The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘startup’

Every few weeks (and sometimes even more often than that), dozens of techies gather together for regional Startup Weekends —  fast-paced code writing frenzies where entrepreneurs and developers conceive of and build a new application in less than 60 hours (and lose quite a bit of sleep in the process). Many of the apps die off soon thereafter, but some of them live on. And now they’re becoming acquisition targets: Learn That Name, a game that uses your LinkedIn contacts to help you remember the names of your business acquaintances, has been acquired by Gist. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but the LTN guys say they’re “very, very happy” with the result.

Learn That Name was built last August at a Microsoft-sponsored Startup Weekend and won top prize (which was amusing, because it was built for the decidedly non-Microsoft iPhone). The app’s idea came from lawyer Eric Koester, who was inspired to create it after he failed to remember someone’s name earlier during the event. A team of 14 people came together to build the app that weekend, and since then, a subset of the original LTN team has continued working on it, releasing an updated iPhone version, Palm WebOS app, and Flash app.

The deal is for LTN’s tech assets, and the proceeds are being split among the 14 original team members. Going forward, the standalone iPhone and Palm applications will still be available, and the game is also integrated into Gist’s own iPhone application, which you can find here.  The Gist version will tap into Gist’s database of contacts (the original uses LinkedIn).

For those that haven’t used it, Gist offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network. The service’s web interface allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plugin that shares similarities with Xobni. Given the business oriented nature of Learn That Name, this seems like a good (and fun) fit.

Given the success of the Learn That Name team, it will be interesting to see if more Startup Weekend teams continue working together following the conclusion of their events.

Fwix, a startup that offers a stream of local news that’s updated in real-time, has landed a deal with The New York Times Company to use Fwix’s hyper-local news wire across The New York Times Company’s Regional Media Group’s 15 newspapers, as well as other business units such as Boston.com and NYTimes.com.

Fwix, which launched its realtime API a few weeks ago, aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood.

While its still unknown how Fwix will be implemented across all of the New York Times’ properties, the startup’s local news content is already being used in the publishing company’s Northern California newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. In the “YourTown” section, the Fwix feed is set to a current location and feeds realtime news about the San Francisco Bay area. However in some instances, the Fwix news feed might show the reader his or her own local news by autodetect location via an IP address (say, at a global-reaching site like www.nytimes.com).

There is a revenue agreement with The New York Times Company, says Fwix founder and CEO Darian Shirazi, but he declined to reveal the exact amount involved in the deal. And the deal is not exclusive, so Fwix can be incorporated on other news sites as well. Fwix’s local news stream has also been integrated on integrated on WeatherUnderground.com and UPI.com. And the startup also launched the Fwix News Publisher app on Facebook, which lets any Facebook Page add local news of any variety of subjects (business, sports, politics, living, entertainment, etc.) to their page’s feed. The deal with the New York Times is a huge coup for a startup that launched less than two years ago.

A new startup dubbed nPario and formed by ex-Yahoo and SAS executives opened its business operations today. The company essentially wants to help clients better understand and market consumer commercial intent through optimal data management and data mining products and services.

The company is led by former senior Yahoo executives Bassel Ojjeh (he left the Sunnyvale company in November 2009) and Krishna Uppala, and former SAS executive Basel Tutunji. According to a regulatory filing, the Palo Alto startup recently raised $300,000 in seed funding.

The company’s website is pretty scarce on details, but according to the release nPario will deliver data solutions that allow companies to increase their revenue by acting upon consumer behavior insights.

In the words of Ojjeh, founder, president and CEO of nPario:

“The digital world gives us an unprecedented opportunity to identify and understand the commercial intent of consumers in order to deliver the right message or product. At nPario, we believe that organizations stand to boost revenue by more than 10% if they harness the power of consumer intent.

Our goal is to provide our customers with a comprehensive set of data products that focus on the vast amount of commercial behavior data and generate immediate impact to their business and revenue.”

Prior to nPario, Ojjeh served as Senior Vice President of the Strategic Data Solutions division at Yahoo, where he was responsible for building data products that leveraged Yahoo data to drive audience engagement and advertising revenues, so it’s safe to say he knows what he’s talking about. Still according to the release, CTO Krishna Uppala is behind more than 15 database technology patents – he served as Senior Director/Architect at Yahoo before nPario.

Finally, nPario Chief Revenue Officer Basel Tutunji will be responsible for sales and business development for the startup. Before nPario, Tutunji held sales management roles at several multinationals including SAS, Intershop Communications and Oracle.

In case you haven’t noticed, the MacBook Pro line is starting to get a little stale with just a lowly Core 2 Duo CPU. Even the Mac Pro with it’s Quad-Core Xeon isn’t the fastest kid in town anymore with the six-core Core i7-980X making the rounds. Hopefully all this fuss concerning a supposed leak of new Mac pricing that’s a bit higher than the current MSRPs foreshadows updates coming in the near future.

Software testing marketplace uTest today announced the results of its so-called “TV Networks Bug Battle” competition. More than 500 software professionals from 30 countries around the world participated in the quarterly competition, reporting a total of 908 technical, functional and GUI bugs in the web and mobile apps of NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC.

Testers were challenged to search the sites for bugs – performing a combination of exploratory, functional and usability testing. At its conclusion, participants filled out a detailed survey in which they ranked each site based on video quality, ease of use, community features and actual TV content/shows. After carefully reviewing each bug and survey response, uTest awarded roughly $4,000 in prize money based on the quality of bugs and feedback.

Top findings:

- Nearly 50% of survey respondents chose video quality as the attribute most important to them when evaluating an online TV network. NBC.com scored highest in video quality.
- Ease of use was deemed most important by 33% of the participants, followed by TV content & shows (12%) and community features (5%). CBS.com scored highest in ease of use.
- 70% of respondents watch at least one show online each week, with more than one quarter watching four or more. 7% watch seven or more programs.
- More than 10% of the total reported bugs were found on mobile devices.
- None of the TV network support mobile video watching as they rely on Flash (tested on Blackberry, iPhone, Android and other mobile platforms).
- Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities of varying degrees of severity were reported on three out of the four sites.

TV Network comparison (top-two box score of testers who rated each site as “excellent” or “good”):

Here’s the full report:

When movie clip search startup AnyClip demoed at last year’s TechCrunch50, it was one of the crowd pleasers. The concept was to be able to search for any line or scene in a movie, and the site would take you to that exact moment and play the clip. The demo looked great, but could the startup actually get the movie studios to license their films? Sean Parker, one of the judges on the panel noted: “This is the kind of thing that absolutely should happen. But it will take you twice as long to make those deals.”

Parker turned out to be right. AnyClip continues to negotiate with the studios, but decided not to wait for those deals to open up its service. Yesterday, it launched in a public beta, without many actual video clips. There are some older and public domain movies, licensed from the Film Chest catalog, such as the classic Reefer Madness. Search for “faster, faster” and up comes the piano scene from Reefer Madness.

But AnyClip works even for movies where it cannot show the clips. Search for “I drink your milkshake” and the dialogue from the scene in There Will Be Blood comes up as a result. Or you can search for “ferris wheel” scenes, where a ferris wheel appears in the scene but is not necessarily mentioned in the dialogue.

AnyClip has indexed 2,000 movies so far. CEO Aaron Cohen estimates that “two percent of all searches appear to be for 8,000 Hollywood films and 1,000 actors.” Creating really deep meta data around movie clips and exposing those to search engines should be enough to get traffic growing simply as movie quotes database. But the ultimate appeal of AnyClip is the ability to start playing the movie clip at the exact moment you are looking for and share those clips. It’s going to happen. Rival MovieClips.com, which launched in December, has already struck licensing deals for 12,000 clips. Those are predetermined clips, however. AnyClip still wants to provide data on, literally, any clip.

At the same time, the movie studios are paying companies to index their digital archives for their own internal purposes. Cohen is hoping to do a trade: give them the metadata on their catalogs for free in return for the ability to promote their films. Maybe if AnyClip gets big enough, they will start paying attention.

Startup Seesmic has perfected the art of developing compelling Twitter clients on a variety of platforms. Seesmic offers a web client, an Adobe Air-powered desktop client, an Android app, a BlackBerry app, a brand friendly Twitter client and a native Windows desktop client. At developer conference MIX today, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is announcing a new Silverlight-powered development platform and Seesmic for the Windows Phone.

The new desktop platform from Seesmic is built based off of Silverlight, which is a refreshing change from the buggy Adobe Air platform. The design itself is similar in look and feel to the Windows client, and includes functionality for integrating your Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin accounts. You can also personalize your background of the app. And the new platform works on both Macs and PCs.

But the most compelling feature of the new desktop platform is that it was designed with plugin features, which will now allows developers build features or integrate their services in Seesmic’s suite of Seesmic clients. One example of a plugin feature is a Bing mapping control plugin, which not only allows you to track geo-location but integrates trackable links at Bing.com

The Seesmic Desktop SDK includes an Extensibility layer as well as a set of utility classes, and the accompanying documentation. Seesmic is also launching a Twitter client app for Windows phones, similar to the BlackBerry app, that will integrated Bing maps and geo-location together.

Le Meur has told me in the past that he has invested in the Windows platform because 80 percent of Seesmic users use a PC. But with the new Silverlight-powered client, both Mac and PC users will be able to experience the client. I’m curious how the client will far against rival technology Adobe Air powered clients, which include Seesmic, and Tweetdeck. And Le Meur is wise to create an ecosystem around his applications, allowing developers to create plug-ins for Seesmic clients.

Disclaimer: Michael Arrington is an investor of Seesmic; I am not.

We’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The site is constantly innovating its nifty product, most recently adding an iPhone app and the ability to incorporate video. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. This morning, Animoto is opening up its API, allowing partners to now incorporate Animoto’s compelling technologies into independent sites

The first API that being rolled out for the Animoto Partner Platform is Animoto Quickstart.  The API essentially allows any website to tap into Animoto’s video creation flow.  The aim is to make Animoto one click away from any website that has photos, videos or music.  Quickstart allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. So partners can integrate Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool into their sites. And the startup promises that Quickstart takes only hours to a partner to set up on a site.

For example, SmugMug, a photo sharing site that caters to professional photographers, uses Quickstart so users can ‘pass’ their photo albums into Animoto’s video creation flow. So is the user now has the option of making a slideshow from their hosted photos and simply needs to pick a song to complete their Animoto video. Once a user slicks to make the slideshow, he or she will be taken to Animoto’s site, where their video and photos will automatically be placed into Animoto’s site.

Another use case is a promotion Animoto is launching with iconic musician John Bon Jovi where fans of Bon Jovi can go to Bonjovi’s site to create an Animoto music video with Bon Jovi’s latest single and footage from his music video.  Pepsi also used the Quickstart API to help users create video slideshows in a contest involving its ShareTheJoy campaign.

With the launch of this API at SXSW, Animoto is partnering with music publication SPIN magazine to allow fans to promote their favorite South by Southwest bands for a chance to win prizes.
From now until March 31, 2010, fans are can create and submit Animoto videos featuring songs from top South by Southwest bands for a chance to win $1000 and a spot on Spin.com, and other prizes.
 
Currently Animoto has 1.4 million users and makes money off of its paid subscriptions. On its site its free to create 30 second videos, but you need to pay $3 per video to make an lengthier slideshow. The site sells a year long subscription to users for $30. A large part of Animoto’s subscription business are composed of professional videographers and photographers who pay $20 per year to create their own branded videos that they can download, and burn to a CD (and the slideshow doesn’t bear the “Animoto” logo). Animoto’s CEO Brad Jefferson tells me that 10 percent of users, so 140,000 people, are currently using some type of paid subscription on the site.The company is already cash-flow positive, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s less than three years old.

In terms of monetizing the API, Animoto isn’t charging any of its partners. In fact, its actually paying its partners in terms of affiliate fees. So if any partners lead new or existing users to the site who end up buying a subscription, Animot will give the partner a 40 percent cut of the first year’s fee.

The Quickstart API seems to be the first of a few sets of APIs that will extend Animoto’s technology onto the other sites. It’s a smart move. While many photo sharing sites have the ability to make slideshows, the technology is not nearly as fun and easy to use as Animoto’s. And Animoto is undoubtedly a compelling tool for an brand marketer to use for a campaign. Frankly, the possibilities are endless because Animoto is such an easy tool to use.

Mobile social networks have tremendous potential to flourish in developing countries where mobile phone usage trumps internet connectivity. SMS based social networks like SMSGupshup have gained considerable traction in Asia because of this. For example, in India, there is currently a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio. Mig33, a mobile social network that involves VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, and picture sharing, has accumulated 35 million registered users of its service and is growing fast in South Asian markets such as Indonesia and India. Assuming 3 to 10 percent are active on a monthly basis, that would be 1 million to 3.5 million active users.

Mig33’s users are now sending over 1 million virtual gifts a month, and posting approximately 100 million messages a day on its network, or 1,000 messages every second. Twitter, in comparison, just passed 50 million a day. Mig33 is eying the virtual gift economy as a revenue maker because of the model’s success for China’s similar application, Tencent QQ. According to Mig33, the Chinese mobile social application has nearly 8% of its over 500 million users in China paying about $2 per month in virtual gifts and goods. Mig33 is hoping to emulate that model in markets like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Bosnia.

Mig33 is available worldwide and optimized for more than 2,000 different mobile devices. The startup has steadily added to its app by integrating social games, user-owned groups, virtual gifting and, most recently, avatars. Avatars are actually a source of revenue for mig33, by charging users to customize and enhance their avatars. Mig33 is looking to expand the virtual economy. In fact, the startup says that its revenue stream has grown to over $1 per user per month in countries such as Indonesia and India.

Founded in 2005, mig33 is backed by Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM and has raised a total of $23.5 million.

Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to wall off the Web and keep grazing on declining ad revenues.

A week ago, I wrote a post based on a conversation I had with Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen in which he made the case that print media companies would be better off shutting down their print operations now (“Burn the boats”) and move forward unencumbered into the digital age, no matter how painful that may be. That suggestion hit a deep nerve, and continues to do so.

Just yesterday, Allan Mutter, who writes the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, took exception to Andreessen’s advice. By his estimate, in 2009:

Print-driven newspaper revenues still are running at better than $30 billion a year. It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.

Mutter’s indignation is typical of the response to the article, even among enlightened newsosaurs. But that is exactly what Andreessen is saying. As I noted in my original post, he is quite aware that “at risk is 80% of revenues and headcount” (or 90%, if you take Mutter’s numbers).

Yes, the Internet media business is much less lucrative than the print side, and may never replace it in terms of the revenues it generates. But Andreessen’s point is that the meteor is on its way and the sooner that media companies start looking for cover, the more likely they are to survive.

He is not trying to be an alarmist. He’s just a realist. In the technology industry, similar disruptions happen all the time. The companies that survive are the ones that adapt and jump onto the next wave of technology before the one they are on finishes cresting. So the real question is one of timing. How long will it take that $30 billion print business to go to $20 billion, $10 billion, or zero? No doubt, it will take years, probably decades. But how long do print media companies wait before they leave their old business behind?

The people who read print newspapers and magazines are getting older and older, while advertisers always chase the young and impressionable. That audience is already on the Web. And they are no longer satisfied with getting all of their news from one or two trusted sources. They get their news from all over the place: newspaper sites, TV news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. More and more, the news is coming to them through their friends and the various streams they consume. The old days of cross-subsidizing political news with ads from the Travel and Auto sections are over.

The longer media companies wait, the bigger disadvantage they will have when they cross over to the other side and find a whole new host of competitors who never had any print legacy businesses to protect. Those competitors right now are blogs and online news hubs who are still furry little rodents in the underbrush, but who won’t stay little forever. The sooner print media companies cross over, the sooner they can be on pure offense. Their online strategies and business models won’t be crippled by any allegiance, or need to protect, to the old print business. If they wait until their online revenues become 25 or 50 percent before they fully commit, it will be too late.

But that is probably what will happen. Media companies are still surrounded by $30 billion worth of leaves that look mighty good.

Photo of duckbilled dinosaur fossil by Ed Schipul .