Common Paradox Tech Blog

The one skill which entrepreneurs need is something they don’t teach in business school—selling.  Yes, I know that “selling” conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because sales is not just about selling things for money. Selling is about life. Convincing the perfect soulmate to go out on a date is a sales job. Enticing your children to eat their vegetables is a sales job. Negotiating a raise with your boss is a sales job. And, yes, selling your company to Google is definitely a sales job. A sales job in that you are listening to others, finding out what they want or need, and giving it to them in a form that they appreciate. And guess who the best salespeople in tech companies are? Your developers.

Let me explain why I believe this.

Startup SendGrid has raised $750,000 in Series A funding led by Highway 12 Ventures, with SoftTech VC, FF Angel LLC, TechStars-founders David Cohen and other angel investors participating. Incubated by TechStars, SendGrid attempts to solve the problems faced by companies when sending transactional outbound email (emails delivered by software applications such as sign up confirmations, shipping alerts, friend requests, and notifications). SendGrid’s outbound email servers promise to improve the delivery rates and solve scalability problems.

SendGrid also delivers CAN-SPAM compliance, link tracking, open rate reporting, and more. Besides deliverability and scalability, SendGrid offers companies analytics, so they can track email clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam reports, and bounces without writing a single line of code. The company already has100 paying customers and has delivered over 100 million emails on their behalf. SendGrid will use the funds to to expand its development, marketing and sales efforts.

It’s a big night for Bump Technologies, the mobile software startup that recently landed a round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company makes mobile apps that let users share their contact information (and other data) simply by tapping their phones together. Up until now the app has been available for the iPhone only, where it’s developed quite a following, and tonight it’s launching on Android as well. The iPhone is getting some love too, as Bump’s 1.2 update was just approved by Apple (you can grab it here).

The updated iPhone app includes a ‘Friend Compare’ feature that looks at the address book and Facebook profiles of you and the person you’re bumping with to see if you have any mutual friends, which can be a good way to break the ice if you’re meeting someone for the first time.

eldavojohn writes “Wired is reporting on a simple hack putting some 65,000 customers at risk. The hack to gain administrative access to the cable modem/router combo is remarkably simple: ‘[David] Chen, founder of a software startup called Pip.io, said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable modem and discovered that Time Warner had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router’s configuration file. That file, it turned out, included the administrative login and password in cleartext. Chen investigated and found the same login and password could access the admin panels for every router in the SMC8014 series on Time Warner’s network — a grave vulnerability, given that the routers also expose their web interfaces to the public-facing internet.’ If you use Time Warner’s SMC8014 series cable modem/Wi-Fi router combo, watch for firmware to be released soon that they are reportedly in the process of testing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Accel Partners has poured $4.5 million into Causata, a San Francisco-based software startup that provides tools companies can use to optimize customer experience and business results.

The Series A round actually closed back in April this year, but the name of the investor has only now been made public through a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. Judging by messages posted this morning on the company’s Twitter account, the software startup has only now gone public with its website and offering.

Causata markets a multichannel customer interaction platform that intends to enable companies to optimize customer experience and business results simultaneously, at any touch point, in real-time. Causata’s software essentially structures enterprise data around customers’ interests, rather than solely on enterprise-centric events and transactions. The company focuses strongly on two verticals – retail and financial services – but also caters to other industries like telecom, media and Internet businesses.