And, by the way, kicking some dirt at bitter rival Vidyo.

“A couple of weeks ago we crossed the million minutes-a-week level,” Blue Jeans chief commercial officer Stu Aaron told me yesterday. “We’ve got thousands of paying customers.”

The company has been monitoring usage patterns on its existing payment plans — a minutes-based plan, a per-user plan, and a per-device plan — and is unveiling a new option Aaron thinks is the best one yet. It would appear that Blue Jeans customers agree — a hundred of them have been testing the new plan since November 2012, and they grew their usage of videoconferencing at ten times the rate of other Blue Jeans clients.

The new plan sees participating companies pay one annual fee, plus between $10-50 per month for active users — employees who use Blue Jeans videoconferencing at least once per month.

“It’s a site-license option,” Aaron says. “Everyone gets an account, everyone gets unlimited usage, for an attractive low annual fee. All employees have accounts, but you’re only paying for active users.”

The new pricing model will come in hand when competing with videoconferencing rival Vidyo, whose CEO recently called Blue Jeans out. Vidyo’s quarterly growth in billings was 68 percent, he said, while competitors were flat or down. And, he said, a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

Them’s fighting words, as the saying goes, and Blue Jeans accepted the challenge and knocked off the chip.

“That was not a correct statement,” Aaron told me. “Our customers are typically pay cents-per-minute or tens of dollars per month, and there’s no way anyone has an advantage over those price points.”

In addition, he said, Blue Jeans is growing fast, having reached the 50 million annual minute run rate — even assuming no further growth in 2013 — after just over a year in business. That means, Aaron says, that Blue Jeans is probably a quarter of the entire videoconferencing market.

“There’s 100 billion minutes a year used for audio conferencing, and 200 million minutes a year in video conferencing,” he said. “Since we’ve exceeded the 50 million minutes a year run rate, we’ve grown to 20-25 percent of the market.”

The new plan seems to be a hit.

Not only are existing customers adopting the plan and increasing their use of videoconferencing, 25 percent of Blue Jeans new customers signed up in April were signed up on the all-you-can-meet plan.

That’s impressive, and given Blue Jeans’ ease of use and wide compatibility with a vast array of devices and software (including Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Microsoft Lync, Skype, Google Video, WebRTC Browser, and smart mobile devices), it portends well for the company’s future sales as well.

One small caveat before small businesses get too excited: To get the $10/user price point, you need over 10,000 users. Less, and you’ll be somewhere between $10 and $50.

photo credit: iandavid via photopin cc

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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud software giant Salesforce has updated its iOS and Android versions of Chatter — the company’s business social networking and collaboration service — with critical new features to match their browser counterpart, the company said today.

“Companies are social at their core, and Chatter can be the heart of that,” Michael Peachey, Salesforce’s senior director of solutions marketing, told VentureBeat. “Legacy CRM software isn’t social or mobile. This next generation of Chatter sets the bar for mobile and social CRM.”

Chatter competes with Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Moxie Software, and Tibbr to help big companies with social networking and collaboration. Salesforce claims Chatter is the backbone for nearly 200,000 active business social networks. Chatter helps Salesforce compete in social, but you can’t really own that arena now unless you have robust mobile apps to support it.

Today’s update sees the Chatter’s mobile apps updated to help with Salesforce’s push to own social and mobile and to be a “customer company.” The Chatter applications have received two major updates, so now you can:

• Post and edit media on the go from the new “publisher” including files, photos, polls, tasks, thanks, and more.
• Access and edit customer information from the Salesforce platform including customer accounts, campaigns, cases, leads, and more

“This makes it so you can see all the context of the account and your key customer data in one place,” Peachey said. “You want to take action in less than 60 seconds, and we’re making that happen.”

Both features seem important to making Chatter more powerful on mobile devices. The “publisher” especially is critical because lets you post polls for your colleagues or photos of whatever you can take with your iPhone or Android device. These sort of things are important for quick collaboration among mobile employees.

While Salesforce does seem to have a strong mobile push as of late, it only seems to care about equipping iPhones, iPads, and Android phones with its tools. Peachy said the company has not yet committed itself to creating Chatter applications for Android tablets, Windows Phone, Windows RT, or Windows 8.

“Our customers aren’t asking us for that today,” Peachey said.

Top photo via Salesforce

Making games isn’t easy even when everyone is in one place. And when development teams are spread out across the U.S. and Europe, it’s even harder. That’s where Huddle comes in. On the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Sega of America’s internal teams stayed in touch using Huddle, a web-based collaboration environment.

Prior to using Huddle, the teams struggled to keep a global view of a marketing campaign or a game development project. They tried to do it through the Internet data transfer method FTP. They also use shared network drives and emails. But London- and San Francisco-based Huddle customized its cloud platform so the U.S. and United Kingdom branches of Sega’s digital business team could share work together on projects. Sega’s teams can access a central knowledge base and communicate across distances more easily.

Conversations and feedback on content are stored in one place, where everyone can access data that is updated in real-time. Producers can manage milestones on games and decision makers have full visibility into the status of projects. Marketers can access a central database for market research and other info.

“Huddle has transformed the way the team works and enabled us to move away from the cumbersome and complex tools that often made working together such a challenge,” said Chris Olson, the vice president of digital business at Sega. “With all relevant content and conversations stored in one place, Huddle has significantly reduced our dependency on email and the need for face-to-face meetings, which is fantastic. Huddle is simple to manage and flexible, and the easy-to-use interface means that people didn’t find it daunting or need hours of training. As well as enabling the team to get work done quickly, we could customize the platform to give it a familiar Sega flavour for workers.”

Huddle’s investors include DAG Ventures, Eden Ventures, Matrix Partners and Jafco Ventures. Other customers include 80 percent of the Fortune 500 and 80 percent of the U.K. central government as well as Unilever and Kia Motors.

“Sega’s digital business team presents a great example of how complex technology systems no longer support the new ways of working,” said Alastair Mitchell, the chief executive of Huddle. “Today’s workforce has to work effectively with people inside and outside of the firewall and it’s great to see such a renowned brand using Huddle to bring teams across the globe together to streamline projects and work on valuable content in a secure cloud environment. ”

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

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The cloud storage wars are heating up: Dropbox has released a series of features for its Teams service that should boost its appeal to large corporate customers.

The most important feature is the creation of a new console that managers can use to track which employees are using the Dropbox account, provide and restrict access to files, and monitor which devices they use.

Dropbox has experienced security breaches in the past, so these new features are designed to give administrators peace of mind. If an employee’s phone is stolen, they can block devices and apps to prevent miscreants from stealing information.

Dropbox launched its business-oriented Teams service about a year ago. But the product didn’t contain features to help IT retain control — as CITEWorld’s Matt Rosoff points out, IT admins could add or remove members, but that was about it.

Still, the Teams service is already used by about 2 million business around the world.

Dropbox is king when it comes to consumers: It boasts a customer base of over 100 million people. But competing service Box has been focused on selling its tools to large enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses from day one.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s only been a few weeks since YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse promised to do “more than just send.”

YouSendIt is best known for its software to help users send and receive large files via a desktop PC. But today, it’s launching a suite of mobile apps for iPhone, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8, so you’ll be able to access documents, videos and presentations on the move.

With the new iPhone app, released today, you can send and sign documents from a smartphone with any changes securely synced. The company promises a faster access and a host of new features — for instance, you can send a document without saving it to the app to conserve memory.

YouSendIt recently launched its revamped Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Samsung S-pen apps. Earlier this month, it acquired a venture-backed startup called “Found.” You can use this tech to discover your files, documents, and data across a variety of devices and cloud services.

As it moves into the file-sharing and delivery space, YouSendIt will compete with well-funded startups like Box and Dropbox, which are also fine-turning their strategy for mobile.

It has chosen its positioning wisely in emphasizing that it will keep sensitive data secure.

Related: Read about Dropbox’s recent string of security breaches.

“Seventy-five percent of businesses allow employees to use their personal mobile devices for work purposes,” said YouSendIt’s product lead Matte Scheinker in a statement. He explained that the mobile apps meet the needs of employees and the “robust security” required by IT.

YouSendIt has raised a total of $49 million in venture funding in the previous seven years. According to Garlinghouse, it is experiencing 50 percent growth year over year and recently exceeded 40 million users. Last year, the company pulled in $57 million in revenue.

Businesswoman with phone image // Shutterstock 

The company sells private, managed clouds with voice and telephony, web conferencing, messaging, and video streaming capabilities to business customers.

“Our products are used by millions of people in the top Fortune 1000 and government agencies each year to collaborate and communicate virtually from around the globe,” said CEO Michael Fitzpatrick in an email interview. “These customer collaborate on new products launches, train their workforce and partners, leverage us for sales and marketing support, and even coordinate with first responders during national emergencies.”

Customers include financial organizations, large corporations, technology companies, and 12 government agencies. ConnectSolutions claims to have delivered more than 4 billion minutes of collaboration on its UC3 Managed Cloud product and has been profitable for several years. The executives decided to take this first round of funding to accelerate the company’s growth. The company will use the new funds for development and commercialization of its technology and possibly for some acquisitions.

Competitors include Cisco WebEx and IBM SameTime. Frontier Capital led this round. ConnectSolutions was founded in 2007 and currently has 50 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco. You can read the filing here.

I asked Georg Greve, a former physicist and nanotechnologist, exactly that question.

“There are three pillars of productivity for modern knowledge workers,” Greve replied. “One is the browser, the second is office applications, and the third is groupware. Free software has tackled the first two very well … but on the groupware side, almost nothing has happened.”

Greve is the CEO of Kolab Systems, which produces Kolab groupware, an enterprise-scale email, calendaring, contact management, and task management suite that is fully open-source, freely available, and interoperable with multiple web, desktop, and tablet clients. The company’s clients include Fortune 500 companies — which Greve cannot contractually name — who have 60,000 employees using Kolab, as well as the entire school system of Bazel, Switzerland, and the German Federal Office for Information Security.

In fact, that’s where the solution originated: an open source German government software project initiated in 2001.

Source: Kolab

Kolab works on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

“They needed a fully audit able, fully open-source solution that was designed around security awareness,” Greve said from Switzerland, where he lives and works. “But they couldn’t find anything.”

So they built one — or at least the foundations of what would become a full groupware solution. Most solutions, Greve says, come to the enterprise with “freedom stripped.” Kolab comes free not just in the standard beer sense — free to use — but also in the speech sense: free to alter, modify, and adapt.

Greve joined as CEO in 2010 when it became clear that the companies who had contracted with the German government to provide the solution needed focused attention on Kolab. Version 3, with an almost entirely refactored codebase, a completely new storage layer, and 100 percent open standards, is being released in January.

“We’re using IMAP as the database, which means we get insane scalability,” Georg said, adding that the company had partnered with Opera to get the project completed. “We’ve also built in full mobile connectivity … all the cloudy stuff … and added support for a whole range of native platforms: Mozilla Thunderbird, Lightning, Outlook … on Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

The data format is xCal and xCard, and enterprise clients can interact with the data via an open API, integrating their groupware solution into any other solution or even creating their own administration clients.

Kolab is bootstrapped with a little cash from Greve, other executives, and others and has a subscription revenue model similar to RedHat: training, certification, service level agreements, prioritized updates and fixes, and support.

It was to provide that third pillar of productivity that Georg joined Kolab from the Free Software Foundation of Europe. OpenOffice and Firefox area available for the other two; The Gimp, WordPress, and of course Linux itself, plus many other open source projects, provide options in other areas. But groupware was a bit of a green field.

Of course, it was also to fulfill an unusual long-time dream for the open-source believer:

“I had always wanted to go into business.”

photo credit: AGoK via photopin cc

Traditionally, businesses have used spreadsheets to manage workflow, but spreadsheets quickly become unwieldy and inconvenient when they have too many contributors or topics at once. The emergence of cloud computing and software-as-a-service, as well as an increasingly distributed workforce, has created a thriving market for platforms like Smartsheet that streamline enterprise collaboration.

Smartsheet provides a suite of tools to help teams stay organized, as well as department-specific solutions (Sales, Marketing, Finance HR, IT, Operations). Employees and managers can use the software to assign tasks, share documents, and track progress. It can integrate with Box, Salesforce, Google Drive, and Amazon Web Services as well as mobile versions.

This investment came from Insight Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group. It makes Smartsheet’s fourth round of funding. The three previous rounds were small by enterprise standards, totaling up to less than $5.5 million, and this $26 million is a significant show of faith in the company, as well as the market.

“Our own experience using Smartsheet, along with market dynamics, convinced us of Smartsheet’s tremendous growth potential and the opportunity it has to be a leading global provider of team-based collaboration products,” said Insight Venture Partners principal Ryan Hinkle in a statement. Hinkle will join the board of directors. Smartsheet is in Bellevue, Wash. Other startups in this space include Huddle, Siasto, and Swirrl.

If you’re Sococo — short for social communication company — you create a virtual world, with virtual offices, desks, meeting rooms, and even buildings. But don’t think Second Life: You won’t find any sexy avatars, flying, pets, or islands. You will, however, see a lot of work getting done.

“We bring distributed workers together to interact in real-time,” Sococo’s chief marketing officer Mark Fisher told me. “Coworkers talk, share, chat … and interact all day long.”

The service is built on a premise of connecting people in a more natural way. Spatial shifting is a key part of that — in a real office, you need to get out of your cube and walk to see someone else — but so is context and situational awareness.

“Today, if I phone you, I have no idea if you’re busy or not. And if I get your voicemail, I have no idea why … if you’re busy, or just don’t want to talk with me,” says Fisher. “Also, in all communication — instant messaging or similar — after it’s over, the session evaporates and there’s nothing to go back to.”

So Sococo not only provides a virtual space for interaction, it tells you if people are occupied and what they’re doing. For instance, when I jumped into the application, I could see Sococo’s CEO was in a conversation with someone in a room. The company calls it “social awareness,” and it helps you make decisions about who to talk to, who’s available, and when to connect.

In addition to the ability to share desktops, chat via voice or keyboard, add remote participants via a virtual phone, share applications for collaborative editing, and show presentations, and more, the company is adding multiple spaces today — separate office “buildings,” if you will. Companies can build multiple spaces to ensure that not only do teams have their own space, but they can connect to other teams, both inside and outside.

“There’s an important break point at 40 to 50 people,” Fisher told me. “We don’t want to just provide a long directory of everyone.”

The upshot of a virtual connected space?

“A person who works exclusively at their house feels connected to their team,” Fisher said. “That increases employee morale.”

Image credits: Sococo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Editor’s note: Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. We’ll be bringing you a fresh set of data from Keynote every month. Check out previous Startup Shootout results.

For online businesses, executing a mobile strategy is still an act of experimentation. Unlike the desktop web, the ingredients that make a recipe for mobile success are being tweaked by companies as large and small alike.

When it comes to mobile strategies, this month’s Startup Shootout Collaboration index provides a wide range of examples. Some companies do not provide mobile-optimized (“m.”) sites for their services on mobile devices. One company even goes so far as to refuse an iPhone user to browse its website. However, it is notable that the three leaders in performance across three screens (Dropbox, Box, YouSendIt), are also the three leaders in the collaboration space itself. Dropbox and Box.net appear to be the most mobile-friendly. Coincidence? Let’s see.

When looking at the index, we noticed that startups leverage mobile in ways that directly benefit the interest of their user strategy. Since collaboration tools are generally used as productivity applications, enabling a positive user experience across 3 screens (desktop, smartphone and tablet) can be critical, especially for enterprise use that may include remote workers.

Here’s how the hottest startups in collaboration are managing the mobile aspect of their online experience:

Dropbox

The clear market share leader in the collaboration category keeps all their sites simple and clean. From the mobile browser, visitors are directly pointed towards the login and then to download their files. Dropbox has pruned all unnecessary objects and keeps the interface fast and simple across all 3 screens. Dropbox maintains the fastest average speed across the desktop, smartphone and tablet screens at 9.84 seconds.

Box.net

As another top contender, Box.net also does a great job when optimizing for its mobile users. It’s clear that Box.net wants mobile users to be able to access files and collaborate with others not only while at the desktop but on-the-go. Box.net asks mobile users if they would like to download their iOS app, but also gives them the option to continue to a mobile website. As a result, Box.net performs well across each of the 3 screens, with only slightly slower performance than Dropbox.

YouSendIt

YouSendIt does not offer their users a mobile optimized site. Instead, they prompt the user to download their iOS app (like Box.net) or continue on the full (desktop) website. While this is not optimal, it does give both new users and existing customers reasonable options for either learning about the service or interacting with it directly.

The other collaboration companies haven’t quite figured out the three screen divide as well as the top competitors. One example is Springpad whose mobile interface leaves the user experience with much to be desired and is frankly a bit confusing.

Springpad.com

It looks like Springpad has developed a site for its iPhone users and tries to push those users seeking www.springpad.com directly to Springpad’s iOS application using the “springpad://” command (as seen below).

If you have installed Springpad app on your iPhone, it will automatically open up the application. But this mobile strategy doesn’t work for new visitors to Springpad, since shortly after the site times out. It seems that Springpad’s mobile strategy is to push users to leverage its application rather than use the service through mobile web. A poor assumption for Springpad is to assume that when users attempt to access the site through Safari, they want to use the app. This approach denies mobile users access to a mobile web experience they may desire.

Directly opening a mobile app when browsing a web page sometimes makes sense in the context of certain tasks. But it only makes sense when you first check whether the native app is installed and then try to open it. As a result, Springpad’s performance in the index suffered greatly.

SugarSync, Huddle

SugarSync offers a downloadable app for their service on mobile, but smartphone and tablet users browsing their website receive the same experience as a desktop user which results in long average response times of more than 46 seconds on iPhone and 47 seconds on iPad.

Visitors to the Huddle website also receive the same experience across devices, but with better performance. Huddle’s service is available via downloadable app for iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android and Blackberry.

Overall Thoughts

Collaboration startups clearly want their customers to use an on-device app when on a smartphone or tablet, but taking a one-size-fits-all approach is bad for users and performance.

For the full data from this month’s Startup Shootout, see below.

Aaron Rudger is the senior manager of web & mobile performance and Venkatesh Giri is the mobile evangelist at Keynote Systems.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Siasto, the tiny startup that competes with Huddle, Podio, Asana, and Microsoft Sharepoint, is making a name for itself as the disruptive newcomer on the scene.

On Siasto, sign up for free, and you can immediately get to work adding tasks, uploading your documents, and inviting your colleagues or friends to join your “team.” An administrator can invite people to work on a project team, or can delete a project altogether.

What’s unique and impossible to ignore about the technology is the tight integration with Google Docs. Users can open and edit a Google Doc from their mobile device or desktop browser within Siasto, meaning they’ll have access to a real-time collaborative text editor. The Google integration is ubiquitous in the design — for instance, your Google + image is auto-uploaded to your profile.

Siasto cofounder, Nic Pantucci

The idea stemmed from the success of Taskforce, the founders’ last product. Taskforce, a Gmail integrated task manager, received thousands of sign-ups and requests for integrations into other popular collaboration software services.

“We didn’t like any of them and so decided to build our own,” said founder Nic Pantucci (pictured left). Co-founder Courtland Allen was one of the first developers to ever build on the Facebook platform.

Unlike its competition, Siasto has already secured valuable partnerships with all the major players: Google Apps, Gmail, Google Drive, GCal, Box, and Dropbox.

In September, the company announced an integration with Box. At the time, Box’s Aaron Levie praised Siasto for its slick user interface and the ability to drill down into a project in a single click.

The San Francisco-based startup with only two employees is certainly punching above its weight. It has brought in several large enterprises as customers, including Thompson Reuters, the British National Health Service (NHS), and Accenture. According to its cofounders, the collaboration space is heating up, and in less than six months, there are thousands of teams already using its software.

Siasto is making a push into the enterprise, but it has not forgotten about its small-business roots. To appeal to students and small businesses, the company has also announced a new “freemium” pricing structure. Up to three people can use the tool for free for 10 projects and get one gigabyte of free storage space. Starting today, Siasto is charging on a per-user basis (rather than a per-project basis), which it views as a fairer option for smaller teams.

The company says its greatest challenge will be to overcome the stiff competition in the space but is convinced that its tool is easier to use than the alternatives. “Many of Siasto’s users were using competitor products previously but switched their allegiances once they started using Siasto,” said Pantucci.

Siasto claims that it is already profitable after launching in April, 2012. The company has raised a small seed round from Y Combinator and a series of angel investors.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Box’s Aaron Levie, a bundle of nervous energy, kicked off the company’s annual conference this morning with a slew of product announcements.

Levie is the young chief executive of Box, the cloud storage startup based in Silicon Valley that competes with Google Drive and Dropbox. On stage, he revealed that Box will incorporate a host of new collaboration features like internal editing, and it will team up with Netsuite.

“Box continues to deliver a consumer experience for enterprise class requirements.  New features such as edit, easy ways to collaborate with colleagues, and the new user experience are making a big change for the enterprise,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Users can expect to work with their content the way the cloud was meant to be and rest assured that they have to worry about security issues and safety of information.”

Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, the company’s enterprise general manager, also hinted at a partnership with SAP to improve data security. They would not say more but told me it would announce additional information in the coming months.

News about the ”bigger, better Box experience“ was officially announced on the company blog.

Following the hoopla at BoxWorks 2012, I caught up with the company’s vice president of platform, Chris Yeh, to chat about the new services in more detail. If you weren’t able to make it to the San Francisco conference, here’s a summary of what to expect from the new and improved Box:

• Box Embed – It’s an HTML5-embeddable interface that allows more people to access Box’s service through other applications. It comes with 10 new enterprise partners: Concur, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Eloqua, FuzeBox, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Zendesk. The idea is to provide a better way to link content together. Using the example of Netsuite, users can access a record of all their relevant content in Box. A user is able to see everything associated with their record, including contact information, invoices, and purchase orders.
  Read more about Box Embed here.
• Concurrent editing – Users can make a change and save and it goes right back into the the cloud. Yeh told me that the company has been talking about this feature for a long time and that it’s part of a broader goal to create an “integrated desktop experience into a cloud content system.”
• OneCloud Apps: Box OneCloud brings together all your mobile content into a centralized, secure cloud. The company has an extensive list of third-party applications that have built integrations with Box. Today, they announced an expansion of the ecosystem through a partnership with over 200 apps.
• New social features: A host of new social features are now incorporated into the product. For instance, you’ll see a profile picture of the last person who edited a document.
• Contact discovery: The company has made it easier to discover contacts within your corporate network. During our phone interview, Yeh used the following example: ”Let’s say I work for a large organization and I login with my email account. Now I can discover everybody else in the organization who is already using Box. I can invite those people to view and collaborate on folders. This makes it way easier for us to slide into an organization, and people feel immediately like they have a network of colleagues around them.”

With these new features, the company wants to push deeper into the heart of the enterprise and increasingly attract Fortune 500 clients. It’s a wise move for Box, given that Dropbox has been critiqued for a series of high-profile recent security breaches.

Read more about the company’s enterprise strategy in an interview with Tidmark Bouck here.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — For the founders of Opal Labs, changing the world starts with a million ideas.

The trick is to get everyone working together to come up with those ideas. And as anyone who has sat through a brainstorming session knows, it’s hard to get the creative juices flowing with just a handful of people.

“The mismanagement of ideas is happening all over the world,” said chief executive office George Huff at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. “They’re stuck inside of the heads of people you didn’t think to ask, and every single day each of us is guilt of snuffing out ideas before they have the change to breath … but humanity is at an inflection point. The scale and complexity of our problems is going to take all our ideas.”

Huff realized there had to be a better way when a client, global design and engineering firm Arup, asked his firm to host a company-wide brainstorming session.

“How do you host a global brainstorm with 11,000 people?” was how Huff put it in a recent email to VentureBeat.

The solution was Opal Brainstorms, which Huff describes as a “delightful, intuitive application powered by cloud-based social enterprise technology … a digital space where a team’s ingenuity and ideas can flourish, where big hairy problems can be solved in bite-sized bits with the power of hundreds of minds focused on solving the problem at hand.”

Source: Opal Labs

Opal Labs CEO George Huff

Huff’s description is long on buzzwords and short on specifics, so we’ll have to wait for the full demo today at DEMO Fall 2012 to let you know just how Opal Brainstorms works.

It’s worth noting that Opal is the latest in a long line of idealistic efforts to use computing technology to help humans solve global problems, dating back to the early work of Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart is remembered as the inventor of the mouse and the graphical user interface, but his work was actually focused more on helping people work collaboratively, through networked computers, through text, numbers, images, and video. While Engelbart’s research was massively influential in the field of interface design, his hopes to get computers to help us fix the world’s problems never came to fruition.

“The app was beautiful, holy crap, that’s a good lookin’ app,” said New Enterprise Associates partner Pete Sosini at the DEMO Confernce. “The thing that I haven’t seen done well is doing this on a mobile app, I’d like to see that.”

Clay Kellogg, chief executive of analytics company Chartboost went on to say that “they’ve hit a market that I think is ripe for a new technology.”

Let’s hope Opal Labs has success where earlier pioneers did not.

Portland, Ore.-based Opal Labs has been bootstrapped through customer revenue along with investments from the founders. It hopes to begin its first round of outside funding shortly after DEMO.

Opal Labs is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Dusit, Shutterstock; Demo image via Stephen Brashear

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’ve ever worked abroad, you’ll know that uploading files can be a painfully slow process.

As it readies for international expansion, Box, the Silicon Valley-based cloud storage startup, has released a product update it says will make it 10 times faster than competitors Dropbox and Google Drive.

During a recent roll-out in nine locations around the world, Box reported that it processed file uploads at a mega speedy 7 megabytes per second.

Box Accelerator, as they’re calling it, is four times faster in Japan, two times faster in New York, and 6 times faster in Washington D.C. than its previous version.

These speeds will be an advantage for Box as it pushes into the enterprise. “It’s a highly strategic move for us,” said Box’s vice president of operations, Stefan Apitz, who told me that about half of Box’s activity comes from outside of the U.S.. To lead its global expansion efforts, the company brought on a new general manager of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, David Quantrell. Prior to joining the startup, Quantrell led European operations for McAfee, HP Software, and Mercury Interactive.

“As Box continues to expand internationally, it’s critical that we provide all our customers with a consistently great experience and rapid data access,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in a statement.

Box said that its speedy technology won’t be easy to replicate by the other players in the market. Its algorithm records every user transaction, and determines the fastest routes for future transactions. It gets smarter over time and won’t be highly affected if you change location. The company has already patented its algorithm, so Apitz couldn’t reveal the nitty-gritty details.

Large enterprises like Sony, Six Flags, and the American Hospital Association are already using the new product. Today, it’s available for free to all business and enterprise customers, and it takes about 15 minutes to deploy. Developers can access the API to develop features and applications, using Box as back-end storage. For more information on the new release, check out the company blog.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Months after getting picked up by Ctirix, “Yammer with apps” platform Podio is making another big move: To the iPad.

Podio allows business users to create and integrate custom apps in a single collaborative workspace. This gives users an extreme amount of flexibility, allowing them to structure their workflows in ways that best suit their projects and businesses. With its new iPad app, Podio brings that flexibility to a device that’s just as mobile as those using it.

As with previous iterations of the platform, custom app creation remains the prime selling point of Podio. Podio says that over 65,000 apps have been created using the Appbuilder, which gives Podio users a fairly robust set of options even before they decide to create their own.

Citrix collaboration vice president Tommy Ahlers summarizes it well. “Bringing Podio’s all-in-one work platform to the iPad makes it easier and faster to collaborate while on the go with the convenience of a lightweight mobile tablet, but without sacrificing Podio’s functionality or sophistication,”Ahlers said in a statement.

As with the most basic Podio subscription, the iPad app is free. For larger businesses, Citrix offers Podio Premium, which runs for $8 per user per month.

Watch this video to get a better idea of how the platform works on the iPad.

The founders of the social network once touted as the “anti-Facebook” have a new creation for you make that new silly LOLcat you found or crazy celebrity pic go viral.

Makr, a newly-launched image remixing website, is the creation of two of the original founders of Diaspora, Daniel Grippi and Maxwell Salzberg. When hopes were high, Diaspora raised $200,000 on Kickstarter and was recognized for its high-minded ideals of open web standards and user privacy. The four founders frequently lambasted sites like Twitter and Google in the press for giving away users’ personal data.

“For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing,” Daniel Grippi, one of Makr’s creators once pointed out in an interview with the New York Times.

Users can sign up to Makr via Facebook to upload photos, add captions, and publish content to friends’ news feeds. The site is targeted to those who like to “lolz” a lot on the Internets, you’re encouraged to compete on who can come up with the most hilarious image captions.

The founders say they’ve been using the site to have fun with friends, but they explain on the company blog that they hope it will spark a creative conservation on the web. The idea came a week after the founders learned the tragic news that their cofounder, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had committed suicide.

Salzberg and Grippi describe their new startup as an open-source ”sister project”, and say they will continue working on Diaspora. Makr is part of the current class at Y Combinator, the highly competitive startup accelerator that will host its highly anticipated demo day next week.

In his own words, this is how Salzberg describes the differences between the two sites:

Makr is us playing with a problem we discovered as we worked on D* (Diaspora) codebase the last two years; that people don’t really understand what their data means. We actually started working on the core of Makr inside of Diaspora, and when came to YCombinator they recommended that we pull it out and let Makr be it’s own thing. 

At our core, Diaspora is about giving people ownership of your data, in any way necessary. Something like Makr is important in giving people a tool to be creative and care about what they are doing online, and think its a vital step towards us being the change we want to see in the world.

Today, I found myself privy to the first meeting between Box’s CEO, Aaron Levie, and his new vice president of engineering, Sam Schillace.

The pair have known each other for years and both saw early potential in cloud computing technology, but Schillace is no easy target for any startup. Until this week, he was the entrepreneur-in-residence and Principal at Google Ventures. “It has been a seven-and-a-half year recruiting project,” Levie half-joked.

Sam Schillace, Box’s new VP of engineering

This announcement follows a spate of recent announcements for Box, a Silicon Valley-based cloud storage startup. In the past month, the company pulled in $125 million in funding, and opened its first international office in London. This week, the company also brought on Evan Wittenberg as its new VP of People (startup speak for vice president of Human Resources).

It will be an intriguing partnership. Levie told me he first reached out to Schillace in 2005 to discuss a potential integration with Box (then “Box.net”). It didn’t work out, as Schillace was already in acquisition talks with Google. Schillace’s startup, Writely, was the first co-editing service, and provided the foundation for Google Docs.

“It has been a decade-long progress moving from desktop to cloud,” Schillace told me, when asked about his reasons for joining Box now, given that he has been a technical advisor to the company for the past two years. “We are just seeing the knee of the curve.” He said he would dedicate his energies to improving collaboration within Box’s core product.

Schillace will continue to serve as an advisor for Google Ventures and its portfolio companies.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Huddle, the enterprise collaboration toolkit, is bringing a new product forward today. The new Huddle puts conversations and content into a single view, making for more thorough task management and workflow.

It’s cloud-based, as always, so you can view files and make changes from anywhere. And it’s social, so you can keep in constant communication with your colleagues to move a project forward.

Some changes you’ll see in the new Huddle are instant access to hi-definition PDF and Office documents and other files (no waiting for them to download), better in-app tools for document editing (again, without a download required), built-in tools for workflow and versioning, and new @mention and sharing tools for conversations.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new Huddle:

It seems to us that Google, Asana, and a few other enterprise-targeted software companies are taking work and project/task management in roughly the same direction — to the cloud, yes, but also to a place that eliminates “work about work,” cuts down on emails and meetings, enables the mobile worker, and takes the pain out of working with documents as digital files.

We asked Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell how the new Huddle stacked up to the multiple other exciting task management tools currently available.

“Huddle is innovating in the enterprise space,” he answered. “Simple file sharing or collaboration between individuals or teams is one thing, and meeting the very complex (sometimes legally mandated) requirements of large companies with thousands of workers and millions of files is quite another.”

In fact, Huddle has for some time been exclusively focused on the needs of the enterprise (a.k.a. the customers with the most money to blow). Features like file sync, introduced earlier this year, are best suited to organizations with tons of files flying through the air and multiple tiers of management — with varying access and editing privileges for different types of documents. Your average small or medium business wouldn’t have any real need for such a tool.

“Individuals and smaller teams may find Asana, Dropbox, Box, Google, and other cloud offerings attractive, however as the quantity of content being stored, shared, and collaborated on grows and more people enter the organization, more robust tools for managing content are needed,” Mitchell said.

“Traditionally, this realm has been dominated by Microsoft SharePoint. That is changing. … We’ve long said that if Microsoft SharePoint was built today, it would have built like Huddle — and the new version of Huddle announced today shows that that’s even more true: We’ve already built the seamless cloud content management and social collaboration solution that Microsoft dreams of building with its Yammer acquisition.”

Microsoft’s falling out of favor with the enterprise was handily illustrated by the UK Meteorological Office in an interview we conducted late last year. Check it out:

“Cloud file sharing and collaboration is a very hot space and there is room for all of the aforementioned companies to be successful,” Mitchell concluded, “as long as we all continue to innovate to stay ahead of the curve of what’s needed in our space.”

Huddle took a $24 million funding round just a couple of months ago to expand its offices in the UK as well as stateside in San Francisco and New York City. The startup plans to be 200 employees strong by the end of this year.

Image courtesy of iofoto, Shutterstock

Forget the company conference room. Coworkers no longer need to be in the same office space — let alone the same time zone — to hold a productive progress reports or brainstorming session. We asked nine young entrepreneurs about how they conduct virtual meetings between their startup teams, and actually get things done while doing so. (Share your own thoughts in the comments.)

Stick to the agenda

Since it’s incredibly easy to get off task in a virtual meeting, it’s important to have an agenda, listing only a few goals of the meeting and complete with an overall time limit. Designate someone to lead the meeting and hold that person accountable for making sure everyone stays on topic to move the meeting along.

Nick Friedman, @NickFriedman1, College Hunks Hauling Junk

Start the meeting beforehand

Sending supporting information before the meeting can often help save you time in the meeting, since everyone is already briefed on the basics. If the meeting is just about making a decision, it can often be fast and productive.

Jason Evanish, @Evanish, Greenhorn Connect

Remember, the clock is ticking

For even more efficiency, put a time limit on each subject of the agenda and ruthlessly cut off rambling. Virtual teams are just as susceptible to unfocused meetings, so having an impartial, third-party reference makes it easier to transition topics and stay focused.

Kelly Azevedo, @krazevedo, She’s Got Systems

Try to shut up

I speak too much. One thing I am constantly trying to work on is asking better questions, and then just listening and letting my team interact. Virtual meetings can be productive if everyone comes together to express what is going well and what they need help on. Also, using the group to throw out potential solutions often reveals a great idea.

Patrick Curtis, @WallStreetOasis, WallStreetOasis.com

Follow up afterwards

Make sure to end the meeting with a list of followup tasks and owners, and have someone distribute by email to the entire team.

Michael Tolkin, Merchant Exchange

Set a schedule of speakers

The main reason for meetings is to give different people a chance to speak. That means that you need to make sure that attendees know that they’re expected to do just that. When you’re planning out your agenda, assign a few speaking slots and make sure that your speakers know what they need to cover. Of course, you do want to have some unstructured time, but balance it out.

Thursday Bram, @thursdayb, Hyper Modern Consulting

Peer pressure turns off multitasking

Without fail, people zone out on conference calls. Have your team use Google+ Hangouts (or another group video chat) so that everyone is actually “present.” Seeing everyone’s face will bring extra energy to the meeting and, of course, it will help you make sure that no one is on their phone or emailing so that you can get the most out of the important virtual chat.

Aaron Schwartz, @ModifyWatches, Modify Watches

Ask yourself, do we really need to have this meeting?

Your first question should always be: Do we need this meeting at all? If a meeting is not necessary because you have nothing substantial to discuss or you could accomplish your goals just as well through another faster method, cancel it.

Elizabeth Saunders, @RealLifeE, Real Life E®

Try weekly reports instead

I manage my virtual team by outlining and sharing the following week’s worth of tasks and projects on Sunday night. For the more urgent projects, I then require daily updates at the end of each day. For everything else, each team member must submit and share their progress at the end of the week. Then, it’s up to the team to analyze everyone else’s work and collaborate for the next week.

Logan Lenz, @loganlenz, Endagon

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization composed of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

Virtual meeting photo via dpstyles/Flickr

Working team via Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud storage startup Box has added a slew of updates to its main product, including universal administrator search, more mobile security features for iOS and Android, and multiple e-mail domain support, the company announced Thursday morning.

Box now has more than 11 million users across 120,000 businesses, with penetration in 82 percent of the Fortune 500. Its most recent customer wins include Netflix, Allergan, Avaya, Lennar, MGM Resorts, Stanford University, and Webcor Builders. The latest round of product updates will help the company further separate itself from more consumer-focused cloud storage options like Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive. Box CEO Aaron Levie once even drew me a diagram to show how the company sections itself off versus competitors.

“We want users to be delighted at the same time we want IT to be happy and feel safe,” Box enterprise general manager Whitney Tidmarsh-Bouck told VentureBeat. “That experience is rare.”

The first major update is a new administrator console that offers enterprise-wide search. If you ever need to search across an entire organization for a specific file or folder, you can now do so. There’s also more granular permissions settings you can set as an admin that help set how files are shared inside and outside the company. “When your organization has multiple thousands of users, this is needed,” Tidmarsh-Bouck said.

Second, Box has added more granular mobile security features for Android, with an iOS update “coming soon.” Not only can IT admins add passcode locks for mobile users, but they can also turn offline access permission on and off.

Third, the company now has support for multiple e-mail domains. If you are a large company that owns many small companies, for example, you can now share and collaborate with Box even if your colleague uses a different domain. The company gave me the diagram below to help illustrate a business with multiple domains, saying that now team members who have “@pg.com” and “@crest.com” address can now more seamlessly collaborate.

Finally, Box has pushed out activity notification archiving that will specially target regulated industries like health care and finance. Box administrators can now log things like Box comments and tasks with already established monitoring systems.

Tidmarsh-Bouck said that the company has also modified its enterprise licensing agreement (ELA) to make it more flexible. There’s now pricing options that cover a multi-year contract, which can save an organization money and simplify the process of adding new accounts. If your organization wants to slowly roll out accounts, the new ELA agreement can cover a cheaper overall price per each new account.

Administrator search photo: Box

Birst raises $26M for big data

Big data startup Birst has raised $26 million in its fourth round of funding, with a goal accelerating growth and product development. The company provides business intelligence software and competes with QlikTech, SAP, IBM, Oracle, GoodData, and Microstrategy. The new funding round was led by big dog VC firm Sequoia Capital with additional participation by prior investors Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures.

Engrade moves to the front of the class with funding to keep teachers organized

Classroom management software company Engrade has closed a $3 million funding round. The company’s software helps teachers, administrators, and school boards keep track of students’ grades and progress reports. Rethink Education led the round, with NewSchools Venture Fund and private investors Greg Gunn, Zac Zeitlin, and Richard Chino.

Flingo grabs another investment, mere months after its last one

Smart TV app maker Flingo has received another $1 million in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban, bringing its total first round to $8 million. Flingo has developed a technology, dubbed SyncApps, that can detect what you’re watching in just a few seconds and communicate that information to your television, smartphone, or computer.

Datasift secures $7.2M investment

DataSift, a social data platform that extracts large amounts of data from a number of online sources, raised $7.2 million. Essentially its services help understand the impact of social media marketing techniques employed by business. Existing investors IA Ventures and GRP Partners led the round.

App security startup Appthority gets a $6.25M boost

App security company Appthority has raised $6.25 million. The company works to prevent potential apps with malware, location tracking, and keystroke recording  from ending up on your smartphone. US Venture Partners and Venrock led the funding.

Vungle Raises $2M seed round

Mobile advertising company Vungle has raised an impressive $2 million seed investment. The company creates ads in the form of video trailers for mobile applications. Big name VCs and angel investors Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy, and Tim Draper participated in the round.

McCann WorldGroup invests $4M in Israeli incubator

Media startup incubator Thetime has raised $4 million from investor McCann WorldGroup. Thetime is an Israel-based incubator for media companies looking to get guidance, funding, and new business ideas before they obtain a seed round. After seed funding, Thetime offers additional resources to help startups receive institutional funding. McCann WorldGroup gets a 15 percent stake in Thetime for its investment.

Collaboration software startup Blueprint raises $15.9M

Blueprint has raised $15.9 million to help with software development project management. The company helps business people and software developers, working for the same companies, set goals for software and app development projects. It then manages the work for each project, helping each department communicate effectively. New investor Tandem Expansion Fund led the round, with the participation of existing investors from BDC IT Venture Fund, Walsingham Partners Fund, and several private investors.

Reading child against numbers background image via Shutterstock and Flickr

Unhappy with the current state of collaboration in social networks, Luan Ngo-Tran decided to build one of his own: Tablen, a social network that harkens back to having conversations around a table with friends.

The company is making its debut today at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., an event which is co-produced by VentureBeat.

The Tablen concept (illustrated above) is admittedly confusing when viewed from afar. But Ngo-Tran believes that by focusing on a few friends at a table, instead of your entire Facebook or Twitter network, you can have a better conversation. At the same time, he believes the connections you make on Tablen can grow your social graph much faster than other networks (yes, I realize this is at odds with the whole focus-on-quality conversation).

“The nature of exclusiveness in a table surprisingly lets you expand your social reach at supersonic speeds,” Ngo-Tron said in an email to VentureBeat. “Just like you go to my party and become friends with all my guests. If you do this on a table of 20 mates, the speed at which your social graph expands is 21 times faster than Facebook or Google Plus.”

The inspiration for Tablen came when Ngo-Tran hired co-founder Tri Tran’s company to build a custom corporate network. Ngo-Tran’s employees ended up loving the service, and asked to have recreational tables created, in addition to tables for work collaboration. In April 2010, the pair pushed the social network forward to create Tablen.

[Update: On stage at DEMO, Ngo-Tran showed how it was easy to create tables with different friends. You can add "table mates" to the table, and they can converse with everyone. You can drill down on information about friends, or start side conversations from directly within the table. In that way, a Tablen group is different from a Google Circle, which is a way to divide your friends into groups.]

The Saigon, Vietnam-based company clearly has some maturing left to do, but Ngo-Tran says he already has 500 friends testing out the service, who have created 1,200 tables so far. He’s managed to raise $80,000 from an angel investor.

[Photo credit: Heather Kelly]

Tablen is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

[Photo credit: Heather Kelly]

Business-focused social network Yammer has acquired document collaboration startup OneDrum, the companies jointly announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Yammer provides companies with their own private social network that employees use to quickly communicate and update their activity throughout the day. (Disclosure: VentureBeat writers use Yammer to communicate on the job.) And while Yammer currently offers some document storage, the OneDrum software will allow businesses to share, sync, and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents in real-time.

“It’s impossible to separate the conversation from the content,” said Yammer CTO Adam Pisoni in an interview with VentureBeat. “But, there is no end-all solution right now where you can create, discover, collaborate, and share content without going between a bunch of different applications.”

Yammer plans to launch a OneDrum document-sync desktop application this summer. The app will have a folder for each Yammer group users create under the broader Yammer account, and will sync documents immediately upon saving. Later on the company plans to add tools that will let people search for anything within the shared documents without having to leave Yammer. It’ll also allow people to view shared documents on multiple platforms, such as the Web, smartphones, and tablets.

But perhaps the biggest addition OneDrum offers is the ability to transform your Microsoft Office docs into a collaboration tool that rivals search giant Google’s Google Docs web app. Users can view changes to a document in a real-time, and much like Google Docs, color-coded cursors identify different users collaborating in the document.

“Most companies use Microsoft Office every day, so adding a social layer through Yammer makes a lot of sense,” Yammer CEO David Sacks told VentureBeat.

U.K.-based OneDrum is the first acquisition for Yammer, which recently closed a $85 million round of funding. OneDrum previously raised a total of $1.62 million in funding. It will bring all 10 employees to Yammer, with CEO Jasper Westaway leading the integration of the two products.

We’ve embedded a demo video from Yammer showing off some of the new integrated social document sharing.

http://vimeo.com/40128698

Wednesday, Springpad launched the latest version of its digital notebook service, which includes a web, iOS, and Android app that help you save snippets of information from the Internet. The new version is a major overhaul of the service and includes some Pinterest-inspired design elements.

We all tend to save a lot of digital information these days; it’s one of the reasons Pinterest has become so popular. But before Pinterest’s time, Evernote and Springpad were competing to be the best digital notebook to save snapshots of webpages, notes, to-do lists, and anything else you want to remember later. Springpad has become outdated in recent years, with an almost cartoony-like interface. Evernote on the other hand, has established itself among more seriously users who love its offline support and straightforward, powerful interface.

“Our focus is to creative the best version of the digital notebook possible,” said Springpad chief executive Jeff Chow in an interview with VentureBeat.

Trying to solidify its place between Evernote and Pinterest, Springpad’s latest release takes some features from both, plus some collaborative features from Google Docs. The result is an app that looks like the offspring of all three popular services.

Completely different look

Perhaps the most striking difference between the Spring 3.0 and its older versions is how it looks. The first versions of Springpad were cute, but looked dated compared to Pinterest’s clean lines. The company appears to have taken cues from the digital pinboard for its latest look. Everything from the notebook backgrounds, to the way photos are displayed feels more grown up.

The comparison to Pinterest becomes apparent when you look at a notebook in the gallery view. Photos, if included in a note, are displayed prominently as tiles. However, unlike Pinterest, each image must be large enough to fit the space or the quality is compromised, which can make some notebooks look a bit ugly.

Improved search

Like its predecessors, Springpad 3.0 still lets you save everything you could ever want to remember, including movies, wine, books, and recipes. Unlike previous versions, the new app plays up the ability to search for something to add to a notebook.

There are two major ways to save information to Springpad: the clipper bookmarklet and the search bar. In the past, the search bar worked about 70 percent of the time, crawling the Internet for the product, book, or movie you were looking for. But it often struggled to find the right match.

It’s this exact feature that Springpad revamped in its latest version. The new “smartbar” uses semantic search to find a product or place that you can add to a notebook. The semantic search allows you to start typing a few words and Springpad will start to guess what you are looking for. In addition, you can start typing a note in the smart bar, and Springpad will give you options to set an alarm, create a note, or make a reminder.

While trying out the smartbar, I found it still struggled to find some local businesses and certain products, but it seems to be improving with time.

Smarter, collaborative notes

Springpad has also added more features to make the information you save more valuable. If you save — or “spring” as Springpad calls it — a product, the app will grab the product’s url and price. If you spring a restaurant, Foursquare, Yelp, and OpenTable information will be included in the note, as well as a map, phone number, and business hours.

This new version weighs heavily on collaboration. Underneath each note you save is a comment section and log of the changes made, similar to features found in Google Docs. This is meant to encourage shared notebooks, where multiple people can curate the content and work collaboratively. Notebooks can be kept private, restricted to invited people, or be made public.

Going along with collaboration, the new version of Springpad is aimed at people who like to curate content to share with others.

“We’ve found we are going after a new audience type, people who love to share their knowledge. We’re creating micro-communities,” said Chow.

Much like you can follow a Pinterest board, users can follow each other’s notebooks and stay updated with the latest great recipes or movies. Springpad found that people who consider themselves the best recipe finder or their family’s go-to person for book recommendations wanted a place to collect their knowledge and share it with others. The company responded and created “Explore” and “Following” tabs, where you can find other people’s public boards and follow the stuff they clip.

Current Springpad users will have their accounts updated with the new look starting early Wednesday morning. Springpad’s iOS and Android apps will also be updated to reflect the changes.

The new look and features of Springpad 3.0 are definitely an improvement over previous versions. The company has seemingly found a niche between Pinterest and Evernote, where people can find exactly what they are looking for and save it in a visually pleasing way.

Creating and managing a wiki can take work. It requires a special syntax to format your text and build out the wiki how you’d like it. Hackpad is trying to make the wiki fresh again, with real-time updating and no special text editor.

“Hackpad is easy to edit, works in real-time, and is simple to share,” said co-founder Alex Graveley.

Hackpad is aiming to create a better option for collaborating than the traditional wiki or Google Docs. Hackpad uses color coding to show which authors have contributed which content. When someone makes a change to the wiki, all the collaborators are emailed. You can also send an email to update the wiki, without having to visit the wiki page. A simple, but useful feature is the ability to create a new page by just typing @ before the page title link.

Hackpad has more features than a traditional wiki, such as in-line photos, check lists, and a smoother text editing format. Companies can use it for collaborative work between co-workers, and everything typed into the wiki is updated in real-time.

The company says its users are creating 1,000 new documents per week and that 400 companies are using its beta service. Thee service is simple, but looks clean and makes using a wiki much easier.

Hackpad is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last week, VentureBeat hosted its first ever CloudBeat conference. It was a huge success (if we do say so ourselves), with more than 400 executives from cloud startups, leading cloud service providers, and various Fortune 500 companies coming together to talk shop. You can check out complete coverage of panels, talks and sessions here.

A few big themes came up over the two day conference. Let’s take a look at the highlights.

The hybrid public-and-private cloud is the future

Companies are mixing and matching cloud offerings to find their own bespoke solutions. Zynga chief technical officer Allan Leinwand trumpeted the benefits of a hybrid public and private cloud solution at his CloudBeat session. Zynga started out relying entirely on a public cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), to host its server-based social games. AWS’s scalability made it the perfect choice for a new company experiencing rapid growth. Four years later, the social gaming company was so large that it became cost efficient for it to built its own data centers and create a private cloud, dubbed Z-Cloud.

Zynga still relies on AWS and is is now happily using a hybrid cloud approach. Leinwand compared the combo to having different car options: “Maybe one day you want a sports car, maybe another you want a Winnebago … Amazon is making a great platform, but we wanted a sports car for some applications and an 18-wheeler for certain applications.”

Oracle is anticipating a widespread adoption of this type of hybrid cloud approach. Rick Schultz, a vice president at Oracle, talked about the company’s plans for its own public cloud product, launching in 2012. Oracle’s cloud is being built specifically to allow users to easily use it with other cloud services. “Forty percent of Oracle customers already have adopted the private cloud,” Schultz said. “But we’re seeing the public cloud grow and the interest in the public cloud is growing fast.”

Enterprise hearts the iPad

As more companies are switching to cloud storage and software, it’s allowing a surge in the use of mobile devices for work. Traditionally, getting new technology adopted within a large company was a difficult and timely process. The iPad, iPhone and a slew of Android smartphones are bucking that trend, and the results aren’t as disastrous as many CTOs feared.

Nick Mehta, CEO of LiveOffice, and Forbes contributor Tom Taulli agreed that reason this new tech is being embraced is the push from the big egos at the head of the corporations. “This is the first situation where the top is driving technology adoption,” Mehta said. “The CEO gets one, he goes to the IT department and he asks, ‘why don’t we support this?’”

That personal attachment to the gadgets is driving adoption, and it has another nice side effect too: fewer mistreated devices. Dick Escue, CIO at physical therapy provider RehabCare Group, said he saw a 92 percent reduction in broken devices after his company switched to supporting Apple iPads and iPhones. The 9,000-employee RehabCare was inspired to support iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches when its CEO fell hard for his iPhone. Now its therapists use Apple’s mobile devices in the field when they treat patients.

The little guys are running the show

Our CloudBeat guests and panelists had little love for Microsoft’s collaboration tool, SharePoint. “If SharePoint happened to work, that’s what we kind of do,” quipped Aaron Levie, CEO at cloud-based file sharing company Box. He wasn’t the only one taking aim at the big guys: Increasingly, cloud computing is a industry where little companies aren’t just keeping up, they’re the ones driving innovation.

For the U.K.’s Meteorological Office, SharePoint was entirely too complicated to take off. The software required a large amount of training and adoption was low among the 1,800 employees, according to Michaela Drummond, an information management and technology practitioner at the agency. “The requirements changed on a daily basis, the teams didn’t know what they wanted and didn’t know what SharePoint could do,” Drummond said. The Meteorological Office switched to Huddle‘s more intuitive collaboration software. “People who can use Facebook can use Huddle,” said Drummond. Huddle is six-year-old 60-person startup, and it’s taking on Microsoft.

Levie thinks the lack adoption for SharePoint is part of a larger shift away from vertically-integrated companies that are overloaded by the breadth of their offerings. Instead, CTOs are turning towards smaller companies that focus on just a few core products. “We think the world is moving away from the integrated vertical stack,” said Levie. “It drives complacency and cost increases.”

Embracing the smaller companies also means IT departments are letting their guards down. Thomas Kelly, enterprise architect for cloud services at Best Buy, discussed how his company embraced rogue applications. “We had 50 applications running on the cloud with no governance … this is where I came in,” said Kelly. Now, BestBuy has brought those applications inside its cloud infrastructure and put appropriate policies in place. The end result is a large company that is unusually nimble when it comes to adopting new technology and changing its cloud capabilities.

Cloud image via Shutterstock

Microsoft Research is at it again: The wily folks who created Kinect, among other cool projects, have put together a project that could redefine the way we approach meetings.

Dubbed Code Space, the project allows groups to collaborate using air and touch gestures with Kinect sensors and touchscreen devices, thereby “democratizing access, control, and sharing of information across multiple personal devices and public displays.”

While still a very early concept, Code Space shows the potential uses for Kinect beyond gaming. With its motion tracking capabilities, the Kinect sensor could be the key that makes Minority Report-style computer interaction commonplace.

Why the need for so many input devices, when a simple whiteboard would do for most meetings? Code Space was created with developers in mind, so having a way to share information across devices could ultimately make meetings more efficient. For a simple PTA get-together, where there’s not much data to share, Code Space would likely be overkill.

The project’s design principles offers up some insight on what Microsoft Research hopes to accomplish. “Everyone can interact with the shared display, from anywhere in the meeting space, with any device they bring,” reads the first principle. That’s certainly a meeting I wouldn’t mind booking.

Check out a video of Code Space in action below:

Via: MSDN, Engadget

Rather than make users learn new tools to work in remote teams, oneDrum is an online tool that seamlessly allows users to share and edit documents in programs such as Microsoft Xcel, Powerpoint and MS Word, spanning as far back Microsoft Office XP, which was released in 2002. With oneDrum, users get the fast and easy functionality of programs like Google Docs, but for the most popular desktop apps.

“We designed oneDrum to be insanely powerful and with as few compromises as possible,” says oneDrum co-founder and chief executive officer Jasper Westway. “Users want files to be accessible and editable offline, and co-authoring, file sharing and chat messaging are all experiences that people have become accustomed to and need for productivity.”

It’s important to remember that while personal computing races ahead, there are tens of millions of business technology users who are still stuck with applications their companies can’t easily update, because it would be cost prohibitive to update Windows software company-wide at an organization with 1,00o or more employees.

Without divulging names, Westway told us that one of America’s top five management consulting firms had approached them about using their software to make their business teams more efficient. While on a tour of Silicon Valley, with a delegation from the UK, oneDrum was meeting with everyone. Well, almost everyone. Westway says Microsoft was the notable exception, because they would be a direct competitor.

Westway says he sees a future for the company where oneDrum is the technology that companies use to make their desktop applications collaborative and social. Software developers who may use the product to collaborate with their teams may be building on top of it down the line, for consumers to use.

The oneDrum platform was developed in the Stirling University Innovation Park, adjacent to a college campus, and Westway says college students were regularly tapped as beta testers, both to see what could be broken, and also to gauge how people not involved in the creation would use it.

A Windows version of oneDrum is available today, with a Mac version expected to be launched in beta some time in Q4 of 2011.

[Image Credit: noonday/ShutterStock]

Today, the company is announcing a major overhaul that gives its customers new ways to collaborate  as they learn and communicate. The aim is to help businesspeople communicate more effectively with visitors, partners, or distributed team members.

The new GlobalEnglish Suite includes new tools such as the Global English LinGo Pro Mobile Business Language app, which provides easy access to definitions, correct pronunciations, and translations. The app can translate industry and topical vocabulary as well as company-specific jargon and acronyms into 34 languages. The app is available on iPhone and Android devices as well as on mobile browsers.

The idea is to apply business-oriented English to real work, such as presentations or negotiations. The app is an add-on to the already-existing GlobalEnglish LinGo app, which provides the dictionary and pronunciation functions. It uses both recording and sound playback to help users grasp pronunciation.

The app works with another new software product, GlobalEnglish Bloom, a component of the GlobalEnglish suite, that uses embedded experts, popular social tools, and peer-to-peer advice to improve worker productivity. With Bloom, employees can upload a document and get immediate feedback on how to improve it so that it can be more easily understood by people speaking other languages. Users can create their own wikis on how to pronounce certain company-specific jargon.

GlobalEnglish is also launching GlobalEnglish Edge, an upgrade to an existing corporate learning service that will now include advanced speech recognition and remediation technology. The Edge tool provides easier access to content and more intuitive navigation. It has easier pronunciation practice activities, better performance feedback on writing and speaking, and less administrative work. Subscribers to the service can practice common business language, grammar and writing so they can do tasks such as negotiating, hosting meetings, or doing presentations. The speech technology lets users listen to any written text with the proper pronunciation.

Mahesh Ram, the recently appointed chief executive of GlobalEnglish, said that the gap in English fluency can be quite costly for companies, since it results in lost proposals, flubbed sales meeting, communications mishaps and productivity hits. For tech companies, it means that not every employee of the firm will be able to participate in discussions about innovation. The company says its product scales up from 100 employees to millions.

Brisbane, Calif.-based GlobalEnglish was founded in 1997 and launched one of the first online language learning platforms in 2000. In recent years, its growth has accelerated. In 2009, revenues were $35 million to $40 million, and the compound annual growth rate for the past four years was 28 percent. The company has been profitable since 2006. The company servers more than 350 of Global 2000 companies, including BNP Paribas, Capgemini, Cisco, Deloitte, Hilton, and John Deere. GlobalEnglish has 210 employees. Rivals include English First, Berlitz, Rosetta Stone, Wall Street Institute and Really English.

GlobalEnglish has raised $65 million from Reece Duca, IGSB, Mayfield, SPO Partners and Mitsubishi.