OwnerListens has raised over $1 million in funding for its suggestion box that lets customers anonymously communicate with store owners.

The business was formed out of a Hummus restaurant in Palo Alto. Owner Oren Dobronsky noticed that patrons would usually request to speak with him to leave positive or negative feedback — but he wasn’t always around to hear it. Dobronsky also came to the conclusion that it’s easier to offer incisive feedback (highly valuable for any business) in an anonymous setting.

He’s got a point — we’ve all probably been irked by an experience at a restaurant or hair salon, but have opted to wait until we’re home to let out our frustration on a site like Yelp.

The Android and iPhone apps were originally developed for patrons of his own restaurant, Oren’s Hummus. But the apps developed a small following among consumers, and 1,200 businesses promptly signed up. TechCrunch reports that Philz Coffee and Whole Foods are OwnerListens’ customers.

Establishments will still receive feedback if they’re not registered with OwnerListens. The team will hunt down the right inbox, and forward along the message. It’s a great customer acquisition tool — once they receive feedback, many business-owners will opt to sign up.

Menlo Ventures, Promus Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Subtraction Capital, Steve Blank, Jeff Epstein, Cary Rosenzweig, and Marc Abramowitz are among the investors that funded the company’s seed round.

photo credit: andreakw via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s clear that tablets are making a huge impact in businesses, but who’s taking advantage of them first?

According to Intuit, the makers maker of popular software like Quickbooks and Quicken, it’s mostly small businesses.

The company has compiled an infographic (below) that demonstrates the projected growth rate in tablet adoption across a variety of business sizes between 2011 and 2016.

We’re already seeing tablets (and mobile devices in general) take over formerly complex tasks for businesses, like acting as a cash register with Intuit’s GoPayment app or Square’s register app. Intuit also just released a revamped version of its Quickbooks Online app for the iPad, which makes it easy to juggle accounting tasks on the go.

Small companies between 10 and 100 employees led the pack with a 78.5 percent growth rate, while micro-companies (under 10 employees) are expected to grow their tablet adoption by 98 percent. Not surprisingly, most business owners are currently adopting the iPad.

It’s important to note that these figures are specifically around growth rates — when it comes to the actual volume of tablets adopted by businesses, larger firms will still be on top.

“We believe the rate of tablet adoption will increase fastest among businesses with 10 or fewer employees because application design is improving to simplify processes for individual business owners,” an Intuit representative said. “They are no longer just extensions of larger enterprise applications, so right now it’s easier than ever for the very smallest businesses to integrate tablets in an effective way.”

via: Small Business and the iPad [Infographic]

When we consider the “big data” trend, it’s most often in terms of how large corporations like Macy’s and Starbucks will use vast volumes of consumer data to grow their business.

But how about the little guy — the coffee shop on Main Street that is struggling to compete with Starbucks to keep its doors open?

Intuit, the maker of financial management products for small businesses, currently has hundreds of engineers tasked with bringing the benefits of big data to Main Street. The company envisions a future where small businesses will be armed with data to help them make strategic business decisions and drive consumer sales. It’s turning its database of small business finances into tools to help its customers save time and money.

Small businesses have a “treasure trove of data”

Michael J. Radwin, Intuit’s director of engineering

In an intimate meeting at the company’s San Francisco office, CEO Brad Smith told reporters that Intuit is stressing three things: privacy, innovation, and the accessibility of data. For Smith, that big data can be used to benefit the little guy by 2020 is a no brainer, given the sheer quantity of relevant data in Intuit’s grasp. (Over the next decade, Emergent Research posits that it will increase more than 40-fold.) With its 60 million global customers, Intuit is currently sitting on a “treasure trove of data,” in Smith’s opinion. He is fond of saying that 20 percent of U.S. GDP flows through Quickbooks, Intuit’s small business accounting software.

One of the most prominent examples is Intuit’s Small Business Index, which pulls together sales, profit and employment data from a statistical sample of 70,000 small businesses (with fewer than 20 employees) that use Quickbooks and its online payroll software. Small business owners can use this data to determine when it’s the right time to cut back on expenses or hire some additional help. This effort was spearheaded by Nora Denzel, senior vice president of Big Data, Social Design and Marketing, with her 100 person-strong team of researchers. Note: Denzel has subsequently left the company.

However, consumers are concerned that their personal information is being used by businesses for targeted advertising.

Surrounded by members of the media, Smith is well-prepared to deflect criticism on the topic of consumer protections and privacy — chief privacy officer Barb Lawler sits front and center. Smith frequently repeats the company mantra, ”Our view is that this is not our data, this is our customer’s data.” He said the company has been working with “every agency there is” to ensure that your data will be secure, and that it won’t be used without permission.

“We can improve your life with your permission”

Intuit CEO Brad Smith

Smith hopes that most consumers and small business owners will voluntarily give up their data — “[we] can improve your life with your permission,” he stresses.

One of his favorite examples is how employees noted that two-thirds of Intuit’s customers using the Quickbooks product, a small business accounting software, were recently denied a loan.

“Banks were afraid to take the risk and we are sitting in the middle of the Quickbooks data [and] can qualify that individual,” Smith explained. The company analyzed whether applicants were paying their bills on time, and the banks were notified about those that were least likely to default on a loan. Smith claims that $10 million in loans were subsequently provided to Intuit’s customers.

I asked whether the company will consider social data  – the number of “likes” on a brand’s Facebook page — as an indication of an individual’s ability to repay a loan on time. Social finance startups like LendUp are beginning to use this information to get a better picture of the borrower. Smith said the viability of leveraging data from social networking sites is “yet to be determined.”

With 8,000 employees, can Intuit spearhead innovation?

Inspired by Google, Intuit’s next-door neighbor at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, it has been company policy for years to let engineers devote 10 percent of their time to innovative projects. According to Smith, this yielded Intuit $100 million in revenue in 2011.

The top execs are keen advocates of Eric Ries’s ”Lean Startup” method — the company recently invited the author and serial entrepreneur in to its offices to help them internalize a culture of experimentation, and rapid product cycles. Ries worked with the company’s most talented engineers, tasked with developing new technologies to arm small businesses.

One of the top engineers is Michael J. Radwin (pictured above), a data nerd who has introduced text analytics, recommendation services, and data-driven algorithms in his two-year tenure at Intuit.

Shortly after the meeting, Radwin pulls me aside to demo one of the projects he’s most proud of — a local business recommendations service intended to provide more detail than Yelp. The idea was conceived by an engineer, and a team formed to bring it to fruition. It’s in beta, and is primarily used today to give Intuit employees, analysts, and the press an idea of how data might be used in the future.

Radwin views Yelp data as highly deceptive, and skewed to favor large franchises with digitally-savvy customers. By integrating information from a variety of external sources including Mint.com (the personal finance company Intuit acquired a few years ago), his team created a detailed map of businesses in any area. Customers can perform a simple search to uncover the hair salons or coffee shops with the highest customer retention rates and most competitive prices — more often than not, its the family-owned businesses that emerge on top.

If Radwin has his way, this prototype will likely be under development in the coming years. It’s just one example of how data can inform consumers, and be used a weapon for the little guy on Main Street.

Kids back-to-back image via GELPI, Shutterstock

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Nobody likes downtime, but while your servers might be out of commission, your revenue could be dropping, too. In fact, businesses lost about $70 million in the past five years just by having intermittent downtime.

There’s a steep cost for letting servers go dark every once in awhile. Even if the blip is just that, a quick moment when you can’t access anything, you could be losing out on sales and losing data. According to the infographic created by MegaPath below, if you are a small to medium-sized business, and if your systems run at even 99.5 percent efficiency, you could be losing up to $12,500 an hour.

And in that time offline, one in every two small businesses experience some kind of data loss.

Downtime is most often caused by power station problems, followed by hardware failure, network failure, floods, and human error. These failures could be the cause of internal issues, or hacks.

The goal efficiency rate is 99.999 percent up-time. Where are your servers?

Created by MegaPath

Orange cones image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Small businesses need to get in touch with their inner app developer. People spend inordinate amounts of time with their phones, even bringing them to bed and to the toilet. So why not be where your customers are?

According to an infographic created by Bizness Apps, people have spent nearly an hour more on mobile apps thus far this month than they have on the mobile web. And 79 percent of smartphone owners use their phone while shopping. Indeed on Cyber Monday, Amazon’s mobile app saw a 171 percent increase in mobile traffic. But, proving that people like to use their smartphone to comparison shop in stores, Amazon saw mobile traffic go up by 222 percent on Black Friday.

Smaller companies, which make up nearly 97 percent of businesses in the U.S., according to Bizness Apps, are starting to understand why it’s worth putting resources toward mobile. Sixty-nine percent of small businesses know that mobile marketing — even if not in app form — could grow their companies significantly in the next five years, and many of those companies plan to increase budgets accordingly.

You might be surprised by what industries are most likely to build dedicated apps, however. Restaurants came first, with a 22 percent likelihood, followed by professional services, which includes lawyers, retailers, accountants, and doctors. Fitness clubs come third, probably trying to keep up with popular health-conscious apps such as Nike’s Running app.

Check out the infographic below for more information on how small businesses are getting into the app race:

Businessman image via Shutterstock

Have you ever built a product that small businesses would love, but you’re not sure which clients are your best targets?

Bizness Apps, a company that helps small businesses build mobile apps, has launched its new customer relationship management (CRM) tool at DEMO, the semi-annual conference for disruptive technology.

With its expertise in the space, San Francisco-based Bizness Apps claims that it is ideal for new sellers who are targeting SMBs. It’s less expensive than more established CRM tools like Salesforce, Zoho, and SugarCRM on the market that are built for corporate salespeople.

“We organize local leads by industry clearly and concisely and then narrow them down based on numerous optional criteria,” Andrew Gazdecki (pictured, left), chief executive of Bizness Apps explained.

The tool lets you hone in on those small businesses that are most active in self-marketing, or those who could really benefit from your product or service. Other features include a sales tracking pipeline, an appointment scheduling calendar, a metrics dashboard, and a native iPhone app to track sales on the go.

On stage at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Gazdecki introduced the product to a roomful of investors and fellow entrepreneurs. He pointed out the vast size of the market and the untapped opportunity: “There are over 500 million small businesses in the world today and tens of millions of people selling to these small businesses,” he said. “With business apps and business CRM, we feel that we have a multibillion opportunity on our hands.”

The panel of sages at DEMO were impressed with the technology, but had some advice for the founders. “It would be even better if it was ingesting some Big Data for predictions and better lead-scoring,” said Pete Sonsini of New Enterprise Associates. Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital followed-up with a particularly salient point. To succeed, Bizness CRM will need to educate small businesses about the benefits of CRM. “[Many of them] don’t understand CRM,” said Fubini.

Gazdecki told me that since implementing Bizness CRM internally for Bizness Apps resellers, the company has seen about 25,000 small business deals created, and about 5,000 of these deals turned into won sales in the first two months.

Since launching at the Spring DEMO conference in 2011, the company has raised $100,000 from angel investors.

Check out the video for more information.

Bizness Apps is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups 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.

Top image courtesy of Morgan Lane Photography, Shutterstock

You may not be able to buy love with money, but you can at least find out how much that love is worth. At least in terms of e-commerce: SumAll launched a metrics tool today that visually represents the power social media has on e-commerce.

SumAll Social Metrics consolidates transactional, social, and web traffic into one dashboard. The technology generates graphs and personalized reports as well data that is searchable by geography, demographics, and types of actions. Marketers can immediately see the connections between Facebook fans, Twitter followers, online activity, and sales data.

Businesses that dedicate significant amounts of time and effort to social media marketing have a vested internet in gauging how effective these efforts are. With SumAll, companies can seek out patterns, track trends, make side-by-side comparisons, and gain customer insights. This data can then be used to make business decisions and strengthen the user base.

The startup’s overarching mission is to make business-intelligence solutions accessible to small and medium-sized businesses — companies that lack the resources to capitalize on data analytics can use SumAll to see value of a “like” in dollars and cents.

SumAll is funded with $1.5 million from Battery Ventures, General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, and Wellington Partners. It is based in New York.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon Wireless is making a strong bid for small businesses today with the announcement that it’s offering Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite.

Verizon made the announcement together with Microsoft at a small press gathering in New York City today. Office 365 is now a part of Verizon’s Small Business Essential’s portfolio, and it bundles together such features as email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and document sharing, all based in the cloud.

“Really, it’s the small business, it’s the real estate brokerage firm…even that pizza shop that’s been on the corner for the last 30 years…. It’s those small businesses that are really fueling our economy, those small businesses that are really important to Verizon,” said Mike Schaefer, Verizon’s executive director of product development. Shchaefer added that Verizon Wireless’s 4G LTE network makes mobile productivity software more useful than ever.

With Office 365, small businesses receive powerful productivity tools that are normally reserved for bigger firms that can afford Microsoft’s hefty licensing fees. The suite supports Windows and Mac desktops as well as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.

Microsoft’s desktop Office suite currently has 1 billion users, but Office 365 has the potential to reach 4 billion users across 88 markets, according to Jeff Anderson, Microsoft’s senior product manager of Office 365 syndication. (Editor’s note: We’re not sure where he’s getting those numbers, because there aren’t 4 billion people with computers in the world, meaning Anderson’s aspirational market is larger than the entire computing universe right now. Perhaps he’s envisioning a distant future when replicants are everywhere and Microsoft software is widely used in the off-world colonies.)

He noted that over 90 percent of Office 365 customers have fewer than 50 employees, hammering in its usefulness for small businesses.

The cloud suite is “on track to become the fastest growing product Microsoft has ever had,” Anderson said.

Verizon customers have always been able to sign up for Office 365, but today’s announcement highlights a significant partnership between Microsoft and Verizon. If customers get Office 365 through Verizon, all of the charges go directly to their Verizon bill, and they’ll also get a custom domain as part of the setup process. Verizon also has its own customer service representatives for Office 365 users (they won’t be able to call Microsoft for support, Verizon reps tell me).

Microsoft hasn’t been afraid to go after Google’s  apps directly in its war to dominate online productivity, and a key partnership like this could land it some loyal small business users. We’ve previously argued that Office 365 has the potential to clobber Google’s apps — and it’s deals like this that could make that possible.

Verizon is offering Office 365 at Microsoft’s standard price of $6 per user, and it’s available to businesses starting today.

Business-software giant Intuit has agreed to acquire small-business marketing software firm Demandforce for $423.5 million in cash, the companies announced today.

Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken, will add Demandforce’s software-as-a-service offerings to its line up to make a more complete package for small- and medium-sized businesses that need a better online presence. Demandforce offers email, mobile, and social tools that help SMBs better connect with customers and drive higher retention rates.

One remarkable fact is that Benchmark Capital, the largest investor in Demandforce, decided not to even announce the firm’s investment in the company, which is a first, according to Bill Gurley, the Benchmark partner who led the deal and who is on the company’s board. Demandforce, based in San Francisco and founded back in 2003, decided to lay low and focus on customer building rather than marketing, he wrote. This is another win for Benchmark, considering it comes on the heels of the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, where Benchmark was also the largest investor. It’s not clear how much capital Demandforce actually raised though, so it’s hard to know exactly how big of a return this was.

“Demandforce sits at the sweet spot of Intuit’s SMB customer base and is consistent with our goal to help our customers save time and make money,” said Kiran Patel, executive vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business Group, in a statement. “With a compelling customer value proposition, SaaS model and high growth profile, Demandforce will provide opportunities to grow Intuit’s customer base and revenue per customer over time.”

You can see a video outlining Demandforce’s latest offering below:

Photo credit: Demandforce

Disclaimer: Rocky Agrawal holds a variety of short positions in Groupon. You can find a full list of his disclosures here and in his author bio.

I’ve spent much of the last year talking about how the sites small businesses rely on to advertise and promote themselves — think Yelp and Groupon – are failing them. In fact, helping small businesses at the local level is extremely challenging for technology companies, for the following reasons:

• Scale. There are millions of small businesses in the country and trying to come up with a product and distribution strategy to reach them can be difficult.
• Lack of technology adoption. Many businesses still do things on pen and paper. Many don’t have Internet connectivity. Business owners are focused on running their business, not trying out Silicon Valley’s flavor of the week.
• Balancing value. Most local products need to create value for consumers, merchants, and the company providing the technology. Getting this balance right is very tricky. You can get massive consumer adoption by playing cash-flow games and spending hundreds of millions on marketing. But in order to build a sustainable business, you need to strike a good balance.

Here are some of my favorite companies in local:

1. Twitter. Most people don’t think of Twitter as a local company, but I think it (along with Facebook) has the most potential to do local right. Although Twitter hasn’t focused on local to date, its new partnership with American Express is a great sign. The massive scale of Twitter and its simplicity mean that small businesses like The Dosa Republic can advertise on the Internet cost effectively. (I’ve been pondering how to conjure dosas with Twitter since 2007.)

2. American Express. Although it’s not a startup, it’s definitely been acting like one. AmEx has had some of the most innovative local products over the last two years. The company has struck important partnerships with Facebook, Twitter and foursquare. Its Small Business Saturday promotion in the fall promotes the idea of shopping locally. Its social media team is on top of Twitter. I’ve met many of AmEx’s top execs, and they understand the future of commerce and online better than many startup execs I meet.

3. Square. Square has successfully credit-card enabled small businesses that were previously cash only. The pricing and product have simplified byzantine credit card rate structures into one easy-to-understand price. Square understands the whole consumer experience like no company other than Apple. Every detail of the experience is nearly perfect, including the packaging they use to ship the Square reader. Square’s Daniel Gatsby is one of the most talented designers I’ve met; I’d work with him on any project, any day.

4-5. Edo Interactive and Swipely. Card-linked offers are the right way to do promotions. Although American Express has made the biggest splash in the space, edo and Swipely are two other companies I like in the space. Edo is approaching the problem by partnering with financial institutions like Ally Bank (more banks are on the way). Swipely is working directly with merchants. Its San Francisco trial is worth checking out.

6. Constant Contact. The email marketing company lets small businesses keep in touch with local businesses. Wayne’s Chicago Red Hots, a Portland bar, had a disastrous experience with Groupon. They are using Constant Contact’s tools to engage with their own list of 1,300 customers. Constant Contact recently introduced a new deals product that is sustainable and makes sense for small businesses.

7-9. Eat24Hours, GrubHub, and Seamless. Ordering takeout and delivery has always been a chore. Menus aren’t readily available. You have to deal with a hurried order-taker who is taking orders in between cooking and serving in-house customers. Eat24Hours, GrubHub, and Seamless provide order-flow services and easy-to-use interfaces for consumers. Seamless’ iPad app is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. The big challenge for these companies is keeping consumer acquisition costs below lifetime value. LivingSocial recently launched its own entry into the space.

10. Hotel Tonight. Deals can make a lot of sense when you have perishable inventory like a hotel does. Hotel Tonight’s concept is simple: matching last-minute travelers with that perishable inventory to create a win-win. Hotel Tonight also has a beautiful iPad app. CEO Sam Shank is brilliant.

11. OpenTable. The reservation site has been playing the long game in local. It’s my go-to example for success in a tough space. That it’s been around since 1998 is telling. It solves part of the inefficiency in restaurants and makes it easy for consumers to make and change restaurant reservations. In addition to reducing staffing costs and making operations more efficient, it provides an important distribution function. If a restaurant isn’t on OpenTable in San Francisco, it might as well not exist for me when I’m planning a nice meal.

12. Savored. The restaurant discount site lets you get 30% off your entire check at restaurants and is still profitable for restaurants. Because the discounts can be restricted to off-peak times, it reduces the risk of cannibalizing full-price traffic for discounted traffic. Interests between consumers and merchants are aligned: the more you spend, the more you save and the more the merchant makes. Contrast that with the daily deal model where consumers have an incentive to spend only up to the voucher value.

[Image of Square Register from Square]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I’ve been testing out the Kindle Fire tablet for the last several weeks. At $199, it’s a tremendous value. It’s no iPad — I just upgraded to the new iPad as well — but it provides a solid base-level tablet and reader. I can think of a lot of uses for it: an e-book reader, a video consumption device, and a dedicated Sonos controller. But the most exciting use I can see for it would be for Amazon to turn into a device that helps small, local retailers.

Amazon could leverage its massive scale in searches for online commerce to help drive business to local businesses, while simultaneously generating revenue and cementing itself as the place to go to shop online.

Here’s how I see it working:

• Merchants would use the Kindle Fire to load their inventory on to Amazon.
• In addition to the standard options consumers have for standard delivery, second-day shipping with Prime, or overnight shipping, Amazon would offer the option to buy locally.
• When an item is selected to buy locally, the merchant would be alerted via the Kindle Fire and could confirm the order.
• Once the order is confirmed, Amazon collects payment from the buyer and the merchant sets the product aside. (Larger merchants with sufficient inventory could configure it to auto-confirm orders.)
• The consumer stops by to pick up the item and shows ID.
• Amazon keeps a percentage of the revenue.

Amazon already does this for some merchants who sell through the mail; I frequently buy items from third-party sellers through Amazon’s site.

The key is that the Kindle Fire is a simple, inexpensive device that integrates well with Amazon services. Add in the option to generate revenue with it, and it can be an important step in increasing the connectedness of small businesses.

The Buy Local service could be augmented with local delivery from a company like Postmates. [Editor's note: This futuristic, cool, visionary stuff is exactly what we're talking about at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit on April 2-3, where one of the main themes focuses on mobile commerce.]

Amazon has been working to expand its reach into the local market. Its daily deals product, AmazonLocal, is launching a subscriber-acquisition promotion tomorrow, selling $10 Amazon gift cards for $5. Although it has lagged well behind industry leaders Groupon and LivingSocial, this is a sign that it may be getting serious about the deals space. (Amazon sources many of its deals from LivingSocial.)

Beyond local retail there are a number of other compelling services Amazon could offer to make Kindle Fire a must-have for small businesses:

• Deal redemption tracking for AmazonLocal.
• Social media management tools for Twitter and Facebook accounts.
• Scheduling tools similar to Groupon Scheduler.

Amazon and local businesses have had a tumultuous relationship, with some blaming Amazon for the demise of local independent bookstores. But these days, even prestigious independent bookstores such as Portland behemoth Powell’s Books are selling through Amazon. Same-day fulfillment plays to the strengths of local retailers and provides consumers a service that Amazon can’t offer today.

6Scan released a new plugin for WordPress today, aimed at giving small businesses the same level of cyber security that enterprises can afford.

“I think what SMBs [small to medium-sized businesses] want most of all is something that doesn’t take technical expertise to set up,” said 6Scan chief executive officer Nitzan Miron in an interview with VentureBeat. “And it needs to just work. It doesn’t need to require manual work or technical work. It needs to be a ‘set it and forget it.’”

The software is completely Internet based and has two different layers, the Patrol and the Bodyguard. The Patrol is what Miron calls “your own white hat hacker.” It crawls a company’s website and attacks it, like a cyber criminal looking for entry would. The attacks are used to find vulnerabilities in the site, which are then transferred to the Bodyguard. This second function then fixes the vulnerability before it can be exploited. Vulnerabilities do not have to be previously discovered for Bodyguard to know how to fix it. The automated system is able to detect and fix unknown issues, which are then published for public benefit.

The plugin costs $10 a month, and Miron says more plugins for other website platforms, such as Drupal, are coming.

“We capitalize on the fact that most SMBs are running on well-known platforms,” said Miron. “They’re not going to start their sites from scratch, they’re going to start from well-known platforms like WordPress.”

6Scan is headquartered in Israel and serves 2,500 websites thus far. It was founded in April 2011, has eight employees, and has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from YL Ventures.

White hat via Shutterstock

WePay, the company that makes it easy for Joe Schmo to charge people online, has officially helped over 25,000 customers, and is releasing other numbers today.

“When we first built this company, we said we’re going to make it really easy for normal people to collect money online from groups of friends,” said chief operating officer Rich Aberman in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’d be a way for people to collect money for your fantasy league. Then people started comparing us to PaylPal in the press.”

WePay caters to the “unsophisticated” seller who still wants to accept payments online. Aberman explained that WePay tries to go after the same market as Square, a company that creates point-of-sale hardware and software for mobile devices. The difference, however, is WePay doesn’t want point-of-sale customers, but rather those who aren’t the most developer-savvy, who want to be able to take credit card payments through their website.

That includes everyone from the father who likes to sell antique furniture on Craigslist to the sorority financial head. Both could take in nearly half a million dollars but would be hard-pressed to do so online.

WePay is growing by 30 percent each month and says it has a multimillion dollar run rate, though it won’t share specific numbers on its revenue. The company serves customers in all 50 states, as well as on 900 different campuses. Other groups have flocked to WePay, including the recent Occupy movement. Indeed, nearly $800,000 in payments were made from 806 different Occupy-associated accounts. These were probably donations.

The company is directly going after PayPal, and even dropped a block of ice off at the competitor’s “X.Commerce” conference two years ago. The message according to WePay? PayPal is “icing” its accounts, or freezing accounts if they don’t meet PayPal’s expectations, and alienating its developers. But despite the criticism, WePay hired two former PayPal engineers.

“Paypal, as much as we poke fun at them, they were the innovators in the space about 10 years ago,” said Aberman. “They have a lot of great talent there, and a lot of their talent is leaving.”

WePay has four different tools to help its customers, which it calls the “informal economy.” The first allows you to set up a quick online store if you have inventory but don’t know how to code your own marketplace. Event organizers can take advantage of the second tool, which lets you sell tickets and create an event website to hold all of the details. Groups can accept donations using WePay’s third tool. The fourth tool, however, may be the most useful for individuals. It is an invoicing program for those service providers such as carpet cleaners, or nannies who would like to bill their clients online.

The company makes its money through a 3.5 percent credit card fee, but does not charge for set up.

Hiring someone internally can cost a lot of money and is a big commitment for many companies that may not have the resources. Because of that, many companies fall short, and lack in outreach to its community and potential customers. This is where Scripted comes in.

Scripted originally began as a Wikipedia-esque way to crowdsource screen plays for the entertainment industry. The company soon amassed a database of over 80,000 ready and willing amateur writers and realized it could do more with its resources. Soon thereafter, jeans company Levis asked them to do a project outside of the entertainment business. It was so successful, c0-founders Sunil Rajaraman, Ryan Buckley, and Orion Richardson decided to shift the whole company toward connecting writers and small businesses in need of blog posts, social media posts, newsletters and more.

“Things like humanities type work are going to skew toward e-work rather than direct hire based,” said Rajaraman, co-founder and chief executive of Scripted, in an interview with VentureBeat. “There’s a huge demand for remote work.”

Scripted’s typical writer is a little over 30 years old, has a day job and just needs a little extra money on the side. The company is focused on amateur writers and is generally sought out by small businesses in need of someone to writer 2 or so blog posts a week. Companies are given writers based on level of skill and industry preference. For instance, if a sports company wants writers, Scripted can quickly pull together a range of sports writers fitting that company’s preference.

Rajamaran believes the US job market is no longer in favor of the humanities, but is instead turning toward engineering, which puts Scripted in a unique position to help writers connect and be discovered. Around 80 percent of his writers are US based. In fact, one writer even made over $30,000, which many call a year’s salary.

The company has served a number of recognizable customers including Levi’s, Viacom, Spike TV, and MailChimp. Scipted recently partnered with MailChimp and Constant Contact to offer e-mail newsletters to its customers.

Scripted was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. The company currently has five employees and will use the funding to expand that number. Crosslink Capital led this round with participation from Liveops founder Douglas Feirstein, and Shopzilla chief information officer Jody Mulkey.

When popular location-base check-in service Foursquare first came along, small businesses had an easy way to use social and location-based marketing tactics to get new customers. But as local marketing options have multiplied, it’s getting more complex.

Boston-based OfferedLocal hopes to simplify the process of using social and location-based marketing to get new customers for local businesses. It does so by making it easy to deliver regular deals, offers, and promotions to local consumers. Then it gathers responses, tracks the results, and offers feedback on how to improve the targeting.

“We help small businesses create, manage, and deliver offers to their local customers,” said Ed Loessi, co-founder, in an interview. “We want small businesses to become really good at it.”

OfferedLocal is demonstrating its business at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference today.

At least one of the venture capitalists in the crowd liked what he saw.

“There’s a pony in there somewhere,” said Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz, in an onstage discussion about OfferedLocal.

The company was founded in January, amid a bunch of excitement about daily deal startups such as Groupon. But OfferedLocal is very different from the daily deals business, which seeks to gather new customers via huge discounts. Rather, OfferedLocal manages the existing deals or specials that a company may have every week, such as a “two-for-the-price-of-one” deal that happens every Tuesday at a restaurant.

And while Groupon and Foursquare target consumers, OfferedLocal targets businesses that want to round up more consumers. OfferedLocal provides a single interface to create an offer, which can be customized based on the social channel it is targeting, such as Twitter or Foursquare. Then OfferedLocal distributes that offer at the right time and collects the analytics.

OfferedLocal is self-funded and has three full-time employees in addition to contract developers. Loessi and his friend Mat Myers started it after a conversation they had in 2010. They both saw the challenges that businesses faced when trying to promote offers and deals across social and location-based channels. Most of those businesses use email marketing, but they didn’t know how to use all of the new tools related to social and location. It hit home when they saw a sandwich board (pictured above) outside a restaurant that had their special of the day, their Twitter handle, and their Foursquare info all squeezed into the sign.

Rivals include Geotoko, Promobox and Buckaroo.com. OfferedLocal is just coming out of beta testing now. Myers previously founded a large email marketing firm in Australia, while Loessi has been involved in small software and marketing consulting businesses over the past decade.

OfferedLocal is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The new splash page features step-by-step online guides aimed at helping small businesses understand and use Facebook Pages, ads, sponsored stories and the Facebook API. While not actually adding any new features, the retooled “online education center” is definitely overdue for a service that most companies have either been using for years or knew they had to use.

“Facebook allows small businesses to create rich social experiences, build lasting relationships and amplify the most powerful type of marketing –- word of mouth,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We created Facebook.com/business to make it even easier for people to reach these objectives and grow.”

It’s likely that the company wants to give businesses more of an incentive to enrich their relationship with Facebook rather than to venture out with Google’s new social service Google+ — which is preparing a business version of the service set to debut soon.

“It is really good to see all this info in one place. Facebook moves very quickly in many directions and it’s always good to see a consolidation point that isn’t written in geek speak,” said Brian Wallace, President of NowSourcing, which develops social media strategies for companies.

Wallace said he thinks Facebook’s new emphasis on education has more to do with Google’s revamp of its Google AdWords Express service (previously called Google Boost).

“I am seeing a great deal of interest for local business on two major platforms: Google Boost and Facebook’s foray into branding for small businesses. Both are great in terms of targeting for local business plus keyword/category (for Google) and interests (for Facebook),” Wallace said. “It’s interesting to see Facebook and Google battle it out for the small business owner’s dollar.  And I don’t blame them.”

Google’s AdWords Express is also stepping up its game to grab small businesses. The company set up phone support earlier this month to help assist business owners with advertising.

Notonthehighstreet.com

The company lets consumers shop from various small businesses that have agreed to post products on the website. Even though the consumer may grab products from various small businesses, there is only one basket and checkout process. Many of the products are exclusive deals the company has set up with the small businesses. Product categories include a wide range include home & garden, fashion, jewellery, and weddings.

Notonthehighstreet.com is uniquely providing small businesses with an additional web presence and sales channel to reach consumers, similar to several U.S. based companies, including custom product community Etsy and custom services marketplace CustomMade, which recently landed $1.2 million in an angel round of funding.

The UK-based company, founded in 2006, claims to have products from some 1,600 small businesses with over 35,000 products. The company claims it received over 420,000 unique visitors to the website in July alone and has seen a %150 turnover growth in the first half of this year, which makes one wonder if the idea of buying from small businesses is catching on in the UK.

Funding was led by Index Ventures and included Greylock Partners.

Executives at the startup, which formerly presented at the DEMO conference, claim that a majority of businesses are still issuing paper invoices and mailing paper checks. The company’s online service helps to automate and organize this process online in an effort to save time and resources. Paperless billing, document scanning and easy online access to financial information are all available.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, founded in 2006 as CashView, is claiming its recurring revenues, total number of customers, and unique paid vendors all grew ninefold in 2009, but did not offer specific figures. (As always, such unquantified growth statistics from startups should be viewed with skepticism, as it’s easy to show strong growth off of a small base.)

There are several other companies in the space offering paperless options and billing management, including iPayables or Xign. Intuit’s QuickBooks software has a large penetration among small businesses, and has a broad range of invoicing and bill-payment solutions. But Bill.com views paper as its real competition.

Bill.com has raised several rounds of funding, including a second round of $8.5 million from August Capital and DCM in August of 2009. This latest fundraising brings its total funding to $20 million. The new round was led by Jafco Ventures with existing investors DCM, Emergence Capital and August Capital.

Nick Sturiale, general partner at Jafco Ventures, will join the Bill.com board of directors.