Socialcast raises $1M to help your company communicate

Socialcast, a startup that provides tools for communication within a company, has raised $1 million in funding from True Ventures.

In the announcement, True Ventures’ co-founder Phil Black cites Socialcast’s “impressive customer deployments” and its ability to exploit “a rapidly growing niche in the corporate market: social media for the enterprise.” (Socialcast says it isn’t releasing any user numbers) There seemed to be a flood of “build a social network” startups a couple years back, many of them focused on serving businesses. Since then, the flood has subsided a bit, but there’s still plenty of interest in using social tools in a business context — for example, Twitter-for-businesses startup Yammer won the top prize at the TechCrunch50 conference last fall, and we brought Jive Software to this year’s DEMO conference to demonstrate how its business social networking tools can unite internal and external collaboration.

So what does Socialcast bring to the table? Well, it seems to offer a pretty broad product, one that includes more than just a microblogging service, a la Twitter, or a business social network. According to the company’s list of features, Socialcast includes a news feed showing team members’ activity on other sites, microblogging, personal profiles, a social network allowing users to find useful connections in their organizations, and a way to post questions to the company. All of this is customizable within an administrative dashboard. Instead of “Twitter for business,” this more like “Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed for business.” A possible shortcoming of this approach is the fact that companies are already using the existing social networks — for example, the VentureBeat team does its online chatting in a private FriendFeed room.

Along with the funding (which also includes $400,000 in angel backing), the Irvine, Calif. startup also announced that it’s moving to San Francisco, where True is based. GigaOm founder Om Malik, who is a partner at True, is joining Socialcast’s board.

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