Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For hotels, a technology glitch can result in unhappy tourists and millions in lost revenue.

Hotel Ninjas, a Barcelona-based startup with a vision to be the Salesforce.com for the hospitality industry, is launching this week. Cofounder Avi Meir said he was inspired to start the company after realizing that most hotels still relied on “expensive, outdated, server-based technology.”

HotelNinjas cofounder Avi Meir

Hotel Ninjas offers property management and channel management tools (through an integration with WuBook), a customer relationship management service, and a booking engine for hotel websites. Meir says 30 hotels are lined up and are “ready to make the switch.” The company is charging its first customers $4-9 per room on a month-to-month basis.

Hotels can sign up directly or via AppExchange, Salesforce’s app marketplace. Meir told me he recently made a trip to Salesforce’s European headquarters to form a partnership with the cloud giant. He claims the startup is the first hotel technology provider developed on top of Salesforce’s platform as a service offering Force.com.

Hotel Ninjas was founded in September 2012, and has grown to seven employees. Meir is the former vice president of product at BudgetPlaces.com, an online travel agency.

To continue its momentum, the company will need to win over customers from more established vendors in the space, including Micros.com’s Opera Property Management software and Medallia.

But Meir believes that Hotel Ninjas has an edge over its competition with its customizable CRM and integration with hotel booking websites. “At the end of the day, the one thing that matters to hotel owners is how they can increase occupancy and revenue,” he said.

The founders have poured their own money into the startup, buttressed by grants from the Spanish government. In total, they have raised about $100,000.

Top image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sales professionals rely on phone calls for making connections, following up on leads, and closing deals. RingDNA released a voice communications platform today that provides sales reps with relevant, contextual data when they need it to make the most of their sales calls. The company also announced raising a $1.9 million seed round.

This iPhone app integrates with Salesforce, Twilio, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and company news feeds. When a call comes in, RingDNA delivers CRM data, social media activity, and behavioral marketing information to eliminate “blind spots” and give reps “actionable business opportunities” in real time.

“Sales reps spend most of their day making and taking calls, but existing mobile CRM apps do little to improve those conversations,” said CEO Howard Brown in an interview. “We don’t see anyone addressing the fact that phone calls and surrounding data are the center of a sales reps’ world. Reps want to know as much as they can about their prospects. Our app focuses on helping enterprise sales reps close more deals by delivering sales intelligence data before, during and after any call.”

RingDNA is not the only startup addressing the demand for data in today’s business environment. Base and Close.io provide comparable products, but Brown said they require switching to a new CRM while RingDNA integrates with existing ones. There are also other products that focus on email, and RingDNA’s approach is “intelligent telephony,” which focuses on the phone as the hub of activity.

Brown previously founded a marketing consultancy called DemandResults and observed the challenges his clients had integrating call metrics from marketing, sales, and service centers into their workflow. Furthermore, he said over 40 percent of sales reps fail to hit their quotas each year. He wanted to build a way to get the right call data to the right person at the right time and improve sales performance as a result.

RingDNA presents users with contacts’ past account history, previous communications, and social data as well as activities from Salesforce. The calls are automatically logged and recorded and the resulting data collected. Executives and marketers can access performance metrics through a dashboard and track what percentage if revenue is closed over the phone, how many inbound calls became leads, and call volume by campaign, channel, or region.

The app was first released to beta testers in August. RingDNA raised $1.9 million from angel investors including people from Salesforce, DropBox, CloudConnect, LeaseStar, Appirio, and Propertyware. Customers include Optimizely, Appirio, and Lease Advisors.

Sales people are an incredibly important resource, but how do you motivate them to close more deals without being an aggressive, insulting prig? LevelEleven believes its flagship app that gamifies the sales process is the answer to that problem.

Detroit-based LevelEleven recently caught our eye when it raised $500,000 in additional seed funding from Detroit Venture Partners and others. The company’s flagship application encourages sales people to meet certain goals like following up on leads, increasing numbers of face-to-face meetings, making calls, and logging events.

Now the company has rebranded the flagship app from the name Contest Builder to (fittingly) Compete. LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh told VentureBeat that the name change was important because the core product was more about creating competitions than creating contests.

“One of the most frustrating things of sales is having so much data but still finding it hard to motivate sales people,” Marsh said. “I call it the ‘sales manager challenge.’ … But it’s a pretty powerful motivator when your name is up in lights on a leaderboard. It can be very emotionally compelling.”

On top of the name change, the app has been redesigned to simplify the user experience and modernize the look. LevelEleven will also soon add new pricing options so customers can make a month-to-month arrangement for the service instead of just a one-year commitment.

The Compete app is built on top of Salesforce’s CRM platform, and claims to be “the number one gamification app” in the Salesforce AppExchange. Marsh said that the company has considered building a standalone app that doesn’t rely on Salesforce, but it will focus on its app for Salesforce for the near future because it has more than 100,000 potential customers that use the platform.

LevelEleven now has about 80 customers, a substantial increase over the 25 it had just six months ago. It has raised a total of $1.5 million in seed funding to date and has 10 employees. Marsh also noted he’s proud of the company’s placement among the emerging Detroit tech scene.

Photo via LevelEleven

Contactually has tools to consolidate and organize all your contacts  across email, address books, social media, and enterprise systems. It automatically prompts you to follow up with important people and provides contextual reminders about your previous conversations.

“We want to make it really really easy for people in referral-based businesses to stay in touch with people in their network,” said founder and COO Tony Cappaert in an interview. “Right now, contacts are scattered everywhere, and people who don’t do a great job of staying in touch miss valuable opportunities. We essentially tell them every day who they should be talking to. This update will take that to a whole new level.”

Customers include freelancers, real estate agents, financial advisers, and others who have large and distributed networks and bring in business by reaching out to people. Cappaert claims that right now, Contactually’s customers are able to generate 12 percent to 15 percent more referrals, which translates into a “ton of money.” With the new features, he seeks to raise that 20 percent ceiling to 30 percent.

The second generation of Contactually includes five major updates. It has a tool to perform more efficient introductions, email templates that make it easier to send messages, and a content-sharing tool for saving and sharing relevant articles. Another new feature is personalized group messaging; the company says you can use it contact a large number of people in seconds without seeming impersonal. Contactually also released an iPhone application that imports phone contacts, logs calls, and provides mobile access to the system.

Contactually closed a seed round of $1 million in March of this year from Point Nine Capital, Boston Seed Capital, and 500 Startups. The company is based in Washington, D.C.

Photo Credit: Contactually

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For startups targeting businesses, rather than consumers, improving the mobile experience has become a priority.

Launching today, Tylr Mobile is a San Francisco-based startup that is solely focused on improving how we work on a smartphone or tablet. The company just demoed its initial product this afternoon at the DEMO Mobile conference.

The first iPhone app WorkinBox is a mobile inbox for salespeople, and neatly integrates with email and Salesforce customer relationship management system. In future, the company will also plug in your calendar (personal and professional) and marketing automation tools, but CEO Ryan Nichols views email as an “untapped starting point.”

Nichols started the company when he noticed that professionals were increasingly bringing their personal devices to work, and opting to perform basic tasks on a smartphone. For this reason, at a recent panel hosted by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, featuring CEOs of enterprise startups like Stripe, Mixpanel and Box, “mobile” was repeatedly cited as the biggest trend. As Box CEO Aaron Levie observed, “It’s easy to roll your eyes when we say mobile — but it’s going to drastically change the marketplace.”

In a demo, Nichols stresses that design and usability is key. He selects an email template to send to a fictitious sales contact promising to address a support ticket within 24 hours. A reminder is automatically filed to the CRM system as an open activity. The email is prioritized in the salesperson’s inbox, and isn’t jumbled up with personal emails or a chain about Friday’s all-hands meeting.

“The key is to deliver information in context [and] the experience is designed to make you more productive,” said Nichols.

Tylr Mobile’s founding team aren’t fresh-faced college grads; they have years of relevant experience under their belts. During his time at legacy vendor, SAP, Nichols keenly observed that the “the way we work on the go is broken.” The company was formed in 2012, and later enrolled in an enterprise-focused accelerator program called Alchemist.

The company plans to make its money by initially offering a free trial, and then up-selling large customers. It is currently testing its product on a handful of beta customers, including marketing automation giant Marketo.

As we exclusively reported in December, the company has raised $500,000 in funding from Citrix Accelerator, Alchemist Accelerator, and individuals from SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com. Nichols is planning to raise an additional $750,000, and has kept the seed round open.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top image via Shutterstock

Enterprise gamification startup LevelEleven has raised $500,000 in new seed funds to motivate sales people around the world.

Detroit-based LevelEleven offers software that makes sales and selling a game. The company’s flagship product is ContestBuilder, which pushes sales people with a leaderboard, has them mark completed tasks, dangles potential rewards for the top sales people, and more. ContestBuilder is the most popular gamification app on the Salesforce AppExchange.

The company said its approach to sales gamification has helped bring in a lot more customers, and clients have nearly tripled from 25 to over 70 during the past six months. Customers include Comcast, Concur, Delta Airlines, Dyn, Good Technology, Kelly Services, and OpenTable.

LevelEleven raised $1 million back in October, bringing its total seed funding to $1.5 million. The seed funding was led by Detroit Venture Partners, with participation by Hyde Park Venture Partners, The First Step Fund, and private equity investor Rick Inatome.

“Over the past quarter we’ve made huge strides in establishing our brand, further developing our software, and acquiring new customers, so the timing was perfect to secure additional funding,” LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh said in a statement. “Having the support of such prominent investors is a real validation of the work we’re doing to help motivate employee behavior in the enterprise sales and CRM space.”

Check out the video below for more on LevelEleven.

Screenshot via LevelEleven/YouTube

This is a guest post by Matthew McLarty

The Application Programming Interface (API) provides a link for smartphone and tablet devices to get data from the cloud, social networks to accept shares, and data to easily be exposed between companies.

For information technology, this is the age of APIs.

In the early Web, data was shared through bulletin boards and forums. As the Internet went mainstream, users demanded a better experience with guided tasks, and a three-tier architecture became standard. This application topology led to many isolated islands of logic and data, which were made accessible by the introduction of web services which allowed third party developers to build applications to connect them through APIs.

The web giants leading the way in social business recognized the importance of APIs from the get-go. For instance, Google’s dominant search and map services are both accessible through APIs.

Salesforce pioneered the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model by offering both a web-based user interface and a web API. Twitter gained ubiquity through APIs that allow its members to tweet resources from other sites. Even Amazon Web Services uses APIs as the gateway to its offering that has become the de facto standard for cloud computing.

Knowing where to start can be the biggest challenge.  What services should my API offer? Can it generate revenue? What will motivate developers to use my API? Read on for tips and best practices from the Web’s giants.

Treat your API as a business

An API is a new channel for your business. It can generate revenue directly, be used as a business development tool or as a means of integrating with other applications in the ecosystem. In the early 2000s, Salesforce popularized the SaaS business model, shifting away from managed services or value-added networks by providing self service administration to their clients and a menu of payment options to fit any size business.

The Salesforce API was a fundamental enabler for this approach, and served as both a way of interoperating with and competing against Siebel and SAP. If Salesforce.com had launched as a web application only, the job of integrating key enterprise data from existing systems would have been left to the client, and would have eliminated the value proposition of the SaaS model. This well-documented, standards-based API provides flexibility for clients to adapt their customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and enables third party app developers to build new solutions that embed Salesforce’s services.

Align your API with your value proposition

Amazon struggled early as a books-only retailer, but an ambitious scope change led to its dominance in publishing and retail. In parallel, the company made a brilliant move by leveraging its excess processing capacity to create Amazon Web Services. Now the leading public cloud computing platform on the web, this is where Instagram, Pinterest and many other successful startups run their systems.

Amazon recognized the struggles of startups to build out their own infrastructure and delivered a hosting solution that provides a more palatable on ramp, allowing smaller companies to scale to the highest enterprise SLAs. AWS has become a profitable business unit for Amazon by providing a number of discrete infrastructure services—storage, application hosting, load balancing and more—that meet the needs of this target market. Recognizing that these services would need to be accessed by automated processes and not just human users, each is exposed through an API, allowing client engineers to administer environments that that suit small mobile startup looking for data storage in the cloud to large enterprises with high performance and availability requirements. This API-based approach perfectly fit the AWS value proposition and helped Amazon scale this business unit to an overwhelming leadership position in Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS).

Spoil the developers

Twitter has created its own form of media, and to some extent its own vocabulary, but its success is rooted in the quantity, renown and currency of its content producers. The first of the web giants who could truly claim the “mobile first” moniker (140 character maximum), Twitter sought multiple channels of communication from the outset. The vehicle it chose for transporting content in and out of its service was a web-based API. Twitter grew in parallel with the success of the iPhone due to native integration of its API with iOS, and by providing open access for third party app developers.

Twitter cultivated this developer ecosystem by ensuring its API was robust and well-documented while providing an extensive developer portal to facilitate self-guided learning and registration. To address third party identification and authentication, Twitter co-authored the original OAuth specification that has become the standard for APIs. The service is so compelling for developers, there are even books written about the Twitter API. By spoiling its developers, the company facilitated the growth in usage of its API and drove the popularity of Twitter itself.

Focus on usability

Google’s success can largely be attributed to its simplicity and usability. Personalization and advertising are embedded into the Google search experience, but never at the expense of the user’s core goal. Another hallmark of the company’s success has been its willingness to make small bets in the market, tagging many newly launched services as “Beta” for comically long amounts of time. This soft launch approach is effective because Google is fastidious about collecting user feedback and incorporating it during these extended beta periods.

Google has taken a similar approach with its APIs. The Google search mimics a basic REST API. Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube are all API-powered. The Android mobile platform provides connectivity to cloud-based services through web APIs. Google’s GData is a REST-inspired technology for accessing information on the web. In all of these instances, Google has taken care to provide a highly intuitive interface that encapsulates a useful function and is easily integrated into an application flow. There is now even an API Console providing unified access to all of Google’s services. Google has retained credibility with developers due its experimental nature, iterative approach and commitment to the user. The company flourishes in part due to the usefulness and usability of its many APIs.

Putting it all together

Any company looking to utilize an API to expose its services — and every company should be looking at this — can stand on the shoulders of these giants:

• Use your API as a new channel for your business like Salesforce
• Align your API with your core value proposition like Amazon
• Create a thriving community of developers that use your API like Twitter
• Keep improving your API’s usability like Google

Following these tips will help your company capitalize on the massive opportunity presented by the new era of social business.

Matthew McLarty is VP of client solutions at Layer 7, where he provides implementation best practices and architectural guidance to Layer 7’s customers that are building out their enterprise and API architecture. He has more than 15 years of technology leadership, with a particular focus on enterprise architecture, strategy and integration. Prior to joining Layer 7, Matt led the global IBM technical sales organization responsible for application integration software and solutions, notably helping to grow the SOA Gateway business substantially over a five-year period.

Maps photo via Fotografiche/Shutterstock

And you thought Amazon reviews were interesting. Today, StellaService has just taken a huge $15 million dollar check to the bank, and all for its capability to track and rate the online shopping experience.

This round of funding is the New York City-based startup’s second institutional financing. Altogether, it’s raised $22 million since its founding in 2009. Norwest Venture Partners led today’s funding; NVP general partner Josh Goldman will take a board seat. Previous investors include DFJ Gotham (Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s NYC branch) and RRE Ventures.

Currently, StellaService helps big retail customers like GNC, 1-800-Contacts, and Eddie Bauer to understand and improve how they rate with online shoppers — and how those ratings compare to those of their competitors.

StellaService uses analysts, accountants, and mystery shoppers to “stress test” all the many points of contact between customers and brands online, such as processing returns and engaging in Twitter conversations.

“Not only does StellaService capture how we are performing against the customer service targets we’ve set for ourselves,” said an Eddie Bauer sales SVP in a statement on the news. “We know where we stand amongst the leading retailers and where the best in class perform across key customer service metrics. This insight pushes Eddie Bauer to continually make improvements to be the best.”

If you’re a salesperson at a major company today, chances are you’re using something like Salesforce Sales Cloud or SAP to manage your accounts and contacts. And chances are that you hate them.

“Customer relationship management systems right now are monoliths,” Dexplora co-founder Hampus Jakobsson told me by phone. “Developers are filling them with lot of tools but forgetting to create software for actual people,” he said.

Jakobsson’s cure for the problem is GetSalesDone, an iPhone app that combines the power of Salesforce with the design elegance of iOS. The idea behind the app is simple: If companies want their sales people to actually use and update their CRM systems (which means better reports and forecasting), they first have to use systems that are as well-designed as the average smartphone app.

Design is something that Jakobsson knows well. Ten years ago he helped create The Astonishing Tribe, the firm that designed the interface for a little operating system called Android before being scooped up by RIM in 2010.

“We were focused on user interface back before it was even a major buzzword ,” Jakobsson said.

With CRM systems, Jakobsson’s target now is a bit different, but the underlying mission still remains the same:  In in undying words of Thoreau: Simplify, Simplify!

Simplification doesn’t mean creating a weak product, however. Jakobsson’s says he believes that, by making CRM more simple, GetSalesDone can help sales people deliver far better results.

“You could build Salesforce so that it looks like Flipboard,” Jakobsson said. After seeing what Dexplora is working on, perhaps Salesforce should create something that looks like GetSalesDone.

GetSalesDone is launching a beta today and Jakobsson says to expect Apple to approve the iPhone app relatively soon.

Infusionsoft has raised $54 million from Goldman Sachs to help small businesses succeed. It does this by building custom, all-in-one systems that combine CRM, email, and social marketing, and sales tools. From this platform, small business owners can more effectively attract new customers, wage automated marketing campaigns, engage existing customers, and drive sales.

Infusionsoft started out as a custom software shop in 2001. The founders quickly realized that companies sought this type of comprehensive product. Its target customers are businesses with two to 25 employees that are “owner-operated, lack IT support, follow their buyers online and desperately need effective sales and marketing tools to succeed.” While Marketo, Hubspot, and Salesforce offer comparable solutions, they do not cater specifically to this segment.

“The small business market is underserved by software companies,” said CEO Clate Mask in an email interview. “Most vendors in the sales and marketing SaaS industry are gunning for the enterprise clients and their products show it. Mid-market software and IT support is too expensive and complicated, but simple marketing and sales tools can’t effectively manage their growing businesses. True small businesses are left having to figure out how to make these systems work for their needs and it usually fails.”

Customers include wedding videographers, kickboxing gyms, and animal clinics as well as internet startups. Infusionsoft has over 12,000 customers around the world and grew by more than 50 percent last year. This third round investment will contribute to developing the product and accelerating its own marketing and sales efforts.

“The news of this deal might shock some people due to the size of the round and the fact that it’s coming from a company outside of Silicon Valley,” said Mask. “But anyone who’s been following Infusionsoft knows that this makes perfect sense. We’ve had a vision for a long time and we stuck to it like glue. Every decision made — from hiring to product development — reflects that vision and now we’re ready to go big.  The sales and marketing SaaS market is blowing up, the small businesses market is blowing up, and we have the most perfect launch pad.”

This brings Infusionsoft’s total raised capital to $71 million. Previous investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and vSpring Capital. The headquarters are in Chandler, Ari. (or Silicon Desert). It currently has 350 employees.

Every industry needs some sort of enterprise Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), and Xtime provides it for the automotive repair industry. The cloud-based platform integrates with car dealers’ own systems to streamline business operations and drive sales. It acts as a digital interface between automakers, dealers, and consumers that can not only enhance customer experience, but also provide data-driven insights and increase profits.

“Xtime was founded to transform the auto service industry that has technologically not changed since 1980s,” said Xtime CEO Neal East. “Xtime’s cloud-based solution gives the auto services industry an overhaul where everyone wins. Car owners get a retail experience on par with leading online players, dealerships streamline core operational functions while capturing lost revenues, and auto makers generate incremental parts revenue while preserving brand loyalty.”

All customer information, repair orders, and appointment data from the dealers’ database can be accessed in real time. Dealers can then use the system to set appointments, check in with customers, display repair histories, and detect patterns. Xtime’s client base includes more than 4,700 dealers and works with major manufacturers in North America, such as Lexus, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes-Benz Nissan, Infiniti, VW, Audi, Chrysler and Hyundai.

This is the company’s second round of funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Lumia Capital and existing investors RPM Ventures and Saints Capital. This brings the total investment to $34 million. Xtime was founded in 2004 and has 225 employees. It is based in Redwood Shores, Calif. and has eight offices around the world.

For Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, yoga is big business.

Bessemer Venture Partners,  Institutional Venture Partners and Catalyst Ventures today invested $35 million into MindBody, a Salesforce-like technology for businesses like yoga studios and hair salons.

With this sixth-round of capital, the San Luis Obispo-based startup is plotting its international expansion — it already has satellite offices in New York and the UK, with a third opening soon in Australia.

MindBody provides a suite of marketing tools, scheduling, analytics, networking and point of sale services for health, beauty and wellness providers. It has been around since 2001, and has witnessed the explosion of competition, primarily online scheduling systems like Schedulicity, SalonBooker, Appointment Plus, and Groupon Scheduler.

To strike ahead of the competition, the company has diversified its software stack. Now, it faces heat from Salesforce, SugarCRM and other major customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which also target small businesses.

MindBody claims it is the only company that can offer the full gamut of software and specifically caters to the health and wellness space– for this reason, it is experiencing impressive growth with 900 businesses signing up per month.

“Our intent is to enable and link the 2 million beauty and wellness businesses operating worldwide with the hundreds of millions of consumers who can use their services to improve their own lives,” Rick Stollmeyer, the company’s CEO (pictured above), told VentureBeat.

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) participated in all the previous rounds; with this funding, the company has a total of $58 million in the bank.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Salesforce may have some huge competitors like Netsuite and Oracle, but it’s not the big dogs that keep the customer-relationship manger on its toes.

“We spend more time thinking about a Dropbox than we do some of our competitors because that’s where the innovation is,” said George Hu, the chief operating officer of Salesforce at the DEMO Conference.

Hu may have been skirting around the question of “who are your competitors,” but the reality is, innovation from young startups really is something that keeps executives up at night.

A number of startups are directly taking on Salesforce, like Nimble, which is going after “social customer relationship management,” or creating a network around your database of customers and partners.

On the social side, Yammer, recently purchased by Microsoft, competes directly with Salesforce’s business social network, Chatter.

But Salesforce, which first launched at the DEMO Conference, is already expecting to bring in $3 billion in revenue this year and hopes to reach $10 billion soon. The company’s platform division, force.com, is its fastest-growing product and accounts for half of the company’s API calls. Its recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Hu said, had 90,000 in registered attendance  – that’s a huge number of people. Numbers like that are exactly what challenges Hu.

“The pace keeps me up at night,” he said. “Things are moving incredibly fast at Salesforce right now. The pace never ends.”

Image via b0jangles/Flickr

In time for a big industry conference, analytics firm Badgeville is launching a “gamification” app on Salesforce.com’s App Exchange that can help salespeople become more motivated and productive.

Badgeville is a big proponent of gamification, or the use of game-like mechanics to motivate people to do things that wouldn’t ordinarily excite them. The company plans to set up competitions that let sales forces compete against each other for recognition and prizes. Badgeville is releasing the app today at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2012 event in San Francisco.

Salesforce.com has more than 150,000 customers who have built 2.3 million custom apps. The new Badgeville app is one of 1,600 built by third-party vendors for the Salesforce.com App Exchange platform, with the goal to improve sales performance, productivity, and utilization of customer relationship management (CRM) software.  The gamification app motivates sales people to convert their leads into actual sales at a faster pace.

The Badgeville’s new software runs in a native format and is configurable for both administrators and end users within the Sales Cloud app. Salesforce administrators can use a wizard-based approach to configure the game mechanics for particular sales forces. Rewards can be set on monthly, quarterly, or annual cycles. The system rewards individuals for participating in the app and recognizes them for their sales contributions. As those users become more engaged, they will theoretically update their records more diligently and provide managers with better insight of the sales pipeline. Users can also employ the tool to improve collaboration and behavior.

“Our strategy is to embed our platform for gamification everywhere,” said Kris Duggan, chief executive of Badgeville, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Internally, we call this Big Game Hunter. You start as a squirrel hunter in sales and work your way up to whale hunter. It is using a virtual carrot, not a stick, to drive user behavior.”

He added, “If you are a salesperson, you face rejection many times a day. It is painful. But salespeople need positive reinforcement. If you reinforce good habits, it drives results.”

“Companies around the globe are transforming the way they connect with customers, partners, and employees through social and mobile cloud solutions,” said Mike Rosenbaum, senior vice president of App Exchange and Force.com Operations at Salesforce.com. “Partners such as Badgeville are leveraging the power of the Salesforce platform to provide customers with the right tools to accelerate their successes in the cloud.”

Duggan said that Badgeville has more than 180 customers including Deloitte, EMC, Oracle, Autodesk, Bell Media, NBC, Universal Music, Recylebank, VMware, and others. It was founded in 2010 and it has 80 employees. He further stated that the company is ahead of its plan to generate $10 million to $20 million in revenues in 2012. The company is based in Menlo Park, Calif. and is moving to Redwood City, Calif. next week. Badgeville has raised more than $40 million to date.

Badgeville is targeting Fortune 1000 enterprises with the app. Rivals include Bunchball, which launched a Salesforce.com app last year, and Big Door.

Customer service software maker Zendesk is today showing off a brand new version of its interface and features. It’s also taking advantage of this moment in the spotlight to tout a hefty new round of funding: $60 million from a really swell collection of VCs.

First, the new app.

Zendesk’s cloud-based customer service software was redesigned to remove some of its rough, enterprise-y edges. The new app was intended to look, feel, and function more like consumer apps.

The company said in a statement on the relaunch that the UI was inspired by “the best of social media and consumer application single-page design.” Zendesk wanted to build the Facebook for the enterprise, as it were.

The new app features in-app tabs and sub-tabs, instant/autocomplete search results, keyboard shortcuts, and relatively easy integration with instant messaging, social networks, web forums, and Ye Olde Telephone.

Speaking of telephones, Zendesk two weeks ago also announced it was breaking into mobile apps — another consumer-app direction it hopes will lead to enterprise-app success.

(Developer side note: Zendesk tells us this launch is also the largest deployment to date for Ember, the ergonomically enhanced JavaScript framework.)

Here’s what she looks like:

Next, the funding news. The $60 million comes to Zendesk via a long string of investors. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with participation from Index Ventures and GGV Capital as well as Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank. Existing Zendesk investors Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Matrix Partners also joined in.

This round marks the startup’s fourth round of institutional funding and brings its total VC money raised to date to a healthy $85.5 million.

Zendesk was founded in 2007; its staff of 250 is headquartered in the heart of San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’ve got customers, then you’ve got mobile customers, and Zendesk wants you to take good care of them wherever they are, even if they’re on the go. To that end, the company pushed its cloud-based customer service software into the mobile world today.

“Customers can use their phone to go onto Twitter or Facebook to complain about the service they’ve received, but not necessarily to get the help they immediately need,” said Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane in a statement on the news.

“Our new mobile customer portal resolves this dilemma by offering a smooth, user-friendly, and effective self-service customer experience. With the new mobile customer portal, we have empowered the more than 20,000 businesses that use Zendesk to engage their more than 100 million customers in a way that fits the lifestyle of consumers today.”

Indeed, mobile is a huge part of how consumers are interacting with businesses these days. In a recent survey, pollsters found that more and more consumers fully expect the businesses they frequent to have mobile presences. And for younger consumers, not having a mobile channel strikes them as a sign of disrespect for the company’s clientele.

Zendesk’s new offering supports all the major platforms, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone; consumers can sign into the app using their Facebook or Google accounts. Zendesk expects that many consumer questions can be answered from within the mobile app (i.e., without requiring direct intervention from a customer service rep), and users can interact with each other to confer on issues and share tips.

The white-label software can be customized and branded for your own company, as well.

Here are some screenshots of the app hard at work:

Zendesk was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco. To date, the company has taken $25.5 million in one seed and three institutional rounds of funding, which saw participation from Charles Run Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Matrix Partners.

Top imag couresy of Arena Creative, Shutterstock

Call it player audience management. PlayRM is like other CRM tools that enterprises use, but it’s built for games and their inner workings. PlayRM includes a suite of tools to identify players in category groups, such as free players, shooter fans, or “whales” (gamers who spend a lot). It can then sort them into groups that allow them to be targeted more easily. And that lets game developers figure out which players are most likely to spend money in a game or buy a certain kind of virtual good.

“You have to think of every single player as a possible long-term customer,” said Chethan Ramachandran, the chief executive of Playnomics, which won our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup in 2010, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We see this as the nerve center of a modern game.”

The suite includes the PlayRM Segmentation Engine, which divides users into groups; the PlayRM Messaging Engine, which allows a developer to place a custom promotion in front of a player; and the PlayRM Player Marketplace, which allows developers to market their games to Playnomics’ audience of 35 million monthly active users. All together, these tools produce marked improvement in player retention, with targeted users spending 150 percent more in their first week.

“PlayRM gives game developers a completely new way to manage their players and create a profitable game,” said Ramachandran. “Our goal is to optimize all steps of the player life cycle — from finding and acquiring the right players for a specific game to retaining and targeting players in the game with personalized incentives. This is why we’ve launched the PlayRM Messaging Engine and Player Marketplace: to build upon our release earlier this year of our proprietary player Scoring System. In contrast to generic analytics platforms, PlayRM was designed from the ground up to manage player relationships and revenue, maximizing the value of each player dramatically.”

Rivals include analytics firms like Flurry, Kontagent, and Apsalar, or monetization firms like PlayHaven. Rich Roberts, the chief executive of Slingo, said that PlayRM gives the company a simple and powerful way to understand which players are most valuable and then act on that insight.

At the heart of PlayRM platform is Playnomics’ predictive PlayScience Engine, which enables game developers to finely slice and dice player data across an infinite number of dimensions. The engine scores each player across multiple facets that measure loyalty, attention, intensity, and monetization. It also captures personality scores (social, competitor, and explorer) and other aspects. The data are handled in a way that preserves anonymity and privacy, said Ramachandran.

“Our mission at Playnomics is to transform the economics of the game industry and give every type of game company — both big and small — the tools and the player insight to find the right audience for building a sustainable, thriving game,” said Ramachandran.

Playnomics was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco. Investors include FirstMark Capital, Accelerator Ventures, x/Seed Capital, Metamorphic Ventures, and TriplePoint Capital.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine a search engine that isn’t for finding fascinating facts about the Indian Ocean. Not for learning how much methane cows produce globally. And not for following the latest antics of someone named Kardashian.

Imagine, instead a search engine for customers — your customers.

That’s exactly what Mintigo has built, and will be unveiling shortly. The company has already helped UK communications company Orange double conversions. And working with Mintigo generated a 600 percent return on investment for lead-generation company Marketo.

I spoke to Mintigo chief executive Jacob Shama to find out how.

“The concept of a customer search engine is very new, very unique,” Shama says, “You’ve got Data.com and Hoovers, but they’re not really targeted … just names, really.”

Instead, Mintigo’s vision is to replace those “old-fashioned databases” with the web. Literally.

“The web will be your CRM,” Shama told me. “The web is your database.”

Mintigo starts by profiling you and your marketing needs, as well as a target industry or demographic. Then, after checking if your campaign is business-to-business or business-to-consumer, the online system asks for examples of good customers.

When it has at least 150, the software will analyze the list for commonalities — creating what the company calls a unique CustomerDNA for your campaign.

In B2B campaigns, CustomerDNA includes factors such as how the company markets, what the size of the sales department is versus marketing, what technologies they use online, social network activity, IT department size, and more. Consumer-based campaigns are more focused on social networks: data that consumers have allowed to be publicly available on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks.

Once the software has identified your needs, the process is all automated.

“We crawl almost the entire web to find similar companies,” Shama told me. “And then we leverage CustomerDNA to find the most matching companies.”

To do so, Mintigo leverages big data, social networks, and the web. For each project and each client, the company re-crawls websites from its cloud-based servers, which the company says ensures data freshness.

“It’s time consuming and resource consuming, but the outcome is quality,” says Shama.

And, I might add, it reduces potential privacy issues related to keeping and storing private information.

The outcome of the process?

A list of qualified leads: either target companies, with contact names and information, or consumers … also with contact information. Meaning that your sales force is starting with an unfair advantage: They know who is more likely to want, need, and pay for the products or services you sell.

According to Shama, “we’re the only solution that we know that does this very cleanly, in a very automated way.”

If this works as well at scale as it has in Mintigo’s tests, the software could almost be a license to print money.

Image credit: Olly/ShutterStock, Dietmar Hoepfl/ShutterStock, Leo Blanchette/ShutterStock

Joe, who knows my former boss Frank, on the other hand … that’s an entirely different matter. That is the premise behind Reachable, a social connection tool for business-to-business sales professionals, which just updated its “enterprise social” graph to over 100 billion connections.

“Companies are sitting on a goldmine of under-utilized social assets – the relationships of all their employees, their customers, and their partners,” said Reachable chief executive Al Campa in a statement.

The idea behind Reachable is to gather all those relationship and then correlate them with the connections that the company already knows about. And then to leverage them to help salespeople make connections, turning cold calls into at least semi-lukewarm conversations.

Why?

Because, according to Reachable, a potential customer is five times more likely to return a sales call if they have some kind of personal connection with the rep.

Reachable built the social graph through analyzing online profiles of both businesses and individuals. The company says they are aggregated from “a number of sources,” which I presume but cannot confirm includes LinkedIn and Plaxo. By checking work history and educational background, Reachable creates a web of connections that could enable sales reps to find a common alma mater, a shared former colleague, or another point of connection.

The cloud-based service is integrated with Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand, so clients of those tools can use the tool right inside a familiar environment. In addition, Campa said, “Reachable supports the import of information from LinkedIn and Facebook as well as email address books.”

The company has released a free version with limited functionality and a premium version, priced at $49/user/month; a desktop version is also available.

Reachable has received venture funding from Rho Ventures, Signal Peak Ventures, and Parkview Ventures. It is based in Palo Alto and Salt Lake City.

Image credit: Alekup/ShutterStock

Cloze helps users manage their professional contacts by collecting information spread across various email accounts, social networks, and corporate tools into one, cohesive location. The product is targeted towards people whose careers are based on the strength of their connections, like those in sales, business development, marketing and PR.

“When I moved from the Bay Area to Boston, I had to essentially rebuild my professional network,” said CEO Dan Foody. ”Doing this makes you realize how important your network is, but also how fragile it is. The important people in your network still need care and feeding. Cloze brings people’s most important relationships to the front of the line.”

In addition to creating an online rolodex, Cloze provides context for each contact by providing relevant information and a ‘relationship quality score’ so users can get the most out of their connections. Users import contacts from their various accounts, which are then analyzed and rated. The scores help separate proven relationships from passive ones, highlight priority connections, and provide networking suggestions.

While tools like Linkedin and Gmail’s Priority inbox facilitate contact management, the Cloze Score is intended to help users leverage their contacts to achieve maximum impact. For example, it not only tells you who can make an introduction, but who is the best person to make that introduction.

The funding — a seed round — was led by Greylock Partners, Kepha Partners, and NextView Ventures.

Cloze was founded in 2012 by Dan Foody and Alex Coté. It is based in Cambridge, Mass., and has around 10 employees.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-hating Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has had an about-face: He actually likes the cloud. In fact, he likes it so much that Oracle will be launching a full suite of cloud-based products on June 6.

Ellison has been a self-proclaimed “cloud-hater,” mostly because up until October, 2011 Oracle’s primary business was based on powerful hardware and software solutions. At the conference, he warmed up to the term during an interview with All Things D’s Kara Swisher.

“They don’t call it the Internet any more. They call it cloud computing,” Ellison said, throwing out one of his trademark sweeping generalizations.

“I’m no longer resisting the name ‘cloud,’” he said by way of explanation. In fact, he says, he was responsible for the genesis of some of today’s most successful cloud companies, including NetSuite (“NetSuite was my idea”) and Salesforce.com (“six months later Marc Benioff copied it”). What bugged him before was the notion that the cloud was something radically new, rather than an evolution of the Internet.

Now, however, he thinks differently. “I like the word ‘cloud’ because it’s a charismatic brand,” Ellison said.

Oracle’s June 6 launch of “Oracle Cloud” will include a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering as well as the full suite of Oracle applications, all delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

“For the first time you’re going to have a complete ERP and complete CRM suite on the cloud,” Ellison said.

He had sharp words for cloud-based competitor Workday, which he called “frail.”

Oracle has also been doubling down on the hardware business, thanks to its $5.5 billion acquisition of Sun, which Ellison said has already paid for itself.

“Sales are going down in hardware, but the unprofitable part is going away. Our margins are the highest of anyone in the server business. The sales are down 20 percent, but the profits are up,” Ellison said.

One of the reasons he likes the hardware business, he said, is that it’s “90 percent software.”

And, he added, Oracle wants to do more hardware manufacturing in the U.S., starting with its Hillsboro, Oreg. location.

“We are bringing a lot of manufacturing jobs back to the United States,” Ellison said. But, he added, it’s a challenge, because of a critical shortage of manufacturing engineers in America. One way to address that, Ellison said, is through immigration (an argument made earlier in the day by LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, incidentally).

“We have got to have a more balanced immigration policy. Immigration is a good thing,” Ellison said.

On his company’s recent court battle with Google over Java, Ellison seemed pleased, despite a decision that went largely against Oracle. In fact, Ellison said, the court found in favor of Oracle on copyright infringement.

“We won on infringement. They were infringing our copyrights,” Ellison said. But because the litigation is still ongoing (which presumably means Oracle will be appealing the decisions), he didn’t comment further.

Drawbridge grabs cash for better social ads

Drawbridge announced a $6.5 million investment today. The company wants to make mobile ads as sophisticated and targeted as their desktop counterparts. Prominent firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital led the round.

Mixpanel’s unique analytics attract a new investment

Y Combinator startup Mixpanel just raised its first institutional round of funding. The company dives deep into pageview and visitor engagement analytics, offering real-time “micro” stats. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and additional angel investors, including PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Yammer chief executive David Sacks, participated.

Coupa gets money for its expense reports

Mere months after closing a $12 million investment, Coupa has closed its fifth round of funding for $22 million. The company did not disclose its valuation. The company’s software can track any payroll-related spending and procurement. It handles invoicing, inventory, budgets, and expense reporting. New investor Crosslink Capital led the round. Existing investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures participated.

Moviepilot.com gets funding for fanboys

Movie site for fanboys, Moviepilot.com raised $7 million in second-round funding. The company scours the Internet for movie news and helps movie studios promote their latest flicks. DFJ Esprit led the round.

Google Apps security company BetterCloud raises its seed round

BetterCloud announced it has closed a $2.2 million investment. It offers cloud management services aimed at Google Apps, such as security and group management. The seed funding comes from angel investors and chief executive David Politis.

This CRM raised $6.8M

Future Simple, the company behind Base, has raised $6.8 million. Base operates similarly to Salesforce by storing business contacts and leads. Index Ventures led the round, with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating.

Drumbi grabs funding for a customer service automated system (exclusive)

Hate those machines you get when you call a customer service line? Drumbi is creating one of those, but it claims it will do a much better job. It also promises to cut down on those excruciating wait times. The company raised $2 million at a $8.5 million pre-money valuation from Quest Software.

Turning webcams into credit card scanners, Jumio nabs funding

Online payment and ID company Jumio has raised funding. The company did not officially disclose the funding amount, but it’s said to be $3.3 million from Citigroup, according to VentureWire. Jumio turns web and smartphone cameras into credit card and ID card processing machines.

Another credit card processing startup, Flint Mobile

Like Square, Intuit, and Pay Pal before it, Flint Mobile raised $3 million to process credit cards with your phone. Flint Mobile is shunning a square, triangle, or moon-shaped dongle in favor of using a smartphone camera to process payments. It will make money by way of transaction fees; 1.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for debit cards and 2.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for credit cards. Storm Ventures led the round.

Bloc is going to make a web developer out of you

Web coding online school Bloc has raised $250,000 in seed money to transform you into a web developer in eight weeks. For three grand, you’ll be able to write Ruby on Rails code with the best of ‘em. In time the company will also offer iOS develop classes and HTML/CSS design programs. Robert Hutter at Learn Capital led the seed round, in the form of a convertible note.

One million dollars goes towards 3-D fashion games for women

Frenzoo raised $1 million today to create 3-D fashion iOS and Android games for women. It’s first game, Me Girl, features 3-D-like avatars that girls can dress up and play with as supermodels. Efficient Corporate, Siemer Ventures, K5 Ventures, and Metaverse Services participated in the round.

Hey, you’ve got a loyalty program in my point of sale system

Mobile loyalty program startup RewardLoop has raised $1 million in funding. The company’s system connects to point of sale devices to offer loyalty programs and printed receipt offers. Madrona Ventures led the first round of funding for RewardLoop.

Money exploding from computer image via Shutterstock 

Salesforce competitor SugarCRM has raised a sweet $33 million in funding. The eight-year-old company provides customer relationship management (CRM) software-as-a-service for companies to manage their sales leads.

There are several heavy hitters in the CRM world, including Microsoft Dynamic, Zoho, Salesforce, and SugarCRM. All provide a place for sales and marketing people to keep customer contacts, track leads, and manage sales. SugarCRM believes its unique open-source approach, which encourages others to modify the software to suit different needs, sets it apart from its rivals.

“The open source software offers control and flexibility and is about changing the connection with our customers, which is big reason why we win deals,” said Larry Augustin, chief executive of SugarCRM in an interview with VentureBeat. “We let our customers work the way they want to work, instead of telling them how they should work.”

Instead of maintaining its own servers and data centers, Sugar CRM hosts its services on Rackspace, Amazon Web Service, and IBM. Augustin tells me this is done to keeps costs low and to keep the company focused on the product, not worrying about how it will be delivered. “We’re not in the business of building data centers,” he said.

“Historically, our business has been more mid-market focused, and in the past year we’ve gotten into bigger enterprise deals. We’ll continue to invest in the sales resources on that side,” he said. “We are also hiring like mad. We have 260 employees and are expecting to grow to 300 plus by the end of year.”

Of the $33 million, $14 million was equity and the other $19 million was for debt financing. This new round brings the company’s total equity funding to $60 million.

SugarCRM was founded in 2004 and is based in Cupertino, Calif. The company is backed by New Enterprise Associates, Silicon Valley Bank, Gold Hill Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Walden International.

GlobalOne will take Cloud Sherpas’ name in this marriage, and the newly merged company will offer the same services for both cloud platforms. Cloud Sherpas also announced a new $20 million round of funding from venture capital firm Columbia Capital that it will use to fuel its rapid growth.

Cloud Sherpas helps enterprise businesses move over to Google Apps, the search engine’s enterprise offering for cloud-based services such as Gmail and Calendar. GlobalOne is a Salesforce partner that helps businesses use Salesforce’s customer relationship management service. Both companies acts as consultants, helping businesses choose and implement the right cloud services.

In mid 2011, Cloud Sherpas acquired Omnetic, a west coast cloud consulting competitor. Last fall the company also acquired two Asian-Pacific Google App resellers, WaveAdept and Devnet.

The cloud industry is huge these days, with Amazon and Oracle in on the action as well. Cloud Sherpas faces competition from Cloud Technology Partners, which also helps companies move into the cloud.

The new round of funding adds to the more than $5 million in angel and venture capital investments Cloud Sherpas has racked up since its founding in 2008. All 261 combined employees from both companies will continue with the new company, which will be based in Atlanta. David Northington, GlobalOne’s chief executive will take the reigns of Cloud Sherpas.

Businessman with cloud apps image via Shutterstock

Over the last few years, Salesforce has made CRMs popular for more than just the sales industry. Posiq is hoping to bring a customer relationship management platform to the restaurant industry with its point-of-sale integrated CRM.

“Businesses get data to see their customers spending habits and see how marketing efforts are paying off,” Posiq chief executive Richard Onyon told VentureBeat in an interview. “Posiq delivers reports to restaurants to tell them how business is doing, which marketing efforts are affective, and helps them analyze offers to see what’s working.”

Instead of focusing on sales leads like Salesforce, Posiq aims to help restaurants draw more customers in and keep them coming back. Posiq can help restaurants develop marketing strategies, promote coupons and offers through print and online marketing, and track how well the marketing efforts worked with analytics.

For example, restaurant owners can create a LivingSocial deal, then track how many people purchased the deal, how many redeem the deal, and how many of those customers visit the restaurant again. Posiq can also create text-message based deals for customer who don’t want to use a third-party service. The system works with several major point of sale systems that restaurants use to process sales.

Once you use a deal at a restaurant using Posiq, the restaurant can track what you’ve eaten, how many times you come back, and what you order consistently. While the information tracking might make you feel queasy, according to Onyon only your phone number is stored unless you provide the CRM with more personal information, such as your birthday or gender. Posiq also acts as a governor for restaurants to prevent them from blasting your phone with unwanted offers.

“Our model is to give restaurants the customer data to grow their business and all the data belongs to restaurant, isn’t ours,” said Onyon, “People want that old-fashioned feeling that restaurant owners to know them, our software helps that happen.”

The biggest competitor for Posiq now is Facebook’s recently announced Offers, which Onyon acknowledges will make deals much more social. Though, he’s quick to point out that Facebook Offers sends an email to you to redeem a deal, where as Posiq is entirely mobile-based. However, Facebook Offers will likely gain much faster traction for consumers given the social network’s massive user base and the familiarity that brands have with its marketing features.

Posiq was founded in 2010 and has been operating in stealth until now. The company is currently seeking seed funding from venture capital firms.

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SalesForce and other services like it have been around for several years to manage contacts, calendars, task, and invoicing. But, most services are aimed at business executives and startup companies, not smaller businesses. Jobber’s goal is to bring business management and customer relationship management tools to “field-services” providers, like handymen, painters, and landscapers.

“We provide field service business owners with a powerful modernization tool that is enabling growth and providing a competitive advantage,” co-founder and chief executive Sam Pillar said in a statement, “We’re making our customers happier business owners.”

Jobber realized that many small businesses in the field-services industry use either old software or pen and paper to manage their business, so it set out to bring these companies up to date. Jobber’s product includes a CRM tool, task management, job tracking, sceduling, invoicing, and QuickBooks integration for accounting, all of which are targeted specifically at small businesses. The company puts a lot of emphasis on easy to use software that anyone can start using with minimal training. The entire service is web-based, is available for all the major mobile platforms, and costs $30 per month.

The company said it is steadily growing its customer base and trying to go after the 75 percent of companies, according to a Gartner survey, that don’t use software to manage their business.

Service Auto Pilot and Click Software are among Jobber’s closest competitors, though Jobber told VentureBeat in a statement that its competition is ”split between web and desktop based software. The desktop offerings are dated, ill-supported and lack innovation but still have a relatively strong following despite their lack of sophistication.”

The company’s funding was led by Vancouver venture capitalists, entrepreneurs Boris Wertz, Vik Khanna, and Pankaj Agarwal, and venture capital firm Point Nine Capital. Jobber will use the seed funding to expand its team, develop new features, and improve its user experience.

Jobber is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and was founded in 2010 by two freelance programers, Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler.

Lawn mower image via Shutterstock

Customer relationship management company Nimble rolled out its 2.0 version today to help companies better make use of social media.

The Santa Monica-based company, which launched at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference, told us last month that it was adding new features to its CRM. This included a hub to control all of a company’s different social networks. As Nimble chief executive Jon Ferrara explains, you can’t just put a community manager in front of a computer and call that “relationship management.” He says there is a lack of communication between sales, marketing and the rest of the company. Leads and relationships often overlap and it is hard to see who is connection, where they’re connected and the various conversations that have already taken place with that person.  That’s what Nimble wants to change.

“If sales and marketing and customer service are not using [social] in a uniform fashion, especially the C-level execs who don’t understand their market, they’re dead,” said Ferrara.

Within Nimble 2.0 lives a social media manager, which allows companies to aggregate and interact with its social networks. Prior to 2.0, you could see the social networks but couldn’t actually poke back or follow someone else. Now, you have all of your notifications in one place, can respond to them without leaving Nimble, and the software will record all of your activity with a certain contact. If you’d rather Nimble not follow that activity, you can set the social network’s settings to “private.”

Ferrara also said he is sick of CRMs simply being a place for inputting information. He wanted a tool that would analyze your CRM data and then tell you something about your leads. For instance, you may have stopped talked to Jane Doe and now her lead is getting cold. A weekly e-mail from Nimble will tell you to reconnect with her. It’ll also give you information such as whose birthdays are upcoming, if someone changed jobs, and other important events.

“Mae West said, ‘Out of sight is out of mind, and when you’re out of mind, you’re out of money, honey,’” said Ferrara of keeping up with your contacts. “We’re bringing the love back to relationships management.”

The relationship doesn’t have to be social, however. Nimble’s recently integrated with Hubspot in its 2.0 version. Indeed, the company’s founder, Dharmesh Shah, is an investor in Nimble. Hubspot looks at the visitors to your website, collects information about them, and sends it to your Nimble account as a new contact. It will then watch that contact for certain milestones, such as how many times they’ve been to the website or watched a certain video, and then alert a sales or marketing employee that the lead is hot.

Ferrara explained that when CRMs were first built, they were to act as warehouses for contact information in case an employee were to leave the company and take their leads with them. Because of its singular purpose, many of these management tools were input-only, and didn’t provide much information other than the data you had already given it. But this was also back in the day when trust was built by visiting each others’ offices. You looked at other people’s walls to see what they did, what school they went to, their interests. Nowadays you do the same thing, but you look at people’s digital walls, their Facebook walls and Twitter streams.

“They’re not customers, they’re people,” said Ferrara. “They’re your peeps, man.”

First photo via Shutterstock

Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble

Customer relationship management “sucks,” according to Nimble chief executive Jon Ferrara. Investors are throwing money at the company, and Nimble is responding with new features that it hopes will turn “sucks” to “sales.”

“Since we started two years ago we’ve been getting phone calls from a number of large venture capital firms and tech companies interested in investing in or acquiring Nimble,” Ferrara told VentureBeat. “I’ve said no to all of them.”

Ferrara calls Nimble a social customer relationship management (CRM) company. “Life and business are social, and people buy from people they like,” he said. “In the old days we got to know people by going to their offices. Now we do it over the Internet in six different tabs.”

The company recently took on a seed round of funding from Google Ventures as well as a number of well known techies such as Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah, and Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban. Why such an eclectic group for a $1 million seed round? Ferrara says they’ve all been wanting a piece of Nimble for awhile, and they all support the new features Ferrara will be releasing by the end of this month.

CRM systems act as a database of people you have been in contact with. From quick e-mail conversations to full out meetings, this often cloud-based software — the best-known vendor of which is Salesforce.com — is your little black book of sales. But because of how many different ways there are to connect with people, along with how many different people we can reach with the advent of social media, customer relationship management has become extremely messy.

Nimble’s solution takes your e-mail, calendar, social networks, business networks, and a number of other points of connection and aggregates them into its software. But even with all of these integrations, CRM systems are static, one-way streets. That’s where Nimble’s changes start.

“Automating all the areas of customer engagement” is Nimble’s new goal. Soon, you will be able to tweet back, write on someone’s Yammer wall, share a story over LinkedIn, or like a Facebook post all within the system. When you connect with someone, you will see all of their loaded social networks, e-mails, and other points of contact and be able to engage right within the window.

Within the beginning of this year, Nimble will integrate with Hubspot, Mailchimp, WooFoo, Zendesk, Yammer, Tweetdeck, and Hootsuite to capture the wide range of “tabs” we keep open all day just to chat.

With the topic of “big data” floating around, Ferrara wanted to touch on not just what you could do or enter into Nimble, but rather what Nimble could tell you. Currently, Nimble’s system sends out daily e-mails announcing a contact’s birthday, job change, or other tid bits of information. But it will soon add alerts to let you know about possible relationship changes with your contacts. Perhaps the lead you once relied on is slipping away, or one of your coworkers has just made a connection to the same CEO you pitched last month. This type of information will soon be included in your daily e-mails, so you can have a better grasp on who you know and how well you know them.

Nimble isn’t alone on this front. Companies such as Nutshell are also adding interactivity, such as showing when a lead is “getting hot” and allowing you to chat with other employees without leaving Nutshell’s portal. But even with these new functions, vendors like Nimble and Nutshell will have to watch out they don’t go the way of  old, cumbersome enterprise software by adding so many features that users just ignore them.

Nimble’s seed round may have stirred up a lot of product development, but Ferrara isn’t done looking for cash yet, which is completely out of his character. The Nimble CEO founded Goldmine, a predecessor to today’s CRM technology, 20 years ago and sold it for over $100 million without ever having taken venture money. At the time, Ferrara felt like he would be diluting the value of his company, but he has since been won over to the positive effects of a little capital injection.

Jason Calacanis

“The mistake I made with Goldmine is that if I had taken money at the right time, I wouldn’t have sold it as a $100 million company,” said Ferrara, “It would have been a $1 billion company.”

So Ferrara has trodden lightly into VC territory this time around, after having put in $2 million of his own dollars into Nimble. Seed investor Don Dodge, currently a developer advocate for Google, was introduced to Ferrara and after three hours of chatting in Dodge’s backyard, the two decided to move forward with an investment. Mark Cuban impressed Ferrara, in essence, because of his ability to tell you what to do based on what he thinks is right. Dharmesh Shah brought marketing software Hubspot to the table, which is being integrated into Nimble’s offerings. Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis brought something different to the table: chutzpah.

“Jason has a reputation and people feel strongly one way or the other about him based on that,” explained Ferrara. “I had formed an opinion and after I got to know the guy, I really came to like his chutzpah and his ability to say what he thinks regardless of what people feel about it.”

Currently, Ferrara is on the hunt for his first round of institutional funding. He would like to find the right investors for a $6-10 million round. But it’s not all about the money this time around.

“I’m not in this thing to make $100 million, I already did that,” Ferrara said frankly. “I want to disrupt the market … because I think CRMs today suck.”

Photo of Jon Ferrara via Michael Krigsman, Photo of Jason Calacanis via Joi/Flickr

Think you’re an email ninja? Check yourself before you wreck your (online) self with Tout’s special year-end product, Year in Review, built to help show email users their habits and trends in 2011.

After allowing Tout access to your email, it scans your account (for up to 72 hours, depending on traffic at the time) and subsequently sends a private report to you, complete with charts and infographics. The report features useful statistics like the number of emails you “dealt” with over the past year, the percentage of emails sent as compared to received, and the response rate (both from you to your emails received and from your friends to the emails you sent them).

Why scan your emails? Knowing how often or not people respond to your messages may help improve your efficiency, professionally or personally. Knowing who is spamming you too often may strain a friendship, or help enable improved communication. The list goes on, but using Tout’s Year in Review almost seems like getting a physical for your online communication habits–maybe a bit annoying or overwhelming, but extremely helpful.

The report dives deep into your mail, telling you your busiest email month (mine was December), your busiest day, your busiest hour, your top 10 contacts (this was fun), popular words in your subject lines, emails by day, week, and of course, the highest numbers of emails sent by specific senders (of course, mostly newsletters). Needless to say, the whole experience was fairly terrifying, but kind of addicting at the same time.

Seeing that I had dealt with over 15,000 emails in 2011 really sparked some personal questions regarding time management (let alone quality of life).

The Tout App service launched a few months ago. The app is meant to be an extension to your email and your customer relationship management (CRM) systems (i.e. Salesforce, Highrise) which helps to “coordinate and streamline your emails through templates, tracking, and scheduling.”

By using it, you can better measure analytics on who views and clicks your emails, send out more group emails at a speedier pace, share email templates with your team, and schedule your emails in advance. On top of this, you can connect it to your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to improve the way you interact with your connections and followers. San Francisco-based Tout refers to their product as EMM (E-mail management) software.

Tout is a free plugin with a freemium model (for teams and high volume users), and they also have an iPhone app available for 99 cents.

Try the Year in Review product to get a better sense of just how productive (or unproductive) you are with your emails (and to see who is bothering you most), and then run screaming to sign up for the beta of unroll.me, which after connecting to your email, helps you unsubscribe from your email newsletters, all at once!