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Posts Tagged ‘web-application’

Armorize, provider of web application security solutions, has secured a Series B round of financing from its (unnamed) Silicon Valley-based Series A investors, Estonian seed fund Ambient Sound Investments and Asian firm Birch Venture Capital.

For your information, ASI is the investment vehicle of Skype’s founding engineers. They’ve recently invested in a European community network for pet owners, which we covered last week.

Armorize provides Web application security solutions such as malicious code detection, real time web application protection, and static source code analysis services throughout the system development life cycle, under brand names like CodeSecure, SmartWAF, HackAlert and Archon Scanner.

Armorize caters to a variety of industries, including finance, telecom, government, and technology sectors. The company was founded in 2005 and is based in Santa Clara, California with an additional office in Taipei, Taiwan.

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Most web application developers have been there: your monitoring system shows nothing but green lights, yet the app is down or not functioning the way it should. Traditional web monitoring services often don’t dig deep enough to detect glitches in the application code, and database or find that problems arise with bugs in Ajax, Flash or Silverlight front-end applets.

German startup iOpus is today unveiling the public beta of a product it claims offers a solution for many a developer or website owner who would like their monitoring services taken up a notch. Enter AlertFox. (free Pro accounts for 100 users, see below)

What AlertFox does is provide in-depth monitoring of rich internet applications (RIAs), offering a potential solution for many SaaS and Web 2.0 web service providers out there who are not satisfied with a simple uptime checker that only provides superficial information without detecting the root cause of problems. AlertFox runs directly from the browser (with support for both Firefox and Internet Explorer) and is capable of keeping tabs on the functioning and performance of sites built with ActiveX, AJAX, Flash, Flex, complex HTML or Silverlight technology.

Another aspect that sets AlertFox apart from most traditional monitoring services is the real-time monitoring of transactions, e.g. the entire checkout process for an e-commerce store instead of only its uptime. This should come in handy for online businesses for which a smooth buying and selling process makes all the difference in the world.

The company is following the freemium approach for its business model, which is subscription-based and as far as I can tell extremely moderately priced. Users can get started with a free account, which covers worldwide monitoring and other basic features but only supports one user and use within the Firefox browser. You’d need to sign up for a Pro account (starts at $49 per month for the time being as a promotional offer) for transaction monitoring with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, support for up to five users and 100% monitoring of Flash, Ajax and Silverlight applications.

We’d love for you to take it for a spin and tell us if it lives up to its promise, so we’ve arranged for the company to give away 100 free Pro2 accounts, valid for two years. All you need to do is quickly sign up for a free account and send an e-mail to techcrunch-at-alertfox-dot-com. The first 100 readers to do that will be upgraded without charge, and are expected to come back and share their experiences in the comments.

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At last week’s The Next Web Conference, I was part of the 4-headed jury that evaluated all presenting startups and ultimately decided My Name Is E should be awarded the top prize. It was an extremely close call, since we ended up having to decide between the young Dutch company and a startup that built a simply amazing web application you’re really going to want to check out. The tool I’m referring to is called Prezi, and it allows you to create amazing presentations on the web.

If you think you’ve heard that too many times, don’t stop reading just yet, because this one is just plain awesome. It’s an entirely Flash-based app that lets you break away from the slide-by-slide approach of most presentations. Instead, it allows you to create non-linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map containing words, links, images, videos, etc. This is similar to pptPlex, a Microsoft Office Labs project that aims to bring that type of functionality to PowerPoint.

It’s really no use explaining how presentations come out without seeing it for yourself, so it pains me that there’s currently no way to embed the examples that are showcased on the Prezi website. Instead, you will need to jump to examples in another tab or window, but please do it: good examples are ‘AIESEC’ and ‘Technical Investigation ICYA’.

It takes a while to get used to the way Prezi lets you create presentations, although the interface is fairly intuitive once you’ve grown accustomed to using the ‘Zebra’. There are a number of tutorial videos to assist you in creating your first Prezi presentations.

To get started, you can use the free version which brands every presentation with a Prezi logo, offers 100 MB of file storage, comes with an offline player but without the ability to make presentations private. For €39 a year, you get all that but 5x the amount of storage space and the option not to have your presentations made public. A third ‘Pro’ version costs you €119 per year but features a cool desktop application you can use to create and edit Prezi presentations offline. Besides offering paid versions of the software, Prezi also has other revenue streams, like selling DVDs and offering branding services.

Try it out and let us know how your presentations come out!

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