In the fast-evolving advertising arena, Spongecell is a prime example of how a hard pivot with different technology in place can transform a company’s fortunes.

On Tuesday the New York company, which adds interactive functions such as video and Twitter feeds to banner ads, announced it raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Safeguard Scientifics. Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman says the new funding will go towards product development and other needs. More importantly, though, Kartzman also says Spongecell more than doubled its revenue last year compared with 2010, as he previously expected.

As Spongecell fills its coffers, grows its staff, and expands into new territory, it is hard to imagine that four years ago the company was running out of cash, letting employees go, and searching for a new direction.

Spongecell’s current technology transforms static banner ads into more interactive tools to engage consumers. In addition to Twitter and other social feeds, Spongecell can insert video, maps, coupons, and other features in the ads to grab attention. For example, when users mouse over banner ads for the Mini Cooper the ad plays a video clip that promotes the car. “Video is the fastest-growing segment of the online ad space,” Kartzman says.

Including the latest funding, Spongecell has raised about $14 million in total from backers that include Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. In 2010, Spongecell generated $3.8 million in revenue and Kartzman says the company more than doubled that figure in 2011, though he declined to give specific numbers.

That is a much different tale compared with Spongecell’s early history. The company, founded in 2006, initially offered a widget platform for ad agencies to use for online promotions. When that did not bring in enough business and Spongecell’s cash ran … Next Page »

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Everyone wants to recapture pieces of the past these days. Facebook for example changed all profiles to the timeline format this year, and others in the social media space are pursuing ways of tracking the past. New York-based Timehop has developed its own technology to let individuals recall content from their personal histories, via once-day e-mails. Jonathan Wegener, CEO and co-founder of Timehop, believes the e-mails offer deeper looks into the past than its rivals in the market.

For the team behind Timehop, the technology also marks a major change from where they were one year ago. Back then, they were also working on a startup called FriendsList as part of TechStars’s inaugural NYC class. FriendsList is now defunct. And the tale of how the team scrapped FriendList and moved forward with Timehop provides an interesting case study on startup strategizing—with a dash of nimbleness.

Timehop sends its users e-mails each day that tell them what they were doing exactly one year ago, based on information gathered from their Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, and Instagram profiles. These personal newsletters, Wegener says, offer more context than what the sources offer individually. “There’s a big opportunity in history, and no one is doing it well,” he says. Wegener says Timehop gives its users a picture of how they spent their time, whom they spent it with, and what they were thinking across the social sphere. “Effectively you’re writing a diary without really doing anything,” he says.

One-year-old Timehop raised $1.1 million in seed funding in January from OATV, Spark Capital, and individual investors who include Foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Wegener says the seed funding will go towards … Next Page »

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Citizen Effect, the Washington, D.C.-based microphilanthropy organization that is perhaps best known for its work in India, has just launched a new initiative called Detroit4Detroit, which aims to fund 150 community-improvement projects using a strategy that’s heavy on social networking and other digital tools.

“Detroit4Detroit is based around the idea that anyone can be a philanthropist,” says Eric Moss, Detroit4Detroit’s project manager. “It’s about actualizing our power and actualizing our social networks.”

Citizen Effect organizers work with its partners—ACCESS, Brightmoor Alliance, COTS, Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program (DAPCEP), SER Metro Detroit, Wellspring, and Vanguard—to curate a list of viable projects, with each submitting five to ten projects for consideration. Once a project has been vetted, it’s posted to the Detroit4Detroit website for a citizen philanthropist, or CP, to adopt. Once a project has been claimed, Citizen Effect gives the CPs a digital toolkit that enables them to promote the project on sites like Facebook and Twitter, reach out to potential supporters through fundraising emails, and have an online platform to post blogs, videos, and photos related to the project.

The goal of Detroit4Detroit is to have 150 people raising $250,000 across 150 projects, though Moss says this initial target is a starting point for what he hopes will be “limitless” community philanthropy.

“I’m blown away by the enthusiasm and how many people want to sign up,” says Matt Bailey, who manages the tech and data side of Detroit4Detroit’s operations. Though the initiative just held its formal launch last month, 15 people have already signed on to be CPs and are in the process of being matched with the project that best suits their talents, interests, and networks. (One project has officially started fundraising.)

The Detroit4Detroit model was developed with the help of the Knight Foundation, and represents the first time Citizen Effect has launched a microphilanthropy initiative of this kind in an American city.

“This is a special moment in Detroit,” Moss says, noting that the city is alive with grassroots energy. “We want to fit into the revitalization and renewal efforts in a way where we engage each other about the idea of philanthropy. We all can make a difference, especially if we’re provided with the tools that level the playing field.”

Moss is himself representative of the kind of change that is rapidly taking root in the city, where people who grew up in greater Detroit but left to attend college or seek work are returning to the area with a sense of purpose. Moss grew up in suburban Detroit, went to college in D.C., and lived in New York and Los Angeles before making his way back home.

“I moved back two years ago and I came back willingly,” Moss says. “What brought me back was the soul of the city, which was missing in the other places I lived. There’s an electric energy going on here that none of us can deny. It’s a great opportunity to experience this very positive transition of order out of chaos.”

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Much like the New York Giants charging onto the football field, companies such as bitly, BarkBox, and Gilt Groupe—along with their backers—have upped the caliber of innovation expected from startups in New York. In response to this upswell of activity, Xconomy brought some 250 members of the local investor and entrepreneurial community together Wednesday to catch a glimpse of the city’s potential as a venture hub. (And to debate the merits of the Giants vs. the Patriots.)

Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures, and Todd Dagres, general partner and founder of Spark Capital, discussed the role media hype plays with some startups and the rise of social media, during a keynote chat moderated by David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stdibs.

Admittedly, the media is notorious for picking its darlings when discussing innovation while barely mentioning some growing companies. Though Instagram, for example, makes headlines when it lands funding, Wilson said, Union Square Ventures has companies in its portfolio quickly building their businesses under the radar. “They don’t get caught up in a bunch of nonsense,” he said. “We have companies like Indeed.com and Return Path that will be public companies in three or four years—maybe less.” The management teams at those companies, Wilson said, are more focused on developing their products than building their media following.

Dagres said that some companies simply do not talk up their plans. He compared Twitter, a usual suspect on many blogs and news sites, with Tumblr, which until recently was not as vocal. “Tumblr couldn’t get arrested even though it was growing like crazy and was very substantial,” he said. “You didn’t hear anything about it. Now it’s starting to catch on.”

New York’s Tumblr could be on to something by shrugging at hype in order to endure in the social media arena, Wilson said. He noted that early players such GeoCities gave way to MySpace, Facebook, and now Foursquare and Pinterest. “People are figuring out how to make these services more useful and how to also make them businesses,” he said.

The trouble with GeoCities, Wilson said, was in spite of the high hit counts on those … Next Page »

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Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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Finland’s Playmysong said in a press release it raised a seed round, $350,000 according to a spokesman, led by startup accelerator Lifeline Ventures and opened a New York office this month. The company plans to also set up shop in San Francisco in February. Playmysong’s Apple iOS and Web app lets users request songs to play at participating bars, nightclubs, hotels, and cafés, and simultaneously checks in their locations via Facebook and Twitter. The venues let the app’s users connect over WiFi or 3G wireless with the in-house iTunes playlists to make their choices.

Playmysong charges venues for premium services, which include the option to send messages with discount deals to users of the app after they request songs. Playmysong says its New York office will handle business development and marketing in the region.

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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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Merry Christmas, Boston. You asked for it, and you got it. A big, publicly traded consumer tech company to put us on the map alongside the Silicon Valley bad boys and uppity New Yorkers. I present to you: TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP).

Sure, we already have Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), and privately held but well-established companies like Wayfair, Kayak, and Harmonix. But TripAdvisor is different. Although the online travel firm is not new—it’s been cranking here in Boston for more than a decade—it has become one of the biggest consumer-focused Internet companies on the East Coast, with more than 1,100 employees; 50 million-plus unique visitors a month checking out hotel, restaurant, and travel reviews; and, oh yeah, a market cap north of $3 billion. Yet it hasn’t received as much media coverage or tech-community-adulation as you might expect over the years. (An exception to the former would be this in-depth story by my colleague Wade Roush; the latter would be this commentary from investor Chris Dixon.)

I spoke with TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer on Wednesday, the day his company officially became independent from Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) and started trading on the Nasdaq under its own stock symbol. Here are my takeaways from our chat:

1. TripAdvisor wants the spotlight now. “We have generally been very, very surprised at how little attention the press have paid to TripAdvisor,” Kaufer said. He pointed to his company’s size, number of employees, traffic, revenues, and profits, calling it “the $3 billion company in our own backyard.” On the local training and ecosystem front, he says college interns are turning down offers from Facebook and Google and working at TripAdvisor instead.

2. TripAdvisor is global. Seventy-five percent of the traffic to the company’s branded websites comes from outside the U.S. Think about that for a minute. “We’re almost unchallenged in most countries in the … Next Page »

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Time for our roundup of the latest deals news from Bay Area technology companies, from biggest to smallest. And today’s biggest numbers are pretty big.

$1 billion—The approximate amount raised by social game maker Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA) in its IPO last Thursday. The company’s shares priced at $10 per share, momentarily giving it a market capitalization of about $7 billion, but shares are trading down about 10 percent day, at around $9.

$1 billion—The price fetched by Milpitas, CA-based NextG Networks, which said last week (PDF) that it has been acquired by Crown Castle International. NextG makes outdoor antenna systems, and Crown Castle is one of the nation’s largest owners of cellular network towers. Backers of NetxtG Networks included Abbott Capital Management, Accel Partners, Bridgescale Partners, Bay Harbour Management, Madison Dearborn Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, New Venture Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

$400 million—The amount San Jose, CA-based Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) paid for online advertising optimization startup Efficient Frontier of Sunnyvale, CA, according to executives speaking in a quarterly earnings call last week. Adobe announced the acquisition Nov. 30.

$300 million—An investment in San Francisco-based Twitter from Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, according to a report today in Dow Jones VentureWire. The investment gives the prince a 3.6 percent stake in the microblogging company. [Update, 12/19/11 8:00 pm PT: Fortune's Dan Primack reported today that the prince's investment was a secondary trade, meaning he was buying shares from existing Twitter shareholders rather than providing new capital.]

$20.1 million—New funding for San Jose, CA-based SoloPower, according to a regulatory filing. Previous backers of the solar panel manufacturer include Hudson Clean Energy Partners; the company received a $197 million loan earlier this year from the Department of Energy to build a plant in Oregon.

$12 million—New funding announced today (PDF) for San Jose, CA-based EnVerv, a maker of chips for powerline communications for smart-grid applications. Benchmark, NEA, and Walden International contributed to the round. Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow has more on the funding deal here.

$10 million—The amount Founders Fund has put into San Carlos, CA-based Pharmacofore in a funding round reported this morning by VentureWire. The company is developing opioid painkillers that are effective only when swallowed, deterring misuse by drug abusers.

$6 million—New funding announced last week for Burlingame, CA-based Carwoo, which helps car buyers get quotes online. The new money, which doubles Carwoo’s previous venture pot, came from InterWest Partners, Comcast Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Raymond Tonsing. Xconomy profiled the Y Combinator-backed startup in October 2010.

$2.3 million—A new round of equity-based financing for San Francisco-based social video startup Spreecast, according to a regulatory filing.

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High school and youth sports teams may lack the deep pockets of the pros, but they can still take advantage of technology for tracking game stats thanks to a New York startup. Angel investor-backed GameChanger Media offers coaches of young athletes a mobile platform that evolves record keeping from pen and paper to smartphones and tablets. “Coaches and scorekeepers of youth and high school teams have incredibly archaic tools for managing what is the most painful and time-consuming part of their job,” says GameChanger Media CEO Ted Sullivan.

His company offers youth teams a free app that lets them log game information, which they can then share in real-time with local news outlets and the public. Rather than jotting down notes on a clipboard, the teams punch in the numbers with their mobile devices. Initially designed for use by baseball and softball teams, the app is available for Android phones, iPhones and the iPad. Sullivan says another version of GameChanger Media’s platform is under development for basketball teams and is due out in beta by midyear 2012 with the full release expected by next winter.

Thanks in part to $1 million raised in November from angel investors, Sullivan says he expects to grow his staff of sixteen by 30 percent by the end of 2012. GameChanger Media has raised $3.5 million to date in total from private investors.

Founded in 2009, GameChanger Media released its app to the public in January 2010. Sullivan says in 2011, some 30,000 youth and high school teams across country and around the world adopted his company’s tools to record game stats. Amateur baseball governing body USA Baseball, youth sports program Little League International, and high school baseball team tournament host Perfect Game USA all use the platform, Sullivan says. The app is also catching on internationally, Sullivan says. “Our product is only in English, but we have teams from Korea to Germany using it,” he says.

While GameChanger Media’s platform is free for teams to use, the company also … Next Page »

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With eyes pointed westward, New York-based LocalResponse announced today it opened a new office in Chicago and is considering plans for an office in California. LocalResponse, backed by Cava Capital and others, puts a business-to-business spin on the “check-in” market. The startup created a platform that lets brands and other marketers respond with relevant ads and offers to consumers who announce via the social sphere where they are. Kathy Leake, president and co-founder of LocalResponse, says the company opened the Chicago office to expand its reach with retailers and consumer goods clients who are based in the Midwest. “It made a lot of sense for that to be our first move outside of New York,” she says.

Brands such as Coca-Cola, Verizon, Microsoft, and General Electric use LocalResponse’s platform, which aggregates users’ check-ins from Foursquare as well as updates from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that include mentions of where the users are. Marketers can respond to such users with offers that relate to their whereabouts.

Leake says LocalResponse plans to continue its growth into next year. The company, she says, expects to double its current staff of 20, which includes the Chicago group, by the end of third quarter 2012. The Chicago office is staffed by a team of sales and account management representatives led by Todd Hayes, previously of 24/7 Real Media. Leake says LocalResponse is also weighing its options for a West Coast office.

“Our platform offers a lot of opportunity for the entertainment category so we are thinking about Los Angeles,” she says. “It’s either going to be L.A. or San Francisco.” Leake says LocalResponse’s platform can be used across a variety of industries but her company specializes in retail, consumer goods, entertainment, travel, and leisure.

In October, LocalResponse closed a $5 million funding round led by Cava Capital and Vodafone Group with participation from Advancit Capital and Progress Ventures. “Now that we’ve closed on our Series A round we’re able to hire the talent we need to scale the business in 2012,” Leake says.

Going forward, she says, LocalResponse wants to self-fund its growth with revenue, generated by charging marketers when customers click on the ads and offers, instead of raising a Series B round. “Raising capital in this climate is incredibly difficult and time consuming,” she says.

Leake says her company stands out in the check-in world by aggregating data to help brands target their marketing campaigns and by leveraging so-called natural language when consumers mention a product or place in the social sphere. “For a client like Macy’s, if someone were to say over Twitter ‘I’m at Macy’s', they’re not checking in on a Foursquare per se but they are announcing their location,” Leake says. “We’re able to turn that into a targetable impression for a marketer.”

Leake says LocalResponse wants to open more satellite offices in the future to bring its sales and account management staff closer to its clients. “We have every intention to have people in-market across the U.S. eventually,” she says.

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Beware of CEOs who dress like their company logo. Beware of Jason Baptiste.

Just kidding. Baptiste is one of the most intensely likable startup founders around (emphasis on intense). His company, New York-based OnSwipe, is trying to take the tablet publishing world by storm. And not just with its aggressively stylish magenta-and-black color scheme.

OnSwipe makes a software platform for publishers to display their content and ads on tablet Web browsers, starting with the iPad. If that sounds a bit similar to Google Currents, the mobile publishing app that the Web search giant unveiled last week, well, Baptiste doesn’t seem too worried about the competition. In response to an article saying that “Google Currents might be OnSwipe’s nightmare,” Baptiste tweeted: “I fear Currents like Twitter feared Buzz and YouTube feared Video.” (OK, he doesn’t lack for confidence.)

We caught up with Baptiste earlier this month in Boston, where he spoke about the deeper ideas behind OnSwipe at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference (you can see photos here—Baptiste represented New York with flair). He also shared some broader views on the future of Web content and advertising, and argued for OnSwipe’s vision of browsing via tablets and touchscreens.

“Instead of a world with ugly text-like ads, we’re going to see a world with beautiful full-page, magazine-like advertising that will finally fill the gap” in the $50 billion in ad spending that’s expected to move from print to digital media, Baptiste said after his talk.

In a short video interview produced by my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty, Baptiste talked a little more about OnSwipe’s specific goals and challenges. You should check out the video below, but here are three highlights to whet your appetite:

1. “The tablet is the TV of this generation.”

2. “It’s not going to be 300 channels or 3,000 channels, it’s going to be millions of channels.”

3. “If Google gained its distribution by powering search, OnSwipe wants to gain distribution by powering [tablet browsing] experiences.”

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Carol Gallagher, the former CEO of Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, is glad to see Gilead Sciences spending billions on acquiring a new drug for hepatitis C, rather than spending billions on stock buybacks. And Jason Rhodes, the chief business officer of Epizyme, borrowed a line from Hillary Clinton, on how “it takes a village” to raise a biotech company.

These were a few of the nuggets I took away from yesterday’s live chat on Twitter about the state of biotech startups. This was the third life sciences “Tweetchat” that we’ve done this fall, in which readers have been invited to fire off their questions about what’s new in RNA interference, biotech venture capital, and startup survival strategies. Here are some of the highlights from the afternoon:

—Gallagher on how to get by in a period of scarce biotech venture capital: “Absolutely need to demonstrate efficient use of capital and clear value inflections to get $$ and creativity to alternatives.”

—Gallagher on the role of Big Pharma partners, and other ways to finance R&D: “Pharma budgets under pressure. Disease specific foundations can be great partners e.g. Multiple myeloma, CF.”

—When asked about the effect the biotech venture capital crisis has had on entrepreneurs, Gallagher replied, “It’s more challenging but some was a needed contraction–still believe good companies get funds but challenging for early cos.”

—On the key to success with Calistoga (it was acquired by Gilead for up to $600 million). “Calistoga had a very clear and well-differentiated hypothesis that at each step the card turned over favorably and a Gr8 team,” Gallagher said.

—When Laura Strong, president of Madison, WI, Quintessence Biosciences asked Gallagher about whether “lean/virtual” biotech companies are appealing to people accustomed to raising lots of money, Gallagher jumped on it. “Agree–efficiency a must—if virtual can get it done, then Gr8. Calistoga began registration trials with 23 employees,” Gallagher wrote.

Rhodes pointed out the interesting bind that pharma partners have found themselves in. These companies are hungry for innovation to replace aging blockbusters losing patent protection, but by cutting R&D budgets, they have made it tougher on themselves to form research collaborations with small biotech companies that might plug their gaps.

—As Rhodes @JasonPaulRhodes put it on Twitter, “Hurdle for research collabs high as big pharma R&D budgets under pressure despite need for innovation.”

—While the hurdles are high, Rhodes added they aren’t insurmountable. “Even now, pharma co’s willing to collab if believe partner can deliver (and quickly) w/clear Rx target & patient groups defined,” he wrote.

—When I asked Rhodes if Epizyme is building a “diversified portfolio” of funding sources like pharma companies and disease foundations, to cushion it from the ups and downs in biotech venture capital, he took it a step further: “Creative financing a must, not Series A, B, C, then IPO. It takes a village to build a company, VCs, partners, & founds (foundations.)”

—And, in what might be the first use of Latin I’ve seen on Twitter, Rhodes essentially said there’s an essential ingredient for success in biotech: “Track record of successful execution by leadership & org sine qua non for investors, partners and recruiting.” Another way to put it: talented and driven novices are going to find some hard sledding.

Thanks to all those who tuned in to the conversation, and especially those who entered the fray with questions. I’m intrigued by how these chats bring readers together from all over the map to discuss key topics we write about regularly. For those of you in the biotech business just exploring Twitter or relatively new to it, I’d suggest you “follow” the Tweets from the people below, who asked some good questions during today’s chat.

@LifesciNYC

@jrkelly

@scientre

@PearlF

@BiotechStockRsr

@DavidASteinberg

@Rob_Carlson

@BayBio

@karls_mlab

@BioBenj

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Quick reminder for those of you on Twitter to join us for a live chat at 3 pm Eastern/Noon Pacific on the state of biotech startups. Carol Gallagher (@carol_gallagher) and Jason Rhodes (@JasonPaulRhodes) are the featured guests, who will field questions on how biotech startups can make it at a time when biotech venture capital is scarce.

You can follow the Q&A under the searchable hash tag #biostartups.

As always, you are welcome to add your comments or send questions directly to Jason, Carol, or anyone else joining the conversation. This should be a lively one. See you there online this afternoon.

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New York’s Social Passport wants to appeal to retailers and restaurateurs who are not quite sold on the other check-in deal programs on the market. CEO David Merel founded the startup last December and brought his company’s technology out of beta this October. Thus far Social Passport has raised some $350,000 from angel investors, and Merel says the company wants to take in upwards of $3 million to fuel its expansion into more cities.

The daily deals industry currently faces questions about its viability as players such as BuyWithMe wither and are acquired. Merel says the predominant strategy for offering discounts that are not scaled to retailers’ budgets is not cost effective. “There is no way to continuously bring more foot traffic into the store” with that model, he says.

Social Passport says it has a different approach, thanks to technology that brings together several options for businesses to offer discounts and loyalty rewards to their customers. Retailers who use the software can scan their customers’ personal quick response (QR) codes displayed on paper or on their smartphones. These unique codes let the retailer dole out discounts and spread the word across the customers’ social networks. Consumers with smartphones can likewise scan QR codes posted in the store or restaurant to redeem available offers.

Social Passport’s technology can also be used to check-in attendees who bring their QR codes for admission to concerts and tradeshows. These codes can be scanned by smartphones, webcams, and traditional barcode scanners.

Businesses can also use electronic chips supplied by Social Passport … Next Page »

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Yaron Samid, CEO and co-founder of BillGuard in New York, likens his company to Robin Hood and his merry band on a mission to return pilfered money to the masses. With $10 million raised in October in a Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures, BillGuard has set out to further develop its technology, which combs credit and bank card transactions for suspicious activity. “Our big mission is to protect consumers from unfair and unauthorized charges,” Samid says.

BillGuard has been quickly gathering resources to pursue that goal. The company was founded in April 2010 and raised $3 million a month later in a Series A round. Other backers of BillGuard include Bessemer Venture Partners, IA Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Social Leverage, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Founders Fund, Innovation Endeavors, as well as individual investors Yaron Galai, CEO of content recommendation engine Outbrain in New York, and Joe Lonsdale, CEO of Addepar, a Mountain View, CA-based developer of a wealth management platform.

Samid says his company’s latest funding will support efforts to grow its user base and and sales in the United States, and to further business development. Currently BillGuard has a staff of 14 in Israel working on development and just two in New York. The company is hiring in marketing and sales in the States and is looking in Israel for more developers. “Roughly speaking, we’re going to double the size of the company in the next 12 to 18 months,” he says.

BillGuard identifies potential problems by comparing new transactions to complaints posted on the Web by other consumers about bogus charges. The system essentially crowdsources examples of fraud to screen for trouble, Samid says. “This is out there on Facebook, Twitter, … Next Page »

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The biotech VC world is in crisis. Just in the space of a few weeks, some venerable names have made some disturbing news. Prospect Venture Partners said it was unable to raise a new fund, Morgenthaler Ventures and Advanced Technology Ventures said they are splitting off their life sciences teams to raise a new merged life sciences fund, and Scale Venture Partners said it’s getting out of the life sciences investment business to focus more on high-tech.

Questions are circulating throughout the life sciences community about what this upheaval will mean for the future of innovation in new drugs, devices, and diagnostics. If Big Pharma is cutting R&D, government research budgets are being tightened, and venture capitalists have less money to invest in startups, where is the innovation going to come from?

This is a question that people are clearly going to wrestle with for some time. So I’m excited to bring this issue out into the open through a live chat on Twitter with a biotech VC insider. Daphne Zohar, the founder and managing partner of Boston-based PureTech Ventures, has agreed to take questions from me and any readers who would like to join the conversation on Twitter.

PureTech, for those who don’t know, bills itself as a “venture creation” company rather than a traditional venture capital firm. Whatever you call it, PureTech looks to invest in, and incubate, “big idea” biotech startups based on input it gets from some seasoned Big Pharma veterans and leading scientists. Zohar has been an outspoken voice against business as usual in biotech VC land for a while—which you can see from her Xconomy guest editorial in August 2009. In that post, she advised VCs to “stop devouring entrepreneurs.”

Here’s how the chat will work. It will start at Noon Eastern/9 am Pacific time on Tuesday, Nov. 22. It will go for about 30 minutes. I’ll send questions from my personal account on Twitter, @ldtimmerman, and from @xconomy. Zohar will respond from her account (@daphnezohar). We will keep track of the running Q&A dialogue under the searchable hash tag #bioVC.

That’s all. If you have any questions you’d like to pose to Zohar, or you just want to see what she has to say, tune in on Twitter at Noon Eastern/9 am Pacific on Nov. 22. See you there.

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Swarmology, a San Diego provider of social media analytics for healthcare clients, is stepping into the light today, disclosing initial funding of $1.2 million and the debut of its website.

The company, founded last December by pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm, provides targeted, Web-based marketing services for its customers by analyzing online conversations about specific health concerns on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Swarmology’s customers already include a large healthcare insurance provider and a couple of smaller pharmaceutical companies, Bohm says.

Before arriving in San Diego last year, Bohm says he was working with electronic health insurance reimbursement records at New Jersey-based SDI Health to help drug developers minimize the costs and risks of their clinical trials. By working with “very rich data,” Bohm says he helped pharmaceuticals optimize the design of their clinical trials—in part by identifying the ideal medical center, and by mapping and recruiting patients for a particular study.

Bohm says the idea for Swarmology occurred after he began wondering if there was a comparable richness in the health and medical information that people share on Facebook and Twitter. “Enormous numbers of people are talking about their own health,” Bohm says. For example, he says Facebook users will update their status with such comments as “My daughter had another asthma attack today” or “I’m taking Sumatriptan [for a migraine] and it’s not working.”

Bohm says a Pew internet Life Research study published earlier this year shows that 70 percent of U.S. adults search online for health-related subjects, and some 43 percent are crowdsourcing their health care through online discussions with fellow patients and healthcare providers. Using data analytics, Bohm says, “You can get this wealth of information across wide swaths of social media. We can capture all the conversations—we call that a swarm—in a virtual community.”

While Swarmology’s technology is proprietary, Bohm says the Centers for Disease Control and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Projects Agency are using similar techniques to analyze social media “to try to understand if the online signals are sufficient to predict political unrest in other countries or to track and predict where flu and allergy outbreaks are going to stress regional healthcare systems. In the same way, Google can track and predict contagious outbreaks as people go online to search for information about their symptoms.

Bohm says Swarmology can collect online comments posted on a particular topic—diabetes, for example—by searching for specific terms such as “insulin,” “blood,” “sugar,” and “HbA1c” (a standard lab test that measures blood sugar) as well as less-specific terms such as “diet” and “exercise” that are more contextual. By using semantic analysis and natural language processing, Bohm says Swarmology’s technology is sophisticated enough to identify and include comments like “I’m walking like a zombie today” in a search for online comments about insomnia.

Bohm says Swarmology also has been working on a set of algorithms to … 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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Put high-quality cameras into devices with broadband wireless connections. Add powerful smartphone operating systems like iOS or Android and app-store ecosystems like iTunes and the Android Market. Mix in some sloth and disinterest on the part of established photo-sharing destinations like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Under these conditions, it was probably inevitable that entrepreneurs would create a slew of new mobile photo-sharing startups like Instagram, Picplz, and Path. Instagram, with somewhere north of 12 million users, seems to be the winner in this space so far; it’s getting smartphone owners used to the concept of snapping photos on the go, applying optional faux-vintage filters, and sharing instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, or Foursquare.

Now comes the next logical step: video sharing apps and startups. All of the latest smartphones shoot high-definition video as well as photos, but so far, Instagram doesn’t let users share video clips—at least, not yet. That’s created room for even newer iPhone apps like Socialcam from Justin.TV, Vlix from Spotmixer, and Klip, from the Palo Alto, CA, startup of the same name.

All of these free apps let users record and edit short video clips and share them with friends. None have a gigantic following yet, and I don’t know which one will dominate. But if the contest were being decided on sheer elegance, the winner right now would be Klip.

I sat down recently with Alain Rossmann, the veteran computing and mobile entrepreneur behind Klip, and got a tour of the app and a glimpse of the thinking behind its design. (See the video below.) If there’s a single theme that differentiates Klip from the other video sharing apps, it’s Rossmann’s obsession with refining the user-experience details.

That’s a skill he says he began to develop at Apple, where he was on the marketing team for the original Macintosh in the early 1980s. One thing Rossmann says he learned from Steve Jobs—whose “genius was there even then, but also the difficult side”—was that “the last 10 percent of refinement gets you 90 percent of the market share.” Which explains why Klip includes seemingly obscure but aesthetically important features like face detection—to make sure that the profile photo that shows up alongside your uploaded videos is cropped properly. “When you see your friends, you want to see their face,” Rossmann insists. “To get that on a phone with retina-display resolution, you have to do face detection.”

Here’s a short video of Rossmann demonstrating Klip. Story continues after video.

Rossmann has five startups under his belt prior to Klip. Three went public, and two were acquired. That’s “more than any one man, or his wife, should have to bear,” he jokes. But he can’t seem to resist.

After Apple, Rossmann co-founded Radius with a group of other Macintosh team alums; the company made graphics cards and external displays for the Mac. Next came C-Cube Microsystems, which built the first chips for handling MPEG video compression. EO, which made a pen-based wireless communications tablet (like the iPad, but about 16 years ahead of its time) was next. Then there was Unwired Planet, which helped give birth to the Wireless Access Protocol for Web browsing on feature phones and ultimately morphed into OpenWave (NASDAQ: OPWV). And finally there was … Next Page »

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