Press & Events

February 22nd, 2012

Visible Announces SMB Solution: Social media Monitoring with VI-LITE

Today, Visible Technologies is putting its SMB face forward with VI-LITE. An innovative and rapidly developing new area of social media, VI-LITE aims to bring the company into the rising small to mid-sized business world with cost-saving incentives and simplicity. And it’s just as tasty as the original.

Good News for the Little Guys

Targeting what it considers to be “one of the brightest areas of social media,” Visible Technologies today releases VI-LITE, a compact version of its more expansive software made for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB), who are anticipated to show 57 percent growth in social media usage this year. The company, a provider of social media monitoring, analytics and engagement software and services, has also added engagement features to its Visible Intelligence platform, made for enterprise customers like Microsoft, Fed-Ex and American Express, along with V∙IQ, a social performance dashboard.

VI-LITE allows those with smaller scaled platforms to engage their customers and chart the impact without mulling through a seemingly endless pile of tools fostering a piece-mail social strategy or paying big bucks to have someone else figure it out for them. Braced for the challenge, the newest edition from Visible Technologies helps SMB brands to host and monitor more impactful discourse with their customers. The software comes with on-demand intelligence to monitor perceptions, gauge trends, and gain insight on customers and competitors.

It also spreads the company’s influence wider in the field of social business, now able to assist all types of enterprises with their advanced technology.

Kelly Pennock, CEO of Visible Technologies, had this to say about the release:

We continue to push product innovation for enterprise customers who rely on the Visible Intelligence platform for listening, analyzing, and engaging with consumers in the fast paced social media market…With VI∙LITE we’ve leveled the playing field for small to medium sized businesses by providing access to the same technology being used by large enterprises. A key to this is having a real-time understanding of what the market is saying and making better informed decisions based on social data.”

Neglecting A Burgeoning Market

According to v3im.com, SMB marketing expenditures came in at about US$ 1.1 billion last year, and are expected to climb upwards to US$ 2 billion in 2012. However, as the article also points out, there’s a difference in merely using social media and using it well. Capitalizing on likes, shares and the enormous wealth of user data does not always come second nature to those new to the field, and many business are missing the boat even with the obvious. Constant Contact pulled together some new figures last year and found that few SMBs were utilizing daily deals like Groupon, despite all the attention drawn to the new IPO.

Thus, a company like Visible Technologies could be just what the doctor ordered. It provides a simple solution with enormous potential that assuredly was never possible in the past.

As marketing guru, Mark Harai comments on his blog, “You now have the ability to create content on a media platform you own and control for about the cost of a cup of coffee a day. What more could you possibly ask for?”

 

February 16th, 2012

Hey Dentists: You’re On Avvo

From lawyers to doctors and now … dentists. Avvo has announced that it’s building out a dentists’ directory in the U.S. to complement its existing lawyer and doctor directories.

But it sounds like this is still a work in progress. Avvo says dentists from all over the country are available to take part in the site’s question-and-answer product, but the actual dentist business listings are only formal right now in seven states: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Washington, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Dentists in other states, though, can still claim their listing by searching for their name in the directory.

I don’t have a strong feeling right now about where Avvo fits in as a local citation source, or even a source of traffic. I do know that I continue to see Avvo pages rank well when I do searches for local medical professionals, ergo it’s a good idea to at least make sure the profile page is accurate, up-to-date and filled out as completely as possible.

February 1st, 2012

What a Facebook IPO means for Silicon Valley

February 1, 2012 –

via GigaOm, Brad Silverberg shares his perspective on how Facebook’s IPO could impact company culture…

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Get ready for a blockbuster — and almost nuts — technology 2012. Why? Because Facebook is doing the mother of all initial public offerings.

And much like Netscape and Google before it, the $5 billion offering is being viewed as the much-awaited catalyst for the technology industry and is expected to set off a flurry of activity. I have been here long enough to cover the IPOs of both Netscape and Google, and on both occasions, the tailgate effect was enough to pull even the clunkers (read: marginal startups) to the proverbial finish line.

We are already seeing four recently public companies — Pandora, LinkedIn, Zynga andGroupon — ramping up their efforts to buy little startups. Google is competing for talent and so are other Internet giants. And now Facebook!

I have been wondering whether we would see a slow exodus of Facebook employees, which in turn would force the social networking giant to go out and start acq-hiring people by buying a lot of tiny startups. And if more of these little companies get acquired, the more dollars would rush into the startups and thus creating a fly-wheel effect. The presence of Facebook millionaires is only going to accelerate angel investment activity….

Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks that the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture.

One of the biggest challenges Facebook will face is the gulf between the have’s and have-not’s within Facebook.  It can create tremendous internal stress and can result in people leaving to follow their own entrepreneurial dreams. This can be both for early people who made it and love the thrill of the startup, and for later people who are contributing, gain confidence, and now want to go off and make their own fortunes.

I think Brad’s point is pretty spot-on. I have seen this haves-versus-havenots  dynamic create havoc at many companies before. I have spoken to multiple people and there is a general sense in the Valley that there is a large contingent of Facebook-ers who are ready to bolt. Google in comparison didn’t see an exodus of employees till recently, mostly because of its deep engineering-centric culture. Google, before it was grafted with the Microsoft genes, was a company where the smartest people went to be with the smartest people. It wasn’t till 2007 that the company started to lose its top-rated talent…

Read the full article on GigaOm.

January 19th, 2012

For Mobile Commerce: The Year Of Convergence And Context

1/16/2012

Guest post in Forbes written by John Caron, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Modiv Media.

Here’s a quick perspective. If you buy a TV via your iPad, is that mobile commerce? In my opinion, no. Yes, a tablet is a “mobile” device, but the experience the purchaser had was with a tablet-optimized website. Ditto for the person who bought a Mercedes SLR via eBay mobile on their smartphone (for $240,001). This is mobile-enabled ecommerce. Not mobile commerce. For the retail and mobile industries to better understand (and report on the growth of) this crazy thing called mobile commerce, or m=commerce, we need to break it out into three categories

• Mobile e-commerce: Transacting with an e=commerce site via a mobile device. Examples include: eBay mobile, Amazon mobile, the Tesco app in Korea, and the majority of mobile commerce “apps.”
• Mobile payment: Payment using the smartphone as the conduit. Examples include: Google Wallet, PayPal, and LevelUp.
• Mobile commerce (in-store): The ability to purchase physical goods in the store via an app that interacts with the store’s point-of-sale system (and bypass the checkout process). Examples include SCAN IT! Mobile from Stop & Shop, Starbucks Card Mobile app, and Chipotle Mobile Ordering App.

Read more at Forbes or visit Modiv Media for more information.

January 18th, 2012

Ignition Leads $20M Round In Cloud Security And Identity Company Symplified

January 18, 2012

Symplified, which provides identity and access management tools for cloud applications, has raised$20 million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners. Existing investor Allegis Capital, Granite Ventures, and Quest Software also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $38.8 million.

With more than 3.8 million subscribers, Symplified offers a cloud identity and access management service for enterprises. Businesses can use Symplified for cloud identity management, access control, single sign-on for employees, user management and auditing across any access device using a unique proxy gateway architecture deployed either in the cloud or on premises. The company provides secure access to SaaS applications like Salesforce, ADP, WebEx, Xactly, Taleo, Success Factors and many others.

Clients include HP, Blue Shield, ESPN, Forest Laboratories, Moody’s, Zynga, Netflix, Rambus and Dolby Laboratories.

Read more at Techcrunch or visit Symplified for more information.

 

January 18th, 2012

Ignition Partners bankrolls flash storage startup WhipTail

1/18/2012

Ignition Partners is continuing its transformation into a national venture capital firm. The latest example is WhipTail, a Whippany, New Jersey company that today announced a second round of venture capital financingfrom RRE Ventures, Spring Mountain Capital and Ignition. The size of the investment was not disclosed. But, as part of the deal, Ignition’s Richard Fade is joining the board.

WhipTail describes itself as an all-flash enterprise class storage array, a solution that boosts storage performance. More than 100 customers are currently using the technology, including inVentiv Health, The Pension’s Trust and Ohio.gov. Today, AMD announced that it replaced 480 15K spinning drives with WhipTail’s solid-state storage arrays, a move that the companies said will eliminate slow response times associated with the older technology.

January 11th, 2012

Ignition’s Artale: 2012 is the Year of Cloud Applications

1/11/2012

For all of you who’ve felt like cloud computing is some kind of foreign territory that you might never visit or fully understand, take heart. Ignition Partners managing director Frank Artale, who specializes in the sector, says everyone else has spent most of the past two years just figuring out what in the hell is going on.

“2011 really rounded out the year of the transition in terms of cloud computing from ‘What is it?’ to ‘How do I do it?’ Artale says. “2012 and beyond … is really, ‘Now I know what this is. I know how to do it. So what are the first projects?’”

That’s where the venture capitalist, who led a rapid-fire series of investments upon joining the Bellevue-based firm last year, sees the next round of opportunities in cloud computing.

January 9th, 2012

Ignition’s John Connors joins Appsense board

1/9/2011 - John Connors, the former Microsoft chief financial officer and current managing partner at Ignition Partners, has joined the board of New York-based AppSense. The virtualization company raised$70 million last year from Goldman Sachs, the first funding round for AppSense.

“John is a trusted expert in the software industry and has an impressive track record of identifying companies with game-changing solutions that significantly impact the way people interact with technology,” said Charles Sharland, AppSense chairman and founder, in a statement.

Read more at Geekwire or visit Appsense for more information.

January 9th, 2012

Hipmunk launches mobile app for booking hotels

1/9/2011 - Finding a hotel in a place you’ve never been, or at the last minute, can be a stressful experience. Hipmunk, known for its visual flight search, launched a mobile application today, with a really pretty way of booking those overnight stays.

“If at any point the user has engaged in active mental math, then we’ve failed somewhere,” said Danilo Campos, Hipmunk’s iOS developer, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Hipmunk was founded on the idea that booking and taking trips is an agonizing process. Thus, you should be able to choose your flights based on the toll they would take on your psyche. The company’s website recently branched out to include hotel bookings but chose not to take that feature mobile until it had the right visual feel that Hipmunk is known for.

Read more at Venturebeat or visit Hipmunk to download the app.

January 1st, 2012

10 Cloud Startups to Watch in 2012

1/1/2011 – Appfog, Bromium, Parse and Scalextreme selected to 10 cloud computing startups that have a chance to make it big in 2012…

AppFog is one of a handful of Platform-as-a-Service startups to launch in 2011, but AppFog is unique because it leverages the open-source Cloud Foundry code as its core. The switch to a Cloud Foundry foundation over the summer resulted in a name change from PHP Fog, as the company was immediately able to support numerous new programming languages. Going forward, AppFog can ride Cloud Foundry’s development wave, while focusing its own efforts on building the best user experience.

Little is known about Bromium other than that is plans to use virtualization technology as a tool for securing the myriad endpoints (e.g., desktops, mobile phones and tablets) that connect to enterprise networks. While securing cloud servers, as other startups such as CloudPassage attempt to do, is important, the advent of consumerization means endpoints need security. Among Bromium’s founders is Simon Crosby, who co-founded XenSource and served as virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems.

Parse is trying to become a PaaS specialist for mobile apps, a laudable ambition given how many people now rely on their mobile devices just about everything. It will be difficult to distinguish itself from competitors such as Stackmob, as well as from web-app PaaS offerings such as Heroku and AppFog, but Parse seems to have the right ideas in mind. It has a backend focused on the needs of mobile apps, and a frontend designed for mobile developers that might not have extensive programming chops.

What ScaleXtreme lacks in sexiness it makes up for in functionality. Everyone needs server-management software, but not everyone needs the big, expensive software offered from traditional software vendors, or even wants to manage software at all. ScaleXtreme gives users a cloud-based service to manage both physical and cloud-based servers, and, it says, has also garnered a lot of interest from cloud providers thinking it might be a good value-added service to their users who want more control.

Read the full article on GigaOm.