After reports earlier this month that LinkedIn was buying contact management service Rapportive, the startup just published a blog post confirming that yes, it has been acquired.
For those of you who don’t use it, Rapportive is a Gmail plugin that shows you the latest social network updates from whoever you’re corresponding with. (I’ve gotten so used to seeing the Rapportive window next to my emails that I sometimes forget that it’s not a default part of Gmail.) And if you’re a Rapportive user who’s worried that the deal will follow the pattern of so many other startup acquisitions, it sounds like LinkedIn won’t be shutting Rapportive down. CEO Rahul Vohra says:
Over the last two years, Rapportive has become an essential product for folks all around the world. When rumours of our acquisition surfaced last week, many asked what was going to happen to the product. Well, we have fantastic news: at LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.
The blog post also includes a section titled “The Future,” though Vohra doesn’t say anything specific about what new things he’ll be working on at LinkedIn. He does say that the Rapportive vision involves building products that “you don’t have to remember to use” (italics his) and that become “an intrinsic part of the tools you use every day.”
After AllThingsD broke the news, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis dug up the fact that the deal was for $15 million in cash. When I asked Vohra today if he had any comment on Alexia’s story, he said, “Yeah — which of our investors were bragging ?”
Speaking of investors, Rapportive raised $1 million from Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500 Startups, Michael Zirngibl, Ashish Soni and David Cancel.
After reports earlier this month that LinkedIn was buying contact management service Rapportive, the startup just published a blog post confirming that yes, it has been acquired.
For those of you who don’t use it, Rapportive is a Gmail plugin that shows you the latest social network updates from whoever you’re corresponding with. (I’ve gotten so used to seeing the Rapportive window next to my emails that I sometimes forget that it’s not a default part of Gmail.) And if you’re a Rapportive user who’s worried that the deal will follow the pattern of so many other startup acquisitions, it sounds like LinkedIn won’t be shutting Rapportive down. CEO Rahul Vohra says:
Over the last two years, Rapportive has become an essential product for folks all around the world. When rumours of our acquisition surfaced last week, many asked what was going to happen to the product. Well, we have fantastic news: at LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.
The blog post also includes a section titled “The Future,” though Vohra doesn’t say anything specific about what new things he’ll be working on at LinkedIn. He does say that the Rapportive vision involves building products that “you don’t have to remember to use” (italics his) and that become “an intrinsic part of the tools you use every day.”
After AllThingsD broke the news, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis dug up the fact that the deal was for $15 million in cash. When I asked Vohra today if he had any comment on Alexia’s story, he said, “Yeah — which of our investors were bragging ?”
Speaking of investors, Rapportive raised $1 million from Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500 Startups, Michael Zirngibl, Ashish Soni and David Cancel.
In our effort to curate the best WordPress themes out there (see here, here and here) we invited our friends from the QualiThemes WP search engine to start a regular column on Inspired Mag, recommending the hottest themes in various niches. Check them out and feel free to suggest new ones in the comments section.
Minimalisto is a clean and minimalist business premium WordPress theme suitable for business, corporate, company and any kind of websites. Minimalisto is fully customizable using the theme options page!
Big Step | $33 | Details | Demo
Big Step WordPress theme is an elegant and professional theme for corporate, company, foundation, software, business that built from/through extracting a lot of WordPress 3.1 features, that makes BigStep perfectly match and suitable for any type of businesses or even your clients around the world. BigStep WordPress theme comes with custom post type, skin in 11 colors with blue as default, extensive admin control panel etc. BigStep will help you to build a good site with good capability and design layout.
Cruz | $35 | Details | Demo
Cruz is a blend of clean and minimalist design style, exclusively crafted for modern business requirements and corporate web sites. You can equally use this theme for personal blogging, portfolio and freelance business ventures. With genuine features and supportive documentation, the theme is easy-to-use for beginners as well as developers.
Presenter | $35 | Details | Demo
Presenter is an WordPress 3.1+ ready premium WordPress theme specifically designed for corporate / business portfolios, designer or agency websites etc. With a clean and minimal design, it lets the portfolio to be the focal point of the visitors attention. Display your services / work in a professional manner using this stylish design. This theme uses only one widget ready sidebar, where you add all you widgets and when and where this widgets will be visible can be precisely configured using smart Widget Logic.
Archie Plus| $49 | Details | Demo
Archie Plus is a premium theme for those who desire a professional-looking web site that comes with the famous simplicity of a blog management. Feel the new concept, new design, new experience, and new atmosphere of blogging. Focus more on your business and forget the hassle of website management. If you want to make a corporate web site, company portfolio, or even personal ones, purchase ArchiePlus and you will realise that your life has been made easier.
Minos | $35 | Details | Demo
Minos is the WordPress theme for corporate, software, portfolio, business and blog built with latest WordPress features. Custom post type, skin & colors, extensive admin panel etc.
Ovum | $35 | Details | Demo
Ovum is clean, minimalist, elegant and modern corporate and business wordpress theme that can be switched as business, corporate, portfolio and blogging theme. There’s many page templates available, 5 skins options, 5 slideshow types, 2 homepage layout and more, please explore the demo or follow below features list. Custom post type for slideshow and 5 skins option(orange, red, dark, green, blue).
Clean Classy Corporate | $49 | Details | Demo
Clean Classy Corporate, be it web products, cloud computing or SaaS, C3 has a clean corporate feel to it which caters to the new breed of web entrepreneurs. Dynamic sidebar widget creation, jquery image / video Lightbox, image thumbnail custom field, feedburner ready, cross browser compatible, font-face custom font and powerful admin options.
Lotus | $35 | Details | Demo
Lotus is the WordPress theme for business, software, corporate built with latest WordPress 3.1 features. Custom post type, unlimited colors, extensive admin panel etc. 5 different portfolio page styles and 10 custom widgets. Portfolio list and detail page. Blog page single post and comments. Timthumb automatically thumbnail support. Unobtrusive jQuery powered effects.
Ellipsis | $35 | Details | Demo
Ellipsis is a flexible and powerful WordPress theme, built specifically for portfolio websites, corporate websites and app websites. Ellipsis is the theme that’s free of that “boxy” templated-look. It’s polished, smooth curves and pixel-perfect elements go beyond standard. Appropriate, yet unique, elements are useful and help you stand out from the crowd of over-used template styles.
This is a post from Inspired Magazine. If you like it, you may want to subscribe to our RSS full feed to be updated on every article we’re publishing. Also, it’s highly recommended to follow us on Twitter!
10 Awesome Corporate Themes for WordPress
In our effort to curate the best WordPress themes out there (see here, here and here) we invited our friends from the QualiThemes WP search engine to start a regular column on Inspired Mag, recommending the hottest themes in various niches. Check them out and feel free to suggest new ones in the comments section.
Minimalisto is a clean and minimalist business premium WordPress theme suitable for business, corporate, company and any kind of websites. Minimalisto is fully customizable using the theme options page!
Big Step | $33 | Details | Demo
Big Step WordPress theme is an elegant and professional theme for corporate, company, foundation, software, business that built from/through extracting a lot of WordPress 3.1 features, that makes BigStep perfectly match and suitable for any type of businesses or even your clients around the world. BigStep WordPress theme comes with custom post type, skin in 11 colors with blue as default, extensive admin control panel etc. BigStep will help you to build a good site with good capability and design layout.
Cruz | $35 | Details | Demo
Cruz is a blend of clean and minimalist design style, exclusively crafted for modern business requirements and corporate web sites. You can equally use this theme for personal blogging, portfolio and freelance business ventures. With genuine features and supportive documentation, the theme is easy-to-use for beginners as well as developers.
Presenter | $35 | Details | Demo
Presenter is an WordPress 3.1+ ready premium WordPress theme specifically designed for corporate / business portfolios, designer or agency websites etc. With a clean and minimal design, it lets the portfolio to be the focal point of the visitors attention. Display your services / work in a professional manner using this stylish design. This theme uses only one widget ready sidebar, where you add all you widgets and when and where this widgets will be visible can be precisely configured using smart Widget Logic.
Archie Plus| $49 | Details | Demo
Archie Plus is a premium theme for those who desire a professional-looking web site that comes with the famous simplicity of a blog management. Feel the new concept, new design, new experience, and new atmosphere of blogging. Focus more on your business and forget the hassle of website management. If you want to make a corporate web site, company portfolio, or even personal ones, purchase ArchiePlus and you will realise that your life has been made easier.
Minos | $35 | Details | Demo
Minos is the WordPress theme for corporate, software, portfolio, business and blog built with latest WordPress features. Custom post type, skin & colors, extensive admin panel etc.
Ovum | $35 | Details | Demo
Ovum is clean, minimalist, elegant and modern corporate and business wordpress theme that can be switched as business, corporate, portfolio and blogging theme. There’s many page templates available, 5 skins options, 5 slideshow types, 2 homepage layout and more, please explore the demo or follow below features list. Custom post type for slideshow and 5 skins option(orange, red, dark, green, blue).
Clean Classy Corporate | $49 | Details | Demo
Clean Classy Corporate, be it web products, cloud computing or SaaS, C3 has a clean corporate feel to it which caters to the new breed of web entrepreneurs. Dynamic sidebar widget creation, jquery image / video Lightbox, image thumbnail custom field, feedburner ready, cross browser compatible, font-face custom font and powerful admin options.
Lotus | $35 | Details | Demo
Lotus is the WordPress theme for business, software, corporate built with latest WordPress 3.1 features. Custom post type, unlimited colors, extensive admin panel etc. 5 different portfolio page styles and 10 custom widgets. Portfolio list and detail page. Blog page single post and comments. Timthumb automatically thumbnail support. Unobtrusive jQuery powered effects.
Ellipsis | $35 | Details | Demo
Ellipsis is a flexible and powerful WordPress theme, built specifically for portfolio websites, corporate websites and app websites. Ellipsis is the theme that’s free of that “boxy” templated-look. It’s polished, smooth curves and pixel-perfect elements go beyond standard. Appropriate, yet unique, elements are useful and help you stand out from the crowd of over-used template styles.
This is a post from Inspired Magazine. If you like it, you may want to subscribe to our RSS full feed to be updated on every article we’re publishing. Also, it’s highly recommended to follow us on Twitter!
10 Awesome Corporate Themes for WordPress
If you run a big web site, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller web site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.
Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to cofounder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system.
Key problems it fixes include SQL injections, cross-site scripting, directory transversals, remote file inclusion and the other top security risks. The scanning software is offered for free, but it will fix remove risks and provide other features, like zero-day research and additional email and SMS support for $10 a month. Although the Israeli company has only been around since April of last year, Miron and his cofounder Yaron Tal worked in web security in their country’s military over the previous years — they’re not new to the space.
Other web site guards that serve small to medium-sized sites include Dasient (now part of Twitter), Armorize, StopTheHacker (also recently funded) and CodeGuard. They each provide a range of competing services for cheaply and quickly identifying threats, and they all offer various methods for containing or removing problems. Miron says that the ability to fix existing vulnerabilities instead of requiring users to take additional actions helps separate 6Scan’s offering from web-based competitors. (Note: I haven’t tested every web site security system around, but so far I haven’t seen others that do this, exactly. Tell me if otherwise in the comments).
More generally, another type of competitor here are companies that offer hosted, supported sites for smaller businesses, that accomplish the marketing goals at stand-alone web sites. This can include anything from Facebook Pages to Tumblr accounts to hosted site creators like Weebly or Webs.com. On that front, Miron says that they’re also talking to hosting companies to get their software auto-installed, and they’ve been getting some interest — so, they’re not only going straight for consumer-style smaller businesses running their own sites.
While WordPress is the first live version, Miron says support for other content management system are coming soon, with Joomla and Drupal in the next few days. In its private beta, 6Scan has already added up a few thousand customers, he adds, many of whom are already paying.
The company has so far raised an undisclosed round from YL Ventures, following on seed funding from Israeli incubator Venturegeeks last year. Miron is coming through town now, and planning to present at the SF New Tech cloud meetup at Might tomorrow.
The Envato gang launched yet another amazing bundle for web designers & developers. The Web Designer Pro is their biggest bundle yet, including over 60 premium web design items, WordPress themes, mockups, icons, apps, plugins, code, photos and more. Only $20 for over $500 worth of top notch web design materials.
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This amazing deal is for a limited time only, don’t miss out!
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Web Design Resources Galore – Get the Pro Bundle for $20 Instead of $500
In darts, hitting the bulls-eye is harder to do than hitting any other part of the dartboard. This is because the bullseye is the smallest target. This same principle can also apply to touch targets on mobile devices.
Smaller touch targets are harder for users to hit than larger ones. When you’re designing mobile interfaces, it’s best to make your targets big so that they’re easy for users to tap. But exactly how big should you make them to give the best ease of use to the majority of your users? Many mobile developers have wondered this, and most have turned to the user interface guidelines provided by the platform developer for the answer.
(Image credit: ogimogi)
What the Mobile Platform Guidelines Say
Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Guidelines recommends a minimum target size of 44 pixels wide 44 pixels tall. Microsoft’s Windows Phone UI Design and Interaction Guide suggests a touch target size of 34px with a minimum touch target size of 26px. Nokia’s developer guidelines suggest that the target size should be no smaller than 1cm x 1cm square or 28 x 28 pixels.
While these guidelines give a general measurement for touch targets, they’re not consistent with each other, nor are they consistent with the actual size of the human finger. In fact, their suggested sizes are much smaller than the average finger, which can lead to touch target problems for users on mobile devices.
Small Touch Targets Lead to Big Problems
Small touch targets make users work harder because they require more accuracy to hit. Users need to reorient their finger, from finger pad to fingertip, to hit the target with clear visual feedback. Using the finger pad would cover the entire target, making it impossible for users to see the target they’re trying to hit. Users use the fingertip to hit small touch targets because it gives them the visual feedback they need to know that they’re hitting their target accurately. But when users have to reorient their finger, it slows their movement down, and forces them to work harder to hit their target.
Not just that, but small touch targets can lead to touch errors. When small touch targets are grouped near each other, users can accidentally hit neighboring targets and initiate unintended actions. This is because the user’s finger overlaps on to the neighboring buttons. And if pressure is not carefully applied in the right spot, it’ll trigger the wrong action. It’s easy for users to make these errors with their index finger. But it’s even easier for them to make these errors if they use their thumb, because their thumb is much larger than the target. Sometimes users will tilt their thumb sideways and use the thin side to hit a small touch target. But this is a lot of unnecessary work.
Thumb use among mobile users is popular. Some users won’t always have two hands free when they’re on their mobile device. Many prefer the convenience of using only one hand and their thumb. Users shouldn’t have to switch from using one hand to two hands, or from their thumb to their index finger to hit a target accurately. And more importantly, the size of a target shouldn’t cause them to make touch errors. Small touch targets make things harder for users, where a finger-friendly target does not.
Pixel Width of the Average Index Finger
An MIT Touch Lab study of Human Fingertips to investigate the Mechanics of Tactile Sense found that the average width of the index finger is 1.6 to 2 cm (16 – 20 mm) for most adults. This converts to 45 – 57 pixels, which is wider than what most mobile guidelines suggest.
A touch target that’s 45 – 57 pixels wide allows the user’s finger to fit snugly inside the target. The edges of the target are visible when the user taps it. This provides them with clear visual feedback that they’re hitting the target accurately. They’re also able to hit and move to their targets faster due to its larger size. This is consistent with Fitt’s Law, which says that the time to reach a target is longer if the target is smaller. A small target slows users down because they have to pay extra attention to hit the target accurately. A finger-sized target gives users enough room to hit it without having to worry about accuracy.
Pixel Width of the Average Thumb
There are many users who use their index finger to tap mobile targets. But there are just as many users who use their thumb as well. The big difference with the thumb is that it’s wider than the index finger. The average width of an adult thumb is 1 inch (2.5 cm), which converts to 72 pixels.
For users who use their thumbs, 72 pixels does wonders. They’re easier and faster to hit because they allow the user’s thumb to fit comfortably inside the target. This makes the edges visible and easy to see from all angles. This means that users don’t have to reorient their thumb to the very tip to see it hit the target. Nor do they have to tilt their thumb to the side to hit it. One tap with their thumb pad is enough to do the trick.
A Target Size Study for One-Handed Thumb Use on Small Touchscreen Devices found that user errors declined as the target size increased. Users were able to tap the target faster without having to make intentional physical accommodations to increase accuracy such as reorienting the thumb, which would have slowed performance.
Another study on Touch Key Design for Target Selection on a Mobile Phone also found that the number of errors decreased as the touch key size increased. In addition, it was provided that the larger the touch key size, the higher the success rate and pressing convenience.
Finger-Sized is Ideal, But Not Always Practical
As many benefits there are to using finger-sized targets, they’re not always practical in every situation. On a mobile device, you’re working in a limited space. This means when you have many finger-sized targets together, they can take up more space than your screen can afford. However, when you have a few finger-sized targets together, that’s when you can fit them all on your screen without trouble. You will need to measure the size of your screen and touch targets to know exactly how big of a touch target you can afford. If you can’t afford finger-sized touch targets on your interface, use the guidelines the mobile platform gives you instead.
Finger-sized targets are much easier to apply on a tablet than a mobile device because there is more screen space available. You can use them liberally without the fear of taking up too much space and improve tablet usability instantly. However, mobile devices are where users have the most trouble hitting touch targets. And that’s where finger-sized targets are needed the most. The challenge for designers is to figure out how to make the most of finger-sized targets on the mobile screen. This might require using less touch targets than you normally would. But this is a plus because it forces designers to keep their navigation simple and minimal.
Thumb-Sized Targets for Gaming Applications
Another thing to think about is when to use a thumb-sized target over an index finger-sized one. It’s difficult to know whether most of your users will use their thumbs or index fingers on your application. However, if your application is a game, it’s likely most users will use their thumbs to play instead of their index fingers. This is why thumb-sized targets are particularly useful for gaming applications. By making your game control targets thumb-sized, users can play the game with better handling and control. They’re able to see the game control targets as they move their thumbs, and the game will feel more adaptive to them.
It is without a doubt that matching your touch target sizes to the average finger size improves mobile usability for many. Whether your application is a game or any other, touch targets are designed for users to tap. If the user has to take their attention away from using your application to the way they move, orient or arc their finger to tap a target, it degrades their experience of your application. With this new-found insight, you can create applications that are truly finger-friendly. Finger-friendly design isn’t reserved for the few. It’s a new design standard for mobile applications to follow everywhere.
(al)(fi)
© Anthony T for Smashing Magazine, 2012.
Microsoft and Apple should hate one another right now. I mean, really hate each other. After decades of domination, Microsoft has watched their rival move from death’s door to become the most valuable company in the world — over $200 billion more valuable than Microsoft itself. And it was Microsoft who helped get Apple there, remember, with a timely cash infusion in 1997.
Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone, which eventually helped kill off Windows Mobile — and it’s now bigger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined. And the company shrugged off the iPad, even as it established a category, tablets, which Microsoft itself had been trying to establish for years.
Now Apple’s iOS ecosystem threatens the very fabric of Microsoft. Given the rise of the iPhone and iPad, and the halo-effect they’re having on the Mac, products like Windows and Office don’t hold the same importance that they once did in the computing world. And their shine is ever-diminishing. People are realizing that they just don’t need them anymore. Apple’s rise is slowly killing the Microsoft we’ve all known for years.
And yet, Microsoft rarely bashes Apple publicly anymore. In fact, they often take their side on arguments or come to their defense on issues. Again, these were once bitter rivals. And these times should be the battleground for their bloodiest battles yet. Instead, it’s all holding hands, s’mores, and Kumbaya.
Why? Because Microsoft has an enemy they hate much worse than Apple. And Apple has the same enemy. Google.
This is nothing new, but the animosity continues to build between the parties. Look at the news today, for example. Following last week’s headlines that Google was bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s mobile Safari browser, Microsoft today says that Google is doing the same thing to their own IE browser. Meanwhile, Google says that Microsoft is full of shit, while Apple is probably off in the corner smiling.
It wasn’t long ago that Apple and Google were aligned against Microsoft. Remember, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board and the two sides worked closely on projects like the original iPhone. Then Android came along and destroyed that relationship. While Google probably didn’t consider it at the time, this set the stage for Microsoft and Apple to align on things like the Nortel patents.
Microsoft should probably be going all-in to combat the rise of iOS, but instead they seem far more concerned with spending obscene amounts of money to bolster Bing as a Google competitor. And they seem to truly enjoy undermining Android by way of licensing agreements with key OEM partners.
Meanwhile, Apple seems downright bored if you ask them about Microsoft as a competitor. But ask about Google (Android in particular) and the knives come out.
Maybe this all just means that Google is doing something right. They have all the biggest technology companies in the world pointing guns right at them. You don’t get to the top without pissing off people along the way. But the way Google has managed to unify all of these main rivals against them should at the very least give them pause. Microsoft and Apple are the two biggest examples. But Facebook and Twitter are finding common ground against Google as well thanks to the search giant’s foray into the social realm.
All of this makes for a fascinating situation in the tech world. On one side there’s Google. On the other side there’s basically everyone else, with new members seemingly joining on a daily basis. And this side is filled with rivals that under any other circumstance would hate each other. But here they’re allied. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
[image: New Line Cinemas]
Mobilisafe, the stealthy Seattle-based mobile security startup with $1.2 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partnership, is opening up access to its private beta program today (invite link below) for a handful of TechCrunch readers.
In addition, the company is revealing new insights it gained during its private beta period related to the penetration of mobile devices in the SMB market – the area which happens to be the startup’s current area of focus.
Much of the current analysis on the consumerization of I.T. and the accompanying BYOD (“bring your own device”) trends are focused on the enterprise market, but Mobilisafe’s data comes from its own hands-on experience with SMB’s.
Founded by by former T-Mobile software architects Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, Mobilisafe is focused on building a security solution that helps companies deal with the influx of personal devices on the corporate network. But the startup doesn’t just provide businesses with tools to manage the increased number of mobile devices, it’s also performing data-mining on the aggregate data it collects, enabling its solution to learn over time, and become more predictive about its analysis and recommendations.
Mobilisafe’s big advantage is that it will be able to use the aggregate data to analyze whether an organization is more or less secure than its peers in the same industry or vertical. Right now, the focus is on providing this analysis and understanding to smaller businesses (between 15-2,500 employees), especially because they’re more at risk due to lower I.T. budgets and/or lack of in-house I.T. expertise. But such an ability could easily be useful in larger organizations in the future, if Mobilisafe wanted to go that route.
Over the past three months, Mobilisafe mapped out more than 38 million employee device connections (now up to 44M), which allowed it to uncover some interesting trends within the SMB market.
For example, the majority of SMB’s are highly mobilized, and are driven by BYOD programs, with over 80% of SMB employees already using smartphones and tablets. A new device model was introduced to a company for every 6.6 employees, but over half (56%) were running out-of-date firmware. SMB I.T. departments, meanwhile, are often at a loss when it comes to determining this sort of information for themselves.
In addition, around 39% of authenticated devices were inactive for over 30 days, something that could indicate devices which were lost, stolen, replaced or sold. In some cases, these devices may have had employee credentials and sensitive corporate data on them before disappearing off the network.
The data gathered here through Mobilisafe’s initial beta run is more of a confirmation of the market value for its mobile security solution, meant to simplify the challenges involved with assessing security risk and then knowing the next steps to take after being presented with specific issues.
Mobilisafe has been quietly running a private beta since late last year. Companies use its SaaS solution to tell Mobilisafe what kind of risk threshold they have, and then the startup does the heavy lifting to determine whether they’re falling above or below that threshold. The whole thing can be deployed in 15 minutes, without hardware or network changes, on-device software, or changes to employee behavior, the startup says.
In conjunction with the release of this new SMB data, Mobilisafe is also opening up access to its private beta to 50 TechCrunch readers who head to mobilisafe.com/signup and enter in the code TECHCRUNCH.
Mobilisafe, the stealthy Seattle-based mobile security startup with $1.2 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partnership, is opening up access to its private beta program today (invite link below) for a handful of TechCrunch readers.
In addition, the company is revealing new insights it gained during its private beta period related to the penetration of mobile devices in the SMB market – the area which happens to be the startup’s current area of focus.
Much of the current analysis on the consumerization of I.T. and the accompanying BYOD (“bring your own device”) trends are focused on the enterprise market, but Mobilisafe’s data comes from its own hands-on experience with SMB’s.
Founded by by former T-Mobile software architects Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, Mobilisafe is focused on building a security solution that helps companies deal with the influx of personal devices on the corporate network. But the startup doesn’t just provide businesses with tools to manage the increased number of mobile devices, it’s also performing data-mining on the aggregate data it collects, enabling its solution to learn over time, and become more predictive about its analysis and recommendations.
Mobilisafe’s big advantage is that it will be able to use the aggregate data to analyze whether an organization is more or less secure than its peers in the same industry or vertical. Right now, the focus is on providing this analysis and understanding to smaller businesses (between 15-2,500 employees), especially because they’re more at risk due to lower I.T. budgets and/or lack of in-house I.T. expertise. But such an ability could easily be useful in larger organizations in the future, if Mobilisafe wanted to go that route.
Over the past three months, Mobilisafe mapped out more than 38 million employee device connections (now up to 44M), which allowed it to uncover some interesting trends within the SMB market.
For example, the majority of SMB’s are highly mobilized, and are driven by BYOD programs, with over 80% of SMB employees already using smartphones and tablets. A new device model was introduced to a company for every 6.6 employees, but over half (56%) were running out-of-date firmware. SMB I.T. departments, meanwhile, are often at a loss when it comes to determining this sort of information for themselves.
In addition, around 39% of authenticated devices were inactive for over 30 days, something that could indicate devices which were lost, stolen, replaced or sold. In some cases, these devices may have had employee credentials and sensitive corporate data on them before disappearing off the network.
The data gathered here through Mobilisafe’s initial beta run is more of a confirmation of the market value for its mobile security solution, meant to simplify the challenges involved with assessing security risk and then knowing the next steps to take after being presented with specific issues.
Mobilisafe has been quietly running a private beta since late last year. Companies use its SaaS solution to tell Mobilisafe what kind of risk threshold they have, and then the startup does the heavy lifting to determine whether they’re falling above or below that threshold. The whole thing can be deployed in 15 minutes, without hardware or network changes, on-device software, or changes to employee behavior, the startup says.
In conjunction with the release of this new SMB data, Mobilisafe is also opening up access to its private beta to 50 TechCrunch readers who head to mobilisafe.com/signup and enter in the code TECHCRUNCH.
