DEMO Fall 2010 conference alumni Profitably, a provider of online business analytics software, has raised a funding round worth $1.1 million led by White Owl Capital.

Traditional business intelligence and analytics programs, such as the ones offered by Oracle and SAP, are popular with larger corporations but are typically much more expensive — too expensive for smaller businesses. That’s where Profitably steps in by offering accounting and analytics software at a much cheaper rate than larger analytics and accounting services.

The company launched an early version of its service at DEMO Fall 2010 in Santa Clara, Calif. last year — but it was an early version of the product and the team was still hard at work on a number of new features. Profitably also works extensively with Intuit to integrate with its Workplace service, a collection of apps for managing small business accounting.

“We launched a very early product, and there are just a ton of features that people want to see,” said Adam Neary, the company’s chief executive. “We just can’t write these things fast enough, so we needed to raise funds to keep this party going.”

Profitably still isn’t targeting the mom and pop stores — it’s geared toward small- and mid-sized businesses that actually need more in-depth analytics and can benefit from the service. The company is going after the problems a chief financial officer at a 40-person firm has, not the kind of problems a local delicatessen or retail store has, Neary said.

The company had raised an earlier seed funding round worth $300,000 in July last year led by North Bridge Venture Partners with angel investors David Tisch, Mark Birch and David Honig. David Mars of White Owl Capital will also join the company’s board as part of the newest funding round.

The New York, N.Y.-based company has four full-time employees and a number of contractors. It will add two engineers with the additional funding. The company has raised $1.4 million to date.

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Salesforce announced today that it has acquired Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million as part of its Cloud 2 suite of cloud applications. The company made the announcement at the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco.

Heroku helps developers streamline their Ruby on Rails web-based applications. Once a developer builds their app, they can launch it on Heroku, which then adjusts things like computing capacity and storage as needed. The community has more than 1 million developers and around 105,000 applications. Last fall, it started integrating with other services. For example, a company could launch their application on Heroku and then monitor it using services from another Rails startup, New Relic.

The company also recently raised a round of funding worth $10 million in May and has raised $15 million total after it was incubated by Y Combinator. The round was led by Ignition Partners, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital.

It’s a pretty sizable exit for a company that was founded in 2007, and another testament to how important cloud computing has become for a public company like Salesforce to pay out more than $200 million. It’s also another indication of a shift in Salesforce’s strategy to focus more on developers, as Heroku specializes in removing headaches for developers working with Ruby on Rails. Salesforce already works with VMforce, which similarly helps Java developers run their applications natively on Salesforce’s cloud application environment Force.com.

Tags: acquisition, cloud computing, ruby on rails

Companies: Heroku, salesforce

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices is not going to be up for sale any time soon, its chief executive, Dirk Meyer, said today in response to Oracle’s recent interest in making acquisitions in the chip-manufacturing sector.

But the AMD executive said the company would listen to any potential propositions that would be good for shareholders, according to a report from Reuters. Meyer made the comments at an industry conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said his company would be on the lookout for acquisitions in the chip-manufacturing sector to help bolster its computer hardware portfolio. He made the comments at the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference last month. ARM holdings was the most recent subject of buyout speculation from Oracle — which spurred a bit of buying in the stock market about two weeks ago.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD is the second largest supplier of chips on the x86 architecture — which Intel also manufactures on — that appear in most PCs and servers. But the recent explosion of popularity in the mobile space has led to greater demand for low-power chips like Apple’s A4 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon, which are manufactured on the ARM architecture.

AMD investors were largely unfazed by Meyer’s statement, with shares of AMD only down about a third of a percent to $6.84 after the bell.

Companies: Amd, Arm Holdings, Oracle

People: Dirk Meyer, Larry Ellsion

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices is not going to be up for sale any time soon, its chief executive, Dirk Meyer, said today in response to Oracle’s recent interest in making acquisitions in the chip-manufacturing sector.

But the AMD executive said the company would listen to any potential propositions that would be good for shareholders, according to a report from Reuters. Meyer made the comments at an industry conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said his company would be on the lookout for acquisitions in the chip-manufacturing sector to help bolster its computer hardware portfolio. He made the comments at the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference last month. ARM holdings was the most recent subject of buyout speculation from Oracle — which spurred a bit of buying in the stock market about two weeks ago.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD is the second largest supplier of chips on the x86 architecture — which Intel also manufactures on — that appear in most PCs and servers. But the recent explosion of popularity in the mobile space has led to greater demand for low-power chips like Apple’s A4 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon, which are manufactured on the ARM architecture.

AMD investors were largely unfazed by Meyer’s statement, with shares of AMD only down about a third of a percent to $6.84 after the bell.

Companies: Amd, Arm Holdings, Oracle

People: Dirk Meyer, Larry Ellsion

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Nokia announced today that it will acquire the San Francisco, Calif.-based mobile analytics firm Motally for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2010.

Motally specializes in analytics for both mobiles websites and apps on the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Android. With the acquisition, Motally’s service will be adapted for mobile platforms that Nokia uses like Symbian, Meego, Qt, and Java.

Its analytics allows both mobile web developers and app makers to get a better sense of how users interact with their mobile offerings. In March, the company enabled a feature called 2-Way Communication for its iPhone app analytics that allowed developers to make Motally-specific settings changes without resubmitting apps for approval. The feature also works for both BlackBerry and Android app analytics.

Former VentureBeat writer Paul Boutin explains the feature:

Previously, if an app built with Motally’s software toolkit transmitted data to its maker from an iPhone, Motally’s API would respond with a simple message saying, “OK, got it.” With 2-Way Communication — can we just call it 2WC? — the app’s maker can send marching orders back to the app that tell it to change Motally-specific settings for tracking and debugging the app.

Earlier this year, it launched an API for uploading and downloading large data sets for analysis. The company brought on former Nielsen VP John Forese as its CEO in March.

Motally was founded in 2008 and currently has eight employees. The company was one of twenty that was featured at our MobileBeat 2010 conference.

Tags: Analytics, Android, iPhone, meego, Symbian

Companies: Motally, nokia

People: John Forese

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