Enterprise software company TIBCO is debuting a new version of its Yammer-clone Tibbr today. The newest version of the company’s social communications app includes geo-location capabilities called Tibbr GEO, which integrates the ‘check-in’ model in the enterprise.

By incorporating location into Tibbr, the service wants to physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As Tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information.

For example, Tibbr says the geolocation feature could turn a gate into a contextual relevant data hub to give agents, pilots and flight attendants insights as they approach the gate. Or the section of every retail aisle could include data on individual shelf space, insights about individual products, how they’re selling, how fast they’re moving or how a new location might be affecting sales.

Tibbr Mobile applications now use HTML5 to deliver users a consistent mobile experience across all platforms and has also been updated to support offline access.

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Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly is today announcing the launch of Bitly Enterprise 2.0, a new version of its enterprise-friendly dashboard. The Bitly Enterprise platform, which helps businesses with multiple social media accounts monitor the impacts of their content’s distribution, will now include the first production release of the company’s brand-new search technology, allowing customers to track content around any subject or phrase across the entire social web – not just Twitter and Facebook.

This technology is providing access to a new view of the web. The web is no longer just a list of linked pages, but a web of fresh, social and viral content that’s weighted and ranked in real-time, and, in many cases, before Google applies its own PageRank to it.

Bitly’s social search engine is able to track the entire Bitly universe, explains CEO Peter Stern, which includes billions of pieces of content, with around 15 million unique pieces from over 100 million shares added daily.

When Bitly shortens a URL, it also crawls and classifies the URL. These links form an index of the most viral content on the web, which, through the Enterprise product, allow businesses and brands to see which items (posts, tweets, articles, etc.) are getting attention.

The new search technology was originally launched into beta testing in October, with the first part being a sentiment analysis system with alerts. Today’s dashboard update includes that feature, as well as tools for managing multiple accounts (Bitly Composer) and message optimization. The latter lets customers automatically share content at precisely the right time, based on when it will be most relevant to the audience and most likely to drive traffic. (For more details, see Bitly’s blog post).

One of the key benefits to the service is that Bitly’s technology doesn’t just track social mentions – it predicts the future, too. For any given search query, Bitly predicts which stories will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. And the company uses its own analytics to make these predictions in real-time. That sort of thing is invaluable to businesses and brands who need to be able to see a shift in sentiment (especially a negative one) before it’s too late. It can also help identify good content that a brand could choose to promote as well as provide ways to view content’s popularity by region, domain or social platform.

In truth, Bitly’s social search engine can be understood as being something like a “Google,” but for the social web. Instead of tracking webpages, Bitly tracks topics. And instead of PageRank, it has its own ranking parameters (17 in all), the most critical of which is, of course, clicks. It also tracks where those clicks are from, the platforms being used, the quality of the sources (i.e. organic vs. inorganic sources) and more.

“The larger story here,” explains Stern, “…is that we’re taking a view of the web not from a link-based point of view…it’s above link-level, page-level or even domain-level analytics.” It’s a different view of a different web than the one Google sees.

What’s most interesting this, is how much of a long tail there is to it. Bitly got its start as the preferred link-shortening service for Twitter (before Twitter launched its own), but the company is no longer limited to tracking Twitter. In fact, Twitter is just 8% of the company’s traffic, and Facebook is just 7%. Today, people are clicking and engaging with Bitly-powered links all over the web. There are over 100,000 in-code sources within applications, for example, plus web-based sharing buttons, links shared in virtual worlds, links shared through texting, within chat, even within games like Minecraft.

Says Stern, the company hasn’t yet considered building a consumer-facing service for its social search technology, but it could if there was interest. (YES THERE IS). Given Google’s decision to forgo a realtime search vertical in favor of promotion of in-house content from Google+, it seems that now would be the time for such an offering, if ever.

Below, a majorly cool video of Bitly traffic throughout the world, which shows the geographic location of the click and keywords associated with the content. Whoa.

Bitly: World Vis (2 / 3) from Micha Gorelick on Vimeo.

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NewsGator. Those of us who were using RSS readers in the middle of the past decade most likely think of desktop app FeedDemon for Windows or desktop/mobile app NetNewsWire for Mac when we hear the name.

But the company has spent the last several years turning itself into an enterprise networking company that competes with Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer and the many others out there. And it’s had its biggest year yet in 2011, chief executive JB Holston tells me, by steadily building up its business on top of a place you might not have thought of: Microsoft SharePoint.

It’s riding the popularity of simpler social software for businesses by bringing industry-leading features to Microsoft’s extremely full-featured and extremely arcane collaboration platform, which has 125 million or so seats worldwide. Which is to say, a big pool of clients who don’t naturally gravitate to the freemium model that some competitors have used to get in with small and medium-sized businesses. Instead, all the products cost money. (Also, note that the RSS reader, which are still available for download after all these years on the NewsGator site, are now owned by Nick Bradbury and Black Pixel, respectively.)

The results in 2011? NewsGator added one million new paid seats over the course of the year, on top of its existing two million. Those additions aren’t just from a few clients who went all in, Holston says, but from among the 300 companies using it now. 100 of them were new last year, he adds, including both the “Global 2000″ corporate customers that normally it targets, as well as medium-sized businesses of 5,000 seats or less who decided to buy in.

Having been founded in 2004, and having raised some $39.3 million in venture backing, the company has come a long way to being profitable and growing across its key metrics.

How did the transition happen? Holston says that back in 2006, defense contractor Lockheed Martin had taken its enterprise RSS service, cobbled it together with SharePoint, Google search and some other features to create its own “Facebook for enterprise.” The SharePoint team at Microsoft noticed, and talked to NewsGator about building a fuller-fledged product line.

NewsGator then went on to launch the first versions of its modern software suite at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in 2007, and has been expanding its business since then. Today, the components for its marquee product line, Social Sites for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, include Microblogging, Activity Streams, Communities, Spheres, Social Profiles, Social Insights, as well as desktop and email clients, and integration with Microsofts Lync and Glassboard products.

Beyond these Facebook-style features, the company has taken the typical approach among enterprise vendors, building out additional features for compliance, IT support, local hosting etc. While it provides APIs to import or export data from other products, like Salesforce’s Chatter, SharePoint is where it’s staying focused on, Holston says. ”Our view is that there’s so much that Microsoft is doing to continue to push their enterprise relationships that we can leverage, that we think it’s a rich place to stay.”

When I asked about the long-time plans for the company — say, an acquisition by Microsoft, or an IPO — he said that the plan for now is continuing to grow the company as its core business continues to take advantage of the current market.

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Big consumer brands generate all sorts of consumer interest and expertise, but they’ve generally struggled to capitalize on these relationships to improve themselves. Lithium has been building itself into a market leader at solving this problem over the last ten years, offering white-label community sites and related products that allow brands to let users share ideas with each other — and tell the brands what they’re doing well, or not.

The company is now doubling down on its business, raising a $53.4 million fourth round of funding on top of the $39 million that it has previously brought in.

The competition has been heating up as more brands wake up to the value of user-generated content, with relatively established competitors like Bazaarvoice, Jive Software and Get Satisfaction being joined by newer entrants that have focused on the Facebook platform, like Buddy Media and Vitrue. This additional money will help Lithium build up more of a lead, especially on Facebook where it is relatively new.

New chief executive Rob Tarkoff tells me that the additional funding will go towards doubling the employee headcount from the 200 or so it currently has through hiring and acquisitions (like Scout Labs in 2010). Its existing set of products include support sites and forums, including game mechanics and social ranking features to encourage quality participation, and analytics software to help brands understand what their consumers care about. Beyond building out sales and marketing efforts in the US and around the world, and continuing to invest in its core products, you should look for it to move into adjacent areas.

It only launched its Facebook product in May, for example, which mainly meant introducing its technology for identifying and promoting top users. But maybe it will expand the products it has available for pages — page apps, possibly, or more ways of buying Facebook ads to help page engagement? Tarkoff didn’t confirm that line of speculation, other than to say they were potential new opportunities.

Tarkoff himself has been at the company for around 100 days, having previously been an executive at Adobe, in charge of its digital enterprise solutions businesses. The new round of funding is being led by new investor NEA, with SAP Ventures also getting in, as well as all of the existing investors — Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

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Digital media publisher Ziff Davis has acquired Toolbox.com, a social networking and knowledge exchange website for IT, HR and Finance professionals that has been around since the late nineties and was previously owned by a company called the Corporate Executive Board. Terms were not disclosed.

For Ziff Davis, which was acquired and ‘relaunched’ as a digital-only media publishing company by former Time Inc. exec Vivek Shah in partnership with PE firm Great Hill Partners back in June 2010, this is the fourth acquisition in the past twelve months.

Also read: Ziff Davis Buys Tech Deals Site LogicBuy; Launches Ad Targeting Platform BuyerBase

Toolbox.com says it connects over three million IT experts and executives from across the globe on a monthly basis, having attracted 2.3 million registered members since its founding in 1998.

Basically, Toolbox.com enables users to evaluate IT vendors, plan and manage projects, solve problems and stay in the loop of what’s happening in the world of tech.

Toolbox.com is henceforth a unit of ‘Ziff Davis B2B Focus’, which was formed earlier this year with Ziff Davis’ acquisition of Focus Research, a provider of online research to enterprise buyers and leads to IT vendors.

Other sites operated by Ziff Davis include PCMag.com, ExtremeTech.com and Geek.com.

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There are plenty of companies out there that help you monitor social media activity. Awe.sm has been going deeper into what’s really going on, providing a service that lets developers track all the crucial details of sharing activities, and automatically optimize their own services using that data. Having accumulated some 500 clients using its technology — mostly brands and startups of various sizes — the company has just landed a Series A round of funding led by Foundry Group and GRP Partners.

Don’t think of a cute little graph showing your number of retweets or Likes in the past week. Instead, imagine automatically tracking all the specific actions of those retweets, like how they convert into actual sales of the item that your original tweet had mentioned. That’s just one simple example.

Here’s a more specific one. Stock-tracking platform StockTwits has implemented Awe.sm to track how its users react to things like quarterly earnings reports for public companies. Awe.sm can look at any link that contains its tracking code in any tweet or other mention of a company produced by StockTwits users, auto-detecting the link and letting StockTwits track all of the metadata around who is doing sharing and when it happens. StockTwits can then use this data to generate more sophisticated data around reach and engagement for how word spreads out among users, and alter its product accordingly.

The service is primarily targeted towards developers who are using social sharing as part of their product, who have specific goals they’re looking to accomplish, as cofounder Jonathan Strauss tells me. Anything from figuring out the right types of content to share, to when to share it, who to aim it at, how many clicks it results in, which types of sharing buttons generate the desired types of sharing, which shares result in purchases, etc.

Provided as APIs, Awe.sm sells access based on usage to developers, with the idea that they’ll integrate it into more general analytics services like Google Analytics or Omniture, or into their own custom tools. This also means that developers can use Awe.sm to programmatically change their own services (so no humans staring at graphs). Demandforce’s Timely app, for example, schedules and publishes your tweets when it calculates they’ll have the highest impact. It uses Awe.sm to track all of its tweets, and automatically adjusts the timing for any tweet based on the reactions that it’s seeing across Twitter.

Other clients include GroupOn, Playdom, and LocalResponse.

Many companies are still at the early stages of figuring out how to use sharing. Other tools that are more user-oriented are probably a better fit for them. For example, Facebook’s own analytics product, Insights, can go a long way. Speaking of Facebook, for anyone tracking results from Likes, shares across news feeds, or other activity, they’ll most likely want to use more specific products offered by page management companies or Facebook-focused analytics companies like Kontagent. Awe.sm’s value in these situations may just be in being an additional layer that a more advance page owner ads, or that is added by the service provider. Awe.sm’s hardcore focus on performance marketing also takes it further away from competing against historical rivals like Bit.ly, which offers some of the same enterprise features, but also targets its products more broadly at social media monitoring.

Long-term, Strauss says the goal is to be part of the plumbing that makes the web more efficient as more people come online, and as more companies build products for them. Its focus on customers who can pay, and a revenue model to match, should make it a good business.

The investors, many of whom have invested in similar types of technology providers, seem to think so. “In a world where companies are mindlessly paying money for ‘Likes’ or ‘Followers’, we welcome the new era in which people will use Awe.sm data to start spending their social media budgets on real metrics like customer conversions,” backer Mark Suster from GRP Partners gushes in a press release. “I believe the end of the hyped phase of social media has begun.”

While Foundry Group and GRP Partners led the round, existing investor Neu Venture Capital joined, as did new investor kbs+p Ventures, the investing arm of advertising agency Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners. The company had previously raised $1 million led by GRP Partners with participation from Neu Venture Capital and Apricot Capital.

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src="http://www.it-toolkits.com/images/IT_Infrastructure_Strategy_Charter.gif"
width=91 height=117>What matters first with a social media mistake is
responding quickly, being transparent and demonstrating sincerity — all of
which should follow a social gaffe committed in person and in public. Social
media, though, introduces complications all its own: How you’ve been using it
all along will also affect your ability to clean up after it.

This is why what comes after the mistake is just as important, if not more
so: The chance to learn why it happened in the first place and do something
about it. You may find better ways to use social media because of this. If
you’ve been spammy or thoughtless, you need to own up to that. If your audience
makes good points about your shortcomings (however badly they phrase them), you
need to respond to those too.

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“We’re at an inflection point”, eBay CEO John Donahoe said from the stage at Innovate, eBay’s brand new developer conference that launched today in San Francisco. “We’ll see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we’ve seen in the last 15 years”.

Donahoe’s prediction for the future came as context for giving a more complete introduction today to X.commerce, the platform formed by eBay and its nest eggs PayPal, Magento and GSI — designed to create a robust, full-service and “open” eCommerce solution. The eCommerce solution “to rule them all”, one might say.

But the real kicker is that, as Leena wrote earlier today, what X.commerce really symbolizes is the first instance of eBay creating a business that truly caters to developers. In the past, eBay developers have been divided into the eBay marketplace, PayPal, etc., but now developers have all those technologies in one place, allowing them to create “new shopping and eCommerce experiences based on these interconnected suite of tools”.

One of the more anticipated announcements to come out of Innovate was a partnership between the world’s largest social network and eBay, which will see the latter integrating Facebook’s Open Graph (the tree of connections Facebookers create by sharing and interacting with friends and content on the social network) into its Magento and GSI global commerce platforms.

What does this mean? The partnership will basically give third party developers a bigger voice in the development of social commerce, allowing them to build new social shopping experiences for consumers and retailers, share their ideas, and create personalized apps for buying, selling, and sharing that have Facebook’s social features baked right into them.

While building Facebook’s features into eCommerce offerings may allow them to make shopping more personalized and display friends’ thoughts about products right in their eShops, the truth is that social commerce hasn’t exactly taken off over the last year. Merchants already have the opportunity to set up storefronts on Facebook to sell directly to their customers while they’re networking or surfing a brand’s fan page, but so far sales on the platform haven’t impressed.

It seems that consumers aren’t particularly jazzed about doing their shopping on Facebook — part of which may be due to the novelty of Facebook’s eCommerce or it could simply be a reluctance to embrace new commerce functionality on what is really a platform designed to share pictures and stalk former romances. It also may have something to do with the fact that many consumers are worried that their credit card and personal information is being scooped up by Facebook in the transaction process. Either buyers are redirected to a brand’s own online store, or they buy on Facebook and often have to accept an app request to make a purchase. That app request can give away a bunch of information on the user and it’s really something many consumers are still loathe to do.

Indeed, it’s a result of this that, as VP and General Manager of X.commerce Matthew Mengerink said today, online shopping remains “a very individualistic and lonely experience”. Which is a shame considering the fact that Facebook’s Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing Katie Mitic told the Innovate crowd that shopping is inherently a social activity and that the world is really just beginning to get a taste of “what’s possible with social commerce”.

Of course, to achieve what’s possible with social commerce eBay and Facebook need the developer community to get excited and want to be on board. Yet, as Reuters pointed out, some analysts and eCommerce experts were hoping for a deeper and perhaps more full-featured partnership between the two companies. And Mitic’s announcement was met with little to no applause from the 3,000+ developers and techies on hand.

This could of course be that they were tired, or that the recent changes to Facebook’s platform that took users beyond the “like” button to allowing them to share what they’ve “read” or want to “taste” just don’t sound that enthralling when applied to social commerce. With eBay’s new Facebook integration, developers will now be able to build social commerce apps that allow users to share what products they “buy”, “want”, “own”, or “recommend”. But is this enough to really change the face of social commerce?

Mengerink said that, in the market today, too many shopping apps target the point of sale, but that the real-life process of browsing, discussing what products are appealing or not, and trying different things on, for example, is inherently social, but it doesn’t always involve buying.

“What we’re encouraging developers to think about is to try out the more ‘pre-shopping’ social experience”, he said. Meaning that the process of joining friends at an online store, browsing, sharing, and chattering via enhanced social features is a way to encourage brand recognition, organic word-of-mouth familiarity with products — and is integral to making the online shopping experience more resemblant of offline shopping. And to grow online sales. The question is, of course, whether or not this is truly possible just with “want” and “own” buttons, and just how much these new pre-shopping features can boost a brand’s bottom line.

The virtual shopping experience is a long ways off from one that mimics its offline counterpart, and I’ve yet to be convinced that just because one of my grade school friends interacted with a product on Facebook, which then popped up in my news stream, that I’m more likely to interact with that product and buy it just because of some loose social connection manifesting while I’m in the process of turning off more Facebook sharing features. Yes, it adds to a brand’s network, and if I’m browsing friends’ profiles and see a product I want to learn about before buying, this is a great conversation starter.

What do you think? Is this a win for developers, consumers, eBay, or Facebook (or all of the above)?

Excerpt image courtesy of TechFouzan

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Yammer, an enterprise social network and communications platform, has raised $17 million in new funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Previous investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participated in the round. Palihapitiya will have an observer’s seat on Yammer’s board of directors. This brings Yammer’s total financing to $57 million.

For background, Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008. But over the past year, the startup has expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise.

A year ago, Yammer added number of applications to its platform that increased its functionality beyond just a communications platform, including polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. An activity feed aggregates stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and allows users to follow content. Yammer Connect launched to integrate log-ins into third-party applications and the platform also now supports badges and in-line videos.

And Yammer has grown at a rapid pace. It has been adopted by over 100,000 businesses in 160 countries in less than three years, including employees at more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Clients including 7-11, Ford, Southern Company, Shell and SuperValu have deployed Yammer this year.

Palihapitiya said of the investment in Yammer: “Social networking is destined to have as significant an impact on the enterprise as it has already had in our personal lives…Yammer is the clear leader in enterprise social networking and is redefining collaboration, sharing and productivity in a way that will disrupt an entire class of existing enterprise applications.”

Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks says that the company, which raised $25 million last November, didn’t need to raise additional funding at the moment. But the opportunity for Palihapitiya to help advise, scale and provide his insight to the company was “invaluable.”

The new funding will be used to scale operations across its offices in San Francisco, London and Melbourne. The company is hiring employees in sales, engineering and customer support. Palihapitiya isn’t the first Facebook alum to join Yammer. Sean Parker is on Yammer’s Board of Directors, and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel was the first investor in Yammer. And we know the company has ambitions of being the Facebook for the Enterprise.

Yammer faces competition from Jive, Salesforce's Chatter, CubeTree and others.

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The Web-based social performance platform Rypple is now available on the iPhone, the company is announcing today. Like the desktop-sized website, the new mobile application will allow managers to give real-time feedback to staff, provide coaching, track goals and publicly recognize colleagues for doing great work.

The idea behind Rypple, which sees itself as a “Zynga for the enterprise,” is to use social software in the enterprise environment to build a great work culture. It does this by allowing managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application.

The software also employs various game mechanics, like badges, which can be custom-built to reflect a company’s own values. And, as in gaming, employees can rack up “skills earned,” in a method reminiscent of building up a character in a virtual world or MMORPG, for example.

With the new iPhone application, users can track the company feed for news, update teams on the status of a project, post “thanks” and hand out badges.

The app will be available as a freemium offering. There’s a limited free version, a $5 per user per month version that offers access to goals, real-time peer feedback, 0ne-on-one coaching and recognition, and a $9 per user per month version that includes Rypple’s rapid performance review application, Loops, support, rollout and integration into existing company work systems. The app is available here in iTunes now.

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