The social media marketing platform that competes with the likes of Wildfire, Sprinklr, and Involver grew 440 percent last year, went global, and added companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, and L’Oreal — you may have heard of them once or twice – to its now 8,000-strong client list.

How? Through the back door.

“We’ve basically built our company around the notion of a self-service platform,” chief executive Wendell Landsford told me from New York today. “People try for free, and if they see value, they keep using the product.”

That started with perhaps humble beginnings with small companies as social marketers created Facebook photo contests and Twitter retweet offers. But it led to massive opportunities at some of the largest corporations in the world.

“As we got success on the self-service product, we started to be adopted bottom-up in enterprise organizations,” Wendell said. “In companies like Unilever, Viacom, or Pepsi, some marketer might try OfferPop. Then we’d reach out, establish a relationship, and get more exposure in these companies, which broadened our footprint.”

Initial success led to Offerpop codifying these opportunities into a sales process, and the company now has a specific division of its sales force dedicated to key enterprise accounts. It’s the new enterprise sales model, Wendell says, with Salesforce.com as its “poster child.”

The model works for upstart young startups. But it also has significant benefits for enterprise companies. As Wendell says, one massive bonus to this model is that a product “has to prove its worth … companies don’t end up with shelfware.”

Offerpop, which closed a $5.7 million series B founding round in December, is now expanding internationally, opening an office in the U.K. and one other to-be-determined location. That’s a direct result of having internationalized the product, translating it to 17 different languages in early 2012. (Which, by the way, is also helpful for major brands, who typically do business internationally.)

Perhaps the most interesting news, however, is the new product suite that Offerpop will be announcing in February. While the company wouldn’t release full details yet, Wendell did give me a sneak peek: “big data.”

“As companies use Offerpop and expand to 350 campaigns or more, there’s a ton of data that gets built up and captured,” he said. “Historically, that’s been kept in individual campaign reports, but it doesn’t provide cohesive, actionable insight.”

So Offerpop is pulling out all the data from all of a company’s campaigns, enriching it with everything that it knows about the company’s fans and customers — including the content they tend to respond to — and making is useable for better marketing on social media, as well as multichannel marketing via email, online marketing, and more.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this product sounds perfect for enterprise as well.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

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

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

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

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

Here’s the visual data:

---

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

---

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

You can never have enough storage. With the amount of files we deal with regularly – whether we share them remotely or simply want to have access to your files wherever we want – the more storage we have, the better. One of the best ways to get more storage is to sign up for Dropbox.

Dropbox users gain more storage either through referring others or upgrading to a Dropbox Pro account. But the VB Store has a giveaway that will give you a chance to win a Dropbox Pro account for life, a prize valued at $9600!

With this giveaway 1 lucky winner will win a Dropbox Pro plan for the rest of their life. If you do the math, that works out to 100GB of storage per year for the next 80 years of your life. That’s a whole lot of storage.

Here’s how to enter:

1. Connect with Facebook (button is to the right side of the VB Store page)
2. Share the giveaway with the social buttons. Remember, the more you share the better the chance you’ll have at winning this unbelievable prize.

Dropbox gives you the opportunity to store, share, and access all of your digital content right from your computer or your mobile device – and you can do that anytime and anywhere. This VB Store offer gives you the opportunity to win big with Dropbox Pro for life! So head over to the VB Store page now and enter now!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Find any file in two taps: That’s the promise of Openera.

The cloud is wonderful, but when you have accounts at Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Evernote, or any number of other cloud storage companies — not to mention your email — how can you ever find anything?

“I’ve been in the content management space for 15 years,” says Openera chief executive Peter Lalonde, who previously worked for OpenText and other enterprise file management companies. “I’ve lived the pain of file management … but realized that no one likes managing files!”

Even when it’s simple, Lalonde says, people don’t put files where they’re supposed to be. Instead, they put files where it’s convenient and easy. So he created a cloud-enabled mobile service that automatically files your documents and email attachments so you don’t have to.

“I love my iPhone but can’t find any files on it,” Lalonde says.

So Openera lets you connect all your cloud services, and then automatically saves, organizes, and backs up your files. Even better, from an enterprise perspective, companies can set up corporate policies to automatically file certain types of files in predefined places.

How does it work?

“First you download the app,” Lalonde told me. “You then connect your email — that’s the first thing you do, and then connect all your cloud services.”

In the background Openera then indexes, tags, and categorize all your files — no matter where they’re stored. Then you’re set up for finding your apps easily. In addition, you can create rules and personal preferences of where you want files to go. For example, all Word documents from Agnes, your corporate counsel, go to Dropbox. Or all documents with “revenue” in them go to your Google Drive.

Essentially, Openera has created an abstraction layer for file storage services and knows where to put what based on the sender, metadata, and terms and keywords in the file. The company is adding even more intelligence shortly, Lalonde said.

But it’s not syncing, it’s finding, he’s quick to say, adding that Openera is useful for finding files even if you don’t care where they are stored:

“Personally, I don’t care where my files are stored. As the CEO of Openera, I do care.”

The company’s iPhone app is available right now, and the Android app is under development. Microsoft and RIM are interested in native apps for their phone platforms as well, Lalonde said.

Tomorrow the company is graduating from FounderFuel, a Montreal accelerator. Lalonde, who’s a veteran of the software and online services industry, doesn’t exactly fit the twenty-something image of an accelerator graduate, and his co-founder, Mark Lennox, recently had a $40 million exit with MXI Technologies.

So I asked him why he joined the accelerator.

“I’ve always been an intrapreneur, but it’s a big difference starting your own company,” he said. “I’ve always been a believer in accepting the resources that are offered, and it’s been one of the best experiences. I know enterprise, and I know how to sell. But we also have to raise money, and develop on a shoestring, which is new to me.”

That humility and wisdom is likely to put Openera in good stead as the company navigates out of acceleration mode and into revenue mode.

photo credit: Junior Henry. via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dropbox just announced a new integration today, and it’s a doozy: Facebook. Starting soon — possibly as early as today — Facebook users can share Dropbox files, pictures, and folders to their friends and contacts in Facebook Groups.

Once you’ve linked your Facebook and Dropbox accounts, you will be able to browse and select files from your Dropbox just as if you were selecting from your own computer and then share them to your group. They’ll immediately show up on your group’s wall, and any updates or changes you make to the documents will automatically be shared to the group as well.

Source: Dropbox

Adding a file from Dropbox to your Facebook group.

This is huge for Dropbox, which in spite of some security missteps has continued to add users at an astounding rate through smart partnerships and bigger, better storage plans.

But I hope they have added plenty of extra storage in anticipation of this integration. Facebook is the mother of all social networks, in the Saddam sense, and if even a fraction of its billion users start using this feature, Dropbox will see a huge influx of new users … and new files.

The feature is rolling out today, and Dropbox says you should see it in Facebook “soon.”

photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google’s big vision was to organize the world’s information. Eric Warnke of Mover.io just wants to move it.

In an increasingly cloudy world of big data, transport is a growing problem. Megabytes and gigabytes may be no big deal, but when you start moving multiple terabytes from a corporate database to Amazon Web Services for processing on a regular basis, that’s a different matter.

Warnke, co-founder and chief executive of Mover, wants his company to be the default mover of data. Everywhere.

He’s aware that this is a big vision, and he says it with a hint of a self-deprecating smile. But he’s also deadly serious in his team’s ability to deliver a globally significant solution for a globally significant problem.

“We’re moving petabytes,” Warnke told me at the recent GrowLab demo day in Vancouver. “When you’re moving that volume of data, there are a lot of problems to solve.”

Quick reminder: a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes … which are each 1,000 gigabytes. In other words, just one petabyte is pretty massively large. Moving it is a correspondingly large headache.

Removing that headache and overhead for developers is the goal for Mover.io.

In fact, Warnke wants to do for data portability what Fedex did for shipping: Create a full-service single point of contact for getting files from A to B, with all the details managed for you. The company has already moved 40 million files for 11,000 users, and it’s still in private beta — with paying customers.

Mover.io has built Backup Box (“we move your stuff from anything to anywhere”) as a demo app showcasing what it does, but the end goal is not to create apps.

Ultimately, Mover.io will simply be an API developers call to move data. Need to move data? Call the API and call it a day. Currently, the company supports Box, Dropbox, SkyDrive, Amazon S3, Google Drive, and more, but the API isn’t scheduled to be released until the first quarter of 2013.

“Why so far away? We’re solving extremely massive problems,” says Warnke.

The company already has an investment from GrowLab but is raising a $1 million seed round now — a large chunk of which is already committed. The money will go to hiring more people (the team is only five right now), scaling the service, and setting up deals with various cloud vendors.

And the worldwide vision?

Warnke is strongly committed to it — when I wondered aloud whether Mover was a product rather than a company, he said he was not interested in an aqui-hire.

Google’s come close to achieving its vision. We’ll see if Mover can duplicate that astonishingly rare startup feat.

photo credit: eldeeem via photo pin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With all the attention cloud storage services Box and Dropbox have garnered, it’s easy to forget that there are other startups in the game, which are quietly picking up steam and cornering new markets.

SpiderOak, a Dropbox competitor, is a Northbrook Illinois-based company that can backup pictures, music, video, files, and documents. The startup’s value proposition is that it works with super-sensitive information, so customers include no-name government agencies.

I asked SpiderOak founder and CEO, Ethan Oberman, about the recent wave of high-profile security breaches. (Read more about the major hack to the account of Mat Honan, a writer at Wired and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak’s claim that the cloud will cause “horrible problems.”)

Prompted to discuss Dropbox’s security problems, he said that there is a world of difference between privacy and security. He used the analogy of a bank. Most cloud storage providers work like your standard bank account; despite a few glitches, it’s a highly secure place to keep your money. SpiderOak, he explained, is like a Swiss Bank account. “The bank doesn’t know what’s in the lockbox,” Oberman said. “It only knows that it’s keeping something for you.”

For this reason, the company is a popular choice for industries (healthcare, legal, and so on) where strict compliance standards need to be met.

Today, the company announced it would cater to users with even tighter restrictions — such as the Department of Defense, and EU and Canadian customers that face regulations against storing data on foreign soil — by announcing a new product, SpiderOak Blue Private Cloud. Instead of storing data on a third party site, SpiderOak can now stored data within a company’s own infrastructure.

Ethan Oberman, SpiderOak’s CEO.

“What better place to store data than in their own firewall? Having that flexibility is critical,” said Oberman.

Note that SpiderOak is one of many niche providers that claim to bring greater standards of privacy to the cloud. As CIO’s Jonathan Feldman put it: ”For business to actually get transacted, sometimes we need to achieve a balance between security and functionality.”

On the consumer side, SpiderOak has also had a bit of success with users who don’t want to drag data into a storage drive. The company offers cloud storage without the box. Its system integrates with the existing file structure on your desktop. Oberman told me that there were a few reasons why they built the technology this way: “It works more in line with how people actually user their computers,” he said.

Locked cloud image via Shutterstock

But the company gave VentureBeat a sneak peek today.

The single most popular tool? Überpopular file-sharing, storage, and back-up service DropBox. Evernote, the electronic memory app, comes in at No. 4.

The number of times Google shows up on the list is simply shocking, although I supposed it shouldn’t be. Google make no less than seven appearances in to the top 25, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Calendar, Google Alerts, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics.

(Add Google Search to the list of freelancer tools and I’m guessing seven would magically transform to eight.)

One fly in this survey’s ointment? The company only surveyed about 100 entrepreneurs. If I remember anything at all from my university statistics course, that might give it a reliability factor of don’t-have-a-freaking-clue.

In any case, here’s the infographic.

Little contest: as you check it out … count how many services you use or have used, and put your number in the comments. Will your score beat mine? My number is 17.

Photo credit: female freelancer/ShutterStock

---

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

---

Surveying more than 600 IT and security pros with an average 11 years of experience, the study found that 90 percent of organizations have leaked data or documents in the last 12 months. Almost 80 percent of organizations do not provide secure file sharing technologies for employees. And well over half of organizations believe that mobile access equals massive security risk.

With no secure file sharing technologies provided by the enterprise, staff unsurprisingly turn to readily available methods: Dropbox, USB drives, or that trusty old standby, email.

Unfortunately, those are three of the four most common methods of data loss.

The survey did turn up some good news, if you’re a chief financial officer. Even though customer and consumer data are at the most risk — 25 percent of IT pros were worried about them — sales, finance, and accounting information is much better protected.

That good news only lasts, unfortunately, until you notice that under Sarbanes/Oxley and other regulations, corporations are legally liable for data security.

Oops.

Here’s the infographic:

Image credit: Warren Goldswain/ShutterStock

Dropbox users are complaining on the forums that email addresses they’ve used only for cloud storage and sharing service are getting spam … which leads them to believe that Dropbox has had some kind of security breach.

The first user complaint was about a day ago:

However, there are some from just three hours ago (morning, July 18), including this one from a fairly knowledgable user who believes that the junk mail is not just coming from random guesses by spammers:

As TechCrunch noticed, a Dropbox employee on the forums has confirmed the company is investigating, and has brought in an outside team of experts to help, who are working around the clock to look for any possible security breaches:

But the issue has not yet been reported either on Dropbox’s news site or the Dropbox blog, which suggests that the company has either not found any issues yet or that issues remain unresolved.

Unfortunately, security problems are not a new thing for Dropbox.

The platform recently had very basic flaws in its mobile apps, and last year it left accounts completely unprotected for four hours. After that failure, the company posted on its blog that it was re-dedicating to security.

It’s unclear still what is happening at Dropbox, and as a user I can say I have not received any unusual emails or spam that would indicate my account may have been compromised.

VentureBeat has reached out to Dropbox for a statement, and we’ll update this post as we receive more information.

[ update ]

Dropbox pointed me to the post from Joe G, a Dropbox employee, that I included above. Upon further questioning, a representative said there was no further comment at this time.

Image credit: JMiks/ShutterStock

It’s also preloads on devices.

That’s a little strange to modern ears, because in some sense it’s reminiscent of the bad old days of crapware: dozens of annoying pre-installed apps on new PCs, placed there simply because a software publisher paid the manufacturer.

Why do we need preloads in this age of virality and social media marketing?

I asked Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, who leads global biz-dev for Dropbox, exactly that question. His answer was both surprising and informative, and made me reconsider some of my opinions on mobile user acquisition.

Fjeldsoe-Nielsen — let’s just call him Lars, shall we — told me that he had to fight internally at Dropbox to even open the topic with carriers and manufacturers.

“Most people were saying we’re doing fine with user growth right now … why do we need this?”

Source: Dropbox

Dropbox is included in Samsung Galaxy 3S onboarding

But Lars persisted, wanting to super-charge user growth acceleration. And the way he did it has added not just phantom users but actual real live recurring users: the holy grail of a freemium service.

“You have to prioritize the partners. And you have to make sure that they commit to you as well,” he said.

Dropbox only worked with partners who were prepared to make Dropbox part of their consumer value proposition … and even part of their marketing. For example, a carrier in the UK highlights Dropbox integration in its in-store displays as one of the key reasons why customers should select its phones.

And that’s the key word: integration.

Dropbox only worked with partners who allowed them to embed the software in the entire solution. That means that instead of an icon on the screen which users may or may not want, understand, or even ever open, Dropbox is fully integrated into the smartphone’s functionality. Photos taken are automatically uploaded to Dropbox, and synced to users’ desktop computers.

“One of the biggest problems is getting your content off all your digital devices,” Lars said in a Mobilebeat 2012 session yesterday. This solves that problem.

In addition, Dropbox signup/signin has been included right into the phone onboarding flow. So, as users are setting up their Android device with a Google identity, Dropbox set-up is right there in the middle.

“This is gold,” said Lars. “You pull out your teeth for that.”

If consumers are prior Dropbox users, Dropbox starts syncing their content to the device immediately … giving users an instant reward for signing in. In addition — and this is part of the value proposition to partners as well as end users — users get a free 50 GB Dropbox account for two years, simply for signing in.

I asked app developer Bryan Kennedy, chief technology officer at Sincerely, about this user acquisition strategy. Referencing his mother (for whom he is chief tech supporter and app installer), he said it was a smart way to access parts of the market:

Source: Dropbox

In-store marketing with Vodafone

“Most non-tech savvy users don’t know how to install apps on their phones and never will. So for Dropbox to have access to those users … that’s an incredible opportunity.”

And it’s working for Dropbox, in spite of some pain, says Lars:

“Working with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) can be a pain … but if you do it right, it’s definitely worthwhile.”

Dropbox has deals with both carriers and phone manufacturers, included Samsung, of course, HTC, ZTE (a Chinese white-label manufacturer of Android-based phones), Vodafone, T-Mobile, and others.

Naturally, all the deals are on Android. Dropbox hasn’t given up on iOS integration as well, but given iCloud, that may be a pipe dream.

Even so, the dream is pretty good right now for Dropbox.

Image credit: Pixel Embargo / Shutterstock.com

Previously, Dropbox was valued at just $7 million. The new funding round, if true, would put Dropbox on the same level as microblogging social network Twitter.

From an investment standpoint, there is plenty to like about Dropbox. Its user-friendly cloud storage service, which has a total of 25 million registered members, has made it the favorite among the growing number of competitors.

Also, the San Francisco-based company’s expansion into Asia and Europe looks very promising. Dropbox recently reached a deal to pre-load its Android app on Sony Ericsson mobile phones running on Japan’s third largest wireless carrier, Softbank.

However, the company isn’t without its setbacks. Last month, many Dropbox users were vulnerable to a security breach that allowed unauthorized parties to access accounts using incorrect passwords (meaning, any password entered would grant access to the account). Dropbox also recently came under fire for revising its privacy policy to allow law enforcement access to user accounts if requested.

Founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox has $7.1 million total funding from Y Combinator, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and others.

Click here to download the VentureBeat Windows 7 desktop app. The Intel AppUp developer program is the official launch sponsor.

“This should never have happened,” Dropbox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi wrote on the company blog. “We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.”

With 25 million members, Dropbox has emerged as a leader in the growing niche of cloud-storage sites, but the privacy snafu could harm its reputation as a secure place to store files. It also underscores the security risks of cloud services: When all of your files are stored on another company’s servers, can you trust that company to keep your data safe? Many large enterprises have held off on moving documents and services to the cloud because of such concerns.

Ferdowsi wrote that “much less than one percent” of Dropbox users were logged in during the period. Dropbox ended all logged-in sessions when it discovered the vulnerability, and on Tuesday was notifying any users who was logged in during the four-hour period.

Back in April, Dropbox emphasized on its blog that the company was “dedicated to security,” adding that “since the very beginning, we’ve devoted an incredible amount of resources and attention to it.” This latest incident, however, suggests that even an “incredible amount” of work isn’t enough. What may seem like a small oversight can expose all of your customers’ files, and maybe dog your reputation for some time.

Are you a Dropbox user? Have you considered leaving the service after this event?

Photo via Karin Dalziel

Airset is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Cloud computing is a hot topic these days, but it usually refers to individual cloud-based applications like Gmail. Airset aims to take the notion a step further by offering individuals and groups cloud computing environments which contain multiple cloud-based applications.

By networking these cloud computing environments, the company believes it can help organize your life. For example, you can use your personal cloud for online storage, document creation, and calendar functionality — but also have access to a group cloud meant for work colleagues or family members. Each cloud contains web apps made by Airset and Zoho, including a word processor, spreadsheet app, and music and photo sharing.

Group clouds feature collaboration features like a group wall, community forum, and activity updates. When you join a group cloud, it’s automatically connected with your personal cloud — giving you a birds-eye view of everything happening within your cloud network. Both group and personal clouds also feature web publishing capabilities, making it simple to create a website, or any sort of web document.

Airset offers some mobile functionality as well: You can update your calendar and contacts from some smartphones and feature phones. The company also says that it has an iPhone app coming eventually.

You can try out the service with an ad-supported free account which features 1GB of storage. Its top-end account is only $9.95 a month, and offers 20GB of storage, along with the ability to add unlimited members.

The company somewhat competes with the likes of Zoho and Google’s many cloud-based services, as well as online storage solutions like Dropbox. It differs by offering a complete computing environment in the cloud, instead of individual applications.

The Berkely, Calif.,-based Airset acquired $400,000 in seed funding, and has since been bootstrapped by bridge funding from CEO Brian Dougherty.