Well, this does nothing to change the downward trend of early-stage software financings, but it’s good news nonetheless. Seattle-based Redfin, the online real estate broker and information discovery service, has announced a $10 million Series D funding, led by new investor Greylock Partners, the Silicon Valley venture firm formerly based in the Boston area. Existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital, and The Hillman Company also participated in the round, which brings Redfin’s total funding to $30.8 million.

Redfin says it will use the cash “to scale its infrastructure for delivering extremely high levels of customer service, to expand into new markets and to invest in research and development.”

By most accounts, the company has had a very strong year, even as the real estate market has contracted and valuations have fallen. Redfin has generated its first profits, shipped what it says is the highest-rated iPhone app for real estate, and increased its website visits by more than 200 percent.

Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s CEO, talked about the significance of the new funding, and hinted at a goal of taking the company public. “Greylock’s experience developing some of the Internet’s most recognized consumer brands as well as its appetite for building large-scale public companies are a perfect fit for our ambitions,” Kelman said in a statement. “We believe that our ability to invest in technology and our consumer-first commitment give us a shot at reinventing a very fragmented, sales-driven real estate industry.”

Redfin was founded in 2002 and serves home buyers and sellers with real-estate listings, maps, analytics, tax records, and other information. Besides Seattle, it has operations in California, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington DC, and other metro areas. Redfin recently rolled out a new version of its website, which includes near-real-time data and photos of recent home sales, as well as links to blog discussions of listings, all on a national scale.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It took about a year and a half before I could even begin to understand the I Can Has Cheezburger (or “LOLcats”) phenomenon online. The mundane yet bizarre cat pictures. The misspelled captions. The curious Internet-slang grammar. They were kind of funny, but mostly they were weird—and, at times, even a little annoying.

Yet millions of people flocked to these Web pages, submitting their own photos and captions and commenting on others. The Cheezburger Network, as the company behind it is now called (formerly Pet Holdings), has become a runaway success—an Internet sensation that has spawned a total of 26 humor sites, including FAIL Blog, GraphJam, Engrish Funny, and Emails From Crazy People. The original Cheezburger site hit 1 billion page views (10 billion cat images) earlier this month. And during the first half of 2009, the company raked in seven figures’ worth of revenue from advertising, licensing fees, and sales of merchandise, according to Time magazine.

So what’s its big secret? Why has the Cheezburger Network succeeded where so many other humor sites and blogs continue to toil in obscurity? It took me a while to realize it’s not about luck, or marketing, or the power of certain kinds of humor. There’s some good timing involved, sure, but mostly it’s about the drive and mentality of the company’s leader, Ben Huh.

Huh is often portrayed in the media as a jokester. Photos in articles show him wearing a funny hat or mask, surrounded by stuffed animals, or posing with a cheeseburger. That image is pretty far from the reality, as I understand from reading more about Huh and interviewing him recently. In a Q&A with Advertising Age earlier this week, for instance, Huh emphasized, “I am a business person.” And he shed some very interesting light on his approach to business: “We’ve gotten into situations where we’ve tried to acquire a blog for large sums of money, and they turned us down, and we’ve gone on to compete and we’ve won,” he said. “My final offer is, ‘If you do not do this, we will start a competitive blog, and we will not stop until we win.’”

Clearly, Huh has the killer instinct. He is deeply competitive, but not in an over-the-top way. He could turn out to be the Michael Jordan of consumer Internet startups, though we probably shouldn’t put him in the Hall of Fame just yet. Still, as a promising entrepreneur in his early 30s with a pretty big success already under his belt, his story—and his company’s strategy—is worth a closer look.

Huh first arrived in the Northwest in 2005 to work for Intava, an interactive media startup in Bellevue, WA. Before that, he had graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism during the dot-com bubble. “They were handing out bonuses to college grads because we’d used the Internet once,” he jokes. Huh worked for a number of startups in the Chicago area, including his own Web analytics firm. “I made all the mistakes they say you’ll make,” he says. “I raised too little money, and spent all my time fundraising and not making a product for the market.”

By the time he landed in Seattle, Huh had made it a priority to always work for a company’s CEO, or at least have a dotted-line connection to them, in any job he took. “That was going to teach me more about running a company,” he says. “This is for my career, not for [any particular] job.” Huh had also learned from his previous startups to have a “huge focus on staying profitable.”

In 2007, he came across the I Can Has Cheezburger site, which had been started by a …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It’s one of the great mysteries of the modern Internet. How can Web publishers make more money from their content? For everything from blogs and journalism to games and entertainment, publishers and software companies alike have been trying to solve this problem for many years.

Now BigDoor Media, a six-person startup in Bellevue, WA, thinks it has found the right approach, at least for a certain market. Its basic idea is to provide a revenue stream for entertainment publishers that bridges the gap between traditional advertising and subscription models. BigDoor, which is emerging from stealth mode today with a beta version of its software, provides an “offer platform” that acts as a gateway to a website’s premium content. Instead of paying for a game by credit card, say, a consumer can opt to fill out a survey, sign up for a newsletter, or buy an advertiser’s product (like Fiji Water, for instance).

This is not an entirely new idea. And in fact, BigDoor operates in a similar space as many other Seattle-area startups we’ve reported on, including AppBank (for social entertainment applications), DevHub (for creating and hosting websites), Mpire (for online-ad optimization), Wetpaint (for social publishing), and Others Online (for behavioral profiling of audiences), which was acquired this summer by the Rubicon Project. These companies have different customers and revenue models, but they are all fundamentally trying to help Web publishers make more money from their content.

What seems to set BigDoor apart is the experience of its founders. Keith Smith and Jeff Malek spent about 10 years in the online advertising world with Bellevue-based Zango, the controversial “adware” company that closed down earlier this year. Smith was CEO and co-founder of Zango, while Malek was vice president of engineering and products. Zango had success but eventually ran into problems, in part because adware in general—software that tracks which sites you visit and delivers targeted ads—became widely reviled by people who felt it violated their privacy or was just plain annoying.

The key is that Smith and Malek seem to have learned from their mistakes as well as …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Call it the iPhone “2G.” Two Seattle-area startups that start with the letter “G” are rolling out new iPhone apps today. OK, this would not normally make significant news for us, because new apps appear on a daily basis, but each of these cases provides an interesting update to the company’s mobile strategy, so here we go:

—Glympse has been on a tear since May, when co-founder and CEO Bryan Trussel said the Seattle-area company first started offering its location-sharing service on mobile phones. The idea of the software is that your friends and business contacts can get an immediate “glympse” of where you are on a map, automatically, for a certain amount of time that you set. Today’s announcement that Glympse is available as a free download on the iPhone is no surprise. Last week, the startup’s service was named a showcase application in Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and the company has been working on its iPhone app for some time. It’s all part of Glympse’s strategy to build a mass-consumer audience based on a free service, before working up to paid models and location-based ads.

—Gist has also been picking up steam, in a very different market. The Seattle-based company, led by founder and CEO T.A. McCann, focuses on giving consumers and business customers information about their e-mail and social-network contacts in a quick and easy way. The goal is to help people manage their relationships more efficiently, for example, by feeding them updates from all over the Web about their contacts. Gist opened up to the public last month, and McCann told me then that the company had done some optimization for the iPhone and was more broadly improving its mobile version. The new iPhone app, which is free, makes sense for busy professionals who want to scan the latest info on whoever they’re meeting next, from blogs, articles, and social media, right before their appointment. It also fits into Gist’s strategy for bridging e-mail, search, and social media in order to help people manage all that information.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Online reputation management is hot these days. Today, Seattle-based Marchex, the online advertising and search company, is announcing a new thrust in its strategy for connecting local consumers with restaurants, florists, and other businesses. The firm is releasing software that helps small, local businesses monitor and understand what people are saying about them and their competitors—and make sure information about the businesses online is accurate.

Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) says the product is the first of its kind, but the news fits into a broader trend of Seattle-area companies offering reputation management and “Web sentiment” software. The idea is to sell software tools that automatically collect what people are saying about brands and products in blogs, articles, and social media like Twitter, and then summarize the positive and negative feedback so businesses can quickly respond to customers. Visible Technologies, Appature, and Evri are some of the other Seattle companies working in the space.

“This is a really important product if you think of the next generation of performance advertising,” says Peter Christothoulou, the chief operating officer and a founding executive of Marchex. “It’s about not just acquiring new partners, but communicating with them.” Christothoulou adds that the new effort acts like the “front of the funnel” in Marchex’s strategy for helping businesses find new customers and maintain relationships with them.

While other offerings provide insights into how a company name or brand is represented online, Marchex is focusing specifically on the local aspect of small businesses, says Matthew Berk, the company’s executive vice president of product engineering. In addition to monitoring the sentiment of local customers, that means making sure a restaurant’s phone number and address are listed correctly in various places online, and that the special features of a Petco store in one neighborhood, say, are differentiated from those of other Petco stores at different locations.

But connecting these local stores with feedback from social media and other sources is the main advance here. “Businesses know things are being said about them online,” adds Ryan Fritzky, a senior product manager at Marchex. “It’s an important first step to provide them with a service where intelligence is brought to them in one place.”

Marchex isn’t selling the product directly to small businesses. Rather, it is going through its big partners like AT&T, Comcast, the Cobalt Group, and Yellowbook.com, who will in turn resell the software to local businesses for a monthly fee.

Strategically, it sounds like reputation management could be an important new revenue stream for Marchex, which reported a 44 percent drop in revenues in the second quarter of this year ($21.1 million) compared to the same period in 2008 ($37.4 million). “This is the first of many forward-looking products we’re delivering to the [small and medium-size business] channel. It can be significant for us over time,” Christothoulou says.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Every time I look at Gist, it’s a little different. Given it’s a scrappy startup trying to navigate the worlds of e-mail, social networking, business software, and Web search—each a huge market opportunity, each hugely competitive—this is probably a good thing.

The Seattle company, backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Colorado-based Foundry Group, is announcing today that its software, which has been in private beta trials for the past year, is now available to the general public. Gist bills itself as an online service that helps people manage their personal and professional relationships more efficiently.

The basic idea is to provide a Web dashboard that finds your contacts from your e-mail inbox and social networks (Outlook, Gmail, Twitter, Salesforce.com), and keeps you up to date about these contacts—even ranking their importance—through online information from blogs, articles, tweets, and updates on Facebook and LinkedIn. So, before your next business meeting, instead of having to Google around or search on Twitter to get up to speed on notable developments, Gist will surface any recent activity involving your contact, says Gist founder and CEO T.A. McCann.

It’s an ambitious product. Since the company’s $6.75 million Series A funding round from Vulcan and Foundry Group was announced in May, Gist has buckled down and focused on listening to customers (about 10,000 and counting) and improving its software and interface. It also moved into new office space near Qwest Field.

Among the new wrinkles in the software: Gist can filter information based on which people you’re meeting with this week, or which people you’ve exchanged new e-mail with; the software can also hook into customer relationship management through your Salesforce.com contacts; you can invite other people to try Gist, so there’s a viral component to the product distribution.

“There are probably a whole bunch of users who can get a lot out of Gist,” McCann says. “We think Gist is something people will want to talk about and share with other professionals.”

For now, the software is free, and will remain so for the rest of the year. But come early next …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Coming out of the long weekend, with summer vacations over, I can feel the pace of entrepreneurial action quicken. With a lot of people out of town or chillin’ the past few weeks, I thought it might be a good time to highlight some interesting recent blog posts you might have missed from various local entrepreneurs, venture investors, and others.

The topics range from what you shouldn’t do as a startup to what you should do, what it takes to commercialize products, and the best Boston CEOs to follow on Twitter. Let’s start there.

25 Boston Area CEOs to Follow on Twitter—93 South

David Laubner, who writes the 93 South blog, has tracked down (or started following, I guess) some interesting CEO tweeters, from folks you have likely heard of, like Robin Chase (co-founder of Zip Car) and Jeremy Allaire, and those you likely haven’t. One in this category for me is former Yahoo exec Jack Barette, aka healthyjack, CEO of WEGO Health. His motto: “I believe health is social media’s higher calling.” I think that means riding the exercise bike and tweeting at the same time. I can do that.

Thoughts About My VC Life, Four Years Later—Bijan Sabet

In this entry from September 3, the general partner at Spark Capital talks about the founding of Spark and offers 11 observations, including his venture blogger influences: Fred Wilson, David Hornik, and Brad Feld.

Proving Cleantech Investing Works—Rob Day

Day riffs on the challenges of cleantech investing and what a cleantech startup has to do to prove its technology to potential project investors. The post includes a nice wrapup of recent cleantech investments.

8 Free Online Entrepreneurial Finance Classes from MIT—College Mogul

Our friends at College Mogul are always on the lookout for good deals in education. As they note: “If you don’t have much experience managing the finances of a small business, these free courses from big name colleges like MIT can be just what you need to learn about everything from the basics of accounting to more complex economic theory…”

VCs With Fresh Money to Invest—Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing

Microsoft blogger extraordinaire Don Dodge puts forth a pretty good list of …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Heading into the holiday weekend, I wanted to highlight a few interesting recent blog posts from around town. They cut across the topics of venture capital, IPOs, and small business owners.

—OVP Venture Partners, based in Kirkland, WA, has a new blog as of this summer. In a recent post, managing director Gerry Langeler talks about what goes on in the room after entrepreneurs make a pitch at a partner meeting. One of the most tragic things the VCs can say is, “Right team, wrong idea.” Langeler’s advice: “If you have pulled together that once-in-a-lifetime team, please work hard to make sure the business you are chasing is worthy of the talent.”

—Christian Chabot of Seattle’s Tableau Software wrote a post this week entitled “Yesterday’s Most Successful Companies Wouldn’t IPO Today.” That pretty much says it all, but Chabot backs it up with data from a large sample of technology companies. He argues that today’s minimum standard for taking a tech company public—roughly, profitability and $100 million in annual sales—means (if applied to previous cases, adjusted for inflation) today’s most successful public companies wouldn’t have been able to do an IPO in their first 10 years. Chabot’s says his analysis points to “grim tidings for early stage venture capital.”

—Hillel Cooperman of Seattle’s Jackson Fish Market ran a great Web comic from XKCD poking fun at adult responsibilities (”I don’t know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman”). Cooperman has also been posting videos of talks from the Small and Special conference from earlier this summer—inspirational stories from people running small, financially successful businesses. The most recent video is of Nisha Kelen from Fleurish, a Seattle-based floral design shop.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Although Microsoft made the official announcement about its new search engine Bing last week, the site won’t be fully functional until this Wednesday.  Here are some tidbits about Bing collected from the Web to tide you over until then.

—In his early test drive of Bing, The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley concluded that the upstart search engine won’t replace Google.  However, he did say that the video searching and travel price prediction capabilities will give the big G a run for its money.

—On a more historical note, CNET’s Ina Fried wrote the story of the development of Bing, why search matters, and why one of the major developers built a boat in China.  Nautical pursuits aside, the most important nugget of information may be that Bing is meant to continue to develop and grow—by adding more information to the search results, for instance—after Wednesday.

—Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head of online services (who came over from Yahoo in January), gave a rare interview to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek that conveyed a similar idea.  He described Bing as just a small part of a long journey.  Lu also said he expects other competitors to arise, which will ultimately benefit end-users of search technologies.

My favorite bit of Bing-ology?  Typing “Bing” into Google brings up “Bing Surfboards” directly below the listing for the new search engine.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Every deal has a back story you can learn from. In the case of Gist—the Seattle software startup that announced yesterday it raised $6.75 million in Series A funding from Foundry Group and Vulcan Capital—the key connection came about because of a timely combination of blogs and social networks. Which is fitting because Gist is all about managing those kinds of information streams, which we’re all increasingly being bombarded with, so as to help people build better business relationships.

Gist released its product in beta trials last September. It’s basically a way to put all your information about your business contacts—e-mails, blogs, tweets, articles in the media, and so forth—in one place, with an efficient, user-friendly dashboard interface. Founder T.A. McCann says his target customers fall into three camps: executives and salespeople who spend a lot of time building relationships; “super networkers” who need to keep track of many different contacts; and the “Twitterati” who are the earliest adopters of social software.

An investor like Brad Feld of Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group fits in all three categories. Last fall, managing director Chris Wand from Foundry reached out to Gist about its product and set up a call with McCann. “Our plan was to put our product out there, get feedback, and raise money in the early part of [2009]. Foundry cares a lot about the ‘Implicit Web,’” McCann says, referring to websites and services that aggregate and synthesize personal information from the Internet. “They blog about a lot of their themes. These guys are switched on, they’ve thought about it.”

In November, the Defrag 2008 conference took McCann to Denver. “I went on Twitter and read more about Foundry,” says McCann. “I found out Brad’s a big runner. I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to Denver, I like running, can you recommend a place to run?’” Feld suggested they meet up at the hotel for a run. They put out a general invite on Twitter, but they were the only ones who showed up. Over the next couple of days, McCann and Feld spent three hours running together on local trails, shooting the breeze about running, Gist, Foundry Group, and other topics. “That only happened because Brad published that he likes to run. And because of Twitter,” McCann says. “That afternoon, we showed [Gist] to Foundry. He and the other guys started using it.”

By January, McCann was well into the fundraising process. (Vulcan Capital previously had seeded Gist.) “I was raising money, and I’d use Gist all the time,” he says, adding that the software allowed him to prepare for meetings quickly, keep track of what info he’d sent to whom, and generally be better informed about each person he met. McCann talked with many venture firms around Seattle and elsewhere.

But one thing in particular stood out about Feld and the Foundry team: they really …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s an acquisition that is truly surprising to no one, but now it’s official: Seattle-based Urbanspoon, the online restaurant guide, has been bought by New York-based IAC (NASDAQ GS: IACI) for an undisclosed amount. Urbanspoon will stay an independent brand based in Seattle, and will report to Jay Herratti, who heads up some of IAC’s most prominent Internet brands like Citysearch, InsiderPages, and Evite. IAC has a market cap of $2.4 billion and owns dozens of popular sites, so its resources should come in handy. The deal closed on February 13, but was kept tightly under wraps.

Urbanspoon co-founder Ethan Lowry says it’s been “awkward dancing around that” for the past two months, especially when he has been approached by investors. He emphasizes that the most interesting aspect of the deal is “we can take advantage of the enormous traffic that comes to other IAC sites. They have huge followings. Our little product brains are spinning.” When asked whether that means branching out beyond restaurants, Lowry says, “We’re definitely looking at ways we can tackle tangential stuff. I think Urbanspoon should stay a restaurant brand, but there may be other ways to tie that in.”

Lowry said in a statement that he’s excited to be part of the IAC family, and that the acquisition enables Urbanspoon to “expand our reach and develop new products while maintaining our brand identity.”

That has always been important to the scrappy three-man startup, which was founded in 2006 by ex-Jobsters and has been completely self-funded from its inception. It has been profitable since its early days, even before it gained worldwide attention with its slick iPhone application. In December, I sat down with Lowry to talk about Urbanspoon’s expansion to every city in the U.S., in part through a partnership with Citysearch—which is apparently how IAC got to know the startup, and which led to the acquisition talks.

PaidContent.org speculates that the IAC purchase price was in the low double-digit millions, while others guess it’s a little lower. TechFlash reports some more comments from Lowry this morning, including that IAC was interested “50-50″ in Urbanspoon’s iPhone app (which gets more than a million “shakes” a day) and its website (which gets 3 million-plus visitors a month).

In terms of the immediate future, Lowry says, “We have no plans to double the size of the company [from three to six] or anything ‘crazy’ like that. It’s largely unchanged. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, I like that they’re giving us a lot of autonomy.” As for recent developments, he points out that Urbanspoon now works with Facebook Connect, which is driving a lot of traffic. “Now you can do everything you want to do on Urbanspoon through your Facebook account,” he says. “If you leave a review or take a picture, those get automatically posted on your Facebook feed.” So if you have friends on Urbanspoon and you try a new restaurant, you can see right at the top of the page what your friends think of the place.

Speaking of new restaurants, Lowry says he recently tried an Italian joint called Cantinetta, which opened in Wallingford in January. “One of the best little halibut dinners I’ve ever had,” he says.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Randy Drawas, chief marketing officer at Moscow, Russia-based antivirus company Kaspersky Lab, shared some disturbing statistics with me earlier this week. In 2007, he said, Kaspersky’s researchers detected as much malicious software activity on the Internet as they had in the previous 11 years combined. In 2008, malware volume doubled yet again. And in 2009, the company estimates, more than 30 million unique malware programs will be found in circulation on the Internet, many of them targeting consumers.

In an effort to help Internet users learn about these threats and protect themselves, Kaspersky this month launched a security news site called Threatpost. Based out of Kaspersky’s US headquarters in Woburn, MA, and edited by journalists, the site is designed to provide objective news, analysis, and education about issues like worms and viruses, software vulnerabilities and patches, and spam and botnets.

Kaspersky will be the site’s sole sponsor and advertiser. While Drawas says the Threatpost’s editors won’t overtly hawk Kaspersky products as solutions to readers’ malware headaches, the site “provides us with unique marketing opportunities just the same.”

To lead Threatpost’s editorial operation, Kaspersky has hired two veteran technology journalists: Ryan Naraine and Dennis Fisher. Naraine is a former editor-at-large for security at enterprise technology weekly eWeek who also blogs about security for ZDNet; Fisher is the former executive editor of the Security Media Group at Needham, MA-based TechTarget and former news editor at eWeek.

Naraine and Fisher launched the site on March 9 to coincide with the SOURCE Boston security conference. The plan, according to Naraine, is to write roughly four original news stories every weekday and to link to six or seven security-related news stories published elsewhere on the Web. In that sense, the site is a conscious imitation of the Huffington Post and other outlets that consist in large part of information culled from other sites. “It’s mostly an aggregation model,” says Naraine. “We really believe in this send-them-away mode—because if we do it right, tomorrow they will come back and see what else we have.”

Personal blogs by both Naraine and Fisher, weekly podcasts, slide shows, guest editorials, and a “watchlist” of security-themed video clips are also part of the Threatpost recipe.

When I spoke with Naraine earlier this week, I was naturally curious about how he plans to maintain the site’s editorial independence, in light of the fact that his employer is in the security business. “Dennis and I are under no illusions about this tightrope we’re walking, being employees of Kaspersky and writing about security,” Naraine said. “Maintaining independence is absolutely critical if this thing is to work. Our big thing was having a full understanding with the company that they have to be hands-off. But what we also understand is that this is a Kaspersky project. They are investing heavily. So obviously, you are not going to see product news from Symantec or McAfee featured strongly—but neither are you going to see overt pimping of Kaspersky products.”

I was also curious about what balance Naraine wants to strike between “educational” content explaining security threats to readers and community discussion and other more collegial or peer-to-peer forms of communication. “Security is a different animal” from other forms of technology journalism, he responded. Most readers “are not looking for a deep journalistic piece about a business model. They come in looking to be educated—’How do I find this patch, how do I disinfect my machine, what is a botnet, what should I be doing to keep my machine immune from falling into these types of attacks?’ Every time a reader comes to a story they must find some sort of information that helps them protect themselves.”

Drawas says Kaspersky will measure the success of Threatpost not simply by its traffic levels or whether it leads to increased sales of Kaspersky’s software, but by by the strength of the community it builds: “How many people join, how many people subscribe to our newsletter or our alerts….This is also an opportunity for [Kaspersky's business partners] to promote what they are doing and provide them with an outlet if they feel that they have something meaningful to share.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

A week ago, I reported on Portland, OR-based Jive Software’s latest product, a business software package designed to let employees communicate and collaborate more effectively using social networking tools. Jive competes with the likes of big companies such as IBM and Microsoft, who want to own the business communication space and have been adding social-network features to their own software offerings. But it also competes with a slew of smaller companies all trying to get a piece of the social-networking-for- business pie.

One of these smaller competitors is Telligent, which was founded by Rob Howard, an ex-Microsoftie. Howard, who is Telligent’s chief executive, started the company in his hometown of Dallas, TX, in 2004. Previously, he had spent six years at Microsoft, living in the Seattle area and moving between a developer relations group and the .NET software team, doing both marketing and product development. He helped launch one of Microsoft’s first community websites, and a blogging platform.

Howard originally bootstrapped Telligent with about $5,000, then grew it into a profitable business. Last September, Intel Capital invested $20 million in the company. Telligent now has just over a hundred employees, including half a dozen former Microsofties (mainly from Redmond, WA), Howard says. Telligent’s big customers include the Associated Press, Dell, Electronic Arts, Honda, Intel, MSNBC, MySpace.com, Visa, the National Football League, and yes, Microsoft.

The idea behind Telligent was to use social tools like wikis and blogs to build a suite of software applications for business collaboration. Over the past few years, the company has focused most on business analytics. “Our software helps companies get much more crisp about how to talk to their customers,” Howard says. “What we uniquely do is the analytics. It’s great you can capture all this information, but what’s difficult is to make informed decisions about it.” For instance, he says, Telligent’s software can scour blogs, forums, MSNBC, Twitter—you name it—and pull out what a company’s customers are really saying about a new product in a way that’s totally different from a user survey.

Telligent’s other focus is employee productivity. For example, its software helps workers at big companies like Proctor & Gamble take their e-mail inboxes and distribution lists and make their content “searchable, discoverable, and reusable” in a Web-based discussion format, Howard says. That can help employees quickly find the right experts within the company on a given issue, among other uses.

As for how Telligent competes specifically with Jive’s social business software, Howard emphasizes that his firm’s “investment in analytics is the biggest differentiator.” He also sees a difference in how the two companies’ products interact with the outside world. Howard says, “Our view of the world is one that requires integration. We have to integrate with existing platforms. Jive says, ‘We are the platform.’ We [Telligent] are part of the system…Maybe it’s my Microsoft background, but integration is usually of more value to the business than stand-alone capabilities.”

Another difference is that Telligent partners with Microsoft and counts the Redmond company as a customer, instead of competing directly with its social computing offerings (for now anyway). It’s a delicate relationship that Howard probably understands how to navigate better than most, given his experience.

Even if Telligent isn’t lining up against Microsoft, though, Howard says he has plenty of “great competitors” in Jive and other social computing startups like Emeryville, CA-based Lithium.

So where is this competition headed? Look for the next version of Telligent’s software to hit the market in the next few months. One focus will be on measuring true customer engagement, rather than things like raw pageviews for a given site, Howard says. On a more personal note, Howard says he’s looking forward to spring, and may return to the Northwest to do a little fly fishing. Apparently you can take the Microsoftie out of Seattle, but you can’t take Seattle out of the Microsoftie.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Bellevue, WA-based Complaints.com announced today it has received angel funding from Seattle-area investor Rob Monster, who has joined the company as chairman. The amount of investment was not disclosed. Complaints.com was founded in 1998 and lets companies track, manage, and respond to complaints listed against them on websites, forums, blogs, and social networks.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Entrepreneur resource site Seattle 2.0 has announced it is hosting a startup awards ceremony on May 7 at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. Nominations are open from now until March 25 in 10 categories including best startup, best venture capitalist, best angel investor, and best startup technologist. Finalists will be selected by a panel of judges, and winners will be determined by community voting, said Seattle 2.0 creator Marcelo Calbucci.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

If you feel it’s time to share something online but can’t think of anything to say, it might be a sign that you’re dull. If you try too hard to craft a bon mot for your blog or some table talk for your Twitter stream, in other words, you might just be inflicting your insipidness on the rest of us.

Or it could mean that you just need a little inspiration.

The folks at Lafayette, CA-based Plinky, a Web startup led by ex-Googler Jason Shellen, have chosen the latter, more charitable interpretation. On January 22, they went public with an online “content encouragement” service designed to supply the dusty nuclei for little snowflakes of confession, insight, or humor.

Every day, Plinky supplies a “prompt”—a provocative question or challenge—and then helps users craft multimedia-enhanced answers that are posted both on the Plinky site and on the social-media services of the user’s choosing. (Currently, Plinky can send posts to Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad, WordPress, and Xanga.) The prompt for February 16, for example, was “Name a book that changed your mind or opened your eyes.” The question elicited as many different answers as there were answerers, from Naked Lunch, the 1959 novel by William S. Burroughs, to Harold and the Purple Crayon, the classic children’s book by Crockett Johnson; Plinky illustrated the answers with a picture of each book’s cover, grabbed from Amazon.com.

Other prompts lead to answers that might contain Google maps, Flickr photos, or Amazon CD covers. The service is designed, in other words, to take advantage of the Web 2.0-style open interfaces that allow data such as product thumbnails to be shared and repackaged across many sites. It also encourages conversation, by allowing people to subscribe to and comment upon other users’ answers—the same way they might on Facebook or Twitter, but with a prefabricated topic. “People want to connect through content,” Shellen told me by phone last week. (Our full interview appears below.)

Shellen was famous even before he joined Google for being part of the team at San Francisco-based Pyra Labs that built Blogger, the first popular blogging platform. (Another Pyra/Google alum, Evan Williams, went on to co-found Twitter.) So it’s no surprise that Shellen’s seven-employee startup has pulled in seed money from big-name investors like Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners. In fact, Polaris general partner Sim Simeonov, who first tipped me off about Plinky, is the company’s interim chief technology officer.

Shellen says the company will go after more venture money soon. And it’s safe to say that the Plinky you see right now will evolve over time. For one thing, the company hasn’t rolled out any services, beyond the occasional advertisement, that it can actually charge money for. And Shellen says users are already clamoring for more frequent and more varied prompts—it wouldn’t be too hard to generate prompts  just for sports fans or political junkies, for example.

I’ve been playing around with Plinky for a few days; you can see my collected answers here and at my personal blog. I’m not one of those people has a shortage of things to say, so I’m probably not at the center of Plinky’s targeted user base. But even so, I find the tool far more inviting than Twitter or Facebook, and I’m sure it’s already becoming a hotspot for many interesting online conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise. As Shellen and his developers find more ways to integrate Plinky with existing publishing platforms, it will doubtless become even more useful. Personally, I think I would be more likely to use Plinky regularly if I could view and answer each day’s Plinky prompt directly from my Tumblr or Wordpress dashboard, from my desktop Twitter client (Twhirl), or from an app on my iPhone.

Some of those capabilities may be on the way—but to hear Shellen tell it, the company is even more excited about finding ways to mine the information that users share over Plinky. As the user base grows, the answers could coalesce into a vast, ongoing consumer survey that supplements review sites like Yelp or Angie’s List. Looking for a good place to meet an old friend for a drink? Just check out the answers to yesterday’s prompt.

Here’s the (edited) text of my interview with Shellen.

Wade Roush: How did the idea for Plinky come about?

Jason Shellen: When I left Google I had a bunch of ideas percolating. Initially I thought I was going to take the approach of something like IdeaLab—raise a little money and get an incubator going, since the amount of money needed to start a company these days is so much smaller. But as is usual with these things, one idea captivated me. It was this idea that you could encourage people to create content in a more directed fashion—that you could end up with a win-win where the content looks better, is easier to create, is a little bit more inspired, and that potentially there would be a business model.

I was on the Blogger team before we sold the company to Google, in a business development and product strategy role. We really struggled with how to make the tool understandable to people, because at the time people didn’t even know what blogging was. Once we had the resources at Google to explain really well what blogging was, people started signing up in droves. But many of them were no longer blogging—they were doing something else like sharing stories, posting photographs. They weren’t blogging for blogging’s sake—they had very directed activities in mind. But there were still enough people signing up every day and then facing this big white text box and realizing they didn’t know what they were going to write. That really got me thinking.

You can look at any of the blogging or social networking services and they’ll tell you that the abandon rate is pretty high. You need some reason to contribute. I really felt like the tools needed some attention again. Blogging software is great, but maybe there can be something that other services can add as a layer, making use of all the great APIs [application programming interfaces] out there—not trying to start another Blogger or Wordpress. But we do see that with things like Tumblr and Twitter and a lot of Facebook applications, people do want to connect through content, and they want to be inspired and challenged in new and different ways.

WR: So how would you describe what Plinky does, at its core?

JS: The core of it is the prompts—that spark that drives you to create. But just as important is the fact that you’re not confronted with a big white text area. For instance, today’s prompt is “Share the longest road trip you’ve ever taken.” Now, the standalone prompt idea has been tried before. Six Apart has a question of the day, for example. But we decided to take a novel approach and …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Boston-based Carbonite, whose online backup service is the main competitor for Decho’s Mozy, has gotten some good publicity over the last few months for its tongue-in-cheek promotions on Jimmy Kimmel Live and other TV and radio programs. But the company is taking a public relations hit this week over a recently uncovered case of reviews planted on Amazon by Carbonite employees who didn’t identify themselves as such. The reviews were published three years ago—and it’s just one of many cases of people trying to game Amazon’s customer reviews—but they’ve attracted widespread publicity this week thanks to a blogger whose criticisms of Carbonite were highlighted Tuesday by New York Times technology reporter and columnist David Pogue.

I called Carbonite CEO David Friend yesterday to get his company’s side of the story. He didn’t try to spin or shift blame for the episode: He says it was “totally wrong” for Carbonite staffers Swami Kumaresan and Jonathan Freidin to post positive reviews of Carbonite’s service on Amazon without making it clear that they were Carbonite employees.

“We apologize for it,” says Friend, who also wrote to Pogue after Tuesday’s post, apologizing to Amazon visitors who may have been misled by the reviews. “We pulled the things down the day we found out about them,” he says.

The Amazon case was an isolated incident, Friend says. “Some people are alleging that this is a pattern of behavior,” Friend says. “It isn’t. It was just one thing that happened back when Carbonite had eight employees and there were a bunch of young guys who didn’t know any better…This was just two overenthusiastic employees who decided to post these things on their own. To be honest they thought it was cool.”

Since January of 2007, he says, Carbonite has had a policy requiring anyone affiliated with the company to disclose that relationship whenever they contribute to blogs or review sites. He says there will be no disciplinary action against Kumaresan or Freidin, since they published the reviews before the policy was put in place. “I’m not going to punish somebody for something they did three years ago,” he says. “Everyone has been well aware of the policy since it was put in place. Had anyone violated the policy since 2007, they would have been in trouble, but there have been no infractions since then.”

But while Friend is apologetic, he’s also a bit miffed about Carbonite’s treatment in the blogosphere over the past couple of days.

The controversy got rolling on Sunday when a blogger and former Carbonite customer using the pseudonym “Bruce Goldensteinberg” published a long post describing his frustrations obtaining technical support from the company. Goldensteinberg wrote that in early 2008, after experiencing a computer crash and then running into problems restoring his data from Carbonite’s backup version, he spent “literally hours on the phone” with customer service representatives and a member of Carbonite’s sales department. (He had opted not to pay Carbonite’s $19.95 fee for priority support—i.e., immediate access to telephone representatives.) Eventually, he was able to restore some of his data, and “after much complaining” he was offered a refund worth a year’s subscription, which he accepted.

In a search later to see whether other people had experienced similar frustrations, Goldensteinberg writes, he found the Amazon reviews by Kumaresan and Freidin. He became suspicious about the sources of the reviews, and discovered through more searches that both men work at Carbonite. The remainder of his post details his detective work and criticizes Carbonite’s actions as “dishonorable,” “unscrupulous,” and “brazen.”

Quite apart from the matter of the Amazon reviews—the impropriety of which Friend does not dispute—I wanted to know whether Friend thought Goldensteinberg had a legitimate beef with Carbonite’s custom service department.

He did not think so. “It says right on our website that we do not provide free telephone support,” Friend says. “If you want to talk to Carbonite for free, you can use text chat or e-mail. This guy called up and was told that the premium telephone service is $20—which is a lot cheaper than [telephone service at] Dell or Microsoft.” The conversation between Goldensteinberg and Carbonite’s representatives became heated, Friend says. “We finally ended up giving him an hour of help. And there was nothing wrong with Carbonite—all of the things were his issues. He has just never gotten over that.”

I e-mailed Goldensteinberg Wednesday afternoon asking for a response to Friend’s comment. Goldensteinberg wrote back: “Was the customer service experience with Carbonite great? Not at all. It was terrible. But I wouldn’t have gone to David Pogue, and he surely wouldn’t have written about this issue if the only thing I had to write about was bad customer service. Honestly, I only included the part in my review about the lousy customer service as a background to how I discovered the fake reviews on Amazon. Any attempt to divert attention from the main issue here…is a red herring.”

Indeed, the whole matter might have ended with Goldensteinberg’s post, if the blogger hadn’t contacted Pogue. The famed columnist wrote in his own blog “Pogue’s Posts” on Tuesday that …Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

Smith Energy, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of wind, solar, and energy storage projects, today launched a news and opinion blog called Build Baby Build. The blog is focused mainly on helping community members organize distributed generation projects such as wind farms. “Time and time again, important renewable energy projects fail because of a small but well-organized opposition,” the blog’s co-editor, Jeff Rosenberg, said in a statement. “It’s a lot harder to organize in support of something than it is to organize against it, but that’s just what we need to do.”

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN), which develops security software for corporate computer networks and other organizations, says it has acquired Defensio, a spam filtering Web service created by two Canadians.

Defensio was founded outside of Montreal, QC, to address the vexing and time-consuming problem of managing spam in the comment areas of blogs and social networking sites. Defensio founder Carl Mercier has joined Websense as director of software development, although he does not plan to move from Canada to sunny San Diego, Websense spokesperson Cas Purdy told me. Purdy describes Mercier as a well-known developer in the Web 2.0 community.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Purdy, who did not identify the second Canadian software developer, says the acquisition closed last month. Websense apparently waited to announce the deal on the same day the company issued its fourth-quarter and year-end financial results. The company is growing fast; fourth-quarter sales of $79.3 million were up 30 percent over the same quarter in 2007, an impressive showing during a harrowing economic period. But Websense still posted an $11.9 million loss for the quarter.

Websense says it already has integrated Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, which will enable third-party Web 2.0 developers to access Defensio’s content classification abilities from their own applications. In fact, Websense says it recently used Defensio-derived analytical software to detect that the popular presidential social networking Web site—Mybarackobama.com—hosted links to malicious content within its user-generated blogs.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Foodista has opened up a cooking website that everyone can edit, wiki-style. Billed as an online cooking encyclopedia, the site includes information on food, recipes, techniques, and tools, and allows users to share their knowledge by posting comments, editing content, and uploading photos. The site is run by former Amazon veterans Barnaby Dorfman and Sheri Wetherell.

Comments | Reprints | Share: