Wittlebee, a monthly kids’ clothing club that was incubated at Los Angeles area “technology studio” Science, has gotten $2.5 million in funding.

Much like another Science start-up, Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee ships a custom box of high-quality kids’ clothes to members.

The seed round of funding was led by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, Crosslink, and Morado.

Wittlebee’s CEO and founder Sean Percival said the money would be used to create a private-label clothing line.

Wittlebee uses stay-at-home parents, who have used the site, as customer service reps. The start-up sends a new order of children’s apparel each month, including onesies, t-shirts, leggings, socks and pants, upping the sizes as the kid grows.

In other words, kind of like a never-ending online Gap.

Here’s the official press release on Wittlebee’s funding:

Wittlebee Raises $2.5 Million Seed Funding Lead By Rincon

Children’s clothing membership service to begin manufacturing private label designs to keep up with growing customer demand

Los Angeles, CA. April 4, 2012 — Wittlebee (www.Wittlebee.com), the affordable children’s clothing monthly membership service backed by technology studio Science Inc., today announces the company raised $2.5 million in seed funding leady by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, CrossLink, and Morado. Jim Andelman, co-founder and General Partner at Rincon, joins Wittlebee’s board alongside Michael Jones, founder and CEO of Science, and Sean Percival, Wittlebee’s founder and CEO.

Since launching less than two months ago, Wittlebee has experienced accelerated growth, in part because of Science’s track record of quickly scaling ecommerce businesses. The company will use the new investment to build out its executive team and user acquisitions.

Upon joining Wittlebee, customers are connected to a team of mom stylists who work with families to compose boxes of high-quality children’s clothing to meet individual children’s needs. Active kids in warm climates like Miami may receive appropriate t-shirts, shorts and socks whereas infants in Albany receive long-sleeve onesies and cozy pajamas.

“Wittlebee’s recent growth has been tremendous,” said Percival. “Our customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive; we are speaking to an audience of 20,000 highly engaged moms across social media who tell us they’re delighted we’re saving them time and money for all their children’s clothing needs. We plan to use Rincon’s investment to create Wittlebee’s private label clothing line that will truly showcase our commitment to high-quality practical children’s apparel.”

In the coming months, customers will receive a selection of parents’ favorite well-known brands in addition to Wittlebee’s private label. Manufactured both locally in Los Angeles and abroad, the new line represents customers’ wish-list of kids’ must-haves, from high-quality soft fabrics, to a wide color palate, to unique graphic designs. After months of research and testing apparel options through Wittlebee’s social networks, the resulting Wittlebee bespoke label will be a timeless array of apparel basics to carry kids through seasons, activities and all their lifestyle needs.

“For every investment decision we make, we care most about customer value proposition, team, and business model,” said Jim Andelman, Managing Partner at Rincon. “We’ve been tremendously impressed by parents’ positive response to Wittlebee’s offering: they love the selections, they save money and you can’t beat the convenience of clothes showing up right to your door. The e-commerce space is exploding in LA, and we’re very excited to be at the forefront with Wittlebee.”

For more on Wittlebee, please visit www.Wittlebee.com.

The problems kicked off this morning when Amazon started sending emails to select Kindle owners, alerting them to a free trial of “The Kindle Compass.”

In the email, Amazon failed to explain what “The Kindle Compass” was, and worse, implied that customers would be charged for it going forward.

An Amazon spokesperson said a second letter has been sent this evening, explaining that “The Kindle Compass” is a pilot project, and apologizing for any confusion over the price. “We built it to always be free for customers, and you will never be charged for it,” the company told its customers.

Still, the response comes hours after much of the damage had already been done.

Angry customers flooded Kindle forums, posting more than 100 complaints to topics called “Where is Kindle Compass Magazine?” and “Auto-Subscription to the Kindle Compass??”

The confusion was understandable.

In the original message, Amazon misled consumers about the terms: “If you enjoy your free trial, do nothing and your subscription will automatically continue at the monthly subscription rate.”

However, no rate was ever mentioned.

Even worse, those who contacted Amazon customer service said the reps weren’t familiar with the publication, so the best they could do was help them to unsubscribe to ensure they would not be charged. At this point, people are still confused as to what “The Kindle Compass” is all about.

A spokesperson did not return emails asking for more clarity on what the publication is, and it’s unclear how many customers were affected (not all Kindle owners received the email).

In the forums, the complaints centered on two concerns: That Amazon would sign them up for something they did not knowingly subscribe to, and that they may be charged for it.

One consumer, who used the name “Susabelle”, wrote: “I am absolutely APPALLED. Amazon, you should be completely ashamed of yourself!! An auto-subscription to a publication I’ve NEVER heard of, that you will be auto-billing me for after 14 days? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND??”

Here is the apology Amazon sent to consumers this evening:

This morning we sent you an email regarding The Kindle Compass, a new free publication built by the Kindle editorial team that we’re piloting to a small number of Kindle customers.

This email incorrectly referred to The Kindle Compass as a subscription with a free trial. We built it to always be free for customers, and you will never be charged for it. We apologize for any confusion.

If you wish to unsubscribe from the pilot for The Kindle Compass you can do so from a link in the last section of the magazine, or from the Manage Your Kindle Subscriptions page at www.amazon.com/manageyourkindlesubscriptions.

Airbnb, the San Francisco online vacation rentals start-up, said it has hired a key former Yahoo lawyer, Belinda Johnson, as its new general counsel.

The legal issues at Airbnb are both interesting and challenging, all around the new arena of global sharing or, as the company calls it, “collaborative consumption.”

Johnson is one of several recent major hires by Airbnb, which has been adding more seasoned execs to its team of late. Other recent key Airbnb hires include Monroe Labouisse as head of trust and safety and customer service, and Vivek Wagle as head of content.

Johnson left Yahoo several months ago as its deputy general counsel, after a long tenure there working on a wide variety of issues.

Among other things, she oversaw legal strategy for Yahoo’s global products, and worked on deals like its search and advertising alliance with Microsoft. Johnson came to Yahoo from its Web 1.0 acquisition of Broadcast.com, where she had served as general counsel.

She attended both college and law school at the University of Texas.

Oracle said the deal, which it expects to close late this year or early next, pending stockholder and regulatory approvals, is worth about $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. Oracle offered $43 a share for RightNow, which, according to its latest quarterly filing, had 33.2 million shares outstanding.

RightNow’s specialty is what it calls a “Customer Service Cloud,” which it says helps companies step up their customer service experience, whether they’re running a call center, a customer service Web site, or a social network.

“Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including salesforce automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud,” Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development, said in a statement. “RightNow’s leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle’s Public Cloud.”

The move is also a direct challenge to Salesforce.com, which has in recent months been emphasizing its Service Cloud as a way to enhance customer service experiences, and to find and get ahead of problems before they blow up in public.

Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher says in a research note that Oracle’s move will ratchet up competitive pressure on Salesforce. Oracle has a stronger distribution channel and will be able to push RightNow directly to its existing customer base.

That may be. But here’s probably the best thing about RightNow: Its location. RightNow is based in Bozeman, Mont., which is about as unlikely a place to find a cloud software company as one can imagine. It’s located in a stupefyingly beautiful part of the country and about two hours away from Yellowstone National Park.

I lived in a neighboring town in Idaho for a few years and once stayed the night in Bozeman. I was pleasantly surprised, and have always intended to get back. The population is about 40,000. It was once the center of America’s canned-pea industry, but is now known as one of the best places to live if you’re a skier.

Or maybe fly-fishing is more your speed. Some of the scenes in “A River Runs Through It,” the 1992 film based on the Norman Maclean novel, were filmed in and around Bozeman. Just to give you an idea, I embedded a clip from that film’s most memorable scene:

As CEO of IronPort, I wanted to be completely transparent with my entire team but my board of seasoned industry veterans was sharply opposed. They raised several serious issues: do you want to leak critical weaknesses to your competitors? Do you want to panic your employees? Do you want to completely reconstruct your culture when you go public? It was just a bad idea. However, the more that I thought about it, the more I believed that sharing absolutely everything would create massive advantages and that we should live with whatever consequences resulted.

So, after board meetings, we would assemble the company and go through every board slide. How much cash in the bank? What’s our burn rate? What are the biggest problems we are facing? Did we decide to build, buy or acquire a critical component? The first couple of go-rounds, there was dead silence. No questions — just heads nodding and a couple of blank stares. After some probing, we realized that people needed to feel comfortable speaking up, that it didn’t just come naturally. We brainstormed a bunch of different ways to get over this hurdle and here were some experiments that ultimately worked:

• We amped up the frequency of communication to all employees. Different members of the leadership team would send out weekly emails to all about customer trips, conferences attended, schedules slips and customer issues. These were written very off-the-cuff, informal and in the voice of the different leaders. I suppose we’d be all be tweeting or blogging these days.
• When an employee would reply to an email with a comment or question, we treated it like it came from a customer who deserved an immediate, detailed and thoughtful response.
• After the weekly staff meetings, we’d send out a summary of the decisions and issues to all of the directors/managers who would then share it with their teams.
• We emphasized “speaking up” as a core value at every opportunity. Our employee orientation, performance reviews and leadership training all emphasized everyone having an obligation to dissent.
• We would leave 30 minutes for questions after every all-hands meeting and then press, often uncomfortably, for no fewer than five questions from the group.

Over time, the benefits of transparency coupled with an emerging cultural norm of speaking up became more apparent:

I thought we would surface creative answers faster. When everyone had a clear understanding of the hard problems, their collective brains were on the table for parallel processing. The best information rarely sat with the senior executives but with the employees who were closest to the product and closest to the customers. And the best answers would often come from the most unlikely of places. For example, some of our most innovative features came from customer support reps identifying customers trying to use the product in ways it wasn’t intended.

Initially, it worked better than we expected. IronPort experienced zero voluntary turnover for the first three years. Because we let everyone’s head under the tent, we implicitly trusted them and it worked both ways. For instance, it wasn’t a shocker when we stopped hiring as we were raising money. Everyone knew exactly what was going on: we were running low on cash and had no idea how long the process would last.

Lastly, nobody was confused about what was important and people would point out any inconsistencies and solve them in the background. I remember standing up at a company meeting talking about how excited I was that IronPort anti-spam was working and we’d finally be able to drop our partner Brightmail. After the meeting, the accounts receivable clerk knocked on my door and said, “I thought you should know that two customers are withholding payment because IronPort anti-spam isn’t performing.” Oh crap. But much better to know about it and fix it than go on believing there wasn’t a problem.

As we were preparing to file our S-1, we hired a CFO with public company experience who insisted that we start “practicing” as a public company. Hmm — I knew that our level of transparency would have to change but what did that mean exactly? “You can’t tell everyone how we did this quarter at midnight quarter-end” and “You can’t go through all the board slides like that — too much sensitive information.” So, we started editing, putting shrouds on issues because we were afraid that the information would leak. I remember our first all-hands during the “practice” time. I felt muzzled and cautious, trying to strike a balance between our wonderful transparent culture and an intricate set of Sarbanes-Oxley rules. As it turned out, the practice was critical in working out the kinks. Here are a few things we did:

• Our CFO and I listened to dozens of public company earnings calls to get a sense for the dynamic and what information was typically shared. The best duos had the CFO as the play-by-play man and the CEO as the color commentator.
• We then staged mock earnings calls with the employees as the analysts asking the questions. This proved to be a very useful format for reining in my over-sharing and was instructive to the employees as they saw us struggle with what we could and couldn’t reveal.
• We prepared a mock earnings press release a few weeks after the quarter closed. This helped us practice keeping the numbers quiet, which was difficult because everyone wanted to know how we did at quarter-end.

Although we eventually opted for an acquisition by Cisco versus an IPO, I came to believe that our type of total transparency was a competitive weapon that applied primarily to private companies. In the end, my board members were right — we did have to limit what we shared with employees on the way to going public. That said, I believe it was much healthier to set the default to full disclosure while we were private. When you prepare for an IPO, it’s definitely a high-class problem to have to work backwards with concrete reasons to withhold information from the employees. And when that time comes, they totally understand.

Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He most recently was vice president and general manager of the security technology group for Cisco Systems. He also co-founded and was CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million.

People who do business with you want to talk about your brand wherever they happen to hang out online. That may be on a Web forum somewhere or it may be on Facebook and Twitter. A few weeks ago we saw Salesforce.com unveil its Service Cloud 3, which aims to do a lot of that, but it’s not the only game in town.

Parature, a venture-backed player in the business of what it calls the cloud-based customer-engagement software business, is today announcing a significant update it’s calling Spring 11. The point of the software is to reduce the cost and time commitment required to answer the same support questions over and over. The company added support for Facebook earlier this year, allowing customer support teams to track discussions and engage consumers there. Today it’s adding support both for Twitter and for Lithium web communities.

“Our vision here is that you have to be where your customers are,” Duke Chung, Parature founder and chief strategy officer, told me. “When we started supporting Facebook we saw a lot of traction there, but more and more we look at our business as making sure we help our customers connect to wherever they are.”

Chung says he thinks Parature is the only vendor out there able to integrate all these channels into one product. Salesforce added a lot of social aspects to Service Cloud 3, but a key piece of that is a Radian6 app for monitoring blogs and forums that is not expected to hit the Salesforce App Exchange until August of this year. Salesforce monitoring for Twitter is up and running, while Salesforce for Facebook is coming during the second quarter of this year. On balance, Parature looks ahead of Salesforce for now.

Another new feature generates two automatic answers based on the customer’s submitted question. The more you can reduce the number of one-to-one conversations, the more you reduce the overall cost of customer support.

Another new feature is the analysis of search terms. Parature users can analyze the service experience by looking at what people are searching for. That helps support personnel detect patterns and can speed up and improve support responses, plus serving as an early warning system for problems with a product or service.

Parature is backed by Accel Partners, Sierra Ventures and Valhalla Partners, and is used to support 25 million customers around the world. Its customers include language-training software company Rosetta Stone, IGN Entertainment and Hitachi.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

Posting fourth-quarter earnings this morning, Sprint said it added 1.1 million total wireless subscribers, 58,000 of them two-year contract customers. Quite a milestone for a company that hasn’t seen a gain in postpaid subscribers in 13 quarters and a sign that Sprint may finally be turning a corner. Another good sign: Postpaid churn fell to 1.86 percent from 2.11 percent in the third quarter, and prepaid churn fell to 4.93 percent from 5.32 percent. And another: For the quarter, Sprint added almost 1.1 million wireless subscribers, its best showing in nearly five years.

All welcome news, even if Sprint is still losing money. The company reported a fourth-quarter loss of $929 million, or 31 cents a share, on revenue of $8.3 billion, up from $7.9 billion a year ago. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters most recently forecast a loss of 30 cents a share on $8.15 billion in revenue. Said Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, “Sprint CEO Dan Hesse might be forgiven for the temptation to hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier that is Sprint. To his credit, he expressly declined to do so. Still, the company has at last achieved post-paid and total subscriber growth, customer service levels have improved, churn rates have been brought under control, and revenues were up.”

At $4.41, Sprint shares are up 1.15 percent in early trading as I write this.