Don’t you just hate when you’re out skateboarding, minding your own business, and suddenly one of the wheels comes off and you break a kneecap? Well now there’s a new startup called BoardProspects, which aims to help companies build better boards. A quick glance at their website reveals that the company is not going to be able to solve your skateboarding woes, however, but it may help your business roll more smoothly.
If your company is in need of new members for the board of directors (cough Yahoo cough) or the advisory board (cough Honeywell cough), you may want to give Boston-based BoardProspects’ upcoming offering a second look. → Read More
Oracle this morning announced that it is acquiring cloud-based talent management solutions provider Taleo for $46 per share or roughly $1.9 billion, net of Taleo’s cash and debt. Taleo’s solutions basically help organizations attract, motivate and retain human capital, and will serve to boost Oracle’s Public Cloud offering. → Read More
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It’s been a long and winding road since Tariq Krim created and eventually left Netvibes, but today Netvibes has been acquired by huge French engineering giant Dassault Systèmes for an undisclosed amount. Krim continues to pursue his original dream of organising the social web on Jolicloud. → Read More
Telecom expense management (TEM) solutions company Xigo, which Greg likened to a Billshrink for large companies, has been acquired by one of its partners, IT services and solutions provider Dimension Data for an undisclosed sum. → Read More
Microsoft announced this morning a new agreement with 24/7 Inc. , a company that designs intuitive customer experiences. As a part of the deal, Microsoft will merge its interactive self-service assets (meaning people, clients and technologies), into 24/7 Inc. The deal also includes an R&D partnership, long-term IP licensing and Microsoft taking an equity stake in 24/7, Inc.
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Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy.
“I don’t know who put the call out to put money into social media, but it is out there,” says CEO Frank Speiser. A year ago, Socialflow had two employees. Today, it has 34. “We have 5,500 leads active and qualified,” says Speiser. “I just need people to work the phones.” → Read More
As healthcare goes through massive changes, health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a similar situation. In the late 90′s, the following dynamics were present:
Owning printing presses was a de facto barrier to entry allowing newspapers unfettered dominance.
Newspaper companies bought up smaller newspaper chains and took on huge debt.
Newspapers were comfortable as oligopoly or monopoly enterprises allowing for slow, plodding decisions. Their IT infrastructure mirrored this with expensive and rigid technology architectures. → Read More
Back in 2009, my colleague MG Siegler wrote a brilliant piece titled ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid,‘ which delved into how having a simple and easy to use product is a key formula for winning in the consumer tech space. A few days ago, Greylock Partner John Lilly echoed MG’s thoughts, explaining that simplicity is quite simply very hard to beat. While this doctrine has been applied tonconsumer technology products like Dropbox, Gmail, Twitter and most famously, Apple; reinforcing simplicity in the product thought process is becoming an ever-present part of enterprise technology as well. → Read More
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Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where online retailers predict what you’ll want to buy before you know yourself.
Ironically, Rao and her pundits are missing the zooming racecar that’s speeding by them as they wait for the personalization bus to arrive. That racecar is Pinterest and the new breed of startups marking the beginning of what I call the “Curated Web.” → Read More
Change in the air. It’s palpable.
Those of us in the technology world are witnessing a transformation: a buyer-led revolution in how information technology is both produced and consumed. Smartphones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional “workforce productivity” and communications applications. → Read More
Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.”
Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 (and TechCrunch). → Read More
I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.” Bush dubs this program as the “cash for clunkers” program for health IT leaving no doubt what his opinion is regarding the legacy vendors’ solutions.
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IP phone company ShoreTel has today announced that it is beefing up its offerings by acquiring unified communications company M5 Networks in a deal that is valued up to $146 million in cash and stock. → Read More
Numecent, a stealth startup building a patented “cloudpaging” technology, just raised $2 million in Series A funding from undisclosed corporate investors. The $2 million tranche is a part of a larger $10 million funding round, and is in addition to the $7.5 million in seed funding the company has already raised from private investors. Exact details as to what Numecent is developing are not known, beyond a general description of what “cloudpaging” means, as provided by the company.
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Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.
Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data. → Read More
Online content, portal and comprehensive front-end technology solution Synacor filed its amended S-1 today for an IPO looking to raise $75 million. The filing revealed that this month Synacor acquired Carbyn, an HTML5 operating system that lets users put their files, applications and more in the cloud and access them from any device. It paid $1.1 million total for the company, $600,000 up front with $500,000 deliver in April 2013, and it hired 7 Carbyn employees. → Read More
Solera Networks just announced that it has raised $20 million in Series D funding from Intel Capital (the chip-maker’s investment arm) and others.
The company says its DeepSee Platform can index and classify all network traffic, giving companies a comprehensive picture of their network security in real-time, either for spotting risks before a security breach or responding quickly once a breach has occurred. Both domestic and international sales supposedly grew more than 100 percent last year. → Read More
Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of Microsoft’s messaging platform.
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Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.
DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.
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In 2011, Sony had several major security breaches: Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures, and Playstation Network all were attacked and private data was successfully stolen. Their handling of the attacks, particularly the larger PSN one, was widely criticized.
Many users are either unaware or acutely aware of how many sites and services have financially or personally sensitive information on record. Events like the Sony hacks do not reassure them, and actions like Google’s yesterday (though arguably innocuous) may alarm them. Users want more control and more security.
And the EU is looking to give it to them. But with the threat of enormous fines, many companies will find that the most logical thing to do is move away from the entire business of storing and serving user identities. → Read More
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