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...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More News Corporation has just reported its quarterly earnings. For Q4 it had revenues of $8.4 billion with earnings per share of $0.32, both down compared to the year before (Q4 2011 the company reported revenues of $9 billion with EPS of $0.35). The company also reported a net loss of $1.6 billion for the quarter, compared to a net income of $683 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company said the figure included a $2.8 billion restructuring charge for its publishing division, which News Corp. is planning to separate from its entertainment division. That includes publications like the Wall Street...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More LinkedIn has just released Q2 earnings, and the enterprise-focused social network continues to rise. It’s posted revenues of $228.2 million and earnings per share of $0.03 (non-GAAP EPS: $0.16). This puts the company past earnings estimates from First Call of $216.3 million, and Yahoo Finance, which had estimated revenues of $216 million. It also beat First Call’s EPS of $0.01, as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance of revenues of $210-$215 million. However, GAAP net income was nearly halved to $2.8 million, versus net income of $4.5 million Q2 2011. (Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter was $18.1 mi...

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 As startups struggle to hire top-notch talent, several startups (like Interview Street and Coderwall) have emerged with a focus on recruiting developers. Now a company called TheLions is offering a similarly-focused approach to the world of sales. For most startups, salespeople are almost as important as the technical team, since they’re the ones who bring in revenue. Since its founding in 2010, TheLions quietly built a data-driven approach to sales recruiting for startups — founder Matt McGraw says his company finds sales “lions” who rate highly on loyalty, performance, pedigree, and talent. TheLions already...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Facebook is making a big effort to diversify its revenue generation into areas like payments around gaming and other services, but today the game is still ads-ads-ads, and it’s growing. In its Q2 earnings which have just come out, Facebook reported advertising revenue of $992 million. That works out to 84% of  its total quarterly revenues of $1.18 billion. Looking back to Facebook’s S-1 filing from before the IPO, that’s actually an increase as a percentage of revenues from last quarter, when ads made up 82% of revenues. The company has gradually been working down its proportion of revenue from ads. Fa...

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More LG has been turning a corner of late, getting its mobile division out of a six-quarter-long rut. Today’s Q2 report outlines a 46 percent increase in net profits year-over-year at $138 million, though phone sales continue to be an obstacle. Overall revenues went up from last quarter, but are still down from a year ago. The handset division in particular had an operating loss of $49.5 million, which has a lot to do with the decline in feature phone sales. Smartphone sales, on the other hand, rose to 44 percent of all units sold, which is up from Q1's 36 percent. It’s not expected that LG compete directly with the iPhone, but the...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More ARM Holdings — supplier of microchips for Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, Samsung’s Galaxy line and soon technology for Microsoft’s Windows 8 devices — continues to report strong results while riding the wireless device boom and expanding to newer areas. The company reported Q2 earnings (ended June 30) of £135.5 million ($213 million), beating analyst estimates of $206 million. Net profit was up by 48 percent, to £39.4 million compared to £26.6 million for the same quarter a year ago. Pointedly, the company is gearing up for continuing good fortune, at least for the next quarter: It says it has a “re...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Apple often gets a lot of love in Europe, but in the last quarter that wasn’t enough to help it against the tide of economic woe hitting the region. In today’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook described sales in the region as “essentially flat to slightly positive” — and, not unlike the wider macro-economy, “that really hampered our total results.” Specifically, he noted that France, Greece and Italy were “particularly poor”, and Germany saw “only single digital positive growth.” Interestingly, the UK seemed immune to this situation and posted a “solid” 13 percent growth rate. Overall, though, the perfor...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Apple today noted in its earnings call for Q3 that two-thirds of its Asia Pacific revenue is coming from Greater China at the moment. CEO Tim Cook noted that revenues in the country were $5.7 billion for the quarter, 48 percent increase on last year, and still growing at an “incredible rate.” To date Apple’s revenues in China for the year now total $12.4 billion. To compare, in 2011 the company made $13.3 billion in China. Nevertheless, Asia Pacific was actually the only region where Apple saw declines in hardware sales in Macs. These were down to 593,000 units, four percent year on year in terms of Ma...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More In today’s Q3 earnings, Apple noted some strong increases in its retail operations, amid some other pressures in overall sales and numbers. Retail sales were up three percent in terms of Mac units, to 791,000 units, and $4.084 billion in revenue. That was a rise of three percent in terms of units, and 17 percent in revenue compared to the same quarter a year ago. In the conference call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that half of the sales in retail were to people who had never owned a mac before. Apple now has 372 stores, 123 outside the U.S., Oppenheimer said. Those stores saw foot traffic of 813 millio...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Search is going very strong in China, and leading player Baidu continues to reap the benefits. In its Q2 results, the company reported sales of 5.456 billion yuan ($858.8 million), up 59.8 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011. The company’s chairman and chief exec, Robin Li, said in a statement that Baidu will “maintain momentum” going forward by investing in new technology, new talent, and more products specifically geared to mobile and cloud services. But these are long-term strategies: for all intents and purposes, just about all of Baidu’s revenues today are coming from online advertising a...