Collaboration Cast

KickApps announced that they received Series C funding of $14 million dollars. The round was led by North Atlantic Capital, Softbank, Spark Capital, and Prism Ventures.

The additional funding will help KickApps continue to exand its product development and international expansion. Currently 35% of KickApps customers come from outside the US.

“KickApps is aggressively extending the scope of services we provide online publishers in a number of important ways,” said Alex Blum, KickApps CEO in a statement. “As a next generation website operating system, our mission is to transform a number of traditional services — video players, editorial presentation, advertising, analytics, marketing, customer relationships — into highly interactive experiences that are contextually informed by live, actionable data.”

KickApps currently powers social services on over 48,000 websites, including Guinness World Records and a New York Knicks Webpage. The company also powered John McCain’s social network, McCainSpace, during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

The additional round of funding in a turbulent market validates the continued customer demand for social media and KickApps business model.

Social Media has become mainstream according to Forrester and IDC predicts that over 70% of the content on the web will be user generated content. Content management conferences such as Gilbane Bostons 2008 - “Where Content Management Meets Social Media” are specifically dedicating conferences to the topic of social media.

Although, what I found impressive is that only 5 out of the 14 content management vendors (35%) who were attending really mentioned social media in their bios.  This is specifically interesting considering the conference is focused on how content management vendors address social media.

With other topics such as SharePoint, Search, SEO, Multi-Channel Publishing, SAAS, and Content Management content management vendors have to choose their focus, given their limited resources. Consequently, it looks like many of the sponsors will be learning from the conference. Maybe next year we will see their social media offerings.

For those who are attending the conference to seek integrated content and social solutions you should for sure stop by the following vendors:

1. Vignette

2. Kentico

3. Red Dot

4. Sitecore

5. Fatwire

Then you can let me know how the show turns out.

Rock You (www.rockyou.com) a company that develops social media applications including a multimedia slideshow creation tool popular on Facebook and MySpace has secured $17 million in series C funding. To date they have secured $52 million in funding.

The funds will primarily help Rock You develop applications for PC and mobile devices in Asia-Pacific. They also plan to open new offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit, and look for potential acquisitions.

The funding of Rock You at this time validates that social media is mainstream and has great potential not only in the US, but internationally. The Asia-Pacific market is a hot bed for social media and social media companies should seek alternative global markets that are still growing.

Recently Prime Visibility (PrimeVisibility.com), a rapidly growing integrated online marketing company specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), released a study showing which presidential candidate was most preferred by social media sites.

Sites such as bookmarking (digg, del.icio.us), video (YouTube, MetaCafe), widgets, podcasts, image/photo-sharing services (Flickr, Photobucket), social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social knowledge (Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia), directory submissions (Google Directory, DMOZ) and online reputation management (ORM) were monitored.

Results showed that through Oct 17th Obama was leading 20 of the 43 sites monitored, McCain led three, and both tied in one site.

The two candidates tied on Yahoo, which had over 1.1 billion comments each.

Obama won on Google Blog Search with approximately 227.7 million comments versus 93.2 million for McCain, while Google search produced 201 million page views for Obama versus 141 million for McCain.

In the following video clip, Barack talks about his use of social media and how internet volunteers helped his campaign succeed in many states.

This recent study shows the power of the web and how candidates can no longer discount the need to leverage social media in their campaigns. Tomorrow’s election results could potentially validate if a win in cyberspace could be a good indicator of a true election win.