Wrike Launches Enterprise Platform For Project Management And A Data Driven Business World

Wrike has launched a new version of its project management platform with an emphasis on real-time analysis and new features such as syncing calendars to work projects. The new platform, Wrike Enterprise, gives the company a deeper focus on the corporate market for its collaboration-centered tools. It gives customers a way to crunch project management data in the order of a million updates per day. This is data around work items such as tasks completed, the original time planned for the project and the historical data that is associated with the project. The data is presented in “instant infographics,” that help people see the latest updates to projects, said Wrike CEO Andrew Filev in an email interview. Historically, project managers have done detailed plans that they then track. The manager periodically updates the projects and then compares the current state to the baseline established at the start of the project. With the Wrike platform, the data from every interaction is stored and then compared to historical data and then presented in a chart. A customer can see the state of the project from different dimensions such as the realistic amount of time a project will take to get done,  what requires immediate action and how performance of an employee has evolved over time.

A new  user group feature in Wrike Enterprise allows the project manager to include employees in multiple work groups by project, department, or any other ad hoc query. It can share the needed data with the whole group and keep permissions organized. This allows the manager to keep track of the overall project without hundreds of people making their own changes. 

Wrike’s new “Custom Calendars,” syncs projects with the calendars of other members on the team. It allows the manager to track a colleague’s vacations, PTO and extra working days. It is designed to avoid schedule overlaps and build more accurate plans. There are also new ways to integrate a company’s  identity into the service. Wrike has also added new security controls for larger customers. In October, Wrike raised $10 million in funding.  It was the first round since the company was originally founded seven years ago. The company has traditionally served the small business community but this release points to its additonal focus on the larger enterprise companies of the world. Wrike competes with the likes of Atlassian and Asana. But its advantage is in its crisp user interface which it can now leverage even more as it embraces data as a way for project managers to better keep track of their projects.  

Feature image courtesy of VFS Digital Design on Flickr via Creative Commons)

Wrike Launches Enterprise Platform For Project Management And A Data Driven Business World

Copycat Ransomware “Locker” Emerges

Probably the hottest new development in malware this year has been the widespread emergence of ransomware.  As the name implies, ransomware is a form of malware that takes your computer hostage and demands you pay a ransom before it sets the computer free.   In late 2013, the ransomware CryptoLocker emerged as a major new threat with an ingenious albeit malicious design.

CryptoLocker worked its way onto computers through a Trojan attachment that hid the fact it was an executable.  It then installed itself as an anonymous file in your Documents and Settings Folder, and proceeded to encrypt important files throughout your local or mapped network drive.  Encrypted files would be locked and held for ransom, and CryptoLocker would notify you of the situation by presenting an ultimatum on screen.

PAY $300 IN THE NEXT 72 HOURS OR YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR FILES AGAIN!

According to reports, payment would then supply users with access to CryptoLocker’s software, which supposedly unencrypted the files and returned them safely to the user.  Estimates state that only about 3% of users actually paid, and of this minority even fewer actually got their files back.  Most experts have agreed that CyptoLocker is essentially unbreakable, and part of the reason is that many variants demanded Bitcoin payment, which allowed CryptoLocker’s creators to operate in anonymity.

Copycat Locker

Just last week, a new type of ransomware called Locker emerged across the United States and Europe.  Based off of CryptoLocker, Locker is decidedly less advanced but still surprisingly infectious.  Locker is spreading via drive-by downloads that once again hide the executable extension and then begin encryption.

With Locker, the encryption process has two new components.  Firstly, Locker copies its hostage files, replaces their extension with .perfect, and then deletes their contents. From there, Locker places a file called contact.txt into each hostage directory.  Contact.txt is readable and usually contains the phone number to a pay-as-you-go mobile phone or the address to an anonymous email, as well as an activation key.

In the end, infected users are prompted to contact the person listed in contact.txt.  Reports have stated that at this point, users are usually met with demands of around $150 to obtain a decryption key to unlock the hostage files.  As with CryptoLocker, chances of actually getting your files back are slim.

The Good News

So far, the good news about Locker is that it is relatively less threatening than CryptoLocker, which used 256-bit encryption combined with other advanced methods to lock files.  In addition, one start-up security software company, IntelCrawler, has already announced effective decryption.

Still, Locker is circulating, and anyone spending any amount of time downloading files on the Internet would do well to keep a cautious eye.  One of the most popular vectors currently in use are files that look like .mp3s but are actually .exes.  So, for those of you still pirating music from less than legitimate sources, watch out!

As for the rest of us, Emsisoft and a bit of discretion should have you covered.

Have a Great (Malware Free) Day!

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Copycat Ransomware “Locker” Emerges

Amazon Kinesis Now In Public Beta For Developers To Build Real-Time Apps

Amazon Kinesis, the company’s new data streaming analytics platform, is now in public beta. It allows developers to build real-time apps without managing the complexity of multiple clusters. But though it has been heralded as a new type of real-time app platform, it also has some drawbacks that have emerged since its launch at AWS Re:Invent.

AWS Kinesis streams thousands of data streams on a per-second basis. It allows developers to pull any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed. The power of the platform comes with its capability to process data in a world where sensors are transmitting information in any number of ways, said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at At AWS Re:Invent. Vogels made the point that there will be an increasing use of sensors to record data. With Kinesis, builders could look at the data and determine the best time to pour the concrete in the foundation.

Kinesis works across multiple availability zones, which is also replicated for high availability. The service shards the data into streams with each handling 1,000 write transactions and up to 20 read transactions.

Here’s a video primer about the new Kinesis service last week made by Bernard Golden, a senior director of cloud management enterprise solutions at Dell.

AWS is positioning Kinesis as an alternative to Hadoop, which has traditionally used batch processing of data to do analysis. But that only tells part of the story. Hadoop has a diverse ecosystem behind it with new pieces such as Yarn, which provides the real-time processing capability and sets the stage for building real-time apps.

Kinesis compares to Storm, another data processing tool open-sourced by Twitter, writes G Gordon Worley III in a recent blog post.

In his tests, Worley found that Kinesis is elastic and able to scale automatically based on the load, which takes away some of the complexity of managing EC2 clusters. If it works as advertised, he writes, it will greatly simplify cluster operations over what is done with a Storm setup.

AWS has a lower barrier to entry compared to Hadoop batch processing, Worley writes. But overall, Kinesis is not built for complex data stream integrations.

The downside, though, is that every Kinesis application consists of just one procedure, so you can’t do complex stream processing like can be done with Storm unless you connect together multiple Kinesis applications. Naturally, I have some concerns about this.

Kinesis does mark a new era in the analytics world with its data streaming capability. But AWS is not the first on the scene and by no means necessarily the leader. There are a growing list of options from the open-source community that are viable alternatives to AWS and its proprietary infrastructure.

Amazon Kinesis Now In Public Beta For Developers To Build Real-Time Apps

With Another $6M, Maxwell Health Is On A Mission To Be The Operating System For Employee Benefits

For companies of all sizes, particularly small businesses, managing benefits can be a serious headache. With health insurance being pushed online by Obamacare and healthcare as a whole plodding its way into the digital era, a new generation of companies has popped up that’s looking to make it easy not only to manage health insurance, but a business’ entire fleet of benefits — from medical to 401(k)s.

Maxwell Health launched in February to provide small and medium-sized businesses with an affordable benefits management service that simplifies the process of creating and managing employee health plans, benefits and payroll. The startup quickly followed with a $2 million Series A raise, with Tribeca Venture Partners leading and contributions from Lerer Ventures, Vaizra Investments, BoxGroup and TiE Angels, among others.

Unlike other fast-growing startups playing in this space, like Zenefits, Maxwell is going after companies with fewer than 1,000 employees and, rather than move to replace insurance brokers, the startup is partnering with health insurance companies and brokers.

In other words, Maxwell co-founder and CEO Veer Gidwaney tells us that health insurance brokers want to talk to employers directly. So, whether it’s individual policies or larger group policies, brokers can use Maxwell’s enterprise software platform to talk to employers directly. Brokers pay monthly fees to use Maxwell’s platform, which in turn makes Maxwell free for employers.

With nearly 40 percent of the top 100 brokerages now using or in talks with Maxwell, Gidwaney says, the founders are looking to expand. To do that, the company is taking on $6 million in Series A1 financing, led by Vaizra Investments, with participation from Catalyst Health Ventures and existing investors, Tribeca Ventures, Serious Change, Lerer Ventures, BoxGroup and angels. Combined with its $2 million raise in August, this brings the company’s total Series A raise to $8 million and total to date to just under $10 million.

The interest in Maxwell Health comes as a result of the company’s effort to become a full-service management platform, or an operating system, for employers and any business under 1,000 employees — of which there are millions. This means that employers can use the platform to manage a range of HR functions as well, beyond simply onboarding employees into group health insurance policies and offering payroll administration.

The company is trying to go one step further by offering HR functionality that starts with onboarding and goes all the way down the chain to retirement planning. The idea is to allow businesses to work with their benefits advisors (i.e. brokers) over the duration of their employees’ lifetime at their company to set up and manage private health and benefits exchanges that sync with their existing plans.

To go beyond the basic suite of benefits, Maxwell offers an incentivization system for employees, which encourages them to eat healthy and get their exercise more regularly, using their fitness devices or phones to log activity. Maxwell then allows companies to reward their employees with points for meeting fitness and health goals, which can then be traded in for rewards, prizes, cash and, someday hopefully, a raise.

The startup also offers a concierge service, which essentially acts as an advisor for employers, allowing them to ask health-related questions and receive recommendations on physicians, compare prescription prices, schedule appointments and resolve insurance disputes. Employees can send photos of medical claims to the Concierge Service, for example, which will then take care of filing and managing the claim so that the employee doesn’t have to worry about it.

Today, Maxwell has a customer base that’s now “well into the triple digits,” with membership having doubled over the past six weeks, according to Gidwaney. The company’s revenue has also doubled, quarter-over-quarter, over the last six months. So, with its growth accelerating, the platform has been able to attract companies like TED and the Acumen Fund, and with its new capital in tow, the company plans to “invest heavily in customer service” and ramp up its sales and engineering teams.

With Another $6M, Maxwell Health Is On A Mission To Be The Operating System For Employee Benefits

WyzAnt Lands $21.5M From Accel To Take Its Tutoring Marketplace Global And Mobile

Building an online marketplace for local services is a tricky proposition, especially at scale. It takes time to recruit a stable of service providers, to offer deep coverage within local markets and maintain the quality of service (and the trust of customers) as the marketplace expands into new cities. For local service providers, though, moving online can be a boon for business, reducing costs and providing access to a new pool of customers.

While products and businesses are increasingly moving online, Mike Weishuhn and Andrew Geant founded WyzAnt in 2005 to bring an online marketplace to a market where service providers still live mostly offline: Tutors. Today, following in the same mold as names like Uber, Etsy and Angie’s List, WyzAnt is building a national company that functions as a hyper-local marketplace, offering students an easy way to find and connect with tutors in a range of subjects.

Starting with college campuses in and around Washington D.C. and advertising its new tutoring service with fliers and via Craigslist, WyzAnt began building a stable of local tutors and customers, slowly expanding into new markets. Today, WyzAnt has quietly become one of the largest online tutoring platforms in the U.S., serving 500,000 tutors and over one million students. The founders have bootstrapped the business to more than $100 million in gross sales to date, with a 120 percent annual growth rate since launch.

After resisting outside investment for nearly eight years in favor of staying lean, the WyzAnt founders are looking to expand their tutoring business into new markets and beef up their team. To do that, WyzAnt is taking on its first capital — a $21.5 million Series A round from Accel Partners. As a result, Accel partners Ryan Sweeney and John Locke will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

While it’s somewhat unusual to see an initial round of funding like this come from one backer, it’s a somewhat familiar market for Accel, which has also backed online marketplaces like Etsy and 99 Designs. It also marks the second significant investment in online education the firm has made this year, following the $103 million round it co-led with Spectrum Equity in video-based education platform, Lynda.com.

WyzAnt and Lynda.com have similar stories in many respects, both bootstrapped online businesses that, over years, managed to organically turn simple business models into millions in revenue. Lynda.com, for example, went 17 years without taking on outside capital, building a huge stable of quality instructional content and leveraging a simple subscription model to not only turn a profit but hit $100 million in annual revenue in 2012, before taking money from Accel.

WyzAnt, on the other hand, has managed to survive in an increasingly crowded market by making it easy for students in any state to connect with a quality, local tutor. Rather than focusing on the SATs, or a particular subject, WyzAnt has taken a broad approach, like Etsy or Amazon, offering tutoring in over 240 subjects that range from K-12 to college, test prep to arithmetic.

The key to its service, WyzAnt co-founder and CEO Andrew Geant says, is to offer enough tutors and enough subjects to enable the platform to connect students to the “right” tutor. The best way to build trust and loyalty in tutoring, when there are now so many services parents and students can choose from, both online and off, is to keep quality high and facilitate better matches than the tutoring school down the street.

Like Yelp, customers can search WyzAnt for tutors in their local area, filtering results by price, rating and distance. Search results include a picture and profile of each tutor, including a brief resume-like description of their backgrounds and areas of focus. Profiles, again much like Yelp, also include star-based ratings and student feedback, making it easy for students to get a quick feel of what their peers are saying and their strengths and weaknesses.

Today, Geant says, WyzAnt has accumulated over 850,000 tutor ratings and reviews, which albeit small compared to Yelp’s bullpen of reviews and ratings, makes it one of the frontrunners in the tutoring industry where transparency is concerned. In most cases, students get connected with tutors based on recommendations from (family) friends, guidance counselors and schools, but WyzAnt’s system gives parents and students choice in the matter, and the ability to take more ownership of the process, rather than leave it up to chance.

On the flip side, WyzAnt offers a way for tutors to tap into a new pool of customers, while moving their small tutoring service online and bringing in more dollars. Like many other marketplaces, WyzAnt generates revenue by taking a piece of each transaction, with the percentage it takes based on a sliding scale, depending how often the tutor uses WyzAnt. In addition, by offering profiles, payment processing and some basic CRM tools, the company wants to be an easy way for tutors to run their businesses, market themselves and manage usually tedious operational pains, like scheduling and collecting payments.

With its new $21.5 million, however, WyzAnt is looking to beef up the services it offers to tutors, and is currently in the process of testing digital tools that will allow tutors to interact with their students online, like via video chat, for example. From the beginning, the company has been focused on live, one-on-one and in-person tutoring, but even as its hyper-local coverage expands, not every rural outpost in the U.S. has a quality tutor in the subject they’re looking for right around the block.

As a result, WyzAnt wants to increase its support for those without tutors in their immediate hoods, while making it easier for students and teachers to chat, message each other, share course materials and content and so on. As of now, WyzAnt doesn’t offer video support, but the founders say that it’s in the works. Similarly, while the platform is available via the mobile web, the company has yet to offer native mobile apps.

With its new funding in tow, WyzAnt plans to launch its first native mobile apps during the first half of 2014 and, as it ramps up its marketing, business development and engineering staff, is beginning to plot its expansion into international markets. In this way, it’s on a similar course to that of Lynda.com, which is also beginning to increase its global footprint, also guided in part by support and capital from Accel.

Over the coming year, WyzAnt plans to hire 50 new employees, particularly in Chicago (where the company is headquartered), and will continue to build out its “Resources” section, which offers students a range of supplementary educational content, like Q&A forums, lesson plans, videos and blog posts.

Tutoring is a crowded market and, as WyzAnt expands its platform, it will find itself in competition not only with the bevy of tutoring services out there, but other online education providers. Some of these can be prospective partners, but many won’t.

In the end, marketplaces of all varieties are subject to network effects, so, as the demand for online tutoring resources increases and competition from vertical services like TakeLessons, WyzAnt finds itself in an arms race and land grab — one that has claimed more than a few startups (like Tutorspree, for one). But with $21.5 million, the runway gets a lot longer.

WyzAnt Lands $21.5M From Accel To Take Its Tutoring Marketplace Global And Mobile

Avoiding Holiday Identity Theft This Season

Shopping online for all of your holiday gifting is an act of pure convenience – for both shoppers and identity thieves.  Combined with powerful antivirus software, your best defense is common sense and a bit of discretion.  There are now millions of places to shop online, which means millions of places to enter your sensitive financial information.

This Holiday Season, take a moment to stop and think before you click and buy that next gift online.  Check out some of our some of our best advice for Avoiding Online Purchase Fraud and Hacking Online Identity Theft before it can happen to you.

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Avoiding Holiday Identity Theft This Season

Impala: Another Google Inspired Platform Enters The Mainstream Data World

Amazon Web Services has added support for Impala, the Google inspired query tool developed by big data startup Cloudera. It provides real-time, parallel processing for large amounts of data. With Impala, a developer can load new or access existing data to run their queries using an SQL-like language on AWS Elastic MapReduce clusters. Its faster, more accessible and shows the increasing use of SQL in Hadoop, the open-source system for distributed computing. In a broader view, Impala reflects how Google deeply influences the market and its inventors to create new data platforms and a potentially richer application ecosystem.

Introduced last year, Impala is based on Google Dremel, the successor to the search company’s pioneering work in the big data analytics space with MapReduce, the technology Google developed to query data stored across its vast cloud universe. Apache Drill is also based on Google Dremel.  Hortonworks has announced Tez, which is part of its Stinger Initiative, designed to work with Hive, the database for querying Hadoop. Hortonworks says Stinger delivers “100x performance improvements at petabyte scale with familiar SQL semantics.”

Citus Data has its own analytics database based on Google Dremel. Its innovation comes in parallel computing in PostgresSQL core to do its queries. MapR is also supporting Drill to provide its own capabilities. JethroData is an analytics database company based on Hadoop that is leveraging the principles of the Google Dremel project.

Hadapt preceded all of these companies with its “Adaptive Analytical Platform,” which brings a native implementation of SQL to the Apache Hadoop open-source project.

Why Is Dremel The New Inspiration?

Hadoop is an important technology for Internet companies like Twitter that process data by the petabyte. Hadoop is also of increasing importance for more traditional organizations that also now must process unprecedented amounts of information. It’s for this new generation of users that Impala is useful. It gives them a way to query data that had previously required deep technical knowledge.

Hadoop has in the past been a complex undertaking, requiring people with multiple talents to unleash its potential. These people were the original data scientists who had learned the art of programming, the management of “clusters,” and data analytics. They emerged from Internet companies that needed to invent their own ways to process and analyze the vast amounts of data that they served. For example, Jeff Hammerbacher left Facebook to be one of Cloudera’s co-founders. Doug Cutting created Hadoop while at Yahoo! where he used it to help develop  an open-source search engine based on Lucene, which Cutting also originally created. Cutting also now works at Cloudera.

Google led the way with MapReduce, which treats a set of nodes as a cluster that processes data in parallel.  It maps the data across the clusters and then reduces it to answer a problem.

Going beyond MapReduce, Google Dremel represents a pillar for the next-generation of Hadoop technologies, fortified by a growing ecosystem of open-source projects such as Hive and Pig – all designed to abstract the complexity of MapReduce with higher-level languages.

The strength of Dremel is in its instant analysis. But it is primarily meant for querying while its counterpart, Google F1, is a massive relational database, originally designed to manage Google’s online advertising.

 Impala’s value comes with its aptitude for analysis. It is why it is viewed as a natural complement to business intelligence tools such as Tableau, the data visualization technology. Analysts can quickly query data with Impala and then run it in their business intelligence tool of choice.

Hadoop has largely not been viewed as a platform for app development. But that will likely change as Impala becomes more widely used and new pieces get added to the Hadoop environment. That became evident earlier this year with the latest version of Hadoop. In the new version comes Yarn, which abstracts MapReduce into a scheduler and a resource manager. It allows for scaling beyond what was possible with Hadoop before.

The application ecosystem that will come out of Hadoop is evident in both Impala and Yarn. Both simplify Hadoop and provide a deeper capability for the end user. And then there is Cascading, the application framework for Hadoop, which Concurrent has commercialized. It counts Twitter, Etsy and Airbnb as customers.

For a long time, Google has been ahead of the market. But Hadoop and the innovation at the platform layer shows that the difference between Google and its counterparts is starting to shrink.

Feature image courtesy of Electric Sheep via Creative Commons)

Impala: Another Google Inspired Platform Enters The Mainstream Data World