LoyalBlocks

The company was founded in 2011 by Ido Gaver and Eran Kirshenboim and is headquartered in both New York City and Tel Aviv.

LoyalBlocks has two main products that complement one another. The first is their merchant-focused loyalty marketing solution, which enables brick-and-mortar businesses to build an app, set up a base station in their store, and select rewards programs to offer customers. The second product is an app targeted at mobile phone wielding consumers. The base station set up in the business automatically sends rewards to the customer as soon as they walk in the door.

The platform also provides for Facebook integration and smart punch cards that clients can access on customers’ mobile phones. As with other services, the smart punch cards are automatically “stamped” as the customer with the LoyalBlocks app installed on their phone walks into the store.

“We have taken mobile loyalty to the next level by making it easy for merchants to give their clients more, automatically. From a business perspective, it is an incremental layer of marketing that leverages their day-to-day activities. It is a simple, innovative and effortless way of generating more business and establishing long term customer loyalty,” said Ido Gaver, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, in a press release.

General Catalyst Partners led the series A investment round, with participation from Founder Collective and previous investor Gemini Israel Ventures.

The company also announced three additions to its board of directors: General Catalyst Partners managing director Adam Valkin, Gemini Israel Ventures managing partner Yossi Sela, and mySupermarket chief executive Allon Bloch.

Photo credit: LoyalBlocks

Loop plans to reinvent the customer-experience survey with its launch today to help businesses get customer feedback in the moment.

Loop is an iOS app that presents customers with a quick survey about their experience at a business. Loop captures the responses then and there, and founder Rajit Marwah said that this could result in up to 30 times more responses, as compared to traditional methods or user-generated sites like Yelp.

 ”Feedback and reviews are everywhere,” he said in an email. “They are at the bottom of your receipt, the check at the end of a meal, and in your inbox. Businesses want to know how they are doing so they can improve and many consumers want to share their experiences, good or bad. But when was the last time you (or anyone) bothered to fill out one of those cards or go to their feedback site? Everyone is in a hurry and just moves on.”

Marwah said that Loop’s main value is its immediacy. Surveys only contain five questions, so very little is required of the customer. It was founded by Marwah and his former Stanford classmate, Mike Liu. The two were working on a different project creating iPad menus for high-end hotels and restaurants, and he saw how challenging it was for these businesses to get feedback and reviews despite their efforts to do so. They saw the potential for mobile technology to improve upon this.

“The existing solutions are a bit intimidating,” Marwah said. “I know many people that don’t want to fill out 15 minutes surveys or write a long essay to review a place. We wanted to create a lightweight experience. Plus, companies like SurveyMonkey and Yelp are billion-dollar companies, so it told us that value can be created around this area.”

Gaining a glimpse into consumers’ minds is a hot ticket at the moment and scores of venture-backed data and social media analytics startups have cropped up to offer insight. There are also competitors like Vision Critical and Qualtrics Mindshare Technologies that also collect customer feedback through surveys. Loop is a simpler alternative to these products, but sometimes simple is better, particularly for small businesses.

Loop is “global on day one,” meaning it is available in 34 languages and in 155 countries. Archimedes Labs in Palo Alto led a seed round for the startup, which is based in San Francisco.

Photo credit: Loop

Storify started out as a free service to “make the web tell a story.” You search through social networks and online media sites, including Facebook, Twitter Google, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram, pull relevant content together in a cohesive “story,” and share it. While Storify has casual uses, it is also a handy tool for media organizations that want to collect social media content to accompany their articles and drive conversation.

At the end of March, Storify took a step toward monetization and announced a VIP plan with features designed for “media organizations, publishers, or anyone seeking to deeply integrate social curation and storytelling into their site.” Features include real-time updates of all embedded stories, custom story display with full CSS styling options, priority technical support, the ability to add in your own content, and privacy features for only sharing within a particular organization.

“As you may know, we recently launched a VIP plan for larger organizations. The response was overwhelming, and we realized that we wanted to offer similar benefits to all our users,” the company said in a blog post.

With Storify Business, you can pay a monthly fee to access features that were built for “professional journalists, agencies, brands, and bloggers.” It bridges the gap between the free service and the VIP, for those people that fall between regular user and large media organization. Subscribers get private stories that are only available through a special, secure link, making them “ideal” for internal reports, company communications, or personal research. They also get access to custom story embeds and enhanced support.

The introductory price is $59 a month billed yearly or $79 billed monthly, down from $79 billed yearly and $99 billed monthly.

Storify was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco.

Photo credit: Storify Facebook page

Today, SendHub launched its Android application, upgrading the business communication app to allow unlimited calls and added new features including call forwarding, call transfer, shared groups, and auto attendant.

SendHub graduated from Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator a year ago with a $2 million check in its pocket — a sizeable amount to get the SMS-based product off the ground. The company billed itself as an SMS service for organizations and has morphed into a social business phone system.

The system works on a variety of devices and includes features such as VoIP calling and voicemail services as well as free SMS and calling. The company also offers simple text messaging and mobile marketing features, allowing business and organizations to broadcast messages to colleagues and customers through group text.

“Email is not really that medium anymore, it’s just such an overburdened channel. Social media is even worse. It’s often impractical to call people. So that leaves SMS. And nobody has really made SMS serious — and that’s what we do,” SendHub cofounder Ash Rust told VentureBeat last year.

SendHub joins other social business services like Yammer striving to engage and connect the workplace through social tools as networks like Facebook and Twitter permeate our personal lives.

However, some analysts are skeptical of the benefits of standalone social business software. Unproductive noise has begun to fill up the business network, writes entrepreneur Alastair Mitchell, and “useful business conversations that the platform was purchased to foster were made obsolete.”

But with a variety of devices and ways to connect, the growing social business software community could help simplify collaboration in the workspace through idea sharing, file exchange, and integrated communication. The SendHub Android application is the startup’s next step in creating a simple, fast, and reliable communications platform for organizations that want an easier and more social way of staying connected.

Image credit: rbulmahn/Flickr

In a column with an unsubtle title, “For Apple business, must stay business,” Chinese-government-controlled Global Times praised Apple for responding to Chinese state media criticism of its warranty policies with Tim Cook’s apology letter, posted yesterday.

But  the column ended with an equally unsubtle finale:

“It will be wise for Apple not to entangle itself into political debates.”

In another editorial on the same site, Global Times said that Apple deserves respect.

“As the world’s leading high-tech enterprise, Apple can adjust its attitude in a timely manner, showing its professionalism and flexibility. Its reaction is worth respect compared with other American companies,” the op-ed column said, while also managing to be remarkably candid in acknowledging that there are still issues for international companies doing business in China.

“China’s market economy has experienced soaring development, while its rules are not mature enough and laws not so sound. … The blame should not only lie in foreign companies, but also China’s business environment.”

This is good news for Apple, as China is its second largest market, and it’s a critical growing economy where Apple needs to succeed if it wants to do well globally. CEO Tim Cook’s quick response — only his second official company apology since taking the office — is a measure of how important the country is to Apple revenues.

Interestingly, the articles acknowledge a political tinge to the recent spanking Apple has been taking in China, saying that Chinese networking and mobile companies Huawei and ZTE “have long been restricted in the US markets under security and other accusations.” Just this January, Los Alamos National Laboratory tossed out Huawei network switches under suspicion that China’s military had infiltrated the company and installed backdoors into its equipment. And in December, the U.S. Congress Intelligence Committee said that Chinese networking equipment could not be trusted.

At the time, China had issued a vague threat, saying the U.S. should “do more that is beneficial to Sino-American economic and trade ties, rather than the contrary.”

However, point made, China may have been pacified by Apple’s apology. But it suggests that Apple stay on its toes:

Apple has won respect from Chinese consumers with its perseverance in developing leading technologies and styles. But the company is not impeccable. Like its continuing stride in exploring for technological breakthroughs, the company also needs to keep working hard to raise its service quality.

photo credit: lemagit via photopin cc

Robin Thurston is CEO of MapMyFitness

You’ve already beaten the odds — your app is successfully gaining adoption. But now a more difficult challenge looms: You need to parlay that app success into a viable business.

A successful apps-based business will demand many of the easy-to-overlook (but crucial) conventional business functions that go beyond pure app development and software maintenance such as customer service, PR and marketing, finance, operations, etc.

But let’s put those things aside for a moment and focus in on the biggest single challenge facing the developer of a successful app: Generating a sustainable revenue base from which to grow a business.

Here are three ways to do that:

#1 – Paid apps

Paid apps are an indispensable component to any revenue-generating efforts in the current app store environments.  Any developer offering a free app should strongly consider offering a paid version as well (and vice versa), even if alternate revenue generation strategies are in play.

There are a few reasons for this:

• There is a large class of consumers who simply prefer paid apps. They directly seek paid apps via the app store categories and will download a paid app over an identical free one.
• Paid apps can easily and effectively be directly promoted by the developer.  E-mail blasts to the free app user base, and interstitial notices within free apps can be a highly effective way to boost revenues and better, boost paid apps high in the rankings of the app stores. By utilizing these tools in bursts. developers can maximize organic revenue lift from the rankings jump as well.
• App stores treat paid apps differently.  There are times when the app store editorial teams are looking for a paid app to promote (over a free one).
• Temporary price drop promotions are easy to execute, and very effective.

Important points to consider with paid apps:

• Consumer expectation of lifetime support: Even at a $.99 price point, consumers have come to expect a lifetime of value and support from an app developer.  Carefully consider what upgrades you are offering and how these are messaged to the consumer.  Paid apps are a one-time charge only, and consumers rarely expect to have to pay more to unlock additional value from a paid app or have a feature set change down the road.
• App store dynamics favor lower price points.  If you have high-cost content or expensive features, figure out how to break them up into bite-sized chunks to keep prices low and revenues aligned with costs.
• Free app downloads tend to be the best source of leads for paid app upgrades.  Make sure you can reach your free app users effectively and convert them to the paid app.  Do so in strategic bursts with other marketing initiatives for maximum efficacy.

#2 – In-App purchase

In-app purchases can be a great way to generate revenues from both free and paid apps.  Moreover, they can be used to effectively gather information on price and feature combinations that will sell most effectively, since product pricing and descriptive information can be modified on the fly if implemented properly.

Both one-time and subscription models can be realized via in-app purchase — although on certain platforms, auto-renewing subscriptions are only approved for use by certain types of applications.

For one-time in-app purchases, many of the same guidelines apply as with paid apps, although typically the promotional tactics that are used for paid apps are less effective when applied to in-app purchase (due to the limited number of ways to drive users to in-app purchase checkout flows).

Subscription models via In-App purchase represent a sustainable, renewable revenue stream for developers.  By building in time or usage-based product expiration, developers can build repeat business from customers over a longer time period.

This model requires intensive focus on repeat usage and conversion — without auto-renewal, the customer has to re-purchase the service at regular intervals, and achieving solid renewal rates can be difficult for even the most popular apps.

#3 – Advertising and sponsorships

Much has been written about the challenging state of mobile advertising. Inventory is outpacing demand, ad units are highly commoditized, and the upside for developers via indirect ad sales (ad networks) remains bleak as mobile eCPMs (effective cost per thousand impressions) have remained flat.

There are, however, some developers experiencing great success with mobile advertising, who tend to employ a combination of three key ingredients:

• A unique and desirable audience
  If your app users are distinctive in some way versus typical smartphone users, they become more desirable for direct advertising or sponsorships.
• Differentiated and targeted native ad “experiences”
  Due to the proliferation of banner advertising, distinctive ad experiences offer unique opportunities for brands and agencies, coupled with much higher response rates from consumers.  These can include rich media ads (i.e. audio/video), however, targeted “experiential” customized ad units that are unique to your app’s user experience offer a high value engagement vehicle not available elsewhere.  One great example is audio ads for apps with a strong audio oriented experience.  Additionally, full app takeover sponsorships provide brands a high degree of exposure and offer a more memorable experience than traditional banner campaigns.
• Direct sales
  A high performance direct ad sales team that knows how to demonstrate the unique value of mobile advertising can be a major benefit. This is difficult to build, however, and requires a certain scale before it’s even feasible.

Generating a sustainable revenue stream is by far the biggest challenge when trying to make the leap from building apps to building a business based on them. Through a savvy and thorough consideration of all the options and app store dynamics, developers can maximize their chances for success.

photo credit: brandon shigeta via photopin cc

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital.

As a general partner at XSeed Capital, I was recently asked by one of our portfolio company CEOs my opinion on a potential strategic investor into his firm.

This is not an uncommon question that arises – what are the plusses and minuses of taking in money from a corporation versus a financial investor? Does it align incentives in a partnership between a large and small company? Can a startup get a higher valuation from a strategic investor vs. a pure financial investor?

Having been a strategic investor while at Intel, a CEO who took in strategic investment capital, and also as a VC who has co-invested with large corporations into startups, my key learnings on this situation are four-fold:

The strategic investor will always do what is in their selfish self-interest

One hypothesis is that if a strategic investor owns stock in a startup, the large firm will have its incentives aligned with management and the other financial investors. This is simply not true.

The broader economic interest of the larger corporation will always outweigh the small financial interest it has in the startup. It is not necessarily bad, per se, that a strategic investor owns stock in a startup, but don’t be mislead into the belief that this will “align incentives.”

A large corporate partner will act in whatever way it believes is in its financial interest, and they will not care about the consequences of getting what they want — including killing a startup in which it has made an investment — if it believes that this is the right thing for it to do.

Not all strategic investors are the same

Certain companies have a substantively more progressive POV towards investments. They see startups as not only sources of product innovation, but also partners and potential acquisition targets (for both products and people).

This is not the case with all large firms, however.

I will posit that many (most?) Silicon Valley large companies have a more “enlightened” approach in these relationships as there is an ecosystem that encourages acquisitions and collaborations between large and small firms. Outside of Silicon Valley this is not always true — in fact, oftentimes there is no history of such strategic relationships in an industry.

As such, a CEO should consider if there is a history of positive interactions in an industry between large and small companies when considering taking on a strategic investor. If there isn’t, be cautious.

Separate the commercial agreement from the investment

At times large companies like to tie development agreements or commercial arrangements to investments. This becomes a convenient way to put cash into a company that needs it, while getting some extra value via stock.

This is almost always a bad idea for a startup.

If a commercial arrangement makes sense for two companies, a structure can be found that is non-dilutive and works for both sides. If a large firm wants to make a strategic investment alongside a commercial arrangement, that can be fine as long as there is no correlation between the two agreements.

In other words, if the commercial arrangement no longer makes sense for one or both parties, the strategic investor should not be able to cause unnatural acts to the shareholders (including both employees and financial investors) or exert undue influence through its stock ownership.

Later is better than earlier

In the earliest days of a company, a startup is at its most fragile state. As such, a strategic investor has the ability to have disproportionate influence to encourage a young entity to do things that may not be in the long-term best interest of the startup (but might be good for the strategic investor).

As a young company gets more established, it has the ability both to survive changes in the status in a relationship with a large strategic partner, and also to push back with alternative choices if incentives end up not being aligned with the strategic investor.

. . .

While the above four pieces of conventional wisdom aren’t always true, I have found them to be consistent guidelines that help describe some key learnings of whether a startup should take an investment from a strategic investor.

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital, bringing extensive innovative leadership in strategy definition, operational execution, and international sales and marketing for companies large and small. This post originally appeared on his blog.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

Facebook’s presentation — and images — were curiously void of detail on how ads will fit into the new Facebook, but you can bet it’s been a hugely significant part of the conversation as Facebook continues to seek lucrative but appropriate ways of monetizing the social network.

A Facebook representative did tell me via email that businesses now have an “even more visually rich way to showcase content” and that users respond better to more visual stories. In addition, she said, your cover photo is going to be even more important in the new reality, as it will show up in the news feed in all its glory — or lack thereof — when a friend likes a business:

One superimportant point: The new news feed is NOT being accompanied by a new algorithm.

In other words, Facebook is not using this roll-out as an opportunity to revamp EdgeRank, the programmatic method by which Facebook determines how interesting you are, how interesting your content is, and therefore and most critically, how often and where to display your messages.

The early reports from advertisers are agreement with Facebook’s messaging.

“Facebook’s news is unbelievably exciting,” Fiksu CEO Micah Adler says. “Introducing enhanced feeds creates rich contextual advertising opportunities and serves as a perfect complement to Facebook’s unprecedented targeting and measurement capabilities.”

Nothing matters more to advertisers than context, Adler says, saying that while Facebook likes are simple, one-dimensional indications of positive sentiment, interactions between advertisers and people through contextual targeting in the new news feeds will “inevitably increase buyer interest.” He added that Fikus is planning to invest “significantly in new ad units on Facebook, particularly in mobile.

“The new look for Facebook’s News Feed promises new opportunities for advertisers,” Adobe media and ads director Justin Merickel said. “As users tend to show a stronger interest in active, personalized news feeds, embedded ads will likely be more relevant and generate higher ROI for advertisers.”

One concern? The feed choice options that Facebook is implementing.

“The friends-only feed could get a lot of the volume which may be a concern — but it does stop people getting upset with sponsored content appearing around their friends content,” Simon Mansell, the CEO of TBGdigital, said. “Standout will be harder for brands as a result but it’s probably a better user experience.”

Source: Facebook

Facebook’s new news feed options

That said, he added that “the chronological view is interesting — as it removes the argument that there is an algorithm in between users and content.”

Sarah Carter, the GM of social business at Actiance, echoed the concern, but she noted that overall, brands that truly get social marketing could do better with the new feed:

“People can skip content from a business if they want to,” Carter said. “The flip side is that the new design is meant to get people browsing for longer, and improve the overall Facebook experience. So if a business is able to effectively market to its audience on this channel, using content that is visual, relevant and spoken in an authentic voice, the ROI should be greater.”

One other tip from Facebook echoed Mansell’s comments: People will be able to choose the “Following” feed, which will simply display everything that every user and company they are following is publishing. That “reality-bubble free” zone in Facebook could get very interesting as people discover an unfiltered lens into their full social graph.

The new feed roll-out will happen “very slowly” over the coming weeks on mobile and web, Facebook says.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Three billion check-ins and tens of millions of tips ought to add up to something. In Foursquare’s case, that means the “Best of” series, which highlights “the most awesome places in cities across the U.S.”

The location-based social network, which has downplayed the competitive aspect of its service in which users get “points” for checking into various locations, has been focusing on local exploration and discovery. This new part of its website, launched today, helps people explore other places as well.

That means, apparently, that Mi Cocina is the best Mexican restaurant in Dallas. And that the 3 Crow Bar is the best nightspot in Nashville, Tenn.

“We use signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly three billion check-ins from over 30 million people worldwide to determine how much people love a place,” Foursquare said in a blog post. “The Best of Foursquare pulls together lists of the places people love most in cities across the U.S., from cafés and pizzerias to museums and bookstores.”

The new service is great for checking out what might be a good place to visit when you travel. But it’s also yet another nail in the traditional Yellow Pages-style directory — and a direct shot across the bow of a Yelp, which has owned local business recommendations, especially in the entertainment space.

Frankly, it also makes even clearer the competition between Foursquare and the more hotels-and-flights focused TripAdvisor as well as even the new graph-search-enabled Facebook.

Now, if only Foursquare could figure out a truly viable business model to go with all its wonderful data.

The new app for business owners, which allows them to monitor Foursquare check-in activity, check out top customers, and monitor analytics data, and the recently added feature enabling businesses to promote events might help with this.

Which means that Apple is now one of the cheapest companies you can buy on the public market.

In after-hours trading, Apple’s share price dropped as low as $458, territory it has not seen since early 2012. At $458, Apple’s capitalization is only $430 billion, still big, but nothing like the $650 billion of just seven months ago.

But $430 billion is misleading.

Apple now has $137 billion of cash and cash equivalents which, added to its other assets, gives it almost $200 billion in assets. Take that $200 billion off the market capitalization, and you’re left with an Apple stock market value of just $230 billion. That’s for a company that made $41 billion in profit last year, and $13.1 billion in profit just this last quarter. And a company that has not just one but six multi-billion dollar product lines

For some comparables, that $230 billion valuation is similar to Google, which had just a bit more revenue for 2012 — $50 billion — than Apple had profit. It’s also in the neighborhood of WalMart, the low-price commodity sales retailer. And it’s just slightly more than Microsoft, whose main profit pillars in desktop operating systems and office productivity software are much more at risk in the current mobile revolution than Apple’s.

At a price-earnings ratio of under ten, Apple is insanely cheaper than Amazon, which sports an ridiculous P/E of 3,583, believe it or not. And cheaper than Microsoft, which at least is sane at about 15, and Google, with a slightly higher 23. None of which, when it’s all stacked up, seems to make any sense at all. As investor Mark Sigal wrote on his blog:

To say that investors are idiots, really is an unfair dig at idiots.

Investors reward future prospects more than past successes, true. But does anyone really think that the bottom is going to fall out of Apple’s business model entirely? When Apple just posted its largest smartphone market share percentage ever last quarter?

Apple should look at the low end and international markets, and Tim Cook would do well to stop avoiding those questions on earnings calls. But Apple is not going to evaporate overnight.

The stock market is crazy.

This post was written by entrepreneur and startup coach Rahul Varshneya.

You know that you want to quit your job and that you want to start a startup. You’ve had this desire for quite sometime now and you really must begin.

But you don’t.

You don’t because you’ve got responsibilities. You don’t because you’ve not got the perfect time. You don’t because you don’t have enough cash. You don’t because you procrastinate.

The bottom line is, you don’t because you’re afraid. The rest are all excuses.

The problem is that there is a gap between knowing it and doing it. This gap is what differentiates the entrepreneurs from the rest, though. You can remain an aspiring entrepreneur forever, or you can take the plunge today.

Sometimes, the gap just remains and you never start. My intention here it to bridge this gap for you by making you dig to the bottom of the gap, identify the issue, and help you nip it. Nip it so that you can take the first step towards a long journey of entrepreneurship.

The only reason why people do not take the plunge into entrepreneurship is fear. That is at the root of all excuses. So how do you overcome fear? Here’s a plan.

#1 – Just Do It

There’s nothing like squashing or overcoming fear by staring straight into its face. Take the plunge for whatever be your reason not to. What’s the worst that will happen to you? You’d fail? But that’s going to happen anyway!

If you’re going to do a startup, you are going to fail. But the best part is that if you embrace failure, you will succeed.

I’ve learnt through my experiences that the best way to do something is to simply get started. Do not worry about the outcome for that is not in your hands. What you control is your karma, the result is something you have no control over, so why worry about something you can’t even control?

#2 – What’s Your Fear?

Identifying what you’re afraid of is a crucial step. You can’t just be afraid of failure; it’s got to be far deeper and intrinsic. Failure is an integral part of life and is deep rooted in everything we do.

The smaller things we don’t notice sometimes. So the task is to identify what is it really deep down that is bothering you from starting up. Write down factual things. Like the fear of not making any money after ‘x’ months/year. Fear of survival for the next ‘x’ months/years. You’ve got to be precise and write these down.

Also pen down what’s the worst that could happen if you come across these situations.

What you’ve just done is remove the clutter and fear from your mind onto real issues that you have down on paper.

#3 – Identify Resources

Once you’ve identified your fears, now begin to identify what you would do in case you come across these problems. Who you would/could go to for help? What resources can you dig into if you face these challenges?

You need to do an exercise in contingency planning, detailing everything that you will do in case you fail or face your worst fears.

Now you have a plan. A well-defined plan on what you will do when you fail. Instead of these issues cluttering your mind, now you’ve got an action plan. But failure can come in many ways and at the most unlikely instances. That is where you need to break your moves into smaller bits.

#4 – Get Started

Now that you’re prepared to get started, there are two things that you need to take care of. Make sure that whatever you’ve chalked out in your contingency plan, you’ve taken care of that. By taken care of I mean that you know you will have access to those resources when you go down that route.

Having laid down your fears at rest, you are now totally prepared to take your first steps. Don’t aim for a record-breaking long jump in the first step that you take. Break down your tasks that are required to get you started into smaller bits; smaller bits of achievable tasks that you can complete in 2-3 days.

If the first step to starting your venture is to put out a website, start identifying vendors. Start speaking to people who can introduce you to them. Most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t even get started with this because of the overriding fear of failure.

You may keep telling yourself all this while that getting website designed and developed is expensive, or how will you ever find the right partner who can understand your perspective and get things done. And then you just don’t get started.

The trick is simple. Just do it. Start finding out vendors. Start speaking to everyone you know about it. You will be surprised with the results. And this will boost your confidence to get on to the next step.

Once you successfully complete the first step, move on to the second. And so on and so forth.

#5 – By All Means, Please Fail

You really must fail. Even superman fails, learns a lesson, and then strikes back. The point I’m trying to make is that no one is immune to failure. And when you take smaller steps and strides, your fall will also be less hurtful.

But fall you must. Fail you must. Because only then will you discover the better path or journey. Only when you tread on the path with thorns will you realize the other better path and understand the value of what it means to be on it.

Failure is great because it teaches you many things. It’s an opportunity because only by failing will you come to understand your true potential. Because if you fail, you will relentlessly pursue till you get it right. Now, it is far easier to relentlessly pursue something when that task is much smaller at hand.

You get the point of breaking them down into smaller bits now?

The bridge between knowing and doing is very very small. All you need is a little bit of focus, a lot of passion, and Nike’s popular slogan imprinted in your head – Just do it. For when you’ve got focus, passion and true love, the universe truly conspires to make it happen for you.

If this article inspired you to get started, please write to me. I’d be happy to hear from you.

Rahul Varshneya has spent his entire career either working for startups or starting businesses. He now spends time between coaching aspiring entrepreneurs in launching their ventures, apps and websites, and building Arkenea Technologies, a service partner for entrepreneurs helping them develop their mobile applications and websites.

ChowNow gives restaurants streamlined mobile-and-online-ordering templates and marketing consulting services for $89 per month, pricing independent app developers ($15,000 per contract) and online deal services like Groupon out of the market. ChowNow’s template allows restaurants to customize their own online marketing strategies and customer incentives.

The growth of e-commerce, projected to rise 62 percent by 2016, according to a Forrester Research analyst report, puts ChowNow in a favorable market position.

“We help [restaurants] build a snowball, and we push it down the hill, and we give them two months of help, and there’s so much repeat business that the snowball builds itself,” ChowNow founder and chief executive officer Christopher Webb told VentureBeat.

Webb identified ChowNow’s primary competitors as grubHub and Seamless, but said restaurants using these services are giving up 15 percent of their revenue on every order.

Webb said he and co-founder Eric Jaffe launched ChowNow in May of 2012 and have already acquired hundreds of clients, including franchises like CiCi’s Pizza and Ground Round as well as dozens of smaller establishments. Additionally, ChowNow has recently expanded its service into ski resorts Mammoth Mountain and Homewood Mountain Resort, said Webb.

ChowNow will use its Series A funding to support the launch of new products and scale its operations around the country, according to a company press release. The same document says that these additions include a catering service and an online-ordering platform made exclusively for pizza restaurants.

GRP Partners led this first institutional round for ChowNow, with participation from Daher Capital, Double M Capital, Karlin Ventures, and Velos Partners.

To date, ChowNow has raised over $4 million, including funding from accelerator Launchpad LA, which graduated the company last May. ChowNow is headquartered in Santa Monica and employs 16 people all over the country, said Webb.

Image courtesy ChowNow.

The digital economy demands a workforce that is computer-literate, fluent in technology trends, and attuned to the market. General Assembly, a global education network focused on technology, business, and design, claims it can get the masses up to speed faster than existing models of computer-science instruction.

Launched in January 2011, by Adam Pritzker, Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves, and Matt Brimer, in partnership with the New York Economic Development Corporation, General Assembly offers classes to students interested in programming, web development, online marketing, and other business-related subjects. It’s got locations in New York (where it started), Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and Hong Kong, among others.

VentureBeat recently met with Pritzker in Santa Monica where he discussed the outdated teaching models holding students back, his plan to make General Assembly a premiere educational-service-and-community around the world, and his company’s strategic partnership with local start-up accelerator Launchpad LA.

“We don’t want to teach what a professor believes is important, we want to teach what the market is demanding,” said Pritzker.

General Assembly offers a wide range of classes (more than 1,200) at multiple tiers and price points, he said. Combining online and offline instruction, Pritzker said General Assembly’s educational programming varies from hour-long classes for $25 to $50, to immersive weekend workshops for $500, to 16-week courses for $5,000.

“The product really steps up in terms of what your desires are as a student, what you’re willing to pay, and the time you’re willing to commit to learn the content,” he added.

Pritzker said his company has an interesting problem because his instructors aren’t certified teachers, but practitioners: working engineers and web developers. “They’ve done user-interface design for YouTube or they scaled Amazon’s email marketing and those are really the people our students want to learn from,” he said.

Additionally, while Pritzker said General Assembly does offer its students certification, he stated that his service does not provide accreditation, which means General Assembly doesn’t allow its students to take on debt to enroll in classes.

Pritzker declined to discuss the profitability of his business, but said that there is demand, emphasizing that over 30,000 students have enrolled in two years, and citing the company’s expansion into eight markets in the United States, Europe, and Australia. In addition to General Assembly’s flagship locations in New York and London, it has outposts in Berlin, Boston, Los Angeles, Melbourne, San Francisco, and Sydney, according to company documents.

To promote technology education around the world, Pritzker said General Assembly’s strategy includes forming partnerships with government entities, like the New York Economic Development Corporation and “10 Downing,” a colloquialism for the British government. Pritzker cited Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent visit to General Assembly’s New York headquarters to illustrate the strength of the latter partnership.

While General Assembly has expanded rapidly, Pritzker cautioned that he doesn’t want his company to grow too fast, emphasizing the importance of maintaining the quality of his content and his community.

“We’re really focused on places where we think we can be an immediate value-add to that community, and L.A. was one of those places,” he said.

In L.A., General Assembly came to an agreement with Launchpad LA for the accelerator to host its local outpost campus. Pritzker said the entertainment industry’s core expertise, combined with the emerging local tech community’s new ideas, make L.A. an ideal ecosystem for innovation in the digital space.

VentureBeat spoke with Launchpad LA Managing Director Sam Teller, who said “we’ve always been eager to offer more events and programming for the L.A. startup community at large. Joining up with GA, a leading global education startup, was the perfect way to achieve that goal.”

General Assembly has raised $14 million in Series A and B funding from Maveron, Mousse Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Learn Capital, Vegas TechFund, Alexis Ohanian, Digital Sky Technologies founder Yuri Milner, Hosain Rahman, and Alexander Asseily, according to company documents.

A representative of the company told VentureBeat that General Assembly’s closest competitors are Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron School, but that both are primarily focused on long-form courses.  Pritzker said his company employs 90 people.

Adam Pritzker image courtesy General Assembly.

Apparently, meetings and PowerPoint slides kill more productivity than an alcoholic lunch. And, more than 50 percent of business data is locked away in inaccessible or unfriendly formats, resisting executives’ efforts to review, learn, and react to the most important information in their companies.

Roambi produces apps that free data from spreadsheets and databases and bring it alive in magazine-style graphical layouts, with charts and interactive graphics. More than 100,000 businesses and executives use its products, and the company surveyed those users to learn what works and what doesn’t in business and data.

Roambi’s iPhone app

There’s a great deal of anxiety about data  in the business world, the survey found.

For instance, 21 percent of those executives said that they could only review and derive value from 10-15 percent of their business data. Another 29.6 percent said they could see and act on between 25 and 50 percent of their business data. For 10 percent, key business data was simply inaccessible.

To deal with the problem, over two thirds of businesses said that business intelligence services were critically important investments in 2013, followed closely by mobile hardware and security.

Of course, good data — and good data tools — are one key to improving productivity. But the survey also asked about other productivity issues.

The top-rated productivity devices were laptops, with 40 percent of executives agreeing, followed by iPads at 30 percent and iPhones at 26.5 percent. Desktop PCs were rated only fourth, followed closely by coffee — and having a meeting canceled unexpectedly.

(And I thought I was the only one who was happy when that happened.)

On the time-wasters and productivity-killers side, however, meetings are unsurprisingly first, followed by PowerPoint presentations. And, perhaps astonishingly, office watercooler chats, Facebook and Twitter browsing, and multi-tasking were all rated more harmful than having an alcoholic drink over a business lunch.

Roambi says that 20 percent of the Fortune 50 companies use its tools for data visualization.

photo credit: || UggBoy♥UggGirl || PHOTO || WORLD || TRAVEL || via photopin cc

Flickr — remember Flickr? — charges $6.95 a month to share your photos to the world, if you want pro functionality. Buffer, the social media sharing and analytics company, charges $10/month for anything beyond the freemium crumbs. And Dropbox goes from $10-50/month, just at the consumer level.

But subscription revenue has been around a lot longer than even the oldest dot-com. Aria Systems, a software-as-a-service billings platform, put together an infographic with all the subscriptions that the average American — you know, the person who lives next door and just got an Android phone — pays every month.

It’s a massive $857/month … mostly because of items that we don’t typically think of as subscription payments, but actually are. Things like insurance, a mobile phone plan, and utilities. Even the biggest one of all: health care.

Over time, startups can only hope that some of this revenue, most of which is dumped into the laps of massive contenders in yesterday’s economy, will come their way.

Here’s the visual data:

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Google Apps “Standard” used to be available for businesses with under 50 users, providing email, calendaring, shared documents, spam, and virus filtering and up to seven gigabytes of space per user. The former premium version is now the new standard, coming with 25 gigabytes per user, 24/7 phone support, and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

One caveat: Google says this change will have “no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version,” which suggests that companies already using Google Apps for free will be grandfathered in.

This is unexpected but not shocking news: Businesses are used to paying for services, and nobody will cry for corporations that now need to pay for Google Apps alongside their Basecamp account.

The funny thing for me: There must be a corporate playbook for announcing bad or potentially negative news.

First comes the obligatory first paragraph with the genesis story and “how we came to today.” Then comes the “but the way we did it wasn’t perfect for users.” Then comes the change: good news first, bad news second, but both just announced without any color or apology. Finally, comes the reason why this is a actually a good thing, followed occasionally by the cherry on top: some other related piece of good news.

Google followed it to the T, even adding the good but entirely unrelated news that Google Apps for Education is still free for schools and universities.

The reason this is actually a good thing?

“With focus we’ll be able to do even more for our business customers. We’re excited about the opportunity to push Google Apps further so our customers can do what matters most to them – whether that’s scooping ice cream, changing the face of healthcare, or contributing to lifelong learning.”

Wow. I feel great. Don’t you?

photo credit: cyOFdevelin fame via photopin cc

Advisory note: The excuses enumerated below work best when used sparingly. Excessive use may result in raised eyebrows or demotions.

The age-old “my dog ate my homework” excuse may not fly in this paperless startup age, but there are plenty of other excuses you can use when didn’t finish all your work. Especially if you’ve earned your MBA.

There’s an endless number of to-dos at a startup, but I am a big proponent of that elusive work-life balance, AKA sometimes skipping out of the office before 8PM to go get an acupuncture or meet friends for a Grouper.

The key to getting away with not getting everything done is to talk like a businessperson. MBA degrees are optional, but helpful. Pull out those banal MBA one-liners and you can circumnavigate your way through any missed deadline or incomplete spreadsheet. Whether you’re too busy or just a little lazy, here are ten surefire lines that will cover your butt and earn you some corporate cred to boot:

1. I didn’t have the bandwidth this week
2. We were trying to boil the ocean
3. I had to prioritize other deliverables
4. It wasn’t the right high-level strategy
5. It fell below the line this week
6. It’s really a time and distance problem
7. There were other low-hanging fruit to attend to
8. It’s just not quite in my wheelhouse
9. It didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel
10. The problem was that we were working in silos
11. It’s an issue of scalability

OK, that’s eleven. Bonus!

As my startup has grown from a team of five to one of 30, we’ve introduced a bit of a corporate structure and the corresponding vocabulary.

And while I’m still learning how to function in this bizarre managerial environment, I’ve already nailed the lingo. It seems talking the talk is most of the battle. A B-school grad even told me that a lot of what you learn in business school is how to speak with people across sectors. Sometimes a little hot air goes a long way.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a startup in San Francisco.

photo credit: robives via photopin cc

Zulily, a daily deal’s site for moms and their kids, has just announced raising $85 million from prestigious venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. This fourth round of funding sets Zulily’s valuation at $1 billion.

Zulily presents flash sales that last for an average of 72 hours. Users receive an email every morning with the daily offerings and have access to around 35 new sales a day. Members can get up to 70% off items like clothing, toys, and kid-centric home goods.

Zulily recently crossed the 10 million member threshold. According to Andreessen partner Jeff Jordan, innovative startups are shaking up e-commerce companies and physical stores alike, and the firm “could not possibly be more bullish on the prospects for e-commerce.”

“We believe we’re in the early stages of a revolution in retail, where inefficient physical businesses are giving way to highly efficient, innovate online ones,” he said  in a blog post. “Zulily is one of the fastest growing businesses we have ever encountered. What is even more impressive is how they have done this: The company spent minimal capital to achieve this result.”

Jordan also underscored that Zulily’s success has had much to do with its entrance into new markets, such as women’s apparel and housewares, the strategic positioning that sets the company apart from e-commerce giants like Amazon, and its data-driven approach to marketing, merchandising, and operations.

Since raising $43 million last August, Zulily has moved order fulfillment in-house, built two shipping centers, and expanded internationally. Today, it also announced the launch of the app for iPad. This recent investment brings the total amount raised to $138 million and will be used to scale the platform.

“Zulily is all about moms — in under three years, we’ve seen tremendous growth combined with the loyalty and passion of our customers, which inspires us to do more every day,” said CEO Darrell Cavens, “The vast majority of purchases come from repeat customers, and we need to continue to surprise and delight them. Additional funding will allow us to expand more quickly and continue to enhance the experience for today’s busy mom.”

Cavens formerly served as the senior vice president of marketing and technology at Blue Nile, an online retailer of fine jewelry. He launched Zulily in 2010. The company is headquartered in Seattle and has 600 employees across the U.S.

NEW YORK: Platfora, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed “big data” startup, unveiled the product it has been baking for over a year at the Strata conference today.

The Silicon Valley-based company publicly launched its technology that crunches raw data in Hadoop, the open source framework, and turns it into intelligence for business users.

For years, data was contained in structured columns and rows, and stored in relational databases. Today, companies are dealing with large volumes of unwieldy data. Every big data startup worth its salt will tell you that once it’s processed, this unstructured data contains potentially valuable insights.

Ben Werther, Platfora’s CEO

In a phone interview, Ben Werther, Platfora’s CEO, made a similar case: “Businesses want to know if they can derive business intelligence from Hadoop [and] the answer is yes.” Werther told me that the startup’s first customers (there are 10 companies signed on to the beta) are struggling to manage petabytes of corporate data in the form of texts, emails, reports and so on.

He explained that Hadoop is a feasible solution but can only really be of use to a small cadre of developers. ”We want to make it possible for everyday business users to interact, analyse, and drive Hadoop,” he said.

Werther says it’s the speed of deployment that makes Platfora unique. “People can visualize and ask questions about data within hours,” he said. “There is no six month cycle time to make Hadoop amazing.” In addition, there is an analytics component; users can visualize the data on an HTML interface.

Werther claims that the closest competitor is the “status quo” — the companies that still rely on traditional data warehouses. However, there are a number of other startups that claim to bring Hadoop straight to your desktop, including Datameer and Karmasphere.

Platfora has over $12 million in first-round venture funding in the bank from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture wing, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Almost all documents — a full 94 percent — require teamwork, according to Knowledge Tree, and the traditional email-it-around-for-changes merry-go-round isn’t cutting it anymore, according to the company.

In fact, 63 percent of documents require between three and five revisions, 20 percent are changed between five and 10 times, and an astonishing six percent of documents are revised more than 11 times.

I think most of us in the business world have been on the receiving end of those emails. The result is that only one in four people think that it is easy to get colleagues’ feedback.

Not surprisingly, the document management company believes that a document management solution is a better option. Document management systems make communication more visible, a company spokesman told me, giving teams comprehensive knowledge of what’s happening.

Document management also gives companies insights into business process.

“We hear that businesses need to organize documents based on rich metadata, like by business unit, geography, product line, date delivered, and more,” a company representative told me. “They need to get insight into these documents based on the way their business is organized.  You can’t value an asset your team doesn’t know it has.”

A good solution for creating shared documents might also result in … more sharing.

Currently only one in four people think that it is easy to get colleagues’ feedback. Most of them — 59 percent — share documents via email, while another seven percent use hard copy, and 5 percent simply skip the painful process entirely.

Here’s the infographic:

photo credit: kk+ via photopin cc

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

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Allied Minds, an “alternative investment company” in Boston, has secured a partnership with the DOD to license military-developed technologies, build commercial applications, and create new companies. First-year investment will total $100 million.

“This is a historic opportunity,” Allied Minds CEO Chris Silva told me this morning. “It’s the first time the DOD has ever partnered with a private investment firm.”

Silva has already launched two companies in the new fund, including Allied Communications, which is commercializing high-efficiency spectrum sharing technologies invented by the DOD, and Broadcast Routing Fountains, which is bringing more secure and efficient routing solutions to consumer and government networks. Eighteen more companies will follow in just the first year.

Both exhibit what really excites Silva about the DOD opportunity: already mature technology.

Since one of the roles of the DOD is to provide high-tech solutions for America’s military, the technologies are already in use. They’ve been “enabled,” as Silva puts it, and much of the risk of a new startup — that it is not addressing a real problem, and that its tech doesn’t actually solve the problem — has already been taken out.

Allied Minds invests somewhat like a venture capitalist, but instead of creating a fund, the company forms subsidiaries. The company previously focused on technologies created by university research labs, creating companies like Spin Transfer Technologies, which is commercializing a new kind of “universal” memory chip, a cross between DRAM and Flash, and just took an additional $36 million round of financing.

With the new DOD partnership, Allied Minds has a rich new field of opportunity: innovations from those 50,000 scientists. Silva is focusing investment in five key categories that he believes are “ripe” for commercialization:

• Cyber-security
• Advanced materials
• Data analytics
• Energy
• Power storage

But the opportunity is bigger than Allied Minds, and bigger than its initial $100 million investment. So Silva intends to partner with other investment firms and venture capitalists to reach the goal of 100 companies a year.

“We want to be the spearhead, not necessarily do all them ourselves,” he told me.

Allied Minds is an interesting animal in the evolving world of startups. Not a VC, not an angel, not an incubator or an accelerator, Allied Minds takes an ownership stake in every company it starts, and focuses on speed to market. The relatively mature technology it starts with helps, but the company also provides all the back office support, accounting, legal, HR, and other needs a new company has, plus all the funding needed.

The goal, Silva told me is helping CEOs focus on building the business, not on raising money or building infrastructure.

If successful, those businesses will also return some value to the American consumer — and the American taxpayer.

photo credit: United States Air Force via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Aiming to do something different with its Windows 8 business tablet, HP today announced the ElitePad 900, a slate that features a slew of accessory “jackets” to transform its functionality.

On its own, the ElitePad 900 looks like your typical thin tablet: It features a 10.1-inch screen, weighs 1.5 pounds, and measures just 9.2 millimeters thick. But the aforementioned jackets make it truly unique. The Productivity jacket adds a keyboard and more ports, the Expansion jacket adds USB HDMI and other ports (along with an optional additional battery), and the Rugged case makes it “military-grade” reliable.

It may sound like HP is just trying incredibly hard to make this tablet matter after failing to make a splash with Windows tablets time and time again. But after seeing the tablet in action, I have a feeling that HP is on to something. Tablets have been a hard sell for many businesses, but with the full Windows ecosystem behind it and the ability to turn into a laptop or desktop replacement, the ElitePad has the potential to be the future of computing for enterprise.

The ElitePad 900 is also a reminder of what innovations Windows 8 can bring to tablets. Just like HP’s hybrid tablet/laptop, the Spectre XT, the real driving force behind the ElitePad is Windows 8′s ability to jump between tablet and traditional computing functionality with ease. With Windows 8, tablets are finally beginning to look like full-fledged computers rather than just trendy content consuming devices.

As with other pay-what-you-want bundles the average price is determined by the market. If the buyer exceeds this price, they unlock three additional apps, including MacFlux 4, Typinator, and Forklift 2. In addition to the sale, buyers may choose between three possible charities to receive 10 percent of their purchase price. Read up on or randomly choose between the acclaimed organizations Stand Up To Cancer, Charity Water, or Electronic Frontier Foundation. Charity Water is currently doing some amazing work bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in Rwanda, but to each their own.

If you are interested in one of the offered apps, it’s only sensible to purchase it below retail price and sample five, if not eight, other applications in the process. StackSocial has arranged quite the variety of beneficial software applications for business and personal use. You get apps, developers get exposure, and charities receive donations, so everyone wins. Sounds like the perfect fit for Apple enthusiasts. It will be interesting to see how the how the pay-what-you-want platform performs outside of videogames and books.

Name your price here!

At first.

In fact, according to HiredMyWay, 80 percent of job-seekers are happy to spend a few dollars to ensure their resume doesn’t immediately get round-filed … or lost in the depths of an automated candidate tracking system.

The hiring and recruiting space is extremely noisy right now. From gamified social hiring to daily deals for jobs to  eHarmony for careers to video-based hiring to more video-based hiring to even more video-based hiring – many startups are attacking this market.

This tumult is reflects the noise for recruiters and hiring managers, who review an average of 219 resumes before hiring a candidate, according to HiredMyWay. But chief executive Matt Mosher says that number drops by a factor to ten when using his company’s solution.

“Companies are inundated with resumes,” Mosher says. “What we’ve done is eliminate the spray-and-pray by asking candidates to invest a few dollars in exchange for a guarantee that the hiring manager will look at their resume.”

A job on HiredMyWay

The theory is that when no limit exists on the number of resumes a candidate can send out, job-seekers send out hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. But if a cost — $5 — comes with the application, people will only apply to jobs they think they actually are qualified for, can get, and are passionate about.

“We’re a hybrid between a recruiter and job board,” Mosher says. “We provide a company what a job board would give them but offer more of the result that a recruiter would provide.”

It’s free for companies to post jobs. With each job, however, the company posts how much they’re willing to invest to find a successful candidate, from $500 and up. The higher that amount, the more exposure they get on the site, and the higher the referral bonus.

When a hiring decision is made, the cash is split evenly between the referrer, the successful candidate, and HiredMyWay.

Doyle Mosher, the company’s chief strategist, first funder, and yes, father of the CEO, says  HiredMyWay’s system has other benefits.

“Companies have become more scientific and less emotional in their hiring,” he says, noting that companies rely on automated candidate tracking system which filter candidates by keywords and skills. “What we’ve found is that people who have been rejected by hiring systems can come in and get hired via HiredMyWay.”

In other words, once the noise is out of the system, recruiters can focus on the human element again. It’s not just the algorithm anymore. And that, Mosher senior says, helps companies distinguish between people who might not be the perfect candidate when reduced to zeroes and ones, but might just have the passion and drive and determination that will make him or her a stellar hire.

So far, 1,500 companies have posted jobs, and 45,000 candidates have registered, as the company has had mostly a regional focus in the midwest: Detroit and Chicago. HiredMyWay is currently adding 100 new employers a month, but that number should jump quickly as the company expands in the next few months to New York, Boston, San Francisco, and L.A.

After initial self-funding — the Moshers own a successful real estate development business – the company has already raised an initial $3 million single investment round Detroit Venture Partners and a pool of local angels. The money will come in handy in HireMyWay’s planned expansion.

What might come in even more handy is that HiredMyWay has created a recruiting model that is clearly differentiated from so many of the other startups focused on the hiring process.

photo credit: bgottsab via photo pin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You’ll often hear “big data” startups promising to help companies unlock the true value of their data, but are they delivering?

GoodData, a startup with some heavy-duty venture capital investment, announced a new strategy to take big data out of the hands of IT and into the purview of sales, marketing, and business users.

The cloud-based analytics service brings operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools to business users. Unlike big-name competitors like Oracle and SAP, it emphasizes user experience — CEO, Roman Stanek calls it the “LinkedIn of Business Intelligence.”

Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData.

“You shouldn’t need a Ph.D to use big data,” said Stanek in an interview with VentureBeat. Stanek explained that business users increasingly have sizable budgets to spend on analytics and reporting tools. “The data isn’t in the hands of IT — it’s with Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Marketo,” he said.

With this new direction, GoodData will deliberately circumvent IT. “The only way that innovation gets into the enterprise is through business users,” said Stanek.

The company markets to mid-sized Software as a Service (Saas) vendors, who integrate the technology in their own platforms. The other sweet spot for GoodData is high-tech companies — its customers include Living Social, Groupon, Zendesk, and Pandora. Since the San Francisco-based startup was founded in 2007, over 6,000 customers have signed-on, and it has seen revenue growth of 500 percent year-over-year.

At this point, GoodData’s “BizData Monetization,” as it refers to it, is mainly smoke and mirrors. But with this announcement, the company is rolling out its new “marketplace” product — a library of prebuilt business analytics mashups for sales and marketing teams to create fancy looking, analytics-filled reports.

When the company raised a substantial third funding round in July, it announced it would invest in sales and marketing. It’s paying off. This is a clever marketing move, considering that companies are still in the dark about how to derive dollars from their data. Research firms predict that big data will increasingly be marketing’s problem. According to Gartner, by 2017, a CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.

GoodData’s recent $25 million round was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners.

CloudBeat 2012 is assembling the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story to learn about real cases of revolutionary cloud adoption. Unlike other cloud events, customers — the users of cloud technologies — will be front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts will give you rare insights into what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going. Register now and save 25 percent! The early-bird discount ends September 14.

Stanek Image via CrunchBase

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The cloud will save money, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. At least, that’s what top financial experts believe, according to Google.

Google recently commissioned a study with 800 CFOs and other top financial executives at companies with 500 or more employees in the U.S. and Europe. The results are a little startling, given the typical reputation of finance wonks as perhaps just a little behind the times, technologically speaking.

According to the study, conducted by Vanson Bourne, 96 percent of chief financial officers believe that “cloud computing provides their business with quantifiable benefits.” A similar 94 percent said that the cloud will be important to the success of their companies, and just over half believed that cloud computing “offers better value” than traditional outsourcing.

Source: Google

Cloud computing: important to your biz success?

French and UK companies were particularly bullish on cloud.

A majority of executives in those countries said that the cloud offers increased flexibility, greater capacity, better scalability and — yes, these are finance geeks — the ability to move technology purchases from a capital expenditure budget, which must be amortized, to an operating expenditure budget, which offers more flexibility and less risk.

In the U.S., execs were confident that cloud technologies would help companies get more done.

“Almost 81% of our U.S. respondents say that they think completely implementing cloud technology would improve employee productivity,” Google’s Alandha Scott wrote in a blog post.

And, even among CFOs who say their company has no current cloud computing plans, over three quarters believe that the technology is important to their business success. Business benefits that the executives cited included:

• 59% – latest version of applications instantly available
• 58% – reduced IT costs (fewer servers, less software, fewer staff)
• 58% – more flexible costs
• 58% – more reliable IT services
• 56% – more mobile-friendly technology
• 55% – improved collaboration

One little caveat: Google provides cloud-based services, such as Gmail, search (if you want to think of it that way), and Google Apps. The last page of the report, ominously titled “The Threat of Being Left Behind,” plays a little shamelessly on executives’ fears of missing the next big thing.

There’s no question: The report is a little self-serving. However, it’s probably also correct.

Source: Google

CFOs: these are the benefits of the cloud

Image credit: HappyDancing/ShutterStock

Nazi Germany controls basically all of Europe, big chunks of Africa. Its soldiers and military machine are large and in charge and have not yet been seriously challenged. So what does genius Hitler do? He attacks Soviet Russia, a country many times its size, much more populous, and with strong, rich allies.

Mark Zuckerberg, are you listening?

Facebook is massive in social, the undisputed heavyweight champ, the global leader. But as its userbase transitions to a mostly-mobile world, its existence depends more than ever on the kindness of strangers … big swinging Micks like Google, Apple, and Samsung, who own the mobile space.

That’s presumably why the world’s largest social network wants its own phone platform. The company has been hinting at it for some time. And now Bloomberg is saying that Facebook is working with HTC to release a Facebook-centric phone by mid-2013.

This is baiting the tiger. Rattling the cage. Hitting the bee’s nest with a baseball bat.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d really LOVE to see what Facebook would make of a modern phone with social baked right into the core — a device that takes the phone back to its roots as a communicator.

(Imagine that, phones used for … actually … connecting … to … people.)

But really, Facebook. How do you think Apple is going to feel about this (after they stop laughing, I mean)? As we all know from the fruitful company’s longish acrimonious history, it does not take well to competition from former partners, or former friends. Ask Adobe. Ask Google.

Well, yes, do ask Google.

Google will just LOVE it when you take the main codebase of Android, fork it and fork them at the same time, then pull an Amazon on the main mobile open-source codebase in existence. Google’s mission in plus-life right now is to beat you, eat you, and spit out the scraps … do you really want to throw extra gasoline on that TNT?

And then the rumored partner: HTC. HTC?!?

Really, Facebook? The company that is just-barely-clinging-with-all-its-might to FIFTH position in the worldwide smartphone market, with a whopping sub-five percent market share? Is this the company that will make the Facebook phone a roaring commercial success?

I admit it: I am not as smart as the geniuses running Facebook. It is entirely possible that they see something I don’t. (And that Devindra Hardawar doesn’t, and Henry Blodget doesn’t, and Alexia Tsotsis doesn’t, and Dan Costa doesn’t, and Billy Gallagher doesn’t … I could go on for a while here.)

But let’s just posit the admittedly-difficult-to-believe proposition that Facebook is smarter than the press. (Work with me here.)

I just don’t see a path for the company to win.

A Facebook phone with HTC is not going to win in terms of market share. It is just not going to beat the installed base and furious innovation rates and amazing technical and design prowess currently leading the mobile market. Not. Going. To. Happen.

And if a Facebook phone that launches doesn’t fizzle on the pad (let’s be optimistic), and wins, let’s say, two percent global market share — it is, after all, launching with HTC, which only owns five percent with all of its phones — it’s simply going to poke giant Gulliver in his fat buttocks with a cheap little plastic toy Lilliputian spear.

And that’s going to make it much less likely those giants will do anything to help Facebook win on mobile in the 98 percent of the market they don’t control.

Am I wrong?

In fact, the top five companies doubled the revenue growth of the average company in the index. For the 500 companies in the index, the average revenue growth since 2010 was 20.4 percent. But the top five companies averaged a blistering 45 percent revenue growth.

And companies that increased their Echo Rank most over just the past two months saw year-over-year revenue growth of almost 30 percent.

“Our rankings show that the companies investing in social and particularly social commerce are seeing the largest gains in revenues,” says Echo System chief executive Lance Neuhauser.

According to the Echo Rank index, the top five companies turning social into sales are:

1. FansEdge (sports fan branded products)
2. Barney’s New York (designer clothing)
3. Turn5 (runs AmericanMuscle.com, a car parts site)
4. GameStop (world’s largest gamer store)
5. Fossil (watches, handbags, fashion accessories)

Echo Rank tracks 500 e-commerce companies across various social indicators such as user engagement, social integration, and site performance. Those include factors as diverse as follower/fan count, likes and retweeets, integration of social into a company’s site and services, and how effective a website is at converting shoppers into buyers.

Source: The Echo System

A sample ranking for Barney’s New York

It appears that tight social integration can even trump site conversion performance, since Turn5, coming in at number three, has a site performance score of only seven. But its social score, which is a measure of how well it engages fans online, is a perfect 100.

Bass Pro fishing and sporting good retailer, 1-800-Flowers, and lingerie legend Frederick’s of Hollywood round out the top ten.

Notable fails in the top 500 include Aeropostale at #491, NASCAR.com at 428, and Best Buy at #215.

And the full top 10:

Image credit: Allies Interactive Services Pvt. Ltd./ShutterStock

Blue: percent of execs who say tech innovation will move away from Silicon Valley

Those are among the results of KPMG’s Global Tech Innovation Survey 2012. The audit and advisory firm asked 668 business execs about the future of disruptive technologies and about where the next epicenter of innovation will be.

VentureBeat talked to Gary Matuszak, global chairman for IT at KPMG, about the results.

It may not be surprising that 60 percent of Chinese executives believe Silicon Valley would lose its pre-eminent place, but it’s a little more surprising that almost 30 percent of American business leaders agree with them.

And when the CEOs and directors were asked “which region showed the most promise for disruptive breakthroughs,” only 39 percent of American execs picked the home team, while 71 percent of Chinese leaders said China was the future.

In a statement, Egidio Zarrella of KPMG China said, “These survey findings also demonstrate that China’s innovation investment has fostered an environment for the development of disruptive technologies that is growing by leaps and bounds.” According to the KPMG report, the Chinese government is fueling intensive investments in cloud computing, mobile payments, and outsourcing services as part of China’s twelfth Five-Year Plan.

But while the press release announcing the study was titled “China projected to be on par with U.S. as a future tech innovation leader,” Matuszak wasn’t certain that replacing Silicon Valley was going to be an easy process:

“A number of places in the U.S. have tried to replicate the Valley and failed. You could imagine people in places like Israel and China not understanding it either. But, they see themselves as making gigantic strides and believe they should be able to replicate Silicon Valley’s success.”

Where global execs thing the world’s center of tech innovation is going (among those who think it is moving away from Silicon Valley)

I talked to Robert Scoble, startup liaison officer at Rackspace and social media guru, about Silicon Valley and whether it is replicable elsewhere.

Scoble recently talked to the founders of Atlassian, the software development toolkit company. They moved to Silicon Valley from Australia for four reasons:

“First of all is money … you can’t get funded to do risky weird shit in very many places. Secondly, it’s PR … most of it is here, for example at Google I/O tomorrow. Third, it’s talent — the guy who built a 20,000 node server farm for eBay, he lives here. You can’t get that anywhere else.”

Fourth and finally, Scoble said, it’s the culture.

“Just on Sunday walking on the beach I ran into the guy who runs the welding team at Tesla … he lives here, not anywhere else. It happens every single day, and you just don’t have this anywhere else.”

Scoble doesn’t see Silicon Valley losing its luster anytime soon.

“There’s a little area of Tel Aviv like this, a small space in London, maybe a neighborhood in Beijing. But they don’t have the big companies, and they don’t have the complete ecosystem.”

Which made me wonder why American executives seemed so down on the Valley. A question I asked KPMG’s Gary Matuszak was whether American execs who are not in the Valley or intimately connected to the Valley really understand how it works. He replied that he wasn’t certain anyone knew why it really worked, and there’s some truth in that.

“What China does have going for it is a huge population of internet users,” said Matuszak. “It’s a huge home market,” which the country’s entrepreneurs can exploit without too much outside interference, thanks to the great firewall of China, by which American companies such as Facebook cannot do business in China.

Whether that is enough to help China become a global technology superpower is unclear. Certainly Scoble thinks it’s not that easy.

“Look at this the other way,” said Scoble. “In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon kicks out so many good geeks every year. They pretty much built the Google self-driving car. But no geeks stay there. There’s no culture, no ecosystem. And no weather!”

Image credit: ShutterStock