We hope to make this a regular feature in our Xconomy cities. It’s a look at small financings of private companies in tech, life sciences, and cleantech. These are deals in the roughly $100,000 to $1 million range, and they’re increasingly where the action is for local entrepreneurs, yet they’re often harder to track than the bigger deals we tend to report on.

And there were at least 12 of these smaller financings in the Northwest in October (see table below), according to ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company tracking VC, angel, and other investments in private companies. ChubbyBrain gets its data from regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources, and this is the second monthly installment of “under the radar” deals in the Seattle area (you can see the previous deals for September here). The data didn’t include the investors or the stage of financing.

A few quick observations: Like the previous month, most of the financings were in Washington (7 out of 12), but a significant number (5) were in Oregon. Most were equity deals (7), with the rest (5) being debt financings. The majority of financings (9) were in software, Internet, or tech, while a much smaller number (3) were in life sciences and healthcare, and no cleantech or energy deals made the list.

If nothing else, these lists are a cool way to hear about emerging startups we otherwise wouldn’t know about. For example, I’ve heard of Teranode, Nearlyweds, and 1000Museums before, but Zapproved and Intellisist are completely new to me.

Here are the 12 “under the radar” deals from last month:

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It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

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Seattle-based venture capital firm Maveron has been in the news a lot this month. There have been reports about its latest stealth startup, which is a new type of e-commerce play. Another report from VentureWire said Maveron will be selling its shares in Motley Fool—a deal that will generate cash for Maveron, which led a $26.5 million financing of the online investing website in 1999. And then, just yesterday, I got a press release about Maveron expanding to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

The VC firm, co-founded by Howard Schultz of Starbucks fame, is used to this sort of attention. But the San Francisco news was a bit confusing to me, because Maveron has been active in the Bay Area for a long time. As usual, the interesting stuff is in the follow-up. I had a chance to connect yesterday with Dan Levitan, a fellow co-founder of Maveron and the mastermind of the firm’s consumer-focused investment strategy. Besides the new San Francisco office, I also asked Levitan about the Seattle e-commerce startup his team is currently building; his outlook and themes in the consumer tech space; and his first fateful meeting with Schultz back in the early 1990s.

First, some basic stats. Maveron was founded in 1998 by Levitan and Schultz, and is best known for its early investments in eBay, drugstore.com, Shutterfly, and Cranium. Its current portfolio companies—there are 22 active around the U.S.—include Potbelly Sandwich Works, Pinkberry, LiveMocha, and Altius Education. The venture firm has about $750 million under management.

Levitan explained that opening Maveron’s San Francisco office has been a two-year process, but it doesn’t signify any shift in the firm’s geographic focus. “I don’t see this announcement as anything more than opening an office where we’ve already done business,” he said. “We’re one firm with two offices.”

The San Francisco office is headed by Amy Errett, a veteran of Olivia.com and E*Trade, who was announced as a Maveron partner last year. She is joined by new principal Ben Choi, who was previously with Storm Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and RRE Ventures. As Levitan puts it, instead of Errett flying up to Seattle four times a month, she’ll fly up three times a month (and the Seattle team will fly down the fourth week).

But Levitan emphasized that he’s looking in his own backyard for new investments as much as ever. “Seattle is an economy and region that’s very rich with groundbreaking, innovative consumer companies,” he said, pointing out obvious examples like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Amazon, and Costco. One less obvious company he mentioned was online real estate broker Redfin, which isn’t in …Next Page »

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I sat in on a good venture capital panel yesterday at Mobile Northwest 2009 in Seattle. No huge arguments or chair throwing to speak of (we’ll see what we can stir up at the next few Xconomy Forums). But some solid and useful observations from Geoff Entress of Voyager Capital, and also a prominent Seattle-based angel investor; Adrian Smith of Ignition Partners in Bellevue, WA, an expert in telecom and wireless; and Puneet Tandon of Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA, who is looking to sign partnerships with top entrepreneurs in digital media and social networking. (You can also see some comments from mobile VC Tom Huseby’s keynote here.)

The panel was moderated by Tricia Duryee, the Seattle-based correspondent for mocoNews, a website that covers wireless telecommunications. Here are my quick “top three” takeaways from the discussion of the local mobile industry:

1. The panic may be over, but caution rules. Entress says he’s added nine companies to his portfolio this year, out of a total of 32 he’s involved in (and six mobile firms, including TravellingWave, Swype, Dashwire, and Treemo). “We’re definitely not out of the woods yet,” he said. “But 2010 might be a good year for selling companies.”

2. It’s not all about the iPhone. Entress and Smith pointed out that Apple has only 17 percent of the smartphone market, so there’s plenty of opportunity on other platforms, like the BlackBerry and devices that use Windows Mobile. “Apple has a huge amount of mindshare,” Smith said, “but the critical thing is the development environment around [mobile applications].” Tandon agreed, saying, “Barriers to doing business with us [carriers] perhaps have been lowered.” Entress stressed the importance, especially for startups, of trying to avoid “getting locked into any one carrier, handset, or operating system.”

3. Watch advertising, input technologies, and connected devices. Tandon pointed out that by sometime next year, there are projected to be 3.3 billion Web-connected devices, and 70 percent of them will be connected via wireless operators. That means carriers will be willing to pay to know “who are the social influencers in your subscriber base,” he said. Smith and Entress said Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob signifies that mobile advertising is here to stay—but that the deal was the “first one out” (like YouTube for video), so don’t look for anything near that sort of valuation again. Entress added that he’s working with a number of startups selling new ways of inputting text on mobile devices (using speech recognition, touch-screen methods, and so forth). For all our fancy gadgets, it seems we still struggle to communicate.

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Tom Huseby says he’s finally able to go home and not worry about seeing his family’s savings stuffed under his mattress. “The panic is over,” he says. “All of a sudden, things are getting a lot better. It doesn’t feel much better now, but it is.”

Huseby, a noted Seattle-based venture capitalist with SeaPoint Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Voyager Capital (and the Godfather of what we’ve been calling the “Qpass mafia”), was giving his 30,000-foot view of the economic landscape and VC market at today’s Mobile Northwest 2009 conference in Seattle. He also drilled down into some of the most pressing challenges in the mobile space, as well as what the startup opportunities are. Just a few highlights here:

“Unemployment is going to slow growth across any consumer business. If you’re in mobile, I hate to tell you, but you’re in the consumer business. I do think there will be liquidity in mobile startups,” Huseby says. “Most startups are going to have to earn it the old-fashioned way, they’ll have to grow over a long time. You’re going to have to survive during a roller coaster ride. Every single company will have to go rushing to the bottom, and then do the slow, clanking ride to the top.”

In terms of startup opportunities, it helps to think in terms of what wireless carriers need. Huseby calls himself “fairly carrier-centric.” As he puts it, they are big customers that are predictable (once you understand them) and they generate huge amounts of cash. He laid out the top three challenges for carriers today—absolutely critical to understand if you’re an entrepreneur trying to get their attention with a new product.

—Bandwidth. There’s “tremendous pressure on carriers” to provide more bandwidth to support people’s exploding need for data connectivity wherever they go, Huseby says.

—Costs of bandwidth. “Oh my God, how are you going to pay for it?” he asks. With such a competitive market, Huseby thinks costs for consumers will actually go down. “I think they’re not going to get the money from us, they’re going to have to get it from advertising. Advertising revenue will absolutely help pay for the bandwidth.” (The problem is that mobile advertising revenue is still relatively small and doesn’t usually go to carriers.)

—Holding onto consumers. “If they’re going to pay for it with advertising, they need to get a much firmer grip on their customers,” Huseby says. He sees this as a crucial issue for the coming decade. “The next viral social network has to work hard to make [ad revenues] accrue to them. Carriers have to be very conscious of the demographics of their customers. They have to get their customers anchored in.”

After his talk, I had a chance to ask Huseby about some other areas of interest, like mobile search. He says he’s generally staying out of that space, but is looking at location-based services from the perspective of retail stores and local advertising.

We’ll have more from the conference soon, so watch this space.

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The second half of 2009 provided a good measure of optimism, easing some of the pain investors felt toward the end of 2008 and in early 2009. The stock market has been volatile but up significantly overall. There are signs of increased lending activity. Mergers and acquisitions have picked up. And there’s a pulse in the IPO market.

Yet despite indications of recovery, we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking we’re over the crisis. The labor, housing, and consumer markets are still struggling. And there’s still plenty of fear and uncertainty as we emerge from the longest downturn since the Great Depression.

Keeping that cautionary note in mind, what do the recent positive strands of hope in the IPO, M&A, and credit markets tell us?

To begin with, a potential increase in IPO listings isn’t necessarily a signal that capital markets have returned to normal. Why? Because the companies coming to market are the best of the best, the ones who have survived the past 24 months of havoc and have continued to build on sound business fundamentals.

And that’s the point—we’re not out of the woods yet; every company that wants to go public isn’t going to succeed. After the initial IPO backlog is worked down, the next wave of public offerings, if any, will continue to present a challenge and will come from specific sectors that investors see as the leaders in potentially expanding markets—for example, health care services and technology, financial services, and software and software services. Other, more traditional companies that can provide a compelling investor advantage and return will also be in the IPO mix.

Job growth in the health services and education sectors and annualized spending growth in the equipment and software sectors—ranging from 10 percent to more than 30 percent from Q3 2008 to Q1 2009, and evidenced by recent quarterly earnings growth by industry leaders—give some hint of recovery as well as an indicator of where the money may flow in the near future. Still, even though many institutional money managers need to invest and are waiting for the right opportunities—including IPOs—don’t expect to see a boom.

In fact, it may end up that growth will be fueled more by the credit markets than …Next Page »

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There’s lots of buzz in the startup community about agile software development; there are software programs, books, and seminars on the topic, and even huge firms like IBM are now touting their “agile development solutions”. The general idea is to create a team and a software process that is flexible, quick, and adaptive to feedback from the market. Put stuff out there, collect feedback on what works, kill what doesn’t, improve what does, rinse and repeat.

But there’s a parallel trend occurring in the early stage technology market that hasn’t been talked about much. Programs like TechStars, Y Combinator, and Founder’s Co-op have been pioneering what I like to call agile organizational development. These “initiator” organizations provide founding entrepreneurs with an incredibly compressed calendar of iterative feedback on all aspects of their company. The feedback comes from a broad network experienced entrepreneurs who serve as mentors in these programs, and it comes often, regularly, and relentlessly.

Mentors in these programs provide feedback on the startup’s team, 30 second pitch, fund raising pitch, positioning, product, pricing—on just about every aspect of the organization. Some of the feedback is contradictory—just like market feedback can be. The TechStars program even has a name for the confusion that results from conflicting advice: “mentor whiplash”.

The net effect of all this mentor input is a set of organizations that adapt to market feedback much more nimbly than startup organizations of the past. This feedback cycle and the entrepreneurs’ response is what I’m calling agile organizational development, and my bet is that the companies that embrace it are much more likely to succeed than those that don’t.

These programs are all relatively new, and there aren’t any books or seminars on the topic yet—but I’m betting there will be.

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“People say if you fail in Seattle, you’re screwed,” said Marcelo Calbucci. “If you fail in the Bay Area, you just have a badge of honor.”

We were at the TechStars reunion event in Seattle last week, listening to early-stage investors Brad Feld, Andy Sack, Steve Hall, Greg Gottesman, Shawn Broderick, and Chris Sheehan speak about entrepreneurship and the tech startup scene in their respective cities. Calbucci, the founder of Seattle 2.0 and Sampa (which folded in August), was asking the panelists about how the tolerance of failure, whether real or perceived, affects a region’s culture of innovation.

It’s a deep question, and it continues the discussion of startup cultures in different cities that I highlighted last week. It’s also part of a debate on failure that has been going on since long before I wrote about it in Xconomy last January. There seem to be two camps. Most entrepreneurs I’ve talked to feel there is a stigma associated with having a failed startup in Seattle. Most venture capitalists, not so much. But it’s a much broader issue than just Seattle. My colleague Bruce talked with a Web 2.0 startup founder in San Diego last week who said his first failure, earlier this year, “was truly a painful experience, and I’m still not over it.” And meanwhile, Brad Feld, the co-founder of TechStars and Foundry Group in Boulder, CO, had some provocative things to say about the failure aspect of Boston’s culture.

But first, Andy Sack of Seattle’s Founder’s Co-op gave his perspective on having failed at his last startup, Judy’s Book, after having had three successes prior to that. “As much as you teach entrepreneurship, as much as there’s supply of capital out there, really when push comes to shove, entrepreneurship comes from within,” he said. “I couldn’t take a job at any of the big companies. We’ve been through the tech boom of the ‘90s. We’re just coming off of a major hiccup. I’d say right now, early-stage investors in Seattle have retreated some; venture capital has retreated some, they’re focused primarily on their portfolio. That said, you [Calbucci] failed and went out and started your own thing. I failed and went out and started my own thing. Because we didn’t know any better. The entrepreneurs that don’t know any better, they just go do it again.”

Greg Gottesman of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group is one of those VCs who says he doesn’t see failure as a black mark. “My sense in this community is, to people who matter most, I don’t think failure is a huge negative,” he said. “There are certain types of failures, like failure of integrity—that’s hard to recover from. But failure of a startup, just speaking with all my partners, that’s not a negative. We talk about that as a learning experience. It’s just another piece of the puzzle.”

So how does Seattle’s tolerance of failure differ from, say, Boston’s or Silicon Valley’s? Feld, who has been investing nationally for 15 years, said, “I actually believe that the shtick of ‘failure as a badge of honor’ is really great shtick. I’ve failed a lot. It’s hard to fail. Failure impacts a person in …Next Page »

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I’m not going to do justice to this event. Let’s just get that out there right now. There were some great speakers and panels at yesterday’s Entrepreneur University in Bellevue, WA, organized by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network. But this isn’t about them. This is about the crowd-pleasers that brought an otherwise productive day to a close. That’s right—this is about pornography and Bacon Salt.

Not necessarily in that order, though. About a year ago, I profiled Bacon Salt, a couple of ex-Jobster guys in Seattle who hit upon a recipe for success: make everything taste like bacon. Their strategy of social media promotions—together with their natural charisma and some great-tasting food products (I can vouch for Baconnaise too)—has led to national exposure on ABC News, Oprah, Jay Leno, and the Today Show, not to mention a couple of segments on Jon Stewart (you can watch them here and here) that started it all.

Bacon Salt co-founder Dave Lefkow gave the closing keynote at the NWEN event, telling his company’s story from the beginning. From starting a food company on $5,000 (won from America’s Funniest Home Videos) instead of the $20 million usually expected in the industry, to fundraising and growth, to marketing and profitability, and now to Operation Bacon Salt—airlifting the company’s bacon-flavored condiments to U.S. troops in places like Afghanistan.

Through it all, Lefkow stressed the importance of finding evangelists for his products—including a couple in Virginia who tattooed the Bacon Salt logo on their legs. “These are people we don’t know,” he said. Bacon Salt also started a website in response to some kids who have snorted Bacon Salt…and put video clips on YouTube.

There are a few more updates to the story. He says Bacon Salt is “currently developing the world’s first meat-flavored personal lubricant.” I still don’t know if Bacon Lube is real or a joke, but Lefkow says he has found a company to manufacture it, and we can expect it in 2010. Other new products will include Bacon Pop (popcorn, not soda) and Bacon Ranch (a dressing, I think).

On a more somber note, Lefkow announced a charity event to benefit children with cancer. His four-year-old daughter was recently diagnosed with leukemia. The “Bacathlon,” billed as the world’s first bacon-themed athletic competition (including an eating contest), will be held the night of November 19 at Heaven Nightclub in Pioneer Square.

The last session at the NWEN event, after a few cocktails, was “Entrepreneur Idol”—seven lucky contestants got to pitch the audience and a panel of media judges (including yours truly) on their startup idea in 60 seconds. This is not an easy thing to do. Of course, we judges had the easy job of sitting back and giving our critiques; I hope some of the feedback was actually useful.

If there was one lesson, it was this: porn wins. Danielle Morrill got everyone’s attention by pitching her idea for a live video streaming adult-content service aimed at couples, called StreamHer.com (like Ustream, but for porn). After that, pitches on business productivity, IT consultancies, and mobile apps felt, well, less stimulating.

In the end, our judges’ picks were Firestarter Labs (T.J. Goan), which does software and services to create better presentations; Buzzeromatic.com (Andres Krogh and Matt Steckler), a Web service for granting front-door access to apartments and condos; and yes, StreamHer.com (Danielle Morrill). I’d also like to thank Jim Byers, Michaela Romanova, Nick Reed, and Gaven Kanemori for pitching us on their cool ideas and companies.

I was told afterwards that I was the “Randy” of the Idol judges. Better than Paula Abdul, I suppose.

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The smell of startup incubators is in the air. Adeo Ressi from TheFunded recently announced that his Founder Institute training program for entrepreneurs is coming to Seattle this winter. And next week, TechStars, the seed-stage investment fund with operations in Boulder, CO, and Boston, is holding its annual reunion event in Seattle amid increasing buzz around the potential for similar programs in the Northwest.

While those incubators seek to launch mostly new tech companies, I’ve also been hearing quite a bit from entrepreneurs and investors about the cleantech and green-energy startup incubator announced last week by McKinstry, the Seattle-based construction, consulting, and energy-efficiency firm. The new innovation center will be housed at McKinstry headquarters in Georgetown, and is slated to be complete next spring.

“We are on the forefront of creating some of the most innovative solutions to eliminate energy waste in the built environment,” said Dean Allen, CEO of McKinstry, in a statement. “Now with the Innovation Center we will have the opportunity to quickly advance new technologies that are working toward that goal, as well as partnering with innovative entrepreneurs to bring new technologies to market.”

I haven’t had a chance to sit down with McKinstry yet, but I’ve already heard some strong reactions from the local cleantech community. Here are a few:

Michael Butler, CEO of Seattle-based investment bank Cascadia Capital and a strong supporter of Northwest energy companies, says the new incubator is a “big deal, I think and hope.” He adds, “The Puget Sound marketplace is not creating a critical mass of clean tech companies. We don’t have the ecosystem in place. I am really hopeful that the McKinstry effort can fill some of the void. We are falling further behind other regions, and the window will start closing if we can’t get the ecosystem built.”

Rick LeFaivre, managing director at Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, says the incubator “could be very interesting” but that “it’s still early,” and details are still being worked out. “I’ve talked several times to the McKinstry folks about what they want to do and I think it could be very helpful to kick-start cleantech companies in the region,” he says. “A truly effective incubator needs more than access to space. It needs access to capital and business acumen to help the startups develop and get ready for venture financing (if necessary and appropriate). This, of course, is what Accelerator does in the biotech space. I have offered to work with the McKinstry team to help develop this concept, and I’m excited about what it could become. I think back to the two years I spent working with the EnerG2 team [energy storage startup in Seattle] to get them ready for venture funding, and they would have been a good candidate to go into an incubator while fleshing things out.”

Burt Hamner, entrepreneur and founder of Hydrovolts, a Seattle-based water-energy startup, stresses the importance of communication between the people running the new innovation center and local entrepreneurs and financiers. “Incubators can be great things,” Hamner says. But it “depends on how they are set up and their connections.” He says he “must wait and see,” and that in the meantime, it’s important for McKinstry to “inform the clean tech community what they are doing.”

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Working for the man. It’s what most entrepreneurs want to avoid at all costs. But if their startup gets bought by a big company, that’s often just what happens—at least for a while.

Although the acquisitions market for tech startups has been relatively soft during the recession, there have been a few recent local examples to draw from. I took a highly unscientific sample of how three Seattle startups are doing post-acquisition. I wanted to hear about the cultural fit, the level of autonomy, and so forth. Not surprisingly, the ones I talked to said their transitions have gone very smoothly. Maybe the surprising thing is that I believe them (well, mostly—they did have to be pretty vague about future plans).

Here’s an update on the three startups and their founders:

Ethan Lowry, Urbanspoon (acquired by IAC in February 2009, announced in April)

The transition has been “remarkably uneventful,” Lowry says. “They’ve been very hands off.” He says IAC (NASDAQ: IACI) has been very supportive of Urbanspoon’s restaurant site, and that his team touches base with the mother ship once a week. “There’s all sorts of discussions before you get acquired. They say you’ll run your own ship…you’re kind of nodding, but what’s it really going to be like?” Lowry says. “I’ve been through other acquisitions that left you feeling more ripped out of your culture.”

He does say, half-jokingly, that Urbanspoon has gone through a “huge shift for us”—growing from three to five employees (adding a developer and a customer service person), and relocating to an office with a better view of Lake Union in Fremont, about a mile away from the old digs on Eastlake Avenue.

Last week, Urbanspoon introduced its “Scope” feature for its iPhone app, which lets you discover restaurants on the street around you by adding visual info to the camera feed on the screen. “In the beginning of summer, ‘augmented reality’ got a little bit of buzz,” Lowry says. “We thought, ‘This is cool, but seems super-gimmicky.’ We started prototyping something, and quickly discovered it’s entertaining. It’s fun, but can solve a real problem.” He adds that Urbanspoon has about 7 million installs of its iPhone app, making the Scope the biggest augmented reality app so far.

IAC’s future plans for the company are under wraps, but Lowry says Urbanspoon is …Next Page »

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Doing some home remodeling? Need someone to clean that pesky gutter? Karim Meghji has an offer for you.

Meghji and Dave Richards, both veterans of Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), have been busy working on their home-services networking site, HelpHive, since it was first publicly introduced in May. The community site helps people find reputable businesses in the Seattle area that do home repair, maintenance, remodeling, cleaning, and the like. The idea is that consumers leave reviews, and people in your social network can recommend local businesses for getting specific jobs done. If done right, it should work a lot better than doing Google and Yellow Pages searches.

Up to now, HelpHive has been free for both consumers and businesses that sign up to be on the site. But today, the company is starting to test a paid model for businesses. (It’s still free for consumers.) So home-services businesses—everyone from plumbers and electricians to landscapers and carpet cleaners to pest control—can pay an annual fee ($99 for an introductory premium plan) to be listed on the site. Then HelpHive uses a “pay per job” model, whereby the company takes a 5 percent commission on any referral that leads to an actual job; if the referral doesn’t lead to a job, the business pays a nominal $5 fee, which is aggregated monthly. That’s different from a lot of online services that charge primarily for leads or referrals, or phone calls, whether or not they turn into revenue for the company. (Which approach is more lucrative depends on how well the service companies do.)

“As their business ebbs and flows, we’re more directly tying our compensation to their compensation,” Meghji says. And, he adds, “Our leads or referrals are higher quality.”

Meghji says the site is getting 9,000 to 10,000 unique visitors per month, and has some 7,600 businesses listed. The plan, he says, is to “stay focused on Seattle. Get it right, get the business model working, and once we get the formula really figured out, then we would look to replicate it in other markets.” Other Internet companies working in the home-services space include Colorado-based ServiceMagic and Silicon Valley’s Redbeacon.

HelpHive has been self-funded since its inception in the summer of 2008, with some contributions from friends and family. The company has four full-time employees and a couple of part-timers. Meghji says it’s still too early to talk about raising outside funding. “The goal is to show the business model connects to the overall value proposition,” he says. “We want to make a good case with real data, and prove the model.”

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A lot of fingers were crossed behind the scenes at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference, which ended today at the San Diego Convention Center. Many extraneous factors can affect attendance at big industry shows, but organizers did not want a repeat of the last time the CTIA came to San Diego, when the opening day for the conference was Sept. 11, 2001.

About 15,000 people attended this week, the same turnout as last year’s conference in San Francisco, according to spokeswoman Cheryl Delgreco. The highlight on the final day was the “Fund Fest,” in which entrepreneurs from Seattle, Washington D.C., and other cities made five-minute presentations to an onstage panel of three judges. Five finalists, including two from Seattle, emerged from a group of 50 companies that were screened by event organizers.

All five finalists received a complimentary exhibit and marketing package for a 2010 CTIA event valued at more than $25,000, and a block of public relations consulting time. All five finalists also will make encore presentations, along with 15 additional companies at the MobiTechFest in Santa Clara, CA, on Oct. 29, according to a spokeswoman for MobiTechFest.

The companies are:

—Mjedi, based in Seattle, is developing a software platform for mobile social commerce that enables people who are out shopping to consult with their friends by using their cell phone to send product images to their home page on Facebook. Founding CEO Chander Chawla says the company’s target market is composed of “teen-agers and women who like to talk before making a purchase.”

—ParkVu, based in Sunnyvale, CA, has developed software that enables users to wirelessly download their entire iTunes library, photos, and other files from their computer to their BlackBerry and other smartphones. Co-founder and CEO Terry Goertz says their technology “frees your smartphone from your desktop permanently.”

—Billing Revolution, based in Seattle, presented technology that enables mobile phone users to buy pizzas, ski lift tickets, and other merchandise directly from merchants. Founding CEO Andy Kleitsch says the company’s software is “a layer that sits on top of merchants’ existing credit card processing system. Kletsch says his company, which raised $2 million earlier this year from a South Korean telecom, is currently preparing to raise another $4 million in Series B funding.

—Chyngle, a San Francisco-based startup, develops custom white label mobile applications for shopping malls, amusement parks, and sports and concert stadiums. Chyngle, which is developing its application initially for Major League Baseball stadiums and other professional sporting venues, says its technology provides background information and statistics about teams and players and enables users to buy sports merchandise and other items. It also serves as a social networking tool that enables friends to meet, share rides, and exchange messages. For each stadium, CEO Todd Sullivan says, “We are that venue’s in-pocket marketing tool.” The presentation wowed the judges, who gave Chyngle the Champion award.

—TelCare, based near Washington D.C., has developed a wireless device for diabetics that enables them to both test their blood sugar and transmit the data to their doctor or caregiver. Founder Jonathan Javitt says the real-time connectivity maintains a more accurate record of tests, and makes it unnecessary for patients to keep their own test paperwork. Javitt says the wireless connectivity also can improve compliance by sending reminders to patients, and that according to one study, using the device reduced amputations, strokes, blindness and other complications of diabetes by 37 percent. TelCare received the CTIA’s People’s Choice award from attendees in the audience who voted by text message.

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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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The results of last Thursday’s investment forum organized by the Zino Society are still wafting through the Seattle business community. Six finalists were chosen for two $50,000 investment prizes—Photon Machines, Enroute, and Giftango in the “tech” category, and MicroGreen Polymers, Harbor Wing, and Zero Crossing in the “non-tech” category. Zino founder and CEO Cathi Hatch tells me her team will have to select the two winners more quickly than expected, probably by the end of this month, because some of the finalists are getting ready to close outside investment rounds.

The Zino Society has invested close to $13 million of angel financing in startups over its four-year lifetime as a business-social network that connects investors with entrepreneurs. Investor members vote on the companies, and the fund makes investments from a common pool. Hatch says one of her key takeaways from last week’s investment forum is that the passion of entrepreneurs is crucial to a broader economic recovery. “Innovation is really what’s going to help drag us out of the doldrums,” she says. And the 28 presenters from the Zino forum are the “poster children” for innovation, she adds.

Hatch also told me some intriguing tales from Zino’s history. Having a nose for this sort of thing, I thought a few of the piquant tidbits could be turned into somewhat unconventional lessons for any startup venture. In fairness to Hatch, she did not lay them out as lessons in entrepreneurship, so these takeaways are strictly mine:

1. Don’t be afraid to change course.

Hatch says she originally started Zino with the idea that it would be about wine investments. People could invest in wineries, software involved in tracking wines, and so forth. Hatch asked one of her angel investors to help develop a logo, which to this day has a grapevine running through it (see image above). “Before we got to our first investment meeting, I decided this makes no sense,” Hatch says. “If someone invests in a winery, they’re not going to invest in a second winery. They’re going to want to diversify.” At Zino’s first investment forum, only one pitch had to do with wine. Since then, the group has been open to all kinds of startups—though wine remains a peripheral theme to Zino’s events (more on that below).

2. Don’t label yourself prematurely.

At last year’s Zino Zillionaire investment forum, presenting companies were asked to sort themselves by “tech” versus “non-tech.” One company gave itself a non-tech appellation, and didn’t win an award—but Hatch says the investors would have voted for it had it been in the tech category. So at this year’s forum, Zino uncorked the categories and let the investors decide for themselves. There was no hard-and-fast rule, but “non-tech” ended up including companies focused on materials technology and physical products.

3. Do choose your name wisely.

I asked Hatch where the name Zino came from. She says she used to be in the restaurant business, where names are particularly crucial. Names that start with “Z” are good because people remember them, she says. Hard vowels are preferable as well. Lastly, Zino rhymes with “vino,” which takes us back to the original idea behind the group. At its forums, receptions, and dinners, Zino often invites wine makers to attend and serve their featured vintages. At last week’s forum, the attending wineries (all from Washington state) were JLC Winery, 428 Wines, and San Juan Vineyards. As David Brent would say, el vino did flow.

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Seattle-based Voyager Capital is announcing today it has added a new venture partner—Bruce Chizen, the former chief executive of Adobe Systems (2000-2007). Chizen started in his new role this month, and he’s based in Silicon Valley, but he’s already making an impact on Northwest companies in Voyager’s portfolio.

First things first, I had to ask Chizen an obvious question: what does he think of Adobe’s $1.8 billion bid to acquire Omniture, the Web analytics firm, which was announced this week?

“It’s strategic and bold,” Chizen replied. “Now it’s all about execution. If [Adobe] can incorporate metadata into the flow, it’ll give them a competitive advantage.” He added, speaking from experience (he led Adobe’s $3.4 billion purchase of Macromedia in 2005), “Acquisitions are funny in that they’re hard to do. If an acquisition is successful, no one talks about how much they paid.”

OK, more about the actual VC news here. The addition of Chizen as a venture partner clearly strengthens Voyager Capital’s expertise and connections in the digital media industry. It’s the latest strategic hire at the venture firm, which in the past year and a half has recruited a new talent stable that includes Daniel Ahn in Silicon Valley, Diane Fraiman in Portland, and Geoff Entress in Seattle. “Voyager is increasingly a West Coast firm, with its roots in Seattle,” says Voyager co-founder and managing director Bill McAleer.

But that doesn’t mean we should expect to see more investments in California at the expense of the Northwest, McAleer says. “We’re going to stay consistent with what we’re doing,” he says. (About two-thirds of Voyager’s investments are in the Northwest, and one-third are in California.) “We’re helping our companies up here with partnering strategies and talent in the Valley. Part of what we look at is how to interconnect companies,” McAleer says.

Chizen stepped down as the CEO of Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) in December 2007, and stayed affiliated with the company through April 2008. He has been an adviser to Voyager since July of last year. He also serves on several boards, including Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), Synopsys, and Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, and is senior adviser to the private equity firm Permira Advisers. “What was missing for me was in the area of really working with and looking at young, cool startups with great technological differentiators. Fundamentally, what excited me about Adobe was its technology and reaching new, different, and exciting markets,” Chizen says.

He calls Voyager Capital a perfect fit—culturally, technically, and intellectually. “They really care about their companies,” Chizen says. “I think I can help them a lot. There’s a lot of deal flow in the Valley …Next Page »

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The Seattle-based investor and entrepreneur network Zino Society hosted its fourth annual Zino Zillionaire Investment Forum today at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seattle. The event drew 28 companies, some in technology and some non-tech, each making a pitch for a chance to win one of two $50,000 investment prizes.

Here are the six finalists in the two categories, announced by the Zino Society at a reception this afternoon:

Technology—Photon Machines, Enroute, and Giftango.
(I wrote about Portland, OR-based Giftango raising $500,000 from the Oregon Angel Fund earlier this week.)

Non-technology—MicroGreen Polymers, Harbor Wing, and Zero Crossing.
(Luke profiled Arlington, WA-based MicroGreen earlier this summer, when the company raised $1.6 million from WRF Capital and local angel investors.)

The winner of each category, who will receive $50,000, will be announced in late October, after Zino Society members perform due digilence on the finalists. Stay tuned…

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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 »

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What’s it like in the world of corporate venture capital these days? For Jeff Schrock, it’s pretty stable and good. Probably more stable than at many boutique venture firms, which are under increased pressure to raise funds and get quick returns.

Schrock is a Seattle-based tech investor with Intel Capital. In a previous life, he co-founded Seattle startup Activate—which was bought by CMGI in 1999 and then Loudeye Technologies in 2001—before becoming an executive at Yahoo and then RealNetworks. He was most recently an investor with Monster Venture Partners, until he joined Intel Capital in late 2008. Schrock is a board member of San Francisco-based Transpera and Seattle-based LearnLive Technologies, and chairman of EVO Media, the Seattle makers of the DevHub publishing platform, which recently became “ramen profitable,” as Schrock puts it.

A quick snapshot of Schrock’s current firm: Intel Capital has invested about $4 billion in some 400 companies, including a $1 billion investment in Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR). It has approximately 70 investors globally, about half in the U.S. and half international. The investment team is organized into eight sectors (including consumer Internet, digital home, and mobility) across 20 or so different geographies. Although Schrock is based in Seattle, his investment focus is not tied to the Northwest. But it’s where he has the most experience and contacts, so he has a unique perspective on the region.

In an e-mail interview, I asked Schrock about his new gig at Intel Capital, his specific investment themes, and the trends he’s seeing in consumer technologies and startups. Here’s a transcript of our interview:

Xconomy: Can you talk about your current role and responsibilities at Intel Capital, and how it fits into the arc of your career as an entrepreneur and investor?

Jeff Schrock: My job is to make profitable investments in companies which move computing and Intel forward. I am on one of our consumer investment teams—so it feels very familiar as much of my career has been in the consumer Internet. (Previously, I was an executive with both RealNetworks and Yahoo!) It is different, however, being on the other side of the table. I spent a good chunk of my early career as an entrepreneur asking, receiving, and sometimes begging for venture capital. I can empathize with the startups and entrepreneurs I have the pleasure of working with. But it’s still early in my investing career, so we’ll see if this makes me a better investor or not.

X: What is special about Intel Capital, and how does it differ from most VC firms?

JS: There are a number of things unique to Intel Capital. First, it is truly a global organization. It’s very easy to collaborate across sectors and geographies. This brings advantages to us, as investors, but also to our portfolio companies who can tap into a wealth of expertise and relationships. Secondly, because of the heritage as a manufacturing company, Intel Capital is very well organized. The decision-making process is quite transparent and structured. As an outsider who’s primarily worked in software companies, this was a welcome surprise. Lastly, Intel Capital is not a fund. Unlike our colleagues in boutique VC …Next Page »

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Wondering how your startup stacks up with others in your sector? Or how consumer Internet companies, say, compare with mobile startups? Seattle-based nPost, a media and resource site for tech entrepreneurs, is preparing to launch a quarterly report on startups—that are based not just in Seattle, but everywhere—to help answer such questions. The program, called nPost Metrics, will report on trends in startup burn rates, revenues, growth, customer conversion, revenue per user, and other data, all kept strictly confidential.

It’s all part of nPost’s mission to promote startups and provide important information for entrepreneurs and the tech community, says nPost founder Nathan Kaiser. The idea arose from his meetings with hundreds of local entrepreneurs who all want to know if their business model will work in a particular market, and at what price points. “They want to know the metrics, the benchmarks. I had that data anecdotally, but nothing in a scientific way. This is data at an industry level,” Kaiser says. “As a media company, we’re all about the expertise, insights and data points that will help startups be more successful.”

The data will be free for participating startups—defined as any company in the tech space that’s younger than five years old—and will cost $2,500 per quarter for everyone else. That includes venture capitalists, angel investor groups, accounting firms, large tech companies, and law firms.

If you’re a startup, you can enroll here and fill out the initial survey, which asks for things like number of employees, tech sector (e.g., consumer vs. enterprise), and platform (e.g., Web vs. mobile). Then, the idea is you’ll share information about your own startup, confidentially, in return for monthly updates and quarterly reports on the aggregate data from all respondents.

Kaiser says he expects strong startup representation from the San Francisco Bay Area, the Northwest, the Northeast, and other pockets of innovation around the country, as well as abroad. In conjunction with the reports, nPost, which has four employees, is also launching a consulting services firm that will work one-on-one with startups to analyze the industry data within their specific market. Kaiser has already signed up an undisclosed number of startups and customers, and plans to release the first report in November.

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