Category: Misc

Over the past year, Groupon has become a rocket-powered social shopping phenomenon — it is one of the fastest-growing startups in decades, is valued at more than $1 billion, and expects to close the year with almost $500 million in revenue. That has gotten the attention of several newspaper chains, since they used to be the primary conduit between local advertisers and deal-hungry consumers: Cox Media Group is the latest to jump on the group-buying train, with the launch of a Groupon clone called DealSwarm. But news publishers may well be too late to this particular game, just as they failed to recognize the competitive threat that Craigslist represented.

Cox is launching its service in Atlanta, Austin, Dayton and Seattle but says it plans to roll out into other major markets nationwide over the next year. The media group claims that it will offer “outrageous online discounts of 50 percent or more on local dining, entertainment and other services from some of the most popular local businesses.” As with Groupon and other group-buying services, users register for alerts and are offered discounts by local retailers that only apply for a certain time period, or are only available if a certain number of users or customers sign up for them.

The media company doesn’t mention Groupon by name, but says that its offering is different from “others in the group-buying space” because its local media properties have already established a relationship between readers, viewers and listeners of its newspapers and radio/TV stations and local retailers, and Cox notes that all of these media outlets will be promoting the deals in question so that advertisers get more exposure. All of which makes a lot of sense — so much sense that it’s a wonder newspapers didn’t think of offering those kinds of services before, given those relationships with local advertisers.

The biggest problem for ventures like Cox’s, of course — and for similar efforts such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s “Steals” offering — is that Groupon is already such a dominant force in a number of major markets, and is becoming the go-to brand name when it comes to group buying, not just in the U.S. but around the world as it has been acquiring competitors in other countries. Meanwhile, some newspaper publishers such as McClatchy have taken what seems like a smarter route and are partnering directly with Groupon for group-buying offers.

This presumably gives Groupon a large cut of the proceeds, but at least it maintains some of the existing relationship between newspapers and their local advertisers, which is one of the few weapons that many publishers have left with which to fight off irrelevance.

As millions more people tweet, blog, comment and update their status every day, the difficulty of finding signal in all that noise increases exponentially. Some services try to filter all of that social-media content by keyword, or location, or use algorithms to determine whether someone shares your interests. Klout, a two-year-old startup based in San Francisco, is trying to build a database of influence that can determine how influential an individual user is on social networks — that is, how much impact the content they create has on others around them. The company today announced that it has expanded beyond its traditional reliance on data from Twitter and is now indexing content from Facebook as well, with a view towards becoming the dominant measure of influence “across the social web.”

Measuring influence isn’t just something that Klout wants to do in order to make users feel good about themselves, or so that it can give them badges for passing certain milestones (although it does that as well). The reality is that as social media and social networks have become a larger and larger phenomenon, marketing agencies and companies have become increasingly interested in using these networks and services to target specific demographics, and to target “influencers” within specific topic areas who can help spread their message. So the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is using Klout scores to build a group of influencers it can approach with special offers, and Virgin Airlines offered special rates to Twitter users with high Klout scores.

[inline-pro-content] Twitter is obviously only part of the social web, however, and until now Klout has been restricted to measuring influence solely on the basis of tweets and re-tweets. Data from potentially hundreds of millions of Facebook users could change that dramatically (provided they want to connect their Facebook accounts to the service, that is). In a blog post, Ash Rust — the company’s “director of ranking” and a former “relevance engineer” at OneRiot — says Klout has been working for several months to analyze Facebook accounts and determine how influence functions on the social network, which sees more than 30 billion pieces of content shared every month.

Unlike some services that simply look at the number of Twitter followers or Facebook friends a person has, Rust says Klout looks at a user’s “ability to drive action,” or their ability to influence others to click and say they “like” something or share a piece of content, post a comment, etc. On Twitter, the service looks at statistics such as the number of followers a user has, or how often their messages are re-tweeted, but also looks at several different levels of influence — for example, how often a user’s messages are re-tweeted by other users who have a high level of influence. The company then ranks a user on metrics such as “reach” and “amplification,” as well as the size and influence of their larger social graph.

Rust admits in his post that Facebook allows users to “interact with their friends in more complex ways than we’ve previously seen,” and that it will take some work to come up with an accurate picture of what that means. But the payoff for coming up with an authoritative ranking of influence across two of the largest and fastest-growing social networks could be substantial — and Klout is already partway down that road, since its data is already integrated into a number of leading Twitter tools and services such as HootSuite and Seesmic. Other companies in the same space include PeerIndex and TwitterGrader.

In the race to attract attention from startups and entrepreneurs, angel investors appear to be winning, and that is accelerating an ongoing shift in the venture capital market — what some would argue is a maturation of the startup-funding model. A new survey shows that startups are increasingly turning to angels not just for their initial rounds of funding but for subsequent rounds as well, and the most recent data on the VC industry shows that traditional venture funds have only raised $9 billion so far this year, a significant drop from the amount raised in previous years. Insiders have been arguing for some time that the VC business needed to get smaller, and it appears to be doing that in more ways than one.

The latest figures from the National Venture Capital Association show that the amount raised by traditional funds in 2010 is just a little over half the $16 billion they accumulated in 2009, and dramatically lower than the $28 billion that was raised in 2008, or the $35 billion that traditional funds managed to pull in during 2007. The NVCA report also notes that the amount raised to date in 2010 was boosted by the closing of a $750-million fund at Menlo Park, California-based Institutional Venture Partners. President Mark Heesen said the industry was “experiencing a period of time in which venture capital investment is consistently outpacing fundraising, creating an industry that will be considerably smaller in the next decade.”

Meanwhile, as startups require smaller rounds in order to get moving — and are more likely to get acquired than building up to a giant IPO — angels are coming to the forefront, according to a new survey from Dorsey & Whitney, a Silicon Valley law firm that specializes in advising startups. The survey showed that angels accounted for 59 percent of the funding for startups in the past 12 months, and almost 70 percent of startups said they would be looking for funding from angels for their next round.

Startups who were surveyed said that they turned to angels in part because of a perception that angels understand the needs of startups better, that they have operating experience, and that they can get a deal done quickly. “The two factors that stood out in the survey were that the investor understood the funding needs of the startup — they didn’t push them to take more or less than they needed — and the speed of the deal,” said Dorsey & Whitney partner Ted Hollifield. “Those are parameters that angels tend to do very well on.”

Startups also said they preferred to get financial backing from someone who was a specialist in the space they were hoping to operate in, as well as someone who had operating experience, and were “not particularly interested in brand names.” And the survey also suggested that there may not be a lot of truth to the axiom that startups seek initial funding from angels and then move to traditional VCs for subsequent rounds. “The jump in VC funding was not particularly significant in terms of people taking a second round,” said Hollifield.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for new Digg CEO Matt Williams. The poor guy has only been on the job for a little over a month, after replacing founder Kevin Rose as chief executive in August, and his first major appearance is on a blog post in which he apologizes for all the flaws and missteps in the recent Digg redesign — none of which he was responsible for — and promises to roll back the changes, and restore almost all of the various features that die-hard Digg fans complained about losing. But can all of this apologizing bring back those frustrated users, or have they moved on for good?

Just to recap, Digg launched the new version of the site in late August, after more than a year worth of planning and design. In addition to some stability problems that kept the site down for most of the first day of the launch, and made it unreliable for some time afterward, almost immediately there was a backlash from long-time Digg users about many of the changes. Many were concerned that too much content from mainstream media outlets was making its way to the site’s front page, instead of the quirky or off-beat content that Digg became famous for, and they also criticized the removal of the so-called “bury” button, which users could click in order to vote a story off the site.

While he was still CEO, Rose wrote a blog post in which he agreed that some of the criticisms from users were well placed, and said the site would bring back certain features such as the “Upcoming” page, as well as allowing users to change the default view of the site to a list of most-voted for stories, rather than the new “My News” view, which featured links posted by a user’s friends and accounts they had chosen to subscribe to or “follow.” But the Digg founder remained adamant about some changes, including the removal of the bury button, which he said was necessary to “put a stop to the bury brigades” who would target content and try to get it removed by working as a group.

The new CEO, however, says in his blog post that the bury button is being restored, and that user profiles are also returning, along with better navigation for videos and images, a tool for users to report comment violations and an update to the front-page algorithm. Williams also admits that the launch “didn’t go smoothly” and that the company is “deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process,” and thanks the site’s users for “your patience and your extremely candid feedback.” And he notes in passing that Digg still has 23 million unique visitors a month, a comment that appears aimed at reports of plummeting traffic at the site since the redesign.

On the one hand, responding to criticisms from users is clearly a good thing for a site like Digg to do, since — as the new CEO points out — without that community the site is nothing, and without a loyal user base it isn’t going to be able to compete with other social tools such as Twitter and Facebook that have stolen a lot of its thunder. But what about the reasoning behind those changes? Rose argued that the disappearance of the bury button and other changes were necessary because “power” users of the site had too much influence, a view supported by some prominent Digg users such as former Engadget editor Ryan Block, who said that the redesign “realigns interests and does a lot to remove the incentives to game the system.”

As I argued in a GigaOM Pro piece after the backlash (subscription required), the upheaval at Digg shows just how difficult it is for a social network to change the way it functions on a fundamental level. Many of the changes were clearly designed to blunt the power of hard-core users and make the service more appealing to a broader range of users, but the revolt made it obvious that the changes had seriously alienated some of the site’s loyal fan base. This kind of strategy only works, however, if enough new users arrive to justify the loss of that traditional fan base.

By apologizing for and unwinding most of its recent changes, Digg appears to be admitting that it backed the wrong horse. But will simply restoring the site to the way it worked before be enough to pacify those irritated users — and more importantly, will backtracking so publicly make it even harder for Digg to change and evolve in the future?

Real-time data is becoming a fundamental part of the web, and social gaming is at the forefront of that wave. Market leader Zynga, for example, is famous for tracking hundreds of different metrics about its games in real-time, down to the smallest detail — where its users come from, what they do, when they leave — and making changes to them on a daily or even hourly basis. As the need for real-time data accelerates, so does the need for analytical tools to make sense of it all, a hole that services like Kontagent are hoping to fill. The two-year-old startup just announced a new version of its dashboard that it says gives app and game developers even more real-time tools to work with.

The principle behind Kontagent — which raised a funding round of $1 million earlier this year from a series of angels, including James Hong of HotorNot and Mike Sego of Gaia Online — is that real-time social activity like social games on Facebook require a different kind of analytics than the traditional pageview-centric and click-focused model associated with Google Analytics and Omniture. There are a couple of reasons for that, says Kontagent founder Albert Lai, and one is the fact that traditional analytical tools tend to use data sampling rather than providing true real-time data.

Data sampling — which involves looking at 10 percent or so of the traffic and then extrapolating from that to overall trends — is a bad thing, Lai says, because it fails to capture important info that social-game makers and others need to track the virality of their apps and services. “That 10 percent may not capture the ‘whales’ or power users,” he said. “And that can be really important in terms of tracking your growth.” Traditional pageview-based analytics also doesn’t provide the kind of detail that developers need, Lai argues. “You might know that people came to you through a search for a specific keyword, and at best you might have a cookie, which you assume is the same user — but you don’t have a unique user ID and a demographic profile and the other detail that we have,” he says.

The Kontagent founder also argues that traditional analytics tools like Omniture are a lot more expensive for developers and app-makers because they charge on a per-click or per-action basis. “For some of our customers, like PopCap Games, they have 10 million monthly users,” says Lai. “If they tracked every action with something like Omniture they would bankrupt the company.” Kontagent tracks hundreds of different real-time actions related to more than 70 million monthly unique users across a number of leading game platforms, Lai says.

Other providers of real-time analytics aimed at social apps and games include Mixpanel, which tracks not just games and apps on Facebook but other web-based social apps as well, and just recently launched mobile app tracking for the iPhone. The company, which was founded by former employees of the social-game company Slide (recently acquired by Google), says it is tracking more than a billion user actions per month. Database company Vertica is also making a play for the social-gaming market, offering companies like Zynga the ability to crunch massive amounts of data in order to track what content is the most appealing in real-time.

Google is apparently testing the integration of Twitter within Google News, according to a report from Search Engine Land, which in turn was based on a tip from a reader who apparently saw the experiment in action and posted a snapshot of what it looked like on Twitter. The feature adds a small box to the right-hand side of the page that allows users to login with their Twitter credentials and then “see when people you follow are talking about the news.” Search Engine Land even found a help page about the experiment.

The description of the feature says that it will allow users to “find news articles that your friends are sharing on Twitter,” but notes that the new Friends section will only show articles that can be found in Google News. “If someone you follow has shared an article or a link that cannot be found in Google News, then you will not see that update in the Friends section,” it states. It’s not clear from the description whether the links that Google parses for the feature will include blogs or only traditional mainstream news sources. When you do a search on Google News, the “blogs” category is one of the filters you can choose from the left-hand column, but those articles aren’t included in the typical Google News home-page layout.

In comments last month about Google’s plans to become more social, CEO Eric Schmidt said that the company was not planning to launch any kind of massive Facebook competitor, as some had speculated, but intended to add “a social layer” to its existing services by pulling in data from places like Facebook and Twitter. The experiment with Google News appears to be part of that plan, although whether it will make it to prime time or not — and whether people will actually use it — remains to be seen

Google has made a number of enhancements to try and make its news offering more social, including a redesign earlier this year that added a section called “News For You,” and also allows users to give news sources a thumbs up vote, from which the Google algorithm is supposed to learn what they like. The initial response from readers was not positive, however, so it will be interesting to see what the reaction is to Twitter integration. Among the other ways of reading news links that are recommended by your followers on Twitter are the Paper.li service (which I wrote about here), as well as Twitter Times and a new service called Tumbl.in.

When Wired launched its magazine app for the iPad in May, it got a wave of publicity — in part because it was the first, and also because it released a gee-whiz video pointing out how the ads actually moved, and so on. But now there are more and more iPad magazine apps every day, with Esquire’s only the latest example from the Hearst empire, and one thing is becoming clear: publishers just want you to look at their content, and are hoping you will forget about the Internet and social media and all of those irritating things that get in between you and the consumption of their wonderful content.

Everyone talks about how what publishers love about apps is the ability to charge readers for their content again (especially now that Apple says it will allow them to charge subscriptions). But I think a close second in the motivation sweepstakes is the fact that the app economy marks — for now at least — a return to the good old days when the walled-garden approach to publishing was the norm, and the Internet was just some pesky chat room for nerds. Wired’s app provides a really slick interface to the magazine, but no way of actually sharing any of that content, or of linking it to related content somewhere else — not even to the company’s own website. It’s like an interactive CD-ROM from the 1990s.

The new Esquire app also has plenty of “interactivity,” if you mean the ability to click and watch an ad for a new Lexus, or listen to cover boy Javier Bardem recite a Spanish poem, or swipe your finger and watch a timeline of the construction of the new World Trade Center. All of those are very cool — but if you are looking for the kind of interactivity that allows you to post a comment on a story, or to share a link via Twitter, or to post anything to a blog and then link back to the magazine, you are out of luck. In fact, if you like the app or any of the stories within it, your only option is to close the app and email someone to let them know.

Esquire editor David Granger admits in his editor’s letter for the inaugural iPad issue that magazine apps are “a mixed bag” so far. “They’re convenient, I guess, but boy, some of the added features are either stupid or annoying,” he says — while assuring the reader that the Esquire app is “pretty good [and] it’s certainly not annoying.” I’m going to have to take issue with him there, however; I found it quite annoying in a number of ways.

To take just a few examples, it isn’t clear that you need to tap on the screen once in order to remove the table of contents, which obscures the text and can’t be moved. And whenever you click on the cover image, you have to watch a Lexus ad, or click the “close” button, even if you have seen the ad already. Also, when you click on the Bardem story that is the cover, it’s not obvious that you have to swipe down to see the rest of the story rather than swiping to the right (which moves to the next story). If you swipe right and then go back, of course, you get the ad again and have to watch or close it again. And the ad itself, which is a movie clip, first appears as a tiny square, so you have to tap on it and then use the pinch-expand motion to enlarge it.

But even those are mostly just design irritations — the biggest flaw for me is the total lack of acknowledgement that the device this content appears on is connected to the Internet, and therefore it is possible to connect the content to other places with more information about a topic, or related material of any kind, let alone any kind of social features that allow readers to share the content with their friends. Some magazines have made some tentative steps in this direction, but so far they are few and far between. Meanwhile, Flipboard and Pulse have taken Twitter and Facebook and RSS and turned them into magazines — and much more appealing ones in lots of ways.

About the only magazine that has taken any kind of creative steps in this direction with its iPad app is Gourmet magazine, which used the services of Anil Dash’s Activate design consultancy to come up with an interesting experiment: the Gourmet Live magazine app is what Dash calls a “massively multiplayer magazine.” As you read the contents — and share them via Twitter and Facebook — you gain points and thereby “unlock” new content, in the same way a player would in World of Warcraft. The content that is unlocked in some cases is a profile of a specific person or a set of related recipes.

I’m not convinced that the Gourmet Live approach is going to appeal to the majority of readers, but at least they are trying something different — and they are taking advantage of being connected to social media and the Internet, instead of trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Fred Wilson — the Union Square Ventures partner whose fund has invested in companies such as Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga — came to Toronto earlier this week for a series of meetings with startups and venture investors, and I had a chance to sit down with him and get his thoughts on “AngelGate” and some other things he is interested in. I also sat in on one of the meetings he had at the office of local VC Extreme Venture Partners, followed by a visit to a local DemoCamp organized by local startup advisor David Crow.

Both during the meeting and in an interview with me (a clip from which is embedded below), Wilson said that Toronto reminded him of New York in a number of ways, and that he is looking at startups — both in the city and elsewhere in Canada — that might make for good investments by Union Square, preferably in partnership with Canadian venture capital group that knew the local market and the entrepreneurs involved. In some cases, Wilson said, good ideas come from outside the usual markets of Silicon Valley and Boston and New York because the people in those areas are thinking outside the box.

As an example, Anand Agarawala — founder of BumpTop, the innovative 3-D desktop interface acquired by Google earlier this year — said that he wasn’t sure the startup would have been created if he had been living in Silicon Valley. Not only would there have been “a lot more distractions,” he said, but the idea might never have even occurred to him, since he would have been surrounded by people working on more traditional interfaces. Wilson agreed that in Silicon Valley there are “lots of people doing things in the same ways they always have,” and so creativity — particularly in interface design — isn’t as likely.

The Union Square partner said that he thinks the best cities for startups are “those with a bunch of different industries, because there tends to be more creativity” due to the mix of different backgrounds and skills — although Wilson also freely admitted that Silicon Valley doesn’t really fit that description, and in fact “much of the evidence tends to suggest that I might be wrong.” In any case, he said that Toronto reminds him of New York in part because it has a mix of a number of different industries such as the financial industry, media, advertising and government.

Among the startups that Wilson met with during a morning meeting were Rypple (which recently closed a $7-million funding round), an image-recognition software company called Idee (which has an image-tracking service called TinEye), along with social-game maker Uken Games, health-information site Well.ca, mobile utilities maker Fixmo and news- aggregator Eqentia — whose founder William Mougayar was instrumental in convincing Wilson to come to Toronto.

At the DemoCamp later in the day, Wilson did a short talk, in which he reiterated his 10 golden rules for successful web apps (including speed and instant utility), followed by a question-and-answer session. Among other things, Wilson talked about his belief that the technology business needs bubbles and “really stupid amounts of spending” on certain technologies, in order to create the foundation for future investment. “We overbuilt broadband infrastructure during the last bubble,” he said. “And thank God we did,” since plenty of companies have been built using that cheap infrastructure.

The companies that Wilson judged during DemoCamp included Visibli (an online advertising service formerly known as Assetize), an app called TaskAve — a “Remember The Milk” type of service that was only 10 days old, having been created during a recent Startup Weekend coding contest — as well as Top Hat Monocle, which makes e-learning software, and GuestList, which is building a mobile invitation service. Wilson told GuestList that he liked the fact that they were trying to be simpler than their competitors, but was concerned about their reliance on PayPal, and he told TaskAve that he liked the fact that they were trying to help him remember things, but didn’t like the map as an interface.

Facebook rolled out a comprehensive upgrade to its Groups feature on Wednesday, but judging by some of the responses from both high-profile users and regular Facebook fans, the ability to “tag” anyone and add them to a group automatically is not winning the company much support. For some, this feature appears to be another example of Facebook’s preference for opting people in to new services by default and forcing them to opt out, which it did with the recently launched Facebook Places as well. Others, however, greeted the new Groups with open arms and said that the new features might even replace Twitter for some of their conversations — words that will probably be music to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ears.

One of the more vocal opponents of the new Groups feature is entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo, who published an email he wrote to Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg about being auto-added to a group called NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association). According to Calacanis, he was never asked to join the group, and was not informed that he was “force-joined” to the group. He closed the email by saying: “If you guys want to run these new features by me before you launch
them, I can probably save you from a couple of privacy law suits each year.”

Anil Dash, founder of Expert Labs, said Thursday morning on Twitter: “Oh, Facebook. I wanted to like groups, but now I’m on 50 unwanted email lists. More incompetent defaults, or an attempt to undermine email?” Others complained about a deluge of auto-add emails from Facebook Groups, including Daniel Victor, the online community manager for TED.com, who said Thursday: “I’d rather be invited than added to a group on Facebook. Woke up with 45 unexpected e-mail notifications today. Spammer’s dream.” Among those who also weren’t impressed with the rollout were technology blogger Dwight Silverman and Socialtext co-founder Adina Levin, who said that the implementation of Groups “has some serious social design flaws.”.

Laura Fitton, co-founder of the Twitter app directory oneforty.com, asked on Twitter “Did Facebook simply “forget” 15 years of email list best practices? ie, email lists should be opt in, not opt out?” Liz asked Mark Zuckerberg about the auto-adding feature during her interview with the CEO on Wednesday, and he said the idea was to “make it as easy as possible” and to enourage “self-selection” — suggesting that groups which might try to trick you into joining would not prosper. He and Groups manager Justin Shaffer (who joined Facebook via the recent acquisition of his company Hot Potato) also noted that you can turn groups off, you can leave a group with a single click, and once you leave a group you can’t be re-added to it without your permission.

Despite the criticisms, however, there were some fans who seemed to take to the new Facebook Groups features fairly quickly — and several who said that they could see using the new service more than Twitter in some cases. Journalism professor Jen Lee Reeves wrote a blog post describing how the new implementation of Groups seems more “alive” than it did before, and added that while she used to use Twitter for such conversations, “this changes it all.” Francine Hardaway of Stealth Partners, meanwhile, said Thursday morning on Twitter that Groups had produced an “amazing transformation” and that “in one day, all the action in my “intellectual” life switched from Twitter to FB groups.”

Angel investor Dave McClure has added a roster of mentors and advisors to the team at his recently launched seed fund/incubator 500 Startups — a group that he has decided to call (not surprisingly) 500 Mentors. Although there aren’t actually 500 people on the list, it is a fairly impressive collection of talent that McClure says will be available to help the startups that he is investing in, some of which include Foodspotting and Flowtown. The mentors include Google’s “open advocate” Chris Messina, Josh Elman of Twitter, Slideshare CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Hunter Walk of YouTube.

Playing on the recent AngelGate furore — in which McClure played a role after being singled out for mention in super-angel Ron Conway’s leaked email on the topic — the startup investor described the mentor team as “a super-secret society of powerful tech-heads [that is] gathering their forces even as we speak, coming together with a shared mission of world domination – er, no, wait, we mean souped-up startup support.” McClure said that while many of the mentors come from the Bay Area, others come from a range of cities, including Seattle, Boston, New York, Vancouver, Tokyo and Paris. The advisors will be available for one-on-one discussions as well as presentations and advice, and some will even be working from 500 Startups headquarters, he said.

The full list of mentors is embedded below. McClure also named another group of “venture advisors” that is much smaller, including Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Dave Schappell of TeachStreet, Sean Ellis of Startup Marketing and Hiten Shah of KISSMetrics.

I had a chance to talk with Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson this morning, both during and after a meeting he had with half a dozen startups at the offices of Extreme Venture Partners, a fund and incubator with dual headquarters in Toronto and San Francisco. Wilson — whose firm has a stake in a few companies you may have heard of, such as Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga — came to town in order to meet with both venture investors and startups with a view towards possibly investing in some Canadian companies, and said afterwards that the Toronto startup environment “reminds me a lot of New York.”

I’m going to write a separate post about some of the companies that Wilson met with and his thoughts on the local startup ecosystem, but during our conversation the venture investor also had some comments about the recent “AngelGate” clash between “super-angels” and traditional VCs, as well as some advice about what some of the big trends are online that he is thinking about as he makes investments for Union Square.

On AngelGate:

The reality is that that market has changed a lot in the last two or three years. There’s a lot more money out there, it’s gotten very competitive. And usually what happens when things get competitive is prices get bid up, terms change, and the early participants feel it — they can’t win every deal, they can’t be in every deal and I think people start to get nervous. I think that’s largely what you’re seeing. You’re seeing people who’ve been in the market for a long time worrying about the fact that their market position isn’t what it used to be.

Is there too much money? I think it depends who you ask. Certainly for entrepreneurs there’s not too much money. But for people who used to be able to get into every deal at really great valuations, yeah there’s too much money for them — but for the market as a whole I’m not that worried about it. It’s certainly a good thing for me as an investor because more opportunities are getting funded, and it’s certainly good for entrepreneurs because more of them getting funded, so I think largely it’s a good thing.

Wilson also talks in the video about whether the so-called AngelGate meeting represented “collusion,” and whether some of what happened was a result of personal egos getting out of joint. During the startup meeting he attended, when asked about the “super-angel” phenomenon, Wilson said that he thinks on balance it can be a very positive thing for VCs like Union Square. “If someone wants to put in $250K and work as hard as I do, even though I’ve invested a lot more? I say bring it on,” Wilson said. “That’s a home run for me and a home run for the entrepreneur.” Among the super-angels who take this approach is Ron Conway of the SV Angel fund, Wilson said — “he works that hard for everyone, regardless of how much he has put in.”

Trends to be aware of:

Globalization is a huge trend. If you look at FB, Twitter, Google — 75 to 80 percent of their users are outside the U.S., so globalization of web services at scale is something I’m really interested in. There are entrepreneurs all over the world creating new web services that are as interesting as those getting created in the traditional tech centres like the Valley, Boston, New York. So globalization is probably the number one thing I’ve been thinking about.

Wilson also talked about the implications of mobility and how he is thinking about that in terms of his investments — and not just mobile with respect to specific devices or services, but how people can participate online from anywhere, and how more and more data is being produced because mobile devices have sensors that can change your experience or add value to it.

What he is thinking about now:

I’m really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity and knowledge — so things like Quora and StackOverflow (a Union Square Ventures portfolio company). These kinds of services use social media in a narrower and maybe higher value way to help people, and that’s really interesting to me. If you look at StackOverflow, developers who do the best job of generating answers to software development issues have their reputations rise in the system, and on the back side of StackOverflow is a job board, and so employers can come in and hire people and see what their reputation is. So when you think about how a Q&A site flows into a job board and how reputation is the key connective tissue there, I think that’s a really fascinating thing.

When it comes to live-blogging news events, plenty of bloggers and journalism outlets use their own in-house tools — but more and more news organizations are turning to all-in-one, cloud-based solutions such as ScribbleLive, a service that sees itself as more than just a live-blogging tool for the Academy Awards or a keynote by Steve Jobs. “We see ourselves as becoming a fully fledged content-management system,” ScribbleLive founder Michael De Monte said during a recent interview in San Francisco.

The company’s software allows news outlets to quickly set up a liveblog that looks and feels like a regular page on their website, complete with all of their branding and sidebar widgets or whatever else is on the page, says De Monte. Other solutions that provide similar live-blogging or live-discussion features — such as Cover It Live, which is owned in part by Demand Media through its Pluck division — restrict the content within a widget or window that can’t be indexed by search engines or easily converted to other formats, De Monte says.

ScribbleLive, which is based in Toronto, recently launched the next generation of its content-management tools, which add a number of different ways of getting content into the live-blog or news discussion. In addition to pulling in Twitter accounts or keywords automatically (which can be filtered to include or exclude specific phrases), the software also allows reporters to contribute their comments via email, SMS, voice-mail or the ScribbleLive web interface, which can be accessed either on the site or via an iPhone app.

During the G20 demonstrations earlier this year in Toronto, for example, De Monte says that one of Canada’s major broadcasters kept a running update of what was happening during the riots by calling a voice-mail number and leaving a message, which the system imported automatically as an audio file. Not all reporters are comfortable with Twitter or SMS, the ScribbleLive founder says, “so we provide whatever means they can feel comfortable with for them to provide their analysis and perspectives on the news.”

The company’s software is used by Reuters and Hearst Television in the U.S., as well as several other news organizations, and has also been used by a number of non-media entities such as Greenpeace, which used ScribbleLive to report on the live demonstration over an oil well. After the event, the searchable pages remain available so that anyone looking for information about that even will be able to find and review the live-blog. “ScribbleLive changes the traditional linear flow of the newsroom to a more dynamic, collaborative process that empowers real-time reporting and audience engagement while ensuring editorial control and journalistic integrity,” De Monte said.

The company was bootstrapped for the first year or so of its development — while De Monte and his partner worked at CTV, a large Canadian media network — then got seed funding from Rogers Ventures in 2009. ScribbleLive just closed a second round of seed financing from Rogers, De Monte says, and is currently looking to raise a Series A round of funding.

The race to create filters for real-time social media — so that companies in particular can track what is being said about them — continues to heat up. In an attempt to stay ahead of the curve, analytics service Trendrr today launched a new version of its social-media dashboard that incorporates location along with the usual Twitter tracking. The service now pulls in data from Foursquare and Gowalla, as well as aggregating “like” activity via Facebook’s open-graph protocol and reputation scores via Klout. But these services don’t come cheap: access to the dashboard starts at $499 a month and goes as high as $2,499 a month for the “enterprise” edition.

The company — which originally launched in 2006 and is a subsidiary of New York-based social-media marketing firm Wiredset — says that it has re-engineered its platform to handle more real-time services such as Facebook and Foursquare. The service competes with other social-media dashboard offerings such as those from Radian6 (which charges $600 a month for an entry-level account) as well as Sysomos and HootSuite. And new analytical services are emerging as well: Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead launched a data-mining product called Tweetbeat at the Disrupt conference last week that also allows for in-depth tracking of social-media content via semantic analysis, sentiment rankings and reputation scores.

At least for now, Trendrr’s incorporation of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla could set the service apart from some of its competitors. Users can track real-time check-ins, badges, mayorships and other rewards through a local dashboard, and can filter those results based on a user’s gender and other demographic info if available. Customers using the dashboard can respond from within the service, and can see the content from the most influential users first, or create their own ranked lists of influencers. Trendrr also has a built-in sentiment analysis feature that allows corporate users to track responses to their brands and products based on attitudes.

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Trendrr says that its dashboard features allow “marketers to identify swarm behavior in real-time and provides the communications mechanism that will drive transactions and insert brands into conversations around hot topics,” and pitches its service as a tool for what it calls “Chief Listening Officers” who monitor social media for their companies.

We started the year with a great fondue dinner and some pool in Buckhorn at the home of our friends Marc and Kris, and some skating and shinny on the pond. We went to Ottawa for our annual Winterlude visit and did some skating on the canal and had poutine and Beaver Tails, as usual. Then we went south to visit Becky’s mom and dad in Florida and did some playing in the waves and lying around soaking up the sun on the white beach at Siesta Key and some shuffleboard back at the Bay Indies park where Becky’s parents have a place. And we headed off with Becky’s family to Busch Gardens for some rollercoaster riding and other forms of assorted merriment.

Meaghan went on a school trip and saw the statue of the lady holding the fire, and had a birthday (something she almost always does once a year). Becky and I went out west because I was invited to be part of a panel at an arts conference at the Banff Springs Hotel. We stayed in a hotel in town that had a spa in the basement, and went for a run down by the river, and had a delicious dinner in a restaurant just down the hill from the Banff Springs that I think used to be the clubhouse for the golf course. There were the usual summer hijinks at the Farm weekend, as we call them, which included the next generation this time — Zoe made a new friend named Fox and we took the kids for a swim in the old quarry.

Continue reading “The Ingrams Christmas Letter for 2009”

The idea that the Internet might be used for scientific collaboration shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since the Web’s predecessor was originally created as a way to connect researchers at different institutions so they could solve problems together. That said, however, collaboration has accelerated over the past several years, thanks in part to the increasing popularity of “social media” or Web 2.0 tools, which have collectively lowered the barriers to online interaction.

A number of social networks and services devoted specifically to scientific research have sprung up and are growing quickly, including one called Mendeley. An online collaboration tool, it allows scientists and researchers to upload research papers, which the software combs through looking for bibliographic data (author, title, etc.) which are then matched with any other research that already exists in the database.

“You can just drag and drop your collection of PDFs into the software and it’ll automatically extract all the bibliographic data – all of the stuff that you’d usually have to type in manually,” co-founder Victor Henning told the BBC. “What Mendeley is designed to do is give you recommendations which compliment your existing library.”

The software has become popular with some scientists at highly-ranked research institutions such as Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge, and Henning says the service has about 70,000 users, and is growing at a rate of 40 per cent every month.

Many scientists from different disciplines have also adopted the “open source” model favoured by the Linux free software movement and supporters of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia. Project Polymath, for example, uses blogs and wikis to allow people to collaborate on solving complex mathematical problems.

In less than two months, Polymath participants “had worked out an elementary proof, and a manuscript describing the proof is currently being written,” Walter Jessen, a bioinformatician and cancer biologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told LinuxInsider. “The project demonstrated that many people could work together to solve difficult mathematical problems.”

Another open-source science project is Bizarro’s Bioinformatics Organization, which started in 1998 and uses wiki software to let researchers post models, questions, experiments and discoveries related to biology and informatics. Scientists were “looking for a central location for their open source projects,” founder Jeff Bizarro told LinuxInsider. Today, the organization has 27,000 members from all around the world.

If Bizarro is like Facebook or Wikipedia, a collaborative network called ResearchGate has aspects that are similar to LinkedIn, the corporate social network. While the service allows scientists to search for and connect research done by others to their own work in order to see patterns or relationships that are worth following, it also allows scientists to create profiles and search for or find relationships with other researchers in similar or related disciplines.

ResearchGate, which has 180,000 members, says it wants to create something called “Science 2.0” using social media tools. In this environment, “communication between scientists will accelerate the distribution of new knowledge. Without anonymous review processes, the concept of open-access journals will assure research quality. Science is collaboration, so scientific social networks will facilitate and improve the way scientists collaborate.”

Some scientists are using even newer tools to collaborate — including Google Wave, the new tool launched by the search giant that some describe as a combination between email, instant messaging and a wiki.

“Google Wave offers two specific things,” Cameron Neylon, senior scientist at Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, told the BBC. “What it looks like is this cross of e-mail and instant-messaging, which is great fun. Where it really wins for science is that actually these documents or ‘Waves’ can be made automated so we can connect up documents and ideas with each other.” The power lies in allowing scientists to share a range of objects, he says, from pictures and text to raw data.

Will these new social tools help produce any penicillin or DNA-type breakthroughs? Scientists and researchers who use them say it’s just a matter of time.