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Revealed: the finalists for the 2012 Crunchies

Tom Krazit — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:00:44 +0000

The finalists for the 2012 Crunchies have been released, and now it’s time to decide who should rewarded for their technology innovation and leadership over the course of 2012.

The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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Transfluent translates for Unity, WordPress, Zendesk and Weibo

David Meyer — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:02:17 +0000

When we last covered Transfluent, the translation firm was applying its technology to social media and mobile apps. That’s obviously still the case, but now the company’s moving into gaming, blogging and even customer services.

At the Slush conference in Helsinki on Wednesday, Transfluent revealed deals with game engine provider Unity and WordPress.com VIP maker Automattic. Also, on the quiet, they’ve inked agreements with Zendesk and Chinese microblogging service Weibo.

In the case of Unity, this means Transfluent’s services will be available through the Unity Asset Store. And, according to Transfluent, translations will be updated every time the developer updates the game itself. The company’s 15,000-strong freelance translation squad will also handle app store descriptions.

Weibo? Well, that’s a social media service, so no new territory there. Zendesk is a pretty big deal though.

“It’s going to be very interesting, because a lot of customers have been asking if we support Zendesk,” Tranfluent CEO Jani Penttinen told me. “Half a year ago, it wasn’t possible, but then they opened up their API.”

And for pro WordPress.com users, well, it’s pretty simple – they can serve up human-translated versions of their posts to customers in the relevant territories.

So, what kinds of deals is Tranfluent striking here?

Pettinen opened up about the two really interesting ones here, namely Unity and Zendesk. Unity’s a profit-sharing deal, apparently, while Zendesk is a far simpler matter.

“It’s an added value,” Penttinen said. “We don’t pay anything. They’re just happy we provide the service for their customers.”

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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Work media tools in 2012 and beyond

stoweboyd — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:15:48 +0000

Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a new class of social tools based on the principles of open social networks like Facebook and Twitter but oriented to the specific needs of businesses and professionals. This report provides a brief synopsis of the business context for work media technologies, with special attention on how businesses are confronted with a set of disruptive forces and how they are responding by heading in new directions, which we call disruption vectors. Work media is an element of those vectors, and work media products will be judged based on their utility therein.

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Zendesk refreshes and rakes in $60m for European push

David Meyer — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Zendesk, one of the poster children for the recent wave of enterprise cloud services, has just raked in $60m in fresh funding. And the timing for that could be most opportune – the news coincides with a significant revamp of the browser-based user interface for the customer support suite, and the revelation of significant European expansion plans.

The new round, led by Redpoint Ventures, boasts some big names: Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, Index Ventures and GGV Capital, with existing investors Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures all taking part as well. It’s by far the biggest injection Zendesk has received, taking the firm’s total funding to date up to $86m.

As for the UI revamp, Zendesk EMEA chief Matt Price told me it was very much a reflection of the consumerization trend – it’s around 18 months since the company rolled out its iPad app, and the positive feedback from that apparently stimulated the browser interface refresh.

“For us that meant we really had to make it beautifully simple,” Price said. “We needed to make sure that when an agent logs in, they see everything they need in one place, and when an enquiry comes in from a customer, everything related to that is in one place.”

That related data can come from a variety of sources, from social media to live chat sessions. Zendesk has had these features for a while, as customers these days tend to have their own communications channel preferences, but older versions required the agent to keep switching tools.

And there’s more on the unification front too: another key feature of the new product is the Zendesk Apps application framework, which provides 75 prebuilt integration points for the likes of Salesforce.com and JIRA.

“We found many people integrate Zendesk into other systems to gather information,” Price said. “They might want to get information out of a CRM system, or on a particular technical issue from an internal system.”

Apart from all the talk of big bucks and sleek UIs, one of the quieter parts of Zendesk’s announcement was the expansion of the platform’s number of supported languages to 12.

That’s very much geared towards a revitalised push into the European market, Price suggested. And to back that up, he added that Zendesk will shortly be opening a Berlin office.

It’s not like Zendesk was lacking a European base before – it was after all founded in Denmark and also has a London office – but it’s clearly targeting an expansion of its existing user base on the continent.

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A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:30:33 +0000

Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Infographic: The Enterprise Mobile Explosion

Simon Mackie — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:04:25 +0000

Companies worldwide are increasingly incorporating mobile technology and applications into their operations to increase productivity and revenue and reduce paperwork, as this infographic, commissioned by helpdesk software company Zendesk and based in part on GigaOM Pro research into the future of workplaces (sub. req.), clearly shows.

Forty-three percent of businesses are planning to increase their mobile use in the future, and by 2015, it’s expected that half of all devices on corporate networks will be mobile devices. This explosion in the use of mobile devices in the enterprise will help fuel demand for mobile apps, with the worldwide market expected to grow from approximately $6.8 billion in 2010 to $25 billion by 2015. Click the image for the full-size version.

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Merry Holidays, Please Hold Premieres With TED Spoof

Liz Shannon Miller — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:00:24 +0000

It’s time to start getting into the holiday spirit, if the Musak at the grocery store is any indication, but the holiday-themed branded web series Merry ~~Christmas~~ Holidays, Please Hold, launching today, doesn’t start off with any Christmas cheer. Instead, it introduces its Scrooge-like protagonist by taking aim at one of web video’s sacred cows: TED Talks.

Scotty Iseri, who’s chronicled his employment history with the Scotty Got an Office Job series, wrote and directed this 10-episode tale of a customer service consultant learning the true meaning of customer service; future episodes return to a more conventional narrative, but will include slapstick homages to silent films and a musical number sung by an automated phone tree.

The first three episodes will debut by this Friday, with subsequent episodes coming out every other day until Dec. 22. In addition, to tease the series, Iseri has produced a musical trailer that also supports Creative Commons sharing of musical rights; the eclectic cast includes Larry Lessig, Kevin Kelly, Leo Laporte, Cory Doctorow, Mark Fraunfelder, Dick DiBartolo, John Perry Barlow, and Zadi Diaz.

This is the largest project Iseri’s ever done, though as he has a background in theater, long-form scripted content wasn’t something foreign to him. And sponsoring company Zendesk, a customer support startup based in San Francisco, was relatively hands-off about messaging. “They’d rather do something people enjoy watching that has their name attached to it,” Iseri said via phone.

My only real critique would be that the first episode feels a little long — but honestly I feel that way about most TED Talks. It’s a funny, dead-on parody of TED lectures, one that also sets up the show’s protagonist in an intriguing way. Holiday series are hard to pull off, but this is one I’m looking forward to following.

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Zendesk — Putting Twitter to Work

James Kendrick — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:31:58 +0000

Twitter is one of those services that you wonder how you did without it once you discover it. Those 140 character rolling conversations never stop (unless the whale appears), and businesses that come up with a way to put Twitter to work for customers are smart folks. Online help desk company Zendesk is leveraging Twitter in a unique way to augment the services for its customers.

Om Malik told us to keep an eye on Copenhagen-based Zendesk, and as usual he was right on the money. The company is an online help desk support provider that brings affordable customer support to companies. Zendesk has announced an integration with Twitter that adds the following features to Zendesk customer support services:

Turn a tweet into a new Zendesk ticket — a twicket — with one click
Record threaded Twitter conversations with full audit trail
Combine public and private dialog while maintaining confidentiality
Switch a Twitter conversation into an email conversation
Seamlessly integrate with social media monitoring tools such as HootSuite, TweetDeck, Twitter.com, and the Twitter iPhone and Android apps

This Twitter integration adds full mobile support for iPhone and Android phone users, reaching a large crowd of users. The ability to create a conversation trail across Zendesk and Twitter makes for a seamless support system for customers and is a very smart move for the company.

Companies are embracing Twitter due to its reach in the online world. Just this week the Comcast Internet connection died in my home office. Rather than waste a lot of time on the phone to find out what was going on, I tweeted my situation to @comcastcares. Comcast operates this Twitter account to let customers notify them of service problems. In five minutes a Comcast representative replied to my tweet, asking me to privately tweet my account phone number. Another five minutes and I was informed via Twitter that there was a “partial node outage” at my location, and that techs were on site conducting repairs. My service was restored in an hour, and I wasted no time thanks to Comcast’s use of Twitter.

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Zendesk for Help Gets Seed Funding

Om Malik — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:55:51 +0000

Keep an eye out on Copenhagen-based help desk-on-demand company Zendesk. The firm, started by Mikkel Svane, just raised half a million dollars in seed money from angel investors including Pageflakes co-founder Christoph Janz. Just like 37Signals offers you project management tools or hosted chat, Zendesk offers you a simple way to manage all incoming help desk inquires.

It’s not sexy, like some social networks, but it is useful and fully featured. No surprise the company counts Web 2.0 startups like Coupa and EditGrid along with convenience stores TETCO and Oxford University Press among its users. Zendesk would fall into our “small really is beautiful” category of startups.

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