Cleversafe, the Chicago-based startup that provides cloud storage solutions, raised a $31.4 million round from Motorola, New Enterprise Associates and Chicago’s own OCA Ventures, reports TechCrunch today. According to TechCrunch:

The funding will be used to support Cleversafe’s growth, ongoing product development for the Cleversafe object storage platform, and further expansion into key markets such as government and public safety where storing sensitive data in the cloud is becoming more and more mission-critical.

This is great news for the OCA-funded Cleversafe, and for Chicago, where Cleversafe recently was a finalist in the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center’s 2010 Momentum Awards. We are happy to see Chicago startups taking off and making an impression on the city and beyond.

About Cleversafe

Cleversafe provides cloud-based, distributed content storage for service providers, web 2.0, government and healthcare industries.

New developments at the market research company, Lab42, one of our demo tables at midVenturesLAUNCH. Laura Rokita, Director of Business Development, shared with midVentures that they will be launching a client dashboard on their website. “Although we will still be a full service market research solution, we are hoping to make it is as easy as possible for both small and large companies to perform market research online,” Rokita remarked.

According to their website, Lab42 “fundamentally, is a survey platform with the ability to dig through social networks to find your target consumers and enable them to give your company feedback.” Lab42 is innovative. They don’t rely on slower, more costly methods of artificial research labs and they return results in a timely manner. As a Sandbox Industries company, they use their own internal system that they “wish to share with the world.”

As a research and survey company, they were the right people to ask about their experience at midVenturesLAUNCH. Luckily, they had some good things to say.

“midVenturesLAUNCH allowed us to interact with entrepreneurs, business owners, and designers to gain knowledge about current issues with market research. Being a young, dynamic startup, this type of insight helps us adjust our services to meet client needs,” Rokita responded. “During the conference, we received a lot of feedback from the attendees, both positive and constructive, which we truly appreciated. Since the conference, we have met with potential clients from the conference, as well as with potential service providers for Lab42.”

Of course, they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask their own booth attendees for some on-the-spot market research, and we can’t blame them. “We asked attendees that stopped by Lab42’s table to vote for their favorite Lab42 slogan – we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do some great research,” Rokita said. “Thanks to the survey respondents, we have started using “market research just got easy” as part of our advertising efforts. We really appreciate the input. It’s definitely true, with Lab42, market research just got easy!”

About Lab42
Lab42 is a new kind of market research firm that is breaking the mold in market research. We are a full service research solution that leverages social networks to reach targeted markets. In doing this, we are able to obtain fresh responses to your important questions. We believe market research should be an easy, inexpensive, and quick process so that all businesses listen to the consumer before making decisions. By utilizing social networks, Lab42 has figured out how to make this possible.

Telling stories is what the internet is all about. In fact, one could say that all we have are our stories. It’s the earliest form of communication – back when the Neanderthal stormed into his lair to recreate the story of his hunt by wildly gesticulating and grunting. Would he ever have suspected that after only a few hundreds of thousands of years of technological advances later that the very stick that he used to kill his prey could have been tagged with an encoded Stick-On Tag to tell that same story to future generations forever?

With Itizen, Stick-On or Sew-On Tags keep those stories alive – whether it’s Uncle Bobby’s hole-in-one golf ball or Grandma’s veil that she wore on her wedding day. Founded by Dori Graff, Mary Fallon and Andrew Norell in 2009, Itizen “lets you tell, share and follow the “life stories” of keepsakes, gifts and interesting things,“ according to their website.

Dori Graff shared some of her stories with us from midVenturesLAUNCH. “midVenturesLAUNCH was an exciting day with non-stop action,” Dori recalled. “We made a number of great connections at the event with both investors and other startups and are continuing conversations with these people.”

When Netted by the Webbys profiled Itizen back in August of this year, we knew we had a good thing coming to midVenturesLAUNCH. And we weren’t the only ones. “The day following MidVenturesLAUNCH, we participated in the Web 2.0 Startup Showcase in New York,” Dori Graff, co-founder of Itizen, remarked in an email to us. “CNN Money covered the event and named Itizen as one of the “five most promising startups.”

Graff also remarked on more exciting news. Itizen has “also been approved for MN Angel Tax Credit Program which provides a 25% tax credit to angel investors both in- and out-of-state.”

It’s impressive that Itizen has come so far so quickly. Then again, it’s not surprising considering Itizen could be changing the way life stories are told and shared for future generations.

In their own words:

Our thoughts on things.
Itizen loves things, even more if they’re unique. Things can do so much more than their intended utility. We believe that by capturing their otherwise untold stories, we can strengthen our connection to others while making the things themselves more interesting and valuable. And when we give and share these things with others, the narratives become richer and the roles these things play in our communities are enhanced. It’s a beautiful thing!

Stay tuned for more about what midVenturesLAUNCH companies have been up to!

All eyes were recently on Apple as they unleashed Lion (the next generation of Mac OS X), FaceTime for Mac, new iLife software and a Mac App Store all in a single event. But all the launches were merely a warm-up for the ‘one more thing’ – two amazing new MacBook Airs that melted the entire world of computing in an instant.

Well, that was the way it felt at least.

Apple, as a company, is an amazing sales organ. When they turn on the pitch, it works freakishly well. The new MacBook Airs are the ‘future’ of laptops according to Steve Jobs.

What did he mean by that?

Yes, the new MacBook Airs are smaller, lighter, faster and better – the normal progression of laptops. But Apple baked something special into this release: flash memory and instant-on. In a burst of brilliant innovation, Apple ditched SSDs and HDDs and adopted Flash memory as the next mass market storage solution for computing. The fact that flash memory has taken over portable media storage is an old tale, but two years ago no one would have expected Apple to port over their Flash knowledge to a full size laptop.

‘Instant-on’ means no more booting time. You press the power button on your computer and it bursts alive. Voila. Instantly.  If you are a Windows user that sounds nearly impossible. That frustrating lag starts our days. Now with the new MacBook Air.

Apple killed off the floppy drive. It is doing the same with modern optical media drives, and it is now relentlessly trying to oust slow boots and change storage.

That is why the new MacBook Air matters.

Sure, the MacBook Air is a great addition to the Mac lineup, but the real future is inside it – the little chips that are going to fundamentally change the way computers work. That is, of course, if Steve Jobs gets his way.

The Game Crafter is a game company that lets you create your own card and board games through their extremely user-friendly online wizard. And not only has one of the Game Crafter’s customers now won a prestigious prize, but there are also exciting new improvements in the service.

We caught up with Tavis Parker, a partner of the Game Crafter, on his experience at midVenturesLAUNCH and what they have been up to since then.

Founded in 2001 by JT Smith, the company started by creating and selling card and board games to people. Now a fully developed and integrated website where designers can upload their own designs and pick the game parts, the Game Crafter doesn’t charge any fees and there are no production minimums.

Parker was new to midVentures, but was excited to hear that this type of entrepreneur conference existed. “We’re currently following up with some of the contacts we met at the event and are still in discussions with them,” Parker remarked.

When we asked what they had been up to since the conference, Parker responded by saying this:

“We’ve been making improvements to our service and will soon be offering cheap international shipping options, PayPal integration, and much more. Once those things are in place, we can service the huge gaming markets overseas and this will allow us to double or triple our current sales volume.”

Regarding exciting news since the conference, Parker had this to say:

“Two weeks ago we were notified that Matt Worden, a game designer that uses our service to self-publish his board game, won the “Traditional Game of the Year Award” from Games Magazine. This is a HUGE accomplishment because this award is usually given to a widely recognized board game that’s distributed worldwide and is represented by a major game publisher. However, Games Magazine selected his game, Jump Gate, and this shows how our print-on-demand business of self-publishing card/board games is making an impact on the industry.

Our business/service allows anyone to compete with the large game publishers. This victory is also important because it provides visibility/credibility to the games, designers, and to The Game Crafter service. It’s really exciting to see how successful people have become through our service and we know that it will only get better from here on out!”

We are excited to hear about how these improvements and awards come to fruition.