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.

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InsideSales applies data science and statistics to increase sales for businesses. Its products provide cloud-based sales automation and predicative analytics services to get the most out of remote sales efforts and stay on top of leads. Tools include the PowerDialer, PowerText, and PowerSocial, which help salespeople increase their reach, as well as gamification tools and scheduling assistance. It’s PowerDialer for SalesForce 5.0 is one of the most popular applications on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Clients include Cisco, Dell, Eloqua, Gannet, and Groupon. Sales for InsideSales itself grew by over 100 percent last year, according to a statement issued by the company, and are continuing to grow. This hefty investment will help scale the platform as well as add new solutions.

New investor U.S. Venture Partners and existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners led this round.

InsideSales.com was founded in 2004 and is based in Provo, Utah. This brings its total funding to $39 million to date, following a $4 million Series A in August of 2012. Read the press release.

Bot&Dolly bought three second-hand industrial robots back in 2008. “I had been wondering for years why people weren’t using them to move cameras around,” says Linnell. He ran a small advertising and video production company in San Francisco and had spent his career doing motion graphics and animation. “The first robot found its way into a Louis Vuitton TV commercial a week later.”

Some time later, Linnell got a call from a major Hollywood studio who were shooting a new movie. “It has a lot of impossible shots which you would not be able to do with traditional wire work and is massively ambitious technically,” explains Linnell. It took a year and a half to write a new control system for the robots which could be used on the set.

Bot & Dolly Reel from Bot & Dolly on Vimeo.

Robots were used in film-making as far back as Star Wars but they were always custom-built and required proprietary software and a highly-specialised operator. In the 1980s the computer conquered Hollywood and movies went digital. Bot&Dolly’s founders felt that everything that could be done on a computer had already been done and that it was time to get film-makers back into the real world. So they took Autodesk’s Maya animation software (the industry standard) and wrote tools to allow non-roboticists like animators to run robots.

“Animators were flying cameras around in the virtual world doing Avatar or whatever but they never had the power to be film-makers,” says Linnell. “Now the same animators can move a camera around, or an actor or a prop. Anyone from Pixar can pick up the tool that they use every day, hit an export button and animate a robot.” Bot&Dolly’s software system controls some standard robots like Scout and Iris which weigh from 6 up to 500 kilograms but users can also control their own robots by adding a new model to the software.

Robots can achieve a level of precision, speed and coordination of movement which cannot be matched by humans. “If you want to move a coffee cup six inches across a table at two meters per second and have it stop on a dime, we want to give you a tool to do that without hiring a developer.” Lights, props, explosions, special effects and even the positions of the actors, can be synchronised to the millisecond and coordinated with sound and playback.

Industrial robots don’t usually work in such close proximity with people so safety was a critical issue, especially when those people are expensive movie stars. The system contains checks and safeguards to ensure the robots are on the programmed flight path and uses laser tripwires, pressure mats and other technology to keep track of the humans. High-risk shots are rehearsed at various speeds, building up to real-time.

Bot&Dolly’s robots have also developed showbiz careers of their own. They have appeared in advertisments for Google and star in a Las Vegas show where they act and play music with the Blue Man group. “People are pretty fascinated by large robots,” muses Linnell. “When they move in a highly coordinated way where all the axes are moving at the same time, the movement is incredibly organic and snake-like. It’s a bit disconcerting and amazing even to myself having watched these things for years now. In a theatrical production, we are trying to give them a sense of character, purposely making them sad or proud or scared. You can convey emotion quite easily.”

George Clooney had better watch out. The next generation of stars may be built, not born.

People are willing to pay a lot of money to keep their homes and families safe, as are investment firms for the companies that protect them.

Home security company Vivint has signed an acquisition deal with global investment firm Blackstone Group LP for a whopping $2 billion.

Vivint provides home security, automation, energy management, and solar services to over 675,000 customers in North America. Key features include automatic door locks, video surveillance, severe weather alters, and safety sensors.

The company is growing fast. Not only is the number of customers increasing, but those customers are all paying for the product over long periods of time. Payments are billed monthly and customers often sign multi-year contracts. As a result, Vivint is bringing in over $30 million a month in recurring revenue.

Blackstone bought the company from existing owners Goldman Sachs, Jupiter Partners, and Peterson Partners. The firm will get Vivint Solar and 2GIG Technologies as part of the package. Citi, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch brokered the deal.

With the buyout, Vivint will continue to grow and expand its technology into more homes around the world. There are also plans to tap into other markets, like cars, offices, and recreational areas.

Vivint was founded in 1999 as APX Alarm Security Solutions. In 2011, it rebranded to Vivint with the help of $565 million of investment from Goldman Sachs, which first invested in the company in 2006. As of March 2012, the company had a credit facility agreement of $812 million.

Vivint is based in Provo, Utah and employs around 3,000 full time employees.

The deal is expected to close before the end of the year and is rumored to be the biggest deal in Utah business history.

The company produces products such as “MamaRoo,” a calming baby rocker that is basically a multifunction massage chair with five different rocking motions and a built-in iPod dock with speakers.

Source: 4moms

Not made by NASA, not a prop in a SF movie

Or Origami, a stroller that folds and unfolds at the touch of a button, sports daytime running lights (!), has a LCD dashboard that shows temperature, trip and lifetime distance travelled, and speed.

The kicker? It not only charges itself while you walk, but it also charges your phone.

This is not yo momma’s stroller.

Essentially, the company is doing for parenting aids what Apple has done to consumer electronics and what Dyson is doing to home appliances: Making everyday tools smarter and better by harnessing an intensely user-focused design to the power of sophisticated modern technology.

Of course, all this high-end automation and electronics does not come cheap: Origami is $850. MamaRoo is a comparative bargain at only $200.

According to AllThingsD, the company plans to use the new funding to expand internationally and increase the range of products it offers.

I’m not a mother (does father count?) but I would have loved these tools — although price would have been an issue.

My biggest question: When will 4Moms focus on the biggest source of home drudgery: preparing meals?

The partnership is part of realizing Cisco’s vision for smart and connected communities, in which homes around the world have the technological abilities to do anything from give their kids remote schooling from the living room to getting a teleconference visit with a doctor who can measure your blood pressure remotely.

That vision also includes smart grid and energy efficiency potential and requires one operating system from which all the potential services can operate. That’s a benefit of Control4′s system and one reasonsCisco opted to partner with the company, said Paul Fulton, a Cisco executive.

It’s a powerful partnership and validation for Control4, which will get access to the projects and relationships with utilities Cisco has around the globe. The agreement also entails Control4 technology being tied into Cisco’s service delivery platform and the introduction of Cisco-branded Control4 products.

“The platfrom for the digital home is really going to expand and accelerate in pace thanks to the partnership,” said Will West, Control4 CEO.

It’s been a busy start of the new year for Control4. Just last month it announced a strategic reseller agreement with smart grid company Silver Spring Networks, which paired a demand response offering with Control4′s in-home display and operating system. The combined offerings was selected for deployment by AEP in Northeast Ohio.

Cisco led a recent investment round for Control4, which has reportedly raised $93 million so far. According to an SEC filing, the most recent round Control4 raised totaled $15 million out of a planned $25 million.

Control4 has made a name for itself by having sleek, well-designed energy management displays that can also provide automation of your TV, lights, drapes, etc. Its utility customers include NV Energy and OG&E, and the company has also done installations for the Mandarin Oriental hotel and Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Automation and home energy management is an area getting hot this year, with players like Schneider Electric, Vivent, Intel, Tendril and LG jumping into the game.

Cisco sees connected communities as a huge opportunity. As cities grow, the company believes, governments and municipalities will opt to build smart and more connected communities when developing new homes.

Cisco’s so-called “Smart + Connected Communities” projects will use a combination of its smart grid communications infrastructure and home energy management with a Control4 hardware and software bundle, which includes a thermostat and in-home display. The offerings would provide residents perks like the ability to automate and control lighting, temperature, entertainment, communication, security and energy use.

In the past few months, IBM has gobbled up the real-time data compression firm Storwize, network compliance specialist BigFix, business software maker Sterling Commerce, and web analytics firm Coremetrics. The company has said it will spend $20 billion on acquisitions through 2015.

The Unica buy will strengthen IBM”s existing portfolio of software meant to “help companies automate, manage, and accelerate core business processes across marketing, demand generation, sales, order processing and fulfillment” — which includes the aforementioned Sterling Commerce and Coremetrics purchases. It will allow IBM to better help businesses predict and analyze customer tastes and focus their marketing efforts.

The Waltham, Mass.-based Unica has more than 1,500 customers worldwide — including Best Buy, eBay, ING, and Monster. Its 500 employees will move to IBM’s Software Solutions Group, and its software will bolster IBM’s Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization — which IBM describes as “a team of 5,000 consultants and a network of analytics solution centers” that’s backed by $11 billion in acquisition investments made over the past five years.

via Between the Lines