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Thursday, December 12, 2013
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Microsoft has been adding firepower to its Windows Azure cloud platform to compete against the likes of Google, Amazon and Dropbox and Box to attract enterprise users to create, host and distribute data around the world. In the latest development, it is launching the Cloud OS Network, a group of some 25 service providers and system integrators that offer services on Windows Azure. The list includes household names in the business like Capgemini, Capita IT Services, CSC, Dimension Data,, Fujitsu Ltd., Lenovo, Tieto, and T-Systems, as well as smaller players like DorukNet, Outsourcerylike VTC Digilink and Wortmann.


Microsoft says that Cloud OS covers some 90 active markets and already services over 3 million customers daily across 2.4 million servers in more than 425 datacenters.


If past efforts were about adding more functionality to Windows Azure — price drops, improved data access, better API management, improved security — today it’s about adding more credibility by way of the network effect.


Microsoft says the deal covers services in total that run on Windows Server with Hyper-V, System Center and the Windows Azure Pack, and it’s a sign of how, while Microsoft itself bidding for more business in enterprise, it’s not yet taking on managed services and integration itself in any meaningful way, looking instead to third parties to provide that bridge.


For now Microsoft is playing up the fact that this means diversity and freedom of choice for its users. “This network of leading service providers will help our customers create datacenters without boundaries for apps, data and device management,” said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft corporate vice president of Cloud & Enterprise Marketing, said in a statement. “That translates into greater diversity of solutions, more flexibility and lower operational costs for customers, allowing them to focus on their core business rather than managing datacenters.” It also begs the question, though, of whether Microsoft at some point may choose to take more of these functions under its own control for more direct sales.


For now, it seems like Microsoft is more intent on growing the ecosystem of those who interact with Azure, in a bid for platform if not services supremacy. “By joining Microsoft in the Cloud OS Network, leading cloud service providers can quickly and cost-effectively develop new services, attract new customers and increase revenues,” Microsoft notes.







1:40 AM

Microsoft has been adding firepower to its Windows Azure cloud platform to compete against the likes of Google, Amazon and Dropbox and Box t...

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Wednesday, December 11, 2013
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Spire Technologies, a big data startup based in Bangalore that helps customers manage current and future talent requirements using a contextual search engine, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from an unnamed institutional investor.


Saurabh Jain, the founder of Spire, said that this investor has requested two-months embargo before his name can be made public. The financing will be used to hire more data scientists, engineers and also bolster sales, marketing efforts.


Started in 2008, Spire has raised $1 million to date in seed funding from several angel investors. This series A funding, valued Spire at $23 million based on an annual revenue of about $400,000.


Jain said that one of the key differentiators for Spire is that its solution can be used to not just recruit fresh talent, but also in detecting and preventing employee frauds, CRM and market intelligence. Spire’s list of customers include IT services companies Atos, Cognizant Technology Solutions, and JDA Software. To date, Spire has processed nearly 700,000 candidates for these customers.


SAP’s SuccessFactors and Oracle’s Taleo seem to be decent rivals for Spire, when it comes to the recruitment and talent management market.


With nearly three million engineers in the Indian IT industry, employers such as Cognizant and JDA are always looking for ways to reduce time taken in hiring candidates because they are under pressure to deliver software projects faster. Spire helps these companies identify talent with required skills, and matches them with the projects they can execute, all in real time.


“Our contextual engine is also able to map potential candidates, both from outside and within a company, against projects in the pipeline. This helps them reduce the number of staff sitting on the bench and improve profitability,” said Jain.


With fresh money, Spire plans to tap into U.S. and other Asian markets. However, unlike the Indian market, where its customers need help in sifting through thousands of candidate profiles and matching them with relevant projects, companies in U.S. are not always looking to hire in thousands.


But Spire is betting on its big data, contextual search engine to offer solutions beyond just smart recruitment for customers in U.S. and elsewhere. Employee fraud detection and prevention, is one of them. Spire wants to become ‘Palantir‘ for its customers, and use the big data engine in tackling challenges beyond recruitment and talent management. But that would require testing Spire’s current engine in situations it has not dealt with before.







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Ottawa-based Shopify has already raised a considerable amount of money, especially for a Canadian company, and its Series C round continues that theme: The e-commerce company has raised $100 million from existing investors, as well as new ones, including OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners; the goal is to help Shopify drop the ‘e’ and embrace all kinds of commerce, for all kinds of merchants, in all kinds of settings.


This $100 million round adds to the $22 million Series A and B rounds raised by the company in 2010 and 2011, both of which came considerably late compared to the startup’s original founding back in 2006. Shopify has had a revenue model since day one, however, and anticipates exceeding $1.5 billion in products sold via its platform this year. That’s more than double its $750 million in revenue last year, which makes sense because it has jumped from around 40,000 shops operating on its platform last year to over 80,000 at present.


“In terms of why we’re raising, we’ve talked about what we see as the future of retail,” explained Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief product officer. “There’s kind of this concept that the future of retail is online vs. offline, or just online. We don’t actually believe that; what we believe is that the future of retail is all about consumer choice.”


Consumers want to be able to buy in-store after shopping online, go see products at retail locations and buy online afterwards, or do some other combination of the two. They want their retailers to be able to provide them with that kind of experience, according to Finkelstein. So to help their clients accomplish that, the next goal of Shopify is to “transition from an e-commerce company to a commerce company,” he says. Moving from online to more involvement in in-store sales efforts isn’t going to be cheap, even if you take a relatively hardware-light approach.


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Shopify’s goal is to serve a merchant’s needs wherever they need to sell – online, from a storefront, at a festival or show, or just when they happen upon a chance customer. To serve those ends, the company has already created a point-of-sale system and Square-style mobile card reader, both of which were released earlier this year. Finkelstein suggested we’ve only seen the beginning of the product rollout to support its new mission, and said to watch out for further developments coming out of this funding to be revealed next year.


I asked Finkelstein about how Shopify feels about launching initiatives that put it head to head with strong players in the space, including Square. The answer lies in Shopify’s roots, which are firmly planted in online shopping. Square’s DNA is in offline, so Finkelstein says there’s an opportunity for a company to step up and recognize that there’s little to no line left between those two things for a lot of small- to medium-sized merchants.


“There are these players, for example Square which is firmly focused on the offline market, and you have guys like Etsy who are focused on the online market, and you have others that are just focused on mobile,” he explained. “But you have no one out there who’s really putting this all together. Our view is that Shopify is sort of that hub right in the middle, and one spoke might be your online store, one spoke may be your offline store, and one spoke may be your mobile device, and one spoke may be cross-selling on Amazon marketplace, but it all ties into Shopify.”


To that end, Shopify has been experimenting with real world retail to glean lessons about how best to operate at that nexus. PopifyTO, an event held recently with a pop-up shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market district, is a perfect example. “We know the online world pretty well, but we want to learn as much as we can about the offline world, so this year you saw a couple things from us around that,” Finkelstein said, referring to Popify as well as the launch of Shopify mobile.


Shopify’s run rate and growth are putting it on track to be one of Canada’s top tech companies, especially in light of a waning BlackBerry. It’s currently at 320 employees, up from 120 last year, and anticipates growing to over 500 next year spread across its Toronto and Ottawa offices. This huge raise is just the most recent evidence that it is quite possible the Canadian tech company to watch.







9:09 PM

Ottawa-based Shopify has already raised a considerable amount of money, especially for a Canadian company, and its Series C round continues...

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Video distribution startup Ooyala raised another $43 million today, in a round of funding led by Australian telecom service provider Telstra...

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Consolidation ahoy!


Playhaven and Kontagent, two of the bigger gaming services companies that help developers run analytics and retain their players, have decided to merge into a combined company worth “hundreds of millions” of dollars in an all-stock deal. Neither company could give more specifics on how the deal was structured.


“The valuation in the hundreds of millions, but I won’t tell you where,” said Andy Yang, who was Playhaven’s CEO and will lead the combined company. They have yet to choose a new name. Playtagent? Konplaygent, anyone?


Playhaven is a company that the biggest game developers use to retain their players with personalized promotions. They help studios segment out players, by whether they tend to play for free or are bigger spenders (known as “whales”). With the top gaming studios reaching tens of millions of players, retention has evolved into a big data problem.


Kontagent, on the other hand, is an analytics company that started off by catering to social game developers on the Facebook platform. They are used by everyone from EA to Zynga to China’s Tencent.


It’s a natural marriage of sorts. One company provides very deep analytics on game play, while the other offers a monetization solution.


“With this combination, we’ll be the 800 pound gorilla and the clear market leader,” Yang said. “Our clients were asking us about how they could take all the valuable data they’ve collected in Kontagent and act on it. We ended up having a shared vision.”


Yang said negotiations took somewhere between two and three months, and the boards of both companies were supportive. The two companies will end up reaching 22,000 apps and 400 million monthly active users together. The new company will employ 160 people and Yang and Kontagent’s CEO Josh Williams said there were no layoffs or redundancies with the deal. Williams will become the chief technology officer of the new company, while Yang will take the helm as CEO.


They expect to merge their two products by the end of 2014.


“At the moment, we’ll have to take one step at a time and have a simple integration at first,” Yang said. “It’s day one of our marriage, and we just moved in together.”


The merger comes at a time where we could be seeing more consolidation. As mobile and social gaming have matured, literally dozens of service providers offering competing analytics and monetization solutions have cropped up. Not all of them will survive.


“The market is very fragmented right now and you’ll see consolidation in the space,” Yang said.


As for why they decided to call it a merger and not an acquisition?


“This is a merger of equals. We are two leaders in our respective categories and there’s no money changing hands. This is not a traditional acquisition,” Yang said.


The two companies have raised at least $26 million from investors including ALTOS Ventures, Battery Ventures, e.ventures, GGV Capital, Maverick Capital, Morgan Creek and Tandem.







4:38 PM

Consolidation ahoy! Playhaven and Kontagent, two of the bigger gaming services companies that help developers run analytics and retain their...

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An image shared on Glow's 'Success Stories' page by an app user

When Glow launched its iPhone app for tracking female fertility earlier this year, it garnered attention for its slick design, $6 million Series A funding, and of course well-known founder Max Levchin. But its real success — how many women conceived with the help of using the app — couldn’t be judged right away. These things take some time.


Now that it’s been a little over four months since its public launch, Glow is finally talking numbers, and they are pretty impressive. More than 1,000 women have become pregnant through using the app, Glow announced today. The company also rolled out a new section of its website called glowing.com/stories, dedicated to the success stories of people who have conceived while using the app (the feature image is one of the photos shared to the site.) The entries are pretty touching, and they show how this app impacts its users’ lives in a personal way not often seen in consumer tech.


Also today, Glow issued an update to its iOS app and a new feature called Glow Community, which is a social space to allow couples who are trying to conceive and parents-to-be to share their experiences. The updated app also has some revamped calendar features that purport to help users track their fertility with more precision.


Max Levchin has said that his goals for Glow go much farther than what we see on the surface. Levchin’s larger vision with HVF, the umbrella company that Glow is operating under, is to use machine learning and big data to solve the world’s big problems, particularly those concerning healthcare — pregnancy is just the first piece of the puzzle.


Levchin talked to TechCrunch TV about what inspired him to launch Glow and his larger motivations back at the app’s launch in August. You can watch that in the video embedded below:








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It’s no secret that Kleiner Perkins has been restructuring its partnership, with some partners leaving and others transitioning to new roles within the firm. Today, the firm announced that General Partner Bing Gordon, who was the former Chief Creative Officer at EA, will become the firm’s Chief Product Officer, leading KPCB ProductWorks, a program that provides entrepreneurs the intensive mentoring, recruiting and technical assistance needed to create consumer, enterprise and digital health products and services.


At a discussion with reporters today, Gordon told us he will continue to make investments and take board seats on behalf of Kleiner Perkins but since the much of his time will be spent with ProductWorks, he will be scaling back his board involvement compared to traditional VCs.


This follows KPCB’s announcement last week that RISD President John Maeda is joining the firm as Design Partner. Maeda will play an important role in ProductWorks by helping entrepreneurs build design DNA into their company cultures, Maeda, along with KPCB General Partner Mike Abbott, former VP of Engineering at Twitter; and Partner Megan Quinn, former head of product at Square, will all be working on ProductWorks with Gordon.


“Great products are at the core of great companies,” said KPCB General Partner Ted Schlein in a release. “Even the most brilliant founders need help refining, prioritizing and executing on their product vision. With ProductWorks, our goal is to deepen and extend our support to entrepreneurs who are building stellar products.”


So what is ProductWorks? As Gordon, Abbott, Quinn and Maeda explained today, it is sort of like a university for Kleiner founders. The program includes mentorship from the above partners, but also one-on-one product review sessions with a KPCB partner during ProductWorks’ monthly Office Hours at the KPCB San Francisco office. The firm says it will also hold a series of product workshops led by key industry product managers. ProductWorks will focus on giving founders access to top product, design and engineering leaders through events with KPCB’s product, Engineering and Design Councils, and through various meetups and events.


As Gordon commented, it is institutionalizing much of what Kleiner already did with founders into a central place. And Abbott and Quinn explain that ProductWorks is also about how to scale knowledge, mentorship, and education to a wide group of people. Part of that will involve more writing by Kleiner partners and Maeda, and disseminating this information on their site.


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Another aspect of FounderWorks will be recruiting. Because of the talent challenges every founder faces, KPCB will be giving entrepreneurs access to a pool of young designers, engineers and product managers via the KPCB Design, Engineering and Product Fellows programs. For the past two years, Kleiner Perkins has operated a summer fellowship program to place top engineering, product and design talent from colleges at the firm’s portfolio companies.


ProductWorks sounds similar in theory to design team at Google Ventures, but with additional product and engineering focus as well. Adding these valued-added services, especially with the advice of someone like Maeda or Gordon, can be meaningful for entrepreneurs. As for operationalizing ProductWorks, Gordon says they may hire a few people to support the initiative but it certainly wouldn’t be an army of talent.


It’s an interesting move for Kleiner that sheds some light on some of the questions we all had following the restructuring news. Many weren’t sure about Gordon’s fate, in particular, with the partner not being named as a managing director of the firm’s early-stage fund. But it seems that with this announcement, Gordon is staying at Kleiner and will be making investments, just not as many. “In a time of change, we wanted to go back to our first principles,” said Gordon. Part of that is helping entrepreneurs. Another part, he explains, is productizing VC, and Kleiner was among the first to hire outside talent to help with recruiting and marketing.


Can VCs productize product and design? Perhaps–Google Ventures has seen success with its design sprints, and in this VC climate, most firms are trying to find ways of sharing knowledge across the portfolio. Despite any internal shakeups the firm has a deep bench of product and design talent within its partnership, and within many of the company in the firm’s portfolio.







3:39 PM

It’s no secret that Kleiner Perkins has been restructuring its partnership, with some partners leaving and others transitioning to new rol...

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