Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup Box has announced its plans for the coming year as it readies for a 2014 IPO – and these call for international expansion.

The company intends to open new offices in Europe, Asia, and Brazil and is planning to fortify its enterprise sales team in those regions. This follows on the heels of healthy growth in 2012: Box experienced a near 150 percent jump in sales from the previous year.

The cloud storage market is flooded with competition: Google Drive, Dropbox, Egnyte, and SugarSync rank among the companies jostling for dominance in the sector. But Box has emerged as an investors’ darling (it raised $150 million in a recent over-subscribed funding round) for its knack of winning over enterprise customers.

Box has announced a new program called the “Box Partner Network,” which formalizes its relationship with channel and platform partners. New partners include Autodesk, Marketo, and Tidemark, which are using Box Emded (the HTML5 embeddable framework) in their applications.

“What we’ve done is taken existing partnerships and brought them under a program,” said Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck by phone. The former chief marketing officer at EMC was brought on to carve out an enterprise sales strategy and land big-name customers like The Gap and Volkswagen.

Bouck points to growth in several areas as proof that the strategy is working: Sales in construction and engineering services grew 103 percent; education grew 119 percent; manufacturing grew 233 percent; and media and entertainment grew 200 percent.

She said the company will refer to itself as an “enterprise content collaboration platform” to emphasize that the technology is used by businesses as well as consumers. In addition, Box wants to promote its open API to third party developers. About 17,000 developers use the platform to build custom applications, approximately a 300 percent increase from 2011.

In recent interviews with VentureBeat, Aaron Levie said that the role of the chief information officer is changing, and startups have an opportunity to compete with legacy vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. “In 2007 when we looked more into the enterprise, even Silicon Valley didn’t think we could win,” he said.

In the coming year, Box will continue to grow its 700-strong team in the U.S. and in international markets. In Europe, Box will hire 100 employees by the end of the year, primarily in sales, support and marketing roles.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Did you know that walking on your office floor is actually creating energy that could be captured and put to work? Gravitational Systems does, and it’s harvesting this energy for you to use.

“First of all, when we think in terms of human kind today, the one trend that seems to be unstoppable is that everybody wants to live around everybody else,” said Gravitational Systems founder Gare Henderson at the DEMO Conference.

Gravitational System’s technology collects the “waste energy” created from momentum and heat. This includes footsteps on highly trafficked store floors, and wheels on highways and parking lots all release this energy. You can see an example of how Gravitational Systems collects this energy in the photo to the right.

Henderson pointed out that energy cannot be destroyed. Because so many people live near each other, you’ll find much higher concentrations of energy that cannot be destroyed in cities.

“To nature, a city is like one of those abandoned coal mines that catches on fire,” said Henderson. “[That energy is] being converted into heat, vibration, noise, pollution … we need to find methods of emulating my favorite energy systems and that is a self winding watch. It doesn’t run when you take it off, but that’s the point.”

Henderson went on to talk about how much energy we’re wasting through actions like cooling office buildings at night, but we’re losing a lot more energy than we realize.

“You have two choices at DEMO, you get up and you show product, or you get up and you [talk about] a big vision for the world,” said Adeo Ressi of Founders Den at the DEMO Conference. “I felt like I was at Ted for a minute there.”

The company is based in Clifton, Va., and has thus far raised between over $500,000 from unnamed investors. Gravitational Systems is looking for a new $5 million seed round and hopes to one day $20 million first round of funding.

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

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear