A potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio — and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype: Twilio and Microsoft have formed a strategic alliance to offer Twilio’s APIs to developers on the Windows Azure platform.
The offering will cover both Twilio’s voice and messaging services, and Twilio is sweetening the deal by giving developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes when they sign up. → Read More
As NFC continues to see growing adoption, we are still noticing more mobile payment solutions that don’t use the technology picking up traction — and funding: one of the latest comes from Germany, where a Berlin-based company called Orderbird has picked up a €2.7 million ($3.5 million) round for a service that lets restaurants use iOS devices to take customer food orders, send them to the kitchen and act as a “cash register” to process the payments at the end.
The round was led by Alstin, a holding company headed by German financier Carsten Maschmeyer, who invested €2.4 million, with another €300,000 coming from angels and existing strategic investors backing Orderbird. (They include Lars Kamp, Carlo Kölzer and Tom Köhl.) The company has raised €3.2 million ($4.2 million) since opening for business in February 2011. → Read More
Birst, a San Francisco-based startup that offers on-demand business intelligence and analytics solutions for companies big and small, has raised $26 million in series D financing, led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors, including Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures, also participated in the round, bringing Birst’s total funding to $46 million. → Read More
Social enterprise software maker Socialtext is today announcing having received strategic investment from Bedford Funding that will now see the service joining the Peoplefluent family of products. Bedford Funding, for those unaware, is a $1.4 billion tech investment fund and owner of Peoplefluent, the maker of Talent Management software for business customers.
Following the investment, Socialtext will be integrated into Peoplefluent’s own Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite, which focuses on offering tools to help companies recruit better. With the Socialtext integration, employees on the suite will be able to collaborate with each other and their greater enterprise, the company says. → Read More
It’s the problem every manager or CEO faces: how do you stay aware of what everyone is doing?
Thinkfuse, which debuted at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, is out of beta with a product that makes it easy to get a single status report on what everyone is working on across a company or team.
The Seattle-based company, which was formed by former Googlers and ex-Microsofties, was inspired by Snippets — an internal tool that Google uses. Every week, Googlers would post a simple status update explaining what they had worked on and what they planned to finish by the next week. All of those updates would go into a report for managers and they would also be searchable for everyone else. Thinkfuse is trying to make this available for everyone. → Read More
Zillow, according to one report, may be closing in on a deal to buy rental marketing software maker RentJuice for $45 million, but in the meantime the online property portal is focusing on the rental market in another way: by launching its first dedicated rentals app — a free app for Android devices.
Zillow Rentals is the latest development in Zillow’s strategy for mobile, which — now numbering at 10 apps — has become a huge part of its business: on weekends, a full 40 percent of all of Zillow’s traffic — 32 million uniques in March — comes from mobile devices, and in the same month 155 million homes on Zillow were viewed from mobile devices: that works out to 57 homes per second, the company tells me.
And although users are able to view some rental information on the original app, the new, dedicated app gives a speedier and more streamlined experience for the fast, high-volume property viewing that characterizes the average would-be renter, says Jeremy Wacksman, VP of marketing at Zillow. → Read More
Twilio, developer of a VoIP API that is used by companies like eBay, Airbnb and Hulu to add voice services into their consumer apps, has been adding support for European countries as part of its expansion strategy, first the UK and then Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. Now Twilio is giving that effort a bit more muscle with the appointment of its first full-time, permanent employee outside the U.S.
James Parton is joining the company as its new European marketing director. His hiring is also effectively a jab at the carrier market that Twilio very much has the chance to really disrupt: Parton has been poached from Telefonica, the Spanish mobile powerhouse, where he has most recently been running developer marketing for Telefonica’s multi-regional API effort BlueVia, and before that for BlueVia’s more local precursor, Litmus at O2 UK. → Read More
Rosetta Stone, for those unfamiliar, are the makers of the oft-advertised language learning software of the same name. The 20-year-old Virginia-based company went public in 2009, and today makes learning software for over 30 languages that is used in over 150 countries. Yet, in spite of its brand recognition, a number of translation and language-learning startups have begun to pop up with savvy online solutions, which has prompted Rosetta Stone to move to boost both its kid-friendly learning options and its digital distribution.
In so doing, Rosetta Stone is today announcing that it has completed the acquisition of Los Angeles-based language learning startup, GoGo Lingo. Founded back in 2008 by Afsoun Yazdian, who developed GoGoLingo’s proprietary “Playful Immersion” method while at Stanford, a language learning method designed to help kids ages 3 to 7 learn Spanish through implicit absorption. → Read More
Enterprise mobile startup DoubleDutch has raised $2 million in Series A funding, the company is reporting today, in a round led by Bullpen Capital and including Mike Maples’ Floodgate Fund, as well as Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. The funding follows the company’s previous raise of $1.2 million a year ago, led by Lightbank.
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The job-hunting market today is getting a little more social: Path.to, a kind of About.me-meets-LinkedIn service that lets people create image-filled, sleek professional profiles for themselves online, is today relaunching itself as a network to connect those professionals with job openings.
And taking a pro-tip from the matchmaking site eHarmony, Path.to has developed an algorithm to create “compatibility” scores between job seekers and job vacancies. It says it is the first online job service to offer this feature. It is also today announcing a $1.5 million round of strategic funding from HR giant Adecco to help it along the way. → Read More
Remember how most companies don’t sell practically overnight for $1 billion dollars and it actually takes years before a startup finds its “Aha!” moment and narrows in on a working business model? Yes, we have one of those stories today.
Fwix, which started out as a hyperlocal news aggregator, is metamorphosing into an enterprise-facing company called Radius that gives salespeople the tools and data they need to scout local businesses.
It’s a big bet. While Radius had some early success making in the “low millions” of dollars per year selling access to its content to media companies, its chief executive Darian Shirazi saw a much bigger market opportunity in targeting companies that sell services to small businesses.
“I’ve always wanted to build a large sustainable company and it turns out that this is very hard to do,” he said. → Read More
The heat is on to migrate more digital marketing activities into the cloud, and while we have seen a lot of movements from smaller, fleet-0f-foot startups in this area, the big players don’t want to be left out in the cold, either. Enter WPP, which today announced a partnership with the Bangalore-based outsourcing and IT specialist Infosys for a new cloud-based digital marketing platform.
Called “BrandEdge,” the two say the platform is the first of its kind in the industry, in that it brings together, into the cloud, a range of digital marketing activities such as creation and management of digital media across multiple locations and tools to manage campaing execution — all running on a single platform. → Read More
Ad-tech may not be the most obvious face of digital advertising, but in a world in which the role of big data is getting ever more essential to how things work, it is taking up an increasingly important role. One sign of that comes from the funding that ad-tech players are getting in this space: today, ad-tech startup Moat announced that it has picked up a $12 million investment led by the Mayfield Fund and including existing investors.
The Series B investment takes the total amount invested in the company to $16.5 million with past investors including Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Founders Fund, Vast Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and First Round Capital; as well as the WGI Group, an investment vehicle from Moat’s founders, Right Media ex-CEO Mike Walrath and brothers Jonah and Noah Goodhart. → Read More
Big news from the UK this morning: Vodafone, one of Europe’s biggest mobile operators, has made a formal offer to buy up the assets of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for £1 billion ($1.7 billion), a deal that catapults Vodafone into running its own fixed line network in the UK and specifically will give it a much bigger view to winning enterprise business — a big challenge to BT and a mark of further consolidation in the space.
Cable & Wireless, first founded in the nineteeth century and one of the biggest operators in Europe, has fallen on hard times more recently and has run through three chief executives since a restructuring in 2010.
The deal will make Vodafone the UK’s second-largest operator, with £7 billion ($10.5 billion) in annual revenue. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.
In the beginning there was the cloud. And it was good. But over time it can also be surprisingly expensive. If you’ve ever said “Oh my god,” at the end of your billing cycle, you’re may be starting to think about putting boundaries on this virtual Eden. Yet you’ll quickly find that public cloud vice is hard to stamp out. It’s ingrained into human nature and finds its expression through self-service IaaS delivery and opaque billing processes. Here are a few of the sins we’ve seen. → Read More
I think we can all safely agree that open source software development is here to stay. Open, collaborative development has fundamentally changed not only how we code, but also the code we produce. It’s easier than ever to build complex solutions by reusing existing components. A new report from Sonatype examines the current state of open source in the enterprise. Although heavily slanted toward open source Java consumption, the trends are interesting. It’s also worth pointing out that Sonatype provides a solution for open source software management, so they have a stake in the game here. Their data is worth a look, though.
Nearly 80% of the enterprises surveyed consume open source software. Most interest to me: two thirds of the companies surveyed are actively contributing code back to the upstream projects they consume. Also interesting to note is that just shy of half of all surveyed companies have a formal open source policy in place. And of those with formal policies, half of the respondents cite those policies as detrimental to the success of development. → Read More
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding have been two of the biggest trends to affect how businesses — especially small businesses and sole traders — raise money, with sites like Kickstarter.com and in the UK Funding Circle attracting a attention for being a great way of getting backing for projects or business ideas bypassing the traditional and expensive world of bank loans in the process.
Now a site is launching that gives this model an additional twist: AskYourUsers.com is a simple service that helps you find people for microconsulting projects lasting no more than 15 minutes — and it uses your LinkedIn network to help you find them.
From the demo that I have seen, the service is basically that simple, but it works very smoothly, and definitely solves a need — one that Dunne and her co-founder, Chris Bumgarder, essentially stumbled on unintentionally… → Read More
In the quest for the Holy Grail of project management software — a product that just feels natural and easy to use — Siasto has made it further than most. If this were The Last Crusade, it’d be somewhere inside the temple, crossing the bridge of faith to reach the chalice.
Siasto might seem a little too familiar at first, as it uses the same concepts as you’ve seen in competing products like Basecamp. You create projects, you add tasks to them, you upload documents, you invite other users, and so on. What’s special is the how the Y Combinator-backed company has organized the interface, and how it’s busy tying in with Google.
Here’s a quick walk-through of what it’s doing. → Read More
A B2B company trying to change the way that marketers procure services for ad campaigns says it has just closed one of Europe’s largest-ever angel financing rounds.
blur Group, which runs a platform called the Creative Services Exchange, says that it has raised $2 million. Bypassing the VC route, the company instead opted for a group of about 20 business names and angel investors including Archie Norman, currently chairman of UK broadcaster ITV; Kevin Lomax, the founder and former chairman and CEO of Misys Plc and director at M&S; and Tim Schoonmaker, chairman of Grapeshot Limited and ex-chairman of Emap Advertising and ex-CEO of Odeon Cinemas Ltd. → Read More
We’ve seen the rise of new kinds of VC funds in Europe recently, mostly notably Passion Capital’s $60M last year and the new fund just raised by Earlybird in Berlin, among others. These new kinds of funds are more fleet of foot, reaching into the hot early stage sector right now, largely in the consumer space.
What has not appeared as often are brand new funds aimed at disrupting the enterprise. That changes today with the announcement today that London-based Notion Capital has closed the first $100M of its ‘Fund 2′. This fund will focus on emerging cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service companies in the UK and across Europe. The total fund size will end up being $150m at its final close, expected in the next few months. But already, this is one of the largest closes for an early stage VC in Europe to date. With this fund closed, Notion plans to look at 4 or 5 deals closely and will do one or two deals in the next couple of months.
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