Contest Builder, an app designed to motivate salespeople and increase productivity through contests that are built and deployed by sales managers has raised $1million from Detroit Venture Partners and ePrize. The gamification app for Salesforce, simply makes a game out of any sales task.

Crushpath has raise a $2 million seed round led by Charles River Ventures to further develop and launch a platform designed help salespeople better control a deal from lead to close, with social elements added into the mix.

Over the last few months the DreamSimplicity Team has reviewed applications from all sorts of categories including Customer Engagement, HR and Recruiting, Marketing Automation, Collaboration, School Management, and Invoice Management. This list of 8 reviews gives you an unbiased, inside look at what makes these software solutions so unique and appealing.

One of the hottest trends so far this year is Big Data. What is Big Data? There are many definitions, but to most, its all that application transaction data sitting in a big database taking up storage capacity. What seems overwhelming, is actually statistics that tells the story of your company and customers. There are more and more solutions entering the market that give enterprises big and small the tools to extract meaningful information from all this data, because after all, Big Data means Big Opportunity.

With these four business applications, all integrated, you can easily streamline your customer on-boarding process -- post sales. Leveraging a customer success monitoring solution like Totango, triggering emails and marketing automation with Marketo, customer training portals by KeyStone OnDemand, and social media engagement with HootSuite. These solutions tie it all together and will drive renewals to a whole new level.

NetProspex, a provider of verified, crowd-sourced business contact data services has announced the availability of its Data Cloud API (application programming interface), a set of developer tools providing real-time access to millions of crowd-sourced business contacts validated by proprietary CleneStep™ verification.

Here is a great article from TechCrunch that is worth a read. Gone are the days of rolling out CRM across your organization and turning to multiple vendors for integration, lead lists, and marketing automation. Today vendors like Salesforce are providing and all-in-one, taking CRM to a new level. With the acquisition of companies like Radian6, Jigsaw, Salesforce's platform comes stacked and ready to generate and manage business.

Marketing online and via social media channels can bring great success online as well as offline. Brick and Mortars are finally leveraging what social can bring, but are they taking a hard look at online promotion and what marketing automation can bring to their businesses? This infographic by KISSmetrics goes deeper.

There are a number of excellent legal applications delivered in the cloud. Lawyers would seem like early adopters of these technologies -- here's a brief snapshot by LawyerTechReview.com detailing how lawyers are using technologies.

Apptio, a provider of Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round. T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. led the round and were also joined by existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures. The new round of capital will be used to further invest in the development of the company's TBM platform, expand market penetration, drive customer success, and maintain its independence as the industry's trusted provider of TBM solutions. The Series D round brings the total amount raised by Apptio to $91 million.