Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For years, companies like Yammer and Jive have been creating technologies for employees of the same company to connect with each other.

How about two different companies? Mazree, a startup launching today, is a business-to-business (“B2B”) social network for employees to ask questions, review information, and discuss ideas. It is available for free for users who need a better way to simplify complex supply chain processes and interactions that take place between buying and selling organizations.

On the site, users can showcase their products and the latest company news to impress their customers and partners. They can monitor external relationships through contact lists, custom groups, messaging and notes. They can also make a request to access pricing information, or share ideas for potential collaborations.

Mazree may prove to be a popular choice for large companies with an extensive network of partners, customers and buyers. In recent months, the Salt Lake City-based startup was able to land its first big fish: Intermountain Healthcare, the largest healthcare provider in Utah, which has a network of over 5,000 suppliers.

“The healthcare supply chain has many participants that don’t communicate or collaborate very effectively,” said Brent T. Johnson, Chief Purchasing Officer, Intermountain Healthcare. “Mazree is a tool that has great potential to add significant value to the healthcare supply chain.”

The technology has been a bootstrapped-effort. However, with a customer of this size, the founding team will be well-positioned to raise its first round of funding. The challenge will be to compete with Yammer, Jive or Salesforce Chatter if one of these more established companies steps up their B2B efforts.

In the future, the company will likely begin selling enterprise-wide subscriptions. However, in these early days, a “freemium” model is a tried-and-tested method, and may be the most viable way for the startups to infiltrate the ranks of large businesses and gain name-brand recognition. Read more about business models for enterprise software startups here.

“While Mazree’s initial focus is in the healthcare industry, we see Mazree as the platform for all business collaboration between buyers and suppliers, companies and partners, and peers to peers,” said Curtis McEntire, the company’s CEO, on the topic of expansion. He told me that the target markets include retail, automotive, manufacturing, construction, and even aerospace.

Prior to starting the company, McEntire worked for Intermountain Healthcare, and developed expertise in supply chain management. He left the company to work full-time on developing Mazree, and was able to land his former employer as a customer.

Image via Shutterstock

Yammer has teamed up with sentiment analysis startup Kanjoya to track office banter and gain deep insight into how employees are feeling at work.

Kanjoya’s analytics dashboard retrieves data from your company’s Yammer network to gauge emotions across departments like sales, marketing, and HR. Individuals won’t be tracked and profiled, as the algorithm will aggregate and compare conversations between groups.

The company claims to use machine learning processing to understand varied and complex emotional signals. Kanjoya’s founder, Armen Berjikly, told me the algorithm works with 70 percent accuracy in detecting 80 emotional responses, such as “surprised,” “frustrated,” or “happy.” He said this is on par with any group of colleagues or friends, who, like machines, often misunderstand complex emotions.

Through this partnership, Yammer users can access a word cloud to view the trending company-wide conversations.

For all you gossip-mongers, the new tool will also showcase the most praised and liked individuals in the office. Yammer’s VP of business development, An Le, told me this helps companies locate “rising stars” in departments, who are asking the tough questions and gaining both influence and authority.

Le offered an example of a junior engineer at a global research company in Perth, Australia, who challenged his company’s status quo on Yammer. “He became the second most followed person behind the CEO,” she said. “That’s the type of conversation we need to understand and track.”

Le told me that Yammer has been searching for over a year to integrate with a sentiment analysis tool to capture emotion across the enterprise.

“Kanjoya offered us a way to understand not just the number of “likes” or volume of conversations, but drive into natural language processing and 80 layers of emotion,” she explained.

Kanjoya claims to have a different approach than its major competitors, Lexalytics and Crimson Hexagon. It began as a social networking site — Experience Project – where users expressed a broad range of emotions. Berjikly leveraged this data set, primarily unstructured data like text, to build an algorithm to track both sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral signals) and emotion.

It’s more reliable than a survey, but sentiment analysis is a notoriously tough nut to crack. The most enduring problem is that it’s difficult for an algorithm to tell the difference between a positive and neutral comment. Consider this ambiguous statement: “The parking lot is located nearby.” Berjikly told me that the company grappled with this problem, and responded by discounting these types of comments.

Another obstacle is that some emotions have a stronger signal than others. It might be an over-indulgence in the TV show “The Office” on my part, but I’d be surprised if any office in America doesn’t engage in a little, healthy sarcasm. Berjikly admits this is a problem, but claims the algorithm gets better at detecting an organization’s nuances over time.

It may seem a bit invasive, but the technology has proven useful in the beta phase for specific use-cases. For instance, if an HR manager decides to switch the company’s health provider, she can view a dashboard to gauge the response and react accordingly.

The new tool is available to Yammer users today, who can try it for 30 days for free before paying an additional fee. Le would not disclose pricing but told me the fee is negotiated on a company-by-company basis.

Water cooler image via Shutterstock

Yammer, the social network for companies, has introduced a Facebook-inspired ticker, giving you the ability to spy on — ahem, track in real time — your coworkers’ every action, both inside and outside of Yammer. The company has also added other less-creepy collaboration features.

Just as Facebook’s ticker hooks into third-party social services for behavioral updates, Yammer’s “activity stream ticker” syncs with Salesforce, Box, Expensify, Tripit, Zendeck, Badgeville, Sharepoint, NetSuite and Spigit actions to provide you with work-related activity notifications you can follow like a hawk.

“We’re launching ticker for enterprise, which is inspired by what Facebook did … but I think it’s potentially more powerful in the enterprise,” Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks told VentureBeat. “It’s about what your coworkers are doing in their business apps … It’s pretty mind-blowing when you get that kind of ambient awareness of what all your coworkers are doing.”

Yammer users can see what content their coworkers are creating, have a quick glimpse at what files their contacts are modifying, find out when a friend completes an expense report and even get notified when a fellow staffer is going on a business trip.

As far as enterprise social networks go, Yammer is top dog. The startup is fast-approaching 4 million verified corporate users and has successfully penetrated 80 percent of the Fortune 500. But why stop at social networking? Why not create workplace collaboration and file-sharing tools and steal away another part of the enterprise market? That’s exactly what Yammer has in mind.

“We’re bringing content into the social graph,” Sacks said. The startup has just added two content-specific modules for enterprise users: Pages and Files. Pages is meant to be Yammer’s answer to the wiki, Sacks said, and allow for collaborative content creation à la Google Docs, but with the social fabric of Yammer.

Yammer users could already add files, but starting Wednesday each file uploaded to a company social network will get its own dedicated URL, which means a staffer can upload a new version of a file but the original URL will remain unchanged. Yammer users can also now follow files to keep track of changes.

“Yes, we’re definitely going to be in conflict with more players, especially in the wiki space,” Sacks said of the new direction. “I don’t think our ambition is to be your file cabinet, so much as your social layer, and to be the way that information gets discovered in the company.”

Okay, so it sounds like Yammer wants to stick to its social roots and isn’t (yet) interested in killing off the Basecamps or Box.nets of the world. We’re almost convinced. But, if social is Yammer’s beat, is it anything more than a social network plagiarist?

I put the question to Sacks. “Where the originality comes in is how we apply [social networking] inside the enterprise,” Sacks rebutted. “There’s substantial originality in creating an entirely new category of enterprise software that didn’t exist before.”

[Image via albyantoniazzi]

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage provider Box.net will now work with Salesforce.com’s enterprise social network, Chatter, and its mobile application will now come pre-loaded on the Motorola Xoom tablet, the company announced today.

Box.net is now shipping its content over to Salesforce.com’s enterprise social network Chatter. Users can pull content from Box.net — like shared files and the comments attached to those files — in activity streams in Chatter. Chatter had around 60,000 customers when last reported, although that number has grown significantly since then, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told VentureBeat. Yammer, a Chatter competitor that has gained good traction in the enterprise social network space and is led by former PayPal graduate David Sacks, also has an existing partnership with Box.net.

“Our strategy is to be the social Switzerland where we integrate with any and all applications including Saleforce.com, SharePoint and many others,” Sacks told VentureBeat. “This announcement has no impact on that strategy.”

Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie made the announcement at the company’s first BoxWorks annual conference in San Francisco, Calif. He said Box.net’s application on Google’s Android mobile operating system will now also come pre-loaded on the Motorola Xoom, the current flagship tablet for the company. Box.net unveiled plans to pre-load its mobile app on Samsung tablets in January this year. While Box.net is an enterprise application, it could punch a hole in the niche Dropbox has carved out as a mobile cloud storage provider for consumers.

“Box has to be the easiest way that you can securely share information in the enterprise. That’s the whole reason why software doesn’t work today — it’s cumbersome,” Levie said. “And for employees that want to use a tablet or a smartphone, the power of those devices are comparable to laptops just a few months ago, they’re becoming an integral part of the enterprise.”

The company also unveiled a new version of its desktop sharing app, Sync (pictured above). That application creates a folder for your desktop that automatically copies the information to a remote cloud-based server. The new version of Sync works across both Mac and PC computers. Any changes made to a file on a PC are immediately transferred over to the same file in the shared folder in the Mac. The process works the same way in the other direction.

Box.net recently turned down a buyout offer worth more than $500 million, as we reported exclusively earlier this month. Box.net previously raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding led by Emergence Capital in February. It is also in the process of finalizing an extension to that round of funding worth $35 million. The company has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 77 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

One of Salesforce.com’s latest and most-touted features in its enterprise social network, Chatter, lets you bring in people from external businesses and customers, so they can participate in activity streams alongside your employees.

The ability to bring in outsiders into a secure network is just a small subset of the newest tools the company unveiled at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Calif.

“When talking to customers, it’s obviously geared toward customer relationship management,” Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff told VentureBeat in an interview today. “We still see Chatter as an enterprise social network. Presence is obviously something every enterprise social network needs to have, and you’re going to see video capability coming into Chatter too.”

Benioff spent part of his keynote address on Wednesday showing off the new feature as a way to engage with customers and get a better sense of what they are looking for from an enterprise. But he told VentureBeat that while Salesforce.com is positioning that feature as a customer group, it’s still just a generalized function.

Salesforce.com is one of the top customer relationship management (CRM) software providers in the world and got on board the cloud computing train before almost anyone else. It has always delivered its computing-intensive applications from remote servers that customers can access through the Internet. It’s a space the company knows well, even though it has since expanded into social customer engagement through Chatter and its acquisition of Radian6.

“It’s natural to expect them to try and include a CRM app in whatever they make,” enterprise social network Yammer chief executive David Sacks told VentureBeat. “It’s what they know best.”

But Salesforce is just about as new as everyone else to the enterprise social networking space, which also carries a few upstarts like enterprise collaboration providers Yammer and Huddle. Salesforce.com initially launched its Chatter micro-blogging service to make a splash in the collaboration space. It then evolved into a more Facebook-like social network designed to handle all internal communication in a company.

That carries a lot of additional responsibilities for larger companies, which have strict governance requirements and need to have tight control over what communication happens inside the company and how much gets out to external sources. That means that customer interaction in Chatter could pose some problems for companies that are looking for a strictly enterprise social network, Sacks said.

“If you’re building a CRM app or something for your CRM app, then it’s fine, but if you’re building an enterprise social network you can’t really bring in external communication,” Sacks said. “It raises a lot of questions about security and governance.”

But that hasn’t stopped Salesforce.com’s charge into the enterprise social networking space. When last reported, Chatter had around 60,000 customers, although though that number has grown significantly since then, Benioff said.

Salesforce.com’s biggest customer, Dell, has around 100,000 active users. The rest of its paying clients have around 5,000 active users each, on average.

Benioff said he plans to hire an additional 1,000 people at Salesforce.com this year. While the company is only 13 years old, Benioff said he felt it has become a role model of sorts for cloud computing companies that are preparing to go public. Since it launched, Salesforce has already landed a market cap of more than $17 billion and it’s on track to generate $2 billion in revenue this year.

“When we say we have 100,000 Chatter customers, those aren’t trials or people who have just signed up, those are active networks. No one has numbers like that,” Benioff told VentureBeat. “It is the most successful of all the social networks because it’s an open service that you can develop on top of.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise social networking site Yammer today unveiled Yammer Connect, a new JavaScript application programming interface (API) that adds a single sign-on “Connect” button and embeddable streams to third-party enterprise software websites.

Yammer is working with a number of third-party enterprise software providers to add a connect button similar to Facebook’s that verifies an employee’s identity. The company wouldn’t disclose what companies it is working with right now but told VentureBeat that it already had a number of agreements in place.

“As employees are increasingly going out and signing up for third-party applications, we want those applications to incorporate Yammer Connect as a way to seamlessly integrate Yammer across those sites,” Yammer chief technology officer Adam Pisoni told VentureBeat.

The company also announced today that its embeddable activity feeds feature is entering a beta and will be available in the third quarter later this year. That feature is an open API that lets businesses add news feed widgets to other websites using HTML coding. It will give employees a way to view important information in Yammer without actually visiting the website.

“It’s really such a big part of our strategy to make sure Yammer is this social horizontal layer across all business applications,” Pisoni said. ”I still see Yammer.com as where people go to see their aggregate stream, and we’re gonna continue to add functionality to yammer.com that will only be there.”

Yammer has 3 million verified corporate users and around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 market — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net — that are taking lessons learned from web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise social networking provider Yammer will now include data from customer relationship management software provider Salesforce.com.

The enterprise social network will now grab incoming data that Salesforce.com can export — including the likes of customer leads and sales data — and drop it into Yammer news feeds. Yammer users can then comment on it and interact with it just like any other Yammer news feed entry.

But this is not a partnership with Salesforce.com, which has its own enterprise social network called Chatter, a Yammer spokesperson told VentureBeat. Yammer instead leveraged Salesforce.com’s open application programming interface (API) to build the integration with Yammer.

“Salesforce intended Chatter to be a company-wide tool, but we don’t see that today,” a Yammer spokesperson told VentureBeat. “So what Yammer does is it takes the activity streams from salesforce data and by integrating it into Yammaer you can socialize data across the entire company.”

Yammer is taking a shotgun approach to gathering data through partnerships instead of building up internal tools. Box.net, another enterprise 2.0 company, fleshes out its cloud storage product by integrating applications from the likes of Salesforce.com and Google to make its software more useful for enterprise companies. Yammer still intends to integrate with other enterprise companies that also have open APIs.

“We want to be this super center of activity stream from applications across the enterprise,” a Yammer spokesperson told VentureBeat. “We see a lot of enterprise applications adding activity streams, but yammer really wants to cut across all that and integrate.”

To compete initially with Yammer and make a splash in the collaboration space, Salesforce.com launched Chatter, a micro-blogging service. The service quickly picked up around 60,000 customers, and its biggest customer, Dell, has around 100,000 active users. The rest of its paying clients have around 5,000 active users, according to a presentation at today’s conference.

That’s compared to Yammer, which has 3 million verified corporate users. Around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net — that are taking lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.

Yammer also has the added benefit of having its own open API that lets businesses add news feed widgets to their websites using HTML coding. That gives employees a way to view important information in Yammer without actually visiting the website. Yammer’s success even charmed Salesforce.com, which turned its enterprise social network loose on the freemium revenue model in order to compete with other collaboration startups (it cost non-Salesforce.com users $15 per user per month beforehand.)

The company uses a freemium model — which gives companies a free taste of a stripped-down version of Yammer in order to hook employees on the service. Yammer charges $5 per user per month for a “gold” subscription that offers additional control and support from the Yammer team. Yammer then converts around 19 percent of its free Yammer users into paid users. The companies either find value in the service, or it becomes so widespread among employees that the companies need a way to control the flow of information and make sure there are no leaks.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Users of Yammer, a social networking service for enterprises, can now embed Yammer feeds and activity streams into just about any business application through the use of embed codes, the company announced today.

The feature functions similar to the way YouTube users embed videos on other websites. It’s a few lines of code that fit snugly into an HTML or JavaScript code. The site then calls out to Yammer to pick up any information about a specific feed and publishes it into a widget built into the website. The feed works both ways, too — any information entered into the widget is sent back to the main Yammer website.

It’s a feature you probably wouldn’t find on Facebook, the most popular social network in the world, because it could pull users away from the main Facebook website or mobile application. But that’s because Yammer’s business model is quite different from Facebook, which relies on having users on the Facebook.com website as long as possible to generate advertising impressions. Instead, Yammer makes money by charging companies for premium features and additional control over the enterprise social network.

The company uses a freemium model — which gives companies a free taste of a stripped-down version of Yammer in order to hook employees on the service. Yammer charges $5 per user per month for a “gold” subscription that offers additional control and support from the Yammer team. Yammer then converts around 19 percent of its free Yammer users into paid users. The companies either find value in the service, or it becomes so widespread among employees that the companies need a way to control the flow of information and make sure there are no leaks.

Yammer also announced a few new features, including an activity feed that is similar to Facebook’s news feed. The feed collects “stories,” such as when users join new groups within Yammer or when they change parts of their profile. Yammer is also releasing a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) that let other companies create stories that will show up in the Yammer activity feed as items that can be liked and commented on. And Yammer is letting companies define what email addresses on Yammer are allowed to see the stories when they appear on the activity feed.

The company is also releasing an open graph protocol that is, again, similar to Facebook’s open graph protocol. The feature basically adds “like” buttons and a number of other ways to interact with a piece of content that links back to Yammer. That can include commenting, sharing or interacting with it in additional ways. Facebook pioneered this by adding a “like” and “share” buttons to many sites across the web — Yammer is basically trying to do the same thing for any site within a company’s intranet.

Yammer has picked up around 2 million verified corporate users and 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider — that are taking a lot of the lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.

[Update: It looks like Yammer has retired the silver model. In order to clear up any confusion, we've adjusted the wording in the headline to more closely reflect the content of the story.]

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. It’s now one of the flagship collaboration programs that help large businesses and companies that have employees strewn across the country communicate more effectively. The company has around 1.5 million corporate users, and around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the service. More than 100,000 companies total use the service in 136 countries.

The enterprise network provider has seen such explosive growth that it’s even making traditional collaboration software powerhouses sweat a bit. Salesforce originally provided its customers with a micro-blogging service called Chatter and charged everyone else $15 a month to use it. But the company did an about-face and is now offering the service for free to compete with Yammer. Kevin Spain, a partner with Emergence Capital and an investor in both Yammer and Salesforce, earlier called on Salesforce to unleash its micro-blogging service for free in order to successfully compete.

“The fact that Salesforce has to copy Yammer even though it has 2,000 sales reps is like Goliath dropping his sword and armor and chasing after David with a sling-shot,” said David Sacks, CEO of Yammer. “This funding will make sure they don’t catch up to us.”

With Yammer, it’s free to join, and the company makes money off subscription models for premium services and off IT servicing, Spain said. A number of Yammer’s features are held behind one of two pay walls — a “silver” model that costs businesses $3 per user per month, and a “gold” model that costs them $5 per user per month. But because the service is free to use initially, it’s able to spread virally as employees begin using it on their own within companies. That means Yammer has virtually no marketing budget — it grows organically, much like Facebook and other social networks have.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised $40 million to date. The most recent round was led by U.S. Venture Partners. Yammer’s existing investors, Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund, also participated. U.S. Venture Partners Principal Mamood Hamid will join Yammer’s board of directors as part of the deal.

Yammer launched in 2008 and very quickly hit the 1 million user mark in July. The company is led by David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer. David Stewart, former senior director of product at social networking game company Playdom, and Mark Woolway, a former managing director at Clarium Capital, are also joining Yammer as executives as of today.