In an effort to expand its reach into the e-learning market, Kenexa, a publicly listed provider of business solutions for human resources and talent management, has agreed to acquire Boston-based OutStart.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

OutStart offers SaaS-based social and mobile learning solutions and will help Kenexa bolster its suite of talent management products, the latter company said in a statement.

OutStart is said to have more than 300 customers, ranging from large global organizations to mid-size companies and government agencies.

Kenexa says it expects to fund the acquisition of the privately-held software company with its existing cash balance. The company also expects the transaction to be at least neutral to non-GAAP net income available to common shareholders on a per share basis for 2012.

Also read: Kenexa To Acquire Salary.com In $80 Million Deal

Smartphones and tablets maker HTC this morning said it foresees a huge drop in revenue (PDF) in the first quarter, citing “short-term difficulties” as it gears up to – reportedly – launch four new phone models at the Mobile World Congress later this month.

The Taiwanese company sees revenue dropping as much as 36 percent in Q1, to between NT$65 billion and NT$70 billion (roughly $2.2 and $2.4 billion) due to this “product transition”.

In PR speak, that sound something like this:

Despite short-term difficulties, momentum will resume in the upcoming product cycle driven by HTC’s brand strength, innovation, and design/engineering capabilities

The smartphone maker also said it expected gross margin to come in at around 25 percent, and operating margin at 7.5 percent, which is down from 27.1 percent and 12.7 percent in the previous quarter. Again, HTC says it expects these margins to “normalize” after the debut of the new phones.

In other words, HTC has a heck of a lot riding on these new smartphones selling like hotcakes, as it feels the pressure from Apple’s overwhelming iPhone success and an increasing number of manufacturers churning out and selling competing Android-powered devices by the millions.

Also read:

It’s About Time: HTC To Refocus Smartphone Efforts Around “Hero” Devices

Is HTC’s 20% Revenue Dip Last Month A Sign Of Things To Come?

Here are some of the past week’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

To Heck With The Super Bowl: GOG Features Sierra Game Three-Packs For $5

iModela Adds CNC Milling To Your Home 3D Printing Arsenal

Swarming Robots Will Fly Menacingly Towards Your Loved Ones In Perfect Formation

Peavey Builds An Auto-Tuning Guitar

nanox: High-Quality iPod nano Watch Conversion Kit

BTjunkie, a popular BitTorrent search service, has been ‘voluntarily’ shut down by its operator(s). In a goodbye message, BTjunkie writes:

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

BTjunkie’s founder went into more detail in a conversation with TorrentFreak, stating that the recent legal actions against other file sharing services such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in the decision-making process. In other words, the war that’s being waged upon file storage and sharing services, many of which are used to upload and distribute copyrighted content, has claimed another casualty. It won’t exactly be the last to falter as a result of the MegaUpload fallout, although you have to wonder how many competitors – or brand new sites – will now be jumping on the opportunity to provide an alternative to BTjunkie users.

As Accel Partners VC Max Niederhofer points out on Twitter, the shutdown of BTjunkie follows other abrupt decisions made by the likes of QuickSilverScreen (closed) and FileSonic (file sharing functionality terminated). Of course, there’s also Uploaded.to (suspended service in the United States), FileServe (disabled file sharing functionality, closed affiliate program), and more.

With even more likely to follow suit soon enough.

Founded in 2005, the sudden, unceremonious shuttering of the site now puts BTjunkie in the deadpool.

(Also check out the reddit thread on BTjunkie’s shutdown.)

Wow btjunkie.org has shut down where am I going to get my music from now—
Marquis Iveys (@kease2kool) February 06, 2012

One of the challenges that many post-IPO tech company employees will face is when to sell stock and how much stock to sell once the their stock lockups conclude.Financial advisors can help with this, but some aren’t experienced enough with the specific fluctuations of tech companies to create a financially wise strategy. Wealthfront (formerly kaChing), a startup that has been disrupting the investing and personal finance space, is debuting a new tool employees use to test option sale strategies post IPO. Basically, Wealthfront will allow you to test various strategies against the actual stock behavior of a number of tech companies that went public in the past 10 years. The tool is actually embedded below so you can test it out.

As we’ve written in the past, Wealthfront brings the quality investment theories of a fund manager online, at a much lower fee, essentially democratizing private wealth management to the masses. The startup is the brainchild of Andy Rachleff, who was formerly a founder of Benchmark Capital.

Rachleff explains that the current tool looks at five typical stock performance patterns: increasing (Google, Salesforce), decreasing (DivX), peak-dominated (Netflix), u-shaped (VMWare) and oscillating (Orbitz). To showcase the tool’s technology, Wealthfront picked 10 companies, two that fit each pattern, to offer real-life examples. Basically, you compare your company’s stock performance to one of these companies.

The tool then applies four different stock-sale strategies to the stock performance of each company, comparing the results to what would have happened if an employee sold no shares. For example, one sample plan shows an employee selling 10% each quarter for 10 quarters. Or an employee could sell 50% up front and 10% per quarter for five quarters. And there’s always the option of selling all shares vested immediately post-lockup.

So, Wealthfront can determine if your company’s stock performance is going to be similar to that of Google, then you are better off holding more stock. If you work for a company that’s going to perform like DivX, you’ll be better off unloading all of your stock on day one, after the lockup period expires. Generally, Wealthfront advises employees to sell shares gradually.

Wealthfront says it will update the simulator to include more companies and sales strategies in the future. The tool could definitely be useful for the growing number of Silicon Valley tech employees that are finding themselves as shareholders of stock from companies that recently went public.

Wealthfront has raised over $10 million from DAG Ventures and individual investors including Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan and partners from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year ago.

He recently raised a seed round of $800,000 from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, 500 Startups, Chamath Palihapitiya, Allen Morgan, Ted Rheingold, and other angels.

Lumatic has an Android app which works right now only in San Francisco. When it gives you directions, it chooses routes which are optimal for walking, cycling or public transport. As you walk through the streets, the app displays a street-view with photos and arrows pointing in the right direction.

The app is built on top of Open Street Map , but the user experience is centered heavily on using photography, landmarks, and visual cues to help people navigate cities. Fighting Google Maps in this category is going to be a tough slog, but if the app can gain a following there plenty of money in local commerce and advertising to make it a worthwhile pursuit.

Editor’s note: Adam Rodnitzky is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Favo.rs. He programmed his first startup using ColdFusion in 1999. Rodnitzky is based in San Francisco, and you can follow him on Twitter @rodtwitzky.

The entrepreneurial world loves nothing like a good meme. One of the more recent ones making the rounds from Palo Alto to Paris is that a startup simply can’t get off the ground without a technical founder. Investors, entrepreneurs and tech journalists alike will tell you that if you’re not a whiz kid fresh out of Stanford’s CS program, you are essentially not fundable — entrepreneura non grata. Well, I am here to tell you that they are right.

For now.

Soon, however, I believe we’ll see a marked shift in who holds the cards in the startup world.

First, let’s flesh out the current argument a bit more. It starts like this: to be successful, a startup requires a founder with a deep technical skillset. This is so a functioning beta can be built that attracts users and demonstrates traction. In some cases, the driver of new user acquisition may in fact be a unique new technology itself (example: Sphero or Lark). Users and traction attract investors. Investors inject capital that then accelerates growth. A fast growing startup can eventually be a target for an acquisition or IPO, which completes our argument that a strong technical founder leads to a higher likelihood of startup success. Oh, and if the startup doesn’t grow fast enough? Then the core engineering team forms the foundation for the new exit: the acq-hire.

So, for the moment, the technical founder is in the spotlight. So much so, in fact, that they can often be funded without the presence of their natural counterpart: what we call the idea person, the product visionary, the business founder. But, soon enough, the business founder’s time will come. Here’s why.

If Moore taught us anything about technology, it’s that it advances at an exponential rate. And that includes the tools that we use to build it too. It’s not a stretch to deduce that there will soon come a time when new development tools and environments eliminate some or all of the technical hurdles required to properly execute a startup in preparation for traction and funding.

After all, those technical hurdles are already obscenely low compared to where they were even a decade ago. During the Web 1.0 era of the late ’90s and early ’00s, massive teams of engineers were required to build even a basic content-driven startup, one that could now be built by a single engineer today. Actually, that’s not entirely true. A rich content-driven startup can be created by zero engineers today. Thanks, WordPress!

But who cares about a content-driven startup, you say? Good question. Let’s ignore how the Cheezburger Network, TechCrunch and Groupon all started, and focus on apps instead. A decade ago, your app would have been built using the LAMP stack, Perl or Java. If you were serious (and you raised a ton of capital), you might have even dropped MySQL and used an Oracle database instead (which meant hiring an extremely expensive and extremely crotchety Oracle DB admin).

Today? You’ll build a better app in less time and with fewer people using Python with Django or Ruby on Rails. Easier, but still not the domain of the business founder. But this, too, will change. The same leap that took us from LAMP to RoR will happen again, reducing the amount of people, skill and time required to build a robust web or mobile app. I have no doubt that – at this very moment – there is a talented engineering team busily building modular, drag-and-drop development environments so that those without their skill sets can develop with nearly the same ease that they can. In a way, they may be coding themselves into irrelevance.

In this future state, where the technical hurdles required to build a robust app are virtually eliminated, we’ll experience even more app overload then we do today. When that happens, what separates the winning startups from those that lose will primarily reside within the domain of the business founder’s traditional areas of expertise: optimizing the user experience, executing innovative marketing, and hacking traffic and traction.

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom for the technical co-founder in the future. For one, many of the most successful technical founders also happen to be great business founders (Drew Houston from DropBox, for instance). And smart business founders will always recognize the benefit of teaming up with an awesome technical partner as well. After all, when any tech-focused startup proves traction and viability, then it needs to ensure that its technical foundation can scale efficiently and reliably to support rapid growth. Then again, if my theory proves to be correct, finding that technical co-founder shouldn’t be nearly as hard in the future as it is now.

So take note of the business founders’ plight today. See how they are slighted by the Valley’s tastemakers. Feel their frustration as potential technical co-founders ignore their ideas and instead execute their own. Encourage them as they clumsily try and learn Python the hard way. Most importantly, however, start to pay attention to them. If the past decade is any indication of what the next one will be like, then it won’t be long before the business founder has the advantage that today’s technical founders enjoy. And, when that time comes, they’ll refuse to be ignored.

Image excerpt from Leadership Freak

The enterprise is moving towards simplicity, and this extends to the data center. Nicira, a stealthy virtualization startup with backing from big-name investors, is pulling the curtains back on its disruptive platform that hopes to change the way server and storage virtualization is done. And Nicira is revealing that it has raised with $50 million in funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital cofounder Andy Rachleff.

Nicira’s NVP is a software-based system that creates a distributed virtual network infrastructure in cloud data centers that is completely decoupled and independent from physical network hardware. Nicira says that it is shifting the intelligence and control of the network away from hardware and into software, simplifying the virtualization process.

NVP’s platform forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities.

According to the company, organizations can provision and deploy services in minutes rather than weeks or months, and you don’t need to change any of your existing hardware or software infrastructure. All enterprises need is IP connectivity.

Nicira says that virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed. These limitations result in restricted workload mobility, and leave data centers under utilized.

Stephen Mullaney, Chief Executive Officer of Nicira, explained to us that the network hasn’t evolved for the cloud-based data center, and the existing solutions are inflexible and complex. “The solution is to virtualize and create virtual networks that are decoupled from physical networks. The network is transitioning from hardware to software just like every other business. Software is eating the world,” he says.

The NVP platform is compatible with any data center network hardware. It can be deployed on any existing network, and it allows for future changes to the network hardware without disruption to the operations of the virtual network platform. The software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly. The company, which has nabbed a number of executives from Cisco, already counts AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

Big TV events are becoming an increasingly popular catalyst of activity on social media, with sporting events being at the top of the list. Many of us can no longer enjoy a Super Bowl without checking Twitter every three seconds. Last year, there were several moments during the Super Bowl that set records for the most tweets per second during a sporting event, with a high of 4,064 TPS. Of course, the highs during the Super Bowl were no match for New Years Eve 2011 in Japan, which saw 6,939 tweets per second.

A year later, the Japanese continue to be avid tweeters, as the premiere of Japanese movie “Castles In The Sky” set the all-time record in December for tweets per second, at 25,088.

As Alexia shared at the time, the TPS record has since been held by a U.S. women’s soccer team’s game at 7,196 Tweets per second, which came among other notable Twitter events: Steve Jobs’ death at 6,049, Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 TPS, the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March at 5,530 TPS, and the Royal Wedding in England in April at 3,966 TPS.

Clearly, we are getting a glimpse of the increasing relevance and popularity of Twitter during important events, as Twitter’s official Twitter account (head explosion) announced tonight that, in the final three minutes of Super Bowl 2012, there was an average of 10,000 tweets per second. Obviously, this is less than half the tweet frequency (I’ll coin the “TF” acronym) of the Castles In The Sky premiere, but by all accounts this is the record for TF during a live sporting event.

No doubt the 2012 Olympics in London, and 100 other events will give tonight’s Super Bowl a run for its money, but, for now, let us revel in tweet history.

Twitter will no doubt be sharing more on the activity during the Super Bowl, which we will include as soon as we have it.

In the final three minutes of the Super Bowl tonight, there were an average of 10,000 Tweets per second.—
Twitter (@twitter) February 06, 2012

Lately, we’ve been seeing more and more big television events come with an online streaming counterpart. Sporting and televised events are showing up online with increasing frequency, with the 2010 Olympics seeming to be one of the first big global events where both viewers and media publicly recognized the power and potential of carrying an event like that online.

This year, for the first time in history, the Super Bowl is being shown online, for free. And it’s completely legal. I was going to say “in a brilliant move by the NFL,” but this should be default. Showing an enormously popular event like the Super Bowl online should not be a “brilliant” move. It should just be second nature. But, wishful thinking aside, the NFL and NBC both wanted to give home viewers options to watch the big game on the Web, without having to rub elbows with the riff raff at a local sports bar.

Interestingly, leading up to the game, over the course of the last week, the Feds began seizing domain names owned by popular sports streaming sites, like Firstrowsports.tv, Firstrowsports.com and Soccertvlive.net, etc. You can read more at TorrentFreak here. Obviously, that action was taken in the name of freedom and preventing piracy, but it’s also in part to protecting the fairly sizable interests of the NFL and NBC.

In spite of that ignominious beginning, especially in light of SOPA and all the controversy lately over seizures like MegaUpload, the streaming online experience tonight during the Super Bowl was pretty amazing. Pre-game coverage started at 2pm on NBCSports.com, with streaming capabilities featuring the ability to pause and rewind, embedded live streams from Twitter and Facebook, and four different camera angles to boot.

While that in and of itself is exciting, the 2012 Super Bowl streaming experience itself left a lot to be desired. The actual banner ads, the online ads being served on NBCSports.com, weren’t particularly offensive, or a pain in the ass. But, the problem is that most people watch the Super Bowl in groups, not as individuals, and most choose to do so through a projector, or streaming the Web onto their TV or a big screen.

In addition, many people watch the Super Bowl strictly for ads or for the halftime show, which, in spite of the ads finding a way to be disappointing each and every year, is a spectacle year in, year out — without fail. Even if the music is awful.

For streaming viewers looking to watch ads in realtime, there was a tab which they could mouse over to watch all the ads after they aired, but the commercials were not shown during the breaks in the online broadcast, when they were actually supposed to air. Streaming viewers who chose not to pick their own commercials just got an enormous eyeful of the same ads, repeating ad nauseam.

Airing on television, live on the boob tube, were the full slate of “creative” ads, from each and every brand; however, airing live on the Web was a loop of GE, Budweiser, and Samsung commercials, punctuated annoyingly by Rainn Wilson, who just became increasingly annoying. The one bonus: Both the Chevy commercial and the Samsung commercial aired online before they did on TV, so streamers got a sneak peek. I realize I may be complaining about small inconveniences, when really I should be celebrating the fact that the Super Bowl was streaming online, legally, for free, but …

For those looking to watch the halftime show, expecting to see Madonna and company, all they got was an endless interview shot in a hallway. Personally, it didn’t completely ruin my Super Bowl experience to be deprived of Madonna’s performance, but it certainly seems that NBC swung and missed on that one. Strike two.

Furthermore, if you are an American living abroad or wanted to watch the biggest football game of the year, NBC only offered limited options, as the network’s broadcast rights didn’t extend internationally.

Sure, increasingly, big sporting events are moving online, but significant limitations endure. The Super Bowl will air on CBS next year, and CBS might as well get started now if it’s going to provide a legitimate alternative.

Including the halftime show in coverage online will be significant, as will providing viewing for international football fans and Americans living abroad. While there was a lot of great functionality, and the quality of the broadcast was pretty good (depending on your Internet connection), and it was very cool to be able to switch between camera views. The future is clearly here, but sometimes it looks blurry in Silverlight.

That being said, NBC definitely has a grin from ear to ear. The game was fantastic, it went down to the last minute, and The Voice still gets to air in primetime on both coasts.

The Super Bowl also proved that spending millions on commercials still can’t buy you creativity, even though geeks were very excited about that Best Buy commercial.