Ajax Girl

Demandbase, a company involved with B2B sales leads, has raised $8 million in a funding round led by Sigma Partners, Adobe Systems, and Altos Ventures. In conjunction with the funding round, Demandbase is also releasing “Demandbase Central”, a platform integrating data from across the web and various databases that will be used to power some of the company’s online services.

The first two of these offerings, also announced today, are Demandbase Direct and Demandbase Stream. “Direct” allows users to manage their leads through a web interface and have them automatically distributed to their email or CRMs. “Stream” allows users to monitor passive visitors to their site and generate sales leads by analyzing incoming traffic. Demandbase says that Stream will allow companies to capitalize on the “98% of unrealized passive Web traffic” by allowing them to directly target specific visitors (Stream’s success will likely hinge on the company’s ability to accurately identify this incoming traffic).

Demandbase is notable for its pay-as-you-go services plans (as opposed to a standard subscription service).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/pj2MBgEXKOE/

For those of you not closely following the drama between social network platform Ning and a popular widget provider called WidgetLaboratory, you can read the background here. On Friday Ning unceremoniously shut down their access to Ning, making all those widgets vanish.

WidgetLaboratory cried foul, saying they’d done nothing wrong, that the ban was “completely without any notice,” and that “it would appear that [Ning] decided to elminate WidgetLaboratory for anti-competitive purposes alone.” Ning was silent in response, citing a “longstanding policy against publicly discussing third party widgets and applications as well as the details of Terms of Service violations.”

Ning remains silent on the reasons for banning WidgetLaboratory, but the whole story is coming out anyway. WidgeLaboratory has posted a number of emails back and forth between the two companies in support of its case (in the event the emails are taken down, we’ve grabbed a copy here). But the emails show just the opposite - that Ning was concerned over the fact that WL was gathering credentials from users and otherwise creating havoc on Ning networks. It was clear that Ning wasn’t happy with WL, was working with them to resolve the problems, and made it clear that if the problems were not resolved WL would be removed from the platform.

In an email to WL on August 2 (more than three weeks ago), CEO Gina Bianchini wrote “Our only goal is to have you build your products in such a way that doesn’t slow down the networks running your products or takedown the Ning Platform with what you’re doing. Both of those would result in us needing to shutdown WidgetLaboratory products and that’s has never been our first choice of options. Hopefully, you know this after 8 months of working with us.”

In another email to WL on August 7, Bianchini wrote “If we have evidence other than our conversation last night that you are asking for username, password, and pin of other Network Creators on WidgetLaboratory, we will be put in the unfortunate situation of shutting down your network and widgets. We don’t want to do this. In fact, we’d like very much to work more closely together but we can only do so if everything you guys are doing is within the Terms of Service.”

The emails taken as a whole show a pattern of emotional rants by WL, followed by reasoned responses by Ning. Frankly, if I was Ning I would have banned then a long time ago based on the harvesting of user credentials alone.

Based on their own evidence WidgetLaboratory flat out lied in their initial communications around the ban to gather sympathy, and then used the situation to get further attention from the community. These guys are idiots.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/hPpaPAZvbe4/

We are continuing to see some really useful stuff being hacked together after we released an unrestricted API for the startup data we’ve gathered on CrunchBase. Last month we wrote about some of our favorite applications using the API.

A couple of days ago blogger/venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote about some of the things he’d like to be able to do on his mobile phone that he can’t do today. Among them was this: “Twitter or sms bot for Crunchbase - When I hear about a company, I want to send the name of the company via twitter or sms to crunchbase and get a link back to a the entry on it.”

There was an immediate response in the comments with solutions. A Twitter-bot to return CrunchBase info. Sean Maurik from Cascada Mobile created a mobile app that works on a bunch of phones to get CrunchBase data. A SMS interface was also created.

The most usable interface was created by Russell Beattie on Textmarks. Joe Lazarus made it even more useful.

Bottom line, to get data from CrunchBase via SMS, send a text message to 41411. “CBASE digg” returns the contact information for Digg (or whatever term you enter). “cbsms tumblr” returns a link to the top search result for Tumblr. You can also enter in product names, people, etc.

By the way, one of the other things Fred requested in his post was a way to handshake two mobile phones and share contact info. A decade ago we could do this with the Palm V. I can’t wait to do the same with my iPhone.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qFNuLwk66A8/