Central Desktop, a cloud-based collaboration platform company, has won three new marketing agency customers, SK+G, Rhea + Kaiser and Upshot, for its SocialBridge collaboration solution.

SK+G, Rhea + Kaiser and Upshot will begin using SocialBridge to communicate and collaborate both internally with agency resources and externally with their clients.

SocialBridge is the first online collaboration platform specifically for advertising, digital and creative agencies and the way they work. The platform’s consolidation of video and creative file markup tools, task management, Gantt charts, web conferencing, social and other must-have tools is changing the way creative agencies work. SocialBridge prevents agency teams from getting bogged down in emails, lost files, prolonged approvals and the overall project management process, enabling them to focus their attention.

“We’re excited to have creative agencies like SK+G, Rhea + Kaiser and Upshot on board as SocialBridge customers,” said Laurence Sotsky, vice president of sales at Central Desktop. “Demand has been remarkably strong for SocialBridge since it launched earlier this year and we’ve been receiving positive feedback from our agency users on how it’s affecting their overall teamwork and client relations processes. We look forward to continuing to provide a collaboration solution specifically focused on the way creative agencies work.”

Junior Achievement of Central Indiana, Inc. announces the 2012 Laureates for its 24th annual Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame event, presented by Crowe Horwath LLP.

The Laureates are Scott Dorsey, Co-Founder and CEO of ExactTarget, Jim Irsay, Owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, Cathy Langham, President of Langham Logistics, and Jerry Throgmartin, Chairman of the Board of hhgregg. The Chair of the 2012 event will be Stephen A. Stitle, Chairman, Indiana, PNC Financial Services Group.

The Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame was established in 1989 by the Junior Achievement Board of Directors to honor outstanding men and women who epitomize success in the business world, high moral and ethical standards, and dedication to important civic causes, thereby improving the quality of life in our community.

The 2012 Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame Laureates will be honored at a black tie event to be held on February 16, 2012 at the Indiana Roof Ballroom. A VIP reception will kick off the event, followed by a dinner and awards ceremony at 7:00 pm. Junior Achievement students will participate in the evening’s events, which will include introductions of the Laureates and video presentations highlighting their many accomplishments. Each Laureate will provide brief acceptance remarks.

Jennifer Burk, JA’s President and CEO, said, “Our goal is twofold at the Hall of Fame event: to honor those Central Indiana business persons who are champions of free enterprise and are business role models to the youth of the community, and to spotlight the importance of providing financial literacy, work-readiness and entrepreneurship programs to today’s students.”

It is anticipated that approximately 600 business leaders and their guests will be in attendance at this traditionally sold-out event.

Since its inception, the event has inducted 95 laureates into the Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame.

Sponsorship opportunites are currently available; please contact Alyssa Krachon at [email protected] or 252-5900 ext. 108 for more information.

About Junior Achievement® (JA)

JA is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about financial literacy, work-readiness, and entrepreneurship through experiential, hands-on programs. Today, more than 120 offices reach approximately four million students in the United States and JA Worldwide reaches more than nine million students in over 120 countries each year. Junior Achievement of Central Indiana (JACI) is best known for its on-site student learning labs – JA BizTown for 5th graders, and JA Finance Park for 8th graders. Thousands of students visit the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Education Center each year for one of these signature programs, culminating several weeks of in-class preparation. JA also offers in-school programs which bring members of the business community into K-12 classrooms to teach JA curriculum. The sequential lessons include hands-on activities that help students understand the business and economics of life. For more information, visit www.jaindy.org

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Cambridge’s Cogo Labs and Boston’s OpenView Venture Partners have different models for investing in startups, but both have the same goal: Get enterprise technology companies into handsome revenue growth, and fast.

“There’s sexy, and there’s making money,” said Kevin Fanning, Cogo’s talent development director. “We build companies that make money.”

Neither Cogo nor OpenView can be considered a typical venture capital firm (and Cogo isn’t a VC at all, though it operates as an arm of Wakefield’s Link Ventures.) They also don’t produce the types of consumer-facing companies that typically get mainstream interest.

Launching or relaunching a website might seem like a fine time to kick back, congratulate yourself on your hard work and awesome design, and move on to the next thing while your site inevitably amasses hits and click-throughs.

Not so, according to this infographic ecommerce technology company Monetate has put together. Using data from Econsultancy’s 2011 Conversion Rate Optimization Report, Monetate underlined the correlation between healthy online business and frequent testing of a website’s functionality and presentation.

One key stat: “Companies that are happy with their conversion rates do, on average, 40 percent more tests than those that are unhappy.”

Frequent testing of navigation, layout, call-to-action buttons, checkout functions and a handful of other factors can discern more easily what their customers respond to, what they’re not paying attention to and what sort of online experience suits what specific audience, according to the graphic. And while the stats say 75 percent of businesses that run tests on their sites do so one to five per month, Monetate suggests daily testing. Check it below or on the Monetate blog.

According to ComScore, online spending reached a record $35.3 billion this holiday season, a 15% increase over last year.

At the heart of this surge in online sales lies Philadelphia-based Monetate, a leading provider of online marketing technology, which announced that its platform drove roughly 20 percent, or $168 million of the record-setting $816 million in Black Friday online sales.

As ecommerce companies increasingly look for ways to increase customer engagement and sales on their websites in a highly competitive online shopping environment, technology providers like Monetate play an essential role in helping to move the needle on sales. The significant adoption of Monetate’s platform signals the importance online retailers place on delivering a more engaging and relevant shopping experience to customers in ways that measurably impact website ROI.

“Online retail has been growing exponentially since I co-founded Shop.org in 1996, and the 2011 holiday shopping season was a banner year,” said Monetate Strategic Advisory Board member and ecommerce visionary Elaine Rubin. “Companies like Monetate influence a large amount of ecommerce transactions by partnering with online retailers to add much-needed marketing agility, increase conversions and revenue, and help them quickly adapt to the changing habits and preferences of their customers in this new multichannel world.”

With Monetate, marketers can quickly and easily run A/B and multivariate tests, leverage powerful tools like geographic and weather-based targeting, and deliver unique customer experiences based on real-time user behavior. Core features like built-in analytics, behavioral profiling, and automatic content scanning empower marketers to move even faster, without having to rely on IT resources or hire specialized staff.

“We had an excellent year in 2011 that concluded with a flurry of holiday activity among our retail partners,” said Monetate CEO David Brussin. “With 20% of all Black Friday sales driven by our platform, it’s clear that retail marketers are beginning to adopt a more agile approach to ecommerce that allows them to quickly adapt to the changing habits and preferences of their customers.”

About Monetate

Monetate is the leading provider of testing, targeting, and personalization solutions for websites. The company’s cloud based platform empowers marketers to test and target product offers and site features and convert successful tests into personalized messaging and promotional campaigns, instantly, anywhere on the website. Monetate removes the IT bottleneck and is quick and easy to install using just a single JavaScript tag, inserted only once, and requiring no internal IT resources. Some of the best known brands in the world use Monetate to make the most of their online marketing dollars, increase conversion rates, and personalize the website experience including Best Buy, Aeropostale, Urban Outfitters, Altrec, The Sports Authority, PETCO, QVC and more. Based in Philadelphia, Monetate serves a growing list of B2C websites around the world. For more information about Monetate, visit http://www.monetate.com and follow @monetate on Twitter.

When the U.S. government passed a stimulus plan in 2009 that set aside more than $27 billion for healthcare providers and hospitals that made the switch from paper-based records systems to an Electronic Health Records (EHR) program, it forever changed the healthcare information technology market.

It also provided Houston-based EHR provider Prognosis Health Information Systems with an amazing opportunity.

“There were significant opportunities for us in the market,” says Prognosis CEO Ramsey Evans. “But we needed more bullets in our gun. We had to get out there, let our prospects know that we existed, and do all of that while lowering our cost of sale.”

In 2011, Evans and his team quickly realized the need to increase brand awareness among its target audience – a relatively small and very specific segment of hospitals and healthcare providers. The team set out to build a lead generation and qualification program within their sales organization that could start the conversation with Prognosis’s target customers. But doing it on their own required more time than they had with the government’s deadline for acquiring EHR stimulus money less than a year away.

Thankfully, the company had a secret weapon: OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm that invested in Prognosis in November 2010.

Just before Q3 of 2011, OpenView’s Labs team – its highly skilled consulting arm – helped recruit, train, and deploy two new lead generation reps that were making calls, creating opportunities, and forging relationships within a matter of weeks from the date of their hire.

“I know from experience that it’s not easy to find people that actually like cold calling and prospecting for eight to 10 hours a day,” said Ann Phillips, Director of Business Development of Prognosis.

“Prognosis has a great product with an impending event that helps salespeople move efficiently through a process. We needed to help them build a team of people that would make their prospects aware and interested in the solution through proactive prospecting. We accomplished it quickly and kept the sales team focused on closing deals,” said Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director of OpenView Labs.

“At the moment, our 2012 Q1 pipeline is bigger than it’s ever been,” says Evans. “We have leads in eight new states and I expect that footprint to continue to expand as we continue to refine our lead generation and management processes. We owe so much of that success to our work with OpenView.”

For more on how OpenView and Prognosis teamed up on the company’s new lead generation and qualification program, view the full case study.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners (http://openviewpartners.com) is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.