SAN FRANCISCO, Ca.: The dirty word that no one would address at Dell‘s press event this afternoon? “Privatization.”

The computer maker held the press event to introduce the press to its new software group. But the meeting was overshadowed by news this morning that private equity firm Blackstone has dropped its bid for Dell, bringing an abrupt halt to the company’s plans to go private. The New York Times reported that Dell’s board has no one but itself to blame for the debacle.

Dell execs would not respond to requests for comment on the failing deal, preferring to remain tight lipped about the whole business.

With a media firestorm swirling around them (and press hungry for answers), Dell execs hope to settle customer and partner anxiety with talk of their “big data” and cloud software products. The company is pushing on with plans to provide hardware and software to existing customers, primarily mid-market companies.

“Dell has been thinking about this transition to software for a while,” said David Kloba, a general manager for Dell Software, who joined the company by way of acquisition. But Kloba admitted that even two years ago, his team met with the sounds of “crickets” when he broached the topic of software at Dell. Now it’s considered the future, especially given that PC sales are in decline.

Dell Software CIO Carol Fawcett

Dell’s software practice is a essentially a melting pot of products it has acquired over the years. Carol Fawcett, the chief information officer for the group, got the job after Dell acquired her company, Quest Software.

“Dell wants to be an end-to-end solutions provider, a one stop shop,” said Fawcett in an interview. “But we don’t want to be another Oracle.”

Fawcett said her team is focused on expanding the current software suite, which already includes units dedicated to mobility, data protection, and security. Fawcett said Dell’s products can meet each customer’s IT needs — whether it’s a single product or a full solution.

But just like its privatization plans, Dell is in a precarious spot. Joshua Greenbaum, an IT analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting, said it needs to make a choice between offering the ”integrated portfolio … the soup to nuts” and offering software that “fills a gap.” “It’s hard to do both,” he said.

Related: Michael Dell also sees a future in storage — Dell launched a $60M fund to support startups.

For now, Dell’s vision is expansive. Both Fawcett and Kloba welcomed a comparison to consumer device giant Apple, albeit with more of an enterprise focus.

Fawcett also referenced another competitor in the small- to medium-sized business space: Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks software.

“Mid market is our bread and butter,” she said. When asked about whether Intuit and Dell will be the two companies associated with software for SMB’s, Fawcett immediately shot back, “I’d say Dell.”

Carol Fawcett image via Quest Software’s website 

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

This is a guest post by SilkRoad’s co-CEO Flip Filipowski

In the past, small businesses could afford a certain lack of sophistication in their human resources processes.  It was common practice to rely on Excel and labor-intensive reporting, but health care reform is changing the game.

Compliance reporting, benefits administration, and managing employee data are just a few of the back-office tasks that will become more difficult for small businesses to handle manually once further requirements of the Affordable Care Act take effect.  The first open enrollment in the health plan exchanges are expected in October and for penny-wise small business owners, throwing additional manpower at these challenges isn’t the answer.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to enter the age of HR automation.

The new health care exchange — what’s the goal?

A central feature of the new Affordable Care Act is the government’s new health care exchange. While the finer details are still being worked out, the goal of the exchange is to empower citizens to choose affordable benefits from an array of state-sponsored plans. 

So what does this mean for small business owners?  It means that the onus is on you to ensure that your employees are offered an employer-sponsored plan and offered information on the exchanges as an alternative option.  Having a systematic way of tracking, reporting and communicating this data will be essential to the bottom line.

First, you’ll need to provide a report to Uncle Sam including basic demographic and health coverage data for employees and their dependents.  Tracking these details will be a time-intensive burden, unless you can automate your reporting.  Beyond that, you’ll need to provide proof of enrollment or risk paying $100 per day, per employee for non-compliance.

You’ll also need to make the complete details of health care plans readily available to your employees.  Chances are, you already share the details of your own offerings but, later this year, you will also need to provide employees written notice on the state health insurance exchanges.  Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) can be set up to provide information on all of an employee’s health care options.

You can also expect each state to have unique reporting requirements to supplement federal mandates.  This might be manageable if you have a single office location, but take notice if your company is spread across the country, or if you have a remote workforce. Your ability to meet the specific criteria will be tricky unless you have technology that can track data and provide customized reports to meet each state’s standards.

Pay vs.play?

For many small businesses, the big question of 2013 is whether it’s more costly to play along with new health care reform mandates or pay the penalty taxes associated with eliminating employer-supported health benefits altogether.  If you have 50 or more employees, one thing is certain – you’re going to have to change the way you do things.

If you’re considering reducing your workforce by moving employees to part-time or contract status, consider this: the IRS will be watching.  Employers will be required to track employees’ hours, and full-time or part-time status, and report to the IRS.  “Variable hour employees” need to be carefully monitored and only those that work less than 30 hours in the designated period may be excluded from eligibility for health benefits.  If you have less than 50 employees, your decision to play could pay off –you may qualify for a 25 to 50 percent small business tax credit, which would help offset the cost of your insurance plan.

Pay or play, accurate reporting will be the lynchpin of your success in avoiding costly penalties, or cashing in on valuable incentives.

HR automation tools aren’t just for the one percent

As the chairman of an HR technology company, I know most small business owners consider automating anything beyond their payroll to be a luxury.  However, in the age of health care reform, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

HR automation is no longer reserved for companies with big budgets and lots of employees.  Cloud-based solutions have alleviated the need for businesses to build expensive HRMS system in-house. Today, you can find a scalable, subscription-based HRMS to suit your needs for as little as $10 per employee, per month. These systems will keep you compliant and ease administrative burdens, freeing up time to allow you to focus on taking care of your most valuable resource — your employees.

Flip Filipowski is Executive Chairman and Co-CEO of SilkRoad, a leading global provider of cloud-based social talent management solutions. 

A high-tech entrepreneur and philanthropists for more than three decades, Flip was the Founder and CEO of PLATINUM technology, inc, which he grew into the 8th largest software company in the world at the time of its sale to Computer Associates.

photo credit: Dell’s Official Flickr Page via photopin cc

New occupations have flourished on the web; among them, merchants on online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.

But these new occupations are not supported by Main Street’s banks, and sellers are often deemed too risky for a loan.

To meet the demand, organizations like Atlanta, Georgia-based Kabbage are providing working capital to small-business owners so they won’t need to put personal assets on the line, like a house or car.

And Kabbage just announced it has closed a credit facility of $75 million, its largest to date. After just two years of operations, Kabbage claims to deliver more advances than any other provider in the industry. For this reason, Kabbage was named the winner at VentureBeat’s recent Innovation Showdown at our CloudBeat conference.

The company says it has extended more than 60,000 advances and expects to provide more than 100,000 by the end of the year.

CEO Rob Frohwein explained in a recent interview that the engineering team is analyzing all the data it can gather to make “educated guesses” about a loan applicant’s future growth. Ideally, it is looking to fund merchants who are making about $1,000 a month through their online store.

“When we tap into the data, we can see how you [an online merchant] were doing six months ago and project how you might fare a year from now,” he explained. Kabbage provides funding to about 80 percent of the small businesses that apply — the big question, Frohwein admits, is how large the loan should be.

Kabbage monitors how merchants are interacting with their customers on social media sites, selling on UPS, or managing their finances in Quickbooks (Intuit’s accounting software for SMBs), as well as their transaction data from sites like eBay, Amazon and Etsy, to determine whether to give out a loan.

“There is a clear void in the market as traditional financing sources remain reluctant to lend,” said Victory Park Capital’s Tom Affolter.

Victory Park Capital led the funding round, and equity investor Thomvest Ventures also contributed.

For small businesses, a hardware failure can cause an extended period of downtime, and worse, an irretrievable loss of data. 

A startup that provides one click backup and recovery for small and medium-sized businesses, known as Quorum, has swiftly been gaining traction. Today, the company announced it has raised $11 million in its second round of funding. 

According to a recent report issued by the company, most small and medium-sized businesses experience one downtime incident a year, which can set them back over $70,000 per year. Prolonged system failure can be caused by a number of reasons. Hardware and software failure are among the most common, but a natural disaster can also wreak havoc.

Quorum claims its hybrid cloud service can get its customers up and running again in a matter of minutes, not hours of days. Small businesses can also choose to backup online or to tape or external media, but CEO Larry Lang describes this as an “old world” solution.

The most recent funding round was led by Toba Capital, an investment arm funded by the former CEO of Quest Software, Vinny Smith. Quest was acquired by Dell for $2.4 billion. With the funding, Quorum will expand its sales and marketing team, and recruit additional engineers.

Small business disaster image // Davi Sales Batista, Shutterstock 

PayPal Here will soon be available in the U.K., marking its first (and it hopes not its last) entrance into the European market.

PayPal Here is a triangular “dongle” that turns smart devices, like phones and iPads, into mobile point-of-sale terminals. PayPal launched Here in March as a direct competitor to Square, a hot startup that pioneered this type of system back in 2009. The combination of a dongle (in Square’s case, it is square) and software that tracks the transactions makes it significantly easier and less expensive for small business owners to accept digital payments.

Square has met with significant success in the U.S. over the past few years and recently expanded into Canada. The company does not yet have an overseas presence, although startups like iZettle, Payleven, and mPowa have built comparable products in Europe.

PayPal already has a large presence in the U.K. and seeks to capitalize on its existing network as well as name recognition. It plans on using the U.K. as launching point to take on the rest of Europe.

Rather than swiping cards with a magnetic strips and signing, like we do in the U.S., the primary “plastic” payment system in the U.K. is “Chip and PIN,” whereby cards are embedded with a microchip and customers enter a Personal Identification Number (PIN) at the point of sale. PayPal has modified its European version of Here accordingly through a “Chip and PIN” version of the service.

Now, instead of cash or checks, small business owners in the U.K. can securely and efficiently do business from their mobile devices. As for British customers, they will no longer have to spend their lunch hours waiting in long ATM queues. Unless they want to.

Lame British humor courtesy of Christina Farr.  

Photo Credit: bjornmeansbear/Flickr

Marketing startup Bislr is taking on the task of making digital campaigns easier to run for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) with its newly launched online management platform.

Bislr wants to simplify the process of a business’s online efforts, since running SMBs can be difficult enough on their own without having to worry about running digital marketing — let alone trying to make sense of that marketing data to improve your bottom line. The startup, which launched its new platform today, has raised a new $3.5 million round of funding led by Southern Cross Venture Partners, with participation from Tim Draper and Terry and Katrina Garnett.

The platform itself allows clients to build mobile-optimized websites, perform A/B testing, track marketing and advertising ROI, conduct email marketing, and streamline social media activity. It also lets you track customer data from a variety of sources without having to hop all over the place. For instance, Bislr’s platform will provide a single place to monitor your exotic meat emporium business’ campaign to boost sales of your famous kangaroo steak rub by pulling in data from Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, LinkedIn Ads, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. (See demo video embedded below.)

Bislr plans to make money by charging clients a monthly fee to use its platform, with both economy and enterprise-level subscription plans.

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup faces competition from Unbounce, ThriveHive, Hubspot, Glyder, Smore, and others.

Image via Bislr/YouTube

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Who would have thought that cloud computing would be the modern day equivalent of Robin Hood?

In a report published by the University of San Diego, Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Computing for Emerging Economics, researchers found countless benefits in increased global access to cheap data storage and processors. The authors intimated that in the future, cloud computing technologies will be an economic stabilizer.

Cloud-based technologies have experienced explosive growth in recent years, and evidence suggests they they will continue to grow. By 2014 Gartner predicted that 60 percent of the world’s server workloads will take place on virtualized cloud servers.

It’s great news for vendors and businesses, but what does this mean for people in countries like India, Mexico and South Africa?

The researchers make the case that cloud computing is keeping the cost of storing information down, and is making broadband faster as more people can access it. In combination, these two factors will enable people in the low-and middle-income bracket to enter into the competitive global economy.

“This growth emerges from the Cloud’s economic advantages of scale and scope that lower costs, improve speed of service, expand operational flexibility for users and reduce risks in IT deployment,” the report explains.

If conditions are reasonable (broadband is sufficient and there is the freedom to operate data centers), there are five major implications for people in the developing world:

• The Cloud enables people to be more competitive in “higher value-added products because goods and services are becoming more ICT (information and communications technologies) intensive.” As ICT grows in intensity, the Cloud enables emerging economics to tap the economic gains.
• It’s vital to ensure that these countries can compete in the “knowledge economy“.
• The Cloud can stimulate the growth of small to medium sized businesses, and improve job creation. It’s beneficial for entrepreneurs as it reduces the cost and upfront investment in the necessary IT infrastructure.
• It enables governments to more effectively share and deliver information to citizens.
• There is a strong synergy between the growth of the cloud and the build-out of broadband networks.

With an eye to the future, the Cloud will improve transparency, and create a dialogue between governments and citizens. As a final step, the researchers recommend that these governments work with multiple stakeholders to improve access to information and create policies that will enable people-in-need to benefit from the Cloud.

(VentureBeat’s upcoming conference CloudBeat is unique with its emphasis on customer case-studies. It’s not abstract theories and ideas — executives will reveal their hard-frought solutions to very real technology problems and discuss the impact on the global economy).

Robin Hood image // Tumblr

Docstoc, the online library of small-business documents, is giving its users a new kind of content: high-quality, beautifully produced videos that will give small and medium-sized businesses an MBA-level schooling in how to build and grow their companies.

In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, cofounder Jason Nazar told us that for this new library of courses, Docstoc tapped experts in topics ranging from account to software to marketing as course instructors, and then the company brought a kind of magic unique to Los Angeles tech startups: production.

“Folks in the Bay are better at building technoogy products, as a whole,” he said. “But in L.A., there’s a focus on the quality of content that there isn’t in the Bay.

“The video, the copywriting — there’s an expectation of standards. What we’re trying to do is differentiate our content that’s better than anything else you’ll find out there on the web in terms of the instructor, the content, the production, and the technology platform.”

With video editors on staff who have previously worked on major motion pictures, Nazar said, “The way that they look from a directorial perspective is different from anyone else in the country. We can produce something that’s network-quality. … We’ve built out a really beautiful studio in Santa Monica, and we have the ability to work with instructors remotely.

Last year, the L.A.-based startup started testing video content, producing 1,200 individual videos featuring hundreds of topic experts. The videos were released free of charge on YouTube, and Nazar said the response from Docstoc users was overwhelmingly positive.

Video was also a big part of a 30-app iOS package Docstoc release free of charge back in May.

Nazar said content covers the three main concerns he encounters from the SMB owners he talks to: how to get more customers, how to raise capital, and how to efficiently manage a growing business, whether that business is a solo freelancer or a 100-employee company with $1 million in annual revenue.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new sections of the site:

“Our goal is to identify the most valuable content that will help people, and keep building breadth around that,” said Nazar.

And as for the instructors themselves, the longtime entrepreneur has tapped one of his best resources. “Quite honestly, it’s my own personal connections,” he told us.

“We’ve been around for a while, so people know me. We’ve hosted events in SoCal that have brought in over 15,000 people. For the last three years, I’ve been reaching out, and a lot of those folks are going to be working with us around courses.”

Of course, tons of online video resources are out there for learning about these topics: options range from accredited universities with online course modules to competing websites that also dish out clips and courses. When it comes to competition, Nazar said, “I don’t think there’s any secret sauce we have; we just have high standards. When someone teaches a course, they have to have had real success in that area themselves.”

For example, Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker, a widely known affiliate marketing expert and blogger, is teaching the Docstoc affiliate marketing course. The person teaching the site’s AdWords course was the media buyer for LegalZoom. While Nazar said instructors aren’t always household names, he said they will always bring certifiable experience to the table.

“All our courses are taught by people who’ve had the kind of success you want to have yourself,” Nazar said, “people who have sold multiple companies for millions of dollars.

“My overall thesis is, explain the concept, then get really specific. Give an action plan, and give as many analogies as possible that people can identify with. Do everything you can to pass on your knowledge to someone else. When you get to something really dry like Quickbooks, it’s harder to make it interesting, but that’s our educational philosophy.”

Aside from the quality of instruction and the quality of production, Nazar said a lot of thought and effort was put into the site’s user experience and the technology platform itself. He also points out that these courses come packaged with a slew of documents, articles, forms, and other collateral an SMB owner would need to take action on what she learned from the videos.

Docstoc currently has around 20 courses available to its paying customers (access to premium content costs $20 per month) and plans to add 25 more courses to the library by the end of the year.

Top image courtesy of lightpoet, Shutterstock

But in the last week, things have gone from bad to worse, leaving CEO Adam Neary as the only full-time employee still with the company.

The company was part of the first class at New York’s General Assembly, and Neary recorded in detail how being a part of the hot co-working space helped to double the size of their seed round. Profitably pulled financial data from a service like Quickbooks and showed small business owners where they were succeeding and what their trouble spots were. Then it offered concrete recommendations for how to build on that success.

Sources began reaching out last week to say something was up with Profitably. When I first heard the company was in trouble, I contacted Neary to get his perspective on what was happening. The rumor was the company was shutting down. He responded by email:

It’s really not that simple. I definitely appreciate you reaching out to me ahead of publishing. The reality is, we’re signing up 200-250 small businesses every week. We’ve just rebuilt our platform from the bottom up to handle all the traffic we’re seeing, and right now we’re making some tough personnel decisions in terms of setting ourselves up for the next phase of the company’s growth. 

The above is not a throwaway PR line–it’s where we are. The members of our team have wives. We have children at home. We’ve all left very lucrative careers to try to do our best to build a product for the country’s small businesses, it’s tough work, and none of these decisions are being made lightly.  

Bottom line–it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to get into the details of various staffing decisions we’re making right now, but please give me the benefit of the doubt that it’s not as simple as “you laid off most employees and are bootstrapping.” Given the traction we’ve been seeing and a number of fantastic partnerships we’re pursuing, that would obviously paint a false picture of where the company stands and gloss over some pretty subtle stuff.  

I’m doing my best to show everybody involved as much respect as possible–I hope you do the same!   Warm regards, Adam

It was difficult for me to sort out the discrepancy between Neary’s email and what I had heard. I knew that one of the company’s co-founders, CTO Francis Hwang, had left in November, and the rest of the team had left or been let go last week. Shortly after I got hold of an email from Neary himself, written to investors. It paints a different portrait of what happened, and where the company might go from here. The email from Neary is after the jump.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Seventy-three percent of small and medium businesses in the U.S. intend to purchase tablets in the next 12 months, but these companies won’t settle for any old tablet — they want iPads.

The iPad is the most-considered tablet by businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees mulling the hardware investment, according to new survey data from research firm The NPD Group and its SMB Technology Monitor.

“The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for ‘Tablet’ in the business market, leaving Apple poised to take advantage of the increased spending intentions of these SMBs,” Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD, said.

Small and medium businesses indicated that they will spend, on average, more than $21,000 on tablets over a 12-month period, NPD found, though the amount skews higher or lower depending on business size.

Medium-sized business with 501 to 999 employees are the most tablet-hungry — well iPad-anxious, actually. Nearly 90 percent of businesses in this category said they plan to purchase new tablets, with each planning to spend an average of $39,000 on the new hardware over the next 12 months.

The data supports a perceptible shift in the workplace, with Apple mobile products being embraced by business users and IT departments alike. At VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference in early December, the consensus among a panel of cloud and enterprise experts was that corporate CEOs (and their egos) are the driving force behind iPad adoption in the enterprise.

[Image via OU Platform/Flickr]

So she decided to build out that idea with co-founder Ludo Antonov, and a few weeks later, JustAbout.co is sending out its first batches of beta invitations (you can get yours below, but we’re making you read all the way to the bottom).

“All business owners are stressed and always have a lot on their plate. The last worry many establishments need is the hassle of creating a complicated website or social pretense,” said O’Dell (no relation to the author) in a recent email exchange.

JustAbout makes it easy to create a stunning, one-page representation of your business that gives visitors a visual and textual overview of what you do. You can also link to places where people can get more information, such as a Facebook page, a Google Places map, a phone number, an email address or even an existing company website.

“There are so many businesses today that have yet to establish a web pretense simply because they think it’s too hard or too expensive to be online,” said O’Dell. “We don’t think this should be the case.”

There are scores, possibly hundreds, of tools for small business owners to create and manage their own websites, but few combine the two winning propositions of consumer-focused tools like About.me or Flavors.me: 1) Dead-simple ease of use and 2) a laser focus on beautiful and modern design. Aside from JustAbout, we also stumbled upon Onepager and Central.ly, both free site-builders for businesses.

But the JustAbout team says their product is better because it gives businesses more ways to connect with existing content online. For example, restaurants can link their JustAbout pages to their pages on Yelp, FoodSpotting and many other food-oriented sites. Lawyers can link to Avvo accounts; photographers can link to Flickr, DeviantArt and Picassa; real estate agents can hook their JustAbout pages up with their Zillow accounts.

For the tech-challenged, JustAbout is as simple as picking a good photo and typing in a description. For those with enough knowledge to be dangerous, there’s also HTML editing and social media integrations available.

The idea for JustAbout was prototyped last month during a hackathon. Since making the prototype in 24 hours, O’Dell and Antonov have spent the past month filing away at the rough edges: squashing bugs, adding features and generally getting the product ready for today’s launch.

Within the next few weeks, JustAbout will also launch premium upgrades. For a fee, business users will be able to get custom domains and more. “We’re still playing around with what should be an upgrade and what should be freemium,” O’Dell wrote.

If you’d like to give it a shot yourself, use the invite code #VBEATBOSS, and don’t say we never gave you anything.