The feature can already be seen in ComodIT’s own application store and on the website of lifestreaming platform Storytlr, but is now available for anyone to use. In effect, it makes the installation of server-based apps a lot more like that of mobile apps – an almost one-click experience that even allows users to “share” the apps in question on Facebook and Twitter.

“You can embed the application – just copy and paste [a few lines of Javascript] and put it on your website. You add the direct install blue button and you allow anyone to install that application directly from your website,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz told me.

Bartz suggested this approach would overcome the traditional open-source server software installation experience, which sometimes involves multi-page tutorials. The test-drive aspect is pretty neat too: when that option is chosen, ComodIT basically installs and runs the app for a free 100 minutes in an Amazon EC2 micro instance.

It makes marketing a bit easier for developers and of course it steers people towards ComodIT’s own distribution platform and wider services. As Bartz explained:

“When you click ‘direct install’, in fact you connect to ComodIT and you create a server on which you will install an OS and all the things that have to be done for installing applications. We’re automating the manual procedure – we do this like we do for any other pieces of ComodIT following the devops approach.

“Behind the scenes, we’re activating recipes for deployments. Within your ComodIT account you have access to all the recipes and descriptions that you usually have. The next step is deploying the application not only for testing but also for production, with all the ComodIT features like autoscaling and autobackup.

“We bring the user onto the platform and, as we have a business model based on the number of servers you’re managing with ComodIT, if you have more users installing the application through the direct install button, we’re a happy provider.”

It’s a smart idea and one that could give ComodIT a boost as it competes with the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) for devops’ attention.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year. This year’s Structure:Europe will take place in London from 18-19 September and, if you can’t wait until then for a high-level get-together around cloud automation and other such topics, don’t forget that our San Francisco Structure event is coming up on 19-20 June, too.

Here’s a video explaining how ComodIT’s direct install button works:

Disclosure:Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Invariably those companies have targeted the mobile carriers that run those networks, but a new startup called Wandera is focusing its MDO technology on the people who get stuck paying those data bills: enterprises. Wandera has attracted the attention of Bessemer Venture Partners, which lately has been investing heavily in the telecom and mobile infrastructure space. Bessemer is the sole investor in Wandera’s Series A round, forking over $7 million.

Wandera was founded by Eldar and Roy Tuvey, two brothers from London who created security software-as-a-service company ScanSafe and sold it to Cisco Systems in 2010 for $183 million. After working for Cisco for two years, the Tuveys decided to return to the SaaS model with a new startup, this time selling optimization rather than security software to their enterprise clients.

Eldar Tuvey said Wandera has built what is in essence a cloud proxy server through which all phone-bound HTTP traffic is routed on its way to an enterprise’s mobile devices. During that traffic’s brief stay in that cloud, Wandera applies any number of optimization and compression techniques intended to reduce the amount of data that flows over the airwaves to those devices – and ultimately reduce the mobile data bill the company has to pay each month.

But Tuvey said Wandera is providing more than just a megabyte-culling data grinder. It’s developed a sophisticated set of monitoring and control tools that allows an enterprise to keep tabs on what apps, webpages and services its employees are using and to apply specific policies on that use.

For instance, an enterprise could set strict limits on social networking use, banning it outright or imposing caps on the amount of data an employee can consume in the Facebook app. Or it could prohibit video streaming when employees are roaming internationally, but allow it when they’re on their home networks.

Tuvey said enterprises can even go so far as to apply specific optimization features depending on the app used. So a company could let employees consume as much video or social networking content as they please — as long as they’re willing to put up with choppy frame rates and pixelated images.

“They can implement whatever policies they see fit,” Tuvey said. “It’s completely up to the company.”

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Not the same opportunity as the creators of Angry Birds, or any number of design shops that popped up to help stores, online publications and everyone else build apps. No, these five founders — who met in a an aviation club at the University of Texas at Austin — saw in mobile the chance to make substantive changes in how enterprises do business. So they founded a company — Mutual Mobile — to do it.

The bootstrapped startup has built a successful business developing mobile apps for companies as varied as Google and Adidas. Companies such as this one, a quiet success that has gone relatively unheralded in the press, are defining our shift to mobile, as much as the obvious hits are. Here’s how it did it.

Lesson 1: Find your passion, then follow it

Mutual Mobile made its debut in April 2009 in Austin and two months later signed PeopleFinders.com as its first client. It wasn’t an enterprise company, but it was money in the bank, and the resulting app (Are They Really Single?) was more than just porting that company’s website to a mobile platform. Instead it took the premise behind the site — doing background checks and lookups on people — and packaged that expertise into a single purpose mobile app for checking out if that person you just met at the bar was really single.

It took one month for PeopleFinders.com to recoup the cost of developing the app. “That’s how powerful a mobile experience done right can be for a business,” says John Arrow, the CEO of Mutual Mobile.

Several other clients soon followed until the firm was doing well, with about 75 employees by the end of 2010 and 100 revenue-generating clients. But with the launch of the iPad that year, and some self reflection from Arrow, the team realized that the consumer business might be big, but it wasn’t what they cared about. So Mutual Mobile started firing its clients.

The result was those two dips in revenue as it ditched lucrative consumer-facing customers, including its last holdout Adidas, so it could focus on the enterprise and what they needed. “It was a tough decision to make, but it was the right one for us,” Arrow said. “And while it was hard to see those dips in revenue, we knew where we wanted to go.”

Today the firm only has 48 clients and $26 million in revenue — all from enterprise companies — at the end of 2012. Plus, it has 375 people who are thinking about mobile computing as more than just apps, but as an overall trend toward computing everywhere.

Identify the real trend

What does Arrow find so compelling about developing mobile products for enterprise customers? It’s not the devices.

“Apple isn’t going to make an iPhone 15,” Arrow says. “If you think that, you’re not thinking about mobile in the right way.” For him mobile is shorthand for adapting the computing to our daily lives and habits as opposed to expecting us to adapt to them. Sure, we may still need desktop computers, but Arrow is confident that computing will be everywhere.

The Briggo coffee-making robot lives inside that cube.

For example, his firm last year built an application for a robotic coffee kiosk on the University of Texas campus for a company called Briggo. Students and professors can order their coffee through their phones or at the kiosk and pick up a made-to-order beverage on the way to their class. The app tracks their location and gives the wait time for their coffees based on where they are as well as how busy the machine making the coffee is.

Other examples are further out there, such as the research Mutual Mobile is doing on haptics — the vibrations your phone makes are an example of haptics — as a source of ambient information. Arrow wonders if it might become a type of code for conveying information, akin to Braille. He sees it having potential in places like airplane cockpits or other information-dense environments, but stresses that its use in an actual product is at least six months out.

No VC means no one to break your fall

In the meantime, Arrow’s staying focused on the business, which he said he wants to grow to $100 million in revenue by 2015. This is a big number for a company that is entirely bootstrapped and has no venture capital investment. Arrow says he’s well on his way to achieving that goal. But to get to this point he’s had to do some detective work in the early days trying to find enterprise customers — or partners with enterprise customers — that were ready to change the way they did business with regard to mobile computing.

His first enterprise client came really early on, and is still with Mutual Mobile. The customer, Greenway Medical wants to help doctors use mobile devices when completing rounds and to access patient records. But getting Greenway as a client was more about Greenway seeing the iPod touch as a potential solution and seeking someone — anyone — who might be able to help, and stumbling on the young Mutual Mobile.

The Greenway Medical iPad app.

It was also important that they would trust an unnamed startup headed by a 20-something CEO. When Arrow co-founded Mutual Mobile he was 21. This week he had his 26th birthday. That was one reason that Mutual Mobile veered into serving consumer clients such as PeopleFinder.com or Gowalla. Those clients were eager for mobile apps and trusted startups.

“Back in 2009 there weren’t enterprises betting on mobility and we had to figure out how to bootstrap this company when there wasn’t even an addressable market yet,” Arrow said. “We knew consumer was our only option … and when Philips and Google and Verizon came around later we were able to apply all that we had learned. If we had started this company in the early part of 2011 or late 2010 we would have lacked credibility and had no infrastructure and no skillset to help, and clients would have been right to avoid this immature company.”

Arrow also thinks that if he had VC backing he wouldn’t have been able to pass up the lure of easy dollars from more consumer-facing clients. Those dips in revenue may never have happened. He probably would have also been asked to move his company from Austin to the Bay Area. So far he’s content to stay VC free, but given the appetite VCs have for putting dollars into older companies with big sales in hot markets, someone may convince him.

In the meantime, Arrow and Mutual Mobile are content to ride a massive wave of interest in enterprise mobile. One of the strongest signals for Mutual Mobile may have come last month when IBM announced its mobile first initiative, validating the type of experience and work that Mutual Mobile has been pushing on its clients since 2009.

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The company is launching a set of tools aimed at brands that want to measure social influence, and in many ways, this makes a lot of sense. While an average user might be curious about his or her reach on Twitter or Facebook, understanding this data is much more valuable to a business than a consumer, and likely something Klout will better be able to monetize.

The company explained in a blog post that it’s already begun measuring the social influence of brands through its Klout Perks program, but now it will target those businesses directly:

“Today, we are taking the data-driven intelligence we’ve developed over the years to begin a more measured march towardKlout for Business. Initially, Klout for Business will give businesses a complimentary set of analytics with pointed insights into how and where influencers are engaging with their brands in social media.

Businesses will be able to look at an easy-to-read dashboard that tells you, at-a-glance, whether you are engaging your influencers on the networks where they are most actively exerting their influence and on which Klout Score ranges you could stand to amp up your efforts. Most importantly, Klout can tell you which topics your audience influences others on, helping you maximize your content efforts to drive consideration for your brand.”

The company last tweaked the formula for its Klout scores in August 2012, and will now launch a specific page for businesses on Klout. Customers will gain access to a dashboard where they can monitor social interactions and communicate with customers.

Klout has been in business for almost five years, and it’s unclear that the company has converted average consumers — or even tech-savvy social-media addicts — into caring about their Klout scores or achieved real traction as a measuring stick for social influence. The company wrote in the blog post that it has acquired a vast amount of social data that it’s now ready to use for other purposes, but it’s possible the company has simply reached the limit of its own influence with consumers.

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Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the signaling system used to manage IP-based voice and video calls and messaging capabilities in many carrier and enterprise networks, but it’s a protocol foreign to most developers. “What’s exciting about this news to the common geek is that Twilio is further establishing itself as the bridge between disparate forms of communication,” Twilio director of product management Thomas Schiavone told GigaOM.

Schiavone readily admits that no developer currently unfamiliar with the arcane ways of SIP is likely to pursue the protocol, but there are plenty of enterprises and enterprise developers that do, and they’re looking for easy ways to link their insular business networks to A broader range of public and private communications tools.

The idea is that Twilio can perform the complex translation of different kind of calls or messages in the cloud. A regular phone call from a landline, a VoIP call from softphone client or a WebRTC call from a browser could all pass through Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and connect as a SIP-based call on an office extension. “Twilio sits in the middle, allowing you to mix and match all these forms of communication,” Schiavone said.

Twilio’s SIP service, which launched as beta in October, aims to become more than just a translation service. Twilio claims that by connecting its cloud platform directly to legacy PBXs, companies can move the application logic of their communications platform into the cloud, where they can build new features without having to upgrade or reconfigure their hardware.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user 2 Much Caffeine

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Nuance aims to automate what is an increasing headache for IT managers: resetting passwords on corporate computers or software. Anyone who has every worked for a big company is familiar with the situation – too many failed login attempts or letting a password expire suddenly locks you out of your laptop or email. The next step is a call to the IT help desk to get your account privileges reinstated and a temporary password issued.

Nuance proposes to automate that identification process with a new service called FastReset, which allows an employee to authenticate their voice against a biometric print on file. The software can either be embedded directly into a Windows PC and accessed through the computer’s login screen or implemented externally, requiring an employee to call an automated system.

While Nuance is most famous for providing the core natural language understanding technology behind Apple’s Siri, it’s been branching out into security as of late. Instead of trying to interpret words and meaning from the tremendous variety of human speech, it’s using the unique characteristics of each individual’s speech as a kind of vocal fingerprint. Nuance is already supporting similar technology in the consumer mobile market, using voice ID as a means of unlocking handsets.

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Since the SAFE program launched in 2011, Samsung gradually fortified its most popular smartphones and tablets with corporate-grade security while attempting overcome the Android fragmentation problems that plague CIOs. The Genband partnership, however, shows that Samsung wants to do more than just retrofit its phones and tablets for business users. It wants offer services specifically tailored to corporate customers.

Unified communications is a pretty key area for Samsung to launch into enterprise services since it bridges the realm of the business network and the plethora of over-the-top communications apps in the consumer world. Samsung will be able to offer IM, VoIP, video conferencing and chat, and document and media sharing apps that work across an enterprise’s wireline and wireless networks.

“It take years for an enterprise to launch something that consumers are enjoying right now,” Genband CEO Charlie Vogt said in an interview on Monday. Samsung, however, can drastically speed up that process by pre-certifying the Genband UC suite in the SAFE program.

Genband’s UC platform, called Experius, is already battle tested in enterprise networks the world over. Vogt said the company has already issued 20 million licenses for the client software to corporate and carrier customers. Genband offers the platform as a cloud software-as-a-service or it sells the software and infrastructure directly to enterprises, system integrators and carriers.

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It is therefore very interesting to see a new Swedish company called Dexplora get involved in enterprise user interface design, starting with an app called GetSalesDone that aims to be a more attractive and functional front-end for CRM systems such as Salesforce than the apps put out by those vendors themselves. Why so interesting? Because these people have serious heritage.

Dexplora’s founders were after all behind The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the firm that licensed user interface (UI) software to handset manufacturers from Nokia to Samsung – and shaped early iterations of the Android UI – before being bought by RIM a couple years ago. And, according to co-founder Hampus Jakobsson, it was during the TAT days that they spotted an opportunity in the enterprise sector.

“When we came to use CRM systems at TAT, we were shocked they were designed for management, not for the users,” Jakobsson said. “It struck us that it’s the same thing we felt in the mobile world, that software was designed for internal use, not for humans.”

Jakobsson maintains that salespeople hate using Salesforce’s front-end, even the whizz-bang HTML5-based Salesforce Touch apps that came out last September. The Dexplora founders considered developing their own CRM system, but blanched at the thought of competing with the hundreds that are already out there. Still, they saw an opportunity in the “abysmal” UIs of market leaders from Salesforce to SAP and SugarCRM, realizing that the problem here was more than cosmetic:

“If the salespeople don’t love it and don’t use it, their reports get worthless. Most people told us they put stuff into the CRM system just before the weekend or just before a meeting, and doing it last-minute means the quality is really low, so the forecasting is really bad. It’s dirty data, and we came to the conclusion that that needs to be fixed at the source.”

So they built GetSalesDone – not a CRM system in itself, but rather an easier way to use the existing market leaders. The first iteration is an iPhone app for using Salesforce’s CRM product. The app, which uses the same APIs that Salesforce does for its own mobile apps, isn’t just (arguably) prettier than Salesforce’s own effort; it also adds new features, such as the ability to generate tasks with full context.

There will also be future versions for the others, in each case trying to fill in the deficiencies of the existing platform – better overviews for users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for example. To get a flavor of what the Salesforce version is all about though, here’s a handy video:

How does Salesforce feel about this? “We have a dialog with Salesforce — we feel that they like us,” Jakobsson told me, pointing out that Salesforce has a platform strategy that might make them not so worried about users consciously interacting with the platform, as long that they’re using it.

Apple gave the go-ahead this morning to launch the app, and Dexplora will do so in around a week’s time. GetSalesDone will be free for salespeople to pick up and use, and the firm will make its money doing customizations for specific enterprises.

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Yet from humble beginnings in 2010, M2 Research projects that companies will spend upwards of $2 billion on gamification services by 2015. By that same point, Gartner Group’s Brian Burke forecasts that 70 percent of the Global 2000 will employ gamification techniques, but that 80 percent of those projects will fail unless they’re designed thoughtfully. To meet these needs, we believe U.S. companies will need 5,000 certified gamification designers over the next three years to infuse every aspect of their operations with the science of engagement.

For my forthcoming book, “The Gamification Revolution” and through our GSummit conference , we looked at hundreds of leading companies that have successfully leveraged gamification in the enterprise to see how they found success. Here are the top five areas where companies are using gamification to find efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage:

Recruitment and hiring

Companies have used games to recruit for some time, but with social and game technologies it’s become more effective. Most famously, Google posted a billboard in Silicon Valley with a tough math question that led users through a series of game-like challenges, and eventually to a special job application queue; those who could solve the puzzle were “pre-screened” in a fun way.

Companies like Quixey have adapted Google’s approach (sans billboard) and recruit using a reality TV-style game that yields qualified engineering candidates for under $4,000/each – compared to $20,000-plus using traditional recruiters. The U.S. Army-developed America’s Army game has brought millions of potential recruits to the attention of the armed forces and has become its most cost-effective recruitment strategy (and one of the world’s most popular games on the way).

On a larger scale, Domino’s Pizza developed a game called Pizza Hero where you can pretend to be a pizzaiolo and make pies the way you like. The app lets you order pizza for delivery based on your design and apply for a job at your local Domino’s – if you’re good enough.

Employee training and development

Like Domino’s, Marriott needs to hire upwards of 50,000 people per year to fill positions in its hospitality division – and those employees also need training. So the company developed a game called My Marriott Hotel that lets you play various hotel roles, develop a basic understanding of how they work and apply for a job. The simplicity of My Marriott Hotel led to over 25,000 players joining in the first week, and is part of a major growth cycle of similar training games that are as easy to play as Angry Birds.

Several other major multinationals are finding success too:  Siemens use its online game Plantville to train plant operators; GE Healthcare’s Patient Shuffle game teaches health care workers how hospitals work; and Sun Microsystems built an adventure game to replace its stuffy new-hire onboarding training. For many companies, gamified training has lowered costs and raised engagement by over 50 percent.

Employee feedback

The lack of adaptability of employee feedback has led many leading organizations to question the structure of the annual review. Enter gamification-based recognition systems like Work.com (formerly Rypple), DueProps and PropstoYou. They use gamified approaches to persuade employees to provide feedback instantly on their mobile device. This peer recognition is turned into social achievements (like badges and leaderboards) that are shared throughout the organization, and typically replace direct cash bonuses or “spiffs.”

Companies like LivingSocial, Spotify and Facebook have embraced the approach, replacing annual reviews in many cases. The fun, instantaneous feedback loops have driven employee engagement to over 95 percent on an opt-in basis at many installations. Early successes led Salesforce.com to buy Toronto-based Rypple for a reported $65 million after just two years in operation, rebranding it as Work.com late last year.

Health and wellness

One critical approach to increasing employee performance is by helping to improve their health and wellness. Besides having the effect of improving cognition, it also results in reduced absenteeism (and thus health insurance costs, too). NextJump, a New York-based employee-incentive startup, has gotten international attention for its gamified approach to encouraging employee fitness.

Using team-based competition and peer support, over 80 percent of the company’s employees currently go to the gym two-plus times a week without a mandate. Similarly, to help others gamify workplace health, startups like Keas deliver “wellness as a service” (WaaS?) to customers like Pfizer and Reed Elsevier.

Creating new profit centers

As gamification’s power to change the enterprise has grown, it has also become a profit center for early adopter organizations. IBM developed a game-based BPM (Business Process Management) simulator called Innov8 that has spawned several B2B products, including a game called City Manager aimed at municipal executives.

Today, the Innov8 platform is used by over 1,000 institutions to teach BPM, and has become the company’s number-one lead generator. Similarly, global consulting giant NTTData has built a platform called GO! that enables its 60,000 worldwide employees to gamify BPM and professional development, helping the company close and retain clients.

Gabe Zicherman is editor of gamification.co and chair of the Gamification Summit. His book, The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition (McGraw Hill) is due out April 5. Follow him on Twitter @gzicherm.

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“The risks are hugely asymmetric,” Sacks said Wednesday at the Founder Showcase in San Francisco. “The upside is you prevent the company from dying, and the downside is the company dies and you could have saved it. So because of those risks, I think you should raise more than you think. I think most founders, and I know I have, tend to underestimate how much money they’ll need.”

Fundraising is a time-intensive process, and there’s always the fear that a founder will sell off too much of his or her company, he said. Take George Lucas, for example:

“I’m sure we all wish we could own 100 percent of their companies,” he said. “But the reason why George never needed to raise money was he was the only one who could ever do Star Wars.”

Sacks pointed out that for most entrepreneurs, if they discover something new, it won’t be long before competitors will be at their heels and they’ll have to find a way to stay ahead. Fundraising can help them stay in first place, which is important.

“If you win the market, the number one company isn’t worth just a little more than the number two company,” he said, noting it could be worth hundreds more than the second-place competitor in a space. “So it’s hugely important to be number one.”

And when you’re not number one, or your product is suffering? Unlike plenty of entrepreneurs or investors, Sacks is honest in noting that a pivot isn’t something to aim for. But at a certain point, it’s the best way to go, he said.

“I don’t think pivoting is desirable, but if what you’re doing isn’t working, the best thing you can do is admit it and move on.”

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