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Salamworld aims to draw Muslims from around the world to have a 'halal' space online. The Turkish startup has already received financial backing from investors in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Social networking is big business. Facebook, with its user base of over 800 million users, is expected to raise billions of dollars when it becomes a publicly-traded company later this spring. But Facebook's not the only game in town. In China, Sina Weibo reports 227 million user accounts, while Russia's Vkontakte says it has more than 100 million.

Enter a new Istanbul-based startup, Salamworld, which hopes to establish itself as the social networking giant of the Islamic world. The company says it will offer a halal-friendly space for Muslims to gather online.

Even though the site won't be open to the public until the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, set for late July in the Western calendar, that hasn't stopped buzz in the Turkish tech world from bringing Salamworld to the fore.

At a recent launch event at Istanbul's posh Ciragan palace, a promo video outlined the company's ambitious plans.

"By filtering out harmful content, and by making the content uphold and respect family values, we confirm to the requirements of Muslims throughout the world," the video trumpeted. "As Salamworld, our aim is to overcome all political, language and cultural barriers, to open the world to Muslims, and open Muslims to the world."

Salamworld is slated to launch in July 2012

Halal social networking

The company's goal is 50 million users in three years - a very ambitious target.

The launch gathered Islamic leaders from around the world, including those from across Europe and the Middle East. Many shared the feelings of Fouzan Akhmed Khan, an activist from Canada, who praised the effort by Muslims to engage with technology instead of cursing it as evil.

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Muslim social networking site set to launch

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

FORTUNE -- What do you get when you cross a buzzword like "social networking" with an eye-glazing term like "enterprise software"? A buzzkill -- in this case, one called "enterprise social networking."

As long as the web has been around, the consumer side of things has been sexier. Enterprise software may be a $285 billion market, according to Gartner, but it receives a fraction of the coverage that the consumer web does, and it tends to adapt slowly to major changes, such as the adoption of iPhones, tablets and web-based apps.

Social networking is another major trend. But until recently, many companies outside of the web industry have been slow to adopt them as workplace tools. There may be 845 million people users connecting with their friends on Facebook, and 150 million LinkedIn (LNKD) members networking with colleagues in their industry at large, but relatively few people frequent an in-house social network to collaborate with their co-workers.

That may be changing. Yammer, a popular enterprise social network with 4 million users, raised $85 million in funding in a round including DFJ Growth, Khosla Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund. Yammer has raised $142 million in venture financing so far.

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It's not alone. Jive Software (JIVE), which went public in December, claims to have 17 million users. Jive's stock is up 82% from its $12-a-share offering price. Others, such as Socialtext and Socialcast, are growing. Meanwhile, bigger companies are moving in. Google (GOOG) is making noise about adding in-house social networks to Google+. And Salesforce.com (CRM) is betting that its Chatter collaboration software will fuel its growth.

Last Friday, Salesforce.com's stock rose 9% to a six-month high of $143.64 in after-hours trading after reporting revenue and earnings that exceeded analyst expectations and forecast that revenue would exceed forecasts again this quarter. On reason, CEO Marc Benioff told analysts in a call, was that the company's social enterprise offerings, including Chatter, was luring in new customers, such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Activision (ATVI). "Our outstanding financial success this quarter was powered by the momentum of our social enterprise strategy," Benioff said. "With the social enterprise, we are now closing our largest most exciting strategic deals."

The rise of social networks in companies is coming as corporations slowly figure out their value. A report by Altimeter Research last week said services like Yammer are growing popular in some companies, but that many don't yet realize the potential to strengthen communication in existing workplace relationships but also build new relationships that can increase efficiency. "Many business leaders are at a loss to understand what value can be created from Facebook-like status updates within the enterprise," Charline Li, founder of research firm Altimeter Group, wrote in a recent report. "Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants."

MORE: What is making enterprise innovation possible

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Where social networking is headed next

Popular Facebook game maker Zynga is scaling up and branching out from the clutches of the worlds biggest social networking site with the launch its own Zynga.com website and gaming platform.

The shift means users will soon be able to play Zyngas popular social games including CityVille, Words with Friends, CastleVille, Zynga Poker and Hidden Chronicle outside of the Facebook ecosystem.

The Zynga Platform is designed with two simple goals: more access to the best social games and more people to play with, said Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus. Were excited to offer new features like the live Social Stream which will enable you to play in real time with your friends and find new ones. Player profiles will let you check your friends helpfulness score to see whos most likely to help you back. And youll be able to chat and play live with your friends and a community of players interested in the same games as you.

Third party game developers will also be able to publish their games on Zynga.com, the beta version of which will launch in early March. Initial Zynga platform partners will include developers MobScience, Row Sham Bow and Sava.

Zynga made it clear that it is not (yet) cutting its ties with Facebook. Users will still pay for virtual goods using Facebook Credits but will now be able to interact with other gamers outside of Facebooks own social network. In its IPO filing earlier this year Facebook revealed that Zynga accounted for 12% of its 2011 revenue.

http://zynga.com/

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Facebook game maker Zynga launches its own social games platform, Zynga.com

FORT LEE, N.J., March 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Jive Software went public this past December in one of Wall Street's hottest IPOs of 2011. Not only did Jive go public at $12 per share, which was above its projected $8 to $10 per share offering range, but Jive sold 15% more shares to the public than initially planned. This allowed Jive to raise $161.3 million or 38% more than the $117 million Jive was projected to raise. Jive closed its first day of trading up 25% to $15.05 per share and today it just reached a new 52-week high of $24.53 per share for a gain of 104% from its December offering price.

Jive currently has 61.31 million shares outstanding. This means at Jive's new 52-week high set today, it reached a market cap of $1.5 billion. This is a huge premium for a company with only $77.29 million in trailing twelve month revenues, with a net loss of $50.8 million. However, with the enterprise social networking industry projected to grow by 61% annually from a $600 million market last year to a $6.4 billion market by 2016, NIA considers Jive's current valuation to be perfectly justified based on what Jive's revenues are likely to reach by 2016.

With Jive getting all of the headlines in the media because of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs leading its IPO in December, most investors on Wall Street actually believe that Jive is the only publicly traded enterprise social play. The truth is, there is another public enterprise social company that NIA believes has even better technology than Jive and it is trading for only a small fraction of Jive's valuation. The company is BroadVision Inc. and NIA believes it has the potential to far outperform Jive for the rest of 2012.

BroadVision went public in 1996 and was one of the biggest plays during the original dot-com boom, rising to a market cap as high as $13 billion. While most companies that thrived during the dot-com bubble have since gone out of business, BroadVision has managed to completely turn itself around from being deeply in debt with negative working capital to today being debt free with $54.4 million in cash. BroadVision has completely reinvented itself over the past couple of years with the launch of Clearvale Express and Clearvale Enterprise, BroadVision's two enterprise social networking platforms for businesses.

BroadVision's closest comparison in the industry is Yammer, which just announced Wednesday evening that they raised $85 million in venture capital funding, blowing away rumors that they would raise $50 million. BroadVision and Yammer are the only two enterprise social companies utilizing a "freemium" business strategy. BroadVision is offering its Twitter-like social platform for businesses, Clearvale Express for free so that the company can benefit from the network going viral. Any employee at any company can instantly setup a Clearvale Express enabled network for free and immediately begin using it to collaborate with their co-workers on projects at work.

When management of a company finds out that their employees are having huge success with Clearvale Express, they can then pay to seamlessly upgrade to BroadVision's Facebook-like fully featured social platform for business, Clearvale Enterprise. NIA considers BroadVision's Clearvale Enterprise to be far superior to Yammer's paid social platform. It has many unique features that make it stand out from Jive's enterprise social platform, including the ability for companies to create both internal networks for their management, employees, etc. as well as external networks for their customers, partners, etc.

BroadVision is the only company that has paid attention to how all these social networks relate to each other. Many of the employees on the internal company social network are also likely to want to interact with customers on an external network. Others will need to communicate with partners and suppliers. Some of the content created on one network is likely to need to be posted on at least one of the others. To solve these problems, BroadVision has invented social ecosystems, which allows businesses to manage all of their corporate social networks together as a series of connected networks that can overlap both members and content as needed.

BroadVision only has 4.515 million shares outstanding. Based on its closing price yesterday of $42.69, BroadVision's market cap is only $192.75 million or just 1/8 of Jive's market cap of $1.5 billion. NIA believes that BroadVision deserves a valuation that is much closer to Jive. With BroadVision being one of only two public companies in the new most rapidly growing emerging technology market, and with BroadVision appearing to be undiscovered and extremely undervalued in comparison to Jive, NIA has been rapidly accumulating BroadVision and it is currently the largest position in NIA's portfolio.

NIA today released a brand new report entitled '2012 Social Network Stocks 2.0 Report.' NIA's new report features many enterprise social networking companies both public and private including BroadVision Inc., Jive Software, Yammer, Telligent, Moxie Software, Lithium Technologies, and NewsGator. It also features consumer social networking companies including Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Renren. With Facebook scheduled to have its IPO in May, NIA believes that social networking stocks will be in play on Wall Street for many months to come and we are working hard to determine which social companies offer the greatest investment potential. To receive NIA's extremely valuable exclusive new report released today, go to: http://inflation.us/social2012.html.

About NIA: The National Inflation Association is an organization that is dedicated to preparing Americans for hyperinflation. NIA offers free membership at http://www.inflation.us and provides its members with articles about the U.S. economy and inflation, daily news stories and blog updates, and important charts not shown by the mainstream media. NIA is the producer of economic documentaries that have received a combined 17 million views including the critically acclaimed 'Meltup,' 'The Dollar Bubble,' 'End of Liberty,' 'Hyperinflation Nation,' and brand new 'College Conspiracy.' NIA provides unbiased reviews of the major online sellers of gold and silver bullion and also offers profiles of gold, silver, agriculture, oil, and alternative energy companies that could prosper in an inflationary environment. NIA is the creator of 'NIAnswers,' the world's most comprehensive database of questions and answers about inflation, currencies, debt, and precious metals.

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NIA Features Publicly Traded Enterprise Social Networking Companies in New Report

FORT LEE, N.J., March 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Inflation Association is getting ready to release a brand new report about the enterprise social networking industry on Friday, March 2nd, at 10 A.M. EST. The report will be entitled '2012 Social Network Stocks 2.0 Report' and it will feature almost every major publicly traded social networking company as well as most private enterprise social networking companies with the potential to go public within the next two years.

This will be a sequel to NIA's original critically acclaimed '2012 Social Network Stocks Report' that was released on January 3rd, 2012. In NIA's original report, NIA featured BroadVision Inc. as its #1 favorite publicly traded social networking stock market opportunity of 2012 and the stock has so far gained 257% from its year-end 2011 closing price. With Yammer announcing Wednesday evening that they raised $85 million in private venture capital funding, NIA believes BroadVision Inc. now has substantially greater short and long-term potential. BroadVision will once again be featured as NIA's #1 favorite publicly traded social networking company in NIA's brand new report coming tomorrow. NIA still considers BroadVision to be undiscovered by the investment community.

NIA believes that BroadVision stands to benefit more than any other publicly traded company from Yammer's just announced $85 million in venture capital funding. BroadVision is the only publicly traded company in the world that utilizes a "freemium" enterprise social networking business model just like Yammer. BroadVision allows any employee at any company to sign-up instantly for free at http://clearvale.com to deploy their own enterprise social network through BroadVision's Twitter-like 'Clearvale Express' platform. Just like Yammer, BroadVision makes money when companies outgrow Clearvale Express and they choose to upgrade to BroadVision's fully featured paid Facebook-like platform 'Clearvale Enterprise.'

While Yammer's paid platform is simply their free platform with new features that were added on top of it, BroadVision's paid 'Clearvale Enterprise' platform has been developed by the company from scratch into one of the world's leading top-tier enterprise social platforms with just about every imaginable feature and function that businesses are eager to offer through their enterprise social networks. BroadVision's 'Clearvale Enterprise' has many unique features that no other enterprise social companies offer, such as the ability for businesses to create separate networks for management, employees, partners, customers, etc. and manage these separate networks together as one enterprise social ecosystem. Through BroadVision's 'Clearvale Enterprise' social ecosystems, businesses can create a series of internal and external connected networks with the ability to have them overlap in terms of members and content.

BroadVision's market cap as of Wednesday's market closing price is only $176.54 million and BroadVision has $54.4 million in cash and no debt. This means BroadVision's enterprise value as of Wednesday's market closing price is only $122.14 million, while Yammer is rumored to now have an implied value in between $500 million and $1 billion after their latest round of funding. BroadVision along with Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Adobe, and Juniper are event partners of the Digital London Summit coming up on March 13-14, which NIA will be attending. BroadVision and Yammer will both be making major enterprise social presentations at the summit. NIA will be reporting live from the Digital London Summit to its report recipients about any new major developments regarding Yammer and BroadVision.

Other companies to be featured in NIA's exclusive report being released tomorrow include Jive Software, Telligent, Moxie Software, Lithium Technologies, NewsGator, Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Renren, and others. To be the first to receive NIA's exclusive new report, simply visit the following link on Friday, March 2nd, 2012, at 10 A.M. EST: http://inflation.us/social2012.html

About NIA:

The National Inflation Association is an organization that is dedicated to preparing Americans for hyperinflation. NIA offers free membership at http://www.inflation.us and provides its members with articles about the U.S. economy and inflation, daily news stories and blog updates, and important charts not shown by the mainstream media. NIA is the producer of economic documentaries that have received a combined 17 million views including the critically acclaimed 'Meltup,' 'The Dollar Bubble,' 'End of Liberty,' 'Hyperinflation Nation,' and brand new 'College Conspiracy.' NIA provides unbiased reviews of the major online sellers of gold and silver bullion and also offers profiles of gold, silver, agriculture, oil, and alternative energy companies that could prosper in an inflationary environment. NIA is the creator of 'NIAnswers,' the world's most comprehensive database of questions and answers about inflation, currencies, debt, and precious metals.

Legal Disclaimer:

NIA owns 140,600 shares of BroadVision at the time this press release was distributed. NIA intends to sell its shares and can sell them at any time. NIA reserves the right to accumulate more shares at any time. NIA's co-founders have also been referred business in the past from somebody who has filed as a large BroadVision shareholder. NIA's report is intended for informational purposes only and does not provide investment advice. Neither NIA nor its co-founders are investment advisors or broker/dealers. Past performance is not an indicator of future returns. NIA's stock suggestions are not a solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell any security. Never make investment decisions based on anything NIA says. Do not rely on information from NIA to make investment decisions. Only use the information contained in NIA's report as a starting point for you to conduct your own research and make your own investment decisions. NIA does not guarantee the accuracy of information in its report. Stock market investing is extremely risky. NIA's co-founders may have previously discussed some companies in other media outlets.

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Yammer's $85 Million in Funding to be Featured in New Enterprise Social Report