July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Impersonal, mass emails are easy to dislike and ignore, which is why SimpleRelevance has raised $1 million.

SimpleRelevance’s platform gathers customer data and then personalized emails to specifically target individuals. The technology looks at information like past purchase behavior and combines it with geographic, social, and demographic’ data to send highly targeted emails. The goal is to make emails ‘smarter’ so the right message is automatically delivered at the right time, with custom subject line, content, and delivery times.

The company claims that this degree of customization can increase conversion rates by 51 percent, increase open rates by 21 percent, and increase click rates by 29 percent. It also said that companies integrating the technology into their marketing have seen revenue increases ranging from 40 to 400 percent, as well as better customer engagement.

“The “big data” revolution has exploded over the past decade,” said founder Erik Severinghaus in an email. “Companies now have access to massive amounts of data from multiple, disconnected platforms such as social media, web traffic, and internal sales systems. However, few companies know how to combine this data and make it actionable, especially from an email marketing perspective. Email marketing is one of the easiest and  cost effective forms of marketing, however it is still significantly behind from a technology perspective.”

The technology uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to get evaluate users and make predictions. It gets smarter over time and can be tuned for different types of interactions and objects. The solutions are comparable to those provided by Sailthru, another digital marketing company that raised $19 million in February for its Smart Data platform that personalizes communications through targeted emails, onsite and in-app recommendations, and text messages.

SimpleRelevance is a newer, smaller company that will participate in TechStar’s Chicago’s inaugural 2013 class. Hydpe Park Angels and Hyde Park Venture Partners led this round with participation from i2A Fund and additional angels. The funding will be used for recruiting and hiring, and to expand its enterprise-level solutions.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy.

You would think that it would be a terrible idea for a company accused of helping teenagers send each other sexually explicit images to feature bikini-clad young girls in their marketing. Most would avoid such direct associations, for good reason – it’s immature, and edgy when it doesn’t need to be.

But not the makers of the enormously popular app, Snapchat, which allows people to send images and videos that “self-destruct” after a few seconds.

The company claims messages are deleted once they are opened, but there have been a series of recent scandals showing that this may not be completely accurate.  Their product is far from perfect, and there are several ways to compromise the protection they offer.  It is never a good idea to send something over the internet that would damage you or your reputation if it became public.  While this may be common sense, it has little to do with how we actually act online.

The makers of Snapchat are right to reject the “sexting app” label — it’s not clear that this is what it is even being used for, and everyone deserves the option to communicate privately when they want, without automatically being branded as a pervert.

Within a few months of launching, the company has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet, and we should all be grateful.

They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication.  Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder.

And Snapchat isn’t even the best product out there — there’s a whole slew of communication tools that are more secure and functional making their way into the public eye.

One of those is Wickr, created by RSA veteran Nico Sell, a more serious security-focused app that uses “military-grade” encryption to send text, video, voice, and document files that can self-destruct after a given period of time.  Hospitals and law enforcement have expressed interest in a similarly functioning Android app, Gryphn.  Although it’s not “self-destructing,” keep an eye on the exciting and powerful suite of communication apps developed by encryption legend Phil Zimmermann’s Silent Circle company – they are not for “average” users, but they could provide enterprise and more serious clients a massive improvement in security.

What apps like these do is allow us a little bit more freedom to be ourselves, for better or worse.

In the copycat world of Silicon Valley startups and funding, expect to see a lot more “Snapchat for _____” type companies.  Finally, the lack of app creativity may work in the favor of consumers.  We have accepted the notion that what you do on the internet is permanent – a statement that is partially a truthful observation, and partially a threatening promise from the companies and entrepreneurs who are making it a reality – but it doesn’t have to be that way for everything.

Perhaps the greatest impact of this rising industry will be when the giants try to co-opt them, as Facebook attempted with Poke.  The issue of trust in these companies aside, it would be a winning situation for everyone for ephemeral features to be built into the services we already use.

We need more human-behavior-friendly default settings.

Privacy is complicated, and nothing is ever completely secure.  Nobody is immune from this, as Nicholas Weaver wrote in Wired, “even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI.”  But in the billions of messages already sent through Snapchat are a few people who didn’t have their lives ruined because of something they shouldn’t have shared.

The media can continue to ridicule the “sexting app” that so many young people are using, but they are entirely missing the point.  The same generation being blamed for the supposed “death of privacy” has become wiser than those who are criticizing them.

In a candid admission at the Milken Conference this year, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, when recalling his college days playing in a band, told the audience, “thank God social media didn’t exist then, because if it did, I wouldn’t be here.”  The Internet wasn’t built with security in mind, and we’re still dealing with the consequences of that.  The next generations are going to be the ones who pay the true cost of the design decisions we make today.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Image credit: Shutterstock/Shocked man

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.

The microchip computer was, arguably, the most significant invention of the latter half of the twentieth century. The closest preceding innovation to provide humanity with such a large opportunity for intellectual advancement was the printing press.

Computers have redefined every aspect of human life, from how we communicate and do business to how we study and explore our universe. In just a few years, we have moved from telegraphs to video conferences; from the first manned flight to sending robot rovers to Mars.

Despite the depth and complexity of the problems computers are tasked to solve, the general populace expects them to function with the simplicity and ease of a household appliance. Consumer demand for computing simplicity is so strong that Apple, the most valuable computer hardware and software company on Earth, has centered their entire public image around the slogan, “It just works.”

Over the last decade, popular perception of computer technology as more servant than tool has grown stronger. In that time — even as computers and electronics have become a larger part of our daily lives — worldwide Google search interest in the Computers and Electronics category has dropped by more than fifty percent.

The category’s top search terms in 2004 included “Linux,” “drivers,” and “Java” with rising terms such as “Sasser,” “computer worm,” and “Eclipse,” a software development environment. Last year’s results tell a vastly different story with top terms like “Apple,” “Google,” and “Samsung” and rising terms “Galaxy S3,” “Minecraft,” and “app store.”

The rise in adoption paired with a decline in comprehension presents a major dilemma for software companies: How do you address public demand for short learning curves and simplified experiences while performing increasingly complicated tasks? How do you manage a product that hinges as much on client perception as it does on technical reality?

As tough as those questions are to answer, the situation is even more daunting for engineers inside these companies. They must not only deal with this client demand, but also with the opinions and wants of their non-technical co-workers who are members of the “it just works” demographic. These employees often shape the direction of the product yet rarely understand how things operate under the hood.

Any experienced software engineer or systems administrator can regale with seemingly endless tales of technical hubris from producers, sales directors, or C-level executives. The clichéd “disgruntled programmer” is often just tired of being told that one plus one equals three, especially when he was hired to do calculus.

It is difficult for anyone to be told how to do their job, let alone by someone with little understanding of the tasks involved. This is the world software engineers at small to medium-sized companies live in, where the relationship between sales and engineering is rarely buffered by project managers and a CTO.

With rapidly changing technology now ubiquitous, understanding the latest devices and the methodologies behind their use is culturally perceived as a sign of both youth and intelligence. Delegation of skilled tasks by unskilled leadership is a common problem in any business, but it is an epidemic in a software development space where executives are constantly urged to be ahead of the curve.

Compounding this problem is the unspoken yet universally acknowledged truth that many people drawn to technical professions are not very adept in social interaction. Though they may be unable to constructively express their frustration, it does not mean that it is unjustifiable.

A popular stereotype among non-technical employees of software companies is that programmers say no to everything. While anyone has the capacity to be negative and stubborn, more often than not this behavior from engineers is a direct response to illogical feature requests or unreasonable time constraints.

For example, here are some actual feature requests that I have either witnessed or have been expected to personally deliver, some with threats of termination if they were not accomplished:

• Modify the source code of the Google Analytics platform to meet the company’s tracking needs.
• Secretly and automatically install a native application to a smartphone’s desktop when a user hits the company website.
• Triangulate a user’s position to less than one meter accuracy, via cell phone GPS, while they are inside of a building.
• Match Playstation 2 graphics quality on a first generation Nintendo DS (PS2 can render 75 million polygons per second, while the DS can only render 120,000).

It is irrelevant that the executives who made those requests did not understand why they were unreasonable. The problem is their failure to heed two principles that can be found in any book on leadership or management:

• Be quick to ask questions and slow to offer solutions.
• Avoid micromanaging at all costs.

As it is with any type of business, the best technology managers assist teams of skilled employees in finding their own solutions to both internal and external problems. Ask a software engineer what they enjoy about their job, and the answer will probably include something about problem solving.

In order to drive a development team towards productive results, an experienced software manager might reformulate the previous requests in a way that allows the engineering team to visualize potential solutions.

• “What can Google Analytics do, what are its limitations, and how can we meet our tracking needs if it’s not enough?”
• “We need to increase our app’s circulation. Let’s brainstorm some ways to do that.”
• “What are the best results we can get from a cell phone GPS and what are some ways we can improve the accuracy of triangulation?”
• “The client is not happy with the graphics quality on the DS. They want it to look like the PS2 game. How close can we get it and what are some technical details I can relay to them?”

Stepping back from your personal investment in a project and deferring key product decisions to your engineering staff can be difficult, but it is essential to growing and maintaining top tier software teams.

After all, no one has ever been hired to a skilled position because of their lack of ability. The best managers know that the fastest way to motivate a team towards results is to exhibit trust in them. As the poet George MacDonald said, “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

Blake Callens is lead engineer for mobile e-commerce platform SpotTrot, which powers stores for many of the world’s leading entertainment brands, such as Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Sesame Street. Blake is known for his contributions to e-commerce technology, especially within the realms of computer vision and natural user interface UX. He was lead architect and co-inventor of the DEMO-winning Webcam Social Shopper, is a Webby award winner, and is co-inventor on e-commerce based U.S. Patent 8,275,590 for virtual dressing rooms. If you would like to connect with him, follow him on Twitter.

At the latest TED conference in California, Cerf says he envisions a future Internet that could expand communication beyond humans to other species — and even other planets.

“All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected. We’re beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn’t just another person,” he said. (As if you need another reason to love Vint Cerf.)

As crazy as it sounds, work on that very kind of Internet already exists. Last year, Peter Gabriel (yes, that Peter Gabriel) helped found The Interspecies Internet, a project “created to explore, encourage, and facilitate communication between cognitive species.”

Here’s how Gabriel describes it:

Many of the phenomena of the net, universal communication, open access to information and education, group behaviour and social networks will have their parallels in the Interspecies Internet. Although it will clearly be used by beings of the same species for communication a special emphasis will be made on communications between species, including our own.

Admittedly, all of this sounds a bit off the wall — but what Gabriel and Cerf envision isn’t completely beyond the realm of possibility. Researchers are already getting closer to decoding the language of dolphins, and Orangutans at the Miami Zoo are today using iPads to communicate with their keepers. (See video below)

The Internet is breaking down the linguistic walls between humans, so why can’t it help make it easier for us to understand animals as well?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard is a visionary. He is a wildly successful businessman, accomplished outdoorsman, and pioneer in corporate management philosophy. Determined not to let his career encroach upon his sporting pursuits, Chouinard created a unique company culture where executives and employees were free to strike a flexible balance between work and play. 

His legacy inspired entrepreneur David Hassell to start 15Five. 15Five is an employee feedback system that seeks to strengthen the internal level of communication within a company. Today, 15Five announced that it secured $1 million on seed funding led by Richmond Global, and from big name angel investors, including founder of Yammer David Sacks, Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, former Mashable editor Ben Parr, and 500 Startups.

Every week, employees complete a report that takes them no longer than 15 minutes to write, and no longer than 5 minutes for their manager to read. The reports include information about their successes, challenges, ideas, morale, and productivity. The mangers review and consolidate the reports, and then present them to the higher-ups who can use them to quickly gain a grasp of what happened in the workplace that week.

“Chouinard worked half a year and took the other half of the year to go climb mountains and surf,” Hassell said in an interview. “However, he still had to keep tabs on his company, so he had each employee create these 15-5 reports that would get bundled up the top to him. We put this method online.”

The goal is to give people at the top of the corporate structure more transparency and visibility into what is happening down below and draw a stronger connection between the various levels. Furthermore, the platform gives employees a greater sense of importance and efficacy within the company, and flattens the hierarchy. Hassell said the team put a strong emphasis on “elegant simplicity” in their design to make the user experience as seamless as possible.

15FIve presented at the Launch Conference in San Francisco in March of 2012. Sacks was  on the panel of judges, and according to Hassell, expressed interested in backing the company during the event. At the time, 15Five was not seeking funding but stayed in touch with Sacks. Now, the application has more robust features and an impressive roster of clients. Early adopters include TaskRabbit, TechStars, Getaround, Citrix, Warby Parker, Mahalo, USTREAM, Retargeted, and even the University of Michigan Medical School.

With this financing, 15Five will focus on building its 2.0 product and funnel resources into sales and marketing. 15Five is based in San Francisco.

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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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How do you bring a radically distributed workforce together and meld it into a single, unified team?

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

The new tools allow HootSuite users to take conversations “offline,” sharing something from Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere on the web to a select group of internal company personnel. They also allow quick real-time chat and promise to galvanize company employees into brand ambassadors.

One of the goals, HootSuite founder Ryan Holmes told me, was simplicity.

“Our product is now three and a half years old,” he said. “It started as a tool for our team to help manage social media, but we’ve grown a lot. We spend two to three hours a day in the tool, and when we leave it’s to jump into email … to send something we found on a social network.”

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite Conversations

HootSuite Conversations skips the email step, keeping the discussion in a web native social tool where any results of the conversation can immediately be shared out to social networks as desired.

“As we look at where we’ve come from,” Holmes says, “Social is now spreading across the whole business. We need better tools for managing that.”

The strategy from HootSuite seems to be to concentrate all of a users’s social activity in one tool. It’s not a serious competitive threat, if any threat at all, to a true intranet or inside-social tool, although one quote in the press release from a Pepsi exec seems to indicate that organizations can use it to communicate with their employees.

However, HootSuite — even with Conversations —  is not currently the kind of tool that everyone in an enterprise will ever need or have. What it does is simplify the communication for social media or marketing teams, especially if the team needs to collaborate on social media messaging before releasing tweets or status updates.

And the new functionality probably will perk up a few ears in the social enterprise space.

Source: HootSuite

Sending messages out that originated inside the organization

photo credit: ohhector via photopin cc

Business-focused social network Yammer is making good on its promise to all aspects of work software more social. Today the startup announced a slew of new features, including a new Universal Search tool, Premium Yammer Groups, more advanced content sharing options, and lots of new integration with third-party enterprise software platforms.

For those who aren’t familiar with the service, 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.) A company’s Yammer network is closed off from public view and is only accessible to people who have a company email address. More than 200,000 businesses are now using Yammer’s social service, including 7-Eleven, Red Robin, Ford, General Electric, Shell, and Penn State University.

Yammer, which now has five million corporate users, said the new features and functionality its rolling out for spring will help the company reach its goal of hitting 8 to 10 million corporate users by the end of 2012. Yammer’s platform looks a lot like Facebook’s open graph, except optimized for a professional business communication client.

One of the most easily recognizable new features due out this spring is the new Universal Search, which allows business data from nearly any enterprise application (including Salesforce.com, SAP, and Microsoft SharePoint) to be accessed in Yammer’s search engine. All activity from those applications will also appear in Yammer’s Activity ticker feed, which functions a lot like Facebook’s news ticker.

The basic idea behind Universal Search is to provide one tool for people to search across all their business data, Yammer CTO and co-founder Adam Pisoni told VentureBeat in an interview. “Most enterprise applications have a slow search tool that crawls and indexes all the information behind a firewall,” he said, adding that those tools require login screens that obviously don’t play nice with cloud applications. And much of the communication people have through social networks lives in the cloud, so this is obviously something Yammer wants to fix.

Pisoni said the search results will appear within separate tabs for each integrated program, and search results will be based on each individual user’s behavior.

Yammer is also giving all users access to “Yammer Embed,” which was previously in private beta testing and only available by request. Yammer Embed is basically a widget that can be added to any business application to enhance its social profile.

New group pricing and external sharing

Integration isn’t the only thing Yammer is focused on. The company is also rolling out a new Premium Groups option, which is tailored to specific department of a business that may want to jump into using Yammer before others. For $79 per month, Premium Groups offers unlimited users, increased file storage limits, and advanced admin controls. Think of it as a way for Yammer to get its foot in the door for companies who don’t yet see the appeal of adding a social network-like tool to their office communication arsenal.

Yammer also wants to make it easier to share between groups on the same network, and its rolling out a new tool that allows groups to cross-post files, conversations, and pages. This could come in handy for larger companies that can’t resort to using the “All networks” communication feed.

The other big change to sharing that Yammer is implementing is a way to communicate with the outside world. As such, it’s setting up a new “Email File” button that enables employees to send messages third-parties (like contracted workers, company partners, outside firms, etc.) a one-time URL to view a file or Page. Viewing rights can be revoked at any time, and the Yammer network admin can turn this functionality off if necessary.

Pisoni told me this particular method of sharing is more secure than regular email communication, and less cumbersome than the large file-sending services like YouSendIt.

Founded in September 2008, the San Francisco-based startup has raised a total of $142 million in funding to date.

Image via Peshkova /Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Technology was once a luxury. Today, technology is a part of everyday life, and indeed it even touches the 99 percent. Protesters are now both live streaming events and using Skype as a megaphone, sometimes literally.

According to The New York Times, live streaming website Ustream has over 700 channels dedicated to the Occupy movement. The point of live streaming is to bring people from anywhere to your event, so they can be involved even if they can’t physically travel there. Occupiers are using the live stream for exactly that, streaming general assemblies, marches, speeches and other pivotal moments of the protest as a means to connect.

This is one of technology’s main roles in a protest such as this one. Occupiers have been accused of having a disjointed message, and no core leaders. Some call the Occupy movement Occupy Anywhere given the mass scale of Occupy camps around the world. There’s Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Denver, Occupy San Francisco even Occupy individual schools, and maybe hundreds more. Given how spread out so many of these protesters are, technology and social media must be used to connect the message.

Live streaming has played an important role showing how “on the go” these camps are. Many of them are being torn down, and thus Internet access isn’t guaranteed. Ustream has seen roughly 70 percent of Occupy live streams come from mobile phones, with 89 percent being viewed on mobile phones. In order to really take part in these, however, you need a smartphone, which many still do call a luxury. Walking through an Occupy camp, you’re sure to see a few iPhones and Androids, but not enough for everyone to whip out a device and stream their thoughts.

That’s where The People’s Skype comes in, taking communication to a personal level. The People’s Skype was created by Jonathan Baldwin to aid in “mic check.” Mic check is when the occupiers come together and listen to people with an inspiring message or important news, otherwise known as a General Assembly. The tent cities, as Occupy camps have come to be called, can be very large, with several thousand gathering at the biggest camps. In order to make sure voices are heard, Occupiers use “The People’s Mic,” where one person yells out a sentence, and others repeat the sentence in concentric circles out to the back of the crowd. Kind of like a loud game of telephone.

The People’s Skype tries to put speed and clarity in this process by having anyone with a mobile device – smart and feature phone agnostic – call into a line connected through a Tropo application programming interface (API). The crowd is, in essence, on a one-way conference call. People in the area can gather around a phone and listen in individual groups, or perform the out loud repetition depending on the size of the crowd. Conference holders can post polls through Skype, which users can participate in by entering a passcode and a 1 or 2 for yes and no responses.

It’s a pretty simple solution to an otherwise inefficient way of communicating. The program itself, however, was built on PHP with MongoDB used as a database and lastly the Tropo API. This isn’t the first “hack” we’ve seen for the Occupy movement either. In October, Matt Ewing, founder of green tech company Rewire Labs, created Occupy the Web, where developers came together for a 24 hour hackathon. Communication was also a theme here, acknowledging the need to connect Occupiers of all walks of technology savvy.

Check out how The People’s Skype works in the video below.

[First Occupiers image via Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Poor Netflix just can’t catch a break. The company already caught hell from subscribers over its recent pricing changes, and last night it announced that it’s spinning off its DVD rental business entirely under the name Qwikster.

The response from consumers — judging from over 11,000 comments on CEO Reed Hastings’ blog post — has been overwhelmingly negative. While there are some interesting elements to Netflix’s latest plan, the company botched any chance of making its customers sympathetic to Qwikster by failing to communicate why the offshoot business was necessary in the first place. That gaff, coupled with the announcement’s close proximity to Netflix’s recent pricing change, was a recipe for disaster.

Ironically, Hastings spent a good chunk of his blog post last night apologizing for his poor communication about Netflix’s price hike. “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success,” he wrote. “We have done very well for a long time by steadily improving our service, without doing much CEO communication.”

Hastings likely thought he was being gracious to his customers by explaining the company’s decision to form Qwikster: Basically, he felt that both the DVD rental and streaming video service would be better off being run by separate teams. But while he did a decent enough job of laying out the company’s logic behind the move, most subscribers don’t give a damn about the company’s long-term vision.

Instead, subscribers see that Qwikster will inevitably make their lives harder. Now they have to manage completely separate queues and billing information. They will also have to review movies multiple times, since Qwikster and Netflix’s websites won’t be integrated. From a consumer perspective, there’s practically nothing (aside from the useful addition of video games) to get excited about with Qwikster.

To make things worse, Hastings and new Qwikster CEO Andy Rendich filmed a cheap and poorly produced video explaining the decision to subscribers. The video seemed ill-fitting for such a massive announcement, and did little to drum up excitement for Qwikster.

Netflix would have been better off delaying the Qwikster news until it had more compelling advantages to splitting up its services, which also would have given it some much-needed distance from its pricing changes. Even better, Netflix could have delayed its price hike entirely until it had a more compelling reason to split its two services.

In time, we’ll probably see more innovation coming out of Qwikster that will ultimately benefit consumers. The addition of video games is just the start — Netflix could conceivably make a play for rival disc kiosk service Redbox. Down the line, having Qwixter as a separate company will also serve Netflix well when it’s time to sell off its DVD rental business.

“Certainly as enterprises become increasingly social, that’s an area where we want to add value,” Weiner said on the company’s earnings call today. “Over time, I fully expect us to be creating more relevant products and services our membership can use where they work.”

LinkedIn, founded by Reid Hoffman, is a business network that’s designed to help professionals connect with other potential business contacts and get a “warm introduction” through people in their network. Right now the company is focused on “external communication” and helping business professionals connect with other businesses and professionals. But that could change, thanks to the success of internal social networking site providers like Yammer and Salesforce.com.

Yammer builds an internal social network for individual companies that’s similar to Facebook. Employees can post updates about what they are working on, and add polls and a number of other interactive media elements. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net — that are taking a lot of the lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.

Yammer has picked up around 3 million verified corporate users and 80 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 have deployed the enterprise social network. It was so successful that it prompted Salesforce.com to re-invent its own micro-blogging service called Chatter. That service, which comes with Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management software and is also available for free, is another internal social network for enterprises.

LinkedIn’s trading debut in June went extremely well, and the company now has a market cap of around $9 billion, well above the valuation of $4 billion it claimed when it priced the shares of its initial public offering between $42 and $45. The company’s shares are currently trading around $100 — more than double the IPO pricing.

The company reported its quarterly earnings for the first time as a public company today. LinkedIn brought in $121 million in the second quarter this year, up 120 percent from $54.9 million in the second quarter last year. The company made $4.5 million in profit off that in the second quarter this year, up from $4.3 million in the second quarter a year earlier.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

(Editor’s note: Pete Bodine is a managing director at Allegis Capital. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

The right level of communication and information flow for a startup changes as it evolves and is always challenging, but it’s imperative to have a communications strategy for shareholders at all stages of a company’s development.

In the earliest stages, communication is pretty easy and straightforward.  With just a founder or two and a few angel investors, regular communication is natural. You don’t even have to think about it because it happens with ease. But as time passes and venture capital rounds increase your investor base, the amount of communication with shareholders tends to become less frequent.

For a while, that’s not a problem. But things can – and will – change.

Let’s say another company wants to acquire yours and you suddenly need approval from the majority of your shareholders, some of whom aren’t up to speed about the company’s progress.  At this point, those communications with your shareholders that used to be so easy may become extremely challenging.

As a manager, you might be comfortable that an acquisition is the right way to go. But if you need 80 or 90 percent of your shareholders to agree with you and haven’t kept in touch with them, it won’t be easy to convince them. Shareholders, at that point, are disinterested and may not believe the transaction will materially benefit them.

Unfortunately, it’s often too late at this stage to start educating them about why this is the right course for the company.  And you may lose the deal because of poor communications.

Communicating well with shareholders doesn’t mean you need to provide detailed business plans and forecasts to everyone on a regular basis. But annual or semi-annual updates to your board are a good idea, regardless of your size.

One of the best communicators around is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. This 1997 letter he wrote to shareholders is a marvelous example of how to talk to – and with – investors.

Among other things, he said Amazon may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than other companies because of its emphasis on the long term, an uncommon view for a CEO for that timeframe. Then he went on to describe the company’s priorities in nine bullet points – not 50. It was a concise and effective way to get his point across.

Further, he didn’t exaggerate how well things were going and he wasn’t afraid to discuss Amazon’s challenges. It’s a philosophy that’s worth emulating, since this type of communication will pay dividends in the future. When your startup hits a speed bump – and startups always do – your investors will absorb the news much better.

In your communications, you don’t have to be this detailed and you certainly don’t have to incorporate all the financial data points that Bezos did. But he did elaborate on his company’s direction and vision – and that’s what your note should do as well.

While your startup might be a small shop now, it’s important to developing a strategic communications policy early. If you’re one of the lucky ones who eventually sees your company go public, you’ll be required to communicate with shareholders – and you’ll know what you are doing.