You’ve got to hand it to Salesforce: The big battleship of Cloud CRM is remarkably adept at turning its boat around to make war against the startups aiming torpedoes at its hull.
First, it was Yammer.
Flash back to the 2008 TechCrunch50: Yammer enters the market with a bold play: Build an enterprise collaboration app around the status update and newsfeed mechanic, give most of it away for free to let individual teams test it out, and then acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up. Once you’ve got the users and the attention of their bosses, (so the logic goes), you leverage what you’ve launched into a platform that can support a wide range of apps. Some of these apps you build yourself, some you open up to third parties. → Read More
CapLinked, the LinkedIn-meets-SalesForce for private investing, has adding a number of new features and upgrades today including sign-in integrations with Facebook, Twitter and more.
As we’ve written in the past, CapLinked launched to allow entrepreneurs to raise capital and sell or buy assets, manage and contact investor prospects, centralize document flow on a secure platform and connect with new investors, advisors and companies. Investors can use CapLinked to manage deals, build public profiles, leverage LinkedIn contacts and connect with promising startups. → Read More
The discussion regarding copycats of US startups in europe is still an ongoing one, and largely due to the fact that the copycats are often heartless rip-offs. DaWanda, a marketplace for DIY goods, took the successful concept of Etsy, which was founded in 2005, to Europe and has since then grown into a company with 65 employees and 1,9 million products for sale.
But in contrast to other “clones” in Europe, DaWanda does not deserve such a comparison, since they’ve managed to build a unique and individual style and community. Neither from a design perspective nor from a strategic one. With 120,000 designers on the site the company just announced that they’ve raised € 4 million in their latest round of financing. They are using the financial boost to develop and strengthen their international presence, with a focus on France. Those providing the capital are newly won investor Vorwerk Ventures, and existing shareholder Piton Capital. It’s an early birthday present for the designer marketplace, which was founded in 2006 and will be five years old in December. → Read More
Slowly but surely, the world is turning 3D. The Acer HR274H is a 27-inch 1080p 3D display with a trick up its sleeve. Using an internal, chip-based system, the monitor can convert most 2D content into (arguably poor) 3D. This will, in short, pop the moving objects to the front of the scene while making the background look further away. → Read More
Hot music startup Spotify is holding a special event in New York City this morning, where it’s going to unveil what it’s calling a “New Direction” for the service. Spotify hasn’t given any details on what to expect, but it obviously considers it to be a very big deal — enough so that it’s invited dozens of reporters to attend.
Several reports indicate that Spotify will be launching a new platform for third party developers, who will be able to integrate Spotify’s large catalog of music into new applications.
As seems to be Spotify’s style, the event has unusually high production values: waiters are handing out espressos and bite-sized breakfast foods that I’ve never heard of (but are quite delicious). The company has a custom backdrop for the stage featuring music-themed illustrations. And there are over a dozen flat-panel televisions lining the walls, which I suspect will be used to showcase third-party apps later on in the event. → Read More
Hatch Labs, a technology sandbox and joint venture between IAC and Xtreme Labs devoted to incubating mobile startups and innovations, is announcing the launch of six new mobile apps in 2012.
As we reported in our initial coverage of the launch of Hatch Labs, the incubator is the brainchild of Dinesh Moorjani, who was formerly the SVP of IAC Mobile. → Read More
W3i, a monetization and distribution network for mobile app developers, is announcing the launch of a new $10 million “AppX Game Developer Marketing Fund” at this week’s AppNation conference in San Francisco. The fund will provide developers with a suite of free services that offer production support, analytics and user acquisition channel analysis, all of which are designed to help indie developers compete with today’s “AAA” gaming giants.
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Social enterprise giant Jive has just set the terms of its IPO in a new filing. Jive, which aims to raise a little over $100 million in a public offering, has set the range between $8 and $10 per share. At the high end of the range, Jive could be worth as over $500 million.
Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive’s software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more.
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Proximiant just launched a new service that provides digital receipts to customers of brick-and-mortar merchants. Like Square, the service involves the use of a low-cost hardware dongle that’s given away for free. But unlike Square, Proximiant leverages NFC (near field communication) to send the receipt from the cash register to the mobile phone.
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Index Ventures is commonly regarded as once of the three “Big Cat” VCs stalking tech companies, in a pan-European sense out of London, alongside Accel Partners and Balderton Capital among others.
I sat down with three of its key players today – Saul Klein, Robin Klein and Bernard Dallé – to tease out where they are right now and where they plan to head. → Read More
Microsoft just posted some impressive sales stats: this week they sold 980,000 Xbox 360 consoles and 750,000 Kinect sensors, both “standalone and bundled.” The sales week is probably due in part to the perfect storm of titles hitting the platform, including Skyrim, as well as Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales.
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Automated Insights, the venture-backed digital media company formerly known as StatSheet, automatically transforms data into content – think interactive applications and things like data-driven news articles, charts and whatnot.
Lately, Automated Insights’s been making waves with its extensive network of sports-related websites. For an example, check out the StatSheet MLB website. → Read More
The Interactive Advertising Bureau just released its third quarter numbers, with internet advertising revenues in the U.S. hitting $7.88 billion for the third quarter of 2011, up 22 percent from Q3 2010.
This also is a 2.7 percent increase from the record-setting revenues of the second quarter of 2011. This is the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. → Read More
This Kickstarter project has been kicking around the Internet a bit but it’s pretty cool. This is a handsome dock for your 11- or 13-inch air and includes 4 USB ports, an ethernet port, a DisplayPort, Kensington lock port, and power supply. To use it simply lock your MacBook into the LandingZone’s snug confines and start working.
As a doofus who just set up a standing desk, this would be a livesaver. First it improves the Air’s USB situation immensely and the ease of use would shave, at worst, a few seconds off of my start-up time and probably improve air circulation around the Air. → Read More
“Yes. I think it’s possible if you integrate tablets,” said HP’s CEO, Meg Whitman in response to a question from French newspaper Le Figaro [translated] concerning Apple’s possible takeover as the world’s top PC maker. “Apple does a great job. We need to improve our game and our products to take over the leadership position. Apple could go past HP in 2012. We will try to become the champion in 2013. It takes time for the products on which I have come to influence the market.”
Whitman’s candid response echos a current debate: Should tablets, such as the iPad, be considered personal computers? If so, then Apple is on track to replace HP as the top PC maker. This comes after British research firm Canalys decided to include tablets in their analysis, basically crowning Apple as top dog. While Meg doesn’t dispute this technicality in the interview, she basically concedes all of 2012 and states to wait until 2013 for HP’s return to glory. After all, she says, that’s when the products she influenced would hit the market.
Wow. → Read More
Startups pivot; it’s part of the process. But how many startups pivot multiple times and still manage to raise significant cash from reputable investors? Sure, maybe it’s a sign of a bubble, a sign that startups are indeed overfunded, or maybe this company is just getting better with each try.
We first covered NewsCred back in 2008, when they launched a credibility rating score for publishers, authors, and stories (by way of community voting plus algorithms) in an attempt to help readers filter the noise and find the highest quality news.
Early last year, NewsCred relaunched as a “Ning for newspapers”, allowing users to build custom online newspapers in minutes. Both approaches seemed to hold water, and the startup raised $750K in seed funding from FLOODGATE and IA Ventures last September in support of it new look. → Read More
According to eGaming Review (note: the story is theirs exclusively but sits behind a paywall), Facebook is engaged in exploratory talks with a number of UK operators to open its platform to real-money online gambling, maybe even as soon as in the first quarter of 2012.
Citing sources familiar with the discussions, eGR reports that the social networking leader is considering offering an initial eight ‘licences’ to as many UK operators looking to roll out such gambling apps on the Facebook platform.
According to eGR’s sources, Facebook has begun staffing up for the launch and support of real-money gambling ventures in the UK, where online gambling is properly regulated, after initially aggressively promoting the use of Credits to online gambling service operators. → Read More
We’ve gotten a few discrete glances as what could be RIM’s first next-generation BlackBerry in the past, and now we may have a name to go with it. Originally code-named “London,” BlackBerryOS reports that the BBX-powered device will henceforth be known as the “Surfboard.”
Erm, yeah. I”m not thrilled either.
As odd as the name may be, it doesn’t come completely out of the blue. RIM filed for the BlackBerry Surfboard trademark in the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in July 2010, and has been sitting on it since then. → Read More
An update to the Sonos firmware and controller now allows Android users to manage their devices on a Honeycomb tablet in a native slate format, eschewing the original portrait-only Android phone app. The new version supports the Kindle Fire as well.
Users can also now Tweet the titles of music they’re listening to right from the app. → Read More
Thankfully, the Web and digital technology are now playing an increasingly important role in the development of healthcare services (and the industry as a whole), so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the professional networking model that has worked so well for LinkedIn is proving just as effective when applied to the sizable network of American physicians.
Earlier this year, Jeff Tangney, Co-founder and Former President of NASDAQ-listed mobile health software applications maker, Epocrates, launched a new venture called Doximity. Taking a page out of LinkedIn’s book, Doximity gives physicians a private network through which to connect and collaborate on patient treatment or identify experts for patient referrals. → Read More
