As great as the virtual world can be, it’s still important to know the people who surround you in the physical world  – whether you need to find a good babysitter, borrow a cup of sugar, or plan what to do in the event of a major natural disaster.

That’s where Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Nextdoor comes in. Founded by tech industry veteran Nirav Tolia (of Epinions and Shopping.com fame), Nextdoor lets neighbors within certain regions create private websites where they can exchange local information and events while getting to know each other better. Nextdoor was founded in the fall of 2010 and is officially launching to the public Wednesday.

Inspired by Facebook’s early days

Nextdoor's main page (click to enlarge)

To be a member of Nextdoor, you must register with your real name and real physical address. Nextdoor verifies members addresses in one of four ways: Sending a postcard to the address with a unique code, making a phone call to a listed number at that address, linking the person to a billing address from a credit card they provide, or by providing an invitation from a previously verified neighbor.

“We were inspired by the early days of Facebook; when they launched, they required university-specific email addresses to allow people to access university-specific networks within Facebook. That creates a little friction up front but ultimately it allows people to feel more comfortable,” Tolia said.

Each Nextdoor network’s size is established by the first person to add the region to the site — Nextdoor provides a drawing tool that allows users to define the boundaries of their neighborhoods on top of a Google map. Boundaries can be changed later as the group evolves. The typical Nextdoor network would comprise between 50 to 2,000 households, depending on the geographic region and its density.

Social network meets public utility

Nextdoor region map (click to enlarge)

Why the need for Nextdoor, in a world where it seems like so many different social networks already exist? The company says it’s because neighbors fill a distinct role in our lives: We don’t necessarily want to be Facebook friends with them or add them to a Google+ Circle; we probably don’t know their email addresses, or even their names, to initiate such a relationship.

That’s why in addition to letting people join the site via email, Nextdoor lets users print semi-custom flyers inviting neighbors to join the site, and it will also send personalized postcards to their neighbors for them.

Over the past year, Nextdoor has been testing its site in a pilot program in over 175 neighborhoods across 26 states — from the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee to tech-savvy bedroom communities in the heart of Silicon Valley. Tolia says Nextdoor has generally been enthusiastically adopted in all different types of places. “It’s the same kind of pattern we’re seeing in almost every neighborhood. In a very short period of time, it becomes a public utility for the neighborhood.”

But will it really take off?

Nextdoor is backed with an undisclosed amount of funding from Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures; its board of directors includes Rich Barton, the chairman and co-founder of real estate website Zillow. The company currently has 22 employees. Nextdoor currently does not make money; it plans to eventually generate revenue by allowing local merchants to advertise their goods and services on the site.

When I was given a demo of Nextdoor, I immediately recognized its potential value — it’s that very rare website that I could envision my extended family in the Midwest using, just as well as I could imagine using it myself. It’s a mix of a crazy idea (another social network?) with one of the oldest, most practical ideas around (love thy neighbor, of course.) And like any social network, it’s only as good as the people who are on it. Only time can tell if Nextdoor will take off, but it certainly seems worth a try — and what better time than now.

Here’s a video intro to Nextdoor:

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Zaarly has closed on $14.1 million in a series A funding round co-led by Silicon Valley venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins, the company announced on Tuesday. In addition, new Hewlett-Packard CEO and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has joined Zaarly’s board of directors.

It’s a big move for Zaarly, the San Francisco–based startup that was founded in February of this year. In the five months since its official public launch, in May, growth has been quite robust: Zaarly says nearly $6.5 million in requests have been posted on the service to date, and the company now has operations in cities including New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Seattle and Washington, D.C. My colleague Ryan Kim described Zaarly in a post earlier this year:

Zaarly is looking to be a sort of Craigslist for local mobile users, helping buyers find a quick way to obtain what they’re looking for from neighbors and local merchants. This is not unlike what Craigslist or eBay offers, but Zaarly is built from the ground up to be mobile, local and real-time, accelerating the speed with which deals can done.

It bears mention that San Francisco startup TaskRabbit has been doing a similar thing since it was founded back in 2008, although there are very notable differences between the two startups: TaskRabbit is focused single-mindedly on brokering human tasks, while Zaarly allows people to buy and sell physical items as well. Also, Zaarly is much more focused on the mobile space and has been expanding nationwide more rapidly, while TaskRabbit has said it is doing its geographic expansion at a slower pace to ensure that its reputation for providing well-vetted task runners stays intact.

To be sure, the first mover in an industry isn’t always the ultimate winner — and of course, this burgeoning space could well have room for more than one player in the future. One thing is certainly clear: It’s an exciting time to be a startup in the new peer-to-peer economy.

Zaarly’s new funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with Sands Capital Partners; CMEA, Venture51, CrunchFund, Mark Ecko and Artists and Instigators participated as well.

Updated: An earlier version of this story mistakenly reported the amount Zaarly raised as $14.5 million. This has been corrected.

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DreamIt’s class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways.

Here are three that stood out to me:

Take the Interview CEO and co-founder Danielle Weinblatt

Take the Interview. Hiring manager and recruiters often lose time winnowing down the field of applicants to a handful they can bring in for real interviews. Often, there’s a lot of time devoted to scheduling and conducting phone screening interviews. What Boston-based Take the Interview does is provide a video interviewing platform that allows companies to solicit up to five video-recorded answers from applicants that they can review.

It allows HR teams to screen candidates more quickly and get a better feel for people using a medium that many younger applicants are already used to: video. The videos can be organized by question and can be shared and commented on within an organization. Recruiters can also pull up an applicant’s LinkedIn profile while watching a video. Take the Interview launched this summer and has about 80 companies participating in its beta, including Deloitte and Bausch + Lomb. Monster and Craigslist have also started embedding a Take the Interview button on their sites.

I like Take the Interview, because it seems like a simple way to get gain more valuable information from candidates and use video to really see if there’s a potential fit with an applicant. And as video conferencing and webcams become a common way for people to communicate, it makes sense to leverage that more for hiring.

Re-Vinyl. This Los Angeles-based start-up is taking on the demise of albums with an application that allows labels and artists to create their own digital albums complete with cover art, streaming music, lyrics and liner notes. There’s also an opportunity for high quality advertising within the app including promotions for the artists themselves.

There’s also a chance to include more interactivity with fans using a Remix feature, in which an artist can ask questions of their audience and fans can respond by dragging and dropping media into the app. Right now, Re-Vinyl is working with artists to create apps, which can take about a week, but the company is poised to release a self-serve tool to allow artists to make these apps on their own.

That, I think, will be cool because it will allow serious and also budding musicians to create next-generation digital albums. We’ve seen some of the promise of this kind of interactive multimedia apps from Push Pop Press and 955 Dreams. But this could be, if it catches on, it a way to help musical albums make the transition to the app world. Re-Vinyls plans to make money by selling Vinyls or subscriptions, taking a percentage of advertising revenue or through sponsored content.

AppAddictive CEO and founder Michael Onghai

AppAddictive. While brands move to social media platforms to advertise and engage their users, it’s not always easy or very effective, especially as they try to branch out to multiple networks. AppAddictive, based in New York City, is working to solve that with a marketing platform that allows companies to manage their content, ads and analytics on multiple networks. It comes down to AppAddictive’s ability to engage with users using mini-apps like quizzes, contests, coupon offers, video galleries.

That makes a brand’s page more dynamic and interesting and allows them to gather more information from users on what they like and are interested in. And by leveraging social networks, it can bring in new customers through viral channels for less money.  Founder Michael Onghai, one of the first employees at Geocities, left his hedge fund job to give AppAddictive a try. He said already 5,500 companies are testing the apps and 50 million people have tried one of the apps. The company plans on making money through performance-based advertising.

I think as advertisers look to tap the power of social media, having a tool like AppAddictive makes some sense. They can make their brand pages smarter and more engaging and they can gain valuable information on their users while lowering the cost of user acquisition.

I also enjoyed Hoot.me, an interactive learning platform built on top of Facebook that allows users to study with friends, connect via multi-person video chat and bring in tutors to aid in learning. KeepIdeas is also interesting, allowing people to organize recipes and food content in the cloud. You can view a longer list of all the graduates here.

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Often living for years with a relatively small amount of investment, this generation of companies is characterized by having endured setbacks, switches and significant changes in the landscape. It’s a situation that, in many cases, has helped foster a real sense of community and a survivor’s attitude.

In the third part of GigaOM’s Euro 20 roundup, we’ll look at five startups we’ve dubbed Almost Famous. They’ve weathered the storm, come out the other side, and have solid products to offer.

• Our introduction to GigaOM’s Euro 20
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Criteo

Founded: Paris, 2005
Investors: Elaia Partners, IDInvest, Index Ventures, Bessemer Ventures
Business: Online ad re-targeting

Europe’s advertising industry is rich and creative, with a long tradition of building clever and innovative startups. But of all the names that are bandied around the continent, perhaps France’s Criteo is the one to keep notice of over the next year.

It focuses on “re-targeting” — that is, catching users who have visited a website but failed to complete a purchase, and then showing them ads on other sites in order to tempt them back.

It’s proven highly successful, with annual revenues set to pass $200 million soon, but the real question is what happens next. The company has raised money every two years since its inception, suggesting that another round could be on the horizon — but with such good numbers, perhaps an acquisition or flotation should be the next logical step.

Mind Candy

Founded: London, 2003
Investors: Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Spark Partners
Business: Online games

Early efforts from London game developer Mind Candy were critically acclaimed but not commercially successful: a formula that led founder Michael Acton Smith to change direction in 2007 by introducing a new game, Moshi Monsters. A virtual world aimed at tweenagers, the title has become a significant multimedia brand and allowed the business to reposition itself in the social gaming space.

On the back of recent growth, the company — led by serial entrepreneur Michael Acton Smith — has seen its value rise dramatically in the past year. That led to investor Spark recently selling half its stake. Is this just the beginning for Mind Candy’s journey to Super Star?

Moo

Founded: London, 2006
Investors: Atlas Venture, The Accelerator Group, Index Ventures
Business: Customizable business cards

When it began five years ago, Moo took one of the London’s newest industries — the web — and married it to one of its oldest: printing. It harnessed new digital printing techniques and hooked into photo-sharing services such as Flickr and Picasa, to allow people to customize and print business cards, postcards, greeting cards and more. With a strong following among early adopters and a charming, human approach, it offered something other print-on-demand services struggled with.

A move to the next level may feel overdue. The company’s long-term plans have no doubt been hampered by the increasingly gloomy retail climate in Britain. But the business seems to be carrying on without too many hitches. It’s important, however, to see Moo not only as an interesting entity in its own right, but also as a crucial player in building up the vibrant startup scene in Britain.

Shazam

Founded: London, 1999
Investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, DN Capital
Business: Music discovery

The oldest startup on our list by several years, Shazam has always been built on great technology. Its first product, launched in 2002, allowed users to identify music they were listening to simply by waving their mobile at the sound. With an audio fingerprinting system that feels like magic, the team has expanded its business to apps and partnerships, with customers like AT&T, Vodafone, NBC and Fox.

But what looked like an increasingly maturing business two years ago, suddenly took on fresh verve with an injection of capital from Kleiner Perkins and a change in management. That switch escalated the company’s plans and now, with an expanding scope and huge ambitions, the business is looking at the television advertising market.

Viadeo

Founded: Paris, 2004
Investors: AGF Private Equity, Ventech
Business: Business networking

It’s fair to say Europe has developed a reputation for clone services — most notably with the Samwer brothers, a duo who have made their careers building and selling German-language versions of sites like Facebook and Groupon. It’s no surprise, then, that French professional networking site Viadeo, is sometimes spoken of in disparaging tones; after all, it started just a few months after its biggest rival, LinkedIn.

It might not have developed as much as its transatlantic cousin, but it’s no slouch either. It has been consistently profitable since 2009, and having rolled up a number of smaller companies, it now has 35 million users. Next up? It’s plotting a course to become the network of choice in rapidly growing markets such as China.

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Here are five we chose out of the mass of companies that we think have a genuine chance in 2011 to turn into serious contenders. These companies are growing fast, using the fact that they are outside Silicon Valley to their advantage, and focusing on ideas that mix of real-world activity and online tools. In the second part of GigaOM’s Euro 20 roundup, we give you the Ones to watch.

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GetJar

Founded: Vilnius, Lithuania, 2004
Investors: Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management
Business: Mobile app store

On the surface, GetJar’s business model would seem like a losing bet: Enter a crowded market (mobile app stores) dominated by huge companies (Apple, Google, Nokia and others) and do it from a little-known European nation (Lithuania). Yet GetJar has managed to confound expectations, growing rapidly and delivering more than 1.5 billion downloads to handset users all over the world.

The company’s crucial play is that it’s device-agnostic. The service can deliver apps, games and other downloads across all sorts of devices, from feature phones to high-end smartphones. A series of savvy deals to get exclusive early release windows for smash hits like Angry Birds and Cut The Rope has driven plenty of traffic. These days, the company has raised funds and moved its center of gravity to Silicon Valley, but remains European at heart with a significant presence in Lithuania and Britain.

Huddle

Founded: London, 2006
Investors: Eden Ventures, Matrix Partners
Business: Collaborative enterprise software

Huddle co-founders Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin

Focusing on helping businesses collaborate more effectively, Huddle has built its reputation on the back of flexible, powerful tools that can either connect employees together, or help them work with outside clients and customers. The tools are available in whatever way users find convenient — on the web, mobile, or hooked into Microsoft Office on the desktop — and the company has grown aggressively over the last couple of years. A distribution deal with HP has helped its expansion, and sales for the first half of 2011 tripled compared to the previous six months.

Its success comes even in the face of tough competition from entrenched rivals (hello, SharePoint). And with adopters that include Disney, NASA and Ogilvy, as well as another 90,000 businesses worldwide, the company looks set to keep on providing a popular alternative.

Songkick

Founded: London, 2007
Investors: Y Combinator, The Accelerator Group, SoftTech, Index Ventures
Business: Online database of live music events

As an early participant in Y Combinator’s widely respected accelerator program, Songkick’s trio of co-founders could have been expected to stay in America. But they returned to Britain soon after their stint ended, and have relentlessly focused on creating a best-in-breed service to serve the $40 billion live music industry ever since.

With a team that has remained sharp, smart and relatively small, they now have a site that allows users all over the world to track their favorite bands and keep an eye on hot acts when they come to town. Business has been stepping up in 2011 for Songkick with a recent $2 million Series A round, a new CTO lured away from Google and more top quality hires on the way.

Soundcloud

Founded: Berlin, 2007
Investors: Doughty Hanson, Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures
Business: Music and audio platform

Services that help people consume and share music have been coming and going online for years, from the various incarnations of Napster, to Myspace, iTunes, Spotify and more. But when Swedish entrepreneur Alexander Ljung and his co-founder Eric Wahlforss started looking at tools for people who create music, they realized there were far fewer tools.

Although building a sharing system around the concept of a waveform may seem clunky at first, Soundcloud has become a hugely popular way for artists, record labels and DJs to share their work with the world — and get feedback. The service has pushed hard to integrate with other services, and it’s now growing fast as the boom in casual music-making combines with gathering user interest in non-music areas such as talk radio, interviews and audio updates.

Wooga

Founded: Berlin, 2009
Investors: Holtzbrinck Ventures, Balderton Capital, Highland Capital, Tenaya Capital
Business: Social games

There’s a large cohort of social gaming companies across Europe with serious ambitions, all of which could potentially be on our list — Gameforge in Germany or Gameloft in France, for example. But one of our favorites is Wooga, a two-year-old Berlin outfit that has rapidly become one of the most successful developers of Facebook games.

The company’s team has done it before, too. The business is led by duo Jens Begemann and Philip Moeser, who previously helped guide mobile entertainment company Jamba to success; you can blame them for Crazy Frog. With a growing library of hits like Diamond Dash and Bubble Island, it’s no wonder they raised a blockbuster round of $24 million this spring in order to expand dramatically.

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Whether the lack of maturity of the continent’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is a result of an ingrained culture of low risk, or whether it’s Europe’s hefty government regulations, remains the subject of much debate. Regardless, for years the most successful European web entrepreneurs have seemed to have been those who have packed up and headed to California.

But all that’s starting to change. I first noticed the difference when I returned to Britain at the end of 2010 and covered startups across the continent, after a couple of years in San Francisco. There was a frenzy in the air: entrepreneurs seemed more driven, more enthusiastic and had a greater sense of community.

The new euro-preneur

Alexander Ljung, the Swedish CEO of Berlin-based audio platform Soundcloud, thinks the transition happened about four years ago: “You used to bump into startups that were doing the typical German thing of building a clone. Now the whole city is one crazy startup — chaotic, unstructured and with a counter-culture vibe.”

It seems like Europe’s entrepreneurs are finally embracing their outsider status, and focusing on the things that make them unique, rather than trying to recreate the Valley bubble across the pond.

In particular, there are the European countries that boast some of the most advanced broadband infrastructures in the world: it’s not unusual to get 100 Megabit lines in a city like Stockholm, for instance. That infrastructure encourages entrepreneurs in those regions to build mobile and web innovations that could catch on globally as the rest of the world catches up.

The European startup culture also benefits from its status as a patchwork quilt of nations, its flexible labor market, and its wealth of cultural hubs. Ian Hogarth, the co-founder of London’s music events service Songkick, didn’t follow his peers from Y Combinator to Silicon Valley. Instead, he saw more value in Songkick immersing itself in the cultural and music world of London, rather in the bubble of Northern California.

The Euro 20

The fact is, Europe’s web scene is now thriving. and as a result we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Depending on how closely you watch Europe’s online scene, some of these companies may be familiar to you. Others you may not have heard of. But all of them are worth watching closely.

For this list, we focused on businesses that rely on the web and connected devices, and we’ve avoided a few broad sectors — such as hardware, telecoms and studios making packaged games — which deserve complete lists of their own. And worth noting, we’ve discounted any company that graduated on to acquisition or flotation.

So, for the next few days we will be profiling the 20 startups that we feel best represent Europe’s current tech scene. We organized our list around perception, and we’ll roll out each section individually. As lists go, it is intended to be a guideline rather than a rulebook. It’s not exhaustive, and clearly, with such a diverse and vibrant continent as our playing field, it never could be.

• Super Stars (Available now)
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The new developments are great to see from the Seattle-based company which, as we first reported last month, initiated as a project within a startup called Travelpost. Trover rolled out as a standalone app on May 4. The company has been funded with a portion of the $9.8 million that was initially invested in Travelpost, and all the development thus far has been attributable to Trover’s six-person team led by CEO Jason Karas. The company plans to debut an Android app this fall.

Despite its relatively humble beginnings as a feature within another startup, Trover has very quickly found a distinctive voice and a dedicated audience of its own. Trover has accumulated 70,000 users across 150 countries during its limited release alone, and has garnered Expedia founder Rich Barton as its chairman. “I’ve done lots of traveling around the world looking for hidden gems, and I’ve always dreamed of having a resource that was at my fingertips with all my friends’ resources and travel recommendations,” Barton told me in a joint interview along with Karas this week. “For me, and for many others, using Trover has very quickly become a state of mind.”

Essentially, Trover allows users to take photos of things they’ve seen and places they’ve been and share them with friends and neighbors. Entries are automatically geo-tagged to the location in which its photo was snapped. Trover aims to catalog the “discoveries” people make when exploring a certain place — Barton described a prototypical Trover entry as saying “park right there, and here’s a photo of the little hidden pathway to the great surf beach.”

Trover’s investors include General Catalyst Partners, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Here are some screenshots of Trover in action (click to enlarge):

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Since its inception in February 2008, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company now known as Luminate has had a solid reception in publishing and advertising. The Pixazza product, which is perhaps most popular for its use on entertainment blogs linking to items similar to those worn by celebrities, has been adopted by more than 4,000 publishers. In fact, the company claims that some 20 percent of people who encounter an image embedded with Pixazza information interact with the technology.

But it has now set its sights on a much larger target. Luminate aims to organize the plethora of images available online — not just the ones of celebrities toting cool handbags — and turn viewing them into a richer and more interactive experience, chief revenue officer Chas Edwards told me in an interview this week.

Luminate’s new platform will host applications that provide additional info about any kind of picture published online, such as stats for a professional athlete pictured in a sports story, a geo-tag of where a photo was taken, or a movie trailer related to a certain image. The Luminate platform is launching Wednesday with a handful of in-house apps, and plans to open up its API to third-party developers later this year.

According to Edwards, Luminate works because it tackles the notoriously difficult technical problem of picture categorization in two different ways: It utilizes both programmed machines and people. Luminate has nine patents pending on algorithms and other technologies for identifying and sorting in-image items. The company also employs a staff of some 130 contractors to tweak the photo tags and add details that humans are still quickest at identifying.

To date, the company has taken on $17.75 million in venture funding from August Capital, CMEA Capital, Google Ventures and Shasta Ventures. As Pixazza the company has generated a solid revenue stream, so Luminate has no near-term plans to take on more venture capital, Edwards said. “We’ve got a fair chunk of our venture capital investment still in the bank.” However, he said the company may look to raise more funds in the months ahead as its platform grows.

But if Pixazza was so lucrative, why would the company expand in such a way that could potentially water down its margins? After all, linking to sites that sell consumer products is surely more directly profitable than providing in-photo information from such sources as Wikipedia. Edwards said the decision to broaden Luminate’s scope is a natural and necessary extension of the company’s original goals. “The past couple years have been phase one for Pixazza, and it’s been optimized for entertainment sites. But we’re now starting to think of interactivity much more broadly and more robustly,” he said. “Certainly other companies that have come along and said, ‘Let’s just put ads on images.’ But we have a bigger aspiration.” And ultimately, Luminate surely plans for those bigger aspirations to lead to bigger revenues at some point down the line.

Here are a c0uple screenshots of Luminate at work (click to expand):

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ReadItLater founder Nate Weiner

ReadItLater, the mobile and web app that allows you to save webpages to read later, has taken on $2.5 million in new venture capital. The company is using the funds to make the shift from “quiet giant” app developer to full-fledged tech startup, founder Nate Weiner said in an interview Tuesday.

Since ReadItLater’s inception in August 2007, its growth has been quiet but strong. ReadItLater is now available on iPhone, iPad, Android, Firefox browser, and the web, and has an API on which third-party developers have created versions of the app for other platforms. ReadItLater now has 3.5 million registered users — double the user base of its competitor Instapaper — and is integrated into more than 250 applications. It’s the top paid news app on Android, and is one of the top ten paid news apps on iOS.

All that growth has not gone unrecognized: Weiner has been approached three separate times this year with acquisition offers for ReadItLater. He ultimately rebuffed those offers because the bidders seemed to view ReadItLater as a feature, not a product in its own right. Earlier this summer, Weiner decided it was time to take on outside funding to double down on his vision. “My idea is more along the concept of using it as a platform for shifting content, no matter where you are. What Dropbox does for files and what Evernote does for documents, we can do for web content,” he said. “It became clear to me that if I want to get ReadItLater to where I truly believe it should be, I can’t do it on my own.”

To that end, ReadItLater has now taken on a series A round worth $2.5 million from Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Google Ventures and Founder Collective. The company, which was run solely by Weiner until earlier this year, now has five full-time employees and expects to add three more by year’s end.

ReadItLater offers paid and free versions of its app, and has thus been able to be profitable for most of its history. Now that its taken on funding and more employees, though, the company is starting to burn cash to focus on growth. “When it was just me it was more of a lifestyle business, but going forward having just a paid to free app doesn’t really make sense for what we want to do,” Weiner said. “We are certainly going to play around with different revenue models now.”

The content shifting space is certainly heating up. Earlier this summer, Apple debuted a feature that allows web users to bookmark webpages for later across different devices, and last week Scribd rolled out its Float reading app that has a read later feature. Weiner said he is not phased by the new competition, since he believes that being an independent business is crucial to true content shifting success. “The issue is that Apple can’t solve this problem, Mozilla can’t solve this problem,” he said. “Say you have a Samsung TV, an Android phone, a Mozilla browser on your laptop, and an iPad. To be able to content shift successfully you have to do it ubiquitously among all the platforms.”

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But the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup isn’t resting on its laurels. This week, Wildfire is launching a new product suite aimed at helping companies better manage their social media marketing efforts. The new product suite is essentially composed of four features, Ransom told me in a pre-launch interview Monday:

1. A social promotion feature that helps companies more easily incorporate promotions such as contests and coupons into their social media profiles
2. A page manager for creating and managing custom-looking Facebook fan pages
3. A messenger product that aggregates and manages messages from Facebook and Twitter in one place
4. A dashboard that helps companies evaluate the performance of their social media marketing efforts and balance that against their competitors

Wildfire decided to incorporate the new features based on the customer feedback it has received since its official launch two years ago, Ransom told me. Since then, the company has attracted an impressive user base that includes big clients, such as Virgin Atlantic and Electronic Arts, as well as a number of small and medium businesses to which Wildfire initially aimed its software platform.

Wildfire’s popularity has translated directly into bottom-line results. The company achieved profitability early on, and remains solidly cash-flow positive to this day, Ransom told me. Wildfire has grown its staff from seven employees in early 2010 to 120 today, with offices in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and London in addition to its Silicon Valley headquarters. The company has taken on $4 million in venture capital, most of which remains in the bank, Ransom said.

According to Ransom, Wildfire stands out from other players in the social media marketing platform space — such as Context Optional, Buddy Media and Vitrue – because it has been focused from the start on providing a plug-and-play product. “A lot of other companies started as custom developers for larger companies” who have since decided to build more generally accessible software platforms, she said. “From the start, we had smaller businesses in mind. We wanted to make a truly turnkey solution.”

Asked if Wildfire has attracted takeover interest from larger players in the space– after all, Context Optional recently sold for a reported $50 million– Ransom said her company isn’t actively looking to sell any time soon. “Is there interest in the market? Yeah, definitely,” she said. “But we’re totally heads down and focused on the business right now. We just feel like we’ve got so much left to achieve.” With profits, new products, and a still-growing team behind her, making that choice is certainly her prerogative.

Here are some screenshots of the new product suite Wildfire is launching this week:

Photo of Wildfire Interactive co-founders Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard courtesy of the company.

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