Mindshare Technologies, the provider of survey technologies and realtime customer feedback solutions, announced today that it has received a $20 million investment from Sorenson Capital, a private equity firm that specializes in buyout and growth equity investments. The PrivateBank and Trust Company also contributed to the investment, which will be used to accelerate product growth and ramp up hiring.

As part of the investment, Fraser Bullock, managing director of Sorenson Capital and former COO of the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics as well as Ron Mika, a co-founder and managing director of Sorenson Capital, will be joining Mindshare’s board of directors.

Mindshare Technologies provides companies with automated survey and feedback management tools that allow businesses to more effectively interact with their customers and employees, improve customer satisfaction, and encourage customer loyalty. The company also develops and utilizes custom speech and text analytics to allow businesses to automate their customer feedback, using these text analysis tools to pull out key phrases, and save companies from hiring a giant customer relations department.

Different from CRM and the Salesforces of the world, Mindshare instead works with enterprises to build “Enterprise Feedback Management” solutions, which allow these businesses to collect, analyze, consolidate, and use feedback sources from a variety of channels to improve business operations and profitability. Using its proprietary survey technology to capture the voice of the customer in realtime, Mindshare works with businesses to transform this unique data into actionable intelligence and reporting.

The company currently completes more than 175,000 surveys each day in 106 countries, 28 languages, and 25 different industries. According to the team, in August 2011, the company recorded monthly revenues of more than $1.6 million, and grew revenues at 33-percent in 2010. Mindshare currently works with brands like Arby’s, Hertz, Tony Roma’s, Comcast, Marriott and more to improve customer interaction and loyalty.

For more on Mindshare, check ‘em out at home here.

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We continue to hear nothing but great things about Unity. Game developers love it – there are some 500,000 registered seats on Unity, and 150,000 of them are active monthly. Hit games like Bigpoint’s Battlestar Galactica and Gazillion’s Marvel Super Hero Squad were built on Unity. And EA inked a wide ranging deal with Unity last year to get Unity tools in front of EA developers.

Today, 12,000 of the companies active developers are in China. But in 18 months, says CEO David Helgason, China-based developers should be 40% of Unity’s business. That’s why Unity went with Asian investors over U.S. based venture funds in this round, he says.

The company isn’t commenting on valuation, but a couple of sources told us that this round values Unity at over $100 million. It looks to be a big win for Sequoia, who got in early.

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Virtualization software giant VMware this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire Shavlik Technologies, a provider of cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses.

Financial terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed later this year, were not disclosed.

Shavlik Technologies provides a portfolio of on-premise and SaaS-based management solutions that enable SMBs to manage, monitor and secure their IT environments when moving to virtual and cloud computing IT deployments. The company is said to have more than 3500 customers using their on premise IT management products.

VMware and Shavlik already had a partnership in place with regards to the former’s VMware GO product, a joint SaaS offering that has been available since 2009 and basically assists SMBs with the installation and management of VMware’s vSphere.

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D2 Technologies, which markets embedded IP communications software platforms, has acquired Webia Technologies through an all-stock transaction.

Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, with development centers in Taiwan and Shanghai, China, Webia was one of the first software vendors to introduce set-top box media player platforms based on Google’s Android OS.

Webia recently unveiled what it claims is the world’s first Android TV solution at Broadband Taiwan 2010.

D2 provides a converged communications client dubbed mCUE that offers OEMs a platform for Android OS-based devices such as tablets, IP media phones, connected TVs and mobile handsets, delivering services like Skype, GoogleTalk and Yahoo! Messenger.

Through the acquisition of Webia, D2 says its mCUE platform is now even more ideally designed for connected TVs and set-top boxes.

John Wu, formerly CEO of Webia, joins D2 as VP of products for the company’s Mobile and Personal Communications Business Unit (MPCBU). He will be based in D2’s Taiwan offices.

(Press release)

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Citrix Systems has made a strategic investment in GlassHouse Technologies, a global data center consulting and managed services firm, expanding the existing relationship between the two companies with Citrix becoming a premier desktop virtualization partner of GlassHouse.

The investment also provides Citrix with an observer’s seat on the GlassHouse board of directors. Others terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

GlassHouse Technologies stresses that the expanded relationship between the companies will not interfere with its current business model as a vendor-independent consulting firm, but that remains to be seen.

According to our data, GlassHouse had raised roughly $77 million up until today.

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IBM today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BLADE Network Technologies, a privately held data center switching company based in Santa Clara, California.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Update: according to Tech Trader Daily, the transaction is rumored to be valued at roughly $400 million, according to one of the publication’s sources.

BLADE, founded in 2006, specializes in software and devices that route data and transactions to and from servers; the company provides blade server and top-of-rack switches as well as software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads.

BLADE’s investor line-up includes NEC Corporation, Juniper Networks, an unnamed “third technology industry leader” and Garnett & Helfrich Capital.

IBM and BLADE have worked together since 2002, and according to the release boast “thousands of joint clients”.

The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews.

IBM has been mighty acquisitive this year, having picked up – deep breath – Initiate Systems, Cast Iron Systems, Sterling Commerce, Coremetrics, BigFix, Datacap, Unica, OpenPages, Netezza and now BLADE. Again, that’s in 2010 alone.

Care to venture a guess which company is next on IBM’s shopping list?

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IBM today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BLADE Network Technologies, a privately held data center switching company based in Santa Clara, California.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

BLADE, founded in 2006, specializes in software and devices that route data and transactions to and from servers; the company provides blade server and top-of-rack switches as well as software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads.

BLADE’s investor line-up includes NEC Corporation, Juniper Networks, an unnamed “third technology industry leader” and Garnett & Helfrich Capital.

IBM and BLADE have worked together since 2002, and according to the release boast “thousands of joint clients”.

The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews.

IBM has been mighty acquisitive this year, having picked up – deep breath – Initiate Systems, Cast Iron Systems, Sterling Commerce, Coremetrics, BigFix, Datacap, Unica, OpenPages, Netezza and now BLADE.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Marlin Equity Partners, a Los Angeles-based private investment firm with over $1 billion of capital under management, has agreed to acquire all outstanding shares of core systems software company Phoenix Technologies common stock for $3.85 per share in cash, or approximately $139 million in total consideration.

The purchase price represents a premium of approximately 27% over Phoenix’s closing share price of $3.02 on August 17. The company is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol PTEC.

The agreement was unanimously approved by Phoenix’s board of directors and is expected to close before year’s end, provided the transaction meets customary closing conditions as well as the approval of the company’s stockholders.

Thirty years ago, Phoenix’s core systems software helped launch the PC industry with its original BIOS product. A majority of Phoenix Technologies’ revenue still comes from designing, developing, and supporting core system software such as SecureCore Tiano, SecureCore, and Embedded BIOS for computing devices.

The company’s total revenues from continuing operations for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended June 30, 2010 were $13.7 million. Gross margin from continuing operations for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 was $11.4 million.

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Inform Technologies, a New York-based developer and provider of semantic web solutions, this morning announced it has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backers Spark Capital, The Stephens Group, and The Oklahoma Publishing Company.

In addition, the startup has announced that Tony Dunaif, former SVP at Internet Broadcasting, has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer. The news of the new hire comes about a month after the company announced that it had recruited Matt Zelesko, former CEO of Internet TV company Joost, as its new technology chief.

Inform builds and provides solutions for the publishing industry, using proprietary semantic Web processes to automate content categorization and relevancy matching along with the association of contextually related articles, images, and videos from a publisher’s archive or from across the Web. The company also provides SEO services and claims it can boost publishers’ search rankings significantly thanks to an increase in links within articles, authoritative links incoming to page and management of taxonomy.

Publishers like CBS Interactive, CNN, NBC and The Economist use Inform solutions to drive more user engagement, traffic and ad impressions. You can see an example of Inform technology in action on its website, e.g. for category ‘Internet’.

Freshly hired Tony Dunaif will be facilitating all company sales, marketing initiatives and internal, external communications from this point forward. Prior to Inform, Dunaif served as Senior Vice President of Market Development at Internet Broadcasting where he was responsible for growing external relationships as well as developing and executing strategies around the company’s mobile initiatives.

Previously, Dunaif served as Vice President, Content Partnerships and International Development at Brightcove, and the man has also held senior-level positions throughout his 12-year tenure at MTV Networks.

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InterGuard allows businesses to limit access to certain software applications, PSP, chat, social networking sites and even tracks employee work output and productivity. The software also monitors, records and controls employee computer activity and detects and averts activities and data-flows that could put a company in jeopardy.

The virtue of InterGuard is that it provides a number of services within one platform. Currently over 10,000 companies already use the Threat Management platform, with a tally of more than 200,000 total users. But enterprise data security is a competitive space and Awareness faces competition from the likes of McAfee, Symantec and others.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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