Freshdesk Launches $10M...

Freshdesk is trying to make waves in cloud customer support. Launched in June of last year, the young company is on a mission to help businesses of all sizes manage customer service through both traditional channels, like email and phone, as well on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Earlier this week, Freshdesk added to its customer support suite , launching support for private customer messages via the new Brand Pages Facebook launched back in February. This means that, using the new Pages, customers can initiate private conversations with brands, with the ability to share the kind of sensitive information they wouldn’t post publicly on Facebook or Twitter, like passwords and credit card numbers. Freshdesk said that it’s the first customer support platform to offer this kind of integration, a shot across the bow of its two largest and well-established competitors, Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com . To compete, the startup is making a push to differentiate its platform, adding private messaging via Brand Pages on top of what it believes is its core differentiator: Allowing its customers to support and manage multiple products and brands from one simple web interface. In less than a year, Freshdesk has already raised $6 million in venture funding from Tiger Global and Accel, and, though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering its brand of cloud customer support to theh enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well. That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through a $10 million “fund,” which includes free support for one year. Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made to begin giving their early-stage businesses customer support tools so that they don’t have to worry about allocating their own money to CRM tools at those critical, early stages of growth. Not unlike any other fund that provides growth services, value, or support to young businesses, Freshdesk is looking to give startups a painless way to start generating customer love early on in their growth. So what does the Future Fund offer? Qualifying startups (any company that has under $1 million in annual revenues is welcome to apply, it’s not limited to the accelerators we mentioned earlier) will get up to three full-time customer support agents free for an entire year as part of Freshdesk’s “Garden” plan. The plan includes multi-channel support, which startups can use to support customer relation management through email, phone, their website, Facebook, and Twitter from one dashboard. This means that they can view and manage queries, lead or sales questions, ticketing functionality, as well as community management capabilities that allow teams to engage customers in discussion forums and let early adopters suggest and vote on ideas. Startups with multiple brands or product lines can support their brands through a single account. Freshdesk is supporting the fund from its internal revenues, and although it’s not disclosing rev growth, the team did say that it was supporting 700 companies as of April, which has doubled since February. With its Future Fund, Freshdesk believes that it’s doing a community service by way of a free service that lets young businesses focus on their product while maintaining quality customer support, but this is also very much an initiative that it hopes will introduce SaaS support to a new generation of companies, which it will try to convert to paying customers when the year of free service expires. Like others, Freshdesk is free to start, with a tiered pricing scheme that escalates based on the number of agents and customization features a business needs. More on pricing here. For startups looking to participate in the Future Fund, check out its landing page here .

Comcast Kills Its 250GB...

Comcast announced today that it is doing away with its 250 GB data cap , and will be moving to test out new plans will charge customers based on usage, rather than cutting them off. Since 2008, Comcast has had a data usage cap of 250GB for all its broadband plans. At that time, the cap was mainly meant to deter users from abusing the network, largely by downloading or distributing pirated video files. But times have changed, streaming media is now a thing, and services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and TV Everywhere services like Xfinity TV and HBO Go are using up massive amounts of data for some customers. “Four years after we put it in place, we don’t think a static, non-flexible data cap is the best approach,” David Cohen, EVP of Comcast, said on a call with press. Comcast’s response is to cancel its 250 GB data cap and to test out different approaches to dealing with broadband data management. That starts with increasing everyone’s data plan to 300 GB, and putting into effect two new plans in test markets. The first test will start its minimum broadband plan — Internet essentials, which is priced at $9.95 a month — at 300GB and will gradually increase the amount of data available to customers who buy higher-speed broadband plans. The second test will provide all broadband customers with 300 GB, regardless of data plan, and charge them more — say, $10 per 50 GB — on an incremental basis for data used over and above that. For those who don’t live in the test markets, the 250 GB threshold will disappear completely, and customers will no longer be cut off if they hit the old cap. Comcast will still contact those who come close, if only to ensure that customers aren’t getting hit by botnets or other malware. The goal for Comcast is to make sure it’s not cutting customers off who are reaching that 250 GB limit — and to also make sure that customers who are using a huge amount of data pay their fair share. The company is also hoping to allay concerns from customer concerns that they might hit those caps due to using services like Netflix, or even TV Everywhere services. Comcast wouldn’t get into specifics about what percentage of customers bump up against the current threshold, but said that median broadband usage is around 8-10 GB per month. That gives most customers a lot of leeway with 300 GB, but the new plans remove any hypothetical threat of disconnection due to usage. At the same time, one of the main reasons that the data cap discussion came about was due to criticism Comcast received over its Xbox Live streaming VOD service . That service, while delivered via IP, wasn’t being counted toward its cap. That won’t change going forward, and Xbox streams still won’t count against its customer broadband usage. [Image via Flickr/Kevin Burkett ]

Twitter Allows Firefox ...

Twitter may further separate itself from the social media crowd by doing something that some might think is anti-social media (at least from a business point of view). That something is allowing users to opt in to a ‘Do Not track’ mode when using the Firefox browser. The New York Times Bits blog reports It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data. Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter. Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it. Couple this action with Twitter’s recent vigorous resistance to turning over information about a user who was part of the Occupy Wall Street ‘movement’. Because Twitter’s focus is more about the news and information that a user passes along vs. the user itself, they can play thins kind of user friendly game MUCH more easily than Facebook can. Facebook is completely dependent on the individual characteristics and data of users so advertisers can decide who they want to target. Twitter, on the other hand, is driven by keywords and hashtags which are different forms of determining what a Twitter user may or may not want to see with regards to ads. Has Twitter found a way to further differentiate and distance itself from Facebook and even Google in the privacy realm? If yes then they have scored a rather large coup. Let’s face it, no matter what happens in Friday’s IPO Facebook will always be positioned as a necessary evil by users. This love / hate relationship is one that makes Facebook more susceptible to the whims of the individual especially if they are feeling wronged by the service (and, of course, another viable social option exists which is a big question mark). Twitter is saying “Hey, it’s cool if we don’t have more data on you than you would like us to have.” and that is like a blast of fresh air in the day and age of ‘nothing is sacred or private in the online world.” Twitter is already different but this makes it more so and that is a very good thing for them and for users. What’s another advantage of Twitter’s move in this direction. Well, how about having the news be “announced” by a high ranking official of the FTC? Yup, that’s the government telling an Internet company “Nice work!”. To Twitter that is priceless. Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said in a statement, “As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track.” Ms. Penner added: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track.” Twitter has been laying low as of late which isn’t hard to do in this Facebook IPO feeding frenzy. Maybe we should already start to ignore the IPO and see what the competition is doing? After all, unless you are getting rich from this IPO it should be business as usual and, despite the hype, there is much more to the social marketing world than just Facebook. Thank God for that.

Slide.ly Is Bringing Ba...

The lowly photo slideshow is not dead yet, or at least that’s the hope of the team at Tel Aviv-based EasyHi , which is debuting its new product Slide.ly today, backed by $1 million in seed funding. The company aims to pick up where Slide.com ( acquired by Google in 2010 ) left off. It’s building a slideshow creation tool for the new age, using sources like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pickplz, and Picasa, as well as Google Images, photos from your friends or those from your computer. You then mix that content with music from SoundCloud and YouTube and add – you guessed it – Instagram-like effects. Although there’s no space on Facebook to “embed” your glorious creation permanently, as Slide.com’s shows were once pinned on dizzy Myspace pages, the resulting slideshows can be shared to your Facebook Timeline or page, tweeted or emailed. EasyHi , founded in 2010, is led by CEO Tom More, who has 12+ years experience in building Internet apps, but whose personal passions for music and photography made building something like Slide.ly a good fit. “Creative self-expression is in our DNA,” he says of EasyHi, now a team of ten. The company’s value proposition, at first glance, sounds a lot like that of instant slideshow tool, Animoto , photo collection-sharing service Erly , or many others competing in the space with DIY or automated tools that let you make jazzier, more social-infused alternatives to PowerPoint presentations and online photo albums. But More says that his vision extends beyond slideshows. “We look at this space as a mere starting point. What we are here to create is a new way of telling a story, and there’s usually more than one photo for every story,” he explains. “The stories we’d like to help users capture are personal (as many similar services attend to), but are also topical stories that mix your own photos with related media, group stories that combine photos (and soon videos) of you and your friends, fan stories that mesh personal photos and video with your favorite music and local stories or real-time events.” Ah, so that sounds more like Storify , it seems, even if Slide.ly is starting out focused on the consumer photo-sharing space. EasyHi, which already has 500,000 installs of its e-card application, plans to grow Slide.ly’s user base by tapping into its current audience. Once established, the eventual business model is to offer a freemium service where things like custom themes and templates could be in-app purchases. Slide.ly is still in closed beta, but there are 100 invites for TechCrunch readers here . Just use the code “ techcrunch ” when signing up.

Shortform Launches Book...

Video curation platform Shortform is launching a few new features that will make it easier for its video jockeys (VJs) to curate and share content with friends and followers. The hope is that by introducing a browser bookmarklet, as well as implementing Facebook Open Graph, the startup will be able to continue its hockey stick-like growth in video minutes consumed. Shortform is introducing a bookmarklet for adding videos to their channels. The bookmarklet will work with all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), making it easier for VJs to instantly update their playlists without having to open a new tab, copy and paste the URL, etc. In addition to adding videos to their channels, the bookmarklet will also find all videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and CollegeHumor that are on a given page so that users can choose between them. In addition to the new bookmarklet, Shortform is also rolling out Facebook Open Graph integration, which will seamlessly share the channels that users are watching. Shortform already had launched a connection with Facebook that let VJs and viewers to share what they were watching with friends on the social network, but they had to click a share button to do so. The new social feature will automatically share channels and VJs that viewers are watching, so long as they opt in. According to Shortform CEO Nader Ghaffari, the choice to share channels and not individual videos was not just meant to avoid spamming user news feeds, like some other high-profile video startups have over the past few weeks. It was also because Shortform is, at its core, about curated collections of videos, and it hopes to highlight those collections rather than individual pieces of content. The goal is to grow its user base, but also to increase engagement — that is, the amount of time that users spend watching videos through Shortform channels. Since the beginning of the year, the startup has seen a 400 percent increase in the time spent per month, with users watching more than 16 million minutes of video in April. One way it’s currently doing that is by encouraging its VJs fighting for viewers’ attention. The site runs a weekly VJ competition , where it rewards the top 50 VJs, as determined by the total amount of time users spend on each of their channels. Shortform is awarding a total of $2,500 to the top channels every week, with the first-place VJ getting $600, second place getting $400, third place getting $200, and so-on down the line. While the competition is one way to reward the VJ who are driving users to the service, it’s just one step toward providing them with more money. In the future, Ghaffari says he’d like to have a more formal revenue-sharing agreement with VJs as the startup ramps up its own monetization.