Facebook’s imminent IPO might mint a mess of millionaires in Silicon Valley by Friday, but in the meantime, it’s driving wealth in a few newly public Internet companies, as well.

With the social networking company’s offering reportedly oversubscribed, some investors are looking for ancillary ways to profit from it, and seem to be turning to Facebook’s already public social networking peers.

As Arvind Bhatia, a financial analyst who covers Facebook for Sterne Agee, observed: “I do sense some ‘temporary’ momentum for these related social media stocks.”

Consider: Shares of LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora, and Yelp have all been trading up in advance of Facebook’s IPO. On Wednesday, LinkedIn closed at $113.49; on May 1, it was trading around $106. Pandora shares ended Wednesday at $11.37, having closed at $8.56 on May 1. More recently, shares in Yelp — which had been slipping lower in value — saw a sudden uptick around May 11.

It’s the same thing with Zynga, which accounts for about 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue. While its stock has been down 25 percent in the last month, it’s been up 2.75 percent in the last five days.

Also on the upswing: RenRen, the so called “Facebook of China,” whose shares were up more than 7 percent Tuesday.

You could add Groupon to this list, as well — although much of the recent upswing in its share price is likely due to the company’s strong first-quarter results that beat Wall Street expectations.

Coincidence? Hardly.

More likely, these stocks are all benefiting from the halo of interest surrounding Facebook’s IPO, an offering that may well prove to be the biggest-ever in the Internet space. Investor drive for a piece of Facebook is becoming the drive for a piece of a company like Facebook or, better yet, one that might be acquired by it.

“LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora, Yelp … these are all potential acquisition bait for Facebook,” Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson told AllThingsD. “If Facebook is going to trade at a premium — like $150 billion to $200 billion, why not buy the fish and the bait, too?”

But this is all pre-IPO chatter. What happens on Friday, and the Monday following — and in the months to come — will provide a hard-and-fast answer to the question of whether the Facebook halo has any true longevity.

If Facebook’s IPO delivers the gains investors expect, sentiment toward the social media stocks may well continue to improve, making the decision to “buy bait” the past few days a wise one indeed.

Said GreenCrest Capital analyst Max Wolff: “By Friday mid-morning Facebook will be the anchor in a sector with several names, a diversity of stories and well over $130 billion in market capitalization.”

Avon Products Inc., famous for sending its representatives door to door, is losing traction in the U.S., where many time-stressed consumers are increasingly buying their cosmetics on the Web. Operating profit per representative in the U.S. has plunged 75 percent over the past decade, according to an analysis by Sanford C. Bernstein.

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Unlike other stores that flinch when consumers pull out their phones, fearing that they are scanning bar codes to compare prices, the beauty supply company is embracing the practice.

“The reality is there’s not a lot of price differentiation in our world, and most of our users are loyalty card holders, so it doesn’t worry us,” said Julie Bornstein, SVP of Sephora Direct. “It makes the experience better if you like to shop that way.”

The Sephora app allows consumers to track what products they’ve purchased in the past, find out how many reward points they have, and look up the ingredients of a particular soap, lotion or eye shadow. So far, the app has been downloaded two million times, and the retailer says that shopping from mobile devices grew by 300 percent last year.

Besides, how could Sephora fear mobile, when all 304 stores have iPods and 20 stores have iPads?

Increasingly, retailers are rolling out mobile devices in their stores, especially iDevices, to empower workers to know more about products or even shorten the checkout lines.

Bornstein says Sephora employees walk the store floors with souped-up iPods that have a credit card scanner, so they can ring up a customer after helping him or her find a particular product. The employees also carry around mini-printers, in case the customer wants a paper receipt. But the iPads are not used for checking out; rather, they are a way for customers to access more information about a product, including different kinds of looks that can be created with makeup.

Bornstein says the intention is not to replace the cash register with a mobile device. “We haven’t made any decisions to walk away from registers in stores,” she said. “It’s nice to have a hub.”

As part of the company’s digital makeover, it also has fully integrated with Pinterest, so that users can “pin” any of the 14,000 products on Sephora.com to the bulletin-board service. Bornstein said that of the Web site’s social media traffic drivers, Pinterest is already second only to Facebook.

Social media tools are the latest in a long line of time-stealers in the workplace, following in the footsteps of March Madness brackets, afternoon golf games, morning water cooler gossip or cigarette breaks. But social media like Twitter and Facebook are more visible from a distance (of both time and space), so they are easier to criticize and quantify.

– Dwane Lay, human resources director at Missouri Baptist Medical Center

The activity of skiing goes back a long way in human history. Wikipedia tells me that there are cave drawings dating back to about 5,000 B.C., depicting people on skis. And pieces of wood, thought to have been primitive skis used for transportation and to help hunt wild game, have been found in Greenland dating as far back as the 10th or 11th century.

I didn’t know any of that before I took my first skiing lesson a few days ago. To make a long story short, I fell three times, didn’t break any bones, and had a fantastic time on the slopes in Beaver Creek, Colo.

I also know that I skied a total of 2,830 vertical feet.

What tells me so precise a number is a Web service called EpicMix created by Vail Resorts, of which Beaver Creek is a part. The service tracked my skiing activity and awarded me a set of different badges, in a manner reminiscent of Foursquare. Since it was my first time, I earned a “First Run” and a “Toe Dipper” badge, both for first timers, plus one for having visited Beaver Creek itself. It also tracked how many times I rode up the various lifts.

Central to it are ski pass cards that are enabled with RFID tags. When you get on a lift, your tag gets scanned, making your movements trackable. That might strike some as creepy, but it also makes it easy to track your stats throughout the season and over time.

So, if you want to brag about having skied some advanced black diamond-level run, there’s no disputing it. You can just point your doubters to EpicMix. It’s also really social: You can share your stats on Facebook and Twitter, and friends from both networks can easily be added to your list of friends on EpicMix.

There are also pictures. Professional photographers are stationed around the resort snapping photos of skiers in action or between runs. As long as the photographers get a scan of your pass, your photos show up in your EpicMix account, and you can buy a high-quality download for $20. They only caught me once after my lesson was over for a group shot with my patient and mellow instructor Tom Newman and fellow first-time skier, Claire from London, who took the class with me. As you can see from our faces, it’s probably not the last time we’ll be seen with long, flat things attached to our feet.

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(See: the SOPA and PIPA online protests, the Planned Parenthood-Susan G. Komen dustup, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.)

Investors, including Internet impresario Sean Parker, think that sounds like an opportunity for disruption. “Politics is one of the few remaining large-scale consumer-facing opportunities on the Internet,” he said in an interview with AllThingsD. “It’s a very interesting moment, where politics is a bit behind the rest of the economy in embracing these new technologies.”

Sean Parker

Parker — who played crucial roles at Facebook, Spotify and Napster, and also co-founded the lesser-known nonprofit fundraising app, Causes — is now hoping to make an impact on politics with an investment in Votizen, a company founded by tech geeks with political stripes.

Votizen spent much of the last two years digitizing 200 million U.S. voting records from magnetic tape, computer databases and spreadsheets. Though it only has tens of thousand of members who have registered and connected to their voter profiles, it is trying to push out products and attract users in time to get involved with this year’s general election.

Parker first invested in Votizen with his venture capital firm Founders Fund in 2010, and also just personally took part in a new $750,000 convertible round with a set of celebrity investors who can raise Votizen’s profile with the push of a tweet button.

They are Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle’s A-Grade Investments, and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter.

Votizen co-founders David Binetti and Jason Putorti

The latest round, which also included venture debt investor Hercules Technology Growth Capital, just closed last week. It brings Votizen to $2.25 million in total funding.

Votizen CEO David Binetti, who formerly founded USA.gov, says he’s aiming to capitalize on peer pressure — in a good way. Instead of money buying votes, Votizen will help friends persuade friends.

People who join Votizen can see voters from their own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks. Then, Votizen will do things like highlight which friends are in swing states or certain political parties, and help users contact them to plead their case.

“Today, people feel rich people and lobbyists get in the way of their interests,” Binetti said. “We’re disrupting the currency of politics with ‘friendraising’ over fundraising. The goal is to make it harder for money to have an effect.”

According to various estimates, online spending in the 2012 election will be somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion, up from $177 million in 2008.

While voter registration is a matter of public record, personal politics might not necessarily be something everyone will feel comfortable discussing online.

Votizen co-founder Jason Putorti — who was formerly lead designer at the personal finance site Mint.com — said he thinks that people will become more transparent about politics over time. “The new generation knows sharing leads to benefits,” he said.

Outside of election cycles, Votizen intends to help users get involved in ongoing public policy by writing officials and mobilizing groups around issues. Users can also create personal “cabinets” of advisors built from politically savvy people in their friend networks.

Eventually, Votizen hopes politicians and activists will pay to reach people in certain regions or interest groups, similar to the way LinkedIn makes money by charging users to contact people they don’t know.

Social networks — LinkedIn especially, but also Facebook — are supposed to make it easier for people to see who works where, and maybe do something about it. Once you’ve decided where it is you want to work, your second question is something like: “Do I know anyone who works there?” At which point, you trawl your network of friends. Often the search is unsatisfying for the job-seeker. “People hit a dead end too fast,” says CEO Joe Essenfeld (pictured). “Once you realize you know five people who work at the company you want, the question then becomes, ‘What do I do next?’”

And on the other side of the equation, employers don’t always have it easy, either. There are often hundreds of applicants to sort through. A good referral by an insider who knows the job could make all the difference. Companies often pay their employees a bounty for a successful referral, but it can be too much trouble to collect.

JIBE is a New York-based start-up that aims to turn both sides of that equation on their respective ears, and today it’s launching three products aimed at enterprise companies and the people who want to work for them.

The first is Get Referred. When you’re looking over a company’s Web site and see a job you want, wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly find out who you know who works there? JIBE’s Get Referred Web button will tell you right away. From there, you can ask someone you know to refer you. Already, Accenture, the IT consulting firm, has used the Get Referred tools to help it fill some of the 50,000 or 60,000 jobs it will have open this year.

The second new product is JIBE Apply, which makes it easier for companies to create mobile-ready versions of their job and career sites, by harnessing data from existing ATS — Application Tracking System — software.

Finally, JIBE Post makes it easier than ever to share new job postings on the social networks and job boards you want to send them to, not just the ones your ATS vendor has picked. Want to share a job posting on a weird combination of Monster and Facebook? Done — easily, and for a smaller cost than with other products.

JIBE has been on a bit of a tear in the last year. It has landed $6.9 million in venture capital investments from DFJ Gotham, Polaris Venture Partners, Zelkova Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Thrive Capital and Jason Calacanis’s Launch. That list is impressive in itself, but even more impressive is its list of customers. Aside from Accenture, companies as varied as Amazon, Bank of America, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed Martin are using it to find and recruit new employees. The plan over the next few quarters, Essenfeld says, is to add more large enterprise customers like these.

To that end, JIBE is adding new muscle to its sales team. Cindy Songne has joined as JIBE’s new VP for agency relations. Her last two jobs were at JobTarget and Monster Worldwide. Cindy Dole, an alum of Yahoo’s HotJobs who stayed on after Monster acquired it, is joining as director of enterprise sales for the West Coast region. She’s also worked at CareerBuilder.com. Tom Strauss will be director of enterprise sales for the Midwest region. Like Dole, he’s a Yahoo veteran.

If the point of helping people get referred for jobs they want seems a little trivial, it’s not. People who apply for a job, having been referred by someone they know, have one chance in 10 of getting that job, according to CareerXroads, a staffing firm. Compare that to applications submitted blindly, where the odds are more like one in 100. And it doesn’t just help the employee. Companies can sift through fewer resumes to find the right person, and are more likely to find someone who works out in the end, saving companies the costs associated with advertising open jobs, and then onboarding those they hire. Is it too corny to call that a “win-win”?

1. The rise of BODM (build once, deploy many) platforms

   Mobile platform fragmentation is growing — the broad range of platforms currently encompasses iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Bada, Symbian, Kindle and Nook, just to name a few. The result has been a wave of “build once, deploy many” platforms to create and distribute mobile applications, which will continue to grow in popularity as developers and content creators simply forgo the onerous task of building something unique for each mobile platform.

   According to a 2011 Nielsen Smartphone analytics report, Android users spend nearly an hour a day interacting with apps and the Web on their phones, with apps (67 percent) accounting for nearly twice the amount of time as the Web (33 percent). Bearing this consumption profile in mind, the economics of mobile content doesn’t encourage investment in new mobile development platforms as long as monetization doesn’t scale with these costs. In other words, developers won’t want to spend more on developing their app while the revenue they bring in is modestly incremental or flat.

   Among the most well-known platforms are PhoneGap, Spaceport.io (a.k.a. Siblingz, Inc.) for games and Appcelerator, the latter of which has already had more than 30,000 apps built using its platform. The approach of some of these services is that they enable developers to unlock the value of mobile web development with native app wrappers. However, a more challenging platform fragmentation problem has been largely ignored: unlocking app development for non-technical consumers and independent content creators through a compelling graphical user interface (GUI).

   Presently, non-technical content creators are disenfranchised from mobile app development unless they invest, usually unprofitably, in mobile web and app development services, or they learn to code outright.

   One company, kleverbeast, is tackling this challenge. Having already signed up prominent beta enterprise customers and non-technical content creators, kleverbeast is empowering digital app publishing across iOS, Android, and other emerging platforms with a compelling native user experience for their app owners’ audiences. The unique technology and market strategy has helped kleverbeast address mobile platform fragmentation, not just for developers, but also for the benefit of the average consumer.

   This new breed of BODM companies will proliferate in 2012, and I expect more than a million apps and game titles will choose this path.

2. Angel funding valve tightens and IPO mafias move into the picture

   Angel investing has risen in popularity over the past two years, but the long tail of unproven individual angels will wane as two events unfold: (1) Many angel-funded start-ups will go belly-up, unable to secure Series A financing or a bridge loan, and (2) institutional investors will adroitly strong-arm early, passive investors.

   Angel dollars widen the capital base available to entrepreneurs in early tech start-ups opening the door to tech innovation. However, many of these new angel investors don’t realize that frequently they will be squeezed down on their ownership percentage in subsequent rounds of financing and face less favorable terms. Many fresh angels have assumed greater risk than is commensurate with their early ownership and expected more upside than they end up getting. Subsequently, some angels won’t have the capital to diversify their portfolios or participate in follow-up rounds of financing.

   Investing can be risky for many fresh angels hungry to keep up with the Joneses and raise their social capital. As these lessons are learned, angel investing will swing back to some rational levels.

   The flipside of this may be the next IPO mafias. Expect a new crop of angel investors to emerge from some of those who benefited from Groupon, Zynga and the much-anticipated Facebook IPO. These IPO angels will take over early-stage deals and fund employees from these successful brands that decide to go it on their own. Ex-Googlers fund ex-Googlers all the time, and the mafias of tech titans will continue to proliferate.

3. One great new mobile social media company will be born out of the U.S. election cycle of 2012

   In 2008, President Barack Obama was widely praised for his mobile marketing prowess, which many political strategists evangelized as contributing to his victory in the election and igniting the youth base to get out and vote.

   Campaign managers utilized a combination of social and mobile media vehicles, with several businesses benefiting as a result: from ad networks like Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple in 2010), to start-up companies like CommerceTel, which powered the President’s interactive voice applications.

   Adding weight to this trend are emerging consumer behaviors over social networks and the power of indirect, viral outreach. A study conducted by SocialVibe revealed that “94 percent of social media users of voting age engaged by a political message watched the entire message, and 39 percent of those people shared it with an average of 130 friends.” Powerful, period.

   The power of social technology to empower and persuade won’t be ignored by today’s candidates, and we’ll likely see the emergence of at least one great company out of the 2012 election.

If the rest of this year is anything like the last one, we’re in for a wild ride of fragmentation, consolidation and innovation.

Dinesh Moorjani is the founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile start-up incubator creating new platforms and applications to improve mobility for the wireless generation.

I am totally convinced that the world of social media is not consolidating around one “winner takes all” social platform.

– Fred Wilson

Nothing wrong with MySpace price. Just our totally screwing up every way. Agree Facebook revenues will zoom, but still Apple cheap.

— Rupert Murdoch, via Twitter

It’s an all-stock transaction, and the companies won’t disclose how they are valuing the deal. But the numbers should get out sooner or later, as 33Across plans on raising more money soon, pitching itself as “the largest social and interest graph in the world.”

You have to do some weird mental gymnastics to make that claim work, so ignore it. The combination of the two companies is sort of interesting, though.

Here’s the logic: 33Across makes money by tracking Web users’ social connections, and using the data to serve them targeted ads. Straightforward enough.

Tynt has its own very big data set, which it accumulates by letting publishers use its services for free, while it collects its own information. So, say, the New Yorker can see that you shared a portion of that Mitt Romney/Bain Capital story with your cousin, and Tynt can also keep tabs on where the story migrated around the Web. (Tynt, like lots of ad services, has a small but vocal group of detractors — in this case led by prominent Apple blogger John Gruber, who finds the service “annoying.”)

Put the two together, in theory, and you have an ad tech company that knows a lot about how people interact on the Web, and what sort of stuff they like to read/share (all that stuff is theoretically anonymized, etc.).

The next step, says 33Across CEO Eric Wheeler, will be to approach some of the 500,000 publishers that use Tynt’s service, and offer to sell their ads via a private exchange. That’s the newly popular concept that’s supposed to let publishers sell off some of their unsold inventory without moving it to lowest-common-denominator ad networks.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Angela Waye)

Topsy’s co-founder and now former CEO, Vipul Ved Prakash, will remain the company’s main technical guru while he becomes CTO, and will run platform and product engineering.

Greatwood’s job will be to scale the company up, which sounds like it will be interesting. I talked with Greatwood and Prakash yesterday, which was Greatwood’s first day on the job.

With so much social data being created on Facebook and Twitter and so many other places, Topsy was built to index it all and make it searchable, and analyze it. “There’s a lot of exhaust that’s being created around analyzing social data that applies to so many businesses, from finance to publishing,” Prakash told me.

Greatwood said that what attracted him to Topsy was the fact that it’s a lot more than a search or analytics engine. “It really lets you extract some deep analytics information from a broad array of data sources,” he said. Think about all the time and effort a company devotes to analyzing who and how many people visit its Web site using products like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture. “At the same time there are probably lots of conversations taking place about that company or just conversations that company would be interested in,” Greatwood says.

Sales are starting to take off, Greatwood says, and though the customer base is small right now, there’s a great deal of interest from the marketplace. “We have a small number of customers, but within that group there’s some very big customers, and they’re driving an acceleration of sales over the past few months.” He wouldn’t divulge many customer names, but one that’s already been disclosed is AOL’s Huffington Post. The plan is to take Topsy’s products to a broader market during the year.

Topsy raised $15 million in a Series C round led by BlueRun Ventures in March with prior investors Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister, the founder of Ironport, participating. Its total capital raised so far is about $30 million.

Like that’s how most people start fighting because that’s how most of the fights in my school happen — because of some Facebook stuff, because of something you post, or like because somebody didn’t like your pictures.

– A middle school girl who took part in the Pew study “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites”

If you project forward 10 years, each person will share about 1,000 times more things per day than they are now.

— Mark Zuckerberg to reporters on a recent recruiting trip to Harvard

The first terse tweets also outpaced the U.S. Geological Survey’s conventional seismometers, which normally can take from two to 20 minutes to generate an alert. The agency is now experimenting with Twitter as a faster and cheaper way to track earthquakes.

Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

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Sometimes a start-up’s product is pretty, sometimes it’s from famous founders and occasionally it’s dead simple.

Qwhisper is none of those things — in fact, it’s barely even a product at this point. But its team of founders are attacking a devilishly hard problem.

The company and Web app of the same name attempt to search and categorize social media updates with an accuracy that even the sector’s giants have been unable to deliver thus far.

“Search for social is really tough. When someone mentions Mars, you don’t know if they mean Mars the planet, the god, Bruno Mars, the rover, or the candy bar,” said Qwhisper co-founder Eldar Sadikov. “With Web pages, there are all kinds of context clues to help you figure things out, like links and other data. Social content is just so much shorter — you have to be very sophisticated to [make sense of it].”

What that means for us avid Twitterers is that, as of now, searching for a category of tweets is not a useful endeavor — and forget about searching for tweets about a simple but amorphous topic such as “popular music.”

But Sadikov’s Qwhisper, which is in private beta, makes use of some new search algorithms to reorganize a user’s social streams.

Its founders claim the search and sort technology of Qwhisper can reliably deliver tweets to the user based on a topic, category and search term.

So, how does Qwhisper do it?

Sadikov made an attempt at outlining just how complex it is for a computer to make sense of a stream of single tweets:

“You need much more sophisticated natural language processing technology [for social] than what is needed for Web pages. [The system must] understand words like “lol,” “cuz,” “gonna,” “gotta” — because there is so much colloquial language in social content, compared to Web sites.”

Only after dealing with those problems, which are in themselves complex enough for several research papers, can Qwhisper layer in the really complex processing to answer such contextual questions as: What does this person do normally? And, what does that person normally talk about?

But every start-up with a search component boasts custom algorithms, so why should users be confident that Qwhisper’s are superior?

Qwhisper is touting the company’s intellectual pedigree.

Sadikov and some of the other co-founders left their PhD programs at Stanford’s InfoLab to start Qwhisper — the same InfoLab where Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed some of the early parts of Google.

Sadikov also spent time at Google, where he worked on building an algorithm for organizing small sets of words together in contextually relevant groups.

Not too long after, he gathered a group together to launch Qwhisper using some of the same concepts.

If Qwhisper or the engine that powers it proves successful, the consequences could be far reaching.

Delivering tweets and other social content in contextual channels could mean a whole new class of applications — and advertising — all built around social content.

But complex graph-modeling and multivariate algorithms aside, the litmus test for Qwhisper will be simple user interaction.

“Ultimately, if I post something like ‘saw inception last weekend – amazing,’ the system needs to recognize what that is about … even though it says nothing about movies or genre,” said Sadikov.

I caught him and one of his co-founders, Montse Medina, at the recent Stanford StartX incubator demo day to talk more about Qwhisper:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110916/qwhisper-is-looking-to-solve-social-search-with-a-dose-of-uber-geek/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110831/crowdbooster-tells-you-when-is-best-to-tweet-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110831/crowdbooster-tells-you-when-is-best-to-tweet-and-more/#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:45:14 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=115655 Crowdbooster, a Twitter analytics dashboard that shows users things like when their tweets are most effective, becomes available to the public today. Used by the social media teams of Lil Wayne and JetBlue, the angel-funded service informed me yesterday that my Twitter follower with the highest Klout score is Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen follows me (and 48,000 other people … shh)? Cool!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110831/crowdbooster-tells-you-when-is-best-to-tweet-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110830/marc-benioff-is-all-over-this-social-enterprise-thing/ http://allthingsd.com/20110830/marc-benioff-is-all-over-this-social-enterprise-thing/#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 03:59:22 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=115454 If you’ve been paying any attention to Salesforce, it’s probably not a news flash that CEO Marc Benioff’s opening keynote address at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco today is going to be very heavy on social enterprise news.

There are three big announcements coming in Benioff’s remarks, and they’re all connected to Chatter, the social enterprise service that Salesforce promoted in a pair of TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl; Chatter will appear as part of the next upgrade to Salesforce.com, called Winter ’12. The whole idea is to deliver a Facebook- or Twitter-like experience that supplants traditional collaboration methods like email and meetings. Salesforce says its clients who use Chatter are seeing email volume decline by 30 percent; meetings decline by 27 percent.

The first is Chatter Now, which will deliver real-time collaboration within Chatter itself. You’ll be able to see if your colleagues are signed in and available in real time — kinda like on AOL instant messenger or Skype — and you’ll be able to chat and share your screen without leaving your Chatter feed.

The second is Chatter Customer Groups. You don’t need to collaborate just internally, but also with people you do business with. You’ll be able to invite people from outside your company into your Chatter network, and can set rules on what they’re allowed to see and do.

Third is Chatter Connect, which is intended to entice software developers to work Chatter into other enterprise applications — many people think this is where the real action is in the social enterprise field. Ask the soon-to-be-public Jive Software, which can add social features to, among other applications, Microsoft Office. There’s also Yammer, which grabs social feeds from any application that has them, including, uh, Chatter. It’s not the newest idea under the sun, but Salesforce is off to a respectable start: Its first conquest is Microsoft’s collaboration software, SharePoint.

Finally, Benioff will talk about mobile devices. He’s a big fan of Apple’s iPad and has regularly talked about its popularity among enterprise customers. And while Salesforce.com has been available as a dedicated app through the iTunes App store for some time now, it’s about to get a lot more flexible through the iPad browser. Salesforce will announce touch.salesforce.com, which it says will bring the power of HTML5 to enterprise applications.

If HTML5 doesn’t mean anything to you, then you missed one of the more significant controversies about Apple’s iOS devices. They don’t support Adobe Flash, because Apple argues that Flash — which is used widely for Web video and animation — is clunky on mobile devices and drains batteries too fast. When it comes to multimedia and rich experiences on the Web, Apple prefers HTML. So touch.salesforce.com will be the place where users of iPads, iPhones and scores of other mobile devices will be able to go and get an experience that’s geared to their device without having to compromise on the Salesforce features they’re accustomed to on their desktops. Additionally, developers will be able to build their own apps, and all 220,000 apps built using Salesforce’s Force.com development platform will work with HTML5, as well.

That’s an awful lot for one CEO to talk about, and Benioff is a busy man. But, as in the past, he’s not too busy to give TV interviews that coincide with the Dreamforce conference. While he’s regularly found on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” on Monday he showed up on Bloomberg West for a chat with Emily Chang.

The highlight comes early in the interview, when Benioff links the Arab Spring — which has been propelled in part by Facebook- and Twitter-using protesters who have toppled a couple of dictators, most notably Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and now apparently Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Companies are falling, too, Benioff says, but they have a fighting chance to survive if they get a little more social. Get it? Chang, to her credit, doesn’t let this pass without calling it an “extreme analogy.” She then goes on to quiz him about Salesforce landing Groupon as a customer. (And revealing that Groupon CEO Andrew Mason went to Davos. Who knew?)

What else about Salesforce is extreme? Its price-to-earnings ratio is insane, at 602 times trailing earnings; which, of course, leads to the question of whether or not Salesforce is overpriced. Benioff, true to form, dodges the question. It’s all about growing the topline and gaining market share now, he says. No change there. Enjoy the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110830/marc-benioff-is-all-over-this-social-enterprise-thing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110826/reminder-make-post-it-for-digital-era/ http://allthingsd.com/20110826/reminder-make-post-it-for-digital-era/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:00:04 +0000 James R. Hagerty http://allthingsd.com/?p=114235 3M Co. is trying to drag its 31-year-old Post-it notes business into the age of apps.

The conglomerate, whose thousands of products range from Scotch tape to battery components, unveiled a free software application, available from Apple Inc.’s online iTunes App Store, that lets people send and receive what 3M calls Post-it PopNotes on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices. People can use the app to send scrawled or typed comments and reminders to themselves or others, the company said. Among 3M’s examples: “Luke, take the trash out,” and “Happy anniversary babe!”

The app adds to an already bewildering array of ways for people to communicate electronically, including email, text messages and “social media” services like Twitter and Facebook.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110826/reminder-make-post-it-for-digital-era/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110824/social-media-warfare-by-nissan-as-also-ran-looks-to-win/ http://allthingsd.com/20110824/social-media-warfare-by-nissan-as-also-ran-looks-to-win/#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:00:23 +0000 Michael Ramsey http://allthingsd.com/?p=113314 Nissan Motor Co. has long been the also-ran of the J3 here in the U.S., an image that it is trying furiously to dislodge. Indeed, they have said a driving motivation behind the introduction of the Nissan Leaf electric car was to take the lead in something.

Having gained market share on Toyota Motor Corp. and being not far from passing Honda Motor Co. in the U.S. in sales, the scrappy underdog is turning a bit more into the playground bully.

Case in point: Toyota was going for the maximum splash in revealing its new Camry today at locations in Los Angeles, Dearborn, Mich., Georgetown, Ky. and New York. And they promoted they would show the vehicle early through Twitter. Too bad Nissan had purchased the top search term “Camry” for Twitter and when you search for that word, the first tweet that appears is something from the Nissan twitter feed.

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