Bazaarvoice announced that Rubbermaid is their newest customer on the Ratings & Reviews platform. Now consumers can share their credible opinions on Rubbermaid products, read peer reviews, and instantly access top-rated products in order to make the best purchase decision. Rubbermaid also shares the reviews with its product and customer service teams to ensure the company is always engaging site visitors with the right content and best possible overall site experience.

“Rubbermaid consumers are loyal to our high-quality products, so we want to give them a place to voice their opinions and learn from one another while researching which Rubbermaid products are right for their home, garden, or office,” said Jim Deitzel, e-marketing manager at Rubbermaid. “Consumers want to talk to us, and we are eager to listen. Ratings & Reviews have opened the door to engaging with our customers, and now we have a better understanding of what they like – and don’t like – about our products, so we can continually improve our offerings to meet their needs.”

Rubbermaid selected Bazaarvoice for its industry-leading social commerce platform that is trusted by more than 350 manufacturers and retailers worldwide. The Bazaarvoice platform includes customizable hosted Ratings & Reviews technology, reliable content moderation, dedicated client services, and seamless integration with more than 30 leading eCommerce partners via the Bazaarvoice Radius program.

“The Rubbermaid e-marketing department didn’t have the bandwidth to create and moderate a ratings and reviews program on our own,” Deitzel continued. “Bazaarvoice offers a fully-hosted, turnkey service that includes moderation of all reviews and a dedicated Bazaarvoice Community Manager, a trained social media expert, who became a core member of our team from day one.”

Hyperformix, a market leader in solutions for IT capacity and performance, today announced that it has secured a new round of equity and debt funding totaling $3.8 million. The funding will be used to drive accelerated growth and market penetration for its solutions aimed at the virtualization market. New investor LTI joins existing investors M/C Venture Partners and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners for the round.

The investment caps off an exciting year for Hyperformix that saw the introduction of its virtualization capabilities, triple-digit growth of its flagship products, and double-digit growth in its target markets. Hyperformix will use the funds to expand engineering, marketing and sales of its IT capacity and performance solutions for virtualized environments.

Gartner sees virtualization as the most important and impactful trend in infrastructure and operations, and predicts that the market for server virtualization will grow to over $8 billion by 2013. As the technologies that facilitate virtual machines become commoditized, server virtualization management technologies will experience explosive growth.

The increasing importance of virtualization management in large scale IT shops has revitalized the market for IT capacity planning. According to Peter Klante, Hyperformix President and CEO, this funding will allow Hyperformix to solidify and accelerate its leadership position in this new and exciting market. “Virtualization presents an exciting opportunity to cut IT costs and maximize return on IT investments, but that can’t come at the cost of performance or service levels. That’s where Hyperformix comes in. Our customers are planning their virtualized data centers and consolidating servers with confidence, knowing that they are prepared to meet the service demands of their business. Our IT decision support capabilities are enormously valuable, and unique to Hyperformix.”

Hyperformix software’s advanced techniques produce accurate predictions of performance and capacity of key applications and deliver actionable insights through compelling interactive dashboards. Hyperformix can automatically assess the current health of IT systems and predict near- and long-term capacity and performance issues. Hyperformix solutions can be used in planning phases for IT changes, in test environments and to manage production environments.

“M/C Venture Partners is extremely pleased to participate in this round, which takes place as Hyperformix is gaining commercial traction and continuing to make significant technology strides with its leading-edge capacity solutions,” said Matt Rubins, General Partner, M/C Venture Partners. “We see virtualization as a fundamental technology shift that will facilitate large-scale deployment of data services across every organization. Hyperformix is well positioned to lead the market with its advanced technology and the strong interest it is seeing from some of the world’s largest corporations.”

DEMO, the conference known for launching products such as Tivo, Java, Salesforce.com, and the Palm Pilot, is running this week in Palm Springs. We always check to see if there are any Austin companies launching at the various launch events, and we discovered that 7 Billion People will be launching at DEMO this week.

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about the companies $3M Series B financing, so they definitely have some budget for a big splash at DEMO. We will try to link the video here when it becomes available.  It looks like 7 Billion will take the stage this morning.

Ustream announced the first-ever Ustream Studio “Live from The Belmont” at South by Southwest, Austin’s largest interactive music festival. The Ustream Studio will combine the ideas and music at the heart of SXSW with the interactive power of live streaming. A free high-profile event open to the public and produced by nicefishfilms, no wristband is required for entry.

The Ustream Studio will showcase musicians, journalists, futurists, artists and thought leaders at The Belmont, 305 W. Sixth St., Austin, Texas. Whether enjoying the events locally or from across the world, Ustream will power all events live on Ustream.TV, the leading internet broadcasting platform that allows anyone with a camera and an internet connection to live stream.

Participants of the Ustream Studio from March 13 to 21 include Grammy® Best New Artist of the Year Adele, Peter Himmelman, Indigo Girls, Manchester Orchestra, The Von Bondies and Glasvegas.

With Ustream’s easy embed tools, users can share any of the live streams, allowing any website to host these compelling concerts and panels. For more information, visit www.ustream.tv/sxsw or the live stream at www.ustream.tv/channel/ustream-studio, or follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UstreamSXSW.

“Our intent is to create a space for big ideas to grow,” said Michael Sean Wright, founder of nicefishfilms and director of the Ustream Studio. “Ustream Studio is a phenomenal space to experience the excitement and collaboration that defines SXSW. An event on this scale -available to viewers across the globe, for free- is revolutionary to me.”

“The Ustream Studio underscores our vision to help people share moments and experiences with each other,” said Brad Hunstable, co-founder and president of Ustream. “We’re thrilled to be a partner in this event that integrates the power of live video with top-notch entertainment and talent.”

Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

Whether you use Twitter or not, it continues to gain business and consumer users at a rate that can’t be ignored. Austin, of course, deserves a wee bit of credit for helping Twitter take off, when it became the hit of SXSW Interactive 2007, winning the web award that year along with many an influential user.

Fast forward nearly two years, and twitter is everywhere:

• Sales and marketing: with hometown Fortune 500 fave Dell experimenting with rapid-turn discounts on product
• White collar crime: with fraud of the most insidious kind starting to pop up
• Mental health: with ‘Twitter remorse’ possibly being a new, mild form of Millenial depression
• Mainstream Info Tech: with that bastion publishing for the IT executive in the corner office – CIO Magazine – writing extensively on subjects like “Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don’ts“

And, these are dos and don’ts for businesses and working professionals – from X’ers to Boomers – with an eye towards helping them to understand the phenomenon and how to get their feet wet. It is this last example that is the segue for what we really want to talk about, which is not twitter.

How can you make twitter meet the security, integrity, and privacy needs of a modern, regulated, current (or aspiring) Global 2000 enterprise or similar-sized civic and academic institution? It’s a vexing problem, but at least one company in Austin has a gameplan. We spoke recently with the principals of Socialware and we liked what we heard and saw.

In a nutshell, they have built a solution that solves the middleware problem shown in the figure above, between those unruly social media apps and the enterprise application and database infrastructure. For indeed, this isn’t just a twitter problem – this a problem for how to reconcile enterprise demands for a whole new and rapidly growing category of social media applications. The solution, as it turns out, is diplomacy, i.e., sitting in the middle between two or more parties and mediating their interactions.

Hence the name Socialware – a clever play off of middleware, which was a huge step in evolving distributed application deployment in the 1990s and earlier this decade. No doubt the company principals would love for their solution to be a similar “next big thing” and to gain even a reasonable level of success that the middleware leaders, like BEA, realized.

However, first things first, the company is still in bootstrap and semi-stealth mode, aggressively building product and performing initial pilots with a very small group of large customers. You can get a little more of an inkling about the philosophy of the company on their blog. We had a look at the beta product recently and we like what we see. Our opinion is, just like certain rapidly expanding tech markets for consumers – like iPhone apps, which Austin developers have dived into – there is a big opportunity for enterprise solutions for exploiting the innovation in social media and other enterprise 2.0 apps.

And, hey, there are worse things than being acquired by Oracle for $8.5 billion.

Austin-based MindBites rolled out a new pricing plan that allows much more flexibility for authors. The new model allows authors to price their video bite at anywhere between 1 and 100 credits, with each credit costing $0.99. Authors are also getting a slightly larger cut of the proceeds.

In order to accomodate content that is worth more money, the upload size has also been increased to 350 Megabytes. This will allow authors to create either the length or quality of the video they upload.

We expect several Austin-based technology companies to be making announcements during South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), so stay tuned for some great news in March.

March 2-5th, 2009 is the annual RISE Austin event. RISE stands for Relationship and Information Series for Entrepreneurs. There are information sessions from such great Austin entrepreneurs as Nav Sooch, Clayton Christopher, Roy and Bertrand Sosa, and John Mackey. Not only is the event packed with incredible talent, it is also free!

Rather than create a packed ballroom style of event, RISE sessions are held in locations all over Austin. Not only can you find great sessions that are close to you, but since the event is distributed you will find smaller and more focused sessions where you can really interact with the speaker and your peers. You must register in advance to attend these sessions. For instance Melissa Anthony’s (of anthonyBarnum PR) session on Ultimate Media Training is already full.

There are some keynote sessions too. Roy Spence will be doing the opening keynote on Monday at 7pm at GSD&M, and John Mackey is on tap for the closing keynote on Thursday at 6:30pm at the Bob Bullock. Check out all the sessions on the website, and you will find more great stuff than you have time to attend.

Austin-based Versata announced the acquisition of Alterpoint today, but there aren’t many details arising out of the deal. In a moment of news release clarity, Versata says it will operate Alterpoint as a “standalone entity” yet will bring all customers into Versata’s “Customer Success” program.

It is unclear how much of Alterpoint was actually remaining in operation. The Alterpoint executive team seems to have left Motive around the time that the earnings overstatements were being investigated. Danielle Royston will take over duties as CEO of the former Alterpoint group, which is a sign that there’s going to be some housecleaning.

Versata is owned by Trilogy, and has been on a real acquisition streak. They acquired NUVO in December of 2007, Clear Technology and ETI in May of 2008, and Ecora Software in September of 2008. Trilogy is known for being a pretty well run organization, and Versata seems to be building up a significant product line to offer the IT departments of corporate America.

Manticore Technology, an Austin-based provider of demand generation solutions, today announced that the company has been named one of the Upshot50, by Upshot Institute, for delivering a demand generation solution that is reshaping the world of marketing.

Upshot Institute is an information, analysis, education, and consulting services firm, with a focus on marketing. The Upshot50 recognizes marketing technology providers reshaping the world of marketing. Winners are recognized for offering the most innovative, powerful and useful marketing tools and technologies and empowering marketers in today’s complex environment.

“Manticore Technology is part of a select group of marketing companies to earn the distinction of being one of the Upshot50,” said Chris Ross, Managing Director, the Upshot Institute. “The Upshot50 winners represent the marketing technologies the industry should be watching and Manticore Technology should be on every marketer’s radar.”

“As Manticore Technology continues it’s rapid growth, we’re honored to be recognized in The Upshot50,” said Nicholas Walker, CEO and President of Manticore Technology. “The Upshot50 winners represent the most essential technologies that marketers need to be successful today. We’re thrilled that all our efforts and our demand generation solution have been recognized with such an impressive group of winners.”

In the spirit of BarCamp and DemoCamp, StartupCampAustin is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on topics relevant to Startup Companies. At StartupCampAustin there are no “attendees,” since everyone participates in some manner: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering. StartupCampAustin is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in startup companies in the Austin area!

It’s being held on Saturday from 1pm - 6pm in the ACTLab (Studio 4B), Fourth Floor of the Communications Building on the campus of UT. The session schedule so far includes Josh Baer talking about how Capital Factory can give your startup money, mentorship, and services to get your startup off the ground.