The folks over at the Sand Hill Group are having their Enterprise 2007 conference this week at Pebble Beach. It’s the 10th year for this conference, which is designed for top level IT executives in enterprise software and technology. Spiceworks has a simple, downloadable IT infrastructure tool that is free of charge. You can download it and try it out for yourself on their website.

Austin-based Spiceworks.com was one of five companies named as the "Next Big Thing" along with Cast Iron Systems, Ketera, Seriousity, and Vocera. Which are probably names you have never heard of, but companies given this honor have been acquired for $2.5B, and two have filed for IPO’s.

Spiceworks was founded by a group of Motive veterans, and took in $5M in Series A funding from Austin Ventures. John Thornton (Motive investor) and Mike Maples Jr. (Motive employee) serve on the board.

There are a handful of Austin companies whose success is defined by eyeballs. It looks like Spiceworks had more reach than even the Slacker music service for a bit in July. iTaggit also had a significant blip in late June, perhaps with their announcement of new features.

Here’s a report from Alexa on their relative reach.

According to the Quarterly Venture Capital Report released today by Ernst & Young LLP and Dow Jones VentureOne, the venture capital markets are heating up again.  However, Texas does not appear to be the biggest beneficiary of this new infusion of capital. On a national level, U.S. companies received venture financings of $7.4 billion, an increase of 8% over the same period last year. Other stats from the report are that the median deal size in the second quarter of 2007 reached $8 million, up from the $7.4 million seen during the same time last year and the highest median seen since 2000. The quarterly deal count reached 717 deals, the highest deal volume since 2001.

The $233M raised in Texas during the second quarter is down 15% from last quarter and down 30% from a year ago. In the regional rankings, Texas has slipped to 8th among regions raising venture money, behind stalwarts Bay Area and Southern Cal and 5 others (New England, New York Metro, Washington State, Potomac and Colorado). The overall climate of the state is obviously not good news for a city that was recently named one of the five "Startup Hubs" in the US by Fast Company magazine.

Austin does seem to be on a bit of an upswing raising $172M, accounting for 70% of the venture capital raised in Texas. That’s up from $67M in Q1, but slightly down from the same quarter last year of $197M.   

Considering that Google, PayPal, HP and Apple are all expanding their presence in Austin, one hopes that the 1st quarter was just a hiccup and that the entrepreneurial spirit of Austin remains strong.

Walmart pushed a news release across the wire yesterday announcing the launch of customer reviews and ratings on it’s website. What it didn’t announce was that Bazaarvoice is the technology behind that capability. Back in May we wrote about Bazaarvoice achieving profitability. Now WalMart joins the customer list along with most of the countries biggest e-commerce sites like Petsmart, HP, Sears, Home Depot, and CDW.

Andy Sernovitz, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and author of the book "Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking" hails it as a landmark for WOMMA when he blogged about it here yesterday. He says QVC.com is getting over 2,000 reviews each day. With the reach of WalMart, they are likely to see 10x that volume.

Now it’s time to go do an online review of that new Dell I just bought at WalMart.