Online search and information discovery are being transformed before our eyes. It’s no longer just Google, or Google and Bing, or even Google, Bing, and Twitter—there are big problems in technology and business to solve across all areas of social media search, real-time news and information, mobile search, user interfaces, search marketing, vertical search (travel, products, people, video, you name it), and other related topics. Just imagine what the landscape might look like in another 10 years.

A lot of the action is happening around Seattle. If you want to hear what the big companies are doing to stay ahead of the curve, and where startups and venture capitalists have some real opportunities, you’ll want to join us for the Xconomy Forum on “The Future of Search and Information Discovery” on November 30 at the University of Washington. (Registration info is here—the early bird rate ends tomorrow, and tickets are going fast.)

Search touches almost every aspect of business today. So get your tough questions ready for our panel, which will feature Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast (acquired by Microsoft last year). Ed Lazowska will moderate the discussion, and I’ll be there to help stir up the crowd and make sure your questions are heard.

We’ll also have a series of startup “bursts”—short presentations from some of the most exciting young companies in the field. They include Evri, which is creating a smart index of the Web to help you browse for information more effectively; Gist, which sits at the intersection of e-mail, social media, and search, feeding you updates about your contacts; Sage Bionetworks, an effort to do for biology what open source did for software and Twitter and Facebook did for social networks; SEOmoz, which helps businesses do search engine optimization and online marketing; and Topsy, which is developing a new search engine for social media (starting with Twitter).

I can’t think of a better way to kick off the holiday season than to spend a couple hours being inspired and challenged by these guys. And, of course, some of the best stuff isn’t even in the program, it’s in the networking—besides our stellar panelists and speakers, you’ll be mingling with a first-rate crowd of entrepreneurs, investors, VCs, executives, researchers, technologists, and students.

Come to think of it, let’s get the discussion rolling right now. What do you really want to hear about at the event? What are your most compelling questions about search, information discovery, and online marketing? Leave a comment below, and we’ll address it.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It was a fairly quiet week for deals in the Northwest, with just a trickle of activity in software, computing, cleantech, and life sciences. But there was a hint that the IPO window may be about to open.

—Seattle-based Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), the supercomputing company, acquired some assets from SiCortex, a Maynard, MA-based computing firm that shut down in May. Financial terms weren’t given, but Cray purchased compiler technology that could help it improve its own products and gain new customers.

—Luke reported that Seattle’s Infectious Disease Research Institute, a global health nonprofit, licensed technology from Israel-based NanoPass to use “microneedles” to stimulate immune system cells just below the skin surface, which might make new vaccines more protective. Financial terms were not released.

—Hillsboro, OR-based ClearEdge Power raised $15 million in equity financing, according to media reports, which cited a regulatory filing. The investors were not disclosed, but ClearEdge Power has been backed by the Kohlberg family, Big Basin Partners, and Applied Ventures. ClearEdge develops fuel cell systems for homes.

—Seattle-based Trubion Pharmaceuticals signed a global partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Facet Biotech to co-develop and market an experimental treatment for leukemia, as Luke reported. As part of the deal, Trubion (NASDAQ: TRBN) will receive a $20 million upfront payment, and Facet (NASDAQ: FACT) has agreed to buy another $10 million worth of Trubion stock. The news sent Trubion shares up more than 40 percent, to $5.45, about six minutes after the opening bell on Friday morning.

—Seattle-based Tuusso Energy, a solar power plant developer, has raised a $2 million financing round from Pivotal Investments, a Portland, OR-based venture capital fund focused on cleantech and sustainability. Tuusso’s first solar plant is scheduled to be completed in the California desert in 2011. The deal represents the first investment from Pivotal’s new fund.

—Omeros, a Seattle-based biotech firm, is preparing a renewed push for an IPO this fall, as Luke reported in an Xconomy exclusive. The offering, which could happen as soon as this month, would be the first IPO from a Washington company in more than two years (since Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire went public in March 2007). Omeros, which is developing a treatment to help people recover faster from knee surgery (among other products), previously tried to go public in January 2008.

—Xconomy broke the news that Seattle-based Marketfish, an online marketing startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from private investors led by the Alliance of Angels. Marketfish, which was founded in July 2008, has developed a Web interface for connecting marketing agencies with list owners.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

BlueKai, an online-marketing startup in Bellevue, WA, has nailed down one of the bigger tech venture deals of the past few months. The company is announcing today it has closed a $10.5 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures, based in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA. The round also includes returning investor Redpoint Ventures.

The company’s name with the Hawaiian suffix (”kai” means ocean) is inspired in part by the bestselling business book Blue Ocean Strategy, which urges businesspeople to create a new market or “blue ocean” rather than fight it out with competitors in established markets. BlueKai seems to be applying this idea to online advertising, creating a completely new way for businesses to reach customers.

I spoke with BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol to get the story behind today’s deal. Tawakol, an MIT and Stanford University alum, is a veteran of Seattle-based Medio Systems and Bellevue-based Revenue Science. He started BlueKai in December 2007 with the idea of creating a huge database of online users’ preferences and intentions. The company provides data on users’ Web-browsing behavior to marketers, advertising networks, and publishers, and it collects a percentage of each ensuing transaction.

What makes BlueKai different from other related companies is its notion of “data exchange,” and the fact that it separates user data from everything else. A travel site, for instance, may sign up with BlueKai to provide anonymous user data. Publishers, airline marketers, and ad networks can then bid for the right to its “cookies”—snippets of code that tell where a user has been and what their preferences are—so as to more effectively target ads. “We’ve aggregated very high-value data at massive scale,” says Tawakol. “People pay for the data, instead of revenue sharing. That encourages big sellers, it gives them a revenue option that’s safe.”

Back in March, BlueKai closed a $3.2 million Series A round led by Redpoint. As Tawakol explains, the original plan was to focus on one “vertical” space—but the company got up and running in the travel, retail, and automotive sectors, ahead of schedule. “Our goal was to validate the concept in one vertical,” he says. “As it approached October, we had three verticals up with huge sellers, and a growing buyer base. So we thought, this is the right time to go for Series B…Our strategy was to keep our relationships with VCs, and we kept our contacts open.”

It seems to have paid off. Besides the infusion of capital, BlueKai gains the online-media expertise of Battery Ventures. Satya Patel, a Battery principal based in Silicon Valley, is joining the BlueKai board. Patel has previous experience as a product manager at Google and DoubleClick.

Tawakol isn’t naming names, but so far, BlueKai has signed up more than 20 large retailers, half of the top 20 ad networks, and several top travel search engines. He says the new funds will be used for “more investment in the product” and sales teams—to do things like add new categories and get more visibility. There will be modest growth in the staff, he says, which currently numbers 13.

I asked Tawakol whether consumers have to buy into the whole concept in order for BlueKai to take off. He emphasized that BlueKai is a business-to-business operation, and that its revenues are growing independent of any consumer push. But he acknowledged the privacy issue, pointing out that the company lets consumers opt out of having their data traded online, as well as letting you “see exactly what data is known about you by marketers” through its BlueKai Registry program.

As Tawakol points out, “If we don’t raise the bar and be more open with consumers, there could be FTC [Federal Trade Commission] backlash.” He adds that it’s important to be completely transparent about what is being done with user information.

All that said, Tawakol envisions a day, perhaps five to seven years from now, when Internet users will receive the equivalent of mileage points for their own data, and be able to trade them for goods and services. People could then manage their product preferences and other information, he says. “We’re creating an economy for data.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Sometimes the best stories are the hardest to tell. This isn’t one of them. I’m not quite sure where to begin, but here goes. There is a startup in South Seattle called Bacon Salt. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t. But the name says it all: Bacon Salt is a zero-calorie, vegetarian, kosher seasoning that makes everything taste like bacon.

Why is Xconomy writing about this? OK, a crucial aspect is how the company’s founders have used social media and the Internet to promote their product and grow their business. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Mostly it’s just a good tale of entrepreneurship. And the company has just released an interesting new product, which I’ll get to shortly.

The story goes back to January 2007, when Dave Lefkow and Justin Esch were working at Jobster.com, the Seattle-based office networking firm. A company speaking tour took them to Miami Beach, Florida. Late one night, at 1 or 2 a.m., they were having drinks at Wet Willie’s on Ocean Drive. Esch brought up the concept of Bacon Salt, which had occurred to him while he was attending a kosher wedding. Lefkow thought the product had to exist already. They Googled around on a BlackBerry and found nothing. So they bought the domain name right there and then.

For the next few months, they met after work to kick around ideas for getting the business started. They had to learn everything about “how to take a food product to market,” says Lefkow. How to get manufactured, how much material you need, how to package it, how to label it, how to get a product code, and so forth. At a wine and food expo, they met a shadowy advisor (who shall remain anonymous) who walked them through the ins and outs of the food industry. What they still needed was money to get started.

In May 2007, Lefkow won $5,000 from America’s Funniest Home Videos, thanks to his 3-year-old son hitting him in the face with a T-ball. That was their seed funding round. “A pretty standard formula. That’s Harvard Business School stuff there,” says Esch. At around the same time, Lefkow and Esch both left Jobster to focus on their new venture. They began trying to make Bacon Salt themselves, by pouring bacon fat over salt crystals. “It was totally disgusting,” says Esch.

So, with help from friends and family, they hooked up with food scientists and chefs and developed the taste profile they wanted to synthesize. It was more art than science. “The primary thing was taste,” says Lefkow. “We wanted the most delicious product possible.” (You might wonder why anyone would want to make everything taste like bacon, but that’s beside the point, as you’ll soon see.)

Lefkow and Esch launched Bacon Salt in July 2007, and with their Web expertise, immediately tapped into the social networking space to promote their product. They put up profiles on MySpace and Facebook, set up discussion groups, and friended all the people who said “I love bacon” on their own profiles—an astounding 37,000 on MySpace alone. They reached out to bacon bloggers and sent them samples of Bacon Salt to help spread the buzz. They’ve since gone on Twitter. “There’s a huge bacon subculture,” says Esch. “There’s love, and there’s fanaticism.”

And their product started selling. At last count, they’ve sold 600,000 jars of Bacon Salt to people in 50 countries and all 50 states. It is in 8,000 grocery stores across the U.S. They’ve done national TV and radio interviews, and they’re in the December issue of Maxim. Their 2007 revenue was …Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Local Marketers, a three-year-old online marketing startup, announced it has raised $4.1 million in Series A2 funding from Madrona Venture Group. That brings its total to $5.1 million raised since 2006. Local Marketers also announced its new CEO, Walter Boos, a partnership with Google as a re-seller of Google AdWords, and an expansion into new headquarters in downtown Seattle next month.

Comments | Reprints | Share: