Social application developer Seesmic is making a big move into the social enterprise and is debuting a dedicated Android app and iPad app for Salesforce’s CRM product (Windows Phone 7 will also be added soon), called Seesmic CRM. The Android app will be launched tomorrow morning at Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, and Seesmic will launch the iPad app in a few weeks.
For background, Seesmic, which was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, helps you monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The bonus of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others.
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“If you don’t adapt, you die,” Loic Le Meur told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio last week. And Loic – aka monsieur Pivot – is certainly one of the Valley’s most skilled adaptors. Having founded Seesmic in 2008 as a video aggregation network, he then transformed it the next year into a popular consumer Twitter client before shifting it earlier this year into a Salesforce and Softbank backed enterprise CRM tool.
The pivot, of course, is the thing these days. And Le Meur – perhaps because of his skill as a wind surfer – is a master of sniffing changes in the business environment before anyone else. In contrast with Catarina Fake and Philip Kaplan, Le Meur is strongly opposed to what the calls “the disposable start-up.” For him, he has a moral obligation to his investors at Seesmic (which include Mike Arrington) to adapt the company to the new environment – even if that sometimes means transforming the company into something unrecognizable from its previous incarnation. → Read More
Few transatlantic entrepreneurs know both the European and American start-up scene as intimately as Seesmic and Le Web founder Loic Le Meur. So the first question I asked Loic when he came into the San Francisco TechcrunchTV studio last week was what American start-up entrepreneurs can learn from their European counterparts.
Nothing, Loic told me. Except, perhaps, the ability to invite each other out for lunch. → Read More
The popular UberSocial Twitter client for BlackBerry (formerly known as UberTwitter) just got an update with a bunch of new features and bug fixes.
Notably, its developer UberMedia is doubling down on its BlackBerry app around the same time one of its rivals, Seesmic, is abandoning the BlackBerry platform.
One of the new features in UberSocial for Blackberry 1.2 is called “Inner Circle”, which basically lets you group together the most important people you follow in an exclusive timeline, alongside the traditional timeline. → Read More
Seesmic might have the sweetest Twitter app for Blackberry, but the Blackberry’s appeal isn’t sweet enough. Seesmic is discontinuing support for its Blackberry app on June 30.
Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, is going through a rough spot right now. But things must be pretty bad if Seesmic bailing. This is Seesmic, folks! They’ll build an app for any platform, even Windows Phone 7. → Read More
We’re back with a new episode of TC Cribs, the show that takes you inside the hopping offices of tech startups. This week we check out Seesmic, the multi-protocol client that lets you monitor your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other accounts from one place (they offer a nice web app and native mobile apps as well). And they have a thing for raccoons, as you’ll see in the video above.
Tune in for our full walkthrough of the office, led by Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur.
Oh, and if you want to watch Loic’s full description of Seesmic (which ran a bit long), you can watch it right here.
As usual, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing.
Here are the past episodes of TC Cribs: → Read More
Social application developer Seesmic has raised $4 million in new funding from enterprise giant Salesforce.com and Softbank Holdings, a subsidiary of Softbank. This brings Seesmic’s total funding to $16 million; Seesmic’s last fundraising round took place in 2008.
Founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, Seesmic helps both individuals and companies monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. One of the bonuses of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others. Last year, Seesmic launched a deep integration with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise, Chatter. → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name
In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups. A great part of that increased opportunity came as a result of the significant reduction in platform dependencies. No longer did the users’ operating system dictate their access to services or information. Even a behemoth like Microsoft was fighting hand-to-hand combat with small startups for the first time in decades. Fast forward ten years, and it’s 1985 all over again.
But even as the risks of dependencies become better understood by startups and investors, the ascent of Facebook and Twitter seem to point to an ever increasing number of startups with significant business dependencies. Recent changes to both Facebook and Twitter show that neither startups nor their investors can assume much when it comes to support for a given API in the future. Today, even the OS seems subject to dramatic shifts in record time. One only need look to Apple’s iOS to see how dramatic and unpredictable developments can change the landscape for startups, customers and investors.
Today, most startups build with significant external platform dependencies, whether it is Facebook, iOS, Google Apps or Twitter. There are a few types of dependencies. A simple distinction might be to call a dependency on a platform symbiotic or parasitic. Symbiotic dependencies are those for which both sides agree to terms of the dependency and for which both sides seem to derive a benefit. Developers on Facebook’s platform, for example. The most successful here being Zynga, which grew completely and—probably for the team and its investors—nervously within the Facebook ecosystem. → Read More
We’re hearing that Salesforce is investing in Seesmic’s next round of venture funding, along with other investors. We don’t yet know how much or at what valuation but the tie up is interesting.
Just a few months ago Mike was saying Twitter deciding to compete with developers had essentially killed Seesmic. That may be true for consumer chats, but enterprise is another matter. And between Yammer’s new round of funding and Salesforce’s Chatter product, enterprise chat is heating up.
Might Seesmic be a spoiler? The two have already been chummy, with Seesmic integrating into Chatter and Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appearing on stage together multiple times. We’ll post more details when we hear them.
(Disclosure: This may come as a surprise since Mike is so hard on Loic, Seesmic and the French generally, but he was an early investor in the company.) → Read More
Seesmic, the realtime social web aggregator, is announcing a new version of its popular Android app today that includes a UI makeover, Salesforce Chatter integration, and other improved functionality.
Salesforce Chatter, the company’s social networking application for the enterprise, can now be integrated into Seesmic’s Android app, allowing users to read their Chatter feeds, comment, view groups, contacts, profiles and post updates from the app. You can also cross-post updates to and from Twitter back into a Chatter account. → Read More
By all measurements, the new picture sharing service, Instagram, is exploding. A week after their launch, they had 100,000 users. A week later: 200,000. A week after that: 300,000. And then they were made Apple’s App of the Week in the App Store. So yeah, basically they’re likely far past a half a million users already. Not a bad first month at all.
But did you know that Instagram almost wasn’t Instagram at all? I detailed some of their transformation from the location-based HTML5 app Burbn to Instagram in my initial preview of the app. But co-founder Kevin Systrom gave more insight a few weeks ago on Quora. → Read More
When I logged on to Brizzly this morning, a notification popped up announcing some brand new features for the web-based social networking client. As you can read on Brizzly maker Thing Labs‘ blog, there are also some design changes accompanying the new features.
Like rival Seesmic Web has done in the past, Brizzly has now added Foursquare support to the fray, which means you can now see your friends’ Foursquare check-ins from within Brizzly. There’s also a new camera control feature and Brizzly has also finally decided to give people the choice on how to retweet, erm, tweets. → Read More
While the phone itself launches in October, Seesmic has just posted a preview video of what the Seesmic app will look like on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Seesmic recently launched Seesmic Desktop 2 and hinted that there would be a Windows Phone 7 app coming shortly. The above video highlights some of its features including Dashboard, Search and Spaces. → Read More
After a year’s worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; “We want to be the first platform for platforms,” says Le Meur.
Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports a multitude of content streams including but not limited to, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google Reader (!) Salesforce Chatter, E-Bay, Last.fm and so on and so forth. → Read More
How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I’ve yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce’s internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far.
The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.
Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce’s Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once. → Read More
How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I’ve yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce’s internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far.
The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.
Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce’s Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once. → Read More
An interesting beneficiary of Apple’s launch of music-oriented social network Ping—social status updater Ping.fm. According to Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, Ping.fm saw a record number of accounts created yesterday (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year).
Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google “Ping,” Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn’t include News results). Apple’s Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple’s Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results. → Read More
If Brizzly wouldn’t be slower than molasses in January, I would have long deemed it my Twitter web client of choice (I don’t like running too many desktop clients if I can avoid it – switching tabs in my browser is much quicker). However, it is as slow as a tortoise, so I took a look at the new Twitter.com (testing inline media nowadays) and Seesmic Web for good measure as I tend to use the latter on my iPhone and Android phones.
One thing the Web app has always lacked, is support for Facebook. However, there in the sidebar was the Facebook logo, along with that of LinkedIn and Foursquare. → Read More
Seesmic, Twitter and the iPhone have all been around for a couple of years, but for whatever reason it took a while for French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur‘s latest venture to come out with a proper iPhone / iPod touch application.
As of this morning, it’s here, and it’s … great.
The application, which you can download from iTunes via this link, lets users manage their Twitter and Facebook accounts and update other social networks through Ping.fm integration (Seesmic acquired the company behind that service earlier this year).
I’ll let you read the blog post and watch the video embedded below for more details about the Seesmic for iPhone app, but I think people will be interested to see how it stacks up against Twitter for iPhone (which was also released this week and is the latest iteration of Atebits’ Tweetie app) and TweetDeck. → Read More
Yesterday we showed a teaser of our conversation with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme. Here’s the full video, in two parts.
This is a debate around the recent decision by Twitter to compete directly with third party developers who are making Twitter applications that Twitter has deemed to be mere “hole fillers.” A variety of third party apps are now competing directly with Twitter.
Most developers we’ve spoken with are upset, and say that Twitter gave them guidance that they wouldn’t compete with them. And in the past Twitter has been consistent in saying that they want to provide the plumbing for the Twitter ecosystem. Now it’s quite clear that they want to build on top of that plumbing, too. → Read More
