Is there any hotter market than social enterprise applications right now? Need proof? Just look at Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer for more than $1 billion. Or Salesforce’s acquisition of Rypple. It seems clear that enterprises realize that one way to actually hone and measure employee productivity is to make that activity more social and collaborative.

There’s just one problem: Few enterprise social networks actually work very well. While they generally register high engagement at launch within an enterprise, activity tends to tail off after a few weeks or months once people get tired of using them as a replacement for email. They don’t provide much in the way of tools for actually getting things done. And it’s difficult to show a real ROI once one of these things is deployed.

NationalField is an enterprise social networking company that was founded to solve those problems. The platform is designed in part to provide more transparency between how members of the enterprise are performing and incentivizing them to improve on that performance. Instead of just letting organizations use its network for collaboration, it also hooks into their systems and provides tools for integrating with a company’s org chart to provide more structure around how users work together.

Formed out of the 2008 Presidential campaign in the U.S., NationalField was built to simplify communications between in-the-field campaign volunteers and regional campaign offices. But the lessons from that campaign could also be used to improve enterprise collaboration, particularly in showing how well members of an organization are performing and trying to lift organizational productivity as a whole.

According to co-founder Edward Saatchi, the goal is to show a real ROI around deploying its system. To do so, it works with enterprises to find out which metrics are important to them and actually builds improvement in those areas into its compensation. So for instance, a sales organization would hook NationalField into its CRM, and part of its payment would be tied into increased sales as a result.

That’s a pitch that is resonating with businesses: It’s got 250,000 active users spread over 800 different enterprise customers. It charges a flat $10 per user fee per month, as well as takes a percentage based on ROI that it shows. It’s also resonating with investors, as NationalField just raised a $1.5 million fund from angels including Excel designer Jabe Blumethal and DirecTV cofounder Jim Ramo. It’s also adding former Jive CMO Sam Lawrence to its board of directors. Advisors include Socialcast’s Matt Wilkinson, Cubetree founder Ross Fubini, Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield, and Blue Kiwi founder Carlos Diaz.

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According to a tweet from longtime Googler Russ Laraway, he has decided to join the flock at Twitter. According to Laraway’s LinkedIn profile, he won a “2011 Great Manager Award”, along with 19 other people.

Today, I accepted an offer to work @Twitter – Thanks @ralfonsi , @aschoemehl , & @dickc for a great candidate experience!—
Russ Laraway (@russlaraway) October 25, 2012

Most recently, Laraway was Vice President, Merchant Sales For FreeMonee Network. He spent nearly seven years at Google. That’s not all, he is a former Marine Corps Company Commander and holds an MBA from Wharton. Sounds like a big score for Twitter.

This is the second former Googler the company has nabbed this week, the other being former Google Exec Matt Derella. He has joined Twitter as “Director Of Agency Business Development.”

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will let you know if we find out which roll Laraway will be taking on.

UPDATE: A Twitter spokesperson has confirmed that Laraway has joined the team, but did not provide his role or focus to us.

[Flickr Photo]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

UbueVu tries to go beyond social media monitoring by providing actual suggestions of things for social media managers to do. Today its Signals service, which we covered previously, is out of beta. The service also comes with a completely redesigned interface.

Every analytics company claims to offer “actionable intelligence,” so what does that mean in UberVu’s case? For small companies that don’t get many mentions, it might not be a big deal to stay on top of social media interactions. For large companies, it could be a real problem to sift through thousands of messages to find out which ones actually need a response. The Signals service processes streams of stuff like @ mentions on Twitter and references to specific keywords, and processes it all into something more digestible.

UberVu Founder and Chief Product Officer Vladimir Oane used GM as a sample company, though GM isn’t actually a customer.

The demo monitors for social media mentions relating to GM brands and competitors, as well as messages meant specifically for the GM Twitter account. It then uses machine-learning algorithms to sift through and find messages that a GM employee should actually respond to. For example, tweets with complaints from influential Twitter users, or questions about GM cars. It can also find things like articles that could be flagged for the PR department to review, or independent content that could be shared from official GM social media accounts.

The real question is how good its algorithms really are at prioritizing important tweets and content. That’s hard to gauge from a demo. But I can clearly see the value of this service for big brands if it works as advertised.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups…at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters.

The problem of too much social data and too little discoverability is so widespread that Facebook even discussed a possible acquisition of Ark. But instead its PhD founders decided to see how far they can ride their cute penguin logo. Soon it will launch native mobile apps with some of most useful push notifications I’ve seen. And as part of its limited launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, Ark is accepting new users at ark.com/tcd until the end of the conference on Wednesday.

Last month when Y Combinator company Ark made waves taking a mammoth seed round, co-founder Patrick Riley told me it didn’t choose to raise a more typical Series A because “If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” Now it’s using that money to hire some information retrieval rockstars the founders spotted during their PhDs at Berkeley.

Facebook was so impressed with how Ark repurposed its data that the social network loosely discussed the possibility of buying the startup or at least acq-hiring its founders. There was no offer extended, but Riley tells me “We didn’t even take it that far. We weren’t interested. We wanted to build something bigger.”

When he says bigger, he means searching beyond profiles, but moving into Greplin’s territory — allowing you to instantly search through all your social data, including public posts, private messages, and even email. If you needed to find an address of a party but weren’t sure if you received in a Facebook message or Gmail, or even any keywords, you could one day use Ark to filter for street addresses, find that apartment number on Haight street, and go have fun.

Soon it will launch native mobile apps that take advantage of geo-fencing to show you relevant info about where you are They do predictive search so when you travel to a new city, it pops up a push notification showing how many friends currently live there. Ark could lead to those offline meetups every mobile app wants to inspire.

There’s rabid interest, too. Ark got 234,000 signups in the first month, and already has 15,000 beta users. Now you can join them and start social searching at ark.com/tcd.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You’ve seen too many recipe websites. It’s okay – so have I. But Punchfork is doing things a little differently by leveraging hardcore algorithms to curate the best recipes found on the Web based on social network chatter, in realtime.

Punchfork has built a sophisticated algorithm that measures a how many times a recipe posted by its publishing partners gets shared on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and sites like StumbleUpon. The higher a recipe’s score based on Punchfork’s technology, on a scale from 1 to 100, the more it should have been talked about and shared on the Web.

In essence, the website lets you find out which dishes are in vogue these days, and tells you how to prepare them yourself.

The company also offers an API for developers who are interested in integrating recipes from Punchfork’s publisher partners into their own websites or apps.

And of course, there’s a brand new, free app for that: check out Punchfork for iPhone and iPad here.

The recipe discovery platform company was founded by Jeff Miller, also the creator of Hacker News-inspired Bitly News, with $20,000 of his own money. Punchfork is up against some venture-backed companies, including Gojee, Foodily and Yummly.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some chicken paninis to prepare.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Universum, a company that specializes in employer branding, has published some findings based on the preferences of over 160,000 career seekers with a business or engineering background from the world´s 12 largest economies (based on nominal GDP).

The goal: to find out which company is most attractive an employer according to business and engineering students.

Well, there’s no way around it: Google is solidly numero uno in both categories – just like last year and the year before that (see PDF).

Microsoft isn’t doing too bad either, while Apple is climbing up the charts fast. And Facebook is nowhere to be seen in the rankings (okay, neither are Twitter, Yahoo and – shocker – AOL).

On the Business index, KPMG keeps its second place, with PwC overtaking Ernst & Young to end up in the top 3. Clearly, professional services firms still outrank major technology and FCMG companies (excluding Google, to be perfectly clear).

Apple went from #18 to #9 in the Business index compared to last year, which is still remarkably low considering Apple is currently the most valuable company in the world. Microsoft, meanwhile, moved from #7 to #6 in the ranking.

As for the Engineering index, which is also led by Google: IBM now finds itself in the second position, bumping Microsoft to the third spot. Both Intel and Apple rose up the charts (from #6 to #5 and #10 to #è, respectively, with Sony dropping from #6 to #4 in perceived employer attractiveness.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user brionv)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch