The established players in web conferencing better look out — scheduling startup TimeBridge is launching a new conferencing service that it says can save companies around 80 percent compared to established products like Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting.
The Berkeley, Calif. startup already has 300,000 users for its service, one that’s particularly useful because it integrates [...]
The Berkeley, Calif. startup already has 300,000 users for its service, one that’s particularly useful because it integrates with existing calendar products like Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Chief executive Yori Nelkin says many TimeBridge users are using the service to schedule web meetings already, so it makes sense to add conferencing to flesh out the product (and to create a revenue stream among the pay services). Almost 60 percent of TimeBridge users employ some kind of conferencing service, and of those, 21 percent use GoToMeeting and 14 percent use WebEx (an interesting inversion of the general perception of who’s the big fish and who’s the underdog).
TimeBridge’s web meeting service costs $8.95 per month — less than WebEx and GoToMeeting, though more than the free offerings from Dimdim. Nelkin says he can charge so little because the customer acquisition cost is so low. In other words, he doesn’t have to spend any money marketing the service, since it’s an obvious switch for existing TimeBridge users. I wasn’t able to try the service myself (oddly, Nelkin briefed me over a TimeBridge conference call line, but we didn’t use the web meeting tool at all), but TimeBridge says it offers all the basic features you’d expect from a web conferencing service — screensharing, a white board, and so on.
Nelkin adds that this is the next step in building TimeBridge into a full collaborations service, rather than just a scheduling tool. In that vein, the company also launched a scheduling feature last month.
Nvidia is trying to stoke its own product ecosystem today as it launches the GPU Ventures Program to identify, support and in invest in early stage companies.
The investments will focus on GPU (graphics processing unit) applications such as video programs that tap the computing power of the graphics chip. Through Nvidia’s CUDA programming environment, the [...]
The investments will focus on GPU (graphics processing unit) applications such as video programs that tap the computing power of the graphics chip. Through Nvidia’s CUDA programming environment, the GPUs can now be used to handle non-graphics computing tasks and software companies are only just beginning to exploit that, said Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip maker is extending a program it kicked off last year with its Nvision visual computing conference, which featured an investment conference that drew 60 startups. Now the company has formalized its plans to invest in startups and to publicize them through a portal site, dubbed GPU Venture Zone. Nvidia offers more than just dollars. It lets some startups such as Elemental Technologies, whose Badaboom program converts video from one format to another, sell their wares on the Nvidia’s own web site or partner web sites.
Herbst said the company will invest anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million in startups. Last year, the company invested $5 million in five startups. This year, he said the company will try to expand its investments, which mostly go into seed or first venture capital round investments.
Besides Elemental, Nvidia has invested in Keyhole, which was acquired by Google to create Google Earth. It also invested in Mental Images (and later acquired it) as well as MotionDSP and Right Hemisphere. Nvidia plans to do another Emerging Companies Summit in the fall of this year. Herbst is targeting companies developing CUDA software applications, as well as other sectors such as those making middleware tools for game companies.
While it’s not a great year to start something because of the economic turmoil, Herbst said that companies need Nvidia’s help more. He wants VCs to know that Nvidia is willing to co-invest, or sometimes be the only one to invest in a new company. Herbst said he continues to see more and more good startups. He acknowledged that the bad economy and Nvidia’s own losses are affecting his program some, in terms of the dollars available to invest, but he said the impact isn’t huge because the program is strategic to Nvidia’s future.
“This is about ecosystem development, and so we have decided to double down,” Herbst said.
Please check out our GamesBeat 09 game conference on March 24.
Jive Software is announcing the latest release of its collaborative “social” software for businesses. The Portland, Ore. company says version 3.0 of its application package, now called Social Business Software, marks the first time someone can combine internal and external collaboration (i.e., collaboration with the rest of the company and collaboration with partners and customers) [...]
A year or two ago, there seemed to be a glut of companies offering social networking for businesses. With the downturn, you might assume that Jive was part of a fad that has passed, especially since it was one of the first companies to follow its investor Sequoia Capital’s advice by eliminating 36 jobs, including executives. But after talking to Chief Marketing Officer Lawrence, it sounds like that would be a mistake — Jive added 200 customers last year, bringing its total to more than 2,500, and many of those newer customers are paying for more expensive tools, so its revenue actually grew 70 percent. In fact, Lawrence says Jive is hiring. And a recent report from Forrester identified Jive and Telligent as the leaders in the “community platforms” market.
In addition to rolling out new features, Jive has gotten rid of the confusing Clearspace and Clearspace Community names for its products; now it’s all just Social Business Software. The services that were included in Clearspace — such as shared documents, blogs, project management, and customers comments — are now part of Foundation, the core SBS product. SBS also allows companies to create “centers” for centralized collaboration around the product’s four main uses: employee engagement, marketing and sales, innovation, and support. Then companies can buy modules to enhance the basic offerings.
One of those modules promises increased productivity by letting you view your department, partner, and customer communities within a single workspace. That may sound like a relatively small improvement at first, but Lawrence says it’s significant because a user will often want or need to work in multiple Jive communities. Without the bridging modules, those communities exist as isolated silos.
Other modules include video, social bookmarking, and analytics and “insights,” which measure discussions and sentiments surrounding specific topics in your Jive communities.
Although Jive is announcing SBS 3.0 now, it won’t actually be available for another week. Lawrence also previewed the product during the Productivity 2.0 panel that I moderated at last week’s DEMO conference. You can see the video of that panel below; the Jive demo starts at around seven minutes in.
Nearly everyone seems to be on Twitter these days. And one of its fastest growing uses has to be in the political sphere, where we find members of Congress tweeting live from President Obama’s speeches. So it should be no surprise that the mayor of the city in which Twitter (the company) resides, San Francisco, [...]
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is heading to Twitter’s headquarters tomorrow to meet with their team. How do I know? He tweeted about it. And so did Twitter chief executive Evan Williams.
From what I can gather, it’s just a general meeting to determine how San Francisco’s government can best use technology like Twitter. Both Newsom and Williams are asking for feedback from their Twitter followers (Newsom has 39,701 and Williams has 239,128 — but who’s counting? Yes, sadly, everyone.) to use in the meeting.
I sent a message over to Twitter to see if this meeting was anything more, and I’ll update when I hear back. Perhaps Newsom is getting some tips on how best to use the service to run an effective campaign for governor of California in 2010? It seemed to work pretty well for Barack Obama, Twitter’s most popular user (with over 400,000 followers), who has neglected the service since taking office.
Last week, Obama invited a group of entrepreneurs, including Twitter’s Williams, to the White House to discuss the economic crisis. Williams tweeted it out beforehand and was bombarded by suggestions to tell the President.
Newsom is actually a fairly prolific, if not redundant, Twitter user. He signed up in late December and has so far sent out nearly 200 tweets. Of course the majority of those seem to be “thank you,” (first for praise of a recent op-ed piece, then more recently in response to congratulations about his wife’s pregnancy). But he’s also been using it for the same reason a lot of good Twitter users do: for self promotion and to post mundane observations such as, “Just finished running through the Presidio down to Golden Gate Bridge– hard not to love this city!”
He seems to prefer updating Twitter through text message, the web and the iPhone app TwitterFon.
The mayor also does seem to do a good job of responding to questions sent to him. And he’s fairly likely to follow you back if you follow him — he follows over 13,000 people.
Twitter secured a new $35 million round of funding last month. And while it’s working towards a viable business plan, it claims that gaining users is more important right now.
You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeatniks Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison, Tam Vo, Camille Ricketts, Dan Kaplan and Matt Marshall. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.
A lot of people use Wikipedia, but until now there’s been no way to see what topics are the most popular.
Wikirank solves that problem, with a new tool that shows how each Wikipedia topic ranks in popularity.
Users familiar with Google Analytics will recognize the setup. Users can search for statistics on each topic (for example, [...]
Wikirank solves that problem, with a new tool that shows how each Wikipedia topic ranks in popularity.
Users familiar with Google Analytics will recognize the setup. Users can search for statistics on each topic (for example, page views on “Barack Obama” during the last 30 days, etc.). In addition, there’s a list of top Wikipedia topics and a list of the most dramatic traffic shift in popularity in the last 24 hours. So, for example, if you want to compare searches for your own name with Barack Obama, a nice little Google Analytics-looking graph reveals your performance. You can share the information with friends.
Wikirank is the first product from San Francisco-based Small Batch, run by Jeffrey Veen, previously a co-founder at Visible Path, and project lead for Measure Map, a company later sold to Google. The inspiration for Wikirank came from how Twitter users employ Twitter search. That service can be used to track how often people reference certain words or hashtags, and allows you to see if certain topics are gaining or losing popularity in real time.
Wikirank took one month to develop and will be launching late this month, and financed by advertising. However, Veen suggested Wikirank may just be the beginning steps of a business. “Wikirank, as a project, is just a way to explore new technologies for other products that we think may be more commercial,” says Veen.
Veen said Small Batch hasn’t raised any financing.
Well, that didn’t last long. This morning, Boxee brought back Hulu content to its users , by way of a workaround, using public RSS feeds. Hulu has already struck back, blocking Boxee’s access to those feeds. Game on, says Boxee in a post on this latest move.
While it was pretty ridiculous before that [...]
While it was pretty ridiculous before that the big media companies behind Hulu forced the company to pulls its content off of Boxee , now it’s entirely ridiculous. These are public RSS feeds, which any browser should be able to access — yes, even a browser optimized for a 10-foot viewing experience.
Again, it’s not like Boxee is blocking the advertisements that Hulu serves up so the content companies can make money. The only reasons I can imagine that those companies are so against this is either a) they don’t understand it or b) they want to create their own set-top box for Hulu and don’t want any other company to offer such an option.
As I noted earlier today, Boxee representatives did meet with Hulu and the content providers, but were unable to come to an agreement.
As Boxee’s Avner Ronen writes in the blog post:
to our users: if you choose to use boxee as your media browser to view legal and publicly available content on the internet, we will do everything we can to ensure that you can access it, no matter what the source.
As I said, game on.
Since the beginning of the social voting site Digg, it’s been a common thought that Digg users don’t click on ads. While that’s generally been the rule of thumb for sites that Digg sends traffic to, it’s not clear just how much clicking on ads Digg users do on the site itself. But judging by [...]
Digg is completely taken over by “Watch The New Trailer” ads for the new Star Trek film right now. That in and of itself might be worthy of a click for a lot of Digg users, but the fact that the current most dugg item of the day is also a story about the new Star Trek trailer, makes this ad a great one.
Clearly, Digg users are interested in seeing this trailer, so why not give them even more immediate access?
And not only are the ads on the top of the site both for the Star Trek trailer, but the ad unit on right bottom right of the page is one as well. For those keeping score at home, that’s four places to see the new Star Trek trailer on one page.
Microsoft is currently in charge of Digg’s ads.
Compliment your open source app with Microsoft!
We all know that in this age of software development most people are choosing open source development options for reasons of flexibility, usability, and cost. However, in doing so, some other benefits may be lost such as stability, scalability and the ability for wide distribution. Over the past four [...]
Compliment your open source app with Microsoft!
We all know that in this age of software development most people are choosing open source development options for reasons of flexibility, usability, and cost. However, in doing so, some other benefits may be lost such as stability, scalability and the ability for wide distribution. Over the past four years, Microsoft has had an entire team, led by open source guru Sam Ramji, diligently working on ways for open source developers to take advantages of the benefits that Microsoft can offer by working together.
On March 23, 2009, Microsoft will be hosting its Third Annual Open Source ISV Forum at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, the day before the InfoWorld’s Open Source Business Conference. This year this is an exclusive opportunity to hear from Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Platform Strategy, who oversees the Microsoft’s initiatives on Linux and open source. He will be giving the keynote entitled “The Evolution of Microsoft’s Open Source ISV Strategy,” and the session will include Q&A; Sam will also be available to chat at the reception following the event. We will also have topical sessions where developers can ask questions and interact with members of the Windows team and Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to hear directly from Microsoft about the advancement of their open source initiatives. Event registration is open and free for startups, to sign-up, please visit our registration page.
If you have any questions please contact jacob.mullins@microsoft.com.
One man’s recession is another man’s opportunity — at least here in Silicon Valley. The latest local unemployment numbers are terrible, which is entirely unsurprising given all the layoffs in technology and a wide range of other industries. Santa Clara and San Benito counties lost 14,900 jobs in January, a decline of 1.6 percent in [...]
Most news coverage of this and other dour economic statistics seems gleefully focused on the mindless fear part. But here’s more positive news that I gathered yesterday at early-stage venture firm Y Combinator’s AngelConf conference on angel investing — and it’s what anyone who understands market economies will tell you. The event was hardly full of pessimism, as successful investor as successful investor got up to discuss their own strategies and experiences, to help potential angels who attended take wing.
Here are some reasons for optimism: In Silicon Valley, more talented people are looking for work, fewer bad ideas are getting funded, office space is becoming cheaper and more plentiful. Regional office vacancies could rise to 27.5 regionally with rents falling by 25 percent, according to a recent report by Oakland-based Foresight Analytics. Why is this good? Google made significant expansion in head count and square footage during the dot-com downturn in the early part of this decade, taking advantage of the fact that its growth and business model were maturing even as larger rivals suffered, as long-time Google engineer and prospective angel investor Matt Cutts told me at the event. The other prospective investors I spoke with — ranging from younger entrepreneurs who have recently sold their first company, to early employees at now-public companies with cash from decades-old public offerings still in the bank — echoed similar thoughts. “I couldn’t believe how much empty offices space I saw on the way from the airport,” said one grizzled technologist YAY who had flown down from Seattle for the event.
The Google anecdote is no doubt already well-known to most of our readers, and it helps explain why the event was packed (registration was also closed beforehand due to limited space). Certainly, the consensus in the room was that angel investing is not for the faint of heart these days — it’s something you do because you’re passionate about startups and innovation. And the event “was part training session, part confessional, part group therapy,” as August Capital’s David Hornik wrote on his blog afterwards. But of course everyone in the crowd was there to make money. As serial angel investor Reid Hoffman wrote recently in a Washington Post opinion column, many leading brands started in hard times: Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King, etc.
For those who didn’t attend, who are interested in angel investing, check out the recorded video or the quotes below, as excerpted from the post by Hornick and from serial entrepreneur/investor Steve Poland’s coverage. VentureBeat investor Aydin Senkut, who spoke at the event, has a post with his takeaways here.
- Don’t worry if the idea seems crazy — if it didn’t seem crazy, it would be too late to invest as an angel. (Paul Graham)
- The lifeblood of angel investors is deal flow — you need huge deal flow to find enough stuff that is worth investing in; The best deals come from other angels. (Naval Ravikant)
- Don’t be afraid to throw a little dynamite into the status quo and see what comes out of it — often times interesting stuff emerges (and sometimes nothing does). (Michael Dearing)
- The Rule of 12 — you need to invest in 12 companies to have statistical diversity — invest in fewer than 12 deals and you run the risk of them all failing. (Mike Maples)
- One-third of your companies will go out of business. Failure is part of learning process. (Ron Conway)
- If your goal is making money, this isn’t your thing. (Dave McClure)
