Spredfast, the leading independent social marketing software provider, today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the 2013 AlwaysOn Global 250 winners.

Inclusion in the AlwaysOn Global 250 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players in the Global Silicon Valley. Companies were evaluated and selected based on a set of five criteria including innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts.

Spredfast and the other AlwaysOn Global 250 winning companies will be honored this evening during AlwaysOn’s 11th annual Innovation Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This two-day executive gathering highlights the significant economic, political, and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries. The Innovation Summit’s goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global tech industry.

“This year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 is seeing an unprecedented shift from desktop to mobile. Concurrently, innovators in the cloud are making it possible for an entirely new generation of application and software solutions to enter the technology marketplace. The enterprise world has endured a long ramp-up to the cloud as well as finally accepting that mobile is here to stay. Now, businesses are demanding even more robust, secure applications with which to run their operations—anytime, anywhere,” says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “The Global Silicon Valley is rising to this challenge with unfettered enthusiasm, providing business management solutions, IT infrastructure, and elegant, stable applications. Coupled with bleeding-edge consumer adoption of the latest and most powerful media applications, the companies on this year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 represent the highest-growth opportunities in today’s private company marketplace.”

The AlwaysOn Global 250 winners were selected from among thousands of domestic and international technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists, and industry insiders. The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2013 list.

As a leading provider of social marketing software, Spredfast enables big brands to achieve great business results through the use of social media. Leveraging the company’s social media management platform, social teams are empowered to plan, execute and analyze all of their social programs from one location, gaining the ability to make smarter decisions, assess program performance and connect their social activities to bottom-line impact.

“We are honored to be named to the list of AlwaysOn Global 250 companies,” said Rod Favaron, Spredfast CEO. “In such a fast paced market, we are constantly innovating in order to equip our customers with the technology solutions needed to hit their social marketing success milestones and we’re thrilled to receive an award that recognizes innovative technology leaders.”

About Spredfast

Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides social media management software that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, and popular blogging platforms. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AT&T, Jason’s Deli, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, Coty Beauty, HomeAway and Ogilvy.

About AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn is the leading business media brand connecting and informing the entrepreneurial community in the Global Silicon Valley. Founded by Red Herring founding editor, Tony Perkins in 2003, AlwaysOn’s mission is to continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, bloggers, and advertisers like no other media brand.

Global cross-channel digital marketing provider ExactTarget launched its HubExchange app marketplace today, enabling marketers to find, install and integrate apps built by ExactTarget and its global ecosystem of technology providers.

Launched with more than 50 apps in the marketplace, HubExchange enables marketers to access and install third-party apps into ExactTarget’s Interactive Marketing Hub, simplifying the process for marketers to bring apps and data together to power more targeted digital marketing.

“ExactTarget is launching a new era of marketing app innovation within the Interactive Marketing Hub,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and chief executive officer. “HubExchange delivers the industry’s first enterprise digital marketing app marketplace, extending ExactTarget’s capabilities and transforming the world’s leading b-to-b and b-to-c companies’ campaigns by offering new marketing innovations.”

 Delivered on ExactTarget’s Fuel software as a service platform, HubExchange provides a host of tools for developers and technology partners to develop and deliver applications that leverage real-time customer data and extend ExactTarget’s strength in cross-channel digital marketing. Much like a consumer purchases and downloads apps on a smartphone, HubExchange empowers marketers to integrate marketing apps, add new capabilities and extend campaigns across enterprises in real-time.

Key features of ExactTarget HubExchange include:

• Cross-Channel Integration: Integrate multiple marketing solutions with HubExchange to optimize customer data in one consolidated, easy-to-use application interface.

• Optimization: Build campaigns based on real-time, analytical insights compiled from each digital marketing application.

• Industry Leading Technology: Featuring apps with capabilities ranging from web conferencing and event registrations to QR code activation and Facebook ad retargeting, HubExchange empowers marketers to leverage limitless digital marketing innovations.

Introduced during a live webcast from ExactTarget’s President of Technology and Strategy Scott McCorkle Monday, HubExchange applications debuted at launch included ReadyTalk, Tealium, Windsor Circle and Localytics.

ExactTarget is featuring its HubExchange and many of its newest third-party applications during a week-long series of events across the U.S., Australia, Canada, Brazil and the U.K. To view the complete list of events, visit www.HubExchangeWeek.com

 For more information about ExactTarget’s digital marketing app marketplace, visit www.HubExchange.com.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of cross-channel digital marketing software-as-a-service solutions that empower organizations of all sizes to communicate with their customers through email, mobile, social media, Web and marketing automation. ExactTarget’s suite of integrated applications enables marketers to plan, automate, deliver and optimize data-driven digital marketing and real-time communications to drive customer engagement, increase sales and improve return on marketing investment.

Marketing leaders crave to know their customers better, focus on the right buyers and maximize customer lifetime value. An upcoming Monetate webinar, How Can Customer Centricity be Profitable?, will explore how marketers can learn to understand customers at a granular level by discovering segments that are the most valuable, and then delivering products, services and offers that are relevant to those customers.

The webinar will feature Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Bruce Ernst, vice president, product management at Monetate. They will discuss the tactical building blocks underlying customer centricity and share important insights about the interplay among them. The speakers will highlight a number of actionable recommendations, including tips to:

• Improve customer acquisition by focusing on customer lifetime value, rather than cost per acquisition

• Increase customer retention by delivering a personalized website experience

•  Discover your most valuable customer segments through data, and then deliver relevant products, services and offers to them

The webinar will be held on Thursday, July 18, 2013 from 2 to 3 p.m. EDT. Click here to register.

“The Holy Grail for marketing is getting the right experience in front of the right person at the right time,” said Bruce Ernst, vice president, product at Monetate. “Peter Fader is a preeminent academic expert in customer centricity, and will share the steps marketers need to take to correlate customers with high-impact experiences that drive increased conversions and profits.”

The How Can Customer Centricity Be Profitable? Webinar is free to attend and open to all marketers.

About Monetate

Monetate empowers marketers to leverage big data to create more personalized and engaging online customer experiences. By providing more relevant web interactions, leading brands are able to anticipate and react to consumer preferences to generate stronger customer relationships and significantly increase profits.

Monetate drives billions of dollars of revenue every year for some of the best-known brands in the world, including Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority and PETCO. The company’s solutions and conversion expertise enable marketers to deliver a more relevant customer experience with unprecedented agility.

Leading marketers rely on Monetate’s cloud-based browser solutions to achieve a new level of speed and control, allowing them to run 16 times more optimization campaigns compared to industry averages. Monetate solutions include advanced products for testing, merchandising, targeting and cross-channel consistency, providing an opportunity to bypass IT restraints and react in real time to customer demands. Monetate also helps marketers implement best practices and drive online revenue through its expert strategic services and content publishing teams.

Spredfast and Brandwatch, two leading social business technology providers, today announced a strategic partnership and integration of Brandwatch’s social analytics and monitoring platform with Spredfast’s social media management platform. The integration enables organizations to monitor, analyze and take action on real-time business insights from the world’s social conversations within a seamless user experience.

Brandwatch tracks millions of sources in multiple languages, including social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, blogs, forums, communities such as Amazon.com and TripAdvisor.com, and international sites including Sina Weibo and Renren. The integration means that the most relevant posts as well as insights driven by Brandwatch are shown in Spredfast content streams. As a result, organizations can make fast, informed decisions and engage effectively with customers and prospects.

“Enterprises are challenged by the scale, breadth and speed of social,” said Sebastian Hempstead, Brandwatch EVP of North America. “Connecting our advanced social analytics with Spredfast’s social engagement platform tackles these issues by quickly separating the signals from the noise to better inform how they engage with audiences on the social web.”

“With our Brandwatch integration, not only are our joint customers now pulling in more conversations from more places across the web, we are empowering them to identify, prioritize, and engage with these conversations in a scalable way,” said Rod Favaron, Spredfast CEO. “Doing so from one platform will continue to enable customers to achieve great business results through the use of social media.”

The Brandwatch / Spredfast integrated offering empowers organizations to:

• Identify more sales opportunities and pursue them efficiently: Listen for potential leads from conversations in which users are expressing purchase intent, and engage to turn sales opportunities into new customers.

• Find more customer care requests and respond to customers more effectively: Cast a wider net to find customers that are in need of a response to a product or service issue, question or complaint. Clearly identified analytics such as sentiment and author influence scoring enable quick and easy prioritization.

• Use competitive intelligence to increase market leadership: Gather insights on competitor brand and product perception globally and take advantage of opportunities to increase your brand’s share of voice in the market.

• Discover and publish content that resonates most with your audience: Use analytics to uncover the topics that are most relevant to your customers (regardless of whether it’s yours or not) and use the knowledge gained to target the right conversations at the right time.

The integrated Brandwatch / Spredfast solution is available immediately. To learn more or to see a demo, contact Spredfast at [email protected] or Brandwatch at [email protected].

About Spredfast

Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides social media management software that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, and popular blogging platforms. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AT&T, Jason’s Deli, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, Coty Beauty, HomeAway and Ogilvy. For more information, visit www.spredfast.com.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch powers social analytics and intelligence across the enterprise, enabling brands and agencies to monitor and identify key insights from the social web to make smarter business decisions. Using the Brandwatch platform, organizations can make greater use of social data throughout the customer lifecycle to grow brand awareness and reputation, mitigate PR crises, conduct market research, uncover sales opportunities, more effectively support customers, and identify advocates and influencers.

Brandwatch solutions are used by leading brands and agencies around the globe, including organizations such as Dell, PepsiCo, Whirlpool, Kellogg’s, Digitas, and Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA). For more information, please visit www.brandwatch.com.

Intronis, Inc., provider of world-class cloud backup solutions for the IT channel, today announced it has earned the Silver Award in ChannelPro-SMB’s 2013 Readers’ Choice Awards in the category of Best Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) Vendor.

The 2013 ChannelPro-SMB Readers’ Choice award recognizes the commitment and execution of those IT vendors and distributors who have earned a reputation for helping channel partners successfully meet the technology and business needs of small to midsized businesses (SMBs) throughout the U.S.

With more than 1,000 votes cast, the annual ChannelPro-SMB Readers’ Choice survey named Intronis one of the IT channel’s best cloud BDR vendors. Several factors contributing to Intronis’ ongoing success within the IT channel include the overall performance, ease of use, affordability and reliability of its cloud backup solution, as well as its investment in partner enablement. Additionally, Intronis offers top-rated sales and technical support, plus customizable marketing and sales resources that can easily be branded by channel partners.

ChannelPro-SMB readers participating in the channel’s second annual SMB-focused Readers’ Choice Awards cast their votes for the most SMB- and partner-friendly products, technologies, services, programs and professional organizations in the first quarter of 2013. For each category, readers selected the option that best satisfied the unique business requirements, work styles and budgets of their SMB clients, as well as those that best serve their own partner organizations.

“A clear differentiator for Intronis is that our cloud backup solution is designed to be sold and supported by channel partners who specialize in the IT needs of SMBs,” says Rob Merklinger, vice president, sales, Intronis. “Another reason MSPs and VARs choose Intronis is that they never have to worry about us competing with them for business. We pride ourselves on teaming with our channel partners and enabling their success by providing the technology, resources and support they need to offer a high-value, turnkey cloudy backup and recovery solution that their clients can rely on anytime, anywhere.”

Last month, Intronis launched its Spring Release ’13 and announced the opening of its latest data center in Montreal, Canada. Among the new features noted within Intronis’ Spring Release ’13 are QuickSpin, a powerful data recovery tool that offers advanced data restore and localized recovery support for virtualized machines; added customization, manageability and partner branding within the Intronis Partner Portal; and the new Branding Wizard, an easy-to-use marketing and enablement tool that lets Intronis partners quickly create a customer-facing portal featuring their own logo, colors and specific information.

“Partner success is a top priority for Intronis and we are honored to be recognized by the readers of ChannelPro-SMB as one of the industry’s top-rated cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions,” concludes Merklinger.

About the ChannelPro Network

The ChannelPro Network provides targeted business and technology information for the IT channel. Via ChannelPro-SMB magazine, events and our online properties, the network delivers expert opinion, analysis, news, product reviews and advice vital to a reseller’s business success. Perspectives from VARs, vendors, distributors and analysts are spotlighted daily.

About Intronis

Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery is a world-class cloud backup solution for the IT channel. Intronis provides the industry’s easiest-to-use secure data solution for offsite and local backup, which generates a monthly recurring revenue stream to add to your business. Intronis offers the best Exchange and SQL backup on the market, supports virtualized environments with native VMware backup and is integrated with major solutions in the MSP ecosystem. Partners receive expert customer support from our U.S.-based team. The solution has been field tested by thousands of MSPs, and the company has been named Best Revenue Generator seven times and Best Customer Support three times by members of ASCII.

ENCINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 15, 2013–

uSamp, a leading provider of real-time insights, today announced that it has closed a new Series D round of financing for $15 million from two leading sources of private equity, OpenView Venture Partners and DuPont Capital Management.

Founded in 2008, uSamp has grown rapidly by focusing on driving technological innovation in market research, particularly in the utilization of mobile research. The company provides insight and sampling solutions to thousands of clients around the world including General Mills, Google, Microsoft, Clorox, Loews, NBC, WPP, Nielsen, Ipsos, and GFK.

“This financing will be used to accelerate the development of our Instant.ly platform, a powerful new way for marketers to access and evaluate data,” said Alan Gould, uSamp’s CEO. “The need to make sense of and act on changes in consumer behavior is placing a premium on insight products that are easy to access and that offer our clients multiple ways to understand their markets and interact with their customers.”

“We are extremely bullish on uSamp,” added Adam Marcus, Managing Director of OpenView Venture Partners. “The company’s vision of enabling any marketer to get real-time insights redefines traditional market research. We believe uSamp will lead this evolution.”

Previous OpenView Investments include Monetate, the leading provider of testing, targeting, and personalization solutions for websites, and Mashery, the leading API management provider that was acquired by Intel in April 2013.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners (openviewpartners.com) is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused 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 quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $445 million in total capital under management.

For additional information about OpenView Partners please visit openviewpartners.com.

About uSamp

uSamp (www.uSamp.com), the fastest growing company in the Market Research Industry, is a premier provider of technology and survey respondents used to obtain consumer and business insights. uSamp’s leading mobile technology and SaaS platform transform the way companies gain intelligence to make better, faster decisions about their products and services by tapping into uSamp’s 12 million member global panel of survey respondents. Through uSamp’s proprietary technologies for self-serve sampling and survey authoring, companies have on-demand access to millions of profiled survey respondents. uSamp is based in Los Angeles, with five offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. The company has more than 200 team members worldwide. uSamp was No. 213 on the 2012 Inc. 500|5000 exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies and is recognized on the 2011 and 2012 Forbes’ America’s Most Promising Companies list. uSamp’s institutional investors include Greycroft Partners and DFJ Frontier in addition to Openview Partners and DuPont Capital Management.

For more information about uSamp, please visit www.uSamp.com.

CONTACT: For uSamp:

The Hoffman Agency

Patrick Dorn, 408-975-3037

[email protected]

Source: uSamp

Copyright Business Wire 2013

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced new enterprise-ready hybrid cloud capabilities that allow IT operations and development and test (dev/test) professionals to quickly and securely extend on-premise environments to Skytap Cloud. The new features, including Network Address Translation (NAT), Command Line Interface (CLI) and Single Sign-On (SSO), enable dev/test teams to more quickly and easily deploy virtual environments in Skytap Cloud, while providing the security, visibility and control functionality required by enterprise IT.

‘For enterprise organizations, adoption of public cloud infrastructure typically starts with migrating non-critical workloads, such as software development and testing. With increased cloud adoption, users have become accustomed to the benefits of public cloud and have tuned internal processes accordingly,’ said Jay Lyman, Senior Analyst, 451 Research. ‘To leverage both new technologies and practices as well as existing and legacy investment and infrastructure and to keep pace with demand while maintaining security and compliance regulations, enterprise IT teams are turning to hybrid cloud technologies that provide the best of both worlds.’

Skytap’s new hybrid cloud features provide on-demand advanced networking and programming capabilities for development and testing in Skytap Cloud, while maintaining the visibility and control features mandated by enterprise IT. New features include:

Network Address Translation (NAT)

Network management is a top challenge facing today’s dev/test professionals, which must create and manage network routes, VM IP addresses, and other related tasks in order to deploy a working virtual environment. Most cloud solutions accommodate this need by providing pre-configured computing environments, known as templates or golden copies, which are designed for developers and testers working in isolation. However, this model does not work for globally dispersed teams who need their working copies to be on a network with routes to the networks of other team members, as it can create IP and MAC address conflicts.

Powered by Skytap’s software-defined networking capabilities, NAT alleviates these challenges. It allows users to automate the creation of one-to-one NAT IP relationships enabling them to deploy copies of the same virtual environment simultaneously, without the need to adjust machine network addresses. Users gain full network access when connecting on-premise environments to Skytap Cloud using a secure virtual private network (VPN), or when setting up inter-configuration routing (ICNR) between Skytap Cloud instances.

“The Skytap Cloud NAT feature eliminates the need for us to manually manage network routes and IP addressing,” said Timothy Demarest, senior director of technical operations at Zettaset. “This allows Zettaset to easily create multiple parallel dev/test environments without networking issues that commonly occur in shared networks across Hybrid Cloud architectures.”

Command Line Interface (CLI)

Skytap’s Command Line Interface (CLI) grants dev/test professionals the ability to work from a command shell and easily script calls to the documented Skytap Cloud REST-based API. CLI also enables administrators to easily audit their Skytap Cloud environments through scripted API commands, or integrate with monitoring tools already in use. Skytap Cloud API is open, flexible, and provides developers with an additional avenue for programmatic automation and customization. Skytap also offer several new capabilities which perform more complex actions such as copying VMs between regions.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Skytap Cloud now supports federated authentication, or Single Sign-On (SSO), utilizing SAML 2.0. Customers can now access Skytap Cloud using corporate directory credentials and applications such as Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services or Ping Identity’s PingFederate.

In addition, Skytap allows customers to share virtual environments within their organization securely by utilizing SSO. Securing Published URLs with SSO ensures that these shared resources are only available to those in the customer’s user directory (LDAP, Active Directory).

“As enterprise utilization of cloud computing matures, development and testing has served as the cornerstone for widespread adoption,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. “This drives business agility for functional users, such as dev/test, while also empowering IT operations with the security, visibility and control capabilities that match or exceed on-premise IT requirements. This release demonstrates the maturity of Skytap Cloud as we continue to execute on our product roadmap.”

About Skytap, Inc.

 Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap Cloud gives businesses a fast, easy, and secure way to create complex computing environments in the cloud. Customers can run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations maintain full visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap Cloud to their data centers and create hybrid clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including development and testing, software demos and evaluations, and virtual training. To try Skytap Cloud and learn more, visitwww.skytap.com.