SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan said they had created an unusual $20 million fund to help U.S. startups break into the Japanese market, while also upping a presence in the U.S.

The partnership between Japan’s largest Internet company — which is also a joint venture with Yahoo — and the venture arm of the giant SoftBank Corp. will invest in companies from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion and focus on mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing.

The new funds for that are being put into SoftBank Capital’s $100 million Technology Fund ’10. As part of the deal, Toshiaki Chiku will become head of U.S. operations in Manhattan. SoftBank Capital also recently announced a $250 million PrinceVille Fund, aimed at growth-stage startups in Asia.

Among the firm’s recent exits: Bluefin Labs went to Twitter, Buddy Media to Salesforce.com, Huffington Post to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon and OMGPOP to Zynga.

Now, it will be focusing even more on helping U.S. startups in Asia.

“Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed,” said Chiku in a statement.

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan used performance display advertising company Criteo as an example of a successful investment, in which it also helped the company enter the Asian market (although, technically, Criteo is HQed in France).

The Philadelphia-based company, which applies image recognition to track pictures posted on Pinterest on behalf of brands, has now raised $3 million in Series A funding led by NEA with First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures (the three also provided seed funding for the company, back in 2011, when it was doing something completely different, an “Airbnb for parking and storage” called Storably).

Curalate’s investors, of course, aren’t putting more money in based on the name alone. They’re pleased to see that in the year since Curalate launched it has signed customers including the Grammys, Whole Foods and Gap.

Curalate provides both analytics and marketing tools. It tells brands which pinned content referred what traffic, and helps them run Pinterest contests.

CEO Apu Gupta says the company’s approach of using image recognition is better than those of keyword-based competitors, because only 10 percent of Pinterest posts include the name of a brand explicitly. Plus, as much as 48 percent of the most popular Pinterest pins are linked to expired pages on retailers’ sites.

“Our software reads the pixels in the image,” Gupta said. “We ignore the URLs, we ignore the words, and we say, let’s match up these images like a giant game of memory.”

Okay, but Pinterest itself just introduced commercial accounts in November and, at the time, the company’s platform manager, Cat Lee, told AllThingsD that the company definitely planned to go more deeply into analytics. The company also doesn’t have a clearly defined platform strategy or formal relationships with many of the people in its ecosystem, including Curalate. Isn’t competition from the platform itself a big risk?

Gupta and his new board member, Patrick Chung of NEA, had a few answers for that. First of all, if you look to Twitter as an example, even though it offers basic analytics, there has still been room for Radian6 and Buddy Media.

Secondly, as Chung put it, Curalate doesn’t just exist flat on Pinterest’s platform — it “creates a layer of data that doesn’t belong to anyone but Curalate and its customers.” And third, Gupta said, Curalate will soon integrate Instagram tracking and analytics.

Longtime digital exec Jeff Berman is joining Hollywood production company BermanBraun as its first president.

Berman — who is no relation to BermanBraun co-founder Gail Berman — comes to the firm from the National Football League where he has been in charge of its Web, mobile, social and non-console gaming efforts. While there, he worked on several new initiatives, such as its multi-party video chat for Fantasy Football.

Several years before that, he was a top exec at social networking site Myspace, finally ending up as president of sales and marketing, where he was in charge of branded advertising, sales operations, entertainment, content and marketing. Efforts there by Berman included the now defunct Web-only series “Quarterlife,” which also had a very short life on a major network.

The Yale Law School grad was also on the board of Buddy Media, which was sold to Salesforce.com last year.

He’s an interesting person, then, for BermanBraun, which focuses on content across multiple screens, including big branded Web sites such as Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN and also more traditional entertainment shows. Its juicy-looking television series “Deception,” for example, is set to appear on NBC this week. It now has about 130 employees, mostly working at its Santa Monica, Calif., HQ.

“We needed an exceptional leader to manage the company,” said BermanBraun co-founder Lloyd Braun, who was once a top media exec at Yahoo. “And Jeff is someone who has skillsets in a whole bunch of areas and an emotional intelligence that is as important to what we do.”

Braun said Berman would initially focus on his area of expertise — digital — but that he would become more involved in the television and movie arenas over time.

BermanBraun — which considered raising funding last year — is at an interesting juncture in its development, trying to form a new kind of independent Hollywood media company that straddles analog and digital.

Berman said he was attracted to the opportunity there.

“I had a great job, since there is nothing bigger than the NFL,” he said in an interview yesterday. “But Lloyd and Gail have an incredible vision across platforms for entertainment.”

He added that content was just at the beginning of development online, but was finally poised to explode with the popularity of tablets, smartphones, interactive TV and other such devices, as well as social and e-commerce tools.

“The mind reels, there is so much that has happened and can happen,” said Berman. “I don’t know if there is a better time to be at such a place to create these new franchises — [BermanBraun] is a laboratory, where stuff is actually working.”

The marketing software concern for which the software giant will pay $871 million might have also made a logical fit at Salesforce.com, though Salesforce might have had to take on some debt to pay that price.

Anyway, there’s speculation that today’s deal for Eloqua may amount to a starting gun for a new round of acquisitions in the cloud software space. In a note to clients today, Karl Keirstead, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, argues that Salesforce may answer Oracle with some acquisitions of its own.

“In our view, the deal is a modest net negative for Salesforce.com, making it incrementally tougher for them to pick off Oracle’s Siebel client base,” Keirstead wrote this morning. He also believes that about 50 percent or more of Eloqua’s customers are also Salesforce.com customers.

That might spur Salesforce into action on the acquisition front, he says. Having already made significant acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media in the last two years, Salesforce might move on two privately held cloud-based companies in the marketing field.

One is Marketo, a fast-moving company that specializes in revenue performance management. It raised $50 million in a Series F round led by Battery Ventures last year, bringing its total capital raised to $108 million. Its other investors include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund and Storm Ventures.

Another possible target for Salesforce, Keirstead argues, is HubSpot, a social media marketing outfit based in Cambridge, Mass. It raised $35 million in a fifth round of funding last month. The round brought its total capital raised to about $101 million, and Salesforce had invested in earlier rounds. Its other investors include Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Matrix Partners, Altimeter Capital and Cross Creek Capital.

The point, Keirstead says, is that Salesforce will seek to build its own “marketing cloud” offering. Of course, Salesforce doesn’t have the financial flexibility that Oracle does. It has only $1.4 billion in combined cash and short- and long-term investments as of the close of its most recent quarter. That’s almost pocket change compared to Oracle’s $34 billion as of the quarter reported earlier this week.

Greycroft Partners has closed a $175 million fund, its third since it began investing in consumer Internet and media companies in mid-2000.

In a press release, the New York- and Los Angeles-based venture firm said the fund was oversubscribed. But general partner Alan Patricof noted that Greycroft capped the amount and kept it small compared to other VCs, in order to maintain its focus on investing in early-stage capital-efficient start-ups.

“It’s always been our philosophy not to overfund the companies we invest in,” Patricof said in an interview. “It’s sometimes been hard in an environment where there is a lot of money available to entrepreneurs, but we are looking for start-ups that understand that it’s important to maintain the right balance of funding.”

The concept of a small fund is important to Greycroft, which has only three general partners and three venture partners, said general partner Dana Settle. The firm typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million, with more of a focus on online media, mobile and video, and also has a small seed fund.

“I think we are very hands-on helping our companies, but you don’t have to always do that in the traditional way most VCs do,” Settle said. “We want to maintain focus on giving our companies the right kind of advice, and let the entrepreneur take the lead.”

In fact, Patricof and Settle stressed, Greycroft does not often take board seats on the start-ups it invests in, and typically invests with other VCs in syndicates, which sometimes means the firm has less equity.

So far, Greycroft maintains that its system has worked. Its first fund of $75 million was raised in 2006 and has invested in 34 companies, with 11 sold and 130 percent of committed capital returned to partners; its second fund of $131 million, in 2010, put investments in 32 companies, several with valuations over $100 million.

Patricof noted that “the sale of our companies is usually our goal,” rather than an IPO event.

Exits include Vizu, acquired by Nielsen Holdings, Huffington Post (AOL), Babble (Walt Disney) and Buddy Media (Salesforce.com). More recent investments include Klout, Pulse and Maker Studios.

Most previous Greycroft investors have re-upped in the latest fund, the firm said, including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock Private Equity Partners, Fairview Capital and Invesco Private Capital. It also added new investors including Hall Capital, Hamilton Lane, Greenspring Associates and Cambridge Associates.

Salesforce has fired “fewer than 100 people,” some at Radian6, some presumably at Buddy Media, and perhaps some elsewhere within the company, spokeswoman Jane Hynes told AllThingsD via email. Two units are being combined in order to create something that CEO Marc Benioff has called the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and so it’s reasonable to suspect that there might be some overlap and duplication in jobs. Hynes’ full statement is below:

“With the combination of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the undisputed leader in social marketing and the only suite that allows brands to unify social listening, engagement, advertising and measurement. With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing, and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people globally have been impacted.”

Salesforce closed the $745 million deal on Buddy Media in August. It disclosed in regulatory filings on Monday that Buddy Media had at the time of its acquisition been burning through its cash at a rate north of $42 million a year. On the other hand, Radian6, which before Buddy Media had been Salesforce’s marquee acquisition, had the advantage of having been cash-flow positive at the time of its $325 million acquisition by Salesforce in March of 2011.

News of the firings was first reported by TechVibes. The Canadian tech news site said Radian6’s marketing and social community departments have been “decimated.”

According to new filings submitted by Salesforce to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Buddy Media, the cloud-based social media marketing company, finished 2011 with $24.7 million in sales, and ran a net loss of $14.7 million. For the first six months of 2012, it clocked $18 million in sales, with a loss of $20.6 million. That puts it on a run rate to somewhere in the neighborhood of $36 million to $40 million.

That’s pretty much in line with the guidance that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave on a conference call the day the deal was announced. That works out to a multiple of a little less than 19 times revenue.

It’s worth paying attention to because Salesforce has a recent history of paying high prices on its acquisitions. Examples include Heroku, for which it paid $212 million, and for which Salesforce took a lot of criticism for arguably overpaying; and Radian6, for which it paid $326 million for a cash-flow-positive company.

At the time of the acquisition, Buddy had $37 million in cash on the balance sheet. That figure was down by about $21 million from the end of 2011, when it had north of $58 million in cash. That works out to a burn rate of $3.5 million per month, or $42.5 million for the year.

But the deal — which is Salesforce’s largest yet, and for which it is said to have out-maneuvered Web giant Google — as with every acquisition, is about the future. Benioff said during Salesforce’s last earnings call that Buddy Media handles about 10 percent of the advertising that appears on Facebook, and obviously the aim is to increase that.

His big hope for Buddy Media, as he described it on a conference call, is to combine its capabilities with that of Radian6 and create what he calls a “marketing cloud” that would bring in about $1 billion in annual revenue. It seems, at first, a little nebulous, until you consider the relative sizes of the two main component of the “marketing cloud” business.

Remember that Radian6 was, at the time of its acquisition last year, doing about $50 million annually. Assuming that it has grown since then, when combined with Buddy’s run rate, the “marketing cloud” is already a $100 million business. Obviously, there’s a way to go, but given Salesforce’s steadily growing free cash flow to fund operations, you can see a reasonable path to getting there.

In the past four months of big-ticket tech exits, Wildfire, co-founded and led by the engaged couple Victoria Ransom (CEO) and Alain Chuard (head of product management), was bought by Google for at least $250 million; Michael (CEO) and Kass (COO) Lazerow’s Buddy Media sold to Salesforce for $745 million-plus; and LinkedIn purchased married couple Rashmi Sinha (CEO) and Jon Boutelle (CTO)’s SlideShare for $119 million.

Asked about the trio of hits, Michael Lazerow told me: “I guess this proves that successful companies are built by teams who love and respect each other, versus teams who hate each other. If you can’t work with people you love, who do you work with, people you hate? Hopefully, this puts an end to any talk that backing couples is risky.”

500 Startups investor Dave McClure, who backed both SlideShare and Wildfire, told me his portfolio includes probably a dozen companies founded by couples. “A year or a year and a half ago, we realized there were a huge number of couples in our portfolio, and they were actually some of our best companies,” McClure said.

McClure added to the list two other recent acquisitions from his portfolio by companies led by couples: Kush sold to Smule, and Yell bought Moonfruit.

500 Startups doesn’t invest in companies because they are run by couples, McClure said, but it benefits from other venture capitalists seeing that as a risk factor.

“Because they don’t want to invest in couples, we probably get a better deal,” he said.

Why don’t VCs like backing married couples? Wouldn’t a tightly aligned duo that’s willing to mix their work lives and home lives normally be an asset? In fact, this is actually such a commonly cited concern that people are quite willing to go on the record about it.

“All partnerships have the potential for conflict, but married business partners have a superset of the problems of traditional business partners,” wrote Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners, on Quora. As examples, he cited the possibility for lack of tough feedback when one member is underperforming, the potential for couples to team up against a dissenting view, and the possibility of a messy divorce.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Tower of Citron Capital wrote in a Fortune op-ed that “the bias in traditional venture circles against investing in such startups is long-standing and rooted in some uncomfortable realities.”

His big concerns? Overly emotional relationships, recruiting difficulties and lack of defined roles.

Of course, every firm rule comes with significant counter-examples, and the companies of married couples backed by VCs past and present have included Cisco, VMware, Eventbrite and ModCloth.

“Investors doubted us always,” said Buddy Media’s Lazerow. “But married couples don’t have a monopoly on investor doubt. We were more than happy to prove them wrong. We’ll see if they doubt us next time around.”

Plus, the intersection of family and tech company is less verboten than it once might have been.

Remember the pregnant CEO trend I wrote about a few months ago, which has now been elevated to the public-company level by new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer?

Well, SlideShare’s Sinha was not only a pregnant CEO with her married co-founder, but she delivered twin boys and then sold her company four months later.

“It’s been a very exciting six months,” she said.

(Image courtesy of mudcards on Etsy)

No comment from Google about price, but people familiar with the transaction tell me it’s around $250 million, plus earnouts, employment agreements, etc. I’ll try to narrow that down a bit for you as the day goes on. Wildfire raised a reported $14 million over four years. [UPDATE: As TechCrunch and others have noted, some of Wildfire's investors are saying they're getting $350 million for the company; one of them I talked to insists this number is before earnouts and the like. I'm reasonably confident Google will have to disclose a price in its next 10Q or perhaps before that, so we'll see what they tell shareholders.]

The logic here is straightforward: Google will integrate Wildfire into its growing display advertising “stack,” which is anchored by DoubleClick and Google’s AdX exchange. The idea is to convince marketers that they can buy both social ads and conventional display ads from Google, even if they want to buy them on competing platforms like Facebook.

This is one of Google’s least surprising buys, since the company already tried to get its hands on Buddy Media, a Wildfire competitor. But Buddy went to Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com in June, so Wildfire was the next logical candidate.

Buddy passed on Google at least in part because the company was concerned about getting the deal through antitrust regulators. And like just about every deal Google does these days, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Feds took a look.

But since social ads are one of the few categories where Larry Page and company are far behind the competition, the Google guys seem confident that this one won’t be a problem.

And what will Facebook think about their biggest competitor buying a service that specializes in Facebook advertising? Good question, and I’m asking Facebook now. (Update: “We aren’t commenting,” says Facebook rep Brandon McCormick.)

But my hunch is that even if Sheryl Sandberg wanted to shut the door on her old company, she wouldn’t do it for fear of creating her own regulatory problems. Which means the only question is whether Facebook will be an enthusiastic Wildfire partner, a heel-dragging partner, or somewhere in between.

If you don’t believe me, ask Karl Keirstead, the analyst at BMO Capital Markets, who wrote in a note to clients last night that Salesforce appears not to be suffering from any of the troubles hitting so many other tech companies in light of the global economic slowdown. Having tapped industry sources for a peek at the tone of Salesforce’s business, Keirstead writes, “We didn’t pick up any evidence that the tough macro backdrop has trickled down to CRM, and the consensus view was that business has ramped nicely since April.”

He notes that Microsoft’s customer relationship management product, Dynamics, is showing up in the small-business end of the marketplace, though it’s seen as “short on user interface and features.”

And even though there was little sign of any large deals closing, Keirstead writes that the chance of Salesforce ending the quarter with billings up by about 30 percent is “promising.”

Another good indicator: The results of German software giant SAP, a key Salesforce rival, which on Tuesday reported solid numbers that defied the economic conventional wisdom.

For the record, the consensus view of Wall Street analysts forecasts Salesforce to report sales of $728 million and per-share earnings of 39 cents on a non-GAAP basis this quarter. One other highlight of the quarter’s results is that it will be the first earnings report since Salesforce reached a deal to acquire Buddy Media for almost $700 milion.

Actually, if truth be told, Buffalo, N.Y., is one of the loveliest places to visit in the summer, especially if you’re lucky enough to be right next to majestic Lake Erie.

And that is where the Z80 Labs will have its grand opening today in the Queen City, home of chicken wings and lots and lots of snow, by launching its first start-up, called AppVue.

While visiting the Western New York city this past weekend, I paid a visit to the new facility, which is in a large airy room on the first floor of the Buffalo News.

What’s most heartening to see, of course, is the definitely more earnest and rawer kind of entrepreneurism on display, of a kind that is often lost in the slick, well-oiled machine of Silicon Valley.

That was the point by well-known venture capitalist Jordan Levy of SoftBank Capital, who has long split his time between New York City and his home in Buffalo. He founded the incubator with SoftBank’s Ron Schreiber.

“It’s easy for entrepreneurs in places like Palo Alto to get going,” the voluble Levy said to me on my visit. “We wanted to find a way to keep really great techies here to create an ecosystem that would be able to jump-start even more and help this city keep jobs.”

The longtime investor (pictured here) had already made scores of wins from fundings of companies such as OMGPOP (sold to Zynga) and Buddy Media (sold to Salesforce.com). But Levy appears particularly proud of Buffalo-based Synacor, where he serves as chairman. It’s a successful cloud platform service for companies that want to put video online.

As the big tech dog in Buffalo, Synacor is playing a big role in Z80 Labs, which will focus primarily on making investments in digital media and mobile Internet companies.

The tech incubator — which will provide office space, support and mentorship to its start-ups — is also getting an assist from a $4 million Innovate NY grant provided by the state.

Such a solid base is just what the founders of AppVue — which “specializes in mobile apps that make trusted recommendations among social media friends and networks” — told me they needed.

Essentially, it’s another new take on app discovery, which is a vexing issue for both app creators and users.

After AppVue won the University at Buffalo’s Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition, besting 19 other companies, its trio of founders — Matthew Epstein, CEO; Andrew Cassetti, EVP of product development; and Chief Architect Nathan Schiffer — told me that, until now, there have been no other options but to leave the area to make it in tech.

“We wanted to stay here, and now we can,” said Epstein. “And we are getting the kind of attention we need to try to make this a real company.”

Let’s hope so. It’s already looking impressive at its start — both Forbes CEO Mike Perlis and New York power VC Fred Wilson will make appearances today for Z80’s debut.

I’d suggest Frank & Teressa’s Anchor Bar on Main Street — where chicken wings were apparently invented, and an arena in which Silicon Valley will never have an upper hand.

Actually, no need for ID. Just tell Twitter that you’re older than 21, and they’ll let you follow brands like Coors Light and Jack Daniels. The messaging service is rolling out a system, built with help from Buddy Media, that lets users self-verify their age.

Ad Age sussed most of this out last month, but Twitter is formally unveiling it today.

The basics: If you want to follow a booze brand that uses the system, you’ll get a direct message sending you to page where you enter your age. Like almost every age-verification system on the Web, it’s not a verification system at all — it’s entirely dependent on users’ honesty. But it’s better than nothing, and once you’ve entered your age in the system, you shouldn’t need to do it again.

Twitter doesn’t require booze advertisers to use its system, but the industry has self-regulations that are meant to keep booze ads out of sight from kids (so they don’t grow up humming the Hamm’s Beer Bear theme). So Twitter is hoping that the offering will make it that much more attractive for alcohol brands and their big ad budgets to make their way to the site.

Involver is Oracle’s third acquisition on the social front in as many months. In May, it said it would acquire Vitrue, for a price reportedly close to $300 million.

Then, in June, Oracle nabbed Collective Intellect, a social analytics outfit based in Colorado.

Financial terms of the Involver deal have not been disclosed.

So what has Oracle got up its sleeve? It is assembling a pretty powerful suite of social-friendly marketing tools that will give it a leg up in its percolating rivalry with Salesforce.com and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft and SAP. Marketers want to reach customers on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else they may happen to be, and that’s not too much of a pivot from other core business processes like customer relationship management (CRM) that Oracle does, where it comes up directly against Salesforce. And there’s also the customer service business: Remember that Oracle bought RightNow earlier this year.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been touting the importance of social tools to anyone who will listen for the better part of two years. Also, Salesforce dropped $745 million on Buddy Media last month. Salesforce is, for the most part, favoring relatively bigger deals. Last year, it paid $326 million for Radian6, a Canadian social media analytics concern that essentially became the cornerstone of its social strategy. Other than RightNow — for which it paid $1.4 billion — Oracle is tending toward smaller deals.

Here’s the newest example: Syncapse, a five-year-old company that helps companies manage their presence on Facebook, has acquired Clickable, a six-year-old company that helps businesses buy ads on Facebook — as well as on Google and other search engines.

You can think of Syncapse in the same vein, roughly, as Vitrue and Buddy Media, both of which were snapped up in big-dollar deals recently. But the Clickable deal is much more modest.

Syncapse won’t disclose a purchase price, but from what I can gather, Syncapse is paying for the deal primarily with equity, and will value Clickable at something close to the $33 million it raised.

Its acquirer has raised a similar sum. Up until this year, Syncapse had pulled in $30 million from investors, and it recently picked up another $5 million, some of which it used in the Clickable deal.

Syncapse started out in Toronto, and got an early lift by working with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. More recently, it has been adding big-ticket customers like Coke and Anheuser-Busch; CEO Michael Scissons now lives in New York.

Scissons says he employs 150 people, but says the Clickable deal will add another 70 to that count. He says “pretty much everybody” from Clickable will come aboard.

Clickable COO Dave Fall will become Syncapse’s chief product officer; Clickable co-founder and CEO David Kidder will take a role as a “strategic advisor.”

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/iadams)

Instead, she’s launching a company.

Falter’s Poptip gets its own graduation ceremony this morning, via TechStars New York’s demo day. And while her youth makes for a good story, my hunch is that the company is going to get plenty of attention on its own merits.

That’s because Poptip’s simple premise — it lets brands conduct and analyze instant polls on Twitter and, soon, on Facebook — lines up very nicely with the recent heat around anything and everything that has to do with social media marketing. See: Vitrue, Buddy Media, Radian6 and more to come.

So Falter may soon have a high-class problem: Take a buyout offer right away, or try to move her project from feature status to a full-blown company.

She’s starting off on good footing, via a $640,000 seed round she lined up from SoftBank and Lerer Ventures before entering the start-up school this year.

Oh, and she’s already executed her first pivot: When she started out at TechStars, her initial plan was to let designers and other creative types collaborate on images, videos, etc., in real time. She scrapped that idea after figuring out that the sales cycle for that kind of thing would take a long, long time.

So in classic lean start-up mode, Falter’s team — in addition to three full-time employees, she has another three engineering interns — changed gears quickly.

She says she managed to get extra-deep access to Twitter’s “site streams” API, which gives developers access to real-time data, after showing Twitter employees what she was working on, and had the thing built in a couple weeks. Now she’s started selling access to big brands and wants to charge them up to $150 a month for a software license.

Her obvious peril: If she could build it this quickly, then it shouldn’t take much for a Buddy Media or anyone else to create their own version of the tool.

But start-up-land is fueled by stories of scrappy companies building useful stuff right under the noses of the big guys, who eventually pay a lot for something they should have thought of themselves. We could find out quite quickly how this one plays out.

iStockphoto.com/pablohart

Radian6 is the Canadian social analytics outfit for which Salesforce paid $326 million in March of 2011. Since then it has turned out to be one of the most important deals that CEO Marc Benioff has done since starting the company. Radian6 offers a cloud-based service to companies to monitor in real time what people are saying about them and their products on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, as well as on blogs and Web forums.

It also bears repeating that this deal with Twitter is taking place against the backdrop of the $689 million acquisition by Salesforce of Buddy Media about two weeks ago.

Radian6 customers will get access to Twitter’s direct feed of Tweets, which is quickly becoming a key source of brand and business intelligence. When you want to know what people think about your brand, Twitter is the place to find out, because it and Facebook are where consumers go to say what’s on their minds, ask questions and so on.

The announcement is sort of sketchy on one key point: Financial terms. There’s no way that access to the “firehose” comes for free, but there’s no mention of what Salesforce did or didn’t pay. Twitter, as a privately held company, wouldn’t have to disclose it. And for Salesforce, the amount would only have to be disclosed if it were material, which apparently it’s not. And if Twitter got no financial consideration, then there must be some other benefit it’s getting. Perhaps now that it’s got an advertising strategy there’s some benefit in allowing advertisers easy access to the stream in order to do the analysis needed to plan future campaigns and figure out if their money is being spent well. We’ll see.

Another thing that’s missing? The word “exclusive.” Will other companies be able to get the same level of access that Salesforce enjoys? Again, we’ll see.

So how did Benioff end up with Buddy Media this week, when Google was also bidding for the social marketing company?

In part because he showed up. And in part because he runs Salesforce.com, not Google.

That’s the story I’ve been able to piece to together in the last few days, by talking to people familiar with the Buddy Media/Salesforce deal.

I don’t have all the details. For instance, several people I’ve talked to have suggested that Google offered more than the $745 million-plus that Buddy ended up selling for, but I don’t know the exact amount. And different people tell me different things about just how far Google went in the bidding process — a couple have told me that Google made formal offers, while others say there was always uncertainty about the deal points.

But I do have a pretty good sense of why Buddy took Benioff’s offer.

In short, Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow and his board sold to Salesforce because they were more confident that Salesforce could actually close the deal and get money into their bank accounts.

Benioff, for instance, negotiated with Lazerow and his team directly, unlike Google, which used lower-level employees to haggle, directed by Google sales boss Nikesh Arora. And Buddy knew that Google now faces federal scrutiny on any major M&A deal, and that the scrutiny is likely to be even more intense when it comes to advertising deals.

Last June, for instance, Google announced plans to buy ad tech start-up AdMeld for $400 million, but didn’t get federal approval until December of that year. Salesforce, meanwhile, says it should have the Buddy Media deal closed in October.

There was also the question of exactly what would happen to Buddy Media if Google actually did buy it. After all, while Lazerow has taken pains to expand the company’s business beyond Facebook marketing, Facebook remains its most important platform. So how would Sheryl Sandberg and company react when one of their two main rivals got into the Facebook marketing plans?

We may still find out. If Google was willing to spend close to a billion dollars on Buddy Media, it is presumably willing to buy a different social marketing company. And there are a whole lot of them out there (with increasingly big bank accounts) to choose from. But if Google ends up back at the social marketing negotiating table, it may need to try some different tactics.

For instance: Madison, Wis.-based Shoutlet, which offers a suite of social marketing tools, has raised a $15 million C round from FTV Capital, bringing its funding total to $24 million.

Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver won’t disclose sales numbers, but says he has more than 400 customers who use his company to build and manage marketing campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and now Pinterest. Facebook campaigns account for about 75 percent of the company’s business, he says.

A press release from the enterprise software company says it has a deal to buy the five-year-old social media marketing company for $689 million in cash and stock. My earlier report said the two companies had a deal that valued Buddy Media at more than $800 million.

I suspect the gap in the two numbers is accounted for in this line of the release: “All of Buddy Media’s vested and unvested options, restricted stock and restricted stock units held by continuing employees will be assumed and converted into options, restricted stock and restricted stock units of salesforce.com.”

There’s no reference to the value of those options and stock units, but my hunch is that if you take them and whatever cash Buddy Media had in the bank (it had raised $90 million, and presumably had a bunch of it left), plus any earnout/employee retention funds, you’ll get north of $800 million. Buddy Media’s last funding round in 2011 valued the company at $500 million.

(Update: Salesforce has already started bumping up the official price: Its 8-K filed this morning lists the “total consideration” for Buddy Media at $745 million; it also refers to the employee retention program but I can’t see a dollar value listed there. Update 2: A Facebook post from Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow says he sold the company for $745 million “plus cash and some other stuff.”)

There’s a conference call at 8:30 am ET today, so maybe we’ll get a bit more clarity then.

Two other notes for now:

• The deal is scheduled to close at the end of October.
• Salesforce says the deal will boost its revenues for the second half of its 2013 fiscal year, which ends January 31, 2013, by $20 million to $25 million. If you assume that means Buddy Media was doing $40 million in revenue this year, that puts its acquisition price in the 34x to 40x revenue price band. Last month, Oracle announced it had purchased Vitrue, another Facebook-centric social marketing platform, at what was reportedly a much lower multiple. (Correction: Ugh. Boneheaded move by me. I was dividing Buddy Media’s purchase price by its half-year revenue, not full year revenue. Let’s try this again: On the call, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said his guidance for Buddy Media’s effect on his top line slightly understates Buddy Media’s revenue. To be conservative, let’s assume that means the company is going to do $40 million in revenue this year. Using the SEC-reported $745 million purchase price, that puts the deal at a 19x revenue multiple. If you’re more generous, and assume a $50 million year, that gets you down to 15x.)

I’ll add more details if I get them.

And here’s a video from Lazerow, which he shot after the deal closed this weekend. Pretty self-explanatory and quite extraordinary. Well worth watching.

Sources say the two companies have agreed to terms that will value Buddy Media at more than $800 million, but that the transaction hasn’t closed yet. People familiar with the deal say Buddy Media chose Salesforce’s offer over a competitive bid from Google.

Both Buddy Media and Salesforce.com reps declined to comment.

Buddy Media is best known for helping big brands navigate Facebook, but it has recently made a point of expanding beyond the social network to other social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Its pitch to big companies: We can help you maintain your apps, ads and pages on the world’s biggest social network, and we can get your content in front of customers on lots of different social networks, too.

Many observers had assumed that Facebook, or a big ad holding company like WPP, would end up acquiring Buddy Media — especially since WPP is already an investor in the company, and recently announced a deal to route all of its Facebook ad buying through the company.

Instead, it appears that Salesforce intends to use Buddy Media to extend its core customer relationship management offering. The presumable logic: Acquiring Buddy Media will help Salesforce’s clients reach their customers and leads where they are spending lots of online time. Last year, Salesforce bought Radian6, another social media platform company, for $326 million.

Salesforce.com isn’t the only big enterprise software company chasing social media: Last week, Oracle announced that it had bought Vitrue, which specializes in social media marketing. People familiar with that transaction say Salesforce.com had also bid on Vitrue, which Oracle ended up buying for more than $300 million.

Buddy has raised a reported $90 million. Investors valued it at $500 million during its most recent funding round in August 2011.

At the time he left last summer, Colleran was Facebook’s earliest remaining employee, save for Mark Zuckerberg.

General Catalyst told the Boston Business Journal that Colleran’s focus will be working with its early stage portfolio companies.

Colleran said today that he expects to eventually land in another operating role at a company, but for the time being he thinks he can help young start-ups figure out “how to make advertising a benefit rather than a cost” and tell them stories about the early days of scaling Facebook.

For instance, Colleran said he advises start-ups to think about monetization early on. Despite the perception that Facebook focused on growing its userbase first, and then figured out how to make money later, the reality was the company sustained itself on campus “flyer” ads in its earliest days, Colleran said.

Since Facebook had always had advertising, users came to expect it, Colleran said. “We were break-even profitable in the early days, before Sean came in and raised the big VC. We knew that if we got $25 for a flyer we could spend that money on paying ourselves, or on servers.”

Colleran said he also expected that being part of a venture capital firm will be a bit like going to business school, as he’ll be broadening his own horizons to learn about the financing side of the industry.

Boston-based General Catalyst also a good perch from which to look at the industry and try to find the next Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard or Drew Houston at MIT, Colleran said. “I’ve figured out the likelihood of me being on the ground floor of another company that changes the world is probably unlikely,” he added.

Colleran said that he is personally joining the advisory boards of Path, VaynerMedia and Backplane, in addition to similar roles he already holds at Buddy Media, Causes and the Basis health band.

Colleran spent the eight months since he left Facebook traveling with his fiancee, but he is “just too antsy” to take more time off, he said.

Early Facebookers are big into investing their money in tech. Matt Cohler became a VC at Benchmark Capital in 2008, while Chamath Palihapitiya started the Social+Capital Partnership last year, and Ali Rosenthal is now an EIR at Greylock Partners. Many early Facebook employees make angel investments, often in each other’s projects.