The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The Trade Show Is Dead: Samsung Not Launching Galaxy S II Successor At MWC
- Garage Sale App Rumgr Raises $500K From Zappos CEO (And Others)
- AOL Beats The Street, Q4 Revenue Down 3 Percent To $577M
- Ecommerce Platform Shopify Acquires Mobile App Development Studio Select Start
- Mint.com Launches Android Tablet App
- The Birth Of An American Giant—Basic Clothing Sold On The Web
- Facebook’s Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior
- Wunderkit Launches Beta For Its Wunderbar-designed Productivity Platform
- Best Overall Startup Dropbox Looks To The Future
- LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Says IPO “Didn’t Really Change Anything”
- Videoplaza Secures $12 million For Ad Platform Led By Qualcomm, Innovacom
- And The Crunchie Goes To…Pinterest, Best New Startup Of 2011
- Daily Crunch: Fine Tune
- Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s Tweet-Level Censorship
- Imgur Wins Best Bootstrapped Startup, Sees 1 Billion Pageviews Per Month
- Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup
- Omniture Co-Founder’s Business Intelligence SaaS Company Domo Lands $20M From IVP
- Crunchies Introduction by Host Harris Whittels
- Watch The Crunchies Awards Live [Video]
- What Recession? Razer’s $2800 Blade Gaming Laptop Sells Out In 30 Minutes
| The Trade Show Is Dead: Samsung Not Launching Galaxy S II Successor At MWC Posted: 01 Feb 2012 09:05 AM PST  The Samsung Galaxy S II successor will not be in attendance at Mobile World Congress. The company issued a statement this morning indicating that the phone will get its own event, one that’s closer to its launch date. But don’t worry that much for MWC. Samsung will still debut “exciting new mobile products.” But just not the exciting new mobile product. Samsung is smartly holding its best cards until the time is right. Samsung,
Samsung is the latest big consumer electronic company to diminish the role of trade shows. Previously, company’s were seemingly held hostage to the trade show circuit. These large events were the only way to get the attention of the press. But slowly major companies started pulling back from trade shows. Apple dropped Macworld after the 2008 show. Microsoft is pulling back on CES. Now Samsung isn’t launching its iPhone 5 competitor at a trade show but instead its own event. These major players no longer need trade shows to gain an audience with the press. The Samsung Galaxy S II was, and still is, a major hit for Samsung. However, it could have had a more strategic launch. Samsung announced the phone in early February at MWC. The phone then launched in European and Asian markets in early June. It didn’t hit the States until September. Samsung is no doubt looking to eliminate the gap between announcement and launch. Hot products like the Galaxy S II can hold the Internet’s attention only so long. Despite the message of Sammy’s current ad campaign, the company wants to curate a launch that will get consumers excited enough to camp outside of stores for the phone — and launching at a trade show just doesn’t work this time.
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| Garage Sale App Rumgr Raises $500K From Zappos CEO (And Others) Posted: 01 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST  Three Zappos alums are trying to replicate the garage sale experience on your smartphone — and their startup Rumgr just raised a $500,000 seed round from a group of investors that includes Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Co-founder Dylan Bathurst says the basic idea came from his own attempts at selling furniture before a move. When users open the app, they’re presented with a list of goods that people nearby are offering for sale. If they see something they like, there’s a public chat associated with each item, where they can ask the owner questions. And if you’re ready to make a purchase, you can negotiate the price, then go to a private chat to work out the hand-off details. An early version of Rumgr is already live, but the startup is launching an update today that includes a separate screen for making offers, a map of nearby sales, and new tabs for tracking what you want to buy and sell. Now that Bathurst and his team are actually launching a company, they’ve discovered that there are, in fact, other garage sale-type services out there — and of course there’s always Craigslist. The difference, says co-founder Ray Morgan, is that Rumgr wants to fundamentally reinvent the experience for a new device. “We’re not trying to replicate Craigslist on the phone,” he says. For one thing, Rumgr is trying to make the listing process as easy as possible. You just upload a photo and that’s it — no description necessary. And the app doesn’t allow users to search for a specific category, like couches or beds. It sounds like the company isn’t completely ruling out a search feature in the future, but Morgan says that’s not the point. Instead, users are supposed to stumble on random, cool stuff, just as they would at a garage sale. Bathurst and Morgan admit that it may be a challenge to attract enough people in each location for the app to be useful, but they say Rumgr can become a vibrant community with a relatively small core of engaged, connected users — which is what happened in early tests, with only 40 or so of the team’s friends and colleagues. In addition to Hsieh, Rumgr’s investors include Zappos CTO Arun Rajan, Fred Mossler, and Andrew Donner, CEO and owner of Resort Gaming Group. Following Hsieh’s vision of revitalizing downtown Las Vegas and turning it into a startup hub, Rumgr is based in Las Vegas. (After all, as former Zappos employees, Bathurst, Morgan, and their third co-founder Alex Morgan already live there.) Among the items in their office? A whiteboard purchased off Rumgr.
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| AOL Beats The Street, Q4 Revenue Down 3 Percent To $577M Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:36 AM PST  AOL reported better than expected fourth quarter earnings this morning. The company, which owns TechCrunch, reported revenue of $576.8 million, which is down 3 percent from Q4 2010 revenue of $596 million. Earnings came in at $0.23 per share, or $22.8 million, which is down 66 percent from $66.2 million a year ago. Analysts expected $0.16 per share. AOL says total revenue decline was its lowest rate of revenue decline in 5 years. While global advertising revenue was 10%, subscription revenue declined by 18%. AOl also saw a 15% growth in global display revenue and a 20% growth in third party network revenue. "AOL took a large step forward in Q4 and I am very pleased with the way we ended the year,” said AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong. “Our Q4 results highlight AOL's ability to methodically improve our consumer offering and financial performance. We continue to invest in AOL and will continue to improve our operations during 2012." The company says that traffic was flat from Q3 2011 as “growth in the Huffington Post Media Group sites offset declines at MapQuest and AIM.”
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| Ecommerce Platform Shopify Acquires Mobile App Development Studio Select Start Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST  Shopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired mobile app and game studio Select Start Studios. The acquisition will be used to further Shopify’s mobile commerce initiatives. While all Shopify stores already include mobile optimized storefronts and checkouts, the acquisition of S3 will bring over 20 new mobile-focused engineers to the Shopify team to continue developing mobile offerings for merchants. Shopify’s web-based platform allows anyone to set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate PayPal or other credit card processor for payments. Storefronts and shopping carts can be customized and the platform assures security for all transactions. Today, the ecommerce platform has over 20,000 active online stores in 80 different countries. for example, Angry Birds uses Shopify’s platform for e-commerce sales (and a sizable portion of Angry Birds online store's sales are made through a mobile device, says the company). Shopify recently raised $15 million in new funding.
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| Mint.com Launches Android Tablet App Posted: 01 Feb 2012 06:14 AM PST  Mint.com, the financial service we first mentioned at TechCrunch40 in 2007 (wow, that seems like a long time ago), announced that they have launched a new native app specifically for 9 and 10 inch Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. This new app, available in the Android Market, will join the previously available versions for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile phones. Curiously, there is no mobile web version (that I have been able to find). 7 inch tablets should work, but this new app is not specifically optimized for them. No word as of yet, when this new version will be available for the very popular Kindle Fire since there is already a version of Mint in the Amazon app store. For the unfamiliar, Mint is an app/web system for aggregating and managing all your disparate financial accounts and then graphically expressing that data for easy, "at a glance" understanding of your expenditures. With the exception of some slight usability tweaks (like reordering some modules) and a few subtle font changes, this latest version offers no new functionality. What it does do, however, is make the service available as a native app for the growing number of Android tablets out there.
Making the service available in as many emerging channels as possible is a credible strategy — a wise move for any financial service these days — but beyond those projections, Mint.com has some interesting statistics to back up this approach. Ken Sun, from Mint's parent company Intuit, revealed as much to me by noting in a quick Q&A that 40% of Mint's registrations are completed on mobile devices. Additionally, 30% of Mint's user base are "mobile only" users, so it makes a lot of sense to distribute the functionality where user activity is increasing. In any event, the graphics and charts appear to look as nice as they do on other platforms. This is sure to make any XOOM or Galaxy Tab wielding Mint user a happy camper today.
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| The Birth Of An American Giant—Basic Clothing Sold On The Web Posted: 01 Feb 2012 05:45 AM PST  Nothing is made in this country anymore. In terms of actual manufacturing, America is increasingly at a disadvantage. The logic of the global economy moves jobs overseas. Get used to it, we are told. Well, Bayard Winthrop thinks the conventional wisdom is wrong. He wants to bring manufacturing back to America, in the apparel industry, no less! His clothing startup, American Giant (gotta love the name), launches today. American Giant is starting small, with a line of basic sweatshirts made in Brisbane, CA. American Giant doesn’t have any stores. It sells its sweatshirts only on the web, and soon will expand to other men’s basics such as T-shirts, polos, and button-downs. While the cost of materials and labor would be cheaper in Asia, a much bigger portion of the cost of a shirt is distribution. By eliminating stores and going direct to consumer, American Giant can cut out a lot of the costs in the apparel industry and pass the savings onto consumers while still making better quality clothing. By controlling manufacturing, Winthrop also expects to be able to reduce his production cycles to 3 months or less instead of the 18 to 24-month cycles typical in the industry. By reducing cycle times, American Giant will be able to experiment more with styles and products and then increase production for the products which generate the most demand. American Giant is a startup with 10 people and less than $5 million in funding, but the little giant is going after the Gap, J.Crew, and Old Navy. There is “no brand affinity” to those stores among men, argues Winthrop. “They don’t have a reason to live.” How does he hope to compete? Simple: with better quality. “I feel like in the apparel sector the whole idea of quality has gone way,” says Winthrop, who has spent the past two decades in the apparel industry, most recently as CEO of Chrome, a chain of urban men’s clothing stores. Winthrop wanted to make an “old-school navy sweatshirt” like the one his father used to wear that lasted 40 years, not the kind you buy at Old Navy. His first line of sweatshirts will be priced at a reasonable $59, but they are made with heavyweight cotton, double- and triple-needle stitching, thick ribbing at the waist, additional panels along the side for a better fit, and other construction details such as metal snaps designed in-house. But can a Web-only clothing brand work? “Consumers are moving more online and spending more money online,” notes Winthrop. “Consumers’ expectations of value and quality are changing. The days of us walking into Macy's and paying full retail for a shirt are basically going away.” Watch the video above, in which Winthrop shows off his new sweatshirts and talks about his approach to American manufacturing.
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| Facebook’s Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior Posted: 01 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST  Facebook has an answer to those wondering how it will justify its IPO price and keep revenues growing as it saturates key markets: a new behavioral ad targeting system. Facebook has been quietly rolling out the beta of “Open Graph action spec targeting” which allows advertisers to target users by what they listen to, where they travel, what they buy, and other in-app activity. These behaviors can more accurately denote conversion potential than a user’s biography or interests, That means Open Graph action spec ad targeting could turn finding a needle in a haystack into shooting fish in a barrel. The targeting options could improve the ROI of Facebook ads, and thereby attract a new class of advertisers, get existing ones to spend more, and pull in dollars from search, display, and offline channels. Since Facebook has already exhausted much of the supply of highly monetizable first world users, it will need to make more money per user to grow revenue. Higher click through and conversion rates of action spec targeted ads will allow Facebook to charge advertisers more per click and waste fewer impressions to get those clicks. It’s also expanding ad inventory by complementing its ad sidebars with Sponsored Story ads in the web news feed, and it will likely monetize its mobile user base in the same way. By serving more ads at a higher cost per click, ad revenue will grow with time. Until the launch of action spec targeting, advertisers looking to target those with purchase intent often went to search or ad networks employing cookie retargeting that scraped a user’s browsing history. Facebook only offered biographic, social, and interest targeting. These are effective for institutional brand advertising and demand generation, but aren’t as useful for reaching users in the purchase funnel. Direct response performance advertisers sometimes had to buy large volumes of clicks to drive one conversion. Open Graph action spec targeting will help these Facebook advertisers reach users who’ve stated they’ve already made a related purchase, or plan to. This could help it break out of the demand generation stage of the purchase funnel and into the more lucrative demand fulfillment stage where Google search ads currently reign. Some Facebook advertising experts tell me action spec targeting could double ad conversion rates. At f8, Facebook announced that advertisers using the Facebook Ads API for buying large campaigns could layer existing targeting parameters targeting users who’ve taken any of the 3 official launch actions: ‘listened’, ‘read’, and ‘watched’ through apps like Spotify, The Washington Post Social Reader, and Hulu. For example, ads could be targeted to anyone who ‘listened’ to ‘Lady Gaga’ or ‘The Rolling Stones’ on Spotify. This was useful for advertisers from these verticals, such a record labels, concert promoters, book publishers, and television networks. Now that 60 new partnered apps have launched and Facebook has begun approving non-partnered apps and their actions, a much wider range of advertisers will be able to make use of behavioral targeting. Airlines could target those who said they “wishlisted” Barcelona via Gogobot, a fashion retailer could target those who “bought” a specific purse via Payvment, and restaurants could target anyone who “wanted” a burger at a competitor’s restaurant via Foodspotting. Advertisers with their own Open Graph apps have the most to gain. For example, Groupon already runs huge Facebook ad campaigns, but now has an app through which users can take the action of “buying” deals. Groupon could now retarget ads at any user who has already bought a deal through its app. That audience of previous buyers likely has a much higher conversion rate than its Facebook Page fans or any biographical demographic. Open Graph action targeting is still in beta so the technical side is bit tricky. There’s no browsable database of Open Graph apps, actions, and objects to target, so advertisers need to find their Open Graph ID numbers by clicking on them in an existing activity story. Third-party developers of Facebook Ads API platforms and services like Nanigans, TBG Digital, and AdParlor are trying to make it easier by creating pre-defined audience segments that advertisers can target. It will take a few years for behavioral targeting to start boosting revenues. More Open Graph apps need to launch and gain traction so there’s something to target, Ads API platforms need to adapt, and the benefits of behavioral targeting will need to be proven before ad spend starts to shift towards the system. Some users might not be thrilled about being targeted by their app activity. However, they opt into using these apps, and might as well see relevant ads if they’re going to see them anyway. In the end Facebook, advertisers, and users will all win. Facebook will boost revenues, advertisers will be able to better reach their customers, and users will see more relevant ads based on activity in apps they voluntarily installed, rather than cookies dropped on them without permission. [Image Credit: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acquisio]
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| Wunderkit Launches Beta For Its Wunderbar-designed Productivity Platform Posted: 01 Feb 2012 02:01 AM PST  Berlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder has just launched their private beta for their productivity suite Wunderkit. This is an extension to their simple, yet well designed task list manager Wunderlist, which was acclaimed both by early adopters and users. With Wunderkit the startup is now taking a next step. They’ve stuck to the user experience that, while beautifully crafted on the one hand is surely tricky to get used to, and have taken their core task manager several steps further by wrapping a fully fledged social network around it. Whereas RememberTheMilk had been their primary competitor until now, the company is now directly competing with full virtual workspace apps such as Podio or Asana, all of them trying to re-invent peoples’ work and organize their private and professional lives.
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| Best Overall Startup Dropbox Looks To The Future Posted: 01 Feb 2012 02:00 AM PST  Dropbox took home two of the big awards at this year’s Crunchies: Best Cloud Service and Best Overall Startup. Both times, CEO Drew Houston came backstage to talk about the company’s growth and its future. When asked about what he’s planning for 2012, Houston offered some very broad thoughts, saying that “one of the most exciting things that’s happened” recently is the explosion of devices that people can use to access Dropbox from. When he looks to the future, he says one of his big goals is to move further in that direction, unifying the experience across those devices. “Really, today people might think of us as something they put on their computer or their phone but really what we’re trying to do is build is this fabric that ties together everything that you use and simplifies your life,” Houston said. You can watch video of Houston’s interview after his big victory below.
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| LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Says IPO “Didn’t Really Change Anything” Posted: 01 Feb 2012 01:30 AM PST  LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner won this year’s Best CEO award at the Crunchies, and backstage he talked about LinkedIn’s big milestone from the past year — its IPO. “The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone,” Weiner said. It’s a common theme from Weiner’s interviews before the IPO, when he would dodge questions about the timing and emphasize that it was just another step in the company’s growth. This time, Weiner added that he’s proudest of the fact that “for us, it didn’t really change anything.” Weiner was also asked about Facebook’s impending IPO and whether he had any advice for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His answer: “Go in when you’re ready. I’m sure they’ve given it a lot of thought.” You can watch a video of the full interview below.
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| Videoplaza Secures $12 million For Ad Platform Led By Qualcomm, Innovacom Posted: 01 Feb 2012 01:30 AM PST  With the huge rise in the consumption of online video it follows that services to monetize that video are becoming hot properties. To that end, today Videoplaza, a ‘sell side’ ad management platform for video, has secured a Series B round of $12million led by Qualcomm Ventures and Innovacom. The company previously received rounds from VCs Creandum and Northzone, which also participated, which means VideoPlaza has received $18 million to date.
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| And The Crunchie Goes To…Pinterest, Best New Startup Of 2011 Posted: 01 Feb 2012 01:11 AM PST  Online pinboard Pinterest, the hot new startup that’s growing at a phenomenal rate, won the Crunchie for the Best New Startup of 2011 at this year’s Crunchies. (This, despite the fact that it actually launched in 2010). The reason? Crazy, crazy traffic and growth. In November, the site had reportedly seen a 2,000% increase in pageviews, according to comScore. That wasn’t year-over-year growth, mind you, but the increase Pinterest had seen since June. At 421 million pageviews, the site had already surpassed more established players, like Etsy, for example. But co-founder Ben Silbermann stayed tight-lipped on the hard metrics behind Pinterest. In an interview backstage after the win, he declined to provide the number of users or even the number of pins. (There were “a lot,” he demurred.) However, Silbermann did attribute Pinterest’s success, in part, to its design and ability to connect people with each other. “Pinterest is a visual site, and a lot of people are visual by nature,” he explains. “But at its core, Pinterest is a site that connects people who are passionate about the same things. In the same way that people who use Facebook are excited to connect with people they care about, people on Pinterest are excited to be inspired by people with similar tastes.” (For what it’s worth, I still think Pinterest could have easily won Best Timesink, too, had it made the cut!)
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| Posted: 01 Feb 2012 01:00 AM PST  Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: FlatFrog Offers Up A New Multitouch Table Self-Guided Bullet Could Strike Laser-Designated Targets From A Mile Away Years After Being Dropped, ZFS Finds Its Way Back To The Mac Apple Is Totally Serious About That Stuff They Put At The End Of Their Emails
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| Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s Tweet-Level Censorship Posted: 01 Feb 2012 12:42 AM PST  After Twitter creator, executive chairman, and product lead Jack Dorsey accepted the company’s award for Biggest Social Impact at the Crunchies, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis asked him about a recent, controversial decision to block individual tweets on a country-by-country basis. Will that hurt Twitter’s ability to make a positive impact on the future? “Absolutely not,” Dorsey said. “It actually censors less.” That’s because the only alternative would be “global” censorship of the entire site in certain countries, he said. He also said it allows Twitter to be transparent when an individual tweet has been hidden. Dorsey also talked more generally about Twitter’s impact, agreeing with Alexia that its real power comes in its ability to handle a range of communication, whether it’s daily life, personal struggles, or broad political issues. “That range is really, really hard to do for most technologies,” he said. Dorsey had to do a second interview when he won for best founder, covering his roles at both Twitter and Square (where he’s founder and CEO). Asked to choose between the two companies Dorsey said it will be like choosing between two members of the family. And when Alexia jokingly repeated the common belief that to accomplish what he does, Dorsey must not sleep, he laughed, “I sleep, I sleep.” How much? Four or five hours a night. You can watch the full video of Dorsey’s “social impact” interview below.
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| Imgur Wins Best Bootstrapped Startup, Sees 1 Billion Pageviews Per Month Posted: 01 Feb 2012 12:39 AM PST  Here at the 2011 Crunchies, Imgur, the photo-sharing site made popular by the Reddit community, won the category of “Best Bootstrapped Startup.” And given the traffic numbers the startup is seeing, it’s easy to see why. According to Founder Alan Schaaf, the site sees 30 million uniques per month and a billion pageviews. (Yes, a billion!) Schaaf admits that the startup is sort of ”under the radar in the tech community.” But there’s clearly a large demand for an image-hosting site that doesn’t focus on personal or professional photos, but on other types of images. “I like to think of an image as different from a photo,” says Schaaf, “you would put your photos on places like Facebook or Flickr, but if you just have an image – which can be like a screenshot, a meme, something you hacked together in PhotoShop – you need a place for those too. We want to be that place.” The full backstage interview is below:
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| Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup Posted: 31 Jan 2012 09:32 PM PST  This year's fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream, check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, winner of “Biggest Social Impact”. His poise and dedication helped keep the microblogging service online so it could aid revolutions. And a big congrats to Dropbox on its win for "Best Overall Startup”. The company’s young founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (from right to left below) demonstrated the power of the freemium model, and had the guts to turn down a 9 figure acquisition bid. Here are the nominees and winners: Best Technology Achievement Best Social Application Best Shopping Application Best Mobile Application Best Location Application Best Tablet Application Best Design Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired) Best Cloud Service Best International Startup Best Clean Tech Startup Best New Device Best Time Sink Biggest Social Impact Angel of the Year VC of the Year Founder of the Year CEO of the Year Best New Startup of 2011 Best Overall Startup of 2011 Thanks to everyone who watched, voted, or attended the Crunchies. This award show is about the tech community, and we’re honored to have you as our readers.
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| Omniture Co-Founder’s Business Intelligence SaaS Company Domo Lands $20M From IVP Posted: 31 Jan 2012 08:58 PM PST  Domo, the SaaS business intelligence startup launched by Omniture founder Josh James, has raised $20 million in new funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). This round brings total investment in Domo to $63 million. Previous investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, and Hummer Winblad. As you may remember, Omniture is a web analytics SaaS company that went public and was subsequently bought by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. Last year, James debuted his next project, Domo, with $33 million in funding from Benchmark, and aimed to tackle the business intelligence space. Domo purchased a company called Corda, and started accepting customers on a selective basis to test out the platform. James tells us in an interview that he believes existing business intelligence offerings are static and non-collaborative. He is seeking to put all of this in the cloud, but in a scalable and easy to use format so people can actually make sense of (and make money off of) massive amounts of business data. James is hesitant to reveal exact details on how the application works but says the SaaS is a “dramatic departure for existing business intelligence offerings.” The application is able to analyze business data and display it in a user-friendly and realtime format. "We're continuing to build out our company to attack and completely reform an old industry that doesn't work, while creating a brand new way of doing business with our business management platform," said James. He also tells us that the company still has much of the $43 million in funding raised last year in the bank but decided to raise additional funding because the company wanted to be aggressive with acquisitions in the coming year. IVP apparently was outbid by Benchmark in the last round, and jumped at the opportunity to to work with James and fund Domo. IVP actually backed Omniture back in the day, and as Todd Chaffee, General Partner at IVP explained to me, “our investment thesis can be summarized in two words-Josh James.” Chaffee says that James is in the category of the Marc Benioffs, Larry Ellisons and Michael Dells of the enterprise world. “When he showed us what he was doing, we were in. We were blown away by what he built. He’s crazy enough and passionate enough to have a bigger exit than Omniture.” “Josh and the Domo team are at the forefront of a huge opportunity,” said said Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who is also a Domo Board Member. “Domo has the team, the vision, the focus and the product to transform an entire market.” James says that for the past 9 months, Domo has had a controlled release with a number of enterprise companies. “The hit rate has been high of people who want it pay for it,’ he says. And the product is aimed at large enterprises as opposed to small businesses. "We've been testing the market through an early adopter program and the overwhelming response signals that we've tapped into a major pain point for CEOs and other executives. Today, we can't install customers fast enough. We are scheduling customers weeks out and have a two-month waiting list for our beta product,” James said. The new funding will also be used towards sales and marketing efforts. The company plans to reveal more news in the next few months including names of large global customers and more details behind its products and strategy The business analytics software market set to hit $33.9 billion in 2012, and is only expected to grow in the coming years. James is taking on the likes of giants like Oracle, Microsoft, and others, but clearly he has a proven track record of creating lasting and valuable companies. And investors agree. Below is video of James talking at the Web 2.0 Summit last Fall and another one showing how the Fort Worth Police Department is using Domo:
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| Crunchies Introduction by Host Harris Whittels Posted: 31 Jan 2012 08:31 PM PST |
| Watch The Crunchies Awards Live [Video] Posted: 31 Jan 2012 07:14 PM PST |
| What Recession? Razer’s $2800 Blade Gaming Laptop Sells Out In 30 Minutes Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:12 PM PST  For months we’ve been waiting on Razer’s Blade notebook, a $2800, 17-inch beast that we weren’t sure whether to laud or mock. It’s just that it’s kind of a strange thing to see making a big debut when people are more cautious than usual with their money, and PC gaming (as ever) is being declared dead. But after our hands-on at CES, we were convinced that it was at the very least impressive and well-built, and apparently enough other people thought so that Razer sold out almost immediately. Now, the actual number sold isn’t mentioned, but Razer isn’t a small company and they were going all-out with this thing at CES. But we’ve seen devices launch to sales of dozens, so a strong response to a launch like this is definitely good news. The company shared the news on their Facebook page, and urges prospective buyers to sign up for a notification email list. Hopefully that $2800 won’t burn a hole in your pocket in the meantime. Personally, I’m more excited about their plans to disconnect the touchscreen and LCD keys from the laptop, making a customizable piece of hardware you can use with your existing PC. I’m not really down with the small-screen gaming and I like my keyboards a little meatier, so the Blade isn’t for me — but I do have gear envy when I see all those future toys on the side.
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