Archive for the ‘fortune 500 companies’ tag
Apple Buys Samsung’s Android Security Partner AuthenTec For $356M
Amid fierce smartphone competition between Samsung and Apple that has spilled into a multinational patent battle, it looks like Apple may have opened yet another front on the M&A side: it is buying mobile security company AuthenTec — which had only just signed a deal with Samsung for Android devices — for $365 million.
AuthenTec, among other things, makes fingerprint sensor chips that are used for security and identification purposes; these are embedded in computing devices. The news was first reported by Reuters; the full announcement was filed with the SEC.
Just earlier this month AuthenTec had inked a deal with Samsung to cover security and device management services to cater to the “BYOD” trend — that is, workers taking their own handsets into their enterprise environment. The AuthenTec service would let IT managers quickly secure and authenticate those devices.
Reuters reported the deal as $356 million — $8 per share of the company. But that’s actually a pretty cheap price, considering that before the company went public it had raised some $600 million (yes, million) in funding.
If we had been listening between the lines (so to speak), we may have even heard a clue to this deal earlier this week, when Apple reported its Q2 results.
In those results, CEO Tim Cook made several references to how well Apple was doing in the enterprise segment, citing “rapid adoption” of the iPad in particular, with the number of iPad tablets more than tripling among Fortune 500 companies. “The iPad has become an indispensable tool worldwide to help employees across the industries do their jobs more effectively.”
Cook also said that the iPhone was becoming “the standard device for the employees,” with the number of iPhones sold into Fortune 500 companies more than doubling in the past year.
We have heard some of that annecdotally ourselves. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told me this week that among the enterprise customers of Box’s 6-7 out of every 10 work in primarily iOS environments.
It’s not clear whether this deal will mean a continuation of existing deals, such as the agreement with Samsung, or whether Apple will use this as a way of cutting off the use of the technology by its competitors.
The 8-K has some details on Apple and AuthenTec’s intellectual property, and well as future R&D. It says that Apple is paying $20 million in an IP and tech agreement to “acquire non-exclusive licenses and certain other rights with respect to hardware technology, software technology and patents of the Company.” But there is also a clause for licensing IP on a “non-exclusive basis” for $115 million.
As for development, the 8-K notes that Apple will pay an additional $7.5 million for product development work. Any new IP that comes out of that becomes the property of Apple.
We will have to wait and see exactly what Apple intends to do with this purchase, but it’s likely to mean a stronger set of enterprise-friendly features, and possibly some security and authentication services that can be used for the whole of the iPhone user base.
Security has become a very strong focus with smartphones: the more wireless we become the more of our lives we put into the cloud, with those devices becoming a key way of accessing it. With the introduction of mobile wallet services — something likely to be on Apple’s radar — the importance of securing our devices will become even greater.
Full SEC announcement embedded below
JIBE Goes SaaS To Make All Job Applications Mobile-Friendly
New York City-based startup JIBE first appeared on the scene in late 2009 as LocalBacon, a job board that required job-seekers to pay 99 cents to apply for positions, weeding out less serious candidates. Several months later in March 2010, the company smartly re-positioned itself as JIBE — a recruiting platform to help people find jobs through their social networks.
The pivot was a smart one: A $6 million Series A round followed in mid-2011, and JIBE grew to have a staff of 18 across three offices in the US.
Despite the decent traction, JIBE recently tweaked its mission once again — and this could be its savviest move yet. JIBE has shifted its core technology to be a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that plugs into company job boards and makes any job posting capable of receiving applications through mobile devices.
JIBE believes that in the near future many people will be applying to jobs through smartphones and tablets, not traditional desktop or laptop computers. It may seem far-fetched right now — personally, applying for jobs has always been something that’s required my full keyboard-and-screen attention. But then again, it wasn’t so long ago at all that people thought digital job applications would never seriously take off. Remember paying extra at Kinko’s to print your resume on really nice paper?
So I sat down with JIBE CEO and founder Joe Essenfeld to hear first-hand the details about his company’s shift to a SaaS strategy. Watch the video embedded below to hear him discuss why mobile could own the future of job applications, how JIBE sells its platform to huge Fortune 500 companies as a relatively small startup, what were the signs that have led JIBE to tweak its strategy, and more.
Reaching 10M Downloads, And The Guerrilla Marketing Tactics We Used To Get There
The day my app (AutoCAD WS) crossed one million downloads on the App Store, the first question that crossed my mind was how did I ever end up doing marketing? I was a techy product manager and never imagined myself in marketing, until my app was in a life or death situation.
The startup I co-founded (which was later acquired by Autodesk) developed a CAD B2B app for engineers. After launching our product, we started marketing it by the book – crafting our positioning and working with a PR agency to approach bloggers. This didn’t work. We went at it a second and third time – tweaking our positioning and web site once again, adding more product features and writing to more bloggers. Didn’t work – again.
I gradually came to an understanding that when competing with hundreds of thousands of other apps for attention, marketing is not just another ingredient in an app’s success. It’s the main one. We were a small team with a very limited marketing budget, so we declared war the only way we knew how – as engineers and UX designers. The following months we left what we knew about traditional marketing behind and started exploring new and creative ways to reach new users, and like the engineers we were – measuring each step along the way, down to the last click. These days the product is celebrating 10M downloads worldwide with customers from dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
Here are some non-traditional tactics that helped us get there.
Making a Vertical App Horizontal (or in other words, making a boring app interesting)
Our product seemed to us like the most exciting app – changing the way engineers and designers work together. Sadly, not many writers shared our excitement. We were classified by the press and media as a ‘niche’ app and were having a hard time getting coverage.
The first big marketing step for a vertical app to admit that it is one. Your killer aquarium manager, Classical music SongPop or wood chopping app won’t interest the average person, but to get to your vertical users you’ll have to use mainstream channels. We managed to get out of our ‘niche’ by working hard on creating funny, quirky and even touching content. Instead of trying to pitch our product and new features, we tried to make people laugh and feel something about it.
Here’s one example where we worked hard to make our app more interesting: when launching our Android version we decided to use the one thing we knew Android users love best – Android. We created ‘Andy the Engineer’ as our mascot, and the video we created for the app showed an architectural version of Andy with plenty of ‘Andy’ jokes. That video got over 1M views, an amazing number considering we’re talking about a video for a CAD app. Those kinds of materials got us into the main Android blogs and got Android fans to tell their designer friends about us.
Getting Customer Stories and Testimonials – The Guerilla Way
From day one we heard beautiful stories about how users were using our app – from building theme parks to oil rigs. But every time we approached companies asking them to write their story – Legal and ‘what’s in it for me’ got in the way. I decided that instead of contacting users I’ll try going the other way around and work with those who contacted us.
When receiving support requests over email from users coming from interesting companies, I actually picked up the phone and rang them. Yes, imagine sending your feedback and having the founder of the app call you 10 minutes later. After talking to users about their request and learning how they were using our app and how it helped them be more productive, I asked their permission to write about it.
In less than two weeks we had amazing stories about designing mines in Brazil, a new children’s hospital, musical theater hall and many more. Small tip: the sooner you call the more likely you are to get good cooperation. I had the “One hour” rule, calling users no later than an hour after receiving their email.
Create a Direct Channel to Your Users – You’ll Be Thankful During Your Next Cloud Outage
Every successful startup has its downtimes, broken versions and awful bugs, and that’s exactly when you’ll want to directly communicate with your users. Requesting users to sign-up using their email was one of the hardest product decisions I ever made. We lost about 10% of users during sign-up. It paid off though – we had one long downtime following a new release and another one when Amazon had an extended outage. At that point a lot of users don’t check your blog or twitter account, but instead go directly to the App Store – to rank your app with a one star. Using email and in-app messages we were able to share the problem with our users directly. Unexpectedly, not only were most users supportive, we even saw a pickup in usage after notifying users that everything was back to normal. Watching your 4.5/5 star rank you’ve worked so hard for sink in just a few days due to a tech problem is every app developer’s nightmare.
Turn On All Engines, We’re Going Global!
It doesn’t matter if it’s a free or paid app – when playing in the mobile arena it’s a numbers game. Every download counts, whether it’s coming from NY or from a village in China too small to be shown on Google Maps. Localizing the app was the first step, but the 2X increase we saw in our numbers came from localizing our marketing. We started by localizing every pixel of content on our app store page.
It’s not enough to translate the app description – we wanted a Russian user to see a screenshot with a Russian user name in it, a Brazilian user to see drawings in Portuguese and a Chinese user to see the app’s contact list with Chinese service email addresses. We worked on different marketing kits for each country – sending local bloggers a summary in their own language, images of the app relevant to their readers and full download numbers for their own country. Small tip : we stored each device’s language to send users newsletters in their own language.
[Some of the imagery used on our international campaigns - straightening the leaning tower of Pisa for our Italian launch and pulling out our app from a Matryoshka for our Russian version]
Marketing is all about telling your product’s story, and it’s difficult when that story is a bit more complicated than photo-sharing. Our app has always been an outsider – taking a 30 year old desktop product to mobile and into the cloud doesn’t make you the most popular kid at school (neither the mobile school nor the CAD one). We fought our own battle with what we felt was right for us and achieved the results we wanted.
With hundred of thousands more of these “outsider” apps finding their way in the App store, I hope to see even more marketing wars fought in unique ways and with stories told in their own voices. And downloads, lots and lots of downloads.
Grow Your Company Or Be Active On Social Media?
Should the CEO blog?
It seems like a question rooted in 2008, but now that blogging could include things like tweeting, creating videos on YouTube, updating a Facebook profile or taking part in LinkedIn, it may well be high time to start asking these questions all over again. The reasoning for this line of questioning comes via a press release issued today titled, Fortune 500 executives behind on social networking. A study done by Domo and CEO.com looked at the online engagement of Fortune 500 companies’ top brass and compared it to that of the mass population. The key takeaway? Less than thirty percent of the Fortune 500′s top executives have (at least) one profile within a social media channel and the vast majority have none.
"I’d like my life back."
During the BP oil spill crisis, then CEO, Tony Hayward, became known for his infamous line: "I’d like my life back." Social media and online social networking force individuals to become public. They also force these same individuals to become active media entities unto themselves. These people are no longer just leading a company but are expressing their views and perspectives. This – as you can well imagine – is not for everyone. Some have done it exceedingly well as a platform to share ideas and thinking to foster better relationships with everyone from shareholders to employees to customers, but the majority of them (according to this press release) are simply avoiding it… like the plague.
Why so shy, Mr. CEO?
Here are some of the fascinating data points taken from this survey:
- 5 of the 19 CEOs on Twitter have never tweeted.
- 25 of the 38 CEOs on Facebook have less than 100 friends.
- The only social network that these CEO outdo the US public on is LinkedIn (129 of the CEOs have profiles vs. 1/5 of Americans).
- Only 4 CEOs are on Google + (and that includes Larry Page).
- None are on Pinterest (which has, according to this report, 12 million American users).
- Only one CEO blogs (Whole Foods‘ John Mackey). That blog has not been updated since November 2011 (so does that even count?).
Social media is personal media.
From the report: "While the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs have yet to pick up the pace in their personal social media efforts, it seems those who do will be better equipped to successfully grow their companies." I’m not too sure that I would agree with that conclusion. If a CEO believes a more public and social platform would enable them to add economic value to the brands that they represent, there may be good cause to get involved. But, it’s not essential. Social media has evolved and I do not believe that consumers have an expectation that because blogging and tweeting exists that there is now a defined line to connect personally to a CEO of a company. It seems like the vast majority of consumers are fine with their current level of interaction with brands so long as they get results that are both fast and end with a positive result in their favor. Does anyone really care if the CEOs of the brands that they like and follow are deeply engaged in the social media spheres? Not every leader is going to be great at developing and nurturing a substantive social media presence and, so long as the brand is actively engaged, isn’t that more than enough? In a perfect world, I would love to see more and more CEOs sharing, caring and connecting in a more personal way, but it’s easy to see where the apprehension lies, isn’t it?
Do you think the future CEO can only be successful if they’re personally engaged with social media?
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Book Giveaway: Marketing in the Round: How To Develop An Integrated Marketing Campaign
Book Giveaway: I’ll buy a copy of Marketing in the Round for the commentor who answers this question: ”How could Marketing in the Round help your nonprofit get more out of its marketing efforts?”
So, read on to learn more about the ideas in the book and leave a comment below. Winner will be selected on Friday.
Marketing in the Round is a new book by colleague Geoff Livingston and co-author Gini Dietrich that explores how to develop an integrated marketing campaign in an age of social media and mobile. This is something that many are grappling with – from large Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits. How does an organization plan, coordinate, and implement flawless marketing across channels and get results?
The book describes how companies can tear down those silos between different departments or job functions – and work towards the best way to serve your company’s customers who probably sees a mosaic of media throughout their day. Rarely does is one media channel strong enough to form a full impression on the consumer and move them to action – a purchase, a change of opinion about your brand or product, or simply knowing about your company.
The book describes “marketing in the round” as working in a hub and spoke model as illustrated above. As identified in the book, the principles of marketing in the round are:
- All departments work together and no single spoke becomes an island
- No more one-off campaigns or channel focused thinking. Marketing in the round is like a fireworks display, continuing bursting and popping
- Integration also means optimizing and distinguishing your messaging appropriately.
- All of the marketing departments/function are not separated from operations, product develop or other areas.
- Information flows in many directions, but is measured in a disciplined way
- The focus is on being as efficient as possible to the end result
The first section of book gives advice on how to prepare to do marketing in the round. This begins with a focus the issues of change management and how difficult it is to change the behavior of many people in a company or organization. The advice is to get senior leadership buy-in and to deliver the vision of marketing in the round to others in the company. The next step is setting up SMARTer goals, a dashboard, and benchmarks. The book provides a step-by-step guide to understanding stakeholders and the competitive landscape in the context of marketing in the round. The guide discussions how to use research in different categories to develop your SWOT analysis.
The book offers some great frameworks and tips about marketing in the round tactics, tools, sequencing, and timing. It describes four different approaches to selecting tactics:
Top Down Influence Approaches: This approach is where events, PR, some advertising campaigns, and well-known influencers are used to inform the market place about new products.
The Groundswell: This approach is having your customers spread the word about your company or product on your behalf by fostering word of mouth.
Flanking Techniques: This approach can be used when there isn’t a customer base or media engagement is negative. The flanking techniques include advertising, content marketing, and search engine optimization as primary tools
Direct: Using email, mail, social, mobile and other channels to speak directly to customers.
The book offers some terrific advice and guidance for figuring out when to take a direct approach and using tactics like direct mail, email, social media, mobile, and events. It gives the pros and cons of the direct approach and good assessment questions:
Do we have a list?
Does it include addresses, email, mobile numbers and social media handles?
Given how our stakeholders use media, what are the most likely ways to achieve our desired outcome?
What can we afford to do?
What are our competitors doing?
Are there events where we can meet our customers face-to-face?
The marketing approach is selected by these criteria:
- Key performance indicators
- Marketing objectives – lead generation, branding, or both
- Stakeholders and how your company communicates with them
- Capacity to market, budget and staffing
The book drills down into each approach, devoting a chapter on the specific tools, tactics, and how to measure. The book includes lot worksheets and checklists for marketers plotting out their marketing in the round strategy.
All in all, the book is a practical guide and checklist to be successful in integrated marketing campaigns. While the book is mainly speaking to larger corporations, there are takeaways for nonprofits, especially larger ones will find useful. You can win a free book by leaving a comment below or order your copy today!
HTML5 Keeps Growing: Users Have Built One Million HTML5 Sites On Wix In The Past Three Months
Wix.com, a Flash and HTML5 publishing platform, announced today that users have built over one million sites using their HTML5 tools since March. Wix, which began offering Flash tools in 2008, did not launch its HTML5 builder, which is still in beta, until late March.
Director of Communications Eric Mason tells us that most Wix users only make one website, meaning they have had nearly one million unique users in the past three months. With more than 20 million users overall, Wix allows users with no coding knowledge to build websites from over 170 templates in Flash or HTML5.
“What’s interesting is that we’re putting Flash and HTML5 side by side and allowing users to choose,” Mason says. “And many are picking HTML5.”
The demand for HTML5 websites continues to grow. In a January survey of technology executives from over 100 Fortune 500 companies, 74% said they were considering HTML5 implementation.
“It’s one thing to have big sites developing on HTML,” Mason tells us. “It’s another to have every day people using it.”
Mason tells us that the “lion’s share” of the users use only the free components of Wix. He adds that Wix will be releasing a number of product advancements in the next few months.
“No one else is doing a full, launched HTML5 editor like this,” Mason says. “This gives us a massive head start and we have an ear to our client base and a great feedback loop. We’re learning from what people want and trying to build those capabilities into an infrastructure that will last for people for the next decade.”
How To Build A Successful Company From The Ground Up
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jay Fulcher; Fulcher is the CEO of Ooyala, a rapidly growing video technology startup that has more than 500 customers worldwide. You can follow him on Twitter @jbfulcher. His previous TechCrunch articles include “A Fistful of Streaming Media Dollars,” “Fear and Loathing in Online Video
Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures and investor in Tumblr, Foursquare, Twitter and Zynga, wrote a great post on his blog the other day about how startups can retain their best employees.
Reading his advice made me reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned growing and building businesses over the years – from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I’ve managed large teams at PeopleSoft and SAP, and also grown smaller startups like Red Pepper and SkillsVillage. Finally, before joining Ooyala, I oversaw Agile Software and its eventual acquisition by Oracle.
The business principles outlined below aren’t constrained to a single industry, so whether you’re building an app, a SaaS business or a high-speed space elevator, these fundamentals should all apply.
Build a Winning Team & Culture
Of course, you must attract the best and the brightest people around. But simply recruiting a smart, successful group of employees is only half the battle. It’s important to find proven professionals as well as stars-in-the-making who will buy in to your vision while challenging and motivating one another.
To do that, you need to take your hiring process to excruciatingly diligent levels. Be exacting in evaluating talent. Then set the bar even higher. At Ooyala, we employ a multi-tier interview process that often begins with a phone screen, frequently requires live skills testing, and ends with several full-day interviews. We want to make absolutely sure that the people we bring on board can brush up against their potential, and we make sure during the recruiting process that their potential for greatness is high. This approach weeds the “passionate” from the “interested” and gives the candidates a healthy dose of our high-octane, intense culture.
Conversely, don’t be afraid of firing team members who aren’t holding their own.
I have never fired someone fast enough. The reality is that the only thing worse than a bad hiring decision is allowing another day to go by without addressing the problem. The whole organization is watching, and you set the tone for what type of performance is acceptable.
When you see someone underperforming or dragging down your organization, don’t waste time if it’s clear the problem is beyond repair. Swift action is ultimately best for everyone involved. An early stage start-up is slightly analogous to fighting a war. Make sure that your band of brothers (and sisters) are the sort you want in your fox hole, and that they believe in fighting your battles.
Be Flexible
Make a plan and establish your vision of success, but don’t write it in stone. Tech moves fast – dauntingly so. If you become too attached to a certain way of doing things, or thinking, you might miss a tremendous opportunity.
Ooyala started as a computer vision company whose products would recognize objects within video and then create companion ads based on the images detected. But early on, we recognized a greater potential to apply our analytics technology to the challenges of personalizing and monetizing premium online video across all screens. We quickly shifted our focus to helping movie studios, TV networks and cable operators better engage an evolving audience and grow revenues from online distribution.
Changes in strategy take courage and conviction, and require early personal agendas and biases to be abandoned. Other people’s doubt is your ever-present enemy. Look for creative ways to achieve your goals, even if they may include a different approach, or a shift in your original thesis. Don’t be afraid to “pivot” to another strategy or business model, should the opportunity present itself.
Get Social
Gather input from a variety of sources and listen more than you speak. Begin building an advisory board or shadow cabinet full of successful professionals in (and outside) your space. Use their advice and their contacts aggressively. I rely on these relationships regularly and know first hand how valuable they can be.
Choose advisors that help you reach new market segments, new geographies, and new business opportunities. For example at Ooyala our advisory board bolsters our contact with Telcos, film studios, television networks, consumer brands and publishers. Convene and speak with your advisors regularly, if only to use them as another sounding board. Their contributions can go a long way toward your success. You have to work at this, and be receptive to the feedback you get.
Stay Lean
Just because you can buy a $500 office chair, doesn’t mean that you should. Ditto on expensive offsites and business trips. While it is tempting, in this age of entitlement and fierce competition for talent, offering absurd perks won’t attract or retain the best people. The reality is innovation, growth, and winning does more to galvanize employees than anything.
Find lean ways of rewarding your employees, like offering days off instead of cash bonuses. Spend an off-site doing charity work instead of throwing a lavish office party. Connect your company with a “nobler cause”, as your raison d’etre goes way beyond the P&L, or making money, or going public. Every stakeholder – employees, investors, customers – will appreciate this.
Embedding thrift into your corporate culture is a good thing to do. This is as true during the late stages of growth as it is in the beginning. Doing more with less is a strong core value.
Stay Hungry
Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it is also an emotional rollercoaster, with plenty of highs, lows, and even a few loop-de-loops.
Your job as a leader is to remain as positive and focused as possible. You set the tone for your entire organization. If you are feeling beat down, tired, or frustrated (and you will feel all of these things at various points) don’t let it affect your attitude and the way in which you connect with employees and partners. Be transparent (nothing is more attractive to those you lead than authenticity), but be smart about how you convey the challenges you’re dealing with. Put your game face on, and lead by example. Just because you closed a round of funding doesn’t mean that it is time to slow down – it means that it’s time to get to work. Attack the job in a way that can be sustained.
Think Like a Customer
Not everyone has been obsessing over the details of your business for as long as you have.
Remember to take a step back every now and then and look at what you are creating from the outside in. Are you effectively communicating the big picture (answering questions like who are we, what do we do, why does it matter)? Are you speaking to the business pain and benefit that impacts your target customers? If you’re not, it won’t matter how revolutionary your tech is, because the people you want to reach won’t understand why it’s critically important to them.
Listen actively to your customers. Some of the biggest innovations at Ooyala are the result of close collaboration with customers like ESPN and PAC-12 Networks (to be launched in August) who demand second-to-none solutions and are continually pushing the envelope. You can never tire of delivering outrageously innovative solutions.
To Conclude
Multi-national behemoths and scrappy startups alike present unique opportunities for leaders to seize opportunities and drive results. In my mind, the challenge and thrill of taking a business from a risky idea to a bold reality is one of the most rewarding things you can do. These simple truths, while difficult to execute, will go a long way in getting your business off the ground and flying high.
10 Examples of Facebook Ads That Actually Work (And Why)
Facebook ads. Facebook ads are what bring us here today.
While there has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding the effectiveness of Facebook ads lately (you remember the whole GM thing, right?), Ford and Coke recently gave their seal of approval in a Wall Street Journal article about Facebook ads, with both saying they were finding value in Facebook ads, and with Ford planning to expand its use of Facebook’s advertising platform.
The C-Suite and Social Media: Will They Ever Buy In? [WEBINAR]
Join Maggie Fox on Tuesday, June 19th at 12pm EST / 9am PST for The C-Suite and Social Media: Will They Ever Buy In?, an exclusive live webinar from Social Media Today.
While some Fortune 500 companies have taken the plunge into social media, studies continue to tell us that the leadership of many large corporations remains resistant to substantially opening their companies up on social networks, either for internal or external use. Are new media professionals deluded to believe that the evidence of social media’s pervasiveness will push the C-Suite into the world of interactive markets and transparent customer relationships, risks and all?
Maggie will be joined by panelists Peter J. Korsten, Vice President and Partner at the IBM Institute for Business Value, Peter Kim, Chief Strategy Officer of Dachis Group, and Tom Chernaik, Co-Founder of CMP.LY.
The panel will discuss the reality of the situation – the reports and statistics that tell us that the information revolution has yet to touch many C-Suites, the underlying reasons, and how much of it is due to the habits of leaders themselves. Are corporations hamstrung by the fact that many CEOs have not used social media themselves, just as a few decades ago few executives knew how to type? Join us as we ask:
- Which corporations’ C-suiters get it?
- What is the future for enterprises that refuse to reinvent themselves?
- Is there a case to be made that social media is just an option?
- Can social media work at the lower levels of an organization without C-level buy-in?
Interested in joining the discussion? Register HERE!
YouSendIt Now Lets Yahoo Mail’s 310M+ Users Easily Share Big Files
YouSendIt, the file transfer and business content collaboration service, has been trucking along of late, in spite of competition from plucky upstarts like Box. The startup has 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies on board in some form or another, and last we heard, YouSendIt had over 600K paying customers along with 30 million registered users.
In May, the company found a new CEO in Brad Garlinghouse, the former head of consumer products at AOL. Prior to AOL, the exec spent five years in various senior positons at Yahoo. Peanut butter manifestos notwithstanding, the CEO (and team) has parlayed past connections into a significant partnership with his former employer.
YouSendIt has announced that its Attach Large Files app will be integrated into the “Compose Message” window in Yahoo Mail. This means that users can now compose emails and attach files via YouSendIt (whether they be personal files, like video and photos or work files like CAD and PowerPoint) within the message.
The integration is significant for YouSendIt both because it’s the first partner app to be included in Yahoo’s compose message window, but more significantly, the integration gives the company direct, always-there access to Yahoo Mail’s sizable user base. Today, the mail client has over 300 million users, who are sending more than 200 million attachments from their inboxes every day, said David McDowell, the senior director of Product Management at Yahoo! Mail.
Since it turns out that more than a handful of people use email to communicate on a daily basis, if this trend continues, the company thinks that easy-to-use apps and services with their hooks in email will play an integral role in collaboration in the future.
Be that as it may, as many readers have likely experienced, the major email providers put a cap on their attachment size, generally in the range of 15MB to 25MB. Since this is a pain in the ass because we’re all increasingly using email to send large files, this is where YouSendIt swoops in. Now users can send up to 50 files or 100MB in a single email.
Since its initial beta release in the app gallery of Yahoo Mail last year, eight million users have registered and have sent more than 20 million files. Now, that growing list of users can not only compose an email and attach a mess of hefty files via YouSendIt but also verify when a file has been downloaded, ensure that only the intended recipient can download a particular file, and set advanced security options (like setting the amount of time a file is available for download or how many times it can be downloaded.
The company’s partnership with Yahoo continues its march across the major email platforms. In addition to Yahoo Mail, YouSendIt is now available within the attachment functionality of Mozilla Thunderbird, AOL Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail.
It’s a smart approach: Take email by storm and let the rest follow.