'There’s nothing new about using public information to identify business opportunities: it’s why lawyers chase ambulances and bankers phone lottery winners. But the Internet has exponentially grown the amount of data available and made it easily accessible. What’s needed to fully exploit this resource is technology that automates the end-to-end process of assembling the information, identifying opportunities, and delivering the results to sales and marketing systems. Lattice Engines was founded in 2006 to fill this gap. Each of these steps takes significant technology. MORE >>

Okay, I freely admit that headlines like “the marketing funnel is dead” are a cheap trick to attract attention. But I swear I came by this one honestly. Too tired to do any serious work on a recent plane flight, I scanned a random white paper that argued the traditional idea of a funnel didn’t capture the need to treat customers individually as they move towards a purchase. So far my head was nodding in agreement plus maybe a little drowsiness. Now I was fully awake, and not in a good way. How is an escalator any less linear than a funnel? But a process is still something the marketer controls. MORE >>

B2B marketing data vendor ReachForce today announced its purchase of SetLogik , which provides technology to build cloud-based marketing databases and do predictive modeling against them. See my post from last October for more on SetLogik.) There’s an obvious peanut butter-meets-jelly type of logic to this match. Reachforce’s core business is assembling data on marketing prospects, which it then sells for as many uses as possible: appending to Web leads, enhancing existing databases, and buying as lists. Everybody wins! Minimum is $625 per month for continuous cleaning on 50,000 records. MORE >>

Marketo made good today on its promise to file for an initial public offering (IPO). Congratulations to them for reaching this step. It’s a major accomplishment. The S-1 registration statement gives considerable new information about Marketo’s business. Revenue for 2012 is reported at $58.4 million, an impressive 80% growth rate vs. 2011 although not quite the doubling that the company had forecast earlier. More significant, the company continues to have huge losses – it lost $34.4 million in 2012, or 59% of revenue. loss that big is pretty scary. MORE >>

HubSpot released its 2012 Year in Review today, reporting 82% revenue growth, to $52.5 million. Number of clients grew by 42%, to 8,440. The figures are in line with my expectations, so they don't require any adjustments to my previous estimates of industry size or growth rate. Compared with last year, the revenue growth rate is about the same (82% vs 85%), while the customer growth rate is sharply lower (42% vs. 55%). That means revenue per customer grew by significantly, by 24%. The revenue per customer suggest that things are going according to plan. MORE >>