Vidly adds video comments to your blog … and Chamillionaire’s

Video startup Vidly is holding true to its promise to expand beyond Twitter with a new tool called Vidly Express, an easy way to add video comments to any blog.

The San Francisco company says publishers just add some code to their site, and the code creates a button for video replies next to every post. Vidly Express also integrates with commenting system Disqus (used by VentureBeat, among many others).

You can see the feature live on the site of Vidly Express' launch partner, hip hop artist (and tech conference regular) Chamillionaire. It slides in naturally next to the buttons for commenting, Facebook sharing, and retweeting on Twitter. Click on the button and the site asks you to leave a video reply. The design makes it easy to leave a message but relatively difficult to view the other comments you have to click on a link to a separate page on the Vidly site. I wonder if this approach will encounter the same problems that Facebook/Twitter aggregator Seesmic encountered with its earlier technology, which focused on video chat, or if it will overcome those problems.

Vidly was originally called TwitVid.io. It has raised $500,000 from angel investors including Ron Conway.

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BigDeal.com Reinvents And Legitimizes Swoopo’s Controversial Auction Bidding Model

We recently wrote about stealth startup Project Fair Bid, which aimed to reinvent and legitimize a controversial bidding model pioneered by Swoopo. Today, Project Fair Bid is emerging from its cocoon as BigDeal.com, an auction-based e-commerce site which takes a different twist on the questionable paid bidding model.

Similar to Swoopo, BigDeal lets users purchase virtual bids $0.75 each which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by $0.15 and an extra 30 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. With this model, items end up selling substantially below their market value. But one of the main criticisms of Swoopo was the risk of losing your money spent on bids (regardless of whether you win or not) when the auction concludes. BigDeal takes a couple of steps to mitigate this risk.

With BigDeal's model, any users who get outbid get a full credit of the money uses for bids to buy the item via a "Buy Item Now" option (which Swoopo also has, called "Swoop-it-now"). So if you spent $10 on bids, your Buy It Now price will be dropped by $10. Of course, the Buy It Now price will frequently be higher than the price of item sold for in the auction but at least users aren't necessarily losing money all together. And the Buy It Now price is set at the same price that Amazon lists for the same product.

That's not all. BigDeal provides an added incentive for bids by letting all users trade in the money they spent on bids for gift cards. All users get $1 gift card discount for every $1 spent on bids. So if you buy $25 in bids, BigDeal will give you a $100 gift card for $75. Gift cards that can be bought are from prominent retailers such as Amazon, Gap, Walmart, Foot Locker and more. It all sounds too good to be true, right? Well, Big Deal admits that they are taking a cut when it comes to the gift card bonus, but the incentive is designed to build loyalty around the site and draw a viral following. Big Deal monetizes by taking a percentage off of the sale price.

Big Deal's co-founder, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau tells me that the site aims to insert transparency in every step of the bidding and buying process. For example, on a given item's page, you'll see a list of the other bidders who have submitted bids on the item, their time spent on bidding on the item, number of bids, and the time since each users last bid. Interestingly, Bid Deal also features the previous auctions that have taken place around an item, which gives you the bid history and the exact price the same item was sold for in past auctions. The site, which claims to only feature the top-of the line products, has also added high-quality pictures of all items and quirky (yet informative) descriptions of products. For example, part of the description for the Nintendo Wii includes a poem, "Ode To The Nintendo Wii."

For now Big Deal, which is open to the U.S. only, is concentrating on consumer electronics but hopes to expand to additional verticals in the near future. Big Deal's founders all have significant experience in both the auction and e-commerce space, with alums from eBay, Yahoo Shopping, Walmart, and more. from The startup raised $4.5 million in funding from from the Mayfield Fund, First Round Capital, and Foundation Capital, with Raj Kapoor, Charles Moldow and Josh Kopelman on the the board of directors.

There is evidence that Big Deal could takeoff. While Swoopo's model was controversial, the startup was able gain a loyal following since launching in late 2008, with the site counting nearly 2 million members in Canada, Germany, the U.S., Austria, and Switzerland and recently raising a $10 million funding round led by August Capital.

It seems that Big Deal has taken the best elements of Swoopo's model and added several features which make it more of a win-win for consumers. Plus, it adds information, like bidding history, to the process to make the auction more fair. And the very least, you can leave the site with a gift card, so the money you spend on bids isn't completely lost.

While the site will face competition from Swoopo, and even eBay to a certain degree, it is compelling. After demoing the product, I'm actually a fan and am looking forward to trying it out to perhaps check some items off of my holiday shopping list. Like any auction model, Big Deal requires more of a time investment than a direct buy retail site but it's actually fun to compete for a product. I'm just waiting for the site to start selling designer handbags.

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Inspired by Nintendo Wii, Playfish CEO tries to broaden appeal of social games

Playfish scored big last week as Electronic Arts said it would buy the social gaming company for as much as $400 million. That's a remarkable achievement for a company that is just a couple of years old. It's a validation of the fast growth of the social gaming market and a tribute to Facebook's growth as well. With original games like Pet Society and Restaurant City, Playfish has been able to garner 59 million monthly active users on Facebook, not to mention users on other social networks and the iPhone as well. We caught up with Kristian Segerstrale, co-founder and chief executive of Playfish in London, for an interview. Segerstrale's co-founder, Sebastien DeHalleux, president of Playfish, is speaking at our upcoming DiscoveryBeat event on Dec. 8.

VentureBeat: Why did you decide to do this deal with Electronic Arts?

Kristian Segerstrale: We set up the company two years ago to change how the world plays games. We've grown tremendously fast over the past two years. We have over 60 million monthly active players. We are so excited about this deal because it substantially accelerates our goal to change how the world plays games. It brings us instant scale. In markets like this, scale matters. EA has some of the most loved franchises in the video game industry. Franchises have been important in games for the past 30 years and we think they will be important in the future. We see an opportunity to bring some of those franchises to Facebook. Also, six months ago we launched an app on the iPhone. We believe gaming is going to continue to spread onto a bunch of connected platforms. This deal gives us access to some of those platforms on a much much broader scale. It allows us to bring our intellectual property to a much broader array of players.

VB: The price of as much as $400 million is a good one for such a young company. But some have said you could have continued as an independent company for longer, increased the value, and held out for a much higher price. Why didn't you do that?

KS: We set up the company as a team to change the way the world plays games. We saw this as a way to ensure that we could do that as fast as we can. That said, given their intellectual property, it felt like a fantastic opportunity to attach their properties to our rocket ship.

VB: EA announced it was laying off 1,500 people on the same day it announced it was acquiring Playfish. It's really surprising to see that juxtaposition. That suggests this change is really happening fast.

KS: It's not my place to talk about the broader changes at EA. We have seen this massive growth in social gaming in the past year. Who would have dreamed that six months ago you would see this kind of monthly active user base on Facebook? It went from 100 million to 250 million so fast in monthly active users. The growth in our area of the market has been tremendous, and we think it will continue going forward.

VB: The Facebook market seems like it is about creating great games, getting them noticed, and taking advantage of your momentum. Do you agree?

KS: We feel this market is characterized by distribution which is not driven by shelf space, or securing a place in some kind of physical catalog. It's game play which is driven by social distribution. You have to create great games that people want to share with their friends. That's ultimately what drives the success of a specific product. We do believe that scale does matter and gives us a significant advantage moving forward.

VB: If other companies have gotten successful copying what you do, does that bother you? How do you strategically respond to that?

KS: If you look at more mature console market, there are lot of first-person shooter games and driving games out there. At the end of the day, the franchises will stand out if they continue to invest in creating the best possible experience for the players. We are at an incredibly early stage for the market, which will be incredibly large and have a lot of exciting new categories. It will also have exciting existing categories, which are part and parcel of growing any part of the industry. We take our IP seriously. We try to create franchises which are relevant. That has been part of our core strategy from the start.

VB: 3-D graphics hasn't taken off in the Facebook game market yet. Do you think it will?

KS: Ultimately, we focus on games where people play not because of what is happening on screen but what happens between friends and family as people play. That is a fundamental difference. The emotional reason why you get involved is not because it's an immersive journey, with puzzles or narratives with lots of graphics that show what is happening in a fantasy world. Rather, it's all about creating experiences that are enjoyed by friends together, like board games. It's about how much fun can you have with friends. We believe that is the most important element of social games. I do believe that production values have gone up and they will continue to go up. But I don't think they will have the same kind of pivotal impact on consumer adoption as they have had in the console market.

VB: Some game company acquisitions work and some don't. What will you focus on to make sure this works?

KS: We focus on creating connected and social experiences between friends. We believe this combination will give us resources to accelerate our pace of growth.

VB: Will you operate independently going forward?

KS: If you think of EA Interactive as a group, it consists of Pogo.com and EA Mobile and us. Both of those other groups have come into EA via acquisitions. They are both doing incredibly well. There is a successful formula to follow. We are passionate about doing what we do and leveraging what EA has.

VB: Observers in social games have made comparisons between Zynga, Playdom and Playfish in social games. They note that others are more prone to copycatting, they advertise more, and they do fewer original titles. They also have more people. How do you look at these comparisons?

KS: I think it's an incredibly young space. We focused on creating player-friendly franchises. We think that franchises will matter in the broader future of the game industry. It's about creating the best possible experience for players. Companies are taking different approaches, but ours is on the players.

VB: Do you think you bear some resemblance to Nintendo and how they have had success with the Wii?

KS: Nintendo has been an inspiration in lots of ways. They had the original marketing insight of marketing the Wii not with huge explosions in games but by focusing on the fun that people had playing together. They have pictures of families playing together. They focus on the emotional experience of playing games with a broader range of people. That was an inspiration for us. We may be pioneers of social gaming online, but they have done the same in the offline games.

VB: Will you expand to more platforms beyond Facebook and the iPhone?

KS: We are on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Android, iPhone and a whole bunch of social platforms. We are exciting about putting more resources into more games and more platforms in general.

VB: Will you go to the consoles?

KS: We are excited about making investments in those areas and about bringing our franchises to other platforms. That said, we haven't announced anything.

VB: Did you have many other choices besides teaming up with EA?

KS: We have known a lot of their people for a long time. I used to work with many of their people in the mobile space. We think this deal is a fantastic affirmation of everything we have done.

[The excitement in this industry is one of the reasons why we're holding an executive event called DiscoveryBeat on Dec. 8 in San Francisco. The event will explore the secret recipe for getting your social game or mobile phone application "discovered" in an age of increasing noise. We'll have Playfish Co-founder and President Sebastien DeHalleux speaking, among others. Get your early bird ticket by Nov. 20.]

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RockYou raises $50 million in venture funding

RockYou , one of the largest developers and ad networks built around Facebook's platform, just raised $50 million in venture funding from Softbank. That brings RockYou's total funding to $119 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and DCM. Softbank was the only participant in this round, the company says.

Venture capital firms have got to be a bit emboldened about companies built around Facebook's platform given last week's sale of Playfish to Electronic Arts for as much as $400 million. RockYou is a bit different it operates a distributed ad network across Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5 and Friendster. The company is pushing into virtual goods with a new gifts app on MySpace.

RockYou's main rival is Slide. On Facebook, Rockyou has the upper hand in numbers of users, with 40.5 million monthly active users, compared to 27 million for Slide, according to AppData. With those numbers, RockYou is the third-largest developer on Facebook, behind only Zynga and Playfish.

RockYou was founded in 2006 by Lance Tokuda and Jia Shen. The two men worked together on a slide show project at software developer Iconix, and their first product at RockYou was also a slide show service. That resulted in a lawsuit that was eventually settled. RockYou's apps include Super Wall, Hug Me, Likeness, Vampires, Birthdays, Slideshows, MyGifts and others.

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GreenBeat 2009: Hot opportunities for startups, investors

GreenBeat 2009 may be the first conference we've hosted in the environmental space, but it wouldn't be a VentureBeat event without emphasis on investors and innovators. Our Innovation Competition will spotlight some of the most promising technologies and business models in the Smart Grid business, hopefully attracting the right backers.

On Thursday, Nov. 19, our "Follow the Money" panel will give some of the most active investors in the grid a chance to talk about what they look for in the companies they choose to fund. Entrepreneurs attending this panel will get the inside scoop on the trends venture capitals and investment bankers are seeing in cleantech and grid innovation, how federal stimulus money is shaping their next moves, and the killer apps they see on the horizon.

So sign up now you still have two days! And if you already have a ticket, follow breaking conference news on Twitter at @greenbeat2009.

GreenBeat's Innovation Competition drew an avalanche of applicants from every corner of the Smart Grid from software providers to meter makers to demand response firms and home energy monitor startups. We can't say too much about our eleven finalists, as each will get star turn at the event on Thursday some are even officially launching at GreenBeat, and we don't want to steal their thunder. We will however, give you an exclusive taste right here (in no particular order).
Grid Net Maker of interoperable network management software utilizing 4G wireless communication products for the Smart Grid.
Viridity Energy Provider of a software platform that runs microgrids covering college campuses, office parks and neighborhoods.
Cpower A demand response firm that helps utilities and companies manage peak energy loads to prevent disruptions.
Consert A demand response company enabling real-time data analysis and the distribution of renewable energy credits.
R2EV Maker of portable rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles to take pressure off the grid. Look for a big announcement. Look for a big announcement at the event on Thursday.
Control4 A home automation company that not only conserves power, but coordiantes home entertainment with a universal remote.
Locust Storage Stealthy, launching at GreenBeat 2009. Stay tuned!
Xtreme Power -  Integrates power management and storage systems that could make existing electricity generation more efficient and smooth out intermittent sources of energy like solar and wind.
Building IQ Stealthy, launching at GreenBeat 2009. Check them out on Thursday, Nov. 19!
Current Group Provides the network and data management infrastructure to integrate any grid device, including sensors, meters and IP communication systems. Look for a big announcement at GreenBeat.
Econetix Stealthy, launching at GreenBeat 2009.

This list was honed by the competition's panel of judges, including Tim Carey, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Craig Lobdell, director at KPMG, Sunil Paul, founder of Spring Ventures, and Rich Wong, partner at Accel Partners. The contest will also be hosted by Navin Chaddha of Mayfield Fund. The ultimate winner will be announced on Thursday, nabbing a coveted spot at DEMO Spring in 2010.

Just as it would behoove investors to attend the two Innovation Competition sessions scheduled for the second day of the conference, startup execs would be well-served to attend the "Follow the Money" panel that same day. Featuring Accel Partners' Peter Wagner, Credit Suisse's Bryce Lee, Goldman Sachs' Brian Bolster and Draper Fisher Jurvetson's Don Wood, the discussion will look ahead to the Smart Grid companies that will get funded next year, and in five years.

VentureBeat's strength lies not only in bringing interesting technologies to the fore, but explaining where and why they will get the money they need to scale. At GreenBeat 2009, we'll apply this microscope to the grid, sussing out the hottest ideas in the space, and maybe even what the next blockbuster cleantech IPO will be. With companies like Silver Spring Networks and SmartSynch in the running, it could very well come out of the Smart Grid.

We'd also like to acknowledge our strategic partners: Vantage Communications, DEMO, Matter Network, and Fora.TV; and our sponsors: Accenture, Southern California Edison, Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, Oracle Utilities, Schwartz Communications, Cisco Systems, CPower, CSC, S&C Electric Company, and KPMG.
VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

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All-in-one TV service Sezmi lands $25M

There are a few words that when put together are music to my ears one of them being "all-in-one." Startup Sezmi has just landed $25 million in third round funding and is hoping consumers are interested in just that an all-in-one television service. As more and more companies begin to offer their own set-top boxes, the chances that consumers will bite are good.

Seizmi secured $33 million back in November 2008, equaling near $75 million in funding on its quest to provide a seamless set-top system to challenge both cable and television providers. The funding was provided by new strategic investor Legend Ventures, as well as existing investors Index Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Omni Capital and TD Fund.

Integrating both hardware and software, Seizmi will offer packages that  include a set-top box that will receive over-the-air high-definition broadcast programming, as well as a DVR box. Through various undisclosed partnerships, Seizmi will provide free access to basic television channels such as ABC, NBC, Fox and YouTube as well as on-demand movies and television shows from studios such as Warner Brothers, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount.

The receiver and DVR will be available to purchase or lease from "major retailers" in the next three months, but is being tested in the Los Angeles market as a pilot program. Customers will be able to test the system for free. There are plans to roll the package out to additional markets. The package price is still unknown at this point.

While similar to services like Netflix and Amazon, Seizmi wants to offer multiple content providers and an unique user experience. Sezmi's user interface focuses on recorded content and can be customized. Similar to a personal computer, the package will have log-in options for each user - allowing your preferences to be saved and launched immediately.

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Crederity tells you who to trust on the web

Background checks are old hat, but Crederity wants to bring an easier, web-oriented approach to verifying that someone is trustworthy. In addition to its business tools, the New York company is also rolling out a way for individuals to create a single verified identity across the web a "seal of approval" that can be part of your identity on social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Crederity, based in New York and Bangalore India, has built a number of web tools that can plug-in to different websites and applications, making it easier and more affordable for companies to perform the equivalent of a background check. For example, if you're running a job site, or you're part of a company accepting online job applications, you can ask everyone to upload their credentials, and Crederity will verify that the information is correct, using public data sources and partner services. Beyond job sites, this could be useful in financial services (as a preliminary form of customer screening), on dating sites (so there's some assurance users aren't lying about themselves and don't have criminal records), and more.

For individuals, you can create an account on Crederity itself, and the company will give you seals that you can place on different social networking accounts. Crederity launched Twitter support in August and says it has verified the identity of 167 Twitter users, including actor Jim Carrey (note the little "verified" seal in his profile picture). Of course, Twitter provides its own "verified accounts" service, but it's focused (for now, at least) on celebrities, while Crederity can be used by anyone. Even if you're not super-famous, you may still want to make sure people aren't impersonating you, or ensure that business contacts feel comfortable dealing with you even if you're communicating through a Twitter account.

Crederity also just added similar support for MySpace accounts and has plans to add Facebook and LinkedIn.

Chief executive Rakesh Antala says the company has certified the identities of thousands of people, and has 75 business customers. He's raised less than a $1 million in funding, and is looking to raise a venture round.

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ZeroFootPrint makes your wall sockets talk

ZeroFootPrint, maker of the so-called TalkingPlug that sits on top of regular electrical outlets and helps companies keep better track of their energy use and carbon emissions, says it will launch the product next week.

Containing an RFID chip, a microprocessor and chip for wireless networking, the plugs will be able to drill down into how much energy individual appliances (plugged into the outlets in question) are using. Users will also be able to remotely control their devices via the TalkingPlugs because they are programmable.

To optimize use of TalkingPlugs, homeowners and companies are told to install many of them at once, allowing them to cast a mesh network of information over the entire space. This data is sent to its web-based interface where users can view how much electricity they are using, how they are using it, and how their consumption compares to that of others. This strategy might get a bit costly for average homeowners, with the price tag estimated at $50 per plug, although that could drop if the company starts making them en masse.

Right now, the company, based in Toronto, is recruiting companies interested in trying the product out, and determining how it will impact their employees' behavior and ultimately their electricity bills.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

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Using Springpad to Organize Your Life

I just heard about a new online tool recently called Springpad. It allows you to quickly organize and share a variety of bits and pieces of information that you collect throughout the day that are important to you and put them into defined structure and places.

The other benefit of Springpad is that it harnesses the power of the social networking world and allows you to interact with and share your collections of data with those that are important to you too.

I would say the power of Springpad doesn't rely in it's ability to collect your information though, it's more powerful in the way it allows you to organize, share and complement what you've saved with other important information that's related. This is the part of Springpad that impresses me and is both most helpful to me.

For example, I can save restaurants to my Springpad collection and there are integrated links for making reservations at that restaurant with OpenTable if available and restaurant reviews from Yelp as well.

For homemakers you can quickly and easily make meal-planning tasks as you go about your day, collect recipes, ask friends for cooking information and then allow Springpad to help build your shopping list automatically.

Springpad integrates with Gmail (for synching your contacts and Google calendar events), flickr for sharing and organizing your thoughts with or related to photos, Facebook to help you share information with your Facebook friends and of course with twitter so you can share links and have alarms and reminders sent to your own account.

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Infosys Co-Founder Adds Another $91 Million To Venture Fund

More good news for Indian entrepreneurs! Infosys co-founder and chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy's new VC firm, now called Catamaran Venture Fund, just added a whole lot more money to its coffers. A few weeks ago, we reported that Murthy was turning to "the dark side" after selling a large amount of company shares in order to set up a venture capital firm. To set up the fund, Murthy reportedly sold 800,000 shares, or 0.13 percent of the company, its total value converting to $38.7 million, more or less.

It appears that Murthy's wife, Sudha Murthy, who reportedly put up the seed funding for Infosys Technologies at its founding 30 years ago, has sold 2 million shares worth of her Infosys stock, worth roughly $91 million dollars. And Sudha sold 22 percent of her personal holding to fund her husband's new VC fund.

The Catamaran Venture Fund will have a total of around $130 million dollars to invest with and will focus on early stage and angel investing. As we wrote in our past report, Murthy aims to invest mainly in 'brilliant' Indian entrepreneurs who found startups that operate in the areas of healthcare, education and nutrition, which may include technology-related companies.

Murthy started Infosys with six others back in 1981 by borrowing INR 10,000 (roughly $215 today) from wife Sudha. Infosys went public 12 years after its original founding and its share increased three thousandfold over the next 15 years or so. While Catamaran's fund is still small compared to the war chests of other VC firms like Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital, it still has the potential to make some very meaningful investments.

Photo credit/Flickr

(Thanks for the tip, Jason)

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GROUPON – Collective Buying Power Coming to Your City

My wife shared a link with me this evening that looks pretty interesting. It's a coupon and discount site called Groupon, but it's more than just coupons. It's a marketing tool as well and the idea is to swarm a location or establishment with business. What company wouldn't want that kind of attention?!

With coupons, you did like I did tonight and save a few bucks on a variety of different grocery items. Groupon let's you save real money on some really great stuff that you'd like to do, but you didn't want to spend the full price on it to do it.

Groupon was started by some folks in Chicago, just a short drive to north of Indianapolis and they did it so they could "enjoy all the great stuff in our hometown of Chicago". Sounds like a good enough reason for me.

Groupon has grown to over a million users who have collectively saved more than $25 million with the service. That's a pretty good track record for a site that hasn't been around very long at all.

Have some fun, save some money. Groupon continues to expand, soon it will be in your city if it's not already there now: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis/St.Paul, Nashville, New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

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Sequoia Capital Invests In Bump Technologies, The iPhone-Tapping Data Swap App

Bump Technologies, the startup behind the very popular iPhone application Bump, has closed a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. We had heard whispers of the news weeks ago, but the company declined to comment on it. Today though, during Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo's presentation at Y Combinator Startup School, we got all the confirmation we need: Bump was listed on one of his Powerpoint slides as a company Sequoia has funded this year.

Bump once again declined to comment on the funding and the amount, but the cat is out of the bag. We've heard the amount raised was over $1 million, and are looking into getting more details.

For those who haven't used it, Bump offers mobile apps that let you transfer information (like contacts and even multimedia) simply by tapping two phones together.

The company is also Y Combinator-funded, and has been featured in Apple's TV ads.

Bump Technologies

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Idea Management

This is a guest post by Jamie Flinchbaugh.

I've met a number of people who want to start businesses but have been clawing away at the same idea for many years without progress. I've met just as many people who have great ideas but never bring them to fruition. These folks are stuck because they don't approach idea management the right way. Idea management is a discipline that every entrepreneur, present and future, should master.

Here's how I handle the process. As I generate ideas, either randomly or through brainstorming, I use a spreadsheet to track them. This includes the idea, status, next steps, required financial or time investment, and current or potential partners. When I have an idea, I don't judge it nor do I start to work on it. I simply add it to the spreadsheet. This gets it out of my head so I can manage it rather than be distracted by it. I keep this spreadsheet updated continuously, color coding the ideas I discard, those I turn into something, and those that have simply stalled.

Why is such a list important? First, the organization of your ideas can be used for further idea generation. If you've tracked five ideas but then decided against them, that's OK because your brain can potentially use those bad ideas to trigger the generation of good ones. The more ideas you generate, the more your brainstorming skills and habits will grow.

Second, and more importantly, the spreadsheet will help you better analyze the viability of your ideas. Too many people fall in love with the first idea they have because it's their only idea. The list helps you to think more critically than that. It enables you to say no to the wrong ideas so that when the right ideas come along you can say yes with conviction.

Idea management is critical to the development of your business. Businesses thrive off ideas, but if your ideas don't go anywhere your business won't go anywhere either.

Jamie Flinchbaugh is an executive coach, consultant and entrepreneur. You can follow more of Jamie's writing at www.jamieflinchbaugh.com.

http://startup.partnerup.com/2009/10/20/idea-management/

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TC50: Sprowtt automates early IPOs for startups

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists complain frequently that few companies can have initial public offerings (IPOs) anymore, because the legal difficulties and compliance costs are so high. A startup called Sprowtt says many more companies will now be able to sell shares to the public, and to do so much earlier in their life, because its websites automates the process. The company launched today at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

On the Sprowtt site, companies enter requested information and upload their businesses plans. This is the hard part to believe: Sprowtt says theyll handle all the legal details. Sprowtt says it developed its product with two law firms, though its not saying which ones.

Sprowtt users can then log onto the site and buy shares in the company, which they can then sell. In a way, the company is pitching itself as an alternate NASDAQ, though Sprowtt hasnt created an exchange for selling the shares yet.

To be clear, these arent traditional IPOs. Since companies are selling shares earlier on, theyll probably make less money. This is more like an alternative or complement to traditional venture funding. There are other companies trying to offer startups additional ways to achieve liquidity (i.e., sell their shares), such as SecondMarket. So far, though, startup founders still dream of ringing the bell on Wall Street.

Click here for more startup news coming out of the TechCrunch50 conference.

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http://nhvc.blogspot.com/2009/09/tc50-sprowtt-automates-early-ipos-for.html

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Zynga’s Mark Pincus: I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America

(I'm live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Mark Pincus is the CEO of social gaming company Zynga. If these notes are a bit scattered, it's because it's paraphrased and Pincus is doing a stream-of-consciousness style talk.)

So Pincus starts his talk by outlining his pretty conventional career right out of college he went into banking. Then to business school. Then he said he hadn't really succeeded at any of those companies. "I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America," he said.

"I thought I was washed up at 28 or 29. And then I started my first company called Freeloader. My first advice is you should set a goal. At first I wanted to just show that I had revenues. I think we sell ourselves short and give ourselves permission to fail."

He went and built the company up. Sold it.

"It was really a disaster. The CEO had a breakdown. He was doing weird stuff I won't even talk about. Yossi, I'm sorry. He's now a CEO coach. So anyway, I locked in the success of a company and everybody was proud of me. But I had nothing to show for it. My investors were happy. Now I had my green card to go and be an entrepreneur. I had $8,000 in savings which everyone should do when they start a company. But I shorted three Internet stocks as they quadrupled in price. So I lost all my money.

So then I did the cliche thing with all the credit cards. But the company got bought for $38 million. I had no idea what to do with my share of that, which is not $38 million. People always ask you what did you get? But usually you just get a small share of the total. So I had a career. I moved the company and myself to San Francisco, which I thought was the motor city of the Internet. Then I did nothing for awhile, which everyone should do. Then I started attracting a different group of friends it's like that a ghetto version of the show Entourage. You go out on Monday at 1:30 a.m. Then they show up at your house on Tuesday. But that gets old after a few months.

So then you kinda realize there was some other reason you were doing that. You weren't trying to go out and make money. There was something else. When you achieve things, you start to realize those weren't your real goals. Then I thought I wanted to build a great company. So I spent a whole bunch of time and I accidentally built this company Support.com. I won't bore you how I got there. We created this service that nobody wanted. We luckily figured out that no one wanted it. John Doerr talks about this idea of failing fast. And that's important.

I'm going to diverge on that for one minute. I have this one friend like on this dating show. They have some harebrained idea for a startup. And they keep sticking with it, and think if the world doesn't see it, they will one day. They confuse stubbornness with great entrepreneurship. We should all intervene with these friends. If they can't get funding, it may be a good idea. Or a bad one. You should give your five to seven friends a pitch. Ask them if they want to buy stock in that company. First off, consider that there's going to be a grade inflation. But use that as your sounding board.

Anyway I had a bad idea and then I shifted it into a good one. .

I find that we all occasionally end up building companies that we ultimately don't want to work with. You find out that the big venture capital firm backs you and you feel like you can't say anything if you're not totally sold on your own idea. All my friends gave me 5's out of 10's but this guy's giving me $5 million. We ended building some tech support software we ended up selling to a bunch of companies. We became profitable.

..

The other thing with VCs is that their junior guys are pretty conservative. They're more worried about the downside. So what happens is that you end up being successful after that junior guy didn't believe you. So now what happens is they say is the company could is so valuable then they say you've never run a big company before. So then what they do is they talk about hiring a COO. And you think, hell yes. Someone else to do my job. Then you find out that there's no really good, world-class COO who will work for a twenty-something. (Unless you're Mark Zuckerberg.) You probably won't be in that situation.

Then you think: I don't like this. And then the happy-smiley thing goes away. And then it's witchhunt time. And the junior VC guy comes in and has meeting with your entire team and says they're really concerned about your leadership. Now your company's successful but they might change your leadership. And then the new CEO's kind of weird. The company culture's changed. And you realize you don't like it. And then you're back where you're started. You're back at your home, drinking booze with all those old friends. Or you could get married and have kids.

Anyway, I was out again and I wasn't fulfilled. I started thinking. I wanted to build something that will matter in people's lives. That was a big goal. But I was going to hold myself to it. I went through a bunch of ideas and ways to get there. Set very high goals but be willing to take any path to getting there. I realized that the only way I was to have a chance at building an Internet treasure was to control my own destiny.

That's part of the reason of why you guys are becoming entrepreneurs. You don't want some boss controlling your destiny. You want to live or die by your own efforts. There were a couple things I realized I needed. First, I needed capital. Well there are not a lot of people who are just going to give you capital and then call you a few years later.

So I realized I needed to be profitable right away. It was 2007. If we're going to start a business, it can be profitable. We don't have the luxury of building a great feature. You can connect all the dots and you should.

We'll skip forward to a few things. One is control your destiny. If you're profitable, you can control your board. This is another thing entrepreneurs get wrong all the time. You control your board. The valuation is not what matters.

Who gives a shit what your valuation is? That's your ego. Your future will be impacted more by a bunch of white men who don't know anything about your customers than your valuation. You're having lunch all month long trying to convince them of what you want to do. It moves faster if you just tell them what you're going to do.

The second thing is you ought to all aspire to be a great CEO. And that is going to have greater impact on bringing great products to the world than being a great entrepreneur. It's not just about the ideas and the strategy. If your company is successful like Mark's been and Tony's been, you will have many more people than 10 people. You can be a great entrepreneur with 10 people. You're not going to be a great entrepreneur with 100 or 1,000 people.

You should always be trying to learn and raise your game. If you guys want to create world-class products, it's probably going to be 10 years of learning and flailing and one year of getting it all right.

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EchoSign Reaches One Million Users For E-Signatures

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has surpassed one million users. The startup, which launched back in 2006, has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign's electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections.

EchoSign's CEO and co-founder Jason Lemkin says that the electronic signature movement experienced momentum as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce's App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

EchoSign: The Way the Web Signs from FromEchoSign on Vimeo.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

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Pricefalls.com Launches – Reverse Auction

Comment: It would be interesting to analyze this business from the perspective of game theory.

Original Article:

Pricefalls.com has been launched and is now available as a public beta. The online reverse auction website uses a unique pricing model that could help this startup find a niche.

Mixing shopping with entertainment, Pricefalls has a "dutch auction" system that has prices continuously decreasing. It's up to the shopper to buy the products at the right price.

Said Elliot Moskow, Pricefalls.com's CEO: "With the economy still biting and the 2009 holiday season approaching quickly, many people will be turning to sites that list popular items at lower prices, like Pricefalls.com, to get the best deals."

When the price is first announced, shoppers can purchase the product right away. The other option is to wait as the price drops. However, the shopper may lose out if the product sells out as the price is being lowered.

Pricefalls.com has a number products including electronics, toys, sporting goods and clothing. It'll be interesting to track the activity on this reverse auction site in its early days.

Pricefalls (Image: Pricefalls.com screen cap)

Post from: Startup Spark

http://www.bizzia.com/startupspark/pricefalls-com-launches-reverse-auction/

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How startups lose at Buzzword Bingo

I had the pleasure (and occasionally the pain) earlier this week of watching more than 50 companies demonstrate new products and answer questions from a panel of judges at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. While watching I live Tweeted my reactions to every presentation from the stage. Very early on the first day I started a series of tweets where I played a game of Buzzword Bingo.

Many of the presentations were exceptional, including the eventual winner of Best Presentation iMo, in which the presenter did not speak during his presentation, but many others illustrated lessons for anyone giving a demonstration and pitch.

I am not, however, going to bash any of the presenting companies in this post (for that you will have to read back into my tweet stream) instead I'm going to cover a few of the common patterns of the weaker presentations as well as the strengths illustrated by the best demonstrations.

As I played Buzzword Bingo I flagged not just the use of overly cliched phrases or terms but also the use of cliched structures. These phrases fell into two common categories. First, there were phrases so cliched and overused as to be nearly meaningless and signal of some laziness by the presenter. Second, there were phrases that do, in fact, have meaning but often indicate that the company has hitched onto current trends and fads or are using terms they think people want to hear.

Overused phrases:
Holy Grail
change the rules of the game
fix fundamental problems
true long tail product
tentpole events
value propositions
retooled our value proposition (extra bonus round edition here)
go from good to great (Hint: Using the title of an bestselling, old business book in your presentations is not a great idea, especially when the "great" companies highlighted in the book are mostly out-of-business.)
low hanging fruit
CompanyA meets CompanyB (hint tech demonstrations are not movie pitches)
will change X forever

Phrases with meaning but showing a focus on current fads and trends:
Brand Equity
SEO opportunity
viral marketing opportunity
monetizeable
crowdsourcing
differentiated business model and competitive advantage

Yes, some of the phrases seem reasonable, are perhaps phrases we use in casual conversation, but in a live demonstration to 2,000 people, a panel of judges and thousands more people watching on the live stream, not to mention the video which will be preserved for years, all of these phrases (and many, many more) should be avoided in favor of speaking plainly, clearly, and with the right level of detail about your demonstration and company.

Hollow phrases, especially mashed together into a meaningless but wordy sentence cause the audience and the judges to tune out. They also reveal a great deal about what matters and what does not matter to your team.

An example: One company on-stage shifted from product description to ways they were going to make money at least three times in one minute one sentence about a product feature then immediately one or two more about how they would make money, in the course of about one minute discussing three different approaches. What was missing, however, from the entire presentation was any sense at all why anyone would ever start to and then continue to use the product being demonstrated.

When I found myself tweeting out about Buzzword Bingo, it was nearly always in the midst of a presentation where I could have tweeted out dozens of buzzwords. Often a single sentence would consist entirely of cliched phrases and buzzwords strung together. In fact a few buzzwords were so common that on their own I ignored them. Seemingly most companies had businesses which related to Twitter, Facebook (often Facebook Connect), real-time, and viral. If everyone is doing it, the uniqueness and value of emphasizing it during a short demonstration diminishes greatly.

I noticed many other structural cliches. Some of these were so common that TechCrunch's Paul Carr created a Drinking Game highlighting them.
Jokes, usually lame, about the conference organizers
Examples using the conference organizers or judges as users (a waiver to this if they are, in fact, a customer as Tim O'Reilly was of one company presenting, though he didn't know it)
Using a real company as an example but noting that they are not, in fact, a customer (instead use a fictional company or, better yet, use a real customer even if they are small real trumps fiction every day)

The best presentations, in contrast, were very focused and built on real demonstrations of the product in a way that was compelling and engaging. Often this involved showing the product in use versus describing a fictional use of the product. By avoiding cliches, the best presentations were also relaxed and comfortable for the presenters practiced, sure, but not so practiced or polished as to hide the passion and drive of the founders.

[photo:flickr/klynslis]

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TC50: Sprowtt automates early IPOs for startups

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists complain frequently that few companies can have initial public offerings (IPOs) anymore, because the legal difficulties and compliance costs are so high. A startup called Sprowtt says many more companies will now be able to sell shares to the public, and to do so much earlier in their life, because its websites automates the process. The company launched today at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

On the Sprowtt site, companies enter requested information and upload their businesses plans. This is the hard part to believe: Sprowtt says they'll handle all the legal details. Sprowtt says it developed its product with two law firms, though it's not saying which ones.

Sprowtt users can then log onto the site and buy shares in the company, which they can then sell. In a way, the company is pitching itself as an alternate NASDAQ, though Sprowtt hasn't created an exchange for selling the shares yet.

To be clear, these aren't traditional IPOs. Since companies are selling shares earlier on, they'll probably make less money. This is more like an alternative or complement to traditional venture funding. There are other companies trying to offer startups additional ways to achieve liquidity (i.e., sell their shares), such as SecondMarket. So far, though, startup founders still dream of ringing the bell on Wall Street.

Click here for more startup news coming out of the TechCrunch50 conference.

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TC50: The five companies to watch

Fifty startups launched on-stage at the TechCrunch50 conference over the last few days. Despite a few duds, most presenters had cool ideas, solid products, or both. VentureBeat writer Kim-Mai Cutler and I watched all of the presentations, and now we've put together a list of our five favorite companies.

These aren't necessarily the companies that we'd invest in if we were venture capitalists, or the companies that had the best presentations. Instead, we judged them based on a combination of ambitious ideas, wanna-have-it products, and realistic business plans. These are the companies you'll be hearing more about in the future.

1. AnyClip A service that purports to let you find any moment from any film every made. AnyClip says it searches through all the publicly available video on the web, then relies on movie buffs to tag and sort their favorite moments through the ClipIt platform. Videos in AnyClips' database have on average about 500 tags. The company plans to make money through advertising deals that will run on AnyClip, and by routing users to buy DVDs and taking a cut of the sale.

2. CitySourced A mobile app that lets residents report problems to their local government and hold them accountable for it. To report a problem, you load CitySourced's app to your phone and choose whether it's trash, a graffiti issue, or something else. Then you add a description, and take a photo or tweet one to Twitter. This information is packaged with GPS location info from your phone. The company claims the app works nationwide with 1,900 cities

3. Threadsy A site that allows users to view their email and social networking accounts all in one place. It divides the messages into two columns — inbound (messages directed at you) and unbound (includes information not aimed at you, from your news feeds on various sites). This could means you never miss a message that it was sent to a social network or account that you don't check. Threadsy also features profiles of everyone you're communicating with.

4. SeatGeek A service that predicts how ticket prices will fluctuate on ticket reselling sites like StubHub, allowing users to figure out the best time to buy. The company looks at factors like weather and the record of the team (for sporting events), and says that when predicting whether prices will rise or fall, it is already 75 to 80 percent accurate.

5. CrowdFlower A service that helps businesses find workers for menial tasks and rate them based on performance. The company's service sits on top of crowdsourcing technology like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. What makes CrowdFlower a bit different is that it feeds back rich analytics on the tasks. If you're create a task, it shows you how likely results are to be true, depending on how many people agree with the result. You can zoom in to find out why certain items have lots of disagreements. You can go back and look at what the individual users have done to see whether they're historical trustworthy.

And here's our coverage of the other demonstrating companies:

With Penn & Teller, your iPhone does card tricks too
Story Something creates personal stories for your children
Clasemovil launches a virtual world for learning
ToonsTunes.com is like GarageBand for kids
Sealtale offers a personalized way to declare brand loyalty
iTwin allows encrypted, cableless file-sharing
iMo turns the iPhone into a joystick for your PC games
FluidHTML builds a more web-friendly version of Flash
Toybots Woozees lets toys come to life with Internet connectivity
Spawn Labs lets you play your console games on your laptop
Clicker is a TV guide for the Internet
5to1.com gives publishers more control over their ads
DataXu optimizes ad campaigns in real-time
HealthyWage pays users to stay fit, lose weight
RackUp sells gift cards in fast online auctions
Udorse lets you tag your photos with product endorsements
Yext transcribes, searches phone calls for local businesses
LocalBacon wants to fix job sites by making job-seekers pay
RefMob gives customers a slice of the referral market
Short on cash? Startups can trade goods and services on TheSwop
MOTA Motors wants to curb lemons, fix the used car market
RedBeacon creates a market for local services
ClientShow manages collaboration for graphic designers
Metricly aggregates analytics for startups, small businesses
Affective Interfaces detects whether your ad makes people happy
Battle other codes to prove yourself at Trollim
Cocodot creates a slicker version of Evite
LearnVest walks users through life's financial milestones
BreakThrough lets people use online calling to get psychiatric help
Glide Health pulls together patient records for treatment
Sprowtt automates early IPOs for startups
Does the world need another news aggregator? Thoora thinks it does
Insttant provides a snapshop of real-time news
Perpetually creates a personalized Internet archive
Crowd Fusion wants to be the ultimate tool for web publishing
Hark! lets friends web browse, share links together
Lissn is like Twitter for longer, public conversations
Radiusly wants to be a site for business microblogging
Stribe builds a social network for publishers around their content
Clixtr launches an iPhone app for real-time photosharing
The Whuffie Bank wants a new currency based on social reputation

[Thanks to VentureBeat columnist Shannon Clark for helping with the selection process.]

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Get the Drift With Gist

Gist, a free web service that provides a snapshot of information about your email contacts, is publicly launching in beta today. The web service pulls information about email contacts and the companies they work for from around 50,000 news sites and 20 million blogs and is supported by Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and Salesforce. Indeed, when we test-drove Gist, we found that it was no longer necessary to sift endlessly through a flood of real-time information such as tweets, LinkedIn updates and the like to find the information for which we were searching.

One of the most potent aspects of Gist is that it stitches together people's email addresses with their public profiles on social networks. The web service automatically creates a profile for all your email contacts, within which you can view their latest tweets, articles published by or about them and any Google images of them. Gist also adds a link to any LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, as well as public Twitter timelines though if any of your contacts have a common name, you'll likely have to add those links yourself. You can filter what type of information is displayed in a profile, too. And Gist snapshots can be accessed in a pinch on any mobile web browser.

The web service also uses an algorithm to determine the "importance" of contacts in your inbox by taking into consideration the number of emails and attachments sent between the two of you and then placing them on a scale of 1-100; contacts with high scores will be featured prominently on your Gist dashboard. And if don't agree with the score Gist assigned, you can simply reassign them a new one.

Gist said today that it plans to launch an iPhone application in the fourth quarter. The 15-person startup, which is based in Seattle, received $6.75 million in Series A funding in May, led by Foundry Group.

http://gigaom.com/2009/09/15/get-the-drift-with-gist/

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Aardvark Launches an iPhone App

Aardvark, a San Francisco-based startup that touts a web-based answer service, today released a similar application for the iPhone that will let you ask friends in your social graph questions on topics, such as recommended restaurants or books, and receive answers directly from your Apple handset.

The philosophy behind the service is that your friends have a wealth of knowledge you can tap into, and Aardvark helps you conduct a search of these peers to find answers to your questions. This makes it stand apart from web services like Yelp and Yahoo Answers, where you rely on the advice and opinions of people you don't know. The free iPhone application uses Facebook Connect and lets you send questions via IM. By tapping into the iPhone's GPS capabilities, the app can automatically tag your current location to any question you ask. By doing so, Aardvark can ask people in the same neighborhood or city as you questions about that area. Another competitor in the space is GoodRec, a recommendation site that also has an iPhone app and lets people ask their friends for reviews on various products and locations.

After downloading Aardvark to your iPhone, the app's main page has a box where you can type in your question and send it to friends who are knowledgeable about a specific topic, such as bars or travel. Aardvark analyzes your question to figure out who to send it to, then searches for people who are available in your network to answer it. It starts searching through your friends first, and if none of them are available, starts reaching out to friends of friends. The company, which was founded by ex-Googlers, told me that the number of people on the Aardvark network is so robust, any question you submit can be answered in five minutes. Skeptical, I used the app to ask about reliable cab companies in San Francisco, and received an answer albeit from people I didn't know directly in less than five minutes. I tried this out very early in the morning, so I bet I would have received an answer quicker if I asked my question later in the day.

The 25-person startup received $6 million in Series A funding in September 2008, led by August Capital. Baseline Ventures also participated in the round. Though Aardvark only has Facebook integration for now, the company said it will start integrating Twitter into the service within the next three months.

http://gigaom.com/2009/09/15/aardvarks-iphone/

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AIM Bets on Social Networks as Startups Reveal a New Spin on Metrics

AOL said at the TechCrunch50 conference this morning that it plans to release a host of AIM Lifestream products, including Mac and Windows desktop apps and mobile clients, on Sept. 22. AIM Lifestream marries the classic instant messenger system with support for social networks, such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg and Facebook, so users can check their friends' updates on those sites directly on AIM. This is yet another example of a company revamping its product by tapping into the power of social networks. The paid AIM Lifestream iPhone app is already available for download, and the beta versions of the upcoming products can be found here.

Meanwhile, Facebook, in addition to announcing that it's cash-flow positive, released a section for experimental features and applications on its site today that's similar to Google Labs, called Facebook Prototypes. Instead of waiting for a feature or app to be fully baked before releasing it to the social network's 300 million users, Facebook engineers can post their ideas for future features to Prototypes. Since the ideas in Prototypes aren't officially incorporated into the Facebook platform, some may have bugs and not work properly.

Also at the event this morning, two startups showed off technology that turn standard metrics on their head.  Affective Interfaces uses its motion-sensing technology and a web camera to analyze people's facial expressions and measure their emotions. The software-as-a-service solution yields data that can be used for market research to determine how people feel about products, web sites or commercials. During the demo, Affective Interfaces' technology measured the happiness of Digg's Kevin Rose, a judge on the panel, on a graph by analyzing a pre-recorded video of Rose smiling and frowning backstage at the conference.  Trollim's platform, on the other hand, takes a more specific approach, measuring and comparing programmers' coding skills, which can be used by companies to screen prospective hires or see how two employees' coding skills stack up to one another. People can engage other programmers in a battle where their programming skills will be tested by fixing bugs in code. Trollim also provides global rankings of programmers for each of the six programming languages it supports, such as Java and Ruby, and people can publish their rankings on web sites and blogs.

But when it came to impressing the judge panel, which included Tim O'Reilly and Google's Bradley Horowitz, CitySourced took the crown. The startup makes mobile applications that let people report problems in their community, such as graffiti or potholes, to local government. For example, people walking through their neighborhood can take a picture of graffiti on a fence on their mobile device and email it to their city government. The city of San Jose, Calif., recently signed a deal with CitySourced to use its technology. CitySourced has an iPhone application echoing startups' favor of the Apple mobile platform yesterday set to launch next month and will release apps for the Web OS, BlackBerry and Android platforms by the end of the year.

http://gigaom.com/2009/09/15/aim-bets-on-social-networks-as-startups-reveal-a-new-spin-on-metrics/

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Startups can trade favors at TheSwop.com

When you're running a startup, you don't have a lot of money to spend on services. That's why startups often trade services between each other, or look for bartering opportunities. A company called TheSwop.com, which debuted its product at the TechCrunch50 event in San Francisco today, has created a site that formalizes that favor-trading process.

The site is built around "favor points," which are earned whenever you provide services to another company say one of your developers spends some time building a website. Then you, in turn, can post jobs that you need done say you don't have anyone who can do marketing and offer favor points in exchange. In the end, startups can get many of the basic services they need for free, potentially saving themselves tens of thousands of dollars. Or you can get paid in a mix of favor points and real money.

TheSwop.com says it plans to make money through a "freemium" model, where access to the site is free, but startups pay extra for services like complete service directories.

Some of the judges were skeptical, pointing out that money was invented for a reason: After a certain point, bartering just doesn't make sense.

TheSwop.com says it will be working hard to control the value of its favor points virtual currency, starting by only allowing 100 startups into the site at a time.

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Five Startups Present At Capital Factory’s Demo Day In Austin

The startup incubator model pioneered by Y Combinator is quickly spreading across the country, with programs popping up in places well outside the Silicon Valley bubble, including Colorado and South Carolina. Earlier this week Capital Factory, an incubator based out of Austin, held its first demo day where the program's five startups presented themselves to a number of potential investors and press. The demo day also included a discussion panel with six venture capitalists, who discussed some of the things involves in building a strong startup. We've embedded a video of the event below, along with a description of each startup.

Cubit Planning — Cubit Planning is a service that allows agencies to automate some of the more tedious and time consuming parts of writing NEPA documents — the documents that summarize how a project will impact the environment as part of the National Environmental Policy Act. The startup says that you can get "cut and paste ready" data for these reports in as little as five minutes.

Famigo is a gaming company that focuses on helping bring parents and their kids together. The company will soon be releasing an iPhone version of the game hot potato', which it plans to launch in the next few weeks. In the long run, the company plans to be a platform that other developers can leverage to help make family-oriented games. For more, you can see a video interview with the company here.

Hourville is a marketplace for local service providers, who can offer anything from private tutoring to haircuts and more. The site lets these service professionals create a sharable calendar so potential customers can see when they're available, and allows customers to book online (service professionals will get Email alerts and phone calls when someone books a timeslot).

PetsMD is a new resource for pet-related health information. There are plenty of sites on the web that offer guidance for taking care of your dogs and cats, but these can be inconsistent and poorly organized. PetsMD looks to offer a comprehensive and accurate database of this data, and includes reports that have been approved by the site's "Veterinary Review Board". There's also a Symptom Checker where you enter in the behavior your pet is displaying to see what the problem might be (the site recommends that you still visit a vet if there appears to be something wrong).

Sparefoot is a site that lets you rent out any extra storage you might have around your house — be it a shed in the backyard or a room in your house — and also gives more traditional storage facilities another marketplace to present their available space on. The site also features a site that lets users who are looking for storage to browser through the available offerings.

Over the course of the last ten weeks, each startup was given "up to $20,000, along with mentorship, PR support, server usage, and legal help, while the incubator took a 5% stake in each company.

Other incubators we've seen recently include Y Combinator (demo day coverage here) , fbFund (coverage here), and DreamIT Ventures (coverage here).

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TechStars Debuts Nine Startups In Boston

Editor's note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. TechStars is a startup accelerator program that selects about ten companies and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from top investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders. TechStars operates annually in Boulder, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts.

TechStars has now been operating for three years. Three of the original ten companies from 2007 have already been acquired (SocialThing by AOL, Intense Debate by Automattic, and Brightkite by Limbo). In February, we covered the news that TechStars had expanded to Boston. Today, TechStars debuted nine new startups from the inaugural Boston class. The teams presented on Thursday to about 200 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Don was in attendance today and these are his notes on the startups that presented at Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center (MS-NERD)

TempMine is looking to change the temporary staffing market. The company believes that they've found a way to make the temps, employers, and agencies happier with a single solution. Temp workers create a profile on TempMine that is automatically updated as placements occur, providing more transparency and traceability to the process.  Employers can search directly for temps across the inventory of multiple agencies, finding the right fit. Agencies retain control over placements of their best temps. The temp agency only gets involved after the employer finds the exact temp they want. There is no cost to employers or temps to use TempMine, but they do take a 1% commission from the agencies. It is an $86B industry, so 1% can add up.

LangoLab is the most entertaining way to learn a new language—by watching popular TV shows and videos with subtitles. LangoLab leverages the American media machine that is constantly churning out entertaining content and then provides an engaging "watch and learn" experience complete with translations, definitions, user generated language notes, and self testing.  Many people have learned English just by watching TV with subtitles, and this is the online equivalent. English as a second language is the largest market. As an example, Rosetta Stone had $250M in revenue last year, and the total market is around $30B.

Localytics provides mobile usage data and analytics for the mobile market, similar to companies such as Flurry and Medialets. Localytics says that it has both real time and "deeper" analytics than the competitors, allowing you to slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to gain better and more immediate insight into the usage of mobile applications. They also explained that they've open sourced critical components so that developers can know exactly what they're putting into their applications, and that their mobile components are highly optimized for performance. Localytics is cross platform and already supports Blackberry, Android, and iPhone applications, with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm planned for the near future. Localytics uses the Freemium model: free basic service, with paid premium services. They already have 60 customers, adding 10 new customers each week, and they just launched.

AmpIdea is working on web-enabled baby monitoring as a platform for delivery of various services such as video monitoring, sleep tracking and analysis, statistical comparison, music streaming, and even an integrated baby encyclopedia (Baby 411) which suggests techniques to soothe sleeping babies based on age. While they're at it, they're using wifi as the delivery mechanism for audio and video monitoring, which eliminates the static and range issues that plagues traditional baby monitors. For new parents money is no issue when it comes to safety and a good night's sleep. The sleep scheduling monitor keeps a record of when the baby is sleeping and waking up over time. This helps the parents schedule when to put the baby down for naps and night time sleep. AmpIdea sells the monitor hardware and charges for additional services.

HaveMyShift has built a tool that allows hourly shift workers to trade shifts online. The company is using a grassroots approach and encourages employees to sign up and trade shifts with or without the blessing of the company itself.  They're seeing strong viral adoption in the Chicago area market where, for example, 80% of Starbucks stores there already use the application. Many of the listings offer "bonus money" to tempt others who work for the same employer to pick up a shift, and last-minute shift changes can be filled with paid emergency promotional placement. HaveMyShift makes money by taking a percentage of the bonuses offered to other workers to cover a shift. Absenteeism costs US employers more than $200M every day. There are 74M hourly workers in the USA, working 888M shifts. HaveMyShift says that it's simply facilitating a process that goes on anyway, and making it easier on everyone involved.

oneforty is creating an app store for Twitter applications, open to any developer who wants to build and sell a Twitter app. The company organizes the apps by category, allows for ratings, media coverage, profiles (showing what applications are used by various users), and the necessary e-commerce infrastructure. Oneforty takes a percentage of every sale. Funded by angel investors just 15 days after the start of TechStars, the company is also advised by Guy Kawasaki who says that oneforty founder Laura Fitton (@pistachio) was a major influence on his initial use of Twitter. Laura also taught Twitter for Business at Harvard Business School.

AccelGolf.  30,000 golfers are already using AccelGolf, after just 3 months in beta, for stroke tracking, range-finding, and personalized improvement of their golf games. The company showed off their BlackBerry and iPhone applications and explained that the heart of their system is really the community of avid golfers who are now connecting and building their own social network. AccelGolf offers personalized improvement tips by analyzing strokes of golfers who are just slightly better than you, and presenting areas for improvement based on your past performance.  AccelGolf suggests which club to use, and where to place the shot, based on your past performance on a specific course. In one example the company showed the iPhone application calculating odds based on past performance for landing a risky shot over a sand trap on a dog leg left. AccelGolf already has 70% of all golf courses loaded in their system. They use the GPS on your phone to determine your position and calculate distance to the pin.

Baydin uses email, and the words in the email, to create keywords to search for other relevant information. It is similar to Xobni, but goes beyond email data and searches all the files on your hard drive, and document repositories across your corporate network. It automatically launches the search in the background while you are reading the email, and presents the relevant results in a side panel in Outlook. The founder used an example from his first job where he designed a USB circuit board. He didn't know that five other divisions had already designed similar boards. Baydin would have found references to this and saved him the effort of reinventing the same board. Baydin is an Outlook plug-in so it is easy to draw comparisons to Xobni here, but Baydin seems to be more focused on unlocking hidden corporate knowledge vs.. analyzing email that you've already received.

Sensobi bills itself as a personal relationship manager (PRM) and also reminds me a lot of Xobni , but it goes beyond email and looks at phone calls and other activity on your phone contact list. In practice, it's a BlackBerry address book replacement that shows you the last time you communicated with your contacts, who's falling off your radar, and who you need to get back to quickly. You can set a reminder for each contact to remind you to connect with them within a specific time interval. It does this by analyzing the email, contacts, text messages, and phone calls on your Blackberry and then presenting your contacts in a relationship-focused view. For any contact you can see the last several communications of any kind with them. The team edition takes this one step further and allows co-workers to share and leverage a unified view of communications with each contact. Sensobi uses the Freemium model, with paid premium services for $50 or $100 per year. Over 6,000 downloads in just 6 weeks, while still in beta.

TechStars plans to bring about a dozen of the 19 companies from Boulder and Boston to San Francisco on September 30th for a "best of" repeat performance. Here is coverage of the San Francisco TechStars event from last year.

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Savoy Energy Gets $10 Million in Funding

Savoy Energy, a United States independent gas and oil company, has announced that they received a $10 million equity line of credit from Tangiers Investors. The company will use the money to continue to build their diversified portfolio of gas and oil assets within the U.S.

"We are pleased to have established this line of credit," said Art Bertagnolli, Savoy Energy's CEO. "This financing will assist our company as we move forward with our recompletion programs, as well as our plans for future growth and expansion."

According to Savoy Energy, the funding will start after the company completes an audit and within a month of the execution of the definitive financing documents.

Unlike other energy companies, Savoy Energy works with abandoned gas and oil assets. By doing so, they can lower their initial drilling costs and thus reduce risk. With lower overhead, Savoy Energy has many industry experts impressed by the flexibility of their business model.

Abandoned Oil Asset (Image: Flickr)

Post from: Startup Spark

http://www.bizzia.com/startupspark/savoy-energy-gets-10-million-in-funding/

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Skyfire raises $5M more for better mobile browsing

Skyfire, make web browsing on your mobile phone as fast and easy as it is on your desktop computer, has raised $5 million in new funding.

The Mountain View, Calif. company said it had more than 1 million users when it lest beta testing a few months ago. The browser's main strength is its ability to load and help you navigate complex or media-heavy websites like, say, social network Facebook. Skyfire recently announced a new chief executive Jeffrey Glueck, formerly chief marketing officer at Travelocity. Glueck told me his goals include improving the product, bringing the browser to more smartphones, and partnering with other companies to develop mobile versions of their websites.

Skyfire confirmed the news, which was first reported in peHub based on a regulatory filing. The funding comes from the company's existing investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Matrix Partners. Skyfire has now raised $22.8 million.

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Facebook’s fbFund Startups Spend the Day Pitching for More Dollars

Twelve weeks after the start of Facebook's new incubator-style fbFund program, the 18 startups in this year's class showed off the fruits of their labor to VCs and Facebook execs in a bid to get more funding at today's fbFund Demo Day. In addition to participating in the 10-week Y Combinator-like fbFund Rev program headed by Dave McClure, Facebook and its two venture investors, Founders Fund and Accel Partners, have already made equity investments in the startups. Previously, fbFund's model included the distribution of grants ranging from $25,000-$250,000.

Five fbFund startups are already breaking even and an additional three of them are on track to do so by the end of this year. This shows that Facebook is "not just about growth and distribution, but it's also about making money," said McClure.

But which of the 18 startups will really be the next big thing on the Facebook platform and Facebook Connect? In January, wedding site network The Knot acquired former fbFund winner WedSnap but that's an anomaly when it comes to fbFund finalists. As we see firsthand all the time here in the Valley, not every good idea is met with success. We were able to speak to a few of the fbFund startups earlier this summer; below are the ones that piqued our interest, along with what some of the VCs at today's Demo Day thought of them.

Thread

Summary: The site puts together potential dating matches for you by leveraging Facebook's social graph. Using Thread, you can view your Facebook friends' single friends' profiles and ask your mutual friends to introduce you.

Notable: In terms of funding, Thread.com is off to a good start. The startup said today that it's received $1.2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Ron Conway.

One VC's Take: "It's like LinkedIn for dating; it makes perfect sense," said K9 Ventures' Manu Kumar. "I'm surprised the incumbents (in the dating space) haven't done this already."

Gameyola

Summary: Gameyola's Facebook app hosts developers' Flash games and helps to monetize them by providing virtual goods for players to buy.

Notable: Social gaming companies Zynga and Playfish have enjoyed lucrative success on Facebook, proving people will pony up wads of cash for virtual goods to give themselves a better chance of winning social games. And Gameyola's co-founder Nicolas Kokkalis already developed a popular application on Facebook, Best Match.

One VC's Take: "I'm skeptical," said Eric Tilenius of Tilenius Investments. "It's potentially a lucrative space, but a casual game has to be specifically designed for a social environment." Zynga and Playfish are successful because the two social gaming companies design their games from the ground up for social networks, according to Tilenius, and he isn't sure whether the process of hosting games and monetizing them can be done under the same roof.

DropPlay

Summary: DropPlay launched its eponymous music service site earlier this year, but developed and  released a Facebook app it's been working on during the fbFund program called Friend Radio. Using the information people list in the music section of their profiles, Friend Radio shows you songs from artists your Facebook friends say they like. It also provides a link that directs you to iTunes in case you want to purchase the song. "Ever since the mix tape, friends have been the best way to explore new music," said DropPlay CEO Chris Turitzen.

Notable: Music applications are hot right now. Look no further than MySpace's purchase of iLike and the buzz around Spotify's upcoming iPhone app for proof. Two months since Friend Radio's inception, it has 20,000 active users.

One VC's Take: "It seemed cool; I'm going to try it out," said Venrock's Dev Khare, a Pandora fan, though he noted that the interactive radio space is crowded, which could present a problem for the startup.

RentMineOnline

Summary: RentMineOnline's site lets property managers and residents refer a property to others over social networks such as Twitter, MySpace and of course, Facebook. Gift cards and other cash rewards are used as incentives. People can log into the site using Facebook Connect.

Notable: Though referring property isn't exactly a hot app trend, RentMineOnline CEO Ed Spiegel said the year-old company has been profitable for the last five months, so the site is clearly gaining traction.

One VC's Take: "It's great to do referrals through social networks since it's normally done through a blind process," said Union Square Ventures' Andrew Parker. "RentMeMine's (financial) trajectory looks terrific."

http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/facebooks-fbfund-startups-spend-the-day-pitching-for-more-dollars/

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Medsphere raises $12 million for electronic health records

Turning the U.S.'s rickety paper-based system of health records into a state-of-the-art electronic one is no pretty task.

But someone's got to do it.

Medsphere Systems Corporation, an open-source electronic health records provider, said it raised $12 million today to meet demand from hospitals racing to keep their eligibility for federal funds by revamping their records systems.

Carlsbad, Calif.-based Medsphere is one of several companies that are adapting VistA, or the Veteran Health Administration's electronic medical records system, for commercial use. For budget-conscious hospitals, taking the open-source route is a cheaper alternative to buying private software. Medsphere's variation, called OpenVista, is used by 20,000 people and 2,500 doctors, according to the company.

The federal government is trying to push hospitals toward adopting electronic records by promising $19 billion stimulus funds to those that make the transition by 2011. If they don't make the leap, they face financial penalties, losing a percentage of their Medicare payments starting in 2015.

Azure Capital Partners, Epic Ventures, Thomas Weisel Venture Partners and Western Technology Investment participated in the round.

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Is it time for the venture capital “two-and-twenty” to end?

Private equity is starting to get the hint. Is it time for venture capital to do the same?

For more than a generation, "two-and-twenty" has been a rule of thumb for management fees in the venture capital industry. It means fund managers get twenty percent of any profits they generate and two percent of total assets under management in fees.

Chris Dixon, who co-founded Hunch with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and made early stage investments at Bessemer Venture Partners, published a provocative post last week asking if it's time to end the practice:

The problem is the management fees.  2% made sense back when VC funds were much smaller, but not now that they have gotten so large.  As peHUB said in their email newsletter today, Benchmark had an $85M fund in 1995 but today has a $500M fund.  That seems to be the typical trend for most big VCs.

Let's do a little math.  2% of $85M is $1.7M.   Assuming 8 partners, that means salaries are in the $100-$200K range.  Much higher than national averages but, by the standards of finance, they aren't getting "rich."  2% of $500 is $10M, so each partner is probably getting $1M+ in salaries.   Over the 10 year life of the fund that's $10M.  Even on Wall Street that is considered pretty rich.  And they get that money even if they make only bad investments and don't return a dime to their investors.

The private equity and hedge fund industries are undergoing similar soul-searching (if that's possible) after last year's market crash when they were swamped with redemption requests. Two-and-twenty was also a rule of thumb among hedge funds.

After the Standard & Poor's 500 Index plummeted by the most since 1937 last year, investors questioned why managers should automatically earn a 2 percent cut of $1 billion under management, for example, even if they delivered a loss. Private equity funds are now down to asking for 1.8 percent this year, according to London-based research firm Preqin Ltd. Hedge fund fees have stayed a little firmer than that, although some new funds are charging 1.5 percent, according to Bloomberg News.

As the venture capital industry also contracts, sending investment activity back down to mid-1990s levels, perhaps its time for funds to ask similar questions as they compete for dwindling inflows from long-term investors like university endowments and pension funds. A lower automatic management fee, with the same or more generous profit-sharing arrangement, would place a venture capitalist's mindset more in line with the entrepreneur's experience.

Another plus, Dixon argues, is that venture capitalists won't flood the market with money start-ups don't need, make too many "me-too" investments or raise too large a fund just to capture management fees. Indeed, Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Partners, argued last week that a contraction may nurse venture capital back to its former health.

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