Company: ExactTarget, a global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions

Product/Service: A new suite of social CRM capabilities for its CoTweet social media management application

What it Does: The CoTweet Social CRM Connector helps extend the benefits of social media across an organization by creating a more complete view of an individual’s lead, opportunity or case history. Users can capture a conversation from Facebook or Twitter, associate it with an individual’s CRM profile, and then tag it as a lead or opportunity. The expanded capability also gives organizations new data to better measure the impact of social media programs.

Management system software maker for the educational sector, Instructure Canvas, has raised $8 million from venture capitalists in an attempt to scale up its operations and widen its customer base.

The Utah-based startup said its investors included OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, TomorrowVentures, and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurveston.

Founded in 2008 by two computer science graduate students, Instructure develops learning management software that helps teachers manage interactions with students through a variety of ways including distributing assignments as well as grading students’ work.

Today, the company appears to targeting its giant rival, Blackboard (News – Alert). The company is currently servicing more than 30 educational institutions, the majority of which are those who have switched from Blackboard to Canvas.

“The investment will be used to scale the company’s operations and to keep up with market demand,” said Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure.

Coates, who was a teacher at Brigham Young University, previously worked for many companies including search-technology pioneer Inktomi, Scale Eight and most recently the online storage provider Mozy, which was purchased by EMC (News – Alert) for $76 million.

On February 1, Instructure announced the availability of Canvas as open source.  Since then, thousands of schools districts and universities have begun evaluating Canvas and turning to Instructure to transition their existing LMS solutions.

“We were compelled by Josh and his team’s vision of delivering outstanding user experiences to those in the education market,” said Firas Raouf of OpenView Venture Partners. “The LMS market is long overdue for a new learning platform built on the latest Web-based technologies.”

Canvas streamlines standard LMS features like the integrated gradebook, assessment tools, discussions, multiple assignment submission types, rubrics and Web chat. Its grading tools, including SpeedGrader for the iPad, reduce the amount of time educators spend grading assignments.

Canvas leverages the leading edge of Web technologies by embracing features such as drag-and-drop file uploads, HTML5 video and automatic speech-to-text conversion. It also integrates with popular Web 2.0 tools and social media platforms like Google Docs and Facebook (News – Alert).

When a teacher changes the date of a quiz, for example, students automatically receive text messages on their cell phones, messages on Facebook or conventional emails, according to the company.

Monetate, the leading independent provider of testing, targeting, and personalization for websites, today announced the first Monetate Open Source Prize for developers in the Philadelphia area. The contest kicks off in advance of Philly Tech Week, which runs April 25-30. The winning entry will receive “The Ultimate Developer Kick Start Package” worth $5,000 and including a MacBook Pro, an Apple 27 inch LED Cinema Display, an iPad 2, a $300 Amazon gift card good for EC2 and books, plus a month’s supply of pizza and Mountain Dew.

“The goal of the Monetate Open Source Prize is to support development of an existing open source project or to provide a kickstart to a new open source idea,” said David Brussin, Monetate founder and CEO. “We have built our company on top of open source work such as Python, Linux, Nginx, Memcache, HAProxy, MySQL, Django and Google Closure Library, so it is only fitting that we at Monetate do our part to drive open source forward while at the same time supporting the Philly Tech community.”

“With the Monetate Open Source Prize we hope to increase the amount and quality of open source code,” said Tom Janofsky, Monetate’s Director of Engineering. “We also want to help publicize the Philly area’s great open source projects and developers while giving them more opportunities to work on their open source passions.”

Any project producing source code under an Open Source Initiative approved license is eligible to participate (www.opensource.org/licenses). The prize is available only to developers who live or work within 60 miles of Philadelphia (not all the developers on the project need to be in the Philadelphia area). Winners can opt for a cash equivalent prize. For additional prize and competition details see: opensource.monetate.com.

Entries are due May 11 and will be evaluated on usefulness, novelty, and the impact of the prize award on project status. The top 5 submissions, as determined by the following panel of distinguished judges, will be announced on May 19 and placed on the Entries page of the competition website for public voting to determine final winners.

• Jay Adelson, CEO of SimpleGeo, co-founder and former CEO of Digg.
• Don Coleman, Director of Consulting with Chariot Solutions.
• Aaron Feng, Principal Software Engineer at Algorithmics, known for PhillyLambda, PhillyAWS, and Philly Startup Hackathons.
• Tom Janofsky, Director of Engineering at Monetate, active participant in Philly technology and startup community.
• Alexey Komissarouk, organizer, PennApps Hackathons, noted Facebook application developer.
• Alex Payne, co-founder and CTO of BankSimple, former Platform Lead at Twitter.
• Jeffrey Persch, Director of Architecture at Monetate, engineer for Philadelphia and San Francisco startups.
• Gabe Weinberg, founder and principal engineer of DuckDuckGo.

Did you ever run across an organization that you want to model your business against because they just get it? Well, I have and for me that organization is OpenView Venture Partners.

What follows is a conversation with Isaac Garcia, Co-Founder & CEO of Central Desktop.
Central Desktop delivers a cloud-based social collaboration platform that allows people to connect and share information to drive profitable business results.

Heads up all you technology companies considering funding…. you may want to keep reading and add OpenView to your list!

Hi Issac, thanks for joining us. How were you introduced to OpenView and what made you choose them?

What makes OpenView different?

OpenView offers their portfolio access to OpenView Labs. How did you use that group?

What would you say to other companies looking for funding?

Thanks so much to Issac. This was great! Like I said, we respect the team at OpenView and if you are an expansion stage software companies company you should check them out. (Even if you aren’t, they do a great job of sharing information well beyond their portfolio companies.)

A special shout out to two OpenView team members – Devon Warwick and Brian Zimmerman. Thanks for all you do for the B2B technology community!

So, what do you think? Any of this ring true for your company?  I would love to read your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Thanks!

Salt Lake City startup Instructure will add 50 new employees this year after raising $8 million in a second round of financing. Of those 50 hires, 10 will be engineers and developers and the remaining 40 will be split between sales and technical support.

Instructure makes the online learning management system Canvas, a competitor to industry giant Blackboard Inc., the Washington, D.C.-based giant which currently has 9,350 clients, up from 5,756 a year earlier. Learning management systems (LMS) allow universities and high schools to post syllabi, course materials, schedules, and announcements, while also facilitating online communication between students and with their teachers.

Founded in 2008 by two computer science graduate students at Brigham Young University, Instructure’s mission is to supplant Blackboard, whose stock is soaring with news of a potential takeover, as the preeminent LMS provider. Its employees must embrace that mission to thrive at the company, said Coates, who has equity in the company but receives only a $1 annual salary.

“The people we hire have to understand why we’re fighting,” he said. “They don’t have to come from an educational background, but they have to understand that most of the schools in the U.S. are using software that is 10 years old.”

Instructure believes its advantage is that its cloud-based LMS is open-source, meaning both that anyone can access the technology for free, but also that students can link the content of Canvas to their Twitter and Facebook accounts and even their cell phones. A generation of students raised on real-time information updates don’t want to log onto a specific Website several times a day to keep up on schedule changes, Coates said.

“We’re going through a cultural shift and the educational platforms need to accommodate that shift,” he said.

Coates said that the company offers competitive compensation packages and that all employees receive stock.

ExactTarget has released a free report entitled “Facebook Messages: The End of Email?”.

This report teaches how to integrate Facebook Messages into interactive marketing strategies and more.

The ExactTarget team says, “You’ve heard the buzz about Facebook Messages.

Exinda, a global provider of Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization and application performance management solutions, has achieved a staggering 150 percent increase in new customer acquisition compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.

In addition, the company also recorded 22 percent revenue growth over the previous quarter, and 120 percent over first quarter of 2010.

Company officials attribute this growth to the expansion of Exinda’s value-added reseller network in each of its key global markets. Further, the company also witnessed increased market demand for its Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform during this period.

Other noteworthy factors contributing to this growth is innovation in Exinda WAN Optimization solution, which incorporates ExOS 6.0, the latest generation Exinda operating system.

ExOS 6.0 addresses many of the challenges facing network managers, including managing ever-growing bandwidth usage and number of complex business applications. It also supports the growing usage of cloud computing and hosted virtual desktops by an increasingly mobile workforce.

“Exinda has committed significant resources to delivering the support that our channel partners need to deliver Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions,” said Michael Sharma, CEO of Exinda, in a statement. “As wide area networks are being increasingly taxed by the growing number of users, applications and devices on their networks, customers are demanding a more complete solution from their technology partners and solutions,” Sharma added.

According to Sharma, Exinda’s UPM platform delivers full visibility, control and optimization of the users and applications on the network. “This is the solution that enterprises of all sizes are looking for to allow them to manage their network amidst the evolving IT landscape.”

Earlier in March Exinda signed a distribution agreement with VADition Benelux BV, an affiliate of VADition UK.

Recognizes the best business application that automates the management of project-based business activities. The category includes: project management software, project accounting, project estimating, project portfolio management, project scheduling, requirements management, bug and defect tracking and resource planning and scheduling software.

Products nominated here are eligible for the Best Operations Management Solution supercategory.

AtTask – AtTask, Inc.

Combining the structure of project management with the power of social media to address the nuances of work management, AtTask has built the world’s first true social Work Management platform. AtTask provides a data-rich environment that improves management visibility, while delivering value to individual contributors in a way that is actually fun to use.

Clarizen.com – Clarizen

Clarizen’s Work Execution Software is an easy to use, cloud computing platform streamlining and optimizing every knowledge worker’s full effort, ensuring all activities are aligned with the overall business objectives and coordinated among colleagues. Clarizen naturally connects unstructured communications with structured project objectives, tasks and milestones.

Work and project details are managed and maintained in one centralized, online location reflecting the true status and orchestrating the team in real time.

Clarizen integrates all facets of collaborative work execution from setting goals and creating projects to customizing resource availability and cost structures to tracking issues and time to real-time reporting to email/note and document tracking and hosting. Managers and team members visually see the state of projects and open tasks/issues/alerts from an intuitive dashboard available in any browser.

Clarizen delivers enterprise security and scalability for work execution. With Clarizen, repetitive actions and initiatives (client kick-off, new location opening, etc.) can be saved as templates with workflows, tasks and alerts so that similar projects can be started in a click and resource conflicts and opportunities can be identified in a moment. Using Clarizen, companies such as DHL, NBC Universal, Roche, Fujitsu, IDC, the US EPA and many more are executing work 85% more efficiently. Clarizen customers eliminate status meetings since status is always up to date in Clarizen – and instead meet to brainstorm, resolve issues and work.

OpenAir – NetSuite, Inc.

NetSuite OpenAir’s Professional Services Automation (PSA) provides a complete cloud solution for services organization including project management; resource Management; timesheet management; expense Management; invoicing; reporting and dashboards

NetSuite OpenAir project management capabilities enables project managers and team members to collaborate on projects and maintain current and accurate project status at all times, allowing managers to proactively identify and resolve potential threats to the success of each and every engagement. The result is a significantly improved project completion record, more satisfied clients, and reduced non-billable work.

Tenrox Project Workforce Management Solution – Tenrox Corporation

Cloud-based Project Management Software that packs all the power you need and still is an absolute pleasure to use.

Your workforce is dispersed and globally dispered. Your project workforce is composed of a variety of skills and experience from a pool of internal staff, part time employees, contractors and partner resources. Project teams are often remote and sometimes disconnected, but are required to collaborate to deliver work. Tenrox cloud-based project management software helps you manage your resource pool and work schedules so that you can optimize project delivery and resource utilization by assigning the optimal resources to the right projects while avoiding scheduling conflicts and resource overload.

Tenrox project management empowers your project workforce by giving them the tools they need to collaborate in real-time, track project progress and issues, and gain access to instants reports and analytics to assess project status and make faster more informed decisions.