Last summer, word started to trickle out about a young, stealth startup called RelateIQ that was rumored to be one of the more ambitious players among the new (and expanding) class of Big Data startups. Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin had founded RelateIQ the summer before to tackle some enduring problems in the way we manage our professional relationships — the same ones that led to the birth of Plaxo lo a decade ago, and many more since. Though we live in the Digital Age of smartphones and cloud computing, Evans and Louglin were frustrated by the fact that people still manually entering important professional data into aging and stuffy relationship management tools.

On a mission to change that by using Big Data to automate relationship tracking and by taking mobile seriously, RelateIQ was able to attract $9 million from Accel, Morgenthaler and SV Angel in Series A financing, while recruiting key advisors like LinkedIn’s former chief data scientist DJ Patil, Bob Cohn (of Octel, Lucent and Sequoia fame) and current Apple board member and former Intuit CEO, Bill Campbell. Fast forward to today and, after two years of extensive and stealthy testing and fueled by a hefty new round of funding from a roster of familiar names, the startup is finally throwing open its doors to the public.

The new Series B round, which was first reported by former colleague Evelyn Rusli of the WSJ, brings RelateIQ’s total funding to $29 million and values the company at $100 million. The company has since confirmed these numbers, telling us that its new, $20 million Series B round was co-led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s new, “smart enterprise”-focused venture capital firm, Formation 8 (which just raised its first, $448 million fund) and Accel Partners.

The lead investors were also accompanied by an impressive supporting cast, including Battery Ventures, AMC Cloud Ventures (via Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang), Thrive Capital, Allen & Co. and Facebook and Asana co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz — among others.

Not bad for a startup that works out of the basement of a home decor business in Palo Alto, right? (Never you mind that Facebook used to house its servers in the same basement before “The Social Network” Era.) In fact, considering that CRM and relationship intelligence software isn’t exactly The New Kid On The Block, it makes one wonder what it is about RelateIQ that attracted this gaggle of tech industry veterans.

Traditionally, the Customer Relationship Management space (and to a lesser degree social CRM) has been dominated by veteran enterprise software companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP. Today, however, the Bigs find themselves being chased by a bevy of startups that are trying to beat them at their own game by using advances in cloud computing and data tech (among others) to offer smarter, more consumer-friendly experiences or by moving downstream to bring enterprise-grade tech to startups and small businesses.

As Evelyn points out, this has forced CRM incumbents to modernize, get more mobile and social either by building out their platforms themselves and acquiring (like Jive’s buying Producteev), or by turning to Big Data startups to help them make sense of enormous data sets.

RelateIQ, which has 100 clients already in tow at launch including companies like T3 Advisors and WellnessFX, wants to go after the incumbents by not only offering social integration and data enrichment out of the box, but by significantly reducing the amount of manual data entry required to get more insight into their professional relationships. Features like the ability to quickly deploy new workflows, the founders explain, are attractive to teams that manage their business’ external relationships, whether in business development, sales or product, allowing them to get started immediately.

Of course, using algorithms and machines to try to better understand and glean insight from the chaos of human relationships is an uphill battle. RelateIQ wants to close that gap by sucking in and analyzing faster, on a bigger scale, and by offering more nuanced analysis of the details in your professional relationships, than the next guy.

It does that by automatically capturing data from email, voice, social networks and calendars and analyzing language in those communications to identify words and phrases in an email that might indicate a lead is getting ready to take the next step, or just the opposite. In other words, the idea is to reduce the amount of work you have to do and only surface the critical stuff you can’t ignore.

The startup’s SaaS service also eliminates the headache that results from the fact that your contact information is scattered across multiple platforms or hiding in someone’s spreadsheet or address book. RelateIQ cleans your contact info and merges it from across address books to give companies one reliable source of contact info, along with offering features of a digital personal assistant, like email tracking and prompts when you forget to reply to important contacts.

The other key to RelateIQ’s value proposition is mobile, allowing teams to track and manage their professional relationships in realtime, collaborate with colleagues and access dynamic reporting and updates contact info from native Android and iPhone apps. By adding an automated intelligence layer to relationship management, it becomes easier for overworked teams to prioritize legit leads and save those that are falling through the cracks by automatically bubbling up forgotten leads in your contact list.

The ability to do that on-the-go while you’re on a business trip — without having to manually log calls from your iPhone — is huge. But what is this all going to cost, your ask? While its mobile apps are free, its SaaS product runs $49/user/month or $99/user/month for its premium version.

For more, find RelateIQ at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cloud storage company Box is making a big push into the healthcare sector today. Not only has Box received HIPAA compliance, but the company has announcing a new set of partners in the space, as well as an equity investment in drchrono, a startup that simplifies the professional lives of doctors by bringing electronic health records and much more to the iPad.

Healthcare is an enterprise vertical for Box, and is growing fast, says co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie. The company even hired Missy Krasner, who helped found Google Health, as a healthcare advisor.

In the past year, Box’s sales in the healthcare industry grew more than 81 percent, with clients including Henry Ford Health System, Beaumont Health System, HealthTrust Europe, Johns Hopkins HealthCare Solutions, Wake Forest Baptist Health, San Juan Regional Medical Center and Garden City Hospital.

The company is also announcing that a number of new healthcare startups are using Box’s API and platform including Umbie DentalCare, TigerText, Doximity, Medigram, PostureScreen Mobile, iMedViewer, iPaxera, Medi-Copy, and Healthtap. And Box has made an undisclosed investment in drchrono through the Box Innovation Network.

Part of making this big push into healthcare is getting the certifications that allows healthcare providers and companies to store medical information in the cloud. Box says it is now HIPAA compliant and is considered a secure and trusted platform for protected health information (PHI), personal health record files (PHRs), and is able to securely serve clinical researchers, healthcare systems and health insurance providers.

The company explains that there are a number of ways for healthcare companies to use Box (besides via a partner app like drchrono). For example, a doctors’ office would store a patient’s medical record or clinical summary in the cloud, or share clinical documents, images and medical records within or between differing EHR systems or even patients.

As Box readies for an IPO in the coming year, going deep in verticals like healthcare will help the company’s top line. And the fact that healthcare systems are securing medical information with Box is a testament to the platform’s security, which is another huge product development area for the year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s time for a brand spankin’ new edition of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series where we snoop around inside the employee-only sections of the tech industry’s hottest companies.

Just like Walt Whitman, the tech industry contains multitudes, and we try to represent it all in Cribs. That means that in addition to touring bootstrapped startups, we also like to go inside established tech giants — and it was pretty amazing to have the chance to take an in-depth tour of LinkedIn, the professional social network that’s grown from its 2002 inception in Reid Hoffman’s apartment to a staff of thousands, a user base of hundreds of millions, a hugely successful initial public offering, and continued stock market success.

What’s even cooler was that our guide was none other than Allen Blue, LinkedIn’s very charismatic co-founder and current VP of product who has been with the company since day one. I think it’s fair to say that he’s the best possible person that we could have asked to give us a tour, even though it meant I had to suffer a pretty humiliating loss at expert-level Guitar Hero along the way.

Watch the video above to see what it’s like inside LinkedIn — from the in-house rock band, to the unlimited Indian food, to Allen Blue’s excellent elephant impression, and beyond.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nicholas Felton, who came to fame through many super-detailed infographics and reports about his life as quantified through data, is leaving Facebook almost two years after being acq-hired to work on projects like Timeline.

His early work, which compiled data on things like all the songs he had listened to or everywhere he had been in a single year into a “Feltron Annual Report,” became the basis for Timeline. In a sense, all the profiles of Facebook’s roughly 1 billion users are all like living, breathing annual “Feltron” reports.

He posted on his page today:

On April 19, 2011 I walked into the Palo Alto Facebook office and began contributing to the timeline project. Two years, many late nights and a few launch celebrations later I will be moving on.

The opportunity to help mold a service of such importance to so many people has been a high point in my professional career. I’m extremely proud of the projects I worked on, grateful to the teams that built them and confident in the products to come.

Facebook acq-hired Felton’s startup Daytum in April of 2011 and Felton and his co-founder Ryan Case moved from New York to Palo Alto.

When Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox unveiled Timeline, he said he was inspired by seeing Felton’s annual reports: “14 pages. One year. One book. It was hard to call it anything other than what it really was — art.”

He went on, “We had one reaction: we have to try to hire this guy.”

There’s no word on what Felton be working on next yet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.

Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now.

LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.”

“We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Standford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future.

The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S.

Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”

Pulse raised an $800,000 seed round in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a $9 million Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures.

Updating…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re hearing from those familiar with the situation that Kim Malone Scott, an ex Apple and Google employee, has left Dropbox after around four months on the job. Upon her hiring, she was described as a “top sales exec” poach for Dropbox. At Google, she was commonly referred to as the “High Priestess of the Long Tail,” a name she had given herself because she placed ads on pages that normally didn’t have them, mostly for small publishers.

During her tenure at Google, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had called Scott’s credentials a “perfect Googler’s resume.”

According to her LinkedIn, Scott worked in “Operations and Online Sales” for Dropbox, with no other details or information about her role. With two years at Apple and six years at Google, it was clear that the hiring was an important one at the time.

Recently, Scott shared her professional story and journey on the site for Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” giving the advice:

Never be afraid to call bs, especially when it’s sexist bs.

We’ve also heard that this could have been partially a personal decision and one having to do with culture issues. We’ve reached out to Dropbox for comment and will update our story once we hear back.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Storify has become a useful tool for media organizations trying to capture newsworthy or entertaining social media conversations for their readers, with its ability to combine tweets, photos and more into an embeddable conversation. Today the company is announcing a VIP plan with features designed specifically for “media organizations, publishers or anyone wanting to deeply integrate social curation and storytelling into their site.”

The plan includes the ability to update a Storify story in realtime (useful for live blogging), to customize the appearance of a story with CSS, to receive priority technical support, add custom sources and share stories privately. Co-founder Burt Herman told me via email that the first two features will probably make the biggest difference for readers, while the private sharing could be useful for newsroom collaboration, and also for communication within companies and PR agencies. So for example if a brand becomes embroiled in a big social media controversy, Storify might be a good way for an agency to capture what’s going on, but that’s probably not something they’d want to highlight publicly.

I asked Herman if a service like this was always in the company’s product plans, and he replied:

Many major media organizations, brands and non-profit groups users have come to Storify organically for its basic functionality. But it’s been clear for a while that our professional users had these needs and we’ve been thinking about how to serve them, which is why we’re launching this service now.

Herman described the cost as “enterprise-level pricing,” and he said it will vary from customer to customer.

One of the first companies to use the VIP service is the BBC, in what Storify describes as “one of our first formal partnerships with a media organization.” BBC developers have apparently built a custom Storify integration for the BBC site — you can see what it looks like in this BBC Radio 2 liveblog of an attempt to recreate The Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me.

Storify is also announcing that it’s now a WordPress VIP partner, making it easy for WordPress VIP sites (such as TechCrunch) to incorporate Storify content. The company says it now reaches 15 million unique readers per month, with 600,000 registered curators and traffic tripling over the past year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Before he was upending the media and financial services, Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey was a proud hacker. During a 60 Minutes interview with Lara Logan, he recounted how hacking helped launch his professional career after he exposed vulnerabilities in a software company’s network,

“Jack Dorsey: I found a way into the website. I found a hole. I found a security hole.

Lara Logan: Is that– are you– is that the same thing as hacking?

Jack Dorsey: It’s– ha– yes. Hacking– hacking is– hacking is– is–

Lara Logan: A crime.

Jack Dorsey: Well, no. Criminal hacking is a crime. Hacking is actually a–

Lara Logan: Hacking for a job application is not a crime?

Jack Dorsey: No, no, no, no, no. No, not a crime at all. And I emailed them and I said, “You have a security hole. Here’s how to fix it. And I write dispatch software.” And–

Lara Logan: And they hired you.

Jack Dorsey: And they hired me a week later. And it was a dream come true, which is a weird dream for a kid.”

Dorsey’s comments are a powerful endorsement for reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1980′s law widely blamed for the untimely suicide of Internet activist, Aaron Swartz. Reformers argue that infiltrating computer systems shouldn’t carry the same penalty as other federal crimes, especially if they’re done out of civil disobedience or to expose dangerous network flaws.

Earlier this year, the debate over the legality of hacking was again sparked after a Canadian college expelled a student, Hamed Al-Khabaz, for exposing network security holes.

Of course, like Dorsey, Al-Khabaz will probably land on his feet, since many modern-day federal agencies and tech companies openly embrace upstart hackers. The career page of The National Security Administration (NSA), reads, “If you have a few, shall we say, indiscretions in your past, don’t be alarmed.” Perhaps now that one of America’s most iconic technology founders got his start as a hacker, policymakers will learn that the law should catch up with the times.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

[Editor’s Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

Imagine that you’re a pretty good drummer, you’re in a band, and you’d like to give lessons. You could charge for these lessons, of course, but you’re really into helping out charities. A site called ProBueno is a marketplace, founded by MIT alums, to shop your talents in exchange for charitable donations. When you think about it, all this really is is technology-empowered volunteering.

It’s a brilliant concept and the site has just announced that it has signed up Khan Academy for a pilot program.

Here’s how co-founder of ProBeuno, Mochel Rbeiz, explains the site and its mission:

ProBueno’s goal is to transform the way people think about pro bono work and use technology to make it easy. Pro bono work is generally reserved to a very small and elite subset of the population, who can offer their professional expertise for free to nonprofits. It comes with a number of constraints: finding a nonprofit one cares about, that also needs particular talents at a time and place that’s mutually acceptable.

While you might not have had the time to give those drumming lessons to someone who needs them, now you can, but feel good because the money is going directly to charity, like say, the Red Cross. It’s hard to help fundraise for a charity, because you never know what it is that you can do to help. It’s easy to help a non-profit like LiveStrong, because you know that you can help out with a bike race to raise funds. Other non-profits with less-defined themes aren’t so easy to get involved with.

Another co-founder, Ryan Kabir, shared the reason why the site was built:

We developed ProBueno because we realized how difficult it was to make a difference for the causes we cared about. We could not write a large enough check, or drop everything to volunteer. We felt there should be an easier way for people to use their talents for good.

The company has raised $340K in angel funding from friends, family and a few investment funds. This recently launched fund-raising tool is best shown off on the landing page for the Khan Academy. There’s a dropdown that lets you choose a task that you could offer time for, and once you’re connected with a willing donor, you perform the task and the money will get right to Khan Academy.

The individual task pages look a bit like what you’d find on Kickstarter, letting you set the number of “spots” that are available for the service that you’re providing. If you were to offer up looking at someone’s resume, you could have five spots available at $20 each, and that would be $100 going to your charity of choice.

I can already think of quite a few things I’m going to list on ProBueno, I bet if you took a few minutes to think about it so could you. I imagine that ProBueno will be adding more non-profits and options of services to offer as time goes on, but it will be interesting to watch this community grow. They’re on to something, and it’s something quite special.

You don’t always have to be the one giving money to do good.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Our furry friends are often labelled our faithful companions, but their loyalty can often come at a price. We humans must accept the responsibility of their care and tolerance for some of their less-savory traits, such as the bouquet of their breath, the piling of their pelage, or the proliferation of their poop. To ease the burden, Indiegogo inventors have been applying creativity to address each of these options to help enable our animal friends to come closer to matching the clean convenience of the immortal robots destined to replace them in the future.

Backed Orapup. As Ralph Wiggam once keenly observed, “my cat’s breath smells like cat food.” Wouldst that were the worst scent to emanate from the mouths of our furry friends. Believing dogs’ barks to be stronger competition for their bites than often given credit for, 75 year-old dentist Bob “I put the ‘wag’ in” Wagstaff has developed the Orapup, a mouth cleaner for dogs designed to drive the halitosis from your havanese. Given that oral hygiene isn’t at the top of dogs’ natural gifts, Dr. Wagstaff developed brisket-flavored bristles that encourage the hound to lick its way to minty freshness, or at least a less obnoxious odor.

After raising nearly $63,000 in its Indiegogo campaign, the Orapup is now available for preorder at Amazon.com for about $16, but isn’t due to arrive until December, where it may offer holiday comfort to Lucy Van Pelt and others who have contracted dog germs. Unavailable to the late adopters who use such a traditional channel is the “I kissed my dog and I liked it” t-shirt that was offered to those who pledged $95 and described by the campaign page as “delightfully inappropriate.”

Backed: The SpotVac. The idea of a device to clean up spills isn’t intrinsically a pet accessory; indeed, the SpotVac also claims to effectively suck up milk, paint and other stray substances. That said, it sure can come in handy if any undesirable solids, liquids or gases have been transferred from your pet’s body to your carpets. Such is a highlighted application for the $120 SpotVac Pet Odor Pack, which attaches to an inexpensive wet vac to permeate carpet stains “the way the professional does it” and without using an “aggressive chemical,” such as sodium punch face. The highlight of the SpotVac video, seemingly excerpted from a future infomercial, involves the inventor’s mom nose-diving into her dining-room carpet twice and describing the lack of dog-related smell to be “like a Christmas miracle” (although one would be hard-pressed to name which one exactly).

For now, the makers of the SpotVac need to suck up to the crowdfunders a little better, as they’ve reached a bit less than half of their $25,000 goal. However, there’s still about 23 days left in the campaign in which to prove that this dog can hunt.

Whacked: CatMan-Doo. Cats may no longer be the widespread object of worship that they once were to ancient Egyptians, but they have many exceptional abilities, including balance, the ability to infiltrate Internet message boards and social networks, and, yes, the ability to use toilets. Getting your feline in line when it comes to eliminating the litter box is the goal of the CatMan-Doo, a toilet seat for cats intended to impart potty training within three weeks and then remain on the toilet to accommodate kitty. As the campaign site admonishes in threatening bold, all caps, and an exclamation point: “DO NOT EVER expect the cat to use a human toilet seat!” (Yes, but what about CatMen?)

The CatMan-Doo system, starting at $39 for a cat-show special, was supposed to ship in February. The backers attracted only a bit over a third of their $10,000 goal, but they get to keep all the money raised via the Flexible Funding campaign, enabling them to purchase at least a one-way ticket to Katmandont.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch