Canada-based LeadSift raised a seed round of $500,000 from Omers Ventures, a fund that has invested in other Canada-based startups like Hootsuite. LeadSift is a startup aiming to help businesses mine social media sites like Twitter and Foursquare for sales lead generation. The company plans to add Facebook and LinkedIn to the mix in the future, in addition to comments, forums, blog posts and other places where people interact online. “The idea goes like this. If you, say, want to buy a MacBookPro, and you post about it on Twitter, LeadSift is able to find you, pass on your details to a relevant business to sell it to you – potentially using extra quantifiers like location as part of its lead generation – and then LeadSift helps make the connection.” The company’s CEO says LeadSift is focusing on Twitter first because of the public nature of the platform. (TechCrunch)