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Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure "click to conversion" metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. "We've been working to establish Spredfast as the 'Omniture for social media', a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast's CEO. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product." Discuss
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Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding
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For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss
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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything
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When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr . Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium . Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead. Sponsor Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following: "How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what's now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges." Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month . Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr's-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of. Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what's now called "social media" and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since. Photo by Beth Kanter. Discuss
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Flickr's Community Manager Says Goodbye
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Back in February at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in Miami, Union Square Ventures ' Fred Wilson presented on his 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps . For those not fortunate enough to attend the conference, a video and transcript of the talk and subsequent Q&A session with Wilson is now available online for the general public to learn what one of the leading east coast investors advises startups do to succeed on the Web. Sponsor So what does Wilson say is the single most important feature of the Web apps that win? Speed. He says that while more dedicated users will provide some leeway for speed issues, the average user (his go-to users are his wife and kids) will make quick and lasting judgements of a Web app based on its speed. "When we see some of our portfolio company's applications getting bogged down, we also note that they don't grow as quickly," Wilson said. "There is real empirical evidence that substantiates the fact that speed is more than a feature. It's a requirement." This reminds me of an idea I've been pondering from time to time about Web apps, and that's the perception of speed. The design of a Web app can go a long way in how users perceive its speed. Luke Andrews of Dabble DB spoke about this very topic at last year's mesh conference , a Canadian Web conference. In his talk, Andrews mentioned how Google just feels faster than Yahoo because the homepage isn't as busy with supplementary items. When the design of a Web app is slick, clean and uncluttered, it translates as speed in our brains. If you saw a Corvette sitting at a red light next to a boxy station wagon, you would assume the Corvette is the faster car just by looking at it (even though the engine could be poorly maintained and slower than the possibly souped up station wagon). Aside from a well designed site, Web apps can also implement small features to their site to bump the perception of speed. Another item Andrews pointed out in his talk was how when we as humans are asked a question, before we begin to respond, we make it clear that we have acknowledged the question with either a nod or a stroking of our beard. Web apps need to do the same thing; if something takes some computing time to complete, let users know with a "Loading..." animation. By providing users with an immediate visual response to their input, you boost their perception of the speed of your Web app, but nothing can truly substitute the real thing. Clean design and well thought out UI can only go so far, so as Fred Wilson advises, make sure speed is not just a feature, but a requirement. Photo by Flickr user Nathan Bittinger . Discuss
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Make Those Web Apps Run Fast! (Or At Least Fake It)
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Will popular websites, especially those from news and entertainment companies, work on the iPad? Apple, in an arguably brilliant PR effort now has an answer: an online collection of iPad-Ready sites . The Cupertino-based maker of iPods and iPhones made a bold, potentially Internet-changing decision when it decided that the upcoming slate computer known as the Apple iPad would not support Adobe Flash technology. This browser plugin, used across the Web for everything from streaming video to casual games, is slowly being phased out by HTML5, the next revision of the core markup language used in the creation of Web pages. The video support included in the upcoming Web standard requires no downloadable, installable plugin in order to work. But HMTL5 is still new, and details - including what video codec it will support - have not been ironed out. Sponsor Apple's New "iPad-Ready" Collection Initially spotted by the eagle-eye bloggers at The Next Web , the new "iPad Ready" resource available at www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad is a collection of websites that now officially work on the iPad. According to the site's description, this collection includes websites that take advantage of standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. In other words, these are sites that have been designed just for the millions of new iPad owners expected to be online by the end of the first quarter this year. Included in the list are CNN, Reuters, New York Times, Vimeo, Time, Major League Baseball, The White House, Virgin America, Sports Illustrated, Flickr, People Magazine and TED. Site owners who want their website listed can use the included submission form to be added to the list. Also, at the bottom of the page, there's a link to the Safari Technical Library documentation detailing how to get your Web content ready for the iPad . Flash vs. HTML5: Did Apple Make this a War? This "iPad Ready" site's launch seems all the more relevant in light of yesterday's news from Apple's newest rival Google : the Internet giant announced it would begin integrating Flash into its Web browser Google Chrome . Was that a shot at Apple? Or was Google genuinely interested in making Web browsing less complex for everyday users? It's a valid question. The debate about Flash's future on the Internet is so hotly charged at the moment, that even WSJ reporter Walt Mossberg seemed afraid go into detail in his otherwise stellar, in-depth iPad review . The only mention he made was this: "I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe's Flash technology, which the iPad doesn't support, despite its wide popularity online." Perhaps he honestly doesn't think the iPad's inability to display Flash content will be an issue...and maybe it won't be. But to ignore the burning question that many soon-to-be iPad owners have - that is: will my favorite websites work? - seems like an oversight at best. These days, the Flash vs. HTML5 discussion is being framed as a "war" (and if you read through the comments of a post detailing video performance test results, you would think it certainly is). But the truth is, HTML5 isn't displacing Adobe Flash anytime soon. It likely will...eventually...but that day is years away. This is according to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire , whose company is helping website owners prepare for iPad. The issue, said Allaire, is that the percentage of Web browsers that support HTML5 is "tiny," and those that do so haven't yet settled on one video codec as the default. Until there's uniformity in the implementation of HTML5 video, he said, publishers will offer multiple versions of their websites, dependent on what device, browser and operating system is in use by their website visitors. So in the meantime, that means desktop Web surfers will see Flash, iPad Web surfers will see HTML5 on some sites and the " Flash broken blue lego " elsewhere. Even if that's the case, it won't, in the end, take away from the iPad's relevance in the new age of touch-based computing. It will just be a temporary setback until the rest of the Internet catches up with its own future. Discuss
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Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears
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