These sister companies share more than a coincidental common name; both were founded by passionate parents with a shared vision of making organic nutrition more appealing and more accessible.  Collectively, they hope to impart the modern philosophy that the path to long-term health begins with the very first bite.

In the US, Plum Organics has built a strong connection with parents and drove over 50% of the baby food category growth last year.  The company’s first-to-market launch of the squeezable pouch transformed the baby food category and allowed Plum to successfully expand into organic snack products geared towards the nutritional needs of school-aged children.  Plum UK is best known for their innovative product formats as well as their premium, culinary-driven assortment.  Most recently, the company experienced a 24% increase in distribution with the launch of their Taste Adventures line focused on globally inspired cuisine.

“From the beginning, both companies were inspired by love to improve the health of our little ones by making great tasting organic food a part of a family’s busy lifestyle,” said Neil Grimmer , CEO and Co-founder of Plum Organics.  “Like Plum Organics, Plum UK is a ‘David versus Goliath’ brand filled with passionate people that are inspired to use the power of business to make a difference in the world. We’re excited to continue this mission together.”

“Plum Organics is known in the US as a game-changing innovation hothouse,” said Scott Wotherspoon CEO of Plum UK.  “The success of their expansion into the toddler and kids categories proves the strength of the Plum brand.  We can’t wait to capture some of that momentum by bringing their products to little ones in the UK and beyond.”

With this partnership, Neil Grimmer will maintain his role as CEO for the new entity doing business as Plum Inc., and Scott Wotherspoon will continue to lead the UK business.  The company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area will employ 88 people including offices in London and New York. For more information about each company please visit: Plum Organicswww.plumorganics.com and Plum UK www.plum-baby.co.uk

About Plum Organics:
Plum Organics® is a pioneer and leading provider of premium, nutritious organic baby food, toddler and kid snack food products. Recognized for their unique culinary-inspired recipes and a modern approach to family nutrition, Plum Organics is the only brand that offers a complete line of organic products that ensure healthy eating from the highchair to the lunchbox™.  Inc. Magazine recently ranked Plum Organics #63 on their 2012 Inc. 500 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America.  In addition, the San Francisco Business Times named Neil Grimmer the Most-admired CEO in the Emerging Growth category for 2012.

About Plum UK:
Plum UK is a leading creator of nutritious organic baby food in the UK. Founded in 2006 by Savoy trained Chef and Mum, Susie Willis , Plum changed the face of baby food in the UK by offering “real food for babies not just baby food.”  Initially crafted in the cookery school she ran, Plum is now available in all the major supermarket chains in the UK and Ireland offering over 40 products including convenient pouches, little pots, snacks and refrigerated dairy items.  Junior Magazine recently named Plum the Best Children’s Food Brand for 2012.  In addition, Plum was a recipient of the 2012 Mother & Baby Awards.

SOURCE Plum Organics

RELATED LINKS
http://www.plumorganics.com
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Twist, the mobile app that helps keep others notified of your arrival, has launched its Android app. Previously only available for the iPhone, this new version now lets more people better manage their schedules. The app is mostly similar to its iPhone counterpart, except that it was built in HTML5 and a number of cosmetic differences.

If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic or late for any reason to a meeting or event, having some way to notify the other party would have been extremely helpful. Twist says that it recognizes this problem — tardiness, it says, is a problem for millions of people. This is exacerbated by the fact that in the United States, 24% of all vehicle crashes involve the use of a cell phone, 25% of Americans admit to sending text messages just to notify someone that they’re running late.

As TNW’s Brad McCarty said earlier when the iPhone app was released:

Twist is a little bit like Glympse, in that it allows you to tell someone where you are. But instead of just showing them a location on a map, Twist will figure out exactly how long it’s going to take for them to get to the intended destination, whether that be via car, on foot, on bike or what have you.

The company says that there are over 100 million Android units shipped each quarter. This is an incredible opportunity for the app to grow and help eliminate lateness not only in the professional space, but in the personal one too. Based on a 2012 Harris Interactive Poll, being late has costly repercussions. Besides the social consequences, it is estimated that it costs businesses more than $90 billion per year in lost productivity.

This could explain the market demand for the Android version. Mike Belshe, co-founder of Twist, says that as soon as the iPhone app was released, a huge swell of demand came from Android users who wanted to see a version for their devices. Now, five months later, that time has arrrived.

We developed Twist so that both parties involved don’t have to have the app installed, but the experience is enhanced when all users are utilizing the application.

With the release of the Android version, users will find that there are four tweaks to the app: the company has addressed the tap integration with the Android OS, received destinations are automatically added to the app’s recent history, battery life has been improved, and participants can be added with one touch in the People tab.

Twist has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Bridgescale Partners, Eric Hahn, Jeff Skoll, and from the two company co-founders, Bill Lee and Mike Belshe.

New iPhone App lets people know when you will arrive; company announces $6 million in Series A funding from Bridgescale Partners, Eric Hahn, Bill Lee, Mike Belshe, and Jeff Skoll

San Francisco, Calif.—July 18, 2012—It’s About Time!  Twist, a new free iPhone app that lets your family, friends and colleagues know when you will arrive and lets you know when others will arrive, debuted today in the iTunes app store. Twist makes going places and meeting up with people simple, social, and fun by accurately notifying others your estimated time of arrival (ETA), simplifying meeting coordination, and eliminating uncertain wait times.  The company also announced Series A funding of $6 million from Bridgescale Partners and investors Eric Hahn (Inventures Group and former CTO of Netscape), Bill Lee (co-founder of Remarq and Social Concepts), Mike Belshe (founding team of Google chrome, founder of SPDY protocol, and co-founder of Lookout), and Jeff Skoll (first employee and first President of eBay, founder of Participant Media).

“Dealing with the headache of coordinating hundreds of meetings a year as an angel investor led to the creation of Twist.  Time is money and time wasted is not acceptable,” said Bill Lee, Twist CEO and Co-founder. “We’re not trying to eliminate lateness. We know we can’t change human behavior, but we do hope to help people get where they need to be when they want to be there. We made a significant investment to develop a service that would efficiently calculate and share arrival times in order to fix that problem.”

Over a billion trips are taken every day in the United States, and over 600 million of these trips involve meeting other people. Twist turns the often arduous coordination process of meeting up with others into a simple and fun experience. For the 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. population that is consistently late, Twist continuously communicates accurate arrival times and ends the stress, frustration, and embarrassment of waiting for others.

According to a new national consumer survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Twist 24% of Americans admit to having sent a text or email while driving to let someone know they were on their way.  The same survey found that the number one cause of lateness is traffic/transportation issues (53%), followed closely by underestimating travel time (38%) and getting lost (25%).

“Building Google Chrome and SPDY, we focused on ease of use, speed, and simplicity.  We created Twist with these same principles and packed a whole lot of horsepower into every message,” said Mike Belshe, Twist CTO and co-founder.  “Solving issues around time is not something any company has really focused on because in order to properly compute all the data you need to process a tremendous amount of information in a split second. On top of that, we needed to develop proprietary methods to preserve battery life and navigate through uncertain GPS data.“

Twist is the only app a user needs to privately share where they are, where they are going, and when they will arrive. Incorporating the best features of your phone including email, text, calendars, maps, traffic, photos, recommendations, and check-ins, Twist delivers an accurate ETA for you and the ones that matter most.

“In the crowded mobile application space, we look for companies that solve big problems,” said Matthew Cowan, co-founder and Managing Director of Bridgescale Partners. “Twist effectively combines time, location, and social engagement in an elegant and seamless way.”

The Twist team is comprised of alums from the very best of technology and education.  Pulling top engineers from Google, Apple, MIT & Stanford and founders with a combined six companies sold in the last 12 years, the company has a focused entrepreneurial spirit.

“I’ve had the pleasure of backing many of the members of Twist’s world-class team in their previous successes,” said Eric Hahn investor and Twist board member. “It is an honor to be working with them again – Twist is another phenomenal opportunity!”

Watch this video on how Twist works: [Insert Video link]

About Twist TM

It’s About Time. Twist lets family, friends and colleagues know when you will arrive—and it lets you know when they will arrive.  Twist merges the best features of your iPhone (maps, traffic, calendar, SMS, photos, recommendations, email, phone, check-in and chat) into a single easy-to-use mobile application. Eliminate the uncertain wait times that often leave people stressed or frustrated, and replace the “When will you be here?” and “Where are you?” headaches with Twist’s simple, social and accurate ETAs. Stop waiting and guessing and start Twisting.

Survey Methodology:

This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Twist from June 27– 29, 2012 among 2,164 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore, no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact: Kristin Farrell| Borders + Gratehouse| Kristin@bordersgratehouse.com PH: 415/963-4174 ext. 10

FORTUNE — The problem with corporate training is obvious: almost no one pays attention. Perhaps worse, often-important company policies and security procedures are typically presented once during a new worker’s training and seldom seriously revisited. In a workplace where manual labor is involved, that can mean serious injury or worse.

Carol Leaman, CEO of startup Axonify, argues that sitting workers down in half-hour-long sessions or making them watch mind-numbing training videos are poor ways to go about it. Case in point: it’s not uncommon to hear workers brag that they completed training in the background, while they did something more interesting or important at the same time. By some estimates, employees forget 90% of what they’ve learned just days after. That matters because it can cost some companies millions of dollars compensating workplace injuries that could have been avoided. “The way our brains work is we remember the first thing and the last thing,” says Leaman, “but very little in the middle.”

Enter Axonify. Founded in 2011 and funded by the Menlo Park-based growth equity group Bridgescale, Toronto’s Investment Accelerator Fund, and Leaman herself, the company aims to transform the way employers train workers. The Waterloo, Ontario-based startup with 16 employees offers cloud-based software built around a behavioral-learning technique called “spaced repetition.” Here’s how it works: Instead of packing training into one long, mostly-ignored session, Axonify breaks things up. It serves up trivia-style questions, bits of data, and games on computers, smartphones, point-of-sale, and security terminals that take up 90 seconds a day or less to complete. Leaman argues workers better remember information in the long run without taking a large chunk of time out of their shifts. Each employee’s experience is personalized, so a company can target that individual’s so-called “knowledge gap.”

MORE: The death of cash

Six retailers are quietly testing the software. One, Pep Boys, an auto company with over 700 stores and nearly 19,000 workers, rewards employees with cash and merchandise for playing. In return, some employees have reported back that the culture in their workplace has improved. The software boosts worker confidence, increases their efficiency, and puts them in the good graces of their employer says Axonify.

Axonify can measure how much money they’ll save by reducing workplace injuries over time. One unnamed large retailer approached Leaman about reducing the number of incidents reportable to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — an injury or illness requiring more than simple first aid — by 5%. After workers trained with Axonify, incidents dropped by as much as 25% in some facilities. “They were shocked,” says Leaman.

Leaman, 46, says startups are her raison d’etre, having advised more than 50 ventures over the years, including as a mentor at the Waterloo-based startup incubator Accelerator Centre. Axonify also isn’t the first startup she’s helmed. Her previous venture, PostRank, was a well-liked service that ranked posts in an RSS feed based on a number of social media metrics. When it was acquired by Google (GOOG) last summer for an unspecified amount, Leaman found her next opportunity in Axonify, turning it from a struggling brick-and-mortar-bound HR business into the e-learning service.

Leaman predicts 2013 will be Axonify’s big year. While the company may only have 6 clients now, it’s in talks with 75 retailers interested in deploying its software. And beyond human resources, they’re exploring ways to expand into other areas — hospitality, entertainment, healthcare, even oil and gas — wherever “lack of following procedure creates big loss.”

Congratulations to Proofpoint for successfully completing its IPO this morning. It’s priced above the range and up 30% at the opening.

Proofpoint Shares Open 30% Higher Post-IPO

It’s nice to see that public investors recognize the market opportunity for Proofpoint’s SaaS based secure messaging platform for the corporate enterprise. Investing in this company from incubation at MDV to follow-on investing at Bridgescale has been a wonderful experience. Congratulations to the founders, management team and all investors.

Axonify has already penetrated some of the largest US retailers who are currently using their technology to train employees in a fun and productive way.  Axonify uses some of the most recognized research on this subject matter to focus on retention, not just training.

Bridgescale’s deep expertise in understanding next generation human resource management software makes Axonify a great fit for our investment thesis.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – February 22, 2012 – Record company and customer growth continued at Xactly Corporation for the sixth straight year, the company announced today.

In the 12 months ended January 31, 2012, Xactly grew new customers by 57 percent over the prior year. In the second half of the year alone, Xactly added more than 120 new customers. Xactly’s market-leading solution is the first cloud-based incentive calculation and commission tracking system.

Xactly’s continued customer success underlines the need for cloud solutions that can efficiently automate the management of sales incentives, while providing actionable insights to both sales reps and management. In addition to rapid new customer adoption, Xactly maintained a customer renewal rate of greater than 91 percent. Its recurring revenue grew by 31 percent over the prior year and the company finished the fiscal year with yet another cash-flow positive quarter.

Customers selecting or expanding their use of Xactly Express and Xactly Incent in Xactly’s fiscal year 2012 (FY12) include Cbeyond, Comscore, Cvent, LogRhythm, Nutanix, PayPal, Perceptive, Projectplace, OrthoFix,  Veolia, Whitehat Security and Yammer.

“Xactly’s success in the past 12 months stems in part from the continued widespread adoption of Software-as-a-service, or cloud-based solutions by larger firms,” said Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO, Xactly Corporation. “In FY12 more than ever companies with over 1,000 sales reps picked Xactly to automate their incentive processes. The incredible growth in larger customers happened even as we expanded our efforts to help small-and-medium-sized businesses get better results through more strategic incentive initiatives.”

Enabling Large Businesses to Incent for Success

Helping enterprise customers improve their performance management, Xactly continued to innovate its flagship platform – Incent. While adding a significant volume of new features and functionality, Xactly Incent maintained nearly 100 percent uptime in FY12.

In addition, the continued success of the platform led the company to split its multi-tenant instance of Xactly Incent into two separate pods in December 2011. Having two pods Xactly Incent will enable the company to better serve customers while also allowing room for continued customer growth.

Xactly introduced new or enhanced features and modules to Xactly Incent in FY12, including:

• Xactly Sandbox: A new workspace that allows users to pre-test incentive plan changes. By pre-testing modifications, customers can insulate their businesses from risks or disruptions.
• eDocs & Approvals: The latest version of Xactly eDocs & Approvals provides customizable workflows to automate the generating, routing, review and tracking of document approvals.
• Xactly Territories: New features for Xactly’s territory management and credit assignment solution include easier uploads for orders, territories and dimension data.
• Mobile and Online Enhanced mobile functionality allows sales to access their individual and team rankings from mobile devices.

Getting SMBs on the Express Way to Better Sales and Operational Efficiency

Xactly Express, the industry’s first incentive compensation management solution designed specifically for SMBs, continues to see momentous customer growth. Already, hundreds of small and emerging companies have selected Xactly Express to ease the administrative burden of managing compensation, as well as provide a competitive edge to their sales teams.

Features and innovations unlocked in FY12 include:

• Xactly Express Plan Store: Sales compensation plan templates founded on industry-leading best practices are built into Express, providing users access to best practices so they can incent right.
• Xactly Express for the iPad: This app enables reps to easily view their plan and performance against their plans, giving them access to performance-altering data anywhere.

• Eased administration: New features support commission payments in 155 currencies and help split sales credit between sales reps. The latest release improved navigation, eased setup for draws and credit adjustments and added custom fields for payment rule formulas.

Company Growth Driving Global Expansion

To support its continued success and momentum, Xactly grew in nearly all facets of the business – bolstering its strong management team, while growing its overall headcount and partner ecosystem. Highlights in FY12 include:

• International and Partner Growth: Xactly built on its partnership ecosystem, adding Zurich-based Nefos, Jerusalem-based Sana Group, Fluido in Finland, and Saleswax in Belgium to further expand into EMEA markets. A new alliance with Channelinsight provides customers with the world’s first on-demand channel sales compensation solution. Xactly also strengthened important relationships with compensation experts including Mercer and ZS Associates.

• Expanded North American Operations: To support its rapid growth, Xactly expanded its U.S. operations, moving to a new headquarters in San Jose, Calif. and opening an office in Denver. All told, Xactly’s grew its headcount by 38 percent.
• Bolstered Strong Management Team: The company added Christopher Newton, vice president of marketing; Ron Rasmussen, vice president of engineering; and Sam Rapp, vice president of enterprise sales to reinforce its solid management team and support its continued momentum.
• Delivered New Customer Success Community: Xactly unveiled the Xactly Customer Success Community, a new self-service customer portal that connects customers directly to Xactly experts and fellow users for discussions about best practices and ideas, as well as provide feedback and to vote on future product enhancements.
• Released Free Offering for Non-Profits: XactlyOne for Non-Profits, a new program offering qualified organizations free licenses to Xactly Incent and Xactly Express, helps non-profits more effectively manage how they are tracking to overall contribution goals. The company also celebrated the 7^th year of its XactlyOne philanthropic program, through which Xactly staff supports community organizations.

• Received Industry Accolades: Xactly was recognized for both outstanding company and product performance in FY12:

• Ranked number three in The Wall Street Journal’s prestigious list of the Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies.
• Won the 2011 Market Award for Incentive Management from CRM Magazine for the third consecutive year.
• Named a “Hot” Vendor in the Ventana Research 2011 Value Index for Sales Performance Management.
• Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera named 2011 Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School of Business.
• Won the CRM Excellence Award from Technology Marketing Corporation’s Customer Interaction Solutions^® magazine for the fourth consecutive year.

Press release can be found here:

Ceridian Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Dayforce

http://www.proofpoint.com/about-us/press-releases/12142011.php