Stuff I've Read

Enterprise-level social platform Addvocate has raised a new $2 million round of funding, the company announced today.

Addvocate’s cloud-based platform allows companies to leverage the social activity of their employees’ personal social media accounts, so that everyone at the company can become a brand advocate. The main idea behind using employees to promote your company is that it seems far more legitimate to customers, who don’t feel like they’re just being marketed to by someone who’s specifically getting paid to blast stuff over Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. The startup’s founder and CEO Marcus Nelson, who previously held the role of social media head at Salesforce, told me in a previous interview that Addvocate also has plans to help manage company-branded social accounts, too.

In addition to the funding news, Addvocate announced that it has hired former Oracle VP of business development Piers Cooper as the company’s new chief operations officer. This Series A round follows an earlier seed round funded by multiple early angel investors, including Cyan and Scott Banister, Jay Baer, and Jesse Engle.

The new funding round was led by Rogers Venture Partners, with participation from angel investor Karen Riley. It comes just weeks after Addvocate raised $539,000 in seed funding from a handful of angel investors including, Taskrabbit engineering VP Yee Lee, former CoTweet CEO Jesse Engle, CoTweet cofounder Kyle Sollenberger, and others.

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $2.54 million in funding to date.

Filed under: Business, Deals, Social

Cloud Infographic: Turning Big Data Overload Into Big Sales

The amount of data in our world increases massively day-by-day. Big data is about capturing, storing and analyzing large pools of data from customers/consumers, suppliers, partners, operations, employees etc. According to a McKinsey  report, US companies from almost all industry sectors have, on average, hundreds of terabytes of data stored per company. The amount of data is growing as companies gather more and more information with each transaction and interaction with their customers. Continue reading the full article.

Attached is an excellent infographic courtesy of PROs titled “The Big V’s Of Big Data”

Infographic Source: Pros

The post Cloud Infographic: Turning Big Data Overload Into Big Sales appeared first on CloudTweaks.

MavenSay is an app focused around personal recommendations, but today the company is launching a brand new standalone app called Rithm.

Seeing that users of MavenSay were spending a lot of time recommending music, and even communicating through music, MavenSay thought it would be a good idea to develop an app all around music messaging. Music messaging? Yes, music messaging. Think of it kind of like Snapchat for music.

No, it doesn’t auto-destroy the musical message after ten seconds, but there is a certain creative quality to it that reminds me quite a bit of Snapchat. See, Snapchat developed a new way to message. It’s not just about the self-destructing bit, it’s about the fact that you can’t send a message on Snapchat without sending a picture along with it.

In the same way, Rithm asks users to think outside the box and attach a song to each message. Not only is the process of creating a “rithm” fun and interesting, compared to other social networks and messaging apps, but receiving one is equally engaging.

Here’s how it works:

You download the Rithm app from the Apple App Store, and with the help of APIs from Spotify, iTunes, Rdio, and SoundCloud, Rithm will let you pull up the preview and/or full track for any song you can think of. Once you’ve chosen a song, you can then add a picture, a video, or choose from one of Rithm’s preset animated characters. You can even draw on your own pictures, Snapchat-style.

Then, simply write a message at the bottom, and send it to the intended recipient.

The interesting thing here is that Rithm can be used for a whole slew of reasons. Perhaps you want to recommend a song to someone, just because you think they’ll like it. However, Rithm can also be a really cute way to reach out to a friend and make them laugh, touch their heart, or tell them you want to be more than a friend.

That’s the power of music.

In terms of revenue, MavenSay itself is not yet profitable, rather powered by investment funds. Rithm will operate under the same business model for now, but MavenSay founder Mike Wagman believes there is a huge opportunity here with in-app purchases for more dancing characters and other creative expressions.

I’ve been playing with Rithm for the past few days, and it’s slowly becoming one of my favorite apps. Used with the right, clever people, Rithm isn’t only a powerful way to communicate with others, but a fun and interesting way to combine visual content with audio in a creative way.

The app is available now on the Apple App Store.

Seen as more of a social event, developers attend hackathons in order to network with fellow programmers, engineers and others. Yet many participants and companies may not realize the repercussions of the intellectual property created during these marathon coding events, as recently discussed by Harvard Business Review.

Some hackathons are held internally, where only company employees can participate. But when the gatherings are more collaborative, the ownership of the innovation and intellectual property is unclear, which can lead to problems about unequal contributions and rights to the patent.

For this reason, some companies ban their employees from participating in external hackathons, despite the fact it seems overbearing and could be bad for talent recruiting.

Instead of limiting employees from participating in hackathons, companies should look into creating specific policies about attendance. For example, they can limit participation to projects that are likely unrelated to their current product line, thus avoiding conflicts of interest.

Hackathons allow developers to be creative and encourage innovation, which may lead to stronger products and smarter employees down the line. Rather than restricting developers from participating, companies should find ways to take advantage of these events.