Salesforce.com successfully 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 today and try it out. You and your sales team will be glad you did.

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.

While 3D printing technology has been around for a while, to date it has been limited to high-end industrial printers costing between $10,000 and $500,000. While the applications of 3D printing are very broad and extremely compelling, the cost and complexity of the products and process has limited the application of 3D printing.

Over the past decade, the DIY (or “do it yourself”) phenomenon has resulted in an increasing number of people using 3D printing technology. Until recently, if you wanted to print a 3D object, you borrowed a high-end machine or sent a design to an outsourcing firm that did 3D printing on demand. Several years ago, three hackers – Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach Smith – teamed up and created the first open source 3D printer, known as the MakerBot Cupcake. While the Cupcake needed to be assembled by hand, it was a unique product that enabled anyone to own a 3D printer for around $1,000.

The Cupcake generated a wave of excitement among DIY hackers and the analogy was made between early personal computers such as the MITS Altair 8800 or the Healthkit H8 and the Apple II – namely that the Cupcake resembled the H8, and in a few years a 3D printer analogous to the Apple II would be created.

A similar analogy is at play in the laser printer market. The laser printer was invented by Xerox in 1969 but didn’t gain mass-market adoption until 1984 when HP created the Laserjet. As with the Apple II, the HP Laserjet marked the beginning of the creation of an enormous market for a new technology.

Last year, MakerBot came out with their second generation product, the Thing-O-Matic. At the same time, they’ve created an incredible community of 3D designs called Thingiverse. And they are hard at work on their third generation printer.

We believe MakerBot has the potential to be the Apple or HP of the 3D printing market and are honored that we get to be part of the effort.

We closed our investment in Occipital last week. The Occipital gang is going to create a bunch of amazing stuff and now’s your chance to get on board with a one minute iPhone download. And, if you are reading this after the free offer expires, it’s still worth getting for the couple of bucks they are charging.

I remember from my reference calls at the time that their biggest customers at that point were Jim Beam Whiskey and a handful of law firms. This mid-size enterprise customer traction convinced us that Postini could grow substantially simply by addressing the mid-market segment, but we and the Postini team also believed they’d be able to move upmarket and eventually service Fortune 500 customers as well. Over time they eventually landed an enviable list of marquee customers like Merrill Lynch, UBS, Glaxo and Starbucks, ultimately securing over ten million enterprise email accounts. Postini continued to grow, and in 2007 the company was acquired by Google for $625m.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Foundry Group has invested in Authentic8, a direct descendant of the Postini DNA. Authentic8 is co-founded by Scott Petry (Postini’s founder) and Ramesh Rajagopal (Postini’s VP Corporate Development), and has the potential to have a similar transformational impact on a new segment of the security market.

Postini was founded to address the fact that email-borne viruses and spam were significant security threat to the enterprise and that IT departments didn’t have the necessary tools to deal with the problem. Authentic8 was created to address the dominant major threat vector in computing today: the browser, and the fact that tools don’t exist to adequately secure the user online.

The browser, the most frequently used application on most end-user computing devices, is subject to a variety of potential attacks including security flaws in the browser code itself, phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks and laundry list of other vulnerabilities.

To create a truly secure browsing environment, Authentic8 looked at the problem from a new perspective – they realized that the best way to remove browser-borne threats from a user’s computer is to remove the browser entirely.

Dubbed the Disposable Browser, the Authentic8 browser (currently based on the Firefox codebase) actually runs remotely on a virtual server in the cloud, though to the end-user it appears that the browser runs locally. Each time a user accesses Authentic8, a “fresh” browser is built from scratch in private server environment. As a result, any malicious code encountered hits Authentic8’s servers, not the end-user’s. When a browsing session is over, the server instance is trashed, leaving no trace of of a user’s personal data or browsing history behind. Finally, Authentic8 can manage a user’s login and password information, encrypting and submitting login credentials on the user’s behalf. Of course, all communication between the user and the Authentic8 service is encrypted, over their secure protocol.

All of these features add up to create a browsing environment that is dramatically more secure than the status quo, and is something we think will appeal greatly to both security-conscious end-users and enterprise CIOs.

The Authentic8 service is currently in closed-beta and will be opening up to larger group of beta users in the coming weeks. You can sign up here to be notified when access to the pre-release program becomes available.

We are looking forward to working with Scott and Ramesh and the rest of the Authentic8 team to build a great company.

MongoLab fits squarely into our Glue investment theme and represents a growing category of cloud-based application infrastructure providers in our portfolio that includes Gnip, SendGrid, SimpleGeo, Standing Cloud and Urban Airship.

MongoLab’s offering capitalizes on two important trends we see impacting the vast majority of our portfolio companies:  the rapid adoption of the cloud deployment model and and the increasing use of “Big Data” and NoSQL tools.  While the benefit of adopting these technologies has been overwhelmingly positive on balance, many of our companies have struggled with adopting these technologies and have paid a “pioneer tax” as early adopters.

Companies like MongoLab who can offer critical pieces of infrastructure with utility-grade reliability and scalability to application developers can help solve the developers challenges of “operationalizing” their products while letting them develop applications more efficiently by allowing them to focus on the truly differentiated aspects of their offerings.

Of the many offerings in the “Big Data” and NoSQL universe, we like the fact that MongoLab has chosen to specialize in 10gen’s MongoDB.  MongoDB’s scalability (in size and read/wriite volume), its ability to run MapReduce jobs and its accelerating adoption among developers are all compelling aspects of the MongoDB platform.  Equally important is the fact that MongoDB stores its data as native JSON objects which makes it very accessible to a wide swath of the development community.  MongoLab CEO Will Shulman blogs about this important aspect of MongoDB here.

While we are excited about our co-investors and the growing market that MongoLab serves, we are most excited about the founding team.  Repeat entrepreneur and CEO Will Shulman was previously the co-founder and CTO of Merced Systems, a successful enterprise analytics software company.  The core team all have strong academic credentials as well, with undergrad and graduate CS degrees from Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

MongoLab is currently in beta offering MongoDB hosting, developer APIs and web-based management tools on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud.  They’ve recently announced a partnership with Rackspace and also have built a Heroku add-on that is currently in beta.

We are looking forward to helping the team at MongoLab build a great company.

Update: you can read more about the funding announcement at TechCrunch.

Openspace is a one-stop marketplace for buying apps, music, books and movies for smart phones, tablets and desktops.  They are approaching building an app store from an open community perspective, via the Developers Cooperative, which we thought aligned well with our newest theme Distribution.  The App Store market is maturing quickly and it’s been exciting helping founders Robert Reich and Randy Watler chart the evolving landscape.

The first version of Openspace is focused on, but not limited to HTML5 – the one real competitor to all existing device centric mobile, tablet and desktop app stores. The company’s approach to managing, syncing and discovering apps is really unique. Their client applications work across all devices and platforms, but leverage the local devices’ operating environments for launching apps, playing music, reading books, or playing movies. Pairing these features with a store makes for a seamless cross-platform user experience that does not exist today.

Robert also built this kick ass skateboard to celebrate the funding.  Developers can register their apps: https://developerscoop.com and if you would like an invite to the closed beta of the store send a note to robert@openspacestore.com.

But maybe not.  We are pleased to announce our investment in Attachments.me, which is building a natural-language based platform to extract information from attachments and links contained within a user’s email store.  The company has created an email enhancement tool to enable easy access to the treasure trove of valuable data currently trapped within email systems.  Attachments.me indexes a user’s email account and presents an attachments-centric view of it, creating document thumbnails, providing search within attachments, and, above all, makes a user’s email experience better and more productive.

Imagine that you remember someone sent you a document about a particular subject or a funny video.  You just don’t remember who sent it to you or what the email text was.  Now, you will be able to search by subject matter embedded in links and attachments, and browse by content type, not just by sender, and the results will include not just data in the email body itself, but in the attachments and links themselves.

This mailbox crawling technology will allow for a single searchable interface to automatically group and filter the structured data and documents in a user’s email archive.  This data will also be accessible via mobile applications for on-the-go access.  Attachments.me recognizes the fact that for most users, email is their de-facto filesystem, knowledgebase and personal information manager, and that better tools are needed to access and manipulate the extremely valuable data in the messages a user sends and receives.

The company was founded by Jesse Miller, Benjamin Coe and  has been advised since inception by our friend and colleague Joe Stump, who is also a co-founder of our portfolio company SimpleGeo.

We were originally introduced to Cheezburger’s founder and CEO Ben Huh about 18 months ago by our mutual friend Micah Baldwin at the LA TwiistUp event. We apparently shared a fondness for clever misspellings and hit it off immediately.

At the beginning on 2010, with our friend Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group, we approached Ben and started talking about investing in Cheezburger. The timing wasn’t right for Ben and his investors for a variety of reasons but we stayed in touch.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Ben called and asked if we were still interested in putting together a financing and really going for it. During the year we had really honed our view of a new theme we have been calling “Distribution.” Cheezburger was right in the sweet spot of this theme, along with Zynga, Topspin, and StockTwits. Since we knew the company well, it took about 17 seconds for us to agree that we wanted to see if we could put something together.

We quickly put together a syndicate with Madrona, Avalon Ventures (with whom we’ve co-invested in Zynga and Standing Cloud) and SoftBank Capital (with whom we’ve had a long relationship and recently co-invested in Cloud Engines), figured out a deal with Ben and his existing investors, and now have a chance to be a lot more humorous on a day to day basis.

In the last three years, Cheezburger has grown far beyond their original lolcats site. They are now a major disruptive force in the way we consume all kinds of humor. We expect Ben to start putting this money to good use right away, hiring engineers, PMs, and sales staff. The jobs are listed at http://jobs.cheezburger.com. If you’re still reading this, you really should pounce on the opportunity to work for the funniest company we’ve ever seen.