So you’ve raised your B round, but an IPO isn’t really possible and the bigger fish aren’t yet sniffing around to acquire your company at a price that your venture backers are interested in. How do you sell some private stock to buy that sports car with cash? Welcome to the secondary market. Shares of stock in companies like Facebook and Twitter are changing hands, even though the stock is not publicly traded yet. How [...]
In the “you knew this was coming” category, Bazaarvoice filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of it’s stock today. The news is being covered by TechCrunch and The Statesman. The company is one of the fastest growing in Austin, going from 70 employees in April 2007 to over 600 today. In conversations with company co-founder and CEO Brett Hurt, he has always characterized the company’s financial condition by saying that they could stop growing [...]
It’s been a big week for WhaleShark, announcing some new executive talent and confirming additional capital of around $10M. Yesterday the company announced that Paul Rogers has been appointed Chief Technology Officer. Paul led the engineering team at Bazaarvoice in the early days and left to anchor Google’s Austin office when it opened in 2008. “I am honored to be part of the WhaleShark Media team,” said Rogers. “I look forward to working with a [...]
Former Lombardi Software CEO Rod Favaron Joins SpredFast as CEO Spredfast today announced that Rod Favaron has joined the company as chief executive officer, effective immediately. In addition, Favaron will join the Spredfast board of directors. Favaron’s appointment caps off a year of successes for Spredfast which include aggressive customer acquisition, Series A funding from Austin Ventures in April 2010 and ongoing recognition by industry analysts as an innovative player in social media marketing and [...]
mobileTech Tuesday, by Steve Guengerich In a post on TechCrunch over the holidays, entrepreneur and author Stephen Martin wrote about the premise of his new book, The Enterprise of One. In the post, Martin writes about how we have arrived at a new milestone he calls “the democratization of opportunity.” He goes on to write a key passage about the potential for individuals: Today, a person’s professional identity is more important than ever. Individual skills, expertise, [...]
Austin-based Bazaarvoice, the leader in social commerce, has been aggressively building out an incredible suite of applications, furthered by the launch of Social Commerce Insights, which allows marketers to easily and precisely measure social commerce ROI. Social Commerce Insights raises the bar on social media measurement by enhancing Bazaarvoice’s industry-leading analytics capabilities with pre-built integrations with leading Web analytics solutions, including Adobe® SiteCatalyst®, powered by Omniture; Coremetrics®, an IBM Company; and Google Analytics. Through Social [...]
The annual Social Commerce Summit created by Bazaarvoice seems to just get better year after year. The attendance grows higher, the clever marketing continues to pour out, and the announcements are big. So what could get bigger than an announcement about a new product, and a search deal with Google? Bazaarvoice announced that is has partnered with Google to share high-quality product review content from Bazaarvoice client sites on Google Web Search, Google Product Search, [...]
Almost two years ago Bazaarvoice started a counter on their home page marking the number of pieces of user-generated content (UGC) they had served up on the web. We estimated that later that same year they would hit 20 billion reviews. Now, as you can tell from the home page, the company has reached the 100 billion milestone. That’s a lot of reviews and user-generated content! With 80% of consumers now seeking user-generated review content [...]
