Concurrent raises $900K to make Hadoop easier

Concurrent, the company providing the Cascading data workflow API, has raised a $900,000 seed round to capitalize on the newfound excitement around Hadoop. The funding came from Rembrandt Venture Partners, True Ventures (see disclosure below) and several angel investors.

Cascading, which Concurrent Founder and CEO Chris Wensel created, is an open-source API for creating and running data workflows atop Hadoop clusters. It’s an alternative to MapReduce, the standard framework for writing Hadoop applications, as well as Hive, the Facebook-created Apache project that provides data warehouse features for Hadoop environments. The Concurrent web site describes Cascading like this:

The processing API lets the developer quickly assemble complex distributed processes without having to “think” in MapReduce. And to efficiently schedule them based on their dependencies and other available meta-data.

Concurrent has been around since 2007, but only now is there enough activity around Hadoop and big data to justify putting much effort into building new products and hiring a team of engineers, said Wensel.

Certainly, Hadoop is at its pinnacle right now, with EMC, MapR and Hortonworks all making very public entrances into the distribution space lately to join incumbents such as Cloudera, IBM and Amazon Web Services (with Elastic MapReduce). Now that companies are comfortable with the prospect of Hadoop, and possibly using it to some degree, Wensel thinks they’re ready to start hearing about MapReduce alternatives.

Looking forward, Wensel thinks there’s an opportunity to expand Cascading support beyond Hadoop distributions (it’s currently certified for Apache Hadoop, MapR, EMC and Elastic MapReduce) and into new Hadoop-based “forks, derivatives and re-imaginings” that gain enough traction. Longer term, he sees an opportunity for a common API to support analytic workflows across a variety of distributed systems, Hadoop-based or not.

In the near future, though, Cascading users can look forward to version 2.0 in the fall, which includes a number of significant improvements, including the ability to use system memory for faster analysis of small datasets. He also said Concurrent plans to create products complementary to the Cascading framework that will help monitor monitor workflows and let users make better decisions by giving them more insights.

Although Concurrent’s seed funding is relatively small compared some of the other big data investments we’ve seen lately, it’s significant. I predicted in my second-quarter wrap-up for GigaOM Pro that we’ll start seeing more investment in higher-level Hadoop tools, and Cascading is one of them.

With the distribution layer locked down, there’s plenty of room for alternative data-processing frameworks such as Cascading and turnkey analytics products such as Zettaset, which just raised $3 million itself, to steal some of the spotlight and make it easier to take advantage of Hadoop’s parallel-processing prowess.

Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Tango raises $42M, will fight Skype on the desktop

How hot is the mobile video chat market? So hot that one of the leading technology companies in the space, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tango, has raised $42 million aimed at rapidly growing its workforce to compete with startups like ooVoo and industry heavyweights like Skype. The round also gives it a little extra cash to extend its video chat app beyond just mobile devices, to reach some 1.5 billion potential desktop users.

The Series B funding round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and includes existing investors. It includes $8.7 million raised in a convertible note that was revealed through an SEC filing earlier this year. With the latest round, Tango has raised a total of $47 million since being founded just 18 months ago. The funding news was first reported by Bloomberg last month, but was just confirmed by the company today.

No doubt some of the investment comes as a direct result of Skype being acquired in a deal worth $8.5 billion, which is a huge amount for a company in what is still a very nascent video chat market. But while Skype began on the desktop and has been slowly (but gradually) adding support for the iPhone and Android mobile devices, Tango is taking the opposite route.

Tango launched with a mobile focus but is gearing up to start working on PCs, with the upcoming launch later this summer of a desktop app that will let users sign in and be contacted on their phone or on their computer. By doing so, Tango also hopes to attract more users to its service. It currently has about 18 million users on mobile devices, which is a far cry from the 600 million that Skype has attracted to date. But it sees desktop availability as a huge potential boost.

Eric Setton, CTO and co-founder of Tango, said in a phone interview that there are about 1.5 billion PC users worldwide, which is a huge addressable market. Not just that, but PC availability has been the #1 requested feature from its users.

The new app will mirror its existing mobile apps both in form and function, allowing users to be simultaneously logged into their accounts through multiple devices, and ensuring that their contact lists are synced across each. When an outside user tries to initiate a video chat, both the PC and phone will ring, enabling users to choose whichever device they want to talk on.

In addition to PC app development, the funding will be used by the company to ramp up hiring in general. According to Setton, Tango has added about 25 people in the last three months alone, bringing total headcount to 60 employees company-wide. He said it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company with more than 100 employees by year-end.

Many of those employees will work on increasing support for more platforms and mobile devices, as Tango struggles to deal with an incredibly fragmented device market. Some will also work on getting its software supported on the chip level, which will ease integration with devices once they finally come to market.

While Skype is the big heavy hitter in the video chat market, it’s not the only competition Tango has to contend with, particularly in mobile video chat. Over the last year, we’ve seen a rash of new entrants emerge, spurred on in part by the launch of Apple’s FaceTime application on iOS devices.

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Affectiva raises $5.7M to sense and measure emotion

Affectiva, a Massachusetts start-up spun out of the MIT Media Lab, has nabbed $5.7 million in Series B funding to help it pursue technology which helps recognize and measure human emotions. The new financing was led by Kantar, the consumer insights group for marketing firm WPP and Myrian Capital.

The money will go toward advancing work on Affectiva’s two products, which get at the issue of understanding and gauging human emotions from different directions. Affectiva is working on a technology called Affdex, a piece of software that uses webcams to recognize interest, liking and attention from users. The system uses machine learning and computer vision to understand non-verbal responses and check them against one of the largest databases of facial expressions.

The system can be used to help media companies get quick feedback and consumer reaction or it can help advertisers understand how effective a commercial is. A researcher could quickly narrow down to specific points in a video when users were most engaged or experienced some extreme emotions. Affdex’s cloud-based architecture allows it to scale easily, which democratizes this process and allows many companies to engage in the kind of market research that previously only larger firms could pursue. Affectiva is applying Affdex to media measurement first and is partnering to WPP to integrate Affdex into WPP’s other research tools.

Dave Berman, CEO of Affectiva, told me companies have gone from measuring presence and location and are now looking to understand how people are feeling. He said when done in the right way, with clear opt-in and transparency, people like to share their feelings. He said while Affdex is initially being used as a marketing tool, he sees a bright future in social networking and online gaming.

“Imagine playing video poker with an avatar that can read your face and tell if you’re bluffing,” he said. “The next big wave is interaction with social networking. Think about a social network that knew you liked something based on your face or physiological signals without you having to push a “like” button.”

Affectiva is also pursuing a biometric wrist monitor called Q Sensor that measures electrodermal activity, sometimes known as galvanic skin response, to understand how people are feeling. When combined with other sensors that measure motion and temperature, the Q Sensor can paint a pretty good picture of how relaxed, excited, calm or stressed people are. More than 100 universities and corporations are currently using the sensors to measure anxiety and engagement.

Affectiva, which has about 20 employees, previously raised $2 million in funding from its founders and the Peder Sager Wallenberg Charitable Trust, represented by Lingfield AB. And the company won a $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for its work. Berman said the company has a bunch of unannounced projects on the way. If they’re as innovative as what Affectiva is showing now, it’ll be interesting to see how long before someone comes along and tries to buy the company.

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Zettaset raises $3M for the consumerization of big data

Big data for all.

The ability to analyze enormous amounts of data and use that to better target an ad, make a new drug or any number of other lofty goals is talked about constantly, but what about harnessing Hadoop for the rest of us? Something as simple as figuring out when the best time to schedule a meeting and get everyone to attend or let a regional manager select what inventory to order can have huge boosts for business. Thus, startup Zettaset has raised $3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and EPIC Ventures to help employees make business decisions on real data as opposed to intuition.

The two-year-old company, formerly known as GOTO Metrics, has renamed itself and re-launched the company. It still offers a software toolset that runs on top of a group of servers and unifies the existing databases so someone can mine them for insights. And for Brian Christian, co-founder and CEO of Zettaset, it’s those insights that will end up adding value to technology companies.”It’s not just about the technology anymore; it’s about the data and if you can produce more granular insights from your data,” he said in an interview.

The software makes is easy for regular employees to use the powerful data analytics software known as Hadoop. Christian notes that users choose whatever Hadoop distribution they want, as opposed to Zettaset trying to offer yet another version of Hadoop on the market. He explained that, generally, executives at big companies ask for big data analytics to understand what the hype is about and it’s up to someone in IT to try to then implement some type of Hadoop or other cluster to grant the request. Projects can stall there, because Hadoop is still complicated to implement, or later on in the process when the right data isn’t easily accessible in a way that’s transparent to the end user.

Zettaset, whose name is an attempt to reflect the growing amount of data available — a zettabyte consists of more than a million petabytes — helps make implementing Hadoop on top of existing databases easier and also offers an user-friendly graphical user interface so people can then play around with the data. They can also export it to more familiar programs such as Excel spreadsheets.

Zettaset’s attitude is a common but underreported element in a lot of the big data stories flooding the web. Because we now have access to cheap processing and powerful resources like Hadoop, big data can filter down to the masses. Startups such as Zettaset and Karmasphere will be part of this, but the bigger opportunity isn’t in enabling this shift; it’s in what the shift can do for businesses and society. For example, making data available for the average Joe helped boost Mint.com and is enabling consumer-facing startups such as energy consumption startup OPower to offer amazing insights really quickly. These insights can help change behaviors.

In the government arena, opening up data has the power to make government entities more accountable or even deliver results and insights that government can’t. There are also stories such as this one from the New Yorker, about a doctor in New Jersey that crunched data and then built a pilot program that reduced medical costs for the most-expensive patients in the city by more than 50 percent. It made people healthier too.

“I think enterprises are becoming more data-centric and more data-minded and we can help them enable that in their organization,” Christian said. In today’s information-rich world, it’s insights that generate the true value of a company. Better analytics of bigger data should enable more people to make the leap from intuition to insight — or even see an insight without ever having the intuition that drives them to look for data to back it up. It’s the difference between looking for treasure using a map of pirate sea routes and historical storm data and looking for treasure by trying to think like a pirate.

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Tapjoy raises $30 million to meet app marketing challenge

As the mobile app market grows, it’s creating new opportunities for application marketing companies like Tapjoy, which has raised $30 million even after running into an Apple ban on one of its products. The new money, which follows on a $21 million investment last year, highlights the growing market Tapjoy is playing in and shows that despite problems with Apple, Tapjoy and others can find success as the app boom extends to multiple platforms.

Tapjoy’s investment was led by JP Morgan, which joins existing investors Rho Ventures, InterWest Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and D. E. Shaw Ventures in this Series D round. To date, Tapjoy, formerly known as Offerpal, has raised $70 million. Mihir Shah, Tapjoy’s CEO, said the money will go toward acquisitions and building out the engineering and sales teams. The company expects to double its 70 employees in the next couple of quarters.

Shah said San Francisco-based Tapjoy is reaching up to 30 million users a day with its campaigns. That’s even after Apple closed the door this spring on so-called incentivized app installs, in which a user can gain virtual currency or goods in exchange for downloading another app. Apple didn’t say why it banned new and updated apps with incentivized installs but indicated that it was because the downloads were affecting the App Store rankings. Tapjoy was the leader in this field of pay-per-install app monetization but has now shifted its efforts on iOS to more traditional banner ads or cost per action campaigns, in which users gain currency in exchange for watching a video or completing some other task.

Shah said Tapjoy, which became profitable in the fourth quarter last year, has not missed a beat with the loss of incentivized installs on iOS. He said the growth of Android, which is doubling month over month, as well as a new opportunity on Windows Phone 7, have helped Tapjoy maintain its momentum. Tapjoy last month started a $5 million Android fund to help developers port their apps to Android, which doesn’t ban incentivized installs, and also recently started supporting Windows Phone 7.

“Regardless of what Apple did with respect to incentivized app installs, the mobile app market we power is booming,” said Shah. “It’s booming on Apple and a variety of platforms.”

Even though Tapjoy has moved on from the incentivized app install situation with Apple, it wasn’t without a fight. The company floated a couple of ideas by Apple including not having app downloads count toward the App Store rankings. But Shah said Apple has not responded at all.

Shah said it’s disappointing because he believes pay-per-install can be a legitimate tool when limits are applied. Without it, developers are having to pay more for other app marketing. Incentivized installs were also a significant way for developers to monetize their apps beyond traditional advertising or in-app purchases. But ultimately, the standoff has forced Tapjoy to diversify and it seems to be doing well because of it. The reality is, in a market that’s expected to hit $37 billion by 2015, many mobile apps will increasingly need help to be noticed and downloaded and serving this market is just getting more lucrative.

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