Webware

Socialcast, a company that impressively applies to business ideas from FriendFeed and Twitter, continues to refine its product.

The vision for a new release of the service, according to CEO Timothy Young, is to make it a universal, real-time platform for business communication. This means precisely nothing by itself. What the company is trying to do is this: take its FriendFeed-like person-to-person messaging system, and make it communicate with business tools like bug databases and CRM systems. So, for example, if you're subscribed to Suzy Sunshine in Sales, and she publishes a call report in Salesforce, you'll see the gist of the report in Socialcast immediately after she enters it.

More importantly, you'll be able to reply to the report from within Socialcast, and then other people in your network will see that dialogue. And it will get archived into the Salesforce system so people who work primarily in that system will also see the dialogue.

Personally, I'd love to use a system like this to track items in Bugzilla, not to mention various other internal corporate workflow systems, like our expense reimbursement product.

Young talked about this feature with me in September and says it's rolling out now. He says Socialcast isn't just a communications platform, like Twitter. He also calls it a "discovery engine" because it lets you discover what other people in your workplace are doing--even if they're not using Socialcast directly.

Socialcast is now a free hosted service, but the company will sell you an installable version of it, if you want it behind your firewall. It also offers setup services for a fee.

In the future, Young says, the company will offer "social business intelligence" tools on top of its services to tell you how information flows in a company. He says executives and human resources pros may use the data to find out who the "connectors" are in a company or to get reports on trending topics in the company.

Socialcast looks a lot like Twitter or FriendFeed, but it's designed to tap into corporate work flow systems.

(Credit: Socialcast)

I expect that Socialcast will end up competing with Google Wave, but Young thinks that it will become a front end to Wave installations.

The company has 5,600 customers, Young says, and just less than 1 million users. Customers include NASA and Guitar Center.

Adgregate Markets, a company that allows users to access advertisements through banner widgets, has signed a deal with Google DoubleClick, the company announced Tuesday. The company's ShopAds widget, which displays ads and sale information on a Web page in place of a banner, is now available to all Google DoubleClick users. Whenever a user views the widget and sees something they'd like to buy, they can click on the ad in the widget and automatically "add it to the cart." They can then buy the product without leaving the page they're on.

Neither Adgregate Markets nor Google would disclose the deal's specifics, but TechCrunch is reporting that there will be a revenue-sharing arrangement between the companies. Adgregate Markets' ShopAds platform will be available to all Google DoubleClick users starting Tuesday.

Almaz Capital Russia Fund I, a venture fund containing mostly Cisco capital, announced Tuesday that it has invested $11 million in virtualization vendor Parallels, as well as mobile social-network platform developer Apollo Project. According to the company, it plans to invest in growth-stage Russian software and IT companies going forward.

Online educational service Knewton raised $6 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Accel Partners and First Round Capital also participated in the round. The company hopes to use the funding to become a staple in the enterprise space, while continuing to offer its service to consumers.

Socialcast, a company that provides social communication for the enterprise, announced Tuesday that it has secured $1.4 million in a Series A round of funding. The round was led by True Ventures. Well-known blogger Om Malik, founder of the GigaOm blog network and partner at True Ventures, will join Socialcast's board of directors.

(Credit: Yammer)

I recently covered Socialcast, a "Friendfeed for business," and liked it a lot. It takes emerging social interaction models that people are just now getting accustomed to and adapts them for business.

Here at TechCrunch50, the idea is also in evidence with Yammer, more of a "Twitter for business" than Socialcast, since it doesn't seem to be able to pull in external feeds the same way.

However, users can have threaded discussions, as they can on FriendFeed. Users can also use "hashtags" for tagging topics, and they can follow just those tags. Useful if you want to follow a project, but not necessarily all the people working on it.

Yammer will launch with a desktop AIR app, as well as iPhone and BlackBerry apps, and an SMS interface.

The base product is free. Enterprise versions with admin tools and security features will cost you.

I really like this concept, but my fear is that this kind of product is too easy to build (especially on a workgroup scale, as compared to the consumer scale Twitter has struggled with). What I don't see is a blocking business strategy. But I still like it.

The service is now live.

Socialcast on Tuesday is launching a revision of its group communication service. Originally released in 2007, Tuesday's update has a much cleaner and more contemporary interface, and liberally borrows features and ideas from social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

I was very impressed by the demo I got last week. Socialcast appears to have a solid, lightweight product for business communication that could help workers (along with customers and clients) keep up to date with each other, and could also reduce in-company e-mail spam.

The underlying principle of Socialcast is that users enter their status messages, questions, or ideas into a simple text box. Users can also link their accounts to other services, such as Delicious, or to RSS feeds and blogs. People who subscribe to those users can see those updates and can respond to them privately or in public.

As on FriendFeed, items that are discussed a lot stay on the top of the stack of items.

Sound familiar?

Socialcast is like FriendFeed, but with a business slant.

What makes Socialcast a business product more so than FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Jaiku, or what have you, is that it offers administrative controls appropriate for a workgroup app. Admins can hook the system into an enterprise directory service, and can make sure new people joining a workgroup are automatically subscribed to others in their company who matter to them.

The system also has different default item types than a general-purpose nanoblog or personal feed aggregator. You can enter your status, as you can with other services, or put items in the categories "ideas," "questions," "links," and "worklog." The last is especially useful to keep tabs on who's doing what.

Socialcast will also let enterprise customers "white label" the product so it carries corporate branding, and there will be capabilities to include company-specific posting types linked to an internal system. For example, when signing a new customer, the service could link to a Salesforce.com record and pull information from it. Links to wikis and bug-tracking systems are also possible.

I believe this tool could do several good things for a company. Most importantly, it connects its users to the pulse of what's happening in a company or workgroup, and still gives them the control to dial back on the onslaught of information if they wish, by un-following certain users.

It can also help capture business knowledge in a central location. And it can greatly reduce corporate spam.

I do have some reservations, though. There's no client app for the service yet, for example, although I'm told an AIR app is forthcoming. I find that using a desktop app, Twhirl, to access FriendFeed and Twitter makes using the services much easier, and for Socialcast to really work, a persistent desktop experience (like on an e-mail app) will make a big difference.

The new small-business version of the application will cost $5 a month per user (after 30-day free trial). It's a fair price, but there are no tiers of service (flat rates for groups of users), and I worry that businesses may be stingy with subscriptions and not sign up for as many user accounts as they could use. This pricing plan might also make it harder for end users to sign up people for their service who aren't in the company proper--customers and clients, for example.

And speaking of external users, I'm not sure how the product manages security, so some feeds stay closed off to non-company users.

For Socialcast to add value to a company, it has to be used. Fortunately, it appears to be easy, even fun, to get into and use the app. I would be delighted to see CNET adopt the product. I think it could help us, and most other businesses too.

See also: Jive Clearspace, SelectMinds, Igloo, Socialtext.