She started her career as a management consultant, but Aubrie Pagano says she always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. And she was particularly energized by fashion.

So Pagano spent her free hours assisting local Boston designer Emily Muller in launching her collection, in exchange for the opportunity to get some firsthand experience in the independent fashion design space. There she discovered that designers face a particular challenge—one that would eventually inspire Pagano to create the e-commerce startup Zoora.

“Its hard for independent designers to scale because there’s a discovery issue,” says Pagano. “[Muller] has a great website buts nobody goes to it.”

And as a shopper, Pagano says she’s felt like she’s had to settle for a piece of clothing that just isn’t quite right. Women like her are the perfect customer base for independent designers, she says.

“Something that a lot of people don’t know about independent designers is that they’re really flexible,” Pagano says.

Just last Monday, Pagano opened the Zoora website to the public, to offer women clothing that they can customize to best fit their measurements and taste. Her hope is that the women who feel underserved by traditional retail will bring independent designers the traffic—and business—they so desperately need.

Zoora joins a booming cluster of Boston companies in the space of mass customization, where e-commerce platforms allow shoppers to select and tailor products to better fit their preferences. As my colleague Greg has pointed out previously, these companies offer shoppers personalized jewelry (Gemvara), bags (F. Rock), girls clothing (FashionPlaytes), men’s dress shirts (Boston’s Blank Label and Proper Cloth in New York), and even bras (Zyrra).

Pagano started working on Zoora (a name inspired by “misura,” the Italian word for measurement) last spring, and made hiring a head buyer her first move. Since then, the company has enlisted about a dozen designers (including Muller) to sell garments on the site with options for customization. Another designer is Althea Harper, a former contestant on the Lifetime show Project Runway. (Worth noting, New York fashion tech startup Send the Trend has Project Runway veteran and winner Christian Siriano on staff.)

The customizations to Zoora garments fall into two baskets, says Pagano: “made-to-measure adjustments” and “ready-to-wear tweaks.” With the first category, customers input their specific measurements, which designers take into account to create a garment that’s a perfect fit. With “ready-to-wear tweaks,” meanwhile, garments come in standard sizes, but offer different options for elements like fabric, necklines, sleeves, and hem length.

The Zoora team now consists of … Next Page »

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Holiday shopping season is a fun time of year for a company like Daily Grommet. The Lexington, MA-based Web startup finds unusual consumer products and tells a story about one such “grommet” each day through videos and text.

This week I touched base with founder and CEO Jules Pieri, who shared some info with me on the top-selling grommets of the season so far. As someone who hates holiday commercialism, but likes warm puppies and weird gadgets as much as the next guy, I found the range of items available on the site pretty enlightening.

So in case you’re looking for an unusual-yet-personal gift for that special someone, you might want to browse around the Daily Grommet site, which includes product categories like home, food & drink, health & wellness, and green & eco-living. Sounds pretty standard, but the products you’ll find there are anything but.

Here are some examples of bestsellers (and links to the story behind each item):

—Sugru, a kind of hacking putty for real-world stuff (“fastest Grommet out of the gate, in history,” Pieri says).

—Urban Cheesecraft, which sounds like slang or euphemism but is actually just a handy cheese-making kit.

—Soggy Doggy, a super-absorbent doormat/shammy for dogs.

—Picture Keeper, an elegant way to grab and store photo libraries from your computer.

—Ila Security, a small, portable security-alarm device, like a personal panic button (good for long board meetings).

—Drawer Décor, a custom drawer organizer for kitchen supplies and other goods (mundane but useful if you don’t like clutter).

Good luck with the shopping, readers. I’ll probably see you online.

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In a remarkable test of will, I’m going to avoid any Thanksgiving-related puns and just dive straight into this wrapup of the past week in Xconomy Seattle’s tech headlines, covering everything from Black Friday shopping apps to the latest rumblings of possible doom from a local wireless company.

—The crew at Seattle startup Decide made the obvious leap into a full mobile app, released just as bargain-hunters were warming up for the holiday shopping frenzy. Decide is among several sites that help consumers decide whether to buy electronics, or wait for a better price. But the company, co-founded by University of Washington search expert Oren Etzioni, takes things a significant step further by employing a sophisticated price-prediction technology.

—I profiled Avalara, a Bainbridge Island-based company that sells web-based software to help merchants calculate and pay sales taxes. That’s a complicated task, with some 11,000 taxing districts of all shapes and sizes littered around the country. Avalara’s been posting impressive growth numbers, and the trend could continue as Congress, Amazon, and traditional retailers try to hash out a deal over charging sales tax on more online purchases.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang brought us the scoop on a speech by all-star investor Brad Feld, who told entrepreneurs and angel investors at Microsoft‘s NERD Center in Cambridge, MA, that product and people should be their main focus. Feld is the co-founder of TechStars, a startup bootcamp program with a branch in Seattle. He’s also a board member and investor, through the Foundry Group, in Seattle startups BigDoor Media and Cheezburger Network.

—I looked at a recent tactical shift made by MiNeeds, a Seattle-based site that pairs users up with local service providers who bid for their business. It’s a relatively active area for Web companies to target, but MiNeeds thinks it found a significant edge in the wedding market when it decided to break those services out from the plumbers and carpenters and house painters on the main site. That was something the co-founders resisted—but, as good data geeks, they changed their minds after testing showed it was the right move.

—PaperShare opened up its doors to the public—or at least the cloud computing and virtualization slice of the public. The startup, headed by longtime server computing consultant Doug Brown and former Microsoft virtualization director David Greschler, is a new twist on the sometimes ancient websites that many professionals still use to spread technical info and industry insights.

—And finally, we had some contrasting bits of news: Clearwire, which is trying to simultaneously slow its losses and raise money for a network overhaul, publicly said it would consider delaying a big debt payment. Shares, of course, took a beating. On the other hand, Ignition’s Frank Artale led a $15 million investment in ServiceMesh, a cloud platform company in Santa Monica, CA.

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Three quick items from around the Seattle-area tech scene this week:

—Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) shares have fallen sharply again on word from new CEO Erik Prusch that the Kirkland, WA-based wireless provider could skip an upcoming debt payment. Prusch discussed that possible step in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The Associated Press and ZDNet quote separate industry analysts’ reports with somewhat contradicting takes on the news: Optimism that majority shareholder Sprint could kick in much-needed cash, and skepticism that Sprint would pay up unless there’s some sort of restructuring.

The math is pretty clear: At the end of the third quarter, Clearwire had about $700 million in cash and about $4 billion in long-term debt. The $237 million payment in question is due Dec. 1, although there is a 30-day grace period.

—Frank Artale of Ignition Partners led a $15 million investment in ServiceMesh, a provider of cloud-computing platforms for businesses. As VentureBeat reports, Santa Monica, CA-based Service Mesh had been self-funded up until the Ignition-led investment.

It’s one of many cloud-computing investments we’ve seen this year from Artale, who has long experience in the sector as an entrepreneur, executive, and investor. Check out this profile I did in July, just before the flurry of announcements about Artale’s investments started hitting the news.

—Seattle-based startup Zoomingo, a new venture by the co-founders of language learning service Livemocha, raised $1.3 million from Naya Ventures, Benaroya Capital, and angels. Zoomingo is building an application and retailer platform that can deliver advertising and sales to consumers on mobile devices.

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If you’re like me, you do a lot of research online before you make a big buying decision, and sometimes even before a small one. And you lean heavily on the reviews left by other shoppers. My favorite trick, when I’m zeroing in on a specific product, is to read all of the “1 star” or “most critical” reviews first. It’s a surefire way to find out about product glitches, misleading advertising claims, or poor customer service.

In fact, I’d say that the explosion of user-contributed reviews around the Web is one of the three biggest developments benefiting consumers in the e-commerce era (which dates back to mid-1995 or so, when Amazon first turned on its website). The other two are the rise of comparison shopping, which keeps prices in check, and the simple-but-still-amazing fact that you can click a “Buy” button on a website and make a book or a game or a DVD appear on your doorstep without ever leaving home. If you think about it, though, e-retailers themselves haven’t innovated that much around reviews. A review on Amazon today looks and acts pretty much like a review on Amazon in 2002.

But there’s one San Francisco company, PowerReviews, that keeps working to make reviews more useful for consumers and more profitable for e-retailers. I spent some time recently with Andy Chen, PowerReviews’ founder, and learned a lot about how the company sees the world of product research—and what it’s learning that could change the experience of shopping online.

Andy Chen, PowerReviews Founder

Chen says that when the company got started back in 2005, it had two interlinked ideas. The first was that a lot more e-retailers needed customer reviews on their sites, and that it might be profitable to build a white-label review system that companies could plug into their sites rather than having to build the functionality on their own. The second idea was that if you could build this system, it would then be possible to aggregate all of the reviews collected by all of the participating e-retailers into one giant product recommendations site, and use that site to earn money on lead generation and affiliate commissions. That’s exactly what PowerReviews has done with its sister site Buzzillions, which brings together a good chunk of the 23 million reviews sent in by customers of Power Review’s clients. That, by the way, is a group of almost 6,000 companies, including many high-profile bricks-and-mortar brands like Toys R Us, Staples, and REI.

PowerReviews has had to tweak its ideas along the way. It originally provided the review system to e-retailers for free, but the Buzzillions site didn’t turn out to be as profitable as the startup had hoped. So the company had to start charging for the review platform, just as competitors like Austin, TX-based BazaarVoice do. The good news is that “we’ve been growing extremely quickly” on the platform side, while Buzzillions is “still a good revenue source,” according to Chen, whose formal title is Founder and Vice president of Strategic Partnerships. (Pehr Luedtke, a veteran of Shopping.com and Levi Strauss, is PowerReviews’ CEO.)

With some $37 million in venture capital on the line from Menlo Ventures, Tenaya Capital, Draper Richards, Four Rivers Group, and Woodside Fund, PowerReviews needs all the growth that it can get. To speed things up, and to compete with e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, the startup has been trying new strategies like getting consumers to answer each other’s questions about products (that’s a feature called AnswerBox) and integrating the review platform with social media, especially Facebook.

But one of the company’s biggest opportunities, Chen says, may not lie in the reviews, exactly, but rather in what he calls “social navigation” based on all the data PowerReviews collects about the reviews and the reviewers. By analyzing what products people are … Next Page »

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Seattle has already birthed a couple of early stage companies trying to help shoppers track the price swings and model rollouts of expensive electronic gadgets. Well, add another one to the mix—thanks in part to the national battle between Amazon.com and big-box retailers over collecting taxes for online sales.

I’m talking about Shopobot, which just set up shop in the TechStars/Founder’s Co-op building in South Lake Union, right next door to Amazon. Shopobot crawls product and price data around the Web and helps shoppers decide where to get the best deal on cameras, laptops, TVs, and other products.

The company got started in January when co-founder Dave Matthews (no, not that one) left his job at Microsoft and moved to the San Francisco area to join co-founder and longtime friend Julius Schorzman, also a former Seattleite. They originally were targeting book shopping online, until Matthews’ passion for photography led to an experiment tracking the price of camera gear. Voila! Shopobot’s mission was clear.

Schorzman and Matthews

The startup got into the AngelPad accelerator program, and landed seed investments from Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, and others. The company’s public rollout was covered in the New York Times and other media.

With Seattle entrepreneur Dan Shapiro selling similar startup Sparkbuy to Google this spring, and Farecast co-founder Oren Etzioni now tackling electronics shopping with Decide.com, it was clear that this was now a hot area for startups to focus on.

So, everything seemed to be going fine—until the state-by-state battle over online sales tax collections re-emerged in California.

As I wrote in March, recession-hammered state governments are starting to eye online sales as a juicy source of revenue. That’s a problem because, until now, the national laws governing online sales tax collection meant that there was a pretty narrow set of circumstances in which officials could force a company to collect local taxes on its sales in a given state.

Amazon has been very aggressive in making sure the number of states in which it collects sales taxes is low, but bigger bricks-and-mortar retailers hate the price disadvantage and are pushing hard to make online sellers collect sales tax in more places.

In late June, California officials passed a law trying to force Amazon and other online sellers to collect sales tax on purchases from Golden State residents. Amazon promptly followed through with its threat to drop some 10,000 affiliate businesses, third-party portals that market Amazon products through their own sites.

That included Shopobot. Just like that, a major source of revenue for the little company was gone, stuck in a political battle between very big players. “All of a sudden, we were … Next Page »

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Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is notoriously tight-lipped about the details of its day-to-day business, telling the press and analysts only what it wants them to know. Ever try to find out how many books they’re selling? How quickly certain types of merchandise is moving? Tough luck.

But when it comes to the Seattle e-commerce pioneer’s ambitions to enter the tablet computer market, there’s plenty of chit-chat.

Most of it has leaked out around the edges, although CEO and founder Jeff Bezos definitely added fuel to the fire when, in a rare interview, he told Consumer Reports to “stay tuned” for news about a tablet, and went on to talk about how any such device would be different from the Kindle e-reader.

There’s been more—lots more. To keep track of it all, I’ve used Storify to build this timeline of significant reports about Amazon’s plans for a new tablet device. If the tablet debuts sometime soon, as expected, it will give Amazon time to sell it hard this Christmas shopping season.

I’ll add more stories as they emerge, right up until we see the little guys roaming in the wild. And please let me know if I missed any big entries (there’s a curious lull between Sept. 2010 and this February, for instance.)

You can also find the timeline over at the main Storify site.

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—The federal government’s surprise lawsuit to block the $39 billion merger of AT&T and T-Mobile dominated the region’s tech headlines last week, and the fallout will continue to turn heads for the rest of the year (and maybe beyond). I deconstructed the Justice Department’s arguments in this post, which is kind of a Cliff’s Notes to the lawsuit filing for those who don’t want to plow through the whole thing. Expect more to come—AT&T is reportedly ready to make some concessions, but it might be too late for all of that.

—As a follow-up, we featured this guest column from state House member and wireless industry veteran Reuven Carlyle, which was adapted from an earlier post on his own blog. It’s a long read, but worth the time as Carlyle—a Democrat—argues against the Obama administration’s deal-blocking lawsuit because, in his view, consolidation is inevitable and the only real way the U.S. can build massive, utility-grade wireless networks that will spark innovation.

—I profiled Decide, the interesting new gadget-shopping startup from the ubiquitous Oren Etzioni and friends. Decide uses the same breed of price-prediction technologies that built Farecast (acquired by Microsoft), but adds some new elements that help shoppers decide (get it?) when they should buy a new TV, laptop, or camera. But it’s about way more than saving money on tech gadgets: Decide’s methods of extracting searchable information from written text, used as a way to track new-model rumors, points to the future of all search.

—The pre-Labor Day Thursday was ripe with tidbits, so here’s a roundup-within-a-roundup—New HTC phones running the “Mango” version of Windows Phone; Microsoft sued over allegedly tracking locations through WP camera software; Expedia‘s CFO stepping down, but not until the TripAdvisor spinoff is complete; and Harebrained Schemes‘ “Crimson Steam Pirates” debuts for the iPad, via Bungie Aerospace and Moai.

—Finally, in a startup profile by way of an SEC filing, we chatted about Viableware, a company featuring some tech and restaurant industry veterans who are targeting the suddenly busy market for next-generation payment devices and systems for dining out. Viableware’s device is called the Rail, and mimics a traditional bill folio. The idea is to save money on transaction fees and labor, cut out the potential for fraud, and—probably most importantly—build a new platform for ads and loyalty programs

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Oren Etzioni is getting a little impatient. More than dozen years after Google emerged from Stanford and set up shop in a California garage, the University of Washington professor and artificial intelligence expert says Internet search still isn’t evolving fast enough.

Right now, as Etzioni recently wrote in Nature, the list of links coughed up by even the best search engines are really just “the electronic equivalent of the index at the back of a reference book.” With advances like IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson computer on display, Etzioni says Internet search should be a lot closer to answering open-ended questions—who won the Mariners game tonight? How much is parking downtown? And where can I get a decent haircut around here?

These aren’t just idle complaints. Etzioni, also a tech entrepreneur, is doing his part to help push the future of search with his newest Seattle-based startup: Decide, an e-commerce search engine that helps shoppers find rock-bottom prices on electronic gadgets. The company, which just opened up its site to the public in June, has raised $8.5 million from Madrona Venture Group (where Etzioni is a venture partner), Maveron, and angels.

Yep, that’s right—discount shopping. And it’s got a lot more to do with the future of search than you might think.

Decide uses sophisticated data-mining and analysis techniques to predict whether prices will change for a given product, giving consumers a better window into volatile retail prices. If this sounds familiar, it’s the same basic idea behind Farecast, another Etzioni company that predicted price changes for airline tickets. Microsoft bought Farecast in 2008 for a reported $115 million, and has incorporated the technology into its Bing search engine.

But where Decide gets really futuristic is its ability to advise consumers whether new models are about to debut, helping them avoid the kind of regret swallowed by all those poor folks who were just a little too late in buying the first-generation iPad, but a little ahead of the iPad 2′s debut—and stuck with an instantly outdated hunk of expensive gear.

(Right now, Decide only tracks TVs, cameras and laptops, but it’s easy to see the service expanding to a lot more gadgets in the future—tablets and smartphones are the two things people request the most, CEO Mike Fridgen says.)

Luckily for the summer interns of the world, Decide doesn’t get its new-model data by stuffing an office with hordes of readers and fact-checkers to comb over the Web for rumors. Instead, … Next Page »

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One of the most head-scratching tech headlines of April 2011 was the news that Kosmix, a Mountain View, CA-based startup best known for building a Twitter filtering tool called TweetBeat, had been acquired by Walmart. Yes, that Walmart—the one with 9,000 big-box stores spread across the American heartland.

For one thing, Walmart already has a large technology presence right here in the Bay Area: you can see the big “Walmart.com” sign on the e-commerce division’s building from Highway 101 in Brisbane. So it wasn’t clear why the company needed a second Silicon Valley redoubt. Even more puzzling, Kosmix’s so-called “social genome” platform, which the company had been applying in areas like news aggregation and categorization, didn’t seem to have much to do with Walmart’s business problems—such as narrowing the gap with e-commerce market leader Amazon, for example.

There was speculation that Walmart’s real interest was in Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have unbeatable pedigrees in the world of e-commerce technology. The pioneering comparison shopping site they co-founded in 1996, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million; inside Amazon, the pair helped to create the e-retailer’s huge marketplace of third-party retailers and came up with the technology behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps Walmart—which paid $300 million for Kosmix, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—wanted Harinarayan and Rajaraman to work similar miracles for Walmart.com?

Anand Rajaraman

Those were the questions on my mind when I drove down to the former Kosmix headquarters, now WalmartLabs, in Mountain View a couple of weeks ago. I talked for about hour with Rajaraman, who now shares the title of senior vice president of Walmart Global eCommerce with Harinarayan; he’s also an active Silicon Valley investor and writes about his big technology passion, data mining, at a blog called Datawocky. It turned out to be the most extensive interview that either Kosmix founder has given since the acquisition, and I learned a lot about why Walmart thought Kosmix was interesting, and what kinds of capabilities Rajaraman thinks his 70-person team can bring to their new employer.

A lot of it has to do with unsurprising things like improving the product recommendations that Internet users get when they go to Walmart.com, and tapping shoppers’ smartphones as a marketing channel. But Rajaraman also pointed to some more interesting applications for Kosmix’s social genome technology—like monitoring social media conversations in the vicinity of a physical Walmart store for signals about what goods that store should stock.

But we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what concrete products, features, or campaigns emerge from the Kosmix acquisition. Rajaraman said his team is hard at work on some features that will likely make their debut before the 2011 holidays. He dropped heavy hints that smartphone apps and an enhanced presence for Walmart on Facebook will figure in the changes somehow, but stayed largely mum about the specifics. “In six to eight months the impact is going to be visible, for sure,” he said.

Here’s the interview transcript, edited for length.

Xconomy: What’s the big picture behind Walmart Labs—why would Walmart want a bigger presence in Silicon Valley?

Anand Rajaraman: Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, but they are not the number-one player in e-commerce—Amazon is. About a year ago, Walmart decided that e-commerce is a strategic priority. It’s not like they had not been investing in e-commerce, but they said, ‘It’s time to go to the next level.’

When you do that, what’s important is to look at how the world has changed. Are there some assumptions that can be challenged, or some trends that can be used, to leapfrog the 800-pound gorilla in e-commerce?

If you think about the way the world has changed in the last two years, there are two big, disruptive changes that have happened, and one of them is … Next Page »

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Shopkick is a startup on fire. Its CEO, Cyriac Roeding, is busier than the heads of companies a hundred times Shopkick’s size; it took me about eight months to get a 30-minute appointment with the German-born engineer and entrepreneur. The day I finally visited the company, which occupies a cramped office above a downtown Palo Alto dim sum restaurant, a bucket brigade on the stairs was refueling the 28-employee operation with bottled water and snacks. They needed it: Just one day before, the company had crossed the 2-million-user threshold. That’s how many people have fired up the Shopkick mobile app inside one of the hundreds of brick-and-mortar stores where consumers can use the startup’s system to rack up reward points.

Not bad for a company that barely existed two years ago, and that didn’t roll out its service publicly until August 2010. If Roeding is right about mobile technology’s potential to boost real-world retail sales, the startup will be searching for larger quarters very soon—and making backers like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Reid Hoffman, and Ron Conway look prescient indeed.

Roeding (it’s pronounced RHO-ding) reduces the whole premise behind Shopkick to this: retail stores will do almost anything to increase foot traffic. After all, once you get people in the door, the “conversion” rates for bricks-and-mortar stores are very high; the proportion of visitors who end up buying something ranges from 20 percent for clothing stores to 95 percent for grocery stores, compared to a paltry 0.5 percent to 3 percent for most e-commerce sites. The problem, though, is that physical stores don’t have good ways to offer visitors rewards that might bring them inside more often, since merchants don’t even know who’s there until customers pull out their credit cards.

But these days, more and more shoppers are carrying sophisticated, Internet-connected sensing devices in their pockets—they’re called smartphones. The “creative spark” behind Shopkick, says Roeding, was the realization that merchants could deliver rewards to visitors via their iPhones or Android devices, if only there were some foolproof way to know when these smartphone-toting shoppers are really inside a specific store. GPS isn’t accurate enough, and Foursquare- or Gowalla-style checkins don’t work either, due to rampant cheating. (Roeding says the company’s tests showed that 80 to 95 percent of check-ins at retail locations are from people who aren’t actually where they say they are.)

Shopkick’s solution is surprisingly low-tech. It’s a white plastic box that plugs into a normal wall outlet and sends digital data via sound waves at 21,000 Hertz—just above the range of human hearing (but well within the range of your dog’s hearing, meaning the system might not work out so well at Petco). If you walk into a Shopkick-enabled store with the Shopkick mobile app already running on your smartphone, the device’s microphone will pick up the signal and use an embedded code to activate the reward of the day. Just for walking into a Target, say, you might get 60 “kicks,” the startup’s virtual currency.

The sound waves don’t leak beyond a store’s doors and windows, so you can’t earn kicks without actually stepping inside. You can pick up additional kicks by scanning product barcodes with your smartphone’s camera; build up enough kicks, and you can eventually redeem them for things like in-store gift cards, restaurant vouchers, and Facebook credits.

As the first app to reward shoppers simply for walking into a store, Shopkick has the potential to build a business at Google scale or beyond, Roeding argues. “Online, when you go to a page, you are expressing intent,” he says. “Offline, when you come through the door, you are interested in buying something. Google has built a pretty nice business on clicks. What if you could scale this up to the much larger physical retail world?”

Shopkick’s launch partners last summer included American Eagle, Macy’s, the Sports Authority, Simon (the nation’s largest mall operator), and Best Buy locations in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Since then, it’s won accounts with … Next Page »

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San Francisco-based SingleFeed, which helps e-retailers format product data so that it can be found more easily via comparison shopping engines, has been acquired by San Mateo, CA-based e-commerce software provider Vendio, according to a June 28 announcement. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. SingleFeed was backed by True Ventures, KPG Ventures, and NetService Ventures.

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Boston-based AisleBuyer, a developer of mobile apps for retail checkouts, announced it has nabbed a $7.5 million Series E financing, bringing its total funding pot to $11.5 million. The money comes from Old Willow Partners, who led the startup’s $4 million round last fall, and will go to product development, new hires in engineering and sales, and adding new customers.

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Divya Gugnani grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and told herself she’d never do that.

Now, she’s CEO of two startups. One of which, she says, is out to transform the way women shop. That would be Send The Trend, a website that sells personalized accessories like jewelry and scarves. It’s one of the many New York fashion-focused sites that has started up in the last couple of years.

Gugnani, who early on developed a passion for cooking, pursued a traditional career in finance after graduating from Cornell, taking positions at Goldman Sachs, and private equity and VC firms Investcorp International and iFormation. Those exposed her to the creative side of startups.

“I really got to see how people started a business: how they grow it, how they start it, the problems they have,” she says. “I really got to get a feel for business, but the end of the day you haven’t done it. As much as I loved being a venture capitalist, there was just this bug in my body that wants to be on the other side.”

It took her a few years, though. She went to Harvard Business School, mainly because “working in finance for four years is enough to kill someone,” she says. She ended up cooking a lot and making new friends, but when she was done, jumped right back into venture capital.

While working at FirstMark Capital, Gugnani had the idea to turn her passion for cooking into a social website for tips on recipes, nutrition and mixology. A colleague encouraged her to pursue it as a fun side project in 2008, and months later Gugnani quit her career in VC to run the site, Behind the Burner, full time.

Living the scrappy startup life exposed Gugnani to the challenges most women face while shopping, she says. “From that experience my life as a woman changed dramatically. It used to be that a great sales rep would say, ‘this is what you need to wear.’ Shopping was an activity where you got so much service and customization. Once you don’t take a salary, shopping sucks.”

“Women have a hard time shopping, whether it’s online or not online, they can’t discover the things they want to buy,” Gugnani says. “Discovery is the biggest problem.

So last year Gugnani launched Send the Trend with friend Mariah Chase, who had worked with Project Runway winner Christian Siriano. The trio developed a website that surveys women on their style preferences and brings them … Next Page »

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[Updated 11/17/11 with additional listings] When the ex-CEO of Pure Digital, maker of the famous Flip pocket camcorder, wins funding from Sequoia Capital to open a chain of grilled cheese sandwich shops, it may be time to abandon your own enterprise-cloud-marketing-analytics-automation venture or your social-mobile-deals-gamification startup and think about getting into the food business.

I was already planning to compile a list of food-related startups for my column this week when I read about Pure founder Jonathan Kaplan’s surprise announcement. I happen to love grilled cheese, so I’m hoping that his new restaurants, to be called The Melt, fare better than the Flip camcorder, which Cisco recently discontinued after spending $590 million to buy Pure in 2009. The fact that Kaplan’s customers will be able to order and pay for their cheddar melts and tomato soup using their mobile phones is a nice twist. But the real message behind his move (and Sequoia’s investment) may be that food is back in fashion as an arena for startup founders.

Food-delivery startups such as Kozmo and Webvan were among the venture-backed companies caught up in the wave of dot-com failures around 2001, and years went by before technology entrepreneurs dared to venture back into the kitchen. But now they’re cooking with gas. Few urban-dwellers these days make a restaurant reservation without consulting a site like Yelp, Urbanspoon, or OpenTable. Smartphone and tablet owners can choose from hundreds of cooking, nutrition, and shopping apps. And there’s nary a venture incubator program without at least one food startup in its pantry (500 Startups has Spoondate, StartX has Kitchit, TechStars has Foodzie, and Y Combinator has Anyleaf, E la Carte, and Grubwithus, among others).

Here in San Francisco, a chocolate tasting organized by health-food search site Foodia last week attracted more than 400 young entrepreneurs—I know because I was elbowing them out of the way. There’s also a monthly meetup for hackers building food-related apps, and even tech publisher O’Reilly Media has come out with a cookbook. (It’s called Cooking for Geeks, and it’s really well done.)

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise—at a time when farmer’s markets are popping up in every town square, cooking and celebrity-chef shows keep multiplying on TV, and concern over the health impact of poor nutrition is growing—that startup types are trying to turn their food obsessions into businesses. With their usual ardor, these entrepreneurs are finding and fixing previously undiscovered inefficiencies in every part of the food business, from managing recipes and making grocery lists to reserving restaurant tables, reading nutrition labels, and figuring out which wine to buy.

But there are so many new food-related companies on the scene that it’s impossible not to wonder whether the market’s getting a bit frothy. Quick, can you tell me the difference between Foodbuzz, Foodia, Foodily, Foodista, Foodler, Foodori, Foodspotting, Foodtree, Fooducopia, and Foodzie? In the end, I suspect that there isn’t really room for three companies that page restaurant guests when their table is ready (No Wait, Textaurant, and ReadyPing), three marketplaces for artisanal food products (Foodoro, Fooducopia, and Foodzie), two members-only restaurant deals services (TipCity and VillageVines), and dozens of recipe search apps and sites. If DARPA were funding all this activity, it would simply hold a bake-off to find the top competitors. We’ll have to wait longer to see which of these startup soufflés get some lift, and which ones collapse.

Meanwhile, here’s today’s main dish: a list of all the notable food-related startups I could find in one afternoon of research. I tried to restrict this list to companies that are making significant use of software, mobile technology, or the Web (if only as a marketing and distribution channel). I focused my search mainly on companies in Xconomy’s home cities, especially San Francisco, and I deliberately didn’t hunt down the names of every maker of every food-related iPhone or Android app. So I know the list is incomplete. But if you know of a name that deserves to be added, please let me know in the comment section.

AllRecipes—Large online catalog of user-contributed recipes.

Anyleaf—Listings of local supermarket discounts; a replacement for Sunday coupon circulars.

Back to the Roots—Home mushroom growing kits using recycled coffee grounds.

BigOven—Web and mobile recipe organizer and shopping list maker.

BlackboardEats—Members get e-mails with 30 percent discount offers for select restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

Chow—Food-related news, entertainment, and instruction. Owned by CBS Interactive.

Cocomama Foods—Online vendor of gluten-free foods such as quinoa cereals.

Consmr—A social network that allows users to “check in” to the grocery products they’re eating.

Cookooree—Community recipe sharing “for the rest of us.”

Cookstr—Recipes from leading chefs and cookbook authors.

Daily Gourmet—E-mail newsletter offering daily deals on artisanal foods.

Daily Grape—Daily wine review videos from Gary Vaynerchuk, formerly of WineLibrary.tv.

… Next Page »

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Sparkbuy, a consumer electronics shopping site based in Seattle, has been purchased by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), the startup announced today on its website. The company, which has been around for less than a year, had raised about $1 million, led by Benaroya Ventures and angel investor Geoff Entress. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but this looks like a clear case of talent acquisition by a big company.

“I know, right? We can hardly believe it ourselves,” the company’s leaders wrote on its website, which also said that Sparkbuy is shutting down as the team joins Google. The Mountain View, CA-based search giant added in a statement to All Things D that the Sparkbuy team will work out of Google’s Kirkland, WA, office.

That’s quite a turnaround for a little startup that just came out of stealth mode last November and only started up its service in late March. The idea behind Sparkbuy, led by entrepreneur Dan Shapiro, was to make online electronics shopping more customizable and powerful for consumers. In fact, with features like little sliders that customized search ranges for price and technical specifications, Sparkbuy was directly inspired by online travel sites like Expedia and Kayak.

Just last month, we reported on Sparkbuy adding products from Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) to its stable, which had already included laptops and other gadgets from Amazon.com and Newegg. That partnership bumped up the product offerings to about 3,000 items.

Shapiro previously co-founded mobile picture site Ontela, which merged with Photobucket in late 2009.

A Seattle-based Sparkbuy competitor, Decide.com, is still in stealth mode. Last month, it raised a $6 million investment round. Decide was co-founded by Internet search expert and University of Washington professor Oren Etzioni.

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As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:

—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.

—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or … Next Page »

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Another day, another bit of news for Seattle-based online electronics shopping startups. This time, it’s Sparkbuy announcing that it will offer products from Richfield, MN-based Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) on its customizable search site, a big addition for a company that’s only been in the public eye for about two weeks. Sparkbuy, which already featured electronics like laptops and TVs from Amazon.com and Newegg, says the Best Buy addition gives it more than 3,000 items to peruse.

Sparkbuy Chief Executive Dan Shapiro, who previously founded mobile imaging startup Ontela (which merged with Photobucket), said access to Best Buy’s product lines would especially boost Sparkbuy’s selection of TVs, along with adding more laptops and tablets. Any Best Buy purchases made through Sparkbuy can be picked up in Best Buy stores, he said in a statement.

So why would consumers use Sparkbuy rather than just going straight to the big-name retailers? Shapiro’s bet is that current online electronics shopping is still not smart enough, sending shoppers to blunt-instrument Web search engines or scurrying between a bunch of retail sites with limited sorting functions.

Shapiro has said Sparkbuy was directly influenced by travel booking sites like Kayak and Expedia, allowing consumers to narrow their search for a laptop down by brand, price, and speed, for instance.

Sparkbuy’s news follows yesterday’s announcement that stealth-mode Seattle company Decide.com, co-founded by University of Washington professor and Internet search guru Oren Etzioni, had raised a $6 million Series B investment round. Decide hasn’t detailed what it’s doing, other than to say it will “bring unprecedented levels of transparency to electronics shopping.”

That makes Decide more heavily financed than Sparkbuy, which previously raised $1 million, led by Benaroya Ventures and Founder’s Co-op. But Sparkbuy is in the market first with a functioning product, and an affiliation with Best Buy, which has more than 1,000 retail stores nationwide, is nothing to sneeze at. Sparkbuy even got a nice quote to tout from Best Buy’s senior manager of platform business, Steve Bendt: “They make it dead simple to find the perfect product.”

So is Seattle suddenly an epicenter for next-generation online electronics shopping? It should be interesting to watch these companies jostle for position and build their businesses.

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Seattle stealth startup Decide.com, which says it’s working on a consumer electronics shopping service, announced a $6 million Series B financing round today. The latest investment was led by Maveron—Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz’s outfit—along with Madrona Venture Group and angel investors. Decide, led by CEO Mike Fridgen, is also adding some notable names: Dan Levitan of Maveron and former Farecast Chief Executive Hugh Crean are on the board, while founding Google board member Ram Shriram is lined up as an adviser and investor. Former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford also is an investor. Decide previously raised about $2.5 million in venture financing. University of Washington professor and Internet search expert Oren Etzioni is a co-founder. Fridgen said in a news release that Decide “puts the power of shopping for electronics back in consumers’ hands,” whatever that means. It sounds like a possible competitor to Sparkbuy, the Seattle startup led by Ontela (now Photobucket) founder Dan Shapiro.

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Seph Skerritt, a New York entrepreneur, says he has a foolproof way to solve a problem well-known to many New York men—how to find a perfect fitting dress shirt.

Skerritt’s company, Proper Cloth, offers an online interface enabling men to custom create dress shirts based on their desired measurements, style, fit, and fabric.

I know what you’re thinking—so what? You never know something is the perfect fit until you try it on.

Well, yes. Proper Cloth is well aware of that challenge, and has anticipated how to get around that objection. Every first shirt a customer orders can be further customized or returned for free, even if it’s the consumer who picked the wrong sizing.

“It makes every first shirt a test shirt,” he says. “We’re more than happy to lose a little bit on the first shirt to get them satisfied and stoked on the fit.”

Let’s back track. Skerritt says he felt firsthand the pain of trying to find the right business attire while working in the corporate world. “The process was go to the mall, try on stuff, and try to find something you like,” he says. “It’s totally frustrating and annoying, and you end up making a lot of compromises just to get it over with.”

While at MIT Sloan School of Management, Skerritt knew he wanted to start his own company upon graduating, he says. And the inspiration came while he was on an internship in Asia and had his first experience with custom shirt ordering.

“It seemed like the kind of offering that could be very interesting if it was rolled up into a really clean, customer service oriented, e-commerce experience,” he says.

Skerritt started working on the business in April 2008 while still in school, and had the site live that October. Proper Cloth now offers … Next Page »

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