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.

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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.

CrunchBase Information

TechStars

Information provided by CrunchBase

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

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/EKkkaLiBQro/

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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.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Venturebeat/~3/Ct7ZqXZ8qQQ/

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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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