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| March 26, 2015 | |
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| Happy Thursday, Data Sheet readers! Facebook’s Messenger, which now has more than 600 million users, is turning into far more than a chat application. Ever heard of FinancialForce? The cloud business software company just raised another $110 million. Plus, mobile insights company App Annie turns five today. Its next focus: active usage metrics. Read on for the news shaping today’s conversations. | |
| TOP OF MIND | |
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| Facebook disrupts customer service. Here's what former PayPal CEO David Marcus has been planning since he joined the company last year. With its new strategy to turn Messenger into a platform—for payments, for calls, transaction confirmations, and so forth—the social network promises to transform how businesses talk to their customers. The plan: instead of sending an email to confirm interactions, Facebook wants companies to speak more directly with Messenger's 600 million users through interactive chat and other quick conversations. Marcus told F8 attendees: "It's reintroducing the personal back to shopping. This is about creating rich content and interactions between people and businesses. You can imagine that in the future, a customer could have multiple threads open with businesses that you care about, and you could transact and buy things." Zendesk is one of the first software companies to fall in line with Facebook's new vision, unveiled during the F8 developers conference in San Francisco. The chat feature in its customer support technology now ties into Messenger. That means, simply, that service agents can manage multiple conversations in one place. Online retailers zulily and Everlane are already on board using this as a method of interaction with both first-time and loyal buyers. | |
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| TRENDING | |
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| FinancialForce closes $110 million funding round. The cloud business management software company reported a 91% increase in subscription growth for 2014, giving it a $50 million revenue run rate. The new money comes from Technology Crossover Ventures, along with existing investor Salesforce Ventures. Marquee customers including Hewlett-Packard and Akamai. Yes, viral video app Meerkat has raised some money, but it's not saying how much. The lead investor is Greylock Partners. It also has plenty of other backers like Hollywood actors Ashton Kutcher and Jared Leto, and Chad Hurley (co-founder of YouTube). Is it time to connect airplane black boxes to ground control? This week's crash in the French Alps has many asking that question, and this is far from the first time. Technology for streaming flight data—including video from cockpits—already exists. But airlines say the costs of real-time monitoring are still too prohibitive. The FTC is really sorry about that Google memo. The three commissioners who were around during the "exhaustive investigation" say the document released by accident last week only tells part of the story. They apologized for the inadvertent disclosure but reiterate that there was no "demonstrably anticompetitive" behavior. Here's why Europe's push for 'digital unity' is such a big deal. Imagine having to download a different set of mobile apps from state to state. Or having to pay onerous roaming charges for your mobile phone. Right now, access to digital content is "geoblocked" or limited from nation to nation. The European Commission is finally trying to fix the situation. | |
| THE DOWNLOAD | |
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| Meet App Annie, the go-to source for mobile insight. Seven years ago, there was no such thing as an app store. Today, the major ones—including those managed by Apple and Google—host more than four million apps generating $75 billion in revenue annually. What's the best way to keep track of bombs and bestsellers? Most leading publishers—including companies like Hasbro, Nestle, Universal, Fox, Amazon and LinkedIn—rely on analytics company App Annie, which you can think of as akin to the Nielsen rating system for the mobile app economy. Celebrating its fifth anniversary this month, App Annie tracks metrics for more than 6.4 million apps representing $25 billion in gross revenue. The company closed an oversubscribed $55 million Series D round in January, led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). That brings its total to $94 million across five rounds. "If you believe that the app economy will continue to grow, and that's a pretty good bet, you have to have pretty good information about it," said Eric Liaw, an IVP general partner and App Annie board member. IVP was actually a paying App Annie customer before it became an investor, he said. The firm uses the data to help evaluate potential investments in mobile startups. Anyone can sign up for the company's trends information, which reveals general information about top publishers and individual apps. Want more specific data on usage trends or about how the competition is doing? You'll have to pay for that insight. "For every large consumer brand, there are 20 app startups with new-fangled services that are amassing huge downloads," said French-born App Annie co-founder and CEO Bertrand Schmitt, who has been developing games since the age of 11. "However, for brands, that are looking at multiple ways of making an impact in mobile, developing and publishing apps is the most obvious way, as is taking advantage of new and native mobile advertising formats." What does Schmitt consider some of the best examples? One obvious pick is the Starbucks app, now fueling more than 7 million mobile transactions weekly. It's hardly surprising that retailers also figure prominently in its rankings. Drug-store chain Walgreens, for example, was behind the third most popular app in this category (by downloads) last year—ahead of Walmart and Target. "We pay particularly close attention to our customer feedback and measure it at several points throughout the [mobile] experience," said Tim McCauley, senior director of mobile solutions at Walgreens. "So much of our success stems from this intense focus and responding to customer needs with innovative yet simple solutions." Other companies providing useful mobile insights include Localytics (which raised another $30 million early this week), Flurry (bought by Yahoo last July); Mixpanel (which boasts an $865 million valuation); 4Info (which measures advertising); and SimilarWeb (which already tracks actual usage). App Annie's latest funding will support several initiatives, including potential acquisitions, international expansion and new offerings. Chief among those is the Usage Intelligence service (currently in beta), which will measure metrics such as active users, average time spent in apps, and frequency of visits. "Usage data is of paramount importance to mobile app publishers and investors, particularly when you're talking about analyzing apps that monetize outside of the store," Schmitt said. | |
| ALSO WORTH SHARING | |
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| Jury out in closely watched Kleiner Perkins trial. It will take a majority assent (nine out of 12) to decide the case in Ellen Pao's favor. (Here's a guide to Fortune's coverage.) If they do, they also get to suggest an amount for punitive damages—beyond the $16 million she seeks. Database genius wins Turing Award. Michael Stonebraker, still active as the co-founder of startup Tamr and an MIT adjunct professor, previously had a hand in founding Ingres, the popular open source product PostgreSQL, and Vertica (acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2011). DOJ wants more info in $1.3 billion Orbitz-Expedia merger. If the deal founders for antitrust reasons, Orbitz is entitled to a $115 million payout. Red Hat beats estimates. The Linux software company attributes the strong quarter to cloud-related projects. Its 30 top deals all surpassed $2 million in sales value. Its backlog of service contracts and subscriptions is valued at more than $1.86 billion. PayPal must pay up. It was fined $7.7 million by the U.S. Treasury for allegedly allowing money transfers to accounts linked to Cuba, Iran and "weapons of mass destruction." $25 million for cloud management company. BetterCloud's technology—used by more than 50,000 organizations—makes it simpler to activate and secure Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365. The company's latest round, which brings its total to $47 million, was led by Accel. | |
| MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS | |
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| Why Facebook's Parse news is a big deal for the Internet of things by Stacey Higginbotham Short interest in Apple is near an all-time low by Philip Elmer-DeWitt Activists fight release of new high-tech Barbie doll from Mattel by Benjamin Snyder 12 apps that let you manage on the go by Jennifer Alsever This is how Uber it trying to make riders feel safer by Benjamin Snyder 3 things millennials want in a career (hint: it's not more money) by Adam Miller | |
| ONE MORE THING | |
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| These sensors may stop you from getting speeding tickets. Ford's new technology will hit the roads first in new minivans.
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| MARK YOUR CALENDAR | |
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| Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit: Crossing the divide. (March 30 - April 1; Las Vegas) AWS Summit. First in a series of cloud strategy briefings. (April 9; San Francisco) Knowledge15: Automate IT services. (April 19 - 24; Las Vegas) RSA Conference: The world talks security. (April 20 - 24; San Francisco) Forrester's Forum for Technology Leaders: Win in the age of the customer. (April 27 - 28; Orlando, Fla.) MicrosoftIgnite: Business tech extravaganza. (May 4 - 8; Chicago) NetSuite SuiteWorld: Cloud ERP strategy. (May 4 - 7; San Jose, California) EMC World: Data strategy. (May 4 - 7; Las Vegas) SAPPHIRE NOW: The SAP universe. (May 5 - 7; Orlando, Florida) Gartner Digital Marketing Conference: Reach your destination faster. (May 5 - 7; San Diego) Cornerstone Convergence: Connect, collaborate. (May 11 - 13; Los Angeles) Annual Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference: JP Morgan's 43rd invite-only event. (May 18 - 20; Boston) MongoDB World: Scale the universe. (June 1 - 2; New York) HP Discover: Trends and technologies. (June 2 - 4; Las Vegas) Red Hat Summit: Energize your enterprise. (June 23 - 26; Boston) Brainstorm Tech: Fortune's invite-only gathering of thinkers, influencers and entrepreneurs. (July 13 - 15; Aspen, Colorado) VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 - Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco) Dreamforce: The Salesforce community. (Sept. 15 - 18; San Francisco) BoxWorks 2015: Cloud collaboration solutions. (Sept. 28 - 30; San Francisco) Workday Rising: Meet and share. (Sept. 28 - Oct. 1; Las Vegas) Gartner Symposium ITxpo: CIOs and senior IT executives. (Oct. 4 - 8; Orlando, Florida) Oracle OpenWorld: Customer and partner conference. (Oct. 25 - 29; San Francisco) | |
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