Seattle-based Voyager Capital has participated in a $5 million investment in 1020, the San Francisco developer of Placecast, a location-based advertising and marketing platform, according to a report in TechCrunch. Quatrex Capital and Onset Ventures also participated in the Series B funding, which will be used to accelerate Placecast’s technology development. Placecast’s algorithms combine data across the Web, mobile, e-mail, and Wi-Fi to try to maximize relevance for advertisers and publishers. In an interview with Xconomy last year, Voyager co-founder Enrique Godreau mentioned 1020 as an example of an intriguingly mainstream mobile startup.

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Bellevue, WA-based BigDoor Media, a developer of software that helps social entertainment sites make money, has rolled out a not-for-profit community website called VirtualCurrencyExperts.com. It is meant to be a resource for online publishers to learn about how to use virtual currencies and goods. The site, along with its first discussion point—a top 10 list of virtual currency bloggers—will be announced at the PubCon 2009 conference in Las Vegas this week.

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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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I caught up yesterday with noted entrepreneur and investor Martin Tobias, after his latest startup, Seattle-based Kashless, announced a partnership with RecycleBank to reward people for recycling items at Kashless.org. The basic idea is a rewards program—redeemable for merchandise at hundreds of retailers—for people who give away things like old clothes, food, bikes, electronics, or other equipment online.

Since I last reported on Kashless last winter, the “recommerce” firm has rolled out its free online marketplace and community website in 122 cities around the U.S. The partnership with RecycleBank, a New York-based firm and fellow RRE Ventures portfolio company, should help Kashless acquire new members. Kashless currently has tens of thousands of members, while RecycleBank has hundreds of thousands. “They’ll promote their members to join Kashless,” Tobias says. “They’re rewarding people for separating their trash, and we’re rewarding people for extending the life of products they’re no longer using.”

Tobias says the deal puts his company “over the top” and should help convince more people to give away their stuff on Kashless.org instead of Craigslist, Freecycle, or Goodwill stores. “We’ve been working hard to make Kashless.org the best place for people to find and give away free things,” he says. The rewards program “adds to the things we’ve already been doing, like driving directions [to available items] and tax deductions. It further differentiates us and makes it more valuable to give things away through us.”

Kashless is now staffed by five full-time employees and a couple of contractors. That’s down from about a dozen earlier this year, during the bulk of the company’s product development work. Tobias says there are more than 500,000 active listings on the website.

The company’s revenue model is a combination of advertising on the consumer site and licensing of the software platform to brands and communities that want to boost their recycling. The latter “private label” portion of the business makes up the majority of Kashless’s revenues, Tobias says.

I asked Tobias for the weirdest thing anyone has given away on the site. He named a couple items off the top of his head: a live monkey in a cage, and a tugboat up on blocks in someone’s yard. “An interesting thing for us is that everything posted on Kashless has been taken by somebody,” he says.

Tobias then remembered that he had once advertised a broken urinal from his old house. (I didn’t ask.) “Some guy said, ‘I’ve been looking for that.’ He thought he could fix it.”

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Beaverton, OR-based Prolifiq was named winner of the day at the annual Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) Venture Northwest investor forum in Portland, OR, today. Eleven companies, including three from the Seattle area, presented to an audience of investors and entrepreneurs. Prolifiq makes mobile marketing software that helps companies distribute sales materials to customers in the technology, media, and life sciences industries.

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NetProspex, a three-year-old Waltham, MA-based startup that provides marketers with sales leads using contact information contributed by users, has completed a new equity financing round led by American City Business Journals of North Carolina, the startup announced on Friday. Mass High Tech—which, along with the Boston Business Journal, is part of the American City Business Journals chain—reported the amount of the financing at $2 million. That’s corroborated by a regulatory filing from July 31 of this year.

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It’s a big day at HubSpot, the Cambridge, MA-based marketing technology startup founded three years ago by local investor-entrepreneurs Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

The company announced that it has raised a $16 million Series C financing round, led by new investor Scale Ventures, with existing investors General Catalyst Partners and Matrix Partners also joining in. That brings the company’s total venture pot to at least $33 million.

At the same time, a new book co-written by Halligan and Shah hits bookstores today. It’s called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, and according to the website for the book, it’s all about the ideas that drive HubSpot’s own Software as a Service (Saas) offerings: that the best way for companies to generate sales leads and win customers is to optimize their websites and their social-media activities to attract “inbound” traffic, rather than marketing to potential customers directly through e-mail, telemarketing, and other “outbound” or “interruption”-based methods.

Halligan, HubSpot’s CEO, announced the funding round in a posting on the company blog. According to the post, the company was able to raise the C round on the strength of its recent revenue growth (350 percent over the last year) as well as the spreading conviction that outbound marketing methods are “fundamentally broken.”

The company has grand plans for the new funding: Halligan told me this morning that the goal is to go public, just as other SaaS companies have. But while there’s a common myth that Web-based companies can be built on the cheap, it actually takes serious money to amass a customer base large enough to justify an IPO, Halligan says.

“When you look at companies like SalesForce.com and NetSuite and Constant Contact and OpenTable, the average amount they raised [before going public] was $40 million,” says Halligan. “And there’s a reason for that: It takes real R&D, and you are essentially funding your customer with the SaaS model, so there are some big investments up front.”

SaaS businesses, Halligan points out, typically collect small subscription fees over time, rather than selling boxed software for a fixed price that would bring in big chunks of revenue up front. (HubSpot’s own services cost about …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Marketfish has launched a new version of its list marketing software platform. The platform, called Great White, lets marketers rent third party opt-in lists using a Web interface similar to Google AdWords. The latest version lets customers complete live transactions and includes new features like expanded payment options and more transparency on prices. Marketfish rolled out its beta software a month ago, and now has 50 users, including ZAAZ, Wunderman, DDB, and Cole & Weber.

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Seattle-based Cheezburger Network (formerly called Pet Holdings) announced today it has served 1 billion page views, or 10 billion images, since its first user-generated humor site, I Can Has Cheezburger, was launched in January 2007. The company also said it has hired Todd Sawicki as chief revenue officer. Sawicki is a senior sales and marketing veteran of several online startups and media companies including Lookery, and is on the advisory boards of Seattle-based Wetpaint and BuddyTV.

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Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone (as the old saying goes). Or maybe not. Maybe no one weeps alone anymore, what with Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

This week’s release of a “sentiment analysis” product from Seattle-based Appature made me think about what’s really going on at the intersection of social media and semantic understanding of the Web. Appature is an up-and-coming, already profitable startup that has made its name in helping companies in the healthcare industry better understand their customers, so as to deliver more effective marketing campaigns. It has made inroads with big customers, like Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft Health Solutions Group.

Appature’s latest offering “allows marketers to close the loop between the pulse on the broad Web and their non-Web business in an immediately actionable way,” says Kabir Shahani, Appature’s co-founder and CEO. “It’s the linkage between the broader Web and the other information you already have about a customer or prospect, with immediate action built on top of this, that is the key here.” In other words, it’s not just about market awareness, it’s about directly driving revenues—by monitoring and understanding positive and negative feelings about brands, products, and other industry topics, gleaned from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other social sites, and Web documents.

It’s a fast-moving trend, and there are now enough Seattle companies working on this kind of technology to put the Northwest squarely on the “Web sentiment” map. (I haven’t talked to companies in Portland, OR, yet, though Jive Software comes to mind.) Here’s how it all works, in a nutshell. If you’re a marketer, you can buy software to help monitor and summarize what customers are saying about your brand on the Web. If you’re a big company, or an individual with a reputation to protect, you can even do things like change the visibility of search results that pop up on your name. And if you’re a regular old consumer, you can keep track of things like what percentage of people (and who) are saying positive or negative things about the iPhone, Microsoft, or Kanye West.

That kind of software is exactly what Seattle-based Evri rolled out in August. Evri’s calling card is that it scours the Web every minute of every day, trying to understand the semantic meaning of sentences on Web pages and documents. What’s more, its software makes connections between all the entities (names, places, products) it encounters on the Web. The broader goal is to give people a better way to browse and discover information.

“One thing we do which is really different is we actually say who or what is expressing the positive or negative sentiment, as opposed to simply remaining ambiguous,” said Deep Dhillon, Evri’s chief technology officer. “One of the reasons we can offer these more involved capabilities is due to the depth of our technology stack—because we know, for every sentence, who the subject, verb, object, etc. are.”

Which raises the question of just how far along the semantic technology …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Appature announced late yesterday that it now provides “sentiment analysis” that lets healthcare marketers understand people’s feelings (positive or negative) about their brand, or other topics in their industry, from blogs and social media. Together with the rest of Appature’s marketing software, companies can do things like search against information in their Appature database about customers and prospects. Back in June, Appature released a Twitter search engine called Chatterfly. The company was founded in 2007 and is currently bootstrapped and profitable.

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The Northwest deal flow in the past week tended toward small partnerships and acquisitions. But there was still some significant activity in software, Internet, and entertainment.

—As ghostbuster Bill Murray once said, “Dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!” Seattle-based Pet Holdings, operators of I Can Has Cheezburger (Lolcats) and other humor websites, formed an advertising partnership with San Francisco-based social network Dogster. Dogster will sell ads for the Cheezburger network in exchange for the greater traffic on Pet Holdings’ popular sites (which will hit 1 billion page views this week). Details of the revenue split were not given.

—The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) joined forces with advocacy organization TechAmerica in Washington state, thereby broadening its membership to include more companies in hardware, electronics, and devices. WTIA has now become TechAmerica’s exclusive management and marketing partner in the state.

—Seattle-based Appature is getting close to securing its first round of venture funding. No deal has closed yet, but the bootstrapped and profitable healthcare marketing startup has generated a lot of interest in the VC community. Appature was founded in early 2007 and develops software that helps companies in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices understand their customers better and do more effective marketing.

—Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, the home entertainment company backed by Paul Allen, was bought by Arris, a Georgia-based broadband communications firm, for $20 million in cash. Arris will acquire Digeo’s high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi, along with about 75 Digeo employees and their expertise in video networking and multimedia services. About 10 Digeo staff members will lose their jobs in the transition, however.

—Seattle-based Maveron and Boston-based Spark Capital co-led an $8 million Series A investment in Altius Education, a San Francisco company deveoping online higher education programs through partnerships with nonprofit universities. The Noah Fund also participated in the funding. Maveron was founded in 1998 by Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan, and focuses on investments in consumer and tech companies.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), a parallel computing software firm in Waltham, MA, as Ryan reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given. ISC’s chief executive, Bill Blake, and the firm’s technical experts are moving into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA.

—This was not a new deal, but I took a closer look at Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners’ investments in cloud computing and virtualization. The VC firm’s biggest win to date is XenSource, the Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization company that was bought by Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) for $500 million in 2007. Three other Ignition investments in the space—Skytap, InstallFree, and Xeround—are still in pretty early days, but are off to promising starts.

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Healthcare-IT is a hot topic in Seattle these days—and it’s about to get even hotter. Sources with knowledge of the company tell me Appature, a two-and-a-half-year-old Seattle startup focused on improving marketing and customer relationship management in the healthcare industry, is close to getting its first round of venture funding—and may even be the subject of a bidding war between venture capital firms in both the Seattle area and Silicon Valley.

I won’t reveal the identities of the VCs involved, because the deal hasn’t closed yet, but let’s just say they are some of the more prominent investors in software and tech. Appature was apparently considering a local deal (with a very different structure) when another Seattle-area venture firm swooped in with great interest—and probably a lot more money. Appature’s founders did not return e-mails seeking comment on the company’s strategy or funding status.

Appature is already profitable and has some big customers, including Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft Health Solutions Group. The company has been bootstrapped up to this point. In the past few months, we’ve reported on Appature’s Twitter search engine, Chatterfly, and CEO Kabir Shahani’s tech entrepreneurship award from BusinessWeek.

The startup is known for its marketing software, which helps companies in the broader healthcare industry do things like deliver targeted and personalized marketing campaigns (and measure their effectiveness in real time), track marketing activity and the performance of their corporate and community websites, and learn more about their customers via sophisticated business intelligence and analytics tools.

Appature was founded in early 2007 by Shahani and senior engineer Chris Hahn. They had met previously at Seattle-based social networking startup Blue Dot, which was backed by prominent angel investors including Richard Fade (now with Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners), and former Starbucks senior vice president Donald Valencia, who passed away in late 2007. In an early interview with Seattle-based nPost, Shahani said his startup’s main opportunity was in improving customer relationship management for medical device, pharmaceutical, and healthcare companies. Appature helps these companies “understand what’s going on in their organizations in regards to their customer segments and how they can drive more revenue,” he said.

Earlier this month, Appature was featured as “startup of the day” by Microsoft’s BizSpark program. In a published interview, Shahani said Appature has 11 full-time employees (five are developers), and is planning to expand its team by the end of the year. “We are in the fundraising process to commercialize our product and increase our time-to-market,” he said.

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The last official week of summer brought a slew of Northwest deals, to go along with today’s heat wave. Two of the year’s biggest financings happened in tech and life sciences, along with a big acquisition in healthcare, while a host of smaller deals went down in software, digital media, and advertising—and one company inched closer to an IPO.

—Seattle-based Integrative Diagnostics, Leroy Hood’s early cancer detection company, has raised $7.5 million out of a $30 million equity round, as Luke reported. The investors were not disclosed, but we’ll have more on this story soon.

—Seattle-based Free & Clear, which offers phone-based coaching for company employees battling tobacco addiction, obesity, and stress, was acquired by Inverness Medical Innovations (NYSE: IMA) of Waltham, MA, for $100 million in cash plus up to $30 million in follow-on payments, as Wade reported. Free & Clear was backed by Polaris Venture Partners, Three Arch Partners, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. Inverness offers medical diagnostic tests and other disease management services for consumers.

—Portland, OR-based Ensequence raised $20 million, led by Clay Mathile, the CEO of CYMI Technologies (and former owner of Iams, the pet food company sold to Proctor & Gamble for $2.3 billion in 1999). It’s one of the Northwest’s largest tech financings of the year. Ensequence was founded in 2000 and is a leader in the interactive TV business, which lets viewers do things like call up additional information on the screen. There is some question as to whether the firm is moving its headquarters to New York, where its new CEO, Peter Low, is based.

—In the biggest life sciences venture financing of the year, Seattle-based Calypso Medical raised $50 million led by Skyline Ventures and Frazier Healthcare Ventures, with Bay City Capital and InterWest Partners also participating, as Luke reported. The funds will be used to expand Calypso’s worldwide rollout of its radiation pinpointing product, which helps radiation oncologists and technicians better treat prostate cancer. Luke also reported on the story behind the deal here.

—Seattle-based Getty Images, the creator and distributor of photos and other digital media, has made a $4 million strategic investment in Daylife, a New York media and content services company, according to the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog. The two companies have also formed …Next Page »

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At Akamai headquarters in Cambridge, MA, today, state officials took the wraps off a cross-media campaign intended to promote Massachusetts as a place to study, live, work, vacation, or grow a business. The new website for the campaign—themed “It’s All Here“—brings together resources for entrepreneurs considering starting their companies in Massachusetts, students looking for jobs in the state, residents looking for housing or recreation opportunities, and the like.

Gregory Bialecki, the secretary of the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, said at a ceremony unveiling the website that one of the campaign’s goals is to be “unabashedly positive” about the state’s attractions. “One of the things that we suffer from a bit is New England modesty,” he said. “We’re not going to do that. We’re going to err on the side of bragging.”

Bialecki pointed to the fact that about 20 percent of all Internet traffic passes through servers at Akamai, which is hosting the new site. “They are a critical part of the Internet infrastructure for the world. That’s not bragging, they are doing it every day.”

The tag line “It’s All Here” was actually introduced by the administration of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney back in 2003 as part of a campaign to bring new businesses to the state. It’s since been appropriated by the state’s office of travel and tourism. But the effort launched today is broader, intended both to advertise Massachusetts’ strengths to the rest of the world and to persuade students and consumers who already study or live here to stay.

Bialecki described the campaign as a non-partisan, public-private collaboration that transcends any one governor’s administration and any one political regime. Key groups involved include the Department of Business Development (a part of Bialecki’s agency), the Massachusetts International Trade Council, the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, better known as Mass Development, and the Massachusetts Alliance for Economic Development, better known as Mass Econ.

Kofi Jones, the director of communications and public affairs for Bialecki’s office and one of the creators of the new campaign, demonstrated the “It’s All Here” website for a packed room of business community members and onlookers at Akamai. The site is divided into sections entitled “Grow,” “Live,” “Play,” “Work,” and “Study,” with each section featuring links to government and non-government information resources as well as a clickable map highlighting regional resources or attractions. Personal testimonials pepper the site, including one from Mohamad Ali, a former IBM executive who recently joined Avaya. “Living and working in Massachusetts has provided my family with unrivaled opportunity,” Ali’s quote reads.

The “Grow” section will likely be of most interest to Xconomy readers. It features sub-sections on business resources around the state as well as roundups of resources in specific clusters such as clean energy, defense, information technology, life sciences, manufacturing, and foreign trade and investment. A featured section of the site, entitled Opportunity Here, includes a guide to networking opportunities for job seekers as well as actual job listings.

Jones said the website was designed by 451 Marketing, a Boston-based inbound marketing agency.

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A small Seattle-area company is blazing a trail in the crowded field of mobile marketing. Kirkland, WA-based HipCricket, a company founded in 2004 to do mobile marketing for brands and media companies, has been growing its revenue significantly from quarter to quarter and aims to be profitable for the first time by the end of this year.

It’s a big step for HipCricket, which has been diligently chirping away in a nascent but noisy industry. Mobile marketing essentially just means advertising via mobile devices. The sector has gained in popularity since the rise of text messaging, particularly in Europe and Asia. But marketing firms, at least in the U.S., have largely struggled to make much money in mobile. So HipCricket makes for a compelling case study in how to deliver the goods for big brands—all while helping create a new industry.

On Friday, I spoke with Ivan Braiker, HipCricket’s co-founder and chief executive, after his talk at a Northwest Entrepreneur Network venture breakfast. Braiker previously co-founded Satellite Music Network, the first radio network to distribute live, 24-hour satellite programming. He has extensive experience in building radio networks and in the broadcasting industry.

Things at HipCricket have been very busy, he says. “Even in the down economy, the activity level has been incredible,” Braiker says. “Mobile is getting to be better understood on the brand level.” He didn’t disclose any specific sales numbers.

The company was self-funded in its early days, followed by a friends and family round, and then a round of outside investment. HipCricket went public on London’s Alternative Investment Market in November 2007, only to be de-listed this summer after the markets crashed. The firm, which is now privately held, is backed by some prominent investors, including Joe Schocken from Seattle-based Broadmark Capital.

One of its key advantages is its deep relationships in broadcasting. HipCricket’s customers include some 300 local and national radio and TV stations, including KZOK, KUBE, and KOMO-TV in Seattle, and KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. The company also does marketing for about 50 brands, including Arby’s, Macy’s, Coca-Cola, Rite Aid Pharmacy, and Harley-Davidson. “It’s all about creating engaged communities,” Braiker says.

The technology is important too. HipCricket’s software and services, for which it charges a subscription fee, lets broadcasters and brands track response rates to ads based on keywords, type of media, or time of day—all in real-time. Braiker says this is a key differentiator for his business. “There’s a new vendor every day that gets into this. But they don’t understand the millions of dollars of software we have that parses data and comes up with sophisticated analytics,” he says.

HipCricket, which has just shy of 60 employees (it has added nine so far this year), now seems to be growing steadily. Earlier this year, the company expanded to Mexico and is seeing a fair bit of growth in the Latino advertising community. In the next few months, Braiker says, HipCricket will be pursuing some “new, unique things” in the mobile space, including “mobile coupons integrated with point of sale,” a mobile billing service that bypasses wireless carriers, and other e-commerce applications. “We see HipCricket as a full-service mobile marketing company,” he says.

Asked for his advice to entrepreneurs in the sector, Braiker says, “Understand you’re going to need endless energy. You have to clearly see your vision, you have to understand that vision, and never stop evangelizing. If you believe you’re right, you have to stay with it.” He adds that the most important factor in success is, in a word, “tenaciousness.”

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Seattle-based Lucid Commerce, a startup focused on business intelligence for direct marketers, has raised a round of equity funding, according to a regulatory filing. The total offering amount is listed as about $4 million. TechFlash reports that Lucid has raised $3 million from Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and European venture firm Adinvest. OVP previously led Lucid’s $2.5 million Series A round, announced in June 2008. Lucid Commerce is led by co-founder and CEO Tyson Roberts, a former employee of Seattle-based aQuantive.

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Chuck Goldman, CEO of Boston-based mobile app development house Apperian, called me this week to let me know about the launch of Timberland Expedition. The new iPhone application, which went live in Apple’s iTunes App Store today, was designed by Apperian to appeal to the outdoor-enthusiast types whom Stratham, NH-based Timberland (NYSE: TBL) considers the core market for its footwear and athletic clothing.

I’ve been playing around with the free app a bit today, and I’m impressed by its combination of slick design, useful features and content, and entertainment. The app is important for Timberland because it’s the company’s first venture into the burgeoning world of mobile marketing. And it’s important for Apperian because it’s exactly the kind of application that the startup, which I profiled when it came out of stealth mode back in March, says it’s best at building: those that help big companies extend their brands into the mobile universe.

“It’s shaping how users interact with a big brand that’s fun and exciting for us,” says Goldman. He calls the Timberland app, which Apperian built in conjunction with Mullen, Timberland’s Boston-based advertising agency, “an ‘edutainment’-type app that combines the core location features of the iPhone with user-generated content and a blend of catalogs and other content to extend Timberland’s marketing efforts onto a brand-new platform.”

Which is a mouthful. What the app really does, more than anything else, is leave the user with a warm-and-fuzzy feeling toward Timberland. That is, assuming he or she has a penchant for outdoor exploration, electronic gadgets, and shopping, which is not-unusual combination in New England. While Zumobi, a Seattle-based mobile application developer, has worked with REI to produce a snow-report application for iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Windows Mobile devices, the Timberland app represents the first time an outdoor gear retailer has come out with a multipurpose mobile application, Goldman says.

When you open the Timberland app, you see an antique-looking compass that gives you four options:

1. Expeditions—a selection of suggested hikes, bike rides, scenic views, and local attractions around, initially, six cities: Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New York. (Here at Xconomy, we’re lobbying for the addition of Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and San Diego.) Each expedition comes with a brief description, a photo, a link to a Google map, and directions to the spot from the user’s current location. Whenever you click on “expedition” on a map, you also see the locations of nearby Timberland stores, which Goldman says was part of Apperian’s strategy to use the app to drive traffic to bricks-and-mortar outlets. Interestingly, Timberland plans to expand the Expeditions section over time using destinations, photos, and writeups submitted by users. (That’s the “user-generated content” Goldman mentions.)

2. Gear—what Goldman calls a “micro-catalog” showcasing Timberland merchandise, with an emphasis on two brand-new footwear lines called Earthkeepers and Timberland Mountain Athletics, both made with recycled rubber. You can’t actually buy shoes from the micro-catalog—Goldman says that function is coming later—but you can click on Timberland’s phone number to order from a telephone rep.

3. Timber Trail—a game that challenges the user to cross an outdoor expanse without running out of energy, food, or water, and without being attacked by bears, snakes, or bees. At the beginning of the game, players gets to choose which Timberland accessories to …Next Page »

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From architecture to kids’ videos to online animated ads, Ksenia Oustiougova’s path to founder of Seattle online ad company Lilipip has been unusual. To start, the company was funded not by investors, but on credit cards. The good news: after shutting down the kids’ video version of Lilipip and retooling to its current incarnation, Oustiougova is now paying down the debt.

Oustiougova said Lilipip’s change of focus in the summer of 2008—from children’s videos to online marketing ads—had a straightforward motivation. “We ran out of money. It was as simple as that,” she said. “Either reinvent or close down. And I’m not a quitter by nature.”

Now, together with more than 150 independent creative contractors around the world and a director of business development, Oustiougova makes one-minute animated videos for small businesses. Her team currently works on about four projects at once, she said, but they hope to get up to their capacity of 20 at a time eventually. Oustiougova and the director of business development are not yet salaried, taking a cut of the proceeds from each project, but Lilipip is bringing on four project managers as Lilipip’s first employees in the next six to 12 months. Now starting to pay off her credit card debt, Oustiougova has no plans to look for outside investment.

Asked why fundraising isn’t part of the plan, Oustiougova gave several reasons, among them: “The entire process takes months, and it takes away focus from sales; second, suddenly you have someone looking over your shoulder telling you what to do—we are breaking a lot of conventional rules, and I want to build a company where people don’t feel like they work, but feel like they play.” She added, “I am not interested in growing huge. I want to build an excellent business, and we won’t be necessarily big. But investors want a certain return at a certain time that might force us to do things faster…Some things just take time to get very good, like good wine—you can’t speed it up.”

Lilipip’s animations are mostly used online, Oustiougova said, on businesses’ websites, Facebook, YouTube, or other social marketing sites. She has also seen them played on TVs at trade shows, or used in presentations to clients or shareholders. Lilipip will encode the videos into any format its clients need for free. Many small businesses like having their ads available on their cell phones to share on the go, she said.

“This is really a tool to tell their story in a uniform way through all the new social media channels,” Oustiougova said.

Oustiougova’s first entrepreneurial steps came when, after leaving a career as an architect, she began making PowerPoint presentations for her son to teach him to read in English and Russian (her native language). Her friends soon started requesting custom videos for their kids, and …Next Page »

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Last month, we broke the story of Marketfish, the Seattle-based online marketing startup that has raised an undisclosed sum of money from prominent local investors, including the Alliance of Angels. Today, Marketfish launched a beta version of its new online platform, which helps marketing agencies and businesses find and rent direct mail and e-mail lists of potential customers.

Here’s how the platform works. Marketfish helps media buyers at agencies and marketing departments shop for marketing lists from list owners, using a secure Web interface. The plan is to allow marketers to track the performance of their campaigns as well. Meanwhile, marketing list owners can use Marketfish to put their lists in front of more businesses and marketing agencies, and boost their own profits.

What Marketfish is doing is worth a closer look. For that, I spoke with Clark Kokich, the chairman and former CEO of Seattle-based Razorfish, the online advertising firm bought by Publicis for $530 million last month. Razorfish was formerly part of Microsoft and, before that, aQuantive (which Microsoft acquired for some $6 billion in 2007).

Kokich says he met Marketfish founder Dave Scott about four months ago and signed on as an advisor to the startup soon after. “I have a lot of respect for David. He’s been in the business a long time, and he knows what the challenges are,” Kokich says. “The more time I spent with him, the more I became convinced it was a significant opportunity. So I invested and joined the board.”

I asked Kokich for more details on what makes Marketfish special compared to what’s available now. “The thing that’s appealing to me is this looks a lot like the business we established at aQuantive,” Kokich says. “It’s an opportunity to use sophisticated technology to dramatically improve the ability to source and [rent] direct mail and e-mail lists. It appealed to me because I’ve been a purchaser, and I know it’s not working for customers.”

In the case of aQuantive—or more specifically, Avenue A/Razorfish, which Kokich joined back in 1999—the key innovation was an online ad-serving system that connected advertisers to actual sales on their websites, so they could accurately calculate return on investment and optimize their media campaigns, Kokich says. That kind of tool did not really exist before.

Similarly, Marketfish is about “creating an efficient market where one doesn’t exist,” Kokich says. “Right now, if you want to buy a list, there’s no place to go where you can search, source, and execute a campaign. It’s a lot of time and hassle, a lot of expense. This is making a marketplace for the list.”

We’ll be watching to see how much of a splash Marketfish makes, and whether the marketplace it is creating takes off with marketing agencies and list owners. As for Kokich, I asked whether he’s staying with Razorfish through the integration with Publicis. “I plan to stay on, absolutely,” he says. “Strategically, it’s a great thing for Razorfish. It will accelerate our international expansion, and allow us to provide greater integration between online and offline.”

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