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The New Atlanta Billionaires Behind An Unlikely Tech Unicorn Mailchimp pitched employees on profit-sharing over equity stakes, and stability over rocket-ship growth. But it grew at a viral clip anyway, on the strength of word of mouth and savvy marketing, like its 2015 sponsorship of the breakout podcast Serial.

Slack, an Upstart in Messaging, Now Faces Giant Tech Rivals [Slack] found success by combining something that Silicon Valley fetishizes - rich data on how people use a product - with something it often overlooks: How do people actually feel while using it?

The Case For Bootstrapping

Mailchimp expands from email to full marketing platform, says it will make $700M in 2019

Want Proof That Patience Pays Off? Ask the Founders of This 17-Year-Old $525 Million Email Empire MailChimp named 2018 Inc. Company of the Year

Women in Silicon Valley Face a Massive Equity Gap A first-of-its-kind study shows that women hold only 47¢ for every dollar of equity men do… It’s not simply that there are more men than women working at and founding these companies. Women make up 35 percent of equity-holding employees, but hold only 20 percent of the employee equity, the Carta survey found.

5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Design Team A recent study by my company InVision finds that organizations that have mastered design have seen outcomes that go far beyond improved product usability and customer satisfaction.

A company where everyone works from home. Here's how to make it work "There is no one in the office to babysit. We are looking for self-starters, who are innately curious and try to figure things out and solve problems," Wade Foster, CEO and Co-founder of Zapier

Business-app automation kingpin Zapier has its eye on consumers Now, Zapier’s automation service is growing faster than ever with 3 million registered users, up from 2 million in January and one million in May 2016.

The Best Time To Land a Job This Year Is Right Now According to ZipRecruiter’s survey, 82% of employers said finding quality candidates is their biggest business challenge, while 70% said they were finding it more difficult to hire this year than last.

Fintech 50 2019: The Newcomers Carta helps private companies, investors and employees track and manage their ownership, acting as transfer agent on equity grants. Already installed nearly 100 unicorns, it aims to expand from venture-backed startups to private equity and real estate.

AI Hasn’t Ushered in the Job-pocalypse Yet I asked the chief executive officer of ZipRecruiter, Ian Siegel, about the ever-looming specter of techno job destruction. ZipRecruiter is a jobs board and online employment marketplace (though you may know it from its prolific podcast ad campaigns).

Here are 3 common mistakes founders make when raising their first funding, according to a CEO who's already raised $150 million for his startup To put a fine point on it, Ward says that it's a mistake to try to convince someone who's already said no. Cut your losses and move on. There are enough seed investors in the world, he said. "Quickly do the pitch and if it doesn't resonate, get out and go to the next one."

The Only Money Hacks You Need to Save Big in 2019 Charlotte Cowles, who writes the "With Interest" newsletter for the business section of The New York Times, loves Digit. "The app hooks up to your checking account and pulls out small amounts of money automatically, like a little savings elf," she says.

Lyft, Uber and Silicon Valley IPOs help the rich get richer — the losers are public investors Carta data from more than 6,000 primary financing rounds raised by 4,500 U.S.-based, venture-backed companies over the last four years show that more money was raised per round in 2018 than in 2017. Valuations increased at all stages of a company’s lifecycle, and Series D valuations (which are given to later-stage companies) increased by a whopping 128 percent.

This Software Company Has a $1 Billion Valuation, 800 Employees, and Zero Offices "The screen has become the most important place in the world," says Clark Valberg, CEO and founder of InVision.

How Marketing Is Caught Between a Constant Push and Pull At MailChimp, we try to model a level of communication in our own marketing that helps inspire other businesses to connect with their audience in an authentic way, because we believe it’s the best way to drive results.

I'm Mailchimp Co-founder Ben Chestnut, and This Is How I Work We talked to Ben Chestnut, CEO and co-founder of the email newsletter company and marketing platform that grew to half a billion dollars in revenue without ever taking any venture capital.

Robots are reading your resume, so here are 5 tips to meet their approval With thousands of previous versions of a job that can be scanned, the algorithm uses the available data on resumes to find the best candidates for a talent recruiter, according to Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter, an online job marketplace.

See Mailchimp’s weird new branding While other software giants are simplifying their branding, Mailchimp is keeping it quirky.

MailChimp: This is no monkey business You may have an email sitting in your inbox that’s powered by MailChimp. The marketing tool brought in more than half a billion dollars in revenue this year and is still completely owned by the two founders.

These are the top business apps of 2018, as ranked by Zapier Each year, automation service Zapier publishes lists of the top business apps, as judged by the volume of automations (or “zaps”) performed by its customers.

InVision, valued at $1.9 billion, picks up $115 million Series F InVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round, bringing the company’s total funding to $350 million. This deal values InVision at $1.9 billion, which is nearly double its valuation as of mid-2017 on the heels of its $100 million Series E financing.

ZipRecruiter’s Job Seeker Profiles uses AI to improve candidate matches “We launched Profiles to help job seekers tell their whole story,” Ian Siegel, cofounder and CEO of ZipRecruiter, said. “Work, and the way people find it, is evolving … With Profiles, we’ve built a flexible, intelligent product that maximizes their chance to find the right employer, and vice versa, thus drastically reducing time to hire.”

Bringing It All Together: How Zapier Is Making Your Productivity Apps Even More Productive Zapier looks to help users build their own personalized, code-less workflow automations, serving as a digital super glue to combine a variety of web and mobile apps with its connectors called "zaps." "The only limit to what you're able to streamline with Zapier is your own imagination," says CEO Wade Foster.

Need to get your spending under control? There are apps for that! If you want to save more, Digit actually hooks up to your accounts and it moves money automatically into your savings... It decides what you can afford to save, and it does it for you.

MailChimp: From startup to Inc. Magazine's top company "We help small businesses build their brand and sell their stuff... For the last 17 years we've been helping them with their email marketing and more recently we've been expending to other channels like social media and video and even direct mail."

101 Ways to Make $1,000 With Digit, you select a goal and a time frame in which to accomplish it (mine is to save $2,000 in the next year for a vacation), and the app saves small amounts of money for you.

MailChimp CEO on the power of small businesses "We have had to reinvent MailChimp so many times, it's hard to remember them all. And it's all with the pace of small business churn... it means that every two or three years we have to reinvent ourselves with the next wave of small businesses."

Digit, with $1 billion saved, turns its attention to consumer debt In the three years since its launch, micro-savings app Digit has helped its customers set aside over $1 billion for emergency funds, travel, and more.

Fattening Up Your 401(k) Will Be Easier Than Losing Weight in 2018 Digit Chief Executive Officer Ethan Bloch's advice on setting financial goals is first to reflect on the prior year, analyzing what went right, and wrong, with your money.

How Clark Valberg Accidentally Discovered The Weakness In Adobe’s Empire The InVision founder’s goal is nothing short of creating the only tool you need as a UX designer–and the only software you need to share your designs with thousands of coworkers.

9 Innovative Tools to Help You Work Smarter Zapier links web apps to automate daily workflows using triggers. More than 1,000 apps work with the platform which is used by more than 2 million people.

A new study says older people want the same things from a job as millennials: A good boss and a chance to change the world Older workers may not be as jaded as you might think. New data from employee feedback platform Culture Amp found that employees between the ages of 55-64 are more likely than their younger counterparts to want a job that does good in the world.

This App Will Help You Pay Off Your Credit Card Debt In the three years since it rolled out, Digit has helped users save a collective $1 billion. This interest in alleviating credit card debt is unique to Digit Pay – and is, notably, one that banks and credit card companies do not share.

Uh-Oh: InVision's New Free Tool Wants To Kill Sketch, Adobe, And Framer "Even big companies are using a cobbled-together set of tools," points out Clark Valberg, the CEO of InVision whose name should be well known... to designers from companies ranging from Airbnb to Amex.

Companies are looking to a bot called Spoke to answer employees' questions Spoke's technology uses artificial intelligence to figure out which existing answers in a knowledge base apply to an employee's inquiry, and then provide better answers over time as it learns.

March Money Madness: Money Saving Apps on LIVE with Kelly and Ryan Digit launched a few years ago and it’s saved it’s users over a billion dollars. It analyzes how you earn, how you spend, and - very friendly - tells you every few days to save a few bucks.

How This Founder Realized the Tech Trend He'd Built His Company on Was All Hype When Ethan Bloch launched Digit, he was sure chatbots were the next big thing. Now he thinks they're dead.

The company that wanted to pay employees $10,000 to leave San Francisco is now a $35 million business Zapier, a software-integration startup best known for offering to pay employees $10,000 to leave the San Francisco Bay Area, tells Business Insider that it's on a $35 million annualized run rate.

Spoke looks to create a simpler workplace requests management tool “There’s too much to look at. In a larger company, the breaking point tends to be that there are probably a bunch of relevant answers, but there’s no way to find the needle in the haystack. So I really wanted to figure stuff out from scratch,” said Srinivasan.

Inside The Design Processes At Netflix, Slack, Pinterest, And More The design platform company InVision has released an intriguing report on how some of the world’s most innovative companies approach design.

Automated Assistants Will Soon Make a Bid for Your Finances "Ender was a guy who saved the human race but didn?t have time to do his own taxes," Mr. Bloch said. "If you want people to have financial health, you need to do it for them."

50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs Many tech companies pay to move new hires to the Bay Area. But this spring the Silicon Valley-based workflow automation software company Zapier offered the opposite deal: $10,000 to help any Valley resident move somewhere else.

Artificial Intelligence Might Soon Invade Your HR Department, Thanks to These 3 Ex-Googlers "We're trying to take a design-first, lightweight A.I. approach to a common problem that every company faces," Spoke's CEO says. "I think the design and usability are as important as the machine learning itself."

InVision acquires design visibility tool Wake “We’re in the midst of a shift,” said CEO Clark Valberg. “The screen is the most important place in the world. Every company is now a digital product company."

You Need To Hear About These Money-Saving Apps Digit saves you from yourself. It’s connected to your checking account, and it tracks your habits. It looks for places to grab $2 or $5, and then all of a sudden you get a text that says, “Hey Steve, I just saved you $40 and you didn’t even realize it.”

Estate of Ray Dolby, SF tech pioneer, donates $115 million to alma mater Cambridge The estate of Ray Dolby on Tuesday donated $115 million to support scientific research and education at the University of Cambridge.

Why This MailChimp Design Team Mostly Makes Arts And Crafts But as it's scaled - it now reports more than 15 million users - MailChimp's leaders have found they need to take more active steps to maintain their company's commitment to design.

Sizing Up Four Apps for Saving Cool function: Just before a bill is due, [Digit] sends the money from the subaccount to your checking account and reminds you to pay the bill.

The 19 hottest San Francisco startups to watch in 2018 Companies of all sizes struggle with resolving workplace service and information requests. Spoke gives employees the real-time help they need.

Zapier's $10,000 'de-location' offer sparks job applicants but (still) no de-location [Zapier has] grown its headcount by more than 65% - from around 75 staffers last spring to 125 today.

5 Artificial Intelligence Companies to Watch in 2018 Spoke - This startup's AI aims to know more about your company than you do.

6 Apps That Will Help Make 2018 Your Strongest Year Yet Connect your bank accounts and [Digit] will automatically save money for you. It monitors your financial situation using artificial intelligence.

Finance hacks to get you back on track The first one we like is called Digit. It links with your bank accounts and just moves money into savings. It has this smart algorithm that figures out how much money you can afford to save.

This tech worker is living the dream in Hawaii, and his company is paying others $10K to follow The 85-person company, in which all employees work remotely, has received over 1,000 applications since launching its 'De-Location Package' on March 17, said CEO Wade Foster. That's an increase of about 33 percent over normal.

A Siri for Your Finances? Digit Says Trust Me Digit had a savings bot before bots were cool, or at least before the hype in the financial technology world reached a fever pitch.

Slack's Quest to Make Work Easier [Slack's] founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield, has become a guru of sorts on the evolution of work, including things like chatbots.

Forbes Cloud 100: These Rising Stars Are Cloud's Next Wave The Rising Stars include some familiar faces such as... Wade Foster of Zapier (pronounced to rhyme with "happier"), which automates workflows between popular services such as Gmail and Slack.

How software is eating the banking industry The following year, having banked enough cash to follow his passion, Bloch set out on a mission to improve consumers' financial health. The tagline on his website is, "Save money, without thinking about it."

This Is How MailChimp's Famous Ad Campaign Was Born "[The campaign] is wacky, but it won a bunch of awards and got us a lot of attention, and it was totally on-brand for us, which was important to me." - Ben Chestnut

MailChimp Sends a Billion Emails a Day. That's the Easy Part MailChimp sends more than a billion emails a day... And by the end of the year, MailChimp executives expect its servers will be handling way more.

Slack Grows Up, Debuts New Suite For Large Businesses Called 'Enterprise Grid' Slack looks all grown up. The company unveiled a new product ... in an event in San Francisco on Tuesday called Slack Enterprise Grid.

Facebook Ads Debut On MailChimp; Google AdWords Might Be Next In what it's regarding as its first move into transforming from an email-only service to full-fledged marketing platform, MailChimp on Thursday debuted Facebook Ads to its 15 million-plus customers.

At Digit, All That Spare Change Is Adding Up - To $500 Million In Deposits Digit, for its part, is betting on automation and simplicity. "Our goal is to make achieving and maintaining financial health effortless," Bloch says of the product his team has built.

Slack introduces shared channels to let companies collaborate If they prove popular, shared channels could offer Slack strategic benefits. A network of companies creating common spaces to communicate is one that paying customers could find hard to leave.

Industry Insight: Zapier's View of the Business App Landscape Zapier has evolved from a tool for building one-off connections or "Zaps," into a powerful workflow automation platform capable of supporting complex logic between multiple intertwined business processes.

MailChimp Wants To Solve Every Small-Biz Marketing Challenge (Even Snail Mail) Based in Atlanta - far outside Silicon Valley's bubble of venture-funded would-be unicorns - the company has 600-plus employees and did more than $400 million in revenue last year.

Atlassian Acquires Popular Team Productivity App Trello For $425 Million Atlassian announced on Monday that it had acquired popular team collaboration software maker Trello for $425 million. It's the largest acquisition to date for the company that went public in 2015 and its 18th in 14 years.

MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-U No venture capital, no Bay Area presence, no crazy burn rate: MailChimp's founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers needs and following their instincts.

The 10 Most Innovative Companies In Finance 2017 Goldman Sachs, Digit, and others are changing the way we spend, save, and invest.

Slack Bids for Larger Customers With New Software Slack founder and Chief Executive Stewart Butterfield has acknowledged the competitive pressure, but he believes there is room for multiple services. In an interview, Mr. Butterfield said he anticipates Slack will more than double its revenue to about $200 million this year on the back of the new product, which required a different approach.

Why Mailchimp Is One Of The Most Innovative Companies Of 2017 MailChimp is expanding its digital-marketing tools beyond email newsletters, making it an even more crucial tool for entrepreneurs.

Why Slack Is One Of The Most Innovative Companies Of 2017 The 33,000 corporate teams using the popular workplace messaging app have seen its capabilities explode: Last year, Slack introduced video calling and made the platform more interactive, allowing users to browse flights, approve budgets, and evaluate job candidates, all within the app.

Slack Offers a More Grown-Up Option for Businesses The app has grown alongside the company, which now has 800 employees. But in its fight to win over much larger businesses, Butterfield discovered they need a vastly different product from the one originally built for his tiny team of game makers.

Slack, Microsoft step up war on work email Slack Enterprise Grid launches with commitments from IBM and Capital One, which have been using the product for a few months. Slack is also announcing a new partnership with SAP, which is designing a portfolio of bots for Slack for its 354,000 global customers. They include a bot for Concur (travel and expense management) and SuccessFactors (human resources).

The Unexpected Design Challenge Behind Slack's New Threaded Conversations At first blush, threaded conversations sound like one of the most thoroughly mundane features a messaging app could introduce.
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But when Slack?s users started asking for threaded conversations, the company behind the hit workplace collaboration tool soon concluded that the capability wasn?t something it could whip up in a jiffy. It did, however, begin to noodle around with the idea?and try different approaches. And, eventually, to use a prototype version internally while continuing to polish it up for public consumption.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on the Future of Communication In John Locke?s letters 350 years ago, he didn?t use any animated GIFs because he couldn?t. I?m not saying that he would have written letters in animated GIFs, but if he could have dropped a photo in to illustrate a point, he totally would have.

The Slack generation It is rare for business software to arouse emotion besides annoyance. But some positively gush about how Slack has simplified office communication.

Trello Gets Serious About Big Businesses As It Passes 1.1 Million Daily Users And Triples Sales Pryor likes to imagine the modern office as a wilderness rescue mission. Slack leads a pack of communication tools that allow coworkers to stay off internal email chains and share ideas faster. They're the radio, Pryor says....(and) Trello is your GPS, it's where you are and where you're going.

Meet Elle's 2016 Women in Tech The first computer project April Underwood ever worked on as a kid was building a spreadsheet of her baseball-card collection on Microsoft Works. She's now vice president of product at Slack.

Slack, the Office Messaging App That May Finally Sink Email Behind Slack's rise is Mr. Butterfield's grand vision for the future of the office. He is betting that solo work is on the wane and that as all of our jobs become more complex, more and more creative and technical feats will be accomplished by teams rather than lone practitioners.

Download these money apps to help you achieve your 2016 financial resolutions Want to save more? Digit monitors your income and spending habits and every few days transfers affordable amounts (for you) into savings without you having to think twice about it.

Slack Is Our Company of the Year. Here's Why Everybody's Talking About It That Slack users feel an emotional attachment to the brand is no accident. From its earliest days, Butterfield and his co-founders have sought to ensure that, besides useful, Slack, the product and the company, would be fun, thoughtful, humane, whimsical, and erudite.

The Fintech 50: The Complete List Digit: monitors cash flow in your checking account, diverting small amounts into savings. Users can save more (or less) via text message.

The message is the medium Instead of inundating workers with individual messages, Slack divides the digital deluge into more manageable “channels”, each dedicated to a project or a team. Users can create and subscribe to such channels, exchange messages, post links and upload files—all of which are saved. Besides reducing the time everyone spends handling e-mail, the channels also help new employees to get up to speed quickly, instead of starting with an empty inbox.

Is productivity software making us less productive? I'm particularly addicted to Trello, which is a visual task board where I organize everything from pieces I want to write to movies I want to see to meetings I need to attend. And I'm not alone. The company recently announced it's hit 10 million users, and it launched a new, more powerful product for enterprise users.

Michael Pryor is Trello's CEO, and so he has an unusually clear vantage point into the habits of, well, productivity app addicts like me.

How To Save Money & Have Your Lattes Too Good news, millennials: You don't have to give up those pumpkin spice lattes just yet.

Ethan Bloch, founder of online financial company Digit, is shaking up some major money myths in a new interview with Bloomberg Business. Chief among them? "Just have your fucking latte," he says.

The man behind the billion-dollar app that's changing how we communicate With his addictive communication app, Slack, Stewart Butterfield built a billion-dollar business in two short years. More impressive, he managed to make work feel like fun.

WSJ. Magazine Innovator Award: Stewart Butterfield, Email Killer Slack stands on the precipice of product mega-fame. There’s a decent chance you haven’t heard of it yet, and it sounds almost banal in description: software that helps groups of co-workers exchange instant messages and swap electronic files. Yet Slack is, by some estimates, the fastest-growing business application of all time.

Messaging app Slack aims to minimize emails in the office "When you talk about transparency inside of a company, it's usually either the bosses can see what the workers are doing or the bosses are forthcoming about what's going on," Butterfield said. "But you can't see what's going on around you."

The app tackles this by creating what Butterfield called "lateral transparency" within the company. Slack works just like other messaging apps like iMessage or Skype, but its messages are public inside the company.

SXSW Interactive 2016: What to expect To help lessen some of the SWSi session stress, show organizers partnered again with Eventbase to build a smarter mobile app (in the App Store and Google Play). This year, the app will actually recommend sessions based on other people’s SXSWi schedules, as well as your location and the time, to take into account your own schedule availability.

SXSW Founder Roland Swenson Says the Obamas 'Want to Get in Front of All the Young, Creative People' at This Year's Fest Another thing that we started doing last year and we're doing even more this year is working with beacons...This is pretty cutting-edge stuff and we're proud to work with this company from Vancouver called EventBase, they've helped us develop this new technology.

Saving Made Simple: Services That Stash Cash Automatically The best part about Digit is its ability to calculate how much to save from day to day. After connecting a checking account to Digit, its algorithm analyzes account activity to determine how much you typically earn and spend.

Digit is best for those who are not saving enough and need help figuring out how much they can afford to save.

5 Tools That Can Help You Build Wealth for the Future One of my favorite new wealth building tools is Digit.co. This is an app that analyzes your checking account, paying attention to your income and spending habits...Digit is a great way to identify "extra" money that you didn't realize you could put to good use.

How Slack Uses Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on how his company uses its own product to be more productive - and how you can, too.

Money Minute: 5 apps that manage your money for you VIDEO: Digit is a new app that makes saving so easy you don’t even know you’re doing it. Using a clever algorithm, the app will monitor your spending, and every few days, it will figure out how much you can afford to save.

3 Money-Saving Apps That Won't Cost You a Dime If you’re among the one in three Americans who hasn’t saved a single penny for retirement, Digit aims to get you stashing cash pronto. It’s a web- and texting-based digital piggy bank app that “automates your savings so you don't have to think about it." We like the sound of that.

A new way to network: iBeacons connect SXSW festival-goers VIDEO: The BBC's North America technology correspondent Richard Taylor spoke to SXSW app creator Ben West about the deployment.

SXSW Wants To Help You Network More Efficiently With Their App You may not be able to do it all, but the SXSW Go app can certainly help you do more...This time around, Eventbase...worked with WiFi provider RightRound and beacon technology company Gimbal to make networking, one of the main reasons so many thousands of people make the trek to Austin every year, much easier.

Near Me is dead, long live iBeacons — at SXSW This year, SXSW partnered up with Vancouver, Canada, based Eventbase..."SXSW is using beacons to propel smart networking by using proximity in a way that was not previously possible. Since SXSW takes place throughout the city, beacons are allowing us to use micro-locations and context in conjunction with attendee profiles to help people sync up in real-time."

This Year’s SXSW Will Be A Staging Ground For Location Technology 2015 might be the year that geolocation gets more accurate. If it does, it will be because of the Austin, Texas, festival South By Southwest. SXSW is going all-in on iBeacons — low-powered bluetooth emitters that have been, until now, a fringe technology, but that many believe are the next step in location services...The company spearheading this adoption is Eventbase.

South by Southwest 2015: All About Beacons, Beacons, Beacons "It's a completely new take on networking," said Jeff Sinclair, co-founder of Eventbase. "There are so many people that want to connect. We're just trying to make those connections better." The company calls its geo-targeting solution "hyper-local networking."

SXSW app will put you where the action is in Austin The networks are designed to make the latest SXSW feel more like it was in days gone by, when the event's much smaller size made serendipitous meetings easier to follow up on, Wilcox says.

The goal is to take some of the chance out of "chance encounters" that could lead to a new partnership or relationship between attendees "who bump into each other at the show" for the first time, he says.

SXSW’s official app will hook up with 1,000 iBeacons across Austin The SXSW Go app was developed by Eventbase, which became the first company to receive direct investment from the festival organizers last year. It collaborated on the project with geofencing experts Gimbal (who supplied the beacons), high-density Wi-Fi company RightRound and mobile marketing outfit Urban Airship.

SXSW to Get (More) Social With the Help of iBeacons SXSW dabbled with the technology last year, through technology partner Eventbase. This year represents a more ambitious undertaking — calling for the deployment of 1,000 iBeacons that use Bluetooth wireless technology to deliver location information through the festival’s mobile app.

PCMag Editor's Choice: Slack Excellent private backchannel. Great for non-essential communication and discussion. Wonderful, rich set of tools and options.

No Thinking Required: Mobile's New Spin on Personal Finance A San Francisco startup has developed a new way to inspire financial discipline: its technology automatically transfers funds from checking to savings every few days, in amounts its algorithms believe a person can afford.

How journalists are using Slack and Hangouts (instead of email) to stay connected “I’m trying to reduce my inbox as much as possible. Newsletters or listservs or Google Groups are oriented around email,” Gibbs said. “It makes sense for newsrooms to use Slack to keep in touch and make communication a little more enjoyable than getting ‘I agree’ reply-all emails.”

Are Savings Apps, Like Digit and Acorns, Better Than Savings Accounts? Digit and Acorns are great ways for young folks to start saving because they siphon a little money here and there. The intended result is that you use one of these savings apps for a while -- without actually thinking about it -- and end up with sizable savings that you would not have built up on your own.

‘Virtual bank manager’ Digit tracks your spending to save you money - but only when it knows you won’t miss it A new service takes the hassle out of this by securely tracking your spending habits and automatically saving a small amount for you each week.

Named Digit, the service only transfers what it thinks you can afford and adjusts this amount accordingly to help you easily build up a nest egg.

Digit is the automated savings plan we’ve been waiting for It’s the best thing to happen to my personal finances in some time, and it seems crazy that no retail bank has developed a system like this before.

Automated Savings Startup Digit Opens Up To All ...if you’re like the majority of people in America, you probably don’t have any savings. In fact, you probably have a negative savings rate. For those users, having a small amount of money deducted and set aside can help out a lot.

A 29-year-old invented a painless way to save money, and Google's buying into it “The bank experience has too much friction and inertia that people are just not saving,” Ethan Bloch, founder of the personal finance app Digit.
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If anyone can make this happen, Bloch seems to be the right guy.

The Billion Dollar Startup Club Slack is among many startups pursuing a similar goal: rethinking the often awkward ways people collaborate via reply-all emails, attached files and conference calls...The biggest hurdle for Slack is diverting workers’ attention from email, which many users find as frustrating as it is central to office work.

Free App Friday: 5 Indispensable Tools For Your Small Business 1. IF YOU WANT AN EFFECTIVE-YET-INFORMAL WAY TO KEEP IN TOUCH WITH YOUR TEAM Try Slack (Android, iOS, Web). Instead of relying on a mish-mash of email, instant messaging, text messaging, and phone calls, Slack does a good job of streamlining things down into a real-time communications tool that can hook into a heaping helping of popular third-party services

How apps like Slack have been able to take over businesses so fast But today, with cloud services so easily available to anybody, employees often choose their own tools to get work done. That was certainly the case for Slack. In most cases, small teams within companies independently started using it, and slowly it took over the whole company. Its CEO Stewart Butterfield told us, “It’s been very much a bottoms-up adoption model.”

On Its First Birthday, Slack Declares Itself The “Fastest Growing Business App” Ever Slack could be the only business application that doesn’t provoke regular bursts of homicidal rage from its users, and instead, on occasion, prompts real joy.

Astounded By Its Own Success, Slack Celebrates First Birthday With Eye-Popping Numbers “The biggest single factor in our success was timing.” Of course, Slack is a good product, Butterfield said, but countless earlier services, from Blackberry’s Messenger to Apple’s iMessage, made people comfortable with the idea of sending short bursts of electronic communications to each other. And those services paved the way for messaging to move into the business world.

With 500,000 users, Slack says it's the fastest-growing business app ever What they didn't know was how rapidly that business would grow. "We've blown past every estimate and prediction we made in the early days," says Butterfield. "It's consistently surprising."

This 1-Year-Old Startup Says It’s the Fastest-Growing Business App Ever The company’s stellar growth rate is especially notable because it’s happening almost entirely thanks to word of mouth and media coverage, not an aggressive advertising campaign.

Slack growth skyrockets: 10,000 new active users each week Today marks the San Francisco company’s one-year anniversary, and Slack released a bundle of envy-inducing growth figures to mark the occasion.
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The success of Butterfield’s company reinforces the well-worn Silicon Valley refrain that first isn’t always best.

Slack reaches escape velocity One of the most striking aspects of the service, from data released to coincide with the end of its first year, is the proportion of active users who are also paying customers. Of those who have been on the service for at least three months, more than 40 per cent pay, says Butterfield.

Most Innovative Companies 2015: Slack Slack entered a crowded category, competing against established players and immediately stood out, both for its potent features (you can tell it to notify you whenever a particular keyword gets mentioned) and genial, quirky personality (when you log in, it greets you with deep thoughts such as, "The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience").

13 cool things you might not know you can do with Slack If you’re one of the companies that’s jumped on the Slack bandwagon there’s a bunch of fun and useful stuff it can do you might not know about.

Here’s our top thirteen handy lesser-known features in Slack.

Slack is everywhere, growing fast, and still works great. Here’s how they did it You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth...But have you visited its Twitter Wall of Love?

These tweets are real, and they’re the stuff of founders’ dreams. And yet Slack hasn’t run any big integrated marketing campaigns—they don’t have an elaborate email strategy or buy million-dollar billboards.

10 Insider Tips to Conference Survival in 2015 Contributed article by Jeff Sinclair, co-founder of Eventbase.

Without the right strategy, you can miss out on important opportunities, useful connections, and the fun perks. However, a few basic hacks can help you turn the next industry conference into your most meaningful event of the year.

Have courage to make big changes: Stewart Butterfield What's the one key mantra for a startup's success?

You need to have a clarity of purpose, which can be communicated to other people. This makes a huge difference...When it takes a long time to explain the purpose of a venture, even if the product is fabulous, you'll struggle.

Slack moves the world closer to an email-free future Slack quickly became a darling of the tech world as modern day workers griped about overloaded email inboxes.
...
With the acquisition of Screenhero announced yesterday—which will allow it to add voice calls, video chat, and screensharing to its platform—Slack is also taking aim at tools like Skype and Google Hangouts.

Slack's new acquistion adds voice chat to its collaboration tools The move is part of the continued and rapid evolution of online collaboration tools. For years, businesses got by with comparative software from Microsoft. But now, so many startups, from Slack to Quip to Evernote, are working to change that, offering a new breed of online tool that are far more powerful—and far easier to use.

Slack is going to add video chat, voice chat, and screen-sharing This will be the first time that Slack has added major new features into its own app, but they're ones that a good number of users should find helpful...Slack has been growing incredibly fast, and new features like this should only help.

Slack buys Screenhero to add screen sharing and voice chat features “Slack integrates with hundreds of other services, but there are some core features that work best when built directly into the platform.”

"Email Killer" Slack Buys Desktop Sharing and Voice Chat Startup It's a promising development for the fast-growing company...While the communications industry is a constantly evolving, crowded space, Slack has come out ahead thanks to its ability to streamline group communication and to help remote teams feel like they are working under the same roof.

Slack's messaging platform is getting voice, video and screen sharing soon There aren't many work collaboration tools that you'd describe as being a joy to use, but Slack, the latest startup from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, actually manages to come close.

Slack acquires Screenhero to add screensharing, voice, and video chat Screenhero CEO and co-founder Jahanzeb Sherwani said that 50% of Screenhero's own customers are also Slack customers...He added the company was "under no pressure to sell," but decided that cozying up with Slack would allow Screenhero to do more with its core concept faster.

Slack Buys Screenher to Add Screen Sharing And Voice Chat To Its Work Messaging Platform Adding Screenhero functionality could mean the potential for Slack to market its platform to businesses in the customer support vertical, with its voice and screen support powering online help desks.

Instant Messaging Increased in the U.S. Northeast During the Blizzard Unable to do our daily headline meeting in person, we opted not to do a conference call and instead just held the meeting in instant message-form using a tool called Slack.

Why chat rooms are the hot social media in 2015 Apps and services that allow users to real-time chat are experiencing a kind of renaissance...[and] the da Vinci of this particular revival is Slack. Its allure? A central chat room for employees to share messages, photos, and company updates.

Apps for the workplace 2015 Video of Donald Brady, principal of Deloitte Digital, being interviewed on CNBC about apps that help employees get work done faster and more efficiently in the workplace. Slack has had viral adoption by startups and Fortune 500s alike.

$1 Billion In Under 5 Years: 12 Hot Tech Startups The company formerly known as Tiny Speck shot to its $1B+ valuation in under two years. Impressive for a simple, real-time tool for messaging, archiving, and search — but not entirely shocking, since one of the co-founders, Stewart Butterfield, previously co-founded Flickr.

People Are Retreating to Private Chats Because the Open Internet Can Be Terrible Group-chats are huge right now: From WhatsApp to Slack, people seem to be retreating from the cacophony of the open internet into quieter, more (for lack of a better word) curated online spaces.

The 7 Secrets to Ensure Your User Conference Is a Smashing Success Contributed article by Jack Newton, CEO of Clio.

Bringing together hundreds or thousands of users can be the perfect way to galvanize your user base, or it can turn into a massive time sink with no discernible ROI. Clio outlines how to make your conference a success.

The Only Truly Intimate Online Experience Left "Slack is a conduit for culture," cofounder Stewart Butterfield tells me. Indeed, the platform creates a de facto online micro-community, like a tide pool away from the larger internet ocean.

10 favorite apps from 2014 Slack offers a clean, searchable, and highly integratable channel-based forum for project management, file sharing, and “ambient awareness” (i.e. less time spent nodding off in the conference room).

These Are The 16 Hottest Startups That Launched In 2014 Slack was originally an internal tool used by CEO Stewart Butterfield's team at Tiny Speck, the company that made the multiplayer game Glitch, but Butterfield decided to spin it out into its own product and company.

Email advice: How to take back control of your inbox Slack - where you can mix messaging and emails together. Chat, send files and set subjects or "channels" to suit you. Cat pictures can stay on the cat channel, while the actual work gets done on another. It integrates nicely with other online services like Google Docs and Dropbox.

The beginning of the end for email I predict that this will be the year that email alternatives finally start to gain real traction...Slack, a new messaging and search platform, is growing by leaps and bounds.

Should digital monopolies be broken up There are also good reasons why governments should regulate internet monopolies less energetically than offline ones. First, barriers to entry are lower in the digital realm. It has never been easier to launch a new online product or service: consider the rapid rise of Instagram, WhatsApp or Slack.

From Flickr to Slack: B.C.'s Silicon Valley golden boy finds success in failure Stewart Butterfield...[the] Silicon Valley’s current golden boy, the Canadian mind behind one of the most popular photo-sharing services of all time and a new productivity app startup that has reached a billion-dollar valuation before its first birthday.

The 15 Best Productivity Apps For Getting Things Done Slack is a great way for keeping in touch with your team at work without sifting through dozens of emails

Three Questions with Slack’s CEO I try to instill this into the rest of the team but certainly I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. Like, it’s just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though.

Top 3 Trends in the Collaborative Enterprise for 2015 The boomers are aging out and their way of working is going with them. Here come the millennials in droves. They have a totally new approach to solving problems. Just take Slack, as an example.

9 Startups That Made Life Better In 2014 Best of all, the Web and mobile app significantly cuts down on unnecessary email, transforming the way teams communicate.

10 of the best startups that made an impact in 2014 It’s the level of integration with other apps like Dropbox, Google Docs and Twitter that has got users hooked. Social media posts are easily embedded, images are downloadable and there are handy features like Slackbot which can be set up to answer common questions and perform frequently needed tasks automatically.

SXSW Starts A VC Fund To Give Its Official App Maker Eventbase $2 Million Eventbase has handled the SXSW Go mobile app for iOS and Android each year for the last five years of the conference. It’s a massive undertaking within an event that has basically taken on a life of its own.

South-by-Southwest takes first investment stake: $2M in Eventbase ...the Vancouver startup whose iBeacon-based app took the events world by storm in 2014, has raised its first outside investment round...the investor is a brand-new investment arm of South by Southwest (SXSW) — the conference where Eventbase first demonstrated a new service that uses short-range wireless signals (aka Bluetooth or iBeacons) to create secure, on-the-fly networks.

How to stay productive when using Slack The things that make the software a pleasure to work with, the ease of use, intuitive design, a great mobile app, and copious third party integrations can also help create a distracting flood of notifications and messages. A few simple tweaks can help turn Slack back into a productivity booster.

Slack: The Nine-Month-Old Company Worth More Than $1B Slack CEO and Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield discusses the company’s growth on Bloomberg West.

Inside Slack: How A Billion-Dollar Email-Killer Gets Work Done What Slack does is deceptively simple...improves on chat ...making it easier to spawn conversations. Its mobile and desktop apps work seamlessly, with no missed updates or sync failures.

And Slack makes all of those conversations searchable—which is an improvement that's hard to explain until you start using it.

5 Tips For Retailers Looking To Rise Above The Competition This Holiday Season Contributed article by Michael Garrity, CEO of Financeit.

With forecasts predicting a rise in holiday spending, try some new strategies to capture competitive dollars and drive business to your door

Is this the future of work email? the information is searchable. "Rather than having all that information locked up in individual inboxes, it's a shared resource which develops over the course of months and years."

Slack, a Start-Up With an App to Foster Business Collaboration, Is Valued at $1.1 Billion “It’s one of these rare things, an Internet treasure, we believe,” said John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Byers and Caufield, a venture firm that participated in Slack’s latest round of financing, along with Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. “It’s a complete Internet business stack with extraordinary user love, and that is translating into extraordinary user growth.”

Stewart Butterfield explains why Slack is now worth more than $1 billion I don’t think it was quite apparent in April how big an opportunity this was going to be or how fast it would be growing...The growth has been completely insane and almost entirely on word of mouth.

Slack’s One-Year-Old Software Business Valued at $1.12 Billion “They’ve cracked the code in a very short period of time,” John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, said in an interview. “Slack is growing more rapidly, with no marketing, than anyone else transforming enterprise communications.”

Slack: The billion-dollar accident The latest entrant into technology's billion-dollar club got there by mistake.

Slack Joins The Billion-Dollar Startup Club “If you go through something traumatic with people, it deepens the bond, and having a spectacular business failure is very traumatic,” Butterfield said. “And the age of our team — we have a lot more maturity and discipline and focus.”

Slack Valued at $1 Billion in Latest Funding Round While business software, such as the various programs made by Microsoft Corp., have improved over the past decade, they still work separately...Slack’s ambition is to be the place where all these technologies come together.

Slack is now the fastest-growing workplace software ever Slack aspires to host the entire history of your corporate communications. The pitch is that it makes you more productive by reducing the amount of time you spend on other productivity-related tasks.

Slack is now worth more than a billion dollars Companies like Blue Bottle Coffee even pitch Slack as a perk, as if it were a discounted gym membership or a free-lunch Friday.

Slack is now valued at more than $1 billion after launching less than a year ago Unlike other recent high-profile billion-dollar startups, Slack is focused on business users — in other words, it has a business model.

How Slack has made itself an indispensable business tool Slack has an air of quality that many apps lack—both from startups and big companies.

Why Slack is worth $1bn: it's trying to change how we work There are two types of people in the world: those who have never heard of Slack, and those who can’t imagine life without it. The latter group explains why the workplace chat app has just received $120m investment valuing it at $1.12bn.

Slack CEO Explains Why He Thinks His 8-Month-Old App Is Now Worth $1.1 Billion “We’ve established that people would pay for us. Slack is being valued based on its ability to make money rather than something more speculative,” Butterfield said.

Read more:

Slack Confirms $120M Fundraise Led By Google Ventures And KPCB At $1.12B Valuation ...the company has done a solid job in converting users from free to premium tiers — the paid tiers essentially give employees more capacity on the platform — and has been equally good at keeping users engaged beyond those crucial 30-, 60- and 90-day windows when people often drop off after initial enthusiasm about a service.

Slack gets $120M infusion to kill email at work The San Francisco company's funding and early customer wins are signs that venture capitalists and bold CIOs are eager to back entrepreneurs with modern software that can improve business processes, usually by tapping the cloud and mobility and adapting consumer apps for workplace use.

Is this billion-dollar startup the email killer? On-air interview with Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack.

Industry insiders pick the hottest apps in tech right now It has given us the conversation back,” Samsung Open Innovation Center VP Valerie Casey said, calling Slack “the product I wish I had made.”

The Fastest-Growing Enterprise App Is Going After Microsoft Office, Google Docs, And Box The business communication app Slack acquired document collaboration startup Spaces on Friday, making further inroads into the increasingly competitive work collaboration space.

Slack Buys a Collaboration Tool in First Acquisition Workplace collaboration startup Slack has made its first acquisition as it prepares to compete more directly with software giants like Google and Microsoft.

Blue Bottle Coffee proves developers aren’t the only ones who love Slack Everybody from accountants to HR finds its drag-and-drop platform for collaboration easy and simple to use, Bauman says. There are even a few baristas who took it upon themselves to join Slack, and use it to discuss shifts and talk to each other outside of work.

The Evolution of Chat New features in software programs like Slack let people go on tangents and have side conversations more easily—more like talking out loud.

Slack soars on success of solving our lame office problems Slack is turning heads because it's more successful as an enterprise service than most breakout consumer mobile apps are. Even its creator isn't sure what's causing the boom. "Slack addresses a huge problem that nobody even knows is real," said Stewart Butterfield.

Slack: I've seen the future, and it reminds me of the past The application itself is pretty amazing. It’s clear that a ton of thought went into the interface and it’s loaded with thoughtful touches... It’s also a very intelligent app. Everything you send into it will be analyzed for context and if the app can figure out a way to save you time, it will.

Some of the internet’s coolest new businesses are based on a technology older than the web Slack, a startup currently getting a lot of love from the tech community, is essentially an updated IRC for less-geeky users.

Slack Wins Over Another Doubter, Scoring A Sandwich Video In The Deal Email killer and group chat app, Slack, wanted one of those trendy Sandwich Videos. Sandwich demurred -- until it got hooked on Slack itself.

This Company's Pivot Could Be Good News for Smaller Merchants When peer-to-peer lending didn't pan out, FinanceIt brought an installment-loan option to a big segment of the market that had never had it.

The Most Fascinating Profile You’ll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup Slack's chat function is a trojan horse for bigger ideas. It wants to oversee all your other business software.

Slack is killing email The founder of Flickr built a chat app that might save your workplace sanity...Slack users spend nearly 10 hours per day in the app.

The Man Behind One Of The Hottest Apps In The World Tells Us How Even Boring Enterprise Apps Can Go Viral In just six months since its official launch, Slack has been able to add over 125,000 active users and 13,000 active teams ...and you rarely see a startup on this kind of growth trajectory in the enterprise space.

5 Tips on Developing a Successful Inbound-Marketing Strategy Contributed article by FreshBooks CMO Shawn Cadeau.

As a small-business owner, marketing doesn't always make it the top of the list, but this type of work helps create new business. By following these five easy steps, you’ll be able to build a customer pipeline and stay focused on the work.

3 Big Box Marketing Tips for Small Retailers Small retailers don't have to limit themselves to a small consumer audience if they have the right marketing tactics on their side.

A Look Back At Yahoo’s Flickr Acquisition For Lessons Today Today, Butterfield is often on the opposite side of the table as a potential buyer of smaller startups. Slack just raised $42.8 million led by Social + Capital Partnership along with Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners.

The Key Ways Small Businesses Set Themselves Apart From Big Box Stores Contributed article by Fianceit CEO Michael Garrity.

Being small has many advantages, but you might not be aware of the strongholds you have against bigger competition.

Well-Funded Competition Forced VC-Free FreshBooks To Take Investors After A Decade Of No's We wanted to make sure that our bank account reflected our ambition, and our market is really ready to grow now,” its founder says.

Slack: The App That Wants to Kill Work Email Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, speaks with Emily Chang

FreshBooks Raises $30 Million and Plans to Hire 250 More Employees by 2016 FreshBooks is delivering a solution designed for the millions of small business owners that want to run their businesses without having to learn accounting.

Fingerprint scanners on smartphones are SO last year With apologies to local start-ups Jawbone and Fitbit and Silicon Valley's Pebble watch, some of the coolest wearable computers to be shown off in Texas this week will be coming by way of Canada.

Vancouver Startup Clio Raises $18M to Help Lawyers Cut Inbox Clutter Clio is one of many recently funded software-as-a-service companies that focus on the needs of a particular industry rather than creating software to serve the operational needs of any business.

FinanceIt Raises $13 Million To Bring Simple Purchase Financing Options To Small And Medium Businesses Today FinanceIt, a company that brings financing options for consumer purchases to small and medium-sized businesses, announced that it has raised a $13 million Series A...The outsized Series A is directly lined up to help the company expand to the United States, starting in 2014. That specific progression will wait until the conclusion of this calendar year.

Why Canada is where smart VC money is going in 2014 Katherine Barr, general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures and a co-chair of the C100, writes about Canada as an overlooked market for VC investment.

Can financing help Main Street retailers beat big-box? As the big-box versus small merchant retail battles rage, FinanceIt is headed for the United States, where it hopes to partner with the smaller players by helping them provide in-house financing for customers.

Can a U.S. expansion establish Toronto’s Financeit as a leader in point-of-sale lending? The financial crisis of 2008 left behind many fiscal casualties, from governments to pensioners.

Michael Garrity, co-founder and chief executive of Financeit, said his company is succeeding because of its focus on overlooked victims of the crisis: owners of small and medium-sized businesses who want to provide customers with payment plans.

Top 5 Technology Secrets To Build Your Small Business in 2014 Michael Garrity, CEO of Financeit, shares tips with small retailers on how to grow their business.

5 Tips For Building A Two-Sided Online Marketplace Contributed article by Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures.

If you are building an online marketplace, how do you survive the tough times when you’re trying to get traction and build out your supplier and consumer communities? Here are five tips...

Lucid goes after Microsoft & Adobe with Web productivity apps, raises $5M With new capital in hand, Lucid audaciously claims that it will release “the stranglehold of a market that’s been controlled by Microsoft and Adobe for decades.” The firm aims to dominate enterprise productivity tools with its light-weight apps, Lucidpress and Lucidchart.

Let Staff Go Rogue on Tech ...Lucidpress lets multiple people lay out and design the same document, each watching the others' changes unfold even as they make their own.

Why I built my startup in Vancouver, not Silicon Valley Kenshi Arasaki, CEO of A Thinking Ape, a C100 alum company, writes about why he chose to move his company back to Canada after founding it in Silicon Valley.

GGV’s Bonham takes on co-chair role at C100 The C100 is just four years old, but it has achieved an impressive track record in that short time.

The nonprofit—which aims to bring like-minded Canadian entrepreneurs and executives together in Silicon Valley through its programs, such as 48 Hours in the Valley—reported that startups connected to it have raised US$700 million in venture funding since the C100 launched in 2010.

That’s great news for Scott Bonham, a founding partner at GGV Capital, who has begun serving as co-chair of the organization.

How the Olympics Impact a Country’s Entrepreneurship Atlee Clark, Director of The C100, writes about how Vancouver hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics impacted the country's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The Essential Guide to Small Business Banking Contributed article by Financeit CEO Michael Garrity.

Banking relationships can be hard to navigate for small businesses. There are necessary services that require a bank, and others where you can get creative.

2014 Small Business Taxes: Advice from the Experts With the April 15 tax-filing deadline quickly approaching, Business News Daily spoke with several tax and small business experts about some of the biggest mistakes made when filing taxes, what deductions shouldn't be overlooked and how small business owners can start preparing now for next year's tax-filing period.

Zen Tips for Tax Time Nearly two decades after small business accounting software hit the market, tax time doesn’t have to be so onerous or so scary. Here are ways to make tax prep a little more zen.

Want Your Clients To Pay Faster? 7 Surprising Tips From FreshBooks Shawn Cadeau, CMO of online billing service FreshBooks, knows a thing or two about invoicing...I talked to [him] to get his perspective on best practice tips for small business owners looking to get paid on time and worry more about their business than their bills.

5 tips for leading your remote staff to success Many small businesses rely mainly on customer references or referrals for much of the new business they develop. What better time to gather feedback when the job or project is freshly completed? That thinking led to the creation of a unique new reviews and ratings feature in the FreshBooks cloud accounting service.

Feedback: Take a fresh look at accounting and marketing with Freshbooks Basically, 20% of the customers account for 80% of revenue so it is important to know who the 20% of the customers that drive the revenue model. What Freshbooks is helping it's customers determine is 1) who are the 20% most important customers 2) how are they driving the revenue through feedback and referrals

Falling For the Job GroupTalent is a marketplace for software-engineering jobs and relies on lightweight interviews to assist its matchmaking. As he grew his business, one of its incidental features became a hit--brokering "try before you buy" deals, in which workers and companies test compatibility on-site for a few weeks before committing to a long-term relationship.

'Speed dating' you way into a dream job CNBC interviews GroupTalent's CEO Manny Medina on Squawk Breakthrough.

"What's so interesting about this is not necessarily the idea of letting someone try out, but to let them try out while keeping their job and perhaps never leaving it."

Small businesses tap into cloud for efficiency With so much data stored, cloud companies can also dive deeply into customers' usage patterns for information that may prove useful. For example, FreshBooks offers a feature that compares your business' performance with competitors in several benchmarked areas, including how long it takes you to get paid and the average invoice size.

No VC: FreshBooks CEO Sees Risk Capital as Too Risky Mike McDerment was shacked up in his parents’ basement in Toronto when the first venture capitalist called. It was 2006 and the entrepreneur was in his fourth year of work on FreshBooks, Web-based accounting software he’d created for small businesses.

App Deals Of The Day: Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone Freshbooks launches an Android app.

Why the Long-Table Approach Leads to Better Designs Cocontributed article by Toke Nygaard, Chief Creative Office at Zendesk.

At the core of the long-table approach is a simple premise: Design is never tangential. Design is central to a company’s identity and all the things it does.

Financeit raises $13 Million to Bring Simple Purchase Financing Options to Small and Medium Businesses As a company, FinanceIt offers a very interesting service: If you sell stuff, it will finance your customer’s purchase of said stuff, charging you nothing for the help.

The 21 Hottest Cloud Startups Right Now Over the past decade, they [FreshBooks] have quietly bootstrapped themselves to a user base of over 5 million users in the stodgy old world of accounting, invoicing and billing.

Lucidpress Slick Web-based Design App for Novice Users People with little time to fuss designing a print or digital newsletter, report or brochure have a solution using Lucidpress...Your finished product, in print or digital form, makes a slick presentation tool, even for novice users.

Small Revolution: Cloud Levels the Playing Field Contributed article by Jack Newton, CEO of Clio.

Access to affordable, enterprise-grade software tools have enabled a new type of entrepreneur to emerge, leading some to call this the biggest change in the employment landscape since the industrial revolution.

Hot Hardware: The Smart Money’s Taking Notice Venture capitalists, like Version One Ventures founder Boris Wertz, points to an increase in the number of quality hardware developers coming out of the maker movement, a confluence of cheaper prototyping and manufacturing costs, an increasingly connected world, and easier ways to reach and sell to customers.

3 Ways to Make More Cash in 2014 Contributed article by Avrum Laurie, director of product management at FreshBooks.

Business Day: Helping Small Businesses Grow Michael Garrity, CEO of Financeit, is interviewed in the company's Toronto office and discusses plans for the future.

20 best Android apps this week This is a useful tool for accountants to create invoices and estimates while out on the job, import expense receipts via the camera, time meetings, manage timesheets and handle other business duties.

Are Cloud Based Accounting Apps Ready For Prime Time? 5 Things You Should Know QuickBooks Online, Sage One, Xero and FreshBooks are competing for the Tier 1 small market. Intacct and NetSuite are competing for the bigger guys. What’s the difference? The vendors selling to the smaller market are doing so directly and are offering less features in their product.

Feast Your Eyes on FreshBooks’ Exquisite Office Video tour of FreshBooks' Toronto-based office.

Lucidpress Launches Web-Based Design And Publishing App For Print And Online If you’ve ever used a desktop publishing app in the past, you’ll feel right at home with Lucidpress, as it features the same kind of standard top-bar menu and layout options as most other publishing apps. In terms of features, it can also hold its own against similar desktop-based apps.

Mobify: Google, Starbucks, Lululemon Sign Up With Vancouver-Based Mobile Media Startup We'll see more and more websites becoming app-like and in a year or two that'll be the (standard) for anybody who wants to do business on the iPad.

‘There’s life after BlackBerry’: Startups’ need for talent may soften landing for laid-off workers Of all the companies seeking BlackBerry’s unwanted talent, FreshBooks is the most direct in its approach. The cloud accounting and billing company recently dispatched its chief technical officer, a couple technical staffers, and a pair of HR representatives to a Waterloo pub frequented by BlackBerry workers.

The Twitter Tax and Zendesk: How Tech Companies Affect the City Zendesk, which moved to Market Street in August 2011, was the first company to take the tax break and submit a “Community Benefits Agreement” that details how the company will support the local community. Soon other big companies such as Twitter will also submit proposals (which are due by January 31).

Today in Small Business Small-business cloud accounting service FreshBooks introduces an android app.

Underdog Lucid takes on Adobe, Microsoft with free design app Microsoft’s Powerpoint is simple, but its functionality is limited. Adobe’s InDesign is incredibly powerful, but it’s costly and difficult to learn. Lucid Software seeks to carve out a healthy middle ground with its new offering.

Keep track of your loved ones thanks to location-based technology You've all heard or asked the panicked question: Where are you right now? On average, kids get their first cellphone at the age of eight. Why not add an app that can help keep up-to-date locations on where all your family members are?

Introducing MyMoby, a new app that helps parents keep tabs on their loved ones.

Effective Software Asset Management in 4 Steps Contributed article by Allan Thorvaldsen, Panorama9 CEO.

While inventory tasks may be taxing, the costs can be even higher when businesses don’t know what software assets they have. Here are four reasons why it makes sense to establish an effective software asset management practice...

Awesome Tips for Entrepreneurs from CEO of @FreshBooks Robert Scoble interviews FreshBooks' CEO, Mike McDerment from Half Moon Bay, CA.

Pricing: You’re probably doing it wrong Do you run a service business? Your obsession with time may be messing with your pricing and seriously limiting how much you make, argues a new ebook from FreshBooks.

Lucid Software brings the power of desktop publishing to the Web with Lucidpress, now in beta With Lucidpress, users will be able to develop professional-looking content for either print or the Web. It’s essentially a competitor to Microsoft Publisher.

Lucidpress Brings Advanced Page Layout Tools to the Browser The Lucidchart team has shown us that web apps don’t have to be basic. Their web app takes on Visio and OmniGraffle — and does a great job competing. And now, they’ve made yet another full-featured app for the web, this time to revolutionize rich print and digital publishing with the brand-new Lucidpress.

Lucidpress: drop-and-drag publishing app simplifies document design Lucidpress, a Web-based, drag-and-drop design app, launched today in beta as a simple-to-use alternative to some of these costly and more complex offerings.

For integrator Control Group, strategy takes discipline In order to spend more time on strategic process consulting and business strategy, Control Group adopted a cloud-based management service from Panorama9 to build ongoing support into its multi-environment, hybrid installations and solutions.

5 Ways Consumer Apps Are Driving The Enterprise Web Contributed article by Mikkel Svane, CEO and co-founder of Zendesk.

Consumer focused apps like Facebook, Twitter and iTunes have become mainstream and expectations around applications are radically changing. Since the software I use every day at home and on my phone are so friendly and easy to use, why is my expensive business application so cumbersome and stodgy?

FreshBooks small business accounting service launches an iPhone app Just like the online service, the FreshBooks app allows you to create professional invoices and get paid right from your iPhone. It's extremely useful to be able to log your hours and keep track of your expenses on your iPhone when you are working offsite. If you've completed your work and are ready to close out a project, you can submit an invoice before you leave the client's office.

Best iPhone Apps for Business Finance If you prefer to do your small business financial management and accounting online, the FreshBooks iPhone app makes it easy.

BlackBerry’s casualties find hope in a healthy tech sector FreshBooks CEO Mike McDerment...message for the soon-to-be disenfranchised: “Head our way.” The Toronto-based accounting startup has already found spots for BlackBerry alumni on its technical staff and in marketing. Now FreshBooks plans to increase its headcount by 30 per cent over the next four months.

Immigrating for Funding CBC Radio's Nora Young interviews Boris Wertz of Version One Ventures about tech entrepreneurs immigrating to Canada to find funding and support for their startups.

Lucidpress Launches Drag-And-Drop Collaborative App For Design & Publishing Creating a publishable design layout, whether for a paper magazine or a digital poster, is no easy task if you don’t have finely honed Photoshop skills. So Lucidpress, a new publishing tool, wants to make it dead simple to create beautiful designs and collaborate on them with others. This should make it even easier to design and publish your own digital magazine.

4 Ways to Blow It When Pitching For Venture Capital Contributed article from Boris Wertz, GP of Version One Ventures.

Having sat through countless pitches, I can attest that many of them fall flat – and it's not always because of the idea or product. Rather, my biggest red flags have more to do with delivery and style than content.

The Next Big Thing: Startup Visa Investor Boris Wertz featured in the CBC's evening news broadcast, The National.

Canada has a new visa program, designed to lure tech start-ups out of Silicon Valley. But, will it work?

How much of hardware is software, and do the differences even matter any more? Contributed article by Boris Wertz, GP of Version One Ventures.

Software may be eating the words, but good hardware still matters. As more products get connected the lines between the two are blurring, but hardware still matters.

FreshBooks adds Android mobile app Building on the succes of its Apple iOS mobile application, cloud accounting software company FreshBooks has released an Android edition.

Is The Silicon Valley Bubble Forcing VC's To Invest Elsewhere? Landa believes that the hyper-valuations of startups in Silicon Valley are driving smart VC’s to look for startups beyond Silicon Valley, where valuations are lower. Hiring and retention are both easier outside the Valley too. As Landa says, “it just seems smarter to invest, or at least diversify outside of Silicon Valley.”

FreshBooks brings simple, cloud-based personal accounting to Android One of the coolest things about FreshBooks is its time-tracking tool, which can be useful for individuals who work on projects at odd times and places. Just run the timer whenever you engage in any work throughout your day, and attribute the billable time to any of your saved projects.

Freshbooks Invoice Management Comes To Android One of the leaders in personal invoice management, Freshbooks has finally expanded its mobile presence to Android. A native app for Freshbooks users has just appeared in Google Play, and its includes most of the functionality you get from the full website crunched down to fit on your phone or tablet.

FreshBooks expands its cloud accounting service to Android with launch of new app With more than six million users in more than 120 countries, FreshBooks is looking to maximize its reach by giving users of iOS and Android device the chance to use its service. The goal is to help small business owners expedite payment while not needing to waste time figuring out invoicing.

11 up and coming cloud accounting apps The Toronto-based service provider got its start as a billing alternative, but it includes modules for expenses, time tracking and more. There are strong mobile applications for Apple iOS (smartphone and tablet) and the service now boasts 5 million users.

On why the biggest tech companies are built in the Silicon Valley [Wertz] questions the commitment and willingness of Canadian investors and entrepreneurs to devote the years it may take to build an independent multi-billion dollar company with staying power, rather than flipping – typically to Silicon Valley acquirers – and exporting that future innovation and wealth building.

‘We don’t have enough great tech companies’: Boris Wertz on Canada’s tech sector and startup investing Propelled by two buyouts, the German-born entrepreneur shifted to investing, establishing himself as one of North America’s top early-stage tech investors...He has also emerged as a major booster of tech sector entrepreneurship in Canada.

Alibaba is Just the Beginning: How B2B Marketplaces Will Thrive (For Real This Time) Contributed article by Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures.

During the heyday of Web 1.0, B2B marketplaces were, we were assured, the next trillion-dollar gold rush...Like so many other predictions of that era, B2B marketplaces proved to be more fizzle than sizzle.

This Startup Lets You 'Date' Prospective New Employers Anonymously For $1000+ A Week Its recruitment platform supports something called a "try out" period that lets employers and employees work together for a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, on a freelance basis for an ample weekly salary.

What If You Could “Date” Companies? The office romance is a staple of American life and popular culture. But what if rather than dating people at our companies, we dated companies themselves? What if instead of launching into long-term relationships (employment relationships, that is) with organizations based on little more than an interview and a hunch, we took things a little slower?

The ‘startup visa’: Why Canada made it a priority & why the U.S. should too Contributed article by Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures.

The importance of foreign entrepreneurs building their companies in the US cannot be underestimated. Few realize that nearly half of Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants.

Is The Vertical Approach To Enterprise Software Enough To Help You Win The Market? Contributed article by Boris Wertz, founder & GP of VersionOneVentures.

In the new era of enterprise software, the winners will be purpose-built, vertically sliced tools.

Hiring Only the Best? Big Mistake Contributed article from FreshBooks.

Don't be fooled: The best person for the job is not always the one with the hottest skills or the biggest reputation.

Ask This, Not That: Smarter Interview Questions For Better Hires Part 3 of 3, contributed series from Amy Kelman, lead of Zendesk's customer success.

Interviews shouldn't feel like pulling teeth. Here are a couple tips for livening up those dreaded conversations and recruiting an all-star team.

How To Hire Like A Pro Part 2 of 3, contributed series from Amy Kelman, lead of Zendesk's customer success.

If you manage anything, there's probably a mountain of resumes sitting on your desk. Overwhelmed? Here's a strategy for efficiently finding the amazing needles in that haystack.

The Perfect Hire Starts With The Perfect Job Posting Part 1 of 3, contributed series from Amy Kelman, lead of Zendesk's customer success.

The art of the effective job posting is an often overlooked and vital piece of assembling a great team. Follow these five steps and find the perfect new employee.

GroupTalent Grabs $1M From Founders Co-Op, Menlo & Others To Help Businesses Connect With Top Technical Talent Today, it seems that everyone you know has their own startup. While this might be good for the economy long-term, it also has the makings of a talent drain...To help simplify the job search for the technically proficient, GroupTalent has developed a matching engine that automatically pairs talent with relevant projects and vice versa.

Select the Right Cloud Provider for Your Startup in 7 Steps At Panorama9, we moved our development environment to the cloud in 2010 and made some errors early on by thinking that our previous experience with hosted environments could be directly translated to a cloud environment. Below are some of the lessons we learned along the way.

FreshBooks Cloud Accounting Lets You Track Expenses And Send Invoices On The Go For those of us with no accounting background whatsoever, FreshBooks is a great way to track these important transactions. Now that I can take care of these things on the go, it’s just that much more of a valuable service.

Solving IT headaches with a monitoring dashboard in the cloud Thorvaldsen wants to make this process not only easier, but also more accessible to small- and medium-sized businesses that may not have a dedicated IT staff. And instead of completely replacing other security and management software, Panorama9 has been designed to integrate with existing suites.

Want the Best Enterprise Software? “Date It" Contributed article by Zendesk's CEO & co-founder, Mikkel Svane.

Today’s dating world is transformed by both changes in culture and technology which lift many cultural barriers. When we talk about the “consumerization of the enterprise,” similar changes have occurred.

14 Tips for Selling Software and Services Online "Try to get a well-respected publication to test your solution/offering," suggests Allan Thorvaldsen, CEO, Panorama9, a cloud-based IT management platform. "This will validate your product (if it is any good) and generate traffic towards your Website for no cost."

The Enterprise Cool Kids No, this isn’t a guest column by Aaron Levie. Though he and his startup Box, the poster child of the “sexy enterprise,” are definitely included in the bunch. “You should definitely kick Aaron off the list. Just to mess with him,” Zendesk founder Mikkel Svane commented when he heard what we were writing.

Inside Zendesk's Tranquil Mid-Market Office Space The three co-founders, chief creative director, and O&A designers envisioned a humble, uncomplicated, airy, and charming space where people could breathe, thus the use of white space, high ceilings and calm colors.

Zendesk's Calm Space Takeover at Mid-Market In 2011, Zendesk moved into a 42,000+ square foot office on mid-Market and took over multiple floors to support their growing business. The culture is very informal and relaxed, so the space needed to be something that reflects and enables the same.

With phone calls from real people, is devops finally getting its day in the sun? One company with a feature-rich online dashboard for IT administrators is distinguishing itself further by offering to have its employees call its clients’ IT people when issues arise, rather than just send emails or texts, and thereby show devops people some much-needed respect.

Another Social Media Inbox? Source Metrics Says This One’s All About ‘Actionable Mentions’ and Breaking Down Data Silos The idea of a new social network listening tool may not set anyone’s heart aflutter, but CEO Scott Lake said the real selling point is the fact that the inbox is integrated with Source Metrics’ other services.

Panorama sets its sights on investment krone Cloud-based IT management platform Panorama9 has raised $900K in seed financing from private investors in Denmark. The company offers a dashboard that small to medium businesses can use to monitor and control all IT operations in their network.

Fix Your Customer Service After testing out five possible solutions, ModCloth settled on Zendesk, cloud-based customer service software that offers reporting and analytics. Why Zendesk? "The ability to customize responses, tag interactions, and collect data on a granular level were super compelling," says Griffith.

The Next Big E-Commerce Wave: Vertically Integrated Commerce Contributed article by Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures.

Web-only brands are vertically integrating the retail value chain, including manufacturing, branding, and distribution. Here are three reasons why vertically integrated commerce is an attractive retail model.

Six Tips For Navigating The MDM Jungle A product such as VerifyCloud, which ensures the integrity of photos taken with smartphone cameras, could be useful to field inspectors but is less clearly applicable to a boardroom, for example. IT managers should be prepared to choose multiple products, as even alleged "end-to-end" solutions might not serve all needs.

FreshBooks adds balance sheet generation to feature list ...This sort of report is more than your average small-business or start-up owner would be able to create on their own without using some sort of application or asking for a report from an accountant.

Zendesk Believes New Design is Way to Lasting Customer Service Peace Zendesk proclaims its redesigned platform will set "a new standard in the consumerization of the enterprise."

This Week in Small Business: An Elevator on the Moon FreshBooks introduces an iPhone app to do billing on the go.

Cloud Accounting: A New Way To Streamline Financial Operations Now referring to itself as a cloud accounting service, FreshBooks lets very small enterprises get their feet wet on invoicing and accounting in a way that’s much more feasible than using QuickBooks.

5 Apps To Help You Swing Back Into Productivity Mode As a small business owner, my company has been using FreshBooks for some time for everyday accounting purposes. There are few cloud-based tools that make invoicing as easy, and dare I say, kind of fun.

20 Best iPhone and iPad Apps This Week Aimed at small businesses and freelancers, this aims to help them create invoices, store expenses details and track time spent on projects, with all the data stored on the FreshBooks server for access on multiple devices.

Freshbooks Invoicing and Then Some Service [Finally] Launches iPhone App I've been a long time Freshbooks user. The online invoicing, expenses, and time tracking service makes it very easy to create professional invoices and get paid faster via PayPal integration. To thank its users, and to grab even more users away from popular services like Intuit and Outright, Freshbooks has repurposed itself as the 'cloud accounting specialist' and launched a native iPhone app.

Cloud Accounting Startup FreshBooks Launches An iPhone App, So Users Can Do Invoicing On The Go ..With the new app, FreshBooks users can now instantly create invoices, manage client information, track time that they’ve spent with clients and expenses, create estimates, and get reports based on the information they enter.

Vancouver: Hollywood North’s tech scene is growing, growing, not yet grown Americans might think of Vancouver in many ways — but typically not as a tech startup mecca.

Change management: four key components to track Contributed article by Allan Thorvaldsen, CEO and co-founder of Panorama9.

Before you can understand the impact of change in your environment, you've got to understand exactly what's in your environment. Having a clear vision of the big picture right down to the small details of every user and device is the critical foundation for any change management strategy.

Grow Conference aims to create a little Silicon Valley North Now in its third iteration, GROWConference began two years ago after Landa recognized the relative lack of investment in Canada's tech sector and wanted to start bringing players from both sides of the border together to help fill that gap.

Escape From Silicon Valley? Debbie Landa is the founder of Dealmaker Media, whose Grow Conference takes place in Vancouver next week. We caught up with Landa to learn more about why she thinks venture capitalists and startup founders alike should learn to get over Silicon Valley and look elsewhere to build, or invest in, businesses.

Defrosting The Great White North’s Startup Ecosystem “Canadians need to stop complaining when a company moves anywhere,” says Debbie Landa, the founder of Dealmaker Media and Grow Conference in Vancouver. She believes that if they supported the companies, instead of heralding Canadian-ness, successful companies that make a solid exit would be more willing to put back into the community.

7 Simple Strategies to Get Paid Faster and On Time Contributed article by Stu MacDonald, Chief Marketing & Revenue Officer of FreshBooks.

Zendesk, Startup Panorama9 Team Up for Cloud-based IT Help Desk Any Zendesk ticket created by Panorama9 includes detailed information about the issue, along with useful links to the Panorama9 dashboard. This gives IT pros complete visibility into the IT environment and a powerful set of tools needed to troubleshoot and resolve any issues.

Panorama9 Review Panorama9 takes on the time-consuming task of collecting information and organizes them in an amazingly intuitive interface for the IT manager. Even if it's only one person managing the entire business IT infrastructure, the platform makes it simple to see at a glance what is wrong, and to get up-to-date detailed information about the machines.

How the cloud helps build agile companies and encourage experimentation Contributed article by Jack Newton, CEO of Clio.

With subscription-based pricing and low cost of entry, SaaS gives companies the freedom to innovate with their software choices and run with what works.

RewardLoop Raises $1M for QR Code-Enabled Loyalty Programs RewardLoop, a startup offering a nifty new approach to customer reward programs, has raised $1 million in Series A funding...RewardLoop started commercial trials of the technology in August, and LaPorte says the funding will help it expand the merchant network more aggressively.

Monetize your social site without annoying your users Skimlinks CEO, Alicia Navarro, outlines how companies can monetize their site without putting them at odds with their user base. your forum or social site."

BlackBerry Goes Bust With App Maker Contributed article by Clio CEO, Jack Newton.

Lawyers used to be big fans of BlackBerry devices. So why is it that a startup that caters to smaller law firms built an iPhone app instead? The answer lies in RIM’s approach to the consumer market.

What the new iPad means for design Igor Faletski, CEO of Mobify, writes about what the new iPad retina display means for website owners and what's coming down the design pipeline.

"The precise rendering of images on the Retina display reveals rough edges across the Web. Text may be pin-sharp, but put that text alongside photos, and those images don't look so hot. Logos appear blurred. Even shopping cart buttons become grainy."

Why One Canadian Developer Won't Build BlackBerry Apps Contributed article by Jack Newton, CEO of Clio.

As a young startup launching a cloud-based platform called Clio, we needed to select which mobile client(s) to support and decided to skip the Research In Motion BlackBerry. Opting not to develop a BlackBerry app hardly sounds like a tough decision today. However, this was 2007 and the mobile landscape was a vastly different place.

Vancouver-based business woos big-name clients For a small shop with only 25 employees, Vancouver-based Mobify has an impressive list of clients, including Starbucks, Lululemon, Bosch, Conde Nast and Siemens.

Mobify sees opportunity in mobile world So far, 20,000 companies have gone mobile through Mobify, including Starbucks, Lululemon and Conde Nast publications including Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

Pinterest Partner: Yes, They’re Making Money from Pins Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro told Mashable, “Affiliated networks help companies monetize their sites and there’s nothing illegal or wrong about it. It’s common, effective and smart. It should be celebrated.”

Clio Gives Lawyers the Keys to Cloud Computing Clio may indeed turn computer infrastructure costs into history (for solo or small law firms).

Apple's App Store: An economy for 1 percent of developers Contributed article by Igor Faletski, CEO of Mobify.

Just because the App Store is huge doesn't mean it makes sense to build an app.

The Apple App Store will certainly be part of the mobile commerce ecosystem, but it will be a small part that shrinks proportionally over time for the following reasons...

Mobify launches tablet optimization tool for websites I think that solutions like Mobify...will make sense over time because the same native apps are changing the expectations of consumers, who’ll increasingly want more of a tablet app experience wherever they go on the web.

Pinterest does disclose it modifies links, and we shouldn’t blame it for making money "...There is something to be said for a startup like Pinterest making an effort to simply make money early on."

5 Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Mobile Commerce Contributed article by Igor Faletski, CEO of Mobify.

With that growth comes a new set of user behaviors and consumer trends. What’s the reality when it comes to the new mobile commerce landscape? Here are five facts that will have striking implications for the future of mobile commerce.

How to Hack the PR Machine Contributed article by Rebecca Reeve, seven steps for bootstrapped start-ups to hack their PR with DIY tactics.

Clio Grabs $6 Million To Help Bring Small Legal Practices To The Cloud While the legal industry has been largely perceived as being slow to adopt modern technologies, Clio’s opportunity lies in helping transition the many small practices out there to the cloud.

Mobile email: Six tips for building a campaign that works Contributed article by Mobify CEO, Igor Faletski, part 1 of 3:

As consumers are increasingly browsing, shopping, and interacting with brands on the go, mobile commerce presents a powerful opportunity. However, any new opportunity brings its own set of challenges. Mobile users have specific needs and biases that you have to consider in your email marketing.

Keeping Up With the Shop-Dashians While seven out of 10 luxury brands on the list have set up mobile applications for Apple iOS-powered devices such as iPhones and iPads, less than a third let shoppers buy on the go. Those that ranked feeble...might provide a potential client list for mobile-app developer companies like the startup Mobify.

Powering the Mobile Retailer Mobify, whose clients include the retailers Lululemon, Threadless, and Bonobos, is taking advantage of what it sees as a hot and emerging sector for merchants: mobile websites for consumers who want to shop anywhere, anytime on their smartphones or tablets.

It's Time For Web Marketers To Cater To Mobile Users Igor Faletski, Mobify CEO, discusses how web marketers can plan for mobile.

By 2014 the number of mobile web users is projected to surpass the number of desktop web users. And those mobile users have specific needs and biases that you have to consider in your marketing.

Mavenlink Raises $3.9 Million for External Collaboration Service Mavenlink, launched about 20 months ago, has more than 130,000 users and has been adding 15,000 users per month. The company, which targets small and medium-sized businesses, has built its service particularly through the Google Apps Marketplace, where it is one of the highest rated project management apps.

Mavenlink Online Collaboration Growing, Gets Funding When you think about online collaboration, popular options such as Basecamp, Chatter or Google Docs likely come to mind. But there’s another rising star in the space garnering the attention of investors and customers alike...

Mavenlink raises $3.9M for start-to-finish project management tool “The workforce that businesses need today is more flexible than ever. A growing number of telecommuters, freelancers, consultants, and outsourced services are replacing the traditional 9 to 5,” Mavenlink CEO Ray Grainger said.

LiveChat Founders Buy Out Investor Naspers, Regain 60% Stake The founding team of LiveChat, which delivers real-time software and web analytics solutions for e-commerce sales and support teams, has completed a management buy-out to regain control over the company, TechCrunch has learned.

Rypple Flow Is Social HR Management On A Big Screen Start-up Rypple brings social networking tools to human resources departments, upending practices like the often-dreaded annual performance reviews.

8 Apps to Help Keep Tots Safe Launched just in time for back-to-school season, Moby shows where children check-in privately, so their parents always know where they are.

Moby's private location sharing hits Android "...Moby is making good on its promise to connect families no matter what devices they may be carrying."

Apps Rush: What’s new on the app stores Android app Moby is the latest app looking to help people share their location privately with friends and family

Moby’s Private Location Sharing App Released for Android Moby is a private system, so you only reveal your location to people you trust. It's a simple setup that's easy to turn on and off, and now that it's cross-platform, your friends and loved ones don't need to have the same type of phone for it to be usable.

LucidChart Nabs $1 Million From 500 Startups, 2M Companies, and K9 Ventures LucidChart, a web-based diagramming application, announced today that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, 2M Companies, K9 Ventures, as well as several angel investors.

5 ways to keep your rockstar employees happy Contributed article by Rypple CEO, Daniel Debow:

When Google interviewed its employees about what they valued most at work, none of the extravagant benefits made the top of the list. Neither did salary.

Jive Apps Seek Enterprise Rigor, Consumer Cool "If companies have installed Jive, that means they get and understand social and this way of doing business that is much more open and transparent," said David Stein, a co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple.

Tools That Can Help When There Is Too Much on Your Plate ...[Mavenlink] is one of several online or cloud-based services that do all this and more, including tracking budgets, expenses, billable time and invoicing. They all differ in interface, capabilities and emphasis, and each seems to have its advantages for different types of project-management challenges.

LiveChat Offers Facebook Integration The capability will allow LiveChat’s clients to gather personal information about visitors to their sites...(e-commerce sites) will be able to use information from an unknown shopper’s profile to provide better customer assistance.

See Business, Management, and HR Videos Like to watch flash mobs? I think they're great fun. Rypple sponsored a flash mob at the HR Tech Conference in Chicago. They wanted the attendees to know that work does not have to be boring. They succeeded as far as I'm concerned

Social Performance Platform Rypple Comes To iPhone The Web-based social performance platform Rypple is now available on the iPhone, the company is announcing today. Like the desktop-sized website, the new mobile application will allow managers to give real-time feedback to staff, provide coaching, track goals and publicly recognize colleagues for doing great work.

LiveChat Brings E-Commerce Support to iPad, iPhone Businesses that augment their e-commerce efforts with LiveChat's real-time software and Web analytics tool would do well to check out the recently launched LiveChat for iPad, which lets users respond to Web site visitors, keep track of online traffic, and monitor chat sessions.

6 Tips for Providing Better Online Customer Support LiveChat CEO, Mariusz Cieply, discusses how customer satisfaction has long been the Holy Grail for retailers, and how social media now brings a whole new significance to customer satisfaction.

Seven Keys to Productivity in the Human Cloud Seven tips designed to help independent professionals leverage cloud-based tools from Ray Grainger, CEO of Mavenlink.

Meet the Microworkers: A new breed of online worker is paid by the task Ray Grainger, a former partner at Accenture, says freelancers who specialize in niche skills are able to find higher-paying work in the U.S. He created Mavenlink, an online workspace for independent workers so they can easily collaborate with others, keep track of multiple projects, and network with other professionals.

My Favorite Tool for Collaborating Entrepreneur Paul Gladen explains how he uses Mavenlink to work on projects with his employees, contractors, and clients.

Can Facebook and Google+ Coexist? Mariusz Cieply, the CEO of LiveChat, says that his company hopes to offer its services through both Facebook and Google+ in the near future, so that companies can, for example, provide post-sales tech support through video over Facebook or Google Hangouts.

LiveChat Delivers a Customer-Service Edge It's no secret that we've entered the era of the connected consumer, where information and merchandise are available at the click of a mouse or tap of a screen. Today's consumers truly expect instant answers; a convenient world where everything is as quick and easy as Amazon's one-click shopping.

Mavenlink Integrates Collaboration, Project Management and Invoicing The soup to nuts approach to project management seems to set Mavenlink apart from other project management tools that handle only parts of the overall project process.

vChatter takes Chatroulette mainstream with new user discovery features vChatter caused a flurry of interest recently when it launched a stand-alone site that is essentially a family-friendly version of Chatroulette.

CEO Will Bunker, who previously founded dating site Match.com, (has a) vision to make vChatter “The world’s largest coffee shop”.

Vchatter takes video chat outside Facebook walls As a Facebook app, the service has seen impressive growth since its launch in May, with 2.5 million active monthly users. But it’s now betting on growth outside Facebook, by providing personal URLs or website addresses for users, akin to the profile pages they have on other social networks like Twitter or MySpace.

Twitter Drops Tweets Into Users’ Streams: A Visual First Look Twitter client and social media dashboard HootSuite is Twitter’s sole partner in this new advertising experiment. Twitter will be testing this form of advertising among HootSuite’s 900,000 users, before trying it out on Twitter.com.

LiveChat Livens Up Its Features Mariusz Cieply, LiveChat CEO said, "It's no longer about waiting for a Web site visitor to click on a chat button. E-commerce sites and brands can now initiate the conversation with their potential customers."

Zendesk for iPhone gets Twitter, multitasking support Zendesk for iPhone gives your staff mobile access to customer support tickets, allowing them to monitor or respond to tickets while on-the-go, whether customers contacted you through e-mail, Twitter, or your company’s Web form.

Zendesk for iPhone hits 50K downloads in 4 months Zendesk is a help desk ticketing system for both small and large businesses. Their developers recently updated the Zendesk iPhone app (free) with iOS 4 compatibility. Incredibly, the company boasts 50,000 downloads of their app within 4 months.

vChatter Launches A PG-Rated Version Of Chatroulette vChatter, a popular video chat application on Facebook, is taking on Chatroulette today, launching a “family-friendly” video chat standalone site.

10 New Education Companies to Watch (Plus 3 More for Extra Credit) Einztein (has) a team of PhD experts review what's out there in free and open course content, and to help people find the best. This is something that's really needed as it can be hard to find and evaluate what's out there.

Zendesk Hosted Customer Help Desk Offers Many Methods of Support Zendesk is a hosted customer help desk service that’s easy to deploy while remaining quite amenable to customization. The service supports multiple methods of providing support, multiple channels through which customers can access that support and multiple routes through which an organization can access and interact with the underlying data.

Start-Up Village Emerges in SoMA's 410 Townsend The technology start-up scene is rebounding strongly from the recession. That's evident at 410 Townsend Street in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane says the building's location—a block from the Caltrain station—is a plus, and prospective hires often go from one start-up interview in 410 Townsend to another.

Help desk firm Zendesk solves problem of how to grow The company is currently “spending for growth,” adding 40 people during the last year, Svane said. Available jobs will be in engineering, marketing, business development, support and sales.

“It is very exciting. Coming to San Francisco and working with the local people here and our advisers has made us think bigger and more aggressively, and really push the envelope. That has really pushed our growth,” he said.

Lonely Planet consolidates forum, contributor feedback The Zendesk deployment ultimately consolidated Lonely Planet’s forum, which has 870,000 contributors at time of writing, on a single platform rather than the mixture of in-house and out-sourced technologies previously used by the tourism giant.

Einztein Knowledge Network Catalogs Virtual Courses from Around the Web More and more universities are putting video courses online but combing through various collegiate and organization web sites looking for videos is tedious. Einztein gathers videos and virtual courses from across the web for easy keyword and category-based browsing.

Why Online Education Needs to Get Social Marco Masoni is a lawyer turned educator who co-founded Einztein.com to address the related problems of searching for good online courses and real-time coursework interaction.

5 Reasons Virtual Teams Fail Whether creating or communicating the vision, the team leader must be able to do so effectively, using tools such as Cohuman and Mavenlink to further a more cohesive team and work process.

Twitter Begins Publishing Ads in Users' Streams The company will start with a smaller pool of its 175 million users by showing the paid tweets only to people who use HootSuite, a popular third-party client. The Vancouver-based startup, which has amassed a following of more than 900,000 users, will get a cut of the revenue, while Twitter will sell the advertising

Are You Headed for a Twitter Chernobyl? It’s tough to navigate this world when so much is out of your control, but there are elements of your social media strategy that you can and must manage. I recently spoke to Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Vancouver-based HootSuite, a popular social media dashboard for groups, who offered five tips for tweeting entrepreneurs.

Social Media Marketing and Security with Hootsuite Hootsuite is making a lot of cool moves in the market lately...They have their finger on the pulse around security and how to safeguard the integrity of a brand's online (and offline) presence.