Want to call your doctor but can’t abide that awful 1970s call center system and the hour-long wait?

Patients need a better way to communicate with their physicians, and Ringadoc believes it can help. Investors agree; the San Francisco-based startup added another $700,000 to its seed round today, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million.

Startups like One Medical are taking on some of the biggest challenges in health care. But sometimes the right approach is to start small and focus on one specific problem. Ringadoc is laser-focused on building simple tech to bridge the communication gap between doctors and patients.

Ringdoc helps doctors separate personal and professional messages, and enables them to triage patients before speaking to them on the phone or in person. In addition, physicians can access after-hours calls on a smartphone or tablet device anytime through the answering service.

Ringadoc initially developed and launched an app that let patients record video messages ahead of a virtual visit with a physician. But the company has dropped video for now and shifted to phone consultations.

“Ringadoc reduces the human error associated with costly answering services and live operators by allowing the doctor to hear the patient’s issue in their own voice and words,” said CEO and co-founder Jordan Michaels (pictured above, right, with co-founder Micah Grossman).

Michaels said that conversations between patients and doctors are “an instrumental part of the health care conversation” and were “previously overlooked.”

The company claims its cloud-based answering service has now successfully handled over 100,000 calls for practices across the country. The business model is also clear and simple; Ringadoc charges physicians $49 per month.

Investors include Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, Sharon Knight, co-founder of One Medical, the chain of concierge primary care practices, Siemer Ventures, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, the neurology chief at Bon Secours Health System.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Booker, the cloud-based service management startup formerly known as GramercyOne, has closed a $27.5 million funding round.

The New York-based company has the ambitious goal of building a “unified platform” for businesses, meaning that it offers customer relationship management tools, scheduling and marketing software, a point of sale system, and more. Essentially, what it does is help local businesses fill up appointments and manage other aspects of their business online.

Booker claims to have over 60,000 service professionals using its tools  across multiple verticals, including health, home improvement, and beauty salons. The company saw some impressive traction in 2012; it achieved triple-digit revenue growth for the fourth consecutive year and doubled its annual transaction volume to nearly $1 billion.

CEO Josh McCarter said the technology helps these businesses “connect consumers with services as seamlessly as Amazon connects buyers to products.”

Booker recently received a “Take the Helm” award for its contribution to Lower Manhattan, a region that wants to be seen as a tech hub poised for growth. The team gave over 100 local businesses $2,000 worth of free software.

Despite its growth, Booker faces stiff competition from large and established players like Netsuite, Intuit, and SAP, as well as smaller startups.

Bain Capital Ventures led this second round of funding, with participation from Revolution Ventures, Grotech Ventures, TDF Ventures, and Vital Financial. The company will use the funds to aggressively build out its product, engineering, and sales and marketing teams.

Top image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The unveiling of Office 365 Home Premium may be a giant step for Microsoft, but analysts say Redmond still has a long road ahead in its effort to regain consumer confidence.

The new Office 365, which became available yesterday, is a subscription-based version of Microsoft’s venerable, profitable productivity suite, with the addition of copious cloud-based features.

Microsoft had to make this overhaul of Office due to increasing competition from online productivity services such as Apple iWork and Google Drive.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer called it “Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service.” The cloud-based approach means that Microsoft can release updates more regularly rather than being stuck in a three-year release cycle.

For $100 per year, consumers and small businesses can access all the Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote, and Access — from up to five devices, including tablets, Macs, and PCs.

There’s also a subscription aimed at college students, called Office 365 University, which gives four years of access for up to two devices for $80.

In addition, Office 365 adds in the company’s InfoPath and Lync Online tools for instant messaging. Vanessa Thompson, research manager for analyst firm IDC, said those additions are minor but important updates, and bring the new offering in line with Google Apps.

But by adapting its product to how we work now — in the cloud and across multiple devices — Microsoft wants to recapture the consumer and small business market.

But will it succeed?

Will consumers bite?

Analysts we contacted agreed that the low annual subscription fee and bonus extras (such as 60 minutes of free Skype calling, and an upgrade in SkyDrive storage from 7GB to 20GB) will appeal to consumers.

Still, Redmond needs to push its marketing efforts into high gear.

“Microsoft will need to go to great lengths to convince users that its online offering has feature parity with its desktop software,” said Phil Black, a program manager at the Urban Business Initiative, a group that instructs small businesses about new technology.

Black stressed the importance of offering “specific examples” for how users will be able to take advantage of the cloud-based features in the new release. He predicts that consumer adoption will be slow at first but will pick up as Microsoft learns to navigate the “tricky pathway” from desktop to cloud.

It’s also a smart move to offer a version of Office 365 aimed squarely at college students. It comes at a better overall price and lets students install the software twice. Microsoft will be able to build loyalty with a tech-savvy demographic that might otherwise experiment with Adobe, which is also jumping onto the cloud bandwagon.

Lincoln Murphy, managing director of cloud consulting firm Sixteen Ventures, sees another potential benefit: the reduction of “rampant piracy.” He said the low annual price point will deter people from illegally downloading popular apps like Word and Excel.

The verdict? The low price will put downward pressure on competitors to offer equally high-quality services at an even cheaper rate.  Murphy said Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud is a “win” for consumers — “in many ways, Office 365 could be the rising tide that lifts all boats,” he said.

How about small and medium-sized businesses?

Analysts view this release as a means for Microsoft to get a “legitimate foot back in the door” with small businesses.

“Small and medium-sized businesses view the cloud as the future but were probably wondering where one of their most trusted vendors was when looking at options,” Murphy explained.

Thompson makes the case that the software as a service (SaaS) model and Lync integration puts the new Office 365 in line with Google Apps. However, “incentivising users away from a freemium competitor product that meets up to 80 percent of their needs is a consistent challenge for Microsoft,” she said. “Expect them to continually iterate on pricing and packaging.”

Black warns that widespread corporate adoption (as Microsoft moves up-market) won’t be immediate.

“IT departments know that Microsoft releases the first version of any software before performance and stability testing is truly complete,” he said, adding that Redmond will need to prove it is “truly committed to a hosted model of its Office software.”

The verdict? Microsoft has emphasized in messaging that the cloud-based Office is intended for consumers. As the company shifts focus, expect to see highly-targeted efforts to reach small businesses, who view cloud-based business technology as the future.

For businesses, building ‘big data’ capabilities is far easier said than done. Precog wants to change that by making it easier for companies to ask questions about their data. The startup has launched its product to the public today.

With all the buzz around ‘big data’, it’s easy to forget that there are a number of stumbling blocks: data scientists are expensive and tough to hire, IT may not have the budget to deploy a full on-premise architecture, and developers will need to pick up new technical skill-sets.

Indeed, companies have been told time and time again that their data is filled with valuable insights, but they can’t afford to get to them.

Precog CEO, John De Goes

Precog is already making ‘big data’ simpler and cheaper for application developers. It has earned the comparison to Twilio, a developer-favorite known for its dead simple APIs.

As the company’s CEO, John De Goes (pictured, left), told me, “Precog allows for companies to ask very deep statistical questions about their data easily, without having to rely on cumbersome big data infrastructures or use complex tools like R, MatLab.”

For developers, Precog offers an API to package analysis into applications and load data from social networking sites (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook), enterprise applications like Salesforce and more, as well as transactional data stored in existing databases, including SQL, Hadoop, and MongoDB.

Similarly to the vast pool of ‘big data’ startups it competes with like Splunk, Sqrrl, and Continuuity, Precog’s platform is cloud-based. It’s not just data warehousing and analysis; today, Precog has also launched a front end analysis tool called LabCoat, and ReportGrid for app layer reporting.

Since launching its private beta in May, De Goes told me the biggest challenge has been to find technical talent. “Our vision of redefining how data is captured, stored, and analyzed is a tremendous engineering challenge,” he said.

However, the company is off to a good start, with eight customers already using the product. One early adopter, SnapEngage (an online sales and support provider) is using Precog to capture thousands of interactions per second and then provide its customers with insight into the effects of the support process on conversion and retention.

This is one of the most exciting companies to have emerged from Boulder, Colo., a region with a budding tech community. Founder, De Goes, graduated from TechStars in 2011, and has subsequently raised funding for previous enterprise startups — all share a mission to make data and data visualization more accessible.

In May, the company picked up its first $2 million in venture financing led by RTP Ventures, and no doubt it will be raising its second round in the coming months.

---

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.

---