San Diego serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is going to have to find something else to do now that Gizmo5, the VoIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) company he founded in 2003, has become part of a certain search giant to the north. We have that news and more.

—Google confirmed that it’s buying San Diego-based Gizmo5, a six-year-old company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. The service will become part of the Google Voice number-unification service. Google did not disclose the purchase price, which media reports put at about $30 million. Gizmo5’s 6 million users will still be able to use the service, according to a statement. But Google is suspending new Gizmo5 signups, and existing users can no longer sign up for a call-in number.

—Platformic, a Web-based startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites, said it is adding social media capabilities. The two-year-old San Diego-based company, which has targeted broadcast companies, says its expanded software-as-a-service product will help a broadcaster’s audience share photos, create their own user profiles, and create personal blogs on the broadcaster’s Platformic-powered website.

—Qualcomm’s No. 2 executive opened a regional mobile technology conference in San Diego by providing an overview of steps the chipmaking giant is taking to help ease the pressure on wireless network bottlenecks as mobile data traffic soars. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer told the 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference that in the year 2014, worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

—Technology innovations that help companies optimize their profitability will likely lead to the next wave of analytics-based software startups, according to Stephen Coggeshall of San Diego-based ID Analytics. Another hot area will be analytics that can help forecast consumer behavior, said Coggeshall, who was participating in a discussion about new opportunities in analytics during the San Diego Software Industry Council’s annual forum on analytics.

—Israel’s Panoramic Power won $250,000 and became the first winner of the top QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power is developing energy-monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy so-called “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities.

—The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group said is getting $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a giant wind farm in eastern Washington state, about 110 miles east of Portland, OR. The $1 billion Windy Point/Windy Flats project is expected to generate enough electricity for 250,000 homes.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Mark Underhill says he was doing Web design and applications development for Clear Channel Communications when the San Antonio, TX-based media company announced plans to sell 448 of its 1,150 radio stations, along with its 42-station TV group. That was in November 2006.

Underhill, who had initially been hired in San Diego six or seven years earlier to run 11 Clear Channel websites, says he remembers thinking at the time, “I’ve learned so much doing this. But I could do better than this. I could build a better mousetrap.”

The following year (just a few months after Clear Channel completed its $1.5 billion sale), Underhill and his longtime friend Claudio Canive started Platformic, a San Diego startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites. The company, which acquired its first customer by the end of 2007, has targeted the broadcast industry and now counts Comcast, the Tribune Co., and Fox Broadcasting among its biggest customers.

Platformic-based Web design

Platformic’s software-as-a-service model provides simple point-and-click tools that do not require users to learn Adobe’s Dreamweaver Web design software or to write computer code. The company says its hosted system enable customers to “come up with any look and feel” for their own websites by empowering people who know what a website should look like, but who don’t necessarily know how to create it. Websites using Platformic’s technology include Los Angeles TV station KTLA and San Francisco’s AM sports radio station KNBR and its San Mateo sister station, KTCT. Last week, Platformic helped launch 12 Fox regional sports websites throughout the country.

Platformic’s roughly 200 customers also include what Underhill describes as small “mom and pop” businesses operating …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

To a large extent, the story of San Diego-based Networkfleet is also an intriguing tale about co-founder Diego Borrego. The privately held company, which currently has more than 100 employees, is one of the nation’s largest providers of technology and services for monitoring the location and status of company-owned vehicles.

Borrego, a Mexican-American who says his first language was Spanish, helped start the company in 1999, quit when he realized he had lost his ownership stake, and rejoined Networkfleet before the business entered a period of double-digit growth. The 42-year-old engineer says his name is on about 10 of 30 patents issued so far to the 10-year-old company.

While wireless fleet management systems are what my Xconomy colleagues politely refer to as “mature” technologies (as opposed to our usual focus on the sweet spot of emerging tech), Networkfleet maintains that not all fleet management systems are alike. Many systems simply use global positioning satellite technology to monitor the locations of company-owned vehicles. Networkfleet’s technology also helps customers reduce their fleet operating costs and vehicle emissions by using the computerized sensors in every vehicle to monitor the vehicle’s performance and engine efficiency.

Diego Borrego

“There are processors now that control the brakes, the engine, transmission, airbags,” says Borrego, Networkfleet’s vice president of engineering. “There’s a rich set of information that we call diagnostics.” He views the technology as more of an IT challenge, because nowadays there is essentially a local area network (LAN) in every new car and truck that links together an average of 25 different computers. “Extracting that data from the vehicle, and somehow transmitting it (in conjunction with GPS) and turning it into information that can be used by fleet vehicle managers is the innovation,” Borrego says.

Networkfleet provides its Web-based service to customers that range from plumbing companies with 10 trucks to the state of Delaware, which operates more than 2,400 government vehicles. Networkfleet installs a piece of hardware that connects to the LAN in every vehicle, gathers information about the vehicle’s operation and transmits the data via cellular links to a data center operated by Networkfleet. Each customer’s fleet manager is given a login to Networkfleet’s website, where he or she can monitor the location of the company’s vehicles. Data about each fleet also can be converted into reports that fleet managers can use to schedule maintenance, optimize operations, and monitor driver behavior.

The company generated about $30 million in sales last year, a 45 percent gain in revenue growth over 2007 that made Networkfleet the second-largest company in the business (based on number of subscribers), according to Keith Schneider, Networkfleet’s president. (The largest is Trimble, a Sunnyvale, CA-based GPS technology company that acquired rival @Road in 2006 for $496 million.) Schneider says many of their competitors tend to specialize in narrow segments of the technology-based business, such as GPS-based vehicle location, advanced routing applications, and workforce management—and he sees the technologies converging. “The industry is poised for massive consolidation,” Schneider says.

The Networkfleet president indicated during our conversation that Networkfleet, which has been owned by the New York private equity firm Apollo Management since 2006, aims to take an active role in that consolidation.

Still, Networkfleet has taken a winding road to get this far—after beginning more than a decade ago on a strategy that came …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Overtone, a company that provides Web-based analytics that enables companies to monitor online sentiment about their brand and products, has raised nearly $2.5 million in a venture round that could be worth as much as $5.3 million, according to a recent regulatory filing.

The company, though, defies any simple definition—at least based on a conversation I had late yesterday with Overtone CEO Craig Brennan.

When I called Brennan at Overtone’s San Francisco office to determine whether the company’s headquarters are there or in Carlsbad, CA, as listed in the SEC filing, he told me that Overtone’s headquarters are in both places. He described Overtone as a virtual company—with a CEO who works in San Francisco, while CFO Chris Vohnout works in Carlsbad. Brennan declined to provide the company’s exact headcount for competitive reasons, but said Overtone has about 50 employees throughout its operations.

And when I asked when Overtone was founded, Brennan said the company, which was previously known as Island Data, has gone through three distinct phases in the 14 years since it was created. Its latest reincarnation came after 2004, when Island Data sold much of its assets—including email routing technology it had developed, he says.

Since he joined Overtone in December, Brennan says the company has raised about $8.5 million in venture capital, including the current round, from a number of individual investors and three venture firms—ABS Ventures, Dolphin Equity Partners, and Whelan Capital Management (also known as the Encinal Capital Group.)

Brennan says Overtone’s business is now focused on providing its analytics technology as software-as-a-service for consumer-oriented companies that need to monitor what their customers are saying on social media sites, Internet message boards, and other online venues. Overtone says monitoring unguarded comments can help companies assess how they are viewed by their customers, how well they are managing their brand, identify issues with products and service, and determine how well their advertising works. An animated graphic on Overtone’s website offers some examples of just how important monitoring such sentiment can be, with one quoted comment about TV advertising for a male enhancement product saying, “I would ask that no Extenze commercial ever air again. Creepy and sad.”

Overtone describes its “Open Mic” technology as a “real time natural language processing, analysis, and reporting engine optimized to extract customer intelligence from free-form consumer-generated text.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

SmartDrive Systems, a San Diego company that uses video recording technology and web-based services to reduce the costs of operating motor vehicle fleets, has raised $12 million in venture capital in a deal that could be worth as much as $25 million, according to a regulatory filing.

The company was founded in 2004 by James Plante, an automotive electronics executive and entrepreneur, who served as SmartDrive’s founding CEO until April 2008, when Greg Drew was named CEO. Drew tells me that Plante continues to serve on SmartDrive’s five-member board of directors, and remains a key investor in the company, which has more than 350 employees worldwide.

Investors in the current round include Oak Investment Partners of Palo Alto, CA, and New Enterprise Associates of Menlo Park, CA, according to Drew. The CEO tells me that SmartDrive, which has now raised more than $22 million in total venture funding since the beginning, intends to use the current round to accelerate the acquisition of new customers.

Drew says that SmartDrive’s strategy remains focused on helping fleet operators mitigate their risk by combining video, audio, GPS, and accelerometer technologies into a SmartRecorder device that is mounted above the windshield of fleet vehicles. “Our focus really is on enterprise accounts that are looking to transform their safety program,” Drew says.

SmartDrive’s customers include ambulance companies, taxi companies, school districts, utilities, waste management companies, and other fleet operators. SmartDrive says its event recorder and related web-based services can help reduce vehicle damage, workers’ compensation costs, and personal injury costs by as much as 50 percent.

SmartDrive’s competitors include San Diego-based DriveCam, which raised $19 million in venture funding in August.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego-based VMIX, which specializes in video hosting technology and services, has raised $2 million in additional venture capital, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC today. When I checked in with VMIX about two months ago, CEO Mike Glickenhaus was in the second year of heading a new VMIX business strategy that’s focused on serving media companies. The company previously raised $21.5 million in venture funding from JK&B Capital, Mission Ventures, ATA Ventures, and Enterprise Partners. A spokesman says all four participated in the latest round as well.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Platformic, a San Diego web development startup, is introducing a new mobile blogging tool, which, according to the company, simplifies the process of adding video, photos, and text to websites based on Platformic’s technology and content management system.

Platformic says new content can be added to a website using an iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device with an Internet connection. The company says its mobile blogging tool is intended to appeal to journalists, professional bloggers, and others who might use mobile devices to remotely file news stories and video, or business representatives who want to update information on a company website from the field.

A spokeswoman says Platformic was founded two years ago by CEO Claudio Canive, a network engineer, and CTO Mark Underhill, a web development veteran, and they have self-funded the startup. Platformic provides a hosted system that streamlines the website creation process by enabling customers to use simple point-and-click tools to develop and manage the content on their own websites. The company says its software as a service model does not require users to write code, use third-party authoring tools, or even be technically adept.

The company says its customers include the Tribune Co., Comcast SportsNet, Cox Media, Bicoastal Media, Broadcast Company of the Americas, and Peak Broadcasting.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

These are dark times for the newspaper business, which has been suffering from revenue erosion as classified ads, corporate recruiting, and other forms of advertising—not to mention readers—have moved to the Internet. You’d think that means the outlook also would be gloomy at San Diego-based VMIX, a venture-backed startup that provides Web-based software used primarily by media-owned websites to manage their video clips.

But the media world is full of contradictions. Even with its business focused primarily on newspapers, VMIX president and CEO Mike Glickenhaus tells me, “We’re still seeing steady, consistent growth.”

Mike Glickenhaus

The reason VMIX has continued to grow—despite the recession and the decline of its newspaper customers—is that video is by far the fastest growing medium on the Internet, including newspaper websites. When I sat down recently with Glickenhaus and VMIX co-founder Greg Kostello, they told me they expect their revenue to grow by 70 percent this year—after growing by 170 percent in 2008. “We’re still not quite profitable,” Glickenhaus adds. “That’s probably still a quarter or two away.”

The outlook wasn’t always so optimistic. When Kostello started VMIX with co-founder Terry Ash in 2005, their idea was to create a website for video sharing and social networking. Their concept was an extension of what they had learned at MP3.com—one of San Diego’s biggest contributions to the dot-com phenomenon. Kostello, who was MP3.com’s executive vice president of technology, became president of Vivendi-Universal Net Technologies following Vivendi-Universal’s 2001 buyout of MP3.com. Ash, who was a senior vice president of advertising sales at MP3.com, also worked at Vivendi-Universal and Universal Music Group before VMIX.

“Even at MP3.com, we understood that video was going …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s Covario, which specializes in high-end software analytics that helps customers optimize search engine results for their web sites and products, says it is expanding to offer Internet marketing services capabilities. The company says the move into agency services, which marks a turning point in its technology-focused strategy, came in response to growing advertiser market demand.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The biggest news by far last week was ExxonMobil’s decision to invest $600 million in biofuels, with half of that going to San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics. A number of companies also launched new technology iniatives. To find out what’s happening, just keep reading.

—ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, said last week it plans to invest $600 million to develop algae-based biofuels, with least $300 million going to fund fundamental work at Synthetic Genomics, the startup co-founded by J. Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer. Venter said Synthetic Genomics plans to begin construction soon on a research and test facility in San Diego. Venter’s wife, Synthetic Genomics spokeswoman Heather Kowalski, told me the ExxonMobil deal won’t affect the startup’s joint venture with BP, where the initial focus has been on coal. Kowalski also said that BP is an equity investor in Synthetic Genomics, but ExxonMobil is not.

—Covario, the San Diego-based software analytics startup, said it has developed a new software-as-a-service program that automates the process of analyzing Web traffic on a customer’s corporate website. Covario says its “D3″ product for search engine optimization replaces the time-consuming work often performed by Web marketing agencies.

—San Diego wireless giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it is “reviewing its options” for LifeComm, its virtual mobile network focused on healthcare services. Qualcomm said LifeComm has been unable to raise enough capital from third parties to fully develop its initial launch product. Mobihealthnews, a Boston website focused on the wireless healthcare industry, said Qualcom has decided to pull the plug on LifeComm.

—Aculon, a San Diego startup specializing in nanocoatings for use in a variety of industries, said its proprietary technology replaces hexavalent chromium in paint primers applied to stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, and other metal surfaces. Hexavalent chromium is a toxic, cancer-causing heavy metal used to make anti-corrosion coatings. Aculon CEO Ed Hughes told me Aculon’s technology forms a coating that is just one molecule thick, or 2 to 4 nanometers.

—San Diego’s TelCentris said it is upgrading its VoxOx universal communicator service to include an automated “personal assistant” that can answer your phone calls and route them according to your preferences. A VoxOx user can combine his or her existing phone number with their e-mail service provider, instant messaging service, and social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

—Simon Thompson, ESRI’s director of commercial marketing, mapped out some of the innovative trends in Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, when we met amid the hubbub of the 2009 ESRI International User Conference in downtown San Diego. Thompson said one trend stems from creating GIS mapping “masks,” or layers of mapped information, so you can change the underlying data set on your iPhone app from a map of gas stations to a map of restaurants or schools. Another key trend he discussed involves the convergence of GIS mapping technologies with software analytics.

—Quasar Geophysical Technologies of San Diego has developed a new type of electromagnetic sensor that is sensitive enough to detect tiny electrical currents flowing through subsea rock—and variations in the conductivity among different types of geological formations. The company says its technology is sensitive enough to help the oil and gas exploration industry increase its chances of discovering offshore oil and gas deposits. Quasar has designed its sensors to be deployed on the ocean bottom, as deep as 2.5 miles below the surface, for weeks at a time.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

I met Simon Thompson at the center of the GIS world, which was set at least for several days this week at 32.7090 degrees North, 117.1644 degrees West. Those are the coordinates for the main exhibit hall of the San Diego Convention Center, where more than 12,000 people interested in GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, gathered to attend the 2009 ESRI International User Conference. The annual convention organized by ESRI, the Redlands, CA-based leader in GIS systems is the largest of its kind.

As I reported a few weeks ago, GIS modeling and mapping software is becoming an increasingly hot segment of the IT industry—and Thompson is doing everything he can to push adoption as ESRI’s director of commercial marketing. Thompson tells me that he was living in Sydney, Australia, when ESRI president Jack Dangermond began recruiting him in 2006. “I actually used ESRI tools to evaluate the move,” he said.

Comparing ESRI’s GIS databases for Sydney with Redlands, CA, a city of more than 64,000 in San Bernardino County, Thompson says he could see that he would be trading Sydney’s cosmopolitan city life, theaters, and soccer, rugby, and cricket matches for easy access to Southern California’s mountains and U.S. National Parks. When I mentioned that San Bernardino also is the unhappy recepient of air pollution blown inland from Los Angeles, Thompson says, “That’s why I chose to live in Yucaipa, which is at an elevation of 3,000 feet above sea level. I get to look down on the bad air.”

Thompson says big corporate retailers such as Walgreens, Petco, Starbucks, and Target use GIS technology to make similar assessments every time they consider locating another store. “One of the reasons I came to ESRI was that I’d seen ESRI tools and technologies mature to the point of reaching the enterprise,” Thompson says. (He worked for an unnamed competitor in Europe and Australia before joining ESRI) What it comes down to, he adds, is taking “geographic thinking and applying it to the business needs that different people have.”

The ability to apply GIS technologies to business problems has improved steadily over the past decade, Thompson says. In early 2000, ESRI launched an online product intended to help business users do market analytics and …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego-based Covario, the software analytics startup that specializes in search engine optimization, or SEO, is introducing new software-as-a-service that poses a direct challenge to web development agenices. The company says their program automates the process of analyzing web traffic at a customer’s corporate website, a time-consuming job often performed by agencies. Covario’s program scores a customer’s website, ranging from 0 to 100, based on 56 factors that determine how well optimized the site is for Internet search engines. A spokesman says Covario charges from about $1,000 to $3,000 a month, depending on the size of the customer’s website.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s RoyaltyShare, which provides software-as-a-service for record labels that want to track and collect music royalties, says its technology now supports the U.K.’s Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society. Bob Kohn, RoyaltyShare’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, says creating an automated process for reporting royalties to MCPS represents a “significant milestone” for RoyaltyShare. “They have 100 percent market share in the U.K., and all record labels in the U.K. use the MCPS system,” Kohn told me today. Royalty Share’s online Digital Advantage service aggregates and monitors record label sales, and calculates royalties owed to artists, songwriters, and music publishers.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

By some estimates, some 40,000 software applications have been developed for the Apple iPhone. But with a few notable exceptions, such as Apperian, the Boston startup that Wade profiled earlier this year, not many companies are working on business apps for the versatile mobile phone.

So today’s introduction of a new iPhone app by MeLLmo, a startup based in Del Mar, CA, is more noteworthy than the run-of-the-mill apps that enable iPhone users to toss a figurative coin or to visualize guzzling a mug of beer. MeLLmo says its RoamBi application enables users to transform data from spreadsheets, tables, and other business software into interactive graphics that can be displayed on the iPhone. Users can view, analyze, and share the information.

The iPhone application is free, although the company says it plans to introduce a premium version in 90 days. MeLLmo says it also is offering a Software-as-a-Service version of RoamBi online so that new data can be transformed into a pie chart, for example, and transmitted to a company’s entire sales force. In fact, MeLLmo says it is working with San Francisco-based SaaS provider Salesforce.com to provide such enhanced mobile access to information stored by Salesforce users.

“It would be very useful for sales reps,” but they are not the only business user MeLLmo is targeting, co-founder, chairman, and CEO Santiago Becerra says. The goal is to provide a quick and easy way of presenting any kind of business information in a graphical display, including financial, production, and human resources data.

As part of today’s announcement, MeLLmo also unveiled RoamBi Enterprise, a server that allows both small and large organizations to transform business data and reports into visual analytics delivered to the iPhone. “We  give them the option of licensing the software and loading it on their own enterprise server behind a firewall,” Becerra says.

MeLLmo says RoamBi offers four views, or user interface templates, that have been formatted for the iPhone. The templates are specialized for viewing tabular data, catalog data, pie charts, and in a card-like format.

Becerra previously founded two software companies (he sold one to Oracle and the other to Business Objects) and is a former Booz Allen consultant and Harvard MBA. In a statement, Becerra says, “With RoamBi, we have introduced an entirely new format that unlocks the true value of accessing content on mobile devices and empowers users to publish dynamic and interactive information directly to their iPhones.”

Oh, and what does MeLLmo stand for? A spokeswoman for the company says it has no specific meaning. It’s just a name that Becerra’s grandson provided.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

“Healthcare is such a mess,” sighs Graham Barnes, the CEO of San Diego-based Concerro. “It was supposed to be recession-proof. It wasn’t. But we can save them a lot of money, as we have a great story also in this economy.”

Concerro was founded in 2002 as BidShift, a software developer that specializes in Web 2.0 workforce management for healthcare organizations that have been grappling for years with the aggravation and costs stemming from a nationwide nursing shortage. The company developed Web-based software for hospitals that essentially provides an online auction service that helps hospitals fill their open nursing shifts by enabling existing staff nurses to bid for shifts and even pay levels. Healthcare organizations save money by cutting down on the use of temporary hires and by spending less on incentives needed to encourage existing staff to work difficult shifts.

Barnes took on the CEO’s job in November 2007, and changed the company’s name five months later to Concerro, latin for “to bridge or connect.” After announcing an upgrade in its software-as-a-service platform last month, Barnes now says he is using advanced software to lead healthcare providers out of the mess in workforce management.

Graham Barnes

“The biggest expense in hospitals is labor. The biggest expense in labor are nurses. The nurses don’t really always want to work in hospitals, which is heavy-duty. The big idea was to to create an online shopping list for nurses, where they can choose from the shifts they want. The hospital gets motivated nurses and the nurse gets to choose—it is a complete win-win,” explains Barnes.

Concerro is not a hiring agency for nurses, and instead provides its software-as-a-service to 200 U.S. hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare providers.  The nurses do not pay Concerro—the hospitals pay Concerro to provide the Web-based service. “Hospitals pay for getting efficiency,” says Barnes. He says Concerro now has 50 employees, and the company’s revenue totaled $12 million in 2008, an increase of 1,365 percent since 2004.

Barnes, who was born near Liverpool, England, is the former founder and CEO of NextWeb, a Northern California company that was acquired by Covad Communications in 2008. He says Concerro has received approximately $10 million in venture funding, and that Kaiser Permanente has been Concerro’s biggest investor.

The software-enabled revolution in workforce management that Concerro has helped bring about in healthcare also has benefitted Concerro itself. The company previously had enabled hospitals to give award “ShiftPoints,” reward points that could be redeemed for gift cards, to nurses in challenging tasks. Barnes says Concerro also adopted the program for its own employees, and now gives monthly motivational reward points—which are called “Concerros.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s been a little over six months since Brandon Nixon moved into the driver’s seat as CEO at San Diego-based DriveCam, a venture-backed company that uses a combination of technologies to help reduce risky driving behaviors. That seems like enough time for a new boss to get up to speed, so I stopped in recently to ask Nixon why he agreed to take over a startup that’s already got some mileage on the odometer.

Nixon has his reasons, three to be specific, all related to the potential growth he sees for the company and its technology. And his reasoning carries some weight. As a general partner at Housatonic Partners, Nixon oversaw the private equity firm’s investments in a number of telecommunications-related companies. In 2002, he stepped into the CEO’s job at a Housatonic portfolio company, Enerdyne Technologies of El Cajon, CA, and led Enerdyne’s sale four years later to ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) of Carlsbad, CA, for $17 million.

So in essence, by naming Nixon as CEO, DriveCam was redefining itself as less of a video technology company and more of a data communications technology business.

Yet DriveCam’s business strategy has only come into focus since 2005, when the company got about $50 million in venture funding from San Diego’s JMI Equity, Silicon Valley’s Menlo Ventures, New York-based Insight Venture Partners, and Integral Capital Partners, the Menlo Park, CA, firm that also put money into Google, Akamai, and Qualcomm.

Until then, DriveCam was mostly bootstrapped, although spokesman Eric Cohen says “there’s not a lot of historical information” available now about the first seven years. The company was founded in San Diego in 1998, after Australian inventor Gary Rayner experienced one of Southern California’s infamous road rage incidents. His idea for mounting a small video camera on the dashboard was novel enough to win a most-innovative product award in 2000 from Connect, the San Diego non-profit group that promotes technology and entrepreneurship. The device combined hardware and software to store unbiased video clips that served as an unbiased eyewitness to traffic accidents and other highway incidents.

Fast-forward 11 years, and it now seems as though hardly a cable TV channel goes by without seeing reality TV video footage of some terrifying high-speed police pursuit that was recorded by the dashboard-mounted camera in a patrol car. “There are a lot of crash recorders on the market,” Nixon conceded. But the company learned a long time ago there wasn’t much demand for …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The San Diego Venture Group hailed three local companies for their breakout year in 2008, then put an executive from each company on stage yesterday with a newspaper reporter asking them to explain how they did it. It could have made for a hesitant and stilted panel discussion, but the format actually was informative and engaging—and it even yielded some news.

Novalar Pharmaceuticals, which was named as San Diego’s breakout life sciences company, is launching its first product—a drug that accelerates the reversal of dental anesthesia following routine dental work. Novalar, which Luke profiled in November, is announcing the availability of its drug phentolamine mesylate (OraVerse) today at the 144th Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting. (More details on that are below.)

The venture group organized the event to recognize the local cleantech, life sciences, and technology companies that prevailed in meeting financial goals and other milestones despite the worsening economy and financial conditions of 2008.
Venture capitalists, media, and service providers nominated companies in each category, and the venture group’s board selected the winners. Two companies were highlighted alongside Novalar:

—In Cleantech, the breakout company was Sapphire Energy, which raised $100 million from Bill Gates’s venture fund and others in September. Sapphire provided the algae-based biofuel used in the January 7 test flight of a Continental Airlines Boeing 737—a first in North America.

—In Technology, the Active Network, a web-based company that provides online registration and information for recreational and sporting events, was selected for its breakout performance in 2008. The private company raised $80 million in a venture round led by ESPN, and completed seven acquisitions in 2008.

Active Network CEO Dave Alberga provided some of the most colorful quotes when moderator Terri Somers, a biotech reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, asked him to explain an earlier comment about some acquisitions he’d made that he wouldn’t do over again.

“I spend more time now thinking about who the founders are (of acquisition targets) and whether they’re going to be a distraction,” Alberga replied. “There are some factors like that, where I didn’t throw somebody down a flight of stairs soon enough. I’m famous for that. I’m famous for saying you can never fire some people too soon.” Alberga added: “What makes startups work is …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

When Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) announced a couple of weeks ago it had acquired Defensio, a Canadian spam filtering Web service, I realized the San Diego software developer had morphed into something bigger and more robust than I remembered.

“A lot has changed in the last three or four years,” David Meizlik, a Websense product marketing manager, told me yesterday when I stopped by to catch up on the company. Meizlik attributes part of the change to the arrival of former McAfee president Gene Hodges, who was named CEO three years ago. Shifting customer requirements also prompted changes, Meizlik explained, as their info security needs expanded from defending a network like a fortress, with firewalls and intruder alarms, to an approach focused more specifically on content—on the potential threats on web sites and in e-mail traffic.

When it was founded in 1994, Websense specialized in providing software that companies used to block their employees from using their desktop computer to view Internet porn, visit online gambling dens, and idly surf the Web. When Websense went public in 2000, its filtering software was generating $8.6 million in sales a year.

The change in direction became more apparent after Hodges was hired in January 2006 to succeed John Carrington, who had served as Websense CEO for seven years. At McAfee, Hodges had overseen technology development and strategy, as well as sales and marketing, for McAfee’s worldwide business. By then, Websense was already expanding the scope of its content filtering capabilities to identify and block computer viruses and malicious software code, but since …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

A private software company that arose following the implosion of San Diego’s scandal-ridden Peregrine Systems says its business is booming despite the recession, because its innovative model for offering Software as a Service can help customers shave their IT costs.

Service-now.com was founded in 2003 to meet the same business needs served by Peregrine, which was once one of San Diego’s hottest technology companies. Service-now’s software, like Peregrine’s, helps big companies keep track of their assets, such as computers, software licenses and other IT resources. Privately held Service-now also offers a set of applications that helps IT organizations operate more efficiently by automating processes and helps system administrators manage their help desk operations.

But where Peregrine’s enterprise software had to be installed on a customer’s computer network, Service-now runs the software on its own network, and serves its customers’ needs by offering its Software as a Service. Chief Executive Fred Luddy says recurring revenue is now approaching $20 million per year, and he expects the company to start booking a profit by May or June. “This economy has played very well into our hands,” the Service-now CEO told me. “When things are going well the status quo is seldom questioned.”

By moving to the Web and doing away with management fees, Service-now is able to undercut competitors like BMC and Hewlett-Packard by 20 percent or more, Luddy says. In the current economic climate, those savings have opened doors for Service-now at big companies that might not have shown …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: