Netvibes, the San Francisco–based company that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS and social media feed dashboards, announced on Wednesday evening it has been acquired by French enterprise software firm Dassault Systèmes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini

The deal makes sense on a few levels, as Netvibes’ engineering team is based in France (CEO Freddy Mini splits his time between France and California.) The company has also been around for a while — since 2005 — and in that time has grown from being a personal RSS feed dashboard to a profitable enterprise web analytics service. Even though there have been a few management changes and strategy pivots along the way, Netvibes’ tenacity and very smart shift toward enterprise products surely helped position it as an attractive acquisition candidate.

As far as the near future goes, it seems that many things for Netvibes will remain the same. A rep for the company said in an email:

Our brand, business, products and team all stay. Our free product will remain free and available to our millions of users. What will change is that Netvibes can innovate even faster.

At the same time, Dassault, which is best known for making 3-D computer-aided design and project life cycle management software used by large corporations for industrial projects (Boeing uses Dassault tools to design its jets, for example), seems on the surface like a fairly unexpected match for a social web–focused company like Netvibes. It will be interesting to see how Netvibes’ tools are integrated into Dassault’s product lineup in the longer run.

Feature image of Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini courtesy of Flickr user snackfight

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Netvibes’ new product suite, dubbed “social pack,” is currently available in private beta for existing Netvibes premium dashboard customers. The features will be available to individuals by month’s end, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini told me in an interview this week.

With the latest additions, Netvibes is solidifying its new status as a enterprise software-as-a-service company — a significant step beyond the consumer RSS feed aggregator it started as.

Netvibes is smart to move from courting individual people to entire companies: The web monitoring space has proven to be a lucrative one for startups targeting brands in recent years. Social media monitoring company Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com  for some $326 million back in March, and brand management startup Scout Labs was acquired last year for a reported $20-plus million.

That said, Netvibes itself is not exactly green to the startup game. The company was founded in 2005, and has had its fair share of managerial drama and strategy pivots along the way. But the company has stood on its own throughout: Netvibes has turned a profit since 2009 and has only one round of funding in its history, Mini told me. In a press release Friday the company claims it still has an edge on the newcomers, saying that its newest offerings provide monitoring and analytics “in ways never before possible.”

I demoed the new Netvibes offerings — and though I’m not in charge of a brand or company (beyond my own, I suppose) I can see the appeal of the social pack service. The social analytics capabilities are quite comprehensive, and should prove popular among the company’s existing customers, many of whom populate the Fortune 500 list. But it bears mention that Netvibes is not the only company offering products to help brands and customers monitor what is being said about them in real-time on the web.

Netvibes’ solid position as a safe bet for its existing customers have kept it in the game thus far, and its strategy to go after the growth market or brands and social media is a wise one. Whether it can continue to hold its ground in today’s world of hyper-funded and hungry social media analytics startups remains to be seen.

Here is a screenshot of Netvibes’ new social pack dashboard:

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The massive explosion of data the real-time Web has given us looked like a good thing for enterprises at first. After all, the bigger companies are, the better they should be at drinking from this new firehose of raw data. Unfortunately, however, the real-time Web turned into an endless tsunami of Tweets, RSS feeds, live CRM and ERP data, videos and social media.

Ironically, the best tools for managing the real-time Web are available for free to millions, instead of costing millions. Small businesses and consumers are thriving with TweetDeck, Google Docs, Basecamp, Zoho and real-time feed readers. However, these same tools have only made matters worse for large enterprises, because they tamper with the underlying machinery, ruining the business process.

According to a new study by Ventana Research, most “desktop productivity tools obstruct efficiency and effectiveness when used in enterprise processes.” Basically, these new apps interfere with deeply entrenched, process-based systems. For example, using collaborative spreadsheets for reports generates a 47 percent error rate (think about all the times you emailed a file around or someone overwrote your changes on Google Docs) versus standard ERP reporting. But who can blame workers for using them? Even if the enterprise doesn’t provide adequate tools to manage the real-time Web, the job still needs to be done. So workers turn to consumer apps, leading to all sorts of security concerns, data loss, reporting errors, time wasted on Facebook and other inefficiencies.

This in turn has had a detrimental effect on the use of enterprise systems. According to a 2010 IDC survey of midsize and large businesses, 25-75 percent of enterprise licenses are paid for but unused. When a marketer needs to see what customers think and how they feel about a new product, there isn’t time to wait for the quarterly sales data to come in and be analyzed by their ERP system — they need to get on Twitter now and directly monitor what’s going on.

So, if new apps increase inefficiencies and app fatigue, does adding new Enterprise 2.0 applications make sense? Not yet. But perhaps it could if the underlying business process changed.

The Future of Business Intelligence: Harness Human Power

To date, the discussion around Enterprise 2.0 has focused mostly on CRM, ERP and communications, but the larger topic we should consider is really Business Intelligence, since that’s what draws data from all other enterprise systems and translates them into actual reports and processes.

Business Intelligence had its heyday in the 1990s (SAP BusinessObjects, anyone?), based on taking corporate data silos (databases, intranets), applying business logic layers, and ultimately delivering analytics and tangible business processes. This system works great when you have defined datasets.

However, the real-time Web is not defined nor controlled by the enterprise. It’s chaotic. It’s massive. It’s the entire public Internet — not your intranet — and it’s intangible. How can any BI system analyze the entire Web in real time or create a quantifiable business object out of a product unboxing video?

So we turn to consumer tools. We give up on enterprise systems and reporting. We go back to monitoring directly with our own eyes, like a pilot who realizes his instruments are broken or Morpheus scanning The Matrix. Salesforce Chatter is a good indicator of this new trend towards monitoring, but unfortunately it doesn’t help workers monitor everything and it doesn’t help enterprises create actual business processes. We need more. Much more.

The future of BI 2.0 will not rely on server power, but on the human power of the entire organization to capture everything, convert social media into tangible business objects, and automate real-time business processes. BI 2.0 needs to help enterprises do three things:

1.     Monitor everything. We need to give workers the ability to better monitor a million things at once: news, competitors, visual brand identities, consumer feedback, e-reputation, etc. (10 competitors x 10 major news searches x 5 social media sites = 500 sites each worker needs to check manually everyday just to stay industry aware!)

2.     Self-organize. Flickr and YouTube’s content was considered too big to organize, until tagging came along. Similarly, we need to help enterprises self-organize the billions of clicks, searches, Tweets and reports they produce every year within their company by harnessing the tagging talents of experts within their organization. Private tag clouds, anyone?

3.     Trigger processes. As we uncover trending topics within the organization, we need to enable it to automatically trigger actual business processes in real-time, like purchase orders or ad budgets.

Essentially, many new Enterprise 2.0 apps that try to accomplish this, from corporate wikis to social networks, fail because they are external systems (‘mo apps, ‘mo problems). They do not help users monitor everything (rather they are an additional thing to monitor). They are not self-organizing and they fail to trigger real business processes.

The next generation of Business Intelligence systems will need to be able to integrate both consumer and enterprise systems together to fix these inefficiencies and leverage the human intelligence of the entire organization to capture the real-time Web.

Freddy Mini is the CEO of Netvibes, a real-time dashboard platform for both consumers and corporations. Prior to Netvibes, he co-founded music search service musicMe and was the CEO of Ziff-Davis (France) and the Senior VP and Managing Director of CNET Networks Europe.

Graphics courtesy of Netvibes.

“People want to consume information the way they want, when they want and for the deliverer to be smart enough to know what they want before they even want it,” said Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini. Talk to Me is what the startup calls “widget recommendation and distribution engine;” it analyzes widgets users already have on their Netvibes start pages and then suggests 12 new widgets each week they may want to add, which is reminiscent of features on Amazon and Pandora. Mini said Talk to Me acts as a user’s personal assistant because the engine is smart enough to cut through the overflow of social content on the web and match a user’s preferences with relevant widgets. He believes providing users with Talk to Me is in alignment with the current evolution of Web 2.0, as more users are demanding content in real time.

Starting tomorrow, all Netvibes users can view their recommended widgets by clicking on the “Add Content” tab at the top of the Netvibes start page. Mini said the company is working on a “near real-time management system” that will update your Netvibes start page faster and should be available at the end of the summer.

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Mini painted a picture of a company that is slowly firming its business and growing its revenue. After bringing in revenue of a couple of million dollars, the company is on track to triple its sales, thanks to signing up large corporate customers, many in Europe. “We are on our way to being breakeven this year,” Mini said. “We are focused on profitability this year.” That’s not bad, considering he is up against Google’s iGoogle platform. (Related: iGoogle vs Netvibes.)

Netvibes has over 3 million active users a month; many of them use white-label or corporate versions of the service. Netvibes gets about 400,000 unique active visitors every day. The company has three different revenue streams — selling the service to corporations that use it for their Intranets; offering it to advertising agencies that use special brand pages for their clients; and lastly, from advertising. Netvibes has more than 180,000 widgets, and many of these are sponsored by brand advertisers. Each install gets Netvibes between 50 cents and 75 cents.

“What we want to be is a personalization platform for the web,” said Mini, pointing to how the company is evolving from just being a startup page for the web. With data deluge on the rise, Netvibes can become a place where people aggregate their content. In addition to allowing people to add their content, Netvibes is going to be adding a recommendation engine, allowing people to discover content they want. “The next phase of the web is about hyper-personalization,” he said. “We want to help with that.”

Photo via Flickr courtesy of alexdecarvalho

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Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, formerly of Yahoo, denied that the company was running out of cash. He invited me to a fancy lunch and offered to pay with the company company card. “All startups are up for sale! We frequently receive inbound M&A inquiries,” he said.

However, my sources are fairly confident about the tough times facing the company, which was founded in Germany and is headquartered in San Francisco.

The company was co-founded in October 2005 by Christoph Janz, Omar AL Zabir, Ole Braundenburg and Shahedul Huq Khandkar. Benchmark Capital Europe invested $1.3 million in Pageflakes in May 2006, and followed up with a $2.8 million bridge.

Even though Cohen denies running out of cash, our sources tell us that their burn rate is over $300,000. Given that the company had little to show in terms of revenues for 2007, simple math shows that they are skating on very thin ice. Simply put, they’re in urgent need of fresh cash, but given the state of their traffic, that looks like a long shot. Pageflakes had around 1.5 million visitors a month and over 200,000 registered users. Those are remarkably low numbers, making it tougher for them to compete with their rivals, which explains why Pageflakes’ recent attempts to raise capital have come to naught.

Pageflakes’ closest rival is Netvibes, a Paris-based company that has had its own set of challenges. Of course, the real competitors for these personalized web page startups are the Internet gorillas – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL – which are offering their own version of personalized web pages. (Read: WebWorkerDaily’s review of Top Ajax Start Pages.)

Pageflakes is just the tip of the iceberg: Many 2005-2006 consumer web startups that have failed to grow real-big-real-fast will find life increasingly tough, with many facing the fate of Pageflakes. Stay tuned!

Updated: Last evening we got an email from Cohen in response to our questions. Here is essentially what he said.

We don’t give out financials, but the liabilities we have are typical for a startup, we always make payroll, and we’re mostly current with our vendors. I won’t comment on the amount you state other than to say that’s it’s not too bad for a VC-funded startup! We’re out raising capital, and as you know the market is tough, and we haven’t closed a new round. Our current VC continues to be supportive.

This morning, there are reports that Live Universe is buying them. Given that Brad Greenspan’s roll-up vehicle buys web companies on the cheap, it is clear Pageflakes didn’t get a premium. Newsgator was another bidder and offered close to half a million dollars. Since Live Universe hasn’t issued a statement, plain math showed Pageflakes was going to be part of the dot-gone club.

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The story has consistently been framed as an issue of getting users rather than making money. For a while the excitement was around MySpace, then Facebook opened its APIs and the widget makers rushed into a promised land of adoption and media coverage. But as social networks and widget platforms, such as Clearspring, begin to explore monetization strategies, and as widget makers such as Slide pull in large amounts of capital, the time to prove that widgets can make money is here.

There are few ways companies are doing this, with the most obvious one centered around using a widget as a billboard. If you already make money from your content and can offer something interesting, a widget is a good way to extend your brand and get people to watch your new television show, read your content or see your movie.

Examples of this type of widget includes the film widgets from the likes of MovieFone, or the widget tools The Wall Street Journal and New York Times offer via Netvibes. In fact, Netvibes is looking to take this a step further by charging people for better placement of their widgets on its personalized home page in a manner similar to Google’s AdSense program.

If you buy into the idea of widgets as a billboard, or that some type of advertising could eventually be shown on widgets, then the idea of knowing how many people are snagging or looking at your widget — and how often — becomes interesting. Services such as ClearSpring, MuseStorm and Triggit provide these sorts of tracking and analytics services and already charge — or plan to charge — the widget makers a fee. Those that charge widget makers serving advertisers such as major publishers and sports leagues are in luck. Those that charge consumer widget makers without a clear revenue model might find themselves wondering what to do if their customers don’t make money.

But running analytics and platforms can be a challenge when there are no set standards for widget monetization. Much like the early days of banner advertising, when people just sold whatever unused space they had, the world of widget ads is a Wild West with no set sizes, rules about placements, or even defined success metrics.

Many company executives and their venture backers in the space believe that the Interactive Advertising Bureau, widget makers, social networks and publishers will get together in the near future to hammer out standards, from something as simple as how to determine the appropriate pixel height and width of an in-widget ad to how to figure out when a widget ad is successful.

Some of the metrics currently being considered include charging advertisers based on: the number of people who see the widget (cost per thousand); the number of people who actually interact with the widget (cost per click); and the cost per install, which measures how many people snag the widget for their own page. As much as analytics can tell people about what happens with a widget and where it goes, it’s still hard to say how successful it has been unless it’s tied directly to a purchase. And frankly, even those numbers can be tweaked.

This standardization will likely emerge once a successful model does. So far, Beacon isn’t winning rave reviews and it’s worth waiting a bit to see what some of the more consumer focused widget-creation platforms like RockYou and Slide can contribute with their revenue models, but my bet is this will happen sooner rather than later (like 2009).

Much like Google monetizes their users by giving them something that enough people want (search results, free directory services via GOOG411) and then painlessly taking something Google can use (money from advertisers, a sampling of accents for its voice recognition efforts), a widget monetization strategy needs to keep users happy while also giving something of value to someone.

The challenge facing most widget makers that target consumers is figuring out what it is their widget-watchers have that’s valuable — and who might want it. Those focused on a more ad-centric model are going ahead with their plans to use the widget as a more interactive billboard, but companies like Slide and RockYou may find that strategy more difficult.

Even with the uncertainly, I agree with Satya Patel of Battery Ventures (and a former Google executive) who says, “While widgets have generated a lot of hype, they are certainly an important vehicle for content, commerce, communications and advertising and they are here to stay. There will be several large businesses built in and around the widget market.” But I think we’ll also see a lot of them fail.

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Ginger allows a user to place widgets, feeds and even information from their social network of choice onto a web page that can be used as a home page. CEO Tariq Krim says Netvibes is charging content companies such as Tagged.com and Alot.com to create personalized content sites within their own sites, and he said Netvibes will start creating an ad network for widgets by the end of the first quarter. He admits that there’s no one standard right now for widget ads, and would like to help set standards, but in lieu of that, he’s going it alone. (Going it alone has become a theme for Krim; co-CEO Pierre Chappaz left Netvibes over the summer.)

As a corollary to placing ads on widgets, Krim’s also creating an AdSense model that allows widget makers to pay to place their widget more prominently on the Netvibes site. Sponsored widgets will be clearly labeled. If an open standard for widget advertising doesn’t work out, established brands are still likely to follow this model, as long as the company can bring in quality users willing to set Netvibes as their home page. GigaOM has been given 100 beta invites, just visit the Ginger start page.

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