Apptegic Uses Big Data ...

For SaaS companies, whose customers are usually signed up on recurring monthly billing cycles, the art of retaining customers is just as important as winning them over in the first place. In fact, it’s probably more important, since customers aren’t tied in to long-term deals. It’s also a lot cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So they need to better understand them and work harder to keep them coming back, which is where Apptegic comes in. The startup, which is being launched as part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, uses big data to provide detailed analytics that companies can use to better engage with their customers. To do so, Apptegic is introducing what it calls a “customer guidance system” (CGS) to identify trends among customer usage and to give them tools to message users in real time and suggest new features that they can use. Founders Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle worked together at Red Hat, where they built operations management tools for SaaS companies. What they found was that there weren’t a lot of tools out there to help those businesses understand their customers and retain them. So they set out to build those tools. Apptegic provides a cloud-based platform that essentially uses big data to analyze behavioral click-through data from customer interactions, then scores the engagement so that businesses can know which features customers find important, and which aren’t. What’s sticky, and what keeps customers coming back. Once a business recognizes that, it can build tools to improve the way that it interacts with those customers. They can customize those reports based on the data that they find important. Apptegic customers can also use the platform to set rules around certain types of customer usage and message their users in real time. That can help guide them to features that they might not be aware of, or to help upsell them on features they haven’t yet bought. Currently Apptegic is focused on web applications, but Wirth told me that it’s looking to extend onto other platforms, and could optimize for mobile applications. It’s currently working with 30 beta customers, but will be launching the cloud-based service this week to add more trial users. Apptegic has five employees now, and has raised $2 million from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Jit Saxena, and other angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q: What do you include that current systems don’t? A: We combine real-time click-stream data and real-time messaging. Q: What was the Ah-ha moment that told you the world needs this? A: We were working with a lot of customers and realized that there were a lot of people building this themselves. Q: How is this more than Google Analytics? A: This gives you information down to the user and offer the opportunity to reach them in real-time. Q: Where are you in terms of launching, and what’s the revenue model? A: We’re launching today and starting to charge today. We charged based on the number of end users that our customers reach.

Clueful Scans The Apps ...

Remember address book-gate ? Locationgate ? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? Oh, that last one might not be a real thing. Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the data we presumed to be ours alone was actually being stored, accessed and shared by others…in many cases, “others” being mobile app developers. Well, leave it to a security firm to capitalize on the privacy scare trend. And by capitalize, I mean launch a $4 app that tells you what the apps on your phone are doing. Introducing  Bitdefender’s Clueful . Today, the security company has pushed Clueful into the iTunes App Store, claiming it can identify the “misdemeanant apps on your iPhone.”  (I believe “misdemeanant” is fancy talk for “naughty.”) Of course, Apple iPhone users don’t have much to fear in terms of malware – Apple curates and tests apps prior to admission. Google has a bigger malware problem, as it only kicks apps out after they’re discovered to be malicious. That being said, even Apple can’t test everything. And some users don’t understand that a social feature on their phone may require an app taking a peek at their address book, for example (the horror!), or tracking their location (ack! I’m being stalked!). While Bitdefender acknowledges that most apps are not malicious, it’s true that app developers can be careless with the way they handle user’s data. With Clueful, Bitdefender says it can now answer questions about what your apps are doing. It shows which apps are accessing your location, tracking your in-app usage, reading your address book, linking your actions across apps to a single identity, needlessly keep GPS running, thereby draining your battery, accessing your UDID, and a host of other ills. To do so, Clueful examines what applications are running in memory and then retrieves audit information from the “Clueful Cloud.” (That’s the name for the space where Bitdefender maintains all the data on apps, and it’s also the way they ensure communication between the app and Bitdefender’s research labs.) To create the Clueful Cloud, Bitdefender built proprietary technology similar to what they use for their anti-virus products, but customized for iOS apps. But because it’s a proprietary technology and patent pending, the company won’t go into detail about the specifics of how it works. But the long and short of it is this: Bitdefender tests apps, creates a database, and then shares that info with the Clueful app to give you insight about the apps you use on your phone. The iTunes App Store has hundreds of thousands of applications, but Bitdefender’s Cloud “only” has tens of thousands at launch. However, the database is still growing, and you can submit apps to be tested using the application. I’ve got an embarrassing number of apps on my phone, but after installing and running Clueful , it still managed to surprise me. (Solitaire was accessing my address book? What?) But the news wasn’t all bad – most of my apps were behaving. Clueful nicely differentiates between apps that “can” do something (like access your address book) versus those that “could” do something (like track your location). Plus, it highlight the good things apps do for you, too, like encrypt your data, for example. I’m not sure the app is worth $3.99, but if you’re at all curious about your apps, or just privacy-sensitive, this isn’t a bad tool to use.

Wishpond Launches Mall3...

Like Milo before it , Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store , which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook. While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360 , a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy. Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall. For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example. To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages. The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties. For more, check out Wishpond at home here , Mall360 here , or see the video below:

Open Garden Lets You Cr...

What if you couldn’t just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden , which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, lets you create a mesh network that ties together all the Open Garden-enabled devices around you into one large network that then automatically shares Internet access and bandwidth between all of these devices. Basically, Open Garden wants to become a crowdsourcing platform for mobile connectivity. For now, Open Garden works on Android, Windows and Mac (it will be available in the Google Play store after today’s Disrupt demo). In the long run, Open Garden also hopes to make an iOS application available. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2011 and has assembled quite an impressive team. Co-founder Micha Benoliel, for example, worked at Skype before starting his own company, and co-founder Stanislav Shalunov has a deep background in Internet infrastructure, including work at Internet 2 and BitTorrent. The company’s third co-founder, Greg Hazel, was previously the lead programmer of the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent. One especially nifty aspect of this project is that Open Garden used its own networking and P2P expertise to built (and patent) its own discovery mechanisms so devices that run its software can easily detect each other. Given the proprietary nature of this, the company doesn’t talk about the exact details of how it does this publicly, though. Right now, Open Garden only uses one Internet offramp for the whole mesh network (though it’s worth noting that it breaks down large networks into smaller ones with about ten nodes as well). If the network detects multiple offramps, it currently selects the fastest one available and switches to another one if that node goes offline or slows down. Soon, says Benoliel, it will also support multi-channel bundling to create a higher data throughput by using multiple on-ramps. Ideally, this could even work if your phone isn’t on a mesh network, as it would allow you to use a WiFi and 3G or 4G network simultaneously. For now, though, the company’s focus is squarely on getting its beta out into the market and making the overall experience as seamless as possible. The obvious question about a project like this, of course, is about how the carriers will react. Benoliel told me that he isn’t too worried about this, though. He likened it to the arrival of VoIP, a technology that the carriers have now embraced. Carriers will just have to adapt to concepts like this and figure out the best ways to make use of them. The Open Garden team believes that, in the long run, the carriers will understand that they can benefit from being part of Open Garden’s open network. Ideally, of course, an ad-hoc mesh network like this could also help carriers offload more data from their 3G and 4G networks. While the company didn’t disclose any details, Benoliel told me that Open Garden already has an agreement with one “forward-looking European carrier.” Other companies that will likely have a hard time appreciating this project are paid WiFi networks like Boingo or GoGo. A phone running Open Garden, after all, could easily provide basic web access to everybody at an airport gate or even on a WiFi-enabled plane. The company, which is probably one of the first to be based on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, has raised some money in a seed round so far and expects to add on to this round or raise a larger VC round soon. Disrupt Q&A Q : Is the plan to sell the app? A : We want to keep it free. Shooting for a freemium model with extra features like VPN access for business users. Q : What about security and privacy? A : The mesh network is encrypted. The device doesn’t let you monitor the traffic on the network. Q : What about the implications on battery power? A : Most of the power consumption comes from the data transmission. Open Garden can also help you save some battery by offloading to WiFi, which uses less power than a 3G or 4G connection. Q : How do you get around the freeloader problem. A : Open Garden has been thinking about moving to a credit system. Q : Do you have competition today? A : We have built a lot of IP. We have a strong competitive advantage there. Competition is in the carrier network offloading business. That’s mostly hardware manufacturers building femotcells etc.

K3 Server Is Making Ent...

How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code…and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server , a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems. BroadPeak is a software consultancy formed in 2006, whose founders have backgrounds in energy trading and capital markets. The idea for K3 Server came to them last year, when they saw the difficulties in how trades were being brought off an exchange and managed for one of their clients. “It really wasn’t about retrieving trades from that exchange,” explains co-founder Vivek Pathak, “it was about moving data from one system to another system effectively, in a way that was transparent for the business users, and that had fail safe mechanisms to alert when things went wrong (as always does in big tech enterprises), and to give a way for a simple business user to manage the logic of that integration thereafter.” And so K3 was born. But the product isn’t just meant for moving data off an exchange – the technology BroadPeak designed can be used for anything. Containing 140 open source components which are initially put to work by in-house I.T., the system can be purposed for moving and managing data between just about anything, from data stores in price repositories to electronic health records. The system offers three main functions: transparency (allowing you to see what data goes through and what fails, so you can act upon that), mapping (field x in System A maps to field y in System B) and rules (if data meets this criteria, then take this action). For IT, K3 Server means they no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they need to translate data between two systems or develop a failover routine, for example. The framework allows them to call up the component instead of coding these pieces from scratch every time they’re used. But while the main data highway, so to speak, is set up by IT, the interesting thing about K3 Server is how the data is handled afterwards. In a traditional environment every little tweak or adjustment would have users scrambling back to developers with a change request. But K3′s “Rules Manager” offers a GUI interface that lets end-users customize their own “if/then” statements for how the data needs to be enriched afterwards (add this reference, set this field, e.g.) Pathak says that in early beta testing, the GUI was simple enough for an end-user to handle, even though this was someone for whom using an Excel spreadsheet was considered a technical feat. Plus, the company claims that using the K3 Server system instead of traditional processes results in a 50% reduction in deployment, operation and maintenance of enterprise integrations. And who doesn’t love less work, right? Given BroadPeak’s wide client connections from their consultancy practice, they’re not worried about signing up their first users. However, others interested can sign up to beta test here . For those waiting for the public launch, it’s very close, we’re told, and the system will then be licensed on a per-server basis, renewed annually. BroadPeak bootstrapped their efforts, spending around $500,000 on K3 Server’s development, and is not looking to immediately raise funding. Disrupt Q&A Judges: Adrian Aoun, Fritz Lanman, Dave Samuel & Michelle Zatlyn MZ: What are the benefits of this? A: Fast to deploy, really after replacing custom code. Market is around trading, primarily. Can move 30K trades per second through K3. Benefit to business: gets data to right place at right time. AA: You know it’s not just about wrapping data, it’s about taking actions on data. How much extensibility is in the UI? And what happens when you pass the limits of that? A: Have 65 integration patterns, plus open source components. We know that in the future we need to create UI transparency into those integration patterns. FL: Which verticals are being targeted? A: Trading is a great place to start, because there’s a low tolerance for losing data. Also looking at healthcare and CRM. FL: Risks in sales process? A: Developers are used to developing their own stuff. Wish I could say it’s been easy. Sales cycles are about 6 months. DS: More about the team? A: Trading biz and tech for long time. (See above) AA: Is it easy to pitch CIOs? A: Most boring part – mapping – is the bane of CIOs, they’re backed up all the time.