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All Those E-mails From Pinterest Are Very Good For This Guy

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/all-those-e-mails-from-pinterest-are-very-good-for-this-guy-2012-3

SendGrid has sent 30 billion e-mails in the three years it’s been in business — and none of them are spam.

SendGrid is an e-mail cloud service hired by Pinterest, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Spotify, job sites, daily deal sites and many other companies.

About 40,000 Web applications use SendGrid, says its CEO  — and Boulder startup icon — Jim Franklin. And none of it is spam because users sign up these e-mails, such as job openings, friend requests and the like.

Franklin says it even coaches its customers on how to do e-mail so people don’t report it as spam.

“One person sending e-mail to another is easy. But an app sending out e-mail is hard. E-mail is a problem for developers,” explains Franklin.

So it’s no surprise that SendGrid is growing at 10% annually — it now sends out more than 3 billion emails per month – and it recently landed Microsoft Azure as a partner. SendGrid will now be the default e-mail service for any app using Microsoft’s cloud, Franklin says. New Azure developers qualify for 25,000 free e-mails a month.

The company is one of the shining stars of the blossoming Boulder startup scene. It began in Boulder’s TechStars accelerator program in 2009 and has boomed from there. It recently landed raised $21 million in Series B funding in January — for a total of $27 million raised so far

As SendGrid uses Rackspace, Web apps that also use Rackspace qualify for 40,000 free e-mails per month.

All who know SendGrid are expecting an IPO in as little three years. One of its VCs, Bessemer Venture Partners, has done over 100 IPOs, notes Franklin. That’s if the company doesn’t accept an acquisition offer before then, says Franklin. 

And if you’re interested in one of the 30 job openings at the company, you might also want to know that the company motto is the 4H’s: Honest, hungry, humble, happy.

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Sure, The Artist did well at the Academy Awards. But what does that really mean, statistically?

As usual, our friends at AddThis, a company that provides social media sharing tools for web publishers, tracked their network of 11 million sites and 1.2 billion unique users per month to find out which Oscar events really drove chatter among consumers.

The data show that the real Oscar winners were the iPad, Pinterest, Sacha Baron Cohen and Twitter. Losers included Ryan Seacrest, Facebook and Billy Crystal.

This was the background chatter in the weeks prior to the Oscars. Note that ‘Hugo’ dominates.

Demian Bichir peaked when he was nominated for a SAG award for ‘Better Life.’ But interest faded. More people were interested in George Clooney than Jean Dujardin of ‘The Artist’ in the week before the Oscars.

Prior to the show, the people’s choice for Best Actress was Viola Davis, not Meryl Streep.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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See Also:

• Will Advertisers Pay $62 Million To Sponsor YouTube Channels? Here’s Today’s Ad Brief
• Here’s Who Facebook Thinks Are Its 11 Best Advertisers
• 10 Horrible Ads Starring Academy Award Winners

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