Business

InsideSales.com has raised $4 million from Hummer Winblad in a Series A Round that the company will use to grow its big data analytics sales force automation (SFO) technology. Joining in the round were Josh James, co-founder and former CEO of Omniture. Mark Gorenberg, managing director, Hummer Winblad, said before the funding, the company was profitable and had not taken any investment. He said the company reminds him of Omniture, which the firm funded under similar circumstances. Omniture was also profitable when it accepted its investment. Omniture was acquired for $1.8 billion in 2009 by Adobe Systems. InsideSales serves small and medium sized companies. It uses predictive analytics to help serve inside sales professionals. Its algorithms are designed to tell the sales professional who to contact, when to contact and how to tailor the message for the sales target. The company has increased its employees from 65 to 140 people. In the past several months the company has increased fr...

Go to almost any small business website and you will find you can’t make a call. A real call where you talk to someone simply by clicking a button. Infratel hopes to change all that. The Seattle company has received $3 million in funding from Prostor Capital and Runa Capital to provide its cloud-based telephony service for providing click-to-talk capabilities. Infratel now has the capability for a business to add an app on Facebook to make calls to a pre-programmed number. The website app works in a similar fashion. The app is installed on the site. The user enters a phone number to pre-program the application. The user then adds the provided widget code to web pages where the visitors will see the “Click to Call” button. Infratel charges according to the number of minutes you use. It has two tiers of service. Subscribers can use a Facebook only service or a combined offering that includes both a Facebook and Web app. Infratel will compete with social CRM providers such as Salesforce...

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... ? Learn More Doug Purdy, Facebook’s Director of Developer Products, just announced that 230 million people played games on Facebook.com in the past 30 days and that 8 of the 10 top grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook. This is an interesting bit of news when thinking about actual user interaction with the service and what third party developers could expect to see when building for the platform. Facebook offers games directly on Facebook.com as well as an SDK to push data from standalone apps on Android and iPhone to Facebook. Both of these traffic sources are obviously quite sticky and quite valuable. Considering, ac...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Facebook has become known for making a good number of talent-focused startup acquisitions, aka acqui-hires — but the cost of each deal is normally kept under wraps. In a regulatory quarterly filing the company made today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though, it put an aggregate pricetag on all those “non-material” sized deals it made in the first half of this year: $24 million. Here’s the wording from the document: “During the six months ended June 30, 2012, we completed business acquisitions for total consideration of $24 million. These acquisitions wer...

Ever wonder what those mysterious government service fees on your cell phone bill go to fund? Part of it goes toward a newly launched $415 million plan to provide 400,000 rural netizens with some broadband goodness. The Connect America Fund, a Obama administration-supported plan for universal broadband, is part of a larger $4.5 billion mission to connect 19 million homes to bit-torrent streaming speeds by 2020. As with any major government rollout, the project is dogged by bureaucracy and industry backlash, but is nonetheless moving forward. Broadband has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for full participation in our economy and society,” writes the FCC, arguing that public money will go toward expanding an essential part of the economy, ultimately resulting in more revenue for the federal government. Not everyone is thrilled with the plan: South Dakota Public Utilities Commission Chairman Chris Nelson says the government’s project has halted private sector plans for his state,...

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. ? Learn More Because we’re in need of some brighter NFC-related news today, Flomio, a TechStars-backed startup, and makers a platform for building NFC and RFID enabled applications, has closed a seed round of $525,000. The round was led by RMR Capital, and included participation from TechStars, the Cloud Power Fund, Matthew Lally (Augme, Pickflair), and Clint Watson (FASO). Based in Miami, Florida (“Silicon Beach!”), Flomio has a different approach to NFC, which will be reflected in a website redesign going out next week. In short, it wants to humanize the technology. Originally a side project from founder Richard Grundy, Flomio was recently accepted into TechStars Cloud, the cloud computing-focused incubator which held its first demo day i...

It is a common perception that IP litigation is exploding, in part because the patent system is allegedly broken. Enter Lex Machina, a Palo Alto based company providing IP litigation data and analytics to help companies ”anticipate, manage, and win patent and other IP law suits,” which just closed another $2 million in a funding round led by X/Seed Capital. Investors in this latest round include Costanoa Venture Capital (founded by Greg Sands), Naval Ravikant (Angel List), Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera), and David Chao (DCM). Prior investors include Dan Cooperman (former General Counsel for Apple and Oracle) and Jerry Yang (Yahoo!). “This funding will enable us to improve our existing SaaS product and develop more IP analytics products that will employ our proprietary data to predict litigation outcomes, inform transaction and investment decisions and value and monetize critical IP assets,” said Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina, in a statement. Sounds good, here’s how: Lex Machina’s cra...

Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... ? Learn More Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg broke out how one of the company’s key new products is doing during the company’s first earnings call today. Sponsored Stories ads, which are advertiser actions (like posting a photo) that appear in the news feed, are getting “early results that are encouraging.” The product, which has slowly rolled out over the last half- year or so, are on a $1 million a day annual run-rate (so $365 million a year), around half of which is mobile. “Sponsored stories and newsfeed are the cornerstone of our mobile monetization strategy,” chief operating officer Sheryl Sand...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Tesla Motors, the electric car company led by PayPal founder Elon Musk, today announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2012. As we’ve written before, car companies aren’t typically on TechCrunch’s radar, but Tesla is unique. It has Silicon Valley headquarters, techie leadership, startup roots, and a completely fresh approach to making automobiles. In a way, Tesla’s vehicles are essentially very big, very expensive new gadgets. The announcement today encompassed the standard earnings information — revenue, spending, profits, and the like — which we’ll g...

Meteor, the company behind an application development framework of the same name, today announced $11.2 series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, with Matrix Partners also contributing. The investment follows Andreessen Horowitz’ record breaking $100 million investment in Github. The Meteor framework is free and open source and can be used for creating rich, Google Docs style applications in the browser. A preview was released last April. The company plans to monetize the product by selling enterprise support and services. Meteor was founded by ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis, MixApp co-founder Nick Martin and early Asana employee/MixApp co-founder Geoff Schmidt. David Greenspan, who co-founded AppJet (the company behind EtherPad) and went on to work on Google Wave, is another early employee. These are guys who know how to build richly interactive, real-time web apps. And they know painful it can be to develop modern, desktop-like apps for the browser. It takes a lot of work to b...

GoodData has raised $25 million to continue developing its cloud-based business intelligence technology. The funding brings GoodData’s total funding to $55 million. Founder and CEO Roman Stanek said the investment came from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners and Fidelity Growth Partners. Windcrest Partners is also contributing to the round. GoodData offers a cloud-based data analytics service that competes with solutions from companies such as IBM, SAP and Oracle. Its business model is pretty clever. Its markets to the vast ecosystem of SaaS providers that integrate the technology into their own platforms. Those providers can then offer their own customers access to dashboards, advanced reporting and other features. The difference is in the apps that the SaaS providers offer from GoodData. Stanek cites as an example how budgets are shifting to digital marketing. Marketers, though, still do not have enough analytics. GoodData provides insights into that ...

During Apple’s Q3 earnings call today, the company’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer announced that Apple now has 150 Million iCloud users. That’s up from 125 million users the company cited in its last quarterly earnings call in April. As Apple announced at its annual developer conference earlier this year, iCloud will be tightly integrated into Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X that’s scheduled to launch tomorrow. Apple sold 26 million iPhones and 17 million iPads in the last quarter, which surely helped to push the number of iCloud users up as well, though the growth in iCloud users is obviously lagging behind the overall growth in the iPhone and iPad ecosystem. The company also announced that it made $1.8 billion in revenue from iTunes (that’s from music, movies, TV shows and apps). During its earnings call three months ago, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer announced that there were 28 million songs and 45,000 movies available in iTunes. The company did not release any updated numbers for...

As America anxiously awaits "The Bachelorette" Emily to chose her man Sunday night, there might be a new clue. Finalist Jef Holm's childhood Utah home is on the market for $3.39 million, according to Trulia. Could he be moving in with Emily? We'll have to wait and find out Sunday. For now, take a tour around Holm's Saint George's estate that has nine bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and spans nearly 16,000 square feet.  Holm made his money through his do-gooder ways and entrepreneurship. Please follow The Life on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Meredith Galante on Twitter. x To embed this post, copy the code below and paste into your website or blog. View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.