Hotel Ninjas launches its ‘Salesforce.com for the hospitality industry’ (exclusive)

Cofounder Avi Meir said he was inspired to start the company after realizing that most hotels still relied on "expensive, outdated, server-based technology."

MindBody, a Salesforce for health and beauty, nabs $35M

MindBody provides marketing tools, scheduling, analytics, networking and point of sale services for health and wellness providers.

Reachable: 100 billion connections means someone you need to meet knows someone you know

It’s really, really hard to sell to Joe Blow.

Joe, who knows my former boss Frank, on the other hand … that’s an entirely different matter. That is the premise behind Reachable, a social connection tool for business-to-business sales professionals, …

Open-source customer relationship management service SugarCRM raises $33M

Salesforce competitor SugarCRM has raised a sweet $33 million in funding. The eight-year-old company provides customer relationship management (CRM) software-as-a-service for companies to manage their sales leads.

There are several heavy hitters in the CRM world, including Microsoft Dynamic, Zoho, …

Pass the CRM: Posiq lets restaurants track what you eat (exclusive)

Posiq, a customer relationship manager for restaurants, launched its first product Monday.

Over the last few years, Salesforce has made CRMs popular for more than just the sales industry. Posiq is hoping to bring a customer relationship management platform to …

How Nimble is using its funding to take over “social CRM” (exclusive)

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 …

What the !@#$ is marketing automation?

VentureBeat inadvertently stirred up a storm of controversy when we published a guest post about marketing automation.

The guest post, by Justin Gray of LeadMD, looked innocuous enough at first. To our editors, it at first seemed like a straightforward …

Social CRM company reaches out to small businesses with Assistly 2.0

Customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Assistly is shaking up its business model to become affordable for smaller and mid-sized businesses.

Assistly’s application gives businesses ways to interact with customers via various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as …