Social networking for the enterprise startup Connectbeam has closed a $3.5million Series A round lead by Gabriel Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures.
Connectbeam social software for business provides a corporate focused product that includes support for social bookmarking, social networking, live profiles, project spaces and intranet search integration.
Connectbeam launched in June 2006 and is led by Puneet Gupta and Prem Malhotra in Newark, California. The company originated as a system for students that evolved into Connectbeam after a number of corporate and academic vendors expressed interest in putting the system to use in their respective businesses.
Love it! Proof that a small company embracing both best practices and innovation can come in on a space and get support despite big players fiddling around there. Oh yeah!
This sounds like feature integration done right. This goes beyond simple knowledge management and appears to be something employees would actually use. However, what if Google’s own search appliance started adding social features or even MS SharePoint?
What is the niche / competitive advantage / compelling value proposition that really separates ConnectBeam from competitors? Just curious…
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Drink the Web 2.0 Kool Aid and keep on drinking. How many social networks will we all use? Facebook for this, LinkedIn for this, Connectbeam for that? I don’t think so.
Social networks are cool and all but people are getting increasingly frustrated with their being too many social networks and too many sets of logins, too many emails saying “You have a message from ____”. Social networks are now adding friction rather than reducing it.
For VCs, adding friction has to be one of the dumbest bets one can make.
yeah too many social networks;
– I think this is a invitation to employee gossip
If they can find a way to engage employees with greater transparency and value it’s a win. For the most part current social networking technologies are not being leveraged to improve the relationship between companies, employees and their customers. My guess is Connectbeam has a pretty good idea of the possibilities. Good Luck.
how can you trust a site, that doesn’t even render correctly in Firefox. I cant even see the menu bar.