Sphere Knows Now how to work with enterprise customers

Lost in the shuffle the past few weeks is a little deal Sphere entered into with KnowNow to bundle our Sphere It! application into their dashboard market intelligence offering. This is a really smart deal for us and has the potential to drive a lot of value to our customers. We’re in the process of deploying at a few very large, prominent sites (I can’t tell you yet but look forward to sharing the news).

We chose KnowNow because they’re in the best position to help us get our product into the hands of a wide spectrum of Fortune 1000 enterprise customers. The main reason we feel they’re the best is because of their leadership team, led by Todd Rulon-Miller. Todd took over KnowNow about one year ago and he has made a significant impact on their business model and prospects for success. He is without doubt one of the most impressive leaders I’ve worked with in the past ten years. I’m a believer in betting on people. I once made a huge mistake, working with someone I didn’t wholly believe in and I learned a painful yet nice lesson from that experience. In Todd and his team we trust and as a result, we’re very bullish about what we can accomplish together.

You can read a little bit more about this relationship in an excellent article wirtten by Paula Hane at InfoToday – Enterprise Solutions and Mainstream Media Get Into the Sphere.

spam farms of the social web

Good post at Niall Kennedy’s blog about spam farms.

Sphere integrated into Forbes.com

It’s a big day for announcements. We’re live as a search tab on Forbes.com. Forbes is using our XML API to power a tab of search results. Rather than search for Tony Bennett, I thought I’d try tax shelters. Yeah, we know who reads Forbes Our logo is a bit squeezed, we’ll get that fixed.

Sphere feels the Vibe

I just got an email from Tariq KRIM and Franck Mahon at Netvibes indicating that Sphere has been added as a blog search button in their site. Netvibes is a relatively new company that’s getting a lot of great buzz and user base in the make-your-own-newspaper space (what do you call that space, the My Yahoo 2.0 space?). Anyway, here’s a screenshot with one of our hot searches (what is Tony Bennett up to that he gets into hot searches??)