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Web Innovators Group: More Boston Startups Present

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:13:15 +0000

[qi:010] I recently attended the 14th Web Innovators Group meeting, which had an even better turnout than the last one — so much so that it was held in a bigger room to accommodate this ever-expanding group.

The three main presenters were Frame Media Inc.’s FrameChannel, GoLoco, and Swatchbox Technology Inc.’s DesignMyRoom.

FrameChannel (Jon Finegold and Alan Phillips) is a web services platform that allows users to manage content that’s delivered to a WiFi-enabled picture frame. The user can select a mix of their own content and pre-packaged content to display on the picture frame, setting various options to control what is being displayed and when. This is clearly targeted to the consumer, as the business is ad-supported (ads are displayed at the bottom of the picture frame, although users can opt out of the ads by buying an annual subscription). One question that came from the audience was why a user would want to display their content in the frame with an ad overlaid at the bottom. It is also arguable that this isn’t a particularly good conduit for ads since people don’t look at picture frames as attentively as they look at the television (or computer screens). Finally, even though the ads displayed are trackable, it is much harder (if not impossible) to make a connection between a user and a purchase decision. It’s hard to see how this will fit into the home since it competes with the television for attention.

GoLoco (Robin Chase and Roy Russell) is a Facebook application that allows people to share rides and share costs and, eventually, reduce their carbon footprint. The demo was interesting: users can advertise and look for rides, and the app even works out cost-sharing schemes for riders. The developers said they built GoLoco as a Facebook application because rather than building yet another social networking site from scratch, they wanted to leverage the social networks already defined on it. This makes a lot of sense from a business point of view, but of course this application is entirely dependent on Facebook behaving itself. The demo was marred by slow page refreshes, for example, though in all fairness, it wasn’t clear who or what was responsible for that.

DesignMyRoom (Andy Jenks, Mike Brunzell and Jesse Engle) is a very attractive web-based application that allows you to try out different interior design ideas on a room. It lets you pick floor coverings, rugs, wall colors, window treatments and furniture. The application itself looks well-designed, appears to be very powerful and easy to use, and includes lots of ideas from real interior designers. You can also share the rooms you design with other users on the site. The site plans to make money through exclusive and non-exclusive product placement deals with a variety of sources.

Other startups present were Oncero, FaFaRAZZI, AdMe, Mobleo, SNIF Labs and TheUpDown.

Oncero (Phil Kim and Adnan Malik) is an online referral recruiting service designed to help employers use referral networks to find employees.

FaFaRAZZI (Chris Keller and Todd Galloway) is an online fantasy celebrity league — basically online Fantasy Football applied to celebrities.

AdME (Peter Eggleston, Elio Maggini and Christopher Payne-Taylor) demonstrated music driven mobile entertainment.

Mobleo (Tom Boilard and Ricardo Garcia) provides mobile bookmark management.

SNIF Labs (John Gips, Phil Liang and Noah Paessel) create a wireless collar tag for your dog that collects information about the dog’s daily activities and social encounters with other dogs and reports it to a web site.

TheUpDown (Michael Reich, Phuc Troung, Greog Lodviksson) provides an social network for investors by allowing them to manage a virtual portfolio. The data is then aggregated to provide investment strategies to manage a real fund.

The next meeting will be held on Nov. 6th.

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Guild Cafe, A Social Network For Gamers

François Schiettecatte — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:11:26 +0000

I have been reading about the Guild Cafe lately, a Cambridge, Mass.-based social networking startup that is distinguishing itself from the usual crowd of social sites out there.

The Guild Cafe was created by Jon Radoff to give MMORPG gamers a social networking space outside the game so that they could continue socializing with one another. The site is different in that members use their MMORPG game handle (their alter-ego) to create a profile, unlike other social networking sites where people will typically use their name (or something close to it) as their handle. Basically this is a continuation of the social aspect of MMORPG games outside of the games themselves.

Radoff points out that they are plenty of sites out there aimed at MMORPG gamers, but that they’re built around game previews and reviews as well as game sales, none of which exists on the Guild Cafe.

The Guild Cafe was founded in December 2006 and has gotten a round of funding from IDG Ventures.

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BetaHouse Incubates Web 2.0

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 17:30:09 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Gibson, one of the founders of BetaHouse, a CoWorking group here in Boston. The premise of BetaHouse is pretty simple: For $400 a month, you get a desk, WiFi, access to a fully stocked (beer, caffeinated beverages and fatty snacks) refrigerator, a barbecue every Friday, music, and — most importantly — a group of other geeks with which to network, socialize and bounce around ideas.

The idea is to provide a creative environment in which techies and entrepreneurs can develop their ideas and bring them to market — and of course, get funding.

One idea that Gibson himself has developed in the BetaHouse office is PrayAbout, a social networking site based around support and prayer. Once you join the site, you can put in prayer requests that other people will answer, effectively creating a support group community to help you deal with your challenges.

The site appears to perform a useful social function and attracts people from around the world. One thing that Greg noted was that a number of people who have received support (such as a suicidal man in South Africa) have in turn become more involved with the site, providing support to others.

PrayAbout is quite different from other social networking sites in that it’s not ad-supported — all revenue is derived through subscriptions. It currently has some 14,000 subscribers, and that number is growing.

As for BetaHouse, time will tell how well this works. One issue I see is turnover. Once an idea is funded, the developers behind it will likely move to new offices in order to accommodate an expanding team, continually leaving BetaHouse with empty desks that need to be filled.

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Boston's Uncommon Angels

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:44:28 +0000

[qi:056] A few weeks ago I was invited to attend a CommonAngels breakfast. CommonAngels is a Boston based group of angel investors and these breakfasts take place every six weeks to hear presentations from entrepreneurs looking to have their ideas funded. Members of CommonAngels are allowed to bring a guest along and I was lucky to be invited.

CommonAngels is composed of 70 private investors and several dozen limited partners in two co-investment funds. This group is fairly unique in that they have a small permanent staff of three people who manage the group, taking care of the putting the breakfasts together, managing the deal-flow, due diligence, board memberships, and so on.

This group is self selected. To join, you need to fulfill certain criteria and go through an approval process. Since its inception in 1998, CommonAngels has funded 33 companies with over $37 million from CommonAngels and over $100 million from co-investors. Rounds are typically in the half to one million dollar range, but can go higher.

They take a very hands on approach to the funding process, and will only fund companies in their areas of expertise. Entrepreneurs present their plans at these breakfasts where the group asks questions and critique the plan.

If a company was funded by CommonAngels and needs bridge or continuation funding, they can present again and the board member will take part in the presentation. If there is interest in funding the company, the group puts together a due diligence committee to dig deeper into the company and the plan. If the company is funded, the group is present on the board.

What is interesting here is that this group is very hands on and involves itself very intimately in the company and its development, rather than just “throwing money over the wall.”

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StyleFeeder Gets More Personal

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:00:43 +0000

StyleFeeder recently launched a personal shopper tool, which made me think it was a good time to sit down with Phil Jacob and his team to get a more in-depth look at the product and the technology.

StyleFeeder has been around since the end of 2005. Initially developed by Jacob, it was quickly bought by TopTenSources and lived as a little widget that you could add to your Web site or your blog. At the beginning of 2007, following a restructuring, it was spun out of TopTenSources as an independent entity, at which point Jacob got funding, brought in a business development team and more technical talent to build out the product.

A number of key features were added to the product during this build out, including a sidebar plugin (written in Flex) for FireFox and Internet Explorer, and a recommendation engine. The sidebar plugin is a dashboard to StyleFeeder, giving you access to all its functions. For example, it allows you to manage your StyleFeed and search for products while recommending products it thinks you will like, finding your StyleTwins, and managing your profile.

The recommendation engine is key to the system. When you first create an account on StyleFeeder, you are prompted to rate a number of product selections. This takes less than a minute and allows the system to gather information about your product preferences, which it, in turn, uses to make recommendations. Rating the choice further personalizes the system, and search results are personalized as well. The system can even pick out your “StyleTwins” — people with tastes similar to yours.

The rankings are computed on the fly, so they require some pretty heavy computation. But the StyleFeeder team feel that it would scale as more and more users joined the site.

The recommendation engine uses an algorithm called Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization. What makes this algorithm interesting is that it takes into account how people rank items, adjusting for those who tend to make extreme rankings compared with those who lean more toward the middle. You can learn more about it on the StyleFeeder tech blog.

Shopping is a social sport, so there is a social side to the system. You can chat with other people on the site via a built-in messaging system, shop online with friends, and keep tabs on what other people are adding to their StyleFeeds. This is, of course, pretty standard stuff for a social shopping site. To differentiate themselves from their competitors, StyleFeeder has been focusing on the personalized shopping search and its personal shopper tool application.

The company also recently created a Facebook application that allows people to add their StyleFeed to their Facebook page. Phil told me that the aim, more than anything, was to use Facebook as a marketing vehicle. It appears to be working; more than 10,000 users were added over the last week.

Currently there are about 125,000 products listed; users can add products to the system using a tool that sits in the browser navigation bar. The system will then prompt for additional product metadata, automatically filling the URL, the picture, and the description. There is some product duplication, such as with the iPhone, but there are plans to fix that.

StyleFeeder wasn’t willing to disclose member figures, but they did say they’ve been growing at the rate of 30 percent a month for the past eight months. And since Kaboodle was acquired by Hearst, the company has received strong interest from potential acquirers interested in both the technology and the team.

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Web Innovators Group: Boston Startups Come Out & Present

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 03:48:40 +0000

BOSTON: On July 9th, I attended the 13th Web Innovators Group meeting in Boston. The meetings, which are are organized and hosted by David Beisel of Venrock and held every other month, provide a forum for startups in the Boston area to present themselves to the tech community and to potential investors. They’re also a great place to network.

[qi:021] I would estimate that there were more than 250 people at the July meeting, which was my third. So far, each has been bigger than the last, a sign that the high-tech startup community in Boston is doing very well.

The meetings follow the same general format, but there are variations and it is evolving over time. The general format has three companies (main dishes) making a seven minute presentation each, and six others companies (side dishes) at tables on the side where people can see what they are offering. The variation this time had the six companies making a one minute presentation each.

The main presenters at the most recent meeting were BandDigs (YBR Entertainment), Beacon Street Girls (B*tween Productions) and GameBrix (Digital Brix).

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BandDigs (Gary Wheeler & Aby Alexander) is a web site that allows fans to interact with music bands and with each other. The site is very much video-based. You can view videos of the bands or see them live. You can also talk to band members — or whomever represents the band — and to other fans. The site has been in operation since the start of the year and says that it has signed up 450 bands. It will be interesting to see how this develops. I suspect that bands will want to connect with their fans when starting up, but that connection will be hard to maintain if the bands gets much bigger.

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Beacon Street Girls (Addie Swartz) is the online venture of an already well-established brand that sells books and gifts to girls aged 9-13. The products revolve around a number of characters with whom the users can identify. Apparently a lot do: 500,000 books have been sold to date.

The founder, Addie Swartz, described her company as the “anti-Paris Hilton.” Up until recently, the web site has been used to support the bricks-and-mortar operation, but it’s now being developed into a product in its own right. With little marketing, the web site currently gets 300,000 uniques a month with users sending in stories and testimonials.

The point was made that this is a very large market indeed, a total of 10 million girls representing $51 billion/year, but Addie did not give any indication of what proportion she was aiming to capture.

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GameBrix (Naveena Swamy & Nanu Swamy ) demonstrated an online games toolkit that allowed users to create online games. This was probably the most unconvincing of the three presentations. These games are AJAX-based and are playable in any browser.

The GameBrix folks demonstrated the creation of a very simple game, but it wasn’t very compelling. And while they also showed some of the functionality available for creating more complex games, they didn’t show what these more complex games would look like. They really should have shown a good example of a complex game and compared this to Flash, which is what they’re up against.

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Other startups that presented at the meeting were Zync, Teachade, Curbside.md, nextcat.com and Frevvo.

Zync (Brad Rosen) connects consumers to local events and local businesses, basically a recommender system for consumers.

Teachade (Wade Dyke) was interesting, a social network for teachers to communicate with each other about a variety of subjects such as curriculum, professional development, etc. They currently have 8,000 members.

Curbside.MD (Kevin Gilpin) was very interesting to me, mostly because of the work I have done in the past on medical/genetic databases. This product amalgamates a number of medical databases and ontologies, allowing users to query the system with medical questions and get the best results possible. Right now the system is open to the medical profession only; it will soon be available to the general public.

Nextcat (Jeff Pucci & Richard Viard) is a social networking application targeted at the entertainment industry. Think LinkedIn for the entertainment industry.

Frevvo (Ashish Deshpande) is a toolkit which allows you to create AJAX-based forms.

The next meeting is scheduled for September 10th.

François was a co-founder of Feedster, an RSS search engine. Prior to that he was an information retrieval consultant for 10+ years, during which he created ScienceServer, an electronic journal browsing product he sold to Elsevier Science. He is currently looking for the next “Big Thing”.

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Introducing, Boston Start-Ups with Hispanito

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:00:37 +0000

The Boston startup & VC scene in many ways is different from the SF/Bay area one. There was, and to a large extend still is, a strong emphasis on telecom, enterprise software and biotech companies. The consumer Internet companies are still a small minority. However, there has been an increase in the start-up activity, mostly, because many large VCs in the Boston Area (such as Polaris, General Catalyst, Charles River Ventures and Venrock ) are starting to pay more attention to consumer oriented startups. Some have even set up specific funds to address this new market. So I will be writing about Boston area startups as I run into them. Here is my first post for GigaOM:

BOSTON: A few days ago I had a chance to chat with Jean Derely, the principal of Hispanito, a Boston based social networking site for Hispanics and Spanish speakers. Hispanito has been around for about six months, and has been slowly gaining popularity. It has about 15,000 members and is adding between 50-120 members a day, though the numbers spike to about 500-a-day on rare occasions. The site includes the usual profile page, friends, etc… that social networking sites include, and also incorporates a jabber server to allow members to chat with each other. The site is attracting visitors from Latin America, as well as Mexico, the US and Spain.

Derely says that the Spanish speaking community is very under served and most of the social networking sites are targeted to English speakers. The popularity of Fotolog, Google’s Orkut and Hi5 in some parts of Latin America indicate that targeted consumer services focused on the Latin American market can become thriving businesses, even though only 20% of Latin America has access to the internet. The internet connections are growing at a rate of 30% a year. At present there is about 8.2 million broadband connections in the Latin America. Derely feels there is a lot of room to grow but it will take 2-3 years to really pan out.

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