Foreign Investment in China Tech Grows - Despite the economic slowdown, investors seem to still be bullish about Chinese technology companies.  From the Wall Street Journal: Tudou Raises $57 Million

Pluggd CEO to Speak at Digital Hollywood - Alex Castro, CEO of Pluggd, a StartUp Beat featured company, will be a part of the "Online Video": TV-Broadband Programming, Content & Advertising Innovation" panel at next week's Digital Hollywood conference.  Pluggd enables advanced online video search.

How Bad Will it Get for Tech Startups? - It has been well established that we are in the midst of a worldwide economic downturn, and know one really knows its ultimate duration and severity.  Founders of tech startups naturally have nervous flashbacks to 2000, when the tech sector, especially the dot coms, experienced a steady decline that put many startups out of business.  BUt this is a completely different climate from 2000, and most tech startups are built on a much more solid footing than eight years ago.  Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle addresses the issue today, doing a good job of finding some balance and highlighting the differences among tech startups then and now: Economic deja vu hitting tech startups

Web Site: www.collegetonight.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2005
Founders: Zach Suchin, President & CEO; Jason Schutzbank, Executive Vice President & CTO
Investors: Publicly held (result of a reverse merger with Simex Technologies)
Employees: 6 full-time; 40 part-time; hundreds of campus representatives
Company News: www.collegetonight.com/press

By Zach Suchin, Co-founder, President & CEO 

College Tonight, Inc. owns and operates the web site www.collegetonight.com, an interactive service and networking platform for the college market that targets both active students and alumni.  As the antidote to “anti-social” networking, College Tonight differs from other social networks by promoting active social interactivity in the "real world" rather than the sedentary lifestyle nearly all competing social networks relegate their users to behind a physical computer screen.  College Tonight fosters in-person communication and activities with an emphasis on nightlife and other social events both local to the user's college campus and beyond that area for more broadly-based communities.  The web site provides an online forum for students to exchange information on social activities happening offline, serving as a catalyst for real-life relationships and interaction among users.

Founders' Story:

During college, I provided marketing and branding for several different companies and organized high-profile nightlife events for college students and celebrities.  It was a very unique situation because the celebrities loved hanging out with the college students and obviously, the college students were thrilled to party with their favorite artists.  It was a rare melding of the two worlds. 

Toward the end of college, I started developing the College Tonight concept with my partner Jason after a microcosmic success story in a conference called “Emory Nightlife” on the school’s server.  While the server was meant for strict academic and school sponsored extra-curricular, what was started as a conduit of communication between me and my small group of friends, quickly turned into the most populated group on the school server, with hundreds of “add-me” requests being processed each day.  The conference eventually reached about 85 percent of the undergraduate populous at Emory University with a strictly opt-in population.  There was even a practical sub-module in the group called “Drunk Lost & Found” meant for those who lost items at various events around town, which ended up becoming more relevant than the official school’s lost and found conference.  Since November, 2005, my partner and I have been developing College Tonight.

College Tonight was started completely organically, through a natural need at one school in Atlanta.  Jason and I realized that this was by no means an isolated vacuum in the market and we both put all of our money from our previous businesses into creating version .5 of the service.  This beta version of the service was meant to test with the Emory community exactly what features were going to be utilized and would be worth expanding upon.  In September of 2006, we held a beta launch event that attracted many people, including the largest periodical in the South, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  We started to get press that no one expected.  At this point Jason and I knew it was time to take our knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, and we started to raise funding for a more official version of the service.  We hustled and finally achieved enough funding to develop the current version of the site.

Business Model:

Client Subscriptions: Local venues pay a monthly fee, or a per event fee, to run a virtual blog/group that updates their events, specials and deals for College Tonight users.  Front-end data and premium placement are also available with this monthly subscription.  

On Site Advertising: Untraditional "click-to-call" banner ads with the latest flash technology, with the ability to target/filter specific user demographics and behaviors are available.  Advertisers can place an ad, sponsor a group, or sponsor an event.

Nightlife Events:  College Tonight’s motto “Get On, Get Up, Get Out” has been the key message behind the site’s “Disorientation Tour,” a nine month roll out tour begun in late 2007 consisting of 52 promotional events targeting 116 campuses around the country.  These nightlife events mark the culmination of week-long promotions held locally at individual campuses, with neighboring student populations merging for the ultimate college party experience.  As College Tonight continues to introduce its services campus by campus, advertisers will create brand awareness with their participation.

Mobile Component: Mobile advertising is directed to a captive student audience with few distractions.

Nightlife TV Podcasts: With an eight-episode season, College Tonight’s monthly podcasts, focusing on college nightlife and lifestyle, provide advertisers with access to College Tonight’s substantial user base.

Freshmen Social Packets: Restaurant menus and social information disseminated to incoming freshman at universities across the United States through a soft-back published book.

Instant Messaging & Chat Services: Advertisements may be placed where users communicate most.

Photo Printing:  Users will be able to print photographs through the web site.

College Tonight Magazine: Traditional magazine advertising through uniquely innovative flash technology.

Online Store: Sale of products ranging from computers to energy drinks through College Tonight’s Online Store.

Power Hour/Music Mixes: Merchants can place an ad in between one of College Tonight’s power hour or music mixes available for download/streaming through the web site.

Sponsored Games: A game that incorporates an advertiser’s brand interactively.

Individual Venue Web Development: Bars, clubs, and restaurants will be able to hire us to custom design their web site, integrated with a software solution that allows events they post to automatically and seamlessly feed into College Tonight.

Food Delivery & Liaison Service: A national food delivery service will act as a liaison between restaurants and students.  This is another avenue to familiarize the student with College Tonight’s services.

Custom Ring-Tones & Wallpaper: Users will have the ability to upload their own photos or take photos from the site, and develop custom wallpapers for their cell phones.  Similarly, users will be able to upload .mp3 files and use snippets to create a custom ring-tone for their cellular device.

Various pending acquisitions will bring even further revenue opportunity to the company.

Current Needs:

College Tonight continues to seek support in the form of an investor base, as it is a publicly-traded entity.
 

What do you think about College Tonight?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Web Site: www.adooga.com
Headquarters: Santa Monica, California
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Perrin Chiles and Chris Sherrill, Co-Founders
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 6
Company News: www.adooga.com/media.html

By Perrin Chiles and Chris Sherrill, Founders

Offering more than 250 contests and over 19 million dollars in cash and prizes, ADOOGA is the powerful search engine that connects creative, Internet-savvy fans with content-seeking brands by aggregating online contests in one user-friendly site.

At ADOOGA, our mission is to simplify the discovery and entry process for anyone who wants to participate in online contests.  There are hundreds of photographers, filmmakers, musicians and writers out there waiting to be discovered and receive recognition (or cash and prizes) for their work.  Now, ADOOGA is here to help expedite the realization of those dreams.  Check it out; hone your skills to enter a contest or two, and win money to fund your next record, indie flick or photo exhibit.

Talent agencies are scouring sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube looking for the “next big thing”—ad agencies and corporations should be doing the same thing by viewing the growing list of contest winners, dubbed ADOOGA All-Stars.  The Internet is such a powerful way to connect creative people with bold brands.  We wanted to simplify the process of putting talent in touch with the brands looking for fresh ideas.

Along with the growing popularity of social networking sites where members can share music, videos and other content they’ve created, the web is seeing a surge in blue chip brands tapping the creativity of the Internet generation to create their next big campaign through contests on sites such as YouTube, MySpace and BrickFish.

When visitors go to the site, they can choose from 12 categories to enter: travel, green, entertainment, academic, sport, home, style, eat, tech, creative, drink and random, or they can search contests by type, expiration date, posting date, prize value or name.  It’s comprehensive and intuitive.

Brands are able to submit contests for inclusion or featured placement at the top of the home page.  ADOOGA can even help them navigate the alternative advertising and marketing platform through creative support and execution on the site.

What do you think about ADOOGA?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Overlay.TV Featured in Wired – Overlay.TV, a StartUp Beat featured company, was recently featured in Wired’s Listening Post blog, where its advertising 3.0 technology is featured.  The post includes a demo using the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” music video:  Overlay.tv Adds Links and Easter Eggs to Music Videos

Miscellaneous…

Who doesn’t want to avoid traffic?  Bill Gates wants to help:  Microsoft introduces an enhanced tool for avoiding traffic jams

Speaking of MSFT... they’re involved in what may be the most interesting takeover battle of the decade.  TechCrunch’s take on the latest developments:  Yahoo Goes Scorched Earth

Web Site: www.pluggd.com
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Year Founded: 2006
Founders: Alex Castro, CEO; Jonathan Thompson, Chief Architect
Investors: Intel Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Employees: 13
Total Capital Raised: $6 million
Company News: www.plugged.com/news

 
By Alex Castro, Founder and CEO

At Pluggd, we are bringing a new slate of products to market this year that we hope will mark significant advances in the way consumers experience web video and in the way that advertisers can monetize that video. 

For starters, we have invented technology that allows web users to “search inside” a web video (or audio) file, before consuming the entire file.  This allows the consumer to find the section they want, then “surf” directly to that part of the video.  In this way, we hope to make video browsing much more like web page browsing.

Our patent-pending “Heat Map” technology is an innovative user interface that guides users to the content topics they wish to see or hear in an audio or video file.  The goal is to make multimedia search as easy and intuitive as general web search.

When a user clicks “play” on an audio or video file, Pluggd processes the file through our Content Publishing system, which essentially generates a transcript of the words and associated topics that are present in the file.  When a user enters a keyword search term, the query flows through our Transcript and Concept databases, generating a color-coded heat-map.  The heat-map shows relevancy of sections of the file to the search term.  Red indicates a direct match, orange a near-match, and blue a non-match.  Intuitively, a user can advance the “scrubber bar” to the part of the file that he or she wishes to see (or hear).  The system works for files of any length, enabling a new kind of viewing experience that puts the navigation of the video or audio file directly into the hands of a user who can browse according to their interest in topics they choose.

Not so long ago, popular video was the exclusive province of movies and television.  These programs were characterized by the following:

*High cost of production

*Established channels of distribution

*Monetization through direct purchase or attached advertising

Let’s take the popular situation comedy, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” as an example of the realities of video production by Old Media.  Each episode cost over five million dollars to produce.  The network, CBS, ordered 26 episodes for a standard season.  The program ran for nine seasons.  The high cost of production reflected the considerable talent of the writers, actors and unionized production crew of a hit show, which could only have been brought to life under a mature television production system.

This system was characterized by high risk associated with high production costs and enabled by mature distribution channels which also had very high barriers to entry—after all, not many video producers can get programs distributed on broadcast television.  In such a universe, copy protection was essential, because piracy threatened the consumer market for shows that were distributed in relatively fixed distribution windows—such as Monday nights on one TV network.

Motion picture production parallels the TV industry with respect to very high production costs and monetization through traditional distribution channels, ranging from movie theatres, to TV, to home video rental, to DVD.

In the last five years, the explosion of web video has considerably changed the calculus of Old Media.  The following new realities characterize new video production:

*Low cost of production

*Very low barrier of entry to mass distribution

*Unclear and shifting methods of monetization

Pluggd is one of many companies participating in the New Video ecosystem.  At Pluggd, we recognize that there is a prominent place for Old Media in the new distribution channels, such as YouTube, MySpace, Atom Films, and other popular sites where people can sample video.  Traditional media companies have recently launched new sites for direct distribution of their prime time video to consumers, breaking the old taboos about “competing” with the old broadcast TV model.

We also see new forms of programming emerging on the horizon.  Much of the new video content will be user generated, but an increasing amount will be produced by independent film and TV makers, who employ low-cost digital production techniques to make very compelling shows. 

Digital formats distributed on the web don’t have to fit into 30 minute or 60 minute time slots, and as a consequence we predict that new program length productions will be invented to serve niche markets: The Lunch Break market; the Share with Friends on a Cell Phone Market; the Kill Time in an Airport Market, to name a few of the many possibilities.

But with these new types of programs, the old realities persist: Covering the cost of production and giving advertisers reliable ways to reach their audiences and measure the results.  Inventive companies will address and solve these problems over the coming years.  To be specific, we anticipate breakthroughs in the following areas:

* Allowing users to discover specific video and audio files they wish to find across the web

* Surf inside video and audio programs for the exact content they want

* Image recognition within video

* Serving ads that are contextual and inviting to consumers

* Reporting results to advertisers about consumption of their ads in meticulous detail

* Greatly reducing network latency and other hosting issues for video files

Pluggd will do our part to make progress in these areas and create a vibrant economy for web video.  In the United States, now ranked thirteenth in bandwidth per capita in the world, the federal government should make new investments for high speed Internet access for everyone, which would stimulate the creation of new products.

So, hold onto your hats as new kinds of programming—news, popular culture and user-generated—continue to rapidly evolve, spurred by the many inventive people working in the web industry and by the hundreds of millions of web users who want to experience video in new ways.
 

What do you think about Pluggd?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

After a brief hiatus, we're back and ready to bring you more pitches from some of the world's most innovative and interesting technology startups.  Tomorrow, we're featuring Pluggd, an online video startup from Seattle, Washington, that is bringing an unprecedented level of control over viewing to users.  

Remember, if you have or know of a startup you think should be featured on StartUp Beat, drop me a line -- editor@startupbeat.com
 
-Brian

Web Site: www.overlay.tv
Headquarters: Ottawa, Canada
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Rob Lane, CEO; Tyler Cope, Chief Architect; Nadav Zin, Vice President Products and Services
Investors: Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners
Employees: 20
Total Capital Raised: $4.6 Million
Company News: blog.overlay.tv/press/

By Tyler Cope, Founder and Chief Architect

Overlay.TV is an interactive media company that provides a video commerce platform that enables Internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets by overlaying contextual information directly onto online video content and linking to external websites.

Choice - Opt-In 

The original idea for Overlay.TV was conceived while watching my wife watch TV.  She would sit down to a line-up of shows that had been PVR’d the night before and be delighted with the fact that the next few hours of her evening would be spent happily viewing the shows she had selected.  Of course, there would be the occasional commercial interruption that she would fast forward through but at least it wasn’t like the bad old days where she was forced to sit through several minutes of advertisements.

My wife wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.  Everyone I know has their own variation of on-demand content consumption.  Some people pause a show when it starts, make dinner and then resume viewing when dinner is done, allowing them to skip past all the commercial breaks.  With the Internet-oriented method of viewing content, users also shun the “traditional” advertising.  Banners, pop-ups and the like have very low click through rates and the minute that a video sharing site introduces the television model of interrupting content to show an ad, many of their users become upset and simply move on.  The common attribute among these viewers is that they are watching content without paying any attention to the advertising.  Traditional advertising models have not kept up with advances in technology and are severely broken.  Any new model would need to work in the world where the user expects to watch what they want, when they want it. This was the first ingredient for the idea.

The Content is The Ad

The second ingredient was this: Although people will choose to disregard the interruptive type of advertising that has been chosen for them, product placement is still partially working. My wife will watch a video or show and make a comment about the shoes, handbags, hairstyles or the lifestyles of the rich and famous. She might simply be curious about what an item is or she may actually be interested in buying something just like it.

Given the right timing, the right mood and the opportunity to dig deeper into what is being shown, these people would most certainly either read more about or purchase items on the spot. If the mood or timing isn’t perfect, they might just set the thought aside for another day. If only they knew exactly what thought to set aside. 

Users

Assuming that you could come up with an unobtrusive system that allowed people to delve into what they were watching, how would that system know what the objects in the video are? Artificial Intelligence isn’t even close to being able to identify objects in video at the detailed level required. Viewers want to know what brand, where it can be purchased and what is comparable. To do that, you need either the people that were involved in creating the content or people who know about the subject matter. That leads me to the third ingredient: the users. 

Users would be able to identify, classify, tag and comment on objects inside the content.

Now in this age of social networking, the user has much more influence over his environment than ever before. With the increasing media fragmentation, only one medium  ie- social networks, according to the IBM 2007 Digital Consumer Study, has more than 50% of user adoption within the following age group: 18-35. Social networking is now mainstay and this is where more and more web content is originating. 

Advertisers must appeal to inhabitants in this space on their terms if they want to effectively reach them. 

Choice - Opt-In. The Content is the ad. Users.

Building a system that combines those concepts is what we’ve been doing for the last year and I know you’re going to love it. Overlay.TV’s model works with today’s culture of choice where you get to choose when to watch advertising and what that advertising consists of.

What do you think about Overlay.tv?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Web Site:  www.circleup.com
Headquarters:  Newport Beach, Calif.
Year Founded:  2006
Founders:  John Payne; Doug Tung; Jim Jonassen
Investors:  Sid R. Bass Associates and early angel investors
Employees:  15
Total Capital Raised:  $3 Million
Company News:  www.circleup.com/my/cu/info/press/

By John Payne, Co-Founder and CEO

The evolution of emailing has been incredible to watch since its inception.  From a techie tool used by engineers, academics and scientists to the defacto method of communication for hundreds of millions of people, email has transformed the way that people from all walks of life communicate.  Instant messaging has been hot on its heels in the younger demographic and is now reaching critical mass even in the enterprise.  With emails worldwide totaling almost 100 billion messages daily, an almost unmanageable torrent of information flows every single day.  And with the emergence of the social platforms and their proprietary messaging and publishing systems at places like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and others, the problem of group collaboration and communication across these heterogenous messaging systems has continued to grow.

It is no surprise that although Internet communications among groups is the most widely used collaboration tool in existence, the messaging systems themselves have proven to be relatively inefficient when it comes to group communication and information gathering.

For a year now, CircleUp has turbo-charged group communication via email, instant messaging and social networking services already in use around the world today.  Where messaging has failed, CircleUp has taken the lead in creating an innovative communications tool that allows users to gather information, make plans or decisions and collaborate more effectively.  CircleUp is a social communications service for real world groups that is built to make people’s lives easier and reduce information overload.

Why CircleUp?

Today, when you ask a specific question or gather information from online and “real world” communities you get back a blizzard of emails that often include random answers, distractions and extraneous details that complicate and delay the information gathering, collaboration and decision-making process.  The problem today really has three parts: You ask for information, opinions, decisions, facts or guidance from 30 people in a group you belong to, and you get back 35 emails or instant messages to sort through, including tons of “reply to alls” that really gum up the works.

You not only have to find and open all 35 emails or instant messages, but you have to painstakingly cut and paste the information you need to get the group information all in one place.

Once you have it in one place, it’s buried on your hard drive somewhere it can’t be used or shared by anyone but you!

CircleUp solves that problem with a unique new social communications service that gathers the answers and presents you and the group with a single, organized result that can be used and shared by everyone.

CircleUp is a free service for consumers, professionals and small businesses.  There is no charge to ask or answer questions, and no registration, download, or membership required for those who are circled-up.  The service uses your messaging credentials as a proxy for membership in a group you already belong to.

Who Can Benefit From CircleUp?

Campus Clubs Use It: Send a CircleUp to 100 people in the campus ski club asking for drivers for the spring trip to Lake Tahoe.  Get back a breakdown of who can drive, who needs a ride, and how many snowboards fit on top of each car instead of sorting through a flurry of 80 IM and email responses.

Businesses Use It: The event coordinator sends a CircleUp to ask 50 sales managers for their flight arrival and departure information so she could schedule airport pickups and hotel arrivals and gets back a single list of arrival and departure info instead of 50 emails.

Politicos Use It: CircleUp with 100 local campaign volunteers to see who can attend the big rally, who needs a ride, who can drive and who has a truck or van to haul the really big signs.  Get back a single list of all attendees that can be shared by riders and drivers.

Coaches Use It: Expedite a CircleUp to the families of 20 kids who made the traveling team for the big soccer tournament, asking how many tournament T-shirts they want.  Get back an exact list of shirt sizes instead of 27 emails and IMs.

CircleUp Results

How Do I "CircleUp"? 

CircleUp was created with the mainstream email and IM user in mind: techie or non-techie, the mom on the go, the soccer coach dad, the president of the university ski club, or the event coordinator of a top company.  

Simply ask a question using the CircleUp Wizard found at www.circleup.com and integrated to messaging applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Facebook or at www.circleup.com.

Then choose a specific AnswerPattern, which determines how the results (answers) will be returned, putting an end to the back-and-forth that often goes along with getting incomplete or incorrect information while organizing them in one single location.

If you are on the receiving end of a CircleUp question, you will get what looks like a normal email, Facebook message or notification or IM from the questioner.  So, if you typically communicate with friends or colleagues through Yahoo! IM or through email, that mode of communication will not change.  You will only realize that you’ve been circled up when a Flash-based QuestionBox widget with the sender’s picture appears on your desktop or in a browser to explain the question and collect your answer.

The respondent makes a quick, focused response that’s even easier and more efficient for them than crafting a response to the email.  And the results are aggregated for all riders and drivers to share.

Most widgets today are distribution endpoints, a way for someone to take something from his/her site and offer distribution everywhere.  As you can see in discussion above, we’ve turned the traditional widget model on its head by using the widget as a collection endpoint.  CircleUp widgets act as a tool to focus a user on a specific task and gather very specific information or decisions.

CircleUp is Now on Facebook Platform

CircleUp recently announced the availability of its powerful new messaging features on Facebook Platform that significantly enhances the power and utility of Facebook groups, events and Friend Lists when added to any user’s profile on Facebook.

With CircleUp, group leaders and members can collaborate effectively via Facebook with simplicity, time savings and flexibility.  CircleUp builds a user customized messaging application on the fly which is delivered to recipients via Facebook messaging, posting to the group wall or individual profiles, newsfeeds, notifications, the CircleUp Inbox and optional email messaging.  Responses from all group members are organized, summarized and presented on a public or private results page inside the CircleUp application on Facebook Platform that can be accessed directly from links on the group page.  The results can exported to XLS or PDF files, viewed and mashed-up with other applications using Microformats, or continually updated in an RSS feed or daily HTML email Daily Roundup.

CircleUp is one of the first applications to take advantage of recently available features in the Facebook Platform api to access informal groups of friends via Facebook Friend List.  To check out the new Facebook application from CircleUp, go to http://apps.facebook.com/circleup/.

CircleUp Continues to Make Group Communication Painless

Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 100,000 registered leaders who can use CircleUp to reach 4.5 million members in their various groups, teams, clubs and business organizations.  To meet the demands of our expanding user base, we have added exciting new features to our application.  Some of these new features include:

*A new inbox that makes organizing your CircleUps easier than ever before.

*Fast and easy to use Circle Management that is even more powerful and flexible.

*New and improved Outlook Toolbar that lets you integrate CircleUp with your Outlook contacts in real time, right inside of Outlook, for free

There are many other improvements that can be seen by clicking here. These features continue to make CircleUp even easier to use with your groups, teams, clubs and business contacts.

When we first started CircleUp, our main concern was to make sure that our solution mapped to the problem consumers find most extremely painful—efficient communication in groups.  We’re social animals, and participating in a wide variety of communities is a normal way of life for all of us.  Email and IM have become the standard for communications among those groups, whether in sports, school, volunteerism, politics, online gaming, or even business.  Our goal is to take the basic, extremely powerful tools we all use today and dramatically expand their efficiency where it counts the most -with the circles of people we interact with every day.
 

What do you think about CircleUp?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Web Site:  www.answerbag.com
Headquarters:  Santa Monica, Calif.
Year Founded:  2003
Founder:  Joel Downs
Investors:  *Answerbag is owned by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media, which acquired the company in 2006.
Company News:  www.demandmedia.com/news-media.asp

By Joel Downs, Founder and CEO

What is Answerbag?

Answerbag.com is more than a leading, independent social knowledge platform and online destination.  To the many users, Answerbag is a community of people helping others.  Users can ask questions, share answers and collaboratively evaluate information, while building a permanent archive of knowledge and experience.  Other sites that share the Answerbag platform—bloggers, web publishers, etc.—leverage the company’s knowledge platform to provide live, social Q&A to their audiences.  Answerbag’s mission is to help people find and share knowledge.

As of February 2008, Answerbag has 236,000 registered members who have asked more than 500,000 questions.  The site receives over 10,000 answers per day (totaling 2.1 million answers to date since the site’s creation) that are provided in response to the 1,500 daily questions that are received across 6,000 categories.  Additionally, Answerbag serves Q&A to 5-and-a-half million unique visitors per month.

What is Social Q&A, and How is Answerbag Different?

In 2006, Answerbag was the first social Q&A site to add both Image Answers and Video Answers, allowing their members to express themselves in new ways and share knowledge in whatever medium is most appropriate.  Questions like “how do you do a wheelie?” or “how do you bathe a baby?” are very hard to answer using straight text, so Video Answers were added to meet that need.

What is the Answerbag Platform?

In an effort to open up its database of questions and answers, Answerbag created the first and only Social Q&A platform that allows other web sites to tap into its active, established community and deep archive of vetted answers.  Through its API, partner sites can read Q&A and allow their users to contribute Q&A directly to the Answerbag database.  Those questions are then seen by any site on the platform, and users of any of those sites may provide answers, providing a true open question-answering community across the entire platform.  When using the Answerbag API, partner sites are charged a nominal fee for making calls to the API, and they can then monetize the traffic however they wish.

For sites that don’t have the resources to take advantage of the API, Answerbag provides a white-label version of their site, as well as a widget that offers Answerbag Q&A in a module that can be skinned to match the partner’s site.  When using the white-label solution, Answerbag can share revenue with the partner, so they benefit from the Q&A activity of their members.

Answerbag Widget:

White-Label Implementation of Answerbag:

Answerbag’s Social Q&A Platform is ideal for publishers or e-commerce sites that would like to add community or customer support to their sites.  Using the API, the white-label solution, or the widgets, publishers can share Q&A in any category they choose.

Answerbag’s questions are separated into a taxonomy of 3,600 categories, with categories as broad as “Real Estate” or “Autos” to categories as narrow as “Particle Physics” and “Mormon Dating.”  This deep categorization allows publishers to choose relevant Q&A for their users, no matter what vertical they focus on.

Answerbag’s target market is anyone who is looking for information.  Like a traditional search application, just about anyone can benefit from the experience, opinions, and archived, vetted answers found on Answerbag.  Its members are 55 percent male, 45 percent female and 50 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34.  Currently, Answerbag’s social Q&A experience is only available to English-speakers.

People are naturally inclined to share their knowledge, and using their Social Q&A Platform, Answerbag allows the people of the world to share not just information but knowledge with each other, to improve each others’ lives, and benefit the global society.

Answerbag was founded in July, 2003 by Joel Downs and purchased by Demand Media, Inc., in 2006.  The company is located at the Demand Media headquarters in Santa Monica, California.
 

What do you think about Answerbag?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Web Site:  www.thinkpassenger.com
Headquarters:  Los Angeles
Year Founded:  2005
Founders:  Andrew Leary and Justin Cooper
Investors:  Shelter Capital Partners

By Justin Cooper, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing

Most forward thinking marketers would agree that the advertising and marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years with the dawn of web 2.0 and the powerful influences of social media.  As more and more consumers embrace social media as a way to communicate with each other, marketers are clamoring to tap into this relatively new medium and its vast influence.  Perhaps the greatest marriage of social media and marketing can be found in the engagement of targeted consumers with an established brand in a collaborative process of “co-creating.”

Passenger has built upon the idea of co-creating by redefining collaboration to bridge the communication gap between businesses and their most valued customers.  This rich, interactive experience is about meaningful relationships that turn dialogue and on-demand access to opinions into actionable insight.  The ability to capture and gain a clear understanding of the human context in which these collaborative activities take place will drive business innovation and growth while empowering your customers.  Passenger’s mission is to make these collaborative relationships possible through an incredibly user-friendly platform.

What is Passenger?

Passenger essentially bridges the gap between technology and everyday brand management by enabling the simple deployment of private brand communities which create collaborative relationships between brands and their most passionate consumers.  The conversations within these communities provide companies with timely, actionable insight, while empowering consumers through ownership of ideas and driving positive word of mouth.  Passenger’s on-demand technology platform is designed for those companies and organizations that view their customers not merely as a target, but as an integral part of their business process.

Passenger allows brands to take part in the discussions their customers are already having, and not only provides brands with the who, what, where and when of marketing, but also the most important aspect, which is the WHY!  The Why is something marketers have not been able to answer in the past, but now they can with Passenger.

Passenger is delivered “Software-as-a-Service,” which means customers benefit from continuous feature enhancements as well as the flexibility to segment and seamlessly launch additional communities as business needs change.

What are the Benefits of Customer Collaboration?

One inherent benefit of customer collaboration is a brand’s ability to drive advocacy.  “Advocates” are those individuals who are fully committed to a brand beyond the typical relationship of brand and customer.  They express the greatest level of involvement with the brand by being active, vocal and proud.  These people have an emotional bond with the brands that they regularly use.

Their lifestyle mirrors that of the brand and they are proactive in talking about their brand experience with others.  By engaging its Advocates, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they do it.  Marketers that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and will ultimately endure the test of time.

Those who choose to embrace customer collaboration will benefit greatly from customers who feel empowered through ownership of ideas.  It gives customers the feeling of ownership which promotes active participation and a desire to accumulate more knowledge about the brand or product.  Those customers who feel more informed have the ability to drive more favorable opinions with their peers; therefore delivering the most trusted and effective marketing practice: “Word of Mouth.”

How is Passenger Different from Traditional Customer Relationship Management?

Until recently, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was the default solution to manage customer decisions.  But in reality, the systems only help manage the marketer’s needs, not the customer’s.  The fragmentation of traditional media has made it increasingly more difficult to locate your customer, let alone catch them at a time when they’re receptive to listening.  Randomly manufactured “opinion leader” teams are not only costly, they also jeopardize the authenticity of the messaging.  Marketers who continue to rent someone else’s customers to talk about their brand are simply ignoring their own customers who continue to remain un-tapped.

Unlike traditional CRM, Passenger identifies and collaborates with key customer segments and leverages socially-networked, existing customers to acquire new customers.

Passenger drives customer advocacy through ownership of ideas and provides the ability to analyze vital customer and competitive insight.  Through this insight we can identify emerging market trends and discover/refine new opportunities in the areas of new product innovation, service ideas and creative concepts.

Ultimately, Passenger can acquire a longitudinal view of customer attitudes and preferences and can analyze how these change over time, something traditional CRM can only scrape the surface of.

Who Is Using Passenger?

Leading brands such as Coca-Cola, ABC Television and Sara Lee are leveraging Passenger to easily deploy private brand communities.

Who is Passenger?

Passenger is a privately held start-up based in Los Angeles, and was founded in 2005 by Andrew Leary, chief executive officer, and myself.  The roots of Passenger stem back to early 2002, when Andrew and I met while developing consumer advocacy programs for one of the world’s largest mobile phone companies.  Over the next few years, we continued to observe the changing marketplace; specifically the proactive role that consumers were taking in both marketing and product innovation.  Identifying a real shift in the consumer dynamic, we brought our collective expertise in customer-driven marketing and pioneering spirit to form Passenger; determined to bridge the gap between brands and their most valued assets—their customers.

Passenger is the leader in on-demand customer collaboration.  Passenger assists companies with identifying and managing an ongoing dialogue with their most valued customers.  Fortune 500 companies are leveraging Passenger to engage customers in a collaborative environment that empowers the customer, while driving business innovation and growth.

The company is backed by Shelter Capital Partners.  Passenger’s advisory board members include Shawn Gold, SVP, marketing & content of MySpace.com; Daniel Walker, former chief talent officer of Apple; Nelson Gayton, Wharton School adjunct professor; Art Bilger, managing partner of Shelter Capital Partners, and Dr. Bahram Nour-Omid, partner of Shelter Capital Partners.

What do you think about Passenger?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Web Site:  www.ehow.com
Headquarters:  Santa Monica, California
Year Founded:  1999
Customers:  More than 13 million per month
Investors:  *eHow is owned by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media, which acquired the company in 2006.

by Gregory Boudewijn, eHow General Manager

eHow is a rich content web site where professional experts and people with expertise can come together and share their knowledge to create and contribute to a growing library of “how-to” information.  Every month, more than 13 million people visit eHow to learn how to do just about everything.  eHow has more than 150,000 articles and is growing by the thousands each month thanks to its easy-to-use publishing tools, which enable professional experts and members to express their knowledge through text, images and video.  Video is becoming an increasingly important medium for how-to information and eHow continues to focus on building its user tools and video library.  In the near future, video will become a prominent part of the eHow experience and compliment the text articles.

The eHow web site is more than just a reference library where users can find comprehensive and useful how-to information.  eHow fosters a conversation between readers and experts through a robust set of social network tools that launched in April 2007.  Readers share their thoughts and expertise through ratings, comments, person-to-person messaging and community forums.  They can also build a network of friends around their interests.  Putting a face behind each piece of content lets eHow add depth to the readership experience.  Finding useful how-to information is important, but connecting readers to experts and creating a dialogue is invaluable.

eHow was originally founded in March 1999 with close to $30 million in funding.  At that time, the company employed 200 professional writers and had a team of 25 engineers.  By 2001, eHow’s library contained thousands of accurate and helpful articles.  The combination of professional writing and major advertising across radio and television briefly made eHow one of the Internet's top ten news and information sites.

Despite the increased brand awareness and popularity of the site, eHow was not profitable and was forced to declare bankruptcy.  In 2001, IdeaExchange.com bought eHow out of bankruptcy with the hope of charging eHow’s readers to access its how-to articles.  Unfortunately, eHow remained unprofitable and was sold in 2004 to Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah.  Approximately five years after the company was launched as a 200-person operation, Herrick and Hannah and one other person maintained the eHow library of thousands of articles themselves.

Between March 2004 and April 2006, eHow traffic increased from 250,000 to over 4 million visitors per month, which attracted the attention of the founders of the yet-to-be-formed Demand Media, Inc.  Demand Media was subsequently founded through the acquisition of eHow and a handful of other companies.  eHow is one of Demand Media’s top media web sites and leverages the company’s core proprietary platform, which fuels user-driven publishing and community development while dynamically optimizing properties to maximize advertising revenue.  eHow’s vision and focus is directly aligned with its parent company’s core strategy of empowering the user, creating distribution channels and compensating them for content.

What do you think about eHow?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com