Congratulations to Kirk Simpson and the entire team over at Wave Accounting for raising $12 Million in Series B funding from the Social+Capital Partnership (s23p), Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures. We couldn’t be happier for this team!
Company Description | Wave helps small businesses achieve success. How? Wave Accounting is a 100% free online app that takes away the pain associated with accounting and bookkeeping, and gives business owners back their time. Wave eliminates laborious manual entry tasks, and yields accountant-friendly reports, without requiring the business owner to know anything about accounting. Along the way, Wave is revolutionizing the business side of small business SaaS apps: Sophisticated, privacy-protective revenue streams allow us to offer an extraordinary product completely for free — not just a free trial. Wave has already attracted 95,000 small business signups in over 200 countries around the world in just over 11 months.
There are some amazing numbers coming out around crowdfunding. The first ever Crowdfunding Industry Report, from Massolution, revealed that $1.5 billion was raised in 2011 from sites like Kickstarter, Indigogo, etc. That’s a lot of investment!
Perhaps the most talked about crowdfunded project lately has bee the Pebble Smartwatch. Just this week, the company had had so much success, they were forced to cut off funding offers at $1 and stop taking orders. This is not only a success story for Pebble, this is a success story for startups and entrepreneurs everywhere who can potentially use crowdfunding investment to kick their projects into high gear.
“Driven by equity-based and reward-based crowdfunding, our forecasts indicate total funds raised will nearly double this year. Additionally, the passing of the JOBS ACT will have a profound effect on the growth of crowdfunding in the U.S. In 2013, we expect securities-based crowdfunding to bring new sources of funding to many startups and early stage businesses,” said Carl Esposti, chief executive of Massolution in a statement. (Souce: VentureBeat).
Below are four types of crowdfunding we’re seeing gain traction:
1. Equity Based Crowdfunding: Investors receive a stake in the company. (If Pebble goes big, you get a percentage of the prize).
2. Donation Based Crowdfunding: Contributions go towards a charitable cause. (You paid for 50 children in Africa to receive watches).
3. Lending Based Crowdfunding: Investors are repaid for their investment over a period of time. (You invest in Pebble, and get your money paid back over time).
4. Reward Based Crowfunding: Investors receive a tangible item or service in return for their funds. (You invest in Pebble, and get a first edition watch.)
So, now that we see where this is going, how do you feel about this? Is this a win for entrepreneurs? Is it a passing fad? Is it legally doomed?
Brands used to give preferential treatment to wealthy or re-occurring customers with loyalty cards and targeted ad campaigns. However, with the rise of the social web, companies have to rethink their marketing tactics. In the world of “viral” going after “influence” may give you more bang for your buck.
Influence measurement company Klout just announced a partnership with Cathay Pacific Airways. San Francisco International Airport (SFO) visitors can now show a Klout score of 40 or higher on their Klout iPhone app and freely enter the Cathay Pacific First and Business Class Lounge. Previously, only First or Business class passengers were allowed entry.
Is influence now becoming more important than wealth or loyalty?
Klout thinks so. Klout has analyzed over 85 million people on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter based upon an individual’s ability to influence other’s actions (ex. retweets, likes, comments). Over 3,000 brands and applications use it to give special “awards” to heavy influencers. Read more about Klout’s recent partnership on Klout’s blog.
SlideShare, founded in 2006, provides a way to share presentations on the Web. According to LinkedIn, Slide Share in March had nearly 29 million unique visitors. The site has nearly 7.4 million presentations embedded on more than 1.4 million Web domains. (Source).
We look forward to seeing the results of this acquisition in the end of this year. Stay tuned…
Congratulations to Rob Bailey and the entire team at DataSift for raising $7.2 Million in funding from GRP Partners and IA Ventures. Only last week we were watching them present at Under the Radar! Woot woot!
Company Description:
DataSift is the social-data platform company, enabling enterprises and entrepreneurs to mine the social web for insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and millions of blogs and forums. As a licensed Twitter resyndication partner, DataSift gulps down and analyses data across the social-web, enabling companies to create powerful filters to listen for social-signals about brands, breaking news, and public opinion. Delivered as a cloud-platform, DataSift does the heavy-lifting for companies creating social-media monitoring, social CRM, business intelligence, financial-trading and news-monitoring applications
Already missing Under the Radar? Our partners over at GlueCon have another great event and it’s happening May 23rd-24th, 2012. Many of our Under the Radar alumni will be there as well… (i.e. Sumo Logic, MongoLab, Eucalyptus and more). Information and discount offering below:
Gluecon started as a conference where we aimed to look at the companies and technologies that were “gluing” together different layers of the web. To be fair, we weren’t totally sure what that meant when we started Glue, but the problem-space seemed big and juicy.
At the first Gluecon (4 years ago), we found the companies and attendees attracted to the show were all interested in this brand new thing called, “cloud computing.” Accordingly, we set out to put the most technical content we could find on stage. And then an interesting thing happened: when you put a bunch of cloud engineers in a room together, the conversation invariably turned to APIs (application programming interfaces). That led us to talking extensively about APIs at Gluecon, year 2. And, as it turns out, as soon as you stand up and say, “APIs” — mobile developers come running (that was year 3). As we’ve entered year 4, the combination of cloud and mobile – where the API is the lynchpin — has led us squarely into the direction of “big data.” As luck would have it, when you’re building apps for mobile and working in the cloud, you end up with a lot of data — and the need to manage it at scale.
Gluecon, then, has evolved into a conference that focuses on the intersection of Cloud Computing, Mobile and Big Data — where the API binds it all together, and the content is aimed squarely at developers (you’ll never hear about the “business case” at gluecon). Some of Gluecon’s confirmed sessions include:
The Badass Beyond Hadoop: Percolator, Dremmel, Pregel
Asynchronous Architectures for Implementing Scalable Cloud Services
Why MongoDB + Node.js is the new server-side stack
Real World Big Data – Achieving 100K transactions per second with a NoSQL Database
Building the best mobile libraries to consume all kinds of backend APIs
Architecting for Performance in the face of Mobile and APIs
Developing RESTful Android Client Apps
Big Pipes: Architecting for High-Volume Realtime Social Data
Is that a token in your phone in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? OAuth and Mobile Devices
Integrating Application Intelligence for Better Management and Visibility into Web Applications
In addition to all of the sessions, Gluecon features a hackathon, a CloudCamp, and an amazing gathering of developers. If you’d like to attend Gluecon, please use the code, “disc123″ to take 10% off of your registration.
If you missed any part of yesterday’s Under the Radar Conference, than you missed out. However, if you missed Yobie Benjamin’s morning keynote session on the “Art of Scaling” than you REALLY missed out
Luckily, we have it filmed and you can watch it below. Get ready for words like “Quadrillions” and notes on $150 Million being transferred through a mobile CitiGroup app. Enjoy!
In case you missed it, here is their company profile:
Company Description:
Cloudscaling designs and builds open cloud infrastructure solutions for enterprises, service providers and governments who want the cost, performance and scalability of the leading public cloud services, but inside their datacenter. It delivers this via the Cloudscaling Open Cloud System, the first complete cloud infrastructure solution based on OpenStack technology and proven to run at large scale. Cloudscaling has more production OpenStack experience than any other company, including successful deployments at KT (formerly Korea Telecom), Internap and others. The Cloudscaling engineering team comes from cloud pioneers like Amazon Web Services, NASA, GoGrid, RightScale and eBay. Founded in 2006, Cloudscaling is headquartered in San Francisco.
Presenter: Troy Angrignon | VP Sales & Marketing | Cloudscaling
Troy Angrignon is a sales and partnering executive with 20 years of experience in the IT arena, spanning network consulting services, enterprise software, software as a service, enterprise and web 2.0, and cloud computing. As Vice President of Sales & Partnering at Cloudscaling, Troy is responsible for global sales and partner development. Prior to Cloudscaling, Troy was ISV partner manager with RightScale and consulting strategist at Appirio. Before this Troy guest co-chaired Under the Radar’s 2009 cloud conference as well as Vancouver’s 2009 Cloud Camp. Before those roles, Troy served as President of a web 2.0 startup, Emerging Technology Strategist for Business Objects, and owned a computer consulting services firm that operated for ten years.
NuoDB Founder and CEO Barry Morris was one of our Grad Circle presenters at this week’s Under the Radar conference. As we’ve done with other presenters, we took the opportunity and asked Barry to give us a few insights on his company culture.
1. If your company was a movie, which one would it be and why? The Social Network – because we don’t want any of the fat cats steal any of our database innovations. Luckily, we’ve filled broad patents early on.
2. If you could give a TED Talk, what would it be about? It would be a talk about Elastic Scalability at the Database Layer. Read more
Today’s Under the Radar was a smashing success. Over 350 people attended and watched over thirty bleeding-edge startups tell their stories and showcase their technology. Over half of UTR’s past presenting companies have raised major funding and/or been acquired after hitting our stage, and something tells me this batch of companies might bump this statistic up even higher. Every single startup hit it out of the park!
Judges included executives from Google, Nike, Wells Fargo, Netflix, and more…
