scores for partners, principals, and managing directors (associates: you’re next!) from twenty-two VC firms in the area.

We identified partners within each of these firms who are based in Boston, did our best to search for their respective Twitter accounts, and then inputted these partner Twitter handles into Klout to pull and rank scores. There is definitely room for error in the list below, so please email me (address in my byline ^) if you find any discrepancies, clarifications, or have names to add to the list.

Five members of the OpenView team including Scott Maxwell, Firas Raouf, George Roberts, Adam Marcus and Brian Zimmerman made the list.

Click here are the most influential VC partners, principals and managing directors in Boston on Twitter.

The VAR Guy is quietly poking around the Autotask Community Live event in Miami. You’ll find official news and observations over on MSPmentor. But there’s also plenty of background chatter here involving executive strategies, potential alliances and… well… these seven rumors behind the scenes.

1. Stuart Squared: Watch for continued developments from MSP business coach Stuart Selbst and MSP marketing consultant Stuart Crawford. Perhaps an event from Stuart Squared in Chicago is coming…

2. Next Moves: Autotask Founder Bob Godgart has stepped away from day-to-day business activities but remains chairman at the company. Does Godgart have a side projects brewing? Lots of people say keep an eye on Godgart’s relationship with former Autotask community leader Mark Crall.

3. Successful MSPs: Several vendors — everyone from Intronis to Level Platforms and Reflexion — are expected to rally the MSP community later today to promote the new CompTIA MSP Partners Trustmark business designation. It’s not a certification or accreditation… but it sure sounds like there are longer-term plans in place to introduce a 2.0 version of the Trustmark.

4. The Synnex Connection, Times Two: Watch for Autotask to plug more deeply into the Synnex ServiceSolv managed services initiative. Also, Equus — which has launched a hardware as a service (HaaS) push — apparently is leveraging Synnex for many of its back-end managed services for VARs and MSPs.

5. Working the Crowd: Cisco employees are quietly navigating Autotask Community Live, exploring the community and learning more about managed services in the SMB market.

6. Reality Check: VARStreet, the product sourcing tool that Autotask acquired in 2010, was not mentioned during this morning’s Autotask keynotes. Yes, Autotask remains committed to VARStreet. And there’s a VARStreet breakout session here. But the clear bet is on SaaS-based business management modules within Autotask.

7. Google One, Microsoft Zero: Google SMB Channel Lead Jeff Ragusa is here… no doubt talking about an initiative (called Appsperience) that allows end-customers to test certain Google Apps for free, with help from VARs and MSPs. Meanwhile, Microsoft is ramping up Office 365 but the company is not here at the conference. That’s unfortunate, considering all attendees here already understand recurring revenue models.

That’s all for now. The VAR Guy needs to run to another meeting while chasing a few more rumors…