Exclusive –Spigit, maker of collaborative innovation management software for enterprises, will announce this morning that it has received an equity investment of $10 million from Warburg Pincus. The financing round completes a $20 million investment from the private equity firm, resulting in $26 million in funding overall for Spigit.
The company markets products that allow organizations to tap the collective intelligence of its employees, partners and customers to help them gain insights about their business.
Spigit founder and CEO Paul Pluschkell says the company is on a roll, growing at approximately 300% year-over-year by leveraging platforms like Facebook, SharePoint and mobile operating systems to basically allow innovation to “happen anytime, anywhere”.
According to the Spigit website, its platform is in use by more than 3 million subscribers today.
The $10 million will be invested in “game mechanics, social algorithms, behavioral sciences, and consulting services”, the company says.”
Former CareerBuilder founder and CEO Rob McGovern launched Jobfox in 2004 as a job profile site in which individuals could search through job openings displayed on the site’s boards. But the site was tough for recruiters to actively use because they had to comb through profiles of potential applicants. Today, Jobfox is unveiling a new version of the site that hopes to solve this problem. Essentially Jobfox allows corporate recruiters and headhunters to create private hiring networks. Job seekers can create a profile on the site and join corporate networks for companies they are interested in working for.
Jobfox says that the virtue of using its network vs LinkedIn for job seeking is that it is completely focused on job seekers and recruiters as opposed to socializing or sharing content. Because to connections made between job seekers and recruiters are confidential and not published on the network, it also ensures user privacy.
And the site will actually connect with LinkedIn and Facebook to alert you of your friends that work at the companies you want to work at, and it pulls in data from Twitter and company HR sites to alert seekers of job openings not displayed anywhere else.
Members can also “boost” friends or colleagues for jobs and earn financial incentives if the connection results in a hire. It’s important to note that Jobfox focuses exclusively on salaried jobs as opposed to hourly positions or freelance opportunities. Currently, 7,000 companies are represented on the site and roughly 140,000 jobs are advertised per month on the site.
While LinkedIn has also become a popular destination for job seekers, there is certainly room for a number of players in the social recruiting space. What LinkedIn has in it’s favor, however, is a massive userbase (which is nearing 100 million). But considering McGovern’s prior experience in the online job market, Jobfox is definitely worth a look.
Nimbit, a direct-to-fan marketing, sales and distribution platform for musicians, announced today that it has closed a $1.25 million series A investment round. The round was led by Common Angels and Hub Angels and, according to VP of Marketing Carl Jacobson, will be used to ramp up the company’s hiring efforts.
Nimbit adds to the cumulative $3.5 million of seed funding it raised during three prior seed rounds beginning in May of 2006. The seed rounds were also led by Common Angels and Hub Angels, with LaunchCapital and Rose Tech Ventures contributing.
Founded in 2002, the Massachusetts-based Nimbit is a one-stop shop for musicians looking to manage their own direct-to-fan marketing and commercial music efforts. And though Jacobson said that Nimbit may have been “a little early to the party”, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the last few years concerning shifts in music marketing and distribution — like the success of Radiohead’s releasing “In Rainbows” direct to fans via their website, for example — and it now seems that the market may be ready to adopt the direct-to-fan model.
Certainly, the Web has changed the complexion of the music industry, having made it easier for bands and musicians to distribute their music and gain an audience. Yet, while YouTube and MySpace provide channels for free digital music distribution, and Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts offer platforms for marketing efforts, these networks are broad in terms of scope and limited in terms of the tools and solutions they provide to small business and musical entrepreneurs.
Starting a band is as intrinsically entrepreneurial as it is creative, yet most bands tend to hire managers and marketers to handle the business-side of operations, because they can’t or won’t deal with that side of the game. Nimbit removes the time-consuming (and total buzz-killing) commercial aspects of musical enterprise by providing musicians with the tools to market their music directly to fans by email, SMS, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as browse marketing analytics and receive realtime sales reports. Musicians can add a custom store to their site to sell MP3s, CDs, and merchandise, or create a customized dashboard to manage catalogs and fan lists.
Quite a few musicians that I know dislike the business side of music and, as seems true of many creative-types, they end up either refusing to participate or do so grudgingly, which makes me think that Nimbit’s services could be very useful to the troubadours and crooners among us — whether they deal in death metal, dub step, or heady acoustic stylings. Plus, the Web is killing (or has killed) traditional music labels, so why not just automate and digitally outsource the process? I know I will.
Jacobson told me that Nimbit understands that, above all, musicians should be focusing on making music, so Nimbit will be putting its Series A funding towards building additional customer support and optimizing fan engagement tools. To do so, they will be aggressively expanding their team and are currently looking for a web apps developer, so you web apps experts out there, check ‘em out.
VigLink, a startup that helps publishers and bloggers monetize their outbound traffic, has closed a $5.4 million Series B funding round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital. The company raised $800,000 in January 2010 and has now raised a total of $7.3 million. The company is also revealing that SoftTech VC took part in an earlier round (their participation was not previously disclosed).
VigLink’s goal is to help publishers monetize their content more effectively and without much effort. After installing a small snippet of code on your site, VigLink will detect whenever you create an outbound link to any of 12,500 merchant sites. It will then automatically convert this link to an affiliate link, which means that you get a kickback whenever someone clicks it and eventually completes a purchase on the linked merchant site. VigLink generally takes 25% of this cut, but given that many publishers don’t monetize their outbound traffic at all, it’s a lot better than nothing. Of course, you could always sign up for an affiliate program yourself, but VigLink is more convenient.
In addition to converting these links, VigLink is also gradually rolling out a new product that automatically inserts affiliate links whenever a relevant keyword is mentioned (for example, if you mentioned Nike shoes in a blog post, the site might automatically add a link to that text). This is a more aggressive feature, but CEO Oliver Roup says that the company’s goal is to make their links unobtrusive. They’re totally optional for publishers, and the service will also cap the number of links in any given article at four.
Since launching in February 2010 the service has been embedded on 15,000 sites, which serve some 2 billion pageviews per month. The company isn’t talking about how much revenue it’s generated for publishers, other than to say it’s been “meaningful” to their bottom lines. VigLink acquired one of its competitors, DrivingRevenue, in August. Other competitors include UK-based startup Skimlinks.
Today, San Francisco-based marketing intelligence company, BackType, announced that it has closed a seed funding round of just over $1 million, led by a group of Silicon Valley investors, including lead investor True Ventures as well as Manu Kumar’s K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Founder Collective, Raymond Tonsing, and more.
BackType adds to the previous cumulative $315,000 of seed funding it raised in July 2008 and January 2009, from Y Combinator and True Ventures, respectively. It also recently added one of the co-founders of Palantir Technologies as an advisor.
BackType’s free analytics dashboard, which is currently in private beta, aims to help brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media in order to make more intelligent marketing decisions. The company has already amassed 30 terabytes (one terabyte is roughly equivalent to the entire contents of a large library) of social data (Tweets, Facebook comments and likes, blog comments, etc.) and assists more than 100 companies with their social media analytics, from The New York Times and Edelman to startups like Bitly, HubSpot, Hunch and SlideShare.
Making sense of terabytes of social data in realtime is no easy feat. BackType uses a high tech stream processing system, akin to Hadoop but for real-time processing, which they claim goes beyond what Facebook and Twitter have developed for their analytics. You can read more about the big data processor here. BackType CEO Christopher Golda told me that, thanks to this backend tech, the company was able to build and release influence profiles for every active Twitter user in under 24 hours.
Golda said that BackType will be using this new round of seed funding to grow the team and launch its new paid analytics product, which he said will debut later this year. In the meantime, you can find its paid Twitter-only product here or use its free product here.
Former CareerBuilder founder and CEO 
