We've all had it happen: You meet someone, ask her what she does, and she tells you her job title. And all you can think is "OK, but—I still have no idea what you do." In the digital age and the start-up world, it's not that uncommon a feeling.

So we decided to find out. Starting with the position of Community Manager, we're giving you a look at the start-up jobs you've always wondered about. Meet these seven Community Managers—from Pinterest to StumbleUpon to Kiva—and find out: What does it really mean to manage a community?

So, what exactly is a community manager?

As Chelsa Bocci from Kiva explains, it’s a bit of a grab-bag: “It depends on who you’re speaking with, what community really means.”

At Kiva, Bocci's job is all about trying to find creative ways to grow both the online and offline communities.

She works on everything from planning programs for college campuses and grade-school classrooms to running Kiva’s social media strategy.

Listen to Chelsa talk more about her job at Kiva.

At StumbleUpon, Currin Berdine and the rest of the Community Team also want to be a part of their users’ lives—both on and offline.

While part of their work is making sure customers are happy with the product, their coolest community initiatives are the real-live events they host. 

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Wireless networks will soon get a big boost in speed.

A new standard supporting the 60 GHz band is coming next year and it will allow wireless networks to be much faster than those that run on today's current 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.

The standard, known as 802.11ad, will create wireless networks that operate at a whopping 7 gigabits per second. CORRECTED: In comparison today's 5 GHz WiFi can work as fast as 600 megabits per second.

But a standard doesn't mean much until companies build some products to support it. And it all it starts with the WiFi chips. As many as four companies are planning on shipping a new wave of chips in less than a year.

Today, chip maker Marvell announced that it will partner with with Israeli startup Wilocity to make tri-band chips, meaning chips that will use all three bands, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 60 GHz. Wilocity announced a similar deal with Qualcomm’s Atheros division about a year ago. Wilocity was founded in 2007 with backing from Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Tallwood Partners.

Plus, two other startups—Beam Networks and Peraso Technologies—said they will announce their 60 GHz chips within the next six to nine months, reports EE Times.

It often takes up to a year between the time the silicon is ready and when actual new WiFi routers hit the shelves. So we're looking at 2014 before your home will have its fabulous, super fast new WiFi.

At these speeds, tri-band WiFi will mean multiple devices can stream movies and live action video games  at the same time, glitch free. It also means that WiFi can be an alternative to wired networks for small and mid-sized businesses.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Hot startup Apigee landed another $20 million round of funding.

That brings its total to $72 million since it launched in 2004.

The reason it's on everyone's radar isn't the cash that CEO Chet Kapoor has raised, though—it's the team he's assembled. Notably, he hired Sam Ramji as VP of strategy in 2009. Ramji was at Microsoft where he had the difficult task of teaching Microsoft to like open source.

Apigee's team also includes former IBM cloud big wig Anant Jhingran, Michael Gardner from eBay and Srinivasulu Grandhi from Amazon and Microsoft Windows Live. Kapoor started his career at Steve Jobs's NeXT Computer.

They came to Apigee because it solves a hard problem for enterprises, helping them convert their Web-based applications into new mobile apps and new business opportunities. Apigee offers tools for "application programming interfaces." APIs are the little hooks that let apps tap into each other.

Apigee's tech helped Walgreens roll out an app that lets people print photos directly from their iPhone and Android phones. Walgreens then turned around and offered APIs so that other apps could use the QuickPrint service. Sites like GroupShot, Kicksend, Pic Stitch, Pinweel, and StillShot signed on to let their customers print pics at Walgreens.

"APIs are like doors, They let information flow in and out of apps," Kapoor told Business Insider. "The opportunity is not just for companies like Netflix to create mobile apps, but for companies like Walgreens." It now "has a third-party ecosystem"  and "a whole new market."

Apigee grew its revenue last year by over 300%, which may make it sound like a tiny company. But it also has about 350 big enterprise customers, says Kapoor. In addition to Netflix and Walgreens, customers include AT&T, Gamestop, Shazam, The Weather Channel and Whole Foods.

The round was led by new investor Focus Ventures, with participation from current investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Third Point Ventures.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Nicira isn't the only startup with tech that's going to disrupt corporate networks. Big Switch Networks is another.

With yesterday's news that VMware was spending $1.26 billion to acquire Nicira, we talked to Big Switch cofounder Kyle Forster, formerly a rising star at Cisco.

"We had about three management team meetings in last 24 hours," Forster told us. "We're a little like kids in a candy store."

That's because, Forster and his team feel, Big Switch is sitting pretty. This is the start of a multibillion-dollar market for the stuff his company makes, and his biggest competitor has already been swallowed.

Not surprisingly, sources close to the company say acquisition offers are raining on them. Big Switch backers Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures have to be smiling. (Forster is a protégé of Index partner Mike Volpi, who hired him at Cisco.)

Forster is also excited because he thinks Nicira will alter some of its plans, letting Big Switch pick up the slack.

Big Switch is like the baby brother to Nicira. It is two years younger but from the same Stanford University stock. Nicira's founders invented the open-source software that is at the heart of all the excitement, known as OpenFlow. But Big Switch cofounder Guido Appenzeller was also involved with OpenFlow. And he and Forster delivered a next-generation version. So two companies know each other well.

Big Switch's main software product competes with Nicira, but it's the added applications that set them apart. Big Switch was careful to avoid too much overlap with Nicira. They didn't want to be "two startups shooting arrows at each other," Forster says.

But he believes "a whole bunch of Nicira's apps are a horrible strategic fit to VMware's portfolio," so it's time to open fire.

Big Switch is not officially launched, though it will be in the fourth quarter. That said, Forster says that they already have a handful of paying commercial beta customers.

Plus interest is insanely high in the product. Big Switch rather quietly released its software as an open-source project in January—mostly to try and lure developers to build apps on top of it. Since then it's been downloaded 5,000 times, and they get contributions to improve it every week, Forster told us. That means that thousands of large enterprises are playing with it.

It sure seems likely that this company will fetch a big fat price someday soon, too.

Don't miss: Ben Horowitz Explains Why Tiny Startup Nicira Was Worth $1.26 Billion To VMware

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Airbnb has acqui-hired DailyBooth, TechCrunch reports. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

DailyBooth helps users tell the story of their lives through pictures. The DailyBooth team is led by CEO Brian Pokorney, and Airbnb will use its design and engineering talent to improve its mobile user experience.

About 20% of Airbnb's traffic comes from mobile; 10 million nights have been booked and 200,000 listings are displayed on the site.

Pokorney knows Airbnb's founders from their days at Y Combinator; Porkoney was in the 2009 class. He joined DailyBooth two years ago from early stage investment firm SV Angel.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

The software industry's newfound love for the "freemium" model is a really bad idea, a prominent figure in the business just told us.

John Powell runs Alfresco, a successful maker of content-management tools. He's the former COO of Business Objects, sold to SAP in 2007 for about $5.8 billion.

He says he's lived through one tech bubble and says we are smack dab in the middle of another one. (He's not the only one telling us this—we've been hearing the same concern from lots of other tech startup CEOs.)

What worries him most is the value being placed on grabbing lots of free users with what some call the "blackmail" model—which more polite folks call the "viral" or "user-driven" model.

"I think there's a moral obligation to question some of these things going on. It feels like there's another bubble happening," he says. "It's not good to have a bubble burst—no question in long term, bubbles are bad."

He points to the Yammer acquisition as an example. Remember, that viral model is one of the reasons that Microsoft spent $1.2 billion on Yammer, Steve Ballmer said at the time. The idea is that employees sign up for free cloud services and then IT is forced to come along and pay for enterprise subscriptions to get management and security features.

Alfresco also uses the freemium model, but that's not its main source of revenue. It offers open-source software for file sharing and collaboration—meaning anyone can download it and install it. But it is IT people who typically do that, as it takes some technical expertise to fire up a server and load software onto it.

When IT people bring the product in-house, they are far more likely to pay for it. To date, Alfresco has sold more than $160 million of subscriptions to its software, Powell says, and has over 6 million users, 70% of whom are paid enterprise users.

Compare that to the average freemium conversion rate. In 2010, Evernote CEO Phil Libin famously revealed that after two years, about 6% of his users will have become paid users.

70% versus 6%—that's pretty compelling.

And it says a lot about how the IT industry has got its focus on the wrong thing.  "In the make believe land of VC valuations and strategic acquisitions ...  getting free users and having viral features to get more free users currently equates to value," Powell says.

"A lot of these tech decisions are actually being driven and pioneered by IT guys and we're trying to throw them under the bus as having failed, and we don't need these IT guys," he explains, characterizing the view of freemium proponents.

In reality, he says, "they are actually the people leading the charge."

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Ever wanted to volunteer for a charity, but never had enough time?

Now you can hire someone to do charity work for you with Exec, a Y Combinator backed startup.

Exec is a startup that lets you hire "execs" for an hourly fee to complete tasks, like assembling a table or picking up a package.

Exec isn't strictly based on charity work. It's just doing this as a promotion to raise awareness about its service. This is a surprisingly crowded field. TaskRabbit and Zaarly are two other startups that let you hire someone to run errands for you.

Exec is led by Justin Kan, who also founded Justin.tv, another Y Combinator company that's seen a lot of success since re-branding to streaming video games as Twitch.tv.

We caught up with Kan to find out why they went this route. Here's what we learned:

• It's just a test-run to find out if it's popular. If there's a lot of traction, then Exec will consider moving it to new cities.

• It's not really lazy activism. Essentially it's like donating money to a charity, except you know the tangible impact of your donation to that charity because you're hiring a helping hand.

• Still, it's a funny and fun idea that could have a lot of impact. The idea came from a post on Facebook from one of Kan's friends.

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the interview:

BI: How are things going with Exec?

JUSTIN KAN: Things are going really well, it's growing, just picked up a bunch of new customers. Dropbox is using us, we're still trying to figure out if we're gonna expand. We're doing a promotion this week that we're pretty excited about. We're gonna allow people to pay for someone to volunteer for them at local San Francisco charities. We figured that was an interesting angle that hadn't been done before. We want to make it a regular thing, give back every couple of months, so the latest idea that my friends actually had, he thought of it on Facebook and posted in on Facebook.

BI: What do you mean working on a charity?

JK: We'll let you choose from a couple charities. We think we can uses an exec to do something in person like working on events, like dinners. For example, you can also hire an Exec to work an after-school program.

BI: Worried people might just consider this another form of lazy activism?

JK: I think that's definitely something that people will ask, but you are donating money. It's better than liking something on Facebook and not doing anything after that

"It's better than liking something on Facebook and not doing anything after that."

. You're putting your money where your mouth is. We've pre-vetted the charities, and we're just using ones that were qualified to use Exec at the time. We talked to them to make sure it's useful to them. It does fit that angle, it's better than doing nothing.

BI: Do you think this is a one-time thing or do you plan on doing it often?

JK: We're gonna run it for a month and see, charities are pretty locally specific to San Francisco. So when we launch other places we're going to have to figure out different ones. A couple of other charities asked me, they're interested in us coming to other cities. If people actually like it and it's an idea that resonates with other people, if it's just something that's more interesting, then we'll figure out some other stuff we can do. 

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Building a startup is hard.

But there's a new trend in startups coming out that make it much easier to make an application.

The latest example is Y Combinator graduate Meteor — which just raised $11.2 million in funding from big-time investors like Andreessen Horowitz. It's a startup that specializes in speeding up the process of making an app.

Meteor takes away a lot of the technical challenges of building a rich web experience with live updates — like comments on Facebook, or a Twitter feed or collaboration service like Asana — by packaging it into a single piece of software you can drop into any app.

Now a less-technical developer can access those really complicated features that users essentially demand, thanks to Facebook, without having to spend months developing them.

We caught up with co-founder Matt Debergalis to find out why Meteor just received a huge round of funding. Here's what we learned:

• Startups typically spend a lot of time building protocols and software for their applications, and not the actual applications. For example, a small team might spend months building the underlying architecture for a live commenting system on photos, like what you might find on Facebook.

• Meteor essentially takes away that development time. All these protocols are available through Meteor, so app developers don't have to spend a ton of time building them from scratch. They can focus on building the actual service.

• With Meteor, you don't need to be a coding genius to build an app any more. All you need is a little bit of experience with JavaScript and a good idea. Meteor handles the rest.

• After building an open-source community, Meteor plans on building a programming infrastructure for enterprise companies. That's a pretty typical route with most open source projects.

Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the interview: 

BUSINESS INSIDER: Tell me a little bit about Meteor.

MATT DEBERGALIS: We're building is a new platform for writing rich client applications, things like the photo-viewer in Facebook or Quora or other sites that actually run inside the browser as a program. That's a big break form the old model, where you would build a website that ran in a distant web server far away from the user that would deliver a rendered page to the browser. The reason this is happening is the same reason we moved from the mainframes in the 70s and 80s to desktop software on Windows  — you can build a richer interface, a more fluid experience for the user, if the software is physically right next to he person using the software.

With the rise of mobile devices where we have powerful computers in peoples' pockets and the rise of JavaScript which has become this industry standard powered by massive investments for Apple, Microsoft and others, we now have a platform where we can move away from that web era where software was far away where we had these static interfaces. The reason Facebook invested in that, for example, is so you can swipe through photos and see comments popping up in real time.

BI: What kind of pain point are you attacking? 

MD: Because the technique is new and because the infrastructure doesn't exist yet, building those rich web services takes teams of experts months to build today. Only larger companies like Twitter and Quora and Asana, people who are well-funded, can do that. Your typical developer is left between a rock and a hard place because users expect the interface to be fluid and interactive like Facebook. It's a technique that's difficult for a developer and small team to master. Meteor is the first off the shelf answer to that problem. It ties together all the techniques and technologies to build the rich applications so the weekend coder and typical developer can focus on the application, not the ni tty gritty

"It ties together all the techniques and technologies to build the rich applications so the weekend coder and typical developer can focus on the application, not the nitty gritty."

.

BUSINESS INSIDER: What do you mean by "techniques"?

MD: Here's the challenge: if someone makes a change on a site like website, how do we get that information on to everyone else's screen. You might have a million people using that app if it's successful, everyone is using that information. To write software like that you have to build a bunch of programs that coordinate the traffic, you invest in protocol that allows your client to coordinate with the server you wrote, which is your air traffic controller, and the server decides which data to send to which people. You're investing a whole layer to connect those things and forced to come up with a solution on how to tell each client when their data is out of date, and keep every single interface up to date.

For example, that's why we have the rise of new programming languages like Node.js. That's good at allowing every client to keep an open connection to the server. But to write those protocols you have to be good at JavaScript, and good at some server side language like Ruby or Python,  and you have to be able to design a protocol. You end up building a miniature database inside your client because you want to be able to store data and cache it so the client is quick and fluid. Those kinds of problems have nothing to do with the app you're trying to build, it's just complex software everyone has to write. That's what meteor does off the shelf.

A good analogy is the relational database. Before Oracle provided a database you could buy, any software you wrote you had to include that functionality by hand. Companies used to hire database hands that would build fragile database systems tied to applications. But once we had this off the shelf SQL technology, every developer could start with that off the shelf instead of focusing on the nitty gritty of figuring out how and when to put information on a disk.

BI: How does this help a startup?

MD: If you want to develop an idea as quickly as you can and you're a small team, you want to iterate and try it out and see how people that feel. If the beginning of that process is a month of underlying technical work and you don't have any product to show for it, you're in a tough spot. Meteor lets a startup iterate their product in days instead of weeks or months. It lets people immediately works with graphic design, with a rich application. Meteor is a technology that lets a graphic designer begin building a complete application. It levels the playing field and it lets a single designer or an artist to be able to construct that next blockbuster app.

BI: Tell me a little bit about your team.

MD: There are three of us, we're all hackers. We've done some projects that all ran into this problem. The reason we wrote meteor is that we struggled with exactly what I described, spending months building the underpinnings of applications because we want these kinds of interfaces. We thought this was an opportunity with the growing acceptance of JavaScript, it was time to bring an off-the-shelf solution that we could put together as a product that would let any developer use those same techniques to the table. We went through YC last summer, we've been working on Meteor for just about a year.

BI: You just raised a huge chunk of cash. What are you going to use it for?

MD: The reason we wanted to work with Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners is that they are experts at taking successful open source technologies into the enterprise. Andreessen Horowitz has made some high-profile commitments to developer-centric technologies, we think they're a great fit. Marc Andreessen basically invented the web. It's a firm that I think is patient and understands the value of a vibrant open source community.

The first thing we're gonna do is use this to continue to grow the Meteor project, an open source project that anyone can use for free and modify it how they want. We ant to help the community grow. That means we're going to do whatever we can do to help people build the meteor project — find jobs, build apps, all these things successful to an open source ecosystem.

In the long term, the funding will help build product that commercial enterprises need so they can integrate Meteor into their existing IT infrastructure. The challenge with the enterprise is you have requirements around how you want to allocate computing resources. Those are products we can develop around the Meteor core that we can sell to the enterprise. The team we've put together has done this repeatedly. We have to be patient and focused on the open source project, once you have that, we have to figure out how to take that technology into the enterprise, which has this very different set of interests.

BI: How does this fit into the big push into mobile? 

MD: You see applications built for all these platforms at the same time. You may build a native mobile application for iOS or Android, and you're usually gonna have an HTML5 equivalent. The real problem is how to have a consistent architecture that lets you share data across those two things at the same time and how you do it in a way that saves engineering time. Meteor is a bunch of individual packages that fit together. It's designed to plug your native mobile application into the exact same server as your HTML5/desktop application and have a consistent standard protocol, so when you make a change on your phone or your native app, it appears on the desktop.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Silicon Valley can never have too many photo-sharing apps.

Now one of the latest trending apps is Dermandar's DMD Panorama, a photo-sharing application that rapidly takes panoramic shots of your surroundings.

It's available for both the iPhone and Android devices.

It's one of the fastest panoramic photo apps we've seen, stitching together a 360-degree shot in about 20 seconds.

It's also one of the slickest interfaces we've seen, and has a good sense of where to stitch photos together to get a full shot.

If you're a camera enthusiast, the app is free for now, and it's worth checking out. We've included a full walkthrough below.

Here we go! You have to hold your camera vertically, because that's how it takes photos.

You can add a flash or adjust the focus, like any camera app.

Once it's vertical, it'll take the first shot

Please follow SAI: Tools on Twitter and Facebook.

If there's one crowd of people who know about hot startups, it's the venture capitalists who fund them.

So we took an informal survey of a handful of top enterprise VCs to find out which startups they are most excited about.

But we gave them rules.

They could tell us about one or two companies in their own portfolios (seems fair, they liked them enough to fund them) but they also HAD TO tell us about an equal number of startups that neither they, nor their firms had a financial interest in.

We've indicated the relationship each VC has to the startup. "It's mine" indicates that the VC is either directly involved, or the company is a member of the firm's portfolio. 

The second category is "No relation. I just think it's cool." This indicates a startup outside of the VC's portfolio.

The total list shows just how diverse and exciting enterprise tech is these days. If you're looking for a company to bet your career on, to partner with, or to just to watch, these are the ones.

We contacted every startup and found out a few interesting facts about each one, too.

Cloudera: Bringing big data to any enterprise

Cloudera helps companies build big data systems using an open source technology known as Hadoop. Hadoop can analyze huge quantities of data using low-cost hardware and enterprises are eating it up.

Cloudera is one of the leaders in this area created by some Valley heavy hitters including ex-Facebook-er Jeff Hammerbacher; Yahoo's former VP engineering, Amr Awadallah.

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners.  "The category leader in innovating and deploying Hadoop in enterprise."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: The inventor of Hadoop (and head guy at the Apache Foundation), Doug Cutting, works for Cloudera.

Nimble Storage: Making storage faster, greener

Flash storage is changing how companies can store data -- making it faster and using less energy. It's the same type of storage used in in a thumb drive or in mobile phones. Nimble Storage is helping to create enterprise flash storage for "post PC" devices (also known as virtualization).

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners."Nimble has developed an innovative file system that leverages the best of flash and disk natively for mainstream enterprise applications."

And watched by: Jim Goetz, Sequoia. "The emerging storage leader."

Relationship to these VCs: "It's mine."

Fun fact: After EMC shot a promotional video of a stunt motorcyclist jumping over the entire EMC line of 40 storage products, Nimble Storage CTO Umesh Maheshwari did the same with a mountain bike over a single Nimble Storage array. 

Platfora: Making big data easy to use for everyone

Once a company builds its complicated Hadoop big data app, Platfora offers technology that lets average business users work with the app. The company is still in stealth, and isn't launching the product until Q4. But enterprises have been hearing about it and have overwhelmed the company with requests to join its beta program.

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners. "A data visualization/discovery application built on top of big data platforms like Hadoop. It allows enterprises to extract value out of all their big data plaforms."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The office lobby features glowing blue highlights and others in the building at first thought the it was a nightclub.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Y Combinator has been helping startups accelerate and get funded for the past seven years. 380 startups have gone through the program, excluding the most recent class.

Paul Graham says those 380 startups have raised $1,048,274,000 in venture capital combined.

Some of the big contributors are DropBox, which has raised $257 million and is valued at $4 billion, and Airbnb, which has raised $120 million at a $1 billion + valuation.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Last Spring, Robby Stein and Bart Stein (not related) left their jobs at Google to start a company, Stamped.

Stamped received funding from Google Ventures and others to become a mobile app that would make restaurant and small business reviews more social.

It was well received and named one of the best new apps in the App Store. But a few months in, Stein and his two cofounders realized they had a bigger, better idea.

They wanted Stamped to be a place where users could keep track of all of their favorite things, from restaurants to books, movies and music. It should be more like Pinterest and less like Yelp, they determined.

The startup's team of ten (five are ex-Googlers) spent the past six months quietly rewriting every line of the app's code. A slew of A-list investors are supporting Stamped's new vision; Ryan Seacrest, Ellen DeGeneres, Justin Bieber, The New York Times, Columbia Records, Crunchfund, Eric Schmidt, ShoeDazzle's Brian Lee, and Pandora CTO Tom Conrad are all investors. Stamped has raised $3 million to date.

"Ellen talks about her favorite things on her show all the time; now she has a place to put them," says CEO Robby Stein.

Stamped 2.0 now app operates like Twitter; you can follow others and see their activity in your feed. Each user only gets 100 stamps to use on their favorite things and they're given more if users interact with their recommendations. The stamp limit, Stein believes, will make every recommendation more authentic.

In addition, Stamped creates personalized guides for users based on their interests and their friends' recommendations. It pulls together lists of books, restaurants, movies and songs for users to try based on suggestions from trusted people and publishers. The New York Times, for example, will be putting all of its Best Sellers on Stamped as book recommendations.

Stamped has relationships with over a dozen third-party sources, from Spotify to Amazon. When you find a song on Stamped, for example, you can listen to it in the app through Spotify. Books can be previewed and purchased via Amazon. But all of the information you need about a product or service you discover on Stamped is available within the app.

The three founders, Robby, Bart and Kevin Palms, are determined to build a long-term network where people help others discover amazing things.

"People ultimately discover things through other people in offline conversations," says Stein. "We built the new version of Stamped to capture a people-driven approach to discovery."

Stein is coming in to tell us more about the app this afternoon. In the meantime, here's a video interview with Stein explaining the first version of Stamped from February. Here's what Stamped's office looks like. And here's what the new app looks like:

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Earlier today we introduced you to Stamped, a refreshed app that aims to change the way you keep track of your favorite things.

The new version works similarly to Twitter, and is an awesome place to keep all of your favorite things, from restaurants to books, movies, and music.

Alyson Shontell spoke with the developers and she observes,  "stamped creates personalized guides for users based on their interests and their friends' recommendations. It pulls together lists of books, restaurants, movies and songs for users to try based on suggestions from trusted people and publishers. The New York Times, for example, will be putting all of its Best Sellers on Stamped as book recommendations."

Keep reading to take a look at the app and start collecting your favorite digital things.

Tap to open. We like the Stamped icon.

We like the Stamped logo.

The app welcomes you to the new version and shows you all of the improvements.

Please follow SAI: Tools on Twitter and Facebook.

Box, an enterprise cloud storage provider, is raising another financing round after already raising $162 million that would value it at a whopping $1.2 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.

That would put it in the small, exclusive club of billion-dollar startups in Silicon Valley. It's yet another enterprise startup to achieve a valuation over $1 billion — showing a lot of excitement over those kinds of startups.

For example, enterprise social network Yammer sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion last month.

Business Insider first reported the new funding round was approaching when CEO Aaron Levie met with bankers in New York in late May. Box just finished raising $81 million in October last year.

A new funding round would make sense. Box has been on a marketing blitz and spends a ton of money trying to build it up as a hip brand and startup.

Box bought a bunch of billboards along highways and gives away a ton of free online storage space. It also paid $1 million to change its name from Box.net to just "Box."

We even hear from one source that the company tried to run a Superbowl ad at one point, but ran out of time to produce the ad. We hear it hasn't ruled out that as an option in the future.

(To be fair, Dropbox, a consumer-oriented competitor, has raised more than $250 million. But Dropbox is also seen to have a bigger brand and a higher valuation than Box.)

Citrix Systems actually tried to buy Box around September last year for a price that was above $500 million, multiple sources familiar with the deal told Business Insider.

Box has a burn of about $1.5 million monthly on about $25 million in revenue annually — although we heard those numbers in November and they could have changed since then. When we reached out, a Box spokesperson said they were not numbers the company publicly commented on.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Remember Instagram?

It's a photo-sharing application that sold to Facebook for $1 billion after rocketing to tens of millions of users in the span of a few months.

As simple as it sounds, it can be technically challenging to build an app like that. But with a startup called Parse, you can build it in a half hour.

Parse gives app developers a way to build an app that looks and feels great. Instead of wasting time coding the technical necessities like Facebook connectivity and push notifications, Parse users can drag and drop the functions right into their apps.

Parse powers some of the most popular apps in the world, including Band of the Day — a runner-up for App of the Year on Apple's App Store, in a batch of more than 400,000 other applications. It's used by 20,000 mobile developers—and that number grows 40 percent monthly.

We caught up with Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam, a two-time graduate from Y Combinator, to find out how easy it was to build an Instagram clone. Here's what we learned:

• Using Parse, you can build a copy of Instagram in a half hour. All the important bits — like adding a camera function and a sharing function for photos — are baked in to Parse.

• It works for other apps that use pretty common functions, too. Geolocation is baked in to Parse, so it's easy to build a clone of Pinwheel in a half hour too.

• Parse has 25,000 apps built on its platform. Around 20,000 developers use Parse, and that number is growing quickly.

BUSINESS INSIDER: Can you tell me a little bit about Parse?

TIKHON BERNSTAM: Mobile app development is traditionally really hard, the whole mission of Parse is to make mobile app development much much easier. There aren't a lot of good examples of open-sourced sophisticated apps like this. We're hoping to show how easy it is to build huge hit apps like that. We're at over 25,000 apps on the platform, at Parse.com/gallery we're building a gallery of some of the coolest, interesting apps on Parse right now.

BI: So what's this promotion exactly?

TB: We're launching a Parse-powered clone of the smash hit Instagram and showing with a tutorial showing how you can go from scratch to Instagram in just 30 minutes. Before Parse, that was impossible, it would have taken you much longer — at least a few weeks. We're actually open sourcing the app and all the code and hoping to spur innovation in photo sharing. 

We're huge fans on Instagram, and this is not exactly the same thing, it's a great basis for anyone to go start their own photo-sharing app. Parse is handling a lot of the problems that are really difficult. The user authentication, uploading photos, server configuration, the servers handle all this logic. All this stuff you no longer have to do with Parse, we're trying to showcase the power of the platform.

BUSINESS INSIDER: Why Instagram?

TB: We'd seen quite a few apps on Parse already doing some parts of photo-sharing. There's obviously been a lot of interest in this space since the acquisition if Instagram, and we just wanted to show the flexibility of Parse. They've done a great job, it's obviously no small feat, and getting 50 million users is not trivial.

Our goal here isn't to make money off anything, it's more to showcase the platform and how quickly you can get something really cool up and running on Parse. That's the point. We're hoping to spur more interesting stuff in this photo-sharing sector. We're gonna fork the code on GitHub, we hope people build their own thing.

BI: Can you give me some other examples of apps you can quickly build on Parse?

TB: We've actually built a couple smaller ones. We built one called AnyWall, a geolocation game, it's a lot like Caterina Fake's app called Pinwheel, you can drop a note anywhere and someone else has to be within a certain distance to see the note. You can drop a note at a restaurant. You can have that up and running in less than a half hour. We've already seen a lot of developers fork that and make extra additions to it.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Imagine being 33 years old, looking a half a billion dollars in the face, and saying "no."

That's exactly what Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith did last spring. After about a decade of hard work, the cloud survey business he, his dad, and brother built was on fire and the venture capitalists were calling.

So were the offers to buy.

At one point the Smiths had an offer to sell their business for $500 million in one hand and seven term sheets from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms in the other, Smith told Business Insider.

"When we first started, we decided we were not going to raise any funding. When you are sitting in a basement you're not really thinking—you're hoping—but not thinking you'll be in an 80,000 square-foot building in eight years, with 5,000 customers," he described.

Sequoia Capital was one of those VCs. Sequoia's Mike Moritz—backer of Google, Yahoo, and PayPal—convinced Smith that a half a billion dollars was nothing compared to the multibillion-dollar company Qualtrics could become.

The family had built a cloud service to fix the "$20 billion outsourced research market" as Smith describes it. Smith's dad was the well-known Dr. Scott Smith, a professor of marketing at BYU's school of business. He was fed up with the software for conducting research so he built this cloud service for doing surveys online. Ryan was still in college, also studying business and marketing, when he joined the company.

Flash forward to 2012. The Smiths did some soul searching and in May opted to keep the company independent and take a $70 million Series A round from Sequoia and Accel Partners. (Sequoia's Bryan Schreier and Accel's Ryan Sweeney joined its board.) This was the largest Series A that the two companies had ever jointly invested in, and among the biggest first-round deals ever.

As you might expect, Qualtrics is so sought after because its marketing has been brilliant. The Smiths first targeted universities. "We signed up every business school we went after." Thousands of marketing students learned to use it at school and then brought Qualtrics into their companies when they get hired.

Business is booming.

• Qualtrics has had triple-digit revenue growth "every year for last 5 years," he says.

• It now has 5,000 customers including 600 universities, 95 of the top 100 business schools.

• Customers include half the Fortune 100 and include companies like Kellogg, Microsoft, Verizon, Toyota, Cabela's.

• They have 220 employees and will hire another 200 next year, and will expand internationally.

Smith still has no plans to sell but says he gets more offers every week.

Don't miss: The Next 25 Big Enterprise Startups

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

For people who want to avoid the embarrassment of strolling down the aisles of their local sex store, Boink Box will deliver a box of sex toys to their house every month.

The model is called subscription-commerce, and it's been popularized by companies like ShoeDazzle and BirchBox. (We suspect the latter inspired Boink Box's name.)

Boink's boxes cost $45 a month. So if you are looking to try out some massage oils, lubricants, vibrators, or other adult items, Boink Box may be for you.

Like other subscription models, founder Chris Dumas combs the world of sex toys, contacts wholesalers, and curates the items in the collection box.

He chooses what items to add to the box based on what customers specify. They can choose “stuff for everyone,” “mostly vagina,” or “mostly penis.” You can add $40 to your order for a premium, um, package.

An extra bonus? He provides a newsletter with recommendations on how to use the products. Helpful in case you were embarrassed to ask.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

A lot of us dream having Sharmila Mulligan's career.

She's been involved in multiple startups with big payouts and is now CEO and co-founder of ClearStory Data, a buzzy early-stage startup in Palo Alto, Calif. It's backed by Google Ventures, her buddy Marc Andreessen's firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Khosla Ventures.

She met Andreessen when her employer, a startup called Kiva Software, was bought by Netscape for $180 million in 1997. She joined up with him again at Opsware, which was bought by HP for $1.6 billion. Later she joined Aster Systems, bought by Teradata for $263 million last year. Along the way she dabbled in a bunch of other startups, as an advisor or investor.

She has three kids and was going to take some time off before plunging back to work, but the startup bug bit again last summer and off she went, along with two co-founders from Aster.

But what's it REALLY like to have that life? We asked Mulligan to tote a camera along for a couple of days and show us.

The big surprise: the stereotype of the working mom is far from true. Life as a startup CEO doesn't have to mean missing baseball games and family dinners.

During this particular week, she was speaking at UC Berkeley's DataEDGE conference, a gathering of top big data computer scientists.

7 a.m.: Sharmila waves goodbye to her kids. She often drives them to school but she's speaking at a conference today so has to leave early.

A day in the life of

8:39 a.m.: Sharmila gets briefed by Quentin Hardy, Deputy Tech Editor for the New York Times, who will moderate the morning panel at the DataEDGE conference.

9:28 Sharmila joins other big data bigwigs on stage including Amr Awadallah, CTO for Cloudera; DJ Patil, data scientist in residence for Greylock Partners and previously chief scientist at LinkedIn; and moderator Quentin Hardy.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Bit9, a business that provides software and services to fight cyber attacks, just secured $34.5 million dollars in Series D funding led by Sequoia Capital.

"This latest round of funding is the largest in the company’s history and underscores the support Bit9 has received from investors who
understand the changing nature of the security market. It places a bet squarely on our vision and technology," CEO Patrick Morley said in a statement.

The company’s main product is an enterprise whitelisting application service; it controls which software and IP addresses are allowed to enter into a company’s system. Bit9 plans on using the funds to add to the security services it already provides while also increasing its sales and marketing efforts.

According to Bit9 research, 59% of U.S companies believe they have been a victim to some sort of cyber threat. With both small and large businesses like Zappos and LinkedIn becoming targets for cyber attacks, investors thought it was time to take action.

“The market has reached a clear inflection point where organizations of all sizes across all industries need a new approach to cyber security”  Mickey Arabelovic, partner at Sequoia Capital, said in a statement. “Bit9 has emerged as a market leader with its trust-based security for endpoints and servers, and we’re excited to help them build an enduring business."

Other investors participating in the round include Atlas Venture, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and .406 Ventures.

Bit9 raised $72.8 million to date.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Cvent CEO and founder Reggie Aggarwal's history is one of sheer grit and determination. Just like his company.

Founded in 1999, Cvent is now a booming company with 1,000 employees and 10,000 clients in 90 countries.

Cvent offers a cloud app that helps companies organize and manage their events, everything from online registration to processing payments.

Revenues are growing by 40% a year, and it has signed more than 1,400 new clients in 2012 alone, including Toshiba, Deloitte & Touche and the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Last month, it made two multimillion-dollar acquisitions, too: CrowdCompass, for $10 million and Seed Labs for $4.2 million.

It's hard to imagine that just over a decade ago, Cvent was another busted dotcom on the brink of bankruptcy.

"We went from six employees to 125 in 2000," Aggarwal said. "Then the dotcom meltdown hit, September 11 hit, and reality hit because we had just grown to 125 employees without the revenue. We were a $1.5 million [annual] revenue company at that point."

"I'm going to take 100% of the blame because I'm CEO—but trust me, all of them [our investors] were encouraging us to do that, including our board. You know, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow," he says.

(Sound familiar? That's kind of what some startups pursuing the freemium model are doing right now, Aggarwal says.)

Aggarwal trusted his investors' advice because they were execs at some of the most successful tech companies around.

Cvent had started almost as accident. Aggarwal was a successful lawyer in Washington, D.C. who founded a networking group for tech CEOs that caught on like crazy. At one point its members included 140 public companies include the CEOs of Nextel, Nortel, AOL and Bell Atlantic.

But organizing the events was a major pain so Aggarwal founded Cvent to build an online app to make it easier. About 90 members of his CEO club became angels. He raised $17 million from them.

When the bubble burst in 2000, Aggarwal was spending more money than Cvent earned. He couldn't raise more.

"We only had about $380,000 in the bank, which sounds like a lot, but not when you're burning a million a month," he remembers.

The company had signed a five-year lease on office space to house 250 employees. Nine months later, the company only had 26 people left and the lease was eating most of the company's income.

To renegotiate the lease, Aggarwal's landlord made him personally sign for the lease. That was a big moment for him.

Aggarwal had already given up his salary and was living with his parents. If he signed the lease and Cvent failed, he would go personally bankrupt.

"I'd be 33 years old, no career, lost all my money, no salary for two and a half years, living with my parents, and I couldn't practice law because no law firm would hire you if you file chapter 7 or chapter 11," Aggarwal said.

On top of that, he owed every top executive in town money. But he decided that he really believed in his company and the employees that were still with him and signed the lease.

From that point on, Cvent grew the old-fashioned way—by earning profits.

"We grew from 26 employees and now we're 1,000 employees—all organically grown."

In 2011, Cvent finally took an official venture round. It was one of the largest Series A rounds on record at $136 million, led by NEA, Insight Venture Partners, and Greenspring Associates.

He used the money to cash out his investors who had stuck with him for 12 years.

And although he's now officially a multimillionaire, he still lives modestly. When he was able to move out of his parents' house, he bought a small two-bedroom condo where he, his wife, and their new baby still live today.  And when he travels on business, his executives book affordable hotels, two to a room.

"We still remember the bad times, and we're always going to think like a startup, which is don't get arrogant, treasure your customers, treasure your employees, and be frugal," he says.

Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »