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LiveRamp

LiveRamp, A Data Networking Platform For Efficient And Secure Data Utilization.

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LiveRamp is a data networking platform for efficient and secure data utilization. LiveRamp allows firms and their partner organizations to better interact, regulate, and invoke data to reshape user experiences and produce more valuable business outcomes. Some of the greatest companies, agencies, and publishers in the world receive end-to-end addressability via LiveRamp’s entirely neutral and interoperable infrastructure.

About The Company

Located in San Francisco, California, LiveRamp is a SaaS company that provides a data connectivity platform. One of its services is data onboarding, which involves transferring offline information online for marketing reasons. After being established in 1969, the firm underwent a number of name changes before acquiring the LiveRamp brand from a business it had acquired. This happened after the Acxiom Marketing Services (AMS) unit of the company was spun off and transferred to the multinational ad network Interpublic Group of Companies.

LiveRamp
Image source: mms.businesswire.com

History

In 1969, Charles D. Ward founded the company Demographics, Inc. in Arkansas. The business’s initial activities included processing payroll and creating mailing lists from phone books. Conway Communications Exchange became the company’s new name in 1980, and in 1983 it became a corporation under the name CCX Network, Inc. and completed its initial public offering. It took the name Acxiom Corporation in 1988. The largest business database in the world belonged to Acxiom until 2018. After the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Acxiom and the data trading sector were the subject of intense public scrutiny. New privacy regulations in California and the EU fundamentally altered the sector. In response, Acxiom sold its databases and brand for $2.3 billion, changed its name to Liveramp, and positioned itself as a standard for data interchange among global data marketplaces. In 2019, LiveRamp acquired Faktor, a developer of consent management platforms. LiveRamp paid $150 million to acquire the Boston-based TV analytics startup Data Plus Math. In 2020, the company unveiled Privacy Manager, its own platform for managing consent. Later in the year, the company introduced Safe Haven, a technology that enables media owners and advertisers to share consumer data while upholding privacy regulations.

Products

IdentityLink( now Data Marketplace) is LiveRamp’s flagship product today. It gives data owners the ability to use its algorithms to match a person’s data with hundreds of identifiers and to augment it with data from third parties. Organizations can enter the content of their CRM or POS platforms, and it will be linked utilizing AI technology with sources of data including publicly available data and ‘contextual cues’ like the weather in your present location. The procedure currently referred to as “Data Onboarding” relies heavily on browser cookies to integrate additional data. The company’s Authenticated Traffic Solutions (ATS) tool helps publishers and marketers to connect their data sources without utilizing browser cookies. The company’s Data Plus Math product helps firms, advertisers, cable operators, streaming platforms, and networks to know who is viewing their advertisements, Data Plus Math offers media measurement services.

Founder – Auren Hoffman

Auren Hoffman is the former CEO and co-founder of LiveRamp. Hoffman cofounded Rapleaf in 2006 and ran it as CEO until 2012 when he resigned to lead LiveRamp, a spinoff of Rapleaf that had been acquired by TowerData, an email marketing firm. In 2014, Acxiom acquired LiveRamp. Hoffman left the company after a year of this acquisition.

CEO – Scott Howe

Scott Howe is the CEO of LiveRamp. Howe headed Acxiom, the previous parent company of LiveRamp, from 2011 to 2018. Howe held executive positions at Microsoft and aQuantive before joining Acxiom in 2011. Scott obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton University and an MBA degree from Harvard University.

WebEngage

Marketing Is Getting More Realistic With Avlesh Singh’s WebEngage

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Most companies jump into establishing a business before having much idea about internal operations. There are start-ups founded by brilliant minds and excellent team efforts, achieving great success. But, those are the only companies we tend to know about. In the business world, many new start-ups are coming up every day but dissolving due to a lack of strategic moves.WebEngage is a very important sector for every business to expand and reach out to people. Most of the companies are indeed more interested in making a profit. But, a few understand that customers are the prime key to that. WebEngage is a marketing company that is focused mainly on personalized marketing experience for its customers. Alves Singh and Ankit Utreja founded the company in 2010. And, currently, it is one of the top 25 software companies in India.

About the Founders

Avlesh Singh went to the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad. He graduated in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in Mineral Engineering.

Avlesh started his career with burrp! where he worked as the Principal Engineer and Search Architect. He worked there for more than three years and joined InfoMedia18 Ltd. Avlesh left the company earlier in 2010 and co-founded WebEngage. Currently, he is the Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Before WebEngage, Ankit Utreja has fourteen years of experience in the field of tech stacks. He is extremely skilled at managing the database system. Currently, he is the Chief Technology Officer of WebEngage.

Early Days

When Avlesh and Ankit developed the company, its main focus was on making more engagement between companies and their customers. They emerged as a company providing an on-site survey and a feedback tool. But, once they started engaging customers, Ankit wanted to create more of a high-tech environment for the company. With the assistant of Ankit and the tech team, WebEngage became a full-stack mobile-first marketing automation platform.

Since then they believe in making marketing more personalized. The user should feel genuine engagement with the company and become more comfortable. WebEngage thus came up as an opportunity for digital companies to improve user engagement.

Growth and Success

WebEngage has been listed in the Winter 2020 Grid Report for Marketing Automation & Push Notification and the High Performer Category. The tool of WebEngage is also very easy to set up which attracts more customers around the globe. Due to this reason, WebEngage received an Implementation Index of 7.96 out of 10. This rate is higher than companies like Oracle and Adobe.

In 2018, the company helped more than 300 digital enterprises to make their user engagement better. Currently, the company is trying its best to help all the B2C companies make more annual revenue. Instead of landing new customers, WebEngage lets the companies reconnect with the existing customers and make a better relationship.

Investors

The major investors of the company are IndiaQuotient, Blume Ventures, Social Capital, Capital Group, and Indian Angel Fund. And, the recent investors are Social Capital and BlackSoil. The Angel round of WebEngage took place in October 2011 and the company raised $100,000. The next funding round took place in August 2012 where they raised $500,000 followed by $1.3 million in 2016. Till now, WebEngage has raised a total amount of $2.1 million from six funding rounds.

Application of AI and ML

Since WebEngage is an initiative to improve user engagement, the application of AI and ML is quite mandatory. The application of AI is needed here mainly to categorize the requirements of the customers based on business requirements, user action, demographic data, etc. It also checks the suitability of the content across different types of user groups.

Accusations

The company was making remarkable success. But, in 2017 one of the former female colleagues of the company accused Avlesh Singh of sexual assault. It spread all over social media like a wildfire. The investigation continued for a long time and they concluded about the relationship is consensual. But, after she came up with the same accusation once again, investigation presumed.

Later, all the charges were removed from him. But, the news affected the growth of the company to some point. Though, the action didn’t lead to something bigger like striking his name off the company. But, the company still suffered some loss.

infoblox-logo

How Infoblox Removed Frustrations and Made Millions Through DNS Technology

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Every founder has an interesting story behind why he or she founded their company. Sometimes it is because they feel that there is something lacking in their industry, and other times it is because they feel burnt out in their current position. Better yet, sometimes founders find a spark and feel they need to chase it with everything they’ve got. Infoblox too has a reason for its existence and that reason is attributed to founder Stuart Bailey’s frustration with network downtime! Here’s a look at how Bailey grew Infoblox into a company leader worth millions of dollars.

Removing Frustrations

Stuart Bailey was researching database architectures at the University of Illinois in Chicago and was quite frustrated with the University’s network maintenance. The framework was down quite often and technicians took quite some time to get the network back into play.

While conversing with colleagues and other students across the city, he realized that this was a frustration they all shared. This common frustration gave Bailey the idea to look for ways to decrease this network downtime, and soon enough Infoblox was formed. The company made history for being the first startup to receive investments from Sequoia Capital via a cold call or cold e-mail.

Stuart founded Infoblox at the age of 28, prior to which he worked for Dr. Robert Grossman at the National Center for Data Mining. He spent five years there learning about data architecture and being involved with the building of the National Scalable Cluster Project. He also helped in guiding teams to win numerous accolades at the High-Performance Computing Challenge at the Supercomputing conference.

Growth and Success of Infoblox

The company was founded in Chicago in 1999 and is a gold-standard in the field of software and hardware manufacturing and development. In 2003, Infoblox shifted its base to Santa Clara, California in search of cheaper technical labour.

Stuart Bailey, who founded the company is still a part of Infoblox, serving at its chief scientist. An increase in the need for network management and risks to internet security through hacks led to a rise in demand for the company’s products.

In 2012, over 7.8 million new malware threats emerged and threats to mobile phones grew by 1,000% with over 865 successful breaches which compromised more than 174 million records. In 2007, they acquired Ipanto, a French startup and brought out IPAM WinConnect appliances. Infoblox acquired Netcordia in 2010 which helped consolidate its hold on the network task automation market.

Infoblox raised funds through five different rounds from 2000 to 2005, bringing in over $80 million via Sequoia Capital. The company went public at a rate of $16 per share in 2012 to raise extra capital. After the first day of trading, the stock price rose by over 40%. Since going public, the company has grown in terms of employees and revenues.

In 2013, the company faced some revenue deficit due to a predicted slowdown within the industry which rose due to business fluctuations. The unique selling point for Infoblox products has been their combination of tools to hack servers, reduce operational expenditure, and make network management more efficient. Also, the company has great social policies, offering environment-friendly appliances since 2006.

Owning the Market

Infoblox now offers services which help in maintaining DNS servers, IP address management and network management. The company, therefore, grew from strength to strength and by 2013, boasted of over 6,000 customers. The company grew over 40% in 2013, bringing in $63.1 million in revenues. As per a Gartner report, by 2015 the company held almost 49.9 percent of the market, which is worth over $533 million.

A year later, the company became a clear market share leader in the fields of DNS, DHCP and IP address management with other players having less than 15% market share. In 2016, they acquired cyber threat company IID, improving their hold in the security services field.

The same year, Infoblox was purchased by Vista Equity Partners for $1.6 billion. The next year the company expanded by opening an office in Tacoma, for cybersecurity research. In 2019, Infoblox updated their Network Identity Operating System and extended support for Google Cloud Platform.

Infoblox continues to grow at alarming rates, and is now an established market leader with more than 50% market share. The company boasts of over 8,000 customers, which includes 93 of the Fortune 100 and 350 of the Fortune 500. Overall, the company extends its services to 58% of the companies that make up the Fortune 1000. Thus, Infoblox powers and helps run most of the world’s most sophisticated networks and companies.

yell

Yell : The Success Story of an Online Marketing Company

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Initially, when the internet had just started gaining popularity in our world, very fewer people possessed the idea of its true potential. And, the one who channelled its power in the right direction, emerged out as very successful entrepreneurs in today’s world. Yell is one such company that has acquired firm ground on the sphere of online marketing. The company was founded in 1966, long before the internet had a massive impact on us. Today, Yell helps small companies drive traffic to their websites and do marketing for them.

History

How many of you have heard about Yellow Pages? If I am not wrong, almost the majority of the world knows about yellow pages being a telephone directory of businesses where contacts are arranged category wise and not alphabetically. Yell was founded as a company to publish these yellow pages as a part of the General Post Office in the United Kingdom. Even today, the company is exclusively for the people of the UK selling a digital version of yellow pages.

The company was founded in 1966, but the website yell.com launched in January 1996. The first step of Yell in the business was when General Post Office included yellow pages for its Brighton telephone directory. After getting added in 1966, it eventually started expanding to other parts of the UK.

yell
Image Source: glassdoor.co

After the website was launched in 1996, Yell started helping out small businesses by advertising on behalf of them. One of the most important parts of a newborn business is to drive the traffic towards their website. When Yell.com was launched the company noticed that most of the companies absolutely had no idea about how to create a website at all and driving traffic seemed far-fetched. So, yell just provided the service of advertising and marketing.

Growth

In January 2001, the company announced that it will be spinning out from its parent company BT Group which followed Yell’s acquisition by Apax Partners and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst in May 2001 for £2.1 billion. The company started a joint venture with Google from 2005 to make local classified content available in Google’s search engine. In January 2008, the company incorporated Apptus technology in its software to enhance the capability of its search engine.

Yell.com released its iPhone app in October 2009. Since the company’s primary product was publishing yellow pages, and with time, The company started using recycled products. From February 2010, the company started using smaller papers, unlike the conventional yellow pages to conserve resources. The very next year, Richard Hanscott was appointed as the CEO of Yell, and since then, the business is escalating even faster. In the financial year 2018, a year before Hanscott stepped down, the company announced £200 million digital revenue and £60 million EBITDA.

In 2012, Yell’s parent company, Yell Group decided to change its name to Hibu which was again back to Yell by August 2014. The company re-launched its website after incorporating many updates, including pay per click (PPC) advertising. Today, the company handles the PPC operation of more than 14,000 UK businesses. They have also launched a lot of promotion packages for their clients.

In 2016, Hanscott was rated as one of the top CEOs in the entire UK by Glassdoor who was eventually replaced by Claire Miles, current CEO of Yell.com. In 2017, the company announced that they won’t be publishing a hard copy of yellow pages anymore and hence digitalized the directory from 2019.

Yell, Today

Yell has been ruling the territory for quite a long time now, and like every other business, Yell also faces criticism. Though Yell.com has become UK’s number one company for providing digital marketing services, over 100 small businesses share their horrifying experiences with Yell.com in social media. The company is growing every second, and with more than 1500 employees, it will surely look into the crisis of its customers and serve well.

Bell Curve

Julian Shapiro: The Founder of Bell Curve, Marketing Agency and the Mascot of Animation

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Have you ever discovered your interest in doing something because you were just bored? Well, that happens to many of us, but only a few make it their passion. And, a handful among the few can establish themselves successfully through it. For example, we love playing video games, but that doesn’t mean every one of us turns out to be a game developer, but a guy named Nitish Mittersain did, didn’t he? You should be highly passion driven if you want to live through what you love. And, Julian Shapiro proved to be one of them.

Julian Shapiro, the founder of the Bell Curve and many other online services, started to show interest in coding from an age of twelve. And, the reason he started tinkering with his computer was he got nothing to do after he moved to a new city. Eventually, he started exploring different aspects of computer, and the wonders, one can make if he/she has good coding skills and was undoubtedly carried away by its charm.

Shapiro started his coding journey with Visual Basic 6, and by the time he was fourteen, he was pretty good at what he was doing. He realized that his skills were in high demand, and he could easily make money out of it. So, he started developing websites for small companies, swooping into the entrepreneurial world.

A Great Start

Since Julian Shapiro started as a teenage entrepreneur, he gradually became one of those tech-savvies interested in learning something new every day. Shapiro was very much involved in domain names for startups and companies. But he noticed that most of the businesses have below-average quality names for their companies and decided to work on it. With the existing knowledge of web development, Shapiro started building tools that would analyze around 50,000 domains daily and among those domains which were likely to be worthwhile.

Julian Shapiro
Image: Julian Shapiro

He put a lot of efforts into like building an algorithm for making combinations of alphabets and sorting out the potential names and acquiring them for a few dollars. After working diligently for six months, Shapiro finally made an inventory of domain names, thus selling it to companies for a few thousand dollars each. He named this service NameLayer and released it in August 2011.

Accelerating as a Tech Entrepreneur

After selling NameLayer to Techstars in 2014, Julian Shapiro again went back to his most comfortable place of web development. While creating several projects, he noticed that web animation doesn’t receive much importance, and no such significant modification or improvement was done in that area. Thinking that this hinders the designs of professional web developers, he started working on it.

In September 2013, Shapiro created his own animation engine, Velocity, to improve the tooling of web development through motion animation. The launch of velocity was very effective as people, especially the front-end designers, started using it extensively because they really understood the impact of web animation on marketing. Famous companies like Microsoft and Uber also started using Velocity.

What About Bell Curve?

With Neal O’Grady and Asher King-Abramson as partners, Shapiro founded Bell Curve in April 2017. It is a San Francisco based startup that operates as a marketing agency and conducts growth training programs. Bell Curve, basically, runs advertisements for startups and businesses across the world. Leading companies like Envoy, Streak and Tovala hired Bell Curve to run their advertisement sector.

Today, Bell Curve comprises a team of 9 members, including Julian Shapiro. This new startup is making great progress, but most importantly, Shapiro at the end of the day strictly adhered to what he loves the most, that is, web development. He devoted his career to make unbound contributions in this area of development.

Moreover, the digital content of the Bell Curve is so powerful that the company gives growth talks at Google and Y Combinator.

Other Aspects of Shapiro’s Career

In November 2014, Shapiro joined Webflow, Inc as a Vice President of Marketing. The company was about web development for professionals, something that Shapiro can never turn down. He worked there for ten months.

Julian Shapiro also started his own blog, Julian.com from September 2015. And, he is the only owner of the website. Shapiro also writes in TechCrunch about growth marketing since March 2019.

Another project that Shapiro worked and is worth mentioning is Libscore. Shapiro created Libscore in partnership with Stripe and Digital Ocean to help people understand that at what rate their libraries are actually used by people after putting it on open source. It helps to gather the statistics, thus providing the developer with proper feedback.

The journey of this man from the dusty streets to a $100 million IPO

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It is a universally acknowledged fact that the combination of talent and persistent efforts always pay off well. Hurdles and hardships become easy to handle when you have firm determination and a positive attitude towards your goal and life. Most of the successful people talk about hopefulness and hard work as mantras to success. Even a small idea can change the face of your entire life if you are determined to take it further. Same is what the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah speaks of when he talks about his journey towards success.

No idea is big or small

Dharmesh Shah had a deep interest in technology and at the same time he wanted start his own business. He first established a company named Pyramid Digital Solutions at the age of 23 with his 17 year old brother. It is no less than a surprise to know that he bootstrapped the company in less than $10,000. As stated by Shah himself, he faced a number of hurdles while hiring employees for the first time and also being a beginner there had been issues in cash flow as well but all of this couldn’t pull him back even for a moment. This is how his first company could be seen as a smack on the faces of all those who do not believe in small or medium scale business. With such less amount invested in the company, Dharmesh Shah took it to various levels of growth and got the Inc. 500 award thrice for it. He devotedly worked for the company for about 11 years and in 2005 sold it to SunGuard Business Systems for millions.

HubSpot

The hunger for knowledge and desire to expand his business drove him to acquire an MS degree from MIT in the management of technology. His education itself states how he had been into both technology and management at the same time. Although after selling Pyramid Digital Systems, Dharmesh Shah promised his wife to be aloof from setting up a start-up and find his

Image Credit: Wikipedia
Image Credit: Wikipedia

contentment and settlement in investing in other companies yet his desire and thirst for more led him into the business market again. And in 2006, he founded the most successful company of his career, HubSpot along with his college friend Brian Halligan. Their intentions to take the company to its pedestal of success could be observed right from the beginning as the two founders started a blog for the company even before the product was launched. This inbound marketing technique boosted the popularity of the product when it actually came in the market. These strategies adopted and well pursued by Shah and Halligan marked the early growth of the company. Dharmesh Shah has set up a great example for all the potential entrepreneurs for how to use their knowledge and learn from the experiences in order to build a successful company.

Work Ethics and Transparency

The basic agenda for any business to be a success according to Dharmesh Shah is transparency. Unlike other businessmen who like to conceal company’s important information and strategies, Dharmesh Shah believes that to maintain a healthy and pleasant atmosphere, each and every employee must know everything about the company. Shah always promotes a friendly work culture within the company and treats his employees as no less important. This transparency builds up trust of the employees for the owner. Shah has given importance to company culture along with other business priorities. This is the reason why he had come across minimum number of controversies as compared to other successful businesses.

Coding is still his first love

Even after coming in the list of world’s top entrepreneurs, Dharmesh Shah has clung himself to his roots. His passion for coding is still the same as before and writing code every day is just like another habit for him. Coding rejuvenates his mind and keeps him “in touch with reality” as he states.

Dharmesh Shah has deep interest in blogging and social media and has also founded an online community for blogging, OnStartups.com. The journey of Dharmesh Shah based on his strict principles and morals make him an outstanding entrepreneur and an inspiring personality.