Monday February 6, 2012

Personalized eCommerce Is Already Here, You Just Don’t Recognize It

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal (@nireyal), a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators. Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com. Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for [...]

Keep It Simple, Stupid: The Enterprise Version

Back in 2009, my colleague MG Siegler wrote a brilliant piece titled ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid,‘ which delved into how having a simple and easy to use product is a key formula for winning in the consumer tech space. A few days ago, Greylock Partner John Lilly echoed MG’s thoughts, explaining that simplicity is quite [...]

An Arab Spring For IT

Editor’s note: Alan S. Cohen is Vice President of Marketing at Nicira. A 20-year IT veteran, Alan has held executive positions at Cisco, Airespace, Tahoe Networks, IBM, US WEST, Coopers & Lybrand, and the Department of Energy. Change in the air. It’s palpable. Those of us in the technology world are witnessing a transformation: A [...]

Yammer Time: In 2011 “Pretty Much Everything Tripled”

Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.” Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. [...]

Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I know of [...]

ShoreTel To Acquire Cloud Communications Company M5 Networks For Up To $146 Million

IP phone company ShoreTel has today announced that it is beefing up its offerings by acquiring unified communications company M5 Networks in a deal that is valued up to $146 million in cash and stock. ShoreTel’s motivation for snatching up M5 was an effort to be able to offer its customers a choice of either [...]

Stealth Startup Numecent Raises $2 Million Series A For “Cloudpaging” Technology

Numecent, a stealth startup building a patented “cloudpaging” technology, just raised $2 million in Series A funding from undisclosed corporate investors. The $2 million tranche is a part of a larger $10 million funding round, and is in addition to the $7.5 million in seed funding the company has already raised from private investors. Exact [...]

In Partnership With Microsoft, RIM Launches BlackBerry Business Cloud Services

Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of [...]

Log Data Management And Analytics Startup Sumo Logic Raises $15M From Greylock And Others

Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million. Today, Sumo Logic emerged from [...]

Synacor Files For IPO, Acquires HTML5 Cloud OS Carbyn For $1.1M

Online content, portal and front-end technology solution Synacor filed its amended S-1 today for an IPO looking to raise $75 million. The filing revealed that this month Synacor acquired Carbyn, an HTML5 operating system that lets users put their files, applications and more in the cloud and access them from any device’s browser. It paid [...]