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To: stockman_scott who wrote (756)	9/28/2011 4:22:56 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1685

Box.net adds CRM as an investor: Cloud Storage Platform Box.net Raises $50 Million From Salesforce And Others Leena Rao TechCrunch September 27, 2011 Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million. Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G. The company says that 200,000+ new users join each month and the average enterprise deployment size doubles every two quarters. Over 1,000 new companies sign up for the business and enterprise editions monthly and Box has seen a 600% growth in mobile deployments in 2011 compared to all of 2010. CEO Levie tells us in the video below that the future of enterprise software will be personal, social and smart, which means that content will actually connect users and help productivity in the enterprise. help connect users to content, make better decisions, faster, and work more effectively with anyone. Box raised $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but Levie says that because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense. And the company has even become a pricey acquisition target. Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well. Levie explains that the company didn’t need to raise more money, with the potential acceleration of growth in the cloud, the company wanted to be prepared to mitigate this growth. The new funding will be used to add additional infrastructure, for research and product development and for hiring. There are no current acquisitions on the horizon, but Levie says that the company would certainly be interested in acquiring if there is the right fit. techcrunch.com

To: stockman_scott who wrote (756)	9/28/2011 4:28:18 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1685

The Kindle Fire Pulls All Of Amazon’s Cloud Media Onto A Tablet Erick Schonfeld TechCrunch September 27, 2011 Today, at an Amazon event in New York City (read our liveblog), Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire, a new media tablet that pulls together all of Amazon’s media services from the cloud. These include 18 million digital books, movies, songs, magazines, apps, and games. The $199 Kindle Fire is designed to tap into all of the digital media products and services Amazon has been building for the past few years: Amazon Web Services, Instant Video, Kindle Books, Amazon’s MP3 music store, cloud storage, and Android app store. Oh, and it’s got a brand new Amazon Silk mobile browser that takes advantage of EC2 to load pages faster on the device. When Amazon was designing the Fire, CEO Jeff Bezos says they asked themselves, “Is there some way we can bring all of these together into a remarkable product offering customers will love?” You can read Kindle books on the Fire, but if that is all you need it for you will probably better off getting a $99 Kindle Touch. The Fire is for reading, plus everything else. The homepage is a bookshelf with all of your media—from books and games to music and movies—that you can swipe through in Coverflow fashion, starting with the most recent first. All of your media is also backed up and synced wirelessly in the cloud. “You can delete it and get it back when you want,” notes Bezos. The Kindle Fire comes with a free six-month trial to the Instant Videos that currently come with Amazon Prime, as well as free three-month trials of the magazines in its newsstand. Amazon is really using the Fire as a way to wrap and present all of its digital media services , and offering free trials to get people to try them. Just as the Kindle includes Whispersync for books, which allows you to pick up reading no matter what device you are using, the Fire does the same thing for movies. You can begin watching on your tablet and then continue on your laptop or Internet-connected TV. The Kindle Fire relies on WiFi, a 3G version was not announced. The device ships on November 15. The Kindle Fire is pretty much as we’ve been describing it. The Fire has a good chance at being the best Android-based tablet out of the gate. Not just because of the fine-tuned software, but because of all the media you can get on it. Of course, it makes it really easy to buy all of that media from Amazon. But just as Apple builds superior product by integrating the software, hardware, its Web-based store, so too is Amazon trying to do the same thing. And all at an affordable price. “We are building premium products at non-premium prices,” Bezos repeated a few times during his presentation. His message seemed to be that in an Amazon world you can have the best of both. techcrunch.com

To: stockman_scott who wrote (756)	9/29/2011 4:55:36 AM
From: Glenn Petersen	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1685

Marc Andreessen: The "Clock Is Ticking" On Oracle Matt Rosoff Business Insider Sep. 28, 2011, 1:13 pm Marc Andreessen thinks that the clock is ticking on Oracle and other old-line software and infrastructure companies. His evidence: not a single one of Andreessen-Horowitz's startup investments use Oracle software. They all use cloud-based alternatives instead. Andreessen kicked off BoxWorks, the first-ever customer conference for cloud collaboration provider Box.net, this morning in San Francisco. His firm invested in Box, he says, partly because he found that a lot of the other startups they were funding already used the product. As he put it, "Ten years ago, it was a joke: you'd raise $20 million in venture capital and write a $4 or $5 million check to Oracle, Sun, BEA, and EMC....When it started, Salesforce looked like a toy compared with Siebel. Look ahead five years later, it's obviously better. Not a single one of our startups uses Oracle." Cloud computing has lowered costs so dramatically, it's made huge success stories like Facebook possible. "Ten years ago, Facebook wouldn't have been viable as a company or a business. The infrastructure costs wouldn't have worked. The checks to Oracle, Sun, BEA, and EMC would have crushed the company before it ever got off the ground." He also said, "I think the clock is really ticking and Oracle is the most vivid case. I have huge respect for Oracle, Larry Ellison is one of my idols -- I wouldn't quite say role model....But objectively looking where they are, they have all the old software, they've cranked up the maintenance fees. That's all well and good for customers that model, but they have not leaped forward into this change." businessinsider.com