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Posts Tagged ‘yammer’

As we reported last night, Yammer has just announced that it will begin allowing users to sign up for the microblogging service without requiring email addresses that are associated with their company domain names (e.g. jason@company.com). This new feature, called Communities, will open the service to less formal organizations, and even families. And it also opens the door to B2B collaboration, which is how Yammer seems to be primarily marketing the new feature  Communities will launch on March 1.

This is a big move for the company. On a conference call this morning, Yammer CEO David Sacks said that one of the problems with Yammer so far has been that communication on the service has been restricted to internal use within a company. The issue many people ran into was that they’d want to collaborate with their clients or business partners as well, but didn’t have a way to do that without inviting them to their company’s internal network (which often wasn’t an option).

Now they’ll be able to build networks around each of their partnerships, upcoming events, and clients, while still keeping their internal networks private. Communities appear to function a lot like Yammer’s existing Groups, but now they can include people who aren’t in your company network. The site now features a ‘Communities’ tab at the top of the screen, which allows users to jump between a number of linked networks. There’s also a new tab called ‘Networks’ that allows you to see how many unread messages are available in each of the networks you’re linked to. Communities will include the same administration tools as company networks (and will offer more control than Groups do).

Yammer Communities will follow Yammer’s pricing model — it’s free to use, with premium pricing for more advanced features. Sacks says that the company’s iPhone application will support Communities from day one, as will the AIR-based Yammer desktop client.

We’ve been using Yammer internally at TechCrunch since it launched (and won) TechCrunch50 2008, and have found it to be a great way to coordinate our team.

Trackur, a bootstrapped startup founded by Internet marketing consultant and writer Andy Beal, up until now offered only paid versions of its online reputation management and social media monitoring tools, albeit with free trial periods.

Today, the fledgling company is introducing an entirely gratis version of the Web-based software suite, giving marketers and small business owners a compelling reason to want to check it out and see why basic Google Alerts simply may not be cutting it anymore.

When you enter a keyword in Trackur’s search system, the service will look for mentions in both ‘mainstream’ and social media, tweets, videos, images, tags and so on. You’ll get a nice overview of where that keyword – which would generally be a company, brand or product name – has been mentioned along with some graphs tracking such mentions over time. You can save a search, which means Trackur will run it automatically every 30 minutes and notify you of new mentions across all of the media it tracks.

With any of the paid versions of Trackur, you can save multiple search keywords to your personal dashboard, but the free version will only allow you to do that for one. For a lot of small business owners or marketers, that will actually be sufficient, although the startup evidently hopes they’ll be tempted to pay for an upgrade at some point.

Alternatives to Trackur are plenty and include services offered by companies like Radian6, Visible Technologies and Attentio.

Trackur is self-funded by Beal, who says he currently serves about 15,000+ users, a mixture of people benefiting from free trials and those who are effectively paying for the product. Beal declined to break down those numbers, but says his 3-person startup, which was founded early 2008, has been operating profitably since day one. He also told me he’s been approached by venture capitalists in the past who’ve offered to invest, but that he told most of them that he wouldn’t even know what to do with $100,000 if it were given to him.

God, I love bootstrapped ventures.

Last week, Yammer, the business-oriented microblogging platform that won TechCrunch50 2008, sent out invites to press inviting them to virtually attend a “major launch event” that will be broadcast through a WebEx meeting tomorrow morning. The company has also posted an invite to its blog, along with a not-so-subtle jab at its competitors: “Forget all that over-hyped chatter and annoying buzz, Yammer is releasing the next wave in Enterprise Microblogging“.

So what exactly is Yammer about to introduce? We’re hearing from one source that the company is planning to start allowing people to create networks that aren’t built around web domains. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would be a major change for Yammer, and one that could open it up to a huge number of new users.

Until now, in order to create a Yammer network you’ve needed to have email addresses associated with your own business domain name (say, jason@company.com) . This works great for sizable companies (everyone who has an email account on that domain is automatically placed into the correct network), but it’s a big limitation on who can actually use the service — plenty of businesses and organizations don’t have their own domain names.

Depending on how Yammer rolls this out, there could be countless uses for this.  Last summer, I wrote about how useful it would be to have a Yammer for families that would allow family members to easily share information in a centralized place (and get SMS alerts if something important came up).  Local groups could set up Yammer accounts to share information instead of relying on long Email chains, and so on. But Yammer wouldn’t be alone here — a recently launched startup called HipChat is already going after this broad market.

We’ll have more details tomorrow at 11 AM. And if you’re interested, the WebEx meeting is apparently open to the public.

First Google, now Foursquare. Hot on the heels of Google’s first Search television ad (run during the Super Bowl, no less), the location-based social network Foursquare is gearing up to do the same thing tonight.

In a tweet sent from their main Twitter account, the Foursquare team notes a “rumor” that an ad for their service will be running on Bravo tonight alongside the show Sheer Genius from 9 to 10 PM. But it’s not a rumor, we’ve seen the ad (and have embedded it below for your own viewing pleasure). It’s a 20-second spot made by Bravo for Foursquare to highlight their recently announced a partnership that allows the network to point out locations from its shows that let fans who use Foursquare (or their own Guides By Bravo app) go to them in the real world. This is believed to be one of the deals currently earning Foursquare some revenue.

While the company is making some revenue, it’s not yet profitable, and the focus remains on building the product and gaining users. Currently, Foursquare is closing in on 500,000 users, but with a cable television commercial, those numbers could soar.

The service is in the process of revamping its website and several of its mobile applications. A new version of the iPhone app, which launched one year ago at the SXSW conference will hopefully be ready in time for this year’s SXSW, we’re told.

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

Finally. Over a year after iPhone users got their native Yammer fix, Android has an official Yammer application available on Android Market. The application, while still fairly basic, comes with support for most of Yammer’s core functionality. If you use Yammer and you have an Android phone, you’ll want this app. We can’t link directly to the app because Google still hasn’t launched a strong web presence for the Market, but you can find it by running a query for “Yammer” from your phone.

The new application is actually derived from the codebase of Yowl, a third party app for Android that Yammer acquired a couple months ago. CEO David Sacks says that the application has been off the Market since the acquisition, primarily so that the team could fix a few issues. Now it’s good to go.

While a mobile application isn’t totally essential to using Yammer (you can use SMS, and the web app works well enough from mobile browsers), they sure make life easier. The Android application can automatically notify you when you have new messages, and you can leave it running all day in the background (on the iPhone you have to set up Push notifications). We’ve relied heavily on Yammer since its launch at TechCrunch50 2008, and this will make things much easier for those of us who have made the jump from the iPhone (or something else) to Android.

I’ve been playing with the app throughout the day and found it to work well overall, but it isn’t perfect yet. I found a bug or two (for instance, whenever I try to jump back in a message I’m writing to correct a typo, the whole message disappears). And there are some features that aren’t in the app yet, like the ability to granularly control which messages should issue an audio/vibrating alert. Sacks says the app will definitely be upgraded with more features in the future.

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For any small business, there’s no question that efficient internal communication is key. That’s doubly true in today’s world, where many companies have team members scattered around the world. There are communication platforms out there that look to tackle this, but many of them are either time consuming to setup or aren’t really designed for your ‘everyman’ small business or organization. Enter HipChat, a startup that wants to be the communication platform that any business or organization can get up and running in a matter of minutes. The service launches today in private beta, and the first 100 people to enter “TECHCRUNCH” as their invite code will be able to start their own company networks (you only need one code to invite your entire company).

HipChat offers an Adobe AIR client (compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux) that lets you chat with your entire team at once, or hold more private discussions with select team members. It offers support for quick attachment sharing, notifications when you receive a message, and a searchable web archive for past messages. And perhaps most important: it’s very easy to get up and running, even for the most casual users. You don’t need your own company Email address, and the signup process takes all of three minutes.

The app itself is slick. It runs in AIR (which I’m not typically a fan of) but it looks very clean and doesn’t come with that distinctly unnative you often wind up with on AIR. Chats are broken into different rooms — along with your companywide chat, you can invite other team members to join you in smaller groups, and you can mark them private if you’d like to restrict access.

Now, businesses often have the same question about services like this: why not just use a group chat room on AIM or Skype? The answer is equally obvious. If that’s so practical, why aren’t you already doing it?

It’s hard to overstate how much these services can help. At TechCrunch we rely heavily on TC50 winner Yammer for much of our internal communication. It’s amazing how reliant we’ve become on the service in such a short time — if Yammer goes down, we wind up turning to mass Email messages, which are hardly ideal.

HipChat will be facing off with Yammer and, to some degree, Salesforce Chatter, but it’s tackling a different market. Yammer appeals to a huge variety of companies, but it requires that they have their own internal Email address (e.g. john@company.com). For small companies with limited tech resources, that’s a fairly high barrier to entry, which gives HipChat an opportunity. There’s also the potential to appeal to organizations like fraternities and clubs. HipChat also competes with Campfire by 37signals but Campfire is web-based rather than a desktop app.

HipChat does have a ways to go from a functionality perspective before it can really match Yammer’s offerings. For one, there’s currently no way to receive a SMS notification when someone mentions you in a message. There are also no mobile applications currently available. HipChat also lacks some of the security options offered by Yammer, like restricting access to specified IP ranges, but for most small businesses that probably isn’t much of an issue. The HipChat team says that they’ll consider any good ideas its users request, so don’t be surprised if we see some of these features roll out soon.

Users will be able to try the service free for thirty days, and then can step up to a paid plan, which range from $9 a month for 12 members and a restricted chat history to $100 a month for 100 members and unlimited chat history. More pricing details are here.

HipChat was founded by Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, who previously founded calendar startup HipCal, which was acquired by Plaxo in 2006. At Plaxo they helped build out Plaxo Pulse. They stayed at the company through its acquisition by Comcast in 2008, and left earlier this year to start HipChat.

You can get a feel for HipChat in the demo video below. Clearly the HipChat team had a good time making it — make sure to pay attention to the The Office inspired chats (this is especially funny because Salesforce used the exact same idea for their demo).

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Come see James Cameron’s Avatar in 3D with us on opening day this Friday in San Francisco. As with past screenings (Iron Man, Star Trek, Batman and others) we’re footing the bill. We just love to see all our happy readers in person every once in a while.

The screening is at 4:00 pm (seating opens at 3:15) at the AMC Metreon 16 (4th and Market) in San Francisco this Friday December 18. Tickets are available here at Eventbrite (we’re releasing a portion now, and more later). We’re asking for a charitable donation of $5 per ticket, and 100% of the proceeds will be given to the UCSF Foundation or Malaria No More (your choice).

Like we said, we’ve got the tickets covered. If you’d like to sponsor the event by buying attendees popcorn and/or a soft drink, email us at sponsors@techcrunch.com.

If you aren’t attending, please do not purchase a ticket. No shows mean an empty seat and you won’t be able to attend future TechCrunch events. If you email us that you can’t attend, we can fill that spot later.

See you Friday! And if you get a ticket, make sure to check in at Plancast to see who else will be there.

Update: First batch is gone, but we’ll release more later.

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Each time we write about Dazzboard, a browser-based syncing solution for getting photos, videos, and music onto your mobile handset, it’s pretty much a given that someone will comment that it doesn’t support their handset of choice yet. Everyone’s a critic, right?

While it still doesn’t support the much clamored-for iPhone or iPod Touch (nor does it seem likely that it will anytime soon, due to software restrictions – thanks Apple!), they’ve just added support for a different hot-ticket item: Android phones.

Read the rest of this at MobileCrunch >>

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Yammer, a twitter-like service for closed groups, continues to add new features that I wish Twitter would implement as well. In the last day or so they added a simple notification for unread messages that syncs across the many ways users can access the service (mobile, AIR, browser). The notification is available through the Yammer API as well.

Twitter needs something like this. Various Twitter clients built by third party services try to do it on their own, but without the feature at the API level it only works if you access Twitter just from that client.

Yammer has consistently pushed new and useful features quickly to users.

If you don’t use Yammer at your business, you should. We’ve been fans of the service since launching at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It has replaced email for most of our in-office communication. And the service is very reliable, other than the occasional service outage while their CEO David Sacks is off playing poker in Vegas.

The company is also getting more serious about the Android platform. Until recently the only Yammer app for Android was created by Nullwire. Yammer acquired the product from Nullwire and will now develop it in-house. You can download it here.

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