Any question about the impact MIT is having on the field of mobile software design can be answered with two words: Modo Labs.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup grew out of the MIT Mobile Framework, an open source project that began in 2007 with the goal of helping developers build mobile websites for universities. The plan was specifically to focus on things that people do every day, like look up directories and campus maps on mobile devices. The commercial version of the software platform is called Kurogo, and it debuted earlier this year, in April.

The idea behind Kurogo (the name comes from the stagehands in Japanese theater) is to help colleges and other organizations get their information up and running online and make it available on any kind of device, from iPhones to iPads to feature phones—and do it all quickly using pre-built templates.

“Someone could configure this without knowing how to program at all,” says Andrew Yu, Modo Labs’ CEO.

Last month, Yu and Marshall Vale, Modo’s chief technology officer, walked me through a demo whereby the Kurogo software lets a developer grab information from different kinds of data sources—staff directories, schedules, videos, Google Maps, Facebook, Yammer, and so on. Then he or she can put these elements together to form a working site, or even a mobile app for Android or iPhone, in a few hours or less, Yu says.

So far, about 150 universities around the world have deployed Kurogo or are tinkering with it, Yu says. And lately Modo Labs has been pushing into the business sector, helping large hospitals and financial institutions set up enterprise-level intranets and mobile apps, including features like a staff directory that links to an indoor map showing where each employee sits in the building.

While plenty of companies and development shops are working on enterprise mobile apps and platforms, most of them (e.g., Blackboard Mobile, Pyxis Mobile, Apperian, Raizlabs) use proprietary code and/or are complementary to what Modo Labs offers. Modo sees open source as a key advantage, in that companies can try out the platform directly and tailor it to their needs. What’s more, many existing apps and platforms concern only specific corporate departments, such as field sales or inventory tracking, says Yu. “We’re taking the stance of something to be used for every single employee,” he says.

Lest you worry about the corporate and mobile security involved in such an undertaking, these guys have some background in that arena. Vale previously was a product manager at MIT working on Kerberos network security technology. (He was also director of software engineering at iRobot, where he worked for almost six years.) Yu, for his part, is on his third software startup and also spent about five years working at MIT as manager and architect of the mobile platform project.

Yu’s near-term goal is to “make sure we have the right people, and create a really strong culture that will be driven by excellence, respecting the open source heritage of the company,” he says.

With that in mind, Modo Labs is really looking to take a leadership position in the open source community around the Kurogo platform. According to the company, some reasonable role models for Modo Labs would include JBoss in open source middleware (bought by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006), and Acquia, around social publishing software Drupal. The startup’s ultimate goal is to “deliver great products that have worldwide reach,” Vale says.

Modo Labs currently has about 20 employees, and the company says its revenue has been growing “very rapidly in the past few months,” to the tune of 50 percent year-over-year growth. The firm raised $2 million in its first financing round last year and is in the process of raising additional funds, Vale says.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Woburn, MA-based Acquia, a social publishing software firm, has raised a $15 million Series D round from Tenaya Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Sigma Partners, according to a report in All Things D. Acquia started in 2007 and, among other things, helps organizations build community sites using Drupal, an open-source content management system. Its customers include Twitter, Al Jazeera, Mercedes-Benz, Stanford University, and the U.S. Department of Defense. The company, which is led by CEO Tom Erickson, has raised about $38.5 million to date, according to the report.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

In its third round  of venture financing, San Francisco-based social publishing startup Scribd has raised $13 million. The round was led by MLC Investments of Australia and SVB Capital, according to an announcement yesterday. Existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Kinsey Hills Group also participated. The company, whose free publishing service allows users to share written documents on the Web in many formats, said it plans to use the money to hire engineers and accelerate development of mobile applications and “multiple revenue-generating products and services.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Portland, OR-based AboutUs announced this week it has acquired Jyte.com, a social website where people can make claims, vet ideas, and comment on others’. Financial terms were not given. Jyte uses RPX, the flagship technology of Portland startup JanRain that lets people use a single portable identity and login across different websites. AboutUs, which is backed by Seattle-based Voyager Capital, says it plans to implement RPX on its own site as well. Last month, JanRain announced its $3.25 million Series A round led by DFJ Frontier.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

It has been a busy fall for JanRain. The Portland, OR-based software startup is announcing today it has closed a $3.25 million Series A financing round led by West Coast firm DFJ Frontier. RPM Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners also participated in the round, which had its first close in late summer. The company also has been signing up new corporate customers for its flagship product, which lets websites register visitors so they can sign on more easily using secure, universal logins, instead of needing a separate password for every site.

First-round venture investments in software companies have been few and far between in the Northwest, especially in Portland. The money should help JanRain expand its efforts in online identity technologies, and will allow it to make new hires in sales, marketing, engineering, and customer support. The company, which has been supported by angel investors to date, currently has 12 employees.

“As an angel-backed company, we’ve had to constrain ourselves. Our [new] investors got excited by the traction we have in the market,” says Brian Kissel, the CEO of JanRain. “Our big challenge and opportunity is execution.” He adds that the company can now tackle its business opportunities “with more bravado.”

Kissel talked about the respective strengths of the company’s new venture investors. DFJ Frontier offers hands-on expertise and the huge network of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Anthem is a strong presence in media and entertainment. And RPM has expertise in moving companies from the early technology stage to market adoption, as well as a deep understanding of how tech markets evolve.

As we reported in a profile back in April, JanRain makes software that helps website operators manage logins and helps consumers take their identities—including user preferences, demographic data, and social connections—with them wherever they go online. The company was founded in 2005 by Larry Drebes, the software entrepreneur who previously co-founded Desktop.com and Four11. (The latter was acquired by Yahoo in 1997 and was the basis for Yahoo Mail.) Drebes serves as JanRain’s vice president of engineering.

The company’s software-as-a-service technology is used by more than 170,000 websites worldwide. The software, called RPX, lets visitors login to a site using their accounts from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, MySpace, AOL, or other OpenID accounts. Some of JanRain’s better-known customers include Sears, Kmart, FOX News, Universal Music Group, EMI Music, Qype, and online social technology platforms like Seattle’s Wetpaint. JanRain uses a software-as-a-service business model whereby companies pay for the startup to power their website registrations.

The big opportunity for websites, as Kissel explains, is to get more visitors to register, so they’ll spend more time on the site and presumably buy more products—all with a more personalized interface that remembers what you users like and don’t like. “At a fundamental level, users want a better experience. Website operators want to provide a better experience,” Kissel says. “You should be treated like a returning guest. This [software] empowers that to happen.”

JanRain’s most recent focus has been on letting website visitors share their experiences on social networks more easily. So if you sign on to a site with your universal login and see something you want to tell your friends about, you can just a click a button to publish your comments on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or Yahoo.

Kissel calls this “social publishing,” and says it could drive more trusted referrals to websites, and ultimately will change how people consume information and products online. Indeed, it’s already happening—and JanRain wants a piece of the action.

“This is social enablement of decision making,” Kissel says. “That will transform the way people do things on the Web.”

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Oh no you didn’t. Come on, Andrew Chen, you know better than to call out Seattle tech startups for not producing a world-changing consumer Internet company in the past few years. You’re an outsider now, having left Seattle for the San Francisco Bay Area after 2006. And now you’re telling us why you left? Them’s fighting words.

I’m intentionally fanning the flames here, of course. Chen is a startup exec in advertising and social media who used to work at Bellevue, WA-based Revenue Science (now called AudienceScience). His thesis, laid out in a blog post today, is that Seattle’s strong history in retail and commerce—Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Expedia, Blue Nile, Redfin, and others—still influences the kinds of companies that get started here. But then he takes it further.

“These retail and transactionally-focused businesses are great money-makers, but because they target in-market buyers for a particular good or service, it means that you’re not really building a huge audience,” Chen writes. “The classic way to build a huge audience is to focus on ad-driven businesses in the world of communication or content publishing, and there just aren’t that many of them in Seattle.” (Though he does give props to Ben Huh’s Cheezburger Network.)

“My hypothesis is that Seattle hasn’t produced mass audience consumer products mainly because it’s focused on down-to-earth charge-users-for-a-product types of businesses that are more transactional than community,” Chen continues. “I don’t think that’s a good or bad thing—just as you’ll get more biotech in Boston, there’s a specialization in Seattle around commerce/retail. But if you’re doing a social [user generated content] thing, the Bay area is the best place to be.”

In case you didn’t know, Seattle got sick of being compared to the Bay Area at least five years ago—yet the comparisons keep cropping up, sometimes for good reason. (See recent comments from UW TechTransfer’s Janis Machala, Vulcan Capital’s Steve Hall, and the UW’s Ed Lazowska.) So Chen’s remarks have triggered some heated discussion in the blogosphere today, especially around Seattle.

Is there anything constructive here? In a blog post of his own, entrepreneur and investor Chris DeVore of Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op doesn’t disagree with Chen’s basic premise. Instead he wonders how the community can broaden its impact. “Investment capital is a major input in the startup equation—many of the most successful angel and VC investors in Seattle made their biggest money on Amazon and Starbucks, and investors tend to look for patterns of success that are repeatable. It’s not surprising to see local money flowing toward the same kind of deals that delivered wins in the past,” DeVore writes. “If we want Seattle to be the kind of town that fosters a broader variety of software innovation, what kind of investment culture do we need to create?”

As an observer, I can see why local techies get irritated with cultural and geographic comparisons. And personally, I’ll take Amazon’s long-term business prospects over Twitter’s any day, but that’s not really the point. The point is how Seattle-area innovation and entrepreneurship can keep rising, keep changing the world (across gaming, mobile, and other areas)—and the issue that DeVore raises would seem to be a good place to start.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based Wetpaint has laid off 15 employees, or 27 percent of its staff, according to a report in TechFlash. The startup, which has raised about $40 million in venture capital, focuses on social publishing. The company was not immediately available for comment.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based Foodista, an online cooking encyclopedia and wiki, has raised Series A funding from Amazon and other angel investors. The news was reported by PE Hub and TechCrunch, which said the amount of funding was $550,000. Foodista was launched in December by Amazon veterans Barnaby Dorfman and Sheri Wetherell.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle social-publishing startup Wetpaint announced it has formed a partnership with MSN Entertainment, a leading online network, to create more than two dozen fan sites that will start rolling out this quarter. Financial terms of the deal were not given. MSN Entertainment will use Wetpaint’s software to power social sites where fans can write content, share interests, and meet one another.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Earlier this week, we heard that two of Seattle’s most promising Internet startups have teamed up to deliver sophisticated photo editing services to a growing pool of social-network users. Picnik, which makes Web-based tools for creating collages and cool photo effects, is now available (with just a click) to users of Wetpaint, a “social publishing” site that lets people and companies create online communities around topics of interest like TV shows, consumer electronics, and other products.

It struck me as a really interesting partnership, because the companies are polar opposites in terms of their financing history. They were both founded in 2005, but Picnik has been entirely self-funded, while Wetpaint has raised some $40 million in venture funding from the likes of DAG Ventures, Accel Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Frazier Technology Ventures. Both startups have a substantial and loyal following, with Picnik getting more than 30 million visits per month—9 million uniques—and Wetpaint boasting more than 8 million users worldwide.

I spoke with Jonathan Sposato, the chief executive of Picnik, to get his thoughts on the deal, among other things. “I love the Wetpaint partnership,” he says. “That’s exactly the kind of joining forces that can really deliver even greater utility and value to the user. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.” He was half-joking with the latter statement, but the partnership is a prime example of how Web 2.0 startups in complementary spaces should think about working together to grow their customer bases.

Here’s how it came about. About six or seven weeks ago, Sposato says, he met Wetpaint co-founder Kevin Flaherty at a symposium organized by Kevin Merritt of Seattle-based Blist. Sposato and Flaherty exchanged business cards and a couple of e-mails. “And we were off to integration,” Sposato says. “They have been so easy to work with. The deal was easy, and that’s how you should do business.” (The deal doesn’t involve any revenue sharing or other financial terms.) Picnik also has partnerships with Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and other popular social sites.

Meanwhile, I also caught up with Rob Grady, Wetpaint’s senior vice president of marketing, to hear his side of the deal. Meeting at a local coffee bar, the former Starbucks executive recommended I try his favorite caramel-flavored espresso drink (it didn’t disappoint). When the talk turned to Picnik, Grady sounded pretty excited. “There is a cultural similarity in that they’re passionate about a great user experience, and so are we,” he says. “Both of us have built open platforms, so integration was totally doable.”

It may be a small step for a couple of local startups, but it’ll be interesting to see what other Web 2.0 partnerships emerge from Seattle’s tight-knit community. “We weren’t arguing over who gets A or B,” Grady says. “Both of our user bases want this, so let’s raise the tide so both boats go up.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based Picnik, a maker of Web-based photo editing software, announced today it has teamed up with fellow Seattle startup Wetpaint, a social publishing site, to allow social network and fan site users to fine-tune their pictures. There is no financial or investment relationship between the companies, but now more than 8 million Wetpaint customers can use Picnik’s tools, like cropping, collages, and creative effects, to work with photos on Wetpaint sites.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based Wetpaint, a social publishing startup, announced it has surpassed 8 million monthly visitors to its websites. The company also released a new set of features, including a premium ad-free upgrade, enhanced discussion forums, video galleries, and embedded widgets that make your social site portable on the Web. Wetpaint is backed by Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Frazier Technology Ventures, and Trinity Ventures.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Coffee is so last year. Just ask Rob Grady, the former Starbucks executive who joined Seattle-based social publishing startup Wetpaint as senior vice president of marketing earlier this month. OK, Grady still enjoys a triple tall Americano or a double tall nonfat caramel macchiato from time to time—his new favorite Starbucks is in the Wells Fargo building in downtown Seattle—but he’s moving on to a different kind of challenge now, and last week he told me why.

Grady was Starbucks’ vice president of global beverage (one of the best titles ever, in my opinion). His team was nearly 100 strong and produced several billion dollars in revenue. But the past year or so has been a time of great change at Starbucks, what with declining sales, the economic downturn, and Howard Schultz’s return as CEO. Grady didn’t point to any of those as reasons for leaving, but it sounds like he wanted to move on to bigger challenges.

“Two things have threaded my career,” Grady says. “Working for a company that can make a difference in the world from a social perspective. And creating a great consumer experience.”

Which is where Wetpaint enters the picture. It’s a startup, backed by $40 million in venture capital, that helps customers generate all sorts of new online content to turn business websites into Web 2.0 social-networking beehives (among other things). “Social publishing is the largest content-creation platform going forward,” says Grady. “Anyone on the Internet with a passion has a way to organize and galvanize around a cause…Online social publishing has great economic promise because it enables content creation that has much lower cost, but has great value.”

Matt Hulett, the chairman and CEO of Mpire (maker of Widgetbucks), has some valuable outside perspective on Grady’s move. He worked with Grady at RealNetworks back in the 1990s, and has known him for 14-plus years. “Rob is a powerful mix of analytic thinking, strong leadership, and a real passion for building creative products and solutions,” Hulett says. “If a guy like Rob is going to Wetpaint, … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s not just Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia anymore. A large number of social websites and wikis have become major players on the Web. Today’s launch of the Seattle-based cooking site Foodista.com is the latest example. But the top social sites of the year were dedicated to TV shows, social activism, gaming, smartphones, and education—in that order.

That’s according to a report out today from Seattle-based social publishing startup Wetpaint. Wetpaint compiled its stats based on the traffic and amount of user-generated content across the 1.2 million-odd social sites it hosts. The company has partnerships with major brands like Dell, HP, The Discovery Channel, Fox, Showtime, and T-Mobile, and those sites drive a fair bit of traffic.

You can read the report for the details, but here are the top category winners from the Wetpaint network:

—TV fansite: True Blood
—Activism: Join the Impact
—Gaming: Last Chaos
—Smartphone: T-Mobile Dash
—Just plain weird: Warrior Cats

“I am always fascinated by the topics that rocket to popularity in any given year,” said Ben Elowitz, co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint. (With the popularity of other sites like Dude Boobs and Chuck Norris Jokes, that’s putting it mildly indeed.)

No predictions for 2009 were given, but I’m guessing that TV and gaming sites won’t suffer too much in the recession…

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based Foodista has opened up a cooking website that everyone can edit, wiki-style. Billed as an online cooking encyclopedia, the site includes information on food, recipes, techniques, and tools, and allows users to share their knowledge by posting comments, editing content, and uploading photos. The site is run by former Amazon veterans Barnaby Dorfman and Sheri Wetherell.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Back in the summertime, we did a short piece about Wetpaint, the Seattle-based Web startup that had just surpassed its 1-millionth-consumer-wiki milestone. Wetpaint is one of the more heralded tech startups in the Northwest, backed to the tune of $40 million in venture capital—including, most recently, a $25 million round led by DAG Ventures in May. Investors (and others) are intrigued by its vision of “social publishing,” which many think will be the next evolution in social networks.

The basic premise is, now that social networks exist online, what are people going to do with them? Wetpaint thinks they’re going to generate new kinds of content, and that this user-generated content is the key to the future of many Web businesses. The company pitch is that with Wetpaint’s software, any site can become social—users can post comments, photos, and other content while connecting with a community around any topic—and that this social dimension will drive up traffic. But I wanted to know more about this strategy: where it came from, why the startup’s founders think it will work, and what they’ve done to overcome various challenges to this point.

So last week, I sat down with Kevin Flaherty, Wetpaint’s co-founder and vice president of marketing. Things looked to be running smoothly at the company, especially given that its staff of just under 50 had just moved into new digs on Second Avenue three days earlier. Wetpaint used to be upstairs from Armandino’s Salumi—Flaherty says that, regrettably, they never got the “Salumi cam” up and running to monitor the line outside the popular eatery (though he ate there only once himself).

Like most seemingly overnight successes, Wetpaint’s story goes back many years. In 2002, Flaherty, an ex-Amazon employee, was working in the Seattle area at Precor, a fitness equipment company. One day, he was interviewing a young guy named Ben Elowitz, who had been a co-founder of Blue Nile, an online jewelry retailer, and had worked at Fatbrain.com. “I thought, ‘What are you doing here?’” says Flaherty. It turns out Elowitz was a fitness fanatic (and still is). He got the job, and a friendship was born.

In late 2004, Elowitz started getting the itch to do something new, and Flaherty went along. They were watching the growth of Wikipedia and saw an opportunity. Their “aha!” moment happened, … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share: