Yammer , the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month. The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing. Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch). David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year. Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall , who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox. Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down . CrunchBase Information Yammer Information provided by CrunchBase

While Apple is being lamented here and there for not supporting Flash on its shiny new iPad – boy does Cupertino have a strong dislike for the platform – Adobe has already responded to the news on the official Flash Platform blog . The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5). We’ve written before that this could turn 2010 into the year when approximately 2 million Flash developers could potentially start cooking up stuff for the iPhone en masse. You can now add the iPad to that, it seems. The company notes: We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad. For that latter part, Adobe points to this article by Christian Cantrell , Product Manager and Application Developer on the AIR team. The article goes in depth about how developers can build apps using Flash with authoring with multiple screen sizes and resolutions in mind. You won’t be able to fire up, say, Hulu through your browser on the iPhone or iPad any time soon, but Adobe appears determined to show the world that Flash has its place on Apple’s products one way or the other. And it’s also sending a message to Flash developers that they can and should stick to the platform rather than look at other ways to join the App Store goldrush.

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy. According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed. Here’s an excerpt from the filing: The invention provides a method and system for location-aware authorization such as for electronic devices (e.g., mobile electronic devices). One embodiment involves authorizing access to a standalone system such as a mobile device, by collecting user credentials on the device for authentication, obtaining location information (e.g., geographical position) for the device from a locating module such as a satellite navigation module attached to the device, accessing profile authorization information for authenticating the user based on the user credentials and device location information (localization), authorizing access to the device by the user if the profiled authorization settings match the credentials and the position of the device. Talk about GPS-lockdown.  In an age of mobile workers and telecommuters, such a product might be more of a hindrance than a help for most organizations.  But I could see putting something like that on servers or machines with super-sensitive data that are not supposed to leave the premises.  The big question looms: what will Big Blue, which reported strong earnings for 2009 this past week, do with this technology? Thanks for the tip Anand S. CrunchBase Information IBM Information provided by CrunchBase

Yesterday, Inside Facebook reported on a nifty MySpace feature called Fan Video that allows users to pull in their Facebook profile photos using Facebook Connect — a notable move given the sites’ longtime rivalry. Some other outlets ran with the story, with CNET calling it “hard evidence that MySpace is committed to using the technology on its site.” As it turns out, that probably isn’t the case: we’re hearing that this implementation was only integrated as a one-off for Fan Video, and that it is not indicative of a MySpace move to embrace Facebook Connect on a wider scale. In fact, we’re hearing that MySpace hasn’t even decided if they’re going to implement Facebook Connect on a wide scale at all, despite the rumors that have been circling for months. Fan Video was built as a promotion for the UK launch of MySpace Music in December. The app is simple: it imports your profile photo using either MySpaceID or Facebook Connect, and inserts it into one of a half dozen music videos from big name artists like Alicia Keys and 50 Cent. The results are actually pretty entertaining — I now have a video of Alicia Keys singing a love song as she gazes longingly at a photo of me. But we’re hearing that the app didn’t come directly from MySpace — it was actually built by a third party under commission. In related news, we’ve recently heard that Twitter is close to launching their answer to Facebook Connect. CrunchBase Information MySpace Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This year’s third annual Crunchies Awards have just concluded, and we’re happy to say that it was an overwhelming success. For those that weren’t watching, we’ve included the list of nominees and winners below. Our most sincere congratulations to the winners and to all of the nominees as well. It was an incredibly tight race for many of the categories, and it’s safe to say that everyone on this list is at the top of their field. We’d like to take a moment to point out Facebook’s win for “Best Overall Startup Or Product”, which marks the third year in a row that the company has taken home the top prize. Facebook continues to innovate and deploy features at an impressive rate while still showing incredible growth. Ours hats go off to you. If you’d like to watch the event for yourself, you can watch an archived version of the live stream here . Best Technology Achievement: Backblaze Bing (Microsoft) Chrome OS (Google) (Winner) Google Wave PuSH Silverlight (Microsoft) Best Internet Application: Animoto Dropbox (Winner) Groupon MOG All Access Posterous Yelp Best Social App: Aardvark Brizzly DailyBooth Farmville (Winner) SocialVibe StockTwits Best Bootstrapped StartUp: atebits (Tweetie) Shoes of Prey Tinychat (Winner) Wildfire Interactive wizehive Wufoo Best Mobile Application: foursquare (Winner) Google Voice Gowalla Kindle for iPhone Skies of Glory Tonchidot Best International: Amiando Jolicloud Playfish Spotify (Winner) TweetDeck vente-privee.com Best Time Sink Application: Canabalt Civilization Revolution (iPhone) DailyBooth (Winner) I Am T-Pain Pandora Zoosk Best Design: Animoto (Winner) Brizzly Chrome (Google) Clicker Facebook Mobile Threadsy Best Enterprise: Amazon Web Services Atlassian Azure (Microsoft) Chatter (Salesforce) Google Docs/Office (Winner) Yext Best CleanTech: CalStar Products Locust Storage Picarro Sappphire Energy Sun Run (Winner) Tendril Best New Gadget: Apple Magic Mouse Barnes & Noble nook (Winner) litl webbook Motorola Droid Sonos S5 Zune HD Best Tech PR: Brew Media Relations LaunchSquad OutCast Communications PerkettPR Spark (Winner) SutherlandGold Group Best Angel: Betaworks Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital) Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC) Ron Conway (SV Angel) (Winner) Y-Combinator Yossi Vardi Best VC Firm: Accel Partners (Winner) Charles River Ventures Benchmark Capital Greylock Partners Sequoia Capital True Ventures Union Square Ventures Founder Of The Year: Aaron Patzer (Mint) (Winner) Elon Musk (Tesla) Jack Dorsey (Square) Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons (Yelp) John Borthwick (Betaworks) Omar Hamoui (AdMob) CEO Of The Year: Josh Silverman (Skype) Marc Benioff (Salesforce) Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Winner) Neil Young (ngmoco) Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media) Tony Hsieh (Zappos) Best New Startup Or Product Of 2009: Aardvark Bing (Microsoft) (Winner) Foursquare Hunch Milo Spotify Best Overall Startup Or Product Of 2009: Android (Google) Facebook (Winner) LinkedIn ngmoco Twitter Zynga Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors