Founders Den Apps Support Productivity On The Go

Founders Den, a shared working space for startups in San Francisco, held its second demo day Tuesday. Three companies stood out for their mobile productivity tools, still in beta:

SocialPandas -- Lets you turn social network relationships into leads and revenue.

Screenleap -- Boosts real-time collaboration by letting you share your screen with other devices in seconds. All participants need is a browser. Sales people can share presentations with their audience while making them. Consumers can share videos and other entertainment.

Streak -- Turns Gmail into a platform that can manage workflow, such as sales and hiring processes.

After demo day, BYTE followed up with SocialPandas co-founder Mark Trang.

BYTE: How is social affecting businesses?

Mark Trang: Social is transforming the way companies do business. From marketing to recruiting to customer service to internal collaboration, companies are adapting to the social era. But sales, the most social department within a company, has been left behind in the online social era. They are using pre-social era tools like email, phone, and CRM tools that pre-date Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to connect with customers that are increasingly social. SocialPandas gives sales teams a new set of tools built from the ground up for them to compete and succeed in the social era.

BYTE: How does your product leverage existing social network connections?

MT: SocialPandas integrates with social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to surface relationships and activities that help sales teams close more deals faster. However, our product isn't dependent on the relationships of our users; our customers can use our solution to generate new leads and accelerate sales opportunities even if the company or users aren't already active on social networks. We aren't a relationship mining tool like many first-generation social selling tools. Instead we discover real-time social data that are directly relevant to the prospects and deals a salesperson is focused on through deep integration with their CRM tools, including Salesforce.com.

BYTE: How does SocialPandas compete with Salesforce?

MT: SocialPandas does not compete with CRM tools like Salesforce.com; we integrate with Salesforce.com. In fact, all our preview customers are existing Salesforce.com customers and use our integrated solution to find new prospects and close more deals via social networks. We don't plan on duplicating CRM functionality and will absolutely partner with the top CRM vendors to deliver breakthrough social selling capabilities to their customers and the millions of salespeople around the world.