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: Startups (Page 26 of 29)

RSS, so yesterday! On my iPhone, I’m now packin’ advanced linguistic metadata analysis and scientific algorithms to aggregate my news sources :-)

December 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

News360-screen1 News360 announced today that Version 2.0 of its news app for iPhone is available for download from the App Store. (UPDATE: the news announcement now won't hit the wire till Monday, I'm told. But the app can still be downloaded.)  I didn't have the previous version of the app, but I guess I'm glad I waited — because I really like this one. It has a very visually pleasing, image-rich UI that let's me swipe though stories. Reminds me a bit of Flipboard on the iPad (and that can't be bad). One tip I'd give when you download it: go into Settings and turn on "HQ images on 3G" – much better!

This News360 app is no slouch: it's already been recognized as among the best of category for 2010 by Apple. It has an average 4.5 star rating out of more than 1200 reviews, and it's still free. It incorporates both Natural Language Processing and Semantic AI analysis of news stories, going beyond RSS news reading and into news analysis and discovery. News360-screen2

The company says its app "leapfrogs RSS…enabling users to discover new information and trends."

Quoting from the press release (which will be public on Monday, December 20):

News360, an emerging leader in applying AI and semantic analysis technology to news stories, today announced a major update of its award.pngnning free app for news discovery on Apple® iOS®.  Named as one of the top worldwide news apps in 2010 by Apple, News360 2.0 remains free of charge with this update. 

News360-screen3 The company also announced today it has received seed funding from Oradell Equities, Inc. Oradell is a venture capital fund investing in startup companies since 1999.  The fund was created by the IBS Group,  Russia's leading player in IT market segments with more than 7,000 employees. 

The News360 App capitalizes on the scientific expertise of the News360 programming team, using a sophisticated, linguistic analysis engine that identifies semantic content inside news articles, gathers metadata, identifies user’s reading patterns, and applies location-based filters.

As a result, users experience a new form of news content, enhanced with underlying links to individuals, locations, and companies – all presented in an engaging, visualized stream.  Features of the News360 App include:

• Sophisticated algorithms to find the most important stories across hundreds of sources
• See the coverage of a story from every angle and relevant source
• Local news based on your current position, wherever you are
• Automatically highlighted and hyperlinked mentions of people, organizations, and places
• The ability to follow people or companies you’re interested in and never miss a story about them
• Facebook® and Twitter® integration

Recognizing that RSS feeds only offer the first step in news consumption, News360 offers an evolutionary jump into news analysis by enabling users to not just read the news, but to instead experience a new level of information discovery and analysis in a seamless and transparent fashion across more than 20 different categories of information – from breaking world news to entertainment.

News360 enables users to browse real-time information from hundreds of thousands of news articles with encyclopedic levels of depth, if they choose to do so.  The News360 app aggregates news from 600 leading news sources into a customized stream of headlines, matched with pictures identified through facial recognition and/or AI (Artificial Intelligence) analysis as relevant to the story.

Using its proprietary AI and semantic discovery algorithms, News360 parses hundreds of thousands of news stories in near real-time, with each article algorithmically evaluated for news “freshness” and source credibility, in addition to a qualitative analysis of both text and photos.

Taking a major leap ahead of RSS, News360 also enables the reader to learn more about relevant topics, people, and other terms of interest mentioned in the story through automatic, server-side markups of more than 130,000 keywords, which lead the user to detailed descriptions and analyses when clicked. 

New features of News360’s 2.0 app include:

• Support for landscape mode across iOS devices
• UI redesign for new elegance while maintaining previous look and feel
• Instapaper™ and Read It Later™ integration
• Integrated stock prices — for all public companies, the app now shows an up-to-date stock graph in a dossier
• More detailed dossiers — more information, links between objects and a more aesthetically pleasing, usable layout

News360 2.0 is free and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the News category, or through iTunes® on Mac® or Microsoft® Windows®.  Google® Android® support is forthcoming in early 2011.

News360 is a startup based in Moscow, Russia.

Defrag 2010: A Chat With Atlassian

November 19, 2010 / / 2 Comments

On day two of the Defrag conference, I wanted to stop by the booth of Atlassian, a Gold Sponsor of Defrag. I was anxious to learn more about what I was hearing is a pretty freaking amazing company. Atlassian-logo You have to love the story: a couple of 22-year-old university dropouts in Sydney decide to start a company together, because they see problems with the state of enterprise software — it's expensive, difficult to configure, and requires huge investments in consulting to implement and years to deploy. So, they launch Atlassian in 2002, ship their first product, JIRA, and become profitable that first year. Fast forward to today: Atlassian has more than 20,000 customers and some 250 employees, on three continents. A few months ago, the company raised its first outside funding, to fuel even more growth: a $60-million investment from Accel Partners. You just don't hear too many stories of such rapid software startup success as this, certainly not coming out of Australia. (My own home country, I'm proud to say!) The company does so much to give back to the community, too, which is touched on in my interview, linked below. Atlassian-products Atlassian is really a different kind of software company, one that's rewritten the rules of enterprise software development and sales. Its bug tracking, collaboration and software development tools allow companies to work smarter and faster — and these tools are especially attractive for startups and small teams. Altassian offers a special package of six of its products, generally for up to 10 users each, for just $10. It's called the Starter program. But, get this: at Defrag 2010, I picked up on an even better offer for cash-strapped startups: how's free? Yes, lucky readers, it's the Free Starter program, which gets you fully functional licenses to all six products, including 12 months of support and updates. The promo code is ATLDEFR10 (and note the offer expires April 1, 2011). Now, let's get right to my interview so you can hear more about this amazing new breed of sofware company: Atlassian….

• Download or listen to my interview with Matt Hodges, a Product Marketing Manager for Atlassian who is now based in San Francisco… (MP3)

(UPDATE: For more on what Atlassian is doing to give back, I meant to inlude this link to a post on one of their blogs: Freemium is Dead…Long Live Causium.)

 

‘Glue’ is a Cloud Conference That’s Different – It’s for *Developers* (and some interesting new twists on the next one)

November 4, 2010 / / 0 Comments

GlueConf-logo You may know I've attended the Glue Conference in Denver since its inception.  I've reported on both of those great events, in May 2009 and May 2010.  The last one I live-blogged, and that is luckily archived here.  The '09 event, however, I only covered by live tweeting — i.e., all my coverage was done on Twitter — so good luck finding that archive. And it was probably a couple-hundred "posts" long, too. Shees…

Anyway, the next Glue is coming up in May 2011, and I certainly plan to be there — live-blogging, not live-tweeting!  So, why would I be talking about that event now, when it's several months out?  Well, because I have some important *advance* news about it for all my developer friends, whether you're involved in a cloud-based startup or not.  Here's the deal:

Eric Norlin runs the event (and sister event Defrag, this month), and makes clear Glue is aimed at developers. That makes it different from other "cloud computing” conferences, which he thinks is a big echo chamber. "Glue seeks to explore the connective tissue of the web and IT infrastructure," says Norlin. EricNorlin-Defrag2007 "That connective tissue can be called a lot of things — service oriented architecture, web services, APIs, cloud computing, etc. Call it what you will, developers know that it’s not the name that counts, it’s the building of the application, and the underlying infrastructure that supports it."

Norlin says his goal with Gluecon has been really simple: to make it *the* gathering place for developers in the API/cloud space. "With that goal in mind, we’re setting out this year to change the game for developer conferences," he says. "And the only way that I know to change the game is to open things up in such a way as to get maximum involvement from the community. As such, I’m extremely happy to announce that Alcatel-Lucent is signing on to be the Community Underwriter and Partner Sponsor of Gluecon 2011."

So, what does that mean for the event?  It's this: Alcatel-Lucent (which runs OpenAPIservice.com) will be underwriting 15 companies to have demo pods at Glue 2011. The participation of these companies will be based solely on merit, not the ability to pay for an exhibit, says Norlin.

"We’re announcing that 15 companies will be selected to have completely free demo space at Gluecon. The demo pod will include passes to the show, signage, Internet — everything you need. Just show up with a laptop."

To select the companies, Norlin says he and Alcatel-Lucent have put together a top-notch selection committee: Chris Shipley (Guidewire Group), Mathew Ingram (of MESH and GigaOM), John Musser (Programmable Web), Laura Merling (Alcatel-Lucent), Alex Williams (ReadWriteWeb), Jeff Lawson (Twilio), Jeff Hammond (Forrester), Ian Glazer (Gartner), Ben Kepes (Diversity.net), Krish Subramanian (CloudAve), Vinod Kurpad (Best Buy), Seth Levine (Foundry Group), and Eric Norlin.

"The process will be simple," says Norlin. "We'll accept applications for the 15 spots, and every person on the selection committee gets to vote for their favorite 15 companies. The top 15 vote-getters will have a demo pod."  He points out that Alcatel-Lucent will have just one vote (two if you count Programmable Web, which is owned by Alcatel-Lucent), but not nearly enough to swing a decision. The company wants to maintain the credibility and neutrality of Glue, Norlin says.  He points out the selection committee purposely includes analysts (Guidewire, Gartner, and Forrester), journalists (GigaOM and ReadWriteWeb), a manager inside a large corporation (Best Buy), and even other company CEOs (Jeff Lawson of Twilio) to help run through this process. Alcatel-Lucent’s involvement, he says, is altruistic: enlarge the size and interaction around this developer community — "and everyone benefits."  Other exhibitors will be still be able to secure exhibitor space, Norlin adds.

But wait — there's more. "We’ll be doing some awesome things leading up to Glue — like holding 'hackathons' around the country, and then flying the winners to Gluecon to participate in a major league hackathon at the conference. And that’ll just be the beginning – stay tuned," he says.

PREDICTION:  Minnesota friends, I'm going out on a limb and predicting that one of these hackathons will be held right here in the Twin Cities.

"I’m excited because I feel like we have the ability to really change the game with this one." says Norlin.  "If you take away the company-specific conferences — Google I/O, Twitter, F8 — there really just aren’t that many national-level gathering spots for developers in the cloud/API space. There are a lot of 'business level' and 'workshop' conferences that happen around cloud computing, but we’re talking about developers.  And even where there are developer gatherings in the cloud/API space, the ability to pay has always been a limiting factor for startups and companies wanting to show their wares and exhibit. That ends with Gluecon 2011!  Now, developers in the cloud/API space will have the ability to participate in a pure meritocracy. Wow the selection committee, and you’re in."

Norlin sums up: "At the end of the day, what I want to see is 500-plus developers coming to Gluecon to build apps, figure out cloud infrastructure, scaling, security, and solve the tough problems around API construction, usage, and maintenance."

How does one apply?  The process starts here.

Gluecon 2011 will cover a broad spectrum of cloud/API topics that matter to developers — "from Hadoop to Clojure to Active API event processing to Cloud Scaling to Big Data databases (of both the NoSQL and SQL variety) to web protocols (activity streams, PUSH, etc)," says Norlin. "We’re going deeper, getting more technical than ever, bringing in a third day of workshops, just generally stepping up and kicking ass."

So, my developer friends, you think you can hang with the big boys and girls at Gluecon? Well, now you can apply for a Gluecon demo pod, and prove it.  (Want more info?  Email Eric at enorlinATmac.com.)

See you at Gluecon in May!

UPDATE: Just after I posted, this popped up on ReadWriteWeb: Weekly Poll: What Cities Should Be Chosen for GlueCon Hackathon Tour?  So, get busy all you Minnesota tech supporters out there, vote for the Twin Cities!!

 

 

My Adventures as a Connoisseur of the Fine Art of Startup Pitching

October 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Mobicart-DEMOfall2010 Can one learn anything listening to a lot of startup pitches?  I mean even if your job, like that of a VC, doesn't require it, per se.  Yes, I believe you can, and I've invested a large part of my time and attention over the years to this practice, betting that doing so brings value to my clients. 

I began attending and reporting on many of the large, national tech conferences (most in California, but some in other U.S. cities and resort locations) more than 12 years ago – as a way to juice my own knowledge as a tech marketing consultant and startup advisor, and to keep out in front of tech trends. (Not to speak of being able to meet and network with lots of heavyweights.) This pastime of sorts is what basically turned me into a blogger, and even an accidental part-time journalist — actually getting paid occasionally to write about what I learned at these events.  Imagine that.  (That was before the intrinsic value of a blog post starting going to zero. But I digress…)  After proving myself early-on as a good event reporter, the conferences began granting me press passes.

I've heard so many startup pitches over my career, especially during the last 12 years, that I've lost count.  But I have no doubt it's more than 1000.  And I've been lucky enough to document most of them — certainly hundreds — in my writings.  Twitter and live-blogging tools in recent years have only added to my output.  Someday, maybe I'll even turn my blog archives into a large coffee-table book. (Yeah, right, like I'd ever have the time! And a large percentage of these startups are now either out of business or acquired, so who would care?)  Just one live-blog I did of a two-day conference last month totaled 9000 words.  More on that below.

The many conferences I've attended include top events like DEMO (11 times), Esther Dyson’s PC Forum 2006 (the swan song), Under The Radar, TechCrunch 50, several O'Reilly events, those sponsored by leading publications (e.g., Forbes, Fortune, WSJ), Defrag and Glue, and many smaller, newer, or regional startup events such as CrowdPitch as well.  The collective intelligence I gather from this investment of time (and money) has been remarkably valuable to me personally, and to my clients. 

How?  Well, in several areas:  understanding and assessing trends, messaging, strategy, business models, and what I'll call style, or stage presence. By observing the best-of-the-best pitch their businesses (all these conferences closely vet applicants), I'm better able to understand not only where technology startup trends are going, but I can hear the best stories, the best messaging.  I get to see with my own eyes what resonates, what hits the mark — meaning the startups that best get people to pay attention, take action, elicit media interest, attract customers, and (not the least) cause investors to write checks.  Sure, not all these technology startups will make it.  But, because I'm getting extensive exposure to this cream-of-the-crop with the best potential, I've found that I'm in a much better position to help guide my clients back home in their own business planning, marketing and launch strategy, media strategy and tactics, and even in coaching the founders in their own on-stage startup pitches. I can also teach them to avoid the mistakes I see others make.

DEMOfall2010-graphic Just a few weeks ago, I attended my 11th DEMO conference, and my 10th in a row.  (The event is held twice a year, and the recent one, called "DEMOfall 2010," was held in Santa Clara, CA.)   Long ago dubbing itself "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology," DEMO is generally regarded as the inventor of the startup pitch fest, and certainly has the longest, continuous track record.  Launched in 1991 by Stewart Alsop (whom I've had the privilege to meet at more than one DEMO), this venerable event was acquired by IDG many years ago, and is still the gold standard.  It is extremely well run, and remains my favorite conference of them all.  It never disappoints. The main thing to remember about DEMO is that it attracts a large, prestigious press and blogger contingent, and generates more than 200 million media impressions for the collective participants of each conference.  Not to minimize the importance of the many investors that regularly attend, too –- it attracts those, and the presenting startups, from around the globe.  Over the years, startups pitching at DEMO events have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars — billions, I'm sure — in funding. And many of them, household names now, have been acquired or gone public. Check this list of DEMO alumni companies, and it only includes those for the years 2006-2010.

Last month, I live-blogged the entire two-day-plus DEMOfall 2010 program, an agenda made up mostly of rapid-fire, back-to-back startups pitches, some 70 companies in all, with several great panels and interviews mixed in.  (In that live-blog archive, scroll down to get to the meat of the pitches, since, on the afternoon of registration, I allowed all those on Twitter posting tweets with the event hashtag to flow into my live-blog, as people were traveling to and arriving at the event, including me. Part of the fun is the anticipation!)

In addition, I did nine audio interviews of some of my favorite startups while I was at DEMOfall 2010:  here's the link to all my blog posts for this event, which include links to those interviews. I started doing audio interviews of startup founders several DEMO conferences back. Two of the companies I interviewed even went on to be named among the DEMOgod Award winners.  My photos of the event are here on this Flickr set.

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.)

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