It’s common advice in the tech startup world that entrepreneurs should focus on developing solutions to problems that they’d like to see fixed, rather than look to innovating in more obscure areas. Needham, MA-based Grasshopper Group definitely follows this ethic.

The startup has a suite of technology answers to basic entrepreneurial business problems, such as choosing and installing phone systems, deciding on recurring payment methods, and now, how to do online marketing. Earlier this month, I was given a demo of the beta version of its newest product release, the Web marketing and analytics tool Spreadable.

“We developed what we think works for other people,” says Jonathan Kay, Grasshopper Group’s “ambassador of buzz” (the company’s title for marketing guy). He says there are plenty of tools out there for forwarding individual articles and posts to friends on the Web, but that spreading entire brands or non-editorial pages via your social network isn’t as seamless.

It’s a worthy point. As you can see from this page, all Xconomy stories have “share” sections where readers can pass the content along via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, but there’s plenty of real estate on our site that’s missing the sharing tool—like our national homepage, regional homepage, jobs sites, About page, and so on—because they aren’t themselves individual stories. Similarly, other sites without editorial content, like retailers, lack a sharing tool at the brand level, Kay says. “There are no tools out there that allow you to spread your brand; this saves a step,” he says.

Spreadable’s aim is to enable viewers to tell their friends about a website, brand, or product they like without ever leaving the page to open up, say, Twitter, to tweet a recommendation to their friends. The service comes both as a standalone referral page, and as a line of code that companies can use to embed a Spreadable sharing button and interface directly on their sites. The button automatically updates when companies make changes to its messages or appearance on their user dashboards, so marketers will be able to test different strategies for their Spreadable interfaces, Kay says.

Readers just click on the button, and out pops a menu with options for sharing the site with friends via e-mail and a number of social networking sites. (For an idea of how this works, check out the “refer an entrepreneur” button at the top of Grasshopper’s own page.)

Kay says the button could enable users to really spread buzz about a page or product they like, because they won’t get distracted with or deterred by having to open up a separate site and paste in a link. Users don’t even have to type in a message about whatever they’re looking to tell friends about. That’s because companies can … Next Page »

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Paul Allen has still got it. The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist announced today the launch of a new Seattle company, Xiant, and the public beta version of its software tools for organizing your e-mail inbox. Xiant (pronounced “Zi-ant,” which rhymes with “giant”) is being run in-house at Vulcan Technologies, the company that handles all of Allen’s tech work. Chris Purcell, the vice president of Vulcan Technologies, is in charge of the startup, which is apparently Allen’s first foray into consumer software since he left Microsoft back in 1983.

The Xiant software being released today (Xiant Filer) is a Microsoft Office Outlook add-on designed to make e-mail systems more efficient by learning your filing preferences, making filing recommendations automatically, and filing long threads of related e-mails all at once. Other software tools are currently under development. The startup currently has no outside employees or additional funding.

The project began as a personal project for Allen, who grew tired of manually filing huge volumes of e-mails in his Outlook inbox. According to Vulcan Technologies, it worked so well for Allen that the whole organization started using it.

Xiant will sell the software online only (“no sales force or packaged product”), according to Vulcan spokesman David Postman, and version 1.0 should be on sale in about 60 days. In the meantime, you can download the beta version for free at http://www.xiant.com.

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Seattle-based Evri has announced its beta site is open and ready for user feedback. Evri, which is backed by Vulcan Capital, wants to make the Web better for browsing by understanding connections between people, products, places, and things—and providing pages and widgets to recommend relevant content.

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