PLANO, TX–(Marketwired – June 04, 2014) – FieldAware, a leader in made-for-mobile, cloud-based field service automation solutions, has released new features that address productivity and safety functions for Oil & Gas exploration and production operations. FieldAware has added mapping by latitude/longitude to its mobile solution to chart remote places where geographic coordinates are the only means for locating them. In addition, FieldAware’s mobile apps bring productivity, safety and OSHA compliance enhancements to the Oil & Gas industry through customizable task reporting and logging features as well as time stamp, photo certification and maintenance documentation capabilities. FieldAware will be demonstrating its solution starting today at the Tulsa Oilfield Expo at Booth #114.

“Oil & Gas field operations require acute operational awareness to not only increase efficiencies in workforce and asset management, but to greatly increase safety and streamline OSHA compliance requirements,” said Johnny Jones, Vic ePresident of Global Distribution at FieldAware. “With key new features such as latitude / longitude mapping, our ability to operate when off-line, and built-in encryption for highly secure operations, we are demonstrating our commitment to this industry.”

FieldAware’s native mobile solutions connect field service workers with back office systems for important accountability and operational awareness. It is in service 24/7 with the ability to work off-line, if a signal is not available or unreliable, and synchronize with the back office immediately when a connection is made. FieldAware Web Apps in the central and back offices leverage mobile data in the field to provide in-time reports and dashboards of the entire organization, or a subset of functions, jobs and people, at any given time.

FieldAware’s mobile applications enable field service organizations to streamline legacy processes, increase workforce productivity and increase safety. It provides a flexible mobile architecture and customizable workflow for all functions in the work order life cycle including work order and asset management, job scheduling, time sheets, quotes and invoicing. In addition it provides critical accountability and documentation capabilities for Oil & Gas operations that enable safety checklists to be verified and problem-solving to be expedited.

“FieldAware’s solution has become an integral part of our business and a competitive edge. All the information from the field becomes available instantaneously and ubiquitously across the entire organization. The visibility is tremendous, enabling our techs to be more effective, more efficient and more accountable,” said Robert Henrich, president of Henrich Equipment Co., Inc., a service provider to the retail Oil & Gas industry.
FieldAware’s mobile-first architecture enables the platform to be flexible, easy-to-use and easy-to-customize; and it can scale from tens to thousands of field workers. It supports smartphones and tablets on both iOS and Android operating systems.
About FieldAware
FieldAware is re-shaping the field service industry. Our made-for-mobile, cloud-based field service management software is easy to use and built with incredible flexibility — a combination that enables field service organizations to better serve their customers and outperform the competition. The FieldAware software was architected as a native mobile platform, which works seamlessly with a business’s existing applications, with no incumbent legacy technologies to modify or migrate from. We combine our software with the industry’s best implementation, on-boarding and support services, enabling companies to take full and rapid advantages of advances in today mobile field service environment. For more information, visit fieldaware.com.

SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwired – Jun 3, 2014) – Skytap, the leading provider of on-demand Environments as a Service, today announced a joint offering with IBM UrbanCode Deploy, enabling dev/test teams to fully automate the deployment pipeline for complex applications and meet increasing enterprise demands for continuous delivery. The offering makes it possible for enterprises to overcome their biggest challenge in the adoption of continuous delivery — deploying applications to consistent and predictable environments.

Efficient software development and delivery drives competitive advantage and requires enterprises to release new products and features faster, more often, and with better quality and reliability. Enterprises achieving continuous delivery have a critical edge in this race as they can rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly push out software enhancements to customers at low risk and cost. Software can then be rapidly adapted based on user feedback, shifts in the market, and changes in business strategy.

“Automated build pipeline processes ensure that teams focus holistically on the practice of building software,” wrote Sean Kenefick, research director at Gartner. “Maintaining an automated pipeline requires discipline and commitment, but the rewards include reducing deployment risks, increasing time to market and producing higher-quality software.”1

“The adoption of continuous integration and deployment is a high priority for enterprises, however it is easier said than done,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. “Automation of the delivery pipeline along with agile practices increases the flow of features into the pipeline, but the pipeline itself is constrained by a small number of static and typically contaminated test environments. The combination of Skytap and IBM UrbanCode Deploy enables the repeated deployment of applications to consistent and clean environments overcoming one of the biggest obstacles hindering increased velocity. At the end of the day, enterprises now can accelerate their delivery and drive more value for the business.”

Utilizing IBM UrbanCode Deploy within Skytap Cloud offers development and testing teams an easy and cost-effective solution for continuous delivery. Enterprises can now fully automate their deployment pipeline, including unit, functional and performance testing, and provision even the most complex enterprise applications in hours versus days. Skytap enables multiple environments to be available to the development and quality management teams to allow parallel development and testing to occur to dramatically increase the throughput and velocity. This can be fully automated with the Skytap Automation Pack for IBM UrbanCode Deploy.

“The combination of IBM UrbanCode Deploy and Skytap solutions drives rapid software delivery by enabling early and often testing,” said Dan Berg, IBM Distinguished Engineer. “Skytap’s Environments as a Service solves a key technical challenge of repeatable and reliable test environment setup for application deployments managed by IBM UrbanCode Deploy.”

Skytap customers can download the Ready for IBM Rational validated Skytap for UrbanCode Deploy Automation Pack from the Skytap library. To learn more about how Skytap is helping enterprises build better software faster, please visit www.skytap.com

1. Gartner, Create a Build Pipeline as a First Step to Continuous Delivery, Sean Kenefick, March 18, 2014.
Social Media
Suggested Tweet: Introducing @Skytap plus IBM @UrbanCode for continuous delivery of complex enterprise applications http://bit.ly/1p4Dlyj
Follow Skytap on Twitter: @Skytap
Follow Skytap on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skytap
About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap is the leading provider of cloud-based dev/test environments to the enterprise. Skytap Cloud removes the inefficiencies and constraints that companies have within their software development lifecycle. As a result Skytap customers release better software faster. Skytap customers can run complex enterprise applications unchanged in Skytap Cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can maintain full visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs. To try Skytap Cloud and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

Yes, venture capitalists have a lot to say about their own investments. They’ve also got a lot to say in general. Here are some blogs from some Boston-area investors (in no particular order) that we’re paying attention to:

 

Jeff Bussgang- Flybridge Capital
Bijan Sabet- Spark Capital
Antonio Rodriguez- Matrix Partners
Pat Kinsel- Polaris Partners
OpenView Venture Partners
Bruce Booth- Atlas Venture
Michael Greeley- Foundation Medical Partners
David Beisel- NextView Ventures
Rob Go- NextView Ventures
Bilal Zuberi- previously at General Catalyst

Also:
David Skok- Matrix Partners

Got any good ones that I’m missing? Email me at davidharris_at_bizjournals.com.

Instructure, the technology company serving the academic market through its Canvas learning management system (LMS), today launched Canvas Catalog, a white-label platform that enables any institution, government entity, university or K-12 school to create a branded index of online courses.

“We think the next step in the MOOC experiment is to help institutions harness the power of open, online learning within the fold of their institutional identity,” said Melissa Loble, senior director of Canvas Network, Instructure’s response to the MOOC phenomenon. “Through Canvas Catalog, institutions can also provide preparatory programs, continuing professional development and community-based lifelong learning experiences.”

Whereas MOOCs have traditionally been housed on common platforms that span multiple institutions, Canvas Catalog shifts the emphasis back to the institutional level. It empowers them to produce and market their online courses with their own look and feel. With Canvas Catalog, they can build custom-branded Web sites that allow content creators from any type of institution to build a marketplace or storefront for their course offerings. This gives students and learners a one-stop shop where they can register, enroll, pay and begin taking courses. It also eliminates the need for institutions to build their own front-end course catalog, which is a time-consuming, complicated and expensive process that may not integrate with other systems within the rest of the institution.

The versatile platform can be customized for higher education, professional development and a variety of other online learning contexts, including K-12. Pasco County Schools, for example, has an e-school with online courses that is set to roll out Canvas Catalog in the coming months.

“Our students, parents and teachers often need to go to as many as five different Web sites to access their courses,” saidJoAnne Glenn, principal of Pasco eSchool. “With Catalog’s easy-to-use interface, everything is in one place, streamlining our entire process.”

Academic Partnerships, one of the largest representatives of online learning in the United States and around the world, is launching Catalog in connection with its Specializations initiative, which helps its partner universities capitalize on the globalization of higher education through a new global credential. The initiative will run on the AP Open Network, which is powered by Canvas Catalog.

“The AP Open Network is a fully integrated global student engagement and online course delivery system that supports the entire student lifecycle from recruitment, registration and payment to multilingual course delivery, tracking, reporting and credentialing,” said AP Vice Chairman Rob Ganji. “Through our strategic partnership with Instructure, the Canvas Catalog is helping to make an ambitious initiative like ours a reality.”

Through Canvas Catalog, administrators can:

• Create public course offerings and custom course landing pages
• Identify collections of courses to create specializations or programs
• Effectively market courses and course catalogs
• Issue discounts or promotion codes
• Automatically distribute certificates and other recognitions of completion
• Accept payment for courses

The robust platform solves many of the issues administrators and students are faced with. It keeps course information all in one place, providing a simple, central location for all who need to access an institution’s course offerings. It also allows for straightforward registration and payment for courses.

About Instructure

Instructure, Inc. developed the Canvas learning management system to make teaching and learning easier for everyone, everywhere. Canvas empowers learning in every context with open, usable SaaS technologies. And through Canvas Network, Instructure provides a cloud platform where teachers, learners and institutions worldwide can connect and chart their own course for personal growth, professional development and academic inquiry. Learn more at www.instructure.com.

Contacts

Instructure

Devin Knighton, Director of Public Relations at Instructure
(801) 722-8187 | [email protected]
Twitter: @devinknighton | www.instructure.com

Matt Reichman, Method Communications
(801) 461-9778 | [email protected]

 

In late March, we announced the formation of the Spredfast Partner Program, which was designed to facilitate the sharing of data, content, context, analytics, and even workflows across the multiple business applications you actively use every day.  Today, we take the next step in our commitment to openness by announcing a new capability called the Spredfast Engage Button.

Now you have the unique ability to interact with the social content residing in select partner applications via the same Spredfast engagement capabilities that you have grown to depend on to execute your social strategies.  Whether different members of your social team leverage any combination of homegrown command centers, listening platforms, or content curation tools, this integration allows you to take native Spredfast actions from within these partner applications and still maintain the workflows, permissions, team collaboration, and even the analytics capabilities that the Spredfast Social Marketing Platform (SMP) provides.

“Social media gives us a compelling way to engage with and inspire our customers every day – not just when they are in the market for a new vehicle. However, as marketers we are challenged with ensuring that each conversation is timely and authentic. The Spredfast Engage Button allows our team to interact with our social community in a prompt and brand appropriate manner regardless of the social platform that they are logged into.”

– Monica Womack Peterson, Director of Social Media for Toyota

The Opportunity

• Teams often depend on a variety of applications for certain social objectives and campaigns.
• Brands need to keep up with consumers, regardless of the application they are using, while still staying within the guardrails of their brand guidelines and workflows.
• Toggling between applications that don’t talk to one another can waste valuable time during real-time campaigns.

The Solution

The Spredfast Engage Button is an extension of the Spredfast SMP and can be embedded into partner applications.  This beta program allows joint customers the following initial capabilities:

• Surface pertinent social conversations in partner applications.
• Respond or retweet to content on Facebook and Twitter from within the partner app.
• Leverage the Spredfast permissions, workflows, and tagging capabilities.
• Retain robust message analytics to evaluate content performance.

The Partners

We actively partner with other best-in-class technologies to provide customers with first class experiences.  Our launch partners for the Spredfast Engage Button include Brandwatch, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, Sysomos, and Visible Technologies.  With this announcement, we’ve also formally expanded the Spredfast Partner Program to include Synthesio, Sysomos, and Visible Technologies, joining our existing partners Brandwatch and Crimson Hexagon.  As we add to the capabilities and applications of the Spredfast Engage Button, we will be expanding our integration partner group

If you are interested in more information about adding the Spredfast Engage Button to your application, please email us at [email protected].

Kareo Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based medical office software and services for small medical practices, announced today that it has been named as a 2014 Red Herring Top 100 North America award winner.

Each year since 1996, Red Herring recognizes the leading private companies from North America and celebrates their innovations, technologies, and contributions to their respective industries. Red Herring selects 100 award winners from among thousands of the most promising privately held technology companies in the United States and Canada. Past Red Herring 100 companies have included Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, Marin Software, Palo Alto Networks and eBay.

“It’s an honor to be recognized as a Red Herring Top 100 company,” said Dan Rodrigues, CEO and founder of Kareo. “This award validates our vision that cloud-based software and services can fundamentally improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery in medical practices. We appreciate Red Herring for highlighting our successes in making our vision a reality with the medical providers we serve today.”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technological innovation and intellectual property, management quality, business model, customer footprint and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their peers. This allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in North America.

“In 2014, selecting the top 100 achievers was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “In fact, we had the toughest time in years because so many entrepreneurs had crossed significant milestones so early. But after much thought, rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across North America to the top 100 winners. We believe Kareo embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Kareo should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.”

About Kareo Kareo is the only cloud-based medical office software and services platform purpose-built for small practices. At Kareo, we believe that, with the right tools and support, small practices can do big things. We offer an integrated solution of products and services designed to help physicians get paid faster, run their business smarter, and provide better care. Our practice management software , billing services , and free, award-winning fully certified EHR help more than 20,000 medical providers more efficiently manage the business and clinical sides of their practice. Kareo has received extensive industry recognition, including the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Inc. 500/5000, Forbes Top 100 Most Promising Companies, and Black Book #1 Integrated EHR, Practice Management and Billing Vendor. Headquartered in Irvine, California, the Kareo mission is to help providers spend their time focused on patients, not paperwork. For more information, visit www.kareo.com .

Media Contact: Joy DiNaro / Amendola Communications
P 847-809-0406
[email protected]

 

Pantheon, which currently offers a professional hosting solution for Drupal and WordPress sites, today announced that it has raised a $21.5 million Series B funding round led by Rory O’Driscoll at Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Dev Ittycheria at OpenView Venture Partners. Existing investors Foundry Group and First Round Capital also participated in this round.

The company, which launched in early 2012, started out as a Drupal hosting solution, but recently expanded into the fast-growing WordPress hosting market as well. The company currently runs about 65,000 sites on its platform, up from 55,000 last September.

Pantheon CEO Zachary Rosen told me that the company plans to use this new funding to continue to improve its hosting platform. In addition, he plans to expand the team quickly over the coming months (especially the support team) and to continue to invest in partnerships. For the time being, however, the company will continue to build products that are squarely aimed at developers who build sites professionally.

While Pantheon offers a $25/month personal plan, that’s not its main market, and this plan is more about giving developers a way to test the service than it is for individuals to host their WordPress or Drupal sites.

Pantheon’s hosting technology is very different from regular web hosts and uses containers instead of the virtual machines most hosts currently use. This, combined with the rest of its infrastructure, allows the company to provide extremely high availability and to easily absorb any traffic spikes to a single site.

This kind of infrastructure play must have been interesting to the company’s new investor’s too. As Rosen told me, he was mostly looking for investors with repeated experience in taking a small, fast-growing company to a large exit and experience in the SaaS space. O’Driscoll did this with Omniture and ExactTarget and is an investor in the likes of Box, Chef, DataSift and Docusign. Ittycheria was the co-founder and CEO of BladeLogic, which was acquired by BMC in 2008 for around $900 million.

 

 

Spredfast, the most comprehensive social marketing platform, today announced Spark, a new tool that empowers brands and media to keep a pulse on in-the-moment trends and conversations on a global scale.

Marketers can discover, inspire, and engage with consumers by weaving relevant, trending content into brand stories. With the addition of Spark, the Spredfast platform continues to move forward and redefine the social marketing industry.

Spark enables marketers to uncover more moments that matter across social, and unleash the ability to engage in opportune, real-life conversations. In-moment marketing content boosts conversion rates by twenty six percent, while forty nine percent of consumers reported feeling more positively about a brand after exposure to in-moment marketing, according to data from eConsultancy and Monetate.

“The speed and relevancy with which brands must engage their communities makes it imperative that enterprises strategically adopt real-time marketing,” said Rebecca Lieb, analyst at Altimeter Group. “To do so in an impactful and scalable way requires enormous preparation and having the right technology in place.”

Spark was developed for brands and media companies to tune into timely moments and conversations the minute they start. Designed with three key elements: discovery, inspiration and engagement; marketers can move beyond social listening and take action by curating and sharing authentic, relevant content across social channels all in one platform.

“We’re hearing from customers all the time, there’s a gap in the market for a product that allows them to identify the right opportunities to engage and take action immediately,” said Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast. “With Spark, we’re filling that gap plus some, by giving marketers a solution that includes discovering more moments to market, personalized trending alerts, content-creation inspiration and creative engagement. We are truly empowering our customers to market at the speed of life.”

An easy-to-use dashboard allows customers to customize, view and analyze a snapshot of the entire social story about a topic. Users can personalize topics and set up notifications that may impact the company at any moment in time. Spark also identifies brand ambassadors, events, followers, and competitors. Whether marketers take action on a one-to-one (a Tweet or retweet) or one-to-many (launch a new social experience across multiple channels) level, users never have to leave the Spredfast platform.

“With Spark, we have the ability to listen to what our audience is saying, and then find creative opportunities to engage around topics that interest them.” said Sarah Bove, Interactive Strategy Associate at Nestlé Dryer’s Ice Cream. “Spark is a game-changer because it not only allows us to surface conversations, but also enables us to chime in on lifestyle moments that inspire them.”

The integration of Mass Relevance products into the Spredfast platform has given marketers an unmatched suite of tools, transforming the way in which brands and media companies actively communicate with their audience. The launch of Spark demonstrates Spredfast’s continued commitment to offer solutions that easily fit into a marketers world by providing the ability to listen, discover, take action, and inspire in one platform.

About Spredfast

Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast gives marketers the tools needed to manage their brand and connect with consumers in an increasingly social world. The Spredfast social marketing platform allows marketers to manage, integrate and amplify social content across any digital touch point in real-time. The solutions offer brands and media access to every piece of social data submitted in order to uncover conversations that matter. Spredfast customers manage over one billion social connections across 84 countries and have the power to process 650 million pieces of social content per day in multiple languages. Over 600 customers, including all five major broadcast networks and fifty percent of Interbrand’s 2013 World’s Best Brands have partnered with Spredfast to create first-class social experiences. For more information, visit www.spredfast.com .