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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Say you’d like to look up an old friend from high school. You have no idea what happened to him after college, and you can’t find him on Facebook. But you do remember the address of his house down the street from your childhood home. What if there was a Web-based map where you could log on, locate your friend’s old house, and leave a virtual note for him to find?

That’s the scenario that Mark Sherman hopes millions of people will explore at ZoomAtlas, a new social mapping service going public today at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Using the site’s tools, you can publicly annotate any location that has some personal meaning to you. That might mean leaving a note for someone, or it might mean reminiscing about the house where you grew up, or a school you attended, or even a restaurant where you had a good meal.

But Sherman, the president, CEO, and main funder of the Cambridge, MA-based startup, thinks finding long-lost acquaintances will be the most compelling use for the site. “There’s nothing on Facebook I’ve seen that allows you to reconnect on the micro level,” he says. “The closest thing you have is groups for school alumni—but that’s not the only place that people want to reconnect from.”

You can think of ZoomAtlas as a cross between Google Maps, Facebook, and Wikipedia, with user-generated missives and memories as the key ingredients that—in theory, at least—will make it more than just another mapping site.

Speaking of Wikipedia, Sherman says Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki, is a close friend and an advisor to the company. In a short essay posted on the site, Cunningham says ZoomAtlas is “a perfect example” of the collaborative philosophy behind wikis. “We can make an atlas of our world that shows what we know and love, not just what a satellite can see,” Cunningham writes. “We can weave our memories and impressions together using the computer’s ever improving graphics to make a collaborative picture from our eyes and minds and hearts in equal proportion.”

The first thing to try when you visit ZoomAtlas is typing in a specific street address—say, the house where you grew up. You’ll see a satellite image of the neighborhood, with small icons representing the location of each house. Each house icon can be edited in a number of ways: you can move it in case it’s not in the right location on the property, you can give it a different look to correspond to your memory of the place, you can write an article about that address (this is the most Wikipedia-like part), and you can attach short notes for others to find. Right now the maps are 2-D, but in the future, according to Sherman, you’ll be able to go inside houses and annotate individual rooms. “Users are empowered to help detail to the map to the point that every location on Earth, no matter how small, can be defined and have attributes assigned to it,” says Sherman.

But ZoomAtlas is more than just a map-based bulletin board where people can leave notes for long-lost friends, Sherman says. He hopes it will evolve into the locus for any online conversation linked to a place. “It’s a framework on which to allow discussion of locations, whether big or small,” he says. “If there were another Fort Hood incident, God forbid, you could … Next Page »

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Portland, OR-based AboutUs, an Internet startup focused on information discovery and sharing, has closed $1.2 million in financing, according to an SEC filing. CEO Ray King confirmed the funding, saying it rounds out the company’s Series A. Back in January, AboutUs announced a $2.5 million commitment from Seattle-based Voyager Capital. The latest tranche closing includes $1 million from Voyager, fulfilling its $2.5 million commitment, and $200,000 from other investors. Erik Benson of Voyager and Paul Stahura of Demand Media are listed as directors.

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I dropped in on AboutUs for a mid-year checkup while I was in Portland, OR, last week. The company announced a $2.5 million Series A funding round from Voyager Capital in January, and has been transitioning from startup mode to strategic execution of its plans to reinvent how people discover and share information on the Web.

Company headquarters is over the Morrison Bridge from downtown Portland, in a bright yellow building visible from across the river. AboutUs founder and CEO Ray King gave me a tour of the digs, which are spacious and open. Almost all of the chairs and furniture are on wheels, and computer monitors are mounted on long, flexible arms—all to encourage collaboration between staff.

Which, on a higher level, is central to the mission of AboutUs. King summarizes the company, saying, “It’s about building human content that describes all content and sites” on the Web. “It’s a discovery tool,” he adds. The basic idea is a collaborative, wiki-style site that has a page for every company and organization out there, with information about that entity (history, management, contacts, customer reviews, and so forth). AboutUs also creates useful lists for communities. So if you’re looking for the hottest tech startups in Portland, say, you can go to an AboutUs page that has editable descriptions of Portland companies, with links to more information.

The whole concept is different from Google, Bing, or any of the search engines currently getting lots of attention. Those other sites give you an impressive list of references when you do a search, but not much direct information about what you’re looking for. “We don’t think of ourselves as search,” King says. Instead, AboutUs is complementary to search engines in that it hosts content about people, companies, and other topics.

It all stems from King’s deeper view of what a website represents—”people acting with intentionality,” he says. That means people set up websites because they want to do something, whether it’s selling a product, blogging their views, or sharing information or media. His company hopes to tap that intentionality in a deep way, by getting people to contribute to descriptions of websites they’re involved with, and eventually helping to create a new mapping of content on the Web.

King says AboutUs envisions three main target users: a “topic researcher” looking for a site she’s never been to before; a “shy maven” who likes using new tools and wants recognition for his expertise; and a “website operator” who wants to improve the visibility of his company or organization. AboutUs seems to have the first and third users pretty well figured out. It’s the middle user that King says he is currently most focused on.

AboutUs was profitable in 2008 and hopes to be profitable again by the end of 2009, King says. The site is getting between 8 and 9 million unique visitors per month. Its revenues come from a combination of advertising and service fees.

As for his outlook for the rest of the year, King says AboutUs is “on plan right now.” He adds that his team is getting more focused on improving technical aspects like the site’s ranking algorithm and its ease of use. Finally, King says he’s looking to “open a few pockets of deep penetration.” Those might come in the medical arena or the technology space, he says. “When you want to see what’s happening in a given area, that’s AboutUs.”

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A week ago, I reported on Portland, OR-based Jive Software’s latest product, a business software package designed to let employees communicate and collaborate more effectively using social networking tools. Jive competes with the likes of big companies such as IBM and Microsoft, who want to own the business communication space and have been adding social-network features to their own software offerings. But it also competes with a slew of smaller companies all trying to get a piece of the social-networking-for- business pie.

One of these smaller competitors is Telligent, which was founded by Rob Howard, an ex-Microsoftie. Howard, who is Telligent’s chief executive, started the company in his hometown of Dallas, TX, in 2004. Previously, he had spent six years at Microsoft, living in the Seattle area and moving between a developer relations group and the .NET software team, doing both marketing and product development. He helped launch one of Microsoft’s first community websites, and a blogging platform.

Howard originally bootstrapped Telligent with about $5,000, then grew it into a profitable business. Last September, Intel Capital invested $20 million in the company. Telligent now has just over a hundred employees, including half a dozen former Microsofties (mainly from Redmond, WA), Howard says. Telligent’s big customers include the Associated Press, Dell, Electronic Arts, Honda, Intel, MSNBC, MySpace.com, Visa, the National Football League, and yes, Microsoft.

The idea behind Telligent was to use social tools like wikis and blogs to build a suite of software applications for business collaboration. Over the past few years, the company has focused most on business analytics. “Our software helps companies get much more crisp about how to talk to their customers,” Howard says. “What we uniquely do is the analytics. It’s great you can capture all this information, but what’s difficult is to make informed decisions about it.” For instance, he says, Telligent’s software can scour blogs, forums, MSNBC, Twitter—you name it—and pull out what a company’s customers are really saying about a new product in a way that’s totally different from a user survey.

Telligent’s other focus is employee productivity. For example, its software helps workers at big companies like Proctor & Gamble take their e-mail inboxes and distribution lists and make their content “searchable, discoverable, and reusable” in a Web-based discussion format, Howard says. That can help employees quickly find the right experts within the company on a given issue, among other uses.

As for how Telligent competes specifically with Jive’s social business software, Howard emphasizes that his firm’s “investment in analytics is the biggest differentiator.” He also sees a difference in how the two companies’ products interact with the outside world. Howard says, “Our view of the world is one that requires integration. We have to integrate with existing platforms. Jive says, ‘We are the platform.’ We [Telligent] are part of the system…Maybe it’s my Microsoft background, but integration is usually of more value to the business than stand-alone capabilities.”

Another difference is that Telligent partners with Microsoft and counts the Redmond company as a customer, instead of competing directly with its social computing offerings (for now anyway). It’s a delicate relationship that Howard probably understands how to navigate better than most, given his experience.

Even if Telligent isn’t lining up against Microsoft, though, Howard says he has plenty of “great competitors” in Jive and other social computing startups like Emeryville, CA-based Lithium.

So where is this competition headed? Look for the next version of Telligent’s software to hit the market in the next few months. One focus will be on measuring true customer engagement, rather than things like raw pageviews for a given site, Howard says. On a more personal note, Howard says he’s looking forward to spring, and may return to the Northwest to do a little fly fishing. Apparently you can take the Microsoftie out of Seattle, but you can’t take Seattle out of the Microsoftie.

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The Internet software firm AboutUs, based in Portland, OR, announced today it has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Seattle-based Voyager Capital. Voyager managing director Erik Benson has joined the company’s board. The deal closed the day before Thanksgiving. But the real story here is what AboutUs is trying to do, and why there has been some buzz about the startup in recent months.

I spoke with Raymond King, the founder and CEO of AboutUs, about that yesterday. First, a quick back story on King, who is a seasoned entrepreneur. He originally moved to Portland in 2000 after selling his first software company, New York-based Semaphore, to Deltek (NASDAQ: DLTK). For King, an MIT alum and native New Yorker, the move to the Northwest was all about quality of life. “You don’t spend too much time stuck in traffic here,” he says. (At least when I-5 isn’t flooded.)

King co-founded SnapNames in 2000, and ran the Portland company as chief executive until mid-2005. It was acquired by Oversee.net in 2007 for a reported $35 million. By then, King had moved on to AboutUs, which he started in 2006 with the idea of creating a Wiki-based guide to all the websites on the Internet.

Go to AboutUs.org and you’ll find a page for almost every website out there. There is basic information about companies and people—addresses, contacts, summaries—and it’s all editable, Wiki-style, by anyone. The aim is to get clients, vendors, and bloggers, say, to add content to its pages about companies. “The Web 2.0 version of an AboutUs page should invite participation,” says King.

At first, this might sound like just another Wiki or social-networking site. But the plan is much deeper that that. “Our long-term mission revolves around transforming the way people work,” King says. “What we’ll focus on in 2009 is correlating all the like pages and interests, to form a topological map of the Web.” That will help people “discover other folks who have similar interests,” he says. Benson calls this “fostering a community culture while building a ‘system of truth’ for information on businesses worldwide.”

It sounds like AboutUs wants to redefine how people find and share information online, … Next Page »

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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…

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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 »

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The eCoast Angel Network of Portsmouth, NH, and Boston Harbor Angels of Boston are among the participants in a $2 million funding round announced today for CollegeWikis. The New York-based startup, which provides e-mail lists and group-editable wikis for student-based organizations (and bears a passing resemblance to Cambridge, MA-based Wiggio), also attracted investments from HighBAR Ventures and Richmond Management.

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When I first arrived in Seattle a few months ago, I’d already heard a lot about Wetpaint. Called “stars in the consumer wiki space” and a “power to the people” company by Jude O’Reilley of online-health startup Trusera, I knew it was one of the Northwest’s top young tech companies. Founded in 2005, Wetpaint has raised $40 million in venture capital—most recently a $25 million round in May, led by DAG Ventures—and just last month it passed a milestone of 1 million consumer wiki sites created using Wetpaint.

So yesterday I checked in with Ben Elowitz, Wetpaint’s chief executive, to see how things were going with the company’s most recent product launch—an online widget called Injected that lets any website become a “social” site. That means anyone visiting an Injected site can add content to the site (e.g., writing, pictures, video), edit it, and connect with a community of other contributors. “It’s instant social publishing,” says Elowitz. “Super easy to install, takes just a couple lines of code, and it works from inside your system.”

That means the “wiki-ness” is created not in the user’s Web browser, like most widgets, but at the server level. Because it is more embedded and integrated into the website, it improves the search engine optimization, which makes the site easier to find and helps drive traffic. Customers include the websites Flixster, IGN, NuWire Investor, and “a whole bunch we haven’t announced yet,” says Elowitz. “We work with the companies, give them the first 100,000 monthly impressions for free, then use a revenue-share model.”

Some quick stats: besides the million consumer wikis, Wetpaint has helped create corporate wiki sites for about 100 different brands like Showtime, Fox, and Discovery Channel. Its widget is targeted at a range of small-to-larger media companies that want to grow their audience and content. Meanwhile, Wetpaint itself has steadily grown; it’s now up to 45 people, with the fastest growth being in the product development team. Elowitz says the company is not profitable yet.

The longer-term strategy of Wetpaint is—no exaggeration—to change the face of the Web. “We want to make every site on the planet social,” says Elowitz. “Today, if you ask someone to name a social site, all they come up with is Facebook and MySpace. We want every site to be socially powered.” That goal flows naturally out of Wetpaint’s first million wiki sites, he adds.

And the most interesting thing he’s learned about Web behaviors? “How crafty the smaller publishers are, and how quick they are,” Elowitz replies. The small ones are the most innovative in terms of how they integrate the Wetpaint widget, he says, pointing to NuWire, a Seattle-area investment information site, as a prime example of a small company building its content and developing a community of readers and contributors.

Elowitz is also a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization of Seattle, a 90-strong network of young innovators who have built their companies to annual sales of $1 million or more. Because of his success with Wetpaint, and online jewelry retailer Blue Nile before that, Elowitz often gets asked for his advice on how to fundraise and attract attention. “Find one thing and do it super-well,” he says. “You’ll end up having one metric, one dimension in how you beat other folks, and you’ll get positive feedback going.” For Wetpaint, that one metric would be the number of social sites created using the company’s platform. “Do something great,” Elowitz adds. “Really go for it, don’t be afraid.”

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Mix one cup of Wikipedia with one cup of Google Maps, add a generous dollop of MIT-bred geekdom, and bake for about 14 months. Serves 600,000.

The confection in question is Povo.com, a user-editable online community directory that debuted in Boston last week. A project of Boston-based Arts Alliance Labs, a combination venture capital firm and technology platform company led by MIT Media Lab alum Max Metral, Povo is essentially a giant, geographically organized blank slate: a template beckoning Boston residents to upload information, reviews, photos, and other content, block by city block.

It’s far from the first user-driven directory of geographically organized local information; other examples include Outside.in, Platial, and Wikimapia. Wikipedia itself has extensive user-generated and user-edited listings on places of interest (including a thorough article on Boston), and there are several services that make it easier to browse Wikipedia’s content by location, including Placeopedia and a new iPhone application called GeoPedia.

But Povo (the name is Portuguese for “people” or “folk”) is more stylish and inviting than a typical Wikipedia-style wiki. People who add information to Povo are recognized for their contributions on their profile pages, which could help encourage Bostonians to pitch in the free labor required to build the directory. (As with most user-generated sites, users aren’t paid for their material.) The site also has some unique features that may appeal to power users, including strangely beautiful “heat maps” that show the greatest concentrations of local resources such as brunch places or clubs with live music, and a simple Ruby-like scripting language that allows users to modify the functionality of the pages they create. And all of the site’s content is available under a Creative Commons license—meaning that heat maps and anything else you or others create on Povo can be embedded in outside blogs or other non-commercial sites.

Metral says the idea for Povo was born when his colleague at Arts Alliance Labs, Hasty Granbery, was walking down a street in San Francisco looking for a dry cleaner that could clean a suit in an hour. “That’s not something you can find in a typical local search,” says Metral. “You might find a dry cleaner in the same zip code, but not something two blocks away. And the search results won’t have details about whether they can do it in an hour.” But that’s exactly the type of detail residents are likely to possess—and if Metral and Granbery can get them to feed it into Povo, it could eventually become much richer than a typical local search site such as Yahoo Local. “The big differentiator over time is going to be the user-generated content and functionality” Metral says.

Metral has a bit of experience with the wisdom of crowds: in 1996, with Media Lab professor (and Xconomist) Pattie Maes, he co-founded Firefly Network, a pioneer in the area of collaborative filtering algorithms that matched people with others with similar tastes and directed them to music content they might like. In a $40 million deal just two years later, Firefly became part of Microsoft, where the technology evolved into Microsoft Passport. Metral went on to become CTO at PeoplePC, which bundled brand-name PCs with dialup Internet service for a $24.95 monthly payment; Earthlink bought PeoplePC in 2002 for about $10 million.

Arts Alliance, Metral’s current gig, funds an electric range of interactive media startups. It was an investor in Spinner (now part of AOL) and Atom Entertainment (now part of Viacom), and its current portfolio includes viral TV clip service BlinkBox, European DVD rental service LOVEFiLM, and mobile games and video distributor Player X. Povo is the first platform the company has decided to develop on its own.

Metral and Granbery have seeded the site with information from sources such as Boston city park directories and Starbucks’ online store finder. But in the end, Metral says, the site will only become useful if … Next Page »

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