Launch This Year opened up today, and VentureBeat has 2,000 special invite codes to give away. More on that at the bottom of this post.

Ooomf is an online app discovery platform that also helps app developers make and find users for their apps. Now the company is taking the next logical step: a social step-by-step guide to helping budding entrepreneurs make their mobile development dreams a reality.

“There’s a big problem in mobile,” Ooomf CEO Mikael Cho told me last week. “4,000 new apps are launched every single day. Our goal is to empower the next generation of creators who are interested in building mobile apps … and help them make a sustainable mobile business.”

So Ooomf, which graduated from the FounderFuel accelerator in May 2012 and raised $500,000 in seed funding last year, is planning on providing all the tools developers need not just to build their apps, but also to make money from them.

Launch This Year is a guide and resource kit that includes a launch website, a sign-up page, a press kit, and tools to manage your first users and testers. The site will also put you in a cohort of developers, so you’ve got a virtual team to turn to for help and encouragement. And the site will help with the app store submission process and give you analytics for your app.

“It’s like a personal trainer for the app store,” Cho says. “You pick a day that you want to launch, and we’ll give you a guaranteed step-by-step guide to launching. And if you’re falling behind, we’ll let you know.

In a way, it’s like Codecademy, except that instead of learning to code, you’re learning to build a mobile business. Cho says there are many developers who have built three to four apps that can then sustain a living for them, but there are many more who are capable of building apps and have not yet.

In addition, Launch This Year allows developers to build a community of users who participate in the development of the app — a core Ooomf competency. Not sure which icon to use? Ask the user community you’ve built with Ooomf’s tools. Wondering if the user interface should include custom gestures? See what actual users think.

Perhaps the best part is positive peer pressure:

“You’ll see other people moving along and see things that they’ve achieved,” Cho says. “Which will make you think that other people are doing this and that and oh, I should catch up!”

Invite code for early access:

The site is open for initial users right now, but you’ll need an invite code. Use “venturebeat” to get immediate access.

Image credit: Ooomf

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Apparently, meetings and PowerPoint slides kill more productivity than an alcoholic lunch. And, more than 50 percent of business data is locked away in inaccessible or unfriendly formats, resisting executives’ efforts to review, learn, and react to the most important information in their companies.

Roambi produces apps that free data from spreadsheets and databases and bring it alive in magazine-style graphical layouts, with charts and interactive graphics. More than 100,000 businesses and executives use its products, and the company surveyed those users to learn what works and what doesn’t in business and data.

Roambi’s iPhone app

There’s a great deal of anxiety about data  in the business world, the survey found.

For instance, 21 percent of those executives said that they could only review and derive value from 10-15 percent of their business data. Another 29.6 percent said they could see and act on between 25 and 50 percent of their business data. For 10 percent, key business data was simply inaccessible.

To deal with the problem, over two thirds of businesses said that business intelligence services were critically important investments in 2013, followed closely by mobile hardware and security.

Of course, good data — and good data tools — are one key to improving productivity. But the survey also asked about other productivity issues.

The top-rated productivity devices were laptops, with 40 percent of executives agreeing, followed by iPads at 30 percent and iPhones at 26.5 percent. Desktop PCs were rated only fourth, followed closely by coffee — and having a meeting canceled unexpectedly.

(And I thought I was the only one who was happy when that happened.)

On the time-wasters and productivity-killers side, however, meetings are unsurprisingly first, followed by PowerPoint presentations. And, perhaps astonishingly, office watercooler chats, Facebook and Twitter browsing, and multi-tasking were all rated more harmful than having an alcoholic drink over a business lunch.

Roambi says that 20 percent of the Fortune 50 companies use its tools for data visualization.

photo credit: || UggBoy♥UggGirl || PHOTO || WORLD || TRAVEL || via photopin cc

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The new tools allow HootSuite users to take conversations “offline,” sharing something from Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere on the web to a select group of internal company personnel. They also allow quick real-time chat and promise to galvanize company employees into brand ambassadors.

One of the goals, HootSuite founder Ryan Holmes told me, was simplicity.

“Our product is now three and a half years old,” he said. “It started as a tool for our team to help manage social media, but we’ve grown a lot. We spend two to three hours a day in the tool, and when we leave it’s to jump into email … to send something we found on a social network.”

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite Conversations

HootSuite Conversations skips the email step, keeping the discussion in a web native social tool where any results of the conversation can immediately be shared out to social networks as desired.

“As we look at where we’ve come from,” Holmes says, “Social is now spreading across the whole business. We need better tools for managing that.”

The strategy from HootSuite seems to be to concentrate all of a users’s social activity in one tool. It’s not a serious competitive threat, if any threat at all, to a true intranet or inside-social tool, although one quote in the press release from a Pepsi exec seems to indicate that organizations can use it to communicate with their employees.

However, HootSuite — even with Conversations —  is not currently the kind of tool that everyone in an enterprise will ever need or have. What it does is simplify the communication for social media or marketing teams, especially if the team needs to collaborate on social media messaging before releasing tweets or status updates.

And the new functionality probably will perk up a few ears in the social enterprise space.

Source: HootSuite

Sending messages out that originated inside the organization

photo credit: ohhector via photopin cc

The User Streams tool will be free to everyone and will complement MixPanel’s premium real-time analytics services that help companies understand how users interact with web applications.

With most real-time analytics tools you get information about tens of thousands of users all interacting with a web site at the same time, but you don’t have an understanding of what was common that made something successful, MixPanel cofounder Suhail Doshi told VentureBeat. User Streams differs from competitors like Chartbeat and Reinvigorate because it can analyze data on a micro level, he said.

While the tool can be useful for anyone wishing to gather data on specific user behavior, it’ll be particularly useful for user interface and user experience designers.

Individuals are identified using IP addresses or information from third-party services and automatically tags each person with aliases like “Crimson Alpha”,  “Maroon Beta”, etc. to make it easier to digest. However, publishers can change a stream’s name to whatever they like. That data is stored for a 45-day period and only uses information that’s publicly displayed or made available with consent of the user.

Founded in 2009, MixPanel has raised a total of $1.75 million to build its analytics services. The startup, which has customers that include Quora, Bebo, Slide and Posterous, tracks data for 2,000 sites, according to Doshi.

Check out some additional screenshots of the User Streams tool below.

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After six years at extremely large media and technology firms (Comcast and Viacom), I went back to startups, where I started my digital career in 1996. Problem was, a lot of the infrastructure that was at my fingertips at these larger companies didn’t exist for my new company, leading me to an essential question: How do we operate and compete with bigger established players?

It came down to tools – 10 services that we believe give our four-person engineering group the heft to develop like we had seven or eight people. Rather than paying the extra salaries, though, our total monthly cost is roughly $1,500.

These are rough estimates, of course; your mileage will vary, void where prohibited, may cause drowsiness, etc.

Below, you’ll find my 10 tools for getting things done at a small startup. Like me, you may learn that a little bit of money each month can go a long way. If you know of any tool I have missed, though, please add them in the comments below.

1) Chartbeat (for real-time analytics)

We use this service every day, all day. It came out of Andrew Weissman’s betaworks incubator group in New York (they are the folks behind Summize, now part of Twitter, and bit.ly, amongst others.)

What it does: Provides real-time data on who is using your site, what pages they are on, and page load.
What it costs: $9.95/month ($119.40 annually).
Why we use it: To suss out what people are doing on the site,  see where they are coming from and get an immediate sense of traffic.
Complementary to: Google Analytics, which is the free resource for historical data.
Competitive with: Nothing that I know of.
Nits: Slows down page load, as all analytics packages do, and isn’t as integrated with Google Analytics as we would like (but they are working on it.)

2) Litmus App (for cross-browser compatibility testing)

I have no idea who is behind the service, but their testing machines are based in Seattle. They are usually prompt with email customer service.

What it does: Allows you to test your website across at least 10 browsers.
What it costs: $49/month ($588 annually).
Why we use it: To test our site across multiple browsers. We don’t use the email component, as we are using MailChimp for that (see more later).
Complementary to: Testing your site yourself on multiple browsers.
Competitive with: Nothing that I know of.
Nits: The Macintosh browser renders can be slow, the process can take up to ten minutes, they can’t replicate the experience or visuals for a user that has logged into your site. They also can’t look at page changes that occur when you use Ajax to alter a page element. They can analyze pages that are behind a password (like your staging servers, for example).

3) Mashery (for API gatekeeping)

By Oren Michels, formerly VP of Feedster. We are firm believers that having universal access to our core technology is important to our success, and that getting people to use our site FanFeedr as the tap-water for sports aggregation is important from a business perspective. Having an API (application programming interface) enables this. At their simplest level, APIs allow databases or services to talk to one another.

What it does: Allows you to deploy a multi-expression API to anybody or nobody (you set the rules) plus analytics.
What it costs: $500/month for startups; $5,000 for bigger firms ($6,000 or $60,000 annually).
Why we use it: To gate keep and measure our API usage.
Complementary to: Building your own API.
Competitive with: Nothing that I know of.
Nits: Seems like a lot of cash, but once you price having a engineer build a business rules engine, plus analytics, you will quickly see that $6,000 is actually cheap.

4) MailChimp (for email newsletters)

Free email newsletter campaign manager.

What it does: Allows you to set up email newsletters driven off of your registered users list. These campaigns can be driven off of RSS feeds as well.
What it costs: Free to start, but you will run into $50/month fees fairly quickly if you have site traffic greater than 50,000 users or 5,000 newsletter users ($600 annually).
Why we use it: To push the “hottest” stories of the day to subscribers.
Complementary to: Other outreach that you do, including widgets.
Competitive with: Nothing that I know of.
Nits: MailChimp is a branded presence on your newsletters (in the footer.) The RSS ingestion is in beta, so it has some kinks.

5) UserVoice (for product prioritization)

Also part of the betaworks group, this firm allows you to put a large “Feedback” tab on every page of your site to solicit product ideas from your users, allow them to get help with the site and it allows them to submit bugs (but it isn’t a replacement for your own bug-filing system.)

What it does: Allows you to rank what features are most important to users using a vote system. Each user gets 10 votes.
What it costs: Free to start, $89 for a package with value ($0 or $1,068 annually).
Why we use it: Best way to crowdsource customer development. They are extremely responsive to feature feedback themselves.
Complementary to: Your own ticketing system — and your ability, as a product developer/manager, to intuit customer needs.
Competitive with: Get Satisfaction.
Nits: Relatively expensive, and the page size overhead for the embedded Feedback widget is high.

6) Google Docs (for surveys)

Google. ’nuff said.

What it does: You can conduct multi-part surveys and track responses in real-time using their “Form” element.
What it costs: Always free (thank you, AdWords).
Why we use it: Customer development surveys.
Complementary to: Conducting usability and customer research sessions in person.
Competitive with: SurveyMonkey (yes, another simian product) and WuFoo.
Nits: Embedding images seems impossible (which is hard for usability, obviously, but you can refer people to URLs.) The user experience for viewing the form as opposed to viewing the results is under-developed. No way to create mailing campaigns where the same group of people are polled or new people are solicited (this has to be monitored separately).

7) Silverback (for usability testing)

Easy usability.

What it does: On Macintoshes, it records the screen activity and clicks for any usability test subjects, as well as recording the audio, and even more importantly, the video of the subjects’ faces so that you can see their reaction to tasks.
What it costs: Free the first month, more in subsequent months.
Why we use it: Usability studies.
Complementary to: Conducting usability and customer research sessions in person.
Competitive with: Getting a room with a two-way mirror, moderator and a lot of cost.
Nits: Can’t set up a list of tasks (and scores) for a user to execute, so it still requires a human being to tell the subject what to do.

8 ) Gnip (for RSS and Twitter crawling)

Outsourced API ingestion.

What it does: Make your life easier by allowing you to do one integration to get access to several different social APIs.
What it costs: $1,000 annually for startups.
Why we use it: Cheaper than doing it ourselves.
Complementary to: Mashery.
Competitive with: Rolling your own.
Nits: We are just starting to work on this, so nothing yet.

9) Facebook Connect (for account creation)

Users can use their Facebook profile on our site.

What it does: Allows users to sign up for the service in three clicks, as opposed to typing out their email, suggesting a password, verifying the email, and then having them come back to the site.
What it costs: Free.
Why we use it: Reduce friction for signups. 20% of our site users have signed up, as opposed to the 1-2% signups we were getting on Viacom.
Complementary to: Your own email sign-up process, OpenID sign-up, Twitter Auth.
Competitive with: All of the above.
Nits: It adds considerable overhead to your page size and speed. It also doesn’t fully extend Facebook permissions onto your third-party domain, and doesn’t integrate with the Facebook Comment widget in a neat fashion (forcing us to roll our own). They are working on the latter items.

10) Pivotal Tracker (for feature prioritization)

Allows you and your co-workers to pick user scenarios and features and to vote for them, so that the best ideas rise to the top (theoretically.) I heard about this from Max Ventilla at Aardvark.

What it does: Bug and feature tracking.
What it costs: Free.
Why we might use it: Fanatical usage amongst other software developers.
Complementary to: Your own bug-tracking and UserVoice.
Competitive with: BaseCamp, Assembla.
Nits: Doesn’t allot time for bug-fixing as elegantly as other solutions, can’t take direct input from users on their feature requests and prioritization (to be clear, I don’t know of a firm that does this).

• Antibody-discovery startup Adimab raises new funding (release)
• Lung-device maker Spiration gets $19M (release)
• Sample-prep startup Protein Discovery pulls in $10M (release)
• Inogen takes in $13M for portable oxygen device (VentureWire)
• Healthcare IT concern Medaptus raises $11M for expansion (VentureWire)
• Contract lab Synexis raises $14M (peHUB)
• Medical-device VC firm BioStar Ventures takes in $24M of $80M fund (peHUB)
• Halsa Pharma gets $250K for “natural” obesity-control treatment (release)
• Diagnostics provider Lab21 acquires NPTech (peHUB)
• Galil Medical names Martin Emerson CEO (release)

Antibody-discovery startup Adimab raises new funding – Lebanon, N.H.-based Adimab, a biotech working on new ways to discover antibody drugs, has raised a second round of funding. The company didn’t disclose the size of the round.

Adimab, which raised $6 million last July, is one of several startups looking to design new antibody drugs in bioengineered yeast cells, as we wrote at the time. (Alder Biopharmaceuticals, which raised $40 million in January, is another.) The technique promises to be much faster — and freer of patent restrictions — than current methods. When Adimab completes its current manufacturing facility in the second quarter, it claims it will be able to produce a panel of human antibodies against a particular target in just 90 days, instead of the year or more traditional methods can require.

Investors included Polaris Venture Partners and SV Life Sciences, who also invested in the company’s first round.

Lung-device maker Spiration gets $19M – Spiration, a Redmond, Wash., medical-device startup, raised $18.5 million in a seventh funding round. Investors included Versant Ventures, Olympus Medical Systems, New Enterprise Associates, New Leaf Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Investor Growth Capital and Three Arch Partners.

Spiration has now raised a total of $97 million. It is developing a set of one-way valves for emphysema that can be implanted in the lung’s airways via a minimally invasive procedure. These valves are designed to shunt air away from diseased portions of the lung and redirect it to healthier areas. The company said the funding would support commercialization of its device in Europe and to complete studies for regulatory approval in the U.S.

Other startups working on similar technology include Emphasys Medical, Pulmonx and Broncus Technologies.

Sample-prep startup Protein Discovery pulls in $10M – Knoxville, Tenn.-based Protein Discovery, a biotech with new laboratory technology for protein identification, raised $10 million in a third funding round. Investors included Santé Ventures, Memphis Biomed Ventures, the Southern Appalachian Fund, and the Nashville Capital Network.

The startup is developing technology that aims to “simplify” the process of preparing biological samples for protein analysis. The details are probably too much for anyone who’s not a lab technician themselves, but feel free to check out the company’s explanation if you dare.)

Inogen takes in $13M for portable oxygen device – Inogen, a Goleta, Calif., medical-device maker, raised $12.6 million in its fifth funding round, VentureWire reports. Investors included Accuitive Medical Ventures, Arboretum Ventures, Avalon Ventures, Novo A/S, Numenor Ventures and Versant Ventures.

The company makes and sells portable oxygen-delivery systems for patients suffering from a lung problem called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The product has been on the market for several years, and Inogen says it believes it might take several more before it’s in a position to be acquired or to go public.

• Drug-screening tool maker IonGate Bio raises €4.6M (release)
• Protein-drug maker Molecular Partners gets $5M up front in Centocor deal (PDF release)
• ProtaGen takes in €1M for protein biochips (PDF release)
• China’s Sundia MediTech, a contract research organization raises second round (release)
• Vital-signs implant maker Transoma Medical sets IPO terms, aims for $78M (Edgar)
• UMD receives $1M grant for Baltimore biotech incubator (TechJournal South)

Drug-screening tool maker IonGate Bio raises €4.6M — IonGate Biosciences, a Frankfurt, Germany, developer of tools for drug screening, raised €4.6 million ($6.7 million) in a third funding round. Investors included Heidelberg Innovation and KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau).

IonGate, whose slogan appears to be “Measure More Membrane,” focuses on the study of proteins embedded in cell membranes, particularly “transport” proteins that move molecules of various sorts in and out of cells. The company’s tools allow drug companies to observe the activity of these proteins, apparently in order to determine whether particular drug candidates activate them in order to make their way into the cell interior.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its international operations, especially in the U.S. The company formed a U.S. subsidiary in December, and plans to build out distribution channels here in order to market its surface-protein analysis technology.

Protein-drug maker Molecular Partners gets $5M up front in Centocor deal — Zurich’s Molecular Partners, a biotech developing drugs based on a new class of binding proteins, struck a partnership with J&J’s Centocor unit (PDF link) that yielded the startup a $5 million upfront payment. The collaboration will focus on Molecular’s work with DARPins — the acronym stands for designed ankyrin repeat proteins, in case you were curious — that the company is currently developing as potential anti-inflammatory drugs.

Molecular will receive additional undisclosed cash for research and licensing fees, as well as royalty payments for any drugs that result from the collaboration. We covered their technology — which is interesting, but may also have serious drawbacks relative to monoclonal antibodies, which is Centocor’s specialty — in more detail here (fifth item).

ProtaGen takes in €1M for protein biochips — ProtaGen, a Dortmund, Germany, provider of protein-analysis tools, raised €1 million ($1.5 million — PDF link) in an interim financing. Investors included MIG, Co KG Beteiligungsfonds 3, S-Venture
Capital Dortmund and Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW).

The funding will allow the company to expand its development and sales of protein biochips, which enable relatively quick identification and analysis of proteins from biological samples. Such chips might one day be useful as diagnostic tools, although for now they are mostly used to find and “validate” proteins that might serve as “biomarkers” for the presence or progress of disease. ProtaGen is also working on its own diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease and various inflammatory conditions.

China’s Sundia MediTech, a contract research organization raises second round — Sundia MediTech, a Shanghai contract-research startup founded by U.S. biopharmaceutical veterans, raised an undisclosed second funding round. Sundia didn’t disclose the identities of its investors beyond noting that first-round participant IDG Ventures was also involved in this funding.

Sundia’s press release makes for some amusing reading, and not just because it seems to have been written by someone with a relatively poor grasp of English. The statement is mostly devoted to extolling Sundia’s “excellent reputation” and “phenomenal growth,” not to mention the difficulty it has had beating investors off with a stick. For instance, there’s this:

One month later, Wuxi Pharmatech from the same city had a very successful IPO at New York Stock Exchange as the first Chinese CRO company to go public. Suddenly, CRO became a hot area for all investors to look for opportunities. ”Wuxi’s IPO definitely brought more investors to us”, the company’s CFO Dr. Beijia Yu recalled, ”We did have a difficult time to handle all requests from VCs, PEs and investment bankers for meetings to discuss investment possibility. The response to our fund raise from the investors was overwhelming.”

Maybe they deserve it — it’s difficult to say from here, and of course, it’s not as if U.S. startups don’t sometimes toot their own horn a bit loudly. Still, it’s an interesting example of the different cultural norms at play in a Chinese company.

Vital-signs implant maker Transoma Medical sets IPO terms, aims for $78M — Transoma Medical, a St. Paul, Minn., medical-device maker, set its IPO terms and now hopes to raise as much as $77.6 million. The company intends to price its shares between $14 and $16.

Transoma makes implantable devices that monitor patient vital signs. We previously covered them here.

• MRI image-analysis firm Confirma receives $18M (release)
• Specialty pharma Zogenix raises $18M (release)
• Arcion pulls in $8.8M for topical pain gel (release)
• Bayhill Therapeutics files for $87M IPO (Edgar)
• Peakdale Molecular, chemistry-services provider, raises £1M (release)
• Radiopharmaceutical maker Cellectar draws in $13M (release)
• Critical-care drug maker Ikaria names Daniel Tasse as CEO (release)
• Noxxon Pharma appoints Frank Morich as CEO (release)

MRI image-analysis firm Confirma receives $18M –Confirma, a Bellevue, Wash., developer of automated systems for medical-image analysis, received $17.5 million in a third funding round. Investors included Telegraph Hill Partners, Fluke Venture Partners, Northwest Venture Associates, Prism Ventureworks and Versant Ventures.

The company already sells image-analysis software and associated equipment for breast-cancer detection, and is developing a similar system for prostate cancer. We previously covered the company here.

Specialty pharma Zogenix raises $18M – Zogenix, a San Diego specialty pharma, raised $18 million in a new financing round. Investors included Abingworth Management, Clarus Ventures, Domain Associates and Scale Venture Partners.

Zogenix previously raised $60 million in a first funding round back in Aug. 2006, and apparently has been quiet since then. Our coverage of them is here. Zogenix is developing a needle-free injection system for pain and CNS drugs, which it licensed from Aradigm in 2006.

Bayhill Therapeutics files for $87M IPO – Bayhill Therapeutics, a Palo Alto, Calif., biotech focused on autoimmune disease, filed to raise $86.3 million in an IPO. The company aims to restore the immune system to a state of “tolerance,” theoretically defusing particular autoimmune diseases while leaving the body’s defenses intact.

Bayhill’s approach to inducing tolerance is by using small loops of DNA, known as plasmids, that code for a specific protein antigen that appears to set off the body’s attack against itself. By introducing those plasmids in such a way that they’ll be taken up and “turned on” by the immune-system’s antigen presenting cells, the company hopes to re-educate the immune system to ignore those particular proteins.

Like most novel biotechs at this stage, Bayhill’s technology is intriguing but unproven. Its lead candidate, a drug for multiple sclerosis, has completed a mid-stage, phase II trial, but the result are complex to interpret. The company’s drug is a plasmid that codes for “myelin basic protein,” or MBP, one of the immune-system’s targets in MS. In that phase II trial, however, Bayhill only tested some patients to see if they had high levels of antibody to MBP — and the company only saw a significant reduction in MS-related brain lesions among those few patients with high MBP-antibody levels.