One such company is Clarizen, an Israeli software startup, that moved to Silicon Valley earlier this month to tap the growing demand for project management software. “Being close to the market is not only a statement, it’s something that you need to commit to do,” said CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski.

Project management software helps companies manage resources, time, people, and  budgets. According to research firm Gartner, the project management market is worth $750 million a year worldwide, and is growing 11 percent annually.

Companies like Clarizen offer this software as a service over the Internet for a monthly subscription fee per user. The online delivery medium helps employees working remotely log into their company’s system from anywhere.

Although Clarizen’s software development will remain largely in Israel, Mr. Nowogrodski and the company’s sales and marketing staff are based in San Mateo, California. Clarizen has yet to unveil a commercial version of its software but says more than 1,000 customers have signed up for its beta version that was launched in June.

Because the project management software market has heated up, venture capitalists are also showing interest in the world of on-demand software. Clarizen, for instance, received $7 million in first round funding last December from top tier VCs Benchmark Capital and Carmel Ventures.

Competitors in this space are also attracting funding. Seattle-based eProject received a $12 million second-round funding last May from Bay Partners and Kennet Partners. Orem, Utah-based AtTask received a $7 million first-round funding from OpenView Venture Partners in June. SmartSheet.com, based in Bellevue, Washington, is a company that provides an on-demand version of Microsoft’s Excel software. The company announced last June that it received $4 million in a first-round funding led by Madrona Venture Group.

Despite all the competition, Mr. Nowogrodski believes there is enough to go around for everyone. “Most companies are doing project management,” he said. “When you have an objective to achieve and have a group of people, you need to plan the activity and that is when project management comes in.”

Veveo’s vTap, which launches Sept. 10, has indexed the largest collection of videos on the web and will provide increasingly specific search results as users type more letters into the search box on their mobile phone screens.

Andover, Massachusetts-based Veveo has received $28 million in two rounds of funding from Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and OmniCapital Group.

“Today there are too many input constraints while searching the Internet from your mobile phone,” said founder and CEO Murali Aravamudan. “With vTap you can tap into the plethora of videos on the net.”

Veveo’s vTap will index more than 100,000 video web sites on the Internet to accurately call up sought after video clips. For example, typing in the first few letters of “Timbaland” will bring up several videos by the rapper and R&B producer, which users will be able to instantly watch on their mobile phones.

The service will be available for all phones running Windows Mobile and it will also provide an Ajax application for the iPhone. J2ME support will be available after a few weeks.

The company has been operating under stealth mode for the last two and a half years to work on the technology, Mr. Aravamudan said.

Eventually, Mr. Aravamudan intends to support this technology through advertising, but he also hopes to partner with providers of set top boxes and IPTV for easier search through the remote control.

Although the industry is filled with video search providers such as Blinx or YouTube, there are few mobile search competitors.

San Francisco-based 4INFO’s mobile search is focused on sports, news, weather, business, travel and local information. Sunnyvale, California-based MyWaves requires users to set their video watching preferences on their computers, before they search for clips with their phones.

Veveo's service will let subscribers search and watch videos intuitively without prior planning, Mr. Aravamudan said. The company does not intend to compete with desktop video search companies such as Google or Blinx, he said.

]]>FalguniBhutaInternethttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22680#0Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:42:16 GMThttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22680http://www.redherring.com/Home/22610In keeping with the trend of eco-friendliness, Sun Microsystems launched its green data centers Tuesday, saying they’ll cut the hardware and software maker’s utility bill by 60 percent.

Sun has deployed the data centers in three locations: Bangalore, India; Blackwater, England; and its campus in Santa Clara, California. The three data centers, which run Sun’s IT operations, were put in place between January and June.

The news comes a few days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a report saying that data centers in the United States have the potential to save $4 billion in annual electricity costs through more energy-efficient systems.

Data centers contain servers and computer systems that run an organization’s IT. They consume a lot of energy running the servers as well as the air-conditioning needed to cool those servers.

During the past year, Sun has completely rebuilt its data centers with a new architecture that saves costs on power and cooling, said Stephen Novak, senior manager of eco services at Sun. Through the new design, Sun has also reduced use of real estate, Mr. Novak said.

For example, the company has gone from 267,000 square feet of data center space worldwide to about 133,000 square feet, according to a company statement. At the Santa Clara campus, Sun has consolidated 2,177 servers to 1,240 and is garnering $1.1 million in savings per year on the energy bill, the statement said.

The company said it also wants to bring such benefits to its customers. Through its Eco Innovation initiative, also announced Tuesday, Sun is rolling out services designed to help customers analyze how efficient their data centers are, make their hardware infrastructure consume less energy, and add virtualization to their systems. Virtualization lets multiple software-isolated applications run on a single system and lets companies consolidate applications onto fewer servers.

“It’s been in Sun’s DNA for a while,” Mr. Novak said. “It’s the belief of the organization that we need to do this not only for the customers’ benefit but the benefit of the planet.”

The EPA report also said data centers account for about 1.5 percent of electricity consumption in the United States and that energy consumption by servers and data centers in the states has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five years, costing $7.4 billion annually.

The Portland, Oregon-based company intends to use the extra funds to promote its Clearspace collaboration software, to expand internationally, and bolster sales and marketing efforts, CEO Dave Hersh said on Monday.

Clearspace, launched in February, is a community system that lets people collaborate with each other through Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, chat, and tagging--all on a single platform.

The product has two versions, one for workers within an organization, and a second for external collaboration with customers, partners, and suppliers.

Mr. Hersh said the funding points to the emergence of collaboration software. Research firm Gartner has estimated the market for collaboration software to reach $9 billion in 2009.

Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, and chats are typically offered by different providers. Jive is one of the few companies that offer all this in one package.

Jive Software’s major competition is Microsoft’s SharePoint software, while startups such as SuiteTwo and Blogtronix are also trying to gain traction. Jive competes with the free online services available from providers such as Google.

“[Customers] are stuck between too much structure with SharePoint and content management solutions and too less structure with [point solutions],” Mr. Hersh said.

Analyst for the 451 Group, Raven Zachary, thinks Jive is positioning itself well in the market and growing rapidly.

“There is a demand in the enterprise for communications and collaboration tools inside the firewall—not every company wants to use free online services for business,” Mr. Zachary said.

Jive has been profitable since day one and has more than 2,000 customers, Mr. Hersh said. The company is targeting small and medium businesses in the $10 million to $500 million revenue range.

The San Francisco-based startup combines social networking with gaming by allowing game developers to upload their games on Kongregate's web site. Gamers can chat with each other, rate games and write reviews on Kongregate.

CEO Jim Greer calls Kongregate the “YouTube” of gaming. Since the beta launch of the company in March, it has accumulated 1,500 games and 750 independent and small studio developers with more than 850,000 unique visitors a month.

To survive in the highly competitive gaming industry, Kongregate will need some high quality content, said Michael Cai, analyst with Parks Associates.

“They need some breakthrough games and will need to [give incentives to] game developers to drive traffic,” Mr. Cai said. “They need to grow the audience as quickly as possible as they are ad supported.”

The company is planning to use the extra cash to fund independent game developers who will create Flash-powered games exclusively for the site. The company expects to fund half a dozen of such games by the end of 2007.

The funding will also be used to become a larger platform for gaming, Mr. Greer said.

“We want to invest in independent developers and fund them to create bigger and better game experiences based on microtransactions,” he said.

Kongregate makes its revenues from in-game advertisements and shares the revenues with the developers. Developers can get from 25 to 50 percent of the ad revenue derived from their games, said Mr. Greer, who was previously managing game development for gaming site Pogo, now owned by Electronic Arts.

Kongregate also generates revenues through “micro transactions,” in which players buy game paraphernalia such as guns, swords or clothes, usually for less than a dollar or two.

Kongregate provides the tools and infrastructure to developers so they can focus on their creative strengths and make games, Mr. Greer said. The company also provides the customer support and billing for microtransactions for developers.

“We are trying to make the site more attractive to developers,” he said.

Kongregate is also trying to tap the social networking audience by creating its own application on Facebook. Users can display their top scores from games on Kongregate directly in their Facebook profile.

Kongregate, whose competitors include U.K.-based Miniclip and Viacom's AddictingGames.com, previously received angel funding from industry experts such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Excite@Home founder Joe Krause, and Jeff Clavier.

The deal was announced one day after shares of virtualization software leader VMware shot up 76 percent on their first day of trading (see VMware Blasts Off).

Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Citrix makes corporate software that creates virtual desktop applications on a central server so that users can access the applications remotely.

The XenSource acquisition will expand Citrix's reach into the market for server virtualization software, used to harness unused computing power by enabling servers to run multiple applications or operating systems from a single unit.

Proponents of virtualzation say customers can yield a return on their investment in three to six months through lower power costs.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2007 subject to shareholder approval.

Palo Alto, California-based Xensource has raised $38 million in venture capital from investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel Partners, Ignition Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Sevin Rosen Funds.

The successful IPO of competitor VMware could have jacked up XenSource’s valuation despite having a little more than just $1 million in annual sales, a report from research firm AMR Research said.

Citrix expects to yield about $50 million in revenue from XenSource next year.

The virtualization craze is good news for Lowell, Massachusetts-based Virtual Iron, a four-year old startup that competes with VMware and XenSource.

“We are more bullish today than we have ever been,” said Virtual Iron CEO John Thibault. “I think this is nothing but an absolute spotlight on the server virtualization market.”

Virtual Iron has more than 750 customers and is doubling revenues every quarter, Mr. Thibault said. The server virtualization market is expected to reach $12 billion in the next five years, according to research firm IDC and, so far, only 5 percent of the market has been tapped.

This presents a tremendous opportunity for Virtual Iron and its competitors. The positive response of the VMware IPO is pushing Virtual Iron toward a possible public offering in 2009, he said.

Virtual Iron is funded by Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, and SAP Ventures.