This week’s Seattle tech news roundup features a hefty venture round for mobile ad tracking startup HasOffers, the new STEM-focused chancellor of University of Washington Bothell, an Avanade study of social collaboration tools use in the enterprise, and a Seattle AWS Direct Connect service from Equinix:
—HasOffers, a Seattle startup tracking and managing mobile advertising campaigns, has $9.4 million in new investment to continue growing. Accel Partners led the round, which was joined by RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Chris DeVore of Founder’s Co-op. The 79-person company took pride in bootstrapping its growth to this point and “didn’t need to raise money based on our current cash flow and ability to keep growing,” CEO Peter Hamilton says in a statement.
However, HasOffers will be able to grow more quickly by hiring engineers to build out its two products: one for ad agencies and networks to manage performance advertising programs, and the other to track app business back to advertising partners. Accel Partners’ Rich Wong is joining the company’s board. More details on the company’s decision to take funding and how the deal went down are in a blog post by Hamilton.
—The new chancellor of the University of Washington Bothell, Bjong Wolf Yeigh, has a background well-suited to the branch campus’ development as a center of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Yeigh, an engineer by training, comes from the State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome, where as president he led capital expansion efforts and grew STEM faculty positions. His appointment is effective Sept. 1, pending UW Board of Regents approval.
—The consumerization of corporate IT is alive and well when it comes to social collaboration tools, according to a new poll from Avanade. The Seattle IT consulting and services firm—established by a Microsoft-Accenture joint venture in 2001—asked 1,000 business and IT leaders and 4,000 employees in organizations around the world about their use of social collaboration tools. Facebook was cited by 74 percent of respondents, followed by Twitter (51 percent) and LinkedIn (45 percent).
All of these outperformed social collaboration platforms built for the enterprise by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce. Avanade says the use of consumer social collaboration platforms is giving corporate leaders “a false sense of accomplishment in social collaboration” because they lack enterprise-level tools for things like document editing and knowledge search.
—The new Equinix data center in Seattle, which we toured in March, is now offering direct connection to Amazon Web Services, which promises very low latency for applications running on the Amazon cloud relative to a public Internet connection to the service. Seattle joins Equinix locations with AWS Direct Connect in Virginia Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
