Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Online Advertising (Page 1 of 5)

Inveni Launches Discovery Engine That Gives You Human-Filtered Recommendations Based On Millions of Crowd-Matched Movies

October 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Inveni-logoInveni LLC has launched a discovery engine that is says “will drive social recommendations in the Web’s next wave.” The company’s free consumer service will also enable better targeted advertising — and, says the firm, change how consumers both make and receive recommendations on the Web.  The service is now publicly available, after more than a year in development and several months of private beta testing. The company (formerly known as Open Preferences, and based in Minnetonka, MN) made its debut at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco this week, and also presented the same day at the midVenturesLAUNCH startup conference in Chicago.

“The next wave of the Web will be about personalization. We’re focusing on using personalization to meaningfully improve discovery and decision making,” said Aaron Weber, CEO and cofounder. “The Inveni discovery engine leaps ahead of other online recommendation services.  What we’ve developed is unlike anything previously available.  Inveni consolidates ratings you put anywhere online – Netflix, IMDB, and more – provides tools to make and receive recommendations wherever you are, and helps you make better, more informed buying decisions.” The service has received positive feedback from users during the private beta over the past several months, said Weber.

Inveni-PersRecommendations Inveni provides its highly personalized product recommendations based on a consumer’s universal taste profile.  To create a personalized taste profile, Inveni empowers users to aggregate product and service ratings they’ve made across the Internet to quickly build deep, rich profiles of their tastes.  Beginning with the media categories of movies and TV, users can share their taste profile information with friends and other services online.  Inveni also facilitates product recommendations between friends (word of mouth), based on their tastes.

“We use this taste profile data, along with our unique crowd-refined recommendation engine, to provide highly targeted advertising, while simultaneously providing consumers with a compelling personalized service for discovery and sharing,” said Robert Bodor, CTO and cofounder, “We aim to become the premier provider of highly targeted consumer data for advertising online. We do that by turning the current consumer data model upside down, putting the user in control of their information.  We are entirely opt-in, and are raising the bar on consumer privacy protection.” Inveni-MyTastes

The company produced a fun, two-minute video to describe its value proposition to consumers, which you can view here.

Inveni describes itself as being “dedicated to driving the personalization revolution that will be Web 3.0.”  It was founded in 2008 by two experienced Internet entrepreneurs, Aaron Weber and Robert Bodor, and has a stellar set of successful Internet-industry executives acting as advisors. It is privately funded. 

Prior to Inveni, Aaron Weber, CEO and Cofounder, was COO and cofounder of W3i (formerly Freeze.com), a software marketing company based in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Aaron helped bootstrap the company to $25 million in annual revenues in seven years.  W3i has been profitable every year since its inception, and has provided initial investors with a 10x return in the first 5 years.  Aaron has received the SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Ernst & Young Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Robert Bodor, Inveni’s Chief Technical Officer and Cofounder, spent four years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company before he and Aaron founded Inveni.  There, he advised Fortune 500 clients in the high-tech industry on operations, innovation, and product development.  Previously, Robert was cofounder, president, and CTO of Point Cloud, an Internet company that provided interactive product visualization to prominent online retailers.  Robert holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering. He has invented and commercialized multiple Internet software technologies and has authored seven patents.

Follow Inveni on Twitter at www.twitter.com/discoverinveni and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/inveni.

NOTE: A version of this post first appeared on Minnov8.com, a site that showcases web innovation in Minnesota.

(Disclosure: the writer has a consulting relationship with Inveni LLC.)

An Interview With Steve Larsen, CEO of PhoneTell

June 26, 2010 / / 0 Comments

SteveWithPhone I traveled to Silicon Valley last week and, shortly after I arrived, stopped in to see Steve Larsen at PhoneTell in Menlo Park. I've known Steve for more than 12 years, through several startups he's helped launch and build. He joined this firm as CEO this past fall and recently relaunched the startup with a new name and branding at the TechCrunch "Disrupt" conference, held last month in New York City.  Steve is just an amazing startup guy. The Energizer Bunny has nothing on this dude — trust me. Great team builder, excellent communicator, and pitchman extraordinaire. No better combo for a startup CEO in my book.

What's PhoneTell about?  It its own words, it creates "intelligent, relevant smartphone
solutions to help users manage high-quality
connections with friends, colleagues, customers, and providers of goods and
services while they're on the move."
PhoneTell-logo Beyond that, "by connecting PhoneTell users to merchants close to them,
when the user is searching for that particular merchant’s product or
service, we deliver high-quality leads."

So, that's Steve above holding his Android phone showing the cool PhoneTell app. It just came out for Android 2.0-2.1 OS. He was jokingly holding it up to my "camera" so everyone could see it… :-)  But, alas, it's just a studio-grade handheld digital audio recorder — so we, uh, were simply left to describe it for all of you in my audio interview below. PhoneTell-incomingThus, I'm including a couple of screenshots here, so you don't have to rely on our bad acting.
PhoneTell-callbacklater You can download PhoneTell for Android here.  Me?  I'll be all over it once the iPhone app is available. Probably when I get my new iPhone 4 (soon).

The link to our chat is below. I think it's about 18 minutes, but I have no idea. I just hit the start and stop buttons. Thanks, Steve!  And good luck with PhoneTell.

• Download or listen to Graeme's interview with Steve Larsen about PhoneTell's plans to make your mobile life soo much easier… (MP3)"

GlueCon 09: My Interviews with VCs Brad Feld and Seth Levine

May 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

While I was reporting from the first-year Glue Conference the past few days in Denver, I had the opportunity to interview two of the guys behind the scenes in launching and planning this great event: Brad Feld and Seth Levine, partners in VC firm Foundry Group, which is based in nearby Boulder, CO. (Actually, of the two, Seth was more involved in Glue, while Brad was the main guy behind launching a sister event called Defrag, which is held in the fall in Denver, the first one being in November 2007.) 

I had noticed in the days leading up to Glue that Foundry Group had announced a new investment (Gist, whose founder was at Glue), then I saw two more investments they announced on their blogs while the event was going on (Medialets and CloudEngines). So, I decided to see if I could interview both Brad and Seth during breaks on Day 2 of Glue to learn about these latest new portfolio companies of theirs.

Brad (left photo) and Seth typify what I’ve called before The New Face of Venture Investing — a post I actually did in December 2007, which specifically called out Brad. BradFeld   I’ve also written previously about Seth, in a post from June 2008 called The Best Advice I’ve Seen Lately on Using Startup Advisors. They are both really nice guys, wicked smart, and doing great work helping many entrepreneurs build successful startups in a place that…well, is not Silicon Valley.  Yes, they’ve proved in spades that it can be done. SethLevine And, unlike your typical VCs, they do believe in investing outside their own backyard — as is the case with all three of their latest investments.  Sure, many of their portfolio companies are in Colorado, where a lot of innovation is going on (which they’re involved in on a day-to-day basis — including the TechStars program, which they helped launch).  But they’re also smart enough to know great ideas and great teams can live anywhere. I love the way they get involved in these events of theirs — they’re right in the middle of it all, very much a part of the “community” that each of these events they’ve launched really has become. It doesn’t take long to realize that both these guys are “people persons” through and through.

I spoke with Brad first, about the Gist investment, which had been announced the week before, and in particular about the investment they had just announced early that morning, on Day 2 of Glue: CloudEngines.

• Download the MP3 of my interview with Brad Feld.

Later the same morning, I spoke at greater length with Seth, primarily about Foundry Group leading a $4M Series A investment in Medialets, which had been announced on Day 1 of Glue.  We also spoke a bit about an earlier investment of Seth’s in the advertising space, AdMeld.

• Download the MP3 of my interview with Seth Levine.

For more about the Glue Conference, see my Twitterstream for the past three days.  I must have tweeted darn-near a couple hundred times!  And I saw this morning after I was back in Minneapolis that conference organizer Eric Norlin said he’d just read through all the tweets on the event — 62 pages total!  You can find the whole shebang by going to search.twitter.com and entering “gluecon” in the search box. It was a very successful event by all accounts.  I’m really happy I was part of it, and have already said I’ll sign up for next year! 

Hints of What’s Coming at DEMO ’09

February 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

As noted to the right in my sidebar, I'll be reporting from the DEMO conference coming up soon in Southern California. I always look forward to this time of year. I think it will be my seventh or eighth DEMO event in a row (they're held twice a year), and maybe my tenth overall. DEMO is "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology."  DEMO-09-logo+dates
Nowhere else can you get a reading on what's coming in tech better than you can at this event. Click in that graphic to the right for details about registering.

DEMO prides itself in finding the "diamonds in the rough" before anyone else. Over the years, this event has been the site of the first launch of such ventures as Palm, Java, TiVo, and E*TRADE in the mid/late '90s, and, in more recent years, Salesforce.com, VMware, Six Apart, OddPost, IronPort, GrandCentral, and Glam Media, to name a few. 
DEMO says it focuses "on real products ready for market—regardless of their geography." Presenting firms hail from many countries.

DEMO-TheMomenContinues

So, who attends this thing?  Media and bloggers, VCs, business development professionals, IT executives, and new technology firms from all over the world.  DEMO says 15,000 people have attended their events over the past
19 years. Read more here: Who Attends DEMO? Here's a sampling of companies the people of DEMO have told me will be attending the upcoming event on March 1-3: Deutsche Telekom AG, August Capital, Meakem Becker Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Allegis Capital, Motorola, Google, Hitachi America, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Symantec, UBS, NYSE, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, VentureBeat, Business Week, Forbes, ABC, eWeek, North Bridge Ventures, NTTCOMWARE, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, SVB Capital, Mayfield Fund, Granite Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and more.

What kinds of firms will be pitching?  Well, DEMO doesn't let out much in advance of the show — certainly not the list of presenters. That's a big secret. (Companies actually have been dropped from the event if they leak that they're presenting. And we press attendees, of course, have to honor that embargo as well.) The list of presenters is only released the Friday night before the event, which kicks off with a Sunday night reception. (I always post that list of presenters as soon as it's released to the press, so watch this space on the evening of February 27th.)  But the DEMO producers did provide me with an interesting set of stats on the DEMO '09 presenters, represented in a couple of charts. So, here's a Breakdown of DEMO '09 Presenters by Market Segment and Funding to Date:

DEMO-09-stats But should we really be expecting much excitement at DEMO this year?  Isn't the economy in the tank?  Does innovation really move ahead in these times?  You bet it does!  And the DEMO blog cites recent examples of that from the 2001 downturn. Sure, there will be fewer attendees, and fewer presenters. For the last several shows, we've seen about 65 presenters on average doing their six-minute pitches at each event. This time, it will undoubtedly be less, maybe may even fewer than 50. But I guarantee you we'll be hearing some of tomorrow's big winners, on stage for the first time. Because we always do. And the anticipation of that is, frankly, really exciting to me, and to the rest of 500+ who will be attending. It is an extremely upbeat affair, every single time.

There are some great updates being posted on The DEMO Blog, by Chris Shipley, Executive Producer, and other staff members.  Here are three recent posts:

• Two Panels Just Announced for DEMO '09 … VCs on one, past DEMO company CEOs on the other
• Smart Money Takes a Flight to Quality … "yes, it's a great time to throw a conference that launches new technology products, spots trends, and celebrates innovation"
• Making a Lasting Impact … about how one past DEMO presenter, battery company Boston Power, is growing rapidly

And give a quick listen to a podcast about DEMO '09 recorded on January 29 by my friend Keith Shaw of Network World and Carla Thompson of the Guidewire Group.

Your intrepid reporter: pumped and ready. I can't wait to live-tweet DEMO '09! I did somewhere between 200 and 300 newsy tweets at the last one — so (fair warning) get ready for the firehose!  And I'll be doing podcast interviews for the first time, too, with my whiz-bang new toy: a studio-quality handheld recorder. I'm gonna give it a go in the way of some short, ad-hoc interviews of presenting company founders, VCs, and various luminaries wandering the great hall, the pavilion, and (of course) the hallways. And I'm told I can upload these pretty quickly to my blog, giving those of you who can't be there at least a near-realtime sense of what's going on at DEMO.

Will you be going to DEMO '09?  If so, let us know in the comments! (And let's try to meet up face-to-face.)  If you can't make it, what would you most like to see covered? What answers would you be seeking if you were there? What you would most want to get out of the event?

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