BizSpark One Week in Review - February 13

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By Sharon Koshy

Over the past few weeks, here’s a sampling of news highlights of members of the BizSpark One program, identifying a small number of the best companies in BizSpark, which is now comprised of over 45,000 startups.

Week of January 22-28, January 29-February 4, and February 5-11:

  • Acumatica, a provider of cloud ERP software, announced that multi-location retailer, Kido, was able to reduce inventory by 20% and eliminate a warehouse with the enhanced real-time view of their inventory enabled by Acumatica’s solution. Acumatica also announced that ASC Partners has joined as a value added reseller of Acumatica’s cloud ERP solution. Acumatica sells 100% of its software through its vast network of resellers and software experts.
  • BizSpark One alum Artesian Solutions, provider of cloud-based social CRM and brand surveillance software announced that it has raised £2Million from Octopus Investments. Artesian has been growing 200% year-on-year, and works with a number of the UK’s largest banks, including Barclays and HSBC and other marquee customers. In 2011, Artesian was also named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA list, which recognizes companies that have achieved the fastest rates of revenue growth in EMEA.
  • BizSpark One alum Dayforce, provider of workforce performance management solutions, announced that it will be acquired by Ceridian Corporation, a global business services and software solutions company. The transaction is expected to close in March, and Dayforce CEO David Ossip will become president of Ceridian Dayforce, the new organization responsible for the development and management of Ceridian’s Dayforce | Human Capital Management application and services.
  • Troika Ventures, the first institutional investor in Evernote, a cloud-based service that helps you remember everything, sold its stake in the company to Sequoia Capital for a purported 10X return.
  • Mark Gilbreath, Co-Founder and CEO of LiquidSpace, guest authored an article in Mashable offering his 5 tips for getting ahead of the competition at SXSW. LiquidSpace debuted at last year’s SXSW Interactive in Austin, and has since experienced steady growth, now with over 14,000 members, more than 1,000 venues and over 5,000 transactions per month.
  • SkillPages, the skill-based social network, announced that over 3 million members have joined the platform in the 12 months since SkillPages launched. The company published an infographic, visualizing interesting stats from their first year
  • Soluto, helping PCs to work the way they should using advanced driver technology combined with collective user wisdom, announced new financing from investors, CrunchFund, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endevaors and Initial Capital. Soluto also introduced new product features to make it easier for people to keep in touch over Skype and keep their PC organized with disk cleanup and defrag.
  • StorSimple, a leading provider of enterprise cloud storage, received the Gold Award in the ‘Storage Systems’ category in Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com’s 2011 Product of the Year awards. StorSimple was selected from over 200 entries for the quality of its enterprise-grade 5010 and 710 cloud storage gateway appliances.