Shameless Promotion: CircleDog, CRM for Small Business.

From the Shameless Promotions Department: I received a happy e-mail today from Mission Research CEO Charlie Crystle, who was thrilled to share that the team launched CircleDog today. (Disclosure note: I have common equity in Mission Research, and on top of that would like to see my do-gooder friends do well.)

Mission Research has been developing fundraising software for nonprofits for almost five years, and has worked closely with great organizations like TechSoup to help small organizations learn about CRM. With backing in March from TBL Capital, Mission Research began work to spin out its GiftWorks technology into the SOHO market: and voila, you have CircleDog, CRM for the "smallest of small businesses." CircleDog is going after the small business space that continues (surprisingly) to be predominantly served by products such as Act and Goldmine. Like Mission Research GiftWorks, CircleDog is designed for the hybrid Web, and uses Web services while living independently on the desktop.

Visit CircleDog to grab the free trial, or even better, plunk down $99 to buy during the introductory period. (Yep, they're selling it old-school.)

Best of Monday at TechCrunch50: Yammer.

TechCrunch50 launched today with multiple waves of new companies and memes. Like many folks, I was most intrigued by the startups in the Enterprise cluster. Of those, I had one clear and immediate favorite: Yammer. At its most basic, Yammer is Twitter for groups; at its most sophisticated, it's a productivity tool for teams and workgroups. I'm usually not an early adopter, but I found Yammer compelling enough to actually give them my credit card number.

As soon as Yammer launched (rather dramatically, they turned on the production server mid-demo), I started up an account for First Round. Within about ten minutes, everyone FRC staffer in attendance at TC50 was using Yammer as a conference backchannel, the folks in the back office had discussed getting some closing paperwork out the door, and we had juggled logistics for a meeting to be held right after the last session of the day. I quickly ended up sending "tweets" from the folks that I followed into IM; conveniently, I was able to respond via IM as well and have it flow neatly back into our Yammer stream. It was easy to add team members (hello virality) and set securitysettings, and the type of profile data being collected (who do I reportto, who is my assistant, etc.) implies that a nice set of productivityfeatures is on the way.

Some concerns did come up as to if Yammer would be 'yet another inbox,' which could be a valid objection for the company's corporate adoption if there isn't a well-understood use case. My prediction is that Yammer will end up as a home for general group FYIs,'please let me know if you have an opinion/suggestion' thoughtstreams, or 'workstreams' (as vs lifestreams) that can be easily searched for either the current status of or the history on projects.

There are a number of obvious items for Yammer's product roadmap, but the service is useful today for groups whose members are already well-trained Twitter users. Kudos to the Geni team on today's launch.

Explaining the Large Hadron Collider (for Dummies).

Tomorrow's the big day: the mad scientists at CERN are starting up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to finally discover if we're on the right track when it comes to particle physics. This is a Big Deal and ideally humanity will be able to validate some key theories without collapsing the Earth into a black cloud of antimatter. If you'd like to see what all the fuss is about, here's a hilarious rap video from the LHC staff...particle physics for dummies! (READ: It's for those of us who chose technology, or even just spending time with the other humans, over science.)

For bonus points, head down to Stanford for a tour of SLAC. (Stanford's linear accelerator.) Even without the 17-mile scale of the LHC, it's an awe-inspiring visit.

Last Chance Offer for STARTonomics.

Dave McClure is sounding the last chance horn for attendance at STARTonomics, his new conference on startup metrics. The event is this Thursday, October 22nd in San Francisco, and there's a last chance offer for 20% off of registration - just register using promo code START208.

Last Call for Web 2.0 Expo Speakers.

Just a quick last call for Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009! Our deadline for speaker submissions ends this Wednesday, and we'd be thrilled to get your submissions. The 2009 call for papers ends this Wednesday, October 8th at midnight Pacific time. Get your ideas in!