In a short amount of time since its launch in April, 2009 and its redesign a year later, realtime analytics startup Chartbeat has gained an impressive following of more than 2,500 paying corporate customers. All of this was done so far with 5 employees, led by general manager Tony Haile.

Now, the betaworks-incubated company has gained an impressive roster of investors in a $3 million Series A financing. The round was led by Index Ventures, and includes some serious superangels such as Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and Jason Calacanis. With the funding, Chartbeat will be spun off as its own separate company, just as betawork’s bit.ly was before it.

IBM put out a new report (embedded below) on security threats to enterprise computer networks today from its X-Force security research group. It found a 36 percent increase in security vulnerabilities, with Web applications being the main culprit. Web apps with security exploits accounted for 55 percent of all disclosed vulnerabilities.

One of the biggest threats are hidden attacks using Javascript. There was a 52 percent rise in such “obfuscated attacks” in the first half of 2010. The increased adoption of cloud computing and virtualization brings with it its own security threats. For instance, 35 percent of virtualization vulnerabilities affect the hypervisor, meaning that gaining control of one virtual machine can give attackers controls of other machines on the same system.

Adobe is strengthening its product portfolio with its intention to acquire Swiss firm Day Software, which makes Web content management systems aimed at marketers. Adobe announced an all-cash tender offer for Day’s shares. The purchase price is approximately $240 million.

Many of Adobe’s products, such as Illustrator and Photoshop, are used already to create marketing materials for companies. Moving into Web content management is a natural step since as many of these marketing materials are consumed and distributed online. Day allows marketers to manage digital assets for online marketing campaigns and set up marketing blogs and other social media outreach.

It is not often that a company’s first round of venture funding comes in at $60 million and eight years after it was founded with $10,000 worth of credit card debt. But Atlassian, which was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002, is taking its first venture money today from Accel Partners. The company pulled in $59 million in revenues in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, and has been “profitable from Year One,” says co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon.

The money will be used to give some liquidity to the founders and employees, expand its product portfolio, and possibly acquire other startups. n order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. But he is in no rush. Wong thinks that once the company passes $100 million in revenue, it will be time to start thinking of an IPO. If revenues continue to grow 30 percent a year, that will be only a few years away.

Google is now in the flight information business. The search giant just announced it is paying $700 million in cash for ITA Software, an essential provider of flight information to airlines, travel agencies, and online reservation systems.

Travel is a huge segment of search and online commerce. Purchasing ITA signals Google’s intention to build out its travel search in a major way. A consortium of rivals including Microsoft, Kayak, Expedia, and Travelport tried to counter Google’s offer last Spring because they all rely on ITA’s data and wanted to keep the company out of Google’s hands. ITA was reportedly holding out for $1 billion, but Google got the deal at the original $700 million price it put on the table.

In response to a patent lawsuit filed by Microsoft last May, Salesforce is countersuing with its own patent infringement claims. But a mere countersuit isn’t enough for CEO Marc Benioff. He is also bringing a big-gun lawyer to the knife fight, Microsoft’s nemesis from the antitrust trial of the 1990s, David Boies.

During Salesforce’s last earnings call, Benioff obliquely referred to Microsoft as an “unnamed patent troll” and “alley thugs.”

Salesforce Chatter just went live to all customers earlier today, but already it is being attacked from below by smaller social CRM players. Taking a page from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s own playbook of getting attention by going after larger incumbents, Bantam Live CEO John Rourke likens Chatter to lipstick on a pig. The pig in question is the underlying Salesforce app which he describes as having “the interface only the mother of a database technician could love.”

Now that he’s got your attention, what Rourke really wants to tell you is that Bantam Live is the social CRM for small businesses. Bantam Live launched last year at one of our Realtime Crunchups, and it came out of beta last February. A couple weeks ago, I got him on video talking about his approach to social CRM and how he positions Bantam Live against the Salesforce juggernaut. He also gave me a demo of his social enterprise app. (Watch the videos after the jump).

Fresh on the heels of the launch of Yext Rep last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yext just signed up its first major distribution partner. Superpages will make an online, co-branded Dashboard which includes Yext Rep available to its 300,000 local business advertisers across the country. The Superpages Dashboard will roll out in the coming weeks.

Yext Rep is a way for local merchants to manage their reputations online. In one central place, it shows them how to claim their business on sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare, Twitter, or Facebook, and what consumers are saying about them on the Web. All of this gets shown in a feed, along with local advertising data from Yext’s main pay-per-call advertising product, Yext Listings. With the new Dashboard, Yext Rep and Yext Listings are treated as enterprise apps for small businesses, and Superpages now also has an app in the Dashboard for managing Superpages ads, which can also be added to the main feed.

Social recruiting is all the rage right now when it comes to finding new employees to hire. Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti recently told me about a simple but effective way his company is using Facebook ads to hire people. Facebook ads are highly targetable. Citysearch puts up an ad with a picture of the hiring manager and shows those ads only to that manager’s Facebook friends. For instance, the image of the ad at right is the one seen by friends of Citysearch senior VP Kara Nortman, who is introducing social features such as business Tweets into Citysearch.

Since each ad can be “liked,” and thus shared across the social network via the news feed, the ads become implicit referrals. If you know Kara and you see the ad, whether or not you are looking for a job, you might feel inclined to like it and share it with your friends. Or maybe you are looking for a job and since you know Kara or at least are connected to her on Facebook, you feel like you’ve got an in. The ads seem to be working. Kara’s inbox was flooded after the ad ran.

Paperless billing is the digital future that never quite fully arrives. Even among people who otherwise embrace the digital lifestyle, and pay their bills electronically, many find it difficult to give up on the paper statement. They feel they need it for their financial records or it serves as a physical reminder to pay the bill. And meanwhile, businesses are stuck sending out paper bills every month which on average cost $10 per customer per year.

Stealthy Seattle startup Doxo is working on a way to increase the adoption of paperless billing. The company raised $5.25 million in a series A last November, which included the conversion of shares from a previous seed round. The round was led by Mohr Davidow, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also invested through his personal investment vehicle Bezos Expeditions.

Before you go to a conference these days, everything is online. You can see the schedule, speakers, and buy a ticket all from your laptop. But when you get to the conference, everything reverts to paper. Even when you check in to get your badge, usually a volunteer has to find your name on a list and check it off with a pen.

Online ticketing service Eventbrite just made the check-in process digital with its new iPhone app which just launched today. The app is for people putting on conferences and other events who use Eventbrite to sell tickets. With the app, whoever is manning the registration table only needs an iPhone to check against the attendee list as people arrive. Of course, Eventbrite can be used to manage the guest list at parties, weddings, or any event.

Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a new service for marketers to measure the dollar value of each person who visits their company’s website. It is called Sysomos Audience (currently in private beta). Sysomos Audience is an analytics tool which at first looks similar to Google Analytics, but with one big difference: it goes beyond measuring visitors directly from referring sites and tries to determine where else a visitor has been on the Web, including competitor’s sites, blogs, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It then estimates the ROI of each visitor by putting a dollar value on each one based on the other sites that person has been to recently.

For instance, someone who visited a competitor’s site and read three blog posts on similar topics to your company’s product (based on keywords each customer provides during setup) will have a higher estimated “engagement value” than someone who just came from a news article. If that visitor fills out a form on your Website or requests more information, they get an even higher score. Sysomos takes those engagement scores and organizes visitors as leads much like you would see in a CRM app, with a data snapshot of their estimated dollar value and where else they’ve been.

Another healthy quarter for Microsoft, which saw a 34.5 percent boost in net income to $4 billion, on top of a more modest 6 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $14.5 billion. The return to growth was driven largely by sales of Windows 7, which were up 28 percent to $4.4 billion. (Windows Live is included in that, but it doesn’t yet produce much revenue, although Microsoft is about to update the products in Windows Live such as Hotmail and Messenger to make them more social).

Bing and Xbox Live were also strong growers, although on an absolute basis they weren’t enough to make much of a difference. At least the Xbox division (which includes the Zune and other entertainment products and devices) is no longer losing money, reporting $165 million in operating income on revenues of $1.7 billion. The online division cannot claim the same. Revenues were up 12 percent to $566 million, but It lost $713 million in operating income. That is about $300 million more than it was losing last year. That is okay, though, the $3 billion in operating income for the Windows division is up by $788 million from last year

Thousands of developers rely on Twitter’s APIs to build their apps and Websites. In time for this week’s Chirp conference for Twitter developers, Apigee is coming out of public beta and launching a special dashboard to keep track of the Twitter API.

Apigee is a Google Analytics for APIs. For developers who rely on data from other sites and companies, it monitors how much data they are using (message requests), the error rate, response times, and downstream users. For the Twitter API, Apigee added the number of Tweets and retweets going through a developers app, as well as the location of users on a map for geo-coded tweets. For instance a developer with a Twitter iPhone client could use Apigee to monitor how many times an hour his app is making data calls to Twitter.

When it comes to getting access to all the data that flows through Twitter, there are the 50,000 apps that drink from Twitter’s Streaming API, which is subject to various limits. And then there are the chosen few who get the full unlimited firehose of data, the more than 50 million Tweets a day coursing through Twitter.

In the past, only select partners, particularly big search engines such as Google or Bing, got the full firehose. Search engines need it more than others to be able to index and serve up results in realtime. Today, smaller search startups are also getting the firehose. These include Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search (which has not yet launched).

Google Buzz might have been pushed out too soon, but there are already at least a dozen apps for Google Buzz, most of them unoffical. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to start BuzzAware, a Google Buzz app directory. BuzzAware is started by the same folks behind Twitdom, a Twitter app directory with more than 1,500 apps.

This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” Why couldn’t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn’t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn’t anything close to a straight-forward solution.

That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn’t ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book Behind the Cloud and can’t help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago—an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential—mirror where we are today. But it’s no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers.

In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?”

Apple thinks of itself as a mobile device company. In January at the iPad launch event, Steve Jobs noted that “Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.” And responding to a direct question today at a Goldman Sachs conference, liveblogged by the WSJ, COO Tim Cook reiterated: “Yes, you should definitely look at Apple as a mobile-device company.”

Cook also pointed out that the majority of Apple’s revenues now comes from mobile devices (including laptops) or content for those devices. Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of Apple’s fourth quarter revenues of $15.7 billion, nearly $12 billion of that came from portable Macbooks ($2.8 billion), iPods ($3.4 billion) and iPhones $5.6 billion). And another $1.2 billion came from iTunes.

Adobe’s Flash technology has been taking a beating lately. Apple still won’t support it on its upcoming iPad or its iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it buggy and crash-prone and dismisses Adobe as being lazy. Adobe is trying to fight the negative vibes emanating from Cupertino and elsewhere. It has already pointed out that it will be easy to convert Flash apps into iPad apps, and now CTO Kevin Lynch is weighing in to defend Flash.

In a blog post today, Lynch addresses the two major threats to Flash: Apple’s refusal to support it on mobile touchscreen devices and the rise of HTML5 as a new, open standard which may one day replace Flash. On Apple, Lynch says Adobe is ready and able to put Flash on the iPhone, the iPad or anything else Apple can throw its way. But, as has been the case for more than a year, the ball is in Apple’s court:

Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.

The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. He writes that Google employees should resist the impulse to create closed products and systems, and even makes a swipe at Apple for doing so (bold added for emphasis):

Google’s new realtime search wouldn’t be complete without Facebook updates. At the tail-end of today’s Google search event Marissa Mayer announced that Google will start to include realtime results from Facebook as well as MySpace. While Twitter and MySpace is making available everybody’s updates (or at least the public ones), Google right now will only show updates from public Facebook pages, which are generally fan pages.

“Facebook will be providing us with a feed of updates from public profile pages, also known as Facebook pages,” says Mayer. Facebook is still holding back publicly-designated updates from individuals (those visible to “everyone”). These individual updates make up the widest and most valuable part of Facebook’s stream.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel.

Moskovitz, who was Facebook’s first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook (and before that, Google) engineer, Justin Rosenstein. Matt Cohler, also a former Facebook executive who is now a partner at Benchmark, will be taking a seat on Asana’s board. And two of its investors, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, currently sit on Facebook’s board.

Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.

One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.

Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com, a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me.

But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures.

When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth.

Cisco is on a buying spree this month. This morning it announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which follows on the heels of another $3 billion acquisition announcement two weeks go for Two weeks ago it announced the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg.

You add $3 billion here and $3 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

Cisco has always been a large acquirer, and the fact that it is opening its purse strings again is a good sign for tech M&A overall. But these are relatively large bets for Cisco, which needs to keep at the forefront of networking technologies. The Starent acquisition gives it a strong play in mobile data networks as carriers migrate to 3G and 4G platforms. Broadband is moving to mobile, and Cisco needs to be there.