Zelkova Ventures

LiveFyre, a San Fran startup, is looking to bring on 2 more kick ass engineers. LiveFyre is all about unifying conversations across the web and wants to rule the talking world!

Qualities You Need to Have:
- Creative Problem Solving Type
- You get and are into the ‘real-time’ web
- You like working with small teams, these roles are the 3rd and 4th tech hir

Stuff You Need to Know:
- JavaScript, JQuery, JSON, AJAX, PHP, Python, MySql, HTML, CSS
- Other acronyms

Bonus if you know:
- Photoshop, Illustrator, SEO, XMPP, Java Server

Other Info:
- The position is in San Francisco

More Info Here – http://hackerjob.livefyre.com/

Re-tweet this one so we can help reduce unemployment!

We are excited to announce the acquisition of one of our portfolio companies NutshellMail to Constant Contact. Below is a portion of the announcement NutshellMail sent out to their users.

Constant Contact, the premier provider of email marketing, event marketing and online survey products for small businesses, nonprofits and member organizations. Together with Constant Contact, the NutshellMail team will continue its commitment to providing tools and services that make it easy for you to manage your relationships across the social media universe.

NutshellMail will remain a free service and we will continue to improve and extend the product based on the great feedback you have given us over the last two years. In addition, as part of the Constant Contact family, we can’t wait to start developing new and exciting offerings that will empower individuals and small organizations to efficiently and effectively engage with their friends, fans and customers through social media.

Constant Contact has distinguished itself as the leader in small business email marketing through its unparalleled commitment to customer service and by providing effective, affordable, and easy-to-use products and services for some of the busiest people in the world: small business owners.

Constant Contact makes email marketing simple; NutshellMail makes social simple, and together we plan to make small business success simple.

To learn more about the powerful combination of Constant Contact and NutshellMail, we encourage you read the press release and to watch the video interview with Constant Contact’s CEO Gail Goodman and the NutshellMail founders.

This past weeken I was fortunate enough to attend my first boxing match, Mayweather vs. Mosley in Las Vegas.  It was a once in a lifetimeexperience; that I would highly recommend.

There are some interesting commonalities between boxers and startups.

Dedication:  In order to be a boxer it takes incredible dedication and restraint.  In the months prior to the fight your life is consumed with training and preparation.  This same dedication is needed in a startup.

Focus: Throughout the training regiment focus is key, but it’s also key in the ring.  Focusing on your abilities, the landscape, the competitor and the goal is important to win in boxing and business.

Strength: It goes without saying a boxer must have strength to go the distance and win.  A startup needs the same.

Agility & Speed: Boxing is not only about strength its about having the agility and speed to adapt and ‘roll with the punches’.  A startup needs to have the  same ability, while being focused.

The social web is being built by people and their thoughts.  To date most analytics companies in the social sphere have focused on ‘their thoughts’ and few have focused on the people who brought you those thoughts.  I don’t want to downplay the value of thoughts, in fact we are investors in Crimson Hexagon, a leading tool analyzing thoughts… but today is about people!

We are very excited to announce our investment in Klout, the leading platform for understanding the ‘who’ behind the ‘what’.  Klout is about determining who people are providing data around them that can help people and companies make decisions.

Were excited about Klout because as the social web continues to grow among people and businesses the ability to identify, rank and sort people is going to be more and more important in getting thru the clutter.   Klout allows you to do just that determine who is important in what areas and is poised to become standard measurement of influence online.

Klout is arguably the leader in the space with some terrific partners using the platform, these include Co-Tweet, TweetUp and HootSuite, to name a few of the 200+.

We look forward to continuing to work with the team along with our investment partners, ff Asset Management, Bobby Yazdani of Saba, Allen Morgan of Mayfield Fund, Nova Spivack of Lucid Ventures, Grape Arbor VC, Paige Craig, Tom McInerney, Michael Yavonditte of Quigo Technologies, and Ofer Ronan.

Note: This is a guest blog post by the team from Barrel.

We added Twitter’s @Anywhere to the Zelkova Ventures website and blog over the weekend. We liked how @Anywhere enabled more engagement with Twitter without being overly intrusive and hope to implement it for other clients who’re active Twitter users.

There are three main things that @Anywhere offers:

1. You can embed a Tweet Box, making it easy for users/readers to Tweet right from your site. You can customize the initial text in the box, so this might be useful if you’re trying to encourage people to RT something.
2. The Hovercard brings Twitter data right to the page, making it easy to see and follow someone’s Twitter account info without leaving the current site. Also, any username mentioned on the page gets auto-linked to the Twitter account page.
3. Connect with Twitter lets users log in to a site/app with their Twitter account. For the Zelkova blog, this wasn’t necessary since it already uses Disqus for commenting with an option for Twitter login.

We first checked out Add Twitter @Anywhere plugin for Wordpress and felt it was too limited for what we wanted to do. We wanted to go beyond just having Hovercards for @usernames and thought @Anywhere could be more integrated with the blog entries. Using the Insert Link Classes plugin, we created a “twitterlink” class that could be called right in the body of post. This way, it would be easy to activate Hovercards on someone’s name and also have that link go to their website instead of their Twitter page. We should note that Insert Link Classes didn’t work out of the box; we had to sift through the comments to find a way to get it to work.

We set up Wordpress to make it easy to enable Hovercards beyond just @usernames.

Next, we added the Tweet Box to the sidebar, which was fairly easy. One thing to note was that because it’s in an iframe, the ability to style the Tweet Box is limited. We prepopulated the box with @ZelkovaVC to encourage a reply tweet from the blog’s readers.

The rest of the Zelokva website runs on ExpressionEngine, which meant adding a few lines of code to the template files. One area where we found @Anywhere helpful was for the company portfolio pages. Each company already has a Twitter feed showing their three latest Tweets, so we were able to add Hovercards for each one.

Overall, implementation was fairly straightforward. We should warn that @Anywhere does slow down the site a bit when it loads. And sometimes you’ll see a bit of a lag on the Hovercards as well, but we’re hoping this is something that’ll improve over time.