When your software is used by over a million IT professionals daily, there is an incredible opportunity to tap into their knowledge to identify needs, trends, and budgets. Spiceworks just completed their semi-annual report on technology usage, staffing, spending trends. The IT industry continues to show strong signs of growth as technology budgets, cloud services usage, virtualization adoption, and IT staffing plans among small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) all showed their strongest gains in more than 18 months, according to latest new report by Spiceworks™, Inc., the largest social business network for IT with more than 1.4 million SMB IT professionals.

Zilliant today announced that the recently released report from Gartner, “Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2008″ is now available by request at www.zilliant.com. The report reviews over 25 CRM technologies to help companies better understand the maturity, application and rate of adoption for the applications. Included in the review process, is an assessment by Gartner of the enterprise benefits of each technology. Price optimization and management software was the only application categorized as “transformational”, Gartner’s [...]

On Friday afternoon, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Financial released data showing that venture funding across the US was up, with 963 companies raising over $7 billion in the fourth quarter.  Most interestingly, out of the top 10 deals in 2007, only 3 were in California (local company Heliovolt raised either the 4th or 6th largest amount depending if you include its follow-on round). Austin also had a significant quarter, with 23 [...]

We were hearing rumors that the relationship between EEStor and Mort Topfer was on the rocks, which would be a huge loss for EEStor. But today they released news and made it official that Mort has joined the Board of Directors. The release goes on to say that they have 1 patent issued with 17 more in process. Our sources tell us that their offices are locked up tighter than a drum. It’s like Austin’s [...]

Silicon Valley Bank has published a very interesting white paper titled After The Bubble: Analyzing the Landscape on the topic of formal valuations of technology and life science companies. It contains some very intersting findings. Of particular note: Life sciences has seen the number of A rounds increase 34 percent since 2003, and almost a 50 percent increase in the total A round dollars (compared to technology’s 24 percent and 18 percent increases, respectively). There [...]