April 25th, 2013

Learndot Officially Opens To The Public To Let Any Business Build Its Own Corporate University In The Cloud

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Matygo emerged out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator in late 2011 to take advantage of the growing popularity of the “flipped classroom” philosophy in education, which, as Knewton describes it, seeks to invert traditional methods of teaching by delivering instruction online (through videos, etc.) outside of class, while moving homework into the classroom. Khan Academy is one of many examples of… → Read More

April 24th, 2013

Workplace Collaboration Service Convo Releases Updated iOS App With Redesigned News Feed And Comment System

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There are very few platforms that have something that you use on a daily basis, let alone on a minute-by-minute basis. Team communication platform service, Convo, is one of those for us at TechCrunch. Today, the company has released an update for its essential iOS app, which is something that we use here quite often to communicate about everything you can think of. Since using the service, our… → Read More

April 21st, 2013

Spoof Video Symbolizes The Energy And Brashness Of OpenStack, A Rising Cloud Power

At the OpenStack Summit last week, Tuesday’s keynote opened with Dope’n'Stack E.N.T.E.R.P.R.I.S.E, a video that symbolizes the arrival of a new force of disruptors who see riches in building software and systems that will displace the legacy systems of old. It’s not a question anymore. OpenStack has the momentum to win, and it can thank this young group of developers and feisty systems gurus for… → Read More

April 19th, 2013

Mobile, Social Newsreader Flud Finds A Home In The Enterprise With A SharePoint & Yammer-Integrated Service For Both Private And Public Content

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The newsreader business has undergone major shifts in recent months. Flipboard has emerged as the consumer’s preferred mobile magazine, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million, Google Reader is shutting down, and now another early entrant, Flud, has refocused on the enterprise market. The company began quietly testing the waters about six months ago after feedback from customers hinted at… → Read More

March 24th, 2013

AWS Reveals In Job Listing It’s Launching “A New Business,” Looks To Be Pushing Deeper Into Mobile

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Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, Amazon sees big opportunity for its technology in the enterprise market and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft. → Read More

March 11th, 2013

AWS Just Made It A Whole Lot Easier For Anyone To Create A Virtual Private Cloud Showing Again How Enterprise Tech Is Obsolete

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Amazon Web Services will now offer the option for everyone to have their own virtual private cloud (VPC), another sign of the company’s intent to push into the enterprise market. The service means that every customer using EC2 will see the option for a VPC as an instance type. Until now, the VPC was a separate service. → Read More

March 7th, 2013

It’s All About The Data For Apps And App Stores – A Discussion For SXSW

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I have five minutes to talk during the panel I am doing tomorrow at SXSW: Enterprise Invades the Apps Playground. It will cover this whole new world of enterprise app marketplaces. A topic of interest for sure, but there is more to this story than just storefronts. It’s also about what developers are doing to make their apps better and then holding similar standards to the marketplaces now… → Read More

March 7th, 2013

More Data Showing iOS, Especially The iPhone, Still Killing It In The Enterprise, At Android’s Expense

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Apple’s iOS is consolidating its grip on the enterprise market and taking share from Android, according to customer data from enterprise file sharing and hybrid cloud storage company Egnyte. The iPhone especially has grown its proportion of business users since the second half of 2011 to-date, according to the data, while iOS devices as a whole now account for 70%+ of Egnyte’s traffic. → Read More

March 6th, 2013

Bloomfire Raises $8M From Austin, Redpoint To Bring Better Knowledge Sharing & Social Tools To The Enterprise

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Bloomfire, an Austin-based startup attempting to create a better way for businesses to capture, save, display and share information, announced today that it has raised $8 million in series A financing led by Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

The new funding, which brings the company’s total investment to $18 million, comes on the heels of a solid year of growth for Bloomfire, in which the… → Read More

February 19th, 2013

Microsoft Plans To Bring Its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform And Skype Closer Together, Announces Lync 2013 Mobile Apps

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Microsoft’s Lync, the company’s enterprise communications platform, doesn’t get a lot of hype, but it’s currently being used by 90 out of the Fortune 100 companies. The Lync ecosystem now includes more than 1,000 partners, and Microsoft has sold more than 5 million subscriptions to Lync’s voice service (up from 3 million just over a year ago). This week, the company is hosting a three-day→ Read More

February 19th, 2013

StackMob Courts The Enterprise With Launch Of New Marketplace, Added Partnerships

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Mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) platform StackMob is expanding upon its earlier launch of a marketplace for third-party services, with the debut of a marketplace targeted towards enterprise customers. Through a series of partnerships, the marketplace allows StackMob to promote its integrations with other software and platforms-as-a-service companies, API infrastructure providers and more… → Read More

February 9th, 2013

We Made Every SugarCRM Employee A Salesperson – Here’s How You Can, Too

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Editor’s note: Clint Oram is the CTO and co-founder of SugarCRM.

I have worked with companies that considered its customers to be obstacles to avoid or ignore: “If only we didn’t have to deal with those pesky, complaining, customers,” they’d say, “we’d have time to do really great work.” Any company whose employees still cling to the “customer is always wrong” mindset can kiss… → Read More

February 4th, 2013

VendorStack Launches With Service Like Yelp And Quora For Enterprise Vendors

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The fertile enterprise startup field has created a space for customers seeking peer analysis of vendor offerings. VendorStack hopes to fill that space with a new service that Co-Founder David Cheng calls a Yelp plus Quora. → Read More

February 2nd, 2013

The Forgotten Secrets Of The Enterprise Giants: Virality, Word Of Mouth, And Other Radical Experiments

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Editor’s note:David Barrett is founder and CEO of Expensify.

I would strongly encourage everybody who competes with Expensify to study Roman Stanek’s latest article, ”Forget Virality, Selling Enterprise Software Is Still Old School.” To everyone else, I’d offer an opposing view: Enterprise sales is undergoing the most radical shakeup since the turn of the century, and today’s experiments will… → Read More

January 29th, 2013

Michael Dell Seeking Majority Control Of Dell Inc., Contributing As Much As $1 Billion Of His Own Personal Funds

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Michael Dell is trying to get control of Dell, Inc. with as much as $1 billion of his own personal funds. His goal: shift the company’s focus from PC sales to a more enterprise focused company that can operate without the pressures of being a publicly traded company. → Read More

January 27th, 2013

The Enterprise Cool Kids

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No, this isn’t a guest column by Aaron Levie. Though he and his startup Box, the poster child of the “sexy enterprise,” are definitely included in the bunch. “You should definitely kick Aaron off the list. Just to mess with him,” Zendesk founder Mikkel Svane commented when he heard what we were writing. With VCs voting with their feet and eschewing consumer startups… → Read More

January 26th, 2013

Forget Virality, Selling Enterprise Software Is Still Old School

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Editor’s note: Roman Stanek is CEO and founder of GoodData.

Lately, in Silicon Valley and its counterparts around the world, disappointment has ruled the halls of companies that had a huge impact with consumers, but then fizzled as investments when they went public—Facebook’s and Zynga’s IPOs being the most notorious examples. Attention quickly moved from the consumer to the enterprise… → Read More

January 23rd, 2013

Apperian Gets Strategic Investment From Intel Capital To Develop Platform For Managing Windows Apps

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Apperian has raised a new round of funding from Intel Capital, bringing its total raised to $28 million for the mobile application management company.

Apperian did not disclose the funding amount from Intel Capital. Prior to this round, Apperian had $23.4 million in total funding, putting Intel’s investment at $4.6 million. The additional capital builds on previous investments from top firms… → Read More

January 21st, 2013

Acceleprise Adds 8 Companies To New Class, Shows Growth Of Enterprise Startup Culture

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Acceleprise, an accelerator for enterprise startups, has announced eight new companies for its latest class. The companies were chosen from an applicant pool twice the size of the previous class.

Acceleprise is also adding a class and increasing the number of companies it accepts. It will now do three classes a year with eight companies in each class. That’s up from two sessions a year with six… → Read More

January 19th, 2013

The Changing Of The Enterprise Guard

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Editor’s note: Aaron Levie is CEO and co-founder of Box.

When we decided to focus on selling to enterprises five years ago at Box, we saw some exciting emerging trends: workers needed tools that were far simpler to use; cloud-delivered technology meant that IT departments could spend less time maintaining infrastructure and play a more strategic role in organizations; and with enterprise… → Read More

January 16th, 2013

GitHub Passes The 3 Million Developer Mark

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GitHub has surpassed the 3 million-developer mark, a milestone for the collaborative platform for application development. GitHub said it happened Monday night on the first day of the company’s all-hands winter summit. Launched in April 2008, GitHub celebrated its first million users in September 2011. The company hit the 2 million mark in August 2012, just short of a year later. How many… → Read More

January 8th, 2013

Bitly Launches Social Data APIs For Real-Time Seach, Attention Spikes, And Deeper Looks At URLs

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Bitly has launched a set of social APIs that includes real-time search, attention spikes and metadata about URLs.

The new APIs offer the following: → Read More

January 4th, 2013

Vobi Raises $1.5 Million For Online Collaboration That’s Kicked Off By Phone Calls

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Austin-based Vobi.com, a cloud-based collaboration startup which will sell its services through mobile operators, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Dallas VC firm Trailblazer Capital. The firm specializes in communications companies that have unique IP, explains Vobi CEO Mark Castleman, making it a good fit as Vobi’s lead investor. → Read More

January 3rd, 2013

Forrester: SaaS And Data-Driven “Smart” Apps Fueling Worldwide Software Growth

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Forrester Research is citing SaaS and data-driven smart apps as the major growth engines for the worldwide software market. The SaaS software market will increase 25 percent in 2013 to $59 billion, a 25 percent increase. In 2014, the market is expected to total $75 billion. Forrester uses the term “smart computing” to define apps that, for instance, provide direct access to data for… → Read More

January 2nd, 2013

The Ubuntu Phone OS Doesn’t Stand A Chance

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Of course proponents will say that the mobile market is still in its infancy and there is a need for an open OS. While I agree, I am not convinced that Ubuntu will become a winner on the scale of Android, its Linux counterpart.

Years will pass before Ubuntu sees developer traction for an Ubuntu phone. The device does not yet have a manufacturer or an operator. → Read More

January 1st, 2013

The 2013 Enterprise Guide For Dummies

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The enterprise — I get a sideways glance when I tell people it’s what I cover. People want to know why I find it so compelling. They ask because truly they have no goddamn clue what the hell the enterprise is in the first place. → Read More

December 18th, 2012

Plex Systems Lands $30M From Accel To Help Global Manufacturing Transition To The Cloud

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Over the last few years, the enterprise has been been quick to adopt cloud computing, but by and large, the cloud has found the most penetration in areas of the enterprise that aren’t mission critical. Yet, as Forbes wrote today, this has begun to change of late as companies that are handicapped by decades-old, legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system increasingly move from on-premise… → Read More

December 14th, 2012

One Dev, At Least, Is Doing Great On Windows 8

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Patrick Husting runs a small development shop, ExtendedResults where he sells a product called PUSHBI, a mobile business intelligence app. While the app was popular on iOS and Android, he found some interesting results when he moved it onto Windows 8 – his sales, once flat on Windows, went up to the tune of 2,500 downloads in the last few weeks. He admits it’s not a huge sample size but it’s some… → Read More

December 7th, 2012

Targeting The Enterprise, Openera Is An IFTTT For Email Attachments

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Openera, an Ottawa-based startup which automatically moves email attachments into cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Salesforce and more, has raised $250,000 in seed funding, which the CEO Peter Lalonde jokes is “equal in significance to raising about a million if we were raising in the U.S.” He may be right – the company has been winning pitch competitions all across Canada for… → Read More

November 14th, 2012

Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Peter Levine: There’s An Enterprise Renaissance Going On

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Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Peter Levine took the stage at the Defrag conference today and said what has become pretty apparent these days: There’s a renaissance happening in the enterprise and the change it brings will go deep and see the emergence of a new generation of creativity that will change the way we live and work. → Read More