Development testing service Coverity’s annual scan report, which is based on data from almost 500 software projects with a total of over 450 million lines of code, says that almost 230,000 defects were found and fixed. And while the average defect density per thousand lines of code was almost identical between open source and proprietary, there was an interesting diversion in the results.

Open source projects, Coverity says, tend to have .69 bugs per thousand lines of code, virtually the same as proprietary software, which tends to have .68 errors per thousand lines. But large closed-source projects — over one million lines of code — tend to have 33 percent fewer errors than small closed-source projects, with .66 errors over each thousand lines of larger projects compared to .98 in smaller projects. And small open source projects have a massive 70 percent fewer errors than large open source software, with only .44 defects compared to .75.

The difference, according to Coverity, is that small open source projects are labors of love by individual developers or small teams, who carefully comb through their code to reduce errors. Large open source projects, on the other hand, tend to lack standardized processes to ensure code quality, and so the error rate increases.

In commercial or closed-source software, developers experience almost the opposite conditions. Large projects tend to have well-defined formal testing processes, which ensure higher code quality, and small projects tend to be hasty, quick endeavors that show the effects of growing pains, as no standardized testing is in place.

In other words, if you’re looking for bug-free apps, look for a small open source project or a large proprietary piece of software, because those have the best chance of having few defects and high overall code quality.

All of the data in infographic form:

photo credit: gui.tavares via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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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 

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What would make high school more rock & roll than a WordPress site for your classes?

A surprise concert from the Ramones, culminating in a huge explosion?

Well, yeah, maybe, we’ll give you that. But until that day comes, you’ll have to content yourself with Classrooms, the newest product from our pals at WordPress.

(Disclosure: VentureBeat runs on WordPress. In general, we love it. We pay for it, and they don’t bribe us to write posts about ‘em, so everyone gets along.)

Classrooms brings a host of educational blog themes and designs for the K-12 teacher market. It also puts a special focus on WordPress features such as privacy, security, interaction opportunities, multimedia, document uploads, and calendar-sharing (for keeping parents in the loop).

For teachers looking to increase organization, enhance their teaching styles for their digitally trained audiences, or simply decrease paper in the classroom, WordPress Classrooms seems like a simple and timely solution. Even though it’s just an edu-washed version of WordPress.com blogging software, it’s still an excellent product and one that first-time site builders will find a friendly introduction to the wild world of webmastery.

Here’s a look at some of WordPress’s highlighted education-specific themes.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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FarmLogs is a Y Combinator alum that seeks to modernize the farming industry. Today, the company based out of Ann Arbor, Mich., announced it’s harvesting $1 million in seed funding, which is led by Huron River Ventures and Hyde Park Ventures.

FarmLogs’ software that helps farmers manage their farm. It offers a wide range of features, including the capability to forecast and measure profits, track activities and expenses, monitor crop progress, manage inventory and sales, monitor weather, study field performance, and stay on top of crop markets and relevant news. The platform also provides analytical tools to help farmers take a more data-driven approach to agriculture.

Founder and CEO Jesse Vollmar grew up on a farm in Michigan and studied computer science. He experienced first-hand many of the inefficiencies in the farming world that led to lower yields and profits, and he set out to solve the problem.

“FarmLogs is about bringing innovation to an industry that desperately needs it,” he said. “We have an amazing opportunity to make a significant impact on the entire globe by serving the people that feed our world.”

Instead of keeping records with paper, farmers can now manage operations and conduct business via the web or mobile. Row crop farmers, who grow corn, soybeans, wheat, and such can see a daily snapshot of their farm’s performance from a central dashboard, and they can update information from the field using the GPS-enabled mobile app.

With this investment, FarmLogs will expand its team of four and accelerate development of mobile applications for the 2013 planting season.

Frankly, tech incubators are getting too ubiquitous for their own good. Why do we need yet another Y-Combinator or 500 TechStars imitator?

But when Silicon Valley’s newest accelerator, Alchemist, launched its first class of startups this week, investors opened their check books.

The startups that have been selected for the first class are far from sexy — unless a “software-defined infrastructure platform for heterogeneous computing” does it for you – but they’re all generating revenues. What they have in common is that they target their products at businesses, not consumers.

Ravi Belani, the program’s managing director, has introduced the program at the perfect time. Part of Alchemist’s appeal is that investors are wary of consumer-facing mobile apps and social games, which have millions of users who won’t fork over a dime. As a result, this year’s hot investing targets are business-to-business (“B2B” or “enterprise”) startups.

General Catalyst is just one of the venture capital firms that is keeping a close eye on Alchemist’s seed-stage startups. “Incubators have historically worked well in the consumer internet space,” noted Deepak Jeevankumar, an enterprise-focused VC at the firm. “With the right access to mentorship and design customers, Alchemist is well-positioned to guide enterprise startups,” he said.

Already, Andreessen Horowitz, Citrix’s Accelerator, True Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Founders Fund have invested in the program’s startups. Alchemist provides the startups with about $30,000 in initial funding, which is a larger sum than alternative programs such as Y Combinator.

“I think what Ravi is doing is exceptionally interesting,” said Kevin Spain, a partner at Emergence Capital.

At Alchemist’s packed Demo Day in Mountain View, Calif.

“There’s a real need for enterprise-focused accelerators in the market,” said Spain, explaining that B2B companies have a whole different set of requirements than consumer startups to get their products off the ground.

Lightspeed‘s Bipul Sinha, an investor with a focus on the enterprise, agrees that it makes far more sense for enterprise-focused startups to enroll in an accelerator. In an interview, he said the “product building and sales process” are very different from the consumer space. He added, “there is a need for mentorship and education.”

Belani isn’t surprised that investors have been so receptive. After all, VCs are beholden to their limited partners (LPs), who expect to see solid returns. “It’s fun to build stuff and make money,” said Belani. “And in the enterprise, your first customers will write million-dollar checks.”

During their six months at the accelerator (a typical accelerator program lasts three months), Alchemist connects the founders with chief information officers at Fortune 500 companies, and they learn how to present a compelling sales pitch. Most of the entrepreneurs have a strong technical background, so this education in marketing and business is vital.

To ensure the startups get the attention they need, Belani will only take on 10 teams per quarter. Belani has already raised enough money to fund 90 companies in the next two years, but won’t yet disclose the amount. The big picture vision is to foster a stronger relationship between Silicon Valley’s enterprise tech startups and key decision-makers at Fortune 500 companies. The current class met with top executives at Procter & Gamble, Best Buy, and Dell.

Ravi Belani, the managing director of Alchemist’s Accelerator.

“We have different needs than guys in a garage building a social game,” said Ryan Nichols, founder of Tylr Mobile, a startup targeting sales professionals that raised $500,000 last month. The serial entrepreneur, who spent four years at SAP, saw a lot of value in the program, which fronted about half of his startup’s seed round. ”I don’t need business 101 advice, but I’m absolutely hungry for expertise in making enterprise sales and help finding development customers with specific needs.”

Mark Trang, cofounder of Social Pandas (pictured above, flanked by his cofounders), heads one of Alchemist’s venture-funded startups. He said he tapped Belani’s “network of experts,” including former Oracle-on-Demand CEO Timothy Chou and DFJ’s Tim Draper, for advice on hiring, research and development, and PR. With its social tools for salespeople, Social Pandas has already raised a sizable $1.5 million seed round.

Related: In 2013, analysts predict that 80 percent of the companies that will go public are B2B.

When Balani hatched the idea for the new model accelerator, he had no trouble convincing Khosla Ventures, Cisco, SAP Ventures, US Venture Partners, and his former VC firm, DFJ, to underwrite the fund. This is an impressive feat. With a few notable exceptions, said Belani, “Venture funds do not fund another instrument that is funding startups.”

Alchemist spun out of the Harvard Club in San Francisco, where Belani brought in top speakers to meet with talented college students. Likewise, the first batch of startups in Alchemist’s program met with entrepreneurs and visionaries like Adam Pisoni, Yammer’s cofounder and CTO; Melinda Gates; and Box’s 27-year-old CEO, Aaron Levie.

At a launch party for Cambrian Genomics, one of the startups enrolled in the accelerator.

At a recent get-together with the founders, I noticed an unusually large number of female entrepreneurs and developers. In another unusual twist, about half of the class are recent college grads, which suggests that the growing interest in enterprise-technology is permeating the top universities.

Andrea Faz is the twenty-something cofounder of ConnectBright, which offers a directory of reviews of B2B companies. Given her lack of real-world corporate experience, the mentorship was invaluable.

“We all unite on this common ground of innovating the sexiest industry [and that's the] enterprise,” said Faz.

With an explosion of seed-stage companies, and a relatively steady supply of first-round capital, it seems pragmatic to teach entrepreneurs how to make money. Alchemst’s founders will be in a strong position when they decide to raise, if they need VC funding at all.

In their own words, the first batch of startups are:

• SendTask, a next generation enterprise task management platform.
• Social Pandas, a social selling platform to help salespeople close deals.
• Xockets, a software-defined intfrastructure platform for heterogeneous computing cofounded by a former Cisco engineer.
• JyMob, a platform to choose the best people for your jobs.
• Selligy, a mobile service helping salespeople with their primary activity, sales meetings [Editor's note: Selligy was a finalist at VentureBeat's Mobile Innovation competition.]
• Active Scaler, a storage-load balancer for network driver enterprise storage.
• ConnectBright, an advocacy empowerment platform for B2B service providers.
• Cambrian Genomics, a DNA laser printer.
• MobileSpan, a BYOD platform for enterprises.

The current media hype around Big Data has clouded where the real opportunity is: software applications that exploit Big Data.

The infrastructure and platform plays that are grabbing the headlines are critical, but they won’t create the same long-term value as those entrepreneurs who figure out how to apply Big Data to the task of disrupting or accelerating a market.

Instead the market needs companies to provide Big Data applications that embed the insights for a particular market or business process, delivered at the right time, and to the widest possible audience. Why? Because there are simply too few skilled Big Data practitioners available for every organization that needs access to such insights to work it all out for themselves.

It’s not just the media that has been focused on Big Data infrastructure, much of the recent venture and growth equity investment activity has gravitated towards the tools and platforms needed to manage Big Data and deliver analytic insights. However the largest wave of Big Data value creation is still to come and it will focus on exploiting the infrastructure to create new applications that analytically optimize business processes.

My firm’s investment thesis focuses on software and information services companies who are bringing together three key capabilities: control or access to a business process; Big Data infrastructure and skills; and information rights to the broadest set of relevant data. Our term for this convergence is Applied Analytics and through our work with a wide range of companies we’ve developed the 11 Principles of Applied Analytics, a framework to assist strategic thinking around this opportunity.

In our experience the companies who are best positioned to be successful in exploiting Big Data are those who have focused on three key patterns.

The first is that they start with the answers their customers need rather than focusing on the data they currently have and what they think that data tells them. They work backward to figure out what is required (more data, tools, knowledge) to get to that answer.

A second trait is rather than delivering insights to a small number of business leaders; the insights are embedded directly into a business application or workflow. Getting the most out of Big Data means making sure insights are consumed, consciously or not, by the widest number of people and not just the data elite.

These companies all share a third characteristic: a strong understanding of Information Rights. In this brave new cloud-based, multi-tenant, third party data world they are methodical in their approach to acquiring, managing and using data.

Successful companies secure the appropriate rights to use key information and then proactively manage how that data is used to both maximize value creation and to ensure that the company stays on right side of the court of public opinion. They are not only compliant, they can prove compliance.

Leading companies such as Google and Amazon have blazed an applied analytics trail in display advertising and eCommerce. Those early innovations have now led to significant investments in Big Data infrastructure, the building blocks necessary to make Big Data mainstream. We look forward to the next wave of value creation that will come from the wide swath of software and Internet companies who exploit the emerging infrastructure and create new Big Data applications.

Justin LaFayette is a managing director of Georgian Partners, the growth-stage Private Equity firm he co-founded in 2008. Prior to Georgian Partners, Mr. LaFayette was Vice President of Strategy for Information Platform and Solutions with IBM Software Group.

Prior to IBM, Mr. LaFayette was a co-founder of DWL, an enterprise software company that led the Master Data Management (MDM) market. DWL was named one of the fastest growing technology companies for three consecutive year by Deloitte and Touche and was acquired by IBM in 2005. Mr. LaFayette was the recipient of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award for Technology in 2001.

Follow Georgian Partners on Twitter @GeorgianPrtnrs.

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For startups developing software for businesses rather than consumers, pitching products to IT divisions can be a predicament: It’s often unclear who makes the final decision on purchases, and IT budgets have become notoriously tight.

A new wave of companies — like GoodData, founded in 2007 — have boldly entered the market with plans to bypass IT entirely and sell their products to marketing and business users.

Research firm Gartner is partially responsible for its shift in attitude with its frequently-cited projection that by 2017, chief marketing officers will spend more on IT than chief information officers. Startups selling software to businesses fear that they can no longer count on IT managers as customers.

With the global economic climate expected to improve, Gartner predicts that the “major retardants to IT growth will lift.” In a statement, Richard Gordan, managing vice president of Gartner, explained that uncertainties in the global market derailed IT spend and caused “pessimistic business and consumer sentiment throughout the world,” but he expects to see “accelerated business growth” by the end of the year.

Gartner’s analysts predict that IT spending will reach $3.7 trillion in 2013, up 4.2 percent from 2012. In previous forecasts, researchers only projected a 3.8 percent increase in the coming year, meaning they see cause for optimism.

Worldwide enterprise software spending is forecast to total $296 billion in 2013, up 6.4 percent from 2012. Hot technologies like security, storage management, and customer relationship management will drive some of this growth, but the global telecoms market will remain the largest IT spending market.

According to Gartner, by 2014, “big data” analytics tools will be increasingly viewed as a necessary investment.

Gartner analysts warned that some of this projected spending increase is a result of gains in the value of foreign currencies versus the dollar.

The firm revised its estimates on worldwide device spending on printers, PCs, mobile phones, and tablets. The previous forecast of $706 million is likely overblown — analysts project that spending will only reach $666 million in 2013.

The market for tablets and PCs will be hardest hit. “The tablet market has seen greater price competition from Android devices as well as smaller, low-priced devices in emerging markets,” said Gordon.

Black cloud image //  artemisphoto, Shutterstock

Aviary, the startup that makes photo tools for developers, has just released a new version of Peacock, its formerly retired suite of tools for advanced image editing.

Over on the company blog, we read that Aviary gave the guy who originally created Peacock, one Mario Klingemann, permission to continue working on Peacock after it was retired as an official product.

Klingemann now calls the suite Nodewerk; it’s an Air app you can download and run sans web connection.

The name comes from the app’s node-based editing — different from layer-based editing in Photoshop and other image editors. It’s less a challenger to established tools and more of a paradigm shift for thinking about digitally created and manipulated images.

Here are a couple screenshots and a Peacock demo video to give you an idea of what node-based image editing looks like in practice:

“On a personal note, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to see an incredible piece of software like this rise from the ashes,” wrote Aviary co-founder Avi Muchnick, referencing yet another kind of bird.

“Mario and the team that worked on Aviary’s advanced flash suite worked so hard on Peacock, and it’s great to know that a true gem like this will be out there in the world helping to make the world a better looking place once more.”

Aviary’s become rather hot of late, with its impressive new CEO hire and its well-timed partnership with Twitter. The developer-oriented company also just launched its own mobile apps over the summer.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This is a guest post by technology executive Roman Stanek

Oracle, the most-acquisitive company in the software industry, just bought Eloqua. Personally, I’m fascinated by this acquisition. With Eloqua, Oracle gets a truly great maker of cloud-based apps geared to chief marketing officers. Along with its earlier purchases of RightNow and Taleo, Oracle is buying itself a solid lineup of cloud-based apps.

I couldn’t help but wonder, could Eloqua become Oracle’s Autonomy — a failed acquisition that undermines its entire foundation? Don’t get me wrong. I’m absolutely not suggesting that Eloqua has engaged in any creative bookkeeping (as HP alleges with Autonomy). I am questioning whether Oracle’s sales organization — fluent in the language of IT — can learn the “Eloquese” spoken by marketers and other business people.

And as I see it, marketing speak is a completely different language because it describes a unique set of concerns and world views. I imagine Oracle’s sales folks — with their blue shirts and chinos — suddenly plunked down in an exotic land of color and spice. Where the Eloquese speak of beauty, Oracle’s minions talk of middleware. It’s like mixing oil and water. Or as Strother Martin so famously put it in Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here, is failure to communicate.”

It’s a fundamental difference that has its roots in Oracle’s acquisition strategy and has become ingrained in its 18-month sales cycle, famous hostility to customers, and addiction to support fees. Here’s what I mean: Back in 2003, Larry Ellison looked at Oracle’s sales and decided his company was too much of a one-trick company, with its reliance on database software. So he hit on PeopleSoft —  then the biggest maker of enterprise apps — as the best source of new revenue and new customers. 18 months later, Oracle had the prize — and kicked off a $45 billion buying spree that swallowed almost 100 companies.

And with each new acquisition, Oracle gained a larger base of customers that its sales force could hit up for new database software, middleware programs and complex applications that customers’ IT organization would install and run. In the process, Oracle’s sales organization became adept at selling to that same IT audience, understanding its needs and concerns and — yes — speaking the same language.

It’s obvious to any industry observer that Oracle has Salesforce.com in its sights with its purchases of RightNow, Taleo and Eloqua. On the face of it, people might suppose that Oracle and its deeper pockets can slow or even stop Salesforce’s momentum. Those people would be wrong. The reason comes down to the each company’s sales team. Because while Oracle has made a science of selling to IT, Salesforce’s team has perfected the art of selling front-office apps to business people. And I believe that, when it comes to selling cloud-based apps to business people — especially to people in sales and marketing — no-one comes close to Salesforce.

That’s why I believe Eloqua could become Oracle’s Autonomy. Oracle doesn’t realize it yet, but they’ve joined in a game with new rules and a new language they don’t and can’t understand. Unfortunately, its chief competitor just happens to be fluent.

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP.

Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek

Daniel Chalef is chief executive of KnowledgeTree, a cloud-based document management service.

For the past 50 years, companies built and bought software to automate every aspect of their business – from finance and HR to operations and production. And the result has been tremendous efficiency gains and enhanced control.

But as enterprise software’s use expanded, it grew bloated. It became too complex to address specific business problems. It became too inflexible for teams to adapt as needs changed. And it became too large for business users to choose and deploy a solution without long-lead times.

Today, nimble software vendors are growing in the enterprise at breathtaking speeds. Mobile, social and consumer trends have radically shifted business users’ expectations of what enterprise software should be. The new enterprise software reality is geared specifically to business users and has flexibility at its core. Enterprise software vendors must take note. To borrow from Marc Andreessen, the new enterprise software is eating enterprise software.

Here are the 10 commitments vendors must adhere to in the new enterprise software reality:

1. Be Purpose Driven. Enterprise software is bought for discrete business needs – to manage inventories, boost collaboration, or automate marketing, for example. Overly complex enterprise software has lost its purpose in a drive to add more features. Get a rigorous focus on the process that business users are trying to make more efficient.

2. Let Users Try it First. Presentations, videos, and sales calls can paint a great picture. But until the software is actually used, customers don’t know whether it will support their people and processes. Let users try your technology for free. Too complicated for a free trial? Maybe your software isn’t focused enough.
3. Give Fast Time to Value. Enterprise software’s history is filled with multi-year deployments that cost millions and failed to deliver. Business users ought to feel productivity gains as soon as they start your tool. And if they can see the value in your trial, even better.

4. Offer Sensible Pricing. Business users need to make intelligent evaluations of software. That requires an understanding of pricing. But opaque pricing models, complex contracting, hidden capital costs, and dozens of SKUs prolongs sales cycles and keeps the value away from end users.

5. Build for Scale. Consumerized tools often struggle to deal with the scale business users need. That’s because scale means more than handling large volumes of traffic. It also means managing authentication, security, and teamwork across thousands of employees. IT needs tools that support these large scale deployments.

6. Support Business Anywhere. Business users are always on the move. That means data and tools can’t be locked away from teams behind firewalls. Enterprise software must be friendly with the cloud, mobile devices, and other secure modes of accessing information.

7. Deliver Insight. It’s not enough to support a business process. Enterprise software must help improve it. That means enterprise software must generate insight built on analytics that help teams correct inefficiencies and replicate successes. That requires intelligence that is actionable from your software.

8. Be Socially Aware. Enterprises are built from teams and individuals. If groups can’t collaborate, work stops. Enterprise software doesn’t just add a “like” button; it gives tools and insights that make teams efficient.

9. Support Customization. Nothing fits well right out of the box. That includes software. Processes, descriptions, organizations, and more need to be tailored to your business to make them useful. But depending on lengthy redevelopment projects to do so is a major disruption – especially as your business evolves. Enterprise software must be easily customizable by the people that use it.

10. Connect to the Enterprise: Your business is part of an interconnected ecosystem. Enterprise software is the same. The information your tools generate is often most valuable when surfaced in other technologies. Like customer proposals appearing in your sales force automation tool. Through interfaces it can readily connect to other tools for a more complete business picture.

Business has changed and the expectations of users have too. Software vendors must rededicate themselves to a rigorous focus on the end-user – accounting for how they research, buy, use, customize, and get value from tools.

The mission behind the organization is to promote continuous learning and innovation in software. Comprised of 35,000 members, Skills Matter holds training and events where developers can improve their programming skills, collaborate, and make connections. It produces workshops, talks, meetups, hackathons, and training courses, as well as videos and a quarterly open source journal. Subjects include a range of technologies, including HTML5, Android, iPhone, NoSQL, Scala and F#, Java, .net.

Founded a decade ago, Skills Matter seeks to establish the UK as the “#1 place to learn and contribute to software innovation.” London has a burgeoning startup scene, and this announcement comes tandem with the unveiling of the Prime Minister and Mayor of London’s plan to spend £50m building a co-working and startup space. Skills Matter has over 2000 events planned for 2013, and this investment will contribute to spurring London’s technology community, as well as nurturing more engineering talent which is in high demand these days.

The investment was led by Beringea, an international growth capital firm with offices in London.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Big changes are happening in Apple’s executive roster: It announced today that Scott Forstall (above), the vice president in charge of iOS, and head of retail John Browett are leaving.

Meanwhile, design guru Jony Ive, senior vice president Bob Mansfield, SVP of Internet software Eddy Cue, and VP of Mac software Craig Federighi are all taking on more responsibilities.

As iOS head, Forstall was responsible for controversial new releases like Apple’s Maps app and the virtual assistant Siri. Consumers seem to have gotten used to Siri not living up to its cute TV commercials, but Apple chief executive Tim Cook had to issue a full-on apology for its Maps software, which has been criticized for being hilariously (and sometimes dangerously) inaccurate. Cook went as far as to recommend alternative map applications until Apple’s Maps app is updated.

Given just how much of a mess the Maps fiasco has been for Apple, it’s not too surprising to see Forstall stepping away. He’ll be advising Tim Cook until he officially leaves Apple next year, according to the news release today. Cue will be taking over work on Siri and Apple Maps.

As for Browett, Apple says that it’s currently seeking out a replacement executive. For now, Apple’s retail team will report to Tim Cook directly.

Ive, often considered one of the most obvious successors to late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, will step in to lead human interface design across the company. It’s a big step up for Ive, and it means that his minimalist design sensibility will soon appear in software, on top of the hardware design he’s already in charge of. Federighi will now lead iOS development, in addition to OS X.

Mansfield is getting the most intriguing promotion today: He’s heading up a new group called “Technologies,” which will bring together all of Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams, the latter of which have “ambitious plans for the future” according to the news release.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This week, 100 employees received layoffs at Radian6, a company Salesforce acquired two years ago.

Salesforce called it a “rebalancing of resources” at Marketing Cloud, the new software suite that Salesforce created from Radian6 and Buddy Media, another relatively recent acquisition. But some in the media immediately reported “signs of trouble,” and referred to Buddy Media as a “money pit.”

Marc Benioff: Not crazy after all.

The layoffs reportedly occurred at Radian6, but within hours, Buddy Media found itself at the center of the storm. Business Insider released a snapshot of the company’s financials from the June 2011-2012 period, when it was still a venture-backed private company, and reported that it was “bleeding money” in the months prior to the $689 million acquisition.

Reality check: After two acquisitions of companies in a similar space, layoffs are a matter of course. Logically speaking, this creates some overlap of personnel.

“When you acquire two companies, it makes sense to slash a lot of jobs that are replicating each other,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst at Altimeter Research. “How many managers or HR managers do you need on the same account?”

Salesforce is a public company and needs to make sure it’s still in the black — “downsizing the overhead makes sense at this time,” he added.

Adding to the speculation that Salesforce is in trouble, its competitors took the opportunity to offer the recently laid-off employees a job (most of the scale backs were in marketing and sales). View the comments here.

Still, the layoffs are not necessarily a vindication for competitors like Oracle and Adobe.

It’s also not out of the ordinary for a venture-backed software as a service (SaaS) company to overspend, then concentrate on monetization at a later stage. Before this summer’s acquisition, Buddy Media was still a private company in growth mode.

In response to the spate of recent articles that question Marc Benioff’s judgment, experts say it will be at least six months before we will say how the acquisition plays out.

“It’s just too premature to make a call,” said Jim Moore, the founder and managing director of J. Moore Partners, a M&A advisory firm. “If the layoffs were on the administrative, sales and marketing side, I don’t see any reason to say these acquisitions have not been successful.”

Salesforce declined to comment for this story beyond this official statement:

With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people were impacted globally.

Top image via Sarah Deer. Benioff photo: VentureBeat.

One of the biggest changes Windows 8 will bring to users when it is released next week is the removal of the Start menu on the desktop. Many Windows users will find it jarring.

That said, SweetLabs‘ new Pokki app for Windows 8 offers its own version of the Start menu for users who want to check out the new the things Microsoft’s latest OS offers but still want a handy menu on the desktop.

“This is a bridge for users who want to upgrade and still access everything on their computers easily,” SweetLabs co-founder Chester Ng told VentureBeat. “We want users to be able to do their everyday tasks again.”

As you can see in the photo above, the Pokki app for Windows 8 emulates the Start menu’s functions and makes it easy to search the computer, launch programs, change settings, and shut down the PC. All of these things are just a tad more complicated using Windows 8, but Pokki makes it possible to embrace the old way of doing things.

On top of adding Start menu functionality, Pokki’s menu includes a notification center, an app store for finding new apps, and a home-screen-like section for launching apps, files, folders, and more. One other cool thing: Pokki can change Windows 8 so it boots to the desktop so you don’t even have to see the Start screen upon booting up. (However, Microsoft could issue a patch to block this.)

SweetLabs isn’t the only company to add a Start-menu-like function — Samsung has added the S Launcher widget to its slick lineup of Windows 8 PCs.

While Samsung will help its users with that widget, Pokki will be available for the other Windows 8 users and won’t cost a cent to download. Ng said that SweetLabs wants Pokki to develop a substantial user base before it monetizes the product with an app store. Thankfully, SweetLabs already has traction with more than 1 million PC users hooked on Pokki.

San Diego-based SweetLabs has more than 70 employees and has raised $21.5 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Intel Capital, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Check out the video below to see Chris Pirillo ask Seattle residents what they think of Windows 8. Much like Pirillo’s video with his father or the video with my father, everyday folks aren’t quite sure what to think about Windows 8.

Pokki for Windows 8 photo via SweetLabs

Coding and testing for the latest version of Microsoft Office is officially complete and will be available for enterprise customers next month. A month before publicly anticipated, the engineering team signed the “release to manufacturing” order.

The team said in a blog post that this is the most ambitious release of Office it has ever done. It offers the full suite of Office applications, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, as well as tools for note-taking, meetings, communications, and collaboration.

The company hasn’t issued a date for the consumer launch, but predictions put it in February. Rumors also say that native Office 2013 iOS and Android apps will arrive in March.

You can check out the customer preview here.

Today, that’s exactly what they’ve done, making the code available to developers in a Github repository.

We open sourced the @clutchio bits finally so you can run the service on your own engineering.twitter.com/2012/10/open-s…

—
Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) October 11, 2012

Clutch.io’s A/B testing tool allows mobile developers to add multivariate tests to their apps with just a few lines of code. They can then show different versions of their app to different users and measure the effectiveness of each variation.

The recently acquired company has also open-sourced its Clutch Framework, which enables developers to mix native code and web technology in a single app. Native code — Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android — gives the app speed and platform-standard look-and-feel. Web technologies allow developers to change parts of their apps, which now live on their own servers, quickly and easily without having to go through an app store approval process.

Source: Clutch.io

Code to integrate Clutch.io into your mobile app

As a little bonus, Clutch Framework also provides app analytics, telling developers what users are doing with their apps, which helps with future development.

Now that the open source version is available, Clutch.io’s hosted application has been end-of-lifed, and its termination is Nov. 1.

The negative of the open source code, of course, is that it is not a hosted service. It will require installation and maintenance. In addition, and perhaps worse, unless a core team adopts it and maintains it, the codebase will age while other tools improve their functionality.

Developers who don’t want to manage their own services will have to look at other options such as Leanplum or Swrv, who, incidentally, we interviewed at MobileBeat 2012.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Everything you need to know about the iconic Silicon Valley company Hewlett Packard, the company that helped a young Steve Jobs get a toehold in micro-electronics, the company that virtually patented the egalitarian, decentralized mode of management codified in the HP Way, and the prototypical founded-in-a-garage to world-beating Titan, you can learn in this chart:

Source: Google Finance

HP (in blue) vs AAPL vs IBM vs Dow Jones average over the past 5 years

Today, a year after taking the top job at HP, chief executive Meg Whitman and her management team outlined a comprehensive strategy to turn the company around, reinvigorate HP’s culture of engineering, and return the enterprise to growth.

To do so, she’s focusing the company on major trends: cloud computing, data security, and “information optimization.” But she doesn’t expect to see results — growth in step with the U.S. economy — until 2016.

Ouch. That is a loooong ways away.

Big ships take a long time to turn around, true, but investors are rarely patient enough to wait around four years (I really want to use all caps on those two words) for the boat to stop leaking. It’s been a few months since Whitman was “cautiously optimistic” that HP was stabilizing, but the company announced today that major cuts and consolidations are still coming.

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst covering the company, is at least impressed with the honesty.

“HP’s transparency was unprecedented in what I’ve heard from a major tech company in the last few years,” Moorhead told VentureBeat.  ”The reality is that every big company turnaround takes at least five years no matter how hard or how much emphasis a company places on it.”

Where is the magic HP sauce when you need it?

In addition, I’m not sure the focus Whitman is looking for translates incredibly well into the business units.

The major segments outlined in HP’s release include HP Enterprise Services and HP Enterprise Group (that couldn’t cause any confusion, could it?), HP Printing and Personal Systems (a group with two foci, one built on printer ink and the other on a decreasing traditional PC market, and neither speaking to the key area of consumer growth: mobile), HP Software (big, profitable, and growing), and HP Converged Cloud (also growing).

There would seem to be a lot of distraction in those five business units that is not in line with Whitman’s core strategic priorities. Not to mention some overlap.

“HP fundamentally must answer three strategic leadership questions in these areas,” says Moorhead. “HP must lay out a inspiring and aggressive plan for public clouds, PCs in the context of an enterprise company, and smartphones.”

One other problem? The strategy document is dripping with jargon that sounds great but sometimes betrays a fresh-out-of-MBA-school baffle-them-with-bullshit mentality.

For example, can you imagine Steve Jobs saying something like this?

HP initiated a multiyear restructuring designed to realign its cost structure and create investment capacity to drive innovation against its strategic priorities, strengthen market leadership and rebuild its balance sheet while returning capital to shareholders.

Driving innovation is a wonderful thing when you can make it work, but it’s not Miss Daisy and it doesn’t just hop into your car. In plain English, the company is cutting people to save money so that it can invest in new technology, which will hopefully help HP return to some semblance of leadership, be profitable, and make investors richer.

Facing the facts — plain English might help — could help HP focus much more urgently on supporting strength and divesting itself of weakness. The core question is: Can HP return to the HP Way — nimble, fast, innovative … and immensely respected, successful, and profitable?

Perhaps, but based on this announcement, I’m not optimistic.

photo credit: włodi via photopin cc, AtomDocs via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

HP’s plan to open source Palm’s webOS is on schedule: yesterday, the company released version 1.0 of Open webOS, which means that developers can now port the software to new devices.

As if on cue, the WebOS Ports team (which isn’t affiliated with HP), announced yesterday that they’ve ported Open webOS 1.0 to the Galaxy Nexus (see video below), the Verge reports. The team has been working on the port for two months, but there’s still plenty of work to be done. They’ve managed to get Open WebOS connected to Wi-Fi, but hardware acceleration and basic phone functions like texting still aren’t working.

HP released its first Open webOS beta to developers last month, and at the time the company boasted that it contained over 450,000 lines of code. Yesterday, HP revealed that it has built more than 75 Open webOS components over the past nine months. The company won’t be bringing the OS to other devices, but it did create a video showing how Open webOS can run on a TouchSmart all-in-one PC.

It’ll be interesting to see just how far developers can take Open webOS. In particular, existing webOS device owners may be interested in the update (HP isn’t officially updating older devices). But I suspect many webOS fans have given up on their Palm mobile dreams long ago.

WordPress is probably the world’s leading blogging platform — millions of sites use it either hosted on WordPress.com, or via downloading the software and running it on their own servers. This new plugin enables bloggers to post small, sequential updates for breaking news: a liveblog.

VentureBeat uses WordPress, but I installed the plugin on my personal blog to test it.

The great new innovation? Publishers can update the liveblog right on-page, and readers can view new updates appear without having to refresh the story:

Source: John Koetsier

Testing the new plugin on my personal blog

It’s fast, it’s friendly, and it’s unbelievably easy. To update the post, simply type into the box and click Publish Update. To add an image, simply drag and drop it into the edit box area. It seemingly couldn’t be easier.

Unfortunately, it also couldn’t be easier to complete delete your entire liveblog, unknowingly.

When I opened the liveblog post in the traditional WordPress editing interface to set a featured image — the image that, on VentureBeat, appears on the home page to the left of new posts — and then saved, all the liveblog posts disappeared. And no, there was no warning and no error message.

I followed up with WordPress developers, who confirmed the issue.

Apparently the plugin was developed on WordPress 3.5, the next version of WordPress. 3.5  handles comments differently than the most up-to-date version of WordPress currently available via the software’s automatic update, 3.4.1.

A fix was quickly made, and will shortly be available, according to Yuri Victor:

@johnkoetsier The change to comments is an update in WordPress 3.5.

Looks like the liveblog plugin has been made backwards compatible for 3.4.1 on github and the push will be available here on WordPress soon.

Another bug was also discovered by other users, which resulted in readers not even seeing the liveblogs. That also seems to be traced to the fact that developers were building and testing on a beta version of WordPress — and publishing to the existing version.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose, but WordPress would do well to test its new plugins on at least the most recently released versions of the blogging engine before releasing them to the world.

It’s a bit of a black eye, to say the least.

photo credit: e_monk via photo pin cc

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RSmart offers two solutions built on open-sourced, community developed software, Sakai and Kuali.

Sakai software is a learning management system that fosters academic collaboration. Teachers and students can use the product to keep track of announcements, schedules, and assignments; collaborate with class members and share files; access supplementary resources; and manage grades and tests.

Kuali software is an enterprise resources planning system. It includes eight tools that colleges and universities can use for financial management, research administration, application development, course planning, library organization, business plan development, HR and Payroll, and mobile connectivity.

Educational enterprises are notorious for relying on outdated systems and amassing paperwork. RSmart has taken these two projects and created a platform that institutions can use to streamline their teaching, learning, research, and administrative initiatives.

By drawing from a open-sourced software, universities can benefit from the collective wisdom of an international community. However, by using rSmart’s products, they also receive the benefits of enterprise-level customer support.

RSmart has over 250 customers, including large state universities like the University of California, smaller private schools such as Brown, community colleges, and trade schools.

This funding will go toward expanding rSmart’s cloud infrastructure, accelerating platform development, and adding more professional services. The money came from ASAHI Net and GSV Advisors, as well as private investors.

RSmart is based in Scottsdale, Arizona and has 79 employees.

 Read the full press release. 

The SHIELD act – Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes, there must be a silly names contest for American legislation — would force patent trolls who lose frivolous cases to pay their defendants’ legal costs.

From the act preamble:

Essentially, SHIELD would increase the riskiness of the patent trolling business model. With the potential for vastly higher costs, deciding to sue becomes a harder decision … and suing companies using ridiculous patents becomes less attractive.

Representative Peter DeFazio from Oregon, who sponsored the bill with Representative Jason Chaffetz from Utah, certainly gets the issues:

“Patent trolls don’t create new technology and they don’t create American jobs,” DeFazio said in a statement. “They pad their pockets by buying patents on products they didn’t create and then suing the innovators who did the hard work and created the product.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees, with staff attorney Julie Samuels writing: “Finally, a moment of sanity.”

The courts system has recently shown signs of being less eager to be the patent trolls heavy, but despite the America Invents act of 2011, it’s been a tough slog passing substantive patent reform. (Although more patent offices and patent review officers is one step.)

This bill is music to the ears of executives like Build.com CEO Chris Friedland, who I interviewed a month ago. Build.com was fighting patent lawsuits from as many as five trolls and formed patent defense pools to spread the legal costs.

“Frankly, the absurdness of some of this stuff is just ridiculous,” Friedland said at the time. “Are you going to patent wiping your ass?”

Perhaps, with SHIELD, there will be less point to … since the courts will no longer be a cash machine for trolls.

Image credit: Songquan Deng/ShutterStock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Either way, send your funding tips to tips@venturebeat.com. For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Zadara completes $7M for VPSAs (not to be confused with vespas) 

Zadara Storage has completed a $7 million first round of funding that will be put towards getting the word out on its service, which gives companies more control, speed, and security over their portion of the cloud. Zadara buys or rents hardware within the data centers of Amazon, Rackspace, and OpSource. It then sells that storage, along with proprietary software, to its customers as “Virtual Private Storage Arrays” that connect to cloud servers. The round was led by Genesis Capital Advisors and Platinum Management. Read more on VentureBeat.

BV Capital unifies 5 international funds onto one global platform called E.ventures

Investment firm BV Capital launched a global venture platform today, unifying its five funds around the world under one heading and rebranding itself as E.ventures. The integration is in an effort to emphasize the firm’s global perspective and promote international collaboration. With the unification, portfolio companies will be able to access financial and technological resources from all over the world as well as see increased opportunities for international growth.

BV Capital focuses on early-stage startups. It has invested in companies such as Groupon, Angie’s List, Shopping.com, and Sonos. Since 1997, it has invested nine funds totaling over $750 million in capital. It is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Beijing, Tokyo, and most recently, Sao Paulo. Read more on VentureBeat.

aPriori secures $5 million for cost reduction software far more effective than penny pinching

aPriori, a company that creates software to help manufacturing companies cut costs, secured $5 million in new venture capital from existing investor Sigma Partners. This announcement followed the latest release of its platform in April and record results from the past fiscal year.

aPriori will use the money to expand the company’s sales and service teams to Europe and accelerate development in the Asia Pacific region. It will also be put towards a new Supplier Network initiative that will address demand from the automotive, aerospace, and industrial machinery industries by giving them greater access to aPriori’s quote generating technology. The company is based in Concord, MA. Read the press release.

LockPath brings in $6M to help companies stay on the straight and narrow

Security software company LockPath raised $6 million in its second round of funding. Its Keylight platform provides governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) applications to companies that need assistance managing regulatory compliances and risk factors. The technology correlates security information from multiple sources with current regulations and policies to gauge risk.

The round was led by El Dorado Ventures, an entrepreneur-focused, early-stage venture capital firm, with participation from Vesbridge Partners and the Webb Investment Network. This round follows the $2 million LockPath raised in 2011, also led by El Dorado. The company is headquartered in Kansas City, Kansas. Read the press release.

Live Nation buys Rexly to help get its groove back

As part of an ongoing effort to bring innovation back to ticketing conglomerate Live Nation, the company’s months-old investment vehicle, LN Labs, has acquired social music discovery startup Rexly. Rexly is the San Francisco–based, angel-backed startup that makes an iPhone application by the same name for discovering music through friends. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but two of Rexly’s cofounders are joining Live Nation and opening up a new LN Labs office in San Francisco to focus primarily on mobile. Read more on VentureBeat.

Brammo raises $13M to make motorcycle racing a green sport

Brammo Inc., a leading developer of electric vehicle technology recently announced it closed $13 million in a third round of funding. This capital is the first tranche of a $45 million round and brings the total funding to $53.5 million.

Brammo manufactures electric motorcycles that are well-known in the world of motor sports. This first chunk of investment is intended to spur the company’s development plans. It was led by Polaris Industries, a company that manufactures off-road vehicles like ATVs, snowmobiles, and golf carts, as well as powersport vehicles.

The investment is part of a strategic partnership with Polaris that will provide Brammo with opportunities to integrate its electric vehicle technology into more sporting platforms. In October of last year, Polaris invested $28 million in Brammo. That Series B was intended to help Brammo solidify its position in the market. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Along with our friends at The Next Web and Trend Hunter, we’re excited to kick off a cool new consultation series. Here’s how it works: Each of the three sites has picked a company that’s effectively utilizing new technologies to get them ahead in their space. We’ll introduce our choices and then do a consultation article on each of the companies, chiming in with any new ideas, tips, or advice on how they can further leverage new and cool technology

We chose Egnyte, a company that provides simple, scalable, and secure cloud storage for the enterprise.

Cloud is all the rage in enterprise … so much so that Juniper predicts mobile cloud revenues alone of $39 billion by 2016. But with new file sharing and application management strategies come new management and oversight concerns.

That’s where Egnyte chief executive Vineet Jain thinks that his company has the cloud technology edge for enterprise. VentureBeat spoke to Jain about cloud adoption in business.

“The public clouds have been great for consumer adoption and maybe even small business,” says Jain. “But enterprises need to go hybrid, which allows you to access your files on any device on the road and access files in the office with the very same controls.”

Engyte, whose customers share over a billion files daily, treat the cloud as a peer to the tradition file servers in the physical office … not as a master or slave. That means that files are available everywhere, as with other cloud technologies, but also that the exact same protocols that an IT manager might apply currently to control access and privileges still work — and are propagated to both the cloud and local storage.

“We don’t want to get into the hardware game,” Jain says. “Rather, you deploy our software on top of your local hardware and then decide what of your info gets replicated onto the cloud.”

The administrator simply manages the account, setting permissions and creating folders, while all the topology is taken care of by the software. Egnyte integrates with Active Directory as well, making it easy for those using Microsoft technologies to continue working in familiar ways while enabling easier file sharing as well as mobile file access on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry for remote workers.

Most mid-size to large clients, says Jain, choose the hybrid model once they see the benefits, even when they start out wanting a pure cloud solution.

“When we sign anyone with 50 seats or higher,” Jain told VentureBeat, “six to seven out of 10 want to go hybrid.”

Jain believes that means that the mid-market and larger companies are cutting through the pure cloud hype and choosing solutions that match both their needs and their current realities.

One question that came up at a recent MobileBeat 2012 session: How do you integrate multiple cloud technologies — for example, if you’re using a cloud file storage and sharing tool and business applications in the cloud?

That requires API-level integration work, says Jain:

“We are very selectively integrating with other clouds and apps — for example SalesForce. That means that within the SalesForce interface you can manage your files and apply permissions.”

The files are still in the Egnyte cloud, but IT personnel can manage them from within SalesForce. Egnyte integrates with other cloud technologies as well — the company is talking to Jive, for instance — but only integrates where users have requested the connection.

Egnyte was founded in 2006 and has raised about $16 million in capital from Kleiner Perkins, Floodgate, and Polaris. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Image credit: Triff/ShutterStock

You’re the chief executive of NewsGator, a key Microsoft partner in enterprise social software. You’ve just been named a Microsoft Globally Managed Partner. And both of your key product lines contain the words “for SharePoint” in their names.

Yeah, that’s the software most industry execs think Microsoft is going to integrate Yammer into. Yammer, of course, being Microsoft’s new billion-dollar toy in the enterprise social space. And SharePoint being exactly what you’ve built your entire solution on top of.

Uh oh.

Source: NewsGator

JB Holston

If you’re like most people, you might think: bug, meet windshield. Most people, however, are not CEOs of major corporations. Or have raised almost $40 million in capital. Or have four million paid users. Most people, not to put too fine a point on it, are not JB Holston.

“A couple of their very senior people called me on Monday,” Holston told VentureBeat. They warned him about the deal before the speculation was confirmed, and tried to soften the blow.

The Microsoft execs told Holston that NewsGator should not be worried, for four reasons.

“They said to me, ‘First, we think these guys have cracked the code for the freemium model … we didn’t buy it for your existing customers. Second, you’re a really critical enterprise partner of ours, and for the long haul. Third, you as an ISV (Microsoft-speak for independent, i.e., non-Microsoft software vendor) should think of Yammer as another platform in the Microsoft arsenal that you can leverage going forward.’”

Finally, they told Holston that the acquisition was not meant meant to imply that they were going to stop doing anything they were otherwise doing.

When Holston caught his breath after the call, he realized several things.

“On our software roadmaps we always assume that certain social capabilities are going to get commoditized. For example, Salesforce bought Chatter, mostly to give it away. What we’ve been focusing on is moving up the value add chain.”

And, from a NewsGator perspective, Yammer is mostly departmental software: not a big enough solution for truly enterprise customers. NewsGator’s focus, Holston told VentureBeat, is Fortune 2000 companies. These are huge multinational corporations with tens and hundreds of thousands of employees.

“Yammer is not a competitor in the space where companies have 180,000 people, they’re multinational, and they need the software in German. If it’s not in German, it’s a non-starter.”

And it’s not just about the product or the localizations; it’s about the sales model, the service model, and the implementation approach.

“For the class of customer we deal with our two competitors and IBM and Jive,” Holston says. “It’s not just a product but a whole service approach. For example, an IBM can go to a company and say, ‘we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people on this solution for years; here’s how we can do it for you.’”

So ultimately, although perhaps a shock, Holston is not worried, as he mentioned in a post on the company blog. NewsGator is a different class of product with a different class of customer. In fact, he feels, Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is a good thing for NewsGator. It keeps NewsGator’s focus on enterprise-class clients, and it keeps Microsoft’s internal focus on lower-end, lower-value, smaller clients.

“If it’s going to mean that Microsoft is going to more on its own … that gives us greater runway,” Holston said. “In fact, Yammer has been a great lead source for us already.

And the integration question? Will Microsoft integrate Yammer and SharePoint?

“My honest answer is that whatever it means it doesn’t mean they’ll take the Yammer code and integrate it with SharePoint,” Holston told VentureBeat. “They’re not going to shove two completely different code-bases together.”

Instead, he feels, there will be an Office 365 integration first, and probably a tie-in to Microsoft’s cloud offerings to compete with Google+.

“Any other relationship with SharePoint per se is unimaginable to me — it would be faster for MS to just write one on their own than to try to port one to their other  – and Microsoft has said they won’t do this.”

NewsGator’s competitors seem to agree, or at least Jive. Holston said that Jive thinks the Yammer acquisition is a great thing. For IBM he wasn’t so sure.

“For IBM a shoe has dropped … but I think they’re looking for the other one in the closet,” Holston said.

Presumably that would not be Microsoft’s closet.

Image source: ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Listen up, Galaxy Nexus owners. You can now get your hands on the developer preview of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean well before its official mid-July debut. But you should also be prepared to do some risky things to get the software early.

The OS has been leaked by the folks at RootzWiki, who managed to snag the early Jelly Bean build sent to Google I/O attendees yesterday and put it online. There are currently ROMs for the GSM Galaxy Nexus and the Verizon version of the phone (with full LTE capabilities).

As always, you should be careful when installing leaked software like this. Since it’s a preview build, there may be bugs and other issues, and RootzWiki’s process of snagging and packaging the OS may lead to other issues. You’ll also have to root your Galaxy Nexus to install the leaked software — so if you’re uncomfortable with that process, or not sure what “rooting” actually means, I suggest holding off until the official Android 4.1 release.

Google officially unveiled Jelly Bean yesterday at the Google I/O developers conference. The update adds a slew of visual improvements to Android, as well as Siri-like voice search capabilities, including a new semi-self-aware feature called Google Now.

Via The Verge

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

[ Updated with new comments as they come in ... most recently at 4:01 PM PST, June 27 ]

Note: we’ve added a full interview with NewsGator CEO JB Holston, a Microsoft partner in the enterprise social space, building its solutions on SharePoint. He’s got some great observations.

Yesterday, after half a month of speculation, Microsoft announced that it has purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion. According to Charles River Partners, the first venture capital firm to invest in Yammer, that’s the second largest all-cash deal for a VC-backed company, ever.

VentureBeat has been reaching out to industry sources — and the original Yammer investor, George Zachary — asking what this deal means for the enterprise social market. Here’s what we’re hearing:

Scott Raskin, chief executive of MindJet, a social collaboration platform that integrates with SharePoint:

“When Microsoft steps up to the plate with a deal this large, you know the category is gaining serious traction. The Yammer acquisition represents new validation for easy to use, integrated social collaboration: both for employees and across the enterprise value chain. This brings the market one step closer to adopting more effective and complete collaboration solutions for taking ideas and executing upon them.”

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and chief executive of eXo, an enterprise portal platform

The fact that Microsoft is purchasing Yammer clearly means three things:

First, that SharePoint has failed to deliver the enterprise social capabilities that organizations are increasingly demanding.

Second, that Yammer has been very successful at attracting individual users, but they’ve continued to struggle at the enterprise level, where IT organizations still have legitimate concerns about security, integration and manageability.

Third, that Microsoft is willing to spend 1.2 billion dollars to play catch-up in this space. Yammer may enable Microsoft to offer a freemium social service, but it’s going to have a hard time cost-effectively attaching SharePoint to that service because Yammer is multi-tenant and SharePoint is not. They’ll sort out the integration eventually, but probably not quickly.

Malcolm Ross, VP of product marketing at Appian, a business process management company

As the Twitter joke goes … Yammer to Microsoft is “SharePoint Cloud Server 2012 Mobile Enterprise Social Networking Edition.” It evolves SharePoint past the age of the Portal and into Enterprise Social Networking.

The companies that are truly threatened by this acquisition are companies like Teligent and NewsGator, who have created a lucrative business filling the social networking hole in Microsoft SharePoint.  As mentioned earlier, Yammer simply fills in the obvious cracks in SharePoint.  It fails to connect social collaboration and sharing with meaningful work context in an enterprise.

The end-user will ultimately have one platform for sharing and collaboration (SharePoint/Yammer) and another where real work gets done (ERP, CRM, BI, etc). Yammer in no way begins to bridge these worlds of structured enterprise processes with collaboration.

Tim Young, VP of social enterprise at VMware (which recently acquired Yammer competitor Socialcast)

It’s clear that across a variety of industries, social is here to stay. VMware recognized this trend early on and acquired Socialcast more than a year ago — since then, many other companies have followed our lead. Today’s news is yet another proof point that social is becoming a critical and core component in the way that employees work.

Vineet Jain, chief executive of Egnyte, a cloud file server

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is a clear indicator that cloud and collaboration solutions are an assumed part of the enterprise landscape.

With this complete embrace of the cloud, we can move on to the more important question of where enterprise files live, and what are the best deployment models for integrating the cloud into a larger data strategy.  It’s in this larger picture that we begin to understand that a hybrid cloud approach is the one that makes the most sense for the enterprise.

They are able to maintain the physical sensation of “touching” their data on premise, while leveraging the cloud for certain applications.  Over the coming months, the integration of Yammer and social collaboration tools with hybrid cloud data and file strategies will propel businesses into ever more efficient models of doing business.

Alastair Mitchell, cofounder and chief executive of Huddle (a Yammer competitor)

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is the latest in a wave of high-profile acquisitions and consolidations in the social software space. We’ve already seen VMware acquire Socialcast, Jive Software snap up Offisync, Oracle scoop up Collective Intellect, and Yammer purchase OneDrum. And these represent just a small snapshot of activity over the last few years.

The Microsoft/Yammer deal provides further validation of the increasing importance of enterprise social software. Technology that supports the new ways in which people are sharing information and working together is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for businesses, it’s vital. Companies that fail to use innovative social and mobile tools to make the best use of information in today’s knowledge economy will simply get left behind their competitors.

By buying up social enterprise vendors, technology goliaths such as Microsoft and Oracle have obviously woken up to the fact that this really is the future of working. They are now racing to plug the gaps in their own social offerings so that they can respond to increasing demand from businesses and government organizations alike.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum

Many employees at the junior (and now senior) end of the workforce live aspects of their personal lives through Facebook and Twitter, so the idea of introducing similar kinds of tools into the workplace seems to make sense from a communication and collaboration point of view. It’s not just Microsoft eyeing-up the opportunities afforded by the Facebook-led social paradigm shift. Established enterprise IT vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP, are all busy bringing social capabilities to the workplace via a variety of ways and means.

Microsoft already has a product that touts social capabilities – SharePoint Server, but this was designed and built in the pre-Facebook, pre-cloud era. Launched in 2008, Yammer is a new breed of enterprise collaboration solution, designed from the ground up to exploit social, mobile, and cloud technologies, and would sit neatly alongside Skype, the communication product that Microsoft acquired this time last year for $8.5 billion.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer will undoubtedly have an opportunity impact at the commodity end of the enterprise social networking spectrum, but if Google and LinkedIn can address this aspect of the market with a compelling proposition, then all is still to play for.

Mark Eisenberg, director at Fino, a cloud and mobile application services firm

Yammer is a good addition to the Microsoft portfolio. Microsoft’s organic additions to the Office suite, such as MySites in SharePoint, have not gained the traction hoped for and are lacking in the robust features social networking users expect today.

SharePoint is the likely center of gravity for the Yammer platform. The mature integration to SharePoint has to be very appealing.  In addition, the reach into the broad spectrum of platforms supported by Yammer will be a huge boost to Microsoft’s social networking ambitions in the enterprise. SharePoint needs to grow beyond its repository roots, and Yammer can make that happen.

Microsoft’s enterprise social networking story has not been resonating to date.  And Salesforce has been making considerable hay in the social networking sun.  This should put them back on equal footing.

Avinoam Nowogrodski, co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, a cloud-based project management solution

As enterprises continue to become increasingly collaborative through new business processes, we only expect the concept of the social enterprise to rise in popularity.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer best exemplifies that the interest in the social enterprise will continue as business decision makers look to match the right tools with organizational needs. In fact, solutions are adapting to better serve employee needs, and we have seen our customers paying closer attention to which solutions are best suited for their employees, clients, and customers.

… As a result, you will see companies, including Clarizen, looking to fortify their leadership in the social enterprise space with continual innovation and resources put into rapidly updating software to fulfill customers’ requests and expectations. … In the end, this creates a more collaborative and efficient ecosystem.

Do you have a perspective you’d like to share?

Let us know – email me, or add it in the comments below!

Image credit: ShutterStock

VentureBeat recently talked to Nginx co-founder Andre Alexeev about the company’s high-performance server software that is now powering over 25 percent of the world’s top websites.

Andrew Alexeev

“We’re like the man behind the curtain,” Alexeev says. “We power over 70 million sites overall — about 12 percent of the Internet, but still a lot of people have not heard of Nginx.”

Nginx, pronounced en-gin-ex,was recently chosen as one of the foundations of Netflix’s content delivery network, or CDN. CDNs help companies with massive data distribution needs serve clients all over the globe quickly and efficiently. Most companies choose a commercially available CDN, but at some size, it becomes more economical to build your own. That’s exactly what Netflix did — essentially following the YouTube model.

Serving content for Netflix is, obviously, not small potatoes. In June the company said it was serving nearly a billion hours of video each and every month. That translates into huge amounts of data, in some cases up to 32 percent of peak Internet bandwidth in North America alone. Not all of that is transferring immediately to Netflix’s own CDN; the company is taking a measured approach to the project. But the cost savings mean that it is the company’s preferred direction.

That’s just a fraction of what Nginx is doing.

The server technology powers the websites of some of the most well-known brands online. Think the busiest site on the planet: Facebook. And WordPress. Not to mention Hulu, Zappos, Zynga, Dropbox, and Yandex, the big Russian search engine. Why are all these giants of the web using Nginx?

“We’ve built Nginx to be much more efficient, much more scalable,” Aleexev told VentureBeat. “We’ve designed it to extract the most performance from hardware — it’s built to scale from 1,000 concurrent connections per server to 1,000,000 per server.”

The company is very young, exactly a year old today. But the Nginx open source software project has its roots in 2002. The server software was first released in 2004, and the core team has been iterating ever since. Nginx, the company, plans to make money the way many companies built around open source software do: consulting, services, implementation, strategy. And that’s pretty much what they did for Netflix.

“We helped them with the proof of concept and helped optimize the operating system they are using, which is FreeBSD,” Aleexev says. “We also optimized Nginx for the hardware.”

But Nginx also plans to offer commercial products, including extensions to the server software and a new product in the web acceleration space. To accomplish this, the company raised $3 million in venture capital last year from BV Capital, Runa Capital, and MSD. There’s still a long way to go to catch market leader Apache, currently running 64 percent of the world’s top servers. But Nginx’s focus is not just the most sites: it’s the busiest sites.

Server market share as of June – green line is Nginx

Image credit: ShutterStock

You’ve got exactly what a prospective client needs to grow their business: the right service, the right software, or the right product. But how are you going to convince her of that fact when she’s in New York and you’re in Chicago? With a killer online sales demonstration, of course.

But online sales demos need to be done right or you’ll lose the client’s attention, and then you’ll lose the sale. Here are 10 tips for delivering killer online sales demos.

1. Do your homework
   Before you open up your laptop and start broadcasting, spend time talking to and researching your customer. Ask questions: Who is she? What does she need? Why? How will your solution be used? Who will use it? Once you know the answers, customize your presentation accordingly. Make it relevant to your customer’s specific situation, and you’ll close more sales.
2. Don’t waste time
   No one has time to waste on long, drawn-out introductions, explanations, or product demos. Imagine Steve Jobs is at the other end of your demo, and he’s itching to get the big picture and see the relevant details, right away, without any dressing or flowery language. Respect your client’s time, and they’ll respect yours.
3. Make it a story
   We forget facts; we remember stories. Loading a prospective buyer up with a million facts about your software or solution is counterproductive. They won’t remember them, but they will remember being bored by you. Not good. Instead, make the demo a story — the story of your client solving the problem they have. That’s going to be more memorable: There’s a hero, a problem, and a solution. Much more interesting!
4. Walk through typical uses — avoid the feature dump
   We’ve all been in the demo or presentation where a “sales engineer” is engineering his way through every single menu, every single item, and every single option in his unnecessarily complex software. Did you find that fun? Enlightening? Enjoyable? Or were you just about ready to connect your head with a hard object, quickly? Remember that feeling … and do whatever it takes to avoid replicating it in your clients. Because, with apologies, your tedious list of features is just as boring as his. Instead, walk through some common processes or typical uses. Ignore edge cases, unless there’s one the client has specifically mentioned they need. Do not walk through the configuration or installation steps. Instead, show your client what she’ll be able to do with your solution.
5. Customize your pitch for every client
   If your client is in the automotive industry, customize your examples to that segment.Don’t use examples from the packaged consumer goods industry … unless you can find an angle that credibly connects the two.
6. Sweat the small stuff
   This one may be obvious, but if so, it’s evidence that common sense isn’t nearly common enough. Make sure you get all the tech details sorted out before you start. Test, try, demo to a colleague before you demo to a prospect, and work out all the bugs.In addition, make sure you know your clients’ computing set-up, and check with the vendor who provides your screen-sharing or webinar software. Are they compatible? Are there plugins that need to be downloaded and installed? Do whatever you can to ensure that all those details are taken care of before your presentation is due to begin.
7. Provide social proof
   Whether you’re a startup or a huge company, don’t assume your prospect has heard of you, knows your story, or has faith in your ability to provide the correct solution.Ease her mind and reduce the perceived risk by mentioning clients who have used your solution successfully. Apologies, but no one wants to be your guinea pig. Everyone wants to know that this is not your first rodeo.
8. Talk less, listen more
   There is a famous adage in sales lore: “In a single day, Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Every day, thousands of sales are killed with the same weapon.”Don’t let your mouth be your worst enemy. Pause, ask questions, and listen. When your potential client is speaking more than you, you’re doing your job well. And you’re positioning yourself for a sale by engaging your prospect.
9. Be flexible
   Sometimes your client wants to go in a different direction than your pre-planned 15-slide presentation. Remember who is making the buying decision, and let them go. Redirect if absolutely necessary, but do it with caution.Remember, your customer knows what they need to understand and what questions they need answered before they can sign a check. Insisting on sticking to your presentation is not going to make you popular … and an unlikeable sales rep is a poor sales rep.
10. Don’t forget sales 101
    You’re showing your product, you’re customizing the presentation to your client, you’re listening, you’re doing it all right. Just don’t forget why you’re there: to make a sale. When the opportunity comes (and you may have to invent the opportunity), ask for the sale.You may have to use trial closes if you’re early in the sales process, but you need to make this more than simply an informational session. It is, but it’s also a sales call, and your job is to provide the information and context within which your client can make a good decision.

Now you’re a pro: ready to go. Load up with lots of energy and make it fun for both you and your client!

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee

More than 15 months after Apple launched its Mac App Store, the software hub has 10,000 paid and free apps.

The Mac App Store brought the concept of Apple’s iOS App Store to the company’s OS X operating system, but it has attracted far fewer developers than its mobile-focused store. When Mac App Store launched in Jan. 2011, it contained about 1,600 apps and has grown slowly to 10,000. At least the store has attracted nice download numbers: Apple said in December that the store had seen more than 100 million downloads since launch. No doubt that number is significantly higher now.

Comparatively, Apple’s iOS App Store now has more than 600,000 apps and has become the gold standard for mobile software distribution. In second place, Google’s Play store (formerly Android Market) now has more than 400,000 apps for the Android OS.

On a personal note, I’ve only opened the Mac App Store a few times since purchasing a Macbook Air last October. Almost all of the apps I’ve downloaded come from the Web, where developers don’t have to worry about giving Apple a 30 percent cut of the sale.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve used the Mac App Store much and what your favorite current Mac apps are.

via MacGeneration

Alt12 Apps Raises $1.26M in Funding and Launches Social Network for Parents

Kidfolio app helps parents connect and create a digital scrapbook of their child’s experiences and memories 

San Francisco, CA – April 17, 2012 – Alt12 Apps, one of the leading publishers of social health apps, announced today the launch of Kidfolio, a social network and digital scrapbook for parents. In addition to Kidfolio, Alt12 Apps closed its seed round of funding of $1.26M.

The round was led by Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, with participation from InterWest Partners and other individual angels, including HealthTap founder Ron Gutman. This funding will help Alt12 Apps make Kidfolio the best social network for parents and expand the company’s growing social health platform.

Kidfolio supports parents throughout the adventure of raising children, connecting them with a network of other parents to exchange information, advice and support; giving them daily and weekly information on what to expect; and enabling them to capture photos and videos of milestones such as baby’s first steps or first words and make those moments even more memorable with colorful badges and creative visual effects.

“Kidfolio is a social network designed for parents,” says Alt12 Apps CEO Jennifer Wong. “Social networks today have become so broad; it’s no surprise that we’re seeing an uptick in certain verticals for like-minded groups to connect around specific topics. Kidfolio fits this bill. It‘s educational and super fun – a rich, immersive experience that’s highly meaningful for the people using it.”

Kidfolio has six distinguishing features:

• Social Network for Parents. Families can leverage Kidfolio to connect with a broader community of parents to share and compare experiences, exchange advice and offer support.

• Family Groups. Parents can share magical moments with only the people they want, via SMS, email, web and mobile app.

• Digital Scrapbook. From a baby’s first steps to the first day of school, Kidfolio automatically and chronologically organizes the stream of content for families to cherish and share with the people they want.

• Cloud Storage. Photos and videos of your family are instantly stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed from iOS, Android, tablets and the Web.

• Child Development Information. Age and stage information for your child. Daily information provided the first year of baby’s life. Weekly information provided for ages 1-6.

•  Keepsakes. Parents can create and send postcards directly from the app.  Coming soon is the ability to purchase other personalized keepsakes.

Across its two flagship products, BabyBump and PinkPad, Alt12 Apps is seeing impressive numbers around user engagement, making it one of the leading and most active social health platforms in the world. Highlights include: More than 4.5M total downloads; One million monthly active users, with over 25 percent using the app daily; A collective total of millions of posts per month for BabyBump and Pink Pad.

Kidfolio is now available for iPhone and launching soon on Android and the Web.