All the cool kids were doing it, so we just couldn’t resist. We’ve created an Xconomy page on Google+, where we’ll share several of our most interesting stories every day. We’ve also added Google+ sharing buttons to all of our stories here on the site—you’ll find them in the sharing box at right, and at the bottom of each story column.

We’re excited to have another great outlet for our content and a new way to engage with our readers online. We’re looking forward to some lively discussions and debates (and hopefully a few +1′s, too!). So please add us to your circles. Who knows, maybe you’ll even let us crash a hangout or two.

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After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

“As far as we know, we’re the only pro bono incubator in the country,” EvoNexus chairman Kevin Hell says in a statement issued late yesterday. “The goal is to grow sustainable tech companies and expand the industry here in San Diego.”

When the EvoNexus incubator first opened in Sorrento Valley, organizers said they wanted to host startups developing advanced communications technologies, including wireless life sciences and smart grid networking.

Since then, CommNexus moved EvoNexus to University City and broadened its criteria. The industry group established the new downtown EvoNexus to host startups that are focused primarily on developing Internet software, Web services, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing technologies. The privately held Irvine Co. made the 15,000-square foot space available to EvoNexus at no cost. The incubator takes up an entire floor of the building at 101 W. Broadway, known locally as the AT&T building.

Hell says he sees parallels in the downtown San Diego locale with San Francisco’s SoMa, the downtown neighborhood South of Market Street that has become a magnet for social media startups and mobile app developers. The nightlife, housing, and amenities available in San Diego’s city center should appeal to young entrepreneurs, Hell says.

CommNexus plans to continue to operate its incubator in University City. The 12 companies in the new downtown space are:

Antengo: Real-time mobile classifieds.

BigSho: Social webcam game show.

Chatmeter: Online reputation management.

Fashioning Change: Shopping experience for eco-friendly apparel.

Saambaa: Social media app for finding things to do.

SwoopThat: Online textbook shopping by course.

TapChow: Cloud-based restaurant experience manger.

Taphunter: Mobile app for locating places that serve craft beer.

UgliApps: Mobile apps focused on food.

Voluware: Saas healthcare information software.

Xpenser: Web-based tracking of business expenses, time, and mileage.

Zambig: Web-based service that provides online outlet for radio ads.

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Pulling signal out of the noise is getting much more important. And the folks at Twitter are getting some help sorting through the flood of daily updates by buying Summify, a Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that counts RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser among its investors.

Summify analyzes a user’s media feeds, including social media and news syndication, to deliver a digest of top stories. But unlike a straight-up news reader, Summify uses algorithms to determine which stories are being passed around and talked about by the people a user interacts with.

There’s no word of the price Twitter paid for the service, just as the seed round from last spring didn’t have a price tag—and I couldn’t find an SEC filing for the company, either. Summify does say that it will be shutting down the service and relocating to San Francisco.

The company was started by a pair of Romanian former interns for Google and Microsoft, and is a product of Vancouver startup incubator Bootup Labs (which is apparently “defunct,” according to TechVibes).

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Tech entrepreneur Alex Iskold has always been a huge entertainment fan, especially when it comes to his favorite TV shows, but a few years back he was frustrated by what he saw as a major void in social media. “Even though I was on Facebook and Twitter, it was hard for me to find out what my friends were watching on TV,” he says.

So in late 2009, Iskold started GetGlue, a company that provides multiple platforms for TV fans to congregate around their favorite shows. GetGlue has acquired quite a following in its short history: 2 million people use its mobile and Web tools, the company says, and 75 TV networks are now using GetGlue to reach out directly to their fans. That was what inspired the $12 million funding round GetGlue announced yesterday, says Habib Kairouz, managing partner at Rho Ventures, which led the round. “An emerging, strong trend is that people are using their iPads and iPhones while they’re watching TV,” Kairouz says. “GetGlue does a very good job of working within the television ecosystem to provide additional value.”

GetGlue allows people to “check in” to their favorite shows while they’re watching them. They can then follow the stream of conversation from other fans, and get access to exclusive content and coupons offered by the networks and their sponsors. Iskold says GetGlue has put a lot of effort into tailoring the experience to each user, and to eliminating the “noise” that’s common on other social-networking sites—such as nonsensical comments. “We built a filtering technology that in real-time removes what it deems uninteresting,” he says. Users can also follow people in a Twitter-esque way, such as their offline friends or other GetGlue-rs who they find titillating. “Comments [about a show] from people you know will be the ones you see first,” Iskold says.

But similar to other members of the new class of tech startups, GetGlue is still figuring out how to monetize its offerings. “We are largely a pre-revenue company,” Iskold admits. The new funding, he says, will allow the company to continue to expand its user base, which he hopes will lead to new revenue opportunities.

Iskold predicts that most of GetGlue’s revenues will come from advertising—and the company has some early experiences from which to build. For example, during the most recent season of The X Factor, Pepsi ran a campaign on GetGlue. During the show’s six-month run, … Next Page »

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Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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How annoying is the Web? I’m not talking about the nonstop distractions, the social-media window into human stupidity, or even the endless pop-up ads that block your view of the screen. I’m talking about the utter loss of privacy that most consumers have suffered online, yet rarely think about.

Sure, the Web is a net positive (we hope), but there are costs. When you visit any website, you leave a record of who you are, where you are, and what you looked at. That by itself might not be traceable to your specific identity, but over time, sites can track you via social media, share buttons (Facebook “likes,” even if you don’t click them or log in), check-ins, and other online activities. Companies can then show you personalized ads based on your product preferences, zip code, and history of Google searches. Worse, they can create a profile of your activities, often combined with data from public records, and sell it to other companies to do whatever they want with it.

Trying to combat all of this is a small Boston tech startup called Abine (pronounced “uh-BEAN”). Its name stands for “A Bit Is Not Enough.” The company is working to give consumers more control over their personal information on the Web. I’ve heard a fair amount about this startup over the past year, but I recently had a chance to meet co-founder Andrew Sudbury and CEO Bill Kerrigan over a beer.

The timing seems good for Abine, what with the massive flak Facebook has been taking over user privacy lately. As Sudbury points out (along with others), Facebook treats its users not as customers, but as products. Meaning that each social network member’s profile, with its likes, recommendations, and social connections, can be thought of as just part of a $100 billion machine for marketers.

“We don’t want our users to be our product,” Sudbury says. Instead, he says, consumers pay Abine to help shield them from Web tracking and other misuses of their personal information. “We want to sell privacy services,” he says. “We want to be at the point of contact between the user and the net. We want them to use the Web without worrying that all their data is flying out the door.” For example, “users think they’re going to Boston.com, but they’re really going to 10 other websites,” Sudbury says. (That’s because their browser fetches different pieces of the website from other sites—things like ads and snippets of code that let advertisers know a little bit about who each visitor is.)

So what does Abine do about it? The company makes add-ons for browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome; at the moment, different pieces of its software work for different browsers. The software, called Do Not Track Plus, blocks unwanted tracking by detecting all tracking requests … Next Page »

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The Boston ecosystem for tech startup investing just got a little more active. Boston Seed Capital said today it has hired Dave Balter, the CEO of BzzAgent, as a venture advisor (see photo, right).

Balter joins Peter Blacklow from Worldwinner, now executive vice president of digital for GSN, as a top advisor to the fund. Both are keeping their current roles in their respective companies as well.

Boston Seed Capital is run by Nicole Stata, the founder and former CEO of human-resources software firm Deploy Solutions, which she led for 11 years before its sale to Kronos in 2007. (If there’s one thing you get from this article, please learn how to pronounce Stata correctly: “STAY-ta.” Yes, she comes from a famous family.)

Boston Seed, which has offices in Newton, MA, is an early-stage investment firm that is about a year old. It invested in eight startups in its first year—most recently, Shareaholic, FitnessKeeper, and Relive (just last week). Other investments include Krush, Yottaa, EverTrue, Kinvey, peerTransfer, and Smarterer. Most of its startups are based around Boston, though Stata says, “We invest from Boston to pretty much anywhere.”

Stata (see photo, left) declined to give specifics about the size of her fund or how much she’ll invest in a typical startup. She did say she’s looking at seed-stage to Series A investments, is testing “the micro-venture model” while “keeping as close as possible to a traditional venture fund,” and is “eager to work with [other] venture firms.” In terms of sectors, Stata says Boston Seed focuses on “enabling platforms for Internet, mobile, and data.”

There is a question of how Boston Seed will differentiate itself from other local micro-VC funds such as NextView Ventures and Project 11 (not to mention angel groups). Stata herself has expertise in software as a service, human capital management, and business software. Blacklow brings plenty of gaming and marketing know-how. And the addition of Balter brings more leadership in marketing, social media, and company-building, as well as more contacts with entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders.

Indeed, the point of bringing in Balter is to provide “existing CEO feedback” to startups, says Stata. “It’s something I wish I had done when I was running Deploy,” she says. (Balter’s company, BzzAgent, is owned by Tesco/Dunnhumby after an acquisition earlier this year.)

So why does Stata want to do venture capital now, instead of starting another company herself? At Deploy, she says, “I was heads down, and quite myopic in my field. I wasn’t good enough at looking around at what was happening. I wanted to understand, what does the world look like today and where is it going?” As an investor, she says, “I can help a lot of companies instead of just one. That’s a big motivator.”

That brings her back to Boston Seed’s essence. “We really want to help startups,” she says. “That’s the reputation we want to get. We have to earn it.”

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Last week was the storm before the calm, as a warm front of high-tech news moved through the San Diego region before the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ve got the details here.

—San Diego-based DriveCam said it raised $85 million through a private placement that will be used mostly for its acquisition of RAIR Technologies. As I explained a couple of years ago, DriveCam puts its video data technology on the dashboards of fleet vehicles. Brookfield, WI-based RAIR provides technology that helps U.S. Department of Transportation-regulated fleet operators manage driver qualification requirements, vehicle inspection requirements, hours-of-service logs, and scoring for compliance, safety, and accountability. A New York private equity firm, Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, provided the $85 million in investment capital.

—The San Diego Venture Group awarded top honors—and $10,000 in startup capital—to San Diego-based SwoopThat at its annual PitchFest event. More than 70 early stage startups applied for the PitchFest competition, which ended last week in final presentations by SwoopThat, Gamer Grub, and Deal Current Network. SwoopThat helps college students at 2,347 schools nationwide save both time and money by purchasing their textbooks through Web-based technology that matches buyers with sellers of used textbooks. SwoopThat also operates a search engine that provides price comparisons for over 15 million products.

—A model fuels consortium formed six years ago by San Diego-based Reaction Design has developed software that can accurately simulate the formation of soot particulates during internal combustion. The modeling software was developed in anticipation of new engine exhaust regulations aimed to dramatically reduce the size and number of soot particles in gasoline and diesel-powered engines. As I had previously explained, Reaction Design develops software that models gaseous chemical reactions.

—A new San Diego startup, Swarmology, said it has raised $1.2 million as part of its emerging Web-based business, which mines social media as part of an integrated marketing approach for healthcare clients. Pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm founded Swarmology to analyze online conversations about specific health concerns.

—Austin, TX-based car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler North America, announced the debut of its all-electric car-sharing program in San Diego—the first in North America. The company began deploying 300 zero-emission smart “fortwo” electric-drive vehicles here Friday, and said they are now in service.

—First, IBM’s Watson beat the best players on TV’s Jeopardy! game show. At last week’s SuperData Summit, IBM executive Christine Kretz said the company is now working on … Next Page »

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Vijay Gaur sees the book going in the same direction that the mobile phone has.

“We are converting a book into a platform,” says Gaur. “Your phone is becoming more powerful by applications. We are now applying that same concept to books.”

That’s the idea behind his Medford, MA-based startup, AppBrick. The company, which graduated this past August from the New York edition of the startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures, hope to put a layer of interactive applications on top of e-books, from novels to textbooks to children’s stories.

Publishers upload their e-books into the AppBrick platform for the iPad, select which apps they want to add on top of it, and push go. It all ties into AppBrick’s original mission of giving businesses “a very simple easy to use tool to launch applications very fast and manage content through a Web based dashboard,” Gaur says.

Though books have evolved to hit digital readers, overall they remain very “flat,” and publishers are looking for a way to better capture their audiences, says Gaur. One set of AppBrick applications enables readers to share sections of the book via channels like Twitter, e-mail, or Facebook, as well as connect with authors via those social media channels. Readers can do all that without leaving the page they’re reading.

But AppBrick’s platform does far more to enhance the overall book experience, Gaur says. Readers can use a Wiki reference app to look up a term they’re unfamiliar with, connect with tutors via video, or discuss a chapter with other readers via a voice-over IP connection. One app enables users to draw and share notes on a virtual whiteboard. All of these functions appear as pop-up windows over the e-book page readers are already on.

AppBrick’s goal is to offer a platform where other third-party developers can create custom applications. The AppBrick core reader application would be free to users, but they would pay for purchases of additional applications. For example, they would pay tutors for lessons related to textbook content. AppBrick would take a cut of those purchases if the system takes off, Gaur says. It also plans to charge publishers for its service.

Gaur says these functions give publishers and authors analytics and insight about their audience that’s not available through traditional paper and e-books. They can understand what chapters readers are consuming, how they’re discussing it with others, and where they’re plugging in the interactive apps.

AppBrick also offers another set of features that allows users to create interactive storyboards, record their own voice for dialogue, and share those creations. “It publicizes the book and increases the creativity in the kids,” says Gaur. Those features are targeted at children’s books, but can also work with adult texts.

Other companies, like Push Pop Press (acquired by Facebook), have worked to make e-books more interactive and social media-oriented. AppBrick is a much cheaper solution though, because with it, interactive e-books individually don’t need to be coded from the ground up, says Gaur.” “They upload books and apply features,” says Gaur. “The beautiful aspect is we are converting the book into a platform and it keeps on improving regularly.”

AppBrick is testing its platform with a few different publishers and is looking to enlist more, as well as attract users. The company is running on $30,000 that Gaur has put in, as well as $20,000 from DreamIt, but is looking to gain more traction with its reader and publisher communities before going after a bigger funding round, says Gaur.

It’s up to the publishing houses to push their texts through AppBrick so their readers can get their hands on the interactive features. We’ll have to see who bites.

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In advance of his appearance at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference on Dec. 1 in Boston, I did a live tweet chat with Kabir Shahani, the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Appature, yesterday. Thanks to all who tuned in and sent us their thoughts; we had a great audience.

Appature is a four-year-old startup that makes Web software tools to help healthcare, pharma, and medical device companies reach hospitals and doctors and build important relationships with them. The big idea, as I see it, is to allow brands to drill down into a huge customer relationship database and quickly target the right people to sell to—and for the right reasons, namely, patient health. Yes, it’s big data, analytics, cloud, marketing, and healthcare, all wrapped up in one.

Which is why I think Boston-area tech companies like HubSpot, Buzzient, Constant Contact, SocMetrics, Kyruus, Ginger.io, Athenahealth, and others should be interested. And young entrepreneurs, who can really relate to Shahani. Plus I hear there are a few pharma and medical device companies (and hospitals) around town…

While some things don’t necessarily come across in tweets (like Shahani’s youthful charisma and CEO hair), other things do. Here are my top takeaways from the chat:

1. Appature knows more about Boston than Boston knows about Appature. “There are some incredible companies in Boston,” Shahani tweeted. “We have customers there and I absolutely love being out there to spend time with them.” Sure, Appature has customers and partners around town (and soon, employees—see below), but the general Boston tech and health-IT community doesn’t talk about this company very much. I’m telling you to pay attention, because Shahani and his crew are potentially on to something big. Whether they’ll execute and take full advantage, we’ll see.

2. The cutting edge of marketing tech for niches like healthcare is moving fast. “The dynamic has changed dramatically in the past 12-18 months,” Shahani wrote. He was talking about pharma companies trying new ways to reach and target customers, rather than just pursuing traditional approaches with their sales reps. It’s no surprise that cloud-based analytics and social technologies are transforming the way most industries work.

3. Growth is challenging for any startup, especially one based on relationships. Shahani, who bootstrapped Appature to profitability before taking a venture round, tweeted that his biggest mistake was “not getting an [East] coast office sooner.” (The company has employees around the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, presumably to work with lots of pharma customers. It also has people in San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago.) And here’s a news flash on its expansion: “Stay tuned on news about a Boston team in [January],” he wrote.

For the record, here’s the full live chat stream, via Storify (thanks to my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty for this).

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Twitter has already sucked away 20 percent of your life. What’s another 30 minutes?

If you don’t know Kabir Shahani or his startup, Appature, here is your chance. I will be hosting a live Twitter chat with him tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 3). This open chat will start at 2 pm Eastern / 11 am Pacific Time, and you can ask him whatever you want for 30 minutes.

What’s the occasion? Well, Shahani will be one of our featured speakers at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference in Boston on Dec. 1, and I want to give him a hearty welcome.

I got to know Shahani and Seattle-based Appature while I was living in the Northwest a couple years ago. The company has a remarkable story. It started in 2007 and bootstrapped itself to profitability before taking a VC round in late 2009. Appature is also interesting because it is complementary to many companies in Boston’s marketing tech cluster, like HubSpot, Constant Contact, BzzAgent (Tesco), and Buzzient. It works with a lot of healthcare companies and institutions around Boston and the East Coast. And, of course, it is going through many of the same growing pains that young companies around Boston (and elsewhere) talk about, as it expands its customer base across the country.

Appature’s founders are hardcore techies with a social networking background, but they chose to go after the healthcare market—making new kinds of software tools for medical device and pharma companies to build relationships with their customers (mostly hospitals and doctors), all in a fundamentally different way from traditional marketing.

So, in our live chat, I’m interested to hear what the big idea is all about at Appature and why it chose its particular niche. Other areas up for discussion include social marketing trends in healthcare and other industries; startup/VC lessons and tech advice; and maybe a little Boston vs. Seattle talk (in terms of innovation ecosystems, talent, and coffee). I’ll bet the tech and healthcare communities will have some good questions for Appature, too—so please get them ready.

Here’s how it will work on Thursday. I’ll send off a few questions to Shahani from @Xconomy, and then we’ll open it up to everyone’s questions. Shahani will be responding from his personal account, @Kabir, with an assist from his team @Appature. And we will all keep track of the running dialogue using the hashtag #XCappature. That’s the key for you to follow the conversation on Twitter. (You can use TweetChat or another app to focus on the half-hour discussion, or for however long you want to tune in.)

See you online at 2pm ET / 11am PT on Thursday…

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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All this talk about quarterly earnings and venture stats reminded me: I never posted my favorite stories from Xconomy Boston’s third quarter.

Yes, I know it’s almost the end of October, and the third quarter ended a month ago. I must have been traumatized by the collapse of the Red Sox or something (is baseball still going on?). Go ahead, run me out of town like Theo and Tito.

This time, I’m not consulting with my colleagues. I’m a rebel, a maverick. I work alone. Without further ado, here are my favorite stories from July through September:

Top 10 Tech Stories:

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I don’t like playing favorites. I just really like beer. Especially after this weekend. But enough about me.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to chat with Tim Noetzel, the co-founder of Pintley, a Boston-based beer website that provides personalized recommendations, tasting notes, and a social community. Pintley is a participant in this year’s MassChallenge startup accelerator, and it is one of 26 companies in contention for $1 million in prizes (divided among several winners), to be awarded tonight at the program’s closing ceremony in South Boston.

So, apropos of nothing, I wanted to provide a quick sketch of Pintley’s story. Noetzel is a Tufts University grad who studied abroad in Germany during his junior year. Not too surprisingly, he fell in love with the beer culture there. When he came back to Boston, he started Pintley as a hobby with his childhood friend, Shannon Hicks. (They grew up together in the suburbs of Chicago.)

Pintley opened to the public in July 2010, as a site where consumers could sign up and rate beers and discover microbrews. The company has since rolled out an iPhone app and social features including a news feed and monthly prizes for people in the Pintley community who share recommendations with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. So, as you might guess, it’s more than just a consumer app.

In fact, Pintley is trying to change “how beer is marketed and sold,” says Noetzel (and yes, he’s a home brewer). “Consumers are demanding much more variety. They want products tailored to their tastes.” He adds, “The availability of social media means the advertising game is really changing.”

The company is working with a range of businesses, from small craft brewers up through established breweries such as Great Divide and well-known companies like Samuel Adams. The idea is to help brewers reach more customers, Noetzel says, as well as put “smaller brands on more even footing with big brands.” Pintley is trying to do this by helping brewers build word-of-mouth campaigns that take “people who love your product and make them advocates,” he says.

That’s an ambitious and popular goal, of course. There are tons of other beer sites and apps out there, ranging from local search and discovery (Tap Hunter) to recommendations and social features (BrewGene) to just plain silly but entertaining (iBeer). But if Pintley can carve out its niche and build some traction, it could gain the leverage it needs to get more paying brewers involved.

Meantime, we’ll be watching to see how Pintley and the other MassChallenge finalists do tonight. (Drync, another finalist, specializes in wine search and discovery, so there’s a mini-theme here.) Truth be told, we’ll probably be knocking back a few too, along with the rest of the startup community. Good luck to all tonight.

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The folks at New York’s bitly want to be known for more than shortened links. So the company, funded by investors such as RRE Ventures and AOL Ventures, started a beta trial early this month for a service that monitors the reputations of its enterprise customers. Though it is best-known for those shortened and shared links, bitly is now putting the data behind that service to work in new ways—including helping business track how they are trending in social arenas.

Clearly bitly could not keep growing based on just shortening Web links, especially now that Twitter is handling that task in-house for tweets and, as of Oct. 10, wrapping all links with its own URL. Peter Stern, bitly’s CEO, says the new reputation-monitoring system sends e-mail alerts to his company’s enterprise customers when topics and keywords they have selected are generating buzz in the social media space. When links that relate to the chosen topics are shared via Twitter or Facebook, bitly notifies its customer if there is a significant trending change.

The technology can also track news clips, for example, that are copied and pasted into e-mails and then shared. “We can prioritize and rank that content based on how many people are engaging with it,” Stern says. “We know the correlations between the content you are clicking on and can measure relevancy.” Bitly’s other services include providing custom short links used by content publishers such as Foursquare, Pepsi, and the New York Post.

Now bitly is flexing is muscles to tackle new services. “The idea behind bitly has always been to provide a great engine for social sharing and analytics,” says Stern, who joined the company in May. He previously … Next Page »

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Wayne State University announced last week that it has received a $1.7 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health to increase the interest of metro Detroit girls in health-related “STEM” disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Sally K. Roberts, faculty adviser for WSU’s Gaining Options-Girls Investigate Real Life (GO-GIRL) program, will oversee the program, which aims to reach female students in grades 8 through 12 with summer academies, academic-year chats over refreshments for girls and parents, and continuous mentoring support by WSU undergraduate women students through social networking sites and other technology.

Roberts says the girls will use iPods while the mentors use iPads to communicate throughout the school year using a “Twitteresque” texting tool. Mentors will use the texts to portray their lives as science students, posting status updates when they’ve learned something new and exciting or even when they’re doing something mundane like studying.

“Most of it will be closed discussions, but there will be some crossover into platforms like Facebook,” Roberts adds. “Even though we hear from the girls that it’s becoming less cool, it still suits our purposes. Little girls seem to want to be rock stars or doctors. We’d like to expose them to the broad spectrum of health and science jobs in between.”

Participation in the newly funded program will be dependent on the students’ previous participation in GO-GIRL as a 7th grader. Organizers say more than 600 adolescent girls have participated in the GO-GIRL program since it was originally funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2002. Last semester, girls from 57 middle schools and 22 communities in metro Detroit took part in programs such as “GO-GIRL Nano” and GO-GIRL Cyber.” Though demographics vary from year to year, Roberts notes most of the girls in the program are African-American—an underrepresented voice that is vital to include in health-related STEM fields.

“So many programs get kids excited but then kind of disappear,” Roberts says. “We hope, though social media and face-to-face contact, that we’ll keep them engaged. We cheerlead so they continue to make good choices and no doors are closed on them.”

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[Corrected on 10/19/11 at 4:45 pm. See below.] Miguel Yeoman—known as the artist BeloZro and, now, as cofounder of the startup company BeloZro Visual Energy—was born and raised on Detroit’s hardscrabble east side. As he tried to stay out of trouble in 1980s Detroit—an extraordinarily violent period in the city’s history—he found his way to boxing, and then to art.

He spent a decade working on the line in local factories until he finally mustered the courage to try to make a living off his craft. He moved to Los Angeles and found limited success—a fairly big gallery show, but also an attorney who swindled him out of a quarter-million dollars. So, in 2008, back to Detroit he came.

“I came back with my tail between by legs,” he says. “I left Michigan for a reason, but I got my ass beat by the business.”

Shortly after returning to Michigan, he hired a business manager who also happened to work at Chrysler. It was the manager’s idea that Yeoman should do a painting to counteract the mounting bad press that the Big Three were getting as they sped toward bankruptcy. Yeoman came up with a conceptual sketch that showed all three Motor City automakers as a unified front.

“It was sort of a Detroit against the world type of thing,” Yeoman says.

He spent three days turning the sketch into a painting and then showed it to his business manager, who began pitching it to executives at Chrysler. The idea was that Yeoman would donate the piece to Chrysler in exchange for wall space, publicity—anything to get the struggling artist’s name in people’s mouths. Instead, the painting made it all the way up the Chrysler chain of command to vice-president of manufacturing and engineering Byron Green, who loved it.

“My manager called me and asked me if I was sitting down,” Yeoman says. “I was expecting more bad news but instead, he told me Chrysler was prepared to offer us $1.8 million for the painting.”

Chrysler proposed to buy the piece, but wanted Yeoman and UAW president Ron Gettlefinger to present the painting to President Obama as a thank you for his support of the bailout plan and … Next Page »

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When it’s time for a scrappy tech startup with a bootstrapped culture to expand its footprint, the conventional thinking might go something like this: Hire young, hungry people who won’t blow through too much of your coin, and hold onto that staff until you absolutely have to take the plunge into grown-up salaries and benefits.

Seattle-based Appature didn’t go the conventional route. When it became clear that maintaining big accounts with drug and medical device clients required more hands-on staff attention, the medical-marketing startup decided to go for very experienced people.

“We believe that the right people for our business, for the long term, are going to be the ones that are coming to our company to build a business. Because we’re going to be in ‘building a business’ mode for a really long time,” CEO Kabir Shahani says. “And we’re the sort of people that are really never done—the same way software’s never done, building a great business is never done.”

That’s just one of the lessons for a growing business I was able to glean from a recent chat with Shahani at Appature’s downtown Seattle headquarters. The company is at one of those pivotal moments in its lifespan: After bootstrapping its way to profitability and taking its first outside financing in late 2009, Appature now has its first remote offices, is looking for more headquarters space in Seattle, and has seen its pipeline of deals swell to 10 times the size it was a year ago.

That’s a nice place to be if you’re an entrepreneur. But it’s also potentially perilous for a startup—how do you maintain the culture and values that the founders have put so much time into developing now that you’re a farther-flung, growing operation?

Shahani jumps up to the whiteboard to illustrate this task. Most companies, when you smooth out all the wrinkles, want to grow in a pretty straight upward line. But in reality, you often run into something that looks more like a series of stairs—and Shahani says Appature is in the middle of taking another one of those steps up right now.

“These [moments] are like getting your foot up off one stair and onto the other, and because you have more people and you have a lot more weight when you’re trying to do that, it’s a pain in the ass,” he says with a laugh. “It’s really exciting, and it’s super schizophrenic.”

To rewind a bit on the basics: Appature was founded in early 2007 by Shahani and technical chief Chris Hahn, who met while at the former social networking startup Blue Dot. The company sells cloud-based software services that help pharmaceutical and medical device companies market their products, both to doctors and to consumers, through targeted advertising.

On the physician side, that represents a major change in the way that drug and device marketing had been done for years. Think former cheerleaders making office visits, pens and prescription pads and samples and swag, speaking gigs, rounds of golf, and so on.

But with insurance reimbursement rates sliding, doctors are having to cram in more patients to make the same money—leaving very little time for sales calls.

“To the point where now, you’ve got a majority of physicians’ offices have limited their hours in terms of, ‘We’ll only see reps one day a week, or the … Next Page »

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New York-based LocalResponse announced that it has closed a $5 million funding round from Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Advancit Capital, and Progress Ventures, with participation from previous investors. LocalResponse makes tools that allow companies to detect when people are “checking in” to places where their products are sold—so they can offer them coupons and the like in real time.

LocalResponse started back in 2007 as Buzzd, a site that aggregated check-ins from Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based sites. But co-founder and CEO Nihal Mehta had trouble monetizing that business, so he pivoted the model from a consumer-based site to a business-to-business platform. One key feature of LocalResponse’s technology is it can translate natural language into check-ins. So if a person tweets that they’re on the way to a certain restaurant, say, that restaurant can use LocalResponse’s technology to pinpoint that customer and offer him or her a deal.

LocalResponse has signed on Coca-Cola, Walgreens, Verizon, USA Networks, Aveda, and McDonalds as early customers. The company says ads placed through its platform have a click-through rate of about 40 percent.

Among the existing investors that participated in this round were Metamorphic Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, FF Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners and Jim Pallotta. Last December, LocalResponse raised $1.5 million from Verizon Ventures, Penny Black/BOLDstart Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Greycroft Partners.

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“Meebo has a culture of doing what we call ‘big swings at bat’ every 12 to 18 months,” Seth Sternberg is saying. “We try something new, a hard project that’s highly innovative. And either it’s going to flame out wildly, or succeed wildly. If it works, great. If not, oh well, it was an experiment. It keeps things interesting.”

I’m meeting with Sternberg, Meebo‘s CEO, at the company’s San Francisco office, opened recently to accommodate the dozens of engineers and salespeople who prefer not to drive to the startup’s Mountain View headquarters. He explains that he and his co-founders Sandy Jen and Elaine Wherry started the Web messaging and content sharing service back in 2005, so they’ve had time to try four or five of these big swings. The most ambitious one before this year was probably the 2008 launch of the Meebo Bar, a strip of ads and social-sharing buttons that Web publishers can add along the bottom of their Web pages. Before the bar, Meebo had been known primarily for its Web-based instant messaging service, which allows users to communicate across AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo, Facebook, Windows Live, Google Talk, ICQ, and other IM networks without firing up actual IM software. The new bar included those functions—but far more important for the company, it carved out a valuable piece of screen real estate that Meebo could use for advertising and other features.

When you hover your mouse cursor over the ad at the left end of the Meebo bar, a multimedia ad appears on screen, often showing video spots. Today at Seventeen‘s website, for example, you can select from videos about Virgin America or the new Mini Coupe. Rich-media advertising launched from the Meebo Bar now brings in the lion’s share of the company’s revenues, which have tripled in the last year. Sternberg says 80 million unique users per month see the bar, and that 0.8 percent of them click on the ads. While that may sound low, it’s actually about 10 times the industry average for Web display advertising—and what’s more, the average ad viewer spends 60 seconds looking at the ads, twice as long as a typical TV commercial. No wonder 200 brands, like Starbucks, LG, Samsung, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, have signed up to advertise through Meebo’s network.

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg

Now Meebo is at bat again, and Sternberg is hoping that its next hit will go equally far. The company is adding a “check-in” button to the Meebo Bar. The term comes from mobile social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places, and the concept is similar, except that Meebo check-ins are tied to the Web, not a physical location. When you check in at a website such as CafeMom, a record that you visited is added to your Meebo profile, so that your Meebo friends and followers can see where you’re hanging out online. By following other Meebo users who check in at your favorite sites, you can find new sites that might interest you. If you check in enough times at one site, you can become a VIP (Meeboese for mayor) and earn rewards.

The buzzword for all this is “social discovery,” but Sternberg puts it more plainly. “Meebo lives at the intersection of content and people,” he says. “We do a lot of research, and it turns out that people really want to learn about sites from other people. So when we were thinking about check-ins, we were thinking about how to hook up people with similar interests, and how to use that to make navigation easier.”

But there’s another motive too. Every time users click on the check-in button, they’re telling Meebo something about their interests—and that’s information the company could use to serve targeted ads, which typically have higher price tags. “If you look at the Web check-in stuff, at some level that is about delivering better brand content to users,” says Sternberg. “If we know you are really into road cycling because you have been checking into a lot of road cycling sites, it would be great to put an ad for Trek [the high-end bicycle maker] in front of you.”

Meebo certainly needs to sell more premium ads, because as fast as it’s growing—it passed 200 employees this summer, more than a quarter of them just hired this year—it has some very high expectations to meet. Over the last six years, … Next Page »

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