Brad Garlinghouse, who just took over as CEO of YouSendIt and used to be a senior vice president at Yahoo several years ago, has a few ideas for the ailing web giant. The company’s got a pile of cash including $2.6 billion in cash and marketable securities from the end of last quarter, plus $6.3 billion more from selling the Alibaba stake over the weekend.
“Yahoo has billions and billions of dollars. Yahoo can do anything that they want,” he said, adding that he thinks the homepage alone is worth more than $1 billion in search and advertising revenue. Garlinghouse thinks the company should be aggressive about acquiring young companies to bring in entrepreneurial leadership. At the top of his list are Flipboard and Gravity. → Read More
Freshdesk, the makers of cloud-based help desk software that allows companies to support their customers through email, phone, website, Facebook and Twitter, are on a mission to compete with the big boys of the space, like Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. Though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering a unique brand of cloud-based customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.
That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through $10 million-worth of services which includes free support for one year. Any startup with less than $1 million in annual revenue qualifies, but to get thing started, Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made. → Read More
HP is reportedly going to be announcing massive layoffs next Wednesday. Conflicting reports state somewhere between 25K and 30K jobs, between 7% and 8% of HP’s global workforce, could be eliminated in an effort to absorb losses from decreasing demand for the company’s products and services. The cuts could happen over the next year, rather than a mass layoff, according to AllThingsD who also state that the total number is still undecided.
Wall Street is reacting positively to the news. HP’s stock price dropped shortly after the news but quickly recovered and started climbing with word of the restructuring. During the writing of this post, the stock price dropped slightly but is still up for the day. → Read More
Pearson, the educational publisher, today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of certification exams and practice tests for IT and digital literacy skills, for $140 million in cash from the private equity firm Spire Capital Partners.
The deal will give Pearson’s VUE unit, where Certiport will sit, much further reach into the retail distribution of testing services in markets outside of the U.S. and UK: Certiport currently sells its certifications and assessments through a network of 12,000 testing centers operated by 70 partners in 150 countries, serving the range of skills in the world of IT. In all, it delivers 225,000 exams in 27 languages every month, and generated revenues of $48 million in 2011.
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Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as well as $500,000 in angel funding from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, co-founder of CapLinked Chris Grey, and a re-up from previous investor, 500 Startups.
As for the new features, there are quite a few, but the major ones include the launch of “Contactually for Teams,” Microsoft Exchange support, a Gmail plugin, and additional integrations with other services and CRM systems. → Read More
With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.
iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.
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Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 30,000 developers in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line.
Considering that Android is currently the most popular smartphone platform globally, this potentially gives Twilio a much bigger opportunity to deliver services to the wider smartphone market — with Android and iOS together accounting for 75 percent of the existing smartphone market, according to Gartner.
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As a culture, we are getting ever-more accustomed to using social networks as our primary hubs for all information, and that trend is leading to the rise of yet more services constructed like social networks to improve accessibility: one of the latest in that line is DoctorsElite, a new site aimed at linking up patients, general physicians and specialists through a social network framework to make it easier for people to find specialists in certain fields when they need them.
Started by a group of physicians working with other medical advisors and technology experts, DoctorsElite is entering the market bootstrapped and with a database of some 500,000 doctors and centers for advanced treatment in the U.S. — and with some strong firsthand experience of why the founders think this service fills a gap in the market.
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Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley rival has also been winning a bunch of this turf — YouSendIt. Today, the company is backing up its position with some new stats, and a new chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse.
He’s coming off a two-year stint as the head of consumer products at AOL, and a previous five years heading up consumer and enterprise apps at Yahoo. He also has roots as an investor and entrepreneur, so this move is going back to that. → Read More
This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine.
The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here.
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As the software-as-a-service market continues to mature, there are companies emerging that are targeting specific sectors within the enterprise with solutions especially tailored and priced for them: the latest of these is InsightSquared, which has announced a Series A round of $4.5 million for its a business intelligence platform aimed specifically at small and medium-sized businesses.
The round was led by Atlas Venture, with participation also from NextView Ventures and new investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce.com. This brings total funding in the company since February 2011 to $5.5 million.
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If your response to virtual infrastructure installations is a derisive “Boring, Sidney, booring” then maybe AngelPad startup ElasticBox isn’t for you. However, if you love cloud computing like Nancy loved heroin, I think you may be in luck.
ElasticBox, founded by former Microsofies Ravi Srivatsav, Alberto Arias Maestro, and Amadeo Casas Cuadrado, is a service that makes setting up and running a cloud-based service quick and easy. With the service you don’t have to set up the environment in order to run an app. Instead, you can focus on the actual functionality and far less on server maintenance.
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Three guys from Provo, Utah set out on a mission to make QR codes, those boring pixellated, black-and-white squares come alive — in other words, to extend their functionality by turning them into realworld “like,” “follow,” and “buy” buttons. And it’s been working. In February, Scan announced a seed funding round from Shervin Pishevar, Google Ventures, CRV, Start Fund, Social + Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and more. The company moved their operations from Utah to San Francisco, and is currently sitting at just over 12 million downloads across iOS devices.
As Scan is in the business of creating apps that extend the potential application of QR code tech, Scan is today leveraging the buzz around Instagram to let businesses, organizations, etc. build their Instagram user base via QR codes. The new app, appropriately called Scan-to-gram, which launches today, lets users scan QR codes and instantly follow a company and its employees. Notable Instagrammers to be part of its initial launch, including Warby Parker, Zooey Deschanel, Nike, Marc Jacobs, and, notably, the Instagram team itself. → Read More
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position “Lead Product Design”, a role in which he shapes desktop and cloud product strategy. I spoke with him recently by phone about the increasing role of Linux in the enterprise, and the shift from traditional enterprise computing to cloud computing.
Canonical and Ubuntu made a big splash early on by intensely focusing on a usable Linux desktop experience. They pared down the dizzying number of packages available in Debian and selected a few best-of-breeds applications to install by default. The installation process was streamlined to be as easy and as intuitive as possible. Ubuntu was a huge success and quickly gained a passionate following. → Read More
Coupa, the creator of spend optimization software for businesses, which brings something of a Mint.com-like view into where a company spends on operating resources, is today announcing the close of a $22 million Series E round of funding led by a new investor, Crosslink Capital. Previous investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures also committed to the round.
Although CEO Rob Bernshteyn says that Coupa could be profitable in a month if it cut back on its investments, the company is raising the additional funding to help it expand its product as well as move into new markets. → Read More
About six years ago, Google launched Apps for Your Domain, which, for the first time, wrapped its suite of emerging cloud products under one umbrella — as a service for businesses and the enterprise. Today, the service is better known as Google Apps and is, according to Google, being used by at least 4 million organizations, with some 40 million-plus end users.
Yet, as the Google Apps ecosystem has expanded, and its tools have become integral to the day-to-day operations of millions of businesses, many are looking for better ways to monitor, control and secure end-user access to apps like Google Docs, Sites, and Calendars. That’s why BetterCloud launched earlier this year — to provide a suite of complementary products that provide Google Apps with enhanced management and security tools for both IT admins and end users. To help it get off the ground, the New York City-based startup is today announcing that it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors. → Read More
Ask a VC, the TCTV show where you ask the questions, is back after a long hiatus and we’re kicking things off with two partners this week from Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz!
If you’ve got questions about what it’s like to shift from being an entrepreneur to being a venture capitalist, both our interviewees can actually tell you. So how does this show work? You ask questions either in the comments or at askaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com and we’ll put them forward to our VC guests.
So for our first taping, we have Nabeel Hyatt, who just joined Spark Capital in February after serving as a general manager at Zynga (pictured at the right). He sold his company Conduit Labs to the social gaming giant and that deal set the groundwork for Zynga’s Boston studio. → Read More
Education is changing, and startups like Coursera another, CodeAcademy, Treehouse, StraighterLine, Khan Academy, Lynda.com, and Udacity,(among others) are all carrying the torch for online education and the flipped classroom. But what also unites them is that they are fortunate to have the resources and capital to build their own custom platforms and infrastructure. But the reality is that there are thousands of traditional schools, education providers, learning coaches, etc. producing stellar learning content that lack the engineering resources or tools necessary to share their awesome content with the masses.
This is where Pathwright comes into play. Greenville, South Carolina-based Pathwright was founded by a team of hackers (and educators) who have set out to build a platform for “the next wave of educators” — a simple, DIY content management system that lets any and all educators create, distribute, and sell online courses under the banner of their own branded, online schools. → Read More
The iPad has, quite quickly, become the tablet of choice for enterprises, with some 97 percent of all tablet activations in Q1 of 2012 attributable to Apple’s tablet, according to Good Technology. So it comes as no surprise that apps are rushing into the wake of those purchases to make the iPad more work-friendly.
The latest in that story is a release of some social software from harmon.ie that will make SharePoint, the collaboration software from Microsoft, usable on the iPad, as well as the iPhone. Harmon.ie’s CEO, Yakov Cohen, says this marks the first time that business users can access SharePoint from both the iPad and desktop with the same user experience.
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As you may have seen over the weekend, someone has discovered a security hole in FileVault, which arose with the OS X Lion security update, version 10.7.3, back in February: FileVault encryption passwords are now visible in plain text outside of a computer’s encrypted area.
The hole was apparently spotted by someone back in February, although it was most publicly first pointed out by security consultant David Emery on the Cryptome blog a few days ago and the rest of the blogosphere has run with it.
Now, it appears that the problem could be bigger than previously thought: it turns out that the developer who first noticed the hole back in February has discovered that it exists outside of FileVault, too, with at least one other company’s security encryption software, Lion VM, from VMWare Fusion, showing the same behavior. → Read More
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