Mzinga Archive

Typically those in Red Sox land do not partner with those in Yankee land, but an announcement hit my inbox this morning that shows that Internet startups can put aside baseball lines for the greater good of the Internet.

NY-based online video platform provided Kaltura has announced a new partnership with Boston-based social software provider Mzinga. The partnership will, “provide enhanced video, photo and audio capabilities within the Mzinga OmniSocial platform”. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The partnership brings Kaltura’s enterprise video solution to Mzinga’s OmniSocial platform. “We are seeing an increased demand for integrated video in the enterprise, across a broad range of functional areas,” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman and CEO. The idea is to help Mzinga’s customers easily integrate video functionality into their communities.

Boston-based Mzinga has announced a new partnership with Playboy today. The partnership means that Mzinga will power many of the social media components for Playboy. Terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Mzinga notes, “Various Mzinga social media applications — including discussions, article comments, ratings, reviews and social profiles — have been embedded throughout the Playboy.com site, enabling users to connect and interact with Playboy writers and each other on news and topics of interest, and post and read reviews of the best new movies, music, video games, places to travel and more.”

I felt it necessary to do some browsing on Playboy to verify that the social media applications were in fact embedded and from what I can tell by going under the covers (hey!) it does look like Mzinga is embedded. It looks like some of widgets actually note Prospero, which Mzinga acquired last year when they raised $32.5 million.

Interestingly, PlayboyU is still hosted by Ning – I wonder if there are plans to move that to Mzinga in the future.

SaaS community tool provider Mzinga has two announcements out today; a round of financing to the tune of $32.5 million and the acquisition of Prospero. The funding was led by W Capital Partners, a private equity firm, also participating in the round are institutional investors Bluecrest Capital Finance, LP, GE Equity, and Knowledge Industries, as well as members of the Mzinga management team. Mzinga will use the funding to continue the rollout of their, "Pervasive Community" strategy for workplace and customer communities.

Mzinga also has announced the acquisition of Prospero today using a percentage of the new round of funding noted above. Prospero provides white-label social networking for companies to integrate into their current Web sites. Mzinga notes that this acquisition will, "establish its position as the leader in business social media". Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Both companies are located in Massachusetts.

Once the integration process is complete, Mzinga will utilize Prospero’s platform for social networking for new clients and will offer the Prospero suite of services to current clients. From what I can put together, Mzinga focuses on education (they call it Learning 2.0) and HR social media inside a company and Prospero focuses outside the company and so this acquisition will allow Mzinga to offer a comprehensive suite to clients for both internal and external social media.

Mzinga and Prospero executives will be on Twitter beginning at 8:30AM Eastern to discuss online communities. Not sure how well Twitter will work for this kind of exchange but I guess it’s worth a try. Here are the handles:

• Aaron Strout: @astrout
• Jim Storer: @jstorerj
• Colin Browning: @crbrowning

Mzinga self-reports more than 2.8million registered users in 160 countries worldwide with 150 employees and $30M annual revenue. Prospero counts most of the major U.S. TV and newspapers as clients.

Update: Josh at RWW has additional information on the acquisition.

One of the companies I had the chance to meet at this weekend’s TechCrunch party was Mzinga. They were offering some prizes for scanning a barcode. Unfortunately I didn’t win the MacBook Pro but I was able to talk them into giving me stuff for the CN readers! Read on for the goodies!

Mzinga is a white-label corporate social networking tool. It’s a rebrand and combination of two former companies combining corporate learning and communities. Erick has an overview of the Mzinga product offering. I am working on scheduling an interview with the company this week.

CEO Rick Faulk used the Mzinga platform to crowdsource a book titled, "We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business". The book contains over 5,000 individual submissions and discusses how to unleash the power of crowds in your business. Karen Leavitt, Chief Marketing Officer was kind enough to give CN five books to give away. If you want one, send in a note including your mailing address and one area for improvement on CN (don’t hold back!). I will update this post once the books are gone.

Thanks to Mzinga for providing the books!