Crashlytics Makes Enterprise Features Free for All

Crashlytics, the mobile crash-reporting and analysis platform that was acquired by Twitter last month, said today that it will make its enterprise-level features available for free. In a company blog post, the company’s co-founder, Wayne Chang, said, “The features and usage we used to charge for based on limits are now unlimited across the board.”

Salesforce to Seek Four-for-One Stock Split

Salesforce.com just filed a preliminary proxy statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that includes a proposal to seek shareholder approval for an increase in the number of authorized shares of the company. If approved, the measure would have the effect of splitting Salesforce shares on a four-for-one basis.

Salesforce shares have been on a tear of late and touched a 52-week high of $175.74 today, closing at $173.86, up more than 47 percent from where they were trading a year ago. The proposal would boost the number of shares from 405 million now to 1.6 billion. It would also push the number of shares owned by CEO Marc Benioff, the company’s largest non-institutional shareholder, to north of 40 million shares from about 10.2 million shares now.

The thinking about the split, Salesforce says in the filing, is to keep the shares affordable for mainstream investors. At $43 and change, a share of Salesforce would be easier to justify buying than it is at $173 and change. It also makes stock options given to new hires a little more attractive, because there’s a perception that there’s a lot more room to grow. Salesforce puts it like so in the filing:

“The trading price of our common stock has risen significantly over the past several years. The Board regularly evaluates the effect of the trading price of our common stock on the liquidity and marketability of our common stock and believes the considerable price appreciation has made our common stock less affordable and, therefore, attractive to fewer investors. The Board believes that this considerable price appreciation, and the associated reduction in number of shares of stock covered by equity awards we issue to newly hired and existing employees, has reduced the perceived attractiveness of our employee equity awards.”

RIM hasn’t forgotten its roots, launches BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 for businesses

RIM is all set to unveil its new BlackBerry 10 devices at the end of January, hopeful that they will make a splash among consumers. Despite that focus, the company hasn’t forgotten its core enterprise roots, and it launched its new BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES 10) today.

The company first released details of the new system for businesses at the end of August, promising that it will launch in the first quarter of 2013, and it has delivered on its word. RIM is coming under increasing pressure for corporate customers from Apple and Samsung — which invested in enterprise-focused Fixmo this week — and its new enterprise service consolidates all of its services for business into one place, while also allowing easier management of non-BlackBerry devices.

RIM was the main target of a Samsung ad which aired this week and poked fun at the fact that many companies are limited to using BlackBerry devices for ‘work phones’. It has set out to address that and, while it has long had technologies allowing other devices to use BES, it has made management of multi-platform devices a central part of BES 10.

With BES 10, everything from the company's mobile device management (MDM) to its security, infrastructure, and app management products come together into a "single unified web-based console."

Other key features that the company is stressing include application management for apps — both internal and public — via BlackBerry World for Work, improvements to over-the-air activation for devices and ‘enhanced’ IT policies.

BES is available on a 60-day trial without cost, while existing customer can upgrade their software through a range of packages.

RIM’s focus on content for BlackBerry 10 appears to be going well and its final Port-A-Thon to encourage developers to port iOS and Android apps to the platform saw more than 19,000 submissions last weekend. That volume has forced the Canadian firm to push back the deadlines for its developer incentive programs.

This walk-through shows the BES 10 product working, and includes it being set up with a BlackBerry 10 alpha device.

Headline image via Honou

How IBM Is Watching How You Shop Online

Starting yesterday and continuing into today, computing giant IBM has been putting out quick reports on the state of online shopping.

Apparently this is now a officially a thing, so here are some stats taken from the latest snapshot as of 3 pm ET, because we just know you’re not shopping on a tablet, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to hear about how many others are:

• Online sales are up 20 percent for this same time period over Black Friday 2011.
  
  
• The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site is at 28 percent, up from 18.1 percent in 2011.
  
• The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase is 14.3 percent, up from 10.3 percent in 2011.
  
• Shoppers using the iPad led to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices, with conversion rates reaching 4.2 percent, higher than all other mobile devices.
  
• Shoppers referred from social networks like Facebook and Twitter generated 0.18 percent of all online sales on Black Friday.

So you might be wondering how IBM gets all this info. It’s all part of its strategic play in the world of big data, essentially helping companies make more sense of the huge troves of data they’ve gathered that were previously being ignored. Smarter Commerce is the area of IBM devoted to helping retailers better understand that data so they can come up with improved ideas concerning how to sell more stuff.

Where they gather that data is the IBM Benchmark. It’s a cloud-based digital analytics platform that soaks up digital information about how consumers respond to different ways of selling things online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, from 500 different online retailers. IBM won’t name them — they joined the network under condition of anonymity — but Big Blue says the companies that participate include about half of the companies named on the Internet Retailer Top 100 list. A lot of the technology comes from Coremetrics and Unica, acquisitions IBM made in 2010.

Last year, I talked about all this with Craig Hayman, IBM’s VP of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group. One quote from that conversation sticks out in my memory; it bears repeating here:

“If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they're incredibly empowered. There's not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that: To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was.”

So now you know. Not only are retailers and your credit card companies watching you shop, so is IBM.