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Kony Solutions Nabs $15M From Insight Ventures For Its Enterprise App Development Platform

Achilles — Thu, 24 May 2012 03:03:24 +0000

Kony Solutions , the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding was led by New York City-based venture capital firm, Insight Venture Partners , a 17-year-old firm that has invested in companies like Tumblr, Buddy Media, Wix, Chegg, and Twitter — to name a few. Insight also led Kony’s $19.1 million series A financing, which it closed in January of last year . With its latest infusion of capital, which brings total funding to nearly $39 million, the startup is looking fund the deployment of new sales and marketing programs, regional expansion, and to ramp up hiring. For those unfamiliar, Kony is on a mission to develop technologies and apps that both facilitate and accelerate customer engagement on any mobile operating system, device or channel. Through its flagship product, KonyOne , the startup offers a development environment and mobile middleware that allows big businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps. As a result, Kony now offers support for nearly every technology and deployment option out there, from native apps on all native OSes, HTML5-capable browsers, single page apps, wrappers, hybrids, and more — even support for BYOD deployments. The agility and scalability of its platform have attracted more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, banks, airlines, as well as automotive and insurance companies. Kony CEO Raj Koneru says that the startup will use its newest round of funding to continue managing and expanding on its recent growth, which (as of the end of its FY2012) had seen more than 200 percent growth in bookings and has added more than 30 new global customers, including Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial. What’s more, the company recently launched a suite of off-the-shelf, vertical-specific apps for banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, while earning the business of more than 30 new customers, including Aetna, CIRC, BlueCrossBlueShield, Scottrade, and Sun Life Financial. With patents-pending for its flagship product, KonyOne, support of more than a billion user sessions annually, and its being named a “Visionary” startup by Gartner, Kony is really starting to find the kind of traction it will need to compete in a crowded space. For more, check out Kony at home here.

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Kony Solutions Nabs $15M From Insight Ventures For Its Enterprise App Development Platform

Tape.tv Raises $6.2 Million To Begin An International Roll-Out

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:57:16 +0000

tape.tv has been around for a while – since July 2008 to be exact. It operates like a mix between an online version of MTV and Pandora. Just like the latter service, on Tape.tv users can skip, like or dislike the videos as they play, so the service starts to tailor itself to their tastes. I came across it in various visits to Berlin over the last couple of years but have been frustrated that this great service has only been aimed at the German market. However, I’m excited that it’s about to scale into new countries. The company has now raised €5 million ($6.2 million) in a Series B funding round. Participants include Atlantic Capital Partners GmbH , Dario Suter, Christoph Daniel and Marc Schmidhelny (DCM), prolific Berlin Angel investor Christophe Maire, alongside Investitionsbank Berlin and VC Kreativwirtschaft Berlin. The cash will be used to scale the business, appear on other platforms like smart TVs and launches into France and the UK in early autumn. The relaunch will also see the creation of an electronic program guide (EPG) for their own live shows and events. Its tape.tv’s catalogue of 45,000 videos has attracted around 3.5 million users in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, its main markets since it launched in July 2008. The company managed to navigate the tricky music licensing laws in Germany, which has seen YouTube hobbled in some areas. Founded by Conrad Fritzsch (CEO) and Stephanie Renner, Tape.tv plans to have an editorial team in each region it launches in, programming its sub channels, like Indie and Hip-Hop. Fritzsch says the company is now aiming at the convergence of Internet and TV towards SmartTV and hopes to extend to mobile as well. “The future of tape.tv will also be more social, based on user behaviour” he says. The company has 65 employees, many of them selling ads around the videos, and also has a real TV show on on the ZDFkultur channel in Germany. But it’s a lucrative business. It’s claiming to be running on €20 million in annual revenues. In Germany it has plenty of strategic partners, including ZDF.kultur, bild.de und spiegel.de and apps with Facebook, Spotify and Last.fm.

HP: 27,000 Job Cuts To Save Up To $3.5B By 2014, Q2 Sales Down 3% To $30.7B

user — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:14:18 +0000

A mixed bag of news for HP today: it has posted Q2 sales that have just edged out analyst expectations, but it has also confirmed 27,000 job cuts that should save the company between $3 billion and $3.5 billion by 2014. The company is a tech behemoth: it employs 350,000 people worldwide, before these cuts were announced. This means the cuts are equivalent to about 8 percent of its workforce. The cuts fall squarely in the middle of the estimates that were reported in past weeks, with CEO Meg Whitman reportedly planning to cut between 25,000 and 30,000 jobs — news that investors seemed to actually find encouraging with the stock price rising on the news. That seems to be the case here, too: the combination of okay results plus a concerted plan for cutting costs has sent the stock up in after-hours trading . HP says that it will be offering voluntary retirement to employees, so the exact number of actual layoffs has yet to be determined. The money that it saves will be re-invested across the whole of the company. It also plans to take a pre-tax charge of $1.7 billion in FY 2012 as a result, with additional pre-tax charges As a result of this restructuring, HP expects to record a pre-tax charge of approximately $1.7 billion in fiscal 2012 that will be included in its GAAP financial results for that period. Through fiscal 2014, HP expects to record additional pre-tax charges approximating $1.8 billion that will be included in its GAAP financial results for the relevant periods. As for earnings, these were down by thee percent to $30.7 billion — but still beat average analyst expectations of $29.92 billion. Earnings per share were also down 21 percent to $0.98, with analysts expecting EPA of $0.91. As a point of comparison in demonstrating the drop in HP’s fortunes, EPS for the same quarter last year was $5.24. In an internal memo , Whitman outlined the strategic direction that HP wants each division to take going forward. Read the full details here . Before today, the company had been slowly changing the course of its ship. In March, the company announced an “ organizational realignment ” in which it started to consolidate some of its hardware assets. Its Imaging and Printing Group were merged with its Personal Systems Group to create a new Printing and Personal Systems Group that is now led by Todd Bradley , who had been heading up the PSG since 2005. Last week HP said that it would be giving shareholders a dividend of 13.2 cents per share. This will be the third divided that HP has paid out in FY2012. The company has 2 billion shares of common stock outstanding. As AllThingsD pointed out earlier today, one big focus for the company is in its regional operations — specifically Europe. Some 37 percent of its revenues come from that part of the world — around $11 billion for this last quarter — and given the economic problems in Europe at the moment this means HP is the most exposed of the tech companies in the region. (We have more detail on one of HP’s European-focused operations, Autonomy, here .) Shares in the company were down nearly 5 percent before the release was announced. Full layoffs release below. PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – May 23, 2012) – HP (NYSE: HPQ ) today outlined plans for a multi-year productivity initiative designed to simplify business processes, advance innovation and deliver better results for customers, employees and shareholders. The restructuring is expected to generate annualized savings in the range of $3.0 to $3.5 billion exiting fiscal year 2014, of which the majority will be reinvested back into the company. Enabling investments in people, processes and technology will allow HP to accomplish the restructuring effort and to generate the savings. These moves are expected to yield significant improvements in efficiency and customer service during the next several years. HP expects to use the savings to boost investment in innovation around its three areas of strategic focus: cloud, big data and security, as well as in other segments that offer attractive growth potential. As part of the restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees to exit the company, or 8.0% of its workforce as of Oct. 31, 2011, by the end of fiscal year 2014. The company is offering an early retirement program, so the total number of employees affected will be impacted by the number of employees that participate in the early retirement plan. Workforce reduction plans will vary by country, based on local legal requirements and consultation with works councils and employee representatives, as appropriate. In addition to these restructuring actions, HP expects to achieve additional savings from non-headcount cost reductions, including supply chain optimization, SKU and platform rationalization, go-to-market strategy simplification and business process improvement. “These initiatives build upon our recent organizational realignment, and will further streamline our operations, improve our processes, and remove complexity from our business,” said Meg Whitman , HP president and chief executive officer. “While some of these actions are difficult because they involve the loss of jobs, they are necessary to improve execution and to fund the long term health of the company. We are setting HP on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders.” HP expects to reinvest savings in each of its business segments to strengthen their ability to stay ahead of customer expectations and capitalize on growing market trends. HP will invest in research and development to drive innovation and differentiation across its core printing and personal systems businesses, as well as emerging areas. It will also invest in marketing, sales productivity and tools that simplify the customer experience and make it easier to do business with HP. Services will invest in accelerating service capabilities in the high client value areas of cloud, security and information analytics by enhancing HP intellectual property. Services will also strengthen its industry orientation and continue to differentiate its service offerings through quality and innovation delivered to clients. Combined, these activities are expected to shift the portfolio to a more profitable mix of higher-growth services. Additional work in lean process methodologies is expected to better serve clients and increase overall efficiencies. Software will invest to speed development in the areas of security, big data and the management of application lifecycle and infrastructure solutions, both on premise and in the cloud. It will also further leverage the capabilities of Autonomy and Vertica across the entire HP portfolio. Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking will invest to accelerate its research and development activities to extend its leading portfolio of servers, storage and networking. Together these assets create a Converged Infrastructure which is the foundation for top client initiatives such as cloud , virtualization , big data analytics , legacy modernization and social media. As a result of this restructuring, HP expects to record a pre-tax charge of approximately $1.7 billion in fiscal 2012 that will be included in its GAAP financial results for that period. Through fiscal 2014, HP expects to record additional pre-tax charges approximating $1.8 billion that will be included in its GAAP financial results for the appropriate periods.

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HP: 27,000 Job Cuts To Save Up To $3.5B By 2014, Q2 Sales Down 3% To $30.7B

ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi’s Advice To Startups: Stay Lean, Don’t Listen To The Nay-Sayers & Hire The Right People

Budowniczy425 — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:58:12 +0000

This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, partner at and co-founder of Founder’s Collective Chris Dixon (and co-founder of SiteAdvisor and Hunch, acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively), sat down with ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi to talk about ZocDoc’s road to success. The company, for those unfamiliar, is a professional booking platform for doctors. Users go online to search, find and book a doctor, dentist or other health care professional, and can even make same-day appointments thanks to ZocDoc’s real-time access to doctors’ schedules. Although ZocDoc has now raised $95 million in funding to date, it didn’t necessarily have that many early believers. For a reminder of the kind of nay-saying that ZocDoc faced back in the beginning, this video from TechCrunch 40 several years ago should strike a chord with any entrepreneur who’s had their vision dismissed outright from industry notables. “Honestly, it would just never occur to me to go to any site to pick a doctor,” proclaimed Guy Kawasaki at the time. (Oops.) ZocDoc didn’t win the TechCrunch competition – that was the year that Mint.com won, and perhaps deservedly so. But ZocDoc is proof that not winning doesn’t translate into failure by any means. And neither does bad press, as it turns out. Massoumi noted that while there were many great articles about ZocDoc post-launch, there were some negative ones, too. He recalled in particular when press called out ZocDoc for not getting a doctor search quite right. Why is it showing me doctors on the lower east side of New York, when I did a search on the upper east side? , people said. Meanwhile, recalls Massoumi, others said ZocDoc was ”overly ambitious to think it could change the way people access healthcare in America.” (Ouch). But the company kept their heads down, he says, and kept being persistent. Trying to grow their business during a poor economic environment also forced them to stay very lean. They raised a little money from another startup competition which helped them to finally launch in their first markets outside of New York (D.C. and San Francisco), thereby proving wrong those who said that ZocDoc wouldn’t really work outside of the city. Massoumi also shared some tips he learned over the years in terms of growing the business. For starters, he said that it really helps to have people in the city they’re rolling out to. While not all startups have a large enough staff to do that, doing so cut the time to market in half, he said. Getting the right people in place to manage the rollouts was very important, too. In fact, he advised startup founders to be especially conscious of the first twenty people they hire, as they set the tone for the business. ZocDoc, now 260 people, up from 100 a year ago, puts an incredible emphasis on the hiring process. The entire management team spends half their time interviewing, said Massoumi, and he admitted he probably even spends more than that himself. And those hires have come from some surprising places, he added, recalling how ZocDoc has hired people they met on the plane while travelling and once, they even found an incredible waitress in Chicago and moved her out to New York. ZocDoc employees are also encouraged to refer people to the company and are rewarded with a new iPad if those people are hired. Another focus for this morning’s chat had to do with why there aren’t many startups working in the healthcare space. “Most people don’t realize that healthcare is a $2.7 trillion dollar industry in the U.S.,” said Massoumi, but it’s been under-represented by startups. This is probably because many people have been burned in the past – likely due to a greater emphasis in solving problems for the patients instead of the doctors, he said. Having grown up around doctors, he remembers dinner conversations about the problems doctors faced in trying to deliver great care while also running an efficient business. It’s increasingly difficult for doctors to have a profitable business, he said. Finally, Massoumi advised startups to work as leanly as possible. “Don’t have a crazy burn rate,” he said, be able to “afford to fail and iterate.” As for ZocDoc itself, this advice has translated into the company’s continued growth. Earlier this month, ZocDoc rolled out to an 18th market in the U.S. (Tampa Bay). And just yesterday, it launched in its 19th market (Denver). With the coming changes to health care under the Obama administration, some 30 million new patients will be coming into the system, which will greatly impact the growing shortage of physicians in the U.S. “Access to healthcare is one of the greatest challenges to our generation,” said Massoumi. It’s a statement which other entrepreneurs could take as a call-to-action to help solve some of the problems in the industry. After all, we have enough photo-sharing apps for the time being.

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ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi’s Advice To Startups: Stay Lean, Don’t Listen To The Nay-Sayers & Hire The Right People

SAP To Acquire Ariba For $4.3 Billion

jos — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:08:31 +0000

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data. The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP. The deal will be funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud. Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce. The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle. “The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement . “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

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SAP To Acquire Ariba For $4.3 Billion

Mirth Launches To Offer Local Deals Without The Dreaded Groupon Effect

user — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:52:19 +0000

While customers love deals and coupon services about as much as they love money itself, merchants — particularly small businesses — tend to see things a bit differently. Often times they feel it’s bad for business (aka the Groupon effect), overloading the retailer with a non-regular clientele, which can make the company look a bit desperate with tacky deals. But Mirth, which has just launched on the Disrupt NYC Battlefield stage, aims to change all that. Because it integrates with a loyalty card system called CardSpring , Mirth only requires a one-time sign-up with your 16-digit credit card number to get started. No app, no check-ins — all you need is your credit card. From there just visit your favorite spots like normal. If you visit the same restaurant twice in a rolling 30-day period, you instantly become a regular, meaning you’ll not only receive 3 percent off every purchase you make, but that the merchant will have a direct line of communication with you. The beauty is that users live their lives just as they normally would, swiping at restaurants with their credit card without ever checking into anything or even opening an app. So let’s put this into a real-world scenario. Let’s say you own a restaurant called FoodCrunch, and I happen to come in about once a week. With Mirth, I’d only need to swipe twice to start receiving discounts, and as long as I continue coming in twice a month after that, I’ll maintain my “regular” status. But for the merchant, Mirth is surprisingly attractive. Three percent isn’t much of a sacrifice; it’s about the same price as swiping a credit card. But the benefits are well worth it. You, as owner of FoodCrunch, can send me an email whenever you’d like to offer me a special discount, or to tell me that you have a new dish on the menu. Mirth gives customers discounts and in turn gives retailers a reliable line of communication to dedicated patrons. Jeremy Philip Galen, Mirth’s founder, conceived of the idea a few months ago and has since brought on Phil Reichenberger as CTO. The company is entirely bootstrapped, and live in New York City. If you want to sign up, you’re free to visit Mirth.ly and enter your info to start swiping yourself to regular status. Disrupt Q&A q: So i def agree with your comment with Groupon and deals. and Foursquare have fixed their model. How are you going to go after that. a: We are going to start with a capable sales force for merchants that are feed up with the current companies. what’s nice with is it’s a it’s a one-time signup. They have very little work to do. q: Local merchants have dozens of companies chasing them. Why sign with mirth? Isn’t there a saturation point at sometime. a: There is probably going to be a saturation point at one time and we’re going to be the one’s that bring it to that point. We’re are going to speak directly to their concerns. Restaurants have been pummeled. They have been very receptive with Mirth with the brand. We are are going to bring the right cliental to the merchant. q: If I show up I look like everyone else if you just send me an email. How I look different as a Mirth user? a: I think it would be an interesting problem to solve if we have so many Mirth users and merchense in a dense geography. We thought a lot about throttling the retailer’s messaging so they wouldn’t be able to send every 10 minutes, only once or twice a week. And then for the customer we thought a lot about letting them specify which types of offers they want to receive. q: How are you doing customer aquications. a: We thought we would launch at tc disrupt and see if anyone signed up. Second thing we are going to deputize our lovely merchants. They have an interest to promote this program. We believe they can genuinely give this to first, light users. And then bring them into the program. q: Can you elaborate the discount model? a:The discount is considerably smaller than the deal discount — 3% at a restaurants. Including our small fee, it’s the kind of small discount that will trigger loyalty logic and give the type of lift loyalty can offer. q: Have you had any friction on people giving you their credit card info? a: We are launching right now. q: So real quickly, the value for the business will be loyaty and foot traffic. So how are you actually increasing the foot traffic? a: We are not bringing new customers, we are giving businesss an opportunity to take the first time customer and getting them back again. And the second and third customers and bringing them back again.

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Mirth Launches To Offer Local Deals Without The Dreaded Groupon Effect

Firebase Raises $1.1M For Real-Time App Infrastructure

bestcbstore — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:51:27 +0000

Last month, I wrote about Y Combinator-backed Firebase and its ambitious vision to reinvent the infrastructure of real-time apps . Now the company is announcing that some big investors have signed on to that vision, with a $1.1 million round led by Flybridge Capital Partners. Other investors in the round include Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Data Collective, Founder Collective, Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah, early Facebook engineers Brian Shire and Lucas Nealan, former LinkedIn VP Adam Nash, and XDegrees founder Michael Tanne. Combined with an unannounced round last year (from YC/Start Fund/SV Angel, Ken Thom, and Inspovation Ventures), the company has now raised $1.4 million. Firebase started out as Envolve, a real-time chat service. Towards the end of its time at YC last summer, the team decided to pursue what it saw as a bigger opportunity — building the infrastructure for any developer wanting to create real-time web apps (and eventually mobile apps too). Co-founder James Tamplin says that with Firebase, developers can focus on design and front-end coding, without worrying about the backend. In the month after announcing its beta test, Firebase says it has seen 7,000 developer signups. Its next big priority: security and permission features.

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Firebase Raises $1.1M For Real-Time App Infrastructure

SpotlessCity Just Brought The Dry Cleaning Industry Online

vertical8 — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:39:07 +0000

When you live in New York City, there are certain expectations of what you should be able to accomplish easily. You can get almost anything delivered straight to your doorstep, whether it be food, groceries, toiletries, or pot. But there’s one service that is still stuck in brick-and-mortar land, and to be quite honest, it’s shocking that it’s stayed offline and off of our doorsteps for so long: Dry cleaning. Sure, you can get a bag of clothes picked up, washed, and dropped back off, but there’s no service that aggregates all of your nearby dry cleaners and compares prices, available pick-up/drop-off times, and books it for you (Seamless-style). But no more — SpotlessCity is finally here. The service asks you to input your zip code and address, and automatically pulls in all the dry cleaners in your area. You can then enter in a pick-up and drop-off time, based on the dry cleaner’s availability, and that’s all there is to it. A delivery person knocks on your door, picks up your giant bag of wovens and delicates, and promises to see you again tomorrow (or whenever you have scheduled the drop-off). What’s better, perhaps, is that dry cleaners go through an almost identical process to end-users in terms of signing up and getting started. The dashboard can be accessed online, and now through a brand new iOS app that was just launched on-stage. SpotlessCity works with local dry cleaners to take a fixed percentage of all orders that come through the online service. Dry cleaning partners will not be allowed to mark up prices for SpotlessCity customers, nor will users ever be charged for pick-up/delivery or for the service as a whole. Most dry cleaners, especially in New York City, are small mom-and-pop shops that don’t have the resources to have a robust online presence, if they have one at all. SpotlessCity works as the middle-man to bring in new customers for dry cleaners and offer an easy, seamless method for getting your dry cleaning done. Founder Hissan Bajwa sees a bigger vision than “the Seamless of laundry” with this product. Along with providing an online platform to small dry cleaners, it’s worth mentioning that most people have no understanding of the various levels of pricing and quality at different dry cleaners. SpotlessCity will eventually offer an education to consumers, matching them with the right dry cleaner based on the type of clothing they wear. After all, a banker probably needs a different dry cleaner than a college student. SpotlessCity has thus far raised a $200,000 seed round from friends and family, and is now launching out of the pilot phase to expand past Brooklyn and Manhattan into the other boroughs. Click to view slideshow. Q&A Q: Can you expand this with other services? A: Yes we have plans to add services that are natural when you’re already shopping for a dry cleaner. Q: What is the problem that you’re solving for dry cleaners? A: When we talk to cleaners, they love the idea because in NY they have pick-up/delivery service. Phone is a noisy way to connect to customers and they want to get online because the phone takes time, people, and isn’t as quick. But since they’re small businesses they can’t build out that online platform with functionality. Q: In Open Table there are a lot of restaurants to go to, but with dry cleaning people just always go to the closest one? A: If you have a cleaner in your building, sure. But most people don’t want to lug around their stuff or get on the phone. Even in buildings with dry-cleaners, they may not like that cleaner. But they don’t want to shop around. Q: Have you checked out if it will work outside the city? A: Since we put up a beta site we’ve been contacted by dry cleaners all around the country. Right now we’re working on how to deploy to new cities, especially suburban cities that have a different delivery/pick-up model. Q: What is the rate that you charge from dry cleaners’ sales? A: We negotiate cleaners by cleaners. Our general rate is around 10 percent. Q: Then it would take a lot of transactions to break even? A: As we move into other cities we’re exploring more of a licensing franchising fee. Q: So what kind of volume do you need to break even? A: We have pretty good protections, and we’re on track to hit the volumes we need to break even. Q: How are you finding customers? Through salespeople or dry cleaners? A: Right now we’re very geographically limited. Three neighborhoods around town. So a lot depends on hyperlocal marketing. We have hit the streets, used refer a neighbor, and found that word of mouth has been great for us. Q: You say you’re like Uber for dry cleaners. Have you thought about launching other categories as well? A: We’ve thought about other household cleaning services. Things that make natural sense when you’re looking for dry cleaning. We want to focus on recurring services, so house cleaning. We’ve found that once people use SpotlessCity they keep coming back. Q: You’ve chosen to focus on convenience above all else. Is there a reason why you choose that? A: It’s still a bare bones site. We want to collect and add reviews but it needs to be done in a thoughtful way. If you’ve ever seen dry cleaners reviews, they’re often just rants. We need to keep them organized and meaningful, based on metrics so that they can educate consumers. Q: Are you worried this will only work in a high density city? A: We obviously want to deploy in similar markets like San Francisco, Boston, and D.C., but the encouraging thing is the fact that we’re getting contacted by cleaners in Denver and Miami. There is a marketplace there. It just has to be pivoted a bit for those markets.

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SpotlessCity Just Brought The Dry Cleaning Industry Online

Update: Someone Is Asking The USPTO To Invalidate Zuckerberg’s News Feed Patent, But Yahoo Says Not Us

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:02:23 +0000

One idea floated when Ross Levinsohn took the reins as the interim CEO of Yahoo is that he might represent a kinder, gentler phase in the Internet company’s contentious patent fight against Facebook. There was even a suggestion that the two sides might even be able to settle. Today, some news that could point to a different approach — at least for now. Some documents have emerged at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that indicate someone, just yesterday, requested for the USPTO to re-examine a patent owned by Facebook concerning news feeds, and to declare it invalid. This happens to be one of the same patents that Facebook has named in its counter-suit against Yahoo , and one patent expert believes that the re-examination request, which questions the validity of the patent, could be coming from Yahoo. To be clear, the documents do not anywhere mention Yahoo by name. They have been filed by Gregory Hunt, from the law firm Jenkins, Wilson, Taylor and Hunt. One patent lawyer tells me that typically these requests are made by companies that are getting sued by the patent holders, as a defensive move to neutralize the suit. At the time of writing, the only company that is getting sued by Facebook over patent infringement is Yahoo. Update : Yahoo tells us that is has not filed any requests for re-examination. Even if the re-examination request has not come from Yahoo, it could represent a problem for Facebook, if it gets approved, because this is one of the patents in its countersuit. The circumstances of the filing are, in typical legal/patent fashion, pretty confusing but here is the gist: According to the documents we have embedded below, Hunt’s client is questioning patent number 7,669,123, which is a patent for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” The patent is registered by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, along with several others (it’s embedded below, too). The re-examination filing from yesterday says that this patent should be rendered invalid because it is based on another patent that is still the subject of an application — not yet approved — which was filed before the one that was approved. That patent is number WO 2007/0052285 and was filed some months before the 7,669,123 application. Patent number 7,669,123 was named, along with 10 in all, by Facebook in its counter-suit against Yahoo, which it filed in response to Yahoo suing Facebook over several social-media-related patents. It is not clear whether these other patents will also get questioned by Hunt’s clients. Why the secrecy of who is behind the suit? It’s not clear but our patent expert offers this explanation: “I think they wanted to avoid the side effects of naming themselves so they’ve picked the anonymous route. This is what we used to do in the old days.” We have reached out to Facebook and Yahoo for their responses to this and will update this story as we learn more. The full whack of patent documents is embedded here: View this document on Scribd

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Update: Someone Is Asking The USPTO To Invalidate Zuckerberg’s News Feed Patent, But Yahoo Says Not Us

Zimride’s Lyft Is Going To Give Uber Some Lower-Priced Competition

Achilles — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:00:29 +0000

If you’re like me and you live in San Francisco where cabs are few and far between, Uber has been a godsend. But the marketplace for on-demand transportation is about to get a lot more interesting. That’s because there are a few startups that will be doing on-demand, ride-sharing at a much more affordable price point over the next few months. Zimride , which has been around for a few years, will be one of them. They’re coming out of the gate with a product called Lyft today. It’s still in beta (so just friends and family). But basically you can use the app to request a driver immediately and get a ride anywhere in the city for a price that’s competitive to or even cheaper than a cab. Like Uber, Lyft faces interesting regulatory hurdles around doing ride-sharing that arguably competes with professional and government-licensed cab companies. It and another company that’s still in beta called Sidecar are getting around this by doing reimbursements or operating on donations. “It’s not revenue. It’s reimbursement,” said co-founder and chief operating officer John Zimmer . “Anything above and beyond that is a donation.” Zimride has an algorithm that suggests a recommended donation based on time and distance, but it’s up to the consumer to decide what to pay. Zimride keeps about a 20 percent share. The company is seeding the market with drivers that are willing to do longer shifts that take several hours. They’re using a thorough interview process that includes driving history, criminal checks and car inspections. On the consumer side, it will be easy to pick the app up and demand a ride. But on the supply side, there’s a whole vetting process. ”We just want to be very deliberate about how we build this market,” Zimmer said. Zimmer says Zimride has gained a lot of experience in growing two-sided markets. ”Ride-sharing is often called a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “But we’ve learned over time about how to take the right steps at the right time with supply and demand.” (Unfortunately, he didn’t share too many of his tricks as those are proprietary!) The company has actually been breakeven at many points in its life. Zimride is really three separate businesses under one roof. One is a university-focused program where they charge colleges for providing school-specific, ride-sharing programs. A second business is for long-distance ride-sharing. Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, is a very popular route. Every time they’ve gotten one leg of the business to profitability, they’ve used it to fund the next piece. This one will likely be their most challenging endeavor yet. “There are three variables and each one makes it exponentially more difficult to get critical mass,” Zimmer said. “There’s starting location, ending location and starting time.” Zimride faces a number of upcoming competitors. Uber has mostly stuck to the higher-end of the market with private drivers and black cars, but there are signs it is moving downmarket . There is also another app that hasn’t publicly launched but is in beta around San Francisco called Sidecar. It has an extremely similar model. “Uber is this amazing, luxurious transportation experience,” Zimmer said. “Our vision for Zimride is to have everyone participate. We have to make that as frictionless as possible.” The company has raised more than $7 million from Mayfield Fund, Floodgate, Keith Rabois, K9 Ventures and fbFund.

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Zimride’s Lyft Is Going To Give Uber Some Lower-Priced Competition