Flash memory maker and storage system technologies provider SanDisk announced today that it has acquired FlashSoft, a company focused on caching software products. Going forward, SanDisk will sell FlashSoft’s products both as standalone software, as well as offer them in combination with its other products, including SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.
The company says that it expects the acquisition to be neutral to its earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013, but additional details were not provided. → Read More
Here’s why social media marketing is broken: my company wants to launch a contest on our Facebook app and website and post about to all our fans and followers, post when we hit 1000 entries, and post again when the contest ends after 5000 entries. Sequencing like this was difficult because marketing team would have to monitor for those milestones to be reached, then manually rotate our apps and publish updates.
Social marketing platform Shoutlet today launches a way to turn the cacophony of disparate campaigns into a concerted push. It’s called Social Switchboard, it uses trigger-based campaign publishing, and your marketing department wants it. → Read More
It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.
Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing access to your applications and personalised desktop from your physical machine. Using WorldDesk, you could use a simple USB drive, or access your desktop from a smartphone, for instance.
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Austin-based cloud apps startup Spanning, which provides a backup service for Google Apps, just launched a new version of its service (Spanning 3.0) which includes a feature I.T. admins are sure to love: a health monitor for Google Apps. The new dashboard shows the status of a company’s Google Apps system, including problems, errors, possible causes and suggested fixes. Day-by-day reports are available, too.
But Spanning’s most visible change may be the service’s updated style, courtesy of ex-Frog designer BJ Heinley.
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StopTheHacker, an aptly named provider of SaaS-based website security services, has secured $1.1 million in first-round funding from public and private investors, including Runa Capital and former Bluecoat chief executive Brian NeSmith. → Read More
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
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
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
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