When Delphia Simmons’ boss at COTS Detroit, an organization founded in 1982 to address the city’s growing homeless crisis, came back from a trip to Philadelphia with an armload of newspapers produced and sold by homeless people there as a means of self-support, an idea started bubbling in the back of Simmons’ mind.

“I had never run across one of those newspapers,” Simmons said. “I was not previously familiar with the concept and I was really excited about trying it in Detroit.”

The idea stayed in the back of her mind for close to a year because she wasn’t sure how she would raise the approximately $2,500 needed to start a similar newspaper in Detroit.

Enter Simmons’ friend Margarita Barry—entrepreneur, champion of all things Detroit, and founder of the website I Am Young Detroit. Barry had been tapped by Michigan Corps, a network of local and global Michiganders committed to positive change in their home state, to be part of its Kiva Detroit Working Group, which trained a cross-section of community leaders to go out to recruit small-business owners in need of microfinancing.

Barry sent Simmons to micro-lender Accion USA’s website to fill out a loan application, and the Thrive Detroit street newspaper was officially born, one of four small-business enterprises already funded by Kiva Detroit.

What sounds like a complicated if serendipitous chain of events is precisely the mission of the Kiva City program. Launched with Accion USA, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Kiva.org, Kiva Detroit represents Kiva’s first locally-organized initiative in the United States and, hopefully, the beginning of a nationwide city micofinancing program. Kiva Detroit allows Detroiters and supporters of Detroit to lend as little $25 to local, small businesses with loan impact doubled through a 1:1 match supported by $250,000 in funds from the Knight Foundation.

Though Kiva is traditionally thought of as an organization that serves people in remote corners of the globe, its mission to give people the power to create opportunity for themselves and others fits nicely in a city like Detroit with plenty of need.

Michigan Corps, whose founding members include Google’s Eric Schmidt, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, sportscaster Dick Enberg, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffery Eugenides, stepped in to organize and educate community members on the ground so they could spread the word about Kiva Detroit’s goal of connecting the underbanked with microloans.

The field of microfinancing was pioneered in the economically ravaged country of Bangledesh, but it has slowly taken root in the United States—especially given … Next Page »

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The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) today announced a partnership with Dow Chemical and state investment funds to help finance second-stage growth companies in Michigan, the first state in the nation to take part in the new nationwide investment initiative.

The InvestMichigan! Mezzanine Fund, part of the $1 billion Start-Up America Impact Investment SBIC Initiative, will pump up to $130 million in debt and equity funding into lower-middle-market Michigan companies over the next five years.

Karen Mills, SBA Administrator, said in a conference call that Michigan was selected as the first state to receive funding through this public-private venture not only because of high unemployment, but because the state’s economy is in transition.

“Michigan has great assets: the highest number of engineers per capita in the nation, great universities, a strong culture of entrepreneurship and a talented workforce,” Mills said “Two out of three jobs are created by small businesses, and data shows that high-growth firms are responsible for the lion’s share of these jobs.”

The mezzanine fund will make investments of $5 million to $15 million in companies with $20 million or more in annual revenue. Kelly WilliamsManaging Director and Head of Credit Suisse’s Customized Fund Investment Group, says the fund is targeting businesses across many sectors, though she expects manufacturing to be at the forefront given Michigan’s historical strengths and expertise in the field. Williams went on to say the first deal under the initiative will be announced in a few weeks and will probably be a company involved in food distribution.

Michigan companies interested in being considered for financing from the InvestMichigan! Mezzanine Fund can call fund co-managers Credit Suisse at (248) 619-1868 or Beringea at (248) 489-9000.

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Your average doctor who owns his practice doesn’t exactly have time to monitor Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and blogs all day for comments and reviews on his business, says entrepreneur David Lifson.

Yet a busy doctor is just the type of customer that Lifson is targeting with Postling, the startup he co-founded in New York City. The company, which launched in 2009, delivers a daily e-mail summary of what’s being said about a particular business through different social media outlets. A business owner also can get instant notifications of new comments on the business, and can respond instantly via e-mail to post responses on the given social media platform.

“Their email inbox is the one thing they do check every day,” says Lifson, Postling’s CEO. “They can treat these new emails as a to-do list.”

Postling users can also schedule and post social media updates ahead of time from the platform, and manage their news feeds from different social media sites—all in one place. Analytics show Postling customers which social media outlets are most effective for them. The software is designed to be simpler and easier to manage, at least for non-professional marketers, than options like HootSuite or Radian6, says Lifson.

Postling’s founders come from Etsy.com, the Brooklyn-based e-commerce marketplace for handmade and vintage items. Etsy co-founders Chris Maguire and Haim Schoppik left the company in 2008, shortly after Etsy brought on Maria Thomas as chief operating officer in April 2008 and promoted her to CEO that July. (She left the company at the end of 2009.) Lifson, formerly of Amazon.com, started working at Etsy in spring 2008 and left that November to join Maguire and Schoppik in starting a new company.

The trio spent roughly six months trying to develop an Etsy-esque site for independent bed and breakfast inns, taking a percentage of rooms booked through the site, like OpenTable does for restaurants. The site, Waffl.com, is still up and running, but didn’t take off among the not so tech-savvy bed and breakfast owners, Lifson says.

“Convincing innkeepers to use our room inventory management system instead of paper and pencil was not going to happen,” says Lifson.

But it was that group of customers that also told the Postling team that they wanted a tool to help them manage social media all from one place. They said, “We’re so overwhelmed on all of this social media stuff, put it all in one place, and we’ll learn that tool,” Lifson says.

Lifson, Schoppik, and Maguire worked on Postling for about six weeks and launched in August 2009. “What we’re good at it is … Next Page »

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Former Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker will join Cambridge, MA-based venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners as an executive in residence, he revealed in an e-mail to his supporters today. “I’ll be working with them to identify small and mid-size firms—primarily in the health care world—that the firm can partner with and help succeed,” Baker, the former chief of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, said in the e-mail. Baker, who lost to Democratic Governor Deval Patrick in November, says he prefers the experience of working with entrepreneurs and small business owners to taking a leadership role a large company.

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Seattle was one of the hardest hit regions during the dotcom boom and subsequent crash of the early 2000s. The companies that were able to survive the fall, however, were grandfathered into a strong regional, and once again booming, technology industry. One of these survivors—now a veteran on the local tech scene—is Redmond, WA-based Concur (NASDAQ: CNQR), a travel and expense reporting software developer.

And while travel and expense reporting software may not sound like the hottest product on the shelves these days, according to co-founder, president, and chief operating officer Rajeev Singh, the company has found a way to maintain rapid growth by shifting away from business services and into the fast-evolving mobile scene.

Singh has seen lots of trends come and go. When Raj and a man named Mike Hilton first founded the company in August of 1993, the two worked out of Raj’s apartment, hiring people with their own money until their first round of funding came through a year or two later. The goal then was to help businesses easily and efficiently manage their expense reporting, before the Internet. Now, 17 years later, all three are still part of the company. While the services they aim to provide have stayed the same, Raj says it’s the solutions that have changed, largely because of the increasing shift toward mobile technology.

Today, Concur products are used by some 10,000 small and large businesses around the world to track day-to-day expenses via traditional, mobile, and cloud-based platforms. The company was one of the first to have products offered in the new Google Apps Marketplace for businesses back in March. Over the last few months, the company has also rolled out new products that allow businesses and their employees to better manage every element of their trip—from hotel reservations to taxi cab pickups—from a mobile device, while also automatically inputting all transaction information into the expense report.

I had the opportunity to speak with Raj last week, just after the company released a few more mobile apps for its Concur Breeze mobile expense reporting system. Alongside its unique history, Raj talked about how the mobile industry has changed Concur’s course and where he sees the company going five years down the line. Here are some of the highlights from the first half of our conversation. Tomorrow, we’ll have the second half.

X: What’s your two-minute company history?

Raj Singh: We started in August of ’93…but in ’93, ’94 there was no web. There was no capacity to build applications that are going to be delivered over the Internet…It wasn’t until ’98 that the company really hit stride…We were probably at the time a less than 100-person company doing less than $10 million in revenues. But then the web happened, and by ’96 we were building a web application. By ’98, our web application on the market for expense reporting really exploded—we grew like mad—and so we took our company public at the end of 1998, so right before the giant dotcom boom of 1999/2000. We were one of the first companies to go public in ’98. We would go through that whole rollercoaster of ’98 through 2001/2 and we were lucky, actually, in that we were one of the only companies that survived that rollercoaster ride.

At the top of the dotcom boom it was craziness—there were companies doing $20-$30 million in revenue that were worth a billion dollars in terms of market cap. It was nuts! And so we were a company whose market value skyrocketed during the boom, and then absolutely tubed when the crash came. And what we’re really proud of is that 99 percent of all companies whose stock goes down below a dollar fail.They go out of business, they get acquired, they go away. We were one of the few that stuck it out, and we survived. And a big reason we survived was in 2002/2003 we saw a trend coming … Next Page »

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I last wrote about Lexington, MA-based Wistia in September 2008, which, I’m sure you’ll remember, was approximately when the economy went all to hell. CEO Chris Savage said it was clear by October that Wistia’s original business model—licensing its Web-based video-sharing platform to large enterprises—was insufficient. So this week the startup is launching a reconfigured version of its technology. Called Zebra, the system has been overhauled to meet the needs of small- to medium-sized businesses, which are increasingly using video for marketing and training purposes.

The basics of the technology remain the same: Wistia hosts video produced by its customers on its servers, and keeps detailed records on who watches them—records that customers can then use to verify compliance (if the videos are being used for education or training) or to help identify the best leads (if the videos are part of the sales process). But Zebra can now track videos published on a company’s public-facing website, which the older Wistia system couldn’t do. And the service is now being sold on a subscription basis, with prices starting at $79 per month.

Wistia had a good first quarter, growing from 20 customers to 70, but almost all of the new customers were small businesses, says co-founder and CEO Chris Savage. “We’ve set out to really align the business and the application with those customers,” Savage says. “People said they loved the private [video] sharing and the ability to see what parts of a video people watched and what they’re interested in… but they started saying they wanted this for their public videos too.”

There’s another Boston firm, Visible Measures, that makes tools companies can use to study the behavior of Web surfers watching public videos, including which parts of a video they view more than once, and how often videos get forwarded. But Visible Measures’ services are aimed mostly at big media companies that want to track the viral spread of their videos as part of multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns. The Zebra system is designed for non-media companies whose videos likely get thousands of viewers per month rather than millions, Savage explains.

Using Zebra, companies can collect data such as the IP address of every Web visitor who views a video and how many times specific viewers come back. That information can be used to prove that a company complied with training requirements, or to fine-tune a pitch to prospective customers.

For example, one of Wistia’s customers is Kiva Systems, a maker of robotic warehouse automation systems that we’ve covered extensively. “They have video on their site that they use to help people get a taste of what their robots do,” says Savage. As prospects enter the sales process, he explains, Kiva creates a custom Wistia project for each one. The company can see which videos the prospects are focusing on and tailor its next communication accordingly. “It’s a video funnel—a whole interaction that hopefully leads to a longer relationship,” Savage says.

Wistia isn’t leaving behind its enterprise users, but “we are definitely not going after whole-enterprise solutions anymore,” says Savage. “We found that the applications in the enterprise were really at the departmental level, or started small and grew up from the department level. That was when the light bulb went off for us: this is much more like WebEx, where any sales person can buy into it, than it is like company-wide messaging.”

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I know plenty of people who have all of the ingredients for business success today, save one. They have a keen talent. They can turn out cool products or services. They know how to line up financial backing and keep account books. They’re “people people,” meaning they actually like to interact with others all day (something I can do only for so long before I need to recharge in solitude). Often, they’ve even run successful businesses in the past. But they don’t know the first thing about online marketing.

How could a little missing Web knowledge be the downfall of an otherwise talented small business person? Well, if the business owner wants someone like me as a customer, he or she had better have a website, and it had better be more than brochureware. It had better show up in the major search engines, or I won’t find the business at all. The proprietor had better give me a way to interact with the company directly through e-mail or an information request form. And it would sure be nice if the site told me more about the real people and passions behind the business.

All of this has been common wisdom for years, at least since the publication of Web marketing masterpieces like The Cluetrain Manifesto and Seth Godin‘s Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. But a shocking number of businesses still have static, lifeless, hard-to-find websites that look like they were built by seventh-graders on summer vacation and that do nothing to collect the vital information that can be used to turn one-time visitors into real customers. Hubspot, a Web startup in Cambridge, MA, is all about saving these businesses from their own ignorance.

It’s nobody’s fault that the rise of the Web has changed the way people find products and services in urban America and left so many entrepreneurs stuck in the era of direct-mail marketing or the Yellow Pages. But for a reasonable $250 per month, Hubspot will bring them back to the present, or most of the way, anyway. The company’s Web-based software, which is designed for non-technical users, automates many of the headaches involved in “search engine optimization,” or SEO, the soul-draining game of trying to beat out other businesses in searches related to your business’s products and bring customers your way.

For example, Hubspot’s system will help subscribers set up a hosted website that’s configured to draw in traffic by including the keywords most likely to get the site a high ranking at Google, Yahoo, and other search sites. The software can also help users decide which keywords are worth bidding on at Google Adwords and other contextual ad services, and allow them to set up special “landing pages” for visitors who find the site via those keywords. (An accountant’s website, for instance, might have special landing pages about tax time for users who click on AdWords ads targeted to the keyword “taxes.”)

With Hubspot it’s also easy to set up forms that visitors can fill out to receive newsletters or other information—permission marketing at its finest. Subscribers can also build and administer a blog that adds a timely, human voice to their business’s site.

Hubspot marketing vice president Mike Volpe calls this whole combination of tactics “inbound marketing,” and if it’s done right, he says, it can convert 20 to 70 percent of visitors into customers, compared to the 1 percent conversion rates typically expected from direct-mail campaigns and other more classical marketing techniques.

Hubspot’s services aren’t for everyone. If you have a bit more experience with website design, content management systems, or online ad buying, you can probably do a lot of the things that Hubspot automates on your own. The question is how much time you’d need to set aside, and how much you enjoy the minutiae of Web publishing. “Sometimes people look at a Hubspot website and say, ‘I could kinda build that myself,’ and yeah, you could,” says Volpe. “But how long would it take you?” And more importantly, couldn’t you be doing something else that would more than pay for the $250-per-month investment?

Hubspot launched its site in late 2006 but has been aggressively pursuing customers only for the last couple of months, Volpe says. (The company eats its own dogfood, to use the Web lingo, making heavy use of its own SEO, permission-marketing, and blogging tools.) The company recently overcame the all-important hump of winning its first round of venture funding, though Volpe won’t say how much or from whom.

“There’s a huge segment of the small-business market that is simply not consuming SEO services,” says Volpe. That’s understandable, since hiring a professional SEO consultant can cost tens of thousands of dollars. But using Hubspot, Volpe says, small business owners “can get 80 percent of what they’d get from an SEO professional, just using the tips and tricks we can give them.” Considering that Hubspot’s services can be had for not much more than the cost of a postage meter or a stack of business cards, that would seem to be a wise investment.

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