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...

Peter is the managing editor of TechCrunch. Prior to his second stint with TechCrunch, Peter launched The Daily, the first major tablet-only daily publication from News Corp, and served as its technology editor. Peter is the former technology editor at TIME Magazine and founder/editor of Techland.com. Before joining TIME, Peter was a news editor at CrunchGear. His work has also appeared in... ? Learn More It might not be the funding announcement we’ve been hearing rumors about but today Square announced that they’ve partnered with Starbucks. Square will begin processing all US credit and debit card transactions for Starbucks across their 7,000 locations this fall. Pay with Square users will be able to find a nearby Starbucks in the Square Directory from their iPhone or Android smartphone. Additionally, Starbucks will be investing $25 million in Square for the company’s Series D financing round. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, will also be joining Square’s Board of Directors. More i...

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...

Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture... ? Learn More A challenging area that has seemed perpetually ahead of its time, HTML5 gaming has seen many startups come and go as Flash or native iOS and Android development have held their own. Yet the lure of having true cross-platform play keeps entrepreneurs coming. Now some former early Facebook and early Google engineers are attacking the problem with a new startup called Artillery. They’ve raised funding from a stellar cast of investors including First Round Capital, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson’s Signia Ventures, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz,...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More There are all sorts of loyalty program out there, but let’s be honest — most of them are a pain in the ass to navigate. They require you to carry around a punch card, or you have to check in using some kind of mobile app, or use a specific rewards card. And each local merchant is tied to a different app or loyalty program, which means that users need to have various different apps or cards at the ready to capture rewards. New York City-based LocalBonus differentiates itself by offering up a “universal” loyalty program that doesn’t require users to download an app, checkin to a location, or carry around a punchcard to get points. Instead, it ties LocalBonus loyalty points to purchases made with a user’s debit or credit card. Once someone has registered a card with...

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Activision Blizzard announced its second quarter results today, beating estimates with net revenues at $1.08 billion, compared to $1.15 billion for the second quarter last year. Meanwhile, net revenue from digital channels came in at $343 million and represented 32 percent of the company’s total revenues, up from a 27 percent-share last quarter. Earnings per share came in at $0.16, compared to $0.29 for Q2 2011. The consensus on Wall Street was that Activision would see 18.7 percent revenue growth and 20 percent earnings-per-share growth to $829.7 million and $0.12, respectively. For the first quarter (the period ending March 31st), the company’s net revenues were $1.17 billion, with net revenues at $587 million and EPS at $0.33. So, all in all, Activision beat estimates, the fifth quarter in a row they’v...

We’ve seen an increasing number of fashion startups lately and the newest one is Hello La Mode, a New York-based startup that just launched its marketplace for luxury fashion resale last week. The company just announced that it has raised a $500,000 seed round from three undisclosed angel investors. That’s not quite on the same level as some other fashion-focused companies like JustFab, which raised $76 million this week, but Hello La Mode has an interesting business model that sets it apart from other fashion startups. Until now, Hello La Mode co-founder Eric Gagnaire tells us, people were often hesitant to buy secondhand apparel online because of potential issues with quality and conformity. His company, however, makes sure that every item that is put up for sale goes through a “manual check by fashion experts.” The company plans to use this funding round to build its mobile and tablet apps, as well as to hire more of experts to scale its operations. Hello La Mode currently operate...

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...

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 ...

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More BaubleBar, a startup that promises high-quality jewelry at affordable prices, has raised a $4.5 million Series A round of funding from Accel Partners and Greycroft Partners. The round was reported this morning in PandoDaily. Co-founder Daniella Yacobovsky confirmed the funding via email (and said the round actually closed in April). BaubleBar says that it tries to tackle two of the big pain points in jewelry shopping — selection and price. The company gets its products directly from designers, with new products introduced every Tuesday and Thursday, and new collections chosen by the company’s fashion team unv...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Former Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhoury is working on a new, super-stealthy project called Pushd. Details are scarce, but here’s what we know: According to an SEC filing, he’s teamed up with Summize co-founder Eric Jensen and the two have raised $1.35 million for the venture, which is based in New York City. Chowdhoury joined Twitter with the company’s 2008 acquisition of search engine Summize. He became Chief Scientist at Twitter, while Jensen became Twitter’s Tech Lead for Search and Relevance. Last fall, MG reported that Chowdhoury, Jensen, and the rest of the Summize team left Twitter, amidst a high-profile shakeup of management at the social network. His resignation followed the departure of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, as well as several key produc...