Hungry for Mobile

Mar 17, 2014

Foodler targets personalization in crowded food ordering services field

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Considering the web- and app-focused world we live in, the idea of picking up a phone, potentially getting a busy signal or waiting on hold, then placing an order, seems almost archaic.

And while there are numerous online restaurant ordering services – including through the establishments themselves – Boston-based Foodler is aiming to differentiate itself through variety and personalization. Founded in 2004, the company connects users with 13,000 restaurants in 3,370 cities across the country (and, as was most recently added, Vancouver).

“The original idea was to reduce the friction of the transactions – no busy signals, no confusion,” said CEO and co-founder Christian Dumontet. But, he said of the platform: “It learns. The more you use it, the better the recommendations are.”

Users access Foodler through its website, or free iOS or Android apps. After entering a city, they've given a list of restaurants that offer delivery and takeout; they can then browse menus, click on selections, and send an order directly to the restaurant, which receives it via web console, email, fax, text message or a point-of-sale system.

Users also have access to restaurant ratings and satisfaction indexes, and, as they continue to order through Foodler, algorithms analyze their cost, cuisine and location preferences to offer recommendations and “best bets.” With each order, they also earn points that can eventually be used for gift cards or merchandise.

The platform also allows establishments to run special promotions just for Foodler users.

Restaurants, for their part, “don't have to spend as much time processing an order,” said Dumontet. “They get a fully formed order, so they can focus on what they do best, which is make the food.”

Boston's Black Jack Pasta is a longtime partner, with 30,000 orders placed through Foodler to date.

On an average night, according to owner Jack Rozza, they'll handle roughly 100 deliveries through Foodler, coming from Brookline, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, Allston, Brighton, and beyond.

“We knew we'd be opening the door to so many more customers,” said Rozza. “They make my life easier. Because of Foodler, I have done really well in business, instead of just surviving.”

With 48 employees, Foodler derives its revenue from commissions on each order. Although Dumontet declined to release revenue figures or user numbers, he noted that the iOS app continues to grow 40 percent, month-over-month.

Looking ahead, Dumontet explained, Foodler is focusing on geographic expansion and the introduction of new features, such as a group ordering function that allows for check-splitting.

Recently, the company brought on Michael Vosseller, formerly of Kayak.com, as their director of mobile development. In his short time there so far, he has “defined a road map of our next six months of software development,” Dumontet explained.

In February, Foodler also partnered with the mobile payment app LevelUp. The two companies had several overlapping merchants, according to Nick Herbold, a LevelUp developer advocate, and the partnership allows the latter's 1.5 million users to order online and access rewards programs that were previously only available through in-store transactions.

LevelUp had been looking at a number of food delivery services, but was particularly interested in Foodler, Herbold said, because “they have an eye towards mobile. They're approaching this from the mobile side of the equation.”

Original story link.

© 2014 American City Business Journals

Emerging Awareness: Backing up your cloud data

Mar 14, 2014

Cambridge's Backupify expands as more companies focus on the cloud

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Companies today are becoming ever more dependent on cloud applications. But there's an unexpected danger in that fact: Whether by accident or through malicious intent, if data is deleted, how can it be recovered?

The possibility of that potentially devastating dilemma prompted the creation of Backupify, a Cambridge-based cloud-to-cloud backup services company. Founded in 2009, the company offers backup for Google Apps, Salesforce and social media.

“A lot of organizations are putting a lot of data in the cloud,” said Rachel Dines, a senior analyst at Forrester Research who has a focus on IT continuity and resiliency. “They need to be able to protect that data. The challenge right now is more awareness of what software as a service providers will or will not do. We're at the early stages of awareness.”

Backupify, which employs 60 and recently doubled its office space in a new Central Square location, had just anecdotal evidence that cloud backup (or lack thereof) was an issue, according to CEO Rob May. But today, the company restores one file every three seconds, he said, and in total, recovered 12.8 million files in 2013.

It now has 850,000 active user accounts at more than 7,000 companies.

“The problem is not well identified,” said May. “The cloud is very new. It's good risk-management not to have your eggs in one basket.”

Backupify specifically works with two of the biggest cloud providers, Salesforce and Google Apps; once activated, the company's application queries for or identifies recently added or updated files, then duplicates and copies them so that they're available on its web interface. The process repeats every 24 hours. Pricing ranges from $3 a month, to $990 a month or domain.

Eventually, the company plans to release backup services for Box, Smartsheet and PipelineDeals, among others, May said. He declined to release revenue figures.

As he pointed out, not only do companies use the service for recovery purposes, but for archiving and compliance. “There will come a time when your Salesforce records, or G-chat records, will be subpoenaed,” he said.

Still, recovery remains the biggest concern, according to Dines. Data can be lost a number of ways, including accidental deletion (the most common), migration errors, malicious insiders, rogue applications, departing employees, and hacking. And while most of the big software as a service providers have effective processes in place to protect their own internal data, companies can't take for granted that they'll do the same for their customers. If data is deleted and it isn't the provider's fault, they may charge an “exorbitant” fee to help retrieve it, or simply say “tough luck,” Dines said.

Therefore, she advised, companies of all sizes need to make themselves fully aware of their provider's policies on backup and recovery, and take steps to protect their data through cloud-to-cloud backup services, which she expects will proliferate as more and more information moves into the cloud.

“It’s not just a best practice — it’s a fiduciary responsibility,” Dines wrote in a report released in February. “If you don’t back up your data, customers, partners, and employees consider you negligent and incompetent. Yet, every day, enterprises send critical data to providers without any plan for how they will back up the data and restore it. Only when they experience data loss do they ask the question, 'Who is responsible for backing up my data?'”

Backupify has received a total of $19.5 million in funding from First Round Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Avalon Ventures, Lowercase Capital and Symantec.

Original story link.

© 2014 American City Business Journals

The "C" is for "customer"

Mar 12, 2014

CQuotient mines data for clues on improving targeted ads

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

CQuotient sees itself as a sort of Sherlock Holmes for retailers.

When customers visit a particular retail website, they leave “interesting, subtle and valuable clues,” said founder and CEORama Ramakrishnan. “We're data detectives.”

The Cambridge-based company helps online and brick-and-mortar stores with “personalized retailing” by collecting and analyzing various bits of data on customers (whether regulars or prospects), then using that information to create tailored content, ads, offers and promotions.

CQuotient assembles a bevy of information – including transactions made online and offline, web-browse data, email interactions, mobile usage, product details and promotions – to create profiles indicating how, when and where customers shop, what merchandise they like and don't like, their price sensitivity, what kinds of offers entice them, among other details.

“Fundamentally what we do is go deep into the data and extract clues, nuggets, about what customers like and don't like,” said Ramakrishnan. “It helps us understand what's really going on in the customer's mind.”

Ramakrishnan has deep experience in data analytics – in addition to running analytics consulting firms, he taught analytics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and previously served as head of R&D for the Cambridge-based ProfitLogic, which helped retailers optimize profits and pricing and offered inventory planning software. The company was acquired by Oracle in 2005 for a reported $160 million.

While at ProfitLogic and Oracle, Ramakrishnan said he found that, while retailers were looking at store and product-level data, they weren't often analyzing data down to the customer level. This prompted him to found CQuotient – the “C” in the name signifies “customer” – in 2010, starting exclusively with email personalization.

Because emails can drive significant revenue for retailers, the goal was to “figure out how to make those emails more individualized, more relevant, more useful,” he explained.

The company – now with 12 employees and actively hiring – has since broadened its data mining to encompass interactions between customers and retailers on the web, mobile apps, through direct mail, and even in physical stores.

Ramakrishnan credited the ability to delve so deeply to advancements in technology and machine-learning. The processes undertaken now simply wouldn't have been possible even five years ago, he said.

“Now we can receive, store and process an amazing quantity of data,” he said.

Going forward, CQuotient has plans to ramp up its engineering, sales and marketing teams, and use data to personalize display advertising across the web. The company is backed by $3 million from Bain Capital from a December 2010 funding round. It may pursue a second round, Ramakrishnan said, as early as the second quarter of 2014.

Although he declined to release revenue figures, Ramakrishnan did say the company is “experiencing rapid growth.” Revenues are derived from a subscription model, and the company currently has more than 15 retailers “of all stripes,” he said, including Karmaloop, The Children's Place, and Men's Wearhouse.

The latter, which has 1,100 stores nationwide, partnered with CQuotient in 2013, focusing on transaction, web and loyalty program data.

“Just as our in-store tailors alter garments to perfectly fit each customer, we (can) deliver personalized emails individually tailored to each recipient,” Susan Neal, executive vice president of e-business, marketing and digital technology at Men's Wearhouse, said in a statement.

Original story link.

© 2014 American City Business Journals

DBaaS poised for growth, and Tesora is ready

Mar 11, 2014

New name, sharp focus on Trove for startup Tesora

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Tesora is the Italian word for treasure. And by adopting that new name last month, the Cambridge-based startup formerly named ParElastic intends to reflect its strategic shift to support Trove, the database as a service component of OpenStack, the massive open source cloud-computing infrastructure project.

OpenStack is widely adopted and supported by 1,200 developers from more than 60 companies, including many IT titans such as Oracle, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

“It’s growing like wildfire, really,” founder and CEO Ken Rugg said of OpenStack. “It’s the fastest-growing open source project ever. We saw great opportunity to get aligned with that.”

Tesora, founded in 2010 and now staffed with 15 employees (with additional offices in Ontario) initially developed what it dubbed a “Database Virtualization Engine” that gives developers the ability to quickly scale resources up and down as needed in the cloud.

“We were very impressed with the distance it had come,” Rugg said of Trove. “We thought this was a great fit for us to come in, make it very easy to use, create a scalable, enterprise-class product that you could quickly install.”

The decision comes as the market appears to be poised for significant adoption of database as a service. According to a report by 451 Research, annual revenue from providers is projected to rise from $626 million in 2014 to roughly $1.8 billion in 2016. By contrast, revenue from providers was $150 million in 2012.

According to the report, demand is being driven by increased confidence in the cloud, a wider variety of providers, and a lower barrier to entry due to falling prices. Likewise, database as a service is a strong force behind the adoption of next-generation databases.

“We have deep database expertise, and at the same time we have this vision that the way people consume databases is going to change,” said Rugg.

Michael Coté, research director of infrastructure software at 451 Research, said database as a service remains “a relatively small slice of the IT market,” but also acknowledged that databases are “a vital part of most every application.”

OpenStack, for its part, welcomes a variety of contributors, he said, including individuals and smaller companies alongside giants like Oracle. “OpenStack as a community is pretty good, no matter what sized company you are,” said Coté.

Tesora is not yet releasing revenue figures or customer names, although Rugg said it is working with a number of entities, with announcements forthcoming. As it evolves, the company plans to derive its revenues through offering service and support around Trove, Rugg said. It will continue to offer its database virtualization engine, and will also eventually offer its own version of Trove with various add-ons, he said.

The goal is to essentially follow the pay-as-you-go model, and “change the way people get capacity,” Rugg said, “making it more like a utility.”

The company, which initially launched in Waltham, is backed by a total of $8.7 million in funding, most recently from a Series A round of $5.7 million in April 2013 led by General Catalyst Partners, and also including Point Judith Capital, CommonAngels, LaunchCapital, and other angels.

Original story link.

© 2014 American City Business Journals

Capturing a lost art

LIBRARY

Taryn Plumb

WATERFALL ARTS

256 HIGH STREET

BELFAST, MAINE

THROUGH MARCH 21

ABBIE READ PAYS HOMAGE TO THE WRITTEN WORD

Abbie Read grew up in a literary household, surrounded by books of all kinds (and yes, her last name is a rather stark coincidence).

So, as the world has begun to alter the tangibility of books — from paper to screen — the Appleton, Maine artist has been compelled to create a living, growing homage to the volumes and sheaves that for so long held the various iterations of the written word. Titled “Library,” it has been the main focus of her creativity for two years.

Now measuring 28 feet long and seven-and- a-half feet high (and expanding) it is an assemblage of handmade, booklike boxes of varying sizes that contain random artifacts, found items, curiosities and miniature pieces of Read’s own art.

“Books have been a big part of my life forever,” said Read. “It seems so strange to me to be going into a time when those are less valued as a source of information and knowledge. What’s going to happen with these items that are filling up actual, literal libraries?”

The large, rectangular, rich-on-the-eyes installation is currently displayed at the Clifford Gallery in the Waterfall Arts center in Belfast, where it will remain through March 21. Previously, it was a fixture in the Portland Museum of Art’s 2013 Biennial.

Read the entire article in our magazine pages here.