Managing a venture fund is hugely different from running a startup. Eric Paley told me that last year at this time his primary responsibility was at dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, the MIT spin-off that he co-founded and where he had served as general manager after its sale to technology giant 3M (NYSE:MMM) in 2006. Nowadays, as managing partner and co-founder of new seed fund Founder Collective, his much broader focus includes meetings with a whopping 30 entrepreneurs a week, he said.

Early this month Paley’s firm had an official launch after closing a first fund of about $40 million to invest in seed-stage startups, even though reports about the firm surfaced in June after its initial SEC filings became public knowledge. The firm is made up of a group of successful entrepreneurs who have been backing each other’s startups for ages before coming together as Founder Collective. David Frankel, the firm’s other managing partner along with Paley, was a seed investor in Brontes as well as partner Chris Dixon’s startups SiteAdvisor and Hunch, for example. Their experience as entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital and reached successful exits, along with their compelling investment strategy, could help them succeed in the struggling venture industry.

Founder Collective, which has offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York (where Frankel is based), is taking a much different tack than many funds have taken over the past decade. Paley says that the vast majority of funds closed over the past 10 years have been more than $100 million, while most of the funds were less than that in the previous decade. But the big knock on the venture industry is that it’s done a poor job of returning capital and returns commensurate with their risk profile to their limited partner investors. And large funds often aim to invest big amounts of capital ($10 million or more) in their portfolio companies, even when companies don’t really need that much money, Paley says. Founder Collective’s first fund is a lean $40 million or so, and that money is intended to be invested in capital-efficient businesses that aren’t taking on more investment capital than is needed to achieve their goals. Indeed, we’re seeing this movement toward smallish investments in lean teams, at least in software/tech, all around the country.

Another big downside of a startup raising more venture capital than it requires to execute its plan is the dilution of ownership for the entrepreneurs who founded the company. “We really created the fund out of frustration that there wasn’t a really good answer for the capital-efficient business in the early days to achieve major milestones and increase the value of the company before giving so much of it away to investors,” Paley said.

There are no banker-turned-venture capitalists at Paley’s shop. Many of the partners maintain operational roles at startups they’ve co-founded. Dixon, a founder of Web security firm SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee), is full-time CEO of his firm Hunch that provides an online decision-making tool. Also, Micah Rosenbloom, who co-founded Brontes with Paley, is now the general manager of the Brontes business for 3M. (Here’s a full list of the the Founder team on the firm’s website.)

The investment philosophy at Founder is to back startups led by committed entrepreneurs. And though Paley said the firm has no stated limits on sectors or geographic areas in which it invests, the firm will most likely invest, as it has done so far, in …Next Page »

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Say you’d like to look up an old friend from high school. You have no idea what happened to him after college, and you can’t find him on Facebook. But you do remember the address of his house down the street from your childhood home. What if there was a Web-based map where you could log on, locate your friend’s old house, and leave a virtual note for him to find?

That’s the scenario that Mark Sherman hopes millions of people will explore at ZoomAtlas, a new social mapping service going public today at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Using the site’s tools, you can publicly annotate any location that has some personal meaning to you. That might mean leaving a note for someone, or it might mean reminiscing about the house where you grew up, or a school you attended, or even a restaurant where you had a good meal.

But Sherman, the president, CEO, and main funder of the Cambridge, MA-based startup, thinks finding long-lost acquaintances will be the most compelling use for the site. “There’s nothing on Facebook I’ve seen that allows you to reconnect on the micro level,” he says. “The closest thing you have is groups for school alumni—but that’s not the only place that people want to reconnect from.”

You can think of ZoomAtlas as a cross between Google Maps, Facebook, and Wikipedia, with user-generated missives and memories as the key ingredients that—in theory, at least—will make it more than just another mapping site.

Speaking of Wikipedia, Sherman says Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki, is a close friend and an advisor to the company. In a short essay posted on the site, Cunningham says ZoomAtlas is “a perfect example” of the collaborative philosophy behind wikis. “We can make an atlas of our world that shows what we know and love, not just what a satellite can see,” Cunningham writes. “We can weave our memories and impressions together using the computer’s ever improving graphics to make a collaborative picture from our eyes and minds and hearts in equal proportion.”

The first thing to try when you visit ZoomAtlas is typing in a specific street address—say, the house where you grew up. You’ll see a satellite image of the neighborhood, with small icons representing the location of each house. Each house icon can be edited in a number of ways: you can move it in case it’s not in the right location on the property, you can give it a different look to correspond to your memory of the place, you can write an article about that address (this is the most Wikipedia-like part), and you can attach short notes for others to find. Right now the maps are 2-D, but in the future, according to Sherman, you’ll be able to go inside houses and annotate individual rooms. “Users are empowered to help detail to the map to the point that every location on Earth, no matter how small, can be defined and have attributes assigned to it,” says Sherman.

But ZoomAtlas is more than just a map-based bulletin board where people can leave notes for long-lost friends, Sherman says. He hopes it will evolve into the locus for any online conversation linked to a place. “It’s a framework on which to allow discussion of locations, whether big or small,” he says. “If there were another Fort Hood incident, God forbid, you could …Next Page »

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[Updated and corrected, see below---Also see end of story for news of Google announcement of Nov. 4] In May 2008, Google moved into colorful (hey, it’s Google) new offices in the heart of Kendall Square. Governor Deval Patrick played ping-pong at the grand opening with Google site director Steve Vinter. And since then, Google Cambridge has grown to some 200 people spread over four floors, and about evenly split between sales and engineering.

But while engineers at the local Googleplex are working on key infrastructure components such as BigTable and MapReduce and consumer-facing offerings like Google Books and Google Images, only one effort to date has been conceived, developed, and released entirely from here in Cambridge, MA: Google Friend Connect.

GFC is a social media tool that makes it extremely easy for website owners to add social features to their sites—without the need to learn programming. These features include gadgets or plug-ins that allow visitors to automatically import their personal profiles from Google, Yahoo, and other places without having to do it manually for each new site they want to join, as well as widgets for letting users rate and review things. Website owners simply select the features they want, fill out an extremely short (three-item) form, and the code is generated for them to cut and paste into their site. The idea is that such as easy tool will make sites more interactive and interesting, thereby helping site owners attract and retain their users. (We’ll get to Google’s motives later on).

[Editor's note: the second sentence of this paragraph was amended to reflect the correct number of monthly GFC websites and users.] And it seems to be working. Since the public beta launch last December, Google Friend Connect has grown to some 8 million websites a month spread across what are estimated to be hundreds of millions of users. Google isn’t exactly sure how big GFC has gotten. “It’s big,” though, is how tech lead manager Sami Shalabi sums things up. And there is apparently more news coming. Google says it is planning a big announcement in the near future about GFC.

Besides being the only Google product entirely born, bred, and weaned here in Cambridge, I found the GFC story interesting because it illustrates how entrepreneurship can flourish inside a big company (yes, Google is officially a big company). A small team was allowed to run with a product idea, much like a boot-strapped startup might do—but when the project showed promise, the corporation stepped in with marketing clout virtually impossible to match in the startup world. If done right, that kind of one-two (startup-giant) punch can make up for the overall bureaucratic sluggishness that often permeates big companies (and yes, Google has been known to exhibit some big company bureaucratic traits).

The story of Google Friend Connect begins, fittingly enough, with two friends. Shalabi and Mussie Shore met each other in 1998 at Iris Associates, an IBM subsidiary where they worked on a suite of Lotus products, most notably Lotus Quickplace and LotusNotes. I visited the pair on the sixth floor of Google Cambridge, where their 11-person team (counting them) occupies a funky, open workspace in a prime corner area. We then retreated to a “huddle room” (what non-Googlers call a conference room) named Magic Hat. It turns out that all the huddle rooms on the sixth floor are named after beers or breweries, which is cool with the GFC crew because three of the team are microbrewers. (Click on the team image to enlarge it and see a full caption.)

In 2006, Shalabi and Shore got the entrepreneurial bug and, together with Martin Fahey, co-founded Zingku, a social networking startup that made it easier to share things like photos, polls, and invitations via instant messages, e-mail, the Web, and (especially) cell phones. You know who purchased Zingku in fall 2007 (for an undisclosed sum). And it was just a few months after …Next Page »

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It’s not that I thought Vermont and New Hampshire were technological backwaters, because I knew from my years of working in Boston that the local venture capitalists were pumping millions of dollars into startups in the two northern New England states. But what I’ve found over the past year or so of living in both Vermont and the Boston area is that the only thing that really separates the startups in Kendall Square from those in Barre, VT, and Lebanon, NH, is that the former are way closer to good seafood. The level of innovation and sophistication among the entrepreneurs in both camps is pretty much equal.

While attending a business and innovation event called Vermont 3.0 in Burlington, VT, last week, I thought it would be fun and interesting to take a look back at all the northern New England innovation I’ve covered over the past year. Indeed, a perk of working north of the Massachusetts border is that I’ve visited the laboratories and research facilities of many exciting startups up here. I’ve had a chance to visit with faculty and researchers affiliated with innovation hubs such as Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont. I’ve also talked shop with venture capitalists at firms such as Borealis Ventures, based in Hanover, NH, and FreshTracks Capital in Shelburne, VT.

What follows are summaries of the northern innovation stories I’ve written for Xconomy in the order in which they were published. For each story description I dug into my notes and tried add something that wasn’t in the original piece (but I’m not one to withhold interesting details from my posts, so the supply of previously unreported material was a bit thin).

My plan is to dig deeper into the pockets of innovation north of Boston over the next year. But make no mistake, the majority of my stories will still emanate from the Hub.

—In northern New England, there are no technology clusters as dense as those found in Boston, but I found an emerging innovation cluster in Dartmouth College and environs earlier this year. My trip to Dartmouth in February resulted in a post about the key labs, people, and concerns that contribute to the startup ecosystem there. (I also learned that parking is as difficult to find on the Dartmouth main campus as anywhere in Cambridge, MA.)

—People may assume startups in New Hampshire operate in small buildings nestled in the woods, and in the case of Lebanon-based antibody discovery firm Adimab, those people would be right. I met the founder and CEO, Tillman Gerngross, at the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, an incubator that hosts Adimab and other firms with ties to Dartmouth College. Gerngross, an engineering professor at Dartmouth, pointed out that a firm called GlycoFi that he co-founded and sold to Whitehouse Station, NJ-based drug giant Merck (NYSE:MRK) in 2006 was operating in separate labs in the same building.

—One of the first stops that startups make to find money in Hanover is Borealis Ventures. Borealis has done well investing in Dartmouth spinouts; its investment in GlycoFi alone made its first fund a big success, firm co-founder and managing director Phil Ferneau told me during a meeting. While there are many angel investors in New Hampshire, Borealis may be the only venture capital firm in the state. So, as you’d imagine, Ferneau and his partners are very popular among entrepreneurs in the state.

—After meeting with Gerngross and Ferneau, I wondered what exactly was under the hood at GlycoFi that would persuade Merck to maintain its operations in New Hampshire. It turned out that GlycoFi’s technology—which involves the use of bioengineered yeast to produce human proteins with lower structural variability than mammalian cell lines typically yield—is a centerpiece of Merck’s recent strategy to develop copies of biotech drugs. And many of the scientists who are developing the GlycoFi platform still reside in northern New England.

—Apparently, I’m not the only Boston-area innovation junkie who’s working in Vermont. John Danner, the CEO of Northern Power Systems in Barre, VT, told me during a meeting at his office that his primary residence is still in Massachusetts even though he spends most of his weeks in the Green Mountain State. Danner, a former engineer aboard nuclear submarines, is now engineering a turnaround at the Vermont-based wind turbine manufacturer. (The latest on Northern Power is that it’s aiming to …Next Page »

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The inventor of the World Wide Web has arrived, somewhat belatedly, in the Twitterverse. Tim Berners-Lee, head of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium, set up a Twitter account shortly before making an appearance at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday.

Normally it wouldn’t be news when Twitter gains a new user—somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people already use the microblogging service, which makes it easy for users to share short, 140-character messages with anyone who signs up to follow their tweets. But Berners-Lee is a special case.

People follow the man who came up with the idea for a network of hyperlinked, consistently formatted electronic documents—and who still oversees its evolution—as if his every move were prophetic. As TechCrunch put it, Berners-Lee joining Twitter is the kind of event (at least in the blogosphere) that “could potentially rip a hole in the time/space continuum.”

So, how is Sir Berners-Lee making use of the new medium? As of this writing, he’s tweeted only twice—once to complain that Twitter’s user interface is confusing, the second time to say that he was “following the teens.” We gather that this wasn’t a reference to Twitter’s popularity among teens, but to the Web 2.0 summit talk that preceded his appearance, a session called “What Do Teens Want?” led by former Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy.

Berners-Lee is gaining Twitter followers fast—when we checked at 5:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning, he had 218. As of this writing, that number had zoomed up to 1,849. But the father of the Web still has a ways to go to catch up with Ashton Kutcher, who has more than 3.8 million followers.

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Boston-based Currensee announced today that it’s opening its online community for foreign currency traders to all comers, after nearly six months of private beta testing. The company also said that it has closed its Series A funding round, raising $6 million from North Bridge Venture Partners in Waltham, MA.

“It’s a major milestone for us,” says Currensee CEO and co-founder Dave Lemont. The company’s motto, he says, is “real trades, real accounts”—meaning that members share information about their actual currency trading, rather than making zero-risk simulated trades as do users of sites like UpDown. And now “the platform is being opened up for anybody to join, as long as they have a brokerage account,” says Lemont.

The idea behind Currensee, as I wrote in an April profile of the startup, is to provide independent currency traders—an excitement-hungry subspecies of day trader—with information, context, and community support. Members link their Currensee profiles directly to their accounts with retail foreign exchange or “forex” brokers such as FXCM, so that other members can see how much they’re putting into various currency-pair trades, in real time.

“This level of transparency of information is what’s completely unique about what Currensee is doing,” says Lemont. “Financial services is ripe with get-rich-quick schemes, but we all know the world doesn’t work that way. Currensee is all about what is your strategy and what were your results…and how to learn from other people.”

Lemont says Currensee gathered about 1,000 users from 60 countries for its beta testing effort. Members are able to choose how much information about their trades is shared, but most beta users have opted to share everything—even data about their losses. “That was the core principle on which we founded the company, so I’m very pleased that it’s been validated,” Lemont says. “People clearly want to share information, and they want a support system, and they want to gain recognition when they’re doing well and they want some help when they’re not doing well.”

The company makes its money on lead generation for forex brokers; every time a Currensee user opens a new account at one of the 40 brokers that the company partners with, it collects a commission. Eventually, Lemont told me last spring, the company may also introduce subscription-based premium information services, such as analytical insights based on aggregate trading data. The site carries no advertising.

Currensee has 20 employees and is still hiring software and quality-assurance engineers, according to Lemont. Word about its Series A round leaked out in mid-2008; reports at the time pegged it at $4 million, but the round was later increased to $6 million, all of which the company has now collected, Lemont says.

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My friend Brad King, a journalism professor at Ball State University, makes fun of me for being such a Web and gadget geek while at the same time shunning social networking tools like Facebook. He’s got a point. I’ve written a lot about Facebook, MySpace, and their predecessors, but I’ve never wholeheartedly joined in, the way I have with most of the other digital media technologies that are the loose theme of this column. I guess I never quite saw the point. Also, though it’s probably a sign that I’m growing prematurely crotchety, I keep telling myself that that social networking is a fad, like some fashionable night club that will empty out as soon as something new opens up down the street.

Well, Facebook may still be a fad, but with 300 million users and growing, it’s a remarkably enduring one. It’s probably time for me to get used to it. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences over the last couple of weeks that have started to change my attitude about the site.

It started with my iPhone. Two weeks ago, as you might remember, I wrote a column about “The Best Camera.” It’s an iPhone app created by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis as part of a cross-media campaign promoting his message that “the best camera is the one that’s with you.” The app lets you apply some intriguing digital effects to the photos you snap with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It also lets you upload your processed images directly to Facebook, where every new shot will show up on your Wall and in your friends’ news feeds.

I’ve sent a few of my Best Camera shots to my Facebook photo albums, and a truly surprising thing has happened. People have been commenting on the photos. Not a huge crowd of people, but enough to make me realize that there are Facebook users who actually pay attention to the new stuff they see every day, and that some of them care enough to leave feedback.

I don’t mean to sound naive—I know that posting and reading updates and commenting on other people’s updates are the main order of business at Facebook. The wake-up call for me was the realization that Facebook has now become what Flickr was originally supposed to be.

I’ve been a Flickr user since ancient times—back before it was part of Yahoo, when it was a funky little startup based in Vancouver and was mainly a place where people could comment on each other’s photos by decorating them with little thought-balloon captions. I’ve got thousands of photos there, and it’s going to remain my default online photo storage location. But nobody ever comments on my photos at Flickr anymore. At Facebook, by contrast, I can upload a camera-phone shot and get five comments within an hour.

What’s up with that? I thought at first that the sheer volume of photos at Flickr might be one explanation. There are so many new ones every day that my shots might just be getting lost in the crowd. But from what I’ve read, the world’s largest photo-sharing site these days is …Next Page »

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Apparently, social media services like Facebook and Twitter aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be, even for the twenty-somethings who are supposedly their most devoted users. Here in Boston, there’s a new group for young startup types who prefer to talk about their entrepreneurial ambitions in person at actual bars, of all places. It’s called Dart Boston, and it’s now going into its sixth month, with its 22nd meeting planned for this Thursday night.

You don’t have to be under 30 to attend a Dart Boston event—in fact, co-founder Cort Johnson says “people of all ages and backgrounds” are welcome at the weekly meetings, which take place at a different bar or restaurant each Thursday. But you do have to be in your twenties to be a presenter or panelist on “Pokin’ Holes,” the podcast/video/live-streaming show that is the centerpiece of each gathering.

With Johnson as moderator, the show gives one guest entrepreneur each week the opportunity to describe his or her startup and collect feedback from the panelists and the audience. Last week, for example, guest Fan Bi described Blank Label, an online “mass customization” service for men’s dress shirts that will launch at the end of this month. (Bi, 21, is Blank Label’s chief evangelist.)

The show is “really an opportunity to give kids who wouldn’t otherwise be asked to speak their minds a voice, and to give these entrepreneurs who wouldn’t have an opportunity to promote their company the opportunity to share with our community what they’re working on,” says Johnson, who is 24.

Johnson and two fellow twenty-somethings, Jake Cacciapaglia and Alexa Scordato, told me they dreamed up Dart Boston over dinner one night last spring. “Jake and I had been working on a company before this, living out in Foxborough, and we would be driving into the city all the time and meeting all these cool young people,” says Johnson. “We finally decided to get an apartment on Dartmouth Street, and we started inviting all these people over to chat about what was going on. Jake had met Alexa, and we had dinner one night and we thought, ‘Why not turn these conversations we were having about the business ideas that kids were executing upon into a more formal atmosphere?’”

The club was originally called Dart 102, after the address of Johnson and Cacciapaglia’s Dartmouth Street digs, but the gatherings quickly grew too large for the apartment, which sent the group barhopping and led to the name change. A typical Dart Boston evening starts with “Pokin’ Holes” at 6:45 p.m. and includes a couple of hours of cocktails and networking after the show. (You can watch or listen to the recorded shows here.)

Scordato, a former employee at Burlington, MA-based social software startup Mzinga who recently took a job in New York with public relations giant Porter Novelli, says she thinks Dart Boston fills a troubling vacuum in the Boston area. She notes that there’s a ton of young talent coming out of the regions’ universities—she calls Boston an “academic Acropolis”—but she says that …Next Page »

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Natick, MA-based Vivox said today that it’s opening its new “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” service to all Facebook members. The application—which allows Facebook users to set up free voice chat rooms and invite their friends to participate from within Facebook—is one of the first creations of Vivox Labs, a new R&D arm of the company, and had been in closed beta testing for the last few months. Vivox, which we profiled last month, is known mainly as a provider of voice communication services for massive virtual worlds and game worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online.

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If you spend much time in the business or legal world, “due diligence” is a phrase you hear a lot. It’s the polite term for the time you have to spend figuring out whether a potential client, vendor, investment, acquisition, or partner is legit or phony, smart or just slick.

Part of the process involves discreetly (or not so discreetly) calling around, trying to find people who know the person or entity you’re “diligencing.” But what if due diligence weren’t such a guessing game? What if there were a central marketplace where you could declare which type of information you need, pick an expert, and—for a reasonable fee—get an hour of private telephone consultation?

That’s the whole idea behind Zintro, a Web-based client-expert matching service being rolled out in beta form by serial entrepreneur Stuart Lewtan. The founder of Lewtan Technologies, a maker of financial analytics software sold to UK-based DMGT in 2004, Lewtan believes there’s a problem with existing professional-networking services such as LinkedIn. They’re great for staying in touch with your acquaintances, he says, but they aren’t really designed to bring about conversations between people who don’t already know one another.

“LinkedIn is an excellent tool, but it doesn’t’ really provide a good mechanism for reaching an agreement to talk,” Lewtan says. “Everything Zintro does is built around trying facilitate introduction, qualification, payment, and all the other aspects of connecting two people and creating a safe environment for them to communicate and exchange information for a fee.”

Here’s how Waltham, MA-based Zintro’s Web service works: Say you’re an investor and you’re thinking about buying a big chunk of stock in A123Systems, the Watertown, MA-based battery maker that went public last week, but first you want to know more about lithium ion batteries. You sign up for a “client” account at Zintro.com and fill out a form describing your information needs. Zintro uses what Lewtan calls “fuzzy search” algorithms to comb its database of experts, who all fill out detailed profiles when they sign up for the service. Zintro sends your inquiry to appropriate experts who indicated they know something about batteries, electric cars, or material science.

These experts are then free to respond with a brief proposal outlining their rates and their qualifications for talking about A123. From your Zintro dashboard, you can sort through their proposals; if you need more details, you can request them from the experts via Zintro’s internal e-mail system.

Once you settle on an expert, Zintro helps you schedule a phone call, and charges your credit card or PayPal account for the amount of the expert’s fee, plus Zintro’s 30 percent introduction fee—say, $100 for the expert plus $30 for Zintro. The funds go into an escrow account, and Zintro provides a dial-in number that both parties can call at the agreed time.

Once the call is over and both parties confirm how much time was used, the fee is released to the expert. There’s also an escape hatch: if you …Next Page »

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Shareaholic founder Jay Meattle was in touch today to say that his Cambridge startup has raised its first round of angel funding. Back in July, I reviewed Shareaholic’s popular browser plugin, which makes it easy to save or share material found on the Web via common social networking, social bookmarking, and news aggregator services.

Meattle wasn’t specific about the size of the round, saying it amounts to “a few hundred thousand” dollars. The list of funders, however, is a who’s who of Web 2.0 entrepreneurship and investing around Boston, including one serial entrepreneur, David Cancel, who worked with Meattle at both of his last two companies, Lookery and Compete.com.

The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:

—Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
—Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
—Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
—Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
—David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
—Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
—Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

Cancel, Payne, and Shin also serve on Shareaholic’s advisory board, along with Rob Go of Boston-based Spark Capital.

“I couldn’t think of a better group,” Meattle says. “They have deep knowledge and expertise in the space we’re playing in. We lean on them for advice all the time—they’ve all ‘been there and done that’ again and again.”

When I last talked with Meattle about Shareaholic, he said the company had spent a long time getting its browser plugin to the point where it’s comprehensive and easy to use, and that the coming months would be devoted to experimenting with different ways of monetizing the service. He confirmed that plan today. “We plan to spend the next few months determining what the best use of our data and user reach assets are,” Meattle says. “We have some pretty good hunches and have a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline.”

Given the momentum the company has built up and the opportunities it has identified, “the time was right to raise some money to further accelerate and support our product roadmap,” Meattle adds.

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A mobile application called Learn That Name, developed by entrepreneurs in the Seattle area, is getting props in a Wall Street Journal blog today, after going live in the iPhone app store late last week. Learn That Name, which helps you associate names with photos in your LinkedIn contacts, debuted at Startup Weekend in Redmond, WA, three weeks ago, winning an award for audience favorite. Team leader Eric Koester of Cooley Godward Kronish said the entire 14-person team has continued to work together and is planning to launch the app in the new Palm store when it goes live.

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It’s not getting any easier to write and perform great music. But for up-and-coming artists, it is getting easier to build a fan base—especially if they can get their fans to do part of the work for them.

That’s the idea behind MyStore, a new Facebook application launched last week by Framingham, MA-based Nimbit. The five-year-old startup builds online tools that help artists sell and market their music directly to fans, with no need for a middleman like a recording label or a promoter. Up to now, that’s mainly taken the form of a Web-based platform that bands can plug into their websites or blogs, allowing them to do things like track fans, promote concerts, and sell digital downloads, tickets, CDs, and other merchandise. But with MyStore, Nimbit has transplanted its marketing and e-commerce engine into the world’s largest social networking site—which means every transaction a band or artist conducts can potentially be magnified many times over by the power of its fans’ social connections.

Once an artist or a band joins Nimbit and sets up a MyStore tab in their Facebook profile, Facebook’s own networking tools swing into action on their behalf. Every time a fan plays a song from the MyStore, or buys a download, or leaves a comment, that action shows up on their wall for all of their friends to see. If a Facebook member recommends a band to a friend, the recommendation will lead them back to the band’s MyStore. And nobody ever has to leave Facebook to make a purchase—the store provides a shopping cart, credit-card processing, the whole e-commerce shebang.

It’s a big step for Nimbit, whose main previous venture into the social networking world was an “online merchandise table” widget for MySpace. The 14-employee company, which has angel funding from Lexington, MA-based CommonAngels, was already growing fast, with 10,000 artists and labels signed up as users and 50 percent year-over-year revenue growth, according to co-founder and CEO Patrick Faucher, himself a professional trumpet player and vocalist. With Facebook’s population zooming past 300 million users (and MySpace’s plummeting at a similar rate) the MyStore integration could become an important new selling point for Nimbit. I talked last week with Faucher, and had a chance to ask him how the MyStore app can help artists, how social networking fits into the company’s vision, and what it was like to work with Facebook. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: Obviously most serious bands have a MySpace presence. Is there a lot of music discovery going on through the other social networking sites?

Patrick Faucher: It depends on the genre and the demographic. Some might do well on MySpace, some might do well on traditional radio, and some are still basically out there doing regional touring, and that’s where they are generating exposure. But at some point in every artist’s process for marketing and promotion, there is an opportunity for a fan to interact with them online, whether that happens to be on MySpace or on their own official website or on Facebook. That is the point at which we maximize that interaction, by making sure the artists can capture their fans, engage them with product offers, and give them a rewarding way to buy directly from them.

X: If you’re an artist or a band, why go to the trouble of building a store inside Facebook—what’s wrong with iTunes?

PF: If the fan has taken the time to find you and you have them right there in front of you, why send them down the street to buy from someone else? We act as a transparent layer between the artist and the fan. Our job is to …Next Page »

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Mzinga, the Burlington, MA, startup that offers tools for online community management and corporate learning management, has raised $6.1 million in new equity financing, according to regulatory forms filed yesterday. Executives told Mass High Tech that the financing is an extension of Mzinga’s $32.5 million Series A round of March 2008 and involved two existing investors, W Capital Partners and BlueCrest Partners, and one new investor, Acadia Woods Partners. After cutting 18 percent of its workforce in March 2009, the company now plans to start hiring again, CEO Barry Libert told the publication.

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Blogging is about active sharing. I’ve known this on an intellectual level for years, but working for Xconomy has made the idea very real to me. My stories reach far more readers if I take a few extra minutes every day to share the items with my e-mail contacts and Twitter followers, and to submit links to places like Slashdot and Y Combinator’s Hacker News. And after all, if nobody is aware that you posted something, what was the point of writing it?

Of course, it’s not just my own stories and other Xconomy articles that I share. I find loads of cool stuff across the Web every day, and Twitter is a great vehicle for sharing the joy with people who share my tastes.

This week I started using a browser plugin called Shareaholic that makes all of this active sharing much easier, by providing a single button that connects me instantly to more than 60 sharing services including social bookmarking, blogging, publishing, and other tools. Shareaholic isn’t new—in fact, it’s the most widely distributed browser plugin for sharing, with over a million downloads so far. It’s been trendy among the digerati at least since February 2008, when its inventor, Jay Meattle, was one of three grand prize winners in a Mozilla-sponsored contest designed to highlight the coolest new Firefox extensions. But somewhat embarrassingly, I only learned about it recently, when Meattle gave a presentation at the July Web Innovators Group meeting in Cambridge, MA.

Meattle came by Xconomy’s palatial new offices recently to tell me more about Shareaholic, which has grown from a plugin into a full-fledged startup based in Cambridge. He showed me how easy it is to configure the free tool to submit whatever Web page you’re looking at to Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Techmeme, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and about three dozen other social networking and bookmarking sites and news aggregators. You can also use it to share your discoveries with yourself, by sending them to online notebook services like Posterous or Evernote (my personal favorite) or your blog on LiveJournal, Blogger, or Tumblr.

And, of course, you can e-mail links to yourself or to others via Gmail, Hotmail, or your default e-mail client. In fact, Meattle says the whole idea for Shareaholic came from conversations with a colleague named David Cancel who, like Meattle, was tired of having to copy URLs from the browser address bar and paste them into e-mails when the pair was sharing Web materials with one another. Cancel is the co-founder and CTO of San Francisco- and Cambridge-based Lookery, a targeting service for online ads where Meattle was, until four months ago, the vice president of products. The pair also worked together on the founding team of Compete.com, a Boston-based Web traffic analysis firm sold last year to marketing giant TNS.

For Meattle, it was a simple matter to write some software that would automatically grab a link from the Firefox URL bar and dump it into a new outgoing e-mail message. And over time (meaning, working nights and weekends until a few months ago) Meattle has been able to make Shareaholic work on multiple browsers—Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome, Flock, and even Songbird, Mozilla’s open-source answer to iTunes—and communicate with practically every Web 2.0-era sharing service that has a public API, or application programming interface.

But why go to all this trouble to provide a free tool that generates no direct revenue? To answer that, all you have to do is look at Meattle’s recent history as an entrepreneur. At bottom, both Compete.com and Lookery are about collecting and selling data that …Next Page »

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Think about the technological tools you use most often. For many of us, cell phones and computers rank high up on that list. But these devices are designed with the hearing and sighted in mind, and are constantly evolving, so there are numerous hurdles to clear to make a phone or a computer usable to the blind or deaf.

The University of Washington’s Richard Ladner, along with students in the electrical engineering and computer science departments, is using engineering and computational tools to work on several of these hurdles—and the commercial applications could have far-ranging impact.

“When you think about a person with a disability, such as a blind person, most people think that’s a medical problem,” he said in a recent interview. “Just restoring the human function may be a solvable problem, but probably not for a long time. But maybe there’s another way to get the same thing done, to allow a person to read a book or talk to their family. So thinking non-medically, as an engineer, there are other ways to solve these problems.”

Ladner, who was born to two deaf parents, also believes that technologies developed for the blind and deaf may eventually lead to broader technological advancements—not such a far-fetched idea, as it’s happened before. Mobile GPS was originally developed as an aid for the blind, Ladner said, as was optical character recognition, a technology developed in the 1960s to turn an image of text (such as a photo of a book page) into digital text, which would then be read out loud using speech synthesizers. Now, the same technology is ubiquitous in turning pictures of text into digital text;Google uses it to digitize books.

Ladner used to work on computational theory before shifting to accessible technology in 2002. He and colleague Eve Riskin, professor of electrical engineering, are now trying to take their long-running project on accessibility for the deaf, MobileASL, to the market. This project uses video compression technology to enable signing over video cell phones on low-bandwidth wireless networks (such as those in the U.S.). Currently, deaf people can’t reliably use video cell phones to communicate using sign language, because the videos are too choppy to be intelligible. Ladner and his colleagues are working with UW TechTransfer on commercializing MobileASL.

“We’re trying to get it out and get it in actual use,” he said. “It’s in high demand. I get hundreds of e-mails about it.”

Although designed with the deaf in mind, MobileASL could be used by anyone who wants better quality video phone calls, Ladner said. Bringing it to market is slightly complicated by the fact that …Next Page »

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Even with only 180 characters per post, it can be hard to find what you are looking for on Twitter. Sorting through the stream of tweets from the people you follow, let alone the entire Twitter network, can be daunting. Seattle-based healthcare marketing firm Appature recognized this fact, and so early last month released the first product from its long-term development group, Appature Labs. The product, called Chatterfly, is a Twitter client—a way of using Twitter and extra features at the same time—that can search through a feed for keywords and trends, as well as archive tweets for later perusal.

Chatterfly is not the first search engine out to help navigate the Twitter flood. Others are starting to crop up as well, such as Seattle-based CrowdEye, which launched two weeks ago. But Chatterfly is one of the first created specifically for marketers. “More and more, our customers are asking questions like, ‘What is this Twitter thing?’” said Appature CEO Kabir Shahani, in an interview. “Brands are starting to make communities around Twitter.” With companies scrambling for ways to exploit online social media, creating a place for long-term idea development in this space makes a lot of sense, even for relatively small companies like Appature.

Appature was founded in early 2007, is self-funded, and now has 14 employees. The company provides ways of gathering and analyzing data on everything from website traffic to publicity campaign success for marketers and brand managers, using software and Web applications. Its customers include medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Earlier this year, Shahani was named one of BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs.

At the moment, Chatterfly is still in beta trials and open to public use. “We want feedback not just from our customers,” Shahani said, adding that Chatterfly is being integrated into a …Next Page »

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Rafe Anderson is moving up into the big leagues. His sports social media network, TruFan, officially goes national today. TruFan grew out of a collection of websites—Sawxheads, Celtsheads, and Blackandgoldheads—which focused solely on Boston teams. Now the national network will include 122 communities for clubs across the country, spanning Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball League, and the National Hockey League.

When signing up, fans indicate which teams and players are their favorites, so that TruFan can funnel them content to match their particular preferences. Users can write their own blogs, vote up news stories, post photos, friend other fans and chat with them. The face of the front page changes according to which news stories are getting the most votes.

“Sports fans in general are used to being spoken to,” says Anderson. TruFan is “more about fans speaking to each other. Instead of the editor-in-chief dictating what headline should be, it’s more compelling because fans are contributing their own content.”

Anderson has spent much of the past few years at Fenway Park, and not just for recreation. Before becoming president and CEO of Brighton, MA-based TruMedia Networks, he spent six years as a consultant for the Fenway Sports Group, a sports marketing group that counts among its clients the Red Sox and NASCAR team Roush Fenway Racing, as well as Professional Bull Riders, Inc. In August of last year, he left to take charge of the TruFan platform, which until that time was a side project of North Adams, MA-based Boxcar Media.

TruFan’s business model, says Anderson, is “all about diversification.” The site does not currently sport any online advertising, which Anderson is leery of as a workable profit generator. Instead, TruFan intends to build its fortune with a multi-pronged approach. The site has entered into a partnership with AceTicket, which allows fans to purchase tickets from each other, and will soon be selling merchandise as well.

But the big-ticket moneymaker isn’t in tickets or even hats—it’s in licensing. TruFan has contracted with the Boston Globe’s website to bring its platform to the boston.com sports page. The result is Slugfests, where fans can spar virtually over burning questions like “what is the Red Sox’s biggest need?” or “Does Paul Pierce have heart?” Other fans referee the debate, voting to decide the victor. So now, instead of having to trek all the way to Cask ‘n Flagon to bellow at fellow Bostonians, you can argue the virtues of Varitek from the comfort of your screen.

“It’s great to be amongst friends that share your passion,” says Anderson. Going national while still retaining the local aspect is essential, he says, allowing fans to “be part of their community, but to also step outside the walls of their comfort zone.” Anderson knows a little something about that: “My best friend is a Yankees fan,” he admits.

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“Tweet, tweet,” chirped the robin outside my window yesterday. Given the Wall Street Journal’s report last month that 32.1 million people now have Twitter accounts, it seems like much of humanity is poised to join the robin and his avian cohorts in tweeting.

Not everyone who has a Twitter account is using it though, according to the second “State of the Twittersphere” report, published yesterday by Cambridge, MA-based HubSpot. The Internet marketing company looked at more than 4.5 million Twitter accounts over nine months and found that they are not as lively as might be expected, with more than nine percent of users owning inactive accounts and almost 55 percent never having tweeted at all. What’s more, about 53 percent of users have no followers (as if my red-breasted pal were singing in a sound-proof room).

Twitter has expanded at an astounding rate (see chart below), having had 1.6 million users just a year ago. But the HubSpot report reveals that much of that growth may be illusory. Even with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey gushing about Twitter and acquiring millions of followers, the report shows that more than 55 percent of users aren’t following them, or anyone else.
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“Like many new technologies, part of the challenge is helping users understand how they might use it and why it’s important,” said Dharmesh Shah, chief technology officer and founder of HubSpot in an e-mail interview. “It’s extremely simple in its execution, but leaves a lot up to the users to come with how they might use it.”

Just owning an account does not, it seems, a tweeter make. Those who actually use it do tweet an average of once a day. The problem, according to an informal survey I conducted of about 15 Twitter users, is that most people don’t do (or think) much of interest, so even if they constantly tweeted their lives, it wouldn’t attract more followers. There is also confusion over whether Twitter should be used for personal events the way Facebook usually is, or treated more professionally like LinkedIn or other professional social networks.

There is even the question of when to reply to tweets. My friends, and Shah, seemed to agree that Twitter is not the best system for talking with people. “Having actual conversations is actually pretty hard,” Shah said.

It may just be a matter of quality. If people write more interesting tweets, more people may follow them and be inclined to improve what they post themselves. Perhaps I’ll ask my feathered friend for some tips on how to tweet as well as he does.

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Gather, a Boston-headquartered social networking site aimed at users over 30, announced today that it has raised $5.3 million in equity financing. Major investors in the round include Allen & Company, American Public Media, Jim Manzi (former CEO of the Lotus Development Corporation), Jack Connors (former CEO of Hill Holiday), Kevin McClatchy, Andrew Tobias, and the Gerace family. They join previous investors Hearst, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and Southern California Public Radio. Gather also reported that bookings in the first quarter of 2009 were up 49 percent over the first quarter of 2008; the company expects to reach profitability in early 2010.

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