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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 CEO 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.”

For part one of our interview, where Zingale details the ROI of social enterprise software, go here.

In an industry first, Sony Ericsson Strategic Business Developer Martin Essl just announced that Sony Ericsson will integrate Facebook’s Single Sign On system across all its Android phones in the next couple of months. Launched in December, Single Sign On is like Facebook Connect for mobile apps, removing friction because it allows you to log into all apps that use Facebook Connect just by logging into one.

Essl did not go into the specifics of the integration but revealed that the Facebook app for Android will come preloaded on all phones and there will be an (optional) initial walk through process for Single Sign On as part of the phone setup. Essl also said there would be additional integrations beyond what the Facebook app can already do.

“Sony Ericsson’s core values are entertainment, communication and we strongly want to see communication as entertainment by deeper integration with Facebook,” says Essl.

Connecting mobile and social is a huge thing theme here at the Inside Social Apps conference and panel moderator Mattheus Krykowski hinted at this announcement at the beginning of the talk by affirming that “the most important thing Facebook did is Single Sign On” because it offers easy accessibility of the social graph on mobile.

Being able to easily import your friends contact information into your phone is becoming a mobile game changer and Sony Ericcsson’s move to adopt Single Sign On for Android is subtle but bold, as Facebook nears 600 million users (1/10 of the world) the solution to this problem will be increasingly one sided.

Other panelists, like Storm 8 founder Anil Dharni, expressed doubts, holding that the Single Sign On system was still “in its infancy.”

Over the past year, the support system for New York City entrepreneurs and tech startups has grown significantly including the addition of: TechStars NYC mentoring and seed funding program, a new Manhattan branch of Accel Partners, and the opening of a startup academy and co-work space for startups and serial entrepreneurs, General Assemb.ly.

Today, DreamIt Ventures announced its expansion to the city, just one hour or so away from its original Philadelphia startup accelerator.

DreamIt Ventures provides up to $25,000 in seed funding to its portfolio companies, along with coaching, exclusive speaking engagements, a chance to pitch at a Demo Day to affiliated angel and venture investors, and a collaborative workspace. The organization has yet to sign a lease on (or reveal the address of) its Manhattan location, but has confirmed that the following entrepreneurs will serve as advisors to companies accepted into its NYC program this spring:

Gil Beyda: Founder, RealMedia (acquired by WPP)

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg: Founders, FutureNow, and New York Times bestselling authors

John Eley: CEO, Pivot; Former CEO HotSpot FX (acquired by Knight Capital)

Jason Finger: former CEO/Founder, SeamlessWeb (acquired by Aramark)

Jonah Goodhart: Co-Founder, Colonize.com; Board Member of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo)

Ken Seiff: former CEO and Founder, Bluefly (NASDAQ: BFLY)

Jonathan Shapiro, CEO, MediaWhiz; Former Chief Strategy Officer, Doubleclick; Former President, Lillian Vernon

Nat Turner: former CEO, Founder, Invite Media (acquired by Google)

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman: CEO, Founder, KIT Digital (NASDAQ: KITD)

Michael Yavondite: CEO, Hashable; former CEO, Quigo (acquired by AOL)

The program will run from mid-May to mid-August this year. Applicants to DreamIt Ventures’ NYC program will be reviewed on a rolling basis with an early decision deadline of February 28, 2011 and a final deadline of March 16, 2011, according to the accelerator’s site. DreamIt has “Hacker” and “Strategist” tracks where individuals not yet affiliated with a company can apply to potentially join a portfolio startup, on either the technical or business front.

DreamIt Ventures plans to admit ten to fifteen companies into its NYC program, five of which will be digital education businesses. That’s the same setup as the Philly program. In both cities, DreamIt Ventures partners with Startl — an organization funded by the MacArthur, Hewlett and Gates Foundations — to help five, digital education startups build their businesses.

DreamIt Ventures alumni companies have included SCVNGR (2008), SeatGeek (2009) and MindSnacks (2010).

After the news that Facebook Credits would become mandatory in five months was broken yesterday, Facebook Head of Product Marketing Deb Liu addressed developer concerns today at the Inside Social Apps conference.

When moderator Eric Eldon alluded to fears that mandatory Facebook Credits would put some developers out of business, Liu said, “Every single day we know developers get to choose between our platforms and another platform” a statement which was met with laughter from the audience, as Facebook is the most dominant player in the space and for some the only option for such large scale distribution. Liu recomposed, “We want to make Facebook the most attractive place to invest, and keep users with credits in their pockets.”

Liu went on to focus on the incentives for developers using Facebook Credits, including emphasizing Facebook’s promotion of games that used Credits as their sole payment, frictionless payments, and the new “Buy With Friends” feature that allows a developer to set up a feature to enable users to share purchases within games — their friends can then buy those items at a discount.

When asked at the end of the panel if the Credits-only decision would be poisonous to “whales” or users who spend extreme amounts of money in-game, Liu said it was a legitimate concern and system improvements would have to be made on a case by case basis.

It was only this past October that Hipmunk closed a “hyper-competitive” from many of the usual angel suspects. But Hipmunk obviously has lofty goals to disrupt the airline travel industry. So they’re probably going to need more than $1 million to do that. And now they’re getting more — they’re in the process of closing a new $6 million round of funding, we’ve learned.

The company has confirmed the new round, but has declined to offer up any further details just yet. We’re still digging — the current SEC document on the funding suggests that they’ve only secured $4.6 millon of the round, so far. The Y Combinator company also previously took a very small seed from the incubator back in mid 2010.

Back in November, Hipmunk brought Christopher Slowe on board, after years running the Conde Nast-controlled social news site Reddit. That’s notable since Reddit co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian are also now working on Hipmunk. Shortly after that, the startup landed a deal with ITA — which is huge for their airline search results. And that’s interesting since Google is in the process of trying to buy ITA — something which has pissed off basically everyone in the online travel industry.

The startup has also be able to secure one airline that has been elusive recently to bigger services like Orbitz and Kayak: American Airlines. Part of the reason is that Hipmunk links directly to those airlines for customers to make purchases — something which American has been trying to promote instead of using one of the all-in-one travel sites.

It’s funny. When I tell my ‘normal’ friends that I’ve just come from Facebook’s office or need to head down to Google’s campus in Mountain View, they often give me a strange look, as if I’ve just told them I’m about to make a house call to the Easter Bunny. These companies aren’t places inhabited by actual people — they’re nebulous things coursing through the Internet’s series of tubes.

But I can’t blame them. Most of the startup profiles we see in magazines feature a portrait of the founders solemnly gazing into the distance as they plot to change the world with their revolutionary new sharing widget. Sometimes there’s a snapshot of a few desks, each of which is far too neat for anyone to actually have done any work on. There’s got to be a better way.

Which brings us to today’s episode of TC Cribs, featuring Scribd, the popular document sharing platform. This is something of an experiment for now, but there may well be more episodes coming in the future (leave a comment below if you think your office is a good fit!).

And a big credit goes to TC’s John Murillo for editing the video.

If you asked most folks what NFC means they’d probably mumble something about the Giants and wave you off. However, Near Field Communication is here to stay and if Google and Apple’s current and potential implementations are any indication, we’ll be using NFC devices in the next two years, at least in some specific environments.

First, though, what is Near Field Communication (NFC)? At its core it’s a low-power radio system that allows short-range data transfer at distances around 3 inches, or 10 centimeters. There are multiple modes, although the most important is passive mode, in which a device acts as a programmable smart card. For example, an NFC transmitter could pose as any number of RFIDs as well as interact, albeit briefly, with security systems and payment kiosks. In short, an NFC transmitter becomes both a wallet and a personal ID.

Continue reading…

I have a confession to make: I’m completely and utterly addicted to browser tabs. It’s a sickness. I might have 15 or 20 or more open in each window at any given time. That’s why I love Chrome. The ability to pin tabs is a life-saver by way of being a space-saver. But there’s always been one big downside.

When you pin a tab in Chrome, all you see is the favion. That means you lose the title of the tab itself. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, but for apps like Gmail, Twitter, and Tumblr that show unread counts in this area, it’s actually an annoyance. As a result, I’ve had to install extensions just to be able to see when I have new messages. Not anymore.

Google has just launched a small, but awesome new feature in Gmail Labs: Unread message icon. With in enabled, you’re Gmail favicon will change in realtime to display the number of unread messages in your account window.

Google notes that this feature will only work Chrome 6 and above and Firefox 2 and above. In other words, everyone who will care about such a thing should be able to use it. To enable it, simply go to the Labs area in Settings and turn it on and save.

One other small thing: it appears to only count messages that are deemed “important” if you’re using Priority Inbox. But that’s just fine by me.

Thank you, Google. Now we just need this for Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Quora.

Earlier today, a strange message appeared on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fan page. It read as follows:

Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011

Who wrote such an odd and seemingly drunken message? Well, if you believe the page, Zuckerberg himself did. Shortly after posting, the post had over 1,800 likes and nearly 500 comments.

Obviously, Zuckerberg didn’t actually write it. Or at least, we’re pretty sure he didn’t. Instead, it would appear that his fan page was hacked. Facebook has now taken down the page — but not before we grabbed a screenshot.

We’ve reached out to them asking what exactly is going on. We’ll update when we hear back.

With billions of dollars flowing into today’s social economy, betaworks CEO John Borthwick sees the social economy radically changing not only media, but all 21st century industries. It’s 1998 all over again, he told me when we met last week in New York City – thus arguing that today’s social boom still has at least a couple of years of innovation left in it.

But while Borthwick – whose betaworks portfolio includes bit.ly, TweetDeck, SocialFlow and Chartbeat – is bullish about the future of social media, he isn’t quite as bullish about Google. Suggesting that social isn’t in Google’s DNA, Borthwick, who used to run technology strategy at Time Warner, believes that the web now not only needs social search but that today’s social media companies – Twitter, Facebook et al – are much more strategically positioned to build a social search engine than Google.

The first half of this interview can be found here.

Borthwick on why 2011 is like 1998

Borthwick on monetization, curation, and real innovation

Borthwick on why social isn’t in Google’s DNA

Today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, Inside Network’s Justin Smith sat down for a discussion with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. The two talked about a wide range of issues including the company’s 2010 (when they cut spam by 95 percent, Taylor said). But there was a particular focus on 2011 and the ecosystem. So what’s next for Facebook’s Platform?

Taylor made it very clear that mobile was the big area of focus for the Platform in 2011. But at a higher level Taylor talked a bit about “streamlining things” with regard to all the different ways Facebook is used.

“When we update something, there are about 7 different versions we have to update,” Taylor said. He rattled off a few: facebook.com, m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, the iPhone version, the Android version, etc. “It’s an incredible challenge,” he said. “And there’s feature-skew,” he continued.

Taylor noted that this same issue is a big problem for their third-party developers and partners as well. So how do they combat it? HTML5.

Taylor noted that while HTML5 has gotten a lot of hype in Silicon Valley, he does really believe that it’s the long-term answer. He said that Facebook is a bit ahead of the curve currently with over 125 million of their users accessing Facebook regularly from HTML5-compatible devices. “But we’re putting more in,” he said. “We’re getting to the point where it’s becoming a more mature platform,” he continued.

He noted that Facebook is going to release a lot of developer tools in the coming year so that third-parties can utilize HTML5 better as well.

When Smith asked if it was fair to say that Facebook would re-write or re-work things to make everything more standardized around technologies like HTML5, Taylor said, “At a high level, that’s the direction we’re going.”

Taylor credited both Apple and Google for doing great work in pushing HTML5 forward with their web browsers both on the desktop on on mobile. “It’s big for everyone in this room,” he said.

He did acknowledge that HTML5 was still a bit quirky when compared to native applications. “But the gap is closing,” Taylor concluded.

As Yahoo announces its second round of layoffs in two months, Google is announcing that it will be embarking on a hiring spree this year. We first heard this morning from soon to be former CEO Eric Schmidt that the company will be adding 1,000 new employees in Europe. And Google’s SVP Engineering and Research Alan Eustace just published a post on the company’s website announcing that the search giant will ramp up hiring to record levels in 2011.

Eustace writes “I love Google because of our people. It’s inspiring to be part of the team. And that’s why I am excited about 2011—because it will be our biggest hiring year in company history. We’re looking for top talent—across the board and around the globe—and we’ll hire as many smart, creative people as we can to tackle some of the toughest challenges in computer science: like building a web-based operating system from scratch, instantly searching an index of more than 100 million gigabytes and even developing cars that drive themselves.”

In terms of staffing up, 2010 was the second largest year in terms of adding employees. Google hired more than 4,500 Googlers, primarily in engineering and sales. And in 2007, Google brought on more than 6,000 people.

Here are a few stats (most of which seem to have been announced that Eustace cited for Google’s growth:

Android now runs on over 100 devices with more than 300,000 activations each day.

Chrome has at least 120 million active users and it’s growing quickly.

Last year more than 1 million businesses switched to Google Apps and embraced its 100% web approach.

Yahoo announced this morning that it would be giving pink slips to 1 percent of its employee base, which amounts to roughly 100 to 150 staff members.

Here at Inside Mobile Apps conference, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor talked about how mobile will be Facebook’s primary focus in 2011, mainly because “mobile devices are inherently social,” he said. Currently Facebook has 1/3 of its almost 600M user base (200M) on mobile devices and Taylor says that Facebook mobile users are 2x as active as Facebook web users.

Taylor thinks of Facebook as a horizontal platform i.e. easily accessible. One big goal for Facebook is reducing friction on mobile and extending Facebook engagement to all devices, and Taylor brought up the PS3, the iPhone and customized devices (but conspicuously not the iPad) as examples.

As an example of a frictionless solution on mobile, Taylor brought up Facebook Single Sign On and mentioned that social movie site Flixster had a 300% increase in usage after it implemented the feature.

As Facebook has already seen with Facebook Places, Taylor emphasized that the convergence of mobile, local and social is the most interesting locus of growth in the space and a trend to watch as it deeply integrates real life with the social graph.

Facebook, which has the extreme competitive advantage of this social graph, is reportedly working on its own foray into to mobile, as a “social layer” on already existing hardware. “Social as a core part of product will have as great an influence on other verticals as it has on gaming,” Taylor said.

Google has just acquired voice messaging startup SayNow, according to a blog post on SayNow’s homepage.

SayNow’s platform allows voice messaging, one-on-one conversations, and group calls to be integrated into Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Android, or iPhone applications. The startup has built a number of applications, which have over 15 million users, with this capabilities, including SayNow Phone, SayNow Broadcast, Big Call and Chit Chat.

It appears that SayNow, which has raised $7.5 million in funding from Shasta Ventures, Tugboat Ventures, and Altos Ventures, will be combining forces with the Google Voice team.

Here’s the post announcing the acquisition:

We are thrilled to announce that we have been acquired by Google.

Since 2005, we’ve explored fun and entertaining ways for people to talk with each other. Through the web, smartphones, and even land lines, our products brought communities together through the power of voice. And as Google has some of the best voice products in the world, we believe combining forces with the Google Voice team will let us innovate in new and unexplored areas.

We have no specific product plans to announce at this time, but we’ll have more to say about our roadmap as we integrate with Google, so stay tuned. We couldn’t be more excited about what is yet to come.

UPDATING

Today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, Inside Network’s Justin Smith sat down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. The two talked about a bunch of things going on with the company. But to kick things off, Taylor offered up a bit of an overview about how 2010 went with regard to the Platform.

In 2010, Facebook’s focus was on user experience, Taylor said. He noted that while everything we growing “like gangbusters”, they had to do some things that weren’t taken as purely positive from a developer perspective. One big thing there is obviously the removal of what Facebook considers to be spam. “There was a lot of spam,” Taylor noted. But this past year they were able to cut spam by 95 percent.

Yes, 95 percent.

How did Facebook do this? Thanks to automated systems that Facebook built and put in place throughout the year. Taylor credits this as being the key factor in spam reduction despite the fact that the social network cut the number of Platform policies in half.

“We’re really happy with the 95 percent,” Taylor said noting again that the mixture of helping developers while reducing spam was a key focus for the entire year.

And while he did acknowledge some community push back, he pointed to huge success stories like CityVille, which was able to grow to 100 million users in 40 days despite new systems in place. It took Facebook itself 4 years to get to 100 million users. It took Microsoft 10 years to do that, Taylor noted.