Server Issues and Downtime

By Vivek | September 22nd, 2007 at 10:32 pm ET         

Most of you might be able to access this post only via RSS feed for StartupSquad.com ’cause the server where the site is hosted is sorta dying and hence the site is not really loading for quite a few out there. Past whole week has been one hell of a time. Launching 360Gadget, discovering StartupSquad server is crumbling, and also working on refocusing the direction of this blog. Anyway, the server side issues will continue for couple of days more as I get everything moved over to a new shiny server. Till then…..

Sermo rolls up big Series C

By Vivek | September 20th, 2007 at 03:02 pm ET         

I think I haven’t come across any startup going through 3 rounds of funding in almost 1 year since launch. Anyway Sermo has done it. The Boston, MA based startup today announced that it has raised whopping $26.7 million in Series C round of funding. Earlier last year Sermo had started by raising $2 million in Series A and quickly followed up with Series B worth $9.5 million in early this year.

For those not following the startup, Sermo wants to be the largest online physician community. Bigger plan is to enable physicians to collaborate and share their observations from daily practice and use this aggregated data in “accelerating the discovery of emerging trends and providing new insights into medications, devices and treatments.”

 Earlier in June this year, Sermo entered into a two-year agreement with the American Medical Association (AMA) aimed at improving medical practice, physician advocacy and patient care. Through this new partnership, the AMA can now listen to the discussions on Sermo, post questions, and get feedback from physicians instantaneously.

The above short writeup does not do justice to the efforts and plans of the well funded startup. Will be back with more details.

Joopz takes sweet time to innovate; Now in more places

By Vivek | September 18th, 2007 at 10:32 am ET         

Joopz, the text messaging startup that had launched last year, has been real slow at adding new features and as a result creating any buzz at all. Anyway, the service now has a new plugin for Outlook users that lets Joopz Premium service subscribers to send and receive Joopz text messages directly from their desktop.  

Joopz has also added plugins for networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. I haven’t looked at the on Facebook and neither do they link directly to it. Either way I can’t justify installing of a new app that does only texting. On MySpace, it is the typical grab and embed of javascript code that you get after logging into the service.

Cornerstone gets $32 million; OnDemand is THE path

By Vivek | September 17th, 2007 at 10:30 am ET         

Time for a quick update on the SMB Enterprise side software. Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc., the on-demand, integrated talent management software and services company, today announced the completion of $32 million in venture funding. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Bay Partners.

Byron Deeter, a partner with Bessemer Venture Partners, and Neil Sadaranganey, a partner at Bay, will join Cornerstone?s Board of Directors.

This space is not devoid of heavy competition. Top player in the SMB space is SuccessFactors that had filed for an IPO in July. Others include Oracle/Peoplesoft, SAP, Authoria,…..

Amazon has widgets; Product Cloud is good to have

By Vivek | September 17th, 2007 at 10:12 am ET         

Not sure why it took Amazon so long to get here. Still it is good to know that Amazon is now offering widgets from it’s wide selection of product categories that can be embedded on blogs and likes. The widget creation process, though manual can output in varied formats. Users can create slideshows, or show their favorites, display their wishlist, or show a Product Clouds.

Out of all these options, i think Product Cloud seems like a good option to go for. The widget works pretty much like a tag cloud but instead each of the tags are automatically linked product titles at Amazon. On Amazon’s end, it’s system crawls your content and identify what your page is about. It then searches the Amazon catalog to find products related to your page and shows their titles in the cloud. Will be on watchout for the CTR of this widget.

For power bloggers, this launch gives them more options to make money from Amazon Associates program. They can make upto 10 percent in referral fees from Amazon. Each of these widgets, except for Amazon Unbox Video Previewer that is only for US, is available to Amazon Associates in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.