When I first began working on TechCrunch, I immediately looked for a tool to alert me whenever people wrote about CrunchBase online. After demo’ing several products, I landed on SM2 by Techrigy.

Techrigy announced last week that their index of online conversations just broke the 1 billion mark. And two days ago, they announced real-time alerts, fixing my biggest complaint with the service–results previously took a day or two to appear.

Like most website analytics packages, these conversation monitoring tools face a delicate balance between simple interface and powerful statistics. Much like a scientific calculator is very powerful, but a little confusing.

More after the jump.

When I hear SEO, I think of brilliant quantitative guys shut-up in an apartment somewhere running A/B split tests and writing link-bait.

Search Engine Optimization is the way companies make it easy for customers to find their website using Google. Because search engines don’t publish their algorithms, SEO is a reverse-engineering guessing-game.

The very nature of SEO–unknown, constantly changing, and unethical spam tactics–seems diametrically opposed to enterprise culture. So I interviewed Stephan Spencer, president and founder of Netconcepts. (Major clients include Cabela’s, HSN, AOL, SuperPages.com, Zappos, and Discovery Channel, among others.)

What’s your experience with large enterprise and SEO?

When it comes to SEO, enterprise companies don’t seem to care or are clueless or both.

When twitter recently added a “Suggested Friends” feature, I was more than a little disappointed. Unlike Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, no explanation is provided for why these people were suggested.

In an enterprise setting, the most valuable people are the connectors: “The people who know which people know what”, according to Alan Lepofsky.

The larger the organization, the more likely someone else is working on the same problem. And the less likely you’ll find them.

While touring IBM’s Innovation lab at Lotusphere last week, I was surprised to see IBM is also tackling this problem with their “Social Networks & Discovery” project (SaND for short). And it looked FAR better than anything I’ve seen previously.

(Screenshots after the jump.)

Last August, I upgraded from a simple flip phone to a HTC Touch. Immediately I began looking for a way to avoid manually entering my Gmail contacts into the phone.

After several hours of fruitless searching, I stumbled on NuevaSync–a free service that sync’d both my Gmail contacts and my Google Calendar. Thankfully, they also support Google Apps accounts.

Napera, a recent Seattle-based startup, is looking for 100 IT and Network Managers for a closed beta test of their new 24-port gigabit network switch. Details after the jump.

Napera is testing a relatively new concept–targeted security software subscriptions installed onto the network hardware. These security subscriptions recognize that different industries face different threat profiles–for example, the health industry versus the financial services industry. Each industry is also willing to pay for different levels of security. CEO Todd Hooper explained it to me:

A good analogy is the trial antivirus software that is bundled with
computer. Imagine if networking hardware came with bundled security features
you could activate for a trial and subscribe to remotely, rather than being
a new single function box you had to buy just for this purpose.

Despite the continuous stream of layoffs, CrunchBoard this week has the most diverse job listings I’ve seen yet. There’s both a range of job types–from marketing to technical–and a wide variety of job locations, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco to Portland, OR.

Want to work as a social media planner in Philadelphia?
Or a product manager at Newsweek Digital in New York?
Or maybe in the online marketing manager with a SEO focus at Match.com in Dallas?

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re looking for a Rails Developer.)

Some other jobs currently on CrunchBoard:

IT Hit just launched the Beta version of their web-based file manager.

Certainly the ability to create, edit, and save Microsoft Office Documents on the server–without downloading the file or any plugins–is the most immediately useful feature.

Unfortuntely, the Microsoft Office integration requires Internet Explorer; however, I successfully used the IE-Tab Firefox extension to edit a Powerpoint deck within Firefox. Try it yourself at the demo site–no registration required.

Want to work as the software engineer for BedandBreakfast.com? Or a healthcare CTO? Or as a Software Development Engineer for the Windows Live Social Network?

Jobs are available in Seattle, New York, Austin, San Francisco, or Mountain View, CA.

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re looking for a Rails Developer.)

Some other jobs currently on CrunchBoard:

Enterprise RSS promised to be far more than just Google Reader on steroids.

On Monday, Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed enterprise RSS is dead–citing Newsgator’s continued infusion of cash as evidence the market is dead. Brad Feld responded with his thoughts on why enterprise RSS is alive.

Yesterday, I spoke with JB Holston, Newsgator’s CEO, and asked him for his thoughts.

These days, when I have technical question, I reach for Google long before customer service.
What if customer service could reach for Google?

Salesforce.com just launched a new customer service application called Service Cloud. The new application, built on a SaaS model, tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet and use them for commercial customer service.

Traditional on-premise contact center technology is disconnected from the experts and knowledge found in the cloud. Yet so many customer service questions are already answered online in forums, Facebook, Google, Amazon, or others. And even more answers are sitting on your personal Instant Messaging history, e-mail history, or corporate intranet.

The Service Cloud includes plugins to each of these environments.

A little over three years ago, Ray Ozzie wrote his famous memo re-focusing Microsoft from software to services. We started seeing results of that memo last October, when Microsoft announced Windows Azure.

The SaaS emphasis is also hitting mainstream products like Microsoft Exchange. This morning Steve Gillmor and I talked with Rajesh Jha, the VP of Development overseeing Microsoft Exchange, about the upcoming release of Exchange 14.

Pirelli Broadband Solutions, the broadband arm of the Pirelli Group, announced they adopted Neptuny’s Caplan SaaS.

Capacity management has long been the domain of large enterprises; it wasn’t cost effective for smaller companies. The cost to implement a capacity management system was higher than the cost savings from optimizing capacity.

Neptuny claims the new SaaS version of their Capacity Management software uses the benefits of the cloud to make capacity management accessible to small-medium enterprises. More after the jump.

LogRhythm just joined the Payment Card Industry Security Council (PCI) with the goal of making log info more secure.

While the PCI group is focused on payment security–it was founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.–the addition of LogRhythm will extend the focus toward making logs across all organizations more secure.

Want to work an IT Product Manager? Maybe an MySQL Database Administrator, or Senior Client Server Engineer?

Jobs are available in Toronto, New York, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, or Seattle.

Want to work as the community manager of a fully-funded company that hasn’t launched yet? Or an “Information Repository Specialist“? Maybe work as a managing editor at CBS Interactive?

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re still looking for a Rails Developer.)

Other CrunchBoard jobs after the jump.

Despite layoff season, companies around the US continue to hire–including New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Indiana. (Here at TechCrunch, we need a Rails Developer to add some fancy new features to CrunchBase.)

See more CrunchBoard jobs after the jump.

Next month is the annual Lotusphere conference. IBM is giving two free tickets to TC readers–leave a comment saying why you’d like to go to Lotusphere, and we’ll pick the winners by Monday morning. (Note: Passes cover conference registration only, not travel/hotel.)

Few pieces of software are as polarizing as Lotus Notes. When my last job forced me to use Notes, I found the interface clunky, the graphics Win 95′esqe, and the workflow architecture non-intuitive. Granted, I was using Version 6.5 (Notes is now on Release 8), but even so I found it frustratingly unproductive. And I’m clearly not alone.

Which leaves me wondering–has IBM’s Lotus Notes lost touch with the user-centric web 2.0 world?

To answer these questions, I interviewed Kevin Cavanaugh, IBM’s VP in charge of the Notes/Domino group. Also joining us was Ed Brill, IBM’s Director of Messaging and Collaboration.

On Friday, I interviewed Ryan Martens, CTO & founder of Rally Software, about agile development. (Rally offers Agile lifecycle managment products and is a key player in the online Agile development community.)

Agile has its roots in the Toyota way and lean manufacturing. But only now is it starting to hit mainstream knowledge management process–like software development. Wikipedia calls it “Agile Software Development.”

Certainly, moving to Agile isn’t pain free–there is risk involved–but companies that take the risk consistently report strong results, including those listed on the banner above. (Expect it to be flavor of the week if you apply it like the flavor of the week.)

Despite the economic downturn, companies that solve real problems are still successfully raising money. Aravo, a SAAS supplier information management tool, announced today that they closed $7 million in Series D funding.

Currently, Aravo claims their GE installation is the largest single SAAS deployment. “We are now managing over 500,000 suppliers and their data in Aravo, and have just gone live in six languages,” said Gary Reiner, CIO of GE.