Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch.
She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was the captain of the women’s varsity tennis team. She has also contributed technology content for Oprah.com.
Another week, another IBM acquisition. Big Blue has announced the purchase of Tealeaf Technology, which provides customer experience analytics software that helps organizations access information about consumer web experiences. Financial details were not disclosed.
Basically, Tealeaf’s software captures and records what each customer is doing and seeing in real-time on every page and across all site visits, down to the page-by-page, browser-level experience. By capturing every single customer’s visit, as well as the reaction of the site in response to the customer’s requests, Tealeaf captures both the quantitative and qualitative details of every single interaction. This data is then used towards optimizing the customer experience. → Read More
There are plenty of companies and startups that want to disrupt the food ordering space including Seamless, GrubHub and others. A new competitor is entering the space today. ChowNow is an online ordering platform built for mobile and Facebook, and aims to provide restaurants with an easy way to offer online ordering to customers via either their Facebook page, branded mobile apps for iPhone and iPad or their existing web site.
Unlike the two giants in the food ordering space, Seamless and GrubHub, which offer one site where you can find local restaurants and order; ChowNow isn’t a centralized platform for all restaurants. With ChowNow’s offering, restaurants can individually customize and brand their ordering apps. → Read More
YC company Hyperink, a next-generation digital book publishing platform, is debuting a new service which helps bloggers create short books from their existing content.
As we’ve reported in the past, Hyperink wants to disrupt the book publishing world. The startup’s digital book publishing platform and full-service agency will help any aspiring author write, design, publish, market, and sell a book without any up-front fees. Hyperink wants to represent the long-tail of book demand. Hyperink’s books production costs are under $1,000 on average, and are published in under a month. And also offers higher royalty rates, and give authors up to 50 percent of their earnings (many publishers give authors around 25 percent).
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You may not know this but Yahoo still operates a product called Yahoo Small Business, which provides SMBs and sites with web hosting, domain name registration, web site design templates, e-commerce solutions and more. In fact, Yahoo says that it has helped millions of businesses get online and grow their presence on the web. Today, the company is debuting a new marketing dashboard to give users additional insight into online reputation, web metrics and more.
As the company explains, the new tool allows small businesses to analyze website metrics and maintain accurate and comprehensive business listings across the Web. For example, the dashboard enables social media monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including on Yelp, Yahoo and others. → Read More
Social enterprise company Jive is debuting a number of new features for its social network for businesses today. The company is also announcing its Try Jive, a free 30-day trial for customers.
Jive is one of the giants on the social enterprise space. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive’s software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured, internal 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, social networking features and more.
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DataSift, a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter, Facebook and other social data sources, has raised $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures. This brings DataSift’s total funding to $15 million.
For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and online message boards. But what makes DataSift special is that it can sort through billions of social interactions then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative. → Read More
It looks like the team from Y Combinator-backed Stypi is heading to Salesforce, according to this blog post. UPDATE: We’ve confirmed that Salesforce has acquired Stypi. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
As we reported last year, Stypi develops a lightweight, real-time collaborative text editor. It’s similar in many ways to fellow YC alum Etherpad, which was acquired by Google. You can create documents in Stypi and edit it just as you would any other document, and you can invite new collaborators simply by sending them the URL. → Read More
Yahoo-owned Flickr is one of the largest content sources for Pinterest, with users posting Flickr images on the pinboard sharing site in droves. But in order to Pin a Flickr photo on Pinterest, you had to use Pinterest’s own Pin button, and you couldn’t Pin photos to pinboards directly from Flickr. Until today. Flickr, which just debuted a new HTML5 photo uploader last week, is announcing a partnership with Pinterest to add Pin It buttons to sharing options on the photo sharing platform. Flickr also assures that all pinned images will be properly attributed, regardless where they are pinned from.
As Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering, explains to us, the photos sharing site wanted to make sharing to Pinterest a one to two click process, for both content owners and for people who discover interesting photos on Flickr to be pinned. Now, you’ll see a Pin It button on Flickr image pages where you see Twitter, email, Facebook and Tumblr share buttons. You’ll be able to share photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you pin a lot, the share menu will prioritize the Pin It button, showing it as one of the two shortcuts on the photo page. → Read More
Startup Newvem, which offers a SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, has raised $4 million in funding from Greylock Partners with participation from Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, as well as angel investors, including David Strohm, George Kadifa, and Maurice Werdegar. As part of this financing round, Greylock’s Erez Ofer is joining the Newvem board of directors.
Basically, Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is a free SaaS solution for Amazon AWS customers, that provides a 360-degree view of AWS cloud usage, revealing issues and anomalies in their cloud, and recommending actionable insights that help solve not just cost efficiency, but security, availability, and utilization issues. → Read More
Y Combinator alum Crocodoc is debuting a new technology today that aims to bring an enterprise-grade HTML5 document embedding service for Microsoft Office and PDF files to web-based products.
Crocodoc launched in 2010 to kill off Acrobat. The startup’s initial Flash-based technology allowed you to upload a PDF, and receive a version of the same document in your browser, which you could then share with coworkers and annotate with notes, highlighting, text, and a pen tool, with changes that show up to other users in real-time. Last year, Crocodoc launched this technology in HTML5 for mobile embedding. → Read More
EcoATM, a company that creates kiosks that automate the buy-back of used mobile phones and other used portable electronics directly from consumers, has raised $17 million in funding from Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, TAO Ventures, PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital and Koh Boon Hwee. As you may know, Coinstar operates the change conversion kiosks and owns DVD kiosk service Redbox. The company previously raised $14.4 million from Coinstar, Claremont Creek Ventures, and others
Here’s how EcoATM works. The seller places their phone into the kiosk (the company says it will not damage the phone nor read/copy any personal data from the device). The kiosk then visually identifies the phone as best it can from a database of around 4,000 devices and uses visual recognition technology to determine if the device has been damaged, and also offers up a device-compatible cable connection which allows it to analyze whether or not the device boots. → Read More
JP Selects, an online marketplace for selling sustainable and ethical brands has acquired LovingEco, a flash sales site for eco-friendly fashion and natural beauty products for $1 million.
LovingEco, which was founded by Justine Lassoff and Melinda Moore, features daily sales on discounted eco-friendly, natural items. Similar to OneKingsLane and Gilt, LovingEco features ‘tastemaker pics,’ where celebrities and environmental experts curate their favorite products from the sales. The site also features a V-Wall for the community to share their donations and eco-friendly content. → Read More
Mobile Roadie, which allows anyone to develop and create sleek, rich media iPhone and Android apps, is launching a native iPad app creation platform and self-service mobile website product.
Mobile Roadie offers a self-serve app development platform that integrates with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. Users can build both iOS and Android apps and the company already has a presence in the UK, France, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and Japan. → Read More
Pindrop Security, a startup that aims to prevent and protect against phone-based fraud, has raised $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, GRA Venture Fund, New World Ventures, Sigma Partners, and Webb Investment Network led by former eBay COO Maynard Webb. Angel investors Paul Bricault, Kevin Donahue, and Ben Ling also participated in the round.
Pindrop says that phone fraud is a serious security problem for both enterprises and individuals. For example, credit card users activate their card using their phone and on the banks end, Caller-ID or Automatic Number Identification (ANI) is used to determine if it is the right customer. However, Pindrop says this information is limited and can be easily manipulated, leaving such services completely broken. → Read More
Chicago-based startup GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, is debuting a new tablet technology for restaurants called OrderHub.
As you may know, GrubHub gives its users access to food delivery service from more than 13,000 restaurants in U.S. cities including: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Los Angeles, and more. GrubHub is free for diners who order and pay for their meals while restaurants pay commissions on each order processed. Restaurants that do not currently partner with GrubHub can still list their telephone numbers and menus for free. And of the 13,000 restaurant menus currently available on GrubHub, 5,000 establishments are paying GrubHub to manage and market a white-label online order and food delivery service.
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CustomMade , an online marketplace that connects shoppers with artisans to make customized goods, has raised $4 million in funding co-led by Google Ventures and Schooner Capital. Existing investors Launch Capital, Nextview Ventures, Andrew McCollum and First Round Capital all participated in the round. This brings CustomMade’s total funding to $8 million.
CustomMade allows customers who want to make custom products like jewelry and furniture post project proposals. The startup has built a community of makers that can browse through customer project requests and assign themselves to ones they are suited to. Makers can sign up for and build profiles on the site, which allows customers to browse through their portfolios. → Read More
Greylock Partners has been long focused on two distinct areas when it comes to venture investments—consumer and enterprise. The last consumer partner hire the firm made was former CEO of Mozilla, John Lilly. And today, the firm is deepening its experience in its enterprise practice with the addition of Dev Ittycheria as Venture Partner in Greylock’s Silicon Valley office.
At Greylock, Ittycheria will be focusing on investing in enterprise software companies, with a focus on cloud-based services and enabling IT infrastructure. Ittycheria is a long-time enterprise veteran with a history of not only founding successful startups, but also helping lead established companies towards revenue growth. He co-founded BladeLogic, which he led through a successful IPO and eventually a sale to BMC Software in 2008 for $900 million.
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Wrapp, a social gifting service backed by Greylock Partners and Atomico, is crossing the pond with the U.S. launch of its mobile gift card and retail app. Wrapp, which was available previously only in the UK, Norway, Sweden and Japan, Wrapp is actually launching today with a number of U.S. retailers including Fab, Gap, H&M, Sephora, The Wall Street Journal, Wayfair, and others.
As we’ve reported in the past, Wrapp was co-founded by Rebtel and SendIt founder Hjalmar Winbladh, Spotify founding CTO Andreas Ehn, and lets friends give, receive and redeem digital gift cards using mobile devices, and allows friends to contribute to gifts given by mutual friends. With Wrapp, which offers iPhone, Android and web apps, you sign in via your Facebook account, and you can then tap the Celebration tab on the app, browse your friends or major events, and select the person you want to send a gift card to. All available gift card offers for that friend are automatically listed.
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Weathermob, a mobile, social network for sharing weather reports around the globe, has raised $360,000 in new funding from a number of angel investors including Christopher Austin, Tim Albright, Drew Volpe and Mark Hastings.
Via a free iOS app, Weathermob allows anyone to become a weather reporter. The app mashes up real-time meteorological data, photo and video sharing to allow users to report on and share the weather in their current location. Since launching in November, the app already has millions of users from 128 countries. → Read More
Online ticketing platform Eventbrite is debuting a new vertical today, called Endurance, which focuses specifically on selling tickets for races and walks, including marathons, triathlons, races, fundraising walks, and more. As you may know, Eventbrite, which has sold 57 million tickets and hosted over 500,000 events in the past year, has been used as a registration and ticketing platform for a broad range of events, from large fundraisers, festivals, tech conferences, and concerts to cooking classes and HTML workshops. But this is the first time the company has launched a dedicated, industry-specific ticketing manager for a vertical.
The company says they realized there are a couple of key markets that have more advanced feature requirements, and in order to take advantage of more opportunities in these markets, the company is building an expertise in select verticals. → Read More
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