There’s more good news for the growth of the social enterprise. Gartner is reporting today that the social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010. Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011.

Gartner says that spending by buyers on social software for marketing, customer service and sales has increased by 40 percent in 2010, but social CRM remained less than 5 percent of the total CRM application market. And more than 100 vendors have social CRM offerings, but most are not profitable and generate annual revenue of less than $1 million.

While the market is clearly competitive, Gartner says that certain factors can help differentiate Social CRM offerings, including interoperation between public social networks and internal collaborative communities, integration with established CRM products, analytics and more.

There’s no doubt that there is growth in the social enterprise in general. And there’s a lot of movement already taking place in the space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, and Salesforce is making big bets on the space with Chatter.

It’s one thing to hear praise for an app from geeks, it’s another when you hear it from ‘normal folks’. Onavo falls in this category.

The free data-shrinking app which we’ve praised in the past runs quietly in the background and dramatically reduces data consumption. I myself keep it running all the time, and on a recent trip abroad to San Francisco it helped me save in the neighborhood of 75% of my potential data consumption. Seeing as I was running on a roaming plan, this meant I could email, tweet, and use mapping apps with far greater freedom.

Today, Onavo is announcing it’s first venture into the Android waters. Now before you get all excited, Onavo for Android is actually a ‘Lite’ version. It’s not data-shrinking ready quite yet, but it does however give users impressive visibility and control over app data consumption on Android devices.

I sat down with Guy Rosen, CEO, who explained that unlike with iOS, it’s pretty much a wild-west in terms of app data consumption on Android. It seems that apps can launch in the background and run tasks, such as updating, on their own accord, without having being launched by the user.

With Onavo Lite, Android users are alerted when an app suddenly consumes data at a disproportionate rate, or at improper timing, for example when traveling. Onavo makes it easy to block particular apps from running on 3G, or disable 3G completely at certain data consumption caps.

A really neat feature, taken from Soluto’s play book, is advanced warning on data-hogs. This is a crowd-sourced feature that provides users information about the data consumption characteristics of an app, as soon as it’s installed.

Just like for iOS predecessor, Onavo Lite is free and can be downloaded here.

Barnes & Noble took to the wires this morning to announced its 2012 first quarter sales and earnings. It’s mostly good news with sales in the first quarter hitting $1.4 billion, an increase of 2% over last year. Online sales increased 37% to $198 million while brick and mortar sales decreased 3% to $1 billion. The big news, however, is B&N’s Nook business increased a whooping 140% to reach $277 million, on a comparable sales basis.

Our NOOK eReaders and applications continue to be cited as the finest digital reading products on the market, with the new NOOK Simple Touch Reader recently rated as the best eReader,” says CEO William Lynch. “The company is encouraged by the progress achieved against our strategy and believes in our plan to continue to appropriately invest in the massive digital opportunity, while delivering strong EBITDA growth this year.

The large uptick now means the Nook is accounts for more sales than B&N’s entire online storefront. Over the last quarter B&N launched the awesome Nook Simple Touch Reader and continued to support the hacker-friendly Nook Color Android tablet. Despite the upcoming Amazon assault, B&N expects big things from the Nook division and stated that the year over year sales should double and reach $1.8 billion this year versus last year’s record of $880 million.

The company’s earnings improved 24% this last quarter from a loss of $30.7 million to $23.6 million. This accounts for a consolidated net loss of $57 million, or $0.99 a share. The company expects the full year losses per share to be in a range of $0.10 to $0.50 no doubt thanks to the upcoming holiday spending spree and the Nook’s explosive growth.

The street clearly likes this news as Barnes & Noble’s stock shot up and is currently at a 2 week high.

So long, Twezr, it’s been fun. The mobile social contacts application Twezr is being shut down after having a fairly well-received launch back in November 2010. The app, for those unaware, was based on a great idea: it was a social address book. It aggregated all the activity from your phone’s contacts (e.g., phone calls, SMS’s, voicemails) alongside their social networking activity (e.g., Facebook and Twitter updates)

Now the company is removing its app from the iTunes App Store and working to build a new location-based photo sharing app called Spotpix instead.

Says the company, Spotpix “has a great potential to solve some real world problems.” That’s probably a bit much, considering that the app seems to just involve geo-tagging photos so you can remember the places you’ve been. Yep, never seen that before.

Sadly, Twezr was actually the more promising of the two concepts. By combining a contact’s phone-based activity alongside social updates, it could function as sort of a social CRM for everyday users.

So what went wrong? Well, for starters, at launch, the app didn’t use OAuth standards to gain access to your social services, and actually asked users for their Gmail, Facebook and Twitter passwords. That’s a big no-no. Also, from personal experience, the app struggled to load large address books. It crashed, too.

Maybe solving the real, ”real world problem” of building the next great social address book (I’ve yet to find an app that really shines here, although Friends came close), was too much for a small team. Photo-sharing may be more Twezr’s speed.

Here’s the letter Twezer emailed its users:

Dear Twezr User, 

Over the past few months we’ve been developing Spotpix, a very interesting location based photo sharing app. Spotpix has a great potential to solve some real world problems. As we’re a small startup with limited resources, we’ve decided to focus on Spotpix and withdraw Twezr from the app store and shut down Twezr service over the next few days. We regret the inconvenience. We hope you’ll find another personal organizer app that closely matches your needs to replace Twezr or switch back to the native apps. 

We hope you’ll try out Spotpix when we launch. You can sign up for early access (http://spotpix.me) and also follow Spotpix on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/spotpixapp) to stay tuned. 

Sincerely, 

Team Twezr 

Hold on to something tight, webOS geeks. Your favorite tablet, which I can only assume is the TouchPad, might not be the last webOS tablet incarnation from HP. An HP executive and former webOS VP recently stated that the company could resurrect the TouchPad stating to Reuters, “tablet computing is a segment of the market that’s relevant, absolutely.” But let’s hope that HP’s Personal Systems Group head Todd Bradley remembers the TouchPad’s rough path to success.

Bradley is currently touring China where he’s likely putting on no less than a small circus trying to convince partners, suppliers and HP sympathizers that the company’s high revenue, high margin PC business will continue to be the top-selling brand. HP’s CEO Leo Apotheker announced earlier this month that they were considering leaving the consumer PC marketplace. This may be done by either selling or spinning off the business. Bradley dismissed claims in his Reuters interview that someone like Acer, who just reported a downturn in the second quarter of 2011, could buy the massive business. Instead, HP might spin the consumer side off into a new company.

This would require, what Bradley called, “unwinding [of] the integration” of PCs within HP and would require this new company to stand tall amid tough competition and not rely on big daddy HP during tough sales quarters. In fact resurrecting the TouchPad and expecting the same sort of buzz generated over the last couple weeks would be tough for a new company.

The TouchPad launched on July 1st but was killed just seven weeks later. We praised the tablet and the webOS operating system, but couldn’t find a reason to recommend the tablet at its $500 MSRP. That’s what an iPad costs, we said and pointed out that with Apple’s tablet you get a massive app ecosystem. The TouchPad then dropped down to $399, which didn’t exactly breed confidence in the product and we still couldn’t recommend it. But then HP canceled the TouchPad and put it on a $99 fire sale. We said Buy! Buy! Buy!

The TouchPad went from zero to hero literally overnight. Early reports place the TouchPad as currently the second best-selling tablet. Best Buy stores nationwide had people lined up to snag the $99 tablet. This came less than a week after the WSJ reported Best Buy was sitting on a massive oversupply of TouchPads. Consumers passed on the tablet when it was $400 or more. They ate it up when it dropped to less than the cost of a Kindle.

As the company stands today, HP likely has the deep pockets able to support selling a next-gen TouchPad at a slight loss where a spun-off company wouldn’t have that luxury. Selling the tablet at $99 is simply unsustainable, but with the right mixture of lower-end hardware, cloud storage, and revenue-producing content distribution, HP could potentially undercut the iPad and hit the sweet spot of $250. That’s what Amazon is primed to do with its tablet.

People like the TouchPad — read the recent online reviews — but the $99 is a big part of the judgement. It’s by far the best value tablet on the market today and hopefully HP will make another round available at the current price. But it’s not the best tablet. That title falls squarely on the $500 iPad, which dominates that price-point. If HP wants to bring back the TouchPad — even with its new-found army of foot soldiers — HP first needs to learn its lesson: Don’t go toe-to-toe with Apple. The path to victory is to win the hearts of the villages.

Nitobi, creators of the HTML5-based mobile app framework PhoneGap, have today launched the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin. The addition of the plugin means that developers building apps using Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript can now simplify the log in process for their apps by allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials.

To enable third parties the ability to integrate the Facebook Connect technology, Facebook provides a JavaScript software development kit (SDK) to developers.

However, Nitobi says that using the Facebook SDK was a challenge because it requires the use of the OAuth 2.0 standard, an open standard for authorization. This sign on process doesn’t always translate gracefully for the PhoneGap developers’ apps, the company found. Typically, a login box pops up on the user’s screen because their Facebook username and password credentials aren’t likely stored on the device.

“We got working on a Facebook plugin because we’re user experience advocates,” Dave Johnson, CTO at Nitobi Inc. says. “The OAuth authentication workflow for a mobile app isn’t ideal so we created the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin as a way to streamline that process and improve the experience for the end user.”

The new plugin uses the same API (application programming interface) as Facebook’s own SDK, but instead of replicating the same workflow you would see on the Web using a desktop browser, it works with the native Facebook application installed on users’ own devices. The end result is a less cumbersome log in process for an app’s end users.

The plugin is now available for download from Gitub here.

Nitobi, which is now seeing over 40,000 PhoneGap downloads per month, says it expects this new plugin to be popular.

Motorola‘s super-sturdy DEFY+ handset was officially revealed in a press release only a few weeks ago, but a recent announcement confirms that the device will make its UK debut early this fall.

Forgot what the DEFY+ was capable of? Here’s a quick recap: the rugged Android handset packs a 1 GHz processor (a 20% improvement in speed over the proc found in the original DEFY), a 3.7-inch touchscreen display that’s covered by a plate of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and a water-resistant, dust proof body. A 5 megapixel camera peeks out of the back, and the device comes with 2 GB of onboard storage and a 2 GB MicroSD card.

The DEFY+ runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and comes preloaded with apps like CardioTrainer for your outdoorsy types and the Zinio magazine reader. An interesting mix, yes, but one that aptly shows that the beefy device is equal parts work and play.

In typical Motorola fashion, you won’t find the stock Gingerbread interface here: Motorola’s chosen to cover it all with a big helping of MOTOBLUR. It has a tendency to rub people the wrong way because of how it attempts to shoehorn as much social networking content onto a homescreen as possible, but someone out there must enjoy it because it just won’t die.

Motorola’s announcement was unfortunately light on specifics: they’ve remained mum on pricing or carrier compatibility, but the DEFY+ is being prepped for a September release.

Today is a big day for Samsung. If you haven’t heard, the phone maker is unveiling the U.S. variants of its flagship handset, the Galaxy S II, tonight in New York (and you can bet we’ll be in attendance). But if that weren’t enough, Samsung also announced three new Bada-powered smartphones today, and each brings something special to the table.

The star of the bunch would be Samsung’s Wave 3, which has pretty respectable specs although it can’t really compare with the beastly Galaxy S II (that I can’t stop talking about). All three come with Samsung’s new BBM-style cross-platform messaging service, ChatOn, and we’re even seeing some NFC action.

The Wave 3 is meant to be the Bada flagship, which is probably why we’ve already heard some details about it. Meanwhile the Wave M, albeit a mid-range device, comes in as a close second with support for NFC. Rounding out the trio, the Wave Y is an entry-level smartphone with somewhat limited specs, but we’re expecting a pretty attractive price tag on the little guy.

Here’s a quick specs run-down:

Samsung Wave 3:

• Bada 2.0
• 4-inch Super AMOLED display
• 1.4 GHz processor
• 9.9mm brushed-metal build
• Social Hub, Music Hub, and ChatOn
• 5-megapixel rear camera with LED flash
• VGA front-facing camera for video chat

Samsung Wave M:

• Bada 2.0
• 3.65 HVGA 320×480 display
• 832 MHz processor
• NFC capabilities
• Social Hub and ChatOn
• 5-megapixel rear camera with LED flash
• VGA front-facing camera for video chat

Samsung Wave Y:

• Bada 2.0
• 3.2-inch HVGA 320×480 display
• ChatOn
• 2-megapixel rear camera with LED flash

While the Wave 3 and Wave M can certainly hold their own, these probably aren’t a great fit for a smartphone junkie. Bada is a rather smart OS, and we will definitely give credit where credit is due. But Android and iOS have some hardware out there that you just can’t beat.

On the other hand, these handsets will get the job done and probably at a pretty reasonable price. Obviously, it all depends on what you’re looking for. With the GSII announcement tonight and these Wave handsets on the way, you’ll have plenty to choose from.

One of Android’s biggest success stories so far has been the Dolphin Browser, a third-party browser that includes plenty of niceties that Android’s stock browser doesn’t: things like gestures, handy sidebars to access menus, user agent spoofing, and add-ons (which are basically extensions). Dolphin’s recently raised $10 million from top-tier VC Sequoia, and the app just passed 9 million total downloads.

And that’s just on Android. Today, the app is coming to the iPhone. It went live late last night, and you can download it right here.

As with other browsers on the iPhone, Dolphin uses the core Safari renderer to display content (in other words, Dolphin hasn’t built a new browser from the ground up — it’s adding a new layer of features on top of Apple’s browser). But it does bring some handy features, including multiple tab support, easy sharing to Facebook and Twitter, its sidebar shortcuts, and Webzine, a Flipboard-esque way to browse your favorite sites. Dolphin also says that this is the first browser on the iPhone to feature gestures: you can draw simple patterns to quickly jump to your favorite websites, or to access navigation options like ‘Back’ and your Bookmarks. They take a few minutes to get used to, but they’re quite handy.

One thing this app doesn’t have: the add-ons, which let Android users tweak their browsing experience with new features. Dolphin says this is because of a technical limitation with the iPhone, which doesn’t allow for native application add-ons. However, it does sound like JavaScript-based add-ons may be on the way.

Dolphin is far from the only third-party browser on the iPhone — competitors include Opera, iLegendSoft’s Mercury Web Browser, and SkyFire. I’m curious to see if Dolphin will be able to get the same kind of traction here as it has on Android; it’s a bit late to the game on iOS (though this is still early days for the platform), and Apple doesn’t give developers as much flexibility to differentiate their browsers as they have on Android.

Exclusive - Woozworld, a developer of a social game / virtual world for tweens (kids aged 9-14, more specifically), has raised $6 million in new funding from Telesystem and iNovia Capital along with unnamed angel investors. In addition, Bernard Gershon, former general manager and senior vice president of Disney, has joined the startup’s board.

The capital will be used to expand Woozworld’s services to include mobile platforms and boost its marketing efforts to grow reach.

Woozworld essentially offers an online, user-generated social platform, where tweens build entire worlds to engage with their peers, build virtual businesses or set up restaurants, hotels and games as they choose.

To date, the company has registered more than 7 million avatars, and more than 14 million virtual spaces were created in 18 months. Woozworld is growing liked a weed, too: its user base has more than tripled over the last six months.

Woozworld says it currently receives more than 15 million monthly unique visitors from over 180 countries, and logs more than 76 million monthly page views

Gershon, who is joining Woozworld’s board of advisors, is considered a pioneer of streaming media and currently the president of GershonMedia, a digital media strategy practice.

He was also the Senior Vice President and General Manager, Corporate Strategy, Business Development and Technology, atThe Walt Disney Company.