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Posts Tagged ‘Shopzilla’

Flush With $10 Million In Fresh Cash, Yammer Strengthens Executive Team

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

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TheFind launches “buying engine,” product search from 500,000 stores

TheFind, a Mountain View, Calif-based startup that applies machine learning and semantic search to shopping, says comparison buying sites only skim the surface of all the millions of products out there on the web.

So it’s launching a “buying engine” today that crawls half a million stores for products and coupons. The site shows reviews alongside products and highlights coupons. It attaches store information in a pop-up that shows the sellers trust and security ratings. There is also a “green” search for environmentally conscious products.

“The truth of why none of the other comparison shopping sites have ultimately become successful brands is because they don’t offer everyone,” said Ron Levi, the vice president of product for TheFind. “When you’re only showing 10 or 15 stores out of hundreds, it’s just not comprehensive.”

TheFind is backed by at least $26.5 million in three rounds of funding from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. Levi said the site has 13.5 million unique visitors a month and hit cash flow profitability in December of last year.

The company is one of many comparison shopping sites we covered way back in 2007. But its competitors like Shopping.com (owned by eBay), Shopzilla (owned by Scripps) and Pricegrabber (bought by Experian) aren’t independent. The company earns revenue from affiliate fees so when a user actually buys a product, TheFind earns a small portion of that. It also earns income from clicks when users are driven to other comparison shopping sites.

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Bing Shopping Grows 169% in June

Bing Shopping, the comparison shopping tool that is part of Microsoft’s new search engine, saw some impressive growth last month. According to Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty, visits to Bing Shopping increased 169% last month and Bing is now the 4th most popular shopping comparison site in the US. Just last month, Bing was still in 8th place. Clearly, Microsoft’s marketing muscle behind Bing.com and consumer interest in Microsoft’s Double Cashback promotion brought a lot of new users to Bing Shopping in June.

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According to Hitwise, about one third of all the visitors to Bing Shopping came from Bing.com and MSN. What is interesting, is that Hitwise found that 66% of the visitors who came from Bing and 50% of those who came from MSN hadn’t been to Bing Shopping in the last 30 days. Given that Bing is only now getting on a lot of consumers’ radar, these numbers make a lot of sense.

Given this growth for Bing Shopping, it doesn’t come as a surprise that most of Bing’s competitors lost some market share during the last month. All of the top 3 shopping tools (Yahoo Shopping, Bizrate, and Shopzilla) lost between 2% and 5%.

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