Last week, Cleversafe introduced a major update to its open source software. Cleversafe is a company with a big, hairy, audacious goal: transform the infrastructure for storing data. All data. Enterprise data. Consumer data. Internet data. Transform the storage of data by radically simplifying the underlying method of storing it and meanwhile making it much more secure and reliable, not to mention cheaper.

Like many startups, Cleversafe has gone through significant transformations itself as it has figured out how to navigate toward this goal. A key decision the company made early on was to put its core software into the open source domain. But it realized earlier this year that it had to rebuild that core software to handle much greater diversity in its prospective customer set. The result: Software that allows the customer to decide for themselves how reliable and secure they want their storage versus how inexpensive. As always, technology requires you to choose between cost and benefit; in Cleversafe’s case, it’s a relative decision because even the most reliable and secure application of the technology is still considerably less expensive than existing, mainstream choices.

Cleversafe’s basic proposition is that you can obviate the need for expensive, high-performance storage by using the Internet itself instead of your own disk farms. It proposes that you carve your data into N numbers of “slices” and then store those slices in discreet locations on the Internet, instead of storing all of your data in one location and then protecting that data by backing it up and archiving it. Cleversafe’s software manages those slices of your data in a way that means you can always get all of your data back even if some percentage of the discreet locations fail. The result, mathematically speaking, means storage is more reliable and more secure by spreading it around the open Internet than it can ever be by trying to maintain close control in your own infrastructure.

That’s an amazing idea; a big, hairy idea. It’s an idea that will take customers some time to absorb and adjust to. Cleversafe is right now identifying which customers will appreciate that idea the most quickly and be willing to pay the most for it as it plans to deliver a product to customers early next year.

Cleversafe holds a dear place in our greedy, venture capital hearts because the terms we offered for investment in Cleversafe were the first terms we offered to any company. We offered those terms before we had raised our fund. We were able to do that because the investment involves old friends on both sides of the investment: Chris Gladwin, the founder and now chairman and CTO of the company, was also the founder of a company where Stewart lead an investment in 1998, MusicNow. And the investor in that case, New Enterprise Associates, is also our co-investor in Cleversafe. Both Chris and NEA agreed to support our investment in Cleversafe before we got our first commitment to fund Alsop Louie Partners. Since we did get funded, NEA and Alsop Louie Partners along with the angel investors in the original funding of the company provided a Series B financing for Cleversafe in November, 2006.

This past week, Justin.tv launched its live broadcasting system. Read the Los Angeles Times coverage of the company.

Everyone’s first question to us: How the heck are you going to make money on that investment? Good question! Answer: We don’t know, exactly. We have some suspicions.

But Justin.tv is the emblematic deal for what we believe about venture capital: The more you think you know about how you’re going to make money in an investment, the less likely you will either make money or make it the way you think you will. In other words, risk is the sine qua non of real venture capital. We prefer to bet on the people behind the venture more than our belief in the outcome.

Justin.tv is all about the live in “live broadcasting”. Everyone knows that video is now, finally, a big deal on the Internet. But the video that is a big deal is recorded video: clips on YouTube (or a bunch of other sites that aggregate or distribute video) and movies and TV shows on iTunes or Amazon.com or wherever. Justin.tv specializes in live video. What impressed us and lead us to invest in the company is that the co-founders didn’t just turn on a web site that let people broadcast live to whoever is watching; they designed a system that allowed anyone to broadcast live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from anywhere that has a reasonable cell phone signal: the most extreme version of live broadcasting.

This accomplishment was first shown in alpha versions earlier this year by the eponymous Justin Kan attaching a web camera to his hat and committing to broadcasting his life, or “lifecasting”. Out of that experience, Justin and his co-founders, CEO Michael Seibel, CTO Emmet Shear and VP Engineering Kyle Vogt, figured out how to build an end to end system that made broadcasting a video signal with even a marginal cellular signal tolerable and, most particularly, made it possible to broadcast high-resolution video both functionally and at extremely low cost. On top of that, the team has built a system for letting viewers and broadcasters cooperate in real time to make sure that the most interesting stuff being broadcast gets promoted to the “front page.”

Call us crazy but we think that a business that can reliably and systematically show people the most interesting things going on in real life in real time anywhere in the world might well be a really popular destination on the Internet. I like to think of it like this: If you can get a million people out of the six billion in the world to create a live broadcast at any one time, there’s bound to be something interesting enough to get a significant percentage of the people sitting in front of their computers to check in and see what’s happening.

Indeed, we believe that Justin.tv could well represent the first instance of a new form of media. With each new turn in technology comes a new form of media. Usually the first thing people do with a new technology is to adapt the old thing. When movies where invented, everyone stuck a camera on a tripod and filmed plays. The first radio broadcasts were simply the audio for staged plays being sent over the airwaves. We think YouTube represents early broadband video, essentially redistributing home movies and other recorded videos. Justin.tv is the first instance of a new media.

As always, there is plenty of competition for Justin.tv including Ustream, Stickam and others. In our case, we have bet on an extremely talented team of youngsters who have shown clear vision and motivation to build a business. Alsop Louie Partners lead the Series A financing of Justin.tv, which closed in August, after the company was seed-funded by Y Combinator and other angel investors and bootstrapped by the founders in an apartment in San Francisco. Check out the team on their own office camera.

I’ve been a loyal fan of Apple products for close to 30 years; by “fan”, I’m serious: I bought at least one of every major product that Apple ever launched. (I’m on my tenth iPod already). My company, Spectrum Holobyte (already two years old when the Macintosh was launched), was one of the first Macintosh developers. I fondly remember the great support the Apple evangelist team gave to third party developers and how they embraced the creative products that developers were developing for their budding new Macintosh. Who could forget that great 1984 ad where a young athlete throws her hammer through that big Orwellian screen to smash “big brother.” Apple has always represented the freedom from the dominant control by IBM (then) and Microsoft (now). Apple users have always prided themselves in their ability to think differently than Windows users and have believed that Steve Jobs was the savior to an industry who had lost its way.

Unfortunately, Apple is beginning to act more and more like big brother itself.

Like the State in George Orwell’s 1984, Apple is using iTunes as a tool to control their users behavior. As has been widely reported, with its 1.1.1 version of the iPhone software, Apple purposely crippled iPhones that had had third party applications installed or had been modified by their users. Apple claims that they are doing this to protect users from applications that may damage their iPhones or threaten the quality of service. Sounds altruistic, but the truth is that Apple hurt their users more than they protected them.

Apple didn’t just reset users’ phones or paralyze specific third party applications; if the phones had been modified in any way, they proactively and purposely crippled those iPhones by turning them into useless bricks. (If the phones weren’t modified, Apple removed any offending software and returned the iPhone to a default, factory state.) Apple’s policy is that they will not reactivate disabled phones; instead Apple requires the owners to buy whole new phones. They are aggressively punishing not only the developers of these apps but users who thought that they had in fact “purchased” their phones. It looks like the only protection iPhone users need is from Apple itself.

Imagine if GM crippled your car if you modified your car with a third party accessory or if Dell decided to shut down your computer because you used a hard disk that you bought from Fry’s Electronics instead of from Dell. Imagine if Microsoft forced you to use IE and if you used Safari, they would cripple Windows and de-authorize your OS. Imagine if Sony used a DRM that…oh yeah, they did that and look what happened to them.

I have no problem with Apple telling users that third party applications will not be supported and may become incompatible in the future. I don’t have a problem with Apple protecting its users by locking out third party application that are known to cause damage either to the phone or to the network. But bricking users’ iPhones is vicious, unacceptable and should be challenged in the courts.

In 2005, at the Stanford University’s commencement address, Steve Jobs challenged the young graduates. He told them, “don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” He told them to stay “hungry and stay foolish.”

Apple believes it is at war with those who try to develop native applications and those who are attempting to unlock their phones. This week in the United Kingdom, Jobs said: “It’s a cat-and-mouse game. We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in.” That doesn’t sound hungry to me, but it does sounds awfully foolish. What is it, now, that separates Steve Jobs from the movie-studio and record-label executives who act as though customers are the biggest problem they have?

For years, Steve had told the world of the dangers of leaving the future of computing in the hands of companies like Microsoft. Apple was supposed to dawn a new age of computing and free “the rest of us” from the tyranny of the incumbents. My question is: is Steve acting more like the heroine savior he once aspired to be or more like the tyrant he despised in his famous 1984 ad?