If someone Instagrams a picture of your messy shoe store or texts a pic of that hair they found in their salad, your business is at risk. But while you can’t stop people from sharing their observations, one company wants to help you use them.

OpinionLab gives businesses the opportunity to let that stream of customer consciousness into their systems as feedback. It raised $15 million in funding today led by SSM Partners.

The company has set up a way for you to get quick feedback on how your website works, how your app runs, if your store is up to par, and if your products actually satisfied their want or need. It does this by employing a combination of buttons that can run on your website or QR codes that exist on physical products.

Say you’re in a store and you feel the staff is rude and the clothes are falling off the hangers, you can scan a QR code on a poster that should be displayed in-store. The QR code leads you to a feedback form. The same goes for products themselves. They may have the QR code on a label. On a website it’s a simple as clicking a button.

But while it seems pretty easy, a lot of people don’t really take time to scan QR codes. It also excludes anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone who might still want to give feedback.

Feedback image via Shutterstock

As a kid, I loved to fill out customer surveys. I would drive my mother crazy by agonizing over the questions and whether to award a business 3 or 4 stars. The days of paper questionnaires may be long gone, but there are companies digitalizing the process so online businesses can receive feedback as well.

WebEngage is a Mumbai-based startup that enables companies to gather customer insight and promote user engagement. It has launched a completely redesigned site and announced raising over $500K in seed funding.

The technology powers the delivery of questionnaires to specific audiences. Using the software, companies can build their own feedback and support forms and embed them on their site. They can then filter which visitors they would like to target with these surveys, for example people coming from a Google search or someone who spent at least a minute on a page. All the collected data is turned into actionable analytic reports.

WebEngage clients can also create filters for push notifications. They dictate certain parameters, such as repeat visitors or users in the shopping cart drop-off phase, and these people will receive targeted messages. The service is implemented through a Javascript API.

Over the past year, the company has added 4200 customers from around the world. The investors include GTI Capital, Indian Angel Network, and Blume Ventures, Rajan Anandan and Jonathan Schulhof. WebEngage is currently a team of six.

Happiily keeps opinions anonymous

With Happiily, workers can give anonymous feedback about their company. Employees are asked several questions about how much confidence they have in the company, how they feel in their job, and how they think the company is being run.

Business owners and managers can view the collected survey responses. They can use the data to make changes, even compare results to events that have taken place in the company to find correlations — for example hiring a new employee or partnering with a new service. Happiily is currently raising a seed round for $500,000.

15Five creates short-and-fast weekly employee reports

15Five is a similar concept to Happiily, but it removes the anonymous part and drills down into feedback responses. 15Five has weekly reports with five questions chosen by a company’s higher-ups. Each employee fills out their report, which should take no more than fifteen minutes. Answers can be as long or as short as employees want, and they are encouraged to leave both positive and negative feedback.

Business managers can then review the answers, which should take no more than five minutes of their time says 15Five. Once a manager reviews each employee’s weekly report, they can leave feedback and flag important answers that are pulled together into a report for the CEO. The CEO gets an aggregated report with feedback that the manager felt was relevant or needed immediate action.

15Five touts the tool  “removes the face-to-face intimidation factor that employees can feel when approaching their managers.” At the presentation, David Sacks of Yammer said that he’d be an angel investor in the company.

Happiily competes with existing employee feedback companies such as Inquisite and Confirmit, both of which serve employee survey questions and provide insights based on the answers. 15Five competes the typical internal weekly-reports that many companies use, often created in-house by the company.

Each company presented its idea Thursday at the Launch Conference to a panel of judges (shown above), which included Tim Lee from Sequoia Capital, David Sacks from Yammer, Naval RaviKant from AngelList, and Stefan Weitz from Bing.

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With respect to the tussle over patents and drug pricing in Thailand, Gal Josefsberg wrote:

I’m not sure how they expect to get cheap HIV drugs if the destroy the company’s profits. I know we all think these sort of drugs should be cheap, but there’s an enormous cost to developing and testing them. Without some kind of profit motive, the R&D spent on these treatments will go down. I’m not saying the pharma companies should gouge HIV patients, but just saying “thanks for developing this drug, we’ll take it from here” is not the right answer.

Where AIDS drugs in the developing world are concerned, the arguments tend to be a little more complicated than I may have suggested. Some pharma and biotech companies — I’m most familiar with Gilead Sciences, although I believe others do this as well — explicitly acknowledge that it’s wrong to profit from the world’s poorest nations and set what they call “no-profit” prices for HIV drugs in almost 100 countries. Of course, they still plan to make out handsomely in the U.S., Europe and other industrialized parts of the world.

Things, however, get quite a bit murkier in “middle income” nations like Thailand, where the population as a whole is unquestionably getting richer, but where many of the people who need the drugs most are also still quite poor. Critics argue that it’s the responsibility of the Thai government to help its citizens afford drugs, and while they have a point, I’m not convinced the drug companies are wholly blameless. Many of them have only grudgingly begun efforts to cut poorer nations some slack on the price of life-saving drugs, following years of protest by AIDS activists and international organizations. Given that many activists still think companies like Abbott are trying to profiteer in developing-but-not-exactly-wealthy nations like Thailand, it’s no wonder that distrust of the pharmas still runs high in many quarters.

By the way, Brazil has apparently issued a similar threat to Merck over its HIV drug efavirenz (via Pharmalot).

In response to an item on the tactics drug reps use to push their product on doctors, RJ notes:

the first paper seems to be describing a phenomenon known as “sales”– truly a beauty to behold when it’s done well. No matter whether you’re selling drugs or enterprise software. That’s why the great sales people are paid so much. They’re artists.

That paper was written so vividly that I couldn’t help but wonder if Ahari, the former Lilly rep, doesn’t kind of miss his old job for exactly those reasons. There’s definitely something awe-inspiring about watching a professional salesperson at work, although I’d feel better about admiring it here if the sales job wasn’t specifically designed to override a physician’s best medical judgment — which is, after all, what the patient needs most and what insurers are supposed to be paying for.