Innovating in an Age of Personalization

Rocket Internet, the German company best known for quickly churning out clones of successful online businesses, has announced that it will create an e-commerce giant by merging five of its existing regional e-commerce services.

The new company, named GFG, will be made up of Dafiti (Latin America), Jabong (India), Lamoda (Russia & CIS), Namshi (Middle East), and Zalora (South East Asia & Australia), the company announced. The new business will have a global reach, although the regional sub-divisions will retain individual business models, inventories, branding, and so on, in order to best serve their respective regional markets.

This merger will bring improved efficiency and sharing of resources and expertise, Rocket Internet said. Here’s more from its announcement this morning:

The five GFG companies combine a unique expertise of developing leading online brands (e.g. Dafiti in Brazil), building the necessary infrastructure including where necessary last mile delivery networks (e.g. Lamoda Express in Russia), creating leading private label brands (e.g. “Lara Karen” and “Sangria” by Jabong in India and ”ZALORA” and “Ezra” by Zalora in South East Asia) and delivering best-in-class mobile applications (e.g. Namshi in Middle East).

The combination will improve global best practice sharing across functions, deliver economies of scale in sourcing international brands and marketing with global media channels, strengthen the private label efforts, enhance GFG’s ability to attract and retain top talent, accelerate development of technology platforms, and enable GFG to acquire a leadership position in growth market fashion e-commerce.

Put together, the five business have a combined valuation of €2.7 billion (approximately $3.5 billion), 4.6 million customers, and more than 7,000 employees.

This is a strategic move as Rocket Internet has long been rumored to be to eyeing an IPO. Fellow German e-commerce site Zalando announced yesterday its plans to list on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange later this year. The two companies share Investment AB Kinnevik as an investor.

Many of Silicon Valley’s most respected companies, from Google to Paypal, were founded by immigrants. In the race to capture the top talent, each state has been slinging various incentives at ambitious and foreign-born students. The Brookings Institute is out with a thorough new study and interactive guide to where foreign students choose to live, study, and spend their money.

Foreign students with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degree aspirations overwhelmingly come from the Asian powerhouses in India and China. Hyderabad, India, sent 20,000 students with a student (F-1) visa, and Beijing placed a close 2nd at 19,000. But with 426,000 STEM-minded foreign students in total, no one country dominates the talent pool.

Where students live

It should be no surprise that foreign students congregate in the largest metro areas: New York ranks #1 with 101,000 F-1 visas. When combined, San Francisco and San Jose combined have about 57,000 students, which outranks Boston’s over 53,000 students.

Interestingly enough, as a percent of total STEM students, Texas and Florida are hot destinations. 80 percent of the Beaumont, Texas, area are tech-minded students. This appears to be connected to generous incentives given by the cities and universities.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles ranks 2nd in students majoring in business and marketing. The report finds that the University of Southern California has both the highest number of total foreign students of any school and has a unique international business MBA. USC students actually do consulting for foreign companies, with large companies paying $22,000 for this consulting service and associated travel expenses.

It appears that many foreign students have a plan to make money before they immigrate.

Spending money

If it wasn’t already clear, foreigners add to the US economy. Over the last decade, the share of upper middle income and upper income students have soared. These relatively well-off students “contributed approximately $21.8 billion in tuition and $12.8 billion in other spending — representing a major services export — to those metropolitan economies over the five-year period,” according to Brookings. “The New York metro area ranked first for total tuition ($2.6 billion) and living expenses ($1.6 billion) received from its 102,000 foreign students.”

Ithaca, New York, gets the biggest chunk of change for each students, at $58,000 for tuition and living expenses.

Unfortunately, Congress won’t be moving on any major immigration reform this year. So any policies to encourage more high-spending STEM students will have to wait until at least next year, if not longer.

The report itself has more for information that we can present in this post. You can play with the interactive graphs at the Brookings website here.

Capgemini S.A. is focused on helping customers transition into a new age of technology tools. In combination with VMware, Inc., Capgemini is seeking to help customers enhance their businesses through social, mobile, analytics, or the cloud. These services, and implementing them with customers, is Capgemini’s “sweet spot.”

Sheryl Chamberlain, Capgemini VP and Global Partner Executive, sat down with Dave Vellante and John Furrier on theCUBE at VMworld 2014 to discuss Capgemini methodology and upcoming trends in the tech world.

Open source drives collaboration and new ventures

Capgemini takes a customer-centric approach, Chamberlain said. First, they listen to what the business is trying to achieve from data and analytics. Then, then go to their tech partners and figure out what solutions will best serve their customers.

New open source technologies, in addition to an atmosphere of openness, have opened up what Chamberlain called a “new world of collaboration.” Momentum, she mentioned, has been building around open source the Internet of Things. A few questions that Chamberlain has been collaboratively investigating include: “How can we use the information that we’re getting as we’re using our devices?” And “how can we integrate the next generation of success?”

Read more after the video.

Big industries using new tech to solve old problems

Capgemini is transforming along with their customers. While it’s maintained focus on the stack, Chamberlain said that Capgemini noticed that “customers are consuming smaller amounts of technology.” Many customers have already made transformative changes to their infrastructure, and are now trying to solve specific business problems. Capgemini is concentrating on helping businesses figure out how to best leverage the data they’re collecting from customers.

Some of the concrete ways Capgemini facilitating customer change are through Cloudification and SaaSification. Capgemini becomes part of business teams that make the decision-making process when changes occur.

Use case: Agriculture

Chamberlain used an agriculture company as an example. “They need to understand what’s going on in the field.” Capgemini can help that customer understand trends, like “when water will be more important or not important.” By facilitating data analysis, Chamberlain said that Capgemini can help the company figure out how to get more crops out of the land in the most effective way.

Use case: Retail

She also cited the retail business as an industry hungry for transformative technology because brick-and-mortar retailers now have to compete with online stores. A shoe company, Chamberlain posited, might be able to use an app to eliminate the waiting process and gain a better, faster understanding of their inventory. That way, in-store customers get faster answers to their questions and access to more knowledgeable customer service.

Next stop: Brazil

Shifting gears, Vellante asked Chamberlain to comment on Capgemini’s investment in Brazil. Capgemini considers Brazil to be a center of excellence because it is blossoming with new industries and new markets. Top Brazilian companies are looking for innovative technology, which is exactly what Capgemini finds most exciting.

Facebook leads the pack, but other social media platforms, especially coming from China, are the ones to watch going forward.

Has it really only been 10 years since Mark Zuckerberg and his college cohorts founded Facebook? It might not have been the first social network, but it has grown to become by far the biggest and most influential.

German online marketing platform bjoerntantau.com recently compiled a list of the world's top 21 social networks, finding they have 5.7 billion user profiles combined. This, from an estimated global population of 7.25 billion. Although many of these will represent inactive and multiple accounts, it still represents a staggering amount of usage. But what state is Facebook in now and which are the most important social networks trailing in its wake? 

In October 2012, Facebook had surpassed the magic figure of 1 billion active monthly users. As of June 2014, Facebook had 1.28 billion active monthly users, and more than 1 billion mobile users, reflecting a major sea change in the way we are choosing to engage with social media. 

Some commentators have been predicting that Facebook has been reaching saturation point for the past few years, but its market dominance shows no signs of dwindling just yet. 

Not far behind is YouTube. Whether you consider it to be a true social media site or not depends on your definition, but it is a place where users can interact and share content and the figures are truly impressive. 

The site has 1 billion active monthly users. More than 6 billion hours of video are watched each month, with100 new hours of video being added every minute. According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18 to 34 than any cable television network. 

Twitter is often thought to be the second most important "pure" social network, but Google+ has overtaken the micro-blogging site, at least in terms of numbers. The search engine giant's social media flagship has shown remarkable growth over the past couple of years, rising from 435 million registered accounts in 2012 to more than 1 billion at the end of 2013. 

Only around 35 percent of those, however (359 million in the last quarter of 2013), are believed to be active, but most social media sites show similar levels of dormancy. 

Twitter itself has 271 million active users as of July 2014. 

WhatsApp has recently overtaken Twitter in terms of active users. In February, Facebook acquired the instant messaging service for a massive $19 billion. WhatsApp currently has more than 500 million users, sharing 700 million pictures and 100 million videos every day. 

Two of the most popular social media sites in the world remain unfamiliar names to many Western Internet users. Tencent's Qzone reports 645 million active monthly users as of the second quarter of 2014. Qzone is a multi-functional social network that allows users to write blogs and other content, share and send pictures, listen to music, and watch videos. 

Sina Weibo, a micro-blogging site that sits somewhere between Twitter and Facebook in design, has around 156.5 million users. The rise of these sites is largely due to two factors: China's vast population of more than 1.3 billion and the fact that western sites including Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and Twitter are all officially banned in the country. 

There are a number of smaller but still significant social networks either bubbling under or rising rapidly to the surface. Before Facebook took an interest in WhatsApp, it bought the photo and video sharing social network Instagram for a reported $1 billion. The site has 200 million monthly users, with that number constantly on the rise. 

The business-oriented LinkedIn, claims to be the world’s largest professional network with more than 313 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. 

A study by Paris-based Semiocast in 2013 found Pinterest users reached 70 million by June 2013. 

Social media is a truly global phenomenon. Qzone and Weibo are so popular that they're difficult to ignore, but there are also a number of alternative sites that are major players within their own markets but little known outside them. 

Some of these include Renren, which is some way behind China's top two but still boasts 51 million monthly users. VK (formerly VKontakte) is hugely popular in Russia and other eastern European territories, andOrkut has been a mainstay in Brazil and India. However, earlier this year its owner Google said it would be shutting Orkut down in September to concentrate on other assets such as YouTube, Blogger, and Google+.

The social network landscape is one that is constantly changing and evolving, as former market leader Myspace could tell you. In 2014 Facebook remains the dominant force, but it will be fascinating to see which players rise and fall in the months and years ahead.

We spend a lot of time and energy at Puppet Labs working to understand the impact and growth of DevOps among technology organizations across all industries and countries.

We share our learnings with the rest of the tech industry in blog posts, articles, and of course the annual DevOps survey. Our 2014 State of DevOps Report (.pdf) definitively shows that DevOps has a real impact on not just IT performance, but the performance of entire organizations.

In fact, done right, IT can be a strategic asset that can actually deliver higher profits and more business value.

One thing you’ll never see from us, though, is any of this work translating into a Puppet Labs “DevOps tool.” That’s because DevOps is not about specific tools. It’s about IT operations and software development working closely together to deliver software faster, with fewer errors. Tools enable this collaboration between people — they can’t create it.

DevOps is a cultural movement aimed at getting developers and operations teams aligned to reduce friction and deployment times, and to advance the goals of the business. While it’s hard to quantify culture, the benefits of DevOps are completely measurable: shorter software development cycles, fewer failed deployments, and fewer bug fixes all demonstrate that DevOps is simply a better way of working. Plus the people who talk to us about DevOps say it makes their working conditions and relationships much better, too.

When DevOps becomes a conversation about products instead of practices, so you can’t “be DevOps” without a specific product, it puts the entire movement at risk of being reduced to a tool choice, rather than staying on the level of changing behaviors or goals. Just as buying off-road tires for a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle won’t win you the Baja 500, buying DevOps XLS 2.0 won’t change the culture of your business to one that supports agility and continuous delivery.

Narrowing the focus of DevOps to specific technologies degrades the movement, turning it into mere product marketing. That’s unfortunate, because it’s clear that DevOps can be a major force for increasing the rate of technology change in organizations, enabling not just greater technical agility, but greater business agility.

Yet DevOps is a movement of technology people, and technology people use tools, discuss tools, try out new ones and discard old ones that no longer help them do the job. The development world has been doing this well for a long time. Yes, there are still COBOL developers out there, but in general, developers are always looking for better tools, and to drive new technology — some of which actually is better technology — out into the world.

The state of IT operations today is far different. It’s great that we have so many interesting new technologies, and that DevOps is working hard to push the state of the industry. But the reality is, we aren’t just a generation or two away from clearing out old technology in the IT operations world; we’re ages away. Adrian Cockroft and Netflix have set a great example of what companies at the true leading edge are able to do, but for most to advance along that path, we need to see a dramatic amount of change.

This change won’t happen for most companies in one generation, or even in a few. Furthermore, very few technologies will still be relevant a few generations later, which means any “DevOps product” is likely doomed to obsolescence by the time most people hear about it.

Even worse, a DevOps product, if it’s adopted too widely, has the potential to halt the development of DevOps itself by blocking experimentation and the fluid development of new ideas. You can’t evolve if you’re stuck with a specific technology or frameworkthat’s considered the key to doing your job right. Just look at all the heavyweight, high-overhead technologies companies still rely on, that are painful and slow to install or update — and that make it nearly impossible to deliver great things to customers quickly.

When I started Puppet Labs, one of my goals was to help sysadmins create a world where the time it takes to go from “the technology works” to “people are using it in production” continuously shrinks. If we can do that, without compromising production uptime or security, businesses can experiment faster, get quicker and more frequent feedback on new products or services, and keep iterating.

Faster technology cycles aren’t just a sign of technology competence or awesomeness: They’re an engine for faster and stronger business growth.

DevOps is all about promoting collaboration between traditionally siloed teams to enable the business. So I urge you to delve into DevOps culture and practices, and to encourage the changes within your organization that will bring about faster technology change.

But you won’t get there just by buying tools. The tools enable your people: They can’t create the culture

The Internet of Things (IoT) is literally and figuratively everywhere. It is almost impossible to avoid this topic in technology circles – whether from industry research, blogs or company white papers, and expectations are high. Between now and 2022, Cisco estimates that IoT will drive economic value (increased revenues and reduced costs) of $14.4 trillion.

While the amount of noise created on this topic is loud and increasing, the topic itself is not brand new. Industrial and Consumer applications that broadly fit under the IoT banner have been around for several years, but the use-cases are evolving and growing.

The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has been building a secure new clinical communications and collaboration platform, and it’s already being used by hundreds of doctors and other caregivers at UCSF Medical Center.

The product, called CareWeb, gives doctors and other caregivers a social networking-like space where they can keep track of a patient’s care in the hospital. It uses a real-time newsfeed model, which works on both desktop and (iOS) mobile screens.

CareWeb is a tantalizing example of how healthcare providers can apply social media and mobile paradigms in clinical settings to better coordinate care.

“It’s kind of like Salesforce Chatter, but it’s built around the patient,” said Michael Blum, MD, director of the Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI), which has been managing the development of the product at UCSF. Chatter is a real-time enterprise communication platform.

Blum says current communication modes also often require multiple steps and leave loops unclosed. When a nurse calls a doctor and leaves a message, it’s up to the doctor to listen to the message and then call back, Blum says. Too many steps.

CareWeb lets everybody watch in real-time all the activities (orders, prescriptions, tests, etc.) of various physicians, nurses, and other providers involved in the care of a patient. “It creates a social wall of communication and invites the whole care team to join in,” Blum says.

One of the reasons CareWeb resembles Salesforce’s Chatter is because it is built on the Salesforce platform. A number of Salesforce developers worked on CareWeb alongside developers at UCSF.

And the relationship may be about to get closer still. VentureBeat has learned from a reliable source close to the situation that Salesforce.com is now in negotiations with UCSF to buy CareWeb outright.

When asked about the possible deal, Salesforce spokeswoman Annie Meenan sent this email reply: “I can’t provide you with more info at this time as we do not comment on rumors or speculation.”

Still, an acquisition would make perfect sense. Salesforce has been looking for ways to move deeper into the health care industry. Earlier this year it announced a joint venture with Philips to build a cloud platform that can gather data from a number of clinical devices, like home health monitors for seniors.

CareWeb pulls in patient data from the electronic health record (EHR) to establish a “conversation” when the patient is first admitted to the hospital. At UCSF, that involves an integration between CareWeb and Epic, the EHR used by UCSF.

This EHR integration is how CareWeb knows who the patient is, what’s wrong with them, and who will be involved in treating them. Then all the communication, discussion, and collaboration happens around that core information. There is never a question of what patient caregivers are talking about on the social wall, said Raman Khanna, MD, the UCSF doctor who has been spearheading the development of CareWeb since its birth in 2011.

And all that information is searchable, too. Messages are searchable by sender, recipient, patient, or message content. This creates a body of communications and orders that describe the care of the patient from admittance to discharge.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in getting doctors to adopt a new communication platform like CareWeb is getting them to stop using the old ones. Texting has become a common way of communicating among hospital caregivers, but it’s an insecure mode, leaving patient data exposed to eyes that don’t need to see it.

Despite that, and despite the fact that texting is usually against hospital policy, physicians will default to texting and SMS messages, saying it’s “in the patient’s interest,” Khanna explained.

The communication in CareWeb, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up with HIPAA privacy compliance in mind. The “social wall” seen by caregivers is accessible only to people directly involved in the patient’s care.

CareWeb is integrated with the hospital paging system, so if a physician receives an alert on CareWeb, they will also get a page, Khanna said.

Patients get access to the messages in CareWeb, too. Not only do they have a right to monitor the services being renderred, but they can receive instructions on how to take care of themselves after they leave the hospital.

The problem is, some patients might misinterpret the communication stream in CareWeb about their care, because it’s filled with lots of clinical lingo.

“We don’t want to freak people out,” Blum said. “We are currently working through this part trying to discover how to do that effectively without really messing things up.”

Blum said CareWeb is also being outfitted to work in clinic environments.

Right now, most of the UCSF physicians using CareWeb are internal medicine residents and hospitalists (doctors who work only in the hospital), Khanna said. He said that by July of 2015 all UCSF Medical Center doctors, and lots of multi-disciplinary caregivers, will be using the platform for communication.

The CDHI at UCSF fosters new digital health technology by providing developmental resources and by leveraging external partnerships (like Salesforce.com).

Wikia, a web hosting company of community-based websites for fans of movies, bands, games, and other subjects, has brought on $15 million in fresh funding.

Wikia plans to use the influx of cash to make itself more popular around the world, specifically in Japan and more generally in Asia, according to a statement today on the news. Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, will advise Wikia on its expansion efforts.

Not that Wikia is small. Wikia claims more than 400,000 fan communities with content in more than 200 languages. Wikia also receives more than 2 billion monthly page views (much of this traffic comes from mobile devices). And Wikia has secured partnerships with IDG, IGN, Warner Bros., and other companies.

The growth of the site over the years hints at the power of creating easy places for communities of subcultures to form. But some community sites win, while others fail. LiveJournal, for instance, no longer carries the gravity it once did. While somemusic fans still gravitate to MySpace, it’s not the behemoth it once was. Wikia has gradually built itself up on the technology front and made acquisitions of companies like Huddler that have helped it maintain freshness.

Digital Garage is leading the new round. Existing investors like Amazon, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners, are also participating, according to the statement, alongside Asuka Investments, Tose, Suneight, and Nobuyuki Idei. Amazon also recently backed another web hosting company, Acquia.

Wikia announced an $11 million round in 2012.

Wikia started in 2006 and is based in San Francisco, with more than 200 employees.

In case it wasn’t clear already, big data is attracting a lot of attention from investors. You can see this recent injection of capital into Lumiata, bringing its total investments to $9 million.

According to an SEC filing dated for Aug. 11, the predictive analytics company that uses a medical graph for making smarter care decisions raised $5 million in equity funding.

The Lumiata “Graph” provides care providers with predictive analytics based on a variety of factors including location, time, behavior, and pathophysiology. Staff at all levels of the medical industry — we’re talking doctors, nurses, health insurance companies, and more — can use the data to make decisions about patient wellness, diagnoses, triage, and more. It also makes identifying gaps in data easier to spot.

The analytics are available thanks to APIs that works in a number of situations and on numerous devices.

Back in January, the company raised $4 million in its first round of series A funding. The primary investor was Khosla Ventures. That round of funding went toward improving the company flagship analytics engine and expand to more hospital networks and health insurance carriers.

Lumiata, formerly known as MEDgle, was founded in 2013 by Ash Damle, the startup’s current chief executive. It’s based in San Mateo, Calif.

Today’s funding deals:

Savant, a company that sells connected-home devices and provides apps for consumers to control climate, audio, lighting, and other characteristics at home, announced today that private-equity firm KKR has invested $90 million in it. The idea is to make Savant popular around the globe.

Read the press release.

Black Duck, a provider of open source software logistics, pulled in $20 million of venture funding Wednesday. General Catalyst Partners led the round, which included previous investors.

Read more on VentureBeat: OSS provider Black Duck pulls in $20 million

Argentinean e-commerce site Avenida has pulled in some fresh funding, to the tune of $17.5 million. Founded in 2013 by Quasar Ventures (a sort of startup incubator or studio), Fede Malek, and Alan Kraus, Avenida is a large online retailer similar to Amazon. The company will use the new funds to continue growing the site’s inventory and available categories and products, add new features to the site, and develop a solid logistic platform. Tiger Global led the round, with additional participation from Naspers.

Find out more about Avenida on its website.

Webinar.ru, a Russian web-conferencing company that provides native and cloud-based conferencing software, announced that it has raised $7.3 million in new funding. Webinar.ru works on any device, without the need to download software, and packs in a variety of features, including presentation and content delivery, desktop sharing, chat, polls, quizzes, and whiteboards. It can also support thousands of participants in a single meeting. Intel Capital and EBRD led the round, with additional participation from Flint Capital and previous investor VTB Capital.

Find out more about Webinar.ru on its website.

Marketers spend gobs of money and even more time trying to devise ways to engage people with a particular brand. Not enough of them realize music might be the best way to do that — and that Feed Media could be music to their ears. Feed Media (aka Feed.fm) launched a “music-as-a-service” platform that allows companies to employ music on their websites, games, and mobile apps, as well as provide statistics on how people are engaging with a brand. Some of the startup’s clients include Budweiser, GameSalad, Starr Hill Brewery, and others. And today, the company has secured a new $1.2 million round, according to an SEC form D document.

Read more on VentureBeat: Feed.fm picks up $1.2M to inject music into your marketing campaign

Uber is at it again, improving its alternative-cab service app after analyzing data on usage from its customers. This time, data scientists have come up with ways to figure out where exactly riders are headed, even in a densely packed city.

The researchers determined the accuracy of their model by comparing its predictions with anonymized information on more than 3,000 Uber passengers’ rides in San Francisco this year, according to a blog post today from Uber’s Ren Lu.

The system makes certain assumptions, taking into consideration a rider’s previous destinations, places Uber riders have gone to, and other factors, Lu wrote.

Uber has previously used data science and even artificial intelligence, to optimize its operations. Recently, for instance, the company concluded that drivers wishing to optimize their earnings would do better than to stay put in one place than to drive around. That observation came from a simulation from the company’s science team. As the company expands into more cities around the world, efficiency is key, and Uber is one of many companies both large and small that draw on their data to achieve that objective.

For this project, Uber drew on more conventional Bayesian statistics to take a good guess about the destination based on geolocation coordinates, Lu wrote. However, the system can predict a rider’s destination correctly 74 percent of the time.

The model should come in handy as Uber keeps growing and adding services like the UberPool car-sharing feature, she noted:

As we introduce UberPool, the carpool option of our app, where drivers make multiple pickups and dropoffs, these occurrences will only happen with increasing frequency … which means that any Uber rider destination popularity analysis is susceptible to be inaccurate due to noise.

Read Lu’s full blog post for much more detail on the approaches for solving its “uniquely Uber problem.”

Nexage said app developers that use its mobile ad marketplace have seen 165 percent revenue growth in 2014. That growth rate is more than double the rate of growth of the market for mobile ads.

The revenue growth was driven by a combination of pricing and volume gains. Effective cost per mil (eCPMs), or the ad revenue generated for 1,000 ad impressions, has grown 55 percent so far in 2014 as brand ad buyers become more interested in advertising in apps. App marketers are willing to pay more for high-value users, and the result is increased competition for the available inventory of ad space in apps. Meanwhile, the volume of ads has increased 66 percent so far this year.

Boston-based Nexage released the details in its new Mobile Insights Report today. The report shows that ad inventory based on a Device ID, or the distinctive number associated with a smartphone, has become a popular way to target users with relevant ads. The eCPMs for ID-enabled ad impressions get a 67-percent premium over impressions without device IDs.

Developers can also target users based on location, resulting in more effective ads. Location-enabled impressions have a 49 percent eCPM premium over impressions without location.

Developers are also expanding their ability to display rich media and video ads, which Nexage calls high-impact ad formats. Since those kinds of ads get more viewership, the revenue associated with them is higher. Rich media-enabled ad impressions grew 346 percent so far this year, while video-enabled ad impressions grew 516 percent.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

That’s exactly what seed-stage venture firm Floodgate is thinking as it closes its fifth and new fund. According to a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, this fund of just under $76 million, more or less the same size as its previous two, is again headed by managing partners Mike Maples Jr. and Ann Miura-Ko. Moreover, the fund will also have the same investing strategy, according to Fortune.

Floodgate has previously invested in buzzy startups such as Lyft, AngelList, IFTTT, Xamarin, Bigcommerce, TaskRabbit, and TapTalk, which SV Angel discovered on Product Hunt, resulting in the company raising a round of funding.

Among its investments, several have already exited, included Dasient (Twitter), DemandForce (Intuit), Gowalla (Facebook), ng:moco (DeNA), Playdom (Disney), and most recently Twitch.tv, which Amazon acquired. Maples invested in Justin.tv, Twitch.tv’s earlier incarnation, just before it graduated from Y Combinator and raised its first institutional round from Alsop Louie Partners and Felicis Ventures.

Floodgate was previously Maples Investments and morphed into Floodgate in 2010 with the addition of Miura-Ko and other tweaks to the firm’s setup.

Twitter engineer Mazdak Hashemi says the Japanese tweet like no one else on earth.

When the New Year arrives or even as they watch certain moments in shows and movies broadcast on national television, tens of thousands of Japanese will tweet at practically the same instant. “Everyone tweets at the New Year, but the Japanese are more in-sync,” says Hashemi, who, as Twitter’s director of site reliability engineering, works to make sure its mini-messaging service stays in good working order. “They do it at exactly midnight.”

This provides a small window into the unique culture of the Japanese, known for exhibiting a certain type of conformity, but there was a time when it was also an enormous problem for Twitter. As the year 2012 arrived in Japan, the country’s synchronized tweets crashed Twitter’s entire service, worldwide. It was 3pm in Britain when the site went belly-up.

So, as the next New Year approached, Raffi Krikorian, one of Twitter’s lead engineers, urged Hashemi to find a better way of ensuring the site could handle the next wave of synchronized Japanese tweets. “I think he had some post-traumatic stress,” Hashemi says of Krikorian in the wake of the 2012 New Year. As a result, Hashemi and his team built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak—that would let them mimic events like a Japanese New Year tweet storm and actually run these synthetic creations on the thousands of computers that drive the live site.

Internet engineers call it “stress testing,” and though this sort of thing is very common, Twitter’s situation was a bit different, and its methods could serve as a model for other online operations as they reach Twitter-like sizes. Because of the real-time nature of the site—where people expect to send and receive instantly, at all times—Hashemi and his team needed tools that could very carefully shape and reshape these massive tests, and because the service is used in this real-time way across the globe—it spans 240 million users who generate about about 5,700 tweets a second—there weren’t “off hours” when they could run live tests without having to worry about massive amounts of real traffic.

“We can’t test outside of business hours,” says Ali Alzabarah, who works alongside Hashemi. “We don’t have business hours.”

The tests Hashemi wanted to run were so large—larger than the real traffic storm that brought down the site during the last New Year—some engineers at Twitter didn’t even want him to try them. “They thought I was smoking something,” says Hashemi, who describes the company’s wider testing efforts in a blog post published today. “You’re pretty much putting your job on the line. It’s like: ‘Am I going to be here or not?’”

But the stress testing framework he and his team built also included new monitoring tools that would let them closely track the results of the tests—on a second-by-second basis—and scale them back as need be. In the end, these tests proved very successful—and the site stayed up for the next New Year, and the one after that. Last August, it also held firm when the Japanese helped set a new tweets-per-second record as they all tweeted at the arrival of a particular moment in the television airing of an animated movie called Castle in the Sky.

Much of this is thanks to a sweeping effort to rebuild the site using a software programming technology called Scala. And the company may be expanding into data centers in other parts of the world, so that it can serve foreign countries like Japan with dedicated local machines—though Hashemi declines to comment on this. But the company’s new stress testing framework plays its own important role. According to Adrian Cockcroft, a technology fellow with venture capital firm Battery Ventures who previously served as a chief architect at Netflix, another company that deals with rather usual types and amounts of online traffic, this sort of thing isn’t easy.

“As soon as you get to enormous scale, the off-the-shelf testing products fail,” he says. “You have to synthesize so much traffic with a pattern that actually matters. You have to put a lot of thought into what the traffic pattern is, and it’s quite hard, then, to actually build it. There are certain subtleties to this.”

As other services across the net continue to grow, they too will face similar testing problems, and the good news is that companies like Netflix and Twitter are showing the way. Netflix has opened sourced many of the tools it has built to test its site, and Twitter is a company that works in similar ways, sharing many of its software creations with the world at large in an effort boost the larger community of sites and services.

Twitter has already open sourced a tool called Iago that generates the “fake traffic” for its stress tests, and though it has not released its stressing testing framework for carefully building and monitoring these tests—the thing doesn’t even have a name—the company could do so in the future. That could come in handy. After all, the Japanese aren’t going anywhere. Nor is the rest of the net.

Whenever startup ecosystem commentators discuss how to create European technology businesses of global scale they tend to name one company as a shining example: Skype. Headquartered in Luxembourg and developed in Estonia, Skype is a revolutionary product and, rightly, a European success story. It sold three times in the last seven years; most recently, to Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

But there is a Dutch company whose revenue is greater than Skype’s, a company that is seldom talked about, but which offers another template for European entrepreneurs to emulate. Its name is Booking.com and, listing 456,000 hotels and other accommodation in over 190 countries, it is massive.

The Booking.com you see today is the product of two predecesssors: Active Hotels, founded in Cambridge, UK, in 1998; and its peer, the original Booking.com, founded in The Netherlands in 1996. These two companies got acquired by the U.S. giant Priceline, in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

Priceline’s Netherlands office, which houses the combined Booking.com unit, did $4.1 billion in revenue last year. That’s 60 per cent of the group’s total and likely four times greater than Skype is reckoned to be pulling under Microsoft.

“It would be tough to argue that there’s been a better acquisition in Internet history,”according to some. Put that way, it is easy to wonder if Booking.com shouldn’t have remained independent and become Europe’s leading standalone Internet company.

When a U.S. company builds a marketplace site, one which connects buyers and sellers, it typically focuses on North America alone (AirBnB being one of the very few exceptions).

But when startups in our fragmented and diverse continent build an online marketplace, they have to acquire merchants, customers, users and market share in multiple European countries to get really big. As a result, it has historically been hard to impossible for large U.S. marketplace companies to expand internationally in any way other than through acquisitions. The best example to illustrate this is eBay, the non-U.S. success of which seems to be entirely based on acquired companies. Marketplaces of European origins are much more comfortable in going international, country by country.

That isn’t easy, cheap, or quick. It was a decade after its start that Booking.com had its exit. Building a European marketplace takes shoe leather — real, on-the-ground presence in multiple countries, gaining trust and growing relationships. Take Just-Eator, in our investment portfolio, its counterpart Delivery Hero: You can’t build such a takeaway ordering service without employing dozens or hundreds of sales reps to go into restaurants in each country.

But the rewards can be great. Once a business has acquired a sufficient listings and customer base, once it has become the go-to brand, it is supremely defensible, and it is hard for any rivals to unseat it. This is enviable: An inter-European marketplace with top brand positions across the continent will always be an acquisition target or a strong IPO candidate in its own right.

There are a number of still-underdeveloped areas open for upcoming European online marketplaces to dominate. My favorite examples are healthcare and beauty, which are highly recurring and very mainstream services representing huge markets of tens of billions of Euros of spend yearly.

At Point Nine Capital, we have invested in companies such as Docplanner, an international platform for booking medical appointments, or StyleSeat, a (U.S.-based) platform for booking beauty appointments. But there is much more to come: household cleaning services, handymen, car repair … lots of the services we use every day can make for a great marketplace opportunity.

As I pointed out in a recent blog post, I think that there are two types of startups: global and local/multi-local. It is very important for founders to understand which category their company is in, as it will have significant consequences for how they internationalize.

Skype will always be a great template for founders, but it’s just one template: one of a global brand and end-user product.

I would encourage European entrepreneurs to pursue the Booking.com playbook and creating scalable, multi-local marketplaces in large markets. And if you’re one of those startups, I’d love to hear about you.

Connected health devices that help at-risk populations, like senior citizens and the chronically ill, make good sense. They help keep people healthy, and they ultimately save the system money.

A San Jose, Calif.-based company called Vital Connect announced today that it received FDA clearance for use of its HealthPatch MD biosensor for monitoring patients at home.

HealthPatch MD can be used for short-term monitoring of a patient who has just been released from the hospital, or as part of the follow-up care provided after a non-critical emergency room visit. The point is to allow the patient’s caregivers to keep tabs on them from afar 24 hours a day.

The biosensor is a small white plastic device that attaches to the patient’s skin. It has two components — a reusable sensor module and a disposable patch. It monitors heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, body posture, fall detection, steps, and many other things.

The sensor uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to a relay or smartphone, and the relay transfers information by Wi-Fi to the cloud and then to caregivers. The data is encrypted to meet HIPPA privacy and security guidelines.

Caregivers can get notifications if there are sudden changes in key metrics or if any vitals metric goes out of the healthy range.

The CDC says more than 1.5 million people in the U.S. get home health services each year, with an average duration of 315 days. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services project that home health care costs for 2014 will reach $86.8 billion.

Today’s funding deals:

Nutanix, a startup with data-center hardware that marries servers and storage, has picked up a hefty supply of new capital to work with. The new $140 million round Nutanix announced comes just seven months after landing $101 million. This money will go toward research and development, sales, marketing, and support.

Read more on VentureBeat: Storage-server mash-up company Nutanix reels in $140M ahead of its IPO

In the past, if you were a professional wanting to learn some new skills to get that promotion, switch jobs, or even switch careers, you’d enroll in some community classes. Today, you can use the Internet, and more specifically, services such as Pluralsight, which offers a variety of online courses for professionals and has just raised $135 million in a second round of funding.

Read more on VentureBeat: Pluralsight grabs $135M to expand online learning for professionals

If you’ve traveled in Europe, especially as a tourist, you know that planning and booking travel is a tedious experience. Berlin-based travel platform GoEuro has a site that aims to make the process simpler. The company has raised a $27 million round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Existing investors Battery Ventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, and Lakestar have increased their investments in the company.

Read more on VentureBeat: GoEuro raises $27M for one-stop Europe travel site

Wikia, a web hosting company of community-based websites for fans of movies, bands, games, and other subjects, has brought on $15 million in fresh funding. Wikia plans to use it to make itself more popular around the world, specifically in Japan and more generally in Asia, according to a statement today on the news. Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, will advise Wikia on its expansion efforts.

Read more on VentureBeat: Wikia’s $15M shows the power of fandom — and it’s finding even more in Asia

Korean companies are reaching out beyond the mobile realm. That fact is evidenced by the $3.5 million in Series A funding raised by Ybrain today, which will be used to build new products and expand the company’s internal team. The health care wearables startup has clinical trials in the works for various neurological disorders. The Ybrain is actually a wearable that’s brain signal-based. It’s working on a big data platform that compiles brain signal data collected from its devices. Ybrain plans to use this data to provide more intuitive and personalized treatments — as well as to specialize in creating products for patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more on VentureBeat: Korean health tech startup Ybrain raises $3.5M to focus on medical wearables

The Internet of things has arrived. Glassbeam, Inc just announced new funding of $2 million and an expansion of its board of directors, pointing to the company’s continued growth and expansion in the IoT market. This brings its total funding up to $5.3 million. Glassbeam is known for SCALAR, a platform designed to process large amounts of data at once. This data is dubbed “machine data” in that it is generated by the growing number of connected devices now available. The IoT requires inherent flexibility, and SCALAR offers that by working with any data stream and any device you can throw at it.

Read more on VentureBeat: Glassbeam adds on $2M to refine its IoT platform, SCALAR

A startup that automates the selling of “influencer” links for use by bloggers — headed by a 19-year-old Stanford student — has scored a $1.5 million seed round. The 14-person company, NeoReach, has developed a platform that rewards people on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis for sharing links through blogs, social media or other means. It is emerging from a trial period and formally launching this week.

In a hyper-connected world where increased connectivity is the norm, the way we think about productivity has changed. These days, we not only expect people to be constantly accessible, but we have become accustomed to the ability to solve a given problem at a moment’s notice. Technology is fueling these expectations, especially in the workplace. With the cloud, information is always accessible and with increased mobility, it’s available when and where we need.

The technology enabling this enhanced productivity – coupled with a workforce that is increasingly self-sufficient and entrepreneurial – is what’s fueling something called bring your own application (BYOA) phenomenon. We’re encountering a new generation of workers who see a problem, want to fix it, and will go build or create the necessary tool themselves and move on instead of waiting for an IT supported and “approved” application to be built for them.

Nurturing a BYOA culture in your organization leads to greater productivity and benefits including innovation, happy customers and engaged employees. But, as most CIOs fear, this new phenomenon can become a double-edged sword without proper governance. The key is to give your people the freedom to solve problems, while still implementing a set of guidelines that work to create accountability, especially in organizations and industries that may require more security.

With that in mind, there are four questions to consider when creating a productive and worthwhile BYOA culture.

1. What will BYOA mean in your organization?

Will BYOA come to mean bring or build your own application, or both? There is a real difference in how you can approach BYOA and the pace at which you adopt these practices. Dropbox is a great example of bringing your own application. You may purchase, download, and begin using the application right away. Like other applications, it solves a specific problem and provides an immediate solution, without involving the IT department. However, customization is limited.

This is where building your own application comes into play, allowing you to customize the technology that best suits your company’s needs. Building an application empowers the company with ready-to-use templates that enable them to quickly solve problems specific to their organization. They’re quick to build, simple in structure and repurpose-ready.

2. How will you protect your information?

Protection management is one of the most critical decisions. The challenge with some cloud storage services lies in the fact that information lives outside the boundaries of the organization and, in regulated industries, this poses many hurdles and risks. When building business applications, you may create new information that needs to be protected and managed for synchronization while avoiding duplication. CIO’s must decide on a roadmap and the right tools that will allow them to turn data into logical business information and hide the complexity of where it originates, or how to save and update it from the end users.

For information that needs to be protected by source systems (e.g., SharePoint, SAP, Oracle, MS CRM, etc.), the build method may work best, as it allows users to abstract their information and surface it as a logical business entity to leverage when building their own apps. It also has the added benefit of never duplicating or copying the data, so no additional risk is introduced to the organization.

3. What role does mobile play?

The original BYOD phenomenon – bring your own device (BYOD) – means there are plenty of devices and platforms that are in use across your organization. In order to have successful adoption of applications and drive a viable impact on the business, it’s critical that new applications and solutions can be built once and then quickly modified to play across other devices.

The same concept applies to data security. It is possible for mobile applications to be built so organizations can understand where they are being accessed from and what data should be made available offline. These applications also enable overarching data protection and know how and when to sync end-user interactions. In addition, templates can be used so you can easily build these types of applications without needing to consider technical design decisions.

4. How can you use this next generation of tools to empower your organization?

Employees want to focus on solving business problems and driving results. They don’t want to wait for IT departments to “fix” their problems and they don’t want to focus on the technicalities of how to build applications to solve their problems. Instead, they’ll embrace new tools, adopt new concepts and embark on a new (and faster) approach to drive the business forward. This is a paradigm shift enabled by technology and CIOs need to invest the time to embrace next-generation solutions into their organization. A change in mindset is being asked of leaders, and while it may sound small, it isn’t easy – and can be the difference in an organization’s ability to truly realize the benefits of a BYOA environment.