CEO Aaron Levie just announced the deal in a corporate blog post. Crocodoc is a seven-person team hailing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its technology has powered the document sharing and embedding capabilities of Yammer, LinkedIn and SAP.

The company had raised a small amount of capital from Y Combinator and Dave McClure, among others. Box isn’t disclosing the financial terms of the deal, though Levie just told me in a phone conversation that “everyone concerned is happy with the deal.”

Crocodoc, Levie said, has gone deeper into the experience of rendering documents on the Web and on mobile devices using HTML5 than other companies that are involved in presenting and sharing documents, like, say, Scribd and DocStoc.

If you think of Scribd as sort of a YouTube for documents, then Crocodoc, Levie says, is comparable to Brightcove. Where YouTube presents video in a consumer friendly way, Brightcove powers video experiences for other companies. “They’re going out and powering the experience of presenting documents. We do this now when it comes to collaboration and content, but we don’t do it yet for documents.”

Crocodoc CEO Ryan Damico will become Box’s director of platform, and the rest of the Crocodoc team will be joining Box. Eventually the Crocodoc brand will fade away inside Box, Levie said.

The deal is Box’s second acquisition. In 2009 it acquired Incredo, a company focused on document and media viewing. Levie said that as Box continues to expand, it will occasionally make opportunistic acquisitions of small companies.

It can probably afford to do more deals. Box has raised a combined total of $312 million. Its most recent round was $150 million, led by private equity firm General Atlantic. It also has strategic investments from Salesforce.com and SAP. Levie has said publicly that Box is eyeing an IPO sometime in 2014.

Startup image copyright white_board

In the early days of software, you had limited distribution opportunities. You might sell your software in boxes, distribute millions of free CDs, spend heavily on advertising or do a deal with a larger partner for distribution. With the introduction of the SAAS model, the hard costs were eliminated, but the advertising spend or sales team were still a must. Recently, the growth and openness of cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Evernote and Skydrive have changed the distribution model for some startups significantly.

At HelloFax and HelloSign, we’ve seen a lot of growth from our platform partners. We don’t release our internal numbers, but there are some public numbers we can talk about. Since Drive launched last year, HelloFax has had over 270,000 installs with Google Drive. HelloSign, which launched in August, has had over 50,000. Our new integration, HelloSign for Gmail, which launched in January, has had almost 30,000. That’s 350,000 installs worth of Google integrations. And we didn’t spend a single cent to acquire them.

The fundamental necessity for each startup is growth. Growth changes your company from irrelevant to relevant. Paul Graham wrote an essay, “Startups = Growth,” that every founder should read.

Building on platforms is one of your greatest opportunities for growth. Historically, a lot of companies have leveraged platforms to become great companies. Not all startups have platforms that are a good fit, but if you can find the right one, it can be a game-changer. The thesis for integrating is simple. Platforms provide an audience, you provide value. The better the value, the more potential for growth.

Here are four examples worth thinking about:

• Airbnb grew on Craigslist. Airbnb added significant value to the renting experience on Craigslist. Because short-term rentals are only one of the many classifieds on the site, Craigslist provided a generic experience. Airbnb improved it with pictures, maps, ratings and more.
• Google grew on AOL and Yahoo. Google was a great company. However, Yahoo and AOL were the big Internet hubs at the time and were capable of sending massive amounts of traffic. Since the platforms didn’t see value in search, they were happy to send that traffic to Google.
• PayPal grew on eBay. EBay was one of the few places on the Internet with a high concentration of purchases. EBay didn’t provide payments in the early days, which made it difficult for sellers to collect money. PayPal provided that experience.
• Dropbox and Box see significant growth on mobile. IOS devices don’t have a file system. Dropbox and Box didn’t have to be better than the current file system, they just had to be better than no file system.

The alternative to growing via a distribution platform is to go after the growth channels that everyone is pursuing. For many startups, search engine marketing, pay per click marketing, media buys and a large sales team can produce results, but it’s difficult to produce explosive growth with these methods. They’re helpful, but often incremental. You’ll absolutely want to pursue all marketing channels in the future, but for a small team, they can be capital intensive and often favor the incumbent.

Platforms also give preferential treatment to products with a good user experience. It’s a great equalizer. Instead of paying to rank higher in search, platforms are often built to be meritocratic. Better reviews will give you a higher ranking and exposure. We worked hard to add as much value as possible and invested a lot in the user flows and experience. Instead of hitting paywalls and a dozen required fields before signing up, we built in a simple onboarding experience. Startups that understand this ecosystem, and build for it, can have an advantage against less product-focused incumbents.

If you’re a SaaS company, follow in the footsteps of these great companies that were built on platforms. There are opportunities for companies that can add value to the cloud storage ecosystem. If you work hard to create value, the ecosystem will provide the audience.

Joseph Walla is co-founder and CEO of HelloSign and HelloFax. You can follow him at @josephwalla.

Well, you’re not alone, and the networking company Novell — yes, that Novell — would probably like to have a talk with you. Today it launched a service called Filr (pronounced “filer,” get it?) that it says provides that same kind of mobile-friendly, access-anywhere type of experience for enterprise files that you might expect from other services, but that leaves total control of what can and can’t be shared and with whom in the hands of IT managers.

Better yet — if you think this is a good thing, and some certainly will — instead of farming those files out to the cloud using infrastructure you can’t see or touch, let alone control, it uses your company’s existing IT infrastructure. It just makes it seem more cloud-y than it actually is. Everything stays on premise, and files maintain the permissions they already have. But they’re accessible from mobile devices and can be shared both inside and outside the organization, and they don’t need to be duplicated for that purpose because they stay right where they are.

The service is available today, like those cloud-based products sold on a subscription basis, though some Novell customers using its Open Enterprise Server or Novell Open Workgroup Suite can have it added on.

And yes, this is the same Novell that became part of the privately held Attachmate Group back in 2010 and that previously fought a seemingly endless legal battle with SCO Group over Linux.

(Image via Wikipedia)

As of 3:05 pm ET today, Fusion shares were trading at $19.89, up $3.26 (or 19.6 percent) from a $16.63 closing price Wednesday. For one thing, the company reported quarterly results yesterday, and gave forward guidance for the current quarter that was better than anyone expected.

Another thing? There’s a new Facebook data center going up in Iowa. And as everyone who follows Fusion-io knows, Facebook and Apple are its marquee customers. A new data center means that a lot of new Fusion-io products are selling.

As CEO David Flynn pointed out in an interview this morning, that can be a blessing and a bit of a curse. Earlier this year, Facebook and Apple trimmed orders and Fusion was forced to trim its outlook. Now, with Facebook building again on a site that’s big enough to accommodate at least two more facilities just like it, there’s a brighter outlook. But if you take out the up-and-down side of Fusion’s business that caters to Apple and Facebook growth, Flynn said, there has been a nice, steady, predictable ramp.

There are also new customers to report: Box, the fast-growing enterprise cloud services company, has started adding Fusion-io products to its servers. So has music service Spotify.

Then there’s the matter of the $119 million acquisition of NexGen, a Louisville-based company that specializes in taking traditional hard-drive-based storage products aimed at mid-range companies and combining them with Fusion-io’s flash-based technology. The combination gives Fusion access to a base of customers it wasn’t previously reaching. “We started out reaching the companies at the top of the pyramid, and the fact is the size of the market opportunity in the middle market is bigger,” Flynn said.

The deal has Fusion paying $114 million in cash and $5 million in stock. It’s Fusion’s second acquisition this year. Last month, it acquired ID7, a British software firm.

Following through on a plan they first announced last year, the two companies said that Box’s content-sharing capabilities would be integrated with Jive’s software. If your company happens to be a customer of both — not uncommon — content in Box will from now on be easily accessible from within Jive and vice versa.

Yesterday I got Box CEO and D11 speaker Aaron Levie on the phone with Jive CEO Tony Zingale to talk about why they’re pairing up and which competitors they share in common.

Here are some highlights from our conversation.

AllThingsD: So you said last year you were going to team up in this way. What exactly have you done here and why is it important?

Zingale: Back in October we announced our intent to go to market together. It had a lot to do with the complementary nature of our products and the huge shift we were seeing in the marketplace as enterprises retool around collaboration and social and mobile. And being the two market leaders in those areas, it makes sense we would get together and connect our two systems. We think it’s a huge deal between the two companies and can now demonstrate the functionality now that it’s shipping.

Aaron, Box was sort of built from the ground up with working with other companies in mind. And now here you are working a little more closely with one in particular. Is there any other outside company with which Box has so close a relationship?

Levie: This is critical to our strategy. We feel that content needs to extend into all sorts of business applications that you may want to use. As you look at the social enterprise and collaboration space more broadly, Jive is the clear leader. So the deeper that we can combine our products and services, it creates one unified experience for customers. And true to Tony being the master of the enterprise, they are in a very big number of large companies that we’re now starting to serve. This will only accelerate that. At a more meta-level, it represents a bigger trend. Five or 10 years ago you were forced to buy all your technology as a single large stack from an Oracle or an SAP. But now because of collaborations like this, and because of open APIs, you can mix and match the best IT products and services. That will fundamentally change the IT landscape. Startups and disruptors will be highly favored over established players.

One big competitor you share is Salesforce.com. Salesforce has Chatter, which competes with Jive, and it has also announced plans to build a product that it says will compete with Box, though Salesforce is also an investor in Box. Can you unpack that shared dynamic for me?

Zingale: The intent to compete with Jive has existed there for years now. The second thing is that I would riff off what Aaron just said. The Salesforce solution is a stack of their own. If you want to use all the Salesforce apps for sales and marketing and service, go have a nice day. But Chatter has morphed into sort of a front-end user interface for its stack of vertically integrated applications. Box and Jive are both agnostic and we’re both going to integrate with whatever is there and present in the customer’s environment. In our case that includes Salesforce. We add a lot of value on top of the CRM (customer relationship management) app, both inside and outside the enterprise. Their position is very much confined to their three silos. And yes they’re open, but I don’t see many enterprises embracing that as the way to integrate how they get things done. We sit on top of and really don’t any more compete head to head with Chatter as much as we once did.

Levie: I would posit that for Tony and myself, the bigger shared enemy for us is probably Microsoft.

Zingale: Same for us.

Levie: I think that in the land of Microsoft, we are all disruptors collectively. Salesforce included. The big opportunity is the legacy spend on collaboration tools. For those companies moving to the cloud, that is the big opportunity for this kind of service.

Aaron, does Box work as closely with any other company as it is now doing with Jive?

Levie: The only other one where we have this depth of integration is NetSuite. We go pretty deep on the Salesforce CRM. But we certainly look for areas where we have a shared customer base, or where customers want to extend the content from Box into something else.

How much do your customers overlap?

Zingale: As we both disrupt the new wave of enterprise applications, Jive has always attacked the larger companies, the ones with thousands of knowledge workers. The attraction for us is that Box has a huge reach within small companies, but also small groups within large companies like American Express or Fidelity or Procter and Gamble using Box is very interesting to us.

Levie: There probably isn’t an enterprise over 1,000 employees that we talk with that isn’t either on Jive or exploring Jive, mainly because social is the type of product where you want it to go across the entire company and not just be integrated with your sales applications.

In an announcement set to be made later today, Somaini, whose title will be VP and chief trust officer, is one of three high-profile hires at Box that will be announced later today. The other two are Niall Wall, who will be SVP and head of business development, and Jeff Mannie, who will be VP, controller and chief accounting officer. Wall will take over for Karen Appleton, who has been promoted to senior VP in charge of global alliances.

What does the new title — chief trust officer — mean? “Two things,” Somaini told me in a brief conversation yesterday. “Really driving a trust strategy for the company around the products and services we provide and how that relates to internal functions of how we perform. Second, we have to make sure there’s a tight integration with our customer to base to really understand their needs. And it’s not only that we’re able to respond to their pain points, but that we’re able to predict them.”

He should have a pretty good appreciation for their pain points. Before creating the CISO job at Yahoo, he held the same title at security software giant Symantec. Before that, he was director of information security at VeriSign and an adviser to Palo Alto Networks. He also writes a widely read blog on computer security.

Wall is also a Symantec alum. Most recently, he was VP and general manager of the Norton Data Services business unit. Before Symantec, he worked at Oracle and Digital Equipment Corp., now a part of Hewlett-Packard. At Box, he’ll be overseeing the company’s efforts to create partnerships and strategic alliances.

Mannie hails from PayPal, the payments unit at online sales giant eBay. He’ll be in charge of external financial reporting, policies and controls. He’s probably going to be busy as Box heads toward its long-talked-about initial public offering next year.

Box has been aggressively raising money, and in January quietly increased its funding to $150 million from a previous $125 million in a round led by private equity firm General Atlantic, at a valuation of about $1.2 billion. CEO Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old wunderkind who started the company in a dorm room at the University of Southern California in 2005, has said on the record that Box will likely go public in 2014, and it has started hiring more execs with time at publicly held companies on their resumes.

The expanded round brought Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. Other investors include Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

A company called MuleSoft specializes in helping companies do exactly that. It started out as an on-premise platform, but has since shifted to one based in the cloud. A textbook case: Getting data from one cloud-based application — say, Salesforce.com — working with another — say, Workday. You might want information about your sales team’s performance integrated with your human-resources information so you can keep track of who’s performing well and who isn’t.

Typically, you’d do that yourself, taking advantage of APIs provided by both companies. You’d assign a team of developers to create a custom process and workflow. It would take more time than you’d want it to, and would probably cost more than you’d like.

“All those problems about integrating data become exponentially greater in the cloud,” mainly because there are more applications and there’s also just more data, said MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott. There are, he said, something like 2,100 different companies offering software-as-a-service applications, plus a whole bunch of older legacy on-premise enterprise software products. And every company has its own mix-and-match combination.

The good news is that most, if not all, of these applications have their APIs, meaning that, in theory, a programmer can take advantage of them. And that’s where MuleSoft steps in. One API doesn’t natively talk to another API. At a high level, MuleSoft sits as the middleman between them all. It has a repository of 13,000 or more APIs, and has an SaaS platform that connects them all together. The time required to integrate data in two or more applications is cut from weeks or months to hours or days.

The problem isn’t getting smaller. The number of open APIs available is multiplying, and in a few more years will reach into the hundreds of thousands.

Founded in 2003, its timing couldn’t have been better. Companies like Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, SuccessFactors and others all sought to shift important business applications out of the office and into the cloud. And now running things in the cloud is more often than not preferred, because in the long run it’s cheaper — cloud companies tend to charge on a subscription basis — and easier.

So MuleSoft has been on fire. Its customers run the gamut from banks to automakers to media companies: Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo are all customers, as are BMW and Tesla. Facebook and Box and Intuit are customers, too. More than 150,000 developers at more than 3,200 companies are using MuleSoft’s platform.

Today, the company announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series E round of venture capital funding, led by NEA. Salesforce.com is also investing in this round. Prior investors participating include Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures (the venture capital arm of software giant SAP) and Bay Partners. The round brings MuleSoft’s total capital raised to $81 million. An IPO is probably not far off.

Here’s one reason for Salesforce’s interest: One of MuleSoft’s newer products is an app called Dataloader.io, that is available on the Salesforce App Exchange. It’s designed to move data from pretty much any application into Salesforce.com. Within weeks, it shot to No. 1 on the App Exchange, and remains the most popular app there today, Schott told me.

Another new product was announced today. It’s called Anypoint, and it’s described as the only complete integration platform to cover applications across the entire spectrum of cloud or on-premise, and to get the data in them working together.

Image copyright Oleksiy Mark

This is rocking the industry. Dell is being taken private — closing a curtain to start the dirty work of restructuring. HP, Microsoft and Intel are all trading well off their peaks when the Dow has recently hit an all-time high. IBM looks like the sole winner, jettisoning its PC business years ago to China-based Lenovo. Well, it’s a good thing all of these companies also play a big part in the $55 billion server market¹ — that’s not going away anytime soon, right? The worst days are over, and hopefully their collective market caps will recover? Not so fast …

Modern Web services, such as Google, Apple and Facebook, are pushing the limits of data center scaling to unprecedented levels as they deal with an exponential growth in user traffic. They are playing a massive game of Tetris as they grapple with deploying and operating data centers with tens of thousands of servers versus hundreds. They are all on the bleeding edge of trying to contain costs while cramming as much capacity into a physical building as possible. The result is a complete architectural rethink of data center designs, and the incumbent server vendors are struggling to stay relevant in this new reality.

The new data center designs use only commodity “vanity-free” components procured directly from the original design manufacturers (ODM) — the current incumbent’s suppliers. For easy serviceability, components are Velcro-ed together, versus mounted in a box. All bells and whistles are stripped off, and the hardware is purpose-built for a specific application and therefore carefully tuned. As compute-utilization rates skyrocket from virtualization and parallel processing, the CPUs are running harder and hotter, and therefore the new expense bottleneck is all about power and cooling.

Take, for instance, Facebook’s Open Compute initiative, which lays out a blueprint for an energy-efficient hyper-scale data center that is 38 percent more energy efficient and 24 percent less expensive than current data centers. Locating in cold climates and next to super-cheap hydro power has become de rigueur. Power distribution, cooling and building layouts have been redesigned from the ground up to maximize mechanical performance and electrical efficiency of the data center. And unfortunately for Intel, the relentless march of Moore’s law no longer affords them differentiation, as customer needs have shifted from performance to power efficiency, an area where they lag rival ARM processors.

The evolution of the modern hyper-scale data center reflects the hyper-scale needs of the applications that run on them. Modern Web 2.0 (and increasingly SaaS) applications need to handle thousands of user requests per second, processing terabytes of information in real time across hundreds of customers. They are by necessity massively parallel, and work in concert to service a user request. This is the modern equivalent of a giant supercomputer — except cobbled together from commodity server components and interconnect fabrics. It’s a profound software and hardware architectural shift that is taking us from a world where data centers consisted of a small number of independent high-performance branded servers to a brave new world where the giant data center building is the server.

Meanwhile, on the enterprise front, the corporate data center is becoming increasingly sedate as on-prem applications give way to their SaaS counterparts. The new data center architectures, born of necessity from the giant Web service providers, have the potential to massively drive down the cost of providing software as a service, the new winner in enterprise applications. As such, the cloud service providers (CSPs), such as Amazon and Rackspace, are adopting these “scale-out” architectures.

So, fast-forward: SaaS will win the enterprise market. Face it — it’s just so much better, and now infinitely cheaper than any of the alternatives. And modern SaaS applications will be delivered through hyper-scale data centers that do not have branded servers from Dell, HP or IBM, but rather highly optimized, scale-out white-box servers made by Asian ODMs. In addition, the operators of these massive data centers will be experts in servicing their creations — monitoring, fixing and rapidly swapping out their expected-to-fail components. Therefore, there will no longer be a need for the recurring revenue, high-margin service and maintenance contracts that have been a mainstay of the OEM server industry.

I wonder if Lenovo is in the market for a server business, too.

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I would like to thank my partner, Ramu Arunachalam, for his research, analysis and material contributions to this blog.

Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter.

While it may be true for the purposes of the law, politics and human rights, it’s sadly not true of programmers. Some are more skilled than others, while those others may specialize in things that make them peculiarly suited to a particular job.

The problem comes when it’s time to evaluate a person for a specific job. On paper they may claim to have certain skills, but when the rubber meets the road, can they really carry off the job at hand? Wouldn’t it be great if you could vet someone not by word of mouth, but by evaluating the code they’ve written in the past?

That’s the idea behind Gild, which I first wrote about over the summer when it was just getting out of the starting blocks.

Today Gild will announce that it has landed an $8 million series A round of venture capital funding led by Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Prior investors in Gild’s seed round also participated. They include SAP Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and investor Mark Kvamme, best known for his early stake in LinkedIn.

Gild has created a cloud-based service that tracks the code that developers share publicly on services like GitHub and Google Code. It monitors how often that person’s code is accepted for open source projects, and how often other developers borrow from their code or “fork” it, which is a sign that other developers like what they see.

The result is that the programmers with the prestigious academic degrees may or may not be the ones you’re looking for, but it’s hard to know for sure until you’ve seen the code they’ve published. Software development becomes more of a meritocracy.

“Everyone is under pressure to find the best people,” Desai told me. “Those companies that hire based on pedigree and people from the best schools, we know that’s not working any more. They’re missing out on a lot of talented people.”

The company has been growing fast, and has seen its overall user base grow by 900 percent. Its customers include Box, Red Hat , Rackspace, Zynga and Square.

Gild has also been on a hiring tear: Jill Erickson, a former senior VP at advertising agency TMP Worldwide, joined as chief revenue officer in November. In December, Vivienne Ming, a Carnegie Mellon PhD and former research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Mind, Brain and Computation, joined as chief data scientist.

Image copyright Pakhnyushcha

These days, it seems as soon as some new technology begins to gain traction, VCs and journalists herald the arrival of a new technological order. While these predictions often end up being true eventually, many of us are left aggravated that the status quo sticks around for so long. Perhaps no such case is as true as with the cloud. The cloud has, without question, resulted in truly revolutionary benefits to enterprises and consumers, but it always seems to be presented in a very autocratic way: Stop what you are doing, and do things a new way.

Enterprises are obviously the first to accept such requirements. As long as this new solution offers a material benefit to their business, the smart companies will rapidly adopt it and put it to work. Conveniently, they are also quite willing to pay for such benefit, should it be real. This is critical, because consumers hate paying for things, so someone has to underwrite the commoditization of new technology. This is essential to understand because, contrary to what is marketed to consumers, the cloud is expensive.

People are buying and creating unbelievable amounts of content daily, driven by photos, personal videos, music and movie purchases. Movies and personal video have gone from standard definition to high definition — potentially going to ultra-high definition, if CES is any indication — and the trend is clearly moving more toward online purchasing. Music downloads surpassed CD sales two years ago and, even in light of successful streaming services; online music sales continue to grow year over year. Digital photography and videography have also surpassed their physical counterparts. Indeed, photos and videos are no longer things you take only on vacation or on special occasions. Smartphones have enabled us all to shoot photos and video all day long, for even the most mundane reasons. All these devices are continuously increasing resolution, and thus file size.

Gartner estimates that the average household had roughly one terabyte of files by the end of 2012, with that forecast to grow to approximately 3.3TB by 2016. At the same time, it is estimated that people will have, on average, 5.8 Internet-connected devices per person by 2015. There’s no doubt that people will continue to spread more and more data across more and more devices, based on these trends. If these predications are even somewhat accurate, the assumption that the cloud will be able to affordably accommodate all consumer data is difficult to accept.

Cloud storage is not built from hard drives bought off Amazon.com on the cheap. Indeed, whether it is the consumer cloud or the enterprise cloud, cloud storage services are enterprise-grade through and through. “Enterprise-grade” might as well be synonymous with “expensive.” That pricey storage is made up of enterprise-grade hardware, and kept in an enterprise-grade data center. Every step of the way, it is managed by an army of smart people, who are generally well paid. Let’s not forget local and geographic redundancy. The result is that while cloud storage is able to reduce its price slowly over time, consumers are increasing their storage demands on a near-geometric scale. Thus, while consumer cloud services may have a free tier to give consumers a taste of the benefits, virtually none of them offer enough storage to accommodate all the average person’s data. If some company were to cobble together all the necessary Web services to offer this, perhaps built off of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or something similar, it would cost nearly $1,000 per year in storage alone, and, of course, there is much more to all this than just storage.

The result is “cloud fragmentation” — users are putting subsets of their files into a litany of separate cloud services. Sometimes this is driven by the amount of free storage, and other times this is driven by an optimization of media type (e.g., documents versus videos). This fragmentation, however, increases complexity and becomes a burden to manage. I often have to think about whether a given document is in Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive. My photos are spread across Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. Some videos are on Vimeo and others on YouTube. Of course, these are only a very tiny fraction of my more than 900 gigabytes of files. This complexity is something I refer to as “cloud overload,” where the number of cloud solutions I have has me scratching my head to remember which one I use for what, or to share with whom.

Why would consumers choose to do this? Price. The free tiers of most cloud services are indeed quite alluring. The marketing is great. The benefits are clear. It is the price that’s unacceptable. To mitigate that, consumers do all they can to extract benefit from the free tiers.

This is a clear divergence between consumer demand and technological reality. Cloud storage is too expensive for consumers to purchase for all their data, so they don’t. The result is user data getting spread across an array of primarily free solutions that fragment features by media type or value proposition (e.g., sharing, backup, etc.).

Occasionally, we see enterprises underwriting technological development that does not lead to the technological maturity and commoditization consumers require, at least not very quickly. This is, without exception, the case with the “consumer cloud.” Consumers require simplicity, convenience and affordability. The consumer cloud is built from services, including storage, sharing and device/platform interconnectivity. We’ve seen many companies emerge as tremendous successes; however, the products that define this space are themselves defined by their compromise in regard to consumer demand and expectations. Changes in user behavior (e.g., stop doing what you normally do, and do it a new way) are the friction that slows ubiquitous adoption. Furthermore, high cost ultimately makes such products, even when widely adopted, niche solutions.

Still, cloud services offer such unbelievable benefit that no one would argue that there is not demand. The question is less about what benefit can be derived from the consumer cloud; rather, it is how it should be delivered.

So, what solution have savvy startups begun to offer? It’s what is increasingly known as the “personal cloud”: A way for users to access all their files, on all their devices, all the time. And best of all, it’s affordable.

Personal cloud services for consumers give users the ability to have all their data on all their devices. While not a consumer platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a good model, since it delivers truly groundbreaking cloud services within a fairly simple service approach. Personal clouds are somewhat analogous to AWS on a consumer level. New personal cloud services have started to build inter-device connectivity into the operating system of your devices, which is conceptually similar to AWS-like services being built into your own computing devices. The result is that instead of users conforming to some new product’s requirements for you to get value, it conforms to the user’s own behavior.

Products like this are technically challenging to build, because they must integrate deeply into some other platform/device; in fact, they often augment it so that the device or operating system itself works in a new way (e.g., as a part of a personal device ecosystem). The result, however, is that consumers are offered a solution that accommodates their demands — one that is simple, convenient and affordable. These services can be cheap or free for any amount of data, whether you have 2GB, 2TB or 2PB, because they are leveraging your own devices to create your cloud and not hardware located in and across multiple data centers.

We all can be overzealous about predicting the future at times, so it is important to take stock of the present. The cloud is producing some of the biggest benefits to enterprises and consumers since the inception of the Internet itself. It is shepherding a variety of services and products that enable content sharing, distribution and access. While enterprises may reap the most advanced benefits of this now, it is obvious that the consumer versions of these technologies are compelling and exciting. The opportunity for companies to innovate is often not measured in features, as much as user experience. This is the unrealized opportunity within the consumer cloud, and the direction so many companies are taking to build the next set of products to affect our lives.

Today, DropBox announced some enhancements for its business-oriented Dropbox for Teams service. The big one is the creation of a new administrative console that gives managers the ability to keep track of all users signed in to a company’s Dropbox account, and to also control what they can and can’t do, how much space they’re using, and what devices they may be using.

If you’re a typical Dropbox user, you probably use it to share files between your home and office, or to quickly share with people you do business with outside your company or with lots of people on your team. In this way, Dropbox has sort of snuck in the back door of large companies where it is used, and has recently fully embraced that with Dropbox for Teams. The service is in use in some capacity by people at more than two million businesses around the world.

The company said the new features are part of a stronger strategic push to make Dropbox more enterprise-friendly this year. It has got a long way to go versus Box, which has been aimed at the enterprise since day one.

A new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission appears to show that the round has swelled to $150 million. I’ve reached out to Box CEO Aaron Levie for a comment, but haven’t heard back yet.

The upward tick in funding is especially interesting now that Levie has publicly put a firm target on 2014 for Box’s inevitable IPO, an event that would follow its global expansion, which began in earnest in June with the opening of an office in Europe. Box needs the money mainly because securing the data center capacity it needs to keep its cloud humming isn’t cheap.

Anyway, to refresh your memory about that funding round: General Atlantic’s Gary Reiner, the former CIO of General Electric, joined Box’s board of directors. The Wall Street Journal reported prior to the funding announcement that Box was raising money at an implied valuation of $1.2 billion.

The expansion of the round would bring Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. And it hasn’t been all that long since Box took an $81 million strategic investment round from Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with several venture capital participating, funds including New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Also, there’s still the mystery of Box’s institutional investors. I heard from sources close to the deal last summer that Box had been courting some institutional investors and that at least two decided to take part. The new filing sheds no light on who they are as yet, but it would make sense. Taking institutional investments, as part of a late-stage investment, Box would be following a variant of the strategy that companies like Facebook and Workday have followed on the way to their own IPOs. It’s a good way to get to know the banks that will be selling your shares to their clients someday. The upshot of all this is that the pace of chatter about a Box IPO is only quickening and will do so all year.

Update: Box just confirmed this in a statement sent to me by a company spokesperson.

“After the initial announcement of our series E round in August 2012, some of our current venture and strategic investors made additional investments. Today we filed the official form D for the series E round, which is now closed at a total $150 million.”

So there you have it.

The three new vice presidents being announced today are tasked with helping the payments company change the way consumers pay for things online, on their phones and at the register.

“In years past, we’ve grown too conservatively,” said PayPal’s CTO James Barrese. “We are reinventing ourselves with a cadre of new talent. I’m completely reinventing the organization, so that the top technologists can have a huge impact on where we are going.”

The three hires are:

Arnold Goldberg, VP of Customer Experience Engineering. Goldberg most recently came from Box, where, as VP of Engineering, he helped establish the cloud-based sharing platform. At PayPal, he will work on coming up with new technology for PayPal’s small businesses and merchants.

Koby Avital, VP of Architecture and Infrastructure. Avital comes from Microsoft, where he led the company’s service-oriented architecture strategy and platform development. At PayPal, he will lead strategic architecture, infrastructure and innovative research.

Ryan Granard, VP of Platform Engineering. Ryan comes most recently from DreamWorks Animation, where he built an internal platform that was able to scale globally. He was also an early employee of Webvan, the online grocery service. At PayPal, he will be in charge of building internal cloud services.

Other recent hires include Douglas Crockford, who was appointed senior JavaScript Architect, and Bill Scott, senior director of User Interface Engineering.

In October, PayPal eliminated the jobs as part of a restructuring that reduced the number of product groups it had from nine to one. The eBay-owned company said it wasn’t about cost reductions, but about streamlining product development.

The most notable change was that mobile was no longer a standalone group, but was moved directly into all of the product lines. Similarly, its parent company conducted the same restructuring just last month.

“We set up ourselves to be focused on new strategic areas, so I’ve been going out and aggressively looking for the type of talent we need,” Barrese said.

PayPal will need all the talent it can get to achieve its lofty ambitions.

Not only does it want to be a consumer’s preferred form of payment online and on mobile phones, it is also entering the offline world by enabling payments for small merchants or large retailers like Home Depot. Its big push into retail will happen this year, but a lot of finesse will have to occur behind the scenes in order to get it all to work together seamlessly.

At the same time, it will be competing against other crafty companies in the space, including Square and Groupon, to name just two of the entrants interested in payments over the past few years.

PayPal’s emphasis on building up a strong technology team kicked off in earnest last March, after PayPal named David Marcus as president. Marcus, who had joined the company previously through the acquisition of Zong, filled the vacancy left when Scott Thompson suddenly left to become CEO of Yahoo.

Since Marcus’s appointment, he has been vocal about the changes he wants to make at the company, saying, “There’s a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now.”

The hires today are just more evidence that he’s willing to back those words up.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
—Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899

Last month, we gathered 75 of the top CIOs from around the country to discuss the new generation of enterprise software and the redefined role of the CIO. These CIOs are dealing with an unprecedented level of experimentation and innovative new approaches focused on unsolved problems in enterprise software. The end result will be a complete remaking of the entire enterprise software stack at the intersection of cloud, mobile and SaaS.

All of the CIOs are also facing a changed environment, one where every department within an organization makes its own software buying decisions, outside the purview of the CIO. This “departmentalization of applications” — from Box for collaboration to GitHub for software development to Tidemark for Enterprise Performance Management — means the CIO not only needs to figure out how to enable the department and employee to leverage these software products, but also meet the security and compliance requirements of the larger corporate environment — which, by the way, Bromium and Okta allow you to do. These CIOs know that they can adapt or organizations will adapt without them.

Their jobs weren’t always so difficult. For those of you old enough to remember, there was a time when enterprise computing was almost exclusively dominated by Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco. It was a time when on-premise, Windows-based applications were the de facto standard and there was no alternative. The enterprise was so entrenched that challenging the status quo was viewed as suicidal and very stupid. So hardened was the thinking that most innovation in the enterprise was relegated to mere feature extensions of existing solutions.

Fast-forward to today and the world of enterprise computing has done a 180. Traditional IT is being blown to bits as cloud infrastructure, Software-as-a-Service and mobile computing become the new standards. We are experiencing innovation and usage as never seen before. It is truly a renaissance of massive scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars are up for grabs as buyers shift to new architectures and away from old, as new users and new markets embrace the availability and ease by which they can consume technology.

On the Road to a Revolution

VMware and Salesforce catalyzed this movement from unlikely origins. Both were little known and under-funded, but against all conventional wisdom each visualized a new world order — a world in which the data center was virtual and where applications would run off-premise, eliminating op-ex and painful software upgrades. The world watched but there were few believers. “Suicidal,” people said. “Why would I ever permit my precious customer data to reside outside my firewall?”

But momentum grew. VMware figured out how to effectively break apart the functionality of software from the hardware it resides on, driving a new set of economics into data centers. Salesforce began expanding beyond CRM, demonstrating the wider viability of subscription-based payments and the customer benefits of constant iteration. Customers began to believe that this new vision might actually come true. From a single virtual server and a single customer relationship app, both companies paved the way for a new world order.

Every part of the business software stack is now being remade — from infrastructure to applications to mobile to analytics — with every incumbent in danger of having its core business eroded. And, sure, incumbents will try to buy innovative products and will try to develop their own competing technologies, but the reality is that this new paradigm disrupts the entirety of these businesses. Overcoming a foundational shift cannot be met by a simple product buy or even a strategy change — the new breed of enterprise software start-ups has different revenue recognition policies, different sales models and different go-to-market models, and engineering processes than incumbents. We are talking about transformations occurring here simultaneously in technology and business models! It’s an entirely new approach to IT.

The Departmentalization of Applications

Buyers are clamoring for this new approach. None of our portfolio companies use Oracle. Some use Microsoft, but the majority opt for Google or an open source package. In our own Executive Briefing Center, where we connect and facilitate exchange amongst global brands and the rising stars in tech, we’re finding that even enterprise CIOs are looking beyond mature players to new and emerging technology companies, especially in areas like cloud computing, mobile, big data and SaaS. These are the early indicators of a more permanent shift in IT consumption habits. This shift is resulting in software applications that are targeted for specific business functions. Apptio, for example, has built a world-class application that specifically targets the CIO as a customer. Mixpanel has an application that is in the big data space, but specifically targets analytics for mobile applications. This shift is what I am calling the “departmentalization of applications”.

And entrepreneurs know that incumbents are vulnerable. We see a tremendous number of entrepreneurs bringing a new approach to this crusty old enterprise software market. We see entrepreneurs like Ben Werther of Platfora, who is passionate about up-ending the Business Intelligence market, and Ash Ashutosh of Actifio, who is creating the next generation storage software.

These are entrepreneurs who choose to do the hard work of building software for companies to use, and the software they are creating is elegant, fast, does what it’s supposed to and priced fairly. This is an unbeatable value proposition. For everyone except perhaps the incumbents, this is a great time to be involved with enterprise software.

Peter Levine is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and blogs at http://peter.a16z.com/. He has been a lecturer at both MIT and Stanford business schools and was the former CEO of XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix in 2007. Prior to XenSource, Peter was EVP of Strategic and Platform Operations at Veritas Software, where he helped grow the organization from no revenue to more than $1.5 billion, and from 20 employees to over 6,000.

Collaboration tools are all the rage in office applications these days, and they come in many forms. There are platforms through which one can share and collaborate on many kinds of files. Box comes to mind. Then there are the cloud applications like Salesforce.com and Workday, all of which are collaborative. Social enterprise apps like Jive and Yammer are built expressly to encourage collaboration. Google Apps has recreated a solid set of core office applications, all accessible directly from a browser, and all of them allow multiple editors on documents.

Smartsheet is essentially a spreadsheet application that’s built for the age of the cloud. Entire sheets can be shared with colleagues, or you can share only granular bits of data, like the contents of a particular row. Sheets can be published to the Web, and are also accessible via mobile apps on iOS and Android. It integrates with Box, Salesforce, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services.

So far, it has a million customers, including companies as varied as ESPN, MetLife and Toshiba. Many of those just found Smartsheet and started using it for a particular project or task, and its use grew virally within those companies. One of them was Insight Venture Partners. And, of course, you know where this is going. In a moment worthy of a Victor Kiam, they liked it so much they’ve bought a piece of the company.

Insight announced today that it has led a $26 million investment in Smartsheet, along with Madrona Venture Partners. Ryan Hinkle, a principal at Insight, will join Smartsheet’s board of directors. The funding will go toward accelerating sales and marketing, and to kick software development efforts up a notch or two.

New York-based Birchbox said it is adding Birchbox Home, a package of home decor and entertaining products, such as cocktail party supplies, kitchen tools and gourmet foods. Products will be sourced from companies like Jonathan Adler, Dean and Deluca and Paperless Post.

The limited edition box will cost $58 for more than 11 products and is being timed with the holidays, when lots of people are hosting parties. An online shop will offer more than 50 products for one-off purchases. Birchbox regularly sells beauty and lifestyle boxes targeting both men and women.

Brit + Co.’s box requires people to be a little more industrious. The Brit Kits will be available for $20 a month and come with a couple different mini projects that are designed to take 30 minutes each. In November, the box will come loaded with a Turkey Oreo-pop making kit (basically a turkey made of Oreos and candy on a stick), and a kit that lets you turn a regular pair of gloves into ones that can be used with a touchscreen device using conductive thread.

The kits will also be for individual sale on the Web site, but will cost $15 each, or slightly more when not part of a subscription.

The launch of the two boxes fuels the well-established trend of sending products to consumers on a monthly basis. Oftentimes, the purpose of the box is to help consumers discover new items. Walmart is one of the latest companies to experiment with the concept, launching something it calls Goodies.co earlier this week. But there are literally hundreds of options out there.

In the case of Brit + Co., it is creating a new way to monetize its Web site, part of its effort to build a media brand like Martha Stewart.

“I’m personally a subscriber of a handful of boxes,” said Brit + Co.’s Founder Brit Morin. “We are all so busy, the act of discovery or decision-making takes a lot of time. This is a way to have people you trust give something to you every month. For us, it’s entertainment, as well as keeping your creativity alive.”

But adding these boxes to your TV setup means factoring in more wires and easy-to-lose remote controls. And finding the right input for the device through the TV remote can leave even the smartest people feeling dumbfounded.

Roku, the California-based company that makes set-top boxes of the same name, has come up with a new solution to this: A wireless stick, not much bigger than a thumb drive, that plugs directly into the back of your TV to stream HD video from the Web — turning your “dumb” TV into a smart one, with minimal gadgetry.

The $100 Roku Streaming Stick, available through Roku.com or Amazon.com, offers the same Web apps and the same powerful processor as Roku’s top-of-the-line set-top box, the Roku XS 2 (also $100). This means that all of that streaming goodness is packed into a small stick.

The Roku Streaming Stick also responds to the same remote used for your TV, as well as to a remote control app for iPhone and Android smartphones — eliminating the need for at least one extra remote.

But there’s one major catch with the Roku Streaming Stick: It only works with a certain type of TV set, one that includes an MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) port.

While Roku’s CEO Anthony Wood says that the company expects to see more of these TVs on the market within the next year, there are currently around 50 sets and displays sold in the U.S. that are MHL-equipped. And, of those, Roku has certified only a few brands that work really well with the device: Insignia, Apex and Hitachi.

In order to test the stick, I had to shift my regular TV set to the floor and set up a television that Roku delivered to me: A 55-inch, HD Insignia TV that costs $900. Normally, I wouldn’t replace my existing TV with another one just because I wanted to attach a $100 gadget to it, and I’m guessing a lot of consumers would feel the same.

But the plug-and-play stick is convenient. It’s a few inches long and weighs just three ounces. It’s bright purple, and plugs directly into a color-coded MHL port on the backside of MHL TV sets.

It has no wires, and one of the benefits of this technology is that the MHL port actually charges the product while it’s plugged in, so there’s no need to charge the stick at any point. The set-up took all of 10 minutes: I plugged the stick into the TV, authenticated the device and registered with Roku on the Web.

Roku says it has more than 500 apps, which it calls “channels,” on its platform, including popular apps like Netflix, MLB.tv, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Vudu and Facebook. Both the Roku XS 2 box and the stick come with Angry Birds, which can be played using Roku’s motion-sensor remote.

Over the past week, I’ve watched a lot of shows and movies through the Roku Streaming Stick, mostly through Netflix, Amazon and Vudu (the last two charge per movie rental or download, unlike Netflix’s monthly subscription). I also listened to NPR radio, streamed music through Pandora and logged into Roku’s bare-bones Facebook app, which lets users view photos and videos, but doesn’t allow for status updates.

The media-streaming quality was very good. Occasionally, HD movies would pause to buffer, but never for longer than a few seconds. Only one movie channel I checked out, Sony’s Crackle channel, paused consistently, to play short ads. This was annoying, but then again, the Crackle movies were free.

One app missing from Roku’s offerings is YouTube. I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit using Apple TV to watch YouTube videos with friends. Roku also doesn’t have a Web browser. And this might seem obvious, but you can’t watch media you’ve purchased through iTunes or the Google app store on Roku’s device, either.

Lastly, cable-authentication apps that require a user to have a cable subscrition — like HBOGo or Epix — will only work on Roku with some cable providers. For example, DirectTV and Comcast do not support HBOGo on Roku. Time Warner Cable, however, does.

As with other set-top boxes, text input is clumsy: You use the arrow keys on the remote to select individual letters of the alphabet. But you don’t actually need the Roku Streaming Stick’s own remote unless you want to play Angry Birds or other games that use motion control. The Stick is compatible with the MHL TV’s remote, so I could access and navigate Roku by pressing the “Home” button on the Insignia TV’s remote and using those arrow buttons.

Being able to just press “Home” to get to the Roku stick was joyfully simple compared to the usual process of searching my TV inputs for different devices I’ve connected to it.

Roku also offers new iOS and Android apps that control the Roku Streaming Stick. Much like Apple’s AirPlay feature, I could use the Roku mobile app to stream the many photos stored on my iPhone directly to the TV set, provided that both devices were connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

The Roku Streaming Stick successfully compresses the experience of a Web video box into a tiny, convenient device, but it comes with a lot of “ifs.” Even Roku says that its Stick may eventually be sold as a bundle rather than as a singular gadget. If you prefer Roku’s channel offerings over other set-top boxes, if you have an MHL-compatible television set and if you’re not planning on upgrading to a high-end smart TV with built-in Internet capabilities anytime soon, it’s a great device. Otherwise, right now it’s a niche product.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121022/rokus-new-streaming-stick-for-tvs-lets-you-ditch-the-set-top-box/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20121019/15-things-about-aaron-levie/ http://allthingsd.com/20121019/15-things-about-aaron-levie/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 22:42:28 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://allthingsd.com/?p=261941 He founded his wildly successful start-up in his dorm room before dropping out and moving to the Bay Area to work on it full-time, he’s regularly referred to as one of the top entrepreneurs under 30, and he looks enough like Jesse Eisenberg to satisfy a movie audience. But unlike Mark Zuckerberg, Box CEO Aaron Levie’s favorite guilty pleasure is Twitter.

Below, Levie answers 15 of our questions — hopefully enough to satisfy an online audience.

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it).
Inventing the mainframe.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
The three Ps: Poverty, Politics, Phablets.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
If by “buy CDs” you mean listen to Spotify and Pandora, and by “rent DVDs” you mean stream from Netflix, then yes.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Hopefully something else having to do with cloud computing. Nearly every market that exists today is a fraction of its potential size, creating new opportunities in every direction. So I’d want to still be doing that, or grinding it out as an astronaut.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Building — and working with — the team at Box.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
My trusty iPhone 4. I know, I’m an embarrassment to the technology community.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Thomas Watson Sr., Harry Houdini, or Groucho Marx.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
https://twitter.com/larryellison. Followed by Box.com right after that.

What was your first computer?
Not a Mac, and I blame my Dad for that to this day.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
Whatever gets you there fastest.

What was the last book you read?
“The HP Way,” a marginally ironic read given the past couple of years, but I’m pretty bullish on Meg. I’m now reading “The Ultimate Entrepreneur” about Ken Olsen and DEC.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Twitter.

What was your biggest most recent purchase?
A bookshelf-like structure from IKEA.

Whom do you idolize?
Too many people to count. I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My height. And my ability to stay organized.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121019/15-things-about-aaron-levie/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20121019/how-many-techies-does-it-take-to-elect-a-president-t4o-launches-innovator-series-videos-for-obama/ http://allthingsd.com/20121019/how-many-techies-does-it-take-to-elect-a-president-t4o-launches-innovator-series-videos-for-obama/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:00:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=261707

A large group of tech luminaries — including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Path’s Dave Morin, JLab’s Judy Estrin, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark and Box’s Aaron Levie — are part of the launch of a series of online videos today aimed at talking up U.S. innovation and, in the process, touting the reelection of President Barack Obama.

The slick “Innovator Series” of about two dozen videos comes out of Technology for Obama — or T4O, for short — and plans to feature daily short interviews with entrepreneurs and tech execs. Along with touting the need for innovation, the group talks about their “personal lessons of success and failure,” which then sidles politically into “their views on why they believe President Obama is the right leader for increasing innovation and moving the country forward.”

The patter is in that vein, such as this quote from Hoffman:

“Innovation is our key differentiator in terms of competitive business model of the U.S. in the world. We need to continue to attract the best people to build interesting businesses, products, services here.”

CNET co-founder and former CEO Shelby Bonnie, who recently joined investment firm Allen & Co., did most of the interviews for the T4O effort.

“Each of us was looking at what we could do and found that this group had a deep-seated belief in the importance of innovation and ability to innovate in this country,” he said of the video offerings, which were shot mostly out of the Obama campaign offices in San Francisco. “The consistent theme we wanted to get out is that President Obama gets that and believe in innovation.”

No word yet on what GOP geeks — such as Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman or Cisco’s John Chambers — are up to for former Gov. Mitt Romney — but until then, here is a sizzle reel of the T4O interviews:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121019/how-many-techies-does-it-take-to-elect-a-president-t4o-launches-innovator-series-videos-for-obama/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121016/boxee-looks-to-reinvent-itself-with-cloud-based-dvr-box/ http://allthingsd.com/20121016/boxee-looks-to-reinvent-itself-with-cloud-based-dvr-box/#comments Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:00:18 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=260289 Boxee, the New York-based start-up that introduced the irregular-shaped Boxee Box for streaming Web video to TV sets, is betting with its new box that users are going to want to DVR a lot of basic TV — that’s right, real TV.

The company’s new device — simply called Boxee TV, not Boxee Box 2 — still works like the previous Boxee Box in that it connects to your Internet router at home and streams Web apps, like Pandora or Netflix, to your TV. It’s still made by D-Link, Boxee’s manufacturing partner on the first box.

But Boxee TV also includes a DVR service that records TV content from free, over-the-air channels patched through the box’s dual tuner — provided that users are in one of eight markets where the TV can be recorded through Boxee. It’s also supposed to transmit unencrypted cable. So if you have a cable TV subscription, you’ll be able to plug Boxee TV into the wall and watch those channels.

What sets this device apart from other set top boxes, Boxee says, is that the DVR is entirely cloud based. There’s no internal storage on Boxee TV; the content is stored in the user’s cloud account.

The new Boxee TV costs $99, nearly half the price of the original $179 Boxee Box, and ships November 1. Boxee’s DVR service, which uses Amazon’s cloud servers, will cost $15 a month for unlimited cloud storage.

Boxee also said it would no longer make, but will continue to offer maintenance for, the original Boxee Box and its short-lived Live TV dongle.

Boxee’s earlier device options. The company will no longer produce the original Boxee Box.

The start-up, lead by Avner Ronen, has come a long way from its early days, when it first offered a Web app for video viewing on a laptop, then put out a designated set top box, followed by a live TV plug-in “dongle” that combined Web video apps with basic TV channels, to its Cloudee cloud service, all of which has culminated in the full-fledged system it’s unveiling now.

Along the way, Boxee has managed to piss off everyone from cable operators to Hulu to Mark Cuban, but now insists the box is a good thing for cable operators. In fact, Ronen said in an interview with AllThingsD, he’d like to do more work with cable operators, especially smaller ones, to perhaps offer an alternative option to the clunky, subsidized cable boxes consumers normally get with their basic or premium cable packages.

The hybrid device is a bit of a head-scratcher, so here are some basic pros and cons of it, based on an hour-long hands-on with it:

Pros:

• Boxee offers unlimited DVR storage — for a fee, of course. No more deleting never-watched shows because you’ve run out of space and can’t record new episodes.
• Cord-cutters or cord-never-getters can now put Boxee in the same price category as a Roku or Apple TV, and still get a few basic TV channels to boot, plus the DVR, plus Web apps (provided they have monthly Internet service).
• Cord-shavers who want to keep their cable subscriptions for premium content, like Showtime’s “Homeland” or ESPN, now have another inexpensive option for a supplemental or second-TV Web video box.
• Users who have been getting free basic TV through antennae can buy and connect the Boxee to coaxial cable and opt into its $15 a month DVR service.
• In terms of design, Boxee has grown out of its gangly phase and is now a lightweight rectangular box that should fit easily on console shelves.

Cons:

• Boxee has put a lot of emphasis on offering free TV channels — both broadcast and basic cable — through the device, but the number of free TV channels that are available will depend on which markets users are in. This could range anywhere from zero to a handful of channels to a couple dozen. And channels can be encrypted (read: made unavailable) by cable operators at any time, but Boxee says it has been working with cable operators to elude that problem.
• Only about 30 percent of U.S. households across 8 markets will be able to use DVR on Boxee TV.
• Hulu and Hulu Plus still aren’t available on Boxee.
• Boxee also doesn’t support cable authentication apps. So let’s say, for example, you’re still paying for your premium cable subscription — you won’t be able to access HBOGo or Comcast Xfinity through Boxee.
• Boxee TV doesn’t offer a basic Web browser.
• Boxee has ditched that fantastic Qwerty remote, the one that kept you from having to painstakingly search for TV show and movie titles using a set of arrow keys. I asked Avner about this; he said going back to a standard remote kept costs down, and pointed out that users can do most of their searching on Boxee’s compatible Web and mobile apps. But I really liked that little remote.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121016/boxee-looks-to-reinvent-itself-with-cloud-based-dvr-box/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20121009/liveblogging-box-makes-all-the-clouds-compatible/ http://allthingsd.com/20121009/liveblogging-box-makes-all-the-clouds-compatible/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:40:20 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=258303 Box CEO Aaron Levie is a speaker-circuit favorite, known as the enterprise guy who keeps people awake and laughing. Today he takes a stage of his own making, at the second annual BoxWorks developer conference at the ornate Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.

Levie will be debuting an array of partnerships with Oracle, NetSuite, Concur, Jive, FuzeBox, Cornerstone, SugarCRM, Zendesk and others, where Box has developed hooks to HTML5-ify what they are doing, so customers of these applications can use all their tools together, instead of in different silos. The company calls this Box Embed, and it was announced earlier this morning.

His openers today are venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and eBay CEO John Donahoe.

8:41 am: Andreessen and Donahoe kick off with some political jokes (the eBay CEO’s wife, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, is U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council). Andreessen notes that he joined the eBay board shortly after Donahoe was hired.

Andreessen hypes recent eBay progress, including mobile growth, acquisitions of Milo and RedLaser, and the spinoff of Skype (a big deal for him at Andreessen Horowitz). Then he talks about the great stock price. Eventually, he may let Donahoe talk, but we’ll see.

8:48 am: Donahoe says that five years ago it was clear that the eBay user experience was behind. “I started using the ‘T’ word,” he said — with the eBay turnaround being user experience, pricing, policies.

Andreessen asks about company culture. Donahoe says he has replaced 80 of the top 100 people at eBay. The outsiders bring objectivity and new skills. “You can’t change the culture unless you change the people,” he says.



Donahoe says that even though he’s not a founder-CEO, he can inject that energy into the company with acquisitions where the founders take leadership roles — like how 25-year-old Milo CEO Jack Abraham is now head of all of eBay Local, and Zong CEO David Marcus now leads PayPal.

Andreessen sets up two competing mobile theories: Peter Thiel versus Aneel Bhusri of Workday. Thiel says the Yelp of mobile with be Yelp, etc. Meanwhile, Bhusri says mobile is an architecture change that’s fundamental, so there will be new leaders. Which do you believe, he asks Donahoe — clearly a loaded question, considering that eBay is the e-commerce incumbent. EBay apps have been downloaded 100 million times, Donahoe replies. And payments are going to change more in the next three years than they did in the past 20.

9:08 am: Andreessen: Talk about the cloud. Oh, maybe they are going to finally talk about stuff that’s more related to Box!

Donahoe says eBay has always been a cloud company, but it’s increasingly so. He uses Box on his iPad, and his product team loves it, too. Infomercial time!

9:14 am: Donahoe says his big takeaway for the next five years is: “Most people are underestimating how fundamentally the shopping and paying experience is going to change.”

9:17 am: Time for Aaron Levie, who leaps out doing the “Gangnam Style” dance.

He says Box started in 2005 with the goal of helping people manage content from any device.

Today, Box has more than 140,000 active businesses, 14 million users, and 92 percent of the Fortune 500. That’s more than double a year ago.

Now he’s doing some light stand-up about the state of the tech industry. “Larry Ellison joined Twitter, did exactly one tweet, then celebrated by buying an island.”

Box works faster than the competition, Levie says, as much as 10 million times faster in Tokyo. This part is vague, but there is a pretty map.

Box has had a 10x increase in iOS usage, and a 30x increase on Android in the past year.



And there’s been a 72 percent increase in the number of businesses that have taken the product through their entire enterprise.

9:27 am: Levie’s big themes — and these are shockers — are: social, cloud and mobile.

Microsoft was founded around the idea of a PC on every desk in every home — Levie notes this was before his time, though not his COO’s. The challenges were that you needed to move data around physically; it was hard to collaborate; there were lots of error messages; the limit of client-server was met. So now it’s time for post-PC, where we can share and work from anywhere.



Now, instead of a computer on every desk, it’s a computer in every hand.

So Box wants to integrate the world of users and the world of IT.

9:40 am: Following a customer video, Levie says he’s getting to the news, which is around getting to and sharing data in more easy and elegant ways.

Box had never really highlighted search — some users didn’t even know Box had it. A new version of the site moves search to the top center of the page. Levie says his own Box account has access to 100,000 files, so search is critical for him. In the redesign, users will also be able to “Like” content and use other social Facebook-y features.

Users can do things like create Microsoft Word documents directly from the site, and there’s more of a sense of a company network where anyone with an email domain on the same URL can work together.

Levie talks about how customers often feel pressured to buy from one particular vendor. He’s after Larry Ellison again, showing an image of Darth Vader while talking about lock-in.

So Box is launching Box Embed (as I noted way up top in the intro) with 10 partners: Concur, Cornerstone, DocuSign, Eloqua, Zendesk, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM and FuzeBox.

Demo shows how all this sharing, creating and viewing stuff can be built directly into NetSuite.

Folks from NetSuite and Jive come up to talk about how working together with Box is great. But still, it’s clear that everyone wants to be a platform, not an app on someone else’s platform.

10:10 am: On to mobile. The number of enterprise-relevant apps has doubled in the past year, Levie says. Given how fast mobile devices change, and how pervasive they are, companies should embrace BYOD (bring your own device), he argues. So Box is adding to its existing OneCloud platform for mobile (launched six months ago).

50 percent of Box traffic is now from mobile, which is a big increase.

So today there are 100 more new OneCloud apps, doubling the available amount.

More demos: This time, Mindjet jumping between iPad and Web app.

The new Box vision, says Levie, is to give people the ability to work with anyone, anywhere, from any device.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121009/liveblogging-box-makes-all-the-clouds-compatible/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120919/salesforce-ceo-benioff-has-lots-of-new-things-to-launch-today/ http://allthingsd.com/20120919/salesforce-ceo-benioff-has-lots-of-new-things-to-launch-today/#comments Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:39:16 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=251970 Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff will soon take the stage at his company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. His remarks, and the company’s announcements, will essentially set the table for the company’s agenda for the next year or so. Here’s a rundown of what he’ll be talking about.

Chatterbox: This is the offering that Benioff telegraphed last week, and which raised so many eyebrows. Salesforce calls it the “Dropbox for the Enterprise,” laying aside the fact that one called Box already exists. Anyway, the point is to “manage and share files in the context of business,” as the press release says. Once you get employees collaborating via social tools, they’re going to want to share files they can work on together within that context. Box, in which Salesforce is an investor, is one target, as is Dropbox. But so is Microsoft’s SharePoint.

Salesforce Identity: Once you get into the business of integrating a bunch of cloud services into one place, you need to manage all the sign-on credentials involved. This is the reason that the start-up Okta exists. Salesforce is essentially aiming to compete with Okta.

Work.com: Remember when cloud-based human resource and talent-management software companies were being acquired at a rapid pace, in part because of the rise of Workday? Salesforce got into the act, too, by acquiring a tiny HR cloud player called Rypple. Work.com is its new name.

Salesforce Touch: One of the earliest companies to see the potential for Apple’s iPad as a tool for use in the enterprise was Salesforce.com. It had early versions of its core customer-relationship management applications in the App Store, and has since expanded its reach to Android and other platforms. Today, it’s kicking that commitment to mobile up a notch. Salesforce Touch uses HTML5, allowing it to work easily on iOS and Android tablets and phones; it is optimized for touch interface. The point is to make Salesforce easy to get at when on the go — and sales people always are on the go — so they can take advantage of just a few minutes of downtime and get things done from a mobile device.

Chatter Communities for Partners: There are a lot of reasons why a company might want to build a social community. The classic example I can think of is a videogame company that wants to support people working their way through the levels of a tough game. But you might want to set up a social network of vendors you buy from, or distributors who resell your products, or third parties who support what you sell. The idea is to make creating that community easy and full-featured from the start, so there’s not so much expense and effort involved. It’s built on Chatter, which is Salesforce’s enterprise social and collaboration platform.

Data.com Social Key: It’s one thing to ask a sales lead what he thinks about something, but quite another to keep track of what he or she tweets or blogs about on that same topic, and often it can yield some insight to help close a deal. Up to now, Data.com has been Salesforce’s go-to offering for background intelligence on sales leads, combining things like Dun & Bradstreet profiles with contact information from Jigsaw. Social Key brings information gleaned from Twitter and blogs and YouTube videos into the mix.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce’s two biggest acquisitions in recent memory are Buddy Media and Radian6. With the Marketing Cloud, Salesforce aims to combine the strengths of the two, to draw together disparate strings of conversations with customers via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and online communities. It also helps create and manage marketing campaigns within those communities, and helps to track the results of those efforts.

Heroku Enterprise for Java: Oracle’s Java is the most widely used programming language in use in the Enterprise. Today, Heroku, the cloud-based software-development service that Salesforce acquired in 2010 , is for the first time embracing the community of Java developers. Getting a Java app built means assembling a bunch of different tools piecemeal from different sources. The new Java service gets software developers fully ready to get right to work with a single click, which saves a lot of time and effort, and thus reduces the cost of development. One other feature sure to be popular with the developers is integration with Atlassian, a collaboration tool that is geared toward the needs of programmers.

It’s worth nothing that Salesforce shares have been trading up considerably in the last month or so, in part because of the anticipation of Dreamforce, but also on Salesforce’s strong results. Today, the shares are up by $1.09, to $157.38, which amounts to a 61 percent increase this year to date. Say what you will about the Salesforce Kool-Aid, its shareholders like the taste.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120919/salesforce-ceo-benioff-has-lots-of-new-things-to-launch-today/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120919/why-okta-ceo-todd-mckinnon-likes-having-salesforce-com-as-a-competitor/ http://allthingsd.com/20120919/why-okta-ceo-todd-mckinnon-likes-having-salesforce-com-as-a-competitor/#comments Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:40:32 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=251907 Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is a few hours away from taking the stage at his company’s huge Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, which appears to have taken over the city. Last night, I happened to drive by City Hall, and saw that an area outside it had been converted into a huge stage that will accommodate, among other things, a performance by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, marking the first shot in a sort of battle of the early-’90s rock bands between Salesforce and Oracle.

There’s another drama playing out ahead of Benioff’s keynote, concerning what he may or may not say about a series of features and services called Chatterbox that Salesforce is launching. Last week, Benioff surprised a lot of people by declaring at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he was gearing up to launch services that would compete with Box, the enterprise cloud file-sharing and collaboration service, and also with Okta, a cloud identity-management service.

Aaron Levie, Box’s CEO, said he had seen the service coming for a few months now, and that it was, in a sense, inevitable. Salesforce’s Chatter social enterprise service would in time need a robust file-sharing capability built into it, anyway.

Since then, I’ve checked in with Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta. His reaction was pretty close to that of Levie’s. He has known that it was coming for awhile, and Salesforce had to do it anyway. “Salesforce is realizing that, with the cloud and a mobile work force, managing the identity layer is a key part of it,” McKinnon told me Monday. “They finally woke up to it. It’s a little unnerving when someone as big as Salesforce gets into your space, but it makes it clear to our customers and partners that this is a big deal we’re working on, so in that sense, it’s a big validation.”

With so many companies adopting cloud services and creating accounts for employees on all of them, McKinnon left Salesforce, where he had headed up its engineering efforts, to start Okta. The service gathers up all those cloud account credentials and passwords and creates a single sign-on for all of them, making them easy to manage. Salesforce.com is one of the 1,351 services it works with. Others include Box, Google Apps, NetSuite, Workday and Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

McKinnon takes some encouragement from the data he sees courtesy of his own service. Offering a service for unified sign-ons makes Okta sort of a barometer for the cloud ecosystem, he says. Chatter, Salesforce’s social service, is more or less central to Salesforce’s efforts to unify its many offerings, and is the company’s answer to services like Jive and Yammer that have sought to make the process of collaborating within a company a little more akin to using Facebook.

Salesforce’s promotion of Chatter helped Jive and Yammer seem more legitimate. “Salesforce put all this money and effort behind Chatter, but it didn’t kill Yammer or Jive, it only accelerated their business,” McKinnon said. Jive IPO’d last year, and Yammer was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion over the summer. “Once Salesforce comes out with its identity management product, I think more people will look at us.”

So, how much of a competitive threat does McKinnon see from Salesforce? Some, but announcements aren’t products. And there’s the rub. Salesforce, McKinnon says, has a habit of making big announcements from the stage at Dreamforce, and then not following up, or at least not following up to the extent that the pronouncements from the keynote stage would seem to imply. “Salesforce is in many ways a marketing-driven company,” he says. “We’ll have to see how they execute. The real proof will be in how they follow up this Dreamforce announcement.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120919/why-okta-ceo-todd-mckinnon-likes-having-salesforce-com-as-a-competitor/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120917/checking-in-with-the-natty-vcs-of-socialcapital-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120917/checking-in-with-the-natty-vcs-of-socialcapital-video/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:40:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=251092

Recently, I paid a visit to the very elegant yet still hipster offices of Social+Capital Partnership in Palo Alto, Calif.

As many know already, the venture fund was founded last year by the dashing-in-Silicon-Valley-at-least Chamath Palihapitiya — the former Facebook and AOL exec, who also did a stint at the very traditional Mayfield Fund and is a competitive poker player, too.

After Palihapitiya started Social+Capital with a $300 million kitty, he famously declared — in a geek version of Frank Sinatra — that he would do it his way with his own money and funds from a bunch of other Richie Riches like him.

“Venture capital firms tend to focus on having large amounts of assets under management and collecting fixed fees,” Palihapitiya said in an interview with the New York Times a year ago. “That creates perverse incentives, because you’re focused on deploying as much capital as fast as possible. I want to be antithetical to all of that.”

Palihapitiya certainly started out doing that, with a noisy kerfuffle over his objections to how a funding was taking place at Airbnb, in which founders were sucking money out while the employees could not.

Eventually, that was water under the bridge, and Palihapitiya ended up investing in the online home rental service.

Thus, a year out, it was time to check in on the firm, which mostly focuses on health care, education and financial services. As Palihapitiya promised, Social+Capital has indeed invested in a range of very interesting start-ups so far, such as diabetes tracker Glooko and Web-design training service Treehouse.

And the firm already had a big win from its investment in social enterprise software start-up Yammer, which was bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion this June.

Most recently, Palihapitiya said that Social+Capital just invested in Box, and also just backed the founders of Jive — Dave Hersh and Sam Lawrence — who are building a Salesforce killer called CrushPath.

Here’s a video I did with Palihapitiya and two Social+Capital partners, Ted Maidenberg and Mamoon Hamid, in the now-slick former warehouse where the firm operates along with some of its start-ups.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120917/checking-in-with-the-natty-vcs-of-socialcapital-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120917/box-gives-uploads-a-speed-boost-isnt-worried-about-salesforce/ http://allthingsd.com/20120917/box-gives-uploads-a-speed-boost-isnt-worried-about-salesforce/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:53:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=251186 The Internet is only as good and efficient as your connection to it. In the course of daily use, it’s difficult to remember how exactly it works. Messages and files you send and receive can take radically different paths to get to their destination, depending on the conditions of the network at any given time.

But when you’re a company with a lot of industrial-grade Internet infrastructure, including, say, a few of your own data centers, the rules can change a little bit, and you have the option of being a little more selective in determining how your data flows. And when you’re the Enterprise cloud and file-sharing and collaboration outfit Box, you turn that advantage into something your far-flung customers can take advantage of.

When file are big — and in business, they always are — and you need to share something, uploads can be a time-consuming pain in the neck. So Box today launched a network of what it calls Box Accelerators. A network of servers distributed around the world, they serve as outposts for Box’s primary data centers. Box customers around the world will be able to upload to these Accelerators, and thus speed things up, say CEO Aaron Levie. In some cases, Box is bringing to bear its relationship with Amazon Web Services, and that company’s global footprint.

“We’re making a big push on international expansion,” Levie told me in a conversation at Box’s Los Altos, Calif., headquarters last week. Over the summer, the company opened a new office in London, and announced plans to hire 100 people there, in order to double down on opportunities it sees in Europe.

Media companies, health-care companies, and companies and institutions engaged in scientific research often have to move large, cumbersome files around in order to make them available for collaboration with colleagues. The primary factor in slowing down that process is distance. For all the vaunted rhetoric of how the Internet makes the world a smaller place, when it comes to moving gigabytes or more at a time, the one thing standing in your way is the distance between you and the server you’re uploading to.

The network of Accelerators are intended to shorten that distance. Box customers will get a choice of servers closest to them, and those servers in turn will have an easier time of communicating with Box’s main servers at its network of data centers, including a newish-one in Las Vegas, and another two in California.

The service is going live in nine different regions around the world on every continent except Africa, and is available free of charge for existing Box customers. And while today the network is specified only for uploads, it will in time enhance the speed of downloads as well, Levie told me. And it will also be addressable by Box’s API, meaning that if you’re building an application that takes advantage of Box’s network, the accelerators will be available for use.

I took advantage of a few minutes with Levie to ask him about his reaction to last week’s disclosure by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he’s close to announcing a service called Chatterbox that will essentially compete with Box. Benioff will likely talk in detail about Chatterbox in his keynote address at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on Wednesday. Expect collaboration and file-sharing to become part of Salesforce’s Chatter social platform soon.

Levie said he’s known about Salesforce’s intentions in this area for about four months to six months. “We’ve known about it, frankly they kind of have to do it,” he said. “If you think about Chatter, and Jive, Yammer, that kind of social world, it necessarily has to connect up to your content. And Salesforce is trying to carve out the space that Chatter can play in. It’s not enough to be a standalone social platform. Salesforce has basically realized that Chatter has to be able to solve more problems for the enterprise before they can have a serious conversation with a CIO.”

Content that companies share both internally and with partners, vendors, suppliers and customers has to be enhanced with social collaboration features. This is the very essence of companies like Jive and Yammer, and Salesforce’s product in this area known as Chatter. “Salesforce will take what it has as a social platform and add content to it,” Levie said. “What we’re doing is more like the inverse. We have a content platform, and we bring social aspects to it, where relevant. We work with all of the social platforms out there, and we’re going to be building more collaborative capabilities into Box.”

You might think this would be a tad awkward, given the fact that Salesforce is an investor in Box, and is even said to have offered to acquire Box last year, for north of $500 million.

Not at all, Levie says. “There are lots of precedents for companies being both investors, partners and competitors.” To me, it sounds like a diplomatic way of saying “game on.”

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