TechCrunch
HyTrust Raises $18.5M For Security Technology That Protects The Virtual Data Center
HyTrust has raised $18.5 million for its security technology designed for the new reality of the virtualized data center that requires new methods to prevent security breaches.
The Series C oversubscribed financing came from Intel Capital and Fortinet, as well as recent investors VMware and In-Q-Tel. Previous investors Granite Ventures, Cisco Systems, Trident Capital and Epic Ventures also participated in this round.
The HyTrust technology is designed to secure virtualized data centers that theoretically will take all the compute, storage and networking and put it into one software layer. In today’s modern data center, IT administrators use management platforms, exposing organizations to considerable risk. An administrator can erase an entire data center or copy a virtual machine with relative ease. HyTrust offers a way to manage data between the administrator and the virtual infrastructure. It offers a role-based system that can help monitor what a person is doing as compared to what they should be doing.
Real-time visibility is the difference for most companies these days that run their own data centers. Attacks are more brutal and damaging. Key codes, servers locked in cages and even armed guards are silly when considering that the greatest threats are from invisible forces that often attack from entirely different continents.
For The Conscious Consumer, An Online Retailer Called Zady
A new ecommerce site called Zady is bringing the conscious consumerism movement to the online retail space by showing shoppers exactly where the goods the carry come from. To that end, the site aims to blend commerce with storytelling in the form of brand profiles and lifestyle articles.
Zady — a word that with a slight spelling tweak means “grandfather” in Yiddish and “prosperous” in Arabic — carries a range of artisanal women’s and men’s clothing, along with home and office supplies. The focus is on beautifully made products from smaller-scale makers, like Nashville’s denim brand Imogene + Willie.
The company is a joint project between Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi and Maxine Bédat, the founder of The Bootstrap Project, who have been friends since high school. Zady raised a $1.35 seed round in March prior to the site’s launch.
While Americans have shown a growing interest in knowing the origins of their food and in buying locally, the mechanisms of clothing production are still relatively opaque. A handful of companies including Nudie Jeans and Nike have exposed their own supply chains through interactive maps, but they are in the vast minority. And clothing is much more complicated than fruit: the cotton for a t-shirt might be grown in one locale, shipped to another for dyeing, and yet another for production.
Like other retailers seeking a greater level of transparency, Zady’s site maps each product geographically, dropping a pin on the brand’s headquarters and then extending lines to the source material and manufacturing locations. Although inventory is international, Zady does promote American-made products in particular.
“Production has moved so far overseas,” Darabi said. “In our parents generation, JFK allowed 5% of design apparel to be designed overseas, and now it’s 95% plus. For shoes it’s 99%.”
Zady will clearly appeal to those Whole Foods-type shoppers looking to use their consumer dollars to have a say in the manufacturing process (either practically or symbolically). The products on the site are good threads, though, and with a price point similar to that of J.Crew, Zady could very well capture a broader audience that’s simply looking for quality, classic designs.
The site’s content-commerce model is not unheard-of in the online retail world. AHAlife also tells the stories of the little-known brands it carries and fleshes out the lifestyle side of its label with auxiliary stories that aren’t meant to push product. Zady launched with features on work-life integration and the history of denim, stories that both speak to the brand’s philosophy and give visitors a reason to stay on the site a bit longer.
“Content is key and a very important part of what we’re building,” Bédat said. “There are stories for every single product that we’re creating. There’s additional content that Soraya is focused on that really speaks to our reader and to the general conscious consumption lifestyle.”
With reputable, paid journalists coming on board to write, Zady is working on producing high-quality content, which will undoubtedly help solidify the brand and its mission in shoppers’ minds. It seems unlikely that these sites will become media destinations in their own right, no matter how much original content they generate, but they are a nice add-on for shoppers who are already there.
It’s the online equivalent of the coffee table books in Warby Parker’s office showroom. It helps the shopper complete the picture of their aspirational Zady life.
“[Our] brand couldn’t be Zady without these stories,” Darabi said. “Unless you actually dig into who they are, you miss the emotional connection.”
Syrian Electronic Army Apparently Hacks DNS Records Of Twitter, NYT Through Registrar Melbourne IT
The Syrian Electronic Army has claimed responsibility for hacking the domain name servers of two of Twitter’s sites, and a third appears to have been redirected to servers hosted by the SEA. In addition, attacks have been made on The New York Times and Huffington Post UK name servers. Updated with statement by Twitter below.
The New York Times says it was attacked via its registrar, Melbourne IT. Once the Syrian Electronic Army had gained access to registry records, it was able to change both contact details and domain name servers.
Now, the SEA is claiming access to a variety of international Twitter domains:
After the claimed responsibility for hacking the DNS records of the New York Times, additional issues began being popping up in relation to the hosting of Twitter images. Those issues were followed by a tweet from one of the Twitter accounts attributed to the hacking group, claiming that it had control over the Twitter.com domain. At this time, it appears that the name servers of Twitter have not been changed, only contact information.
The SEA then followed up by claiming responsibility for Huffington Post UK and New York Times domain name server changes.
Another tweet from the account points to an outage of Twitter.co.uk, whose DNS records have also apparently been altered to refer to the SEA’s servers. The Twimg,com domain, which serves up Twitter images and avatars, also shows changes that point to servers that are apparently SEA-owned.
A Twitter representative told TechCrunch that the company was ‘looking into’ the possibility that the SEA had changed DNS records.
“The site is down for some, not all and we are working to fix the problem,” said NYT spokesperson Eileen Murphy. “Our initial assessment is that this situation today is most likely the result of a malicious external attack.”
Interestingly, both The New York Times and Twitter name servers appear to have been registered through the registrar Melbourne IT. This led some to posit that a breach at the registrar allowed changes to be made, possibly with an administrative account. This would explain why the changes are being made across several companies. The New York Times has now confirmed that his is true.
According to a report from The Next Web, Melbourne IT began managing Twitter’s domains in 2009.
Chief Information Officer Marc Frons of The New York Times issued a statement to employees that attributed the attack to “the Syrian Electronic Army or someone trying very hard to be them.”
New York Times employees were then instructed to be careful when sending sensitive emails until the situation had been resolved.
This is the second time that the Times has been down in a month, with the previous outage coming on August 14th. The Times has been working hard to circumvent the loss of control of its DNS servers by tweeting links directly to its IP address and posting news at news.nytco.com.
The Wall Street Journal has taken advantage of the situation by temporarily removing its paywall and perhaps even advertising this fact against tweets about the New York Times hacking incident.
The SEA has made news over the past several months with high-profile media hacks including one of an AP Twitter account which caused a massive crash in stock market trading briefly in April. The SEA sent a tweet out about a fake attack at the White House.
Update: Twitter has issued the following statement on the DNS record issues with Twimg.com.:
At 20:49 UTC, our DNS provider experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter’s domains used for image serving, twimg.com. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted. By 22:29 UTC, the original domain record for twimg.com was restored. No Twitter user information was affected by this incident.
It has yet to respond to the changes to contact information on the Twitter.com record.
TC Cribs: Pinterest, Where Making Beautiful Stuff Is A Way Of Life
From the outside, Pinterest is known for being one of the Internet’s go-to places for beautiful things. But on the inside, the company is also killing it from an engineering perspective — and tech folks have sometimes been known to neglect decorating their own work spaces to focus on making great products for their customers.
So we weren’t sure what to expect when we headed over for a TechCrunch TV Cribs tour of the company’s headquarters, which is fittingly situated smack in the middle of San Francisco’s “Design District.” But as it turns out, the crafty ethos that millions of people know and love Pinterest for is alive and well amongst its own employees.
In fact, the office’s beautiful interior design can be largely credited to projects created by Pinterest staffers during the company’s Make-a-thons, day-long hackathon-esque sessions that encourage everyone to halt work on their normal projects and do something out of their comfort zone. We happened to film this Cribs as the latest Pinterest Make-a-thon was just getting underway, so there was a lot going on — and I was even able to lend a helping hand to one of the crafts (perhaps unfortunately for them, but hey.) Check it all out in the video embedded above.
Yahoo's Redesign Isn't Over Yet, More Sites & Ad Formats To Come
Yahoo rolled out a major redesign to several of its web properties today – a move that’s part of a project apparently code-named “Grand Slam.” At least that’s how it was recently described in a Vogue profile of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, which said Grand Slam is “an effort to bring a more coherent look and identity to Yahoo’s pages.”
The updated, revamped sites today include Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! omg!, Yahoo! Games and Yahoo! Weather, but the company says that these redesigns will continue across all of Yahoo’s properties, with the goal of making the Yahoo experience one that’s “more personal and consistent.”
The makeover isn’t just one of look-and-feel, however, but is one that will also include changes to Yahoo’s advertising as well, with support for Stream and Billboard ads, and more yet to come.
The Yahoo Weather makeover is one of today’s standout upgrades. It’s familiar to those who have downloaded the Yahoo Weather mobile application on iOS or Android, as it features Flickr images in the background, overlaid by the same modern-looking, minimalistic weather dashboard that appears in the mobile apps.
Meanwhile, Yahoo Sports’ revamp also includes a refreshed Yahoo! Fantasy game, which Yahoo claims makes it easier to use. The other sites have seen similar changes, with the goals of making both navigation and accessing content simpler.
Yahoo has been making a series of changes to its online web properties in recent months. In February, it kicked things off with a new, more personalized Yahoo.com home page, which now adapts to visitors based on the stories they click on as well as direct feedback about the kind of news they want to see. Later, the company rolled out an updated Yahoo News, again with the overall cleaner look and also with semantic-based technology under the hood, which understands the “who’s” and “what’s” of the topics the stories cover, allowing visitors to dig even further into the subjects they care about, or eliminate others.
But this redesign is more than just a visual makeover – as noted on Yahoo’s Advertising blog, the company is also bringing its Yahoo! Stream Ads native advertising format to all the new properties as well. These native ads now appear across the updated sites. Adweek earlier described these Stream ad units as mirroring unpaid in-stream content by displaying a thumbnail image, hyperlinked headline and text. The advertisers can link to any URL they want, including websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and more. The ads will be labeled as sponsored content to the end user, and will include different coloring the AdChoices icon.
The Stream Ads are also being made available for Yahoo! Mail on desktop and on the Mail app for Android, where they will appear at the top of user inboxes, also identified as Sponsored Content. Stream ads are designed to work across desktop, mobile and tablet, the company tells us, including on Yahoo’s flagship mobile application.
The Billboard ad format, which can include interactions like watching movie trailers or buying tickets in the ad, will also be available across Yahoo’s newly updated sites. Today, Yahoo’s Sports features an example of the Billboard ad, with a large banner from Samsung, which includes a video of a Samsung commercial, for example.
That’s why Yahoo’s alluding to other, new ad formats is interesting. The company did not disclose details, only saying that “for every improvement we’re making to our user experience, we’re also thinking about how we can innovate the ad experience as well.”
Today, Yahoo’s ad revenues are still challenged, however. The company reported display revenue was $472 million in Q2, a 12 percent decrease from from Q2 2012. The company has been infusing itself with new talent, through an unprecedented acquisition spree – during the second quarter, it used a net $1 billion in cash for acquisitions — including a net $970 million to acquire Tumblr.
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