The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘commercial-uses’

Ever wonder where inventors and companies find the technical materials needed to manufacture their products? Traditionally, inventors could find materials at trade shows or could order the products via trade magazines. Unfortunately, both channels have many drawbacks, including travel, connectivity and accessibility. Chicago-based Inventables has entered the scene has an online marketplace for materials where vendors can advertise their products and engineers and designers can easily find these materials. And the site has just closed a $2 million funding round from True Ventures.

Inventables allows vendors to create online profiles for their products in order to generate sales leads. Customers, ranging from mega companies such as Procter and Gamble to individual inventors, who are looking to source new materials and technologies can browse through these profiles and submit inquiries about products they are interested in. Each vendor profile includes exact details on composition, makeup and use of the material, commercial uses for the material, similar materials and more. Products range from electroluminescent fabric to concentrated cheese flavor powder. The site currently lists over 1500 different materials and technologies.

As a vendor, (e.g. Dupont, RTP Company, MDI Products), you are notified by email each time your Inventables profile receives a new inquiry and given an opportunity to purchase the corresponding sales lead from Inventables. It’s free for vendors to list their products; they only pay Inventables for specific leads that they are interested in.

The essence of Inventables is that it helps vendors develop “sales leads worth their time”. The site’s cognitive technology, remembers and “learns” what kinds of materials the potential buyers are interested in and will suggests similar products based on this. The investment from True Ventures is going to be used towards further product development and to hire additional software engineers.

Launched in January, the site doesn’t include a ton of bells and whistles and has a fairly simple userface; but it’s easy to navigate and serves a genuine purpose in the materials and technology industry. And Inventables is already gaining the attention of Fortune 500 companies and prominent brands such as Palm, Microsoft, PING Golf Clubs, and Kraft Foods.

Welcome to the Touch revolution. Ahead of the impending news about the iTablet/iPad from Apple today, comes news that a French maker of touch input technology has been acquired by Tyco Electronics for $62 million upfront. Motorola’s venture arm also has an interest in the technology. Will we see the mobile maker create new touch devices? Could be.

The news wraps up a good day for key European venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners, which has exited its stake in its portfolio company Sensitive Object. At the same the VC has announced the closure its sixth fund, Sofinnova Capital VI, raising €260 million.

Sensitive Object has created a touch input technology based on acoustic waves processing (more here). Oh yes, you read that right. Instead of making the screen itself touch sensitive, it analyzes the sound waves that pass through object when somone touches it. Star Trek huh.

Open source content management system Drupal is increasingly being used by organizations, corporations and governments to power their websites and communities.

To name but a few entities who rely on Drupal for their websites: The White House, AT&T, Intel, BBC Magazines, Forbes, Stanford University, Reuters and Procter & Gamble (and plenty more where that came from).

But up until now, there was no other way to set up a website or blog with Drupal than having to download and run code from a server. Acquia, a commercial company that provides Drupal-based products, services and technical support, is today bringing change to that situation with the private beta launch of Drupal Gardens.

You need a beta invite code to get in for now, but the first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get access today (others will be granted access in the next few weeks).

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert – also co-founder and CTO of venture-backed Acquia – in a blog post announcing the private beta launch refers to Drupal Gardens as the Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Which was also the first thing I thought when I tried it out for the first time (see screenshots below).

Built on the Drupal 7 core, currently still in alpha, Acquia powers the entire back-end for Drupal hosted websites and communities so users don’t need to worry about server management and can focus on the personalization and content part of the equation instead.

Unlike Wordpress.com, Buytaert tells me, Drupal Gardens isn’t really meant for individuals looking to set up their own blog as much as it is aimed to help organizations and small businesses set up a Drupal environment with multi-user blogging features, social integration, forums, custom content types, and so on.

The way I see it, Drupal Gardens is thus more of a competitor to the likes of Ning and Six Apart. Both companies, as well as Automattic, have of course a considerable head start when it comes to hosted micro-site content management services, so time will tell if Drupal Gardens can break the mold.

As powerful as the Drupal CMS and its small army of code contributors may be, how much demand can there really be for another browser-based site builder?

Drupal Gardens will be available for free until the end of this year. By the end of 2010, Acquia hopes to have finished incorporating all of the important features that will enable organizations to create feature-rich, social microsites. Although this is still undecided, Acquia thinks it will be able to continue offering a free tier for smaller sites alongside paid tiers for larger websites or those who want access to premium features.

Preliminary pricing can be consulted on this page, but to be clear: all of these packages will remain free of charge until the end of this year.

You can sign up for the beta here; Acquia will open up the beta to thousands of users in the next couple of weeks. General availability is expected in the second quarter of 2010.