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Paul Greenberg's engaging experiment in highlighting CRM vendors from around the world has concluded today, with the announcement of the winners of his CRM Idol contest. You can view the finalist entries on his website here. There were entries from all over the world, and today two finalists were announced.

As Brian Williams of NBC News is fond of saying, the news begins now. If you are looking for cool CRM apps from smaller companies that don't necessarily have the talent to show off their goods, Paul Greenberg's labor of love (which we covered earlier this year here), began last week with dozens of apps posted to the judging website here.

Webtrends announced yesterday that it acquired real-time analytics company Reinvigorate from (mt) Media Temple Ventures. The move rounds out Webtrends' strategy of tying together Web, mobile and social analytics by bringing in a real-time component. The acquisition will also bring a new set of data visualization tools to Webtrends, including heat maps, link maps and visitor path analysis.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Longtime analytics player Webtrends announced a social marketing suite called Webtrends Social, which is actually a revamped version of its Webtrends Apps product. The company says the suite will allow users to create and manage a Facebook presence without writing any code or integrate any other tools.

Of particular note is that Webtrends is one of the few companies with access to the invite-only Facebook Ads API, which means it will be able to create features that few if any of its competitors can replicate at this time.

Oracle announced today that it will acquire FatWire. Financial details were not disclosed. FatWire bills itself as customer experience management company and provides tools for content management, community forums, analytics, digital asset management, etc. It sounds very much like what Adobe is doing with its Digital Enterprise Platform (formerly LiveCycle), which was announced yesterday.

According to the announcement, Oracle wants to use this technology to help its customers create unified customer experiences across channels - including those ever important new channels like mobile and social.

Want to do a better job of working together but don't want to run some desktop-oriented software? Then consider a new suite of mobile social apps available for your smartphone from DoubleDutch Software called HYVE Enterprise Suite.

Buddy Media, the Facebook content management company we profiled earlier this year, announced that it will acquire social media sharing and analytics company Spinback.

And earlier this week Tap11 was acquired by AVOS, the new company from YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

These moves follow Salesforce.com's high profile acquisition of Radian6 in March.

Paul Greenberg announced this week a fun new project called CRM Idol that will have 60 small CRM-related companies go up in front of a panel of judges and be reviewed.

The problem Greenberg outlines is one that we're familiar with here at ReadWriteWeb: bloggers, journalists, analysts, venture capitalists, etc. are inundated with pitches from small companies. Many of these companies could be great, but there are too many to sift through. This will help get some of these companies in front of a larger audience.

Today Jive Software announced its acquisition of Proximal Labs, a social network analytics company. Prior to the acquisition, Jive was a customer of Proximal Labs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Proximal Labs co-founder and CEO David Gutelius is joining Jive as Chief Social Scientist.

Jive will use Proximal's machine learning technology, powered by Apache Hadoop, to help its users apply complex analytics to their enterprise social graphs. Example use cases include locating subject matter experts both inside and outside the firewall or surfacing relevant content within the network. The company is calling the platform "Jive What Matters."

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Every week we take a look at the latest developments in its use in the enterprise.

This week we look at a new iPad app for cardiologists, new apps from SugarCRM, Radian6 and Zoho and a few more apps that bring SharePoint to the iPad.