West Chester-based Hoopla Software closes $2.8 million Series A; Salesforce.com is an investor

Tom Paine


West Chester-based Hoopla Software, which I wrote about early this year, announced today the closing of a $2.8 million Series A Financing, This is the completion of the round announced late last year, which at the time totaled $2.3 million including $1.3 million from Safeguard Scientifics.

Today's announcement also identified two other investors: California-based VC firm Illuminate Ventures and Salesforce.com., which frequently invests in startups operating within its ecosystem.

Founded by CEO and veteran Philly area technology executive Michael Smalls in 2009, Hoopla provides digital scoreboards and gamification techniques to enhance the performance of employees in sales, call centers, and support organizations. Hoopla leverages integration with the Salesforce platform and Salesforce's Chatter social networking tool.

The company says that "proceeds from this financing are being used to further build out Hoopla Software's gamified performance platform and to expand marketing initiatives". Hoopla also says it has added more than 25 new customers to its platform over the past two months, including Box, Marketo, and Zillow.



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Exton-based Scala makes splash at Digital Signage Expo 2102

Tom Paine

By most accounts, the digital signage industry is booming as new technologies provide reduced costs and increased capabilities, and new vertical markets for digital displays open up. And Exton-based Scala, a leading player on the software side of the business, had a huge presence at Digital Signage Expo 2012 in Las Vegas earlier this month and made significant new product announcements.

One announcement was the release of Scala's Leading Indicators CxO Board, a digital dashboard designed for enterprise managers to track key organizational metrics, in real time when such data are available. Although CxO Board is said by the company to be available for numerous CRM/ERP platforms, the only one that Scala specifically mentions right now is Salesforce.com. I asked Scala CEO Tom Nix in a phone interview if Scala had any specific relationship with Salesforce on the CXO Board product, and he declined comment on that.

CxO Board consists of three software components: CxO Designer, which enables displays to be built from a series of dashboards created using graphical widgets; CxO Data Connector, which automatically connects customer data from Salesforce.com and other sources to the widgets for display; and CxO Player, which manages display of the complete presentation of widgets on a network of digital signage displays.

CxO Board seems somewhat similar in concept to software being offered by West Chester-based startup Hoopla Software, Inc., which I profiled earlier this year, and is also focused intially on the Salesforce user base. Hoopla, however, is very specifically geared towards goal measurement and motivation for sales and customer service teams, while Scala's language implies that CxO Board is targeted towards higher level executives.

I asked Nix what Scala's go to market strategy would be for what appears to be essentially a new channel for it. But he disputed that premise, saying that Scala is well established in the enterprise market and already has been involved in some CxO Board-like installations, and that what it is doing now is creating a formalized product architecture for that application.

In Las Vegas, Scala also introduced Scala Advanced Analytics, a cloud computing-based predictive analytics application for retailers. Scala says Scala Advanced Analytics "transforms market data and live third-party data streams into marketing messages that positively impact buying behavior". It can analyze massive amounts of data to determine what specific messages to deliver at specific times to shoppers via digital displays, based on predictive analytics-based projections for otimizing store performace or achieving other important goals. Scala says its Advanced Analytics offering is best suited for multi-site retailers with large numbers of SKU’s and point-of-sale data.

Scala does have a partner on the predictive modeling side, though Nix declined to identify who it was. He did say it was a proven application that had been around for a while. Although the SaaS solution is off the shelf, data customization can take considerable effort within an organization.

Scala also announced the release of a new version of it flagship digital signage software (Scala 5, Release 6). The new version is said to offer significant visual enhancements, better dynamic content management, new video and streaming options, and improved IT management capabilities.

More new product announcements are reported to be in the pipeline at Scala.

When asked how the first quarter was going for Scala, Nix said growth was probably stronger than it had ever been. Retail and Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) were probably the fastest growing market segments. Europe was holding up fairly well, he said (something I've heard from others recently), and Asia remains an enormous opportunity.

While Scala faces considerable competition on the software side and has its own challenges, it is in an envious strategic position. There is a crush of hardware vendors trying to get their products to customers, and Scala has leverage since it has a stable, proven software platform and the channel partners to reach them.

Related posts:

Exton-based Scala names Tom Nix new CEO; big opportunities in large global market

Exton-based Scala sees 20% growth in 2011, fine tunes leadership team for future growth



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West Chester-based Hoopla, developing CRM scoreboards, scores funding from Safeguard Scientifics, others

Tom Paine


Though not everyone is aware of it, there is a growing ecosystem in the Philly area around cloud-based SaaS CRM (Customer Relationship Management), the leading player in that space, Salesforce.com, and its Force.com platform. There is a large base of Salesforce.com customers, both for-profit and non-profit, and small companies as well as large enterprises such as Comcast and AmeriSourceBergen. There are also companies that have built their own SaaS offerings on top of the Force.com platform (Higher Ed recruitment tool TargetX of Conshohocken and life sciences CRM vendor Veeva Systems , which has much of its marketing and client side operations in Malvern though it is headquartered in California, are two that come to mind); and Salesforce.com consultants/installation experts such as Malvern-based CRM manager, in which Salesforce.com owns a stake, and Bluewolf, which has a Philadelphia office and provides consulting, training and recruiting. Another part of the ecosystem is for apps that complement and work with the Force.com platform, and can be sold through Salesforce.com's AppExchange.

In the latter category, one area venture that stands out is Hoopla Software Inc. of West Chester, which recently received $2.3 million in VC funding , including $1.3 million from Safeguard Scientifics and the rest from other yet to be named investors. Hoopla was founded in 2009 by Mike Smalls, a veteran of the Philadelphia technology scene. After spending several years with Symantec, he was with Philly startup Destiny WebSolutions, then Josh Kopelman-backed anti-spam software vendor TurnTide, where he headed up sales. After he helped it to achieve a rapid ramp-up in revenue, TurnTide was acquired by Symantec, and Smalls did a second tour of duty with that company for a couple of years. His next stop was as Executive Vice President with SEO software firm ClickEquations (now part of Acquisio) , which he left in 2009 to pursue his startup.

Hoopla Scoreboard Video on Vimeo.

Hoopla is targeted at doing something Smalls knows well how to do from his experience as a sales executive: motivating a sales or customer service organization to achieve its goals and measuring its performance towards them. Its primary product, Scoreboard, provides a visual dashboard generated from CRM sytem data showing how individuals are doing in reaching goals and relative to each other. It also provides a social layer through integration with Saleforce.com's Chatter social media tool, and provides gamification elements to enhance (hopefully) friendly competition among the group members. Scoreboard launched on the AppExchange in late 2010, and Smalls said in a phone interview with Philly Tech News that Hoopla now has more than 40 customers. Although focused on the Force.com platform now, Smalls says Hoopla may look at other CRM platforms or social media tools in the future.

Smalls declined to specify who the other investors are, saying they would be announced within a few weeks. He did say the other investors are not locally based. Hoopla's Form D filing indicates the round is still open for raising another possible $500,000.

Smalls will give a talk on Hoopla, gamification and on being part of Salesforce's Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner program at the Philly Force.com meetup on the evening of January 18 at LiquidHub in Wayne.

For Safeguard, this investment represents another commitment to an early stage IT venture, something the firm
hadn't done too much of for a while. Early last year it invested in Exton-based "Internet of Things" startup
ThingWorx, and it announced along with the Hoopla funding an investment in another Internet of Things venture, Richmond, VA-based Crimson Informatics.

Salesforce.com reported revenue of $584 million in its most recent quarter, a gain of 36% over the prior year. It has a market value of $14 billion. In a blog post about its investment in Hoopla, Safeguard emphasized booming growth estimates for spending on gamification processes, although that is a very broad category including many different types of things.



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