BizSpark One in Review - March 12

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.

Weeks covering February 12-March 10:

• Andrew Yates, CEO of Artesian Solutions a BizSpark One alum that focuses on cloud-based social CRM and brand surveillance software guest authored a post in Growing Business on how young UK startups like Artesian can flourish despite economic austerity. Andrew also shared his perspective in The Sunday Times on the benefits of customers having direct access to CEOs.

• BizSpark One alum ClickDimensions , providing an email marketing and marketing automation solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, announced its Spring 2012 release is now available, enhancing its email marketing, nurture marketing and web survey components.

• BizSpark One alum Flite, the advertising effectiveness company, unveiled Flite Platform 3, enabling real-time updates to live campaigns and the ability to integrate web applications directly into online ad units, resulting in a 600% increase in advertising effectiveness.

• Glympse, a mobile service that enables simple and safe location sharing, shared their lessons learned in building a technology product that solves real-life scenarios rather than focusing on adding features upon features, which seems to have served them well as the company now has over 2.5M users.

• InishTech , providing a unique cloud-based software licensing platform, announced the rebranding of its flagship SLPS software licensing service to ‘Software Potential’, encompassing InishTech’s mission of helping software companies to commercialize their creations, unlocking their software’s potential.

• LiquidSpace , a mobile application that helps people find and share available workspace, joined Startup America as a partner, offering a $100 credit to Startup America firms to book real-time meeting spaces through the LiquidSpace application.

• BizSpark One alum Kobo, a global eBook retailer released its eReading application for Windows 8, one of the selected apps for the release of the Consumer Preview of Windows 8.

• News360, a next-generation news personalization and aggregation service, released an updated version of its application for Windows Phone featuring a unique interface, personalization through social integration and live tile support. News360 participated in the Mobile Acceleration Week held in San Francisco last year.

• BizSpark One alum Pyramid Analytics providing user-friendly BI tools to business users, is expanding its presence in North America in response to surging demand for its SQL Server Analysis Services-based BI platform.

• SkillPages, the skill-based social network, shared two guest blogs with BizSpark focused on enabling a more efficient labor market with cloud computing, and how Europe’s economy is driving a multi-skilled jobs Renaissance.

• Soluto, helping PCs to work the way they should using advanced driver technology combined with collective user wisdom, released its application for Windows 8 concurrent with the Consumer Preview of Windows 8. Check out the application in this video here.

• StorSimple, a leading provider of enterprise cloud storage, was selected as a hardware partner for the Microsoft Technology Center alliances program. StorSimple cloud storage appliances integrate locally deployed Microsoft applications, including Exchange and SharePoint, to the Azure cloud storage platform. With this partnership, StorSimple will be made available to customers at MTCs across the country. StorSimple was featured in the BizSpark Spotlight Series on Microsoft News Center showcasing how the company is solving enterprise-class storage challenges with a hybrid cloud approach.

• BizSpark One alum, Yammer, focused on enterprise social networking, raised $85M in a new funding round, bringing its total financing to $142M. DFJ Growth led the funding, with new investors Meritech Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures and Capricorn Investment Group participating in the round.