Contactually, a 500 Startups-backed company has launched an easy-to-use CRM solution for email users. The application works with any IMAP-connected account, including Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, AOL and others. Plans to support both POP3 and Microsoft Exchange in the near future have been discussed.

In addition to launching their service, the company also just closed an angel round totaling $165,000 -- their seed round was $50K as consistent with all 500 Startups-backed companies.

InsideView, a leader in social selling and sales intelligence software, today announced an upgrade to the InsideView application for the NetSuite SuiteCloud Computing Platform. InsideView for NetSuite brings customer insights from both traditional data sources and social media directly into the NetSuite CRM and ERP systems to increase productivity throughout the enterprise. Built using NetSuite's SuiteCloud development platform, the SuiteApp can help NetSuite customers increase revenues by building relationships with their best prospects, customers, vendors, and distribution partners.

The announcement was made today at SuiteWorld 2011, NetSuite's inaugural conference designed for NetSuite customers, solution providers, independent software providers, developers and system integrators. SuiteWorld 2011 is being held in San Francisco.

When the first CRM system came to life in the 1980s, it was nothing more than a robust database structured like a funnel; collecting and filtering client information. The 1990s brought with it one of the most crucial advancements in CRM still prevalent today- the ability to use the system as a two-way street: gathering client data and giving back a customer experience. The combination of newer software, the internet and superior capabilities has lead CRM to evolve into one of the largest and most competitive industries in today’s economy.

 

From a static database to a cyclical business tool, CRM’s transformation over time has impacted the way companies conduct business and communicate with clients. The big question people are now asking is: What does the future of CRM hold? The answers to this question are endless but for this blog, I will explore three possible paths of where the CRM industry might be heading and how CRM vendors like us, plan on getting there.  

Are you getting obsessed with tweets, uploads, and writing on your wall? See our checklist to be sure.

Here's a great article written by Kristin Burnham:

Answer these questions carefully (since denial is the first sign): Do you find yourself dreaming about status updates and friend requests? Does your TwitPic account chronicle your trips to the grocery store and cleaners?

These days everyone seems to have advice about how to run your social media marketing program. There are so many tips floating around, it's hard to know what truly essential strategies you should follow to effectively use social media to build your business. Questions abound: Do Facebook fans drive sales? Why should I fund forums for consumers to pillory my products, ridicule my service and tout the competition? And, whatever I decide to do, how I will I know if it's working?

In the search for truth, sometimes social media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

So, in a modest attempt to bring a dose of sanity to this intellectual frat party, I've reined my impulse to lob more "personal picks" into the fray. Instead, I'll follow the wisdom of an august data mining colleague to just "let the data speak."

Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged -- and here's what we found: 10 rules that hold up across category and time.

This week Saleforce took the wraps off the Chatter pilot program. After several months of testing with select customers, it is going into production for this group. We reviewed Chatter with SalesForce's VP of Corporate Strategy, Bruce Francis and SVP Product Marketing, Kraig Swensrud to find out what all the excitement was about.

Chatter has the goal of bringing the best of the social media tools to the enterprise, making enterprise sales as easy to use as Facebook or Twitter. With all of the buzz around privacy and social networking tools, it's refreshing to hear that these tools use a the same security models that the rest of SalesForce has built in to its platform.

Chatter is a new module in the SalesForce architecture that takes advantage of the existing APIs and services, while providing rich collaboration features. "Collaboration as a Service" is now trending as a new category in the industry.

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