We are pleased to announce that we have made our initial investment in Awe.sm. The company provides a powerful analytics platform for social media to developers, marketers, agencies and publishers. We first met Awe.sm's co-founder and CEO Jonathan Strauss at the Glue Conference in 2009 and have been following the evolution of Awe.sm with interest since then. As Awe.sm's user adoption increased and their platform vision evolved and came into sharper focus (see today's launch of the new awe.sm for developers platform), we decided it was time for Foundry Group to invest in Awe.sm.

For the first decade of the web's existence, the largest single contributor of traffic to a web site was search-engine referral traffic, explaining the rise of Google and its current status as one of the pillars of the web. Following the emergence and hyper-growth of Facebook and Twitter, a new fundamental user behavior has emerged: sharing. As Facebook and Twitter have grown their user base to hundreds of millions of users, referral traffic from social networks has become an equally important traffic source to most web sites. More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month, while over six billion monthly tweets generate more than three billion clicks per month on Twitter. Social sharing is now a critical user acquisition and engagement driver for any consumer application or site.

However, while search-engine referral traffic is relatively easy to measure, attribute and analyze, understanding how sharing behavior drives traffic is far more complex: understanding which users and actions drive more traffic, user conversions, revenue, etc. to a site requires a social native-attribution model and detailed analytics that can be deeply integrated at the application level and integrated with third-party and proprietary conversion funnels to measure and optimize key performance indicators that are relevant to each specific application developer, marketer or publisher.

Awe.sm has built a powerful on-demand platform and toolset aimed at providing application developers, marketers and publishers with the easiest and most flexible way to harness social data in their applications. The company's goal is to become the key infrastructure powering quantitative performance marketing across the social sharing channel.

Awe.sm has been adopted by numerous Foundry portfolio companies including Topspin Media, Stocktwits and Big Door. Notably, each of the customers in the Foundry Group portfolio came to Awe.sm without any help or influence from Foundry Group's partners, and feedback from the developers who have integrated Awe.sm into their applications has been uniformly positive with respect to the flexibility and power of the platform.

Awe.sm fits firmly into our Glue and Protocol themes and is most analogous to companies like SendGrid, Gnip and Urban Airship. With the massive (and still growing) importance of social as a channel to drive traffic, we believe that the social sharing gesture within an application will become as important a part of basic application infrastructure as email or mobile app notifications, which presents a compelling opportunity for Awe.sm to become an important developer infrastructure and analytics platform used by a huge number of application developers, marketers and publishers.

We are very excited to be working with Jonathan and the rest of the Awe.sm team, as well as our co-investors GRP Partners, Neu Venture Capital and kps+p Ventures.

We are pleased to announce that we have made our initial investment in Yesware. Based in Boston, Yesware is a seed stage company that is developing services that connect salespeople, their email and CRM. We believe that mapping this basic relationship - between the application in which salespeople, executives, and the people who support them spend the majority of their time and the app which is used to perform key business functions - is a critical step in driving organizational efficiency and further spreading both the ubiquity and power of CRM.

Salesforce.comsuccessfully disrupted the CRM industry by shifting CRM from heavyweight, enterprise apps like Siebel(now owned by Oracle) to lightweight, easy to deploy, cloud-based apps. As a result, CRM became a mainstream app, replacing traditional SFA ("sales force automation") products at the low-end and seeing broad enterprise adoption at the high end.

However, as CRM evolved, tight integration with email was missing. As we observed CRM deployments in many of our investments, along with CRM deployments in much larger companies, we saw two parallel universes emerging for a salesperson. A salesperson would spend their day in their email system - typically Outlook or Gmail - and then spend some time at the end of the day (often an hour or more) updating information in their CRM system. If the sales organization was disciplined, the process, while inefficient, was effective. However, if the sales organization wasn't disciplined, over time the CRM system was garbage, as it was widely divergent from what was actually happening and well-represented in the email system.

While most CRM applications have paid lip service to email integration over the years, a short conversation with virtually any salesperson or sales leader will quickly validate that there is a functional disconnect between the two. As CRM systems continue to evolve, especially along the enterprise social computing dimension, focus on this integration continues to take a back seat. As a result, we think there is a huge opportunity for an application that once and for all provides the glue between CRM and email.

We are very excited to be working with the founding team of Matthew Bellows, Cashman Andrus and Raj Bhargava. We met Matthew and Cashman through an introduction from Raj, and entrepreneur we've worked with many times over the past 17 years. Raj was working on a similar concept and decided to team up with Matthew and Cashman to form Yesware.

We are also psyched to be working with Rich Miner and Google Ventures on another investment. Rich has been a good friend, a great mentor for TechStars, and a superb co-investor in Trada with us.

Yesware's first product is available now. If you are a Gmail and Chrome user, download it todayand try it out. You and your sales team will be glad you did.

Today we're happy to announce that Federated Media Publishing has acquired Foundry Group portfolio company Lijit Networks. The deal is a great outcome for the company and its investors. As part of the transaction, Foundry Group Partner Seth Levine will join the Federated Media board of directors and Todd Vernon (Lijit's CEO and founder) and Walter Knapp (Lijit's COO) will take on senior operating roles at the combined business (both will report directly to Federated's CEO Deanna Brown).

Lijit has built up an impressive business by focusing on providing web publishers with tools to better engage with, understand, track and ultimately derive revenue from their site visitors. Through Lijit's search, analytics and insight products, a rapidly growing number of publishers are discovering more about their users and finding new and better ways to engage with them. Federated brings a similar passion for publishers to the combined entity (powering "the best of the independent web"). And together we think the two businesses provide a broad set of tools and monetization capabilities to their combined over 77,000 publishers.

You can read more about the transaction from All Things D, The Lijit Press Release or the Federated Media Press Release. Seth also has a post up on his blog about the combination as does John Battelle and Todd Vernon.

Please join us in congratulating Todd, Walter and the rest of the Lijit team on this significant milestone for the business.