Viber has made quite a name for itself as a global mobile first company, but today that all changes as the company breaks ground in the desktop space. That means that starting today, Viber’s 200 million+ users will have access to their Viber contacts from both mobile and desktop.

The rollout is part of a bigger push from Viber, including an update to its iOS, Android and BlackBerry apps to version 3.0. But the real story is this desktop app.

I played with the software earlier this week, and can say that it’s a truly impressive VoIP, messaging, and video calling platform. That’s right. Viber for Desktop (available on both PC and Mac here) marks the company’s entry into video calling with a beta version of the feature. For now, video calling is only available from desktop to desktop.

Chute, a startup that offers tools for collecting and displaying photos, has raised $7 million in Series A Funding.

The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and US Venture Partners. Chute previously raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Freestyle.

The company allows publishers and other businesses to pull relevant photos from social networks or collect them directly from users, then display those images on their own websites and in real-world locations. It’s also experimenting with other photo collection methods, like allowing NBC News reporters to post photos of the presidential inauguration directly from a Chute mobile reporting app.

Jeet Singh and Joe Chung have already had a nice exit, taking their enterprise software company Art Technology Group public (it was acquired by Oracle for $1 billion back in 2010). Now they’re hoping to turn the act of building successful startups into a “repeatable process,” through their new firm Redstar ventures.

Singh and Chung, along with their third co-founder Matt Beecher, said they became interested in angel investing a few years ago, but at the same time they were turned off by the randomness and risk of the traditional model. So they developed their own approach, a “venture foundry,” where the firm focuses on a few broad themes, develops companies internally, and then spins them out if they seem to be getting traction. Here’s how the model is described on the Redstar website:

We identify significant trends and growing markets, and develop potential products and services for those markets. We match very successful mentors with young and experienced entrepreneurs and co-found companies with them. Together, we staff these teams, evaluate the market, build and test the product or service, establish partnerships, identify sources of investment, and launch the enterprise. We also fund these firms through their seed-stages.

It wasn’t until widely respected economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff shared the Excel files behind their influential paper on the relationship between government debt and economic growth, that a very basic and consequential spreadsheet error was discovered.

Suddenly, a conclusion that policy makers around the world had seized on for years to justify steep spending cuts was thrown in doubt.

That’s why Richard Price, the CEO of a social network for researchers called Academia.edu, says that sharing raw research data should be expected from the start. His platform is adding a feature today that lets researchers post the data behind their work through embeddable data-sets and code on their profile pages.

Australian startup Tapestry, which makes an app for Android tablets to help seniors stay connected to family members, has raised $400,000 in new funding in the form of a grant from Commercialisation Australia — capital it will use to extend its wares to iOS (and beyond tablets), add additional community features, and gear up for a U.S. launch.

It follows $600,000 raised last November from Sydney Angels, with a list of investors that included David Greatorex (founding investor ResMed, SecureNet), Su-Ming Wong (CHAMP Private Equity), Brand Hoff (Tower Software, Director NICTA).

Targeting the ageing population and their family members, Tapestry’s service — currently an Android tablet app — is an attempt to simplify the social web and make it more accessible to less tech-savvy seniors in order to help them stay connected to family. It does this through a user interface that relies on two different account types — one for “sharing”, aimed at the more tech-savvy family members, and another, dubbed “simplicity”, for the senior(s) in the family who wish to mostly consume content and require the tailored Tapestry experience.

Today marks the latest step in Aereo’s legal battle with major broadcast networks like Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC, with the live TV streaming/DVR service filing a declaratory judgement action against CBS, in particular.

The company is asking that the court prevent CBS from suing Aereo in every district to which it expands, as CBS has twice threatened to sue Aereo in Boston, where it will launch on May 15.

After losing a preliminary injunction in the Second Circuit of New York, the major broadcast networks have been eyeing other routes to shut down the fledgling TV startup, which rents out mini-antennas to its users to watch live or recorded television from thirty OTA broadcast channels on any device.

Inventure-backed Froont has launched in public beta today with a web-based tool that aims to make it easy for designers to create, prototype and share responsive website designs, without the need to code. Using a visual, largely drag ‘n’ drop interface that creates responsive CSS/HTML on the fly, it aims to replace the somewhat arcane process where a designer hands off a Photoshop mockup for a developer to interpret. In fact, Froont offers the potential to leave developers out of the design (and even prototyping) process altogether, which in some cases may be a very good thing.

Responsive web design — where a single version of a site is designed to adapt in size and layout depending on the device that it’s being viewed on — is particularly in vogue right now. And with the proliferation of various types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.), alongside the traditional desktop, it’s easy to see why. A responsive approach to web design offers an attractive solution to reaching as wide an audience as possible without necessarily degrading their experience, even if it does make some compromises.

But the old way of designing websites, and the traditional division of labour, doesn’t necessarily scale well if you’re jumping on the responsive bandwagon. Trying to represent a responsive design in a series of static Photoshop mockups to show how a site will adapt when viewed on various screen sizes involves quite a lot of compromise. One solution is to have the non-coding designer work hand in hand with a front-end developer to prototype their Photoshop designs in HTML/CSS, thus making them viewable as is and to get a feel for how the responsive design will work in practice. This approach, however, can involve a lot of unnecessary back and forth as the design gets lost in translation.

Founded in 2010, Israeli startup JoyTunes has been on a mission to become the Rosetta Stone of music — to help those looking to learn play an instrument do so by turning practice into a mobile game, activated by playing the instrument of their choice. The startup’s first app, a free iPad app called Piano Dust Buster, enables wannabe rockstars to learn and play songs at their own pace, using a piano to play the game through their iPad’s microphone or by using the app’s 3-D virtual keyboard. To date, users have played 25 million songs using the app, with one million songs being played each week.

Today, based on the success of Piano Dust Buster, JoyTunes announced that it has closed a $1.5 million round of Series A financing, led by Genesis Partners. Founder Collective, Kaedan Capital, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, angel investor Zohar Gilon, Head of Yahoo Creative Innovation Center Eran Shir and former Steinway CEO Dana Messina, among others, also contributed to the startup’s Series A raise. The new round follows the $500K in seed capital the startup raised early last year from a host of angel investors, bringing its total funding to $2 million.

In conjunction with its raise, JoyTunes is also announcing the release of its second piano app, Piano Mania, which builds on the startup’s first app, while offering a deeper practice experience for those who’ve moved beyond entry level. The app aims to help users learn to read sheet music notation and symbols, play melodies in both treble and bass clefs, work on songs while focusing either on the left hand, right hand or both, while saving work to show to their piano teacher.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Indeed, great things can come from this, and for many of its one billion users, Facebook isn’t just on the web — it is the web. It is where images, biographical data, and every speck of a connection to a person, place, or thing lives, both the dream of a doting family spread miles apart and a marketer close by. It is a place where generations of people now reside, hang out, fawn over public statuses and peek into the lives of others. Ironically, while Facebook’s aim is to make the world more open, they themselves are building a new web within their own closed garden, inaccessible and (mostly) unexportable to all. As the saying states, “what goes on the Internet is written in ink,” so what goes onto Facebook is etched in stone walls.

Yes, much of Facebook’s traffic comes from mobile now, too. For most people who don’t care about all the latest and greatest apps, Facebook works splendidly for them, simply yet powerfully connecting them to exercise the habits they’ve picked up on the web version. Yet, at the same time, mobile platforms (phones and tablets) have presented newer and younger audiences with new graphs of people, folks whose first computing device may have been of the latest iPod touches (complete with Facetime), folks who live in other countries with exploding mobile growth adoption curves. As working professionals have come to use the Internet to help define, cement, and reinforce their perceptions of their own identities, younger generations in search of their own identity can use a battery of new services and mobile apps which containerize their activities, isolating them from the permanence of the web, a permanence embodied by the likes of Facebook and Google+.

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s skeptical comments about the current wave of tech startups (comments that included a not-too-veiled dig at Snapchat), ended up fueling plenty of discussion at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this week. In fact, when I interviewed Sequoia Capital partner Aaref Hilaly backstage, Palihapitiya’s remarks provided a springboard for Hilaly’s take on messaging apps, including Sequoia-backed WhatsApp:

To us, they’re a pretty significant change. We see a company like WhatsApp as reimagining the social network. And the way I think about it is, What’s your real social graph? Is it the people you communicate with and spend time with, or is it the 100 people you barely know on Facebook? We think it’s pretty clearly the first of those, and that’s what mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp capture.

Hilaly went on to praise WhatsApp’s growth (users are supposedly sending 20 billion messages per day) and its design, but he also said there are other companies doing well, especially if you look in other countries. I asked if there’s a bit of a generational divide in terms of usage (which is another way of asking if I’m too old), and Hilaly said “it’s generational and it’s geographic.”