July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

There wasn’t a huge number of deals today, but the ones that there were, were big.

FireHost gets $12 million

FireHost, a cloud-hosting company, announced a $12 million series D funding round led by investment partner The Stephens Group. FireHost has customers in 30 countries around the globe, including Whole Foods, Kaiser Permanente, and Casio.

“FireHost has had tremendous traction in extending the cloud into the most secure and mission-critical applications, and this investment will enable them to extend their reach in cloud and security innovation. Enterprises can no longer reactively address gaps in security,” Aaron Clark, the vice president at The Stephens Group, said in a statement. “The company has strong and proven leadership, has a defensible advantage in the market, continues to push innovation and product development, and is driven to succeed.”

FireHost is using the cash to expand its enterprise market presence, develop new solutions, and add new security, compliance, performance, and managed services. This increases its total amount raised to $34 million.

Idomoo snaps up $9 million

Idomoo, which provides a platform for the creation of inexpensive personalized videos, closed a $9 million round of equity funding led by New York-based Marker LLC.

The company built what it calls a Personalized Video as a Service (PVaaS) platform that helps companies general “massive numbers” of personalized videos for individual customers. So far, it has served tens of millions of videos in 16 languages, each automatically generated for an individual person, the company says.

Idomoo is headquartered in Hod Hasharon, Israel, and will use the new investment to expand its operations in North America, South America, and Europe.

Datamnr raises $30 million for Twitter hotspots

Dataminr has closed $30 million for its real-time analytics service, which helps enterprise clients keep tabs on the pulse of their industry.

The company takes social media data and analyzes it for “hotspots of activity.” The system then creates a customized signal stream of market-relevant information, noteworthy events, and emerging trends that clients can refer to while making decisions.

The company has raised $46.5 million to date and is based in New York.

Photo credit: ViaMoi via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Tibco today acquired Streambase to augment its analytics offering and appeal to the largest financial firms on Wall Street.

Neither company disclosed the final sum. But Tibco released the news on its website today, and it says the acquisition will bring streaming capabilities to its event-processing portfolio.

Palo Alto Calif.-based Tibco is a midsize enterprise company that competes with giants like IBM and Oracle. It has been around since the late ’90s, and it provides infrastructure software that its clients can use in the cloud or on site.

Tibco’s software helps data flow between and within companies in fractions of a second. Customers include e-commerce companies that want to sell products based on real-time customer behavior or broker the processing of high-frequency trades.

Tibco targeted Streambase for its data analytics technology, which is used for algorithmic trading, and it’s a known brand in the capital markets. Tibco is also popular with Wall Street firms, a highly lucrative source of business.

“This combination extends our event-processing abilities and provides a terrific opportunity to address a growing number of use cases for data in motion – in financial services and beyond,” said Tibco chief technology officer Matt Quinn in a statement.

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall reported in March that Tibco claims to be the fastest growing enterprise software company — despite sales missteps with its larger accounts. Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive [above] says Tibco has grown 20 percent each year for the past decade.

This spring, Tibco acquired a French location analytics company Maporama, which it will roll into its Spotfire offering. Spotfire, along with Tibco’s messaging product, Tibbr, and some other cloud products, is growing rapidly.

In five years, half of Tibco’s revenue will come from products “I don’t have right now,” Ranadive told VentureBeat.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yet another big data-meets-marketing startup has hauled in a hefty round of funding.

BrightEdge has raised $42.8 million in its fourth round of funding. The company provides an enterprise grade SEO platform that applies big data analytics to marketing efforts.

Founder and CEO Jim Yu said in an interview with VentureBeat that the S3 platform does three core things. It visualizes collected data in customizable dashboards with drag and drop charts. The engine indexes information from websites, search engines, mobile devices, and social media and “glues” it back together for an overall view of relevant activity.

It then generates recommendations in a to-do list of actions that marketers can take to drive impact. Third, BrightEdge has also built a strategy engine that looks at how competitors are performing in different segments and create a “market map.” Using predictive analytics, businesses can build forecasts to help understand and prioritize what drives the most impact.

“We now live in a world where brands are becoming publishers and consumers are influencers and content is getting created, shared, and accessed at a massive scale.” Yu said. “This is one of the biggest changes that has happened in modern business and marketing is the first place where you will see that impact. Marketers have to think more like scientists than artist and we believe there is a massive chance there.”

Yu founded BrightEdge six years ago as a marketing platform to help companies measure the value of their content across multiple digital channels. 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone, and BrightEdge got an early start on making this data accessible to people who can use it to impact their business.

Now BrightEdge works with over 6000 brands and 600 direct clients, including 30 percent of the Fortune 100. Clients include Microsoft, 3M, Nike, Marriott, and Performics. Yu said the technology serves 9 of the top 10 largest hotel groups, 7 of the top 10 online retailers, and 7 of the top 10 technology companies. Yu said this is because the platform drives “transformative results” in traffic and revenue.

The company is growing fast and this funding will go towards scaling and expanding the business, with a focus on international markets. It will also fuel product innovation. Insight Venture Partners led this round, with participation from existing investors Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

BrightEdge said it is taking on a $12 billion market. Using big data to make intelligent business decisions is ubiquitous now as companies of all sizes realize the benefits of funneling their time, money, and resources into areas where it can drive returns on investment (ROI). Last week Brand Networks closed $68 million for its enterprise software for social media marketing and Marketo, which makes marketing automation software solutions, went public in March 2013 after raising a total of $108 million. Eloqua and HubSpot are other big time competitors.

BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, California. It has raised $61.9 million to date.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Spinnakr released its product today that works as a “Big Data for Dummies.” The company also announced raising a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, Point Nine Capital, Sandhill Angels, a cofounder of comScore, and other angels.

Spinnakr’s platform seeks to make data analytics so simple, accessible, and comprehensible that anyone can do it. The technology serves as an “analytics and optimization consultant” that can sense important opportunities and give insight as to how to respond.

“Spinnakr’s insights driven analytics eliminates the need for digital strategists or expensive consultants to interpret web analytics data and make sites changes based on that data,” said founder Michael Mayernick in an email “Previously this process could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months. We found it intolerable that the value of big data is still locked away.”

The system collects visitor data and runs it through real-time analytics engines to detect trends and then prioritizes the information and notifies the business owner/marketing person of the most important ones. Startups, small business owners, bloggers etc…using the system receive a news feed of whats going on in words, rather than charts and graphs. It could read “you have a traffic spike from Facebook” or “you have a new search term driving traffic.” Once the discovery is displayed, Spinnakr will present a targeted, specific recommendation on how to act on that data. For example, if there is an influx of job seekers to your site, the engine suggest that you redirect them to a careers page to learn more about job opportunities.

Mayernick said that many clients don’t want to interpret data on their own and prefer to be told what to do. Spinnakr still does advanced, real-time analysis like competitors Chartbeat, Google Analytics, or Optimizely, but presents it a more clear-cut, idiot-proof way.

Mayernick and cofounder Adam Bonnifield previously worked on digital strategy for a political campaign. They built online targeting systems for politics, working with congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial campaigns, and said their technology helped set fundraising records in 2006 and 2008. While data scientists and experienced strategists were able to extract value from data, this was still a challenge for regular people. The two wanted to open up the benefits of data to all.

Analytics are becoming an increasingly important (and necessary) element of any business that operates online. To remain competitive, companies of all sizes need to be aware of what drives or hurts their traffic and engagement, and react accordingly. Those that can’t afford or understand analytics products like Chartbeat, Google Analytics, or Optimizely can use Spinnakr. The demand is clearly there — Spinnakr has more than 5,000 business on its waiting list and said it already optimizes 10 million page views each month for active SMB, e-commerce, and emerging enterprise customers. It also said that users frequently see over 100% conversion lift on messaging, compared to the 10 to 30 percent of traditional web optimization methods like A/B testing.

Spinnakr works out of AOL’s First Floor Labs in Palo Alto and Washington DC. It was founded in 2011 and has six employees.

Five months ago, Segment.io‘s business just wasn’t getting traction. But an open-source library the team had released in 2012 that enabled web developers to drop in site analytics code once, and integrate dozens of analytics tools immediately, was seeing surprising momentum. So the team changed directions, built a hosted version, and today is serving “over a billion API calls a month.”

Zero to a billion in five months sounds good, so Segment.io is trying it again.

The Y Combinator-funded startup is launching a single analytics solution for mobile apps. Similar to its web version, the Segment.io’s mobile analytics SDK enables developers to implement just a few lines of code and then toggle any analytics service on or off instantly. No recompile, no resubmission to the app store, no re-installs on user devices.

That’s impressive.

“Mobile analytics is a brand-new field, and no clear winner has emerged yet,” Segment.io cofounder Peter Reinhardt told me via email. “Countly, Mixpanel, Localytics, Flurry, Amplitude, and others are neck-and-neck … many of Segment.io’s customers ask, ‘Which should I use?’ So we made it incredibly easy to try them all.”

I’ve built mobile apps with hundreds of thousands of downloads and have an app in the iOS app store right now. From my personal experience, this is huge. In fact, I wouldn’t build another mobile app without it, because it’s like buying analytics and integration insurance. Just having to use it once, if you ever need to switch to another analytics provider or want to integrated a new marketing automation solution like Marketo, could save weeks of time and hours of work.

Source: John Koetsier

iPhone5 next to my Google/Samsung Nexus.

“The client-side code took half an hour, including setting up our account,” DrChrono, a media data iPad app maker, Marketo customer, and Segment.io user said. “The backend code was equally simple. This is a huge win.”

Colin Nederkoorn, one of the cofounders of Customer.io, agrees:

“iOS and Android apps used to have a large up front cost to integrate with Customer.io,” Nekerkoorn said in a statement. “Segment.io eliminates ‘integration risk.’”

With the new software development kids for Android and iOS, Segment.io is also announcing new partnerships with marketing automation competitors HubSpot and Marketo. Which means that you’ll now be able to track and manage mobile user acquisitions — and revenue-critical items like in-app purchases — with best-in-class marketing automation analytics and solutions.

It’s also the first time that HubSpot can access and collect data from mobile apps.

“We’re really excited about Segment.io’s [capability] to update contacts’ activities directly from mobile apps,” a HubSpot representative said in a statement. “In a multidevice world, it’s important to understand the journey your prospects and leads take across devices, and send them the right message with the right context at the right time.”

That’s exciting news for app developers, who can now know more about their users, where they are, what devices they’re using, and make better decisions about how to refine their apps, improve their user experience, and also monetize.

Reinhardt didn’t know how interesting Segment.io’s original web-focused analytics product was until the team put it on Hacker News, a Y Combinator-focused technology news site. Shortly thereafter, the open-source project’s GitHub code repository had over 2,000 stars … impressive when you consider that Node.js — which is absolutely huge — has 20,000.

Now he’s hoping that mobile developers will respond just as web developers already have.

Segment.io has raised $580,000 from Y Combinator, Start Fund, General Catalyst Partners, SV Angels, and other sources.

photo credit: stuant63 via photopin cc

First of all, ixnay on the faces: brand images without faces drive many more repins than images with faces.

And generally, color is good, particularly images with more than one dominant color, which are repinned 3.25 times more often than images with just one dominant color. But even though blue seems to be many people’s favorite color, it’s a bad choice for repin-seeking Pinteresters. Red images get more repins than primarily blue images, and pictures that contain a mixture of red, orange, and brown, oddly enough, are repinned twice as as often as blue images.

Which makes the header photo for this post — a decadent Loaded Baked Potato Soup at a Disney theme park– a just-about-perfect pin: It’s been repinned almost 60,000 times and liked almost 8,000 times.

To generate its guidelines for creating more-shareable pins, Curulate analyzed 30 visual characteristics of images on Pinterest, such as color, texture, size, format (portrait or landscape), and saturation (how light or dark an image is).

Another interesting finding: Never, ever post a rough-textured image to Pinterest. According to the Curulate data, images with smooth texture are repinned a massive 17 times more often than images with rough texture. In addition, to maximize repinnability of products or objects, make the shot a close-up. Imagines with less than 30 percent background are repinned most often, while images that contain 40 percent or more background are two to four times less likely to be repinned.

One more guideline: saturation.

Very light and very dark images are seldom repinned. In fact, images with medium lightness are repinned 20 times more often than mostly dark images and eight times more often than images that are mostly white.

Source: http://pinterest.com/pin/89368373825810713/

Another very pinnable post with 165 re-pins

Finally, while it’s not an image guideline, brands need to be careful that their images on Pinterest actually lead somewhere. Pinterest is the fourth-largest traffic-generating site on the Internet, but 48 percent of the most popular pins lead to expired pages on retailers’ sites.

It’s a complete waste of time to engineer the perfectly-repinnable Pinterest pin only to have it lead straight to a 404 error page on your website.

Image credits: Pinterest; Baked Potato Soup/Disney; Pinterest Cake by Shards of Blue/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Ticketfly wants to reward you for seeing live music.

Today, this hot ticket-selling startup released Fanbase, a suite of customer analytics products that founder Andrew Dreskin said is a first of its kind. Venues and event promoters can use Fanbase to identify their top fans and offer them rewards for loyalty.

Dreskin’s claim to fame is “being the first guy to sell tickets on the Internet.” He cofounded a company called TicketWeb, which Ticketmaster bought in 2000. Around 2007, he saw that the main problems in event ticketing were still not being addressed and started building Ticketfly.

Ticketfly does not only sell tickets. Dreskin describes it as a “holistic technical solution” for events and venues. The platform provides events and venues with tools for ticketing, cross-channel marketing, and analytics that serve to streamline operations and drive sales.

“Historically, this industry had a lack of innovation,” Dreskin said during an interview at Ticketfly’s offices. “There were no integrated technical systems, nothing was connected, and there was no understanding of how tickets were bought and sold and who the customers are. We were the first to bring social ticketing and an integrated platform to this industry, and with Fanbase, we are continuing the theme of doing things first.”

The inspiration for Fanbase came from a discovery: that 7 percent of customers drove 30 percent of revenue. Ticketfly saw an opportunity to harness the power of these users by incentivizing their loyalty. The technology behind Fanbase is based on 12 different criteria that generate a ranking for each customer. Factors include how often a customer visits a venue, how much money they spend, their social media following, etc. Venues can adjust the criteria based on their preferences and reward their top users with perks like VIP access, presale tickets, merchandise, and drink tickets.

“Going to live events used to be an anonymous process, even if you went to the same venue 40 times a year,” Dreskin said. “Fanbase is about encouraging top fans to market on behalf of the venues and promoters, this has never been done before in the industry because no  other provider has access to this data. We are uniquely positioned to do this because we power all the technology for our clients. The industry is yearning for next-generation tools, and Fanbase is a great example of that.”

Fifty venues and promoters used Fanbase during beta testing and the feedback was “overwhelmingly positive.” Ninety-two percent of the clients said they would use Fanbase multiple times a week, and email sent with Fanbase offers to fans were twice as likely to be opened.

Dreskin told me to imagine that my favorite local venue offered me a VIP table for an upcoming show or gave me early access to shows that I might like. What’s not to like?

“It would be disingenuous to say that people solely buy tickets because they like a venue,” he said. “Of course the driver is the artist, but we are seeing more and more that people are developing great affinities for venues and promoters. If it’s a band they kind of like at a venue they love, they will go, and when they walk through the for, they are no longer a nameless, faceless person.”

Since launching in 2008, TicketFly has grown to 105 employees and 1,100 clients. Last year, the site sold tickets to 26,000 events and revenue growth continues to accelerate. Every 90 days, Ticketfly signs agreements to sell a million new tickets, and Dreskin projects it will do 250 million of gross transaction volume in 2013.

Ticketmaster is the startup’s main competitor, but Dreskin said it has major issues with technology and customer relations, not to mention alienating promoters by merging with event promoter Live Nation. Today’s releae is the first iteration of Fanbase and the platform will evolve over time as more people use it.

Ticketfly has raised $37 million in venture capital and is based in San Francisco.

Check out this video about Fanbase.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise software giant SAP has been throwing its hands in the air for years, exclaiming that it is indeed a cloud company. But yesterday, SAP took a big step that shows where the it and its customers are at by offering its “HANA” in-memory database technology from its own cloud.

HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is an appliance that stores terabytes worth of data and can move through that data at high speeds. As of this week, SAP and its clients are storing more than 750TBs of data in the system. HANA is an expensive solution not many companies can offer, and it’s clearly important to SAP’s future. “We expect [HANA] to have a billion-dollar future on its own,” SAP mobility head Sanjay Poonen told us in November.

SAP previously only offered HANA via the cloud through Amazon Web Services. There are many potential reasons why SAP would want to offer HANA from its own cloud rather than AWS. For example, it gives SAP more control over its product, lets SAP allocate the right high-performance hardware for HANA’s monumental tasks, and lets SAP offer HANA in the cloud at a lower overall cost.

Another reason SAP has moved HANA to its own cloud is that HANA has reportedly underperformed with current customers. SAP has even given away HANA for free to some tech startups in order to seed interest and maybe gain more big customers if those startups grow big.

But after talking with several “big data” experts, one final reason particularity sticks out: SAP needed to move HANA to its own cloud to make it easier to deploy the damn thing to businesses.

“In the last 10 years, the speed of business has significantly increased,” Stefan Groschupf, the CEO of Hadoop-based big data analytics startup Datameer, told VentureBeat. “No one has time to wait 18 months anymore.”

Essentially, many businesses have given up on overly long deployment cycles — it bogs down other processes, and the software is outdated once it’s ready to be deployed. Cloud software pioneers like Workday have shown enterprises how handy the cloud can be and they like what they’ve seen.

SAP and chief competitor Oracle have been watching this trend carefully during the past few years. Both companies have acquired smaller companies and launched new cloud-focused products to help speed up deployments and stay relevant. SAP’s biggest move in recent history was acquiring SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion back in December 2011. Similarly, Oracle has purchased a boatload of companies.

In the case of HANA, this is SAP tapping two huge trends (big data and cloud) and trying to tie the biggest companies in the world to its solution. Offering it via the cloud means companies might bring in those companies that see how the cloud can speed up their workflow.

That said, lean startups focused on big data solutions could gobble up some of the market SAP wants to attack with HANA. One such startup is SiSense, a big data company that has seen a 520 percent growth in subscription revenues in the past year. SiSense’s offering is different than HANA but it still thinks it can solve many businesses’ big data qualms.

“We can run on any hardware out there; many companies don’t want to buy new hardware,” SiSense marketing VP Bruno Aziza told VentureBeat. “There’s been a shift in the market for how people procure their big data solutions.”

For example, SiSense’s CTO recently crunched 10TBs of data in 10 seconds using an off-the-shelf $10,000 server as a conference stunt.

Another thing on SiSense’s side: it only takes “hours” to deploy.

Clouds image via PhotoAtelier/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Startups targeted to businesses, rather than consumers, are increasingly closing the largest rounds.

Today was no exception. Analytics startups Clicktale and Skytree raised the most sizable sums. As our own Rebecca Grant whimsically put it in her Clicktale write-up, “every mouse has  a story, whether its Mickey and Minnie, Alice in Wonderland’s Dormouse, or the one helping you navigate around the Internet.” A further three enterprise tech companies also secured funding.

The moral of the story? It’s wise to invest in enterprise. Here’s our full list of the startups that received funding today.

Skytree gets $18M for its “big data” analytics tools

The company that applies machine learning for “big data” analytics raised $18M in funding led by U.S. Venture Partners, joined by joined by USP, the world’s largest package delivery company, and Scott McNealy, co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems.

Clicktale raises $17M to tell the story behind every [computer] mouse

Clicktale has raised $17 million for its ‘in-page analytics’ technology that provides insights into customers’ online behavior, down to the last click. Read the full story on VentureBeat. 

Dwolla raises $16.5M from Andreessen Horowitz to revolutionize banking

Dwolla’s software allows anyone or anything connected to the Internet to move money. Individuals all the way up to enterprise companies can use the technology to send, request, and accept money from anyone else, and transactions can be conducted through email, mobile devices, and even social media. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Alpha Payments Cloud gets $12 million for its enterprise app store

The Singapore-based startup raised $12 million from an angel investor. The company has a cloud-based IT startup, and today launch an enterprise app store. APC hopes to change the way payment products are developed.

Fashion commerce company Ruby Ribbon gets $8.5 million

Ruby Ribbon claims to be the first company to sell unique shaping apparel through technology-enhanced, person-to-person social commerce. The company’s second round was led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and joined by the company’s original investor, Trinity Ventures.

Top Image via TellApart 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Every mouse has a story, whether its Mickey and Minnie, Alice in Wonderland’s Dormouse, or the one helping you navigate around the Internet.

Clicktale has raised $17 million for its ‘in-page analytics’ technology that provides insights into customers’ online behavior, down to the last click. The technology tracks every mouse move, click, and scroll, and provides visual heat maps and behavioral reports that serve as a complement to traditional web analytics, which primarily deal with page-to-page navigation.

In this data-obsessed age, online businesses are always trying to figure out what their users are doing, how they respond to various features, and what the barriers to engagement are. Clicktale’s solutions for mouse tracking and heatmap collect and present this data, while the conversion suite provides tools to improve conversion rates. Businesses can watch recordings of their visitors’ browsing sessions and “see your site through the eyes of your visitors.”

The goal is to “maximize your site’s potential” by making simple changes that can increase engagement. When businesses understand where they lose people, they can adapt accordingly. ClickTale’s Online Optimization Cycle is designed for make improving the site’s more efficient. For example, if a particular form in a field is consistently left blank, businesses can take steps to clarify, alter, or remove the field entirely.

The service is available on a freemium model. Clicktale has more than 80,000 clients including CBS, Lenovo, T-Mobile, and Groupon and brought in over $10 million in 2012. After raising $800K in 2007 from YL Ventures, Clicktale achieved this impressive traction with no additional funding. This hefty $17 million is growth financing to take Clicktale “to the next level.” Amadeus Capital Partners led the round, with participation from Goldrock Capital and Viola Credit. Clicktale is based in Tel Aviv.

Photo Credit: Jeff Christiansen/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Web optimization startup Optimizely has closed a $28 million funding round led by Benchmark Capital.

The San Francisco-based company was founded by Dan Siroker, an engineer who was inspired to launch the startup when working at Obama for America.

Siroker told me he first heard President Barack Obama speak in 2007 when he was working as a product manager at Google. Obama had made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to root out analytics tools that would prove beneficial for the campaign.

Siroker was so inspired that he quit Google, and went to work for the campaign as a volunteer. He would later rise up the ranks to become the director of analytics, and would lead a team of analysts using new technology to maximise voter registration and donations. “Even back in ’08, we viewed data as a means to make better decisions,” he explained by phone.

It was during his time working in D.C. that Siroker grew frustrated with the current suite of web optimization tools, such as Adobe’s Test & Target. So Siroker set out to create his own technology, Optimizely, which is billed as “A/B testing software you’ll actually use.”

The Obama and Romney campaigns used Optimizely in 2012, alongside 4,000 other customers. This quarter, it will launch the product in nine languages in 36 countries. The company says its revenue growth rate from March 2012 to March 2013 is 400 percent.

Optimizely’s team claims to be the third highest valued startup to graduate from the prestigious accelerator program Y Combinator — after Dropbox and AirBnB.

As part of the funding, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton will join the company’s board. Bain Capital Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Google Ventures participated in the round.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Four months after hitting five million users, social media management company HootSuite has surpassed six million users, putting it on a pace to gain more than three million users a year, even without further acceleration.

That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine this: You’re a founder of a Silicon Valley enterprise software company. It’s only 15 years old, but it’s already worth $3.5 billion. You’ve never lost money, and you’ve left your initial competition in the dust.

The companies you’re now competing against are behemoths like IBM, Oracle, and SAP — all 35 or older.

What’s more, you’ve used your relative nimbleness — your company only has 3,400 employees — to run circles around those bigger incumbents on the technology front. You’ve invested in more modern, efficient products. Seamless integration with public cloud? You offer that. ‘Big data’ analytics? You saw that coming years ago (yeah, you even wrote about book about it). In-memory, all software processing, at millisecond speed? Check! And to top it off, you’re planning more fireworks soon.

What’s not to like?

Forrester chart, April 2012

Well, last week, I went down to the offices of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco to interview its founder and chief executive, Vivek Ranadive, who finds himself in that enviable position.

However, it wasn’t a day of celebration. To the contrary, it came on the day before Tibco was to release its weak first quarter earnings: Tibco’s results showed a mere 5 percent growth in the first quarter, year on year, deeply disappointing analysts who expected much more. Moreover, on a conference call, Tibco lowered its forecast for the next quarter. Over two days, Tibco’s stock tanked about 20 percent — to just under $20, from close to $24.

What happened?

Sales leadership problems in North America and the U.K. contributed greatly to the weakness of Tibco’s results in those regions, Ranadive explained in the conference call to analysts. Growth in Tibco’s North America sales, which began slowing in the fourth quarter last year, continued to show weakness — even though Ranadive had made executive changes last quarter.

“Well, it’s at all levels,” explained Ranadive during the analyst call, when asked how he was able to identify the “bad leadership” problem. Demand for Tibco product remained robust, Ranadive said, referring to a strong pipeline of deals in most regions. In Asia Pacific, sales were up 27 percent. So it was easy to identify the problem areas. Closure of only a couple more of the larger deals in our pipeline would have helped Tibco make its numbers. So when a few big deals didn’t get done in the U.S and the UK, Tibco went back to look at what happened. “There are all kinds of things I can point to,” he said. “So it’s… talking to a customer who was very happy and then going in and finding out that the customer doesn’t have a clue that we do these 4 other things,” Ranadive said. “Or not having the requisite expertise in a certain office in certain product categories or not doing — or not getting — in some cases, I mean, I’m embarrassed to say people not even being in the office.”

A wider enterprise story: It’s sales, stupid!

Tibco’s miss may embody a larger story that is playing out across Silicon Valley and beyond: As cloud and big data technology mature, mid-sized companies like Tibco and smaller ones must suddenly get more sophisticated about the way they sell, not just about what they sell, to the thousands of companies implementing this new technology. Turns out, it takes more than technology prowess and vision to succeed. Hell, even the big guys are having problems (Oracle referred to sales execution issues of its own, when it badly missed its earnings numbers last week).

Source: Tibco

Tibco Spotfire on iPad

There’s no doubt: Tibco’s technology is sleek, exemplified by fast-selling products like Spotfire, an in-memory tracker of key corporate data and transactions (analysts say Spotfire revenues are growing at 30 percent or more). “I’m bullish on Tibco,” says Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, who tracks the enterprise software sector, referring to Tibco technology.

However, enterprise giants like Oracle, IBM, and SAP, which once sold only expensive “on premise” software (software not delivered over the web but downloaded onsite), are catching up. They’re starting to offer less expensive and more nimble cloud products as well as data analytic products — even if they’re often not as agile and cost-effective as Tibco’s. Armed with massive sales and marketing budgets, these larger players tell their existing customers that their offerings are “good enough.” A switch to Tibco’s solutions would be unnecessary and costly, they argue.

So while Tibco tries hard to penetrate the market with those customers willing to experiment, the slightest misstep on the execution side with larger accounts can make the difference between hitting or missing earnings expectations in any given quarter.

Exuding confidence

Not that Ranadive is obsessed with the company’s stock price. ”I’m not concerned with market cap right now,” he tells me.

Ranadive, 57, is a slight man who likes to speak in confident, declarative statements. They leave little room for interpretation and can impress with their conviction — though they’re often clearly meant to provoke — a hallmark of a cocky entrepreneur.

“We’re the fastest growing enterprise software company,” he boasted early in our talk, noting that for the last decade the company has grown 20 percent each year. And unlike Salesforce, which makes barely any profit, Tibco has spent $1 billion in profits buying up its own shares over the past six years, he said.

Ranadive also likes to talk about the need to deliver value and invest to do that in the future. He’s proud that Tibco’s technology runs crucial businesses such as banks, exchanges, phone networks, and airlines — all of which would grind to a halt if Tibco were to go down, he said. By contrast, social networks, no matter how big, aren’t nearly so essential.

“If Facebook goes down, what stops?” he asked me. “What would you not do? Maybe you wouldn’t know what some random friend ate for dinner.”

And because Tibco has positioned itself for the future, the company’s growth is going to accelerate over the next few years, he said.

The ‘visionary’

Granted, Ranadive has reason for his confidence. He trailblazed the enterprise software market from an early age, and he’s credited with digitizing Wall Street in the 1980s. That came in 1986, when he made a breakthrough innovation based on the computer “bus,” the system that governs data communication between the CPU, memory, and other I/O devices. Ranadive devised a software-based version of the bus that enabled messaging to happen on a computer network in real time. His first customers were big banks like Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, which used his technology to push market data such as stock quotes and news to their traders. By 1997, Ranadive had founded Tibco, naming it after his software bus innovation (The Information Bus, or “TIB”).

But Ranadive kept innovating with the rise of the web in the 1990s. He built his messaging technology around the HTTP web server send-receive protocol. Tibco thus became the earliest software company offering customers real-time data communication in the cloud. From there, Tibco has continued to surge ahead, releasing a range of other software products nicely oriented for the future of real-time data analytics. The background stands in contrast with the IBMs and Oracles, which have older core architectures, and which were forced to acquire newer technology and tack it on — often in ways that are clunkier and more expensive.

“They have all of the pieces,” said Forrester’s Gualtieri, of Tibco. “The thing I really like about them is that they’re so nimble. From a technology standpoint, and the way they serve customers, they can run circle around the IBMs and the Oracles.”

Gualtieri says it helps to have a guy like Ranadive at the helm, who has written books about The Two-Second Advantage, or the need to for companies to make split-second decisions. “He’s a visionary,” says Gualtieri.

‘I know everything about you’

Take, for example, how the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association is using Tibco’s software. Tibco created something called Fan Zone, which Ranadive calls a sort of “psychological router.” It detects what Warriors fans are doing in real time and then helps Golden State make offers to fans based on their behaviors, interests, or even moods. “I know everything about you,” Ranadive, who is a part owner of the Warriors, explained. “You’re eating pizza, I know it. You tweet, I see it. You’re going to be unhappy? I know it before you know it.” Tibco won’t comment about what specific cases are being used, because the Warriors want to keep that private. But the technology will let Golden State specify certain events it wants to respond to in real-time. If you tweet “my hot dog is cold,” “my seats are too far away,” or “parking costs too much here,” the Oakland Coliseum Arena would like to know that and respond accordingly. But it really gets more interesting with the application of geolocation data. If the Arena detects you’ve been standing in line at a hot dog stand for 15 minutes, the vendor can greet you with an offer, saying “Sorry, this one is on us!”

Tibco is pushing the same sort of real-time analytics and messaging technology aggressively elsewhere, such as banking, hospitals, and retail. Macy’s is using Tibco to make real-time offers to customers based on their interests, Ranadive said. (The chart at right illustrates Tibco’s event processing approach.)

Tibco is making other acquisitions to help build this out, especially for customers to track mobile customers. Just this week, Tibco acquired a French location analytics company Maporama, which Tibco will rolled into its Spotfire offering. Spotfire, along with Tibco’s messaging product, Tibbr, and some other cloud products are all growing quickly. In five years, half of Tibco’s revenue will come from products “I don’t have right now,” Ranadive said.

When loyalty is a personal weakness

For now, though, it’s the big sales to larger enterprise customers where Tibco needs to apply itself. These require more focus on the relatively mundane area of sales and marketing, where careful execution counts for more than the actual prowess of your technology. And its here where analysts grilled Ranadive for missteps during the quarter, where Tibco lost some deals to the bigger players, in part because of what Ranadive called “a void in leadership” in U.S. sales.

Ranadive shouldered the blame for this during my interview. He responded that he’d wanted to make a leadership change in North American sales for some time, but he hadn’t moved fast enough.

When I asked him what he thought his great personal weakness is, Ranadive said, “Sometimes I don’t go with my gut … that’s cost me from time to time.” He likes to give his executives relative autonomy, he said, and likens his leadership style to that of a jazz band conductor, with tolerance for a lot of improvisation — and he wants to let people come around to his point of view. However, he’s loyal, he said, and this can often let people stay in a job “when the company has grown bigger than them.”

That’s not to say that Ranadive is touchy-feely. He bristles when I raised Google’s practice of allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their time to dream up projects. He says there’s a myth about innovation, that somehow it stems from having a cushy job, spare time to dream up projects, and having freedoms like bringing a dog to work. He disagrees. He says he wants his employees on site (he’s in full agreement with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s policy of forcing employees into the office). He likes to drive his employees hard, he said. His version of innovation, he says, is to “shut the doors, lock them in a room, turn off the light, cut off the water, and if green shoots come out from under the door, you have innovation.”

Sales and marketing help badly needed

That’s the sort of focus that Ranadive needs to translate to his sales and marketing efforts. Ranadive has made changes (in October, he revamped both his sales and marketing teams), but analysts like Forrester’s Gualtieri  worry it hasn’t been fast enough.

Today’s enterprise sales teams need to communicate clearly to IT executives who are overwhelmed by the plethora of technology options in front of them. Most customers have a mix of existing on-premise technology investments and a growing number of public cloud experiments. Integrating these, and calculating what makes sense to spend on improvement, can be as much art as science. So Tibco is forced to go the mat to make many of its big new sales.

Take the case of a “travel and hospitality” client during the first quarter. IBM initially stole the deal even after Tibco had cultivated the customer for weeks, Ranadive explained on last week’s analyst call. But Tibco fought back, arguing that Tibco’s product is superior and more agile.

Tibco won the deal.

The problem is, Tibco hasn’t been in fighting mode near enough. Ranadive says he’s determined than ever to fix that, he says. “If we come against them,” he says of meeting Oracle in a sales battle, “we will crush them.”

Just as urgent is the need to fix marketing, according to Forrester’s Gualtieri. Few people know, for example, that Tibco moved very early into big data analytics with its acquisition of a precursor technology to hot open source statistical computing language R. Instead, smaller companies have defined themselves and taken the lead as big data pioneers. “When you think of R, you think of Revolution Analytics,” Gualtieri said, referring to a private Silicon Valley company founded in 2007. Without more marketing clout, Tibco risks coming across too much like a me-too enterprise company, living in the shadow of IBM and Oracle. (This is one of the reasons an HP acquisition of Tibco would make sense. HP needs compelling cloud and big data technology, and would have brought marketing muscle to Tibco. A deal was rumored to be in the works last year, but fell through.).

“They have to do some more work,” said Gualtieri of Tibco. “They’ve succeeded in saying they’re ‘full-stack,’” he continued. “But now they have to make a perception transition, and they haven’t done it as fast as they need to.”

Top photo credit: Tibco

Such as the fact that goats — yes goats — were the top trending animal on YouTube this month, beating out the ever-popular cats and dogs. And that Rebecca Black searches spike every week on the day after Thursday and before Saturday.

Essentially, what Google has done is added YouTube to the Trends interface. Searchers can now keep their trend searches web-wide, or limit them to Images, News, Products, and now YouTube. Given that YouTube is a bigger online video destination than perhaps all its competitors combined, including Facebook, Yahoo, and VEVO, you’re getting a massive slice of the online video-watching data when selecting YouTube as a source.

While it’s true that there’s a lot of useless data and noise in Trends, there is, however, some degree of hope in this news: Harlem Shake, as a phenomenon, may be starting to lose steam:

One real challenge with Google Trends is that it only presents data in a relative way. So, for instance, the chart above doesn’t say anything at all about the absolute number of Harlem Shake searches — beyond that fact that there were enough to chart — it simply reveals trends over time. That makes it tough to compare countries, for instance, since it’s unclear whether Brazilians care much about the Harlem Shake or not compared to Americans.

Oh and those goats?

If you’re as lame and oblivious to popular culture as me, you’ll have no clue what that’s all about. This will give you a clue, and probably a few minutes amusement:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The myth of the “average shopper” is dead, according to New York City customer analytics startup Custora.

Instead, retailers are better off relying on the mountains of available data to determine just how valuable individual customers are, as well as predict what they’d like to buy next. Not surprisingly, that’s exactly the service that Custora is offering.

This week, the company is launching a new version of its platform, which grants retailers an unprecedented ability to test marketing strategies across any group of customers. It’s an evolution of Custora’s existing technology, and it’s also a sign that data science isn’t just for stuffy academics anymore. The new “marketing lab” tool lets retailers devise experiments — complete with a control group — to test the effectiveness of just about any campaign.

Custora’s extensive customer analytics may sound a bit scary and invasive, but according to co-founder Corey Pierson, it’s where the industry is headed.

“Retailers previously lived in this world focused on the average shopper … and as we started uncovering information about interesting [customer] segments, we found a lot of our clients started to extract some of that information,” Pierson said in an interview with VentureBeat.

The availability of customer analytics tools also means consumers won’t have to deal with as much irrelevant marketing. That leads to less junk mail that you’ll toss instantly and more relevant offers that could potentially save you money.

Bonobos and Revolve Clothing are already taking advantage of Custora’s new marketing platform, Pierson tells me. Revolve Clothing used the marketing platform to target the best customers for its recent catalog mailer campaign, but it can be used to test practically any strategy. Once retailers find a good technique for attracting their customers, they can automatically apply that technique to the rest of their relevant clientele using Custora’s platform.

“The benefit of this is retailers want to be able to reach out to different customer segments in different ways, but a lot of the tools today don’t talk to each other,” Pierson said. “So an email provider may know who’s opening emails, but they don’t know who likes what products. We now expose all of those segments and make it very easy for marketing teams to get access to [them].”

The two-year-old company spent its first year building its technology for deep customer insights, while its second year was focused on helping marketing teams act on those insights. Custora spent the past six months developing the marketing lab tool, Pierson tells me.

The company raised a small round of seed funding around two years ago, but since then it’s been growing revenues steadily. The company is now profitable, and it’s not currently seeking any more funding, Pierson says.

As for what’s next, the company says it will continue to focus on building new tools based on its extensive customer insights.

“If you can predict the long-term value of customers, there are some really interesting implications,” Pierson said. “There’s more room for them to figure out more ways to integrate with the ad buying world, and it has implications for acquisition campaigns as well.”

Marketing strategy photo via Shutterstock

This is a guest post by Walt Maguire, Analytics Director at ParAccel

The emphasis on “big data” has grown mightily over the last year, as more companies strive to draw useful intelligence out of increasingly massive data volumes from web clickstreams, sensor data, social media data and other large datasets.

One technology approach has dominated the discussion: MapReduce. MapReduce is open-source technology used for distributed programming, and its current incarnation “Hadoop” (named for its inventor’s son’s stuffed elephant), has been trumpeted as the new solution on the scene, the silver bullet for getting value from big data.

But while MapReduce and Hadoop are interesting and useful, the approach is nothing new, nor a panacea. While often cost-effective for inexpensive data storage and lightweight data processing, running analytics on Hadoop data has been challenging. Early adopters report that analytics in Hadoop are very slow to process — a big problem for analyzing giant data sets — and complex to write, due to not supporting SQL (structured query language, the lingua franca of analysts.)

Newsflash: Other technologies that solve many of the same problems have existed for decades, namely Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) databases, which are known for speedy processing of analytics and robust SQL support.

However, the MPP and Hadoop approaches are not mutually exclusive. Hadoop and MPP databases are increasingly used together by forward-thinking companies for a complete big data infrastructure that is cost-effective and leverages the best of both technologies.

Let’s compare the two approaches and look at a few specific examples of how they can be combined.

Map/Reduce and Hadoop evolution

At the heart of MapReduce are two functions called, unsurprisingly, Map and Reduce. A Map function’s role in life is to take some input data such as a list of words, apply some function and then map those inputs to output data. A Reduce function will take the outputs from a Map, and apply a function to reduce the input data into usable output data.

In the world of big data, divide and conquer is a must if we’re to cope with the data volumes generated today.

Example of a Map/Reduce function:

The initial driver behind the development of MapReduce was a paradigm shift in computer programming during the 1990s towards an approach called “functional programming.” Not long after it was first used at Google to speed up its indexing of the World Wide Web in 2004, the open source MapReduce platform, Hadoop, was developed. Hadoop delivered a reasonably complete way to develop distributed MapReduce programs. It had numerous gaps, but for those analyzing 10,000x as much data as they were five years ago, it helped.

The recent uptake of Hadoop has been driven in part by necessity. With the exponential growth of the Internet, machine data and the trend toward “saving everything,” organizations have more data than ever before, much of it in unstructured forms. So an innovation first created as a programming technique has been pressed into service as a specialized platform for distributed data processing. While it’s good at functions traditionally performed by ETL tools, it’s not as good at providing fast answers to questions.

Organizations risk finding themselves with a large repository of data in Hadoop that they can’t analyze very well.

Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) evolution

For many of the tasks necessary in processing and analyzing big data today, the Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) database is better. MPP databases also split up complex, large volume jobs into units processed across multiple nodes. While they don’t act exactly like MapReduce, they accomplish many of the same things, and are far better at some things.

MPP databases provide things taken for granted by database users for decades such as ACID compliance — meaning you will get predictable answers to questions. This isn’t enforced in Hadoop. Also, MPP databases include cost-based optimizers and monitor the distribution of data within the system; and as a result, they are generally an order of magnitude more efficient than Hadoop. So you can do things ten times more quickly, or do the same thing with one-tenth the infrastructure.

MPP databases do not solve every problem. For example, when the structure of incoming data is unknown or variable, an MPP database requires that this be structured at load time. So a measure of data manipulation must take place to prepare it. Also, appliance-based MPP systems can be difficult and costly to expand, whereas Hadoop is designed to run on any hardware. Software-based MPP database solutions don’t have this problem.

The following table compares and contrasts Hadoop/MapReduce with MPP databases.

Comparisons from the real world

Many firms have brought in both technologies for their big data infrastructure.

One large retailer found that Hadoop and an MPP platform are complementary. The company ingests large amounts of unstructured data and archives it at low cost with Hadoop; it then loads the data needed for analytics into the MPP platform via the vendor’s proprietary, high-speed integration module. Now, this retailer can run jobs 200x faster than its previous data warehouse, enabling more granular market basket analysis and customer segmentation. It leveraged Hadoop for low-cost storage and an analytic platform for doing the actual analysis,  cost-effectively solving a number of key problems with this combination of technologies.

This is a common model these days. Evernote, a Redwood City, Calif.-based developer of note taking and organization software, has a similar architecture, using Hadoop for low-cost data storage and processing of web application log data, combined with an MPP platform for analytics. For them, it was faster to move the data to a platform purpose-built for analytics than to try to run the analytics within Hadoop.

Evernote CTO Dave Engberg provides much more detail and a summary in the company’s Tech Blog:

Hadoop is great for cheaply storing a ton of data and performing parallel batch processing jobs in minutes instead of hours (or days)…But it’s not particularly quick for more complicated analyses that combine multiple different sets of data.…

Overall, the new infrastructure has met our goals. We can load and transform hundreds of millions of records in two hours instead of 10+, we’re generating far more (and far better) reports, and we can safely perform much more complex analyses of user trends than we could before.

In summary, there is a useful place for MapReduce and Hadoop in the big data landscape, but MPP technologies also offer significant advantages. Companies should strongly consider using both together to deliver big data infrastructures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

PeopleLinx, a startup that makes LinkedIn engagement and analytics software, has collected a $3.2 million round of funding to continue its growth among the Fortune 1000.

This is the company’s first institutional round of funding; it was led by Osage Venture Partners with participation from Greycroft Partners, MissionOG, and a handful of angels. In fact, the startup said via email that the round was oversubscribed.

In a nutshell, companies can use PeopleLinx to improve hiring activity (as well as sales and marketing) via LinkedIn. The software helps them set specific goals and corresponding metrics, then meet those goals using customized scores and reports.

And then, there’s online reputation management to think about. Large companies have tens of thousands of employees, many of them with a LinkedIn presence. And all that adds up to a lot of user-generated data about the company itself.

“LinkedIn has become the leading search tool for information about people and the companies they work for,” said Greycroft partner Ian Sigalow in a statement on the news.

“PeopleLinx is … helping our customers represent themselves online and manage their online reputations. The opportunity for PeopleLinx to create value for the enterprise within LinkedIn is similar to what we saw Buddy Media do in the early days of Facebook.”

PeopleLinx was founded in 2009 by former and early LinkedIn employees. The startup is based in Philadelphia. Its clients include the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, the Direct Marketing Association (both internally and for its clients), and credit company Experian.

Image credit: sheilascarborough/Flickr

Can Google redeem itself after sparking outrage on Twitter for shutting down its RSS reader?

Data nerds will benefit from the batch of updates to BigQuery, a web service that lets developers perform interactive analysis of massive datasets.

Google product manager Ju-kay Kwek announced the news on the company blog today and claimed the new features will give businesses “new ways to work effectively with large amounts of data.”

More specifically, the updates give developers a greater range of query and data types, more flexibility with table structure, and an improved toolset for collaborative analysis.

And Google’s new Big JOIN feature lets devs merge data from two large tables by a common key.

“Big JOIN simplifies data analysis that would otherwise require a data transformation step, by allowing users to specify JOIN operations using SQL,” a blog post addressed to technical users reads.

BigQuery makes it easier and cheaper for companies of all sizes to crunch big data sets. It’s a cloud service that lets users run SQL queries against enormous data-sets and get an answer in seconds, or designate a query as a batch query and let it complete in a matter of hours. In the past, it has been a more expensive process for IT than simply spinning up and uploading data to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) program.

BigQuery is Google’s answer to the “big data” trend. It also signals a renewed focus on large businesses; the enterprise division was formerly treated like a neglected sister.

Five years ago, though, analytics was an Excel spreadsheet from accounting, or a complicated application that corporations spent millions on and business analysts pulled data from with blood, sweat, and tears. We’ve already come a long way, but in just a few more years, a full 25 percent of analytics capabilities will be embedded within business applications, according to Jaspersoft, which powers 130,000 apps with embedded business intelligence features.

But we’re not there yet.

Even though analytics is already a $34 billion industry, only 25 percent of workers have access to BI tools — mostly due to costs that are still too high, and complexity, which is still too great.

More data, and the solution, in the infographic below:

photo credit: pmarkham via photopin cc

This is huge, because brands like Sephora say that their Pinterest followers spend 15 times more than their Facebook fans.

The new analytics package tells you what people are repinning from your website, how many people are seeing those pins, and — a key measure for your social marketing ROI — how many visits to your websites those pins generated. It will also show you visual selection of your most pinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so that “you have a better idea of what’s popular.”

“For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more,” Tao Tao, a Pinterest software engineer wrote on the announcement blog post.

Much as Facebook’s Insights for Facebook page owners, the new analytics are basic measures of the most important engagement numbers. Before today, to get good information on Pinterest campaigns, brands needed a third-party analytics tool such as Pinfluencer or Curalate.

While you’ll still be able to get more insight and data and particular marketing tools from third parties, this announcement from Pinterest covers the needs of most casual Pinterest marketers.

“This is a good basic analytics product to serve as a foundation for Pinterest. It has great features around impressions and reach that large brands and agencies care about,” said Pinfluencer CEO Sharad Verma, noting that Pinfluencer also has Google and Omniture integration, as well as many other marketing and e-commerce features. “No third-party analytics can accurately report on impressions and reach.”

And the new tool is — perhaps — a shot across the bow of Pinterest third-party apps that have been “filling holes” in Pinterest’s now-growing suite of business tools. Pinterest has been fairly partner-friendly to this point, so we’ll have to wait and see if it’s now moving towards a Twitter-like practice of warning developers away from areas where it plans to make money itself.

To get access to the new analytics, you’ll need a verified Pinterest website, and you’ll need access to Pinterest’s new look.

Imagine using data to pinpoint the most high-performing employees and keep them satisfied?

A startup called Evolv is building technology to make that possible, and it has raised $15 million in a fourth funding round led by Vantage Point Capital.

“We prevent the wrong person ending up in the wrong job,” said Max Simkoff, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview.

Evolv’s team of data scientists have developed software they claim can increase workforce tenure by an average of 15 percent and workforce performance by 5 percent. The product compiles data from disparate sources and makes recommendations.

“It’s hard to understand why it’s radically predictive, but it’s radically predictive,” said Jim Meyerle, Evolv’s cofounder.

More specifically, the in-house data science team will extract information like termination history and performance data, then combine it with relevant econometrics, like gas prices and nationwide unemployment rates. To bolster the data sets, Evolv pushes out surveys to its customers’ employees about social media usage, work history, and other core traits and competencies.

Evolv showcases how “big data can be leveraged to improve stagnant business processes,” said Bill Harding, Managing Director, VantagePoint Capital Partners, and a newly-appointed member of the company’s board of directors.

Since forming in 2007, the company has scored some high-profle contracts with household-name customers, such as Xerox, that pay a six figure sum for an annual subscription.

Evolv’s San Francisco-based team will use the cash at its disposal to build out its sales and marketing team, and expand internationally. Previoius investors, GGV, Khosla and Lightspeed Ventures, also participated in this latest funding round.

In November, we reported on Evolv’s partnership with The Wharton School of business. The effort was not just about helping Fortune 500 companies recruit talent and boost productivity — there are tools like SAP’s SuccessFactors and Oracle-owned Taleo for that. Instead, the partners were looking to better understand (and potentially combat) high attrition rates in US workplaces.

Top image via Shutterstock

Imagine this scenario: A dinner guest to The Cheesecake Factory in Louisville, Ky. informs his waiter about some funky tasting ketchup. Simultaneously, across the country in Palo Alto, Calif., a customer complains about the color and consistency of the ketchup on his burger.

Are these two scenarios related and potentially linked back to a bad batch from a supplier? And if so, will The Cheesecake Factory be able to prevent such incidences from occurring?

“You need to take structured data like a restaurant’s location and combine it with unstructured data like the color of the mustard or taste of the ketchup,” said Paul Chang, a program director for the consumer products team at IBM.

For restaurant chains with dozens of locations and hundreds of suppliers, it’s a near impossible task to maintain the consistency of ingredients. One screw up from a supplier and they risk unhappy customers, or worse still, a rogue meatball infected with horse meat. In the aftermath of last week’s scandal, Ikea withdrew meat from hundreds of stores to offset the public relations nightmare. (Update: See below.)

To maintain a watchful eye over its supply chain, The Cheesecake Factory is using IBM‘s tools to analyze large data sets from its 175 locations across the U.S.

In future, the restaurant giant may even be able to predict a potentially bad batch (a trigger is set off, like a supplier’s tomatoes are cheaper than usual) before it makes its way to kitchens — and eventually to your table.

“If that mustard didn’t come out the right color because it wasn’t mixed properly on the production line, it’ll be flagged” said Angela Nardone, chairman and chief innovation officer of N2N Global, a provider of software and services to companies in the food supply chain, in an interview.

N2N has teamed up with IBM to provide The Cheesecake Factory with a technology that can communicate critical supply chain data instantly, so thousands of food items won’t need to be recalled and tested. Nardone said they have initiated a conversation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as it may be easier to track the culprit if a food-related scandal occurs.

It’s a big customer win for IBM, which is pushing its professional services branch into the growing market for “big data” technology. Projections show that the overall market could increase from $8.1 billion last year to $23.7 billion by 2016, according to to the technology research firm IDC.

In February, IBM announced it would cut the price on its least-expensive Power server computers by 50 percent, to under $6,000, in a bid to compete with other large vendors like Oracle and SAP.

The restaurant industry represents a massive opportunity for IBM and startups like Food Genius, which provide chefs with insights into the optimal menu, including what dishes to make, and how to market, and price them.

According to the National Restaurant Association, restaurant sales top $660 billion, and with nearly a million eateries in the United States alone.

Update 3:30pm Pacific: IBM’s technology does not actually help restaurant chains detect horse meat, a test that requires DNA testing. IBM provided the following statement to VentureBeat:

While there are certainly applications for this technology beyond brand consistency, including food tracking and sourcing, they are currently using IBM’s tech over at Cheesecake Factory to ensure a consistent food color, taste and texture.

photo credit: Simon Greig (xrrr) via photopin cc

A startup called SiSense says it will break computing records today by crunching 10 terabytes of data on a $10,000 machine in a matter of seconds — all on a single server node.

SiSense CTO Eldad Farkash hopes to break in-memory computing records.

CTO Eldad Farkash (pictured) will analyze all that data on an off-the-shelf Dell server at the O’Reilly Strata Conference on ‘big data’ this week. The goal is to prove to the attendees (a mix of data scientists, IT execs, engineers, and entrepreneurs) that they don’t need to invest millions of dollars for a database solution from a competing vendor like SAP.

Last year at Strata, SiSense analyzed 1TB of data on a laptop with only 8GB of RAM. The laptop the startup used for the demonstration was a standard Dell Vostro 3560 that sells for under $750.

“Our mission is to show that companies don’t need to architect a complex and expensive system to crunch data,” said Bruno Aziza, SiSense’s vice president of marketing, in an interview.

Aziza recently threw cold water on the big data hype, arguing that the “market is flawed.” He made the case that the vast majority of companies will only need to crunch between 0.5TBs to 40TBs of data, so they shouldn’t worry about setting up complex clusters and distributed environments that handle pedabyte-scale data.

The Israeli startup works with large customers like Yahoo and Target, but it specializes in small to medium-sized businesses. It’s flagship big data analytics product Prism can connect to any existing data source, process about 100 times more data than RAM based in-memory solutions, and be deployed immediately.

The capability of crunching data in a matter of seconds is viewed as a competitive edge. Most famously, President Barack Obama’s team of backroom quants powered the re-election campaign to victory by putting data-driven insights about potential voters to use.

The new SDK adds better mobile analytics that will help developers get metrics on sharing events and actual usage: what people are actually doing in their apps. In addition, the new tools will enable conversion logging from ads running in Facebook-connected iOS apps, and — currently in beta — logging of in-app purchases. Both of which, of course, will help Facebook-connected apps monetize better.

In addition, the new Facebook SDK adds better — and simpler — error handling.

“The SDK will now automatically categorize errors by common application handling behavior and provide helpers to simplify some common error response cases,” Facebook engineer Jason Clark posted today. ”In addition, the SDK will automatically handle a larger number of error cases including various iOS 6 cases such as password changes and expired tokens.”

It sounds like developers who have heard about the update are happy, so far, as the update is solving annoying problems. One, Jack Tihon from Endorse, said “It’s about time. I was living in a world of pain trying to unstick users with expired tokens due to various reasons (change password, sign out of devices, etc.”

With better tracking and analytics capabilities, the new SDK is almost starting to impinge on some of the functions of dedicated app analytics solutions like App Annie and Flurry, but of course in a purely Facebook-focused manner.

The update also includes bugfixes, is backwards compatible, and is available here.

photo credit: Steel Wool via photopin cc

Playnomics, which is making a science out of figuring out which players are the most valuable to a game company, has raised $5 million in a second round of funding from Vanedge Capital.

That’s a vote of confidence in the company’s PlayRM service, which predicts which monetization or retention schemes work best with online and social-game players. Last week, San Francisco-based Playnomics extended that service to mobile platforms.

Existing investors FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital also participated in the round. That should help Playnomics on its mission of democratizing the use of scientific analytics for the larger game development community.

With Playnomics’ technology, mobile, social, and online game makers can target consumers with special offers at the moment when they are most likely to stop playing a game. The method resembles how enterprises manage their customers via customer relationship management software. In short, it’s tool that can help game makers design their apps and promotions so that companies can retain users and make more money.

Playnomics has profiled more than 100 million unique players across dozens of online games and brands.

“Playnomics has always been focused on determining why and how audiences play and enabling game developers and brands to measurably increase player retention, engagement, and monetization using our PlayRM platform,” said Chethan Ramachandran, chief executive of Playnomics. “With this new round of funding, we’ll be able to further expand the features and capabilities of the platform to meet the growing needs of our partners worldwide. Developers can expect several new product releases this year that leverage our predictive scoring and segmentation engine.”

In an interview with GamesBeat last week, Ian Atkinson, the vice president of business development at Playnomics, said that early results from beta partners on the mobile product show a 150 percent increase in player retention during the first week of using the platform.

With the service, customers can segment their audiences by different game behaviors and then target those players with custom in-game messages on an individual basis. Developers can also re-target people to bring back valuable players who have stopped playing. They can also cross-promote games to prequalified players. While other analytics packages help explain why someone left the platform, Playnomics wants to help companies predict which players are toying with quitting a game.

Playnomics was founded in 2009 and was the winner of VentureBeat’s Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2010. Playnomics is used in more than 100 games with more than 30 million monthly active players. Playnomics processes more than 5 billion in-game events a month. Other prior investors include Accelerator Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, and TriplePoint Capital.

Vanedge Capital, which focuses on investments in interactive entertainment and digital media, was founded by former Electronic Arts veterans Paul Lee and Glenn Entis.

Tony Lam, principal at Vanedge Capital, will join the Playnomics board.

“As veterans in interactive entertainment and video game technology, we recognize that access to big data science, improved analytics, and advanced marketing software are absolute requirements for successful games,” said Lam.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Cloud care is free.

Half of cloud deployments are insecure and vulnerable to attack, and a third are not properly set up to maintain service if Amazon Web Services has downtime, says cloud optimization company Newvem. Which is why Newvem is releasing a free version of its analytics product to pinpoint problems in small and medium-sized business’s clouds.

A sample Newvem report

“We’re just amazed at how exposed many small and medium-sized customers of Amazon are,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday from Tel Aviv.

The free services that Newvem will now offer include emergency triage, activity diagnostics, and cost efficiency reports. The reports will highlight security risks, show where companies can improve availability options in case of Amazon cloud issues, point out where backups are needed, and expose situations in which companies can resize their cloud usage and potentially move to a lower service level to save money.

Newvem tracks almost $250 million in Amazon EC2 usage annually and has 1,500 cloud clients who use its services to manage their increasingly sophisticated — and complex — cloud deployments. Enterprise clients and heavy cloud users get more trend analysis, can separate cloud usage by business group, get better Amazon reserved instance tracking and S3 analysis, which shows what storage capacity they have and what they’re actually using.

“The big guys who spend over $1,00,000 … they have everything they want,” Laderman says. “But the small and medium guys, there’s a big gap.”

This new product, Cloud Care, is aimed solidly at those small and medium guys, who might spend $1,000 to $5,000 a month on Amazon. Based on Amazon Web Services’ projected 2013 revenue of around $3 billion, that group likely consists of about 3,500 businesses that are using, but not necessarily optimizing, the cloud.

Amazon delivers its cloud services with what it calls a “shared responsibility” model. The problem is that the small and medium users don’t have the same level of resources as the big boys to devote full-time staff to ensuring they keep up with their side.

A sample report from Newvem

photo credit: bitzcelt via photopin cc

This guest post by Brian Solis was originally published on LinkedIn 

Social media represents a new frontier in customer engagement. Not only can companies participate in conversations, a dizzying array of tools now help them listen to conversations as well. This isn’t news though. Everyone understands the importance of social media in business right? We all know that customers are demanding that businesses use social media to listen to ideas, engage them in conversations, and also solve their problems when in need. As I’ve often said, the best listeners often make the most engaging conversationalists.

Not so fast.

According to a joint study published today by NetBase and J.D. Power and Associates, a double standard exists in social media customer service where consumers say that listening is intrusive — except when it’s not.

Cue the screeching brakes…

What!?

Social media listening is largely recognized as the new standard in community management. Listening is how companies can learn how to better serve and engage customers. Listening can improve sentiment and foster stronger relationships, build communities, and encourage loyalty.

Yet, your customers may not welcome it, even if your listening is well-intentioned.

This creates an interesting dilemma, considering that improving listening is a goal for businesses this year. My colleagues at Altimeter Group, a research firm, found as part of its upcoming Social Business Strategies Survey that 42 percent of companies indicated that “listening/learning from customers” is a top three priority for 2013.

But, if consumers don’t want companies to listen to them, what are they to do?

Let’s take a look at the interesting story that NetBase and J.D. Power and Associates visualized in this  infographic, “Is Social Listening Too Much Big Brother?” [Disclosure: NetBase is an Altimeter Group client.]

Consumers believe that listening can be intrusive except when they need something. But how can companies help customers if they’re not supposed to listen? It’s a classic catch-22.

Did you know that 32 percent of consumers using social media have no idea that brands are listening? I find this fascinating as social media is inherently social. For consumers to be so unaware makes me wonder if it’s us or them who are living on another planet.

This is where things get very interesting. Over half of consumers (51 percent) want to be able to talk about companies without them listening. Perhaps more alarming however is that 43 percent of consumers actually think listening to conversations intrudes on privacy.

Businesses appear to be caught in a web of “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” At first blush, the double standard comes alive: 48 percent will allow companies to listen if the goal is to improve products and services. And 58 percent believe that businesses should only respond to complaints in social media.

As the infographic suggests, it may be time to sharpen up our telepathy skills. Businesses need to become mind readers — 42 percent of consumers also expect them to respond to positive comments. And you’re going to love this, 64 percent of consumers want companies to only speak to them when spoken to. Huh?

Considering that 58 percent want you to engage in times of need, 42 percent wish to hear from you in good times, 64 percent only want you listening to be at their beck and call, and half of all consumers don’t want you listening at all, what are you to do?

Obviously social media, and specifically social listening, isn’t going away. But it does take tactfulness, genuine intentions and diplomacy to listen, learn, and engage (directly or indirectly) in ways that consumers feel recognized, and important. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who says something negative or positive won’t feel thankful it’s taken seriously by an organization.

To help CMOs and social strategists tread carefully while improving products, services and relationships, here are four steps to follow:

1. Don’t just listen…understand. There’s a difference between listening and hearing.
2. Context is king here. Consider the context of each post before your respond, react, or assign engagement. This is where listening converts into intelligence.
3. Engage with good intentions. In social media, the end game is reciprocity.
4. Actions speak louder than words. Demonstrate how your participation in social media is dedicated to helping and building relationships. Do so relentlessly.

For additional insights into consumer impressions on social media and how it breaks down by demographics, take a look at this free ebook.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Even the swiftest ships go faster when pushed by tail winds. True to its name, data startup Sailthru is applying this wisdom of the seas to its own progress.

Sailthru announced today that it has raised $19 million led by Benchmark Capital. The financing will support the company’s growth as it expands its roster of Fortune 500 clients.

Sailthru’s flagship product is the Smart Data platform. Smart Data collects data about users and generates specific profiles for each individual. Marketers can use this information to personalize communication through targeted emails, onsite and in-app recommendations, and text messages.

“Our goal is to provide brands with the opportunities to connect with each individual in a way, unique to them,” said VP of marketing Aubrey Sabala in an interview. “My experience of a brand should be different than your experience, and this should be cross channel- the experience should be unified across every touch point. Individuals don’t want to be one of the masses. We can send a million different emails to a million different people. If everyone is different, we should start to treat them as the individuals that they are.”

Sabala described Sailthur’s approach as resembling the recycling symbol. The first arrow is data, which Smart Data aggregates, compiles, and displays for each user. The second arrow is automation. Marketers cannot analyze and act on the profiles of each and every user, so Sailthru has built a system that does it for them.

For example, if a user looks at a wedding dress one time, but never again, she may not want to receive customized emails filled with white gowns. However, a user that repeatedly shops for wedding dresses would probably react positively to bride-themed content. The third arrow is customer insights and analytics, which lets brands look at their customers’ behavior over time and apply the fundings to business strategy.

This approach is evidently successful. Sailthru claims that its technology causes an 8x extension in customer lifetime value, a 90% reduction in campaign setup time, 3 -5x increase in open and lick rates, and 200% increase in page views for publishers. Revenue increased by 270% last year and Sailthru has clients on five continents, consisting mainly of publishers and e-commerce vendors like AOL, Fab, The Huffington Post, and Refinery29.

High demand for the product and the need to scale accordingly led Sailthru to seek institutional funding. In addition to Benchmark, RRE, DFJ Gotham, and AOL Ventures contributed to this round. This brings the total capital raised to $28 million, following an $8 million Series A in 2011.

Sailthru is based in New York, but recently opened up an office in San Francisco and will expand into Europe in the coming months.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Contrary to what it sounds like, Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs does not signal a desire by the social network to get into the fishing business. It is, however, stepping up its game when it comes to social TV analytics.

Twitter confirmed yesterday’s rumors of its Bluefin Labs purchase in a blog post detailing why the startup is an important addition to Twitter’s overall strategy. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Bluefin Labs provides data about Twitter users while they watch various programs on television as well as demographics that are similar to what Nielsen has traditionally supplied to media companies. Most of the user data is collected from what people include into their Twitter profiles as well as what people tweet out publicly using hashtags or mentions during a particular program.

“We believe that Bluefin’s data science capabilities and social TV expertise will help us create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences in the exciting intersection of Twitter and TV,” Twitter COO Ali Rowghani wrote in the post.

The purchase makes sense given Twitter’s push to become an essential part of the media industry, and Bluefin Labs will undoubtedly help Twitter create a new “social ratings system” in partnership with Nielsen.

Bluefin isn’t the only company Twitter works with to help gain a window into the media world. The company also has a contract with Austin-based Mass Relevance, a startup that focuses on managing a brand or TV program’s crazy feed of mentions rather than analytics.

After three years of operating under the radar, Think Big Analytics is ready for its big debut.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup leverages open-source computing frameworks Hadoop and NoSQL to bring “big data” to large companies. The company may also offer consulting services, such as assisting clients in prioritizing use cases before working with a Hadoop vendor like Cloudera, GigaOm reports.

To bring its product to market, the founding team has raised a massive $3 million seed round from former Cisco executive Dan Scheinman, with participation from the venture firm WI Harper Group.

The market is full of big data and analytics startups, which are competing for customers against legacy vendors like SAP.

However, investors see massive opportunity for these startups to appeal to companies that are grappling with vast quantities of potentially valuable data. Analysts have reported that both chief marketing officers and chief information officers will carve out a slice of their budget to spend on big data technologies in the coming years.

Early customers include NetApp and Quantcast — the former company of Think Big founder Ron Bodkin. In an interview, Bodkin said inspiration hit on in spring 2010. He announced to dinner guests that he intended to quit a steady job at as the vice president of engineering at Quantcast to help companies use analytics tools.

“Our goal is to be to enterprises what Google is for consumers — the fastest response engine for ad-hoc queries,” said Bodkin. The technology is different from legacy vendors due to its emphasis on helping companies generate real value from the data, and the speed — “questions [are] answered in minutes, not hours,” he said.