Vator Splash is a must-attend high-tech event where promising startups are discovered, lessons from prominent founders are learned, views from blue-chip venture capitalists are heard – and wine is continually served. Now the popular event is heading down to LA.

Vator is looking for the most promising high-tech startups to present onstage at The Highlands Hollywood in Los Angeles. If you’re a startup that’s under three years old with no more than $1 million in financing, be sure to apply to the Splash LA competition today. It’s free and it’s great exposure.

As always, the competition consists of popular and judged vote rounds. Ten finalists will make the stage and get in front of venture capitalists mostly from the LA area, including Anthem Venture Partners, Crosscut Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Javelin Venture Partners, Mission Ventures, MK Capital, Rho Capital Partners, Rustic Canyon Partners, Walden Venture Capital. More to be announced soon.

We know the LA area is an hotbed for emerging companies — and venture capitalists are seriously taking notice. Rustic Canyon and Javelin Venture Partners are backing Vator Splash LA to ensure the event rocks the house.

If you want to check what will be the hottest LA event for startups, there’s still time to get tickets using the VentureBeat discount. Click here and use your VentureBeat discount code “VB25″ to get 25% off the ticket price.

In addition to seeing the top 10 finalists, attendees will also get a chance to hear two amazing entrepreneurs, who will share their nuggets of wisdom about entrepreneurship. Demand Media co-founder and SVP of M&A, Shawn Colo, will talk about starting hist company in 2006 and building it to being one of the hottest IPOs this year. He’ll also share his views on the future of digital media. Zorik Gordon, founder and CEO of ReachLocal, will share his lessons on building his company in six years to becoming one of the hottest IPOs last year. Zorik will also talk about his views on the future of local.

We hope to see you there. And, remember – if you want to get onstage, be sure to enter the Vator Splash LA competition, before the earlier applicants run away with the popular vote.

At Splash, entrepreneurs learn from leading founders, such as Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, Peter Thiel, Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Pandora’s Tim Westergren — all of whom have keynoted past Splash events. Investors from top VC firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Anthem Venture Partners, August Capital, AngelPad, Alsop Louie, Arizona Bay, Bessemer, Blue Run Ventrues, Bullpen, Canaan, Claremont, CMEA, Crosslink Capital, Crosscut Ventures, DFJ, FirstMark, First Round, Founders Fund, Granite VC, Greycroft, Greylock, Google Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Industry Ventures, Intel Capital, IVP, Jafco Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Madrona Venture Group, Mayfield, Mission Ventures, MK Capital, NEA, North Bridge, Norwest, NYC Seed, Oak Investment Partners, OpenView Partners, Polaris, Redpoint Ventures, Rho Capital Partners, RRE, Rustic Canyon, Scale, Shasta, SoftTech VC, SV Angels, TechStars, VantagePoint, Venrock, Walden Venture Capital, and 500 Startups, and more are attending or have attended the Splash events.

Two big pieces of news this week in ed tech.

Earlier in the week we found out that Cisco is shutting down the Flip video camera division, two years after purchasing the company for $590 million.

And then today we hear that Instructure Canvas, an up-start LMS start-up company out of Utah has received $8 million in a Series B round of financing, led by Open View Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, TomorrowVentures and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurveston. For those of us who fantasize about Google getting serious about the education market, the fact that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is behind TomorrowVentures may give us some cause for hope. Closing this funding round is a major accomplishment for Instructure and its CEO Josh Coates. These investments show the importance of having experienced leadership, leadership with serious skin in the game, such as Coates.

I have no idea if the learning management system offered by Instructure will gain enough traction to succeed in the marketplace. I see many things that I like about the technology that Canvas is built on and the platform they have developed, and I also have some serious critiques of the companies strategic business model. You can read my 2/6/11 post “Instructure’s Canvas LMS: 7 Cheers & 7 Critiques“, to see my ideas, as well as the great discussion that this post generated.

What I do know, however, is that $8 million (or $80 million) is a very smart investment for these VC firms, exactly the sort of bet on education technology that funders should be making. Investing in ed tech start-ups is also what big companies like Cisco (and Microsoft and Google and Oracle and Apple and Amazon and HP and IBM etc.) should be doing with the massive amounts of cash they have on hand, rather than chasing yesterday’s hot technology, as Cisco did with Flip.

The global education market will be disrupted, and some ed tech start up will reap the massive rewards of catalyzing that disruption. Instructure thinks that it has cracked the code to disrupt the academic technology market by offering Canvas as an open source product, and indeed the company reports that “thousands of universities” have downloaded the LMS to poke the tires. To date, Instructure has signed contracts with over 30 institutions to provide Canvas as the LMS. At what point of adoption does Canvas get on the radar of Blackboard or D2L, or of institutions thinking about re-signing with either of these companies or moving to Moodle?

This investment in Instructure Canvas, and the recently announced $20 million 3rd round at Kaltura are early signs of this investment trend. Most of these investments will not pay off, but a few will enjoy massive returns. Who knows, Instructure could be one of those winners.

Teachers and students, like many company employees, rely on mobile devices and social networks in their personal lives and want similar new-wave tools in their work. A Utah-based startup is trying to close that gap, aided by a new cash infusion.

Instructure, a closely held company led by veteran tech entrepreneur Josh Coates, on Friday plans to announce an $8 million funding round by investors that include OpenView Venture Partners, TomorrowVentures (an  investment vehicle of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt), Epic Ventures and Tim Draper, of the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The company is taking aim at entrenched players like Blackboard in offering colleges and universities what the industry calls learning management systems. Such software helps teachers manage interactions with students, distribute assignments, grade students’ work and so forth.

Instructure, founded in 2008, is the brainchild of two former graduate students in computer science at Brigham Young University. Coates was teaching there at the time, after a lengthy career in Silicon Valley–including a stint at search-technology pioneer Inktomi, co-founding the storage software company Scale Eight and most recently the online storage provider Mozy, which was purchased by EMC for $76 million. He later decided to help bankroll Instructure and become its CEO.

The system it developed, called Canvas, is run as an online service rather than software installed by an educational institution. It exploits recent advances in Web programming, Coates says, to help connect with other online offerings like Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter. When a teacher changes the date of a quiz, for example, students could automatically receive text messages to their cellphones, a message on Facebook or conventional email, the company says.

To hear Coates tell it, investors came calling after Instructure’s announcement in February that it would offer a free version of Canvas on an open-source basis as well as a paid commercial version. So did educational institutions.

“We had almost four thousand schools contact us,” Coates says. “We were inundated.”

It’s not that schools like fooling around with software source code. Indeed, Coates expects most customers will wind up buying the conventional offering, which comes with technical support.

But the open-source approach–pioneered in education by offerings such as Moodle–gives customers assurance that if a startup goes out of business or is sold its technology can live on. The new funding for the company, which claims 30 customers, provides additional assurance that Instructure won’t go away soon, Coates says.

Coates, a World War II history buff known for restoring his own tank (technically a Hellcat Tank Destroyer), may need the financial ammunition to survive a long war against segment leader Blackboard. “It’s not the sexiest thing I’ve ever worked on, but I think it’s the most important,” he says.

Exinda, a leading global provider of WAN optimization and application performance management solutions, today announced it achieved record new customer growth in the first quarter of 2011, with a 150 percent increase in new customer acquisition, compared with the fourth quarter of 2010. The company also achieved a new quarterly revenue record in first quarter of 2011, with 22 percent revenue growth over the previous quarter, and 120 percent over first quarter of 2010.

Exinda’s growth was fueled by the expansion of its value-added reseller network in each of its key global markets, and the increased market demand for the company’s Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform and new product innovation, especially among enterprise customers

“Exinda has committed significant resources to delivering the support that our channel partners need to deliver Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions,” said Michael Sharma, CEO of Exinda. “As wide area networks are being increasingly taxed by the growing number of users, applications and devices on their networks, customers are demanding a more complete solution from their technology partners and solutions. Our UPM platform delivers full visibility, control and optimization of the users and applications on the network. This is the solution that enterprises of all sizes are looking for to allow them to manage their network amidst the evolving IT landscape.”

WAN Technology Innovation

Each Exinda WAN Optimization solution incorporates ExOS 6.0, the latest generation Exinda operating system. ExOS 6.0 includes enhanced monitoring, reporting and acceleration capabilities, enabling network managers to ensure optimal performance across their networks at all times.

ExOS 6.0 addresses many of the challenges facing network managers, including managing ever-growing bandwidth usage and number of complex business applications, and supporting the growing usage of cloud computing and hosted virtual desktops by an increasingly mobile workforce.  ExOS 6.0 offers enhanced management capabilities, including Application Performance Scores (APS), detailed reporting on TCP efficiency and TCP health. ExOS 6.0 also provides VOIP Mean Opinion Score (MOS) measurements, which measures the user experience for voice applications. Incorporated with the ExOS 6.0 release are Netflow v9 extensions, which enable enhanced centralized reporting functionality.

“Our customers are finding that simply accelerating the traffic across the network is not enough to ensure a high quality user experience,” said Sharma. “Today’s CIOs and network managers want a solution that will let them identify exactly what traffic and which users are consuming WAN resources, and have the ability to manage any non-essential or recreational traffic, while giving priority to traffic that is essential to their business. As a pure-play WAN Optimization provider, Exinda has emerged as a leader by delivering these features, all within a single appliance.”

About Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The company has helped over 2,000 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide improve the end user experience, manage application performance, manage congestion over the WAN and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

eEye Digital Security, a leading provider of IT security vulnerability management solutions, today announced its upcoming Vulnerability Expert Forum (VEF) will comprehensively address the largest Patch Tuesday to-date (tied with one in December 2010) with 17 bulletins being issued, which will include 64 vulnerabilities.

Nine of the bulletins are labeled “critical,” carrying the risk of remote code execution. The other eight are labeled “important” with six enabling remote code execution, one allowing privilege escalation, and one potentially leading to information disclosure. Seven of the bulletins have mandatory restarts; the remainder “may require restart.”

eEye’s VEF sessions are held online, the second Wednesday of each month, the day after Patch Tuesday, when Microsoft discloses their monthly patches. This month’s session will be held April 13, 2011 at 1:00 PM (Pacific) / 4 PM (Eastern). VEF attendees will have an opportunity to win an Amazon Kindle.

VEF sessions provide insight and information on recently announced critical vulnerabilities from Microsoft and other software vendors, as well as:

• A complete analysis of the latest critical vulnerabilities, vendor patches, and zero-day threats
• Detailed assessment of the true criticality of each patch to best prioritize rollout
• Expert guidance on the actions necessary to protect systems

eEye’s VEF is one of several free, online resources that the company provides to the IT security community. Retina Community is a free asset scanner for up to 32 IPs, now being used by nearly one thousand organizations. Zero Day Tracker provides a catalogue of the newest zero-day vulnerabilities, instructions for quick remediation, and a historical record of past vulnerabilities.

“We encourage IT security pros to attend the VEF for specific insight on how to address each vulnerability announced,” said Marc Maiffret, eEye cofounder and CTO. “Especially for a Patch Tuesday of this magnitude, the additional guidance from the eEye research team will help prioritize critical fixes, so that organizations remain as secure as possible through the patching process.”

Register for the Vulnerability Expert Forum >>

About eEye Digital Security
Since 1998, eEye Digital Security has made vulnerability management simpler and more effective by providing the only unified vulnerability and compliance management solution that integrates assessment, mitigation and protection into a complete offering. With a proven history of innovation, eEye has consistently been the first to uncover critical vulnerabilities and prevent their exploit. eEye leverages its world-renowned research to create award-winning solutions that strategically secure critical IT assets and the data they hold. Thousands of mid-to-large-size private-sector and government organizations, including some of the most complex IT environments in the world, rely on eEye solutions to protect against the latest known, unknown and zero-day vulnerabilities. See more at eeye.com.

Heading in to 2011, expansion stage technology companies uSamp, Kareo, and Central Desktop weren’t exactly struggling to sell their product.

Sales were up, revenues were strong, and the businesses’ trajectories certainly pointed skyward. But that didn’t mean the three companies couldn’t improve their sales performance and processes, and gain clarity on their sales philosophies.

“At the startup stage, we’d just go out, sell, and hit our targets,” says Susan Hwang, uSamp’s Senior Vice President of Survey Solutions. “It was almost that simple. But now it’s becoming extremely important to create a scalable model for growth and have a much more focused sales strategy in a marketplace with much different needs and challenges.”

That’s why OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm that counts those companies among its portfolio of expansion stage technology businesses, invited uSamp, Kareo, Central Desktop, and executives from several of its other portfolio companies to a Sales Execution Workshop in January.

The workshop gave founders like USamp’s Matt Dusig and Kareo’s Dan Rodrigues the chance to compare and contrast their sales structures, discovering what has — or hasn’t — worked at this particular stage of their growth. Managing Director Brian Zimmerman and Analyst Devon Warwick organized the forum and brought in a sales consultant and industry expert to lead the workshop’s participants in a series of exercises that focused on things like sales recruitment, sales metrics and executive dashboards, value proposition, and sales culture.

“It was, without question, one of the more effective and informative workshops that I’ve attended,” says Rodrigues, who founded Kareo in 2004. “We left with much better clarity on the things we needed to implement and the sales processes and concepts that we could focus on to prepare us for the next step.”

Read the case study in full on OpenView’s new website.

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

Sometimes I worry about the managed services market. Worldwide, I suspect roughly 1,500 MSPs are really executing well. Perhaps another 15,000 are moving right along — doing well but not exactly firing on all cylinders. And in North America alone, there are 70,000-plus VARs and resellers that are evaluating a range of options — managed services, cloud, IT project work, and so on. My key question: Is there still upside in the managed services market? Are more resellers still coming in? I found the answer earlier this week at the Synnex Varnex conference in Boston, Mass.

During an MSP-centric workshop on April 10, Synnex rolled out a freemium managed services strategy that involves close working relationships with Level Platforms, Axcient, Intronis, Reflexion and Symantec. Roughly 30 Synnex Varnex channel partners attended the workshop. Some were seasoned MSPs looking to fine-tune their business strategies. Others were box resellers asking basic questions:

• What’s a NOC (network operations center)?
• How do I price managed services?
• How will I interact with Synnex and go to market with my managed services?

During the workshop, Synnex shared some interesting math. Using Level Platforms’ remote monitoring tools, Synnex estimates that roughly 45 percent of customers’ PCs and notebooks are four or five years old — or perhaps even older. So the massive PC refresh trend will continue. But as part of that trend, Synnex is calling on channel partners to promote lifecycle management services. In other words: Cradle to grave PC managed services.

In some ways I found the workshop reassuring. Plenty of resellers are still gearing up to catch multiple managed services waves — PC and server management, digital signage, video as a service, unified communications, hosted PBX services… and the list goes on.

But on the flip side I don’t want to paint managed services as a silver bullet that solves all reseller problems. As I often say: If you’re a bad reseller why on earth would expect to become a top MSP?

Bottom line: I think there’s more upside in this market. And I think plenty more resellers will thrive as MSPs. But let’s all steer clear of the hype. Managed services ain’t easy. And the challenges will only intensify as big vendors offer direct-to-customer options.

Online sample provider uSamp and DIY online research firm Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) have partnered to make uSamp’s panel of more than 1.7 million US survey respondents available to AYTM clients.

The partnership is driven by uSamp’s SampleMarket 2.0, which offers real-time, self-service access to its panel.

AYTM’s platform enables users to drill down into a panel of millions of US consumers to find their ideal research respondents based upon psychographic and demographic characteristics. Users can then use the tool to design their own survey of up to six question types, with routing, images and video.

‘AYTM has opened an entirely new niche for businesses that previously lacked the access, expertise or budget to conduct market research,’ states uSamp co-founder and CEO Matt Dusig. ‘We share that sensibility with AYTM – that the boundaries of market research are now expanding to encompass businesses of all sizes and complexities.’

Lev Mazin (pictured), CEO and co-founder of AYTM says the partnership makes projects of virtually any scale feasible on his company’s platform.