Hoopla Software raises $8 million led by Trinity Ventures; moving to larger Malvern-area offices

Tom Paine

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Hoopla Software, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley but has an R&D office in West Chester, announced last week it had raised an $8 million Series B round led by Trinity Ventures. The round also included participation from previous investors Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE: SFE), Illuminate Ventures and additional private investors.

Hoopla, founded in 2010 by veteran Philadelphia-area entrepreneur Michael Smalls, provides cloud-based software that uses gamification techniques and insights gained
from data analysis to boost performance for groups such as sales and customer
service teams. The company said it grew over 250 percent in 2013, adding over 150 new customers.

Hoopla's LinkedIn page shows 26 employees, 9 of whom are based in the Philadelphia area. Hoopla hopes to double that headcount by the end of the year, and also plans to release
a mobile version in the Spring.

Salesforce participated in Hoopla's Series A, and Hoopla's website still emphasizes its
product's close integration with Salesforce's CRM platform. California-based Trinity Ventures also invested $6.25 million in Philadelphia-based RJMetrics last year.

Hoopla raised $2.8 million in its Series A round in 2012, led by Safeguard Scientifics.

Prior to founding Hoopla, Small's Philadelphia area experience included executive roles at Destiny Websolutions, TurnTide and ClickEquations.

Update 2/16: Responding to my email inquiry, CEO Michael Smalls tells me that Hoopla
is moving from West Chester to the Malvern area "with expanded space to enable us to continue to add to the engineering team there and add sales resources to give us better east coast coverage. John Galvin, our CTO (and colleague from Destiny and ClickEquations) runs the Philly area office." Smalls says he is now living in San Jose but makes frequent trips back to the area.

Hoopla was also named a finalist for the PACT Enterprise Awards ( to be presented on May 8) in the category of "Technology Startup Company."

Comcast/TWC merger: What some commentators are saying to date

There are many angles to the Comcast/Time Warner Cable saga, and many more that will
come out over time.

I've tried to highlight articles that capture some of the key points so far here:



Two mayors far apart on Comcast deal (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

A Bigger Comcast May Beget More Deals (New York Times: DealBook)

DOJ Antitrust Chief Uncertain for Comcast Review (Wall Street
Jounal: MoneyBeat)

Comcast taps its ex-SEAL, Neil Smit, to lead bulked-up cable group (LA Times)


Wolff: NBC odd man out in Comcast merger (USA Today)

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH THE COMCAST MERGER (Tim Wu/The New Yorker)


Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger: Is Apple TV toast? (Fortune Tech)

Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters (New York Times)

State wired in for huge impact (Denver Post)


Analysts Watch Cox After Comcast-Time Warner Cable Deal
(Wall Street Journal: MoneyBeat)

Links 2/14/2014: SAP serious about opening HANA startup cafes

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Putting on PennApps: 2 days and $200,000 (Daily Pennsylvanian)

SAP founder outlines start-up strategy as small firms call on the "tank" to be agile
German enterprise software giant opening new start-up spaces to foster collaboration
(Techworld)

Hedge Fund Takes Stake in Malone’s Liberty Interactive (New York Times: DealBook)
Liberty Interactive is QVC's parent company. It is expected to spin out QVC as a tracking stock some time this year.

Tech vendors and cable companies push for more Wi-Fi spectrum (Ars Technica)


TAKING THE PULSE OF MEDICAL APPS AT MOBILE MONDAY MID-ATLANTIC (Mobile Week)

4 questions raised by Castlight Health IPO filing (Med City News)


MicroStrategy Launches In-Memory Analysis Engine (Information Week)

Reports: How the Comcast/TW Cable deal was done

How Comcast Snatched TW Cable Away From John Malone (Variety)

Comcast Talks From Sochi Win Time Warner Cable in Six-Day Sprint (Bloomberg)

Comcast's deal for Time Warner Cable left Charter out in the cold (LA Times)

Comcast-Time Warner Cable: What it may mean for other media deals (LA Times)

Everything you need to know about the proposed $45B Comcast-Time Warner merger (Gigaom)

Comcast's objectives in acquiring Time Warner Cable

Tom Paine

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Comcast's proposed deal to acquire Time Warner Cable for $45 billion (if approved) could accomplish four primary objectives:

First, it would assure in terms of nationwide economies of scale in the video content business, that Comcast would continue to maintain a considerable size advantage. This is important for achieving technological leadership, the ability to spread technology investment costs across as many customers as possible, greater marketing power, and bargaining power with content providers as well as technology vendors. Some cable execs have tried to downplay the value of the latter because they don't want those words used against them in front of an FCC or congressional hearing, but it is important.

While Charter backer John Malone has options, he couldn't come close to matching the scale of a combined Comcast/Time Warner Cable. Lets say he were to pick up the all of the three million subs Comcast says it would shed as part of the deal and somehow buy out the next five largest systems and add them to Charter's base subscribers. That would give Charter approximately 20 million subs versus Comcast's forecasted nearly 30 million. And that's unlikely to happen for a number of reasons.

In broadband, it gives Comcast the ability to build a stronger network, particularly along the east coast but also one with nationwide reach. This will make it more competitive with the telcos, including Verizon and AT&T. Some industry observers consider broadband to be a more attractive future market than delivering packaged video content.

If you look at Comcast's existing markets plus the ones it is likely to pick up from
Time Warner Cable, you can see how many of them are major national or regional communications hubs. It would put Comcast in a very powerful position in the telco world.

Regionally, it will strengthen Comcast's position in key metros such as New York,
Los Angeles, and Charlotte. In New York, Comcast already has some pieces in the area in
Connecticut and New Jersey. However, a combined Comcast/TWC would face strong competition there from Verizon's FiOS (often for the same subs) and in terms of regional presence from Cablevision (on Long Island and in Connecticut and New Jersey). Could Cablevision be Comcast's next target to round out its New York footprint? Remember what it did in the Philly market.

The fourth objective is to build an infrastructure capable of competing for larger enterprise accounts in business services.

A fifth tentacle of the octopus may be wireless. The cable industry has largely given up
on trying to build its own 4G LTE-type network, and I don't think much has come out of the joint product marketing agreement with Verizon Wireless. But cable operators see Wi-Fi
as a increasingly valuable option, not just for in-home or near-range network extension but possibly for building significant networks on the back of Wi-Fi hotspots, of which both Comcast and TWC have an ample supply.

What's next: Unless Comcast wants to buy a fill-in cable acquisition (such as Cablevision), my guess is its next large acquisition will be outside of the US.

Cable Consolidation History (Graphic: Wall Street Journal)

How dozens of regional cable companies consolidated into a few mega-companies, in one chart: http://t.co/tjmrtGF7FD pic.twitter.com/Tskd9UGhfQ

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) February 13, 2014

Some early views of Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal on Twitter

A quick look through the Twittervrse suggests some knives are already out for the Comcast-TWC deal:

Is there anyone out there arguing that Comcast/TWC merger is a good thing for consumers?

— danprimack (@danprimack) February 13, 2014

The Time Warner-Comcast merger could be a nightmare for customer satisfaction http://t.co/GmMqu3acoM

— BI: Tech (@SAI) February 13, 2014

Comcast Wants Total Control Of The Internet Pipes http://t.co/IAewn5spG0

— Dan_Rowinski (@Dan_Rowinski) February 13, 2014

Yes, you will probably get screwed if the Comcast-Time Warner deal goes through http://t.co/B91ZcK8EWR

— BI: Tech (@SAI) February 13, 2014

Moonves on Comcast/TWC: "It's way to early to decide what we like about it and what we don't like about it."

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) February 13, 2014

Comcast keeps saying deal to acquire TW Cable doesn't remove a competitor. True, but it does make them a lot bigger.

— Joe Flint (@JBFlint) February 13, 2014

@JBFlint part of the terms of the investment - i get one non-answer in every conference call.

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 13, 2014

Catch the references to business services from Comcast/Time Warner?

— Mari Silbey (@msilbey) February 13, 2014

Comcast and Time Warner Cable: Forget TV, it is all about broadband http://t.co/XpSShalKHO via @gigaom

— Paul Schneider (@PaulSchneiderPR) February 13, 2014

Comcast-Time Warner Cable Regulatory Review Will Be Raucous http://t.co/leToQzGlyp

— Paul Schneider (@PaulSchneiderPR) February 13, 2014

Links 2/12/2014: Report: Comcast to announce Time Warner Cable deal in morning

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Comcast Said to Agree to Pay $159 a Share for Time Warner Cable (Bloomberg)
Announcement expected in morning.

Comcast strikes deal to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion (LA Times: Company Town)


Get Ready for a Long Proxy Fight Over Time Warner Cable (New York Times: DealBook)
What was learned from Air Products/Airgas battle.

Comcast Adds Warner Bros. Fare To Electronic Video Store (Multichannel News)

Apple Said to Plan New TV Box Amid Time Warner Cable Talks (Bloomberg)

Alibaba to launch U.S. e-commerce website (Reuters)

SAP boss reveals plan to open chain of start-up cafes (Techworld)


Gartner Says CRM Will Be at the Heart of Digital Initiatives for Years to Come (Gartner Press Release)

Why Mobile CRM is a Mega-Shift in CRM (Jitendra Gupta/ Sand Hill)



Yahoo Strikes $10M Research Deal with Carnegie Mellon (Re/code)
Article isn't clear on this, but I assume Yahoo is paying C-M, not vice versa.

SAP user group says members will pull back on IT spending growth this year (PC World)


Email Attack on Vendor Set Up Breach at Target (Krebs on Security)
Was Target's Ariba portal part of the problem?



Delaware watches as Fisker hits the auction block (NewsWorks)


Campbell Soup Company upgrades software (Food Production Daily)

Irish firm acquires Chester County waste management software firm, PC Scales Technologies

Tom Paine

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A Limerick, Ireland (not Limerick, Pennsylvania, with its majestic Limerick Nuclear Power Plant) software firm has acquired Oxford (Chester County) based PC Scales Technologies, creating what it calls "the world’s largest waste management software company," the Irish Times reports.

AMCS Group will add $10 million (€7.3 million) in revenue and 50 North American employees through the deal, which will raise its annual sales to about €25 million. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AMCS Group had just completed a €23.5m investment round by Highland Capital Partners Europe and Investec Ventures through the Ulster Bank Diageo Fund.

PCST was founded by Donald Tefft in 1986 and has 2,000 customers, mainly in the US, although some are in Canada and Mexico. PCST’s chief operating officer Ken Good, a 25-year veteran of the industry, will lead AMCS’s new division.

On its website, PC Scale says it started in 1986 as a division of Scale Systems, Inc.,and that its first software package designed for the solid waste industry was installed at a transfer station in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Links 2/11/2014: SCOTUS will hear Aereo agurments April 22, minus 1

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Charter C.E.O. Is Pressing All the Right Buttons on Time Warner Cable (New York Times: DealBook)

Charter Names Its 13 Nominees for Time Warner Cable Board (New York Times: DealBook)

Supreme Court will hear Aereo on April 22 with one Justice sitting out (Gigaom)

Netflix Says Verizon Isn’t Slowing Down Its Streams (Re/code)


Exclusive: Lithium Technologies to Acquire Klout (Re/code)

Rackspace Under an Amazonian Cloud (MarketWatch)

Cornerstone, Jive, Marketo deliver mixed earnings (ZDNet)



New York state to give ADP $2M to open tech lab in NYC
(New York Business Journal)

Links 2/10/2014: Charter expected to name TWC nominees; Comcast's influence on Olympics

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HVAC Vendor Confirms Link to Target Data Breach (PC Magazine)
A Pennsylvania company confirmed that the Target hackers stole network credentials from its network.

Charter to name nominees for Time Warner Cable board as soon as Monday: source (Reuters)

No Olympics for you: Comcast locks value customers out of Sochi streams (Gigaom)

NBC single-handedly pays for a fifth of all Olympic Games (Washington Post)

Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months (Ars Technica)

Verizon drops Home Monitoring and Control service (FierceCable)

Esri To Enable Thousands Of Government Agencies To Open GIS Data To The Public (ReadWrite)

Microsoft Debuts Cloud-Based Power BI (Information Week)

Oracle's 12c database to receive SAP certification faster than usual (PC World)

Rackspace CEO Napier to retire; Q4 solid (ZDNet)

Cornerstone Seen Maintaining Double-Digit Growth Run
(Investor's Business Daily)

Patients may now get lab results without a doctor's help (USA Today)

N.J. company wins global entrepreneur of the year honor from IBM (NJBIZ)