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:

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.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

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.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This approach has worked wonders for Naked Pizza, an all-natural restaurant chain that began using the social-media service five years ago.

Owners Robbie Vitrano and Jeff Leach post humorous (and pointed) notes every day, on subjects ranging from nutrition to the state of the food business to out-and-out jokes like, “One more glass of wine and I will b buying pop tarts from that damn vending machine for dinner, again.”

The New Orleans company says it has gotten about 8,000 investment inquiries in the past year and a half thanks to its online presence.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Today, Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations in its second-quarter earning, growing revenue and lessening losses.

The Santa Monica, Calif., online content maker also announced that it had re-upped and expanded its advertising partnership with Google and also bought two start-ups in social media and advertising.

Now, it’s time for the inevitable conference call to explain it all to Wall Street analysts and the media.

2:02 pm PT: The call starts off with an unusually jaunty CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who quickly got to the real deal: Exactly how badly did Google’s changes to its search algorithm, under a program code-named Panda, hurt Demand’s content business?

Not much, says Rosenblatt, who reels off a list of things the company has done to improve its offerings, which have been dinged by many as, well, spam.

Rosenblatt was not having any of that, talking about removing 300,000 pieces of crappy content and also “quality improvements” with partners such as cheerily demented cooking goddess Rachael Ray. She might cook with spam — here is a delightful Spam Hawaiian recipe — but she ain’t spam!

2:13 pm: Now it is on to the acquisition of IndieClick. Essentially: It’s for the young people.

Then, international. Latin America Demand editorial via eHow en español! (Actually, the acquisition of Emergincast.com, an Argentine start-up. Coming soon to a blog site near you: ¿Cómo se hierve el agua?

Last, social media. Demand will be doing a lot more of it, like everyone else in the world, including more recommendations. I would really like it if some Internet company said it was going anti-social.

2:18 pm: The finance guy comes on, covering everything already in the press releases. Which is why I am cutting out here and getting a gluten-free doughnut at the Whole Foods store where I am writing this post.

It is as delicious as you might imagine a gluten-free doughnut can be. Which is to say: Not very!

2:32 pm: Q&A time from the Wall Street dudes — and, let it be said, they are all dudes.

The first question is about the “cleansing” of its cruddy content and if it is all flushed out.

It might be baked-on sludge, but Rosenblatt assures that Demand has it all figured out.

Then, a query about international and how the company decides what to pick. Algo, of course! And local content writers.

Back to the spam content: Does the need to have better content mean less of it? Kind of, since there is a lot more video. But still a lot of content churning out of Demand!

A question about Facebook and how to program Demand content into it. Good lord, it’s hyper-poking!

“It’s not clear the best way of how you expand into all these properties,” said Rosenblatt, specifically referring to its acquisition today of both IndieClick and RSS Graffiti.

The next question is how successful Demand is in the display and brand business, and how IndieClick, a premium ad company aimed at niche blogs, will be integrated in.

More on social media advertising’s future. Aaaghh, this is as obvious as a store-bought-crust apple pie baked by Rachael Ray.

Rosenblatt notes that its flagship site, eHow, is but one means of distribution, but Demand content is going all over the place and winging by people when they least expect it.

“Social is more effective … to try to find stuff you didn’t know that you needed,” says Rosenblatt, who also would not dis search as a means of discovery.

That’s important, since Google is a major traffic driver and advertising partner, when it is not terrorizing Demand and others with its search algo version of Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor Snape.

And presto, here comes a question about Demand’s Google ad relationship, which Rosenblatt touts nicely.

Of course he does. It’s tastier than spam, after all.

Last we heard from file sharing start-up Minus, the two-man team was still early in the development of their product.

How early? Founder John Xie was still in the dorms.

Now the minimalist Web service has raised a $1 million round from IDG Capital, which follows the $200,000 it has taken in since its founding in October 2010.

The first big check written out of the funding account was $117,000 for the purchase of he Minus.com domain name.

Xie characterized the overall round as “really a bridge round … we anticipate raising more in a year or so.”

Just to refresh, Minus began as little more than a well-made demo of some of HTML5′s drag-and-drop features (which Google has now added to Gmail).

Since then, the product has expanded to include drag-and-drop sharing of just about any kind of file, via the sharing method du jour — pretty little min.us shortlinks.

Other technical improvements include user accounts, a player for music files right in the browser and the ability to download a gallery of files as a .zip.

Of all the improvements, though, the seemingly natural addition of user accounts may turn out to be the most important feature as Minus matures.

With its new cash, technical co-founder Carl Hu hopes Minus will become “the place to share collections of files, socially.”

That’s a tall order, even if you ignore the legal gray area that this kind of file sharing might occupy.

As it is now, files that are uploaded to Minus live on its servers, which may create exactly the kind of legal headaches that person-to-person, torrent-style sharing was designed to avoid.

Legal sand traps aside, Minus’s intention is to “get social.”

But since getting that doesn’t mean anything in particular these days, I asked Hu to explain:

“Reddit really inspires me. It’s a really vibrant way to discover new content,” he said. “The way it scores content, comments and users is something we will be adding.”

He added that the vision moving forward is to leverage Minus’ super-simple interface to let users explore the content that has been uploaded, and connect with people who share things they like.

You can see Xie and Hu talk about their future in the video below, which I shot on a short visit to Minus’ mini-funding-sized office, complete with a recreation area and Hu’s ultranerd competition chess set.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110729/social-file-sharing-start-up-minus-raises-a-mini-round-but-hopes-to-go-plus-sized/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110728/hearsay-social-raises-18m-to-help-big-brands-get-social-locally/ http://allthingsd.com/20110728/hearsay-social-raises-18m-to-help-big-brands-get-social-locally/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:30:27 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=103582 Just five months after launching, Hearsay Social has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by NEA and including Sequoia Capital for its social media products addressing large brands with local presences. The company also launched new features including a tracker for “rogue pages” that illicitly represent a company’s brand. Hearsay’s largest customer contingents are in retail, financial services and direct sales.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110728/hearsay-social-raises-18m-to-help-big-brands-get-social-locally/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110726/seven-questions-about-smarter-commerce-with-ibms-craig-hayman/ http://allthingsd.com/20110726/seven-questions-about-smarter-commerce-with-ibms-craig-hayman/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:30:44 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=102594 Recently IBM has been talking about making lots of things “smarter.” There’s the “Smarter Cities” initiative, and its ads talk about creating a “smarter planet.” Broadly speaking, making something smarter means making it more efficient, and less costly, time-consuming or less wasteful as a result.

Earlier this month, Big Blue made an announcement on the subject of “smarter commerce.” The idea is to throw some cloud computing resources at classic problems that businesses face in selling their products and services, especially around marketing. The cloud provides the computing horsepower needed to do deep analytics to find out if marketing campaigns are meeting their objectives, by gathering lots of data about customer preferences, especially online: Nearly two-thirds of all consumers make a first purchase because of a digital experience.

The effort has grown out of two IBM acquisitions, Coremetrics and Unica, both acquired last August, and through IBM’s detailed study of the inner workings of more than 2,000 individual businesses. The result is the IBM Coremetrics Web Analytics and Digital Marketing Optimization Suite, which IBM says automates and simplifies the creation of things like online marketing promotions and ad targeting.

I talked with Craig Hayman, Vice President of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group, about what smarter commerce means.

AllThingsD: We hear IBM pronouncing various things as “smarter” these days. You’re focused on smarter commerce. So what is smarter commerce, who does it affect, and how?

Hayman: If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they’re incredibly empowered. There’s not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that. To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was. We looked into enterprises and industries and we found some very inefficient processes in how they buy and market those goods and services, how they sell them, and how they service.

How big a problem is this?

We looked at 2,000 different customer deployments to understand the best practices around that, and we were very surprised, because first off, this is a huge segment. It amounts to about $20 billion worth of software spend, and we realized that when you are able to do something compelling, there are some incredible stories about customer value and increasing loyalty and retention. That led us at IBM to invest in our own capabilities, but we also spent about $2.5 billion on new acquisitions in this area in 2010 alone to help us.

What sorts of things did you learn?

How can you help a customer get customer insight and understand what your future customers are doing? One way to do that is through analytics. Find a way to get that data to the marketing professionals as quickly as possible to help them better run a marketing campaign. We called it our Pegasus release: Track the analytics of how future customers are interacting with different channels, sometimes up to 1.5 billion pieces of data per day. We feed that data back to the marketing pros, integrate it in a way that’s connected to their campaigns, and adjust them based on the results. If I ran a Twitter campaign versus an email campaign, I’d be able to compare the results, including geolocation of the respondents, to show if it’s effective.

Have you tried this with any customers yet?

Seton Hall University was running a social media campaign to bring in more students. And we were able to show them that most respondents were coming back through those links through two zip codes: One was South Orange, New Jersey, where the college was located, and one was a commuter town nearby. If you wanted to target the people who already know about the college, you’re doing a great job. But if you wanted to target students from overseas or from other states, you’re doing a lousy job. We were able to give them those metrics and they were able to shift their campaign and attract more students from a wider range of places. The main problem is to know how well your campaign is working, and having the data to prove it one way or the other, and help you tune it.

Companies are always struggling with things like inventory and distribution and logistics, how much stuff to have on hand to meet anticipated demand and so on. Can this sort of thing help on the back end too? If you market too well, you might find you don’t have enough of the item you’re promoting, for instance.

One element of people’s frustration is when you get an offer and you go to buy it and it’s not there. The customer walks away unhappy, and the company has wasted money marketing to you. You may end up going to a competitor. It’s a triple-whammy. So now we say, let’s find some visibility into the supply chain. We don’t manage the supply chain, but we can see what’s in it, so you know what’s in stock, where it’s in stock, down to what truck it’s on and where it’s going, so you can be sure you have the inventory when people go to buy it. We did this with Crocs, the rubber shoes. They sell through small mom-and-pop shops, but also through major retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s, and also online and through their own stores. People were ordering through all these different means, and they were having stock-outs. People would order and it wouldn’t be available. We acquired a company called Sterling Commerce that gives complete visibility into the inventory no matter where it is in the supply chain, and render that through each of those channels. We helped them to virtually eliminate stock-outs for Crocs.

But in this case you don’t help manage the supply chain specifically?

No. But we integrate with all the supply-chain systems out there. We have a view that you shouldn’t have to rip and replace everything you already have to get this benefit. You shouldn’t have go through a five-year ERP or supply-chain rollout to benefit from smarter commerce. You should be able to work with what you already have.

What other areas of commerce do you touch?

Companies often sell through a series and partners, and generally you want to get those partners up and running and selling your product as quickly as possible. If you’ve got a hot item, you’re looking for new partners to fulfill the sales need. That’s another thing that Sterling helps with. We worked with a big transportation company, CSX Transportation — they used this to reduce the time it takes to on-board a partner from two days to 10 minutes. You can easily see the benefit of that.

Image via IBM’s Flickr feed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110726/seven-questions-about-smarter-commerce-with-ibms-craig-hayman/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110723/flixlab-tackles-the-last-thing-an-iphone-does-slowly-export-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110723/flixlab-tackles-the-last-thing-an-iphone-does-slowly-export-video/#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:48:36 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=101624

The Apple iPhone user experience is pretty snappy. Web browsing, picture taking, trivia-disagreement solving — it all happens at the speed of a tap.

Unless, that is, you try to edit and export a video. That’s because speedy video editing is a very hard problem to solve.

One of the first app makers to take a serious whack is Flixlab, with its app offering of the same name.

Flixlab was started three years and a few patents ago, in the hopes of “letting people do something with the videos they shoot on their devices,” said CEO David Slater.

The company markets the app as a social video creation tool. In this case, that means enabling users to create videos, share them on Facebook and then remix other videos that their friends have made through Flixlab.

So, basically, it’s a less creepy video version of what has been attempted by beleaguered and overfunded app-maker Color.

In addition, there are lots of big players trying to optimize video for social sharing, such as Google and Facebook.

Saving time for users is what Flixlab is touting as its real differentiating feature, which is important for video editing on mobile.

Here’s where it gets a little technical:

After editing a movie on Apple’s own iMovie for the iPhone app, the user chooses an export size, which is when the heavy processing begins.

Just like professional editing software, the iMovie app chews through the video frame by frame and creates the finished product at the selected resolution.

It is analogous to the process an animator would have gone through back in the days of Bugs Bunny, drawing the cartoon one frame at a time.

This process, called “rendering” by video nerds, gobbles memory and battery and is probably the most intensive thing an iPhone is asked to do in a normal operation.

Even on Apple’s iMovie app, it can take up to two minutes of rendering and exporting time for every minute of video created — a lot more if the video is being uploaded. And those two minutes must be spent with iMovie running in the foreground, so that calling, texting and cat-video watching has to be put on hold.

In the iPhone user experience universe, minutes might as well be millennia.

Flixlab solves the problem by doing all the video processing in its cloud.

“The user’s video gets uploaded to our servers and gets processed by a really fast computer,” said Slater. “Playback happens in near real time.”

This is essentially the same value proposition that cloud gaming start-up OnLive offers: Do stuff on your mobile device at speeds typically reached only by beefy, graphics-enhanced desktop computers.

It’s unclear why iMovie isn’t yet offering the same cloud-based editing, but Slater thinks Flixlab “probably has about 18 months in the market where [it] is the only [company] doing this — because it’s a hard problem and we own patents around it.”

Cloud-based mobile solutions are harder than just making an app, and Flixlab does have an edge solving the most expensive part of it.

But the company’s bigger bet is on whether or not users want to co-create video, as well as share.

Slater is betting that the future is one where “we have to deliver creation and consumption experiences that are as integrated.”

Color bet on the same idea and the jury is still out there. So, if Flixlab can’t make it work either, the tech community may need a new working theory about what “the future of social media” means.

Here’s a video interview I did with Slater, in which he talks about all of this:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110723/flixlab-tackles-the-last-thing-an-iphone-does-slowly-export-video/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stephen-colbert-finds-another-revenue-stream-for-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stephen-colbert-finds-another-revenue-stream-for-facebook/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 14:15:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=33028 Facebook now lets you tag brands in your photos. The next step, Stephen Colbert points out, is obvious. And in fact, this is what people like Ad.ly are already trying to do IRL–though Facebook isn’t gung-ho about the idea, for now.

(Hat tip to All Facebook.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110520/stephen-colbert-finds-another-revenue-stream-for-facebook/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/at-bloomberg-twitter-grabs-an-unlikely-convert/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/at-bloomberg-twitter-grabs-an-unlikely-convert/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 13:15:36 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32874 Twitter is old news to lots of journalists, but not all of them. Last week, for instance, Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News’ editor in chief, sent out his very first tweet.

Straightforward stuff, but still enough to cause a minor stir among the Bloomberg ranks. That’s because Winkler, who enforces the news service’s spartan style, seems like the kind of newsman least likely to take to Twitter’s anything-goes ethos.

The opposite, in fact: Just a year ago, Winkler was sending out staff memos chiding Bloomberg reporters who used the service to write about stories they were covering.

But now even Bloomberg has a social media director, and a social media policy: reporters are encouraged to use Twitter, but not to break news on it. And Winkler seems to be trying it out as a show of good faith.

Top dogs at other very serious news organizations have found a way to use Twitter to both inform and entertain, even if there’s still some evident disdain. Last week the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller used Twitter to debate whether using Twitter made you stupid.

Don’t expect any of that from Winkler, though. He’s tweeted three times to date, and each one has been a sober note about accolades earned by Bloomberg reporters. Expect more of the same, he says, via email:

Peter Kafka: Why did you get on Twitter? What do you hope to accomplish?

Matthew Winkler: I want to share the most immediate and direct appreciation of Bloomberg’s reporting, and Twitter is ideal for that purpose.

What was your opinion of Twitter before you started using the service? Has it changed now that you’re tweeting?

I have always admired technology that makes the delivery of news more efficient and Twitter is a good example.

Your tweets to date have been links to stories about Bloomberg and a Bloomberg story. Should we expect more of the same, or do you expect you’ll venture outside Bloomberg?

Bloomberg News will always be the focus. It won’t be about me, it will be about us and helping people appreciate the quality and impact of our work at Bloomberg. That’s why my handle is @BloombergWay.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/at-bloomberg-twitter-grabs-an-unlikely-convert/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/insideview-an-intelligence-dashboard-for-salespeople-raises-12-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/insideview-an-intelligence-dashboard-for-salespeople-raises-12-million/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:00:58 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4339 When you’re gathering information on a potential sales prospect, there’s an awful lot of places to look. A decent Google search only gets you part of the way there. You can look for mentions in the media, find them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but you also need to know what’s going on within that person’s company.

InsideView, which today announced $12 million in funding in a series C round led by Foundation Capital, aims to be something of a personal CIA for salespeople. The service deploys within existing CRM applications like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM and SugarCRM to enhance the information view on a person or company with data gathered from numerous sources. When you look at the window for a target, you see information taken from their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, information about them from Jigsaw, but also what people are saying about their company on Twitter. There’s also corporate financial and relationship data from CaptialIQ–a powerful financial database owned by McGraw-Hill–and a news feed from Thomson-Reuters.

Yes, it’s another social enterprise software play says CEO Umberto Milletti, but with one key difference. “Most of the social CRM space has been focused on the marketing and support use cases. We’re very focused on business-to-business sales,” he told me. “It’s using social media together with traditional news and financial information to make salespeople more productive. We turn all that information into business intelligence.”

With the funding round, Foundation’s Paul Holland, a former exec at Kana Communications, is joining the InsideView board. Its prior investors–who are also participating in this round–are Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners.

The company has more than 1,000 corporate customers, including Adobe, BMC, Cap Gemini, Experian and SuccessFactors, and supports some 75,000 end users.

Millietti said the funding will be used to boost distribution. “We want to get every customer-facing sales professional in the world an InsideView acount,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/insideview-an-intelligence-dashboard-for-salespeople-raises-12-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:08:59 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3669 When something breaks, we users ask for help wherever we think we can find someone responsible. Or maybe we just stand up on our social media soapbox and whine.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:04:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40732 UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million, in a round led by Accel Partners.

The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross (pictured here)–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.

Accel’s Jim Breyer will join the board of UberMedia, maker of social media reading and posting tools, which is currently largely aimed at the Twitter ecosystem.

“We are hoping to work very closely with Twitter, which is certainly our goal, as well as other social media platforms like Facebook,” said Breyer in an interview with BoomTown this morning, answering a question about previous tensions between Twitter and UberMedia. “There will be a lot of efforts to monetize Twitter and there is no silver bullet.”

Index Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated in the round.

The company did not reveal the amount raised, nor the valuation for UberMedia.

But many like him are trying to find a way to monetize the huge microblogging platform–including Twitter–and take advantage of its enormous scale.

Gross founded the start-up last spring.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, including Index, Revolution, betaworks, First Round Capital and angel investors such as Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

Started in Gross’s Idealab start-up incubator and called TweetUp (and then PostUp), it was initially cast as a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

TweetUp also offered an organic search service to surface the best tweets. This put it at odds on several fronts with Twitter, which began to aggressively move to take over key parts of its business that had largely been left to third-party developers.

That still remains UberMedia’s essential goal, and Breyer hopes that the new investment will show Twitter that UberMedia hopes to work in harmony with it, as other developers have done successfully with Facebook. (Accel and Breyer himself are big investors in the social networking giant, so he should know.)

“Like Twitter, we want to drive the customer experience,” he said, pointing out successes such as the Zynga gaming service. “This is a lot like Facebook several years ago and cooperation worked out well for everyone.”

Here’s the official press release:

Accel Partners Leads Investment Round in UberMedia, Jim Breyer Joins Board of Directors

PASADENA, Calif.–February 14, 2011–UberMedia, the leading independent provider of applications for reading and posting to Twitter and other social media platforms, today announced that it completed a financing round led by Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures. Existing investors Steve Case of Revolution Ventures and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures also participated.

“At UberMedia, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience with functionality in our clients and to be the best partner with Twitter in growing and enhancing their ecosystem,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO. “In particular, the addition of Jim Breyer to our board will really enable us to succeed at this mission. His experience on the boards of Wal-Mart, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Dell and so many other high-profile consumer brands will be particularly helpful.”

“We’ve been watching closely Bill’s efforts at UberMedia to build upon the ground-breaking communications platform created by Twitter,” said Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “We see a tremendous business in the kinds of innovations in user experience being developed at UberMedia. The result of these efforts will be an expansion in the number and variety of people engaged with Twitter as well as a method for advertisers to reach consumers in highly targeted and relevant ways.”

And here are two video interview I did with Gross last April when the company was founded:

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