Hoover’s Connect: LinkedIn for Businesmenn?

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins from Mashable on today’s launch of the new social network for businessmen:

Hoover’s today launched officially the Hoover’s Connect social network, a very highly engineered social network for businessmen intent on networking and establishing relationships with targeted prospects. The launch announcement comes hand in hand with confirmation of the rumored agreement Hoovers has made to acquire Visible Path, a company responsible for powering Hoover’s Connect in it’s beta last year.

Visible Path is a service that provides connections for businesses, mapping a company’s social graphs. Or, as Kristen put it in her review last month, “a custom LinkedIn for just your company, and the peripheral contacts outside of the company that are made through individual connections.”

Read more at mashable.com.

Niche Marketing on the Rise

“There appears to be a growing trend in the social networking industry. Marketers appear to be targeting sites with smaller, niche memberships more so now than ever before.

According to eMarketer, last year advertisers spent $920 million on advertising within social networks – and of that amount, 8.2 percent went to niche networks. This year it is estimated that spending will increase to $2.1 billion, and the take for smaller networks will rise to 10%. This is due to what is perceived as an improved return on investment for an advertiser’s marketing dollar through secondary social channels.”

Read more at mashable.com

Drupal Developers Acquia Raise $7 Million (Mashable!)

Mark Hopkins reports:

Only a few days ago did Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind Drupal, the open-source content management system, decide to launch a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Today, Acquia, the company formed to pusue that effort, has gathered together a $7 million first round investment. The round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners as well as Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Buytaert put Acquia together to be “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.”

Read more at mashable.com

MyLifeBrand Powers New Network for Venture Capitalists

“The New England Venture Network has created an online component to its community called VentureNetwork, for the purpose of making communication amongst members that much easier. It makes sense. Isn’t that why we all turn to social networking in the first place? We join Facebook and find all sorts of high school and college friends that we haven’t spoken to in ages, and all those messaging tools and photo-sharing options make it so much easier for us to stay caught up on what’s going on in our friends’ lives, right?

Similar concepts are backing the reasoning behind NEVN’s new online network, which is being powered by MyLifeBrand. NEVN’s members, which include Vesbridge, Softbank Capital, Windspeed and Fidelity Partners, are encouraged to use this new network for staying caught up with news feeds, press releases, related articles, etc. From there, industry professionals can then carry on relevant discussions. This will include Q&A sessions with experts from across various fields, mainly focusing on law, accounting and marketing.”

Read more at mashable.com

Jobvite Raises $7.2M for Recruitment 2.0

“On-demand recruitment solution Jobvite has raised $7.2 million in Series A funding. Not too bad for its first round. With collaboration tools that work across several departments within a corporation, the transparent recruiting service aims to minimize the amount of work needed to find the right employees for your company.”

Read more at mashable.com.