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Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure "click to conversion" metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. "We've been working to establish Spredfast as the 'Omniture for social media', a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast's CEO. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product." Discuss

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Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding

Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple's announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking . While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple's Game Center - a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple's Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking. Sponsor The Game Center may be Apple's attempt to compete with Facebook's dominance over the hugely popular and incredibly lucrative area of social gaming . A report released this week suggested that the gaming company Zynga , maker of six of the seven most popular social games, is worth over $5 billion. Unlike Facebook, Apple does not currently have a social network upon which to automatically connect players and friends, although implementation of the Game Center may well bring this about. Details about the Game Center were not explicit in Thursday's announcement, although the beta release of the operating system will include a developer preview of Game Center and contain a set of APIs so that mobile game developers can build apps that take advantage of the social gaming network capabilities. Echoing the popularity of gaming on the iPhone, initial analytics since the iPad release point to the continued domination of the App Store by gaming and entertainment applications. The updates to the iPhone OS could provide an opportunity for mobile and social game developers and for entrepreneurs in the gaming industry. Discuss

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Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

I am a huge fan of podcasts and podcasting and one of my favorites to listen to each week is Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech (TWiT). Now and then, angel investor and Open Angel Forum founder Jason Calacanis is a guest on TWiT, and not long ago he launched a podcast network of his own borrowing the " This Week in " name (with Leo's blessing, of course). After success with his first podcast This Week in Startups (TWiSt) which Jason hosts himself, he is now creating a brand new podcast that is a perfect resource for startups and entrepreneurs: This Week in Venture Capital (TWiVC). Sponsor Venture capital is a big part of what we discuss here at ReadWriteStart, and Jason's new podcast is sure to become an excellent source of VC news straight from the horse's mouth. The premier episode is available now and features two-time entrepreneur turned VC Mark Suster , who authors the Both Sides of the Table blog, and who was previously a guest of Jason's on TWiSt. In the episode the pair discuss the recent collection of obnoxiously high valuations for startups like Foursquare and Quora, as well as the resurgent IPO market, an issue we mentioned earlier this week after the Nation Venture Capital Association released some record breaking numbers . Suster even discusses how his blog, mentioned above, has changed the way he does business as a venture capitalist. TWiSt usually runs over an hour, and this first episode of TWiVC thankfully comes in around 45 minutes, a much more digestible length for a video podcast. Hopefully they will stay true to this length, as brevity and density is often a more enjoyable listen. Either way, I know I'll be tuning in each week to catch Jason's and other's opinions on the latest VC happenings, and I think any early-stage startup or first-time entrepreneur should do the same. Discuss

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This Week in Venture Capital: Jason Calacanis' Latest Podcast Creation

Monday's sudden departure of Jay Adelson as CEO of social news aggregator Digg has raised a few eyebrows in the tech community as some rumors imply that it may have been a decision made by the company's board. Regardless of the nature of the breakup, it got me thinking about the dichotomous relationship some startups have between founders and CEOs, and which, if either, is more expendable. Sponsor Digg was originally founded by Kevin Rose in 2004 and Adelson, who had experience as founder and CTO of a few companies in the 90s, was given the CEO role while Rose became "the face" of Digg. Many startups have used this same leadership role leaving the passionate entrepreneurial founder as a separate executive from a business-minded CEO. A similar situation has happened at Twitter , with Evan Williams becoming CEO in place of Jack Dorsey who remains as chairman of the board. This seems to separate the single-focus CEO from a serial entrepreneur with other interests. Since founding Digg, Kevin Rose has founded Pownce and WeFollow as well as personally investing in several other companies while Jack Dorsey has used his time to found the mobile transaction platform Square . For the majority of startups, I would think the concept of the free-wheeling founder would be less common, and other times, founders choose to also be CEOs. But in the case of the startups that have two separate people handling founder and CEO duties, who is more vital to the company? In these cases, founders usually start their company and hire a CEO when things start to pick up and they can't handle everything by themselves. While CEOs do lot of the corporate navigating, the founder, with his passion for the product, is often the forward facing driver of the company. With this argument, I think that losing a CEO over a founder is a better loss than vice versa. Of course, all businesses are different, and people leave for different reasons, and decisions like this should be taken on a case-by-case basis. However, VCs often talk about how they invest in founders just as much as they do ideas, so for a company to lose that passionate individual that the investors initially trusted might send bad signals about later investments. I'd like to hear what you think about this issue, and whether you think either a CEO or a founder is more or less likely to stay when someone needs to go. If you have personal experience with the dual relationship of CEO and founder in a startup, please share you experience in the comments below! Photo by Jim Merithew, Wired.com Discuss

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Founders & CEOs: Who Is More Expendable?

Web-video management startup Brightcove announced Monday that it had secured an additional $12 million in venture funding and hopes to make its first public offering as soon as next year. As we reported Monday, the first quarter of 2010 saw a significant rise in IPO and M&A activity for venture-backed companies, and Brightcove seems to preparing itself for one of these options in the next year. Sponsor Josh Hawkins, director of corporate communications for Brightcove, mentioned on the company's blog that the new funding would be used toward "expansion in Asia and Europe, the rollout of new product lines like Brightcove Express on a worldwide basis, R&D innovation, and possible M&A activity." Brightcove has three offices in the U.S. as well as offices in England, Spain, Germany, China and Japan. Much of its strategy for 2010 seems to be focused on expanding its presence in these regions, possibly by using some of its fresh cash to buy out upstart companies in those areas. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company also plans to use what could be their final round of funding to build runway before going public, and that it could see revenues as high as $50 million in 2010. The news of Brightcove's plans to go public is further evidence of the rebounding M&A and IPO market that we mentioned on Monday , especially if investors are willing to pump money into the web-video industry which has seen less than stellar revenues. Brightcove also can serve as an excellent example for young startups looking for an IPO or buyout day of their own in the future. The company is not sitting back and hoping the day comes that it can go public or be acquired; it is making sure they have the proper capital to continue to innovate and grow its company to that point. The company realizes that being able to go public is not entirely about having a steady revenue stream, but it is also about carving out a significant portion of its market by expanding its current products and creating new ones. Just last week the company announced it was launching a service to allow its customers to create iPad-compatible HTML5 based video players , keeping the company on the cutting edge of video management. Last year rumors circulated that Google was in talks to buy Brightcove, but the rumors were later revealed to be false . It seems they weren't far off, however, as Google just last week announced it had acquired video service Episodic . Google, which has been picking up companies left and right in 2010 , could be signaling an impending consolidation within the web-video industry with their recent purchase and rumored interest in Brightcove. Brightcove appears to be hunkered down with its new funding and is ready for future prosperity, a strategy every startup should recognize and attempt to emulate in their future rounds of funding. Followers of Internet startups have been waiting for a major IPO for a few years and Brightcove could provide that in the next twelve months. Discuss

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Brightcove Closes Series D Funding, Expects IPO By 2011