Last night, the Technology Association of Oregon honored some of those companies who are putting Oregon on the map with their technology and mission. It can’t be easy to choose just four to put a spotlight on, because Portland has an abundance of technology companies who have or are on the verge of success.

For all of us at Janrain, just to be in the company with the likes of Iovation, Puppet Labs, FEI, Digimarc, Vendscreen and the other nominees for Technology Company of the Year is such a compliment to all that we’ve achieved. And to be selected as the Rising Star Technology Company of the Year is a huge and humbling honor that reflects the smart, dedicated people who bring their talent and passion everyday to the important work we’re doing on behalf of our customers.

Congratulations to all the nominees, winners and those who devote themselves to this incredible technology community. Thanks to the Technology Association of Oregon for acknowledging the great work we, and the entire community, are doing.

By the way, the Portland tech community would likely edit that common goal mentioned above to read: bring the very best technology to the world, and put Portland, Oregon’s Silicon Forest on the global map as the premier community for starting and growing world-class technology companies.

How cool is that?

We’re thrilled to be honored with membership into Gartner’s “cool social technology” club (our words, not theirs) along with 140 Proof, Influitive, Woobox and Zuberance. The report’s focus is around the opportunity that exists for digital marketers in leveraging the social web to reach their online goals, and goes on to recommend these cool vendors for organizations to call upon.

Our motivation at Janrain isn’t necessarily to “be cool” but we think it’s pretty darn awesome to work with brands we all like, know and buy from such as Universal Music Group, Fox, Dr Pepper, Samsung, AMC, Guitar Center and Pac12. In our book, it’s our customers that we find pretty cool because they understand exactly what Gartner analyst Julie Hopkins means when she writes:

Janrain simplifies the process of managing multiple online identities to remove the “digital hassle” often associated with the user’s broad social participation.

In other words: our customers know that password fatigue is a real problem and leverage our social login technology to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of allowing their website visitors to quickly log in to their site.

So, while we’re humbled to be called a “cool vendor” and thank Gartner for the recognition, we really want to thank our customers who make us who we are by choosing Janrain in the first place and relying on us to earn their trust everyday.

Success is determined by our ability to deliver exceptional products and services that delight our customers, and it also requires a high degree of trust. We believe that trust starts with openness and transparency. That’s why, as part of our ongoing commitment to promote transparency with our customers, we have introduced a new site to proactively communicate the status and availability of Janrain’s services – trust.janrain.com.

This site will be the primary resource for Janrain customers seeking to monitor the availability of the Janrain service as well as learn about our infrastructure, security and compliance. The trust.janrain.com site includes:

• Real-time and historical data on system performance
• Incident reports and notification of planned maintenance
• Information about how we safeguard and protect the privacy of your data
• Information on Janrain’s product infrastructure

Trust.janrain.com was inspired by conversations directly with our customers. We know that our customers hold us to a high quality standard, and we strive to provide you with the tools you need to hold us accountable to our commitments.

Please check out the site and bookmark it for future reference. And as always, don’t be shy about dropping us a line to let us know if you have any feedback.

We have always been committed to the open source movement and the belief that our industry can come together to create the standards and framework necessary to instill trust in the strength of security, privacy and operational policies for all parties involved when authenticating a user’s identity online. We have a storied history in supporting the mission of OIX and OIDF, so this makes a lot of sense for everyone.

In 2005, we became an active participant in the OpenID community and was instrumental in developing the open source libraries which today power the majority of the websites accepting OpenID logins. Janrain was also involved in forming the OpenID Foundation, an organization seeking to advance the market for this technology. As the leader in online user management and identity, we will continue to contribute our experience and global presence to assist OIX in expanding an international network of trust frameworks.

You can learn more about the Open Identity Exchange here.

Today we announced our series C funding, $33 million of new investment from four new firms and all of our current investors. We are humbled and honored by the trust our new partners have placed in us, and are equally grateful for the relationship we have had with our existing investors, all of whom have done much over the last several years to guide us to this point.

At Janrain we have been obsessed with authentication, identity, and profile management for many years. We’ve been fortunate to find a business model that allows us to continue to grow and invest in a deep, focused, best-of-breed platform approach solution. What was just a handful of software engineers five years ago is now a team of nearly 200 spread across functional roles and geography. We are on a continuous innovation and delivery cycle. And yet at the same time, our mission and thesis have remained unaltered for the past three years.

Our new investment round will allow us to continue to scale quickly yet responsibly, while also giving us the ability to make some decisions that will have longer term payback. All areas of the company will expand, but we will be making a disproportionate investment in customer success.

We find ourselves in front of a huge opportunity, with a great product, extremely well capitalized, staffed with 180 of the smartest and most pleasant people you’d want to work with across the globe and a great set of partners united to help us build the best company possible for our customers. Let’s go!

Recent Coverage:

• Forbes: Janrain Raises $33 Million To Supercharge Social Media
• TechCrunch: Janrain Raises $33M From Salesforce, And Others For Social Log-In Management Platform
• Oregonian: Janrain confirms $33 million venture round, plans to accelerate growth
• Fortune: Venture capital Deals
• CMSWire: Social Login Provider Janrain Raises New Round of $20 Million
• SocialNewsDaily:

  Janrain Raises $33 Million From Salesforce, Millennium Technology, And Others

• ClickZ: Janrain Raises $33M Series C Round
• socaltech.com: DFJ Frontier, Anthem Boost Janrain
• techrockies: EPIC Ventures Joins In JanRain Investment

The technology Janrain provides offers tremendous value to our clients as they are able to more easily and effectively convert anonymous site visitors into known, registered users while also gaining permission-based access to social profile data that can be used to create more compelling, relevant online experiences.  With that ability comes responsibility, however.

Our experience has shown that when our clients are transparent about what data they are collecting, why they are collecting it, and how the data will be used, consumers are much more willing to share personal information.  This is because they understand what they will get in return for providing access to the data.  A great example of this transparency can be seen on the Channel 4 website, in their Viewer Promise.

On our side, we need to provide consumers the ability to easily grant and revoke access to their personal data and ensure that this information is protected and treated with integrity.  We’ve always done so, and with Lewis’ help, promise to maintain and perhaps even improve our data protection assurance to you.

We have a number of initiatives underway that will reinforce our commitments in this area, so watch this space for upcoming announcements.  (And feel free to reach out to Lewis to congratulate him on his new role!)

In 2005 the Janrain team began working to solve the problem consumers faced from password fatigue and companies faced as a result of poor registration conversion rates.   Fast forward to 2008, following the lead of Janrain, Clickpass became another early innovator in the social login space.

With this acquisition, Janrain unites our two customer bases. Clickpass customers can now gain access to the most widely deployed solution for social login – one that is implemented across 365,000+ websites, supports more than 25 social networks and email providers, enables brands to collect and store a rich set of social profile data, and lets users easily share content to their social networks.

If your website currently uses Clickpass to enable authentication, please click here or contact us to learn more about next steps and how you can easily get up and running with Janrain Engage social login and social sharing.

So, we took to the hallways and asked our Janrain team: Tell us what it means to you, personally, to work for a company that has been recognized for it’s fast growth over the past few years. Here’s what some of them shared:

“Being named to the Inc 500 list is, to me, nice recognition – but we’re not done yet. We’re on a mission to make the web a better, more personalized place.” - Cory

“It means we are humbly leading the effort towards a seamless online footprint for users and companies alike, and each day we’re expanding those panoramic possibilities and lifting limits on what can be accomplished.” - Nishant

“It has been an amazing experience participating in a fast paced, highly collaborative team environment at Janrain. The results speak for themselves, but the quality and passion that have achieved such rapid success come from a solid community of smart and committed individuals.” - Ben K.

“I love my job and all the great people I work with! Our CEO takes part in every interview, in order to “make sure we hire cool people.” - Jeremy

“It’s like I’m on the Apollo 11 rocket heading to the moon. We have the best technology, and are using it to trailblaze new frontiers.” - Manuel

“I’ve been with the company exactly one year this September, and have witnessed it grow from about 60 people to more than twice that size. I feel secure in the belief that this company will continue to thrive because of the quality of the talent we continue to bring onboard.” - Jason T.

“Our rapid growth has meant an incredible amount of new customers getting set up with Janrain products. The pace is fast and every new customer brings new engineering challenges we get to solve — which is my favorite part!” - Ryan

“Janrain is not just the product, its the people that work here!” - Karrie

“Working at a fast-growing web company means that I get to impact many, many end users. If I can save millions and millions of people each a few seconds, that means I have saved the world months and months of time!” - Jamie

“As a native Oregonian who spent almost 10 years working in the Silicon Valley, I am proud to be a part of a local technology company that is showing record growth on a national scale!” - Kelly O.

“Janrain grows so fast,
so fast they say,
employees need raincoats every day!”
- Daniel

“I feel like I’m on a rocket ship on it’s way to planet awesome!” - John B.

We do too, John! Go Team Janrain!

I had a great time talking with Jay and Tristan Handy about how Janrain collects social data from users, and makes it available to other systems in the marketing technology stack.

Even though I’ve known Jay for years, it’s always great to find a chance to catch up with what is the latest thinking in the social space. I remember the first episode of Social Pros I listened to, where the hot topic was releasing your Super Bowl commercial online before the actual Super Bowl – remember when that was considered a risky move?

Our conversation was wide ranging, from the privacy implications of social sign-in; what marketers must offer users in order to be willing to share more of their identities (hint: it’s not all about free stuff); and the changing notion of identity online. I hope you have a chance to listen, and please join the conversation in the comments here, on the Convince and Convert website, over Twitter, or by skywriting over the beautiful Portland skyline. Really, there are so many ways to participate, you don’t have an excuse not to!

Check it out here, or download to listen when you are not connected.

What struck me as really exciting that day were just how many items were in the final two buckets – capabilities we were about to release to our customers.

Well, these capabilities are now available, and there should be something for just about everyone in this list:

• Social Commerce Extensions
  Retailers can now easily incorporate social login, social sharing and social profile data collection and storage within their Demandware or Magento-based eCommerce sites using the new Janrain eCommerce Connectors.
• Deeper Analytics
  Customers can accomplish deeper segmentation of users into online buyers and registered visitors by correlating social attributes and demographic info with onsite activity including content viewed, time spent on site and conversions using the new Janrain Analytics Connector for Adobe SiteCatalyst. Retailers can leverage additional intelligence offered by social profile and social graph data to target their users with the right set of products and content.
  
• Improved Email Targeting
  Brands can leverage rich social and traditional user profile data stored in Janrain Capture to improve segmentation, targeting and relevance of email campaigns through the new Janrain Email Connector for ExactTarget.
• Government support
  Janrain now supports FICAM-compliant identities for State and Federal Governments as well as for regulated industries.
• Expanded Identity Provider support
  In this release, Janrain has added Chinese identity providers Sina Weibo and RenRen, Germany-based SoundCloud and US-based Tumblr.

We also announced new partnerships with 500friends, Certona and GraphicMail.  All in all, a tremendous amount of work across our entire company has gone into this release.

(PS – I wasn’t 100% honest up above – my excitement in that meeting was also due to what was in the first two buckets!  We’ve got some really cool stuff coming soon…)