StartUp Beat

Company: MentorMob
Website: www.mentormob.com 
Founders: Vince Leung and Kris Chinosorn
Headquarters: Chicago
Year Founded: 2010
Twitter: @MentorMob
Brief Company Description: MentorMob simplifies learning any topic by organizing content from anywhere on the web into a step-by-step format called a Learning Playlist.

By Vince Leung, co-founder and CTO

Product Overview

MentorMob, founded in 2010, seeks to achieve nothing less than a revolution in the way human knowledge is transferred by turning the power of crowdsourcing loose on the learning process. Its website at www.mentormob.com is a free, community-powered repository of information on any skill, hobby or subject in which the community wishes to engage—a resource that is accessible anytime, anywhere. MentorMob seeks to bring the sense of discovery, fun, and “addictiveness” back into learning while making it extremely easy. The potential for MentorMob to impact individuals, companies, organizations and society in general is significant.

MentorMob’s learning modules are called Learning Playlists that users can view at their own pace without registering for an account. Any registered user can create new playlists or add to, comment on, or re-order the steps in existing Playlists. Presently, content in each Playlist comes from the web in the form of articles, videos, slides and other media forms.

Like Wikipedia, Playlists are collaborative—they reflect the combined wisdom of volunteer contributors, with the best ways of learning rising to the top. It is estimated that the crowdsourced nature of MentorMob will result in a three-fold increase in learning power for users. Now in private beta, MentorMob expects to go into its full release in early Q4 of this year.

Founders’ Story

Kris and I met at the University of Illinois in Champaign. I graduated with a Computer Engineering degree while Kris graduated with a Biology degree. After graduation we both moved to California for work—I as a firmware engineer at HP and Kris in real estate in the SF Bay Area. At that time Kris became connected with the “PayPal Mafia,” a group of serial entrepreneurs who founded PayPal and went on to found notable companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp.  Kris and I saw the rising trend in turning to the Internet to learn everything but realized the disorganized nature of learning any topic, such as how to play guitar, online. We decided to build a platform that would remove the wasted time and frustration of searching for the information to learn online, and thus was born MentorMob. The concept is simple, harness the existing information around the web by organizing it into a step-by-step format called a Learning Playlist. To make the platform scalable, it is open to anyone to create, edit, and improve these Learning Playlists, similar to how Wikipedia operates.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

-Promoting Learning Playlists in highly sought-after verticals by online users.

-Community Management.

-SaaS (software as a service) offering will broaden MentorMob’s brand and platform into institutional learning such as schools and corporations.

-Allowing anyone who wants to showcase a playlist on their website with MentorMob’s unique Learning Playlist widget, which can be embedded just like a YouTube video.

How We Differentiate from the Competition

Unlike traditional online gateways to learning such as search engines and bulletin boards, MentorMob content is presented in a structured and ordered fashion. Learning Playlists, the basic MentorMob learning unit, contain elements that are viewed sequentially to learn the desired skill. Playlists are edited by the community and therefore collaborative.

The vast majority of structured learning resources on the Internet is formal in nature and offered by schools and private learning companies. MentorMob, while less formal, is flexible enough to support any kind of topic, from “How to play a guitar” to “How to identify and contain common blood pathogens.”

Adding to MentorMob’s appeal, Playlists can be taken off the site and embedded into any third-party website as a widget to complement or showcase the site’s product and service offerings.

Business Model

Despite its free use philosophy, MentorMob is uniquely positioned to support two strong sources of revenue. First is advertising: because of the sequential nature of MentorMob learning, it’s possible to target users by their education level. Guitar manufacturers, for example, can advertise products to novices that would be of less interest to accomplished musicians at higher levels of learning.

A second source, now in an early stage of development, is the use of MentorMob as an institutional, B2B, or internal company training tool using the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Organizational learning in the form of private Playlists can be developed by customers for virtually any kind of training.

Current Needs

MentorMob is looking for experienced developers and business development folks. We are currently in the process of fundraising and open to new introductions.

MentorMob – www.mentormob.com

Posted by startupbeat at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Web/Content

Codecademy raises $2.5M to make you a coding master (via VentureBeat)

Posted by startupbeat at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor,

This was a news week dominated by global economic news and of the worldwide growth of the Occupy movement. But while things continue to look dour on the economic front, the tech sector saw another vigorous week of funding and acquisitions announcements, mixed with negative news about Groupon’s pending IPO and serious layoffs at fellow deals site BuyWithMe. The sector increasing looks like a bad deal (sorry, I had to go there).

Speaking of Groupon, StartUp Beat this week featured a guest column about the decline of the daily deals juggernaut by David Galvan, president of online appointment platform Schedulicity. We also featured Q&As with social games startup Crowdpark, restaurant technology provider Ordr.in, and a Featured Startup Pitch from Internet security startup KnowBe4.

Seed and Series A funding announcements this week:

Chartboost – $2 million

Subtext – $3 million

Mobli – $4 million

PlayJam – $5 million

Zaarly – $14 million

Sincerely – $3 million

Hyperink – $1.2 million

Discovr – $1.1 million

Datahug – $1.5 million

Posted by startupbeat at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Enterprise

Irish firm Datahug secures US$1.5m investment (via SiliconRepublic)

Ecommerce

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A Q&A with Crowdpark co-founder and COO Christoph Jenke. The Berlin–based company was founded in April of 2009.

SUB: Please explain what Crowdpark is, and the value proposition you bring to social media.

Jenke: Crowdpark is pioneering social betting games—bringing the thrill of legal betting to the world of social gaming. Crowdpark will offer several betting and casino gaming products for multiple platforms including the web, mobile, and social networks. Crowdpark adds a betting layer to where people are already connecting with friends on engaging topics such as sports matches, current events, celebrity gossip and the like. Its first social betting game is “Bet Tycoon” on Facebook, where players make bets with virtual currency on what will happen in the future. Crowdpark’s patent-pending dynamic betting technology is what generates live, real-time experiences allowing players to leave a bet—at any time and collect winnings—similar to the stock market.

We’re also really excited about what we have coming for the mobile and second screen platforms. We’ll provide more insights on those products soon.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Jenke: Crowdpark is creating a new genre in social gaming—social betting games. Other games in the larger category of casino games have solely focused on slot machines, card games, bingo or roulette. So far, there has not been an equivalent on Facebook for real-money betting, especially sports betting. On a broader level, we play in the social gaming playground with companies such as Zynga, RockYou, Playfish and Wooga, including those developing casino games such as Playtika.

SUB: What differentiates Crowdpark from your competitors?

Jenke: We’re experts and completely focused on social betting games. Our products are based on current events and the bets happen real-time. Much of the excitement of Crowdpark’s games derives from its patent pending “dynamic betting” technology that enables forecasts in social gaming—in real-time—similar to how people play the stock market. Crowdpark products offer players the opportunity to bet on actual events in sports, entertainment, business, politics and other topics. For more information about Crowdpark’s unique technology used in some of the games, see the “Dynamic Betting: The Technology Behind Crowdpark’s Social Betting Engine” white paper.

Prediction markets are already being used by companies to forecast various business key performance indicators, Google, HP etc., with higher accuracy then before—see the white paper. 
Our patented “dynamic betting” technology brought a new level of stickiness and differentiates from betting principles people are used to. With Crowdpark, you’re in it every second and are always connected with every player. This makes for an extremely sticky game. Our first game, Bet Tycoon, uses this patent-pending dynamic betting technology.

Moreover, as part of the launch, the Company announced the Crowdpark Social Betting Index, where you can see the current events and topics that people are betting on most frequently. It is fascinating to see (you can see the index here: http://www.crowdpark.com/press/bet-index/).
Our most popular topics include: Soccer (European football), Gossip/Celebrities, Football (American football), Business, Politics, Music, Movies and TV, Baseball, and Motorsports.

SUB: What’s your business model? How does Crowdpark generate revenue?

Jenke: Just like other social gaming companies, Crowdpark generates revenue via the sale of virtual goods through micro-payments. Game players in general buy Facebook Credits to play games on Facebook. Players in “Bet Tycoon” are able to buy an in-game currency called “Crowdpark Dollars” to buy additional energy or buy virtual items with those Facebook Credits just like in any other social game. There is no translation of such virtual currency to real money and, therefore, no gambling or money-laundering. It’s 100 percent legal, and has all the thrill.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind the idea? Was there an “aha” moment, or was it longer in developing?

Jenke: The inspiration for Crowdpark happened as a natural outgrowth of the collective expertise of the founding team. Crowdpark’s founders have a background in developing algorithms to predict pricing in B2B markets as well as in the realm of social gaming. With this technological expertise and game industry savvy, we saw a unique opportunity in a B2C context—to create a new genre of social gaming called social betting games.

SUB: When was Crowdpark founded and what were the first steps you took toward establishing it?

Jenke: Crowdpark was founded in April of 2009 in Berlin which we regarded as a place that was a burgeoning creative hub and continues to be so as Europe’s Silicon Valley. We first developed a web-based German language prototype, Crowdpark.de, and then quickly evolved the game into the Facebook ecosystem with the help of our Series A financing round.

SUB: What have the biggest obstacles been so far to building the business?

Jenke: In pioneering any new category and building a business, there are challenges. In our case, Crowdpark is pioneering an entirely new genre of social gaming—social betting. No other developer is focused on social betting so we’re especially excited to evangelize the fun to be had around combining legal betting with social gaming. The games are 100 percent legal. In addition, finding the right creative talent is crucial in order to turn a vision into working products, and the recent funding will help us expand the team.

SUB: You recently raised $6 million in new funding. How do you plan to use the funds?

Jenke: The funding will be used to enhance the technology; develop new games on a cross-platform basis by offering several betting and casino products for different platforms including Facebook, the web and mobile apps, and, to hire more talent in game design and development. 

SUB: Why was this a good time to raise outside funding?

Jenke: Our investors—Earlybird Venture Capital and Target Partners—are among the leading and most respected venture capital firms in Europe. With many years of experience as managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, Earlybird and Target Partners help us with their network, support us in developing and marketing our products and to build our organization. We are convinced that with our recent funding, we can accelerate our growth to bring more and better games to users faster on a cross-platform basis.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more funding in the near future?

Jenke: Currently we are not looking for further funds. However, social gaming is a highly competitive market and our competitors have raised considerable amounts of money. Therefore, we are more than willing to look at opportunities that will enable us to grow further, attract more talent or internationalize faster.

SUB: What big goals do you have for Crowdpark over the next year?

Jenke: We aim to extend our growth and build amazing games based on our dynamic betting technology and in other hot growth categories such as casino games. In July, Sean Ryan, the director of game partnerships at Facebook, said the casino category is creating “unbelievable monsters,” and is still largely untapped by developers.

Crowdpark will continue to enhance our first product, the Facebook social betting game “Bet Tycoon”. It is part of Crowdpark’s strategy to offer several social betting and casino products for multiple social platforms, mobile and for second screen technologies.

Crowdpark – www.crowdpark.com

A brief video explaining “dynamic betting”: http://vimeo.com/17525013

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Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Web Content

Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel Back Next-Generation Digital Book Publisher Hyperink (via TechCrunch)

Redfin Raises Another $14.8 Million To Reinvent The Real Estate Market (via TechCrunch)

Radionomy Now Streaming 30 Million Hours Of Online Radio Per Month, To Raise $15 Million (via TechCrunch)

Ustream Forges Joint Venture With South Korea’s KT Corp., Raises $10 Million (via TechCrunch)

Mobile

4INFO Raises $14 Million from Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, Mitsui Global Investment, and Existing Investors

Discovr releases Mac app, hits 1M downloads, gets $1.1M funding (exclusive) (via VentureBeat)

Social Media

Socialbakers Acquires Social RSS, A Facebook Feed Reader, Adds Google+ Support (via TechCrunch)

Finance/Investment

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A Q&A with Ordr.in co-founder and CEO David Bloom. The New York City–based company was founded in 2010 and recently raised a seed funding round led by Google Ventures.

SUB: Please explain what Ordr.in is, and the value proposition you bring to the restaurant business.  

Bloom: Ordr.in has a set of tools-APIs-that turn any website, app or device into a way to order food. These APIs create new ways for customers to discover and transact with restaurants—incremental orders and exposure to customers that are very hard to reach.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Bloom: While we don’t know anyone taking our API-driven approach to restaurant ecommerce, there is not a ton of awareness about our service. There are alternatives like affiliate relationships to virtual food courts like Eat24Hours and Delivery.com.

SUB: What differentiates Ordr.in from your competitors?  

Bloom: We have an API-driven model that gives our clients the tools they need to build their own food ordering service. We don’t have a website or app where customers place orders so there is no competition between our clients and ourselves.

SUB: What’s your business model? How does Ordr.in generate revenue? 

Bloom: Restaurants pay a commission for each order. Very simple pay-for-performance.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind the idea? Was there an “aha” moment, or was it longer in developing?

Bloom: No single “aha” moment, just a steady realization that the restaurant industry is fragmented, local and inefficient. In similar industries, distribution platforms turn fragmentation into organization. There was nothing like it in restaurants so my co-founder and I built it.

SUB: When was Ordr.in founded and what were the first steps you took toward establishing it?  

Bloom: We started Ordr.in in early 2010 and there were four major hypotheses we thought we needed to test. The first was whether restaurants would be interested in our approach. The first thing we did was ask restaurants to join us—even before we had a demo product or any customers. When dozens signed up we realized we were on to something.

SUB: What have the biggest obstacles been so far to building the business?

Bloom: Managing and organizing menu data from so many sources is a huge challenge. Happily my co-founder Felix Sheng is responsible for this and is a total genius at it. The other challenge is that our business model is very successful in other industries. Showing people it will work in restaurants has taken time.

SUB: You recently raised a seed funding round, led by Google Ventures. How do you plan to use the funds?

Bloom: We run a very lean operation, but the funds will help us invest in product development—i.e. people who design and build software-based products.

SUB: Why was this a good time to raise outside funding?

Bloom: I think it is a good time to raise money, especially if you are credible, pursuing a big idea and have real traction. It all helps!

SUB: Do you plan to raise more funding in the near future?

Bloom: We are raising another round of funding now.

SUB: What big goals do you have for Ordr.in over the next year?

Bloom: We have a simple dashboard of five operating metrics we track. It is pinned up over my desk and I see it every day. I won’t say what is on them but the numbers are big!

Ordr.in – www.ordr.in

Posted by startupbeat at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's funding and acquisitions news roundup: 

Mobile

Zaarly Adds Meg Whitman to Board of Directors & Closes $14 Million in Funding to Accelerate Growth

Ecommerce

Sincerely Raises $3 Million To Deliver Real-World Postcards, Holiday Cards On The Way (via TechCrunch)

Sociable Labs Raises $7 Million To Help Retailers Manage Social Commerce (via TechCrunch)

CashStar Secures $12 Million in Funding

Enterprise

CrowdOptic Raises Funding to Expand Security Features of Analytics Platform for Live Events

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Company: KnowBe4
Website:  www.knowbe4.com
Founder: Stu Sjouwerman
Headquarters: Clearwater, Florida
Year Founded: 2010
Twitter: @KnowBe4
Brief Company Description: KnowBe4 delivers next-generation security awareness training and testing, addressing the needs of business owners, IT, HR and end-users.

By Stu Sjouwerman, founder and CEO

Product Overview

KnowBe4 provides proactive next-gen Internet Security Awareness Training that really works against phishing attacks. Our training reduces phishing susceptibility by 75 percent and higher. When our customers asked for more, our answer was to present security consulting services with a special proactive angle focused on making an organization a hard target for phishers.

Founder’s Story

My name is Stu Sjouwerman (pronounced ‘shower-man’). I have been in the IT industry for 32 years and am one of the founders of Sunbelt Software, which was established in 1994. Sunbelt was recently acquired by GFI software, a portfolio company of Insight Partners, a large venture fund in Boston.

As part of the management team, I helped make the decision to build a brand new low-overhead anti-malware platform from scratch. In 2008, we released VIPRE Antivirus, which is continuing to expand in this crowded AV market. Being inside the AV industry, I came to find they have a dirty little secret: their effectiveness is not all it’s cracked up to be by their marketing departments.

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Social Media

Subtext Unlocks Potential of eBooks, Transforms Reading Experience

Tradeshift Secures $17m Investment 

Web/Content

Leo DiCaprio Gets In On Celebrity Tech Investing, Leads $4M Round In Photo Sharing App Mobli (via TechCrunch)

Gaming

PlayJam Secures $5 Million 'Series A' Funding

Marketing/Advertising

Device Identification Startup BlueCava Lands $9.5M From S3 Ventures, Mark Cuban (via TechCrunch)

Enterprise

Nutanix gets $25M to help you scale like Google (via gigaom)

Posted by startupbeat at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By David Galvan, president of Schedulicity

Daily deal services have become a multi-billion dollar industry and have reestablished focus on the local marketplace since late 2008. With Groupon and LivingSocial leading the pack, there were, as recently as a year ago, more than 350 players in the space providing deals, platforms, data, analytics and aggregation.

But that was then. The current state of the daily deal industry has quickly shifted, creating challenges as well as brand new opportunities for small businesses.

The daily deal site pool is shrinking at a remarkable rate. According to The Wall Street Journal, nearly one-third of all daily-deal sites in the United States have shut down. This consolidation of the industry cannot be ignored, and when the daily deal dust settles, those who’ve discovered how to deliver benefits to both the merchant and the consumer will ultimately be the last men standing.

What Happened?

Touted as the consumer’s crusader, daily deals exploded because they saved the masses tons of cash, although many times at the expense of small and startup businesses. The sites then took as much as 50 percent of the revenue off that already discounted product or service, leaving merchants with as little as $25 (or less) to deliver a $100 service. Furthermore, many daily deal horror stories have centered on the logistical nightmares of accommodating the front end (and back end) loaded nature of appointment-based offer redemption. It was not uncommon to see an attractive offer of $50 for $150 of spa services, sell upwards of 300 or 400 units. Fulfilling 400 massages starts with taking 100 phone calls the first few days and trying to accommodate everyone who’s after the Saturday 11a.m. slot. 

The cost of acquiring customers has skyrocketed, from around $7 per new customer at the outset to as much as $25 per new customer today. Groupon spent more than $241 million in 2010 and $466.5 million on marketing during the first nine months of this year alone. While some companies are big enough to absorb these costs, smaller operations certainly cannot. More importantly it seems like the venture-backed cash pipe for daily deal companies is starting to run dry, as painfully noticed by BuyWithMe’s rumored liquidity problems.

What Now?

This consolidation has serious implications for small business and startups looking to cash in on the daily deal craze.

Whereas merchants once saw daily deals as an opportunity to get in front of a lot of people in a short time, the market consolidation means many merchants have learned from past mistakes. Random, “go-for-broke” deals will evolve into well thought-out, planned and managed offers. This gives merchants the opportunity to establish loyalty by offering targeted, hyper-local deals. The more geographically concentrated the consumer base, the better the chance of turning deal-seekers into repeat customers. 

With fewer daily deal options to vet, merchants and service providers now need to employ productivity management tools to maximize a deal’s potential. For example, scheduling applications like Schedulicity provide easy and inexpensive daily deal management by allowing a service provider to meter the fulfillment of an offer over a specific set of time blocks for the entire duration of the offer. Basically, the merchant could set aside 20 appointments for daily deal redemption per week, the availability of which could be easily accessed by the consumer. Once the slots were filled for the week, the consumer would be forced to move into the following weeks for availability. In addition to alleviating the onslaught of phone calls, scheduling services allow the merchant to set aside ample appointment slots for current, walk-in and other full-paying customers.

What About the Future?

While it’s hard to envision what this dynamic industry will look like a year from now, we can make a few predictions.

Going forward, we will continue to see massive consolidation and an evolutionary fine tuning of the remaining players. I see the space ultimately being run by a couple of the large, national “big guys”, a bunch of vertical niche players and a long tail of smaller local guys who are able to form strong hyper local market penetration. For small businesses, it means owners can now pick the right deal partner for the right deal offering. The biggest isn’t always the best, especially if you are a provider of specialty goods and services. With vertical deal providers, from luxury goods to babies to pets to children (and everything in between), merchants can find the perfect match beyond simple location. A little homework and small and startup businesses will be amazed at the type of deal partner they can find!

Daily deal fatigue has become a common term, as the slew of daily deal emails to consumers’ inboxes has become more of an annoyance than an enjoyment. This fatigue will ease in the coming months and years, as consumers begin to dictate what types of deals they want to receive and from whom (check out personalization products like dealadar.com). Discount directories will allow consumers to search for deals that interest them, transforming passive discount recipients into active couponers. Digital “coupon books” will offer small businesses an engaged, active audience and another way to leverage their existing consumer relationships with hyper-local offers.

Some sites have dabbled in hyper-local deals, but they will come into their own in the near future. Today, a consumer sees a deal across town, but will make the journey to take advantage of the deal. Unfortunately, that customer is not likely to make the trek again to pay full price for the same service. The merchant is the one affected, as they offered a discount service to a one-and-done consumer. However, a consumer who lives five blocks away and received the same deal is more likely to return to that business. Opportunities for startups and small businesses to use hyper-local deals will become more and more prolific, allowing them to connect with customers and turn them into repeat business. We can’t forget about the role of mobile, which will provide a quick and efficient medium for hyper-local deals, allowing merchants to push offers to customers in the vicinity and quickly move time-sensitive inventory.

--

David Galvan is President at Schedulicity. He is an internet industry veteran who previously served as Vice-President of Sales and Business Development at Topix LLC, an online news and community site, where he was responsible for managing all revenue programs for the company and advertising development of new revenue products and local strategy. Prior to joining Topix, Galvan was the Senior Vice President of Business Development and New Media for business and consumer database provider Infogroup Inc., previously InfoUSA. From 2001 to 2005, he served as the Senior Director of Business Development for the Search and Marketplace Group at Yahoo!, working across the Yellow Pages, Local, Search, Real Estate, Classifieds, Pets, Maps, City Guides, Autos, Tickets and Employment verticals. While there, he negotiated and closed complex revenue deals and strategic partnerships, resulting in 20 to 40 percent revenue growth each year. In addition, Galvan has held senior roles at leading technology organizations throughout his career at: AOL/Netscape, Motorola and Unisys. He is a frequent speaker on the Search and Local marketplace scene. A native Californian, Galvan is a graduate of Stanford University.

Posted by startupbeat at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Mobile

Chartboost Raises $2 Million In Series A Funding, Already Profitable (via TechCrunch)

Location-As-A-Service Provider Location Labs Acquires Wirkle And Volly (via TechCrunch)

Appcelerator Acquires Particle Code to Become the Leading Integrated Native Application and HTML5 Mobile Web Platform

Cloud

Kanbox, China’s Dropbox, Raises $20 Million (via TechCrunch)

Advertising/Marketing

In-Image Ad Network GumGum Raises $7 Million From NEA, First Round And GRP (via TechCrunch)

Enterprise

Workday Closes $85 Million in Series F Financing

Web/Content

Posted by startupbeat at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor 

It was a week that saw some big funding announcements in the tech sector, some news about Q3 funding trends that could be positive or negative depending on your perspective, and the continued growth of the cult of Siri (see the Siri song on YouTube). The funding highlight of the week was no doubt Dropbox’s $250 million funding round, just because of its sheer size. The personal cloud storage startup has now raised a total of $257.2 million in outside funding. Also notable was CouponCabin.com’s $54 million round. The coupon site was founded in 2003, and claims to have generated $500 million in online retail sales for merchants in that time.

StartUp Beat this week featured Q&As with web infrastructure platform NGINX, database platform DataStax, advanced language translation site MyGengo, and online identity management service Vizibility.

Seed and Series A funding announcements this past week:

SideTour – $1.5 million

HALL.com – $580K

Treehouse – $600K

Ordr.in – Undisclosed

OwnLocal – Undisclosed

Visual.ly – $2 million

GramercyOne – $14.5 million

TextNow & PingChat – $1 million+

Pose – $3 million

Hadapt – $9.5 million

Posted by startupbeat at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Ecommerce

CouponCabin.com Receives Strategic Growth Investment From JMI Equity

Pose Raises $3 Million in Series A Financing from GRP Partners, True Ventures and Mousse Partners

Blackhawk Network Acquires Cardpool

Enterprise

Hadapt raises $9.5M for Hadoop data warehouse (via gigaom)

Web/Content

Posted by startupbeat at 10:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A Q&A with NGINX co-founder Andrey Alexeev. The company, which offers products based on the open-source platform of the same name, was founded in July of this year.

SUB: Please explain what NGINX is, and the value proposition you bring to market.

Alexeev: NGINX is an advanced web infrastructure platform. NGINX provides the essential set of features required to build modern and highly efficient online services. The software has been a free, open source product since 2004, when it was first launched to the public. NGINX is mostly known as an extremely high performance web server and a reverse proxy. However, it can also be used as a Layer 7 load balancer, caching engine, HTTP streaming server, SSL accelerator, mail proxy and a security gateway for back-end applications. The value NGINX brings is in efficiency, performance, scalability and reliability, as well as optimized costs of development, deployment and operations for either large-scale or smaller web installations.

SUB: How does the technology behind NGINX work?

Alexeev: NGINX was developed in the 2000s, so it followed a different approach in its architecture. It is event-based, asynchronous, non-blocking core architecture and has a number of functional modules that you can enable or disable. NGINX was also created to take lots of connections in a single process versus spawning a separate process or thread for individual connections.

It is also written in the way to enable full performance of the underlying operating system and hardware. It is not trying to outthink the OS like the software that was written before it, which often attempted to resolve some legacy historical limitations of the OS kernels and hardware. Since then, operating systems have evolved dramatically. There are a number of useful mechanisms to employ, such as event notifications and asynchronous disk input/output. NGINX blends perfectly with the modern OS and server hardware to allow the most efficient operations. Last but not least, NGINX’s configuration was carefully designed to be ultimately scalable and clean, which is what many system administrators truly appreciate.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Alexeev: In general, we’re very often an integral part of the entire ecosystem of open source products, enabling the growth and development of the services of the modern Internet. There are products in this market that provide subsets of similar capabilities and have comparable characteristics. We do not really want to engage in discussions about the competition; we reject anything that resembles a “holy war” approach to competing in the marketplace. We’ve always acknowledged the tremendous efforts of the other open source developers who produced amazing products like Apache, HAProxy and Varnish, and we wish these products the success they deserve.

However, NGINX is probably the only platform so far to provide this lean set of features that companies can really use in practice to enhance performance and flexibility. NGINX is capable of improving the performance of a company’s existing hardware tenfold, and it also allows users to get the most out of modern operating systems. NGINX was always meant to be the right tool for the right job, and many people have found it incredibly useful, whether it functions as software-to-the-rescue to solve long-standing performance and scalability issues—primarily at the front-end layer of the setup—or, the next logical step, towards a modern front-end and back-end web infrastructure for online media and entertainment, CDN, hosting, cloud and even enterprise applications.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates NGINX from the competition?

Alexeev: We think it’s primarily the uniquely designed combination of functions that customers may use either in a standalone mode or together for ultra-efficient utilization of hardware and software infrastructure. NGINX is a true lean software product; it has pretty much everything that’s needed for an online service to start and grow dynamically, and all of the NGINX features are implemented with optimal precision and effectiveness. It is also very compact web software, yet is capable of handling continuously increasing workloads without wasting server memory and CPU.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind NGINX? How did the idea develop into what it is today?

Alexeev: Igor Sysoev, who is the original author of NGINX and the main stakeholder in the company, was trying to overcome certain barriers he encountered in his efforts to scale the web infrastructure of a large online Russian media company, Rambler, which he was responsible for. Back then, no web server software was able to crack the so-called C10k problem—the handling of at least 10,000 concurrent connections. So Igor made an attempt to solve both practical and academic problems when he started to write NGINX. Eventually, it turned out to be one of the few successful implementations and the most popular one.

Igor opened NGINX to users in 2004, and many people soon jumped on the idea and started to use NGINX to scale their quickly growing web infrastructures. They were also actively providing the necessary feedback about their experiences with NGINX, reporting bugs, offering suggestions and requesting more functionality. So the help from the user community has been immense so far, and it’s something we really value a lot.

It was the dawn of a new era of ubiquitous social media, mobile applications, permanently connected and demanding users of all ages, and instantaneous communications. In a sense, Igor has implemented what has become a very important enabling mechanism for big and small companies worldwide. Today, NGINX is powering 4 out of 10 of the world’s most valuable startups (see the Business Insider 2011 Top 100 list), including Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial and Dropbox. But it is also being run by 22 percent of the top 1,000 busiest websites, and overall by 43 million websites on the Internet.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Alexeev: The company was founded in July 2011. There were lots of internal discussions and preparations that we took before launching the company. We all had full-time jobs as well, so it really wasn’t easy to step out and follow an entirely different direction in our careers. We then proceeded to talk to VC investors in the U.S., which eventually led to further negotiations and subsequent investment. We picked our VC funds based on their understanding of and interest towards a well-known and famous open source project, and we’re hoping to make it an even bigger success.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building NGINX?

Alexeev: Obviously it’s non-trivial software to develop. There are many technical obstacles with regard to how the NGINX core is architected, what kind of internal and external APIs are supported, how to enhance the functionality and remain a lean, compact software capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections and tens of thousands of requests per second on a single hardware server.

Probably the main obstacles were faced by the third-party developers who’ve been trying to make their own extensions to NGINX. Sadly, it’s mostly because of the lack of developer documentation—Igor just didn’t have enough spare time for working both on the NGINX code and writing developer’s documentation. Fortunately, this is now one of the priorities for the ongoing team work. We also hope to enable more opportunities in the future for third-party developers as they create open source and proprietary extensions to NGINX.

SUB: You recently raised $3 million in Series A funding. How do you plan to use the funds?

Alexeev: Basically, we’re focusing on two main directions. The first one, which is vitally important to us, is to continue to improve the open source product. We’ve been actively improving documentation, adding more features, integrating long-awaited improvements and fixing bugs in the couple of months since we became a company. We’re now hiring more developers and system engineers to help us streamline these processes even more.

So, I’d say we’re focusing intensely on the open source product now. Some of our users have expressed a certain level of concern about what the establishment of NGINX as a commercial entity means for them. We’d like them to know that both the company and the investors clearly understand the subtleties and dangers we face as we try to maintain a balance between making commercial products based on existing open source product and keeping the huge and loyal user community happy. We think that we can achieve a balance that would be really beneficial for both open source and commercial users of NGINX. We’re not going to stop adding exciting new features to NGINX under the 2-clause BSD license.

At the same time, as a commercial entity we’re obviously focusing as well on offering paid products based on NGINX. Based on our conversations with commercial customers, we’ve determined the paid extensions will follow the real-world requests and demands of the businesses that need advanced performance, configuration and security management—for instance, the needs of the companies maintaining thousands of NGINX instances across numerous locations. There will be also features specific to the hosting and cloud service providers, providing them with more flexibility and automation in deploying and controlling their infrastructure, but also allowing more useful services for their clients. In our commercial spin-off we will also be actively establishing partnerships with the other ISVs and hardware vendors, as well as with the services providers in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Alexeev: NGINX is becoming more popular these days, and Igor was already a bit overwhelmed by the increasing user feedback with regard to new features. With the growing popularity of NGINX, it just became too problematic for a single person to fully and effectively maintain the project on his own. So Igor decided to form a company with the other two founders. We like to think we’ve already demonstrated how a commercial entity backing the project is beneficial to the overall progress of NGINX development. NGINX has always been a good and unique product, and we’d like to deliver more.

NGINX – www.nginx.com

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Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Web/Content

Zoove Secures New $5 Million Investment from Rogers Ventures to Deliver StarStar Numbers to Brands and Advertisers

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire BNI Video

Visual.ly Closes Seed Round, Co-led by Crosslink Capital, SoftTech and 500 Startups

Qwilt Raises $24 Million From Accel, Redpoint and Crescent Point for Pioneering Video-Delivery System

Cloud

BlueStacks Closes Strategic Investment Round

GRAMERCYONE CLOSES US$14.5M IN SERIES A FUNDING FROM REVOLUTION VENTURES, GROTECH, TDF AND JUBILEE

Mobile

Posted by startupbeat at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Q&A with DataStax VP of Marketing Michael Weir. The Burlingame, Calif.–based company was founded in 2010.

SUB: Please explain what DataStax is, and the value proposition you offer to the enterprise.

Weir: DataStax is the developer of DataStax Enterprise, a distributed, scalable, and highly available database platform built on Apache Cassandra that delivers optimal performance either on premise or in the cloud for modern enterprise applications that manage both real-time and analytic workloads.

SUB: How does the technology behind DataStax work?

Weir: With DataStax Enterprise, you get everything you need in one subscription to build modern applications that have no limits. Enterprise-class database software, visual management and monitoring solutions, and expert production support.

DataStax Enterprise is unique in that it can serve as the primary database receiving direct input from online applications, while offering analytic, Hadoop MapReduce functionality for analysis on that same data. All of this is accomplished across a smart and scalable architecture, powered by Cassandra, that delivers workload isolation for real time and analytic data operations.

Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable and high-performance distributed database that can serve as both an operational data store—the “system of record”—for online and transactional applications, and as a read-intensive database for business intelligence systems. Cassandra is able to manage the distribution of data across multiple data centers and offers incremental scalability with no single points of failure.

Cassandra is a logical choice for enterprises that need high degrees of uptime, reliability and very fast performance. Leading companies like Netflix, Twitter, Cisco, HP, Motorola, Rackspace, Ooyala, Openwave and many more rely upon Cassandra to manage the data needs of their critical production application.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Weir: We obviously compete with some of the other “NoSQL” offerings, but we really consider ourselves to be in the same market as any enterprise database offering. We aim to be the database of record for a certain class of modern applications that require real-time transactional capabilities and the ability to scale easily to N machines and to the cloud, elastically and with high availability.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates DataStax from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Weir: DataStax offers both free Community and Enterprise editions of our platform, both powered by Cassandra. This enables customers to easily get up and running with the product and actually get into production easily. Both versions offer Smart Start Installers from DataStax to automatically install and configure Cassandra, which guarantees the best possible out-of-the-box performance experience in addition to demo apps, client libraries and a bundled operations and management console called OpsCenter to make it easy to run your clusters.

Additionally, DataStax Enterprise is unique in that it can serve as the primary database receiving direct input from online applications, while offering analytic, Hadoop MapReduce functionality for analysis on that same data. All of this is accomplished across a smart and scalable architecture, powered by Cassandra, that delivers workload isolation for real time and analytic data operations.

DataStax Enterprise solves the pressing problems encountered by today’s modern businesses that are looking for alternatives to legacy RDBMS systems that are not designed to support their growing data management needs.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind DataStax?

Weir: DataStax was envisioned by Jonathan Ellis, now the project chair for Apache Cassandra, while he was working on distributed data systems for Rackspace. He was having such a great time working with the technology that seeing its promise, he decided to leave to start his own company to commercialize the project. Matt Pfeil, also a Rackspace employee, drove to San Antonio from Austin to talk him out of it. That trip did not turn out as he expected and they both ended up starting Riptano, now DataStax, together with a seed investment from Rackspace.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Weir: The company was officially founded April of 2010 in Austin, TX and the first thing we did was hire the best engineers we could find, including most of the heaviest committers to the open source Cassandra project. Even today, DataStax employees account for about 95 percent of the code committed to the project. After that we began to work on building the community and developer resources, including the only Cassandra documentation ever written (it’s hosted at: http://www.datastax.com/dev).

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building DataStax?

Weir: There have not really been any obstacles other than just applying plain old fashioned elbow grease. It is a little hard to find engineers that are up to our exacting standards, but we value skills over location and now have a pretty amazing, distributed engineering staff. They are located from the Bay Area to Austin, New York City, Tokyo, France, and Belarus.

SUB: You recently raised $11 million in Series B funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Weir: Pretty simple. Make the product better and make sure more people know about it and want it.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Weir: We found it to be a good time. For all of the hyperbole associated with the ‘big data’ space, there are some cool companies out there solving real enterprise problems and we are one of them. The investment dollars are going where they are needed.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Weir: We are too busy executing right now and taking care of over 100 customers to think about another round of funding.

SUB: What big goals do you have for DataStax over the next year or so?

Weir: Really help the world understand the advantages of deploying these types of databases for their complex, growing modern applications and continuing to build the best product on top of the best, massively scalable, distributed database—Apache Cassandra.

DataStax – www.datastax.com

Posted by startupbeat at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Web/Content

OwnLocal nabs new funding from Automattic to resurrect newspaper revenues (via VentureBeat)

Social Media

New Social Games Company Crowdpark Secures US$8M in Funding From Target Partners & Earlybird

Advertising/Marketing

TagMan Receives $5 Million in Series B Funding

Posted by startupbeat at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Q&A with myGengo co-founder and CEO Robert Laing. The company was founded in 2009 and recently raised $5.25 million in Series A funding.

SUB: Please explain what myGengo is, and the value proposition you bring to the translation market.

Laing: The world wants to communicate, but translation is hard, expensive and time-consuming. To solve this, myGengo has created a huge translator pool that is accessible either through a web order form or API, allowing you to “go global” in a few clicks. Our customers range from individuals who want to send an email in Chinese, up to large ecommerce and travel sites who translate thousands of pages into German or French via our API.

myGengo offers seamless global communication, rather than being part of the old fashioned translation market—in the same way that Skype is in the communication market, not the traditional ‘phone’ market. Eventually people will forget the translation, and just enjoy communicating.

SUB: How does the technology behind myGengo work?

Laing: Our API lets you ‘plug in’ to the translator pool and order translation from any website or application. We have plugins and libraries for all major code frameworks, so it’s simple to start building on myGengo.

On the back-end, our core technology enables us to test and qualify translators, and then allocate jobs efficiently without involving human managers. We have automated and human systems for quality control that ensure we do a great job every time.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Laing: Our API, huge translator pool and unique price point puts us in a different space. There are companies like Smartling who are doing very cool things with translation, and Duolingo, which has some interesting technology that we’re following. But we’re focused on delivering high quality and affordable human translation that scales, with an emphasis on quality that comes from working with the best translators out there and implementing a system of checks and balances that ensures our quality standard.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates myGengo from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Laing: Firstly, a focus on quality at scale. We’re the only company that tests every single translator that works through our system, so that customers know they’ll get consistent quality every time. Secondly, a true platform approach, where our API is a reliable piece of infrastructure that developers can access from any website or app. This truly allows you to scale.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind myGengo?

Laing: I ran a web agency in Japan, and always needed simple texts translated, which was way more complex than it should have been. As a bilingual Japanese person, Matt, our CTO, was always being asked for ‘favors’ to do translation. We thought there must be a better way, a simple way to get your text into another language without any hassle.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Laing: We launched a beta before any company was founded, to test the idea. Then we formed our Japanese company a few months afterwards in June 2009. We incorporated in the U.S. in February 2010. This approach is in line with our philosophy of testing things out and gradually improving—kaizen!

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building myGengo?

Laing: Our Tokyo location has been simultaneously fantastic and difficult. Fantastic because there is simply no better place to understand the problems of translation. Difficult because it’s not an established startup environment, and raising money is tougher than in the U.S. Other obstacles have been the same that all startups experience, but the same things that give a great feeling of satisfaction when you’ve achieved them.

SUB: You recently raised $5.25 million in Series A funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Laing: This funding is a key part of propelling myGengo to our vision—seamless global communication across languages. Of course we are hiring and investing in marketing to reach new customers, but the biggest areas of focus are in strengthening our translator pool and reaching out to developers—these are two communities that are vital to myGengo.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Laing: myGengo is experiencing very strong growth, which is the best time to raise money. We have customers looking out for new features, bigger capacity, and new tools, so we really needed resources to grow. The atmosphere in the company has been that we’re “ready for the next stage,” so we felt it was the right time to raise.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Laing: We’re concentrating on building the business.

SUB: What big goals do you have for myGengo over the next year or so?

Laing: Our intentions are always to build a strong, profitable company that has great growth. So our goals for the year are to keep creating things that customers really need, to invest in our translators, and to have fun.

myGengo – www.mygengo.com

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Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup from across the web:

Cloud

Dropbox closes a jaw-dropping $250M round (via VentureBeat)

Social Media

Waze Zooms Past 7 Million Drivers, Brings in New Growth Funding From Horizons Ventures & KPCB

Web/Content

Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt Back BillGuard in $10M Series B Financing

Ordr.in Raises Seed Funding From Google Ventures For Its Food API (via TechCrunch)

Enterprise

Oracle Buys Endeca

Posted by startupbeat at 10:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A Q&A with Vizibility founder and CEO James Alexander. The New York City–based company was founded in 2009.

SUB: Please explain what Vizibility is, and the value proposition you offer to individuals and companies.

Alexander: Individuals and companies only get one chance to make a killer first impression, and Vizibility SearchMe Buttons, links and QR codes allow them to make it happen by providing a way to curate and share online identities. With Vizibility, users can create and manage personalized Google search results, professional profiles and contact information. SearchMe Buttons and links are primarily used online to direct viewers to user-controlled information. QR codes are typically used on printed items such as business cards, resumes, presentations or marketing material to direct viewers to online business cards or microsites via mobile device or smartphone scans.

A new Vizibility feature, CommonConnections, integrates personal QR codes with LinkedIn and Facebook. This allows users to embed their social graphs into their Vizibility QR codes and use social networks as real-time, instant reputation-building tools.

Vizibility is a powerful tool for professionals like lawyers, accountants and managers. It’s a great tool for job seekers, the vast majority of whom will be subject to online searches by potential employers or recruiters. It’s also useful in managing online identities for searches related to potential dates, business partners, employees and anyone who receives media attention. People with common names or who share a name with someone else should use Vizibility. Basically, everyone who wants to manage their online identity should give it a try.

SUB: How does the technology behind Vizibility work?

Alexander: We’ve vastly simplified the complexity around advanced Google searches. Fewer than 5 percent of users access Google’s advanced search feature because it’s complex. We developed an algorithm and an easy-to-use wizard that allows users to quickly create an advanced, personalized search for themselves, put results in the right order and get alerts when they’re Googled or when their business card is scanned.

Our latest innovation is the social network connection pre-authorization (patent pending) that powers CommonConnections, which allows users to embed their social graphs into their smartphone-scannable personal Vizibility QR codes and use Facebook and LinkedIn as real-time networking tools.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Alexander: No other company is producing free SearchMe buttons, links or QR codes that deliver one-click results like we are. It’s possible for users to cobble together tools to manage online identities, but no one offers updates and easy management features like Vizibility does. No one else offers a portal that enables firms to easily manage many online professional identities.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates Vizibility from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Alexander: One thing that makes us unique is our partnership strategy, which turns potential rivals into partners. In simple terms, our goal is to become the online brand management “dial tone”—a utility that individuals, companies and partners use to manage online identities or help their customers manage online identities. We’ve partnered with numerous brand management companies to serve in this role. 

We provide a way for individuals and companies to manage mobile identities through scannable QR codes and online identities through links and buttons. We also provide notifications and metrics that allow users to collect data and act on the results.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind Vizibility?

Alexander: The inspiration for Vizibility hit when I couldn’t find myself in Google. I’m a guy with two first names. The search results brought up many irrelevant links, and the relevant links were buried several pages deep. I thought there had to be a better way to control search results. What I wanted was a ‘Google me’ button—a one click link to just my online identity. That’s what we have built.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Alexander: The company was founded in mid-2009. The first steps were to validate the problem and our solution through discussions and customer interviews. We started building the product prototype in late 2009 and launched the service in beta in early 2010.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building Vizibility?

Alexander: Given the timeframe of our founding—which occurred right after the financial markets nearly collapsed—funding has been the most significant obstacle. And we’re not alone. But because we offer a truly novel and necessary technology, we’ve been able to generate interest and seed money despite the challenging economic conditions. 

SUB: You recently raised $1.3 million in seed funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Alexander: Our plan is to use the seed funding primarily on marketing and sales. We’re growing fast and want to increase our momentum. We also plan to use the money to develop and enhance our products.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Alexander: Actually, it’s still a challenging time to raise capital because of economic conditions. But we were successful for a couple of reasons. First, the latest round was a follow-on round, so we had previous investors serving as champions. Second, we had made incredible progress executing against our business plan so we had an attractive story to tell.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Alexander: No. With two successful funding rounds, we think we have what we need to meet the company’s financial requirements into mid-2012.

SUB: What big goals do you have for Vizibility over the next year or so?

Alexander: I can sum it up in two words: generate revenue. We have the proof of concept. We have resources for sales and marketing. Our primary focus now is on building a strong base of satisfied customers and growing revenue.

Vizibility – www.vizibility.com

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Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Ecommerce

From Graffiti Lessons To Olympic Luging: SideTour Raises $1.5 Million (via TechCrunch)

Wahanda Secures $5.5 Million From Fidelity Growth Partners Europe (via TechCrunch)

Advertising/Marketing

Clickable Completes $12 Million Series C Funding

Web/Content

HALL.com Raises $580K From Founder’s Collective And Others To Transform Realtime Collaboration (via TechCrunch)

Web Design Community Treehouse Raises $600K From Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose, And Others (via TechCrunch)

Grockit Raises $7 Million to Drive Social Learning

Posted by startupbeat at 11:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor 

It was another week of compelling tech startup news that ends with long lines at Apple Stores for the iPhone 4S debut and with Microsoft closing its purchase of Skype. There were also rumblings on various technology blogs and news sites that venture funds that focus on early-stage startups are struggling to raise funds. But the Seed and Series A funding announcements continued to flow—here’s the roundup:

Wave Accounting – $5 million

MovableInk – $1.3 million

DuckDuckGo – Unspecified

Crashlytics – $1 million

Udemy – $3 million

LocalResponse – $5 million

Stickery – $500K

Kiwi Create – $2 million

NGINX – $3 million

Spree – $1.5 million

StartUp Beat this week featured Q&As with mobile polling app Floop, Wi-Fi cloud-based video monitoring service Dropcam, and ride-sharing service Zimride, along with a Featured Startup Pitch 0from new car shopping site Web2Carz.

Posted by startupbeat at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Marketing/Advertising

Marketing Startup Flowtown Gets Swooped Up By Demandforce (via TechCrunch)

Enterprise/Software

Posted by startupbeat at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Floop offers a real-time polling app for mobile devices. The Woodbridge, Connecticut–based company just announced its official launch.

SUB: Please explain what Floop is, and the value proposition you offer to voters and political candidates, and even those just casually interested in politics. 

Schultz: Floop is an app for seeing and sharing opinions on a wide variety of community-contributed topics. It is entirely real-time and can be used both during live events and to measure sentiment on an ongoing topic or question over time. In terms of politics, questions like “what do you think of Obama” provide a long-term view of general sentiment, as well as specific comments from users across America. 

Additionally, the use of Floop as a real-time feedback mechanism during, say, a live debate allows both the audience and the constituent to provide and view feedback live, so sentiment on specific issues or comments can be seen and responses can be made. 

SUB: How does the technology behind Floop work?

Schultz: Our team has a serious background in data, large data and complex analytics. We’re always refining, though we feel the app itself is quite powerful as a tool to provide real-time visualization of opinions, built on top of a mobile platform for connecting with friends, communities, and like-minded people.  

From the business side, Floop’s powerful analytic platform is designed to help us discover and observe interesting patterns and trends in the data users are providing us in their profiles and responses. With this, we are building a next-generation market research style business model.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competitors? What do you offer that differentiates Floop from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Schultz: There are social Q&A platforms, like Quora and Formspring, which have launched mobile versions. There are also a bunch of polling apps like Localmind, GoPollGo, and then a bunch of survey website tools. On a broader level, people are already asking each other on the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ for opinions.

Here’s how we’re different: Floop is the only social polling mobile app with the unique real-time voting and opinion graphing tool, which instantly shows a visual real-time measurement of how people are thinking or how opinion is shifting. Most social Q&A apps just have the group discussion thread and some have ways to calculate responses. As for polling apps, usually that’s multiple-choice and website-based, whereas in Floop you can gauge overall opinion, plus how that shifts over time and the degrees of commitment to that opinion because of the line-graph. 

Additionally, there’s so much information out there and little time. To help users cut down the noise, every conversation in Floop is organized around a question or topic, producing the three perspectives described earlier—voting and overall opinion graph, group message feed, image feed. We feel this will help users find more quickly and stay engaged on the topic of interests. Of course, filters give users the power to see just topics of interest, and they can easily unfollow a question or topic when it’s no longer that relevant to them. Users now have the power to do three things just with their phone: 1) measure and aggregate opinion; 2) put the overall opinions into context via discussion and 3) allow users to engage, influence and connect more deeply on a specific topic or question they feel is important through discussion or image-sharing. A picture can change feelings quickly.

We’ve thought about this a lot. On a much broader level, people wanting to ask their social graph what they’re thinking and express an opinion on a topic tend to use something like Twitter or Facebook, now Google+. We see Floop as a complement to these platforms, and right now, we feel having a specific discussion on the go—or when location truly matters, say at an event, is where we’re showing real value. So you might be polling your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ already, but we just make it easier.

As a mobile app, the big difference for us is unlike the bigger platforms, users can use filters to just see the topics and people they’re interested in, or apply the filters to see what’s coming in within the eight-mile radius with the “Nearby filter”—all at their fingertips. You don’t have to run back to a computer when you want to know something. You can do it in front of your TV, in the stadium, as part of the audience at a town hall or rally, literally anywhere you are with your iPhone.

Our next move is certainly to integrate more smoothly to push and connect with friends and followers on the major platforms. That will be key for us.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind Floop?

Schultz: We designed Floop after watching a Presidential debate in 2008 where a sentiment graph—40 constituents in a room—was shown over the candidates speaking. I found it interesting and entertaining, but I also felt that I wanted to participate—not just be a spectator. It’s this feeling of empowerment that we hope to bring to the marketplace. We feel strongly that people should feel free to ask what they like and be able to get a true reaction from the group, whenever they need to know something. And Floop fulfills that need.

SUB: What have the first steps been that you’ve taken to establishing the company?

Schultz: We spent the first 18 months focusing on strong product design and R&D. We have gone through a beta process, refined our user interface, and are now focused on the feedback from our early users. Of course, we completed a small round of seed funding to just launch the first version. Now, we’re onto the second version to be released in mid-October, and we’re currently doing additional fundraising. We also embarked on marketing, though a bit sooner than we thought we’d have to, but so far, we’ve gotten a decent response from users, investors and the media, thus far. We’ve had some preliminary but encouraging talks in Hollywood and with New York City media, and demoed the app at conferences to test out some applications. All encouraging feedback. We’re on our way.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building Floop?

Schultz: Because of the millions of social apps launching, we see our immediate challenge as the ones common to other new start-ups: adoption, rising above the fray of me-too apps that aren’t doing anything differently, and of course, things like community development, and natural integration with major platforms. 

Fortunately, although we’d planned a very quiet launch in the App Store in September, Apple liked us so much that they featured us as “New and Noteworthy” and then as “Hot,” which brought us nearly 10,000 users within the first four weeks, about 400 registrations a day and nearly 1,000 downloads daily. We’re now implementing the feedback from our users into the next version to be released in mid-to-late October.

Our challenge now is to keep up that momentum with an earlier-than-planned marketing and PR push. We’d like to educate users, organizations and potential strategic partners how Floop can be used and the best applications for it.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to launch?

Schultz: We see tremendous opportunities for Election 2012, media and news organizations, Hollywood and TV networks, sporting organizations and business enterprises, and professional or social conferences, which are all moving toward being more social and getting more information from the crowd. We hope to help them parse through that down the line. It’s still very early, but it’s a great time to get out there and now that there’s openness to using new social tools.

Aside from political debates, conferences, polls to integrate to TV programming or organized events, there are some fun applications for Floop too.

One that’s come up in our talks is how Floop is right for the holiday shopping season. It’s not a very serious use case of Floop, but someone shopping for a new pair of boots, for instance, could easily take a couple pictures of different boots and ask their network if he or she should buy the first or second, and ask in the group message what people suggest. It’s fun, fast and a totally natural kind of social poll anyone might do. A reporter mentioned this to a member of our team.

In the long-run, regardless of how people use Floop as a company and data analytics veterans, we ultimately see an opportunity to create a next-generation market research business. The technologies and user adoption now exists in way that it never has before to enable this shift.

SUB: Do you plan to raise outside funding in the near future?

Schultz: Yes we are currently raising the second tranche of our seed round.

SUB: What big goals do you have for Floop over the next year or so?

Schultz: Directionally, we are working to use data to gain insights into preferences, expectations and group dynamics. We are working to turn that into capabilities to understand what the community will be interested in, and offering it to them.

Also, the use of Floop at live events this Election 2012 season, the TV premiere seasons and sporting or entertainment events may all open up what is normally a one-way broadcast—like watching TV, listening to a conference or concert—into a two-way shared conversation where feedback from Floop could even get used in determining the direction or outcome of events.  

In addition, we look to form partnerships in those areas to utilize Floop leading technology in a setting that can provide the context for the feedback.

Again, immediate integration into the major social platforms will be key, and we’re working on that as priority. We want to show the Floop team is keeping up with changes in social technology. Floop wants to be right where all the people are so we can continue to fulfill our promise to put polling in the hands of the people.

Floop – www.floop.com

Posted by startupbeat at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Cloud

Backed By $10M In Funding, Lemon.com Lets You Store, Organize Your Receipts In The Cloud (via TechCrunch)

TwinStrata Raises $8 Million in Series B Funding

Marketing/Advertising

Movable Ink raises $1.3 million for real-time email marketing (via gigaom)

Social Media

Ushi, China’s Answer To LinkedIn, Raises $3 Million From GLG, Others (via TechCrunch)

Web/Content

Union Square Ventures, Others Invest In Alternative Search Engine DuckDuckGo (via TechCrunch)

Knewton Secures $33 Million to Expand the Personalization of Education

Mobile

Posted by startupbeat at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dropcam offers a cloud-based Wi-Fi based video monitoring service that integrates with almost any device. The San Francisco–based company was founded in 2009 and recently closed a $5.8 million Series A funding round.

SUB: Please explain what Dropcam is, and the value proposition you offer.

Duffy: Dropcam is the maker of Wi-Fi video cameras and intelligent cloud-based video services that capture life’s moments. We make it easy for users to check in on the things they care about from anywhere, anytime on any device, including computers, smartphones and tablets.

Dropcam’s Wi-Fi video cameras are easy to set up and the Dropcam DVR service seamlessly integrates into your life: iPhone, laptop, tablet, you name it. Our service allows users to keep a watchful eye on what they care about—which could be different for everyone whether they are keeping an eye on the living room, a new baby, pets, garage, second home, etc.

The Dropcam DVR service also handles motion detection, audio detection, and related email and mobile alerts.

SUB: How does the technology behind Dropcam work?

Duffy: Dropcam is a cloud-based video platform that allows users to have 24/7 video of anything they care about, receive alerts about events and store up to 30 days of video all through Dropcam’s cloud based infrastructure. This means users do not need to worry about having any sort of local storage that users have to manage themselves and that could fill up.

Your Dropcam video is encrypted before it leaves the camera. Dropcam uses the same data encryption methods as banks—so you know that it’s safe and secure.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Duffy: Companies like Panasonic and Logitech offer home video monitoring solutions.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates Dropcam from your competitors?

Duffy: Easiest platform for cloud video monitoring: the video from your Dropcam camera is stored in the cloud—which means easy access from anywhere and no worry about losing video or filling up space on your hard drive. And you never have to worry about your footage being lost or stolen.
Live, 24/7 continuous streaming and recording: because Dropcam’s cameras are AC powered you don’t have to worry about batteries dying and missing any important video. The camera is always on and always streaming and recording up to 30 days of minute-to-minute video—based on the DVR plan you have. When a camera is battery-powered it’s limited to recording only short clips—usually only about 5 minutes per day.

Secure sharing of video feeds: your video is encrypted to ensure your privacy, only those invited to view are able to. Many competitors do not offer this level of security.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind Dropcam?

Duffy: After seeing my dad get frustrated while setting up IP cameras around his home, I thought, ‘there has to be an easier way to do this.’ Since it seemed like lots of people would want to keep an eye on things while they were away, I was surprised to find that there was not—you had to be a tech wizard with a lot of spare time to get anything to work. So I quickly began developing a more consumer-friendly and approachable method for remote video monitoring with Aamir Virani, a skilled software engineer I had worked with at Xobni. The goal was to create something simple, affordable and user friendly, while not compromising video quality. Very early on, we pivoted as a company about three times helping us figure out exactly what our customers wanted. What we offer today is the product of the knowledge gained in this process. For instance, our cloud DVR service was the result of a pivot from live-only monitoring. Now, the DVR is really where our product benefits users the most, and we are continually improving it.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Duffy: Dropcam was founded in 2009. The first step in establishing Dropcam was to find the ideal founding partner. While working at Xobni, I met Aamir and found the perfect fit for Dropcam’s co-founder and COO. This was the first major step in establishing Dropcam.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building Dropcam?

Duffy: We have been confident in how we have gone about building and developing Dropcam. If we could do it again, we would build the product and hire people first. Building up the team as soon as possible is key as a startup. All the people we want to work with are here now, but we wish we pushed for them earlier. Lesson learned: as you find good people, bring them in as fast and early as possible.

SUB: You just raised $5.8 million in Series A funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Duffy: This funding round will be used to build on Dropcam’s current cloud-based video platform and expand its software engineering team in San Francisco.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Duffy: We found it interesting to be a hardware and service startup (DaaS/SaaS) raising money in Silicon Valley where for the past several years the buzz is about social software. Our funding was led by Accel Partners, which is best known for its recent investments in social companies like Groupon and Facebook. The Angels who backed us often invest in software, but they took a bet on Dropcam, so they saw something that had promise.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Duffy: Our focus now is on making Dropcam even better for our present and future customers and hiring software engineers who love coding and want to make something people use daily. Our Series A round provides an ample runway for us.

SUB: Where do you hope to see Dropcam in a year from now?

Duffy: We hope to continue providing the highest quality, easiest to use Wi-Fi video camera on the market to our users. This has been our mission from day one and we will continue to adapt and develop our offering to continue to meet and exceed this objective.

Dropcam – www.dropcam.com

Posted by startupbeat at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Web/Content

Care.com Raises $25 Million (via TechCrunch)

Advertising/Marketing

LocalResponse raises $5 million for check-in based ads (via gigaom)

Mobile/Gaming

Stickery Gets Seed Round From Google Ventures, 500 Startups, Others

Enterprise

Box.net closes extension round worth $81M (via VentureBeat)

Posted by startupbeat at 09:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Web2Carz

Website: www.web2carz.com

Founders: Ben Wallach and Alex Bravy

Headquarters: Highland Park, Illinois

Year Founded: 2006

Twitter: @web2carz

Brief Company Description: Web2Carz is a car shopping website featuring several million used and new vehicles, a robust research section, and unique editorial content.

By Ben Wallach, co-founder

Web2Carz is a car shopping website. There are several million used and new vehicles for sale listed on the site, a robust research section, and unique editorial content on all subjects automotive. Around 20,000 unique users a day come to the site to browse vehicles, do research or read articles.

Alex Bravy and I founded the company during the summer of 2006. We both had successful careers at other Internet companies including Orbitz.com, Monster.com and Cars.com. We decided to join forces and utilize our strong technology backgrounds and auto industry knowledge to build Web2Carz. Web2Carz started attracting a fair share of the car shopping public fairly quickly and today is listed on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the country.

The advancement and availability of open source software are a big reason for our success. What we are doing today was unheard of 10-to-15 years ago. We would have had to spend a small fortune and hire a much larger team with much overhead. Today we can build world-class, highly scalable technology on open platforms. We have significant automation in place which keeps us small and nimble. This has been absolutely crucial for us as a startup. Being versatile and having low overhead also enabled us to survive during uncertain times. The auto industry and economy as a whole took a big hit in 2008. It took a lot of hard work and strategy to survive as a start-up during that time.

So what makes us different from some of the competition? Well, for starters, our goal has always been to create a simple online car shopping experience. The focus has been on simplicity, value, and informative content. We get a lot of positive feedback from our customer base on how easy our site is to navigate and use, and how clean and simple it is without too many bells and whistles. Our daily articles are increasingly attracting more and more eye balls and gaining popularity as they help consumers become more knowledgeable and informed. In that respect we have moved away from the traditional car search engine model and have become a destination site that consumers can frequent regularly.

The Web2Carz revenue model is advertising and marketing driven. However, unlike some of the competition out there that relies on direct subscription relationships with dealerships, we took a different approach. While we still cater to dealers, sellers, lenders, and vendors indirectly, our focus has been consumer-driven with an emphasis on good user experience. So at a high level, we are a customer acquisition platform, but the customer always comes first.

Looking ahead, Web2Carz is currently growing its writing and content team. We have had really exciting success and increased interest in our editorial content, so we will continue to grow the team and expand the subject coverage. People like to read our articles and we want to continue to provide interesting and informative content in that regard. An example of this would be our articles on ‘green’ cars. A lot of the public just does not understand the current state of hybrid and electric cars. We try and provide facts and information on the models out there.

Web2Carz is currently seeking to fill the following open positions: Managing Editor, Senior Writer, and Web/Graphic Designer.

Web2Carz – www.web2carz.com

Posted by startupbeat at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Social Media

Digital media company raises $15M to monetize social photography on a mass scale (via VentureBeat)

Google acquires social analytics startup SocialGrapple (via VentureBeat)

Web/Content

Subscription Service For Kids Activities Kiwi Crate Raises $2 Million (via TechCrunch)

Online Video Ad Network DBG Acquires Digital Sports Ventures (via TechCrunch)

Enterprise

Posted by startupbeat at 08:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Zimride is a social ride sharing service. The –based company was founded in 2007 and recently raised $6 million in Series A funding.

SUB: Please describe Zimride, and the value proposition you offer to your customers.

Zimmer: Zimride is the largest online social ride sharing service in the U.S, and we’re transforming the transportation infrastructure by integrating social networks and ride sharing. We embrace ridesharing as a social activity, and the service integrates with Facebook to make it fun and easy for users to share the seats in their car or find a ride.

Zimride currently has ridesharing communities on over 120 university and corporate campuses across 30 states in the U.S.—in fact, 35 percent of Facebook employees use us! And we’ve recently rolled out an SF/LA route that's picking up steam. We’ve even partnered with artists Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews Band and Sheryl Crow to provide ridesharing to their events.

Since launching in 2007, Zimride has facilitated more than 26,000 carpools, helped users travel over 100 million miles and created over $50 million worth of savings in vehicle operating expenses.

SUB: How does the service work, from the user’s perspective?

Zimmer: Zimride connects drivers and passengers online. Participants create profiles that show their favorite in-car music, radio stations and even smoking preferences; then if you have seats available in your car, post your ride on the site with your price for the seats available. It’s easy to find passengers and coordinate your trip, check out profiles and read reviews to determine who your next passengers will be. If you need a ride, find the route you want and check profiles and reviews to learn more about your driver. 

Because Zimride users connect via Facebook, it adds a layer of trust to the system and gives drivers and passengers a better idea of who they are sharing rides with. So, before a rider accepts a seat in a car or a driver accepts a passenger, he or she can view the person’s profile information to ensure he or she is comfortable with the match. And drivers and passengers are encouraged to communicate with each other before the ride.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Zimmer: No one has the same approach as Zimride with Organization Networks including UCLA, Stanford, Harvard, Intuit, Facebook and JetBlue—along with a consumer strategy. Other companies in a similar space include GoLoco, PickupPal, Zebigo, and Avego. 

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates Zimride from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Zimmer: Our combination of social and accessibility is really key to our success. Zimride users connect via Facebook, adding a layer of transparency to the system. Users can view profiles of potential rideshares before accepting, which removes the anonymity that accompanies other forms of rideshare connections, allowing users to feel secure about their rideshare partners. On Zimride, participants create profiles that show their preferences to ensure an enjoyable ride.

And Zimride isn’t just about changing transportation to be more efficient and cost-effective, but it’s really about the relationships our users build—we want to create a community around transportation. In fact, Zimride users cite cost savings as their initial reason to try the service, but say they come back for subsequent trips for the relationships they make.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind Zimride? Was there an “aha” moment, or was the idea longer in developing?

Zimmer: CEO and founder Logan Green was inspired by what he saw on a 2005 trip to Zimbabwe—a grassroots public transportation system—and so he derived the firm’s name from that country. The name also made sense when he met me through Facebook, where the service started as an application.

Logan has a background in transportation and web development, and he created the first car-share program at UC Santa Barbara and served on the board of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District. I’m passionate about community driven solutions to environmental problems. I actually left Lehman Brothers in early 2008, where I spent two years after graduating from Cornell University’s hotel school. I moved from New York City to Palo Alto in July of 2008 by using Zimride to carpool across America.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Zimmer: We initially launched as an application on Facebook in 2007, and we were one of the first companies to do this. In fact, we received $250,000 in seed money from a Facebook (fbFund) grant the same year.

In order to build the critical mass we knew would be imperative to a successful ride-sharing service we began by initially only allowing users from verified social networks such as colleges, universities and companies to use the platform. This gave us a consistent, large, dependable user base. Then in August this year, we opened our first public route, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The route was so successful that we’ve now included the reverse route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. And more public routes are coming!

SUB: You recently raised $6 million in Series A funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Zimmer: We plan to use this new round of funding to significantly scale our 120 current networks, build out new markets (municipalities) and routes, and expand product functionality (mobile, transactions etc.).

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Zimmer: We have made serious milestones from a revenue and adoptions stand point.

SUB: What big goals do you have for Zimride over the next year or so?

Zimmer: We maintain our vision of creating a new form of transportation where everyone, everywhere will be able to say, “I can fly, take the bus or Zimride.” We first launched as a native Facebook app and started the SaaS business to build up networks, and we eventually grew to break even with 100 networks in July this year. 

So over the next year, Zimride plans to grow into a known brand and service for students, employees and the general consumer. We plan to reach more than 300 networks and double the size of the company.

Zimride – www.zimride.com

Posted by startupbeat at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ecommerce

Spree Raises $1.5 Million From Github, Heroku Co-founders For Open Source eCommerce Platform (via TechCrunch)

Social Media

Friend.ly to be Acquired by Facebook (Not the Dining Chain)

Mobile

Keynote to Acquire DeviceAnywhere, a Leader in Mobile Testing and Quality Assurance

Cloud

Six Degrees Group Raises GBP 60m to Bring Cloud Services to British Business

Posted by startupbeat at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor

It was a week where all other tech news was overshadowed by the passing of one of the pioneers of technology and a true Silicon Valley legend. RIP Steve Jobs.

Seed and Series A funding this week:

mobeam – $4.9 million

Cloudbot – Undisclosed

Keek – $5.5 million

ReportGrid – $750K

GetApp.com – $1.1 million

Enterproid – $11 million

HiGear – $1.3 million

Posted by startupbeat at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Web/Content

HiGear raises $1.3M for luxury peer-to-peer car sharing (via gigaom)

Finance/Investment

LivingSocial Issues $143 Million In Stock For Recent Acquisitions (via TechCrunch)

Enterprise

Palantir Technologies Raises $70 Million At $2.5 Billion Valuation (via TechCrunch)

Posted by startupbeat at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

HomeSav is a members-only home furnishings ecommerce site. The Toronto–based company was founded in 2010 and recently raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

SUB: Please explain what HomeSav is, and the value proposition you offer to homeowners and consumers.

Norman: HomeSav.com is inspired living. HomeSav’s experienced buyers, interior designers and experts make it easier for homeowners and consumers to make their home spectacular at an affordable price. We find inspirational luxurious home products and negotiate great prices for our members. Our members save time and money by buying from us as they know all products have been carefully selected, we ship to their home and we do it at incredible prices.

SUB: How does the technology behind HomeSav work?

Norman: HomeSav’s technology is based on a unique shopping cart and ecommerce site that has tailored processing to quickly upload our sales events and an algorithm that figures out the optimal way to send products to our members.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Norman: One Kings Lane, Fab, Gilt Home.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates HomeSav from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Norman: We focus on inspired living and are focused on providing all the products and information HomeSav.com members need to furnish and enjoy their house. In addition, we ship to almost all addresses in Canada and the United States.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind HomeSav?

Norman: All three HomeSav.com founders purchased their first home at about the same time. We all had time consuming jobs and found it impossible to find the time and information that we needed to furnish our home and figured there had to be a better way to do it. When we couldn’t find it we created it.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Norman: We decided to work together and started researching the industry. We had complementary skills and made a great team, so we quickly hit the pavement looking for suppliers and figuring out what processes we needed to create to make the products available to members.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building HomeSav?

Norman: Educating potential members about HomeSav.com’s value proposition. Building the required technology. 

SUB: You recently raised $1.2 million in seed funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Norman: Expand the breadth of our team and increase awareness of HomeSav via marketing.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Norman: HomeSav.com is experiencing rapid growth and could clearly demonstrate how additional funds would let us accelerate growth and reduce risks.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Norman: Most likely we will.

SUB: What big goals do you have for HomeSav over the next year or so?

Norman: Make HomeSav.com the only place members have to go for any home-related problems. We will be launching new programs like our Inspired Picks program (experts pick inspiring programs), better user interface and more insightful articles on our blog LivSavvy.com.

HomeSav – www.homesav.com

Posted by startupbeat at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Cloud

GetApp.com the Business Applications Marketplace Secures $1.1M of Funding From Nauta Capital

Mobile

Enterprise Mobile Computing Platform Enterproid Raises $11M From Google Ventures, Comcast And Qualcomm (via TechCrunch)

Gaming/Social Media

Posted by startupbeat at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Endomondo offers a social mobile sports and exercise app that integrates fitness tracking and social networking. The Copenhagen–based company was founded in 2007 and recently raised $2.3 million in new funding.

SUB: Please explain what Endomondo is, and the value proposition you offer to consumers.

Lykke: Endomondo is a fitness community that is based on tracking of sports with a mobile phone. In combination, the mobile app and the website makes fitness more fun and motivates more people to become fit.

SUB: How does the technology behind Endomondo work?

Lykke: You bring your mobile when running, walking, biking or doing any other distance-based sport. Open our app and press Start. We will then track everything in real-time, e.g., distance, duration, average speed, calories etc. You can also see the route while exercising and easily find your way back if you get lost. While out there, a voice will give you audio updates on your performance and tell you how fast you’ve covered the latest mile or kilometer, for example.

With the social features, friends can follow you live and send you pep talks while you’re out. They simply type in a short message which is then read aloud to you a few seconds later as a pep talk—or trash talk. Other social features include ability to race against a friend’s best time on a given distance or you can try to beat the local route champion on a specific route.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Lykke: It’s a competitive space and there are a number of other tracking apps but none of them have our focus on how the social element makes sports more fun.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates Endomondo from your competitors or from companies with similar offerings?

Lykke: Endomondo is the only app that works with any smart phone. For example others only work on iPhone or Android devices. Also Endomondo is the only site offering the social features as mentioned above.

SUB: Does the service integrate with Facebook and other social networks?

Lykke: Yes Endomondo integrates with Twitter and Facebook so you can choose to automatically post to either.

SUB: What is Endomondo’s business model? Do you run ads or is there a charge for the app/service?

Lykke: Endomondo does have a PRO version available for purchase, which is one way that we make money along with gear that you can buy on the Endomondo site.  The main business model is corporate challenges that can be branded for the corporation or organization and white labeled. Endomondo sets up a social site for the company or organization. One example is Kimberly Clark in Wisconsin that did a Bike to Work event. The Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin and Kimberly Clark teamed up to offer a free biking campaign to help get people involved in a more healthy and active lifestyle.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind Endomondo?

Lykke: A vision of making fitness more fun and thereby motivate more people to become fit. The founders are all passionate about sports and they got together one day and talked about they wished there was something that they could use to track their activity but also to include their friends in the fun, this spawned the idea for Endomondo.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Lykke: Founded in November 2007. The first alpha version of the website was released in August/September 2008. We just reached the 5 million downloads milestone.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building Endomondo?

Lykke: No specific obstacles, but it has taken longer than expected.

SUB: You recently raised $2.3 million in new funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Lykke: Staffing up on our development team and expanding to open an office in San Francisco.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Lykke: It’s crucial to keep growing fast and there’s a certain sense of urgency right now since the market is growing and hot right now with competition.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Lykke: No.

SUB: What big goals do you have for Endomondo over the next year or so?

Lykke: The goal is to keep growing the user base exponentially, to increase retention and to become profitable.

Endomondo – www.endomondo.com

Posted by startupbeat at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Social Media

Keek Lands $5.5 Million In Funding For Its ‘Microvideo’ Platform

Web/Content

Just-Eat Digs in to Corporate Market with Urbanbite Acquisition

Enterprise

TechStars Grad ReportGrid Raises $750K Seed Round (via TechCrunch)

Finance/Investment

Posted by startupbeat at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: CouponTrade.com
Website:  www.coupontrade.com
Founders: George Bousis and Bradley Wasz
Headquarters: Chicago
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 20 
Twitter: @coupontrade
Brief Company Description: CouponTrade: where coupon experts buy and sell daily deals and gift cards.

By George Bousis, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

CouponTrade.com is a secure marketplace where coupon experts buy and sell daily deals and gift cards. Our long-term goal is to teach consumers better shopping habits while helping them save money and take advantage of these awesome deals, and perhaps even make money off of their own deals and gift cards.

We’re aiming to create the web’s most extensive marketplace of gift cards, daily deals, coupon codes, map views, digital coupons and more, to empower consumers with exceptional savings to help them stretch the value of a dollar. By developing innovative technologies to support this new social shopping model, it’s our goal to put purchase power back into the hands of the people as a way to help boost the economy.

Founders’ Story

I come from a family of successful entrepreneurs, but I found my inspiration from the other family hobby—saving money. A “nonredeemable coupon” incident in my family’s store got me interested in advances in couponing, gift cards and daily deals, and I decided to partner with Bradley Wasz, an expert in the e-commerce industry, to create an online marketplace for gift cards and daily deals.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

The goal is to promote a lifestyle that’s savvy, funny, and always engaging. Currently, we’re delighting our fans with daily Twitter and Facebook giveaways, while letting the educational and technological tools essentially speak for themselves. We often mention the deals available on the marketplace and plan do to that more as the marketplace grows. We think it’s especially important to support our sellers; those are the people who make CouponTrade fun and exciting.

We’re also launching an affiliate marketing effort in the near future. Affiliate marketing is, in our opinion, one of the best forms of online marketing. Affiliate bloggers and publishers are free to write what they think will sell our products to their audience, giving a voice to all the different communities that use our services and shop on our marketplace. A competitive program will create a large amount of backlinks, especially to the deals within our site that are the most exciting.

How We Differentiate from the Competition

Because we’re in two different industries, we have a lot of competitors, but we don’t have any competitors at this moment that are both in gift cards and daily deals, so we think this gives us an advantage. We’ve noticed that our competitors in the daily deals reseller industry are mostly just flying on the coat tails of the daily deal industry, without a lot of strategy or what we would see as long-term planning. We’ve also noticed that some of our competitors are either less interested or unable to provide the customer service that we’re offering. We take the approach that human beings still need to work with other human beings, that attempting to fully automate all processes in customer service actually makes tech companies seem cold and calculating, or even worse, possessing a passive-aggressive view of the consumer. We don’t believe that picking up the phone and talking to customers is a waste of time. Instead, we see it as an opportunity to make a connection and to learn more about our audience and their needs.

In terms of our competitors in the gift card resellers group, we differentiate ourselves in one very unique way: by taking ourselves out of the sales process as much as possible. Most gift card resellers, such as Plastic Jungle and CardWoo, act as brokers. They purchase the gift cards from sellers at about 70 percent of the value, then resell the gift cards at 90 percent of the value. We offer our gift cards sellers the opportunity to get the full 90 percent of the value of their card, and even market that card to their friends and family.

Business Model

We take a small fee from each sale, depending on the prize of the product. Currently, we’re attempting to grow our group of sellers. We also have an inventory of gift cards that were previously purchased from private sellers prior to the launch of the site, which we’re selling at a discounted rate to keep buyers excited about our products.

While we’re currently only playing in the daily deal and gift card resale space, we’re very intrigued by the online coupon industry, and what it can mean for our customers. Some retailers allow coupon experts to apply a promotional code on top of a gift card, and if we can provide both the discounted deal and the discounted e-gift card, the savings can be phenomenal.

Current Needs

We’re currently looking for investors. We’ve recently received seed funding from private investors, but we’d be interested in taking in more funds. We are looking for employees as well. We have a team of web developers, but our needs (and ideas) may be growing faster than our ability to fill them. We’re also on the lookout for marketing professionals with specific skillsets (media buying, SEO, analytics) who are willing to take a chance on a new website that’s getting more attention every day.

CouponTrade – www.coupontrade.com

Posted by startupbeat at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Cloud/Social Media

Cloudbot Secures Investment from Lightbank

Web Content

Adobe Acquires Web Typography Innovator Typekit

Mobile

Affle Raises Over USD 10 Million Investment From D2 COMMUNICATIONS

Enterprise

IBM to Acquire Q1 Labs to Drive Greater Security Intelligence

Red Hat to Acquire Gluster

Posted by startupbeat at 08:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Neo Technology developed its Neo4j software, which provides feature-rich database functionality for big enterprises. The Malmo, Sweden and Menlo Park, Calif.-based company was founded in 2007 and recently closed a $10.6 million Series A round.

SUB: Please explain what Neo Technology is, and the value proposition you offer.

Eifrem: Corporations today are facing an explosion in data growth. Up until now, NOSQL databases handling big data have not provided the key elements that enterprises expect in a database. Neo4j is the first database to give you the scalability of NOSQL, as well as the transactional integrity that enterprises expect.

Neo Technology provides the flexibility and scalability of a NOSQL database, while supporting key elements imperative to the enterprise—transactions, true durability and first-class Java support.

SUB: How does the technology behind Neo Technology work?

Eifrem: Neo4j is a graph database that provides a far richer data model than a traditional, relational database, and is excellent at processing complex and connected data.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Eifrem: There’s a lot of movement around alternative databases today and a lot of companies in NOSQL like MongoDB, Couchbase and Cassandra. However, when we’re out in the field and talking to customers, our actual competitors are in-house custom-built solutions.

SUB: What do you offer that differentiates Neo Technology from your competitors?

Eifrem: Neo4j has the properties required to put NOSQL into the enterprise. That means three things—transactions, durability and awesome Java support.

SUB: What was the inspiration behind Neo Technology? Was there an “aha” moment, or was it longer in developing?

Eifrem: At my previous company as chief architect, I was exploring database alternatives for our enterprise content management system. I was looking for a database that made it easy to handle complex and connected data and none existed. Therefore, we built it.

SUB: When was the company founded, and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?

Eifrem: We founded Neo Technology in 2007. Our big breakthrough came a couple of years later, when a Fortune 500 company brought us on to build a mission-critical system that would address the complex and connected data that was hindering performance in their multi-million dollar Oracle databases. The end result is that Neo4j outperformed Oracle by a factor of more than 1,000 times. This company bet their mission-critical revenue-impacting system on our technology at a time when we were simply six guys working out of a garage in Malmo, Sweden.

SUB: What have the most significant obstacles been so far to building Neo Technology?

Eifrem: We’ve seen a surge of customer demand so far this year. By far our most significant obstacle today is to recruit people to meet that demand.

SUB: You recently raised $10.6 million in Series A funding—how do you plan to use the funds?

Eifrem: We are expanding rapidly here at Neo, so we will invest in product development, customer support, and increase distribution to reach demand.

SUB: Why was this a particularly good time to raise new funding?

Eifrem: The NOSQL market is taking off. In the past month, the top four NOSQL companies have collectively raised over $54 million.

SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?

Eifrem: Right now, we are focused on expanding the company and serving our customers. As of now, we have enough money to meet our expansion goals.

SUB: Where do you hope to see Neo Technology in a year from now?

Eifrem: A year from now I hope to see Neo continue to make our customers successful as fast as we can, and for the company to be the leading NOSQL database for the enterprise.

Neo Technology – www.neotechnology.com

Posted by startupbeat at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s funding and acquisitions news roundup:

Mobile/Ecommerce

mobeam Closes Initial Venture Round

Web/Content

AOL's Huffington Post buys Localocracy site

Postmedia Network Acquires Sprouter Inc.

Cloud

Posted by startupbeat at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor

It was a week that included rumors that Facebook was going to begin charging members because “it was even on the news,” and controversy between two of the largest tech blogs that included accusations of pay-for-play. But even as VentureBeat and TechCrunch feuded, the technology sector continued to produce a dynamic stream of acquisitions and new funding. They included TechMediaNetwork’s $33 million, Tumblr’s $85 million in additional funding, Blekko’s $30 million round, and real-time parking tracker Parking In Motion’s Series A. Acquisitions for the week were highlighted by Seamless picking up MenuPages and claiming to now have the “most comprehensive restaurant listings across 50+ cities,” and Salesforce’s $50 million acquisition of Assistly.

Seed and Series A funding for the week:

Endomono – $2.3 million

myGengo – $5.25 million

Wikets – $1.5 million

Homesav.com – $1.2 million

Parking In Motion – Undisclosed

Fundly – $5 million

BetterLesson – $1.6 million

Socialbakers – $2 million

Posted by startupbeat at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)