What’s New blog: Squad news and happenings
Adding Digital Fuel to the Fires of Businesses Everywhere
Last week our client Digital Fuel, a provider of customer-facing service management software, launched the latest release of its ServiceFlow solution with a focus on the emerging global trend of businesses shifting from selling products to selling services. To understand this trend, think of what Dell does. It doesn’t just sell the physical computer; it provides all of the services associated with computing, from technical support to updates/grades to maintenance.
In the context of the modern service provider, consider this example: 10 years ago, a company had its own IT department to take care of all of its computers, servers, network, troubleshooting, etc. Now, that same company buys IT services from an IT service provider. That company will outsource its HR needs too. It’s like the adage, “People don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits because they want them, they buy them because they want quarter-inch holes.”
Similarly, more companies are realizing that they can more effectively fulfill their IT, HR and other services-based needs without burdening themselves with having to establish and maintain IT and HR departments and infrastructure. As more and more of these services are outsourced, the complexity of keeping track of these various contracts and commitments gets increasingly complicated.
What Digital Fuel is doing with ServiceFlow is tabulating which service agreements have been made and with which service providers; monitoring how well those services are being provided according to those predetermined agreements (SLAs); and calculating and reporting on the business impact of the entire transaction. In short, it allows for companies to closely track this complex web of relationships to ensure that they fulfill their obligations to their customers.
Leading up to this launch, we’ve talked to a ton of reporters, bloggers and analysts and there seems to be an almost universal sentiment that Digital Fuel is addressing is a really fundamental component of how businesses are going to look at these issues in the future.
This an exciting vision with huge ramifications for the way businesses are evolving and it’s been great to help Digital Fuel share this story with the world.
Former Client Adify Acquired
If the rumor is true, Former client Adify has been acquired for an estimated $300 million. We worked with Adify for a year and a half, helping to launch the company and evangelize its pioneering vision for vertical advertising networks.
Congrats to Russ, Larry and the rest of the Adify team!
Entriq Catches the Online Video Wave
You know a trend is hot when one day you wake up and realize it’s become a part of your life and you didn’t even notice it. Take online video. Only a few years ago, YouTube was starting to catch on as the place to check out stupid pet videos. Now, we tune in to Hulu to watch The Simpsons and check out Lost clips on our mobile phones. Of course, this kind of disruptive growth has sent the traditional broadcasting world scrambling to keep up. For those who attended this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas earlier this month, the rise of multi-platform digital video was the topic of the hour. I was at the event with one of our newer clients, Entriq, which is fortunate to be in the exact right place at the right time. Entriq’s latest acquisition was covered by such industry watchers as Shelly Palmer, Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee and Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute on TV Week, all of whom recognized the significance of Entriq’s position in this emerging market.
Broadcasters are all too aware they need to keep up with this online video thing in a big way, but this isn’t an industry that is used to swift and constant change within its delivery approach. And for the most part, none of their operations were designed to take this new technology into account. Entriq offers a technology platform in which customers interact with a web-based tool that provides them with everything they need to manage their video publication and delivery. Its technology platform ensures that video content is translated into the proper digital format, and then delivers it to wherever it needs to go, whenever it needs to get there—be they multiple web sites, set top boxes, mobile phones, podcasts, or some combination of all of them.
With customers such as Clear Channel, Sky Broadcasting, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Oprah’s Harpo Productions, MTV and CBS, Entriq has carved out a significant niche in this nascent and growing area. The company demonstrated its latest platform at NAB, and I witnessed customer after customer nod and smile in amazement at Entriq’s vision and opportunity. They all seemed to recognize the power and simplicity of using one all-encompassing solution that ingests, publishes and monitors video content in whatever way, and on whatever platform they choose.
Happy Enterprise RSS Day of Action!
We here at LaunchSquad are huge fans of RSS. Most of us use it personally to keep up on our daily news and reading, and we also use it as a company to keep up on coverage and intelligence for our clients, as well as sharing information internally and externally. Having a constantly updated stream of information sent right to your desktop is more than a huge advantage – it’s essential in our line of work. It also helps that our client NewsGator is the biggest and best name in this area.
A blogger and IT consultant in Australia by the name of James Dellow created the RSS Day of Action a few months ago, and it’s finally here today. With a bit of help from other enterprise RSS advocates, and from NewsGator and other vendors, Dellow put together a wiki chalked full of podcasts, case studies, white papers and other goodies to help spread the word about the use of RSS within companies.
For anybody who deals with high volumes of information on a daily basis, RSS is an essential work tool. We’d be swamped without it, and waste many hours a week trolling through different blogs and news sources looking for the information we could have had delivered right to us. If you’re not using RSS already (you admittedly may be even if you don’t know it), hop on board – today’s as good a day as any.
Online Video Advertising on a Roll
For years, television advertising was hailed as the most effective way to reach a large, targeted audience. Seeking out young males? Look to sports channels and run your ad during halftime. Women 30-45? Place your spot between “Days of Our Lives” scenes.
The Internet, along with television advances like Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) have made the advertising budget picture fuzzier these days. The most desirable, hard-to-reach demographics are fleeing to online media, while DVRs allow those still watching the boob tube to skip commercials altogether. Savvy agencies are embracing this change by putting their dollars where their audiences are – and increasingly, that’s online.
Luckily there are online video advertising networks like BrightRoll to make this transition easier and more effective. That last part’s key – the Internet is a different, more complex animal than television, and it’s important that branded advertisers work with networks that provide access to their most sought-after customers in a brand-friendly environment.
When BrightRoll started in 2006, it pioneered a model that delivers reach and scale, without expensing transparency, control and access to top quality publishers – By sticking to its high-quality guns (today advertisers can deliver ads on more than half of the top 100 online publishers through BrightRoll), the company has made itself into the world’s largest video advertising network, having served more than 1 billion advertisements in the last 12 months.
And two weeks ago, just to add a shine to its already “bright” future, BrightRoll announced a proprietary, first-of-its kind HD advertising unit that allows advertisers to deliver campaigns in high definition across its network of publishers. We’re excited to watch an HD Godzilla jump out of our online video trailers, and see the rain drops fly off of our dream car as it rounds a corner in an online advertisement. And even more, we’re looking forward to watching BrightRoll push the quality envelope in order to target audiences no TV ad has reached before.
Honey, I Shrank the Files
Ocarina Networks made a splash this week, officially launching itself and introducing its key product at the Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, Florida. Ocarina’s technology offers relief from the mounting storage nightmare that threatens to swamp Internet data centers—especially those for sites that offer free, unlimited storage of photos, email or other web content.
Such influential technology trades and blogs as Byte & Switch, GigaOm, TechWorld, and InfoStor jumped on the news, giving Ocarina plenty of ink and top billing at the event. Click here for more coverage.
If you’ve ever sat down and thought about it, you’ve probably guessed that the files you share—whether pictures of your dog, or that new Amy Winehouse track you sent around to fifty of your closest friends—all have to be stored somewhere. Ocarina’s optimization solution winnows these files down to never-before-seen levels, freeing up more space for everyone else’s web content, and having a major impact on costs and upkeep for companies who are storing that data on your behalf.
It should come as no surprise that Ocarina’s first customers are photo sharing sites and web-based email providers, which are groaning under an increasingly huge load of data that must be not only stored, but made immediately accessible to users. As one customer, European photo sharing company Photoways Group puts it, “We believe that Ocarina will pay for itself within six months of installation, save us millions of Euros over the next few years, and change the way we buy storage and the overall economics of our business in the future.”
But this is just the beginning. Ocarina’s solution can be applied to a number of other companies that face storage headaches, in such sectors as medical records, oil and gas, and banking, to name a few. With backing from Kleiner Perkins and Highland Capital and an impressive group of storage and technology execs, the future is bright for Ocarina.
Get Your Evernote Invites!
Evernote, a note-taking application that recently unveiled a private Web beta is flying hot off the pan. The program allows users to instantly capture and recall information across any device or platform and effortlessly search for it using Evernote’s advanced text and image recognition technology.
Bloggers and mainstream media alike have been swooning over the newly-redesigned product calling it a ‘backup for your brain’ (Wired), the ‘first choice for mobile enthusiasts’ (ZDNet) and ‘pretty amazing’ technology (TechCrunch).
Most recently, the company also launched its first Mac beta—making the program’s functionality available for die-hard Mac fans and on-the-go consumers alike.
We’ve been busy giving away beta invites for folks to give it a go. Haven’t gotten yours yet? Shoot us a note and we’ll let you in on the fun!
Vivaty Brings Your Web to Life
Vivaty, a new client here at LaunchSquad, just came out of stealth mode this week, kicking off the private beta of their first product, Vivaty Scenes.
Backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), Vivaty has been building a platform that changes the way we experience the web – to what we call the Immersive Web, a visually rich experience that amplifies self-expression and social engagement. The Immersive Web is the next level of how users interact with the Web, making the everyday activities of catching up with friends on Facebook, watching videos on YouTube and looking through photo albums on Flickr truly come to life.
Vivaty is taking a distributed approach to bringing these experiences to the user, so you will be able to access it anywhere, right through a Web browser. Founded by a solid team of leaders in Internet, gaming and graphics technologies, Vivaty has the chops to shift the standards for social experiences on the Web.
We’re thrilled to be talking about the company publicly, as is Keith McCurdy, Vivaty’s CEO, who expressed his own excitement on the company’s blog.
Here’s some of the great coverage we’ve received so far:
The New York Times
San Francisco Chronicle
ZDNet
VentureBeat
Virtual Worlds News
And this is only the beginning – Stay tuned for more news on Vivaty’s much-anticipated public beta launch or check out their Facebook page.
InsideView and the New Socialprise
The amount of information on Facebook and other social groups gets bigger (and more complex) by the second, as people accept friend requests on their iPhones and continuously update their profiles. But does that mean anything for businesses? Can companies find meaningful ways to leverage this new information channel in the enterprise?
One of our clients, InsideView, which provides a business search and intelligence application, has explored this in-depth since last year. A few days ago, the San Francisco-based company made its mark in Enterprise 2.0 by coining a fresh term called “Socialprise” to explain the mash-up of social tools and the enterprise, as ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez calls it in her post about the company’s launch.
As part of the Socialprise concept, InsideView launched SalesView, one of the first true applications created to help businesses leverage the rich, unstructured data from social groups and media. The product collects data from 20,000 online sources (Facebook, Web 2.0 sites, press releases, you name it), sorts it and then custom-highlights the most meaningful information based on the triggers customers set.
InsideView also announced mash-ups with SugarCRM, Landslide Technologies and a future one with Microsoft, making SalesView integrated for free use with CRM apps, as Phil Wainewright comments on in his blog post on us.
InsideView is hosting a launch party next Thursday, April 3 at 6 pm to celebrate their incredible launch. The party will feature San Francisco’s best – crab, Anchor Steam beer, sourdough, a live DJ spinning house and, of course, top folks from the Enterprise 2.0 community. If you’re interested in attending, just send us an email to insideview(at)launchsquad(dot)com, and we’ll put you on the list.
Interactive Barcodes Coming to a Store Near You
With the rise of e-commerce, traditional stores have been scrambling to compete with the convenience of online shopping — and LaunchSquad client StoreXperience was at National Retail Federation’s 97th Convention & Expo this past January to launch its new mobile commerce solution.
StoreXperience harnesses the power of customers’ cellphones to merge the convenience of online shopping with the tangible benefits of the in-store experience. Using 2D barcode technology, StoreXperience allows customers to access in-depth product information by scanning bar-codes at participating retail locations with their mobile phones. The company then leverages advanced CRM capabilities so that retailers and brands can create relevant promotions and offers based on customer behavior at specific locations in real time.
The NRF Conference was as an ideal launching pad for StoreXperience, and the Javits Center served as a mock retail floor where attendees were able to win prizes by scanning product information from various booths using StoreXperience. StoreXperience also helped the National Retail Federation manage its Silent Auction. Then later in the month, Microsoft officially announced StoreXperience’s inclusion in the Startup Accelerator Program, a highly selective program that helps high-potential startups accelerate their time to market.
StoreXperience has been well received in the media, and soon consumers everywhere will join the experience as well.
