Seattle entrepreneur Kevin Merritt wants to help lead a transformation in government. Not by running for office, but through unleashing the mountains of data that government transportation departments, health departments and other agencies have amassed over the years.

And today, Socrata is getting a big boost to deliver on that mission. The company just scored $18 million in fresh funding from OpenView Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures and Frazier Technology Partners. That brings total funding to the six-year-old company to $25 million, which means Socrata will be able to help more governments unlock data that has historically been stuck in legacy data silos.

Originally started as the online database Blist, Merritt changed the company’s name to Socrata in 2009, completing a pivot into the open government niche.  It has been a smart transformation, with Socrata now helping to lead the charge in the realm of open government.

“We discovered that the innovative approaches we pioneered in open data are a catalyst for a much more sweeping shift toward the data-driven government,” said Merritt in a press release. “Socrata is leading this shift by institutionalizing the data-fueled innovation process that puts quality of life information in citizens’ hands, and empowers government leaders to improve performance and decision-making with newfound facts and insights.”

Merritt is a proven entrepreneur, having previously founded MessageRite, an email archiving service acquired by FrontBridge Technologies. FrontBridge was then acquired by Microsoft in 2005, bringing Merritt to Seattle where he worked at the software giant as a software architect.

A number of cities are already utilizing Socrata. For example, The City of Austin is using the Open Data Platform to compile restaurant inspection information, while King County in Washington state is using the service to showcase election results and other voter information.

As a result of the funding, Scott Maxwell of OpenView will join the board. The company now employs 48 people, and with the new funds it plans to ramp up hiring.

“As a company we’re now ready to put (the money) to good use,” Merritt tells GeekWire. “We are the open data market leader and we’ve absolutely figured out the product market fit which has translated into strong customer traction and partner interest. We have a deep product backlog, many new customers coming online and new partnerships that need to be operationalized. The funding allows us to make those investments sooner.”

NextDocs announced today that it has signed its largest and most comprehensive contract to date for its regulated content management and compliance software suite. The contract is with a leading Fortune 500 consumer healthcare products company with more than $1.5 billion in revenue.

The Fortune 500 company selected NextDocs as its strategic platform for managing regulated document management and compliance across its global organization, replacing its legacy Documentum platform. The company will utilize the NextDocs suite to manage the creation, approval, storage and retrieval of critical compliance documents.

NextDocs solutions, which work alongside Microsoft’s SharePoint platform, enable businesses in regulated industries to comply with FDA and other regulatory agencies, while also streamlining and automating business processes, improving collaboration and reducing costs.

“NextDocs has earned its reputation by helping more than 100 life sciences and healthcare companies improve their compliance and efficiency — and thus enabling them to bring treatments to market faster, cheaper and with higher quality,” said John Loucks, vice president, global sales and alliances at NextDocs.

NextDocs customers include Astra Zeneca, McKesson, Sandoz, Sanofi and the National Cancer Center in Japan. For more information on NextDocs, visit www.nextdocs.com.

CONTACT: Dan Cahill, 917.617.0106, [email protected]

SOURCE NextDocs

/Web site: http://www.nextdocs.com

Agile methodologies have found their stride in enterprise departments of all kinds —from development, to marketing, and IT. Yet, those teams often struggle with using many other point solutions to communicate, and manage other types of work. This results in lost productivity, poor visibility, and disconnected collaboration. This new release of the AtTask Enterprise Work Cloud enables Agile teams to manage and collaborate on all types of work, not just Agile, in a single solution that improves productivity, visibility, and collaboration at every stage in the work lifecycle.

“Many groups, from development teams to marketing organizations, are adopting Agile methodologies into their workflows,” said Eric Morgan, CEO of AtTask. “Those groups can now work seamlessly with others in their department or organization through AtTask to collaborate and report on work without moving to separate, siloed systems. And they can do all of this while harnessing the power of enterprise work management through AtTask.”

 AtTask has created a new world of work, unlike:

• Traditional project management tools are specialized tools developed for a few highly trained project managers, not for the entire team. As a result, they face adoption challenges by contributors, which are only aggravated when they are bolted onto Agile solutions and have limited visibility into the overall work.
• Traditional Agile Management tools are singular solutions built for agile. As a result, they lack the ability to manage all types of work, and the capabilities to facilitate collaboration across the lifecycle of all work types.

AtTask offers the best of both worlds because teams can do all of their work with optimum visibility in one place with one tool. Whether teams work in Waterfall, Agile, or a hybrid, AtTask can manage the work at every stage, including development, collaboration, planning, and reporting.

AtTask enables teams to:

• Work with their preferred work methodology—No matter the approach a group or department uses—from Agile to Waterfall to traditional to a mix of everything—AtTask can support it. It even enables teams to estimate in story points, add filters, custom statuses, segment data, and add additional columns to bring in outside information to the storyboard.
• Do it all, in one tool—No longer are multiple tools needed to manage help desk requests, ad-hoc work execution, resource planning, Agile, or traditional projects. AtTask opens the door for teams to do all these things in one tool at every stage of the process.
• Capture all of your requirements and requests in one place—Requests can often fall through the cracks when they are received in multiple ways, with no way to prioritize them. AtTask creates a single, centralized place to manage and prioritize all work requests, giving managers a full understanding of their employees’ workload, not just small parts of it.
• Manage work across multiple projects—AtTask ensures that teams work on the right work in the right sequence at the right time, so that it is delivered successfully and on time. AtTask enables prioritization across all of the projects in a queue— at the organization, department, team or individual contributor level.
• Collaborate in the context of work—Teams can now eliminate multiple status meetings to find out what is going on with a task or project. With AtTask, teams can update automatically in the tool, and the whole team can see it in real-time.

By unifying all of the work management solutions needed in an Agile environment, AtTask provides deep visibility into what everyone is working on, all in once place. The premium visibility leads to much more productive teams.

To learn more about the capabilities of the AtTask Enterprise Work Management solution, visit www.attask.com/agile.

Additional Resources:

• Watch the AtTask Agile management solution in action, attask.com/product-videos/agile
• Learn more about how AtTask can give Agile and Enterprise teams the ultimate winning combo attask.com/agile

About AtTask

AtTask is the only provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solutions for enterprise teams. This provides a single, central place to better manage and control the chaos of enterprise work, which improves visibility and productivity by eliminating wasted time dealing with fragmented, siloed tools and processes. With AtTask, teams, managers and executives receive visibility into work planning, prioritization, resourcing and sequencing to help everyone work more efficiently toward achieving the organization’s goals. AtTask has a broad range of Global 500 and other enterprise customers, such as Nike, Cisco, ABC, ESPN, 3M, and Trek. To learn more, visit www.AtTask.com or follow us on Twitter @AtTask.

Contact: Shelbi Gomez
[email protected]
801-477-9813

 

SOURCE AtTask

RELATED LINKS
http://www.attask.com

NextDocs announced today that it will co-present with Novella, a full service clinical research organization, at DIA 2013, the Drug Information Association annual meeting and conference.  The companies will present case studies that explore best practices for making the transition from paper trial master file to electronic trial master file (eTMF) systems.

Sharon Ames, enterprise program director at NextDocs will present alongside Krystyna Kowalczyk, executive vice president of clinical operations at Novella, in a session entitled, “That Awkward Stage: Transitioning from Paper Trial Master File to eTMF.”  The session will examine how to structure a paper-to-electronic transition that incorporates the needs of ongoing studies while also meeting regulatory needs and reducing operational impacts.

DIA 2013, the 49th annual meeting and conference of the DIA, is the largest multidisciplinary event for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, focusing on advancing therapeutic innovation and regulatory science.  The DIA 2013 conference takes place at the Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston from June 23 – 27, 2013.

NextDocs and Novella’s session, “That Awkward Stage: Transitioning from Paper Trial Master File to eTMF,” will take place onMonday, June 24, 2013 at 2:30 p.m.  Additionally, NextDocs will be demonstrating its solutions at the DIA conference in booth #1722.

For more information on DIA 2013, visit www.diahome.org.   For more information on NextDocs, visit www.nextdocs.com.

CONTACT:
Dan Cahill
1-917-617-0106
[email protected]

 

SOURCE NextDocs

RELATED LINKS
http://www.nextdocs.com

Acronis^® today announces it has appointed Simon Howe to head the company’s expansion into the mobility market across the whole APAC region. In the newly created role as Sales Director, Mobility Solutions, APAC, Simon is to develop and grow the mobility market for Acronis, recruiting new partners and customers.

Simon Howe is a highly regarded sales professional with a proven track record in leading backup and software management vendors such as Acronis, Symantec and CommVault. His experience includes sales management, channel management and enterprise account development. From 2007 to 2011, Simon worked at Acronis to establish its presence in Australia and New Zealand. He returns to Acronis on the back of its acquisition of GroupLogic.

On his appointment to the new role Simon Howe said: “It is a tremendous opportunity to be able to work again with the high calibre people and solutions at Acronis. It’s even more exciting to be responsible for the push into the limitless potential of the mobility sector in the strongest marketplace in the world.”

Bill Taylor-Mountford, President of Acronis APAC said: “We are delighted to welcome Simon back to Acronis in this new role. He has the high performance credentials to lead our mobility strategy in APAC.

“Expanding into the mobility market is a strategic move for Acronis. It is where the opportunities are in today’s world. We have the top quality products and now with the right people, I am confident that Simon and the team will grow the market significantly for us in APAC.”

About Acronis

Acronis is leading the next wave of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions to simplify today’s complex IT environments. Acronis technology enables organisations of all sizes to manage the always-on anywhere data access demands of users, reducing risk against the loss of valuable corporate data and controlling management and storage costs. With proven technology for data migration and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments, and secure enterprise file-sharing and synchronization regardless of type or platform, Acronis is enabling organisations to embrace new IT strategies and options such as BYOD and Mac in the enterprise.

For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com.au, follow Acronis on Twitter:http://twitter.com/acronis and visit Acronis on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/Acronis.APAC

For further information please contact:

Shuna            Boyd BoydPR       02 9418 8100

Lis Walters      Acronis             02 8458 0845

Acronis^® is a registered trademark of Acronis International GmbH. in the United States and/or other countries.

New research released today commissioned by UnboundID, a leading platform provider for identity data, shows that consumers not only value their digital identity, but they also expect companies using that data to exhibit Identity Etiquette.

The survey, conducted by Compass Intelligence, polled over a thousand digital-savvy adults in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and showed that consumers have an explicit idea of the economic value of their digital identity and expect companies to give them something in return for using this personal asset. Results of the survey indicate that customers understand that companies use their digital identity data for marketing purposes — and that most expect some level of etiquette from companies using this data, such as asking for permission to use it. Respondents also expect some form of compensation for the use of this data — cash value in the form of a discount was the most popular benefit cited by respondents (47 percent), followed by value-added services, such as more content or viewing options (22 percent).

“The research shows that 62 percent of customers expect companies to ask permission, in one way or another, before using digital information,” said Steve Shoaff, CEO of UnboundID. “Many of the respondents stated that they would like to determine what, if any, of their data is shared. Giving customers this option is an example of good Identity Etiquette.”

Other examples of the kind of Identity Etiquette customers expect include “responsible use” or “two-way incentives.” “Responsible use” is based on a permission-based, dynamic system that allows customers to determine how much of their personal data and identifying information (such as their behavior on a vendor’s site) is used in external activities — including sale and rental. “Two-way incentives” provide meaningful rewards to customers (e.g., discounts, monetary rewards) when their data is used; 61 percent of respondents said they would be more motivated to give more of their personal and behavioral information if they received some kind of reward.

“Many companies worry that if they give customers the chance to opt out, they will,” said Shoaff. “However these findings indicate that customers really want more control over how and when their data is used. By practicing the right kind of etiquette, companies will ultimately get better, more realistic data from their customers.”

Findings from the Compass Intelligence study show 43 percent of customers say they would “think better of and/or be thankful to companies” that give them control of how their digital information is shared. When asked which Identity Etiquette actions would make them more agreeable, “asking which items can be shared” was the top response (33 percent), followed by “offering a meaningful benefit for data use” (29 percent) and “the ability to update or revoke access to data at any time” (26 percent).

“We’re seeing that there are distinct benefits for companies who practice good Identity Etiquette,” said Kneko Burney, Founder and Chief Strategist of Compass Intelligence. “Improved customer relationships, an overall better view of a company and its brand, and better quality of customer data.”

For more on the Compass Intelligence findings, see an excerpt from the final report here.

About UnboundID Corp.

UnboundID is a leading platform provider for identity data, enabling companies to dynamically manage, protect, and share customer data in real-time across cloud, mobile and social applications. UnboundID solutions help companies increase average revenue per customer while significantly lowering their costs for service and application delivery. UnboundID is a privately held company based in Austin, Texas, and is funded by Silverton Partners and OpenView Venture Partners. For more information, visit www.unboundID.com.

About Compass Intelligence

Compass Intelligence, a global consulting and strategy acceleration firm, specializes in segment and vertical market intelligence for the high-tech and telecom industries; and offers clients a tailored research experience through excellent customer support. Compass Intelligence provides subscriptions and research reports, insight videos, forecasts, competitive analysis, market data and expert recommendations on multiple markets. Visit Compass Intelligence at http://www.compassintelligence.com and http://www.NE2NE.com.

UnboundID is a registered trademark of UnboundID Corp. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: Edelman for UnboundID

Tammy Lee, 650-762-2981

[email protected]

SOURCE: UnboundID Copyright Business Wire 2013

uSamp a leader in providing mobile insights, has today announced a new way for businesses with mobile apps to utilize its software development kit (SDK) technology to monetize their app and drive user engagement. By allowing integration of its platform, uSamp offers businesses and app developers the opportunity to add an additional revenue stream, and learn more about their members.

Mobile app developers are able to seamlessly funnel uSamp’s entire set of mobile insights features into their own app, giving their users the option to participate in mobile missions or surveys in exchange for rewards. In addition to standard survey questions, the SDK enables app users to capture photos, shoot videos, record audio, and scan barcodes as part of the missions.

The solution brings on-demand access to a vast library of mobile survey missions that will keep their users active. These mobile missions offer lucrative rewards and are shorter in duration than traditional online surveys, with some mission payouts being as much as $50. Ultimately, this cultivates a better user-experience and increases the lifetime value of mobile app users.

Developers can create deep demographic and usability profiles that can help them not only enhance their own app, but also negotiate better cost per impressions (CPMs) from display advertisers. By integrating the SDK, app developers will make money each time one of their app users completes a mobile mission or survey that they qualify for.

“As a pioneer in mobile research, uSamp has spent years developing technology to help companies reach their key audiences and customers,” said Gregg Lavin, Co-Founder and President, uSamp. “This is an exciting step toward our goal of providing mobile developers and advertisers with the most comprehensive tool set in the market to better understand and engage loyal mobile users.”

For more information, see http://www.usamp.com/publishers/sdk-mobile.

ABOUT uSamp

uSamp (www.uSamp.com), the fastest growing company in the Market Research Industry, is a premier provider of technology and survey respondents used to obtain consumer and business insights. uSamp’s leading- mobile technology and SaaS platform transform the way companies gain intelligence to make better, faster decisions about their products and services by tapping into uSamp’s 12 million member global panel of survey respondents. Through uSamp’s proprietary technologies for self-serve sampling and survey authoring, companies have on-demand access to millions of profiled survey respondents. uSamp is based in Los Angeles, with five offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. The company has more than 200 team members worldwide. uSamp was No. 213 on the 2012 Inc. 500|5000 exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies and is recognized on the 2011 and 2012 Forbes’America’s Most Promising Companies list.

MEDIA RELATIONS CONTACTS:

Juliet Niczewicz
The Hoffman Agency
408-975-3091
[email protected]

– See more at: http://www.usamp.com/our-company/press_releases/pr_052013.php#sthash.jg2fzb0T.dpuf