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

One of New York’s most prominent “big data”-focused investors has joined FirstMark Capital as a managing director.

Matt Turck is a force in the Big Apple’s burgeoning tech scene. He is the principal organizer of New York’s “big data” meetup group and is one of the most advocates for the city’s potential as a hub for technology startups.

Turck plans to continue investing in early-stage analytics and big data startups in his new gig, a trend that he believes is set to continue for at least a decade.

“I’m interested in big data applications and companies that are trying to disrupt industries or invent new industries using the big data stack,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “New York is well positioned from that perspective; we have the right type of talent here,” he continued.

Turck told me he is impressed by FirstMark’s commitment to funding early-stage business to business (B2B) startups. The small firm isn’t the only one that is dedicated to the space — Emergence Capital has been around for years, and newcomers include Costanoa VC and Data Collective – but it’s one of the few with a headquarters in New York.

Prior to joining First Mark, one of New York’s rising firms, Turck was an investor at Bloomberg Capital and a founder of TripleHop (which Oracle acquired for an undisclosed sum in 2005). He has invested in hot local startups like ThinkNear, which Telenav bought for $22.5 million, making it the first TechStars New York acquisition.

First Mark has invested in ed-tech startups like Lumosity and Knewton as well as SecondMarket and NewsCred.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg describes himself as an “entrepreneur” first and foremost on Twitter, so it’s no surprise that he’s launching a new initiative to support local tech startups.

Dubbed “We are made in NY,” the program includes a new website to highlight the city’s resources for entrepreneurs, including subsidized office space and grants as well as job listings at 900 local startups. New Yorkers should expect to see a series of digital ads on subways and buses to highlight the campaign.

“Growing our local tech industry is an important part of our economic development strategy to bring new businesses to our city and more jobs opportunities to New Yorkers,” said Bloomberg in a statement. The mayor’s office recruited the city’s chief digital officer Rachel Haot and media and entertainment commissioner Katherine Olivia to lead the initiative.

Considering a career change? The site includes an extensive list of tech companies in New York — and many of them are hiring. Kickstarter, Etsy, ZocDoc and many other high-profile startups are based in the Big Apple.

The new website features an interactive map of New York City’s tech startups.

Local entrepreneur Matthew Hogan said the initiative evokes a “strong sense of pride in the NYC startup community.” Hogan is the founder of an early-stage startup called DataCoup; he said resources like these are a life-saver for entrepreneurs living in a fast-paced and expensive city like New York. “The sense of camaraderie is heightened when we recognize others that are fighting as hard as ourselves.”

According to Bloomberg Ventures’ Matt Turck, the initiative demonstrates that the administration “truly gets it” and is “driven by a mayor who’s himself an an extraordinarily successful tech entrepreneur.” He added that the city is now well on its way to “reinventing itself as major tech hub.”

Turck, who recently spoke with VentureBeat about the shortage of data scientists, said he hopes the ad campaign will build the public’s confidence in tech startups — a career path that is “at least as desirable as a job on Wall Street.”

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian is one of many well-known tech entrepreneurs that have lent their support to the campaign. He said in a statement that he’s “thrilled be part of a vibrant industry that has not only been hiring New Yorkers, but hiring them to help change the world.”

For more info, check out the promo video below.

Everybody and their mother is on the hunt for a data scientist, dubbed the “sexiest job of the 21st century,” by the Harvard Business Review.

To train the next generation, New York University (NYU) has launched a data science and statistics initiative, which is intended to drive breakthrough research in other programs, including medicine and technology. The new website for the program cites research from McKinsey that projects the U.S. alone will need 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytic skills by 2018 as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts for “big data” jobs.

NYU has created a Center for Data Science composed of faculty from across the university and will offer a variety of graduate-degree programs to its students. A two-year master’s program will begin accepting applications this month and will commence this fall. In addition, the university plans to establish a doctoral program in the field.

“Data Science is becoming a necessary tool to answer some of the big scientific questions and technological challenges of our times,” said Gerard Ben Arous, director of NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, which will house the Center for Data Science.

Machine learning expert Yann LeCun will lead the initiative. He said in a statement that we can use a variety of data sources to answer questions like, “How does the brain work?” The new program will focus on managing a vast volume of data, but also on exploiting it in ways that can yield myriad “social and economic benefits,” according to the statement.

As we reported when eBay opened its New York office, the city’s startups and tech companies have a keen interest in analytics and “big data.”

Bloomberg Ventures’ Matt Turck, who also runs the Data Business meetup in New York, said with initiatives like these, the city is in a position to become a “big data mecca.” “[But] let’s just hope that all the graduates don’t get scooped up by hedge funds or the Facebooks of the world,” he warned. 

Jacob Brody, a New York based partner at seed fund MESA+, said this is a first step in addressing the talent shortage for data scientists in New York. “So many problems currently being solved by companies in New York require expertise in Big Data,”  he said.

“The program will help startups somewhat in the short term, but it will help longer term when alumni leave big jobs in a few years to join startups or start their own,” said Brody, who is also a former tech reporter for VentureBeat. “It’s about creating an ecosystem, and this is a start,” he explained. 

NYU isn’t the first university to offer training to budding data scientists: Syracuse University has a certificate in advanced study in data science, Columbia University recently launched its own Data Science Institute, and Stanford University has classes in data mining. Check out this fairly comprehensive list.

Graduation hats image via Shutterstock 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

STANFORD, CA: With the highly public failure of its New York taxi beta, it has not been a great week for fancy car service, Uber.

To address concerns that the service is not scalable, the company’s CEO and cofounder, Travis Kalanick, made a public appearance to make one thing very clear. He is not worried. ”We know what we’re doing,” Kalanick addressed a roomful of young entrepreneurs at Startup School, Y Combinator‘s annual event at Stanford University.

At Saturday’s conference, Kalanick spoke immediately after Mark Zuckerberg took the stage.

Kalanick has been travelling around the world in an effort to launch the car service in cities like Sydney, Paris and London. “I don’t even remember the last time I spoke in San Francisco in front of an audience,” he said.

In the opening minutes of his talk, he pulled up revenue charts to show that his efforts have not been in vain. The company is making strides internationally. “More than half of our employees are not in San Francisco,” he said. “We are growing fast [at] 29 percent month-over-month.”

To succeed, Kalanick needs to prove that the company can succeed outside of San Francisco. The tech hub is the fertile testing-ground for Uber: it is always willing to adopt new services, it is notorious for a lack of cabs, and many of its inhabitants have money to burn and very little time to get from A to B.

Investors have long feared that the service will fail to resonate with people in cities which do not suffer from a dearth of cabs or public transportation. Critics like VentureBeat’s contributor Rocky Agarwal have argued there is no scarcity of yellow cabs in New York. You might see five or six empty cabs pass by while you wait for an Uber to arrive.

To make matters worse, Uber’s cab-hailing app was shut down in New York after a protracted dispute with the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. Kalanick felt he was fighting the good fight, and that users were on his side.

“We are building an urban logistics fabric,” he said. “The older the industry you are tackling the more protected it is by government or by corruption or both.”

New Yorkers can still access Uber Black and the relatively lower-cost UberX offering. For Kalanick, the secret to success is to accelerate the time it takes for an Uber to arrive. When the company first rolled out its service, it took about 12 minutes. Today, the average wait time is less than five minutes.

The company has also received non-stop criticism for its dynamic pricing. Uber will increase the price of its fares as more people request them (when cabs are scarce, at rush hour, and so on).  Read more about the reaction to Uber’s “surge pricing” on New Years’ Eve here.

“Prices are a bit too high,” Kalanick conceded. “I know some of you have felt that sting.”

The entrepreneur ended his talk on an optimistic note. He stressed that the numbers don’t lie — Uber’s fast-growth and deepening user-engagement is impressive.

“Whenever I have a bad day,” he said, soliciting chuckles from the audience. “I just look at our overall revenue graph.”