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Corporate microblogging and enterprise social networking tool Yammer has taken some of its latest investment funding and made its first acquisition today: a small British software engineering firm called oneDrum. The idea is to extend its features to the desktop, improve collaboration and give Google Docs a bit of a competitive push too.

This morning the Big Data online marketplace vendor Infochimps announces a new analytics dashboard for their services called Dashpot.

Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show.

Cloud synchronization vendor Druva announced today a new version 5.0 of its InSync software that provides a wide array of features, including the ability to remotely wipe a smartphone or tablet, geolocate and track the device, and encrypt data, too. From a single on-premises or cloud portal, IT personnel can view and manage backup, data access and data loss prevention, as well as allocate bandwidth and monitor device security, for all of the user's laptops, tablets and smartphones.

If you are looking to do real-time monitoring of your server processes in addition to seeing the overall conditions of your Windows, Linux and Mac OS servers, then take a look at the new v3 of Reveal Cloud that was announced today by CopperEgg. We last covered them in July here. CopperEgg has hundreds of RevealCloud customers who are actively monitoring thousands of servers around the world.

Today CloudPassage boosts security for your cloud-based servers by announcing an enhanced version of its Halo SaaS security tools called NetSec. The new version brings two-factor authentication methods for remote terminal access, as well as improvements to cloud firewall policy creation and management. As with earlier versions, the tools only work on Linux-based instances, since you need to install their agents on each cloud-based server. The tools are being used by Foursquare, for example, to help manage their increase in weekend check-in traffic.

One of the most influential retail technologies of the last quarter-century has been digital signage - the use of video to show crisp, bright full-motion advertising, more recently incorporating multitouch interaction. At the National Retail Federation Conference in New York City next week, Microsoft will present a full demonstration of use cases for its Kinect for Windows motion capture system - which uses the technology that first premiered for Xbox 360 - in tailoring live ads directed to shoppers as they walk past window displays and items for sale.

Software being developed for Windows Embedded POSReady 7 will be shown ascertaining live data about the people they scan - including their estimated gender, height, weight, ethnicity, and age - and produce live ads tailored and targeted directly to the estimated demographic. And as the technology's product manager told ReadWriteWeb today, business intelligence and analytics functions networked to those systems will enable advertising managers to literally change and create campaigns for those live shoppers on-the-fly.

The latest entry into calculating cloud computing costs of the public providers is from Cloudsizer, with more than a dozen different cloud providers covered. It is simple and easy to use, and you can start out with a free trial of its "express" service immediately, and upgrade to a paid "pro" account for AU$300 for three months.

VirtualSharp Software announced today a new version of its automated Disaster Recovery solutions for private and public clouds called ReliableDR 3.0. What does this mean? Well, you have heard about backup in the cloud, this takes things to the next level, essentially making it easier to stage and orchestrate your recovery processes. It isn't just making copies of your data, but packaging the entire server and OS and everything you need to restart a downed machine in a matter of minutes, using virtualization technologies. Think of it as RaaS, or Recovery as a Service. (Yes, I know, another aaS app.)

We last wrote about CopperEgg's RevealCloud real-time server monitoring service earlier this summer. Today they announced a major expansion of their program to include various Windows, Mac and FreeBSD servers on top of the Linux/Unix ones that they came out of the gate with.

Today Sprout Social has come out with v2 of their social media management service. It adds personalized dashboards, multi-user account management, an iPhone app, and dozens of other features. We covered their launch last year here.