日本在线英语辅导公司Langrich被收购，在线教育已成日本热潮
美国远程教育公司EnglishCentral上周早些时候宣布了对日本公司Langrich的收购。
Langrich总部位于日本东京，提供在线英语辅导一类的服务。签署换股协议后，该公司将并入EnglishCentral，其投资者 KLab Ventures以及Hitomedia 都将成为EnglishCentral的小股东。据KLab公司发言人表示，此次并购标志着第一次日本创业公司被美国同类大公司收购。
Langrich成立于2010年，通过Skype语音软件提供英语教学，授课老师均为菲律宾籍。和其主要竞争对手Rarejob以及DMM一样，Langrich提供一对一教学，并专注于会话技巧。今后，其用户还可以通过电脑或者手机观看录制好的视频课程，并配上EnglishCentral的智能化语音识别技术来学习词汇和发音。
EnglishCentral首席执行官Alan Schwartz在采访中表示：“在日本，我们还将继续使用Langrich作为我们的品牌。”
“EnglishCentral不会更改旗下公司或平台的名称，包括很多在韩国、中国以及巴西的领先的在线学习公司。”
EnglishCentral总部位于马萨诸塞州阿灵顿，每月拥有超过10万付费用户。其服务范围包含全球各地超过100个国家的400多所大学。在扎堆的远程教育领域里，EnglishCentral这家创业公司最大的亮点或许就是有退款保证了。如果学生在三个月内不能得到提升，EnglishCentral会退还全部学费。
Schwartz表示，EnglishCentral将会接手Langrich现有的包括教师在内的260名员工，同时还表示：“我们也会每个月增加几十名教师，并且我们不会再限制教师国籍，菲律宾籍之外的老师也可以考虑。”
日本的补习班（juku），也就是培训学校产业价值大约100亿美元。而英语口语课程就占据了当中很大一块市场。随着互联网的发展，智能手机的日益普及，很多这些课程被搬到了线上。
这对线下实体学校造成了很大冲击，因为对于学习者而言，在线学习更为划算，以至于目前许多实体学校已如强弩之末，而在线教育却已经成了日本最热的创业领域之一。
“2007年，日本最大的实体英语培训学校Nova破产之后，整个日本培训市场一度停滞不前，但近几年，情况有了转机。”Schwartz解释说：“Rarejob现在已经上市了，你可以看到它的财务状况，其注册用户数量增长了将近50%。DMM的增长还要快。它们是日本在线市场上，最主要的两个竞争对手。而去年，我们的收入也增长了90%。”
还有一件事进一步证实了日本在线辅导热潮的火爆，上周的亚洲科技东京舞台上，日本国内的在线教育公司Mana.bo就拿下了特等奖。
Japanese edtech startup acquired by US startup amid online tutoring boom
American edtech startup EnglishCentral earlier this week announced the acquisition of a Japanese startup offering similar online tutoring for English learners. Langrich will be acquired in a share-swap agreement that sees the Tokyo-based startup’s investors – KLab Ventures and Hitomedia – become minority shareholders in EnglishCentral. According to a KLab spokesperson, it marks the first time that a Japanese startup has been acquired by a larger American one.
Founded in 2010, Langrich uses English tutors in the Philippines to provide English instruction via Skype. Like its main competitors, Rarejob and DMM, lessons are one-on-one and focus on conversation skills. Langrich users will now benefit from a video lesson archive for web and mobile, as well as EnglishCentral’s speech recognition technology for studying vocabulary and pronunciation.
“We will keep the Langrich brand as our consumer brand in Japan,” Alan Schwartz, EnglishCentral’s CEO, tells Tech in Asia. “EnglishCentral will remain the name of the company and the name of the platform that we provide to our global partners, including many leading online learning companies […] in Korea, China, and Brazil.”
EnglishCentral, headquartered in Arlington, Massachusetts, boasts more than 100,000 paying users per month. The service is available in more than 100 countries and at over 400 universities across the globe. Perhaps EnglishCentral’s biggest differentiator in the crowded edtech space is its money-back guarantee – the startup refunds 100 percent of a student’s lesson fees if they don’t level up after three months.
Schwartz says that EnglishCentral will retail all of Langrich’s current employees – a total of 260 including teachers. “We’re also adding dozens of teachers a month, and we will not limit teacher hiring to the Philippines going forward,” he adds.
The Japanese juku – cram school – industry is valued at roughly US$10 billion.Eikaiwa – conversational English lessons – take a big chunk of that market. With strong internet infrastructure and a population that’s increasingly fond of smartphones, many of those lessons are moving online. That could hurt brick-and-mortar schools, which have already faltered, since online learning is more cost effective for learners. This shift to online has created, arguably, one of Japan’s hottest startup verticals.
“After the Nova implosion (once Japan’s largest physical English conversation school, Nova went bankrupt in 2007), the whole market in Japan stalled, but things have changed in last several years,” Schwartz explains. “Rarejob is now public and you can see from their financials they are growing at close to 50 percent in terms of registered users. DMM we believe is growing even faster. They are the main competitors in the online market in Japan that have traction. We grew 90 percent last year in terms of revenue.”
Further evidence of Japan’s online tutoring boom could be seen at Tech in Asia Tokyo’s Arena pitch battle last week, where domestic edtech startup Mana.bo took the grand prize.
Editing by Terence Lee
Source:techinasia
营销数据服务公司Unified获1000万美元投资
Unified成立于2011年，总部位于纽约。
Unified通过行业先进的数据平台为专业营销人员提供分析、方案和广告工具。目前该公司有超过600个客户，包括全球2000强企业和他们的广告代理。
该投资由Silicon Valley Bank提供。
Social Marketer Unified Raises $30M Round Led by iHeartMedia
Unified is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding, plus a $10 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
That sounds like a nice chunk of change, but equally noteworthy is the fact that the equity funding was led by iHeartMedia (the radio and digital media company formerly known as Clear Channel). The two companies previously announced a strategic partnership to develop custom products for advertisers, as well as an investment of undisclosed size.
“We specifically chose iHeart because of the strategic value they brought to table in terms of data sets — it’s not just cash,” said Calvin Lui, Unified’s president and chief strategy officer. After all, Lui noted that in addition to its social advertising business, Unified aims to bring data together from a variety of marketing channels, an approach he contrasted with other social marketing companies that are mere “point solutions.”
“We have such rolling momentum with these major brands that we continue to win flagship relationships with, and all of that is premised on having a system of record for all of our data, so we can collect information from multiple sources, extract value and execute against that,” Lui said.
The new money will allow Unified to continue developing its product and find new markets. Lui emphasized that that doesn’t just mean geographic expansion but also adding new products.
Specifically, Vice President of Corporate Communications Dave Donohue said the company plans to expand its data offerings beyond social media, starting with broadcast advertising — another area where it would make sense to work with iHeartMedia. (To be clear, while Unified expands its data business, the ad-buying product will remain focused on social media.)
It’s been more than three years since Unified announced raising a $14 million Series A. Asked why the company waited so long to raise more money, Lui said that the team knows how to “deploy capital very efficiently.”
“We understand that there are cycles to the business and the industry and we’re here for the long-term,” he added.
Unified customers include Tesla, 22Squared, Lenovo and Toyota. Other investors in the Series B include Advance Publications, Upfront Ventures and Foundry Group.
Over the past couple of years, Unified also acquired analytics companies Awe.sm and PageLever. Donohue said the company is open to making more acquisitions, “but this round isn’t aimed at funding acquisitions.”
来源：TC
Fama：帮助企业找出候选人社交媒体中的“危险信号”
如果你几年前在 Twitter 上发布的一些蠢话影响到了你找工作的机会，可能你会很讨厌这样的事情，不过 Fama 的首席执行官兼联合创始人本·莫纳斯（Ben Mones）表示，一些雇主已经在实施这种社交媒体筛选——只是他们的做法还不是非常全面和系统。
莫纳斯并不认为这种做法是件坏事。毕竟，社交媒体可以让雇主更好地知道这个人是不是适合这份工作，以及他们有没有可能会在网上发布一些有损公司的内容，从而让公司陷入麻烦。
莫纳斯认为，“你在网上是个什么样的人也代表了——如果不是完全对等——你在现实生活中是一个什么样的人。这一点是人们才开始认识到的事情。”
Fama 的客户可以指定他们想要筛选的社交媒体中的“危险信号”，比如吸毒、性内容、偏见或是亵渎等等。该公司会分析文本、图片和视频（部分是利用亚马逊的众包平台 Mechanical Turk)。
莫纳斯表示，一般来说，雇主对于候选人是否在大学里吸过大麻或是酗酒等内容并不怎么关心，他们更关心的是比如对于女性是否给予尊重这样的内容。
莫纳斯还强调，Fama 不会提供推荐。它只是为招聘经理提供额外信息——这种区分可以让该服务避免让人头疼的法律纠纷。
“我们不会给人打分，或得做出关于是否应该雇佣此人的结论，”莫纳斯说。我们所做的是为招聘经理提供足够的经过提炼的数据，这样他们就可以做出决定。我们的做法是推动大家的行动。这有助于确保我们 (或是我们的客户) 不会因诽谤而被控告，因为我们并没有打分。”
此外，莫纳斯表示 Fama 遵守《公平信用报告法》，而且不会突出种族、性别、残疾等 保护类 信息。
Fama 今天宣布了与人力资源工作流及背景调查公司 CARCO 的 合作伙伴关系 ，两家将联合提供产品服务。
Fama Helps Businesses Find Social Media “Red Flags” Before Hiring Someone
Fama Technologies aims to help companies screen potential employees by analyzing their social media posts.
You might not like the idea that something dumb you posted years ago on Twitter could affect your chances of getting a job, but Fama CEO and co-founder Ben Mones said employers are already performing this kind of social media screening — they’re just not doing it very comprehensively or systematically.
And he doesn’t see that as a bad thing. After all, social media can give an employer a better sense of whether someone will be a good fit, and also whether they’re likely to get the company in trouble by posting something offensive.
“Who you are online is very indicative — if not equally indicative — of who you are in the offline world,” Mones argued. “This is what people are just starting to come to terms with.”
Fama customers can identify the “social media red flags” that they want to screen for, whether it’s drug use, sexual content, bigotry or profanity, among other things. The service analyzes text, images and video (in part by leveraging Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk).
Mones said that in general, employers are less interested in, say, whether or not you smoked pot or drank a lot in college, and more in issues like whether or not you act respectfully toward women.
He also emphasized that Fama doesn’t provide recommendations. It just gives hiring managers additional data — a distinction that could help the service avoid thorny legal problems.
“We’re not assigning a score to individuals, or drawing conclusions/making claims about whether or not someone should be hired,” he said. “What we are doing is providing enough distilled data to hiring managers so they can make a decision. Bringing folks to the precipice of action. This helps us ensure that we (or our clients) are never held for libel, because we aren’t scoring.”
He added that Fama is compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and that does not highlight protected classes of information, like race, gender or disability.
Fama also announced a partnership today with HR workflow and background check company CARCO to offer combined products.
来源：TC
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数据分析SaaS Discern获A轮2000万美元投资
据报道，数据分析SaaS Discern获A轮 2000 万美元投资。
Discern成立于2009年，总部位于旧金山。主要功能是通过特有的数据集、有效的专业知识和技术，为用户提供可行的投资见解。
该轮投资由Artiman Ventures领投。
Discern Raises $20M in Series A Financing
Discern, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a financial decision-making platform for investment professionals, raised $20m in Series A financing.
The round was led by Palo Alto-based Artiman Ventures.
The company will use the funding to expand its platform beyond the Energy industry to offer modules for Real Estate, Consumer Retail, Banking/Financial Services and other sectors.
Founded in 2009 and led by Harry Blount, CEO, Discern provides a cloud-based platform connecting financial decision-makers to synthesized data and content that is personalized to an individual user’s investment process. The company’s solution continuously scans the user’s universe of real-time data (public and commercial) then signals the user when new, relevant data surfaces.
Discern data can be viewed by sector, by company, and/or by the user’s own parameters, automating and enhancing the work of the traditional data research associate.
The company also has offices in New York.
来源：FINSMES
提供企业内部应用商店的Apperian获1200万美元C轮融资
移动应用管理初创企业 Apperian 刚刚获得了 1200 万美元的 C 轮融资。
Apperian 是一家提供移动应用管理（MAM）的初创企业，成立于 2009年，总部位于波士顿，现有员工 67 人。所谓移动应用管理，是指提供内部开发的移动应用并对其进行管理，从某种意义上来说，可以视其为企业内部的应用商店。其契机是有一部分企业要求提供类似苹果应用商店或 Google Play 这样的公共移动应用集散地，供其在内部发布移动应用。要知道 2007年iPhone 才刚刚推出，2年 后 Apperian 就开始进入企业移动应用市场，这种当时消费者化为主流的移动市场还是需要眼光和勇气的。
从企业移动应用的发展轨迹来看，大多数企业一开始主要把注意力集中在移动设备管理（MDM）上，只是到了最近几年才开始慢慢扩大到移动应用的管理（因为一开始企业并没有多少移动 app）。因此，移动应用管理的功能是很多 MDM 平台的功能扩展，像被 VMWare 收购的 AirWatch、被黑莓收购的 Good Technology 就是这样。不过 Apperian 跟此类竞争对手的不同在于，它支持应用封装、独立应用容器，提供了移动应用安全与动态策略控制，允许客户在 MDM 系统之外部署 MAM，这样的话 Apperian 的客户可以向自己的合作伙伴、第三方人员等提供定制 app，从而更加灵活地进行移动应用管理。
目前 Apperian 的客户包括 Aetna、AT&T、Emory Healthcare、Reed Elsevier、丰田以及 Walgreens 等数千个组织，通过 Apperian 发布的移动应用已经超过了 170 万。
此轮融资由 First Floor Capital 领投，Bessemer Venture Partners、KPCB、North Bridge Venture Partners、Intel Capital 等跟投，此轮融资过后其总融资额已达 3900 万美元。此轮融资所得将用于加强市场营销、产品开发以及增加人力。此轮的领投方 First Floor Capital 是一家马来西亚的投资公司，Apperian 选择这家 VC 的部分目的正是在于希望借此来拓展亚洲市场。
APPERIAN CLOSES $12 MILLION IN SERIES C FUNDING AS IT TRANSFORMS THE ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MARKET
Company Growth Accelerates as App-Centric Security and Management Take Center Stage and MDM Alone is Deemed Insufficient
BOSTON – September 9, 2015 – Apperian® Inc., the mobile application management and security company, today announced it has completed a $12 million Series C funding round. New investor First Floor Capital joins Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, North Bridge Venture Partners, Intel Capital and CommonAngels Ventures in backing Apperian. The funding will be used to fuel growth and platform innovation as CIOs and line-of-business leaders increasingly need to secure and manage the proliferation of apps and data in the enterprise.
MAM Offers a Superior Solution to the Enterprise
With enterprise apps, BYOD and contracted workforces on the rise, enterprises are increasingly tasked with supporting an environment of unmanaged devices – mobile devices not under corporate mobile device management (MDM). This creates a barrier that prevents organizations from securely distributing critical mobile apps to the users who need them.
As Gartner’s August 2015 report, ‘How to Live With Unmanaged Mobile Devices’ states “Gartner clients who have tried MDM and have received poor feedback from their workforce, which perceives it as too invasive on their mobile devices, have been inquiring about alternative methods to securely provide enterprise access from mobile devices.”
Even organizations using MDM are seeking out additional layers of security and technology to insulate apps that matter. In “Mobile Applications and Cloud: Companies, Vendors Take Aim at Mobilizing Business Workflows,” 451 Research states, “Enterprise mobility management built around applications represents the future of ensuring enterprise data is protected and locked down and end users have the access they need to mobile service.”
These trends have driven demand for and adoption of Apperian’s mobile app security and management platform. The new funding will enable the company to accelerate delivery of new security and management capabilities as its technology has evolved into the industry’s most extensible platform.
Since completing its B round in January 2013, Apperian has:
Increased its annualized recurring revenue by more than 250%
Increased users under management by 400%
Enabled more than 1.7 million app deployments
Nearly doubled its average account size
Won numerous Fortune 500 and public sector customer engagements, including Aetna, AT&T, Emory Healthcare, Reed Elsevier, Toyota and Walgreens. Increasingly, Apperian is being selected as the corporate system of record for mobile app security and management
“Arming our employees with mobile apps that provide easy access to key systems has been a key initiative to improve the company’s productivity,” said Cheryl Van, Head of Learning and Development at RMS. “Delivering intuitive and private access to these mobile apps is incredibly fast and easy to maintain with Apperian. We’re driving high levels of secure adoption and our team members simply appreciate easy access via their personal mobile devices.”
“We’ve experienced incredible growth in demand for our platform over the past year as organizations are running into the limitations of traditional, device-centric enterprise mobility management products,” said Brian Day, CEO of Apperian. “Some of the world’s largest companies and public sector organizations have turned to Apperian for app-centric security and management methods so they can securely reach every single user. We’re excited to see this validation of our approach from new and existing customers, investors and analysts alike.”
To learn more about Apperian’s Enterprise App Store and Mobile Application Management platform, please visitwww.apperian.com.
About Apperian
Apperian is the leading enterprise-class mobile application management (MAM®) and security platform for the delivery of critical apps to 100% of users across an organization. Apperian provides fine-grained security and dynamic policy controls at the individual app level for deployments where mobile device management approaches are not possible or desired, such as BYOD, contract workers and other unmanaged devices.
Apperian’s easy to use interface offers a private, branded consumer-like enterprise app store that greatly increases mobile app adoption and a comprehensive app management back-end for administrators to easily protect and manage their business apps and data. The company has helped IT and line of business professionals secure and deliver more than 1.7 million enterprise apps to organizations such as Maxim Integrated Products, NVIDIA, Nationwide, New Balance, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
来源： Apperian
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