StartUp Beat

Company:  rSitez, Inc.

Web Site:  www.rsitez.com

Headquarters:  Sparks, NV

Year Founded:  2007

Founders:  Rohan Hall, Sylvie Hall

Investor:  Private Investors

Employees:  10

By Rohan Hall, Founder and CEO

Web 3.0 - Monetizing Social Networks

Web 3.0 will be about monetizing social networks.  Entrepreneurs will use social networks to create revenue from advertising, membership fees and service fees.  Non-profits and associations will collect donation, association fees, event fees and convention fees online.  And corporations will be able to target products and services to specific audiences while having full control of their brand.  They will not be able to do this with the current large generic social networking sites.  They will need to do this with their own targeted branded site where they have total control of the site, content, and revenue.

I had a discussion about this concept with my wife, who is also my business partner, two years ago.  My wife was an EMEA Manager at Oracle.  I owned an ERP technology consulting firm whose clients included PeopleSoft, Honda, Sierra Pacific Resources and other multinational organizations.  It was clear to us that the benefits of online social networks had not yet reached many corporations, groups and organizations—some of which had offline networks with millions of members.  In addition, I realized that entrepreneurs like myself had not yet figured out how to capitalize on social networking.

Many could not afford or did not have the ‘know how’ to build a complex application like this from scratch.  The unexplored value of social networking is found in its potential to easily attract and monetize existing or new networks, but this value was not available to everyone.

rSitez evolved from this epiphany.  We provide an application where entrepreneurs, corporations, associations, non-profits, and any other group, individual or organization can create an online social network in minutes and monetize this network.  The entire process to create and start monetizing a new social networking site with our application takes less than 30 minutes.  What’s great about this for our clients is that we do practically everything for them.  We create a full-featured Web 2.0 site with blogs, chat, IM, photos, video, personal profile, groups, forums, newsletters, email and a variety of other features; we host the site for them or our enterprise customers can host the site themselves; we provide 7 days/24 hours support for our customers;  we provide regular upgrades and add the latest technology innovations at no additional cost to the product; we provide daily backups and security features; and we provide a variety of monetization features.  We also provide full customization services to clients who want to modify the software to further meet their business needs.

Because no technical skills are needed to create or manage our sites, we believe that our platform will continue to provide opportunities for everyday individuals and groups who would like to benefit from the social networking trend.  Not only are our clients able to turn on monetization features, but they can easily turn these features off as well.   Our customers are given full control of the site, content, members, revenue, and other features.

The results have been extremely successful for both us and our clients.  We continue to grow our customer base and revenue month over month.  We were profitable the 2nd month after launching the business and continue to be profitable today.  We generate revenue from licensing fees, hosting fees, advertising, and consulting fees.  We will also introduce transaction processing fees in the future.  We are privately funded and will be seeking investment to expand our market presence in the near future.

This month is our one year anniversary and we are in the process of releasing Version 3.0 of our product where we will release a variety of new features and additional monetization options for our clients.  We look forward to continued success for both ourselves and our clients in the coming future.

rSitez - www.rsitez.com

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Web Site: www.plandone.com

Headquarters: Petaluma, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: A.J. Wacaser

Investors: Privately funded

Employees: 4

By A.J. Wacaser, Founder and CEO

PlanDone is a disruptive project planning tool that is transforming the web-based project collaboration market.  Designed to help companies and their teams complete projects on time, PlanDone is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) social project planning application that utilizes web 2.0 features such as instant messaging and wikis to help distributed teams work together more efficiently and effectively.

After managing a team of software engineers in India and California while reporting to managers in California, Illinois, and Amsterdam, I grew frustrated with missed deadlines and incomplete projects using complex, bulky tools not designed for efficient communication.  I found the use of email, traditional project software and document editors ineffective and I knew there had to be a better way to collaborate.

After many years of research and development, in 2006 I developed what would later be called PlanDone, web-based project collaboration software to help small-to-medium sized businesses manage and complete their projects.

Most project team members have no formal training as professional project managers and are left to use linear, static tools and processes in isolated meeting spaces.  PlanDone prevents commonly experienced problems with managing projects such as accessing the most current document.  These problems are solved by providing a centralized, interactive platform designed to gather and capture critical pieces of information such as files, guidance, goals or ideas within an open, flexible framework.

PlanDone also organizes, prioritizes, schedules and enables better communication in a maintenance-free, hosted application that is easy to use for staff members at every level of the company.  The software was designed to support people in the way they work naturally—not forcing them to change their working style based on the confines of the software features.

Unlike other products, PlanDone has a built-in wiki system for tracking recent changes, a priority ranking system for differentiating task importance, an instant message system that captures chat information directly into the supporting documentation and a projected deadline system for accurately pinpointing end dates with certainty.  PlanDone avoids the back and forth document version confusion by dynamically tracking the most current version in the wiki and providing clear expectations as action steps to team members of their prioritized tasks and due dates.  Teams report higher productivity, more accurate deadline projections, greater ability to get back up to speed, and reduction in miscommunication and confusion over shared roles.

Business Model

IDC forecasts that the small and medium-sized business (SMB) enterprise applications market will grow to $80.3 billion by the end of 2012, representing a 10.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2008-2012 period.  PlanDone fits nicely in this market and offers users a subscription-based model—either month-to-month at $16 per user for up to three users or discounted six and 12 month packages.  PlanDone’s services are best suited for small-to-medium sized business in the following industries: consulting, healthcare and manufacturing, but any industry that wants to cut costs and save time with distributed team planning and task management implementation can benefit from PlanDone’s solution.

Current Needs

We are currently evaluating early stage investment firms that have experience in the web 2.0 field to bring in seasoned management teams.

AJ Wacaser has more than 15 years of experience working in public and private software companies in desktop and web development.  He has managed numerous teams around the globe.

Previously AJ was the Web Development Manager at KnowledgePoint, an HR software company in Petaluma, Calif.  He helped guide development through the dot com boom/bust and helped many small businesses with a suite of pay-per-use, on-demand HR productivity tools such as HRTools.com, JobDescription.com, PerformanceReview.com and PersonnelPolicy.com.  These products are currently owned by Administaff.  When HRTools.com launched in 1999, the site was selected as a Codie Award finalist.

AJ graduated from Augustana College, and earned a M.A. in Environmental Planning from the University of Illinois.

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Web Site: www.sightmind.com

Headquarters: Fremont, California

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: Angie Wong

Employees: 4

By Kim Rubin, CEO

SightMind is a national Internet Protocol-based (IP) video surveillance, networking and security company.  We utilize IP-based digital video technology to provide local government agencies, educational institutions and large industrial facilities with the most technologically advanced service in its industry.  We have distinguished ourselves among more than 16,000 vendors and installers in the U.S. market today through the recent launch of our new SightMind franchise opportunity.

The company is a one-of-a-kind business opportunity in a highly fragmented market.  For independents, others in related industries or even newcomers to the field, the SightMind business investment comes with a proven business model, processes and necessary support tools to gain a significant competitive advantage.

As a seasoned entrepreneur with four prior technology businesses under my belt, I plan to grow the business from its home market in Northern California eastward across the country through franchising.

With the networked video surveillance industry reaching a sustained 44-percent annual growth rate, the switch from ageing analog cameras to sophisticated networked security systems will further propel the segment’s growth to new heights.  The sophisticated, reliable IP-based digital surveillance systems are proven to reduce theft, vandalism and injury claims.  System software delivers core business values such as locating parking spaces and reading license plates automatically, using a resolution 32-times greater than that of an average analog camera.

The sophisticated capabilities of our networked video systems not only provide direct cost-savings to many of our business-to-business customers, but also improve customer service and can help organizations focus on running and growing their business.  Every system we install has network monitoring, redundant storage and a system maintenance contract with up to a five-year service agreement.  Today’s systems deliver proven business benefits, which is what is driving the extreme industry growth.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: SightMind" »

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Web Site: www.ourstage.com
Headquarters: Chelmsford, Massachusetts
Year Founded: 2007
Founder: Ben Campbell
Investor: Signature Capital
Employees: 36

By Ben Campbell, Founder and CEO

OurStage is a brand new way for the world to discover the best new music—and for the industry to discover the best new artists.  Our goal is to solve the single greatest challenge facing the music industry in the new world order—separating out the truly great artists from the millions of people marketing their music online today.  At its simplest level, OurStage uses the work and the wisdom of the broader Internet community to rank from best to worst (not rate as in one to five stars) the music of thousands of emerging artists each month.  We use this information to produce rankings or charts to allow consumers to easily find and stream the very best new music—and to allow industry players (venues, sponsors, music labels, etc.) to identify who the best new artists are, and subsequently give them job opportunities.

The ranking process is done in our unique judging engine, which leverages an extraordinary series of proprietary anti-gaming technologies, preventing overzealous individuals from unfairly inflating the ranking of any given artist.  We are totally artist-agnostic.  In other words, we are not focused solely on “independent” artists.  We are focused on new artists and new music.  Artists on OurStage may be free of any association with any label, may be signed to a small independent label, or even signed to a major label.  We are about discovering the best new music, regardless of the source, as opposed to discovering the historical music catalogue of the major record labels, which is what most other “music discovery” sites do.

OurStage has enjoyed dramatic growth and general market acceptance since our launch less than two years ago.  We currently have more than 50,000 member artists, 250,000 registered users and two million unique monthly visitors.  In addition, several artists have achieved career-altering success as a result of exposure on OurStage.  Artists have garnered record label and publishing contracts, booking agent deals, mentoring sessions with major artists, profiles in national publications, and performance opportunities to tour and open for major acts and participate at major music festivals.

In early 2008, we began a very successful partnership with the world’s largest music site, AOL Music, to share some of our content with their community.  We’ve recently partnered with the world’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation, to offer opening slots at major performances to top-ranked OurStage artists through our talent and gig finder service, Marketplace.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: OurStage" »

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Web Site: www.tricklestar.com
Headquarters: Hong Kong
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Bernard Emby and Thomas Joergensen
Investors: Self-funded
Employees: 2 full-time

By Bernard Emby, Co-Founder 

TrickleStar has developed a range of energy-saving products with a strong focus on those which help to reduce the amount of standby power consumed by PC and TV accessory devices.  These types of devices are in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and standby power is a big problem that can be alleviated with the use of TrickleStar’s products.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: TrickleStar" »

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Web Site: www.socialvibe.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Joe Marchese, Brandon Mills, David Levy
Investors: Redpoint Ventures
Employees: 24

By Joe Marchese, President and Co-Founder

SocialVibe.com is a new social media platform that facilitates interaction between people, the brands they love and the causes they care about.  SocialVibe is truly reinventing advertising by recognizing the power of the people within social media and converting media dollars into charitable donations.  We recognize that individuals hold the key to generating attention and wielding influence in social media.  It’s a powerful new way for brands to interact with people and it’s changing the way brands participate in social media.

Some time ago we realized that to crack the social media code, more power needed to be in the hands of the people who were creating the content; to be able to choose the advertising they are aligned with, and to allow people and the causes they cared about to benefit in meaningful ways from sharing their influence.

SocialVibe allows people to choose a brand to support, earning chances to get brand perks and points within SocialVibe.  The points that members earn are then turned into funds for the charitable cause of their choice.  SocialVibe is aligned with such brands as Coca-Cola, Adobe, NBA, Sprint and Nestle.  Most importantly, SocialVibe.com has partnered with the most requested non-profits in the space including Komen for the Cure, WWF, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, Invisible Children, One Laptop per Child, PETA and Donors Choose. I don’t know that there is anyone right now doing what we are doing, but then again if I thought there was we wouldn’t have started this business.  The idea that people can band together online to make a big difference in the real world is what social media is all about.  In social media, people are media and only with peoples’ explicit permission can brands find their way into their online profiles.  SocialVibe tries to recognize all of this.

It was SocialVibe’s members that led the site to where it is today: people caring about social issues but not having the monetary means to make a difference.  When we founded SocialVibe, the idea was simply that people controlled all the valuable attention and influence that brands wanted and that the people should get to decide how that value gets shared.  We weren’t “charity” themed, we were actually “member choice” themed.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: SocialVibe" »

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Web Site: www.sodahead.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Jason Feffer, CEO, and Michael Glazer, President
Investors: Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, Ron Conway, Mission Ventures
Employees: 22 

By Jason Feffer

Continue reading "Featured Company: Big Moving Pictures" »

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Web Site: www.envysion.com 

Headquarters: Louisville, Colorado

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: Dan Caruso, Executive Chairman

Investors: Columbia Capital; High Country Venture; Bear Equity

By Matt Steinfort, CEO

Envysion provides a web-based video management service that enables organizations with multiple locations to use remote video to improve performance and profitability.  Envysion Video is an enterprise-level solution that transforms traditional surveillance video into a strategic management tool that enables increases in efficiency, quality, brand consistency and the bottom line.

Envysion Video solves two main problems.  The first is how to make video of multiple locations accessible to people throughout an organization.  Envysion Video allows authorized users to view, search and share live and recorded video of any number of locations via a single password-protected web interface.  Users can watch, analyze and improve whatever aspect of the organization they are involved with, whether it is security and loss prevention, operations, marketing, training or human resources.

The second is how to enable users to quickly find specific video.  By integrating video with a customer’s point of sale (POS) or other event-based business data, Envysion enables users to click on events in a report (such as "voids" or sales of a certain product) and immediately see the associated video.  Users can also create custom reports and receive automatic alerts when business rules that they define have been broken.

Founder's Story

Dan Caruso, Chairman of the Board of Envysion, Inc., was one of the founding executives of Level 3 Communications.  From inception in 1997 through 2000, Dan was responsible for engineering, construction and operations.  Between 2001 and 2003, he was responsible for most of the company's lines of business and marketing functions.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Envysion" »

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Web Site: www.mocana.com

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Year Founded: 2004

Founder: Adrian Turner, CEO

Investors: Southern Cross Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures

Total Capital Raised: $12.1 million

Employees: 30

Company News: www.mocana.com/press.html

By Adrian Turner, Founder and CEO

Mocana is a security software company that delivers comprehensive protection for any embedded device or “thing” connected to the network.  This includes smartphones, PDAs, routers, switches, printers or VoIP phones, but also more everyday items like automobiles, home appliances, cash registers, power meters and HVAC equipment.  These “attached devices” are quickly outnumbering PCs.  Forrester Research predicts that there will be more than 14 billion devices on the net by 2010—and that 95 percent of these devices will be something other than a PC.

Product Line

Mocana offers its Device Security Framework (DSF) to deliver comprehensive protection for any device connected to any network, wired or wireless.  The Device Security Framework is made up of over a dozen separate Mocana product offerings that reside at different places on the device, network, or application stack to provide comprehensive device security and management.  Some of the DSF offerings are NanoSSL, NanoSSH, NanoUpdate, NanoBoot, NanoRadius and NanoSec.  Mocana’s DSF is designed for device manufacturers and service providers and includes design processes and software that are embedded into devices during the manufacturing process.  All components of the Device Security Framework feature an asynchronous event driven architecture, very high performance and very small memory footprint specifically designed for the special challenges that embedded device security engineers face.

The newest addition to the Device Security Framework is NanoDefender, an embedded Intrusion Prevention System technology that secures all aspects of a device: communications, identity, access, privilege, control and execution.  The new product, now being offered to device manufactures, enables product engineers to create a rules base of acceptable behavior for any applications running on the new device.  If an application begins behaving erratically due to malware or some other security threat, NanoDefender terminates the application so that the malware can’t spread across the network or impact the functioning of the device.

It’s clear that the existing “signature-based” model of detecting and eliminating viruses and malware can’t work forever—and it can’t work at all in the device environment.  That’s because there’s just too much bad stuff out there.  With millions of malware signatures required inside any antivirus product today—and 3,000 new viruses and malware signatures being added every hour of every day—there’s just no way an attached device would be able to keep updated or dedicate the processing power needed to screen all traffic against all virus signatures.  By turning the current “virus signature” security model on its head, NanoDefender monitors behavior against a rules base of acceptable actions, and thereby frees up administrators from having to monitor this rapidly-expanding army of viruses, trojans, worms and other malware at all.  It also provides a broader net for catching future Internet-based threats, since it does not rely on specific signature-based fixes.

The “Internet of Things”

The rate at which mobile devices are proliferating is staggering.  In fact, there are predictions that the number of devices on the Internet could reach far into the billions in the next three years.  According to a white paper by Harbor Research, there are approximately 2.8 billion mobile phones in use today, with 1.6 million new ones added daily.  Whether you call this phenomenon “the network of devices” or the “Internet of things,” the underlying message is the same: connectivity permeates our society.  Nearly everything in our day-to-day lives—from TVs and cell phones to cars, medical devices, networking equipment, thermostats, industrial sensors, aircraft and home appliances, and everything in between, connects (or will soon connect) to the network to operate.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Mocana" »

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Web Site: www.reliantaudit.com
Headquarters: Laguna Niguel, California
Year Founded: 2006
Founder: Dipak Shah
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 26
Company News: www.reliantaudit.com/news_events

By Dipak Shah

Reliant provides software and consulting services for chief audit executives who want to reduce the high cost, complexity and uncertainty of enterprise-wide audits.  To effectively manage risk, auditors need efficient audit processes, reliable test data and continuous visibility into risks, controls and audit results at any time.  Reliant delivers all of these and more with the only continuous risk management solution for auditors.  With Reliant, organizations can continuously monitor controls, streamline audit operations, automate control testing and remediation, and implement a dynamic risk framework that shows up-to-the-minute status of audit programs.  Using pre-packaged, standards-based controls for compliance, operational and financial audits, we help organizations reduce risk while gaining efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.

Audit has traditionally been a labor-intensive effort that requires huge amounts of manpower and time at the end of every quarter and fiscal year.  During this time, other operations can come to a screeching halt as resources are poured into the audit efforts.  As everyone who has gone through an audit will tell you, this is not an efficient process.  But there’s something else that gets lost; the business intelligence and business process management improvements that you can derive from continuous risk management.

And that’s how Reliant is different.  It would be hard to find a company today that is looking at risk in a continuous manner.  A controller may know the balance in bank accounts at any given time.  Your COO may know the inventory at any time.  There are even compliance managers who can look back and identify where risk has occurred using spreadsheets.  However, if you ask a CEO or CFO if they know where the risks are high for their business on a given day, all they will have are some static reports from the past.  This is where Reliant’s continuous risk management will fundamentally change how businesses view audit.  We enable companies to observe, understand, manage, and remediate risk continuously throughout the quarter, instead of waiting until the end of the quarter for the avalanche of financial reports.

Reliant Solutions helps to improve efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Reliant Solutions" »

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By CaseyRyan, CEO

TickerMine is a collector of real-time channel and point-of-sale market data.  The company allows its customer base to integrate TickerMine’s real time data into current analysis of stock investment ideas, or a portfolio review.  Data can also be used by business professionals to track competitors, identify trends, or spot new opportunities in the market that are being revealed daily at the point of sale.

TickerMine was founded by me and three additional partners who were experiencing the significant changes in the financial research industry on a first hand basis.  Before founding TickerMine (and currently serving as CEO), I worked as a sell side equity research analyst.  While working at Wells Fargo Securities and then Nollenberger Capital Partners, I saw the strong need for primary data on the companies and industries that I covered.  The ability to source accurate, real-time information did not exist in equity research departments and the money to hire outside consultants did not exist, as trading commissions were squeezed and revenues for broker dealer firms fell between 2000 and 2007.

My partners and I developed a method to collect large sets of primary point of sale data, efficiently and cost effectively.  The view became one of offering this valuable service to the broader financial community with the belief that if analysts needed this type of data it meant that most investors and money managers needed the data as well.

Continue reading "Featured Company: TickerMine" »

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Continue reading "Featured Company: Syncplicity" »

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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.

Continue reading "4/22/08 - Featured Company: College Tonight" »

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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.

Continue reading "4/16/08 - Featured Company: ADOOGA" »

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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.

Continue reading "4/8/08 - Featured Company: Pluggd" »

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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.

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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