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
Something that I loved about TechCrunch Disrupt last week is that the top two startups that launched in the competition weren’t from the U.S. – winner Soluto is based in Israel, and runner up UJAM is a German startup. In our previous events we had lots of non-U.S. startups, too, but the winners have always been U.S. based teams. So to have startups from Israel and Germany win was a real treat for me personally.
The judges selected Soluto, which is software to make your computer run better, as the clear winner. The company has a proven team, lots of funding and has been working on the product for two years, they say. We take audience voting into account as well, and we will also put in our vote. But at the end of the tallying there just wasn’t much of a discussion. You can never tell how a startup will do until it actually launches (see, for example, Cuil, which had massive funding and a killer team but flopped on launch), but everything we saw suggests that Soluto is likely to go on to do amazing things. And they have a terrific business model. They deserved to win the Disrupt Cup. → Read More
Yammer CEO David Sacks dropped by TechCrunch today to talk about corporate and sales milestones. The “Twitter for enterprise” startup, which won TechCrunch50 in 2008, continues to grow nicely.
Yammer now has 70,000 corporate clients, and 800,000+ total seats (users). At least 1,000 of those companies are paying for the product, and Sacks says 10%-15% of seats are converting to paid. 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using Yammer, says Sacks. Paying customers include Cisco, Nationwide, AstraZeneca, Alcatel-Lucent, Sungard and Molson Coors. → Read More
Realtime streams are quickly moving from the consumer Web to the enterprise. The constant flow of status updates, links, and shared items people are becoming accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter is finding its way into enterprise apps like Socialcast, Yammer, and Salesforce Chatter.
Investors are betting on this trend. Socialcast is getting an $8 million cash infusion from Menlo Ventures and True Ventures in a Series B financing. In February, 2010, competitor Yammer raised a $10 million Series B. → Read More
As we reported last night, Yammer has just announced that it will begin allowing users to sign up for the microblogging service without requiring email addresses that are associated with their company domain names (e.g. jason@company.com). This new feature, called Communities, will open the service to less formal organizations, and even families. And it also opens the door to B2B collaboration, which is how Yammer seems to be primarily marketing the new feature Communities will launch on March 1.
This is a big move for the company. On a conference call this morning, Yammer CEO David Sacks said that one of the problems with Yammer so far has been that communication on the service has been restricted to internal use within a company. The issue many people ran into was that they’d want to collaborate with their clients or business partners as well, but didn’t have a way to do that without inviting them to their company’s internal network (which often wasn’t an option). → Read More
As we reported last night, Yammer has just announced that it will begin allowing users to sign up for the microblogging service without requiring email addresses that are associated with their company domain names (e.g. jason@company.com). This new feature, called Communities, will open the service to less formal organizations, and even families. And it also opens the door to B2B collaboration, which is how Yammer seems to be primarily marketing the new feature Communities will launch on March 1.
This is a big move for the company. On a conference call this morning, Yammer CEO David Sacks said that one of the problems with Yammer so far has been that communication on the service has been restricted to internal use within a company. The issue many people ran into was that they’d want to collaborate with their clients or business partners as well, but didn’t have a way to do that without inviting them to their company’s internal network (which often wasn’t an option). → Read More
Last week, Yammer, the business-oriented microblogging platform that won TechCrunch50 2008, sent out invites to press inviting them to virtually attend a “major launch event” that will be broadcast through a WebEx meeting tomorrow morning. The company has also posted an invite to its blog, along with a not-so-subtle jab at its competitors: “Forget all that over-hyped chatter and annoying buzz, Yammer is releasing the next wave in Enterprise Microblogging“.
So what exactly is Yammer about to introduce? We’re hearing from one source that the company is planning to start allowing people to create networks that aren’t built around web domains. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would be a major change for Yammer, and one that could open it up to a huge number of new users. → Read More
See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.
Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.
Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present. → Read More
Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.
The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing. → Read More
Finally. Over a year after iPhone users got their native Yammer fix, Android has an official Yammer application available on Android Market. The application, while still fairly basic, comes with support for most of Yammer’s core functionality. If you use Yammer and you have an Android phone, you’ll want this app. We can’t link directly to the app because Google still hasn’t launched a strong web presence for the Market, but you can find it by running a query for “Yammer” from your phone.
The new application is actually derived from the codebase of Yowl, a third party app for Android that Yammer acquired a couple months ago. CEO David Sacks says that the application has been off the Market since the acquisition, primarily so that the team could fix a few issues. Now it’s good to go. → Read More
Yammer, a twitter-like service for closed groups, continues to add new features that I wish Twitter would implement as well. In the last day or so they added a simple notification for unread messages that syncs across the many ways users can access the service (mobile, AIR, browser). The notification is available through the Yammer API as well.
Twitter needs something like this. Various Twitter clients built by third party services try to do it on their own, but without the feature at the API level it only works if you access Twitter just from that client.
Yammer has consistently pushed new and useful features quickly to users.
If you don’t use Yammer at your business, you should. We’ve been fans of the service since launching at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It has replaced email for most of our in-office communication. And the service is very reliable, other than the occasional service outage while their CEO David Sacks is off playing poker in Vegas.
The company is also getting more serious about the Android platform. Until recently the only Yammer app for Android was created by Nullwire. Yammer acquired the product from Nullwire and will now develop it in-house. You can download it here. → Read More
Yammer, the Twitter-like short messaging service for business users, has been experiencing a prolonged period of downtime today due to DNS issues. The service first went down over 12 hours ago, was alive for a short period tonight, and then became unresponsive again a few hours ago. The issue is also affecting sister company Geni, who share the same DNS servers. → Read More
It seems like we’ve all been waiting forever for the new version of Yammer’s iPhone app, version 2.0. And we really have, it had been about a month and a half since we announced it was sitting in the App Store, waiting approval. But today, finally, it’s here — and it’s great.
The big addition here is Push Notifications. This is really a key feature since you now can see whenever someone in your network says something without having to open the app. And there are Push settings to allow you to see all messages, replies to you, direct messages, “liked” items, bookmarked items, events, and editorial items — and combinations of any of those. You can also set whether or a not a sound plays when the notification comes in (it seems to say “Yam”), and set “quiet” times; times when you don’t want to get any notifications (such as at night). → Read More
Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.
Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications. → Read More
At the start of this year’s TechCrunch50 conference, last year’s TechCrunch50 winner, Yammer, is making a significant announcement about a partnership with Microsoft. Yammer, a micro-messaging tool for enterprises (TechCrunch uses it), is releasing a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and an app for Windows Mobile phones. Yammer is also joining Microsoft BizSpark, a program that encourages startups to build on their software.
Yammer, which recently launched a “likes” feature, threaded conversations and a new push-enabled iPhone app, is rolling out “Yammer For Outlook,” a Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 plug-in that afford users much of the same functionality as Yammer desktop app. From a secure, separate pane within the Office client, Yammer users can post status updates, view feeds, reply to messages, upload attachments, send messages to Yammer groups, and invite colleagues. → Read More
There are plenty of Web-based task management tools that let you track the progress of your work projects and collaborate with co-workers. Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera wants to go one better and help you “complete your task” by making it easy to ask your contacts and followers on Twitter for assistance.
Producteev shows you a dashboard of different tasks you’ve set up, each in its own widget box which you can drag around and rearrange. For its commercial launch today, Producteev is introducing some new features. One is the ability to syndicate any task to Twitter or Facebook. → Read More
We were plagued all day today at the TechCrunch offices with a faulty Yammer Air app. Updates weren’t working or were seriously delayed, and most of us just moved over to the web version to get reliable service. We rely heavily on Yammer to communicate asynchronously across our very distributed team (three continents). I didn’t realize how heavily until today when the service wasn’t working properly.
I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem – it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.
Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.
We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery. → Read More
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