GigaOM » online search

Colleges getting serious about reading, writing, and reputation management

Ki Mae Heussner — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 23:17:14 +0000

When Pete Kistler was a student at Syracuse University in 2008, a digital doppelganger with the same name and a history of drug dealing kept him from getting an internship. Later, after realizing that it was a Google search that was hindering his career prospects, he and two former classmates launched Brand Yourself, a DIY online reputation management tool that enables anyone to improve their personal search results.

Now, a handful of U.S. colleges are snapping up the program for their own students, to make sure that digital blemishes don’t discourage offers from potential employers.

In the last few months, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester and Elon University bought the software for their seniors, in addition to the founders’ alma mater, which purchased the program for all of their students (previously they piloted the program with seniors).

College students are slowly waking up to the fact that searchable photos of themselves funneling beer or tweets that were clearly written under the influence aren’t going to help them get their first gig. But Mike Cahill, the head of career services at Syracuse University, said Brand Yourself helps students not only become more aware of the impression they make online, it can help them actually change their search results.

A more affordable approach to online reputation management

“It used to be that an error on your resume would put you in the do not consider pile,” he said. “Now, if you’re further along in the process, your online reputation [can put you there].”

According to a 2010 study from Microsoft and Cross Tab Marketing, 75 percent of human resources departments are required to do an online search before making a hire. And a study this year from Brand Yourself and Harris Interactive found that 42 percent of online U.S. adults that searched for a person online, did so before deciding to do business with them.

It’s hardly surprising that individuals’ online reputations affect their professional opportunities – and companies like Reputation.com and Integrity Defenders have been providing services for a while that promise to help individuals clean up their digital identity. But BrandYourself’s interesting difference is that instead of charging potentially thousands of dollars, it provides a Web-based program that lets people improve their own results through search engine optimization (SEO) — for about $10 a month.

“The software takes you through the process of making search results more friendly for your name,” said Ambron, BrandYourself’s CEO, and the SEO brains behind the operation.

What’s your ‘search score’?

To start, users can register for free and get their “search score” (or an assessment of the first page of results for their name). Then they can submit links that they want others to find online (i.e. their LinkedIn profile, About.me page, etc.), as well as receive specific recommendations for boosting the visibility of those links (such as connecting a personal website to profile pages or featuring your name more prominently on a site’s URL or page heading). The site lets users submit and receive recommendations for three links but to add more, they have to upgrade to the premium service. This week, the company also launched a Facebook game that lets people compare their search score to their friends’ on the social network because users were already sharing their scores online, Ambron said.

Web publishers and others who do business on the internet may be familiar with the basics of SEO, but Brand Yourself is bringing those tactics to individual web monitoring in a way non-techies can actually understand and apply. It’s not as comprehensive as Reputation.com, which monitors clients’ digital reputation across a broader spectrum of sites and databases and can provide more targeted services. But it’s a much more affordable consumer option.

The company initially launched in 2010 as a service for managing online reputations on search and social networks but re-launched early this year with a more specific focus on search. Since then, it’s raised $1.2 million (on top of about $300,000 in seed money), won a startup competition at SXSW and grown to include 10 employees. To date, Ambron said, the service has attracted more than 150,000 registered users and more than 3,000 paying members (excluding students at Syracuse, John Hopkins and its other college clients).

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Office space search engine 42Floors lands in NYC with $5M in new funding

Ki Mae Heussner — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 02:01:46 +0000

Searching for office space in New York is notoriously tough, but Y Combinator-backed 42Floors is hoping to make it easier for local businesses.

The office space search engine on Friday announced an expansion to New York and a $5 million Series A round of funding from 35 big-name investors, including Thrive Capital’s Jared Kushner, Founder Collective’s Chris Dixon, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Digital Sky Technologies’ Yuri Milner. The company said the majority of its investors are New York-based because that’s where it plan to focus.

42Floors, which launched in San Francisco in March, provides users with a free, comprehensive database of available office space listings, along with photos and relevant information. The goal of the site is to make the usually painful and frustrating search for office space hassle-free. The search engine serves businesses of all sizes, but 42Floors’ “growth hacker” Darren Nix told me 80 percent of its queries are for spaces between 1,000 and 6,000 square feet, making its “sweet spot” companies with 5 to 50 people.

For now, the comp;any targets the businesses themselves, but Nix said they believe brokers will find it valuable in the future.

“Our plan is to reinvent office search one city at a time. We had huge demand in San Francisco,” said cofounder Jason Freedman in a statement. “So, for the New York launch we’ve quadrupled our capacity by partnering with the biggest property owners and brokers beforehand.”

In September, the company revealed in a job listing on Hacker News that it had raised $5 million but didn’t reveal its funders.

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Adchemy nabs $61M in Microsoft-led funding round

Colleen Taylor — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:30:27 +0000

Adchemy CEO Murthy Nukala

Adchemy, the six-year-old online ad technology company, has raised $61 million in a Series E funding round led by Microsoft.

Adchemy, which currently has 160 full-time employees, hopes to add between 50 and 80 more staff in the months ahead. About half the company’s workforce is in engineering.

This round brings the total venture capital invested in Adchemy to $116 million, Adchemy CEO Murthy Nukala said in an interview on Tuesday. But none of this money will be used to cash out early investors: It will all be put toward corporate growth.

Mainly the new funds will be put toward turbo-charging the development and delivery of Adchemy’s IntentMap product, which acts as a virtual layer between advertisers and search engines. IntentMap’s technology purportedly does all the keyword selection heavy lifting for online advertisers. IntentMap works with Microsoft Search as well as Google Search, Nukala said, and it is a boon to advertisers because it is very easy to use.

“All an advertiser has to tell us is the products they are selling, and we take care of understanding all of that and our software develops all the relevant keywords they need to communicate to the search engine,” Nukala told me. “This should not be a human-scale problem; you need machines to solve it. What we’re doing is automating a lot of the keyword selection process that is largely done manually right now.” Adchemy sees its technology, essentially, as a VMware for online advertising — a virtual layer that ideally optimizes the performance on all sides of ad-serving operations.

Besides Microsoft, Adchemy’s other investors include August Capital and the Mayfield Fund.

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