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Zector, developer of cloud-based storage platform ZumoDrive, announced today that its solution is now available for Palm Pre and Android mobile devices.

Zumodrive offers users the ability to store several forms of content, including music, video and photos, to a cloud-based storage platform that can be accessed from multiple devices. The service is valuable as many devices — both PCs and mobile, alike — have limited storage capabilities. Its a good option for people worried about content size and losing data. ZumoDrive automatically provides backup to specifically selected folders so that consumers can access their content both online and offline.

Recently, the company made several big announcements, including that Hewlett-Packard agreed to have ZumoDrive power an “HP CloudDrive” service installed on the computer maker’s new line of netbooks. It also closed a new round of funding for $1.5 million from investors Ram Shriram, plus original investors Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron.

The Burlingame, Calif.-based company, founded in 2007, offers several tiers of the ZumoDrive application. The application is available for Mac OS X, PC, Linux, iPhone, Android and Palm Pre platforms.

Tags: Android, cloud storage, Palm Pre

Companies: Zector, ZumoDrive

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini is being replaced as the CEO of Ning by COO Jason Rosenthal .

Many people (including myself) have come to the conclusion that Gmail, with its threaded messages, spam filtering, and vast storage space, is one of the web’s best webmail providers. In fact, we like it so much that we use it for both our personal accounts and work accounts using Google Apps. But that also poses a problem: many of us wind up having to maintain two separate Google accounts, which means we have to swap logins whenever our Gmail, Reader, or other data is stored under the other account. Fortunately, there may be an end in sight for this juggling act.

As today’s SXSW panel on Gmail came to a close, the panelists revealed one last juicy tidbit: they’re working to resolve the problems with multiple namespaces that users have to deal with. The team didn’t get specific — they simply repeated that they have to deal with the same problems, as they have “@google.com” accounts for work and standard Gmail accounts for personal use. And they know it’s a pain.

There’s no time frame, and we have no idea what form the feature will take. But at least we know Google is working on it.

Image by Helico

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

Unquestionably, the major obstacle for indoor, or household-friendly light-emitting diodes is price. No matter how long a bulb lasts, nobody wants to spend $30 on one light. Exacerbating the situation, there are too many competing uses for LEDs, according to electronics market research firm iSuppli, slowing their development for home use.

Back-lighting for televisions is a huge growth market for LEDs, with 2.5 million LED-lit sets manufactured in 2009, and an estimated 25 million to be built this year. Estimates range up to 100 million LED-lit TVs to be made in 2014. All this demand has created a shortage of LEDs for other uses.

In response, LED makers are buying up the MOCVD (metal organic chemical vapor deposition) systems that manufacture LED materials. Aixtron and Veeco are two prominent MOCVD makers. Between them, an estimated 120 MOCVD systems will be shipped this quarter. With so much new production capacity being scaled up, one might expect the shortage to end quickly.

But this isn’t the case. Once Veeco or Aixtron ship a MOCVD system — already about five months after it is ordered — the purchaser must customize it for its own LED chip design. This takes an additional three to four months, as Jerald Kolansky writes. There is typically a ten-month gap between new production equipment being ordered and the actual start of production.

Since LEDs are growing so explosively (the prediction is double-digit percentage increases over the next three years), most LED companies are looking to boost production capacity. In two years or less, the LED shortage will be over, and the LED glut will likely begin, analysts say.

Kolansky writes that an over-supply situation “is likely in 2011″ — unless lighting moves into mass production. In order to do so, LED makers will want to satisfy their immediate customers first, which brings us back to LED-backlit televisions. TVs use up to 500 lights per panel, whereas a notebook computer uses 50. With demand so high in these areas, it may be difficult for lighting companies to drive prices lower.

This is especially true when one considers the bulk purchasing power that TV makers have. It would take an awful lot of light bulbs to equal the purchase of just one TV. If manufacturers have to devote resources to one of the two markets, one proven and one emerging, the new guy is likely to be left out. In other words, LED lighting is unlikely to take off until after the display market is stable. This could lead to a period of market saturation, with LEDs being overproduced for display applications and under-utilized for lighting.

Aixtron and Veeco are both planning to double production capacity by the end of 2010. The LED market itself is expected to more than double by 2014.

Companies: Aixtron, Veeco

Ray Muzyka, chief executive of popular video game-maker BioWare, spoke at our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco about building game franchises. While onstage, Muzyka talked about his Electronic Arts-owned company’s upcoming games in the Star Wars, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age franchises — all across BioWare’s “future portfolio,” he said it’s shifting toward selling games as an ongoing service rather than a standalone product.

Afterwards, I did a brief video interview with Muzyka, during which he elaborated on how his BioWare’s business model is changing, described the company’s new games and downloadable content (DLC), and offered his advice for up-and-coming game entrepreneurs.

See all our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC.

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC

Companies: Bioware

People: Ray Muzyka

Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay’s Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos.

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

Sonos wouldn’t comment on this story. But we believe the deal will close and be announced in the next week or two.

FirstRain, a service that scrapes the web to deliver relevant research to investors, has brought in $7.3 million of an anticipated $8.8 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Mateo, Calif., the company has raised $20.9 million to date and is backed by Oak Investment Partners, DiamondHead Ventures and Ampersand Ventures.

Companies: Ampersand Ventures, Diamondhead Ventures, Firstrain, Oak INvestment Partners

We have written repeatedly that Windows itself is one of the main reasons why touchscreen computers have never caught the general public's attention. The interface just wasn't designed for finger input. Like it or not, that's the truth. Windows was designed to be used with a mouse, and to a lesser extent, a pen or stylus. That's fine. Windows 7 works great. I'm writing this on a Win7 machine. But I hate Windows on my tablet computers for the aforementioned reason. It's also the reason I'm very apprehensive of the upcoming onslaught of slate computers. I'm afraid that wonderful hardware will be passed up in favor of the disappointing iPad because of the interface. But Adobe gave me hope today in its demo of Flash and Air on the HP slate device.

A new Google Labs project merges two breakthroughs into one. Public Data Explorer brings together a set of databases — health statistics, crime stats, oil prices, economic metrics — with a browser-based technology that lets researchers and presenters create charts that move. The motion  show trends in a way not possible with motionless plots.

Google’s motion charts are familiar to a small set of people, many of whom first saw them in a video of a presentation at the 2006 TED conference by researcher Hans Rosling, who dazzled jaded TED attendees with an 18-minute presentation of animated charts on global life expectancies and their correlations with global wealth. Roslings moving graphs debunked, he said, the presumption that there is a gap between rich and poor nations today. Instead, Rosling showed how most of the world’s population has gravitated into a middle ground over the past 40 years.

Google Public Data Explorer now makes it possible for anyone to chart public data from TK HOW MANY databases, correlate information from multiple databases, and create moving charts that can be embedded in a Web page just like a YouTube video.

EMBEDDED EXAMPLES GO HERE

The chart technology was conceived by Rosling’s son, Ola, and his wife Anna Ronnlund. The two had studied the arts rather than science in college. After Ola’s father complained over dinner in 1998 that his students at Sweden’s Sweden’s Karolinska Institute didn’t have a fact-based worldview, Ola and Anna eventually brainstormed the idea of making the elder Rosling’s bubble charts of global wealth versus child mortality into a single animation — a chart that would play over time to show emerging and evolving trends.

Eventually, Ola and Anna dubbed their tech and formed a company to develop their motion-chart idea with funding from the Swedish international aid agency Sida. Over the next couple of years they learned of the heavy demand for this kind of visual exploration tool among public agencies around the world.

At the same time they began to ve invited to tech conferences in American, where they met early personal computer visionary Alan Kay. They asked if he could help find someone who could take over this idea and develop it further. Kay gave them the ugly truth: It very unlikely, he said. They would probably have to develop it themselves. That’s how it works with most innovations.

In 2005, Anna and Ola founded the Gapminder foundation together with Hans. With his ever-more-powerful visualizations, using the technology now named Trendalyzer, Dr. Rosling was invited to more and more prestigious conferences. Eventually, he met the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Hans was also invited to TED in 2006. His presentation, widely viewed online, got him invited to give an internal presentation at Google’s Tech Talk series. He insisted that the inventors, Anna and Ola and software engineer Johan Nystrand, give the preso instead.

You can guess how the story ends: Google acquired the Trendalyzer software from the Gapminder foundation, which still operates in parallel. Anna, Ola and three others from Gapminder were hired by Google in early 2007.  Google’s motion charts have been available in Google Docs since TK WHEN. But now, by pairing the Trendalyzer software with public databases, and letting Google’s super-scalable servers handle the work, Google hopes to empower researchers and just-plain-nosy people worldwide to make new discoveries akin to Rosling’s wealth-and-health correlations.