The Helsinki-based venture capital firm Inventure announced that it has made an early-stage investment in Whitevector and will join the company's board of directors. With the new investment, Whitevector plans to expand its presence in the Nordic and UK markets, primarily through local partners.

Recently announced software updates:

• Lexalytics
  Entity toolkit.

• Visible Technologies
  TruCast 2.5: Summary views, redesigned UI, dashboard performance, full-text search, improved data cleaning.
  

Satmetrix is presenting a series of free webinars. All events start at 1:00 PM EST (GMT -5).

• 12 March - "Making Your Customer Engagement Program Pay," with Tom Kehler
  
• 25 March - "Economic Value of Word Of Mouth," with Vince Nowinski
  
• 9 April - "Acting on Customer Feedback Results in Increased Net Promoter Scores," with Symantec's Desiree Madison-Biggs
  
• 22 April - "Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience," with Laura Brooks

29 March 2009 (Shanghai) - Workshop on Modeling, Managing, and Mining of Evolving Social Networks (M3SN). In conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering ICDE’09.

20–24 April, 2009 (Madrid) - 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009)

FirstRain has offered "Eye on the Storm," a free, twice-daily report on the economy and financial markets, since June 2008. Today, the company added free samples of current reporting to their company web site. New widgets highlight selected coverage of US layoffs and municipal bonds. Sample industry and company reports are available on request, limited to 5 per person.

• Eye on the Storm
  
• Email sign-up

Recently announced software updates:

• BuzzGain
  Setup, boolean search, dashboard metrics, RSS output, data export.

• Lexalytics
  Sentiment concepts, model-based sentiment.

• Moreover
  Language detection, language tagging, Harvest Date field.

24 February - Vocus is presenting a free webinar, Maximizing the Value of Your News: From Twitter to Google, 2:00 PM EST (GMT -5). The session features Sandra Fahti of Affect Strategies and Free Spirit Publishing's Jenni Bowring-McDonough.

25 February - TNS Cymfony is presenting a free webinar, Putting the Social Web to Work, 12:00 PM EST (GMT -5). The session features Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Satmetrix is presenting a series of free webinars. All events start at 1:00 PM EST (GMT -5).

• 25 February - "Join the Conversation," with Joseph Jaffe and Deborah Eastman
  
• 12 March - "Making Your Customer Engagement Program Pay," with Tom Kehler
  
• 25 March - "Economic Value of Word Of Mouth," with Vince Nowinski
  
• 9 April - "Acting on Customer Feedback Results in Increased Net Promoter Scores," with Symantec's Desiree Madison-Biggs
  
• 22 April - "Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience," with Laura Brooks

25 March (London) - MeasurementCamp, 10:30 AM at Dare Digital.

Collective Intellect and Iconoculture announced a partnership that combines CI's SMA capabilities with Iconoculture's specialization in understanding consumer trends. The companies plan to introduce a series of syndicated reports on current topics for marketers.

• press release

Quirk eMarketing's BrandsEye online reputation monitoring service now offers alerts sent through direct messages on Twitter, in addition to the existing email and text message options. BrandsEye's filtering options allow users to receive alerts immediately, daily and weekly, with different rules for each.

• How To: Set Up Twitter Notifications

Scout Labs launched today after six months in private beta with over 200 clients and 3,000 more on the waiting list. The new SMA platform emphasizes collaboration, encouraging use by an unlimited number of people at every price level. Introductory pricing starts at $99/month for up to five concurrent searches.

Scout Labs uses human-assisted software analysis—automated content selection and sentiment analysis can be edited by users, and the system learns from their changes.

• press release
• Additional coverage from CNET, TechCrunch
• SMA for workgroups

Filtrbox launched its second-generation SMA service, Filtrbox G2 today. The new version features revised pricing, improved search and new sharing capabilities for workgroups. A free, entry-level account remains available.

• press release
  
• product sheet (PDF)
  
• Additional coverage from Rocky Radar
  

ComScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) released new data on social networking usage in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region today. The company reports that 74.6% of European Internet users visited social networking sites in December, compared to 60.6% in Asia-Pacific.

The announcements include rankings of social networking sites in France and India. Facebook and Skyrock lead in France with 11.9 million and 11.0 million unique visitors in December, while Orkut leads in India with 12.9 million unique visitors.

• Social Networking Has Banner Year in France, Growing 45 Percent (French version)
  
• India’s Social Networking Market Sees Global Brands Gain Prominence in 2008
  

Rexer Analytics is looking for data miners to respond to their 3rd annual Data Miner Survey. Highlights from the 2008 survey are available on the company's web site.

Please use the access code BL2222 when you take the survey.

Welcome to SMA, where we'll report on the companies and people of the social media listening business. This site picks up from the weekly news digest that appeared on The Net-Savvy Executive from June 2007 until February 2009. In the fine Internet tradition of building a site while it's running, new features (and site refinements) are already in the works.

What you'll find today
SMA is launching with five sections, three of which offer RSS feeds today:

• News
  Company and product launches, investments, leadership changes, upcoming events, new papers—everything you want to know about the fast-changing business of monitoring and measuring social media activity.

• Opinion
  Thinking about the industry, the market, societal trends, and technology. Got something to contribute? Drop a note to editor (at) SocialMediaAnalysis (dot) com. SMA welcomes guest posts and regular contributors.

• Scanner
  Items of interest found by our contributors.

• Press releases
  A sidebar listing press releases from any vendor who provides an RSS feed (hint).

• Company blogs
  A sidebar listing recent posts from vendor blogs (companies, not individuals).

Plans to grow
Today's SMA is the first take. New sections are already planned, but while that's cooking, what do you think? What do you want to see here?