There are as many different reasons social networking platform providers will be considered as the hot targets in venture capital as social networking sites. HiveLive, an enterprise social software solution provider is announcing that it has raised $5.6 million in a Series A financing. In a press release, this round of financing was led by Grotech Capital Group and with participation of the current private investors. This bring HiveLive’s total funding to date is $7.8 million, which includes prior angel investments of $2.2 million. In addition, Grotech General Partner Joseph R. Zell will take a seat on HiveLive’s board of directors with immediate effective.

This news reminds me of another social networking platform provider that called Five Across, acquired by Cisco exactly one year ago. Both target on enterprise customers, with the offering of some social tools such as wiki, forum, blog, all with the core purpose to facilitate the online communication from one enterprise to its enterprise clients. Frankly, I never used or get involved with HiveLive software, but reading some other blogs on HiveLive, I know that HiveLive tend to become a Web software that is a highly customized, configurable, and scalability. Since HiveLive is an on-demand, companies that want to create social network on their sites will probably short-list HiveLive based on the aforesaid features. If you want to know more about the social networking functionality that offered by HiveLive, you can visit the review done by TechCrunch.

Finally, HiveLive is a Boulder-based startup that just launched in last year.

KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, today announced that they have released the newest version, i.e. 3.0. KickApps is a social platform provider that accentuates the virtues of building a rich media experience while the social media publishers remain the controls in their communities’ content and visitors. This newest version 3.0 improved some of the core functionality in the four building blocks of the platform, such as social networking, user generated content, programmable video players and widgets. KickApps are appropriate for the creation of content by a group of people, particularly if the content, involving large media files such as videos. In particular, KickApps has increased the maximum file size for media files that upload by publishers, i.e. 100MB, up from 25MB from the previous version. As profiled in my previous post about KickApps, many established corporate clients are building communities by using their platform, especially in view of the advertisement aspect that pretty appealing to these large-size publishers:

- PayPal buyout of KickApps Ad inventory on a self-service basis for small businesses
- Volume pricing of ad-free and API experiences for larger businesses
- No cost deployment available (includes advertising inventory share with KickApps)

In the meantime, KickApps also released the KickApps API Developer Kit, that enable publishers to have complete control on their application deployment. From the features listed below, it’s pretty clear that KickApps is focusing on creating a right environment for the developers.

- Open standard, powerful, REST-based APIs covering all business components
- Extends existing SOAP single-sign-on (including one-click Drupal, Joomla and WordPress plugins)
- Custom feeds, workflows and display, media ingestion and management
- Tight integration with Affiliate CMS and user experiences
- Usage-based pricing model: cost-efficient and advertising-free

Perhaps the most exciting features an user found on this version 3.0 is the improved control panel of KickApps 3.0 Affiliate Center. There is a video related to this that I found on the Web, as embedded in the below.

Watch and enjoy.

KickApps, a social media platform provider has a new customer today, i.e Guinness World Records (GWR). The Guinness World Records Community is now built on the KickApps platform, and users that want to break the world records can now upload their videos to this community site since the “white label” solution provided by KickApps is a natural fit for an authoritative site for records like GWR. Click on the left-hand side of the landing page of GWR will bring you to this community site, and you’ll find this online community is a fun place, occupied by all the passionate people that willing to share their videos, to get involved as well as connect with one another.