Zendesk opens new Denmark office, teams up with startup incubators

Customer help desk management provider Zendesk today announced that it is opening a new office in Denmark and is teaming up with nearly a dozen startup incubators around the world to give its customer support software.

The company is working with the likes of Y Combinator and Seedcamp to give those attending startups its software for free for a year.?Zendesk operates a Web-based help desk service that lets companies track customer complaints across most of the web. It’s one of a number of startups trying to bring the ideas behind consumer-facing technology like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise space.

“We were once a startup and we know how important it is to get help from those other companies whenever [you can] get it,” Zack Urlocker, the company’s chief operating officer, told VentureBeat. “Incubators weren’t around when we were getting started, and now that they are, they’re one of the best ways to get an idea off the ground, so naturally we wanted to work with them.”

Some of Zendesk’s largest customers are graduates from those same incubators.?The company now has 10,000 customers, including the likes of superstar startups Groupon, Airbnb and Dropbox. Erply, another major customer, is a graduate of Europe’s Seedcamp — another incubator Zendesk is working with.

“It isn’t a play for new customers,” Urlocker said. “We just wanted to throw some help out.”

The company now has more than 100 employees, and while it’s based in San Francisco, Calif., it has strong ties to Copenhagen, Denmark. That’s where the company is born and where the company has a “fan base,” Urlocker said. There’s a lot of talent there that the company would like to tap into, and it already has a large number of connections there thanks to Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane’s history in the city, Urlocker said.

Zendesk is part of a number of new-age venture-backed enterprise startups that are bringing consumer tech to the enterprise.?The company?recently closed its third round of fundraising,?worth $19 million. It also?closed a $6 million fundraising round in August 2009.

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Tags: customer help desk, enterprise, incubator, seed funding

Companies: Seedcamp, Y Combinator, Zendesk

People: Zack Urlocker

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Square who? Intuit brings its GoPayment mobile card reader to Verizon Wireless stores

Intuit and Verizon Wireless announced this morning that they will be partnering to offer Intuit’s GoPayment mobile card reader in Verizon stores, bringing the device to more than 2,300 retail locations across the US.

Aside from the obvious benefit of more widespread availability, the partnership shines some much-needed light on Intuit’s two-year-old GoPayment technology. GoPayment launched a year before the more hyped mobile payment startup Square. which has made its tiny mobile credit card reader synonymous with mobile payments.

Intuit’s GoPayment credit card reader slides into your phone or tablet’s headphone jack (yes, just like Square’s), and works together with a free app to accept payments. It opens the door for you to take payments anywhere, which could be particularly useful for small business owners. GoPayment supports iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices. It can also synchronize with Intuit’s QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online accounting software, a major plus compared to Square.

As part of the partnership, Verizon Wireless customers will be able to get the GoPayment credit card reader for free when they activate their GoPayment account and mail in a $29.97 rebate. Intuit would have been better off figuring out another way to offer the discount to customers, since a mail-in rebate isn’t as tempting to consumers as an instant discount.

Square, on the other hand, has offered its mobile card reader for free from the start, which has likely accounted for its massive growth and hype. Square’s card reader is also sold at Apple stores for $10, but you instantly get that money back when you sign up for a Square account.

There’s no monthly or transaction fee for the basic GoPayment service, but you will get charged 2.7 percent for swiped transactions. For heavy users, Intuit also offers a $12.95 a month plan with a 1.7 percent rate for swipe transactions. Verizon Wireless users will receive two free months of the monthly plan when they sign up. GoPayment can also support up to 50 users on a single account.

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Tags: GoPayment, mobile payments, smartphones, tablets

Companies: Intuit, Square, Verizon Wireless

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SoundHound parnters with Spotify to offer music streaming in Europe

Music discovery company SoundHound has formed a partnership with streaming music service provider Spotify that will allow European SoundHound users to instantly access Spotify’s catalog of 15 million tracks, the company announced Thursday.

Much like its rival Shazam, SoundHound’s free mobile application identifies music by listening to songs that are currently playing or by users humming or singing the song. It also provides users with lyrics, song previews, YouTube videos and now integration with Spotify.

SoundHound users on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android devices? — who also have a premium Spotify subscription — will be given the option to ‘Play Now in Spotify’ after identifying a song through SoundHound. If the user chooses the option, SoundHound will then seamlessly launch Spotify’s service, immediately playing the requested song while showcasing the requested artist’s singles, albums and compilations.

For now, it doesn’t appear that the partnership will extend to users in the U.S., which is likely due to the complex music licensing agreements with major record labels.

Founded in 2005, San Jose, Calif.-based SoundHound has received funding from Global Catalyst Partners, TransLink Capital, Walden Venture Capital and others.

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Tags: music, music recognition, streaming

Companies: SoundHound, Spotify

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Tampa Bay Buccaneers replace playbooks with iPads

If being a professional football player wasn’t already a sweet enough deal, imagine being told by your coach that you’re getting a free iPad. Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris has issued his entire team iPad 2 tablets to replace printed playbooks and to allow players to re-watch game videos, reports the St. Petersburg Times.

The move to go paperless by replacing printed tomes with tablets is becoming a trend at companies and organizations. Two days ago, United Airlines announced it was purchasing 11,000 iPads to supplant massive flight manuals and give pilots access to digital flight tools.

Tampa Bay has told its 90 players to bring the iPads to practices and games instead of playbooks, which are the size of the “Yellow Pages.” Players can use the devices at home to review important practice, situational and game footage from anywhere they choose, rather than a team room with a projector or their personal TVs.

“It’s crazy how much technology has changed the game,” second-year safety Cody Grimm told the St. Petersburg Times. “Back in the day, I think probably the whole team had to sit down with a projector and a reel, and watch the film together. They’d have the whole offense in the same meeting room. Now we all have our own iPad.”

Using a tablet instead of a paper playbook also gives the team a better sense of security in case it is lost. Players can lock the devices with a passcode, and if an iPad is ever stolen, the device can be remotely wiped using the Find my iPhone application.

Overall, it seems like a pretty smart deal all around, and I expect other NFL teams might follow this inventive play.

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Tags: Buccaneers, iPad, NFL, Tampa Bay

Companies: Apple, National Football League

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Diffbot launches APIs for monitoring web pages

Internet search startup Diffbot launched its API today for visually scanning, parsing and extracting information from web pages. Diffbot detects what type of layout a page has, then searches it for common visual cues to monitor when any content changes on a page, or to extract specific information for developers to use.

The Palo Alto-based company was founded in 2008 by two former Stanford students, CEO Mike Tung and CTO Leith Abdulla, with seed funding from Stanford incubator StartX. Tung originally created Diffbot to monitor the websites for his various Stanford classes and tip him off to any new announcements, posted lectures or assignments via text message.

According to Diffbot’s creators, all web pages fall into one of 30 different page-type categories. By pegging what category a page falls in to, it can extrapolate the various types of information on that page. For example, front pages of news sites typically have the same elements: headlines, images, tags, advertisements and article summaries.

“Diffbot understands visually what all of these different elements of the page are and can be used by developers to connect that content to direct action,” Tung told VentureBeat.

Currently Diffbot has hundreds of developers using the beta API, and some intriguing products have already been created using the tools. AOL’s free Editions iPad magazine app uses Diffbot to analyze the front pages of news sites and pull out important new or breaking information. Hacker News Radio tapped Diffbot to pull content from hacker news sites and turn them into spoken reports. The city of S?o Paulo in Brazil uses Diffbot to track changes on the local government website and turns them into an automated Twitter feed.

Diffbot’s Follow API creates an RSS-style feed of fresh content. The On-Demand API currently looks at just two major page types, Frontpage and Article, but Diffbot plans on releasing more in the future, and that’s when things could get interesting.

“Once we have released the API for all 30 page types, we hope to enable a new type of mobile application — one where the user can take actions directly on web data, instead of reading a bunch of blue links,” said Tung to VentureBeat. “Something like SIRI, but for the entire web, and not just a set of handpicked APIs.”

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Tags: APIs, search, Stanford University, StartX

Companies: Diffbot, StartX

People: Leith Abdulla, Mike Tung

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Why do big companies get stuck?

Everyone knows they need to engage with growth, but the resistance companies face in moving resources from areas that work into new areas is tremendous. This is why big companies are so slow to innovate, says Geoffrey Moore, author and venture partner at MDV. In this Entrepreneur Though Leader Lecture at Stanford University, he explains that while there are no shortage of great, groundbreaking ideas at big companies – including many that could threaten startups – the established culture at those companies prevents the ideas from maturing.

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Tags: Stanford University

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Druva raises $12M for protecting enterprise data

Druva, a startup that protects data on enterprise laptops, said today it has raised $12 million in a second round of funding.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company makes Enterprise inSync software to back up data on enterprise laptops, smartphones or tablets. It can also retrieve data as needed. Intel recently said that the cost of a lost laptop with unprotected data is $49,000.

Druva’s backups are more efficient than a standard backup because the company “de-duplicates” data, where it saves only a single copy of data duplicated across users. That makes backups 10 times faster and allows them to save 90 percent bandwidth and storage. Druva can store its data on a company’s premises or in the cloud, or web-connected data centers.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, and existing investor Sequoia Capital also contributed. The funding will be used to expand both products and sales and marketing in several regions. Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and chief executive of Druva, will also become chairman. Other board members include Shailendra Singh, managing director, Sequoia Capital; Jishnu Bhattacharjee, principal, Nexus Venture Partners; Ramani Kothandaraman, co-founder and chief operating officer of Druva; and Yoram Novick, CEO and founder of Topio.

Druva was founded in 2007 and it has more than 750 customers. It protects 300,000 laptops and other devices. Druva has 90 employees and competes with EMC Avamar, Symantec, and Iron Mountain (now Autonomy). It has raised $17 million to date. The name Druva comes from Sanskrit and means “North Star.”

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Tags: enterprise laptop backup

Companies: Druva

People: Jaspreet Singh

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