Customer relationship management “sucks,” according to Nimble chief executive Jon Ferrara. Investors are throwing money at the company, and Nimble is responding with new features that it hopes will turn “sucks” to “sales.”

“Since we started two years ago we’ve been getting phone calls from a number of large venture capital firms and tech companies interested in investing in or acquiring Nimble,” Ferrara told VentureBeat. “I’ve said no to all of them.”

Ferrara calls Nimble a social customer relationship management (CRM) company. “Life and business are social, and people buy from people they like,” he said. “In the old days we got to know people by going to their offices. Now we do it over the Internet in six different tabs.”

The company recently took on a seed round of funding from Google Ventures as well as a number of well known techies such as Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah, and Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban. Why such an eclectic group for a $1 million seed round? Ferrara says they’ve all been wanting a piece of Nimble for awhile, and they all support the new features Ferrara will be releasing by the end of this month.

CRM systems act as a database of people you have been in contact with. From quick e-mail conversations to full out meetings, this often cloud-based software — the best-known vendor of which is Salesforce.com — is your little black book of sales. But because of how many different ways there are to connect with people, along with how many different people we can reach with the advent of social media, customer relationship management has become extremely messy.

Nimble’s solution takes your e-mail, calendar, social networks, business networks, and a number of other points of connection and aggregates them into its software. But even with all of these integrations, CRM systems are static, one-way streets. That’s where Nimble’s changes start.

“Automating all the areas of customer engagement” is Nimble’s new goal. Soon, you will be able to tweet back, write on someone’s Yammer wall, share a story over LinkedIn, or like a Facebook post all within the system. When you connect with someone, you will see all of their loaded social networks, e-mails, and other points of contact and be able to engage right within the window.

Within the beginning of this year, Nimble will integrate with Hubspot, Mailchimp, WooFoo, Zendesk, Yammer, Tweetdeck, and Hootsuite to capture the wide range of “tabs” we keep open all day just to chat.

With the topic of “big data” floating around, Ferrara wanted to touch on not just what you could do or enter into Nimble, but rather what Nimble could tell you. Currently, Nimble’s system sends out daily e-mails announcing a contact’s birthday, job change, or other tid bits of information. But it will soon add alerts to let you know about possible relationship changes with your contacts. Perhaps the lead you once relied on is slipping away, or one of your coworkers has just made a connection to the same CEO you pitched last month. This type of information will soon be included in your daily e-mails, so you can have a better grasp on who you know and how well you know them.

Nimble isn’t alone on this front. Companies such as Nutshell are also adding interactivity, such as showing when a lead is “getting hot” and allowing you to chat with other employees without leaving Nutshell’s portal. But even with these new functions, vendors like Nimble and Nutshell will have to watch out they don’t go the way of  old, cumbersome enterprise software by adding so many features that users just ignore them.

Nimble’s seed round may have stirred up a lot of product development, but Ferrara isn’t done looking for cash yet, which is completely out of his character. The Nimble CEO founded Goldmine, a predecessor to today’s CRM technology, 20 years ago and sold it for over $100 million without ever having taken venture money. At the time, Ferrara felt like he would be diluting the value of his company, but he has since been won over to the positive effects of a little capital injection.

Jason Calacanis

“The mistake I made with Goldmine is that if I had taken money at the right time, I wouldn’t have sold it as a $100 million company,” said Ferrara, “It would have been a $1 billion company.”

So Ferrara has trodden lightly into VC territory this time around, after having put in $2 million of his own dollars into Nimble. Seed investor Don Dodge, currently a developer advocate for Google, was introduced to Ferrara and after three hours of chatting in Dodge’s backyard, the two decided to move forward with an investment. Mark Cuban impressed Ferrara, in essence, because of his ability to tell you what to do based on what he thinks is right. Dharmesh Shah brought marketing software Hubspot to the table, which is being integrated into Nimble’s offerings. Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis brought something different to the table: chutzpah.

“Jason has a reputation and people feel strongly one way or the other about him based on that,” explained Ferrara. “I had formed an opinion and after I got to know the guy, I really came to like his chutzpah and his ability to say what he thinks regardless of what people feel about it.”

Currently, Ferrara is on the hunt for his first round of institutional funding. He would like to find the right investors for a $6-10 million round. But it’s not all about the money this time around.

“I’m not in this thing to make $100 million, I already did that,” Ferrara said frankly. “I want to disrupt the market … because I think CRMs today suck.”

Photo of Jon Ferrara via Michael Krigsman, Photo of Jason Calacanis via Joi/Flickr

Think you’re an email ninja? Check yourself before you wreck your (online) self with Tout’s special year-end product, Year in Review, built to help show email users their habits and trends in 2011.

After allowing Tout access to your email, it scans your account (for up to 72 hours, depending on traffic at the time) and subsequently sends a private report to you, complete with charts and infographics. The report features useful statistics like the number of emails you “dealt” with over the past year, the percentage of emails sent as compared to received, and the response rate (both from you to your emails received and from your friends to the emails you sent them).

Why scan your emails? Knowing how often or not people respond to your messages may help improve your efficiency, professionally or personally. Knowing who is spamming you too often may strain a friendship, or help enable improved communication. The list goes on, but using Tout’s Year in Review almost seems like getting a physical for your online communication habits–maybe a bit annoying or overwhelming, but extremely helpful.

The report dives deep into your mail, telling you your busiest email month (mine was December), your busiest day, your busiest hour, your top 10 contacts (this was fun), popular words in your subject lines, emails by day, week, and of course, the highest numbers of emails sent by specific senders (of course, mostly newsletters). Needless to say, the whole experience was fairly terrifying, but kind of addicting at the same time.

Seeing that I had dealt with over 15,000 emails in 2011 really sparked some personal questions regarding time management (let alone quality of life).

The Tout App service launched a few months ago. The app is meant to be an extension to your email and your customer relationship management (CRM) systems (i.e. Salesforce, Highrise) which helps to “coordinate and streamline your emails through templates, tracking, and scheduling.”

By using it, you can better measure analytics on who views and clicks your emails, send out more group emails at a speedier pace, share email templates with your team, and schedule your emails in advance. On top of this, you can connect it to your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to improve the way you interact with your connections and followers. San Francisco-based Tout refers to their product as EMM (E-mail management) software.

Tout is a free plugin with a freemium model (for teams and high volume users), and they also have an iPhone app available for 99 cents.

Try the Year in Review product to get a better sense of just how productive (or unproductive) you are with your emails (and to see who is bothering you most), and then run screaming to sign up for the beta of unroll.me, which after connecting to your email, helps you unsubscribe from your email newsletters, all at once!

CRM, or customer relationship management, is at the top of everyone’s mind these days.

Just as important as attracting new business is developing and nurturing the relationships you already have. Doing so these days requires a sharp eye on the Internet (especially social channels) and equal parts patience and responsiveness.

Here are my top ten tips for keeping your customers satisfied, engaged and returning to do business with you again and again.

1. Let your customers write the rules of engagement.

There was a time when companies told customers how they could contact them; now, customers are in control.

Give customers options for communicating with you. When a customer is having an issue, he or she wants to get in touch with you in the fastest way possible. That may be by phone, via email, through support forums or even on social media channels like Twitter.

But with all these means of communication, you need to be much more vigilant to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Be sure to monitor every channel and respond to outreach.

2. Track social media.

Social media has given the customer a very powerful voice, and if your business is the focus of an online public outcry, the results can be devastating.

Take a look at what happened when Netflix raised its prices or when Bank of America started charging a monthly fee for use of debit cards.

Companies need to be keeping a close eye on what customers are talking about on Twitter, Facebook and other channels so they can react swiftly before a situation that could have been easily fixed blows up into a public relations nightmare.

3. Respond at the speed of the Internet.


The immediacy of the Internet requires real-time action when online complaints crop up. A quick response decreases the likelihood of a big fiasco.

Hire a community manager or appoint someone from your customer support team who to thoroughly monitor the social web for complaints about your organization. Then empower those individuals so they can act quickly to resolve complaints and issues.

One great example is how some hotels are now diligently searching the Internet for complaints and resolving them quickly — before guests even check out, in fact.

4. Apologize appropriately
.

There is a big difference between saying to a customer, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” and saying to them sincerely, “I’m sorry.”

When it’s time to apologize, there are four simple steps to ensure the apology is made the right way and the customer is appeased.

First, give the reason for the error. Customers are more accepting to learn that a misstep was unintentional. Next, make the apology sincere and truthful. Apologies that are perceived to be insincere are worse than no apology at all. Then, take responsibility. Do not assign the blame elsewhere. Finally, offer a solution. Although the offered solution may not be exactly what every customer wants, most will be satisfied that one was offered, which in turn helps close the issue.

5. Be transparent.


Create a culture of transparency in your company.

Facebook is an example of a perceived lack of transparency — and a resultant customer backlash. Recently, the company admitted to tracking the web activity of its 750 million users even after those users had logged out of the site.

These are the kinds of things where even the biggest companies can lose customer loyalty. Long-term success comes to those companies that are open with their customers and win their trust.

6. Don’t make the same mistake twice.


Only four percent of people complain about a single customer support failure. But 96 percent of people complain when they’ve been burned twice by the same company.

With so many tools available for customers to talk about when a company has failed them, it is absolutely necessary that companies take the required steps needed to ensure that mistakes happen only once.

7. Implement customer satisfaction ratings.

Customer satisfaction ratings and surveys are a great way to see where their customers are happy and where they aren’t.

But surveys can offer a false sense of security. How many companies actually go the extra step and take action based on the information a survey reveals?

Make satisfaction ratings and surveys actionable; dont’ just accumulate data for data’s sake.

8. Keep your agents happy.


Not everyone is cut out for a career in customer service. It takes a special personality to spend an entire day listening to problems and finding solutions.

Your customer services reps are the voice of your company; they speak for you to your customers. It’s important to rotate people through different tasks so they don’t get burnt out.

If you make it easy for your customer service reps to deliver great service, they’ll be happier and so will your customers.

9. The casual customer versus the steady customer.


A company’s response to a customer complaint should depend on what kind of customer it is dealing with: a steady customer or a casual customer.

Steady customers tend to value the relationship with the company. Research shows that these relationship-focused customers are more amenable to recovery efforts, regardless of any compensation, than casual customers are.

An admission of wrongdoing and sincere apology can be more important than restitution. The company should communicate that it values the relationship with its customers.

Casual customers are less won over by proof that the company values them and may care mainly about getting a refund.

10. Stop problems before they start.


Don’t wait for customers to tell you what’s wrong. Instead, use tools to help you, your agents and your community manager to identify where your company’s weak spots are.

As mentioned earlier, use surveys or customer satisfaction ratings to do this. Knowing where your customers need help gives you the power to create useful content for them, or better staff for when your help desk is at its busiest.

Zack Urlocker is COO of Zendesk. He is responsible for all the company’s customer-facing areas, including sales, marketing, business development and services. He has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry and has held executive management positions at MySQL, Active Software, webMethods and Borland. He is a frequent speaker and writer about disruptive technologies and business models.

The “cloud” is a buzz-word that refers to the new way applications are being delivered: over the Internet.

Some analysts said the price SAP is paying for SuccessFactors was “nuts.” It’s a whopping 49 percent premium over SuccessFactors’ market value. SuccessFactors sells software that helps manage employee performance. This doesn’t exactly exude sex appeal. It’s also not a big play in mobile, big data or any of the other buzz-worthy areas considered broadly strategic these days.

But looked at more closely, the SuccessFactors deal is more than just another purchase by a hungry software giant trying to transform itself. From what I can garner, it’s actually a brilliant move on several fronts. SAP is way behind the cloud movement, and this purchase could help it catch up. And the deal could even propel SAP into a more compelling beast still, by helping it actually break free from the chains to its existing model, which is to sell software upfront to companies for thousands (or even millions) of dollars — something few companies want to do anymore. More on this in a second.

If SAP pulls this acquisition off properly, it could deal solid blows against Oracle, its main competitor, and IBM, another competitor. My analysis is helped by an interview earlier today with SAP’s Sanjay J. Poonen, president of global solutions, and informed by the insights picked up at the CloudBeat conference we produced last week, during which we talked with several experts, including Oracle’s Rick Schultz.

Here are nine main reasons this looks like a deft move:

1. Talent management is the future

Talent management is a key area of growth in the economy going forward. Ask your company’s human resources or recruiting expert; they’re likely to concur. With the Web, people can boost their profiles, they become more accessible, and they’re therefore more poachable. That means companies need to act more agressively to protect their valuable employees. Distinguishing the good from the bad performers is crucial.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman once told me created created his company on the conviction that on the web, people have essentially become small businesses (concerned with pushing their personal brands). Employees care more about where they work, and they’ll move quickly to find better work.

Ray Wang, head of San Francisco-based Constellation Research, told BusinessWeek: “What SAP had in human resources — basic transactional software such as payroll — was good enough for the old era. In the new era, performance reviews and talent management will be important.”

SAP’s Sanjay J. Poonen, President of Global Solutions, asserted the same thing in his interview with VentureBeat today. He pointed to the growing competition between companies — and countries — to attract employees.

“This is a talent economy,” Pooenen said.

SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard

2. Talent? Well, SuccessFactors has that too

Lars Dalgaard, SuccessFactors’ CEO (pictured left) is considered a passionate, savvy leader, and SAP picks him up with this deal. He’ll become the executive vice president of cloud at SAP, helping the company navigate one of the most important future industries.

Add to this the fact that SAP has lost some talent lately, namely John Wookie, who had headed SAP’s on-demand strategy, and Jeff Stiles, SVP, Solution Marketing, another executive who led on cloud issues, but who leaves in January.

SAP has flubbed its efforts to build much of worth in the cloud so far, and Dalgaard could really help.  He’s shown what he can do: He founded SuccessFactors ten years ago, raised a little more than $45 million, and is now selling it for $3.4 billion — no small feat. By the way, Dalgaard launched  the company’s “Dashboard” product at DEMO, the conference we co-produce, in 2005 (watch this demo to see him in action).

3. Employee Performance gives SAP a leg-up on competing products

SuccessFactors is the undisputed leader in its field. Recently, Forrester rated the Plateau Systems talent management software the best in its sector, and Plateau is now owned by SuccessFactors (SuccessFactors bought it in April). Oracle’s horse in this race is PeopleSoft, which is part of the new Oracle Fusion, but the product is widely considered inferior. It didn’t even show up in the list of Forrester’s top talent management vendors. Indeed, it’s precisely the lack of innovation in the so-called “human capital management” (HCM) area by the big software leaders — SAP included — that led to the rise of other players in this space such as Taleo (whose revenues come mostly from recruiting), Workday, Ultimate Software, and Cornerstone OnDemand. Some say the latter is SuccessFactors’ toughest competitor.

4. It fills a big hole in SAP’s own offering

With the acquisition of SuccessFactors, SAP can now boast it covers the four top segments where cloud providers offer software: customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration, procurement and human capital management (HCM). So far with its HCM, SAP has offered core HR and payroll software, but it hasn’t offered a cloud compelling employee performance software. While SAP has offered on-premise talent management software (as well as on-premise workforce analytics, and shared services delivery), SuccessFactors enriches that considerably with its focus on the cloud.

SuccessFactors actually comprises several offerings, including talent management, recruiting management, goal management, performance reviews and business execution. More significantly, picking up SuccessFactors will likely help SAP slow the rumored hemorrhaging of SAP customers to companies like SuccessFactors, Workday and SalesForce. Other SAP customers, including Siemens, had started using best-of-breed on-demand (cloud) talent management apps like SuccessFactors alongside their SAP core HCM product — causing a dangerous beachhead for them to start using other cloud products in other areas.

Dan Scholnick is a general partner at Trinity Ventures. In this conversation with VentureBeat editor-in-chief and founder Matt Marshall, he discusses the future and potential of cloud technologies.

Scholnick will also be speaking at CloudBeat 2011, VentureBeat’s upcoming enterprise cloud conference, so you can catch him there for more perspective. He’ll be moderating a case study session with Thomas Kelly, Enterprise Architect for Cloud Services at Best Buy.

For Scholnick, “cloud” is a vague term, but is all about making IT more responsive to business needs. Cloud-based services are easier and faster to deploy than in-house services, which means an IT department can respond to business requests and add new applications literally overnight. That’s a remarkably new development in technology.

“The market opportunity is enormous,” says Scholnick in this video.

At the moment, cloud services are a miniscule part of overall IT spending, but Scholnick believes that it’s where the long-term future of technology lies.

In the video, Scholnick and Marshall discuss Salesforce.com, New Relic, NoSQL, SugarCRM and others. And, he says, he’d be willing to fund a CRM company. Even with all the competition, there is still a lot of potential in this market.

“That’s what we do at the end of the day, is fund disruptive companies,” says Scholnick.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud event, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh, VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

The New York City-based startup has built a mobile customer relationship management (CRM) platform that lets restaurants offer deals, loyalty programs, news and even table waiting management, directly to customers’ phones. The company was a part of NYC’s Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s first class, all of whom presented on stage during ERA’s demo day today.

BuzzTable launched several weeks ago with its simple table waiting management, which lets restaurants use phones, instead of the more traditional buzzers, to alert restaurant-goers that their table is ready. The company says that buzzers were used over 1 billion times in the last year, but since they’re dumb devices, restaurants had no useful data to gather from them. Buzzers are also expensive (most cost around $50) and get lost easily, often costing restaurants thousands of dollars every year to replace.

With BuzzTables’ platform, restaurants get information about their customers via an iPad app as they’re waiting. Customers waiting for a seat receive a text message telling them when there’s space available, and they’re also directed to download BuzzTable’s app. Restaurants can then use the app to stay in touch with customers by delivering news, or tracking loyalty programs.

BuzzTable says it’s filling a gap created by popular daily deal sites like Groupon, which don’t care if customers end up going back to a particular restaurant.

The company has progressed quickly in its time at ERA. Four months ago it only had basic wireframes (early design prototypes) for its app and service; now it has a fully working product that’s being used by four restaurants in New York City. So far, BuzzTable’s service has helped seat 7,524 people and 1,837 tables. The company is in discussions with national chains, including Ruby Tuesday.

BuzzTable is in the process of raising $750,000, and it hopes to expand to over 300 restaurants and three national chains in the next year. The company was founded by four friends — Warner Siebert, John Williams, John Brennan and Mike Cerrone — who have all previously founded startups.

The guest post, by Justin Gray of LeadMD, looked innocuous enough at first. To our editors, it at first seemed like a straightforward list of the pros and cons of several different marketing automation solutions: Eloqua, Genius, Marketo, Pardot and Silverpop.

Unfortunately, when we published the post we neglected to mention one important fact: Gray’s company, LeadMD, is a reseller of one of those services, Marketo.

We should have disclosed that. Once alerted to the fact, we promptly added that disclosure to the article. We also rushed to correct a number of factual errors that Marketo’s competitors pointed out in the article, and we’ve invited those competitors to post followup articles of their own. One of them, Eloqua, accepted, and we published its post, “What’s next for marketing automation?” But it didn’t stop the stream of critical comments or emails, which eventually wore my patience thin.

The controversy pointed out one important thing, however: We need to know more about marketing automation. And there’s clearly a lot of interest in this topic.

So we invited Joe Chernov, vice president of content marketing at Eloqua, to join us in a Q&A. Joe has been criticizing our handling of the post firmly (yet politely) via e-mail for several days, so rather than pull any punches we decided to take our discussion into the public forum. I had questions for Joe about marketing automation, and he also had questions for me about VentureBeat’s handling of the story. Both exchanges appear below.

We’re also looking forward to continuing to report on marketing automation more carefully in the future, and we’d be especially interested to interview real users of the technology to get past the marketing claims. Got stories? Let us know.

Dylan Tweney, VentureBeat: Marketing automation sounds like another name for lead generation and customer relationship management. What’s the difference?

Joe Chernov, Eloqua: For the most part, marketing automation requires a customer relationship management system. Sometimes when someone who has never heard of the category before asks me what marketing automation is, I’ll tell them, “Think of your CRM system. Now think of your CRM system with a marketing engine build on top.”

Marketing automation combines technology, typically hosted, with business processes that score leads based on fixed criteria like title and size of company, as well as dynamic criteria, such as which web pages the person viewed, whether the individual attended a webinar or clicked through to an offer. Ultimately this information allows the marketer to better target messages and promotions to individuals based on their stated and implied interests. That process is generally called “lead nurturing,” which is a popular buzzword in the industry.

VentureBeat: I’ve already got Salesforce.com. Why would I need to add yet another service?

Chernov: Congrats! So do most of our clients. In fact, we tell prospects: If you don’t have a CRM system, you probably aren’t the right fit for marketing automation.

But to answer your question, you need another service because the goal of marketing automation is to get the ‘right’ leads in the hands of sales at the ‘right’ time. In many ways it’s an efficiency story: marketing automation is based on the concept of “nurturing” leads with relevant content until the individual appears ready to buy, and then routing that prospect to a sales rep at the optimal point in the buying process.

Most marketing automation systems, and not just Eloqua’s product, are integrated deeply into the top CRM systems. It’s a your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter relationship.

VentureBeat: How complicated are these services to implement?

Chernov: We are talking about a fairly significant shift in thinking for most companies. What job titles are given which score? What is more consistent with purchase behavior, a whitepaper download or webinar attendance? What conversion rate do we need if we are to make our numbers given the number of names in our database? These are unfamiliar, if not foreign, questions for many marketers. As a result, the “complications” are less on the technology side and more on the business process side.

We offer an educational program that promises to get new clients up and running in a few days. Other companies in the space have similar programs. Although it’s a rough and tumble category sometimes, I believe we all want to see this space continue to grow, so most vendors invest in training and education — both at the start and throughout the relationship.

VentureBeat: What’s the best way for a company to evaluate competing MA services that they’re considering?

Chernov: Ha. Now we are getting a little closer to the fault I found with your article!

There are a number of trustworthy people and companies in this category. A specialty analyst firm called SiriusDecisions really understands the marketing operations role (the function we often sell into), and they produce reliable research. As does Forrester Research. An independent named David Raab produced a behemoth report that breaks down pretty much every vendor and them some. I have personally found his writing to be reliable.

However there are a number of boutique shops who resell or service a subset of marketing automation vendors but claim to speak for the industry. That model can be confusing to a potential buyer.

Ultimately, I’d say this: You are going to have a relationship with your marketing automation vendor. It’s not ‘just’ a technology purchase. Do you trust them? My father said, “Trust your instinct. That’s why you have it.”

VentureBeat: What does an entry-level MA solution cost?

Chernov: There’s a product for every price point. I don’t want to speak for other vendors, but if you are a dentist’s office and want to be found online and do some lightweight nurturing of potential patients, well there’s a solution out there for a couple hundred bucks a month. If you are a multinational Fortune 500, well you can spend in the tens of thousands monthly. For a business with a small marketing department and sales team on a CRM system, figure the starting point is $1,500 or so per month.

Chernov: Now I’ve got some questions for you. What was your understanding of marketing automation prior to this “situation” and how has it changed?

VentureBeat: I knew very little about marketing automation and VentureBeat hadn’t covered it much, if at all. This was our introduction to the field.

Chernov: Had you known initially that the author of the article was a reseller for only one of the vendors reviewed, what would you have done differently?

VentureBeat: For starters, we would have disclosed that fact right away. As it happened, one of our editors did know this fact but didn’t add it to the author’s bio, which was a mistake.

Apart from that, I would have examined the story more closely for potential bias, and tried to educate myself more about the marketing automation space, so that I could make a more careful edit. That’s easy to say in hindsight, but generally we try to be alert to these things. Sometimes the generally fast pace of the news overwhelms our editing processes though.

Chernov: In our exchanges, you seemed committed to leaving the article up, but ‘making good’ with those who felt slighted by offering them an opportunity to contribute an article. What was the benefit to your solution?

VentureBeat: Unpublishing a story is never a good solution, in my opinion, because it leaves a vacuum that can only be filled by Google cache searches and the like. It makes it look like you have something to hide. Anyway, as a publisher of news, we can’t really hide something we’ve taken pains to publish. So making corrections allows us to try and make the original article better.

Offering counterpoints from other contributors helps widen the discussion and give our readers a more balanced view. Rather than try to quash the argument, I want to foster a debate, ideally right here on our site.

Chernov: Historically, news organizations that review consumer products have processes in place to remove all perceived bias. Reviewers, for example, need to return products to the manufacturer after testing. Do you feel there is a different standard when reviewing business-to-business products, like marketing automation in this case?

VentureBeat: We have those guidelines as well, and when we review products we take the same pains to avoid bias, and to disclose it where it’s unavoidable. However, this article wasn’t intended to be a review of these products: It’s an op-ed piece from a contributor who has some experience working in the field. We viewed it as an introduction to a market that we hadn’t covered much and weren’t expert in ourselves.

Chernov: Moving forward, will you ask contributors if they have a material connection to any of the subjects in the story?

VentureBeat: Absolutely. We’ve already added that to our contributor guidelines.

Chernov: You said that I criticized firmly but politely. As the executive editor for one of the technology industry’s most influential news sites, what would be the ideal reaction you would hope to receive from a vendor who perceives some injustice at the hands of a major publication?

VentureBeat: Firm but polite insistence that I was wrong. And rational persistence.

Like anyone, I’m busy and I’m likely to respond briefly (and perhaps irritably) to criticism of my amazing news team’s work. But if your argument has merit, it’s in my interest to hear it. More importantly, our readers need to hear it. That’s why we welcome comments, pro and con. And when necessary, we run followup stories.

Chernov: Is VentureBeat ever going to respond to one of my emails again after this ordeal?

VentureBeat: I’ve already created a special “Joe Chernov” filter in Gmail. I won’t say what folder it puts your mail into.

Funnel image credit: Gossamar. Photo of Joe Chernov courtesy Eloqua.

Assistly’s application gives businesses ways to interact with customers via various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as email, all through a single window. Like the customer service product it is, Assistly listened to its own reviews and found smaller and mid-sized businesses could not afford the product.

Enter new business model, Assistly 2.0.

Co-founder and chief executive Alex Bard told VentureBeat the company now offers the account with Assistly free. Assistly wants smaller and mid-sized businesses to try out the company’s software and find out if it needs to expand.

“We want to grow with our customers,” Bard said. He said he hopes customers will identify their business needs and be willing to pay for more accounts.

Small and mid-sized businesses are deterred from buying because CRM pricing levels are difficult to grasp, Bard said. Companies don’t understand what features are worth paying for or what they will utilize, he said. That’s why Assistly has taken the freemium route — a model that gives customers a taste of a service and then charges for premium services later. Their new pricing model looks like this:

The “flex agent” is an employee who only uses the CRM software on the occasion. A developer may be called into customer service action at the launch of a new product. That developer can spend 25 hours assisting customers that week and only pay $25 for his usage. All full-time users after the initial agent pay $49 a month — which includes unlimited usage for the CRM software.

The company is going the popular “gamification” route to get users to try out features in the service. Setting up new features within the app gives customers rewards such as hours of free usage. For example, if a company connects its Twitter account to Assistly, it earns 3 free hours. The company is gamifying customer feedback in Assistly 2.0. Similar prizes are awarded when companies receive good feedback..

Assistly’s competitors are other social-based customer relationship apps like Zendesk, Parature, RightNow. The company also competes with CRM supergiant Salesforce, who is an investor in the company.

A competitor that is also an investor? Yup.

“We target 1-800 employee companies,” he said. “Their sweet spot is medium and large enterprises.”

Though they occasionally cross paths, Salesforce generally acts as more of a strategic investment. Assistly works with Salesforce to cover the a company’s overall CRM needs.

When asked if they would welcome an offer from Salesforce to buy the company, Bard said he wanted to create a large, standalone business. As far as the future it concerned, Assistly is developing iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Bard expects the mobile apps will go live at the end of Q3.

The company currently serves clients like Instagram, Klout, Vimeo, Yelp, Etsy, Spotify, Pandora, Square and more. San Francisco, Calif.-based Assistly was founded in 2009 and currently has 35 employees. Investors include True Ventures, Social Leverage, Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce.com and Kenny Van Zant.

Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that wraps together the best apps from multiple companies that all do one thing very well.

Box.net (which specializes in enterprise cloud storage) is moving in that direction by adding the ability to access and use files from other companies like customer relationship management software provider Salesforce.com and Google Docs, an online document editor. That’s also a strategy that companies like Microsoft and Apple seem to be avoiding, Levie said.

“With iCloud, Apple’s … seeing the cloud as a way to connect their devices together and their software,” Levie said. “We think it’s moving in the direction of openness, by combining the tools together and making it work seamlessly.”

iCloud is Apple’s next iteration of MobileMe, which will include access to online mail, contacts, and calendar applications. When a user makes a new contact or calendar entry on his or her iOS device, the entry is automatically put in the cloud and then pushed to all other iOS devices. If you ever change that information, it is automatically updated on all devices. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs also talked about three other new iCloud apps — Documents, Photo Stream, and iTunes in the Cloud — when he unveiled the service in June.

Levie said that Microsoft was attempting to do the same thing with Office 365, the company’s online version of its flagship Office software. It’s a cloud-based version of Office and gives customers access to document editing, email, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software under a single blanket.

Box.net’s strategy is to do one thing — cloud storage — and be very good at it. And if Levie’s prediction of where the market’s heading plays out, the company could see a big payoff. The startup seems to have investors convinced that it’s on the right road — it just managed to raise a $48 million round of funding that it will use to double its engineering and sales staffs. On the other hand, it’s difficult to discount Microsoft and Apple’s strategies — with market caps of $209 billion and $300 billion respectively, they certainly have a lot of weight behind them.

But Box.net does currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is also no stranger to mobile — as of January, its iPhone application recorded more than 250,000 downloads and its Android application had been downloaded more than 70,000 times.

“We can only build so much and of our limited time we want to be the best place to store and manage your data,” Levie said. “The competition thinks very differently.”

The new service, Intuit Anywhere, lets developers connect their apps to Intuit’s Partner Platform, giving them the ability to integrate with QuickBooks data and let customers sign on using their Intuit ID. That’s similar to the way you can sign on to websites using Facebook Connect or a Twitter ID, except in this case you’ll be using an Intuit login and giving the web apps access to your QuickBooks data on Intuit’s servers.

The service is aimed at helping turn QuickBooks into a platform and an app store, an approach that has generated huge returns for Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and others. Intuit also said it would make certified apps available on its Intuit App Center, a collection of Web apps that work with QuickBooks. Intuit said that 1 million users have registered for its App Center.

With just 4 million customers, QuickBooks doesn’t have anything like the gravitational pull of an Apple or a Facebook. But those customers — small businesses that use QuickBooks to run their core operations — are a prime target for developers.

“The ease of building and marketing apps using Intuit Anywhere means we’re going to see more developers integrating with QuickBooks,” said Paul Jackson, president and founder of MethodCRM.com, in Intuit’s press release.

Companies using Intuit Anywhere include Bill.com, Concur, eBay, FreshBooks, Mavenlink and MethodCRM.com, according to Intuit.

Intuit Anywhere is in beta now and will be released in the fall.

The service “grades” websites and determines how often they will pop up in high spots on search engines — a process called search-engine optimization (SEO). The service also gives smaller- and mid-sized companies tools to quickly create and manage blogs and landing pages for their websites. The analytics part of the software gives companies a way to track the behavior of incoming and outgoing site visitors and tune the website to make them more likely to stay.

Salesforce in particular seems to be throwing around a lot of money lately — the company has made three acquisitions in the past couple of months. It dropped a whopping $212 million on Web-application developer Heroku in December, and then spent an undisclosed amount on email contact manager Etacts. Salesforce also acquired Web-conferencing provider Dimdim for $31 million. The company’s cash reserves dropped more than 50 percent to $424 million, down from around $1 billion in January last year, according to a recent filing with the securities and exchange commission.

Google Ventures, which is a profit-driven investment arm rather than a strategic investment arm for the search giant, probably won’t be taking on any of HubSpot’s tools, said Rich Miner, partner with Google Ventures. But Google does want to offer HubSpot on the Google App Store, according to HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan. Salesforce, on the other hand, will be working more closely with HubSpot to bring its services into Salesforce’s online customer relationship management (CRM) software.

HubSpot wasn’t planning on raising money in a fourth round but was convinced by Sequoia Capital’s general partner Jim Goetz to start another deal to become a part of Sequoia’s portfolio, Halligan said. Goetz will become a board observer with HubSpot but won’t be an official board member as part of the deal. Hallinger talked about going public the last time the company raised money in 2009, but those plans have apparently gone on the back burner.

“We think these guys can really help us make a dent in the universe,” Hallinger said. “In terms of going public, we’re too early.”

HubSpot has raised $65 million to date across four funding rounds. Its most recent round, worth $16 million, closed in October 2009. General Catalyst, Matrix Partners and Scale Venture Partners — all existing investors — also participated in the most recent fundraising round. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company was founded in 2006 and has more than 4,000 companies as customers. The company has 192 employees.

For small businesses who may be feeling overwhelmed by large amounts of traditional and social contacts and communications, Nimble Contact may have a solution. The company is launching today at DEMO Spring 2011.

Nimble Contact dubs itself a social customer relationship management (CRM) tool and pools LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, email contacts into one location. The tool automatically syncs calendar, mail and social profiles with each contact and allows the user to see all correspondence with any contact with just one click.

Nimble Contact has several additional features that may be especially interesting to a small business, including “social listening” which lets a business monitor popular social networks, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, for brand mentions. In addition, Nimble Contact can work with existing tools the business may already be using, including Google Apps, like email and calendars.

A host of social CRM companies exist, although each appears to have different sets of features and target audiences. Sprout Social gives users one central location for managing social contacts and the ability to engage and monitor brand mentions, but it focuses more on social than traditional contacts. Constant Contact, and its recent addition of Bantam Live, now offers users the ability to manage their traditional contacts with their social ones, but it lacks the social monitoring. Of course, there’s CRM giant Salesforce.com, which hosts a myriad of traditional and social features, but its main target audience appears to be large businesses.

The Santa Monica, California-based company, founded in 2009, currently has 30 employees and is self funded by founder John Ferrara, founder of GoldMine, an early innovator of CRM for small to medium-sized businesses. Ferrara sold control of that company to holding company FrontRange in 1999.

Splunk provides IT professionals with ways to log any piece of information and quickly index it, find it and run a number of analytics functions on it. That can be GPS data, data from customer relationship management (CRM) software from Oracle or cell phone data — basically anything, as long as it has a time stamp. The service has a bit of a cult following among IT professionals and is a pretty strong candidate for an IPO this year.

Splunk is basically making a statement that it can compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other Web 2.0 titans — all of which have offices in the Seattle area — for talented developers and engineers. The competition for talent in Silicon Valley is even more fierce, with basically every tech company in existence running a San Francisco- or Bay Area-based office.

It wasn’t a move to save money, either, said Splunk co-founder Erik Swan. The new office will serve as a home base for Brad Lovering, a Microsoft technical fellow that Splunk just hired, and as a recruiting central for the area. Splunk considered Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, as potential locations for new offices. Each spot has its own quirks and types of engineers and developers, and Seattle ended up being the best fit, Swan said.

Microsoft had a lot to do with that culture, said Swan. Founded in 1975, Microsoft has been based in Redmond, Wash., since its inception. Microsoft, along with Amazon, has attracted a large amount of system administrators and developers to the Seattle area, he said.

“Microsoft has done a brilliant job of building people who understand the developer ecosystem, what it means to support developers,” Swan said. “Much more so than the Valley.”

Splunk has raised $40 million in venture funding from Ignition Partners, August Capital, JK&B Capital, and Sevin Rosen Funds. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company brought in $66 million last year in revenue, up 96 percent from 2009, and signed on an extra five Fortune 100 companies as clients. Splunk currently has around half of the Fortune 100 companies as clients, and 2,500 customers overall.

The company has around 260 employees and also has an office in Hong Kong.

The company, which first made its name a decade ago as a provider of Web-based customer-relationship management software to smaller companies for whom traditional enterprise software was unaffordable, has finally realized it is playing with the bigger dogs in the park. The company’s major competition comes from other customer relationship management (CRM) software providers like Oracle. They aren’t run-of-the-mill tech companies, they are behemoths with massive revenues that demand a little more attention than some of the other smaller CRM providers Salesforce has typically competed with.

Lautenbach was with IBM — another major competitor for Oracle — for 20 years, where he manned the company’s 1000-strong enterprise sales team. He’ll be responsible for pitching the company’s service major enterprises — like Dell, a current Salesforce customer, for example — rather than Salesforce’s traditional strategy of targeting business managers.

Salesforce looks like it has been building up its resources to attack the enterprise market in full force — including some targets outside of its typical CRM software market. The company has acquired three companies in just under two months. Salesforce dropped a whopping $212 million for Heroku to bolster its development tools for its web services and picked up Manymoon to expand into some other cloud services.

The company also recently launched Chatter.com, an enterprise-style social network that is free and open to everyone. Salesforce does want to convince Chatter.com users to sign up for the official Chatter service, and then Salesforce’s CRM service, but it’s still a bit outside of Salesforce’s enterprise activity. Salesforce initially launched Chatter as a Twitter-like service to compete initially with Yammer and make a splash in the collaboration space.

Salesforce also recently named former Microsoft government sales guy Matt Miszewski to head the company’s government sales team.

Manymoon adds some additional functionality to Google Apps, such as the ability to create projects and alerts in Gmail based on information received in an email. It also has similar apps for the Google Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn. Manymoon also includes some tools to share Google Docs with others and browse large amounts of documents. The service is designed to help employees keep track of their work life and tasks and to collaborate with co-workers.

The company’s services won’t be disrupted, and the Manymoon team is going to continue adding features to it as they normally would, according to a post on Manymoon’s site, which gives some additional details about the announcement. That’s a contrast to Salesforce’s last acquisition, Etacts, which ended up shutting down its service just after it was acquired.

The acquisition is part of Salesforce’s latest attempt to branch out from its traditional customer relationship management (CRM) software. The company launched an enterprise-style Facebook service called Chatter.com yesterday. Salesforce also invested $4 million in Seesmic, a client for reading status updates from Facebook, Twitter and other social services. Now Salesforce has a slight reach into another cloud service with Manymoon’s presence on Google Apps. Manymoon didn’t say whether its features would end up on Salesforce’s CRM software — just that it would continue working on its current products.

Salesforce recently dropped $212 million to buy Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails. It made that announcement at Dreamforce in December. Salesforce also acquired email contact manager Etacts for an undisclosed sum shortly after Dreamforce in December.

The financial details of the Manymoon deal weren’t disclosed, but Kara Swisher’s BoomTown blog said the price was somewhere between $25 million and $35 million. Manymoon has raised a small amount of seed funding from Harrison Metal, who was also an investor in Heroku.

Assistly’s brand of CRM software mashes together pretty much every avenue of communication into a single Web interface. It includes traditional communication methods like email and phone calls. It then uses application programming interfaces (APIs) from social media services like Twitter and Facebook to directly feed that information into its website and combines it all into a single interface.

The web app lets users enter a number of tags and other keywords and crawls social media outlets to find people who mention them. That information is fed into a dashboard and Assistly users can quickly respond to questions or complaints about a service.

Assistly started in 2009 when co-founder Alex Bard and his team decided to take another crack at starting a company in the customer service space. It’s their fourth startup together, and the third that works with customer service. Their last company together, Goowy Media, was sold to Aol in 2008 — though the details of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“Our investors were pretty happy,” Bard said.

They pulled the idea of adding an analytics component to CRM software from their previous outing with Goowy Media, a company that designed web and desktop widgets and distributed them with an analytics suite, and ran with it. Assistly has picked up customers like web-based music streaming service Grooveshark and Twitter since launching the service in September last year.

Since then, Assistly has raised about $4.7 million with its most recent round of fundraising. The first round, led by True Ventures and Social Leverage, closed last year. Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures and investor Kenny Van Zant joined in the most recent round. The latest round took about two months to finish.

The company hasn’t had a marketing budget since its launch. The most recent round of funding will be used to actually help market Assistly and develop a sales force. It will also be used to “add more gasoline to the fire” and develop the analytics suite further, Bard said.

[Photo: The Next Web]

The open source CRM provider is expected to bring in around $107.7 million in revenue in 2013 and $95.8 million in 2012, according to the report. That’s peanuts when compared to Oracle’s latest earnings report (which indicated that the company brought in $8.6 billion in a single quarter). But for a company that was founded only six years ago and one that charges half of what most CRM providers charge for open source software, it’s pretty good.

The CRM space has exploded because it helps businesses of any size run more efficiently. It can provide a business with a number of tools that can help them handle customer service. Most come with analytics suites that help executives figure out which programs are working and which ones aren’t.

SugarCRM has an advantage with smaller and mid-sized businesses because it is usually much cheaper than other CRM providers. The service can cost around half of what some of the major CRM software providers charge. It doesn’t have the full functionality that some of them, like Salesforce, have — but it can do about 90 percent of what those services can, according to the report. Companies like Oracle and SAP likewise dominate the high end of the market that typically has a much larger budget for CRM-like software.

SugarCRM users can deploy the software on in-house servers or on the public cloud, which involves shipping data through the Internet to remote servers that have a lot of computing firepower. The company partnered up with Amazon and Microsoft to let users deploy its software on Amazon’s EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services. 70 percent of SugarCRM’s revenue comes from licensing deals with partners that resell the software and help manage it, according to the report.

But because it is so cheap and because the development is open source, it can be difficult and time-consuming to install the software, and the customer support can be lacking, according to the report. Around 70 percent of SugarCRM customers still choose to install the software on in-house hardware because it’s cheaper, rather than use hosted versions on public cloud servers.

The company’s valuation is still not even close to some of the dominant forces in the CRM software market, but for a provider of open source software it’s a pretty decent number. Salesforce, for example, is worth around $18 billion based on its market cap, and Oracle is worth a massive $160 billion.

Since it was founded, SugarCRM has collected around 600,000 users across 75 countries and is deployed on about 55,000 servers. The open source community that works on SugarCRM has around 150,000 active users and 22,000 developers. The community has made 800 applications that plug into the CRM suite to date.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company was founded in 2004 and has more than 150 employees. To date, SugarCRM has raised $46 million in venture capital funding from firms like New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. Its last round of funding came in 2008 when it raised $20 million.

NeXt Up! is a research firm co-founded by Michael Moe, a former senior managing director and director of global growth research at Merrill Lynch.

The application pulls in data from Salesforce, SAP and other enterprise-level analytics suites and translates it into a template user interface for mobile viewing. The application is available on the iPhone and the iPad. Surprisingly, it’s not available on Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, which dominates the enterprise mobile phone space.

“The operating system was so compelling that we were sure it was going to make it into the enterprise market,” said Santiago Becerra, co-founder of MeLLmo. “We wanted to be ready with software when that happened, and that’s exactly what happened.”

While the iPhone hasn’t enjoyed the success that Research in Motion has had in the enterprise space, it’s still seen some decent adoption. Not including activations of RIM’s BlackBerry line, the iPhone 4 accounted for more than 30 percent of mobile device activations for enterprise purposes, and more than 10 percent of activations were iPads.

MeLLmo has two options for its Roambi mobile application — one for large businesses and one for smaller ones. Smaller businesses that aren’t concerned with security risks can upload their enterprise data to remote cloud servers that will package it for the Roambi application. Roambi can also be installed on an in-house server for larger businesses that can’t switch to cloud servers for any number of reasons.

The Roambi visualizer app is free. There are two versions of Roambi service with different pricing. Roambi Pro connects to Google Docs, Salesforce and Excel spreadsheets and is available for $99 per user per year. Roambi ES3 is the enterprise version that connects to all the enterprise data sources. Pricing for ES3 starts at $795 per user with a minimum of 50 users.

The company was founded in 2008 and has around 61 employees. It raised $10 million across two earlier fundraising rounds, bringing its total funding to $20 million.

After easily beating the expectations of many analysts with its most recent earnings report, Oracle is setting its sights on capturing market share and claiming HP’s spot of number two database hardware and software provider behind IBM.

Net income for Oracle jumped 28 percent to $1.87 billion in its second quarter of 2011, up from $1.46 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, according to its most recent financial statement. Oracle’s operating revenue also rose 47 percent to $8.6 billion in its most recent quarter, compared to $5.9 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.

Oracle continues to successfully fend off the public cloud  (which allows developers and companies to offload storage and heavy-duty computing to remote servers at a lower cost) said Oracle president Mark Hurd on the company’s earnings conference call. Some of its servers and accompanying software can cost upwards of $1 million. But the strategy seems to be working. Its most recent line of servers and software is able to run more than 30 million online transactions per minute, shattering the previous record of 10 million transactions per minute set by IBM.

“We expect overall that our new generation of SUN machines, Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC will enable us to win significant share in the high-end server market,” Ellison said. “That will put us in the number 2 position very soon behind IBM, then we’ll fight it out for the number 1 spot.”

Despite the popularity of the public cloud, servers and databases that are run in-house are usually faster and easier to access. A number of security concerns prevent some of the largest companies in the world — big targets for Oracle’s hardware and software products — from jumping on board the public cloud. Those are companies that can afford the massive price-tags of Oracle’s software and hardware and have the staff to install and maintain them.

HP, which is second in market share at this point because of its legacy in servers, came a distant third in speed with 4 million transactions per minute, Ellison said. Despite the presence of former HP CEO Hurd on the conference call, Ellison did not mince words when it came to HP’s servers. He said they were downright terrible when compared to Oracle’s new products and IBM’s servers and software.

“HP’s servers are slow, expensive and have little or no software, that makes them vulnerable to market share,” Ellison said. “All our new servers are engineered to run databases and middleware faster than HP and IBM.”

But even with its success with on-premise database hardware and software, Oracle isn’t going to shy away from the public cloud. It’s releasing a suite of applications called Oracle Fusion that can run on in-house hardware and public cloud servers. Ellison said he expects it to compete with Salesforce and other public cloud applications beginning next year.

“You’re just seeing the beginning of us getting share in applications,” he said.

Investors loved the news, sending Oracle’s shares up about 4 percent to $31.45 in extended trading.

The round was dominated by Andreessen-Horowitz, with Floodgate also participating to an auxiliary extent, according to SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon. VentureBeat reported a while earlier that SnapLogic had raised $10 million in a funding round that included Andreessen-Horowitz — one of the largest and most well-known investment firms in the valley. There wasn’t any indication of who led the round, though.

It was likely Dhillon’s hand that brought Andreessen-Horowitz into the discussion. Dhillon is the former CEO of data integration giant Informatica, which is now a public company with a market cap of $4.1 billion. Dhillon said he and Horowitz have some history when it comes to investment rounds. The funding will be used to expand internationally and help expand the team’s marketing branch.

SnapLogic runs an app store that provides connectivity software for various cloud applications, like Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software and Google Apps. It helps transfer data effectively between those cloud applications and makes sure definitions are the same across multiple applications. The developer community has around 50 developers that publish applications to SnapLogic’s app store. The revenue sharing model is the same as other app stores — 70 percent goes to developers, and 30 percent goes to SnapLogic.

Today, there are around 60 “snaps” — basically 60 applications that connect cloud applications. That means SnapLogic can manage about 1,800 (60^2) total connections. The company has some pretty high-profile companies as clients, such as cloud music radio provider Pandora.

The company previously raised $4.8 million in funding from a number of high-profile investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Floodgate. Epinions co-founder Naval Ravikant also participated in the round. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company has around 30 employees.

Chatter was marketed more as an add-on to Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform, rather than a new innovation to help its customers with business collaboration, he said. That made it difficult to attract new users and help the service grow into something that could generate a lot of revenue for Salesforce.

“The way you get the most value out of a platform like Chatter or Yammer is in making them as pervasive as you possibly can,” he said. “Salesforce has made it hard for people who are not Salesforce customers to get on the platform, use it, get value out of it.”

Meanwhile, Yammer recently revamped its business micro-blogging software to behave more like a Facebook for enterprise users and has seen a lot of success as a result. With Yammer, it’s free to join, and the company makes money off subscription models for premium services and off IT servicing, Spain said.

Chatter is available to people who already use Salesforce’s CRM software, and companies have to pay $15 per user per month to be able to access Chatter without the Salesforce CRM software. That makes it hard to justify introducing the business collaboration service into a work environment that hasn’t had any time to try it out — whereas Yammer users can try it out before they invest in the software’s premium services.

“Because of the way Salesforce approaches the Chatter business model, it’s hard to justify,” he said. “Until you make it easy, and in my opinion free, to get access to it you’re never going to maximize your value.”

Salesforce, one of the largest CRM software providers, was one of Emergence Capital’s first investments. Emergence also invested in Yammer, which launched two years ago. Yammer has already attracted more than 90,000 companies, and about 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list use the social enterprise network.

Anybody who walks around their town notices things that could be fixed, including potholes, sidewalks, or even buildings. The traditional way of dealing with this: a phone call to city hall — or maybe an email in more advanced burgs. PublicStuff, a new startup, is looking to ease such communications between municipalities, universities, and other local operations and their communities.

PublicStuff is unveiling two Web-based tools today at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley. One is for the general public to report and request services. The other is for local governments to see inbound requests as well as manage and track request completions.

For example, a consumer could request that a pothole be fixed on a specific street and check in to see the status periodically. A user could also see other requests or services submitted by community members. From the other side, the local agency can receive the pothole request and process it more efficiently than dealing with an overload of paperwork.

Both tools are available as iPhone, Blackberry, and Android apps. Users can also text message or call a toll-fee number to make a request or file a report.

The company sees its main competition as large CRM software providers that serve the public sector, including Oracle and SAP. Another rival is City Sourced.

The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has taken an undisclosed seed round of funding from Investor Circle Philadelphia.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

Today, private Seattle company, Etelos, unveiled a “customer relations management” (CRM) tool that can be used on Google’s homepage along with Google’s other applications.

It is just one more step toward making Google’s suite of software more compelling for small businesses, as an alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office.

There are already lots of features you can use on Google’s homepage, such as calendar, weather and news. However Etelos is offering a full-fledged CRM tool, which lets business owners and sales agents manage their relations with their customers — including reminders to stay in touch, ways to manage tasks and share schedules (see screenshot below).

While Google’s $50-a-year suite offers email storage, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar, it did not have a CRM product.

Etelos’ product is in (beta) testing, and is invitation-only for now. Accounts can be requested at www.crmforgoogle.com. Once out of testing, Etelos CRMforGoogle will offer a basic free edition, but also monthly paid subscription versions which will allow further customization, choice of hosting and integration with other software, the company said.