Datameer, a company that allows users to analyze massive amounts of data without technical know-how, today announced a second round of funding for $9.25 million. The money will be used to hire additional employees for its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

The company created a user dashboard to easily feed and analyze data into Apache Hadoop, an open-source software that processes large amounts of data sets and spits out analytics as well as reporting. The benefit of the tool comes to those that don’t have a technical background and thus wouldn’t be able to use Apache Hadoop.

Companies in several industries have needs to process large amounts of data, including

Social analytics firm Claritics has raised a $1.5 million round as it tries to help social game and app developers analyze their data and reap more money from their efforts.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Claritics calls its work “social intelligence.” Claritics has been testing its cloud-based analytics with partners that range from game companies to utilities and media companies. It’s all about getting enough data and organizing it in a way that it becomes “actionable.”

The company raised the round from Cervin Ventures and TiE Angels. Raj Pai is the chief executive. The company will use the money to expand its sales and marketing and to improve its product.

The vision for the company is to leverage the immediacy of the social web and the rich profile and behavioral data available to create automated processes around it. That allows developers to optimize their reach, retain users, and launch revenue campaigns on the fly. The data become useful not just for looking back but for predicting the future, Pai said.

Rivals include Kontagent and Mixpanel in games as well as Omniture and Webtrends in the broader analytics business. Claritics hopes to reach beyond social game companies to the broader market of social commerce, said Neeraj Gupta, managing director of Cervin Ventures. He said that companies have to harness the incredible amount of data available and make immediate changes to their content or marketing campaigns. Claritics is one of 50 companies chosen to present at TiECon, which takes place in Santa Clara on May 13 and May 14.

Claritics’ platform has been in private beta testing with a number of media, Facebook app, and game companies — including Grab Games, ChaYoWo Games and Hallmark’s Social Calendar. The company was founded in 2010 and has around 15 to 20 employees.

Tags: Analytics, TiEcon

Companies: cervin ventures, Claritics, Tie Angels

People: Raj Pai

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

AVOS, the new and upcoming startup by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has announced the purchase of Tap11, an analytics platform for social media campaigns.

A spinoff from Zannel, a mobile social networking startup founded in 2006, Tap11 lets marketers monitor and measure real-time engagement of their campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. It gathers its data by having access to tools such as Twitter’s Firehose, which provides partners access to the site’s 90 million tweets posted everyday.

The platform has managed to partner with 500 major brands and media agencies over time, also being recently selected as a Top 6 app at Twitter’s Chirp conference.

CEO Adam Zbar will stay on as head of business operations and strategy, while CTO Braxton Woodham will become head of engineering at AVOS, also doubling as a strong talent acquisition for its new owner.

As to how this might tie in with their upcoming venture, Hurley said in a statement that his startup shares a “vision to create the world’s best platform for users to save, share, and discover new content. With the acquisition of Tap11, we will be able to provide consumer and enterprise users with powerful tools to publish and analyze their links’ impact in real-time.”

Less than two weeks ago, the duo also announced the purchase of social bookmarking site Delicious from Yahoo, which according to a leaked slideshow was supposedly in the process of “sunsetting” at its previous home.

Tags: Analytics, content, Discovery, Social Media

Companies: Avos, Tap11, YouTube, Zannel

People: Adam Zbar, Braxton Woodham, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Wells Fargo CFO Howard Atkin informed people last week that he was resigning from the firm, in announcement that employees and regulators apparently did not see coming (even hours prior, senior executives were said to be “aware” of Atkins’ plan). Today Chris Whalen has a theory.

Whalen, analyst at Institutional Risk Analytics and a frequent critic of the largest U.S. banks, downgraded Wells Fargo to “negative” from “neutral” in a sharply-worded four page report that was highly critical of the bank’s disclosure practices. “The departure of Atkins, we are led to believe, was not merely the result of personal issues, but reflects an ongoing internal dispute within [Wells Fargo's] executive suite regarding the bank’s disclosure,” he writes.

Whalen then goes on to argue that Wells Fargo’s “public behavior suggests significant problems in the bank’s internal systems and controls as defined by the Sarbanes-Oxley law. We further understand that some officials of [Wells Fargo], increasingly uncomfortable with the bank’s aggressive public disclosure regime, have reached out to regulators because of concerns regarding accounting issues.”

So, there’s that.

Wells Fargo Exit Tied To Disclosure [TSC via BI]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

OpenGamma, a provider of analytics software for the financial services industry, announced today that it has raised $6 million in its second round of funding — even though it doesn’t have a product quite yet.

Traders can basically use OpenGamma to work with a suped-up version of Excel. The application programming interface (API) uses Excel and taps into multiple on-premise machines to quickly do calculations and access data without slowing down the machine a trader is working on. Instead of relying on the power of individual machines, OpenGamma will tap more powerful servers that are deployed in-house to provide some better computing firepower. That will allow traders to work their magic on Excel sheets that have thousands of cells active at a given time.

OpenGamma is also designed to be open source, said Kirk Wylie, the company’s founder and CEO. It’s not really clear how, as it doesn’t really have some of the traditional hallmarks of open source software. There isn’t any kind of community developing plug-ins or applications for OpenGamma’s software. But any company that decides to deploy the software can modify it in any way they see fit, and OpenGamma will provide them the tools to do so.

There’s also the question of just who will deploy this software. Many hedge funds and banks are running older versions of trading software — but that’s because they are reliable and it’s a very slow-moving field. Wylie said the companies were excited about getting access to some new tech that would speed up the process.

“You can’t rely on black boxes when dealing with trades, you have to understand everything that is going on in those black boxes,” Wylie said. “What OpenGamma does is run its code in a crystal box where traders can see every single step, so there’s no uncertainty or risk because of technical issues.”

This is OpenGamma’s second round of funding, even though the company hasn’t released a product just yet. The initial version of the software should come out sometime at the end of the first quarter or the beginning of the second quarter this year, Wylie said. The company’s CEO has plenty of experience on both ends — he worked with a number of silicon valley startups that secured venture financing and then moved to London to work in the financial services industry. The rest of the team rounding out OpenGamma also has similar experience.

But given the inertia of the financial services industry, it’s hard to imagine that a lot of companies would begin deploying the software in the immediate future — especially an initial release. Wylie said the company has been in contact with tier 1 banks, some of the largest banks in the world, to begin deploying the software bit by bit rather than swapping it out immediately for a brand new system.

Tags: Analytics, Financial Services

Companies: OpenGamma

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Assistly, a customer relationship management (CRM) software provider that specializes in social media, announced today that it has raised  $3 million in its second round of funding.

Assistly’s brand of CRM software mashes together pretty much every avenue of communication into a single Web interface. It includes traditional communication methods like email and phone calls. It then uses application programming interfaces (APIs) from social media services like Twitter and Facebook to directly feed that information into its website and combines it all into a single interface.

The web app lets users enter a number of tags and other keywords and crawls social media outlets to find people who mention them. That information is fed into a dashboard and Assistly users can quickly respond to questions or complaints about a service.

Assistly started in 2009 when co-founder Alex Bard and his team decided to take another crack at starting a company in the customer service space. It’s their fourth startup together, and the third that works with customer service. Their last company together, Goowy Media, was sold to Aol in 2008 — though the details of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“Our investors were pretty happy,” Bard said.

They pulled the idea of adding an analytics component to CRM software from their previous outing with Goowy Media, a company that designed web and desktop widgets and distributed them with an analytics suite, and ran with it. Assistly has picked up customers like web-based music streaming service Grooveshark and Twitter since launching the service in September last year.

Since then, Assistly has raised about $4.7 million with its most recent round of fundraising. The first round, led by True Ventures and Social Leverage, closed last year. Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures and investor Kenny Van Zant joined in the most recent round. The latest round took about two months to finish.

The company hasn’t had a marketing budget since its launch. The most recent round of funding will be used to actually help market Assistly and develop a sales force. It will also be used to “add more gasoline to the fire” and develop the analytics suite further, Bard said.

[Photo: The Next Web]

Tags: cloud computing, CRM, customer relationship management

Companies: Assistly

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Morgan Stanley Set To Trim Executive Pay (WSJ)
The bank has told executives to budget some 10% to 25% less for bonuses this year as the securities firm tries to put a tight lid on pay while wrestling with turbulent market conditions and the company’s makeover, according to a person familiar with the situation. Dozens of managing directors who oversee groups of employees at the New York company have been informed of the estimates, which are preliminary and subject to change in the coming weeks, this person said. The cuts would affect traders, back-office staff and other major employee groups, though unusually strong performers in equity capital markets and investment banking could be spared. Top executives also might be pressed to take less.

Larry Summers: White House Still Committed To Trimming Deficit (Reuters)
“We have been successful in achieving the first prerequisite for meaningful deficit reduction, namely taking measures that will significantly accelerate growth,” National Economic Commission Director Lawrence Summers said in an interview. Summers said he expected the tax cut plan hammered out between the White House and congressional Republicans to be enacted by Christmas and said it would actually reduce the budget deficit in 2015 because of stepped-up growth and changes associated with corporate expensing provisions.

Mike Bloomberg: I’m Not Running For President (CNBC)
FYI.

US Initial Jobless Claims Fell 17,000 To 421,000 Last Week (Bloomberg)
“The labor market is moving in the right direction, slowly but surely,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “Things look a little better than they first appeared, but we’re still not creating enough jobs to lower the unemployment rate.”

More Than Half Of Americans Want Fed Reined In Or Abolished (Bloomberg)
While three-quarters said they’d like to see Bernanke sans beard.

16 Tycoons Agree To Give Away Fortunes (WSJ)
Mark Zuckerberg has signed onto the “Giving Pledge,” which asks its signatories to commit publicly to give away the majority of their wealth. The 26-year-old is one of 16 billionaires new to the pledge, which now totals more than 50 donors. New names include AOL co-founder Steve Case, investor Carl Icahn and former junk-bond king Michael Milken.

Goldman To Donate $20 Million To Non-Profits (WSJ)
The bank plans to announce Thursday the donation of $20 million to a network of nonprofit organizations that provides job training and family assistance to wounded veterans. The New York company’s contribution increases to $212 million the total committed so far this year to 1,100 organizations through a Goldman fund that requires partners to give away some of their pay to charity.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

ThreatMetrix, an online service that helps businesses verify a person’s identity and cut down on fraud, announced today that is has raised an additional $12.1 million in its third round of funding.

ThreatMetrix gathers non-personal information from visitors to various e-commerce and financial institution websites and builds a profile over time. The information can include country of origin, what kind of fonts are on the device and whether users are behind proxy servers. But ThreatMetrix does not gather or use sensitive data like social security numbers and driver license numbers, which consumers have become increasingly hesitant to give out.

A good profile — meaning it regularly comes from the same source and behaves consistently — receives a positive grade. At the same time, a profile that rapidly registers for e-mail accounts or credit cards, or comes from multiple countries and has clearly been compromised, is graded negatively. ThreatMetrix profiles around 12 million devices every day, said president and CEO Reed Taussig.

The funding is pegged for further development of its fraud detection algorithms and marketing strategies. ThreatMetrix was actually over-subscribed, raising an additional $100,000 beyond its original goal of $10 – $12 million.

There’s a lot of space to grow in fraud-detection, which Taussig said is a roughly $1 billion market. Sophisticated attacks on financial institutions grew by around 500 percent last year, and money transfer fraud grew by around 1,400 percent, Taussig said.

“What’s different about it is it used to be that the strategic air command protected us against the bad guys,” Taussig said. “Nowadays, every individual that does business is a potential victim of this whole thing, and it’s become very personalized.”

All the analytics and processing occurs on an in-house database that registers around 200 million matches in around a half-second, he said. The data processing isn’t outsourced to other cloud infrastructures like Rackspace or Amazon’s EC2 because it’s too intense for the on-demand computing that those companies offer.

Primarily e-commerce companies, financial institutions and Web 2.0 companies like social networks currently use the software. ThreatMetrix is also seeing some traction in the mobile space, particularly because of the proliferation of the iPad, which behaves like a mobile device because it uses Apple’s iPhone operating system, Taussig said. Around 5 percent of users profiled by ThreatMetrix use mobile devices, and the share is growing, he said.

ThreatMetrix has raised about $24.1 million to date, with $6 million from its first and second rounds of funding. The second round, led by US Venture Partners, closed last year. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company has 38 employees and around 300 business customers, including 3 of the top 5 e-commerce sites — though Taussig wouldn’t disclose which ones.

[Photo: Don Hankins]

Tags: cloud, cloud infrastructure, credit card fraud, fraud, identity theft, nigerian prince, wire fraud

Companies: Threatmetrix

People: Reed Taussig

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

IBM announced this morning that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Netezza, a company that focuses on data warehousing and business analytics, for approximately $1.7 billion.

The deal is still subject to Netezza shareholder and regulatory approval, and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. IBM will pay $27 a share for the company, which closed at $24.60 on Friday.

Netezza provides analytics inside of a data warehousing appliance, which can handle complex analytic queries “10 to 100 times faster than traditional systems.” The deal is an extension of the companies’ existing partnership:

Today, Netezza designs and develops its appliances on IBM systems technology and combined with IBM software powers many applications within organizations.  The two companies have been strategic partners for many years focused on workload optimized systems that deliver integrated systems, software and storage for analyzing vast amounts of complex data.

The acquisition will bolster IBM’s own analytics offering — the company intends to integrate Netezza into its Information Management software portfolio.

Based in Marlborough, Mass., Netezza has around 500 employees worldwide. The company has raised $68 million since it was founded in 2000.

Tags: Analytics, business analytics, data warehousing, storage

Companies: IBM, Netezza

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

IBM announced today that it has acquired OpenPages, which provides software to help companies isolate and manage enterprise risk elements. The price of the acquisition wasn’t disclosed.

OpenPages’ software highlights any inconsistencies in risk and performance goals — such as overly aggressive revenue goals for an emerging market like Latin America — and gives management a comprehensive view of the business opportunities and risks associated with the expansion.

OpenPages had previously partnered with IBM for the Operational Riskdata eXchange, a consortium of banks formed to collect loss-event data and meet operational risk guidelines outlined by standards set by an international banking committee.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Goldman Sachs, Matrix Partners and Sigma Partners among others. Allianz, Barclays, Carnival Corporation, Duke Energy and SunTrust are among OpenPages’ clients, according to the company’s website.

IBM has invested about $11 billion in analytics research and interpretation, which included hiring about 6,000 consultants and seven full-time analytics centers.

[Photo: epSos.de]

Tags: acquisition, Analytics, Deals & More, Management, Mergers and Acquisitions, risk, risk analytics, risk management

Companies: IBM, OpenPages

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More