Wilson Lau's List: newsroom

"Lumiata, a San Mateo, California, startup that launched in January with the promise of using machine learning to help hospital personnel make better decisions, has added $6 million to its series A round of venture capital. BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners and Sandbox Industries provided the new financing, which adds to the $4 million that Khosla Ventuers has already invested.

Lumiata’s system ingests millions of data points (170 million to date), including medical literature and individual patient data such as claims and sensor reading, and uses graph analysis techniques to gain a better understanding of a patient’s health at any given time. This kind of data could help hospitals make better decisions about how to treat patients or understand the overall health of the populations they treat As patients come into the emergency room, Lumiata’s technology, which knows a lot about the relationships between symptoms, personal traits and diseases, could help nurses make accurate diagnoses without waiting for a doctor.


Credit: Lumiata
Health care is a major focus of attention for tech companies trying to turn their expertise in fields like machine learning into very helpful and very lucrative businesses. A very small sample of these companies include IBM, which has famously been working closely with various medical institutions to help them integrate its Watson cognitive computing system; a deep learning learning startup called Enlitic that wants to analyze medical images in order to diagnose diseases; and a planned spinout form the University of Washington that uses machine learning models to predict the likelihood a patient with cardiovascular disease will be readmitted within 30 days."

" Boxworks 2014, Box CEO Aaron Levie announced that the company is building a suite of features to better serve its business customers. The new Box Workflow adds a workflow process on top of the Box platform using rules-based tasks and machine learning.

Using open APIs, the Box Workflow employs automation and metadata features to create workflows. For the rules-based features, the metadata can be mined to create IFTTT-type triggers. For example: if your business needs to separate credit card charges from cash charges, it can create a rule that automatically finds those different types of charges and send the cash charges to a folder or to an employee.

The rules feature can also be used to create time-based triggers. For example, you can be reminded when contracts are about to expire.



The logic-based machine learning feature can help to quickly classify documents based on the content of the document. For example, if you have uploaded highly classified documents, the system could determine whether a new document should be added to the existing cache by just viewing the document’s content.

Finally, the entire Box Workflow system will be available via Box’s open V2 API. So enterprise customers can build Box Works into their current organization workflow.

Box Workflow will be available in 2015."

"Doctor on Demand, the service that lets you video connect with a U.S. physician on Android and iOS for $40, closed a $21 million Series A round led by Venrock, Shasta Ventures and angel investor Sir Richard Branson. With the announcement, Doctor on Demand is available as a web-based app on desktop computers.

Doctor on Demand uses a HIPAA-secure network and synchronous video chat to connect patients with doctors, but the service is to be used for non-emergency clinical issues that do not immediately require a direct presence, lab work or imaging. It’s still an easy option to quickly meet a doctor about a particular issue, or even to refill your prescription. The service says the team of physicians can treat colds, coughs, allergies and infections, among other ailments. $30 of the $40 paid goes to the physicians.

Comcast will also offer Doctor on Demand services to its U.S. employees, integrating it into the company’s health offerings. For some plans, Comcast will fully subsidize employees’ video visits. Comcast is the first major company to integrate Doctor on Demand into its health plans for its employees.

Last December, Doctor on Demand raised $3 million in seed funding from Venrock, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Athena Health CEO Jonathan Bush."

"MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the top-ranked distribution for Apache™ Hadoop®, today announced that it is one of the first to receive Big Data Competency status from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now part of the new AWS Partner Network (APN) Competency Program, AWS has named MapR as a Big Data Competency Partner based on customer success, technical proficiency and software validation.

“As the first Hadoop distribution company in the APN Competency Program, we’re excited to be recognized for helping customers successfully use Hadoop in production environments at any scale,” said Jon Posnik, vice president of business development at MapR Technologies. “This validation from AWS reaffirms the value that the MapR distribution provides in the cloud by delivering unparalleled flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness.”

The MapR Distribution for Hadoop is an enterprise-grade platform built from the ground up to bring unprecedented dependability, ease-of-use and performance levels to Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications. MapR is available on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) as a simple drop-down selection in the AWS Management Console. MapR is fully supported on multiple AWS instance types, including the latest high-performance SSD-backed high I/O instances. The combination of MapR and Amazon EMR provides a proven solution for users who want to effectively and rapidly leverage Hadoop on the AWS Cloud.

About MapR Technologies
MapR delivers on the promise of Hadoop with a proven, enterprise-grade platform that supports a broad set of mission-critical and real-time production uses. MapR brings unprecedented dependability, ease-of-use and world-record speed to Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications in one unified distribution for Hadoop. MapR is used by more than 500 customers across financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications as well as by leading Global 2000 and Web 2.0 companies. Amazon, Cisco, Google and HP are part of the broad MapR partner ecosystem. Investors include Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. MapR is based in San Jose, CA. Connect with MapR on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter."

"Nanosatisfi, now Spire, will soon grow its fleet of tiny satellites from four to more than 50 after receiving $25 million in Series A funding.

RRE Ventures led the round, in which Moose Capital, Quihoo and Mitsui & Co. Global Investment also participated. The new funds will go toward building and launching more satellites, improving communication infrastructure and hiring more people, the company said. Spire also announced that it will open a second office in Singapore."

"LinkedIn is exploring location alerts reminiscent of Foursquare and Sonar, according to LinkedIn designers Mauroof Ahmed and Moses Ting.

These experiments follow a series of moves from LinkedIn designed to boost engagement, including the acquisition of Newsle, the launch of redesigned Web profiles, and the debut of LinkedIn’s new Connected app, which prods you to stay in touch with your network.

Ahmed and Ting share that LinkedIn may extend the “signals” in its Connected app beyond generic professional alerts, like job anniversaries, with updates like location alerts. These alerts were described by Ahmed in a way similar to Foursquare’s check-ins:

If you were connected with me, and I knew you were in Zimbabwe [Editor's note: I'm staying in Zimbabwe right now], I would know that and that would be kind of cool. That’s like a quick way for me to send you a message and say “hey, what’s your view right now? What do you see when you look out the window?”
And that’s something that both builds our relationship and at the same time it’s something very timely because we know where you are. And that’s something we want to optimize for, and sort of really strengthen individual relationships at a deeper level than going for breadth.
According to Ahmed, “one of the things that we’re going to be looking into is the idea of conferences,” a concept very similar to the ambitions of now dead social discovery startup Sonar.

Let’s say you’re at Google I/O or WWDC…are there people here that you want to talk to — that you want to connect with? And just by opening the app you can start conversations that way and reach out to people. Wherever that goes, that would be pretty Amazing.
The experiments above fall in line with the goal of LinkedIn’s Connected app — to help you “keep your network active and warm” — but they also greatly deviate from existing LinkedIn social updates, which largely center around job changes, birthdays, and promotions.

Although the status of these experiments was not disclosed, more personal, location-centric updates could help bring LinkedIn’s professional social network to life."

"Editor’s note: Julia Kukiewicz edits UK-based Choose.net, a price comparison service that provides guides, product reviews and comparison tables for consumers.

Between 2008 and 2010, Wonga was doing something mind-bendingly stupid: sending letters from fake law firms to borrowers behind on their loans. It sounds like a bad office prank.

They even took the firm names from apparently still current employees — except when you consider that they did it 45,000 times and that it will cost them £2.25 million to give each injured party just £50 in compensation, as they were ordered to a few weeks ago. It may even land them in court.

Wonga wasn’t alone in sending faux-legal threats; in the past few weeks it’s emerged that many big lenders and the Student Loans Company (SLC) have using similar tactics for years, but the payday lender was the only one to create their law firm out of thin air. In an under regulated market, Wonga clearly weren’t too concerned about having to explain themselves. But under regulation alone isn’t enough to explain their actions.

What does explain them is at the heart of their business and that of many other fin-tech lenders: prediction and collection.

Creative destruction

If ever there was a sector ripe for a little Joseph Schumpeter-style creative destruction, it was banking in 2008. Borrowing from mainstream lenders was, and remains, slow, confusing and difficult, particularly for people with poor credit histories.

Startups like Moven, LendUp and Zestcash in the U.S., Wonga in the UK and Lenddo and Kreditech elsewhere promised an alternative: smart lending delivered efficiently, with transparent charges.

Smart lending means big data. Really big. “All data is credit data,” the CEO of Zestcash said in 2012. “We just don’t know how to use it.” Wonga claims to use 8,000 data points to make a lending decision. Kreditech says it uses 15,000.

By data they mean all the traditional identity checks and indicators that a borrower will repay, plus everything they can trawl from the depths of the Internet: social media; Google searches; court records; and any indicators that can be picked up from the context of the application down to the time of day and whether the applicant uses Firefox or IE.

This extra data is the secret sauce of alternative lending. Some, like Philippines and Columbia-based Lenddo, emphasize that social bonds predict and encourage repayments. Others, like Zestcash, simply say they have a better mousetrap: a more reliable way to pick out the most responsible borrowers.

Every borrower is assessed by algorithm. As Wonga’s then chief executive put it in a Wired Money talk last year, “we’ve moved beyond anecdotal, judgment based decisions… we leave that to the machines.”

But somewhere along the way, Wonga’s predictions started turning out to be wrong.

The lender has always claimed to write off about 7 percent of their loans but in 2011, Companies House records show, they wrote off £76.8 million, or 41 p ercent, of their £185 million annual revenue.

A Competition Commission investigation into the payday sector earlier this year noted that default costs “make up nearly half of total industry operating costs, suggesting that differences in lenders’ ability to assess risk may have a significant impact on their ability to compete.”

Calling in debts   

Which brings us to the problem of calling in debts.

According to Bank of England figures, default rates were rising even before 2009. Over the past few years, all lenders have started to take collections more seriously. As credit reference agency employee put it in a 2012 paper, “the focus was always on lending. Now the focus is on collections and people are running very fast to do what they do better.”

Armed with the conviction that their data would predict defaults far better than the banks, Wonga may well have been underprepared for an environment where collection is as important as selection.

They may also have underestimated the negative effect of their outsider status. For borrowers with multiple debts, an outsider they have no other affiliations with, like a current account or mortgage, can fall low on the list of repayment priorities, even one charging such a high interest rate.

It’s telling that even big lenders felt the need to use letters from in-house legal teams to encourage borrowers to repay; they did it, they say, because letters with the bank’s own letterhead were ignored.

A lender that has overestimated its predictive powers and underestimated its need to call in bad debt is apt to do very stupid things. Like make up a law firm.

If other alternative lenders want to avoid doing the same they’ll need to stop treating big data like a crystal ball and start getting those creative minds to work on ways to collect repayments that don’t involve a subsidiary of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe."

"Facebook is trying out letting you pay for ecommerce purchases from other businesses without leaving its site or app. For now it won’t be charging the few small and medium-sized businesses in the US to test this new Buy button on their News Feed Pages posts and ads. When I asked if Facebook would be charging businesses for the feature eventually, it said “it was not disqualifying that option” in the future.

Rather than clicking away to a merchant’s site, the Buy button lets you complete the entire purchase flow within Facebook, which could boost conversion rates and endear retailers to the social network. You can use a credit card you have on file with Facebook, enter new payment details and save them for future use, or just checkout and not store your payment info. The feature is privacy safe, and Facebook won’t pass payment details on to other advertisers. Users who have"

"High above us in Earth’s orbit, Planet Labs‘ growing constellation of 43 mini “Dove” satellites are busy snapping images of our always-changing planet. The startup released the first pictures from its newest 11 satellites today, and they reveal everything from shifting agricultural practices to the comings and goings of boats in the Suez Canal.

The first image shows more than the pretty patchwork of Earth’s surface: It depicts crop growth in June just north of Rio de Janeiro."

"Amazon has petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for exemption from rules barring it from testing drones in the United States.

The online shopping company made waves recently by showing off small unmanned aircraft that it claims will be able to deliver parcels to consumers in 30 minutes. The drone delivery service, called Prime Air, could greatly speed up Amazon’s delivery times, creating a competitive advantage for it over other digital marketplaces and lowering the time-threshold advantage that traditional stores still enjoy over their online competition.

Amazon’s plans are not small.

“One day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today, resulting in enormous benefits for consumers across the nation,” the company adds. It asks for the exemption so that it can be ready to launch its drones when the legal framework is in place for it to do so.

The drones, it claims, are on their eight and ninth generation, and can fly up to 50 miles per hour.

The FAA is currently testing drones at a number of locations in the United States, but has come under criticism that its work has been too slow thus far to meet set targets. If true, the FAA could in fact retard the growth of the drone industry, something that Amazon obviously thinks will be large.

Why is there foot-dragging about drones? There are rules in place that allow hobbyists to have fun, of course, but commercial use has been frowned on by the government for some time. You can understand their concerns: The FAA is tasked with keeping the skies safe. What happens when a drone accidentally flies into a commercial air pattern and takes out the cockpit window and a few hundred people. That’s a dire hypothetical, but you get the drift.

I’d love to lay wagers on what major technology company is the second into drone technology on Amazon’s scale. Microsoft probably has something in the lab. Google is more focused on cars, and Apple? Well, I don’t see that happening.

Also, when will the first drone-first e-commerce company launch to take on Amazon. And finally, how much venture capital money will be expended in whatever becomes the drone sector rat-race to become Big Drone."

"The motto at Salesforce.com seems to be if you can’t beat them, buy them. This time the exact target of Salesforce.com’s $390 million desires is the scrappy startup RelateIQ, which uses searches of unstructured data from email, social networks, and calendars to automate large portions of the sales process.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company raised a significant $40 million round earlier this year at a roughly $250 million valuation, and has made a string of interesting hires.

Earlier this summer RelateIQ brought on Twitter’s former VP of Search. In 2013 the company brought in data scientist DJ Patil , who spent three years as the head of data science at LinkedIn before joining Greylock Partners and eventually making the jump to RelateIQ.

In a blog post on the company’s site, RelateIQ’s Chief Executive, Steve Loughlin, wrote:

Salesforce.com pioneered the shift to enterprise cloud computing, redefining modern CRM as we know it. As you know, RelateIQ is pioneering the next generation of intelligent computing through data science and machine learning. Looking ahead, salesforce.com’s acquisition of RelateIQ will extend the value of salesforce.com’s #1 CRM apps and platform with a new level of intelligence across sales, service, and marketing.

RelateIQ uses large-scale data-mining technologies to automate relationship tracking in the enterprise and CRM world. The company’s software eliminates the manual data entry required to get more insight into professional relationships.

The connection to search stems from the company’s use of algorithms to better understand actions in the workplace, capturing data from email, voice, social networks and calendars, and using natural language processing to analyze those communications.

Under the terms of the Salesforce.com deal for RelateIQ , all outstanding shares of RelateIQ capital stock will be cancelled and converted to share of Salesforce.com common stock with a value of $350 million. Salesforce.com is also assuming the $40 million in cash that’s on the RelateIQ balance sheet from its March round of funding.

Salesforce.com is also taking on the unvested stock options and equity awards granted to RelateIQ employees. Other than RelateIQ’s employees, the winners in the potential M&A deal include RelateIQ backers like Accelerate-IT Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Felicis Ventures, News Corp., Battery Ventures, Formation 8, and Accel Partners.

The RelateIQ acquisition would be Salesforce.com’s largest deal since ExactTarget, which it bought for $2.5 billion last year."

"Running a startup or small business today typically entails monumental workloads, so we forgive companies that forget to tweet at their followers every day.

But Audrey Melnik won’t, because her service makes it stupidly easy.

Melnik today launched her latest startup, ZootRock, which helps businesses maintain an active social media presence with minimal effort. After a quick setup process, the social tool spits out articles, images, and quotes to your social accounts on a regular basis, with as much or little manual curation as you want.

ZootRock supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Scoop.it, and RSS, with more platforms coming soon. It sources content from around 200 streams, though it adds more every day. ZootRock customers can subscribe to existing streams or request new ones, said Melnik.


Above: ZootRock CEO Audrey Melnik.
Image Credit: ZootRock
Melnik has been testing out the service with around 600 beta users. A company representative passed along some social accounts hooked up to ZootRock so we could take a look at the service in action.

Sure enough, it looked like a robot was in charge. The Bubblecoin Bitcoin Community Facebook page posted the same article six times in a row this past weekend.

But that was the most egregious misuse of the tool. For the most part, the accounts posted content relevant to their audiences. And ZootRock doesn’t prevent humans from inserting some personality into their posts: Folks using the tool can review and edit posts before the go live on their accounts.

“Around 80% of the time you spend on social is sourcing great content,” Melnik told VentureBeat. “We help find that content. It’s up to the person managing that to decide how much additional effort they want to inject.”"

"In case you missed this like I did (I blame a Structure hangover), Yahoo released last week a huge dataset Flickr images and videos. Called the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million, it contains 99.3 million photos, 700,000 videos and the associated metadata (title, camera type, description, tags) for each. About 49 million of the photos are geotagged and, Yahoo says, comments, likes and social data for each are available via the Flickr API.

Needless to say, this is a pretty impressive resource for anyone wanting to analyze images for the sake of learning something or just to train some new computer vision algorithms. We have been covering the rise of new artificial intelligence algorithms and techniques for years, most of which have benefited from access to huge amounts of online images, video and related content from which to derive context. Often, though, researchers or companies not in possession of the content (that is, pretty much everyone but Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo) have had to scrape or otherwise gather this data manually.

That being said, Google and Yahoo, in particular, have been pretty good about releasing various large datasets, usually textual data useful for training natural-language processing models."

"The FAA made it plain this week that Amazon, or anyone else for that matter, won’t be able to deliver packages using a drone in the near future. In a document soliciting feedback regarding drone policy — a “Notice of Interpretation with Request for Comment ” — the FAA calls “delivering packages to people for a fee” a non-hobby or recreation-based drone activity. As such, the FAA wants to ban it.
A recent court case set the FAA back regarding its wish to ban commercial drone usage in the United States. The agency is appealing that ruling.
There might have been an Amazon loophole in the proposed rules, however. Amazon’s Prime program provides free shipping to its subscribing customers, so could it get around the FAA’s language due to its use of the word “fee”? Nope.

A footnote to the delivery comment says the following, eliding the online retailer perfectly:

If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose.

Surprising? No, but it is almost fun to see the government be so particular in its language.

Any future Amazon fleet of drone carriers is likely far off from a technological standpoint, making the above perhaps effectively moot. By the time Amazon would be ready to deploy its drones, our legal code might have caught up to the technology it wants to use.

As Ars Technica notes, Amazon was aware of the restrictions in place on its potential use of drones, with the company saying that “[p]utting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.”"

"BuzzFeed may raise a $200 million funding round — its fifth to date — a source close to the matter claims.

It’s unclear how far along talks are, nor is it clear who will lead the round, although existing investors NEA, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Hearst Ventures, and SV Angel may participate. When reached for comment, a BuzzFeed spokesperson provided VentureBeat with the following statement: “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”

According to VentureBeat’s source, the $200 million figure is seen as a median estimate; the round may fall above or below that line.

Buzzfeed’s last funding round back in January 2013 saw the company raise nearly $20 million at a rumored valuation of $200 million. Following its last round, Buzzfeed reportedly planned to expand its mobile and video products. To date, Buzzfeed has raised $46.3 million.

BuzzFeed’s list posts and experiments in long-form journalism reached an “audience of more than 130 million unique visitors in November [2013],” according to an official press release. Yet, BuzzFeed took a few blows to the chest this month: The site’s Facebook traffic has reportedly tanked, and BuzzFeed’s longtime chief operating officer and president Jon Steinberg left the firm for British news and entertainment site The Daily Mail.

More about the companies and people from this article:

BuzzFeed Lerer Ventures
BuzzFeed is a start-up trend-tracking Website. The company tracks and delivers the content that is grabbing the most eyeballs on the Internet. It is similar to Digg, except doesn't rely on votes to determine the popularity of a video,... read more »

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"Thoughtspot, the business analytics startup with a founding team comprised of ex-Nutanix, Google and Yahoo folks, has raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing the company’s total to $40.7 million. The company is targeting the business intelligence market to provide a “Google-like experience” in regards to database analytics and will use the money to build out its sales and marketing staff.

Thoughtspot offers a hardware appliance that comes loaded with software that can connect to a company’s existing data infrastructure — as well as services like Hadoop — from which it can provide users with search capabilities that will supposedly save the time it takes for employees to gather the data they want, said Thoughtspot co-founder and CEO Ajeet Singh.

The key to Thoughtspot’s product resides in a homegrown in-memory database and a company-built search engine designed to do computations and search for numbers instead of documents."

"BlackBerry today began the rollout of its first eBBM suite product, which tailors its BBM instant messaging service to enterprise users. Today marks the debut of BBM Protected, FIPS 140-2 cryptographic library-enabled messaging, between users within the same enterprise, or between organizations who also use BBM Protected, for secure and confidential communications.

Who cares about this? Specifically, companies or organizations working in regulated environments, like defense contractors, for instance. In other words, this is BlackBerry trying to shore up its beachhead, and appeal to the big governmental customers (and others including law firms that work in regulated environments) who have continued to form the bedrock of its customer base even as consumers fly to other platforms including Android and iOS.

BlackBerry’s BBM Protected rollout is starting “ahead of schedule” according to the company, and currently work with BB OS 6.0 or later, or BlackBerry 10 running on REgulated mode. It’ll hit BlackBerry 10 devices running BlackBerry Balance to switch between work and play later this fall, and should arrive on iOS and Android devices later this year, too."

"Microsoft has been on quite a cloud roll lately and today it announced a new cloud-based machine learning platform called Azure ML, which enables companies to use the power of the cloud to build applications and APIs based on big data and predict future events instead of looking backwards at what happened.

The product is built on the machine learning capabilities already available in several Microsoft products including Xbox and Bing and using predefined templates and workflows has been built to help companies launch predictive applications much more quickly than traditional development methods, even allowing customers to publish APIs and web services on top of the Azure ML platform.

Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president at Microsoft, who was in charge of the Azure ML, and spent years at Amazon before joining Microsoft to lead this effort, said the platform enables customers and partners to build big data applications to predict, forecast and change future outcomes.

He says this ability to look forward instead of back is what really stands out in this product.

“Traditional data analysis let you predict the future. Machine learning lets you change the future,” Sirosh explained. He says by allowing you to detect patterns, you can forecast demand, predict disease outbreaks, anticipate when elevators need maintenance before they break and even predict and prevent crime, as just a few examples.

Sirosh says the cloud really changes the dynamic here because it provides the ability to scale, and the service takes care of much of the heavy lifting that would have taken weeks or months for  companies trying to do it themselves in-house in a data center.

“The cloud solves the last mile problem, Sirosh explained. Before a service like this, you needed data scientists to identify the data set, then have IT build an application to support that. This last part often took weeks or months to code and engineer at scale. He says Azure ML takes that process and provides a way to build that same application in hours.

What’s more is it supports more than 300 packages from the popular open source project R used by many data scientists.

Sirosh says the hope is that as more people use the platform and generate APIs and applications, and create what he called, “a virtuous cycle between data and APIs. ” People have data. They bring it to [Azure ML] to create APIs. People hook into applications then feed data back to the cloud and fuel more APIs, “he explained.

The product is currently in confidential preview, but Microsoft did mention a couple of examples including Max 451, a Microsoft partner working with large retailers to help predict which products customers are most likely to purchase, allowing them to stock their stores before the demand.

Carnegie Mellon University is working with Azure ML to help reduce energy costs in campus buildings by predicting and mitigating activities to reduce overall energy usage and cost.

Microsoft is not alone in this space, however. IBM launched Watson as a cloud service last winter for similar types of machine learning application building and just last week a startup called Ersatz Labs also launched a deep learning artificial intelligence cloud platform.

Azure ML goes into public preview next month. There is no word yet on the official launch date. Note that the Azure ML site should be live shortly."

"HackerRank, the technical recruitment platform and code-challenge community, today announced that it has raised a $9.2 million Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures. Other participants in this round include Motorola Mobility VP Peeyush Ranjan, former Facebook senior director of engineering Greg Badros and Facebook director of product management Dan Rubinstein.

The HackerRank team decided to go with these investors because of their expertise around hiring for, and work with, fast-growing companies.

“As software and data science becomes a critical tool for every industry, there will be intense competition for talent in this area,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, in a statement today. “HackerRank is clearly the first mover and lead player. This is why we’re leading this round.”
The service has changed some since it first went through Y Combinator and then launched as a platform for hosting coding challenges at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012. While coding challenges remain among its core focus areas, most of the company’s growth now comes from its white label recruiting platform.

Indeed, as HackerRank CEO and co-founder Vivek Ravisankar told me, the company has doubled its revenue every quarter for the last three quarters based on the strong performance of this service. Monthly active users on the platform are also growing 20 to 25 percent every month. Currently, about half a million developers are active on the site.

That’s another reason the company decided to raise more money. HackerRank wants to grow its sales team rapidly to capitalize on the current momentum. On the product side, the company plans to expand to more domains that include a wider range of skills than today’s code-focused platform. These include topics like networking and database administration.

Companies can use sponsored coding challenges on the service to find potential hires, but in addition, the service also now offers a real-time whiteboard with a built-in code editor for technical phone interviews.

Among the companies that currently use the service are Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, VMware, Skype and Square, but Ravisankar also noted that the service has made inroads with companies that aren’t necessarily associated with tech."

"A company isn’t much without people. That’s why it’s smart to use software that can show what happens when you bring in good people and keep the best ones around.

One startup with software for performing these computations, Visier, announced today that it has raised $25.5 million in new funding.

Visier brings together data from lots of a company’s different data sources, including software like Taleo, and then lets human resources (HR) people create dashboards and visualizations of the data. It’s purpose-built for HR work, unlike complex data warehouses or business-intelligence software that allows for analysis of lots of data types.
Now Visier can try to become a known quantity in the HR business, which is far from uncharted territory.
The startup goes out of its way to say on its website that its software can take in data from Workday’s human resources and finance software. Nevertheless, publicly traded Workday could represent competition for Visier, as could companies like SAP, where Visier cofounder and chief executive John Schwarz previously worked.
Before that, Schwarz was chief executive of business-intelligence software company Business Objects, which SAP bought in 2007.

Along with legacy vendors like SAP and Oracle, startups with cloud-based software for tracking or predicting workforce trends could also present competition to Visier. SilkRoad fits in that camp, among others.

Visier, based in Vancouver, B.C., and San Jose, Calif., started in 2010. To date it has raised $49.5 million, including last year’s $15 million round.

Adams Street Partners led the new round. Foundation Capital and Summit Partners also participated.

Customers include ConAgra, Hyatt, NetApp, Nissan, and Time Inc., according to Visier’s website."