On the heels of announcing profitability, startup NetVibes is announcing a new feature today to help users monitor the realtime web. NetVibes is launching a personal dashboard monitoring platform, called Instant Dashboards. The new feature allows users to enter a keyword on NetVibes’ site to pull up an instant dashboard that automatically collects all of the latest photos, videos, news, feeds, search results, Twitter conversations and more around that topic. Instant dashboards are automatically updated in near real-time.

The dashboard is essentially a way for users to track content on the realtime web. For example, if I create a dashboard for Tiger Woods, NetVibes will aggregate videos from Google search, news from Google news, photos from Flickr, realtime search results from Yahoo, Tweets about Woods and more.

Users can browse content within their Instant Dashboard using the Netvibes Smart Reader, which lets people view real-time content in magazine-style widgets or in a flowing RSS reader. Dashboards can be personalized and users can also add more content from the Netvibes widget and content ecosystem, which includes a plethora of RSS feeds and widgets from social networks and content platforms.

NetVibes has transformed its product since its launch five years ago. The startup began with personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.

And the startup just hit profitability on a net income basis, with revenue from enterprise offerings comprising most of sales. NetVibes offers an enterprise version of dashboards for PR and marketing professionals, which pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard.

Netvibes Showcase from Netvibes on Vimeo.

Crunchbase

• NETVIBES

Company: Netvibes

Website: netvibes.com

Launch Date: September 1, 2005

Funding: $16M

Netvibes Dashboard platforms transform browsing, sharing, and tagging into tangible business data to share, analyze, and act on in real-time. Listen to Everything. Learn from Everyone. Act in Real-Time. This is Dashboard Intelligence, the evolution of Business Intelligence.

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