Enterprise Mobility: Devices, Security, Design, And Distribution

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at 

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Crowdtilt Raises Another $23 Million From Andreessen Horowitz & Others For International Expansion, Enterprise Tools

Crowdfunding platform Crowdtilt wasn’t looking to raise another round, but when their Series A lead investor Andreessen Horowitz offered to lead their B round, the team decided it would make sense given their forthcoming plans. Today, the company is announcing another $23 million in new funding, which also includes participation from SV Angel, Sean Parker, and others.

Founded in early 2012, Crowdtilt has already raised $14 million through its seed and Series A rounds. The company, to some extent, competes with sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, for example, but found a niche for itself in helping everyday users crowdfund smaller projects, often with a more community-oriented nature.

For example, CEO James Beshara says some of his favorites include the one where Rockridge city residents self-funded their own private security in the wake of police force cuts; or another where people raised money for Boston resident David Henneberry, whose boat was damaged in the manhunt for the Boston Bombing suspects; and then there’s the one where a Dallas resident raised over $50,000 to throw a private Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan party. (Yeah, okay…).

“There’s 85% of the population that won’t have a documentary, an artistic project or a hardware project to crowdfund, but they’re going to have an objective that they do want to send around to their friends and their network,” says Beshara. “That’s where Crowdtilt was born.”

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Enterprise Social Network Convo Adds At-Rest Encryption To Its Servers To Better Protect Client Data

Convo, an enterprise social network that competes with the now Microsoft-owned Yammer, today announced that it has added at-rest encryption (ARE) to its servers in order to better protect its client information.

Recent revelations relating to the National Security Administration (NSA) have taught the technology community and world at large that data isn’t safe from surveillance, and other forms of snooping. One NSA program, MUSCULAR, became infamous for tapping communication links between American companies’ data centers abroad.

The Washington Post reported that the NSA has “secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers” abroad, and that by “tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans.”

In response, Google and others are working to encrypt the data that flows between their vast server installations. Microsoft, for example, went as far as calling the NSA and others of its ilk “advanced persistent threat

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