Do you have a product or service you don’t really like, always complain about, yet can’t really stop using?
Everyone knows someone who owns a car that always breaks down, or dates a girl that they’re not particularly into but for some reason they haven’t made the move to cut ties. You just kind of wave the annoyances away like, “Yeah, [whatever it is] sucks,” but you don’t want to go through the trouble of getting a new one because the switching costs (i.e. the time it takes to adapt to a new product/service/girlfriend) are too high. → Read More
Yammer, an enterprise social network and communications platform, has raised $17 million in new funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Previous investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participated in the round. Palihapitiya will have an observer’s seat on Yammer’s board of directors. This brings Yammer’s total financing to $57 million.
For background, Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008. But over the past year, the startup has expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise.
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Enterprise social networking platform Yammer is expanding the reach of its network today, launching Yammer Connect. The new plug-ins allows users to bring their Yammer identity to other business applications and an Embed feature enables companies to embed Yammer feeds into their intranet or other apps.
Using a JavaScript API, developers can add the Yammer Login Button to their applications via Yammer Connect. The Login Button eliminates the need for Yammer’s more than three million users to maintain multiple user profiles across business applications. So similar to the way you use Facebook Connect to log into consumer apps, Yammer Connect allows workers to authenticate business apps with their Yammer identity, and all of their profile details will automatically be completed. And users can share activity from third-party applications with colleagues back on Yammer.
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Enterprise social networking platform Yammer is adding two new features to its platform today that are worth noting. The company is supporting in-line videos within news feeds, and is also allowing users to recognize colleagues with badges.
Now you can attach videos to Yammer messages (just as you would with a Word document or PowerPoint presentation), and then users can play the videos directly in the feed, comment, and like videos. Users can also browse all uploaded videos that have been added to a company’s stream and search for videos by keyword. Yammer says that the video player is HTML5 compatible and works in the web browser on the iPhone and iPad. → Read More
Enterprise social networking platform Yammer, just debuted a brand new iPad app and today is rolling out a new version of its Adobe AIR-powered desktop app.
Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, offers a multi-platform communications app for businesses. In fact, we use Yammer internally at TechCrunch. → Read More
Our love affair with Yammer is pretty hot and cold. On one hand, they launched at and won TechCrunch50a few years back. And they seem to be kicking ass on the business distribution front. On the other, the apps they put out there (which we use for TechCrunch day-to-day business) are often very buggy and more or less infuriating day in and day out. iPhone, Android, Web, AIR — they all have issues.
But issues are one thing. For the past year or so, I simply have not been able to get Yammer to work on the iPad — at all. It would launch and then crash. I tried this on four different iPads (both the first and second generation). Same result.
Today. Finally. They have released a native iPad app. And it works! → Read More
The social enterprise wars are heating up. Last week, Jive’s Tony Zingale came on to talk about a user survey that showed quantifiable value his customers were getting from Jive’s software and answer why Yammer and Salesforce get the bulk of the industry press.
I invited Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Yammer’s David Sacks on the show if they wanted to rebut anything said. Sacks took me up on it, bringing his own user survey, a funny video aimed at today’s Chatter launch, and some fighting words.
All are below. → Read More
Enterprise software isn’t as sexy a topic as the iPhone or consumer apps. So why do I love to cover it? The fights.
While most consumer Internet companies view their market as a warm and fuzzy place where there can be multiple winners, in enterprise software it’s a slug fest. Companies are competing head-to-head for deals and customers want as few software vendors as possible. That means scrappy founders who love to joust– especially those trained in the school of His Royal Highness of Jousting, Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
In this second segment of our sit down with Jive’s Tony Zingale, he throws down on competitors like Yammer and Salesforce and explains why he loves his competitors’ freemium model, saying “They’re the best lead gen source we have, because the moment anyone gets serious they call Jive.”(By the way, if a named competitor would like to come on TCTV and have your say, you’ve got our number.)
Only an enterprise software exec would say someone calling his sales force “ex-Mercury sons-of-bitches” was “flattering.” → Read More
Who cares about enterprise software? Apparently you do. Even though I posted this solicitation for Ask a VC questions late on a Thursday, I woke up this morning to one of the better inboxes of questions since the show began.
Our guest in your virtual hot seat was Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Like a lot of things in tech, Green is a believer that the hype in software-as-a-service may have over-promised in the short term, but has underestimated how big this trend will get over time– and how big companies can get. His LPs certainly hope so. There are few firms who have bet so heavily on this single trend. → Read More
Let the social enterprise software wars begin. Socialtext, which offers an enterprise social software platform built around microblogging, is going after competitor Yammer today with a new free migration tool that allows Yammer users to move to Socialtext.
The free tool allows users to move from Yammer to Socialtext, and to use the social platform for businesses at a discounted rate. Customers who have a free instance of Yammer with more than 100 users can switch to Socialtext Signals, and get a hosted or on-premise microblogging appliance to suit their needs. → Read More
You know how obsessed we are with billboards here at TechCrunch Aol, so imagine my joy this morning when I drove into work this morning (at 8am as always) and saw this awesome piece of artillery right in front of my office.
Yeah, our officemate Yammer has decided to wedge a billboard-sized nail in the coffin of old media (i.e. “one-way communication”) which conspicuously includes print magazines, newspapers and eh hem, billboards. Says Yammer marketing designer Aria Shen, “Simply put, we wanted to make a statement about the new paradigm of how people and organizations communicate, and figured what better way to do that than to use the oldest mode of paid media.” → Read More
It’s no secret that we like Yammer here at TechCrunch. We gave the company the top TechCrunch50 honors a few years back, we use the product pretty obsessively for in-house communication, and Mike even uses it as a reporting tool.
But we could like it a lot better…
In part two of our interview with David Sacks we ask him what he’s going to spend that new $25 million in venture capital on, and we oh-so-humbly suggest a few things we’d like for him to spend it on. (Spoiler alert: Jason Kincaid is going to be the happiest.)
I forgot to make my request, which is for a “dislike” button. I asked Sacks over email and he said, “You want to tell people you dislike them? What kind of operation is Arrington running over there?” As he said in the first part of our interview, the Yammer feed is like looking in a corporate mirror. → Read More
Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks came all the way from his office upstairs from us to talk about his new $25 million round of funding. We discuss a lot of interesting things in this clip including why Sacks says Yammer wasn’t everyone’s new favorite word, a pivot; why he still loves Geni, the company Yammer spun out of that we don’t hear nearly as much about; why more social-media-for-the-enterprise companies haven’t taken off; and his defense of the freemium business model.
Make sure you stay to the end, when I ask Sacks about a rumor floating around Silicon Valley that he tried to put a deal together with Yammer and Twitter back before the company even launched. Bonus: Sacks- as tactfully as possible- says what TechCrunch’s Yammer usage tells us about our company culture. → Read More
Enterprise social networking platform Yammer, has just raised $25 million in new funding led by U.S. Venture Partners with Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund also participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $40 million. Additionally, U.S. Venture Partners’ Principal Mamoon Hamid will be joining Yammer’s board.
Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, recently expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise. → Read More
Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, is launching the next-gen version of its platform today. Aiming to be a full-fledged social network for the enterprise, Yammer 2.0 is being released today at TechCrunch Disrupt. As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer is adding a number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform.
These new applications include polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. And a new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content. → Read More
Since Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, the startup has continued to improve on its already solid product, releasing mobile apps and new desktop clients, adding threaded conversations, and more. The fact is that in just under two years, Yammer, which we use at TechCrunch for internal communications, is being used by more than one million users and 80,000 companies worldwide (which includes 80% of the Fortune 500). That’s impressive growth for the startup, which has raised $15 million in funding and is doubling revenue every quarter. But the social enterprise arena is competitive with Salesforce Chatter, Jive, Socialcast and many others vying for a piece of the pie. However, Yammer is going to be releasing a new version of its application at TechCrunch Disrupt this fall which could be a game-changer.
The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar. → Read More
What does Yammer’s David Sacks have to do with Apple’s reception hiccup? And what does DoubleTwist’s Jon Johansen have to do with Google Me? To be honest, not a whole lot. But we had both founders in on Friday morning, for our fifth episode of TechCrunch NOW.
For those who are unfamiliar with the program, TechCrunch NOW is a daily show (Monday-Friday, 3 PM PST) where we combine an assortment of entrepreneurs, investors, reporters and other tech personalities to debate the top headlines. This week, our line-up included Cyan Banister, founder of Zivity (and host of Speaking Of), Brian Singerman of Founder’s Fund, Ryan Sweeney of Accel Partners, Andy McLoughlin, co-founder of Huddle, Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.tv, Evan Soloman, VP of Marketing for Justin.tv, and our OMG/JK dream team MG Siegler and Jason Kincaid. More on this episode ahead. → Read More
You’ve heard the term “betting the company,” but have you ever known anyone who has actually done that? I mean literally. As in, they’re playing poker with shares of the company on the line. Because that’s exactly what Yammer founder David Sacks and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis are doing at The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
When Calacanis first tweeted about it, I thought it was a joke. He wrote, “Got a sick @WSOP Main Event Prop bet with @DavidSacks: 10,000 shares of Mahalo vs. 10,000 shares of @Yammer–whoever lasts longer #poker“. But I emailed Sacks to confirm, and sure enough, the bet is on. “Of course. Sucker born every minute,” Sacks wrote to us. He continued, “To be clear, these are personally-owned shares we’re betting.” → Read More
At the risk of pissing off our new office neighbors, I have a confession to make: I loathed the Yammer iPhone app. Don’t get me wrong, I love Yammer, and find it absolutely vital to our work. But the app was easily the least stable of the dozens of apps I have on my iPhone. It was so bad, in fact, that I’ve been accessing Yammer through mobile Safari in recent weeks. But that’s why I’m happy to announce that today, with the launch of the latest version of the app, 3.0, my nightmare is over.
As they note in the App Store description, Yammer 3.0 for iPhone is a complete re-write of the app. It promises to fix “many crashes,” load “much faster,” and even work on the upcoming iPhone 4. A quick run through confirms all of those things. The app’s UI has also been overhauled and is much more pleasing to look at now (and is actually simplified). This looks to be an all-around win. → Read More
At the risk of pissing off our new office neighbors, I have a confession to make: I loathed the Yammer iPhone app. Don’t get me wrong, I love Yammer, and find it absolutely vital to our work. But the app was easily the least stable of the dozens of apps I have on my iPhone. It was so bad, in fact, that I’ve been accessing Yammer through mobile Safari in recent weeks. But that’s why I’m happy to announce that today, with the launch of the latest version of the app, 3.0, my nightmare is over.
As they note in the App Store description, Yammer 3.0 for iPhone is a complete re-write of the app. It promises to fix “many crashes,” load “much faster,” and even work on the upcoming iPhone 4. A quick run through confirms all of those things. The app’s UI has also been overhauled and is much more pleasing to look at now (and is actually simplified). This looks to be an all-around win. → Read More
