Conference Category Winners

June 29 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

THE WINNERS!

June 29 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

We’re happy to announce the overall winners of the Under The Radar Entertainment and Media Conference!

Best In Show Judges Choice: YuMe Networks

Best In Show Audience Choice: Ustream.tv

Our winners will each get some amazing prizes:

Nokia N800 Pocket Tablet PC:

Microsoft XBox:

Adobe CS3 Premium Web Bundle:

Congratulations to our winners!

Stay tuned for our Category Winners announcements!

Under the Radar Recap: Internet TV

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

Is there more room in the market aside from YouTube?  This group of startups is hoping to break through the YouTube strangle-hold with innovative offerings that offered niche content, viral components, interaction with live video, or live TV on a PC.

Moderator: Jeremy Toeman, Livedigitally.com

Judges:
Steven Li, Webex
David Hornik, August Capital
Steven Horowitz, Yahoo!

FORA.tv
Aggregates the top public content around political, social and cultural issues from around the world and enables users to engage in the conversation.  It allows users the ability to zoom into a chapter or a transcript; download the content in any format, submit a link, or place it on digg. FORA.tv supports video blogs from subject matter experts and provides them a place where have an online conversation around an issue.  The startup has partnered with organizations such as The Commonwealth Club and C-SPAN, and the Hoover Institution.  FORA.tv's basic premise is to offer public events around world online, overcoming the frustration some people with TV news programming. The judges acknowledged there is a need to distributed well produced social content, they noted that FORA.tv was targeting the anti-YouTube crowd and that the market was not large enough and needed to make their content more mainstream.  They also commented that the web is about taking the cost out of producing content and making it easy for people to find it.

SplashCast
SplashCast is a mixed media platform for creating, mixing and syndicating content channels through an embedded player. The company has a vast media library that users can access and then modify with authoring tools and then embed their content or distribute customized content to their friends.  They offer a free ad supported accounts, paid accounts with less intrusive ads and also offer branded video channels within Facebook, which has caught the interest of record labels, video bloggers, and political groups.  The judges commented that SplashCast going after the longtail with a focus on distribution, but noted that distribution is ultimately across a set of social networks behind it and NOT behind the technology.  Judges wanted to know which part of SplashCast's business model was the most important over the long run?  SplashCast sees its advertising revenue being most significant over the long run, but that in the short term the company's branded channels are a great revenue stream.  One of the judges pressed SplashCast here and wondered whether they should focus entirely on advertising revenue as there might be a trade off with company focus. SplashCast was confident that it could pursue both simultaneously and not loose focus.

UStream.tv
This startup is a platform that lets people with a camera and an internet connection broadcast live video to the web.  Live interactive video lets people build connections with their audiences and turn this into a viewer experience.  UStream deals with Live and recorded content. Live for Ustream enables you to interact with the video, broadcaster and participate in it live. Their business model will be ad supported free services coupled with “pro-sumer” services or broadcasters who will be selling their content.  Judges wanted to know what is going to make live casting interesting and whether Ustream had measures in place to eliminate questionable content that is broadcast.  One judge commented that small bands could use UStream's tools to promote their live shows in advance and that this market segment would be a strong fit. Both the judges and presenter agreed that content acquisition would be the company's biggest challenge. 

Zattoo
Zattoo delivers live TV on your computer and is like a virtual cable network for your PC.  It acquires, transports, and presents streaming video in one application for all channels for broadband users anywhere.  Zattoo's live content takes 3-8 seconds to switch a channel, so during this time, it monetizes those seconds between the switching of the channels to display ads.  The company partners with broadcasters and advertisers to serve viewers with a wide selection of content from various sources in one easy-to-use interface.  The judges noted that there have already been several previous attempts to surplant TV, but ultimately these companies were unable to provide a wide array of content choices beside porn.  Judges also wanted to know how Zattoo validated its business model that its ad revenue could at some point in time exceed its content cost.  Zattoo commented that in negotiating with content providers, their request for fixed cost and revenue share and other revenue streams vary by provider.  Zattoo also confirmed that it had patents pending to set up a defensible barrier to entry.  Judges wanted to know what Zattoo was doing to get U.S.-based content companies lined up but also agreed that targeting expats in the U.S. was an ideal target market.

Under the Radar Recap: Search

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

Despite the 800 pound gorilla dominating online search, there are still many ideas and companies percolating to the surface to provide either a new twist on search or a search solution that is solving an unmet need or untapped opportunity.  How can these companies index the web to the degree that Google has already done and provide relevant results that will satisfy users?  Will entrenched players (ie: Google, Amazon, YouTube) respond or maintain their dominance in a favorable way that these startups were anticipating?

Moderator: Jeremy Toeman

Judges:
Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome
Doug MacMillan, Forum Nokia Americas
John Balen, Canaan Partners

ChaCha
Chacha search is a hybrid of technology and humans to provide better answers.  According to the CEO, if you were on the “Who wants to be a millionaire,” program, this is the site you’d go to quickly get your answer.
ChaCha relies on a community of paid skilled search and domain experts who get to choose their areas of interest, expertise and passion.  Judges wanted to know what ChaCha was doing to avoid people from “gaming system.”  Another key question judges posed to the CEO was how the company can manage to support the thousands and thousands of categories for which people will need answers.

Mpire
Aggregates both new and used goods from the largest ecommerce sites and delivers those to users in a single view.  The company’s combines historical data trends to let users see how much they should pay for the items they want and spices up their online shopping experience with driven information and visual photos of products delivered to users in them in the form of widgets. A shopping plug-in also alerts users while their shopping if another merchant is offering the product at a lower price.  Judges wanted to know if Mpire is like a price predictor but while it does show users general drop offs in price it currently cannot predict pricing changes.  Judges also asked about Mpire’s relationship with Amazon and eBay and the possibility of either of these companies shutting Mpire off to their ability to collect data.  To reduce this possibility, with each partnership, Mpire always works to add strategic value with that partner.

Pluggd
This startup provides a search service that looks inside audio and video to let consumers find and navigate to the exact piece of video they were seeking.  They enable video search via speech recognition and semantic analysis.  Pluggd’s offering also doubles as it helps advertisers target ads to audio and video context.  The company can enable a SDK into the manufacturer’s own player or can serve as a contextual ad targeting for video.  Pluggd’s business model comes by matching an ad for an advertiser and taking a percentage of the advertiser’s revenue; it also charges a service fee for ad networks and has signed up several media publishers as customers.  Judges wondered whether and shy Pluggd is tackling both the advertising and search technology.  The CEO believes it can play well in both arenas and also anticipated some percentage of users moving away from the YouTube in the future and that this would help companies such as his.

Polar Rose
Face recognition technology for manipulation and user integration. The startups offering had a strong viral, visual appeal to it.  Polar Rose will run in a browser and others who have the software/plugin can see postings that are embedded into photos.
Judges wanted to know more about the business model which was not disclosed and another did not see the value or problem being solved by Polar Rose’s technology.  They also mentioned that there were other startups with interesting technology that were unable to make a business model success around interesting facial recognition technology. 

-post by Carmen Hughes

Under the Radar Recap: Virtual Worlds

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

Virtual worlds just could be huge. If you have time on your hands, you can spend 5 hours a night tricking out your avatar. What’s going to bring virtual worlds the masses? Ease of use, cool content, and time. And, I think only time will tell how huge they will actually be.

*Moderator
Rafe Needleman – Webware, CNET

*Judges
Chris Carvalho – LucasFilms
Simon Hayhurst – Adobe
Alexander Marquez – Intel Capital

Doppelganger – to enable immersive, emotionally connected entertainment. They want to amplify the youth demographics’ real-world experiences and interests: music, pop culture, fashion, celebrities, self-expression, community, and social networking. Users take tools like dance competitions or DJs or performances. They have a huge number of partners such as Intercope, MTV, and Jay-Z’s Rocawear. User count is 150,000 about 40% per month.    

Kaneva – Kaneva is the first virtual entertainment world that unifies the 2D web with a 3D experience. Built for the masses, Kaneva integrates social networking, shared media, and collaborative communities into a real-world, immersive 3D virtual world. Kaneva has partnered with YouTube and will offer Kaneva game cards at Target.

Meez -Meez provides a web-based, 3D, way users to create avatars of themselves, and then export them all over the Internet to represent themselves on blogs, IM, and social media sites. We partner with branded advertisers to offer their virtual goods to our users on a sponsorship level. They are partnered with Photobucket. It’s all about transportability and portability for them.

Multiverse – creating a network of online video games and other 3D virtual worlds. It’s empowering development teams to create high-quality, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and non-game virtual worlds – download their tech for free and “mod” your own world. If you charge the consumer to play, they take 10%, and you take 90%. Partners with Fox and James Cameron (director of TITANIC) is on the board.

Under the Radar Recap: Games

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

I’m an almost-40-yr-old “soccer mom,” and thus am the traditional target market for casual games. I admit. I do love them. But the opportunity now isn’t really for me. But, I think that actually my kids will be more excited – as they are about Club Penguin – my current favorite company that I found out about from a second-grader. The business model is subscription (like Club Penguin) and some of these companies (good on them) have user-tested with kids. The biggest challenge is assuming that you’ll have a set of hits people will play, but several have distribution models that help to mitigate potential downside. -by Alison Murdock

*Moderator
Rafe Needleman – Webware, CNET

*Judges
David Hornik – August Capital
Sam Klepper – MSN
Alexander Marquez – Intel Capital    

Bunchball – Bunchball is the leading provider of social gaming services which empowers members to initiate casual games with each other – without ever leaving your site. Bunchball manages and hosts everything. And they can customize games to promote your brands. Bunchball has also had great success with Facebook.

FlowPlay – FlowPlay is an entertainment technology company that combines virtual worlds, social networking, and online games into a next generation social entertainment platform. They license their games (maybe have 50-100), which costs less than $1000 per game. Their costs are pretty low and building a community that access to hundreds is games is great.

Hothead Games – Hothead Games is an interactive entertainment company. The company's first game project is a PC-based episodic adventure game based on the popular web comic strip Penny Arcade—the series is forecasted to generate revenues of $56 million by 2010. They also release episodes on the internet and allow people to pay per episode rather than set a high price. Re mobile, waiting for off-deck to penetrate in the US.

Kongregate – Kongregate seeks to create the leading online hub for players and game developers to meet up, play games, and operate together as a community. Anyone can add their own games to Kongregate's library. Founder game from pogo.com (who has the “older” female market). 145% growth since by May – they have a small Facebook app which has brought in fat traffic for them. Average viewing session length is a whopping 40 minutes.

Under the Radar Recap: Power Tools

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

PowerTools was a look at a handful of startups providing cutting-edge tools and analystics to help video producers, marketing and advertising agencies, social and video networking sites gain insights into the behaviors of and overall success of a video with their user-base.  In this session, judges wanted to understand defensibility against entrenched bigger players like Google, YouTube and Omniture and how quickly these startups could expand.  Do these startups have key strategic partnerships in place within the advertising agency-side to be able to improve CPMs and be in a stronger position to close deals.  Each of these companies must overcome the reluctance large companieswill inherently have, especially around an analytics-focused component, to invest in these offerings due to the long-term viability of startups in general.

Moderator:
Jeremy Toeman, Livedigitally.com
Judges:
Chris Carvalho, LucasFilm
Simon Hayhurst, Adobe
Steve Li, Webex

Crazy Egg
Lets customers see what its users are seeing, doing and where they are going on your website by capturing and associating visitor-specific data with one-page click patterns. Crazy Egg helps customers improve how they convert users based on demographics, behavior, etc. to help people monetize their websites.  While judges liked many aspects of Crazy Egg, especially is visual appeal, they also felt the company needed to shore up its defensibility.

Cruxy
Provides content creators with a set of social promotion and monetization tools for their digital work.  Using an open format approach that support cross platforms and devices, Cruxy is used by the long-tail media producers and its sweet spot is within the various virtual worlds.  It platform provides distributing, vending and tracking of players and widgets for digital goods services. Judges felt while there is a huge opportunity that Cruxy is pursuing, they need to be swift as bigger players can be a real threat.

Vidmetrix
Provides online video viewership analytics.  Its Vidmeter 100 is like the BillBoard 100 and aggregates top videos across Youtube, Myspace to generate a most viewed video list across the internet. Tracks and reports views, comments, feedback and blog links and then icenses findings to online publishing sites, videomakers. Vidmetrix sees itself as a  services firm to support customers for tracking social media. Judges wanted to see Vidmetrix improve its video upload automation and give users the ability to do something after they see a video. 

Visible Measures
Provides independent 3rd party metrics of video viewership. The company is looking to create a new set of metrics among the various constituents such as publishers and advertisers.  They have partnered with leading video platform providers and advertising agencies.  By measuring and comparing who's watching what and when. 

Under the Radar Recap: Music

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

 We kicked off the last morning session with 4 companies in the music business. Music is one the poster-children for discovery and community driven businesses. People are very particular about their tastes and somewhat distrustful of recommendations that don’t come from like-minded music lovers. The business models for these companies are obvious in some ways — advertising music products or peddling tickets.
*Moderator
Rafe Needleman – Webware, CNET

*Judges
Sean Crawford – Orange FT Group
Peter Daley – Rutberg & Co.
Steven Horowitz – Yahoo!    

iLike
Discover music via your friends – core audience is iTunes and Facebook users. Learn tastes by scanning your music or filling out a questionnaire. They were running for 6 months and saw Facebook as a potential paradigm shift. In 4 weeks – they built a microsite within Facebook – one of the largest paradigm shifts in the history of computing – it took their users from 2M to 7M in two months. Monetize via advertising, ticket sales for concerts, music sales, initially, but since they were able to turn on a dime before, we’re not worried that they’ll figure it out.

MOG
Uses cutting-edge technology to analyze your digital music collection and make personalized music recommendations – a platform to exchange their tastes and develop trusted sources. They are a last.fm competitor – and they have pretty solid artist pages. They stay away from recommendations – algorithms more set up to have you find people. Had to shut off Facebook spigot as it drove their traffic beyond what they could handle. Monetize via brand advertising. Not filtering and fingerprinting.

ReverbNation
Marketing solutions for musicians for marketing and promotion across the Internet as a whole – be it via social networks, blogs, or the artist’s homepage. Real-time stats then provide a 360-degree view of how the music is spreading, who is listening, and which fans are actually passing it on to their friends and posting it on their pages. They tell people which songs people like, where the music is being served. Money can come from transactions and data/demographic aggregation.

Splicemusic.com
The only pro-quality web-based music creation and remixing site with a community. Its for the casual creator who wants to make music and share with it other musicians. Business model is via membership and monetization content.

Under the Radar Recap: Social Commerce

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

With online shopping spending hovering around $125 billion annually, many startups are building innovative services to improve and solve current online shopping deficiencies and, in the process, grab of piece of the online shopping revenue pie.  This group of companies focuses on helping consumers identify produces they are seeking or may be predisposed to buying.

Moderator:
Rafe Needleman
Webware, CNET

Judges:
David Hornick, General Partner, August Capital
Sam Klepper,GM, MSN Media Network Group
Alexander Marquez, Intel Capital

Criteo
Consumer recommendation engine; plans to work with ecommerce sites to boost sales, works with content portals to increase page views and lets bloggers in on the action by sharing their ratings with the entire recommendation system. Criteo offers a plug and play widget distribution and for more advanced installs they have an open API. In a benchmark test run by Netflix, Criteo scored >5% better score than the rest; they rated in the top 30 out of 16K competitors.

Powerreviews/Buzzillions
Buzzillions aims to be the starting place for online shopping, by focusing on market research via product reviews;  PowerReviews collects and distributes those reviews to retail sites. Tag-based reviews to enable tag-driven shopping. Powerreviews converts 2 to 1 over other product review sites.  The business model is to monetize each product they review and look to maximize this fee to closer to $1 per review, also will incorporate a CPA revenue model and expect that sponsorships will also materialize.

ThisNext
Helps people discover cool products similar to LastFM but with a twist. Users at their partner sites and at ThisNext enter cool products that they think are neat and these recommendations also gets cross-fed to other sites.  ThisNext is not a transaction site but more of a shopping and browsing site. Judges felt ThisNext needed to better clarify its business model and target market and that it was unclear to a visitor whether the site was a social recommendation site or an ecommerce site. 

Wize
Wize aims to simplify and minimize the time it takes to research products.  Their business model is driven by lead generation and syndication. They offer a range of reviews gathered from consumers and from experts, evaluates any biases of these sites and adjusts for a weighted average. The company focuses on mining the sentiment about what core features are most useful to buyers. Provides a single numerical score so buyers can make a better buying decision based on the scores provided. Judges liked Wize's score differentiation ranking differentiation but see challenges in building a brand. Wize has a number of syndications in place and plans to get the Wize rank integrated into these sites. Company also seeking out select manufacturers to have them adopt/endorse the Wize ranking.

Under the Radar Recap: Advertising

June 28 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

ADVERTISING:
What’s your YouTube strategy? Especially when YouTube/Google’s ad platform has 60% marketshare? This morning’s 4 companies are filling the gaps in that market; from paying low-cost content creators for brand advertising to enabling advertisers and content producers to control their ads.
Also addressed: What happens when products that block video ads (Tivo or DVR for the web) come along? Companies think that they’ll be forced to innovate, and some of these guys are already thinking that way.

*Moderator
Rafe Needleman – Webware, CNET

*Judges
Sean Crawford – Orange FT Group
Peter Daley – Rutberg & Co.
Chris Pirillo – Lockergnome.com     

adapt.tv – online video advertising platform that allows publishers and advertisers to match relevant, contextual advertising with online video content – Google AdWords for video. The technology monitors viewers and adapts ads to their preferences and displays ads during video. Pricing is between text and rich media ad. They are banking on the fact that the online content providers are going to defend their territory and will erode YouTube’s market share.

ScanScout – helps digital agencies and publishers by providing technology that delivers the right creative the right time to the right consumer – essentially not matching to the word but matching to the genre. It’s able to include both “brand” ads and text ads in video – so they can power both direct response and brand advertisers.

XLNTads.com – platform for Consumer-Generated Advertising (CGA) for brand sponsors, it’s a cost-effective way to capitalize on the creative energies of semi-proad creators. One audience member said that it’s like asking talent to make product for a “perennial” design contest. Model is to increase eventually the number of vertical campaigns – cars or food etc. – while building the ad network.

YuMe Networks – broadband video advertising network providing advertisers and publishers the ability to identify, classify, and track content to ensure brand safety, contextual relevance, controlled syndication, and consistent delivery across all digital media platforms – web, downloads, mobile, and IPTV. Attacked live, BitTorrent, downloads — acting as connecting point between content and advertisers and are more forward-thinking about new distribution models.

Last Chance To Register for tomorrow’s Under The Radar Entertainment and Media Conference

June 27 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

Under the Radar “is the most relevant and powerful dealmaking conference in the Valley.”

HAVE YOU REGISTERED YET?

THEY HAVE: Fox Interactive, Yahoo!, Google, Reuters, Bessemer Ventures, NBC Universal, Viacom, MTV Networks, AOL, Nokia, Microsoft, Orange, Maveron, Intel, Accel Partners, SAP, Sun, Canaan, Motorola, Fujitsu, Cisco… see more attendees here.

The last Under the Radar event sold out, register today and save $100
[Register now]

Details

Date:
Thursday, Jun. 28, 2007
8:00 AM  - 6:00 PM

Location:
Microsoft, Conference Center, Building 1
1065 La Avenida Street
Mountain View, CA 94043

CrazyEgg: Web Analytics Tool With a Killer User Interface

June 26 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.crazyegg.com

Founded: 2006
Headquarters: Irvine, CA
Management Team: Hiten Shah, CEO and Co-Founder, Aneil Weber, Co-Founder
Investors: Self-funded
Partners: Deals with large hosting companies
Customers: 40,000
Competitors: Clickdensity / Clicktale

Analytics, more than anything, have become the best tool aiding in the monetization of content. Simply put, the more you know about your consumer/reader/user the better you are at serving them. Thus, analytics services provide the equivalent to market research for internet companies.

Crazy Egg brings a bit of panache to the exceedingly boring traffic analyzing industry. One of their most notable features is the Heatmap function which allows you to see where the most traffic flows as if you were using ultraviolet rays at a crime scene. This allows a quick view of how visitors use your website. Their Confetti feature is also worth a look. Confetti better develops users understanding of their visitors interactions with their website. The system tracks everything from which operating system and browser users are using to how much time passed before users clicked a link. The visual interface Crazy Egg provides is far superior to the dull charts and graphs of other analytics sites and proves to be much easier to use.

Pluggd: New Tech Search for Podcasts and More

June 25 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

URL: http://www.pluggd.com

Management: Alexander Castro, CEO/President

Year Founded: 2006

Headquarters: Seattle, WA

Funding Stage: Angel

Date and Amount of Last Funding: November 2006, $1.65M

Investors: Intel Capital and prominent Seattle-area angel investors, including Paul Maritz and Scott Oki

Partners: Unable to disclose at this time

Customers: Advertisers and publishers are our customers

Competitors: Blinkx, Podzinger, ScanScout

As video and audio offerings grow more and more diverse, companies seeking to improve the medium and expand the listener base spring up. No longer only associated with iPods and Macs , lowly PC users have also come to embrace podcasts and podcasting themselves. And as we've all come to find, where the audience grows – the money goes.

Listeners can use Pluggd to subscribe to podcasts, and soon videos, share them with friends and rate them, with comments. There is a huge directory of podcasts to browse through that's very user-friendly. Pluggd acts like a podcast aggregator and cataloguer. The site places independent and mainstream media producers' content at your fingertips.

What makes Pluggd a standout in the world of search? Their HearHere and SeeHere functions that search podcasts (and soon video) word-by-word, contextually, so you can easily find the information you'd like to hear. The technology, based on speech recognition, allows consumers to better control content they consume and holds great possibilities for advertisers. In fact, The Economist just did a story that mentions Pluggd as a great use of speech recognition, and heralds the technology as a breakthrough with massive potential.

Mpire: Shopping search done right

June 22 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.mpire.com

Cross platform consumer deal-finder Mpire is every coupon clipper's dream. The span of the site's functions is mind-boggling: it crawls through the most popular retailers and sorts the product results based on popularity, price and relevance. It also shows complicated, yet strangely concise, charts on price trends, and even provides over seventy different widgets for Amazon associates and Ebay affiliates. (Send an email to widgets@mpire.com and they'll write the code for a custom widget to put on your website or blog for free.)

 Furthering their attempts at online shopping information domination, this holiday season Mpire launched a browser plug-in for Firefox, which was quickly followed by an Internet Explorer version. And while the results may be a bit off, at best, for niche market items, Mpire is definitely on the brink of revolutionizing the way we shop on the internet. We sat down with CEO Matt Hulett to discuss why Mpire is cool enough to have a fellow named J.Rock on their board of investors.

1. What is your company about? What's your business model?
Mpire is a shopping Web site that aggregates the largest online commerce sites, such as eBay, Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, Gap and thousands more into one location.  We act as the Kelley Blue Book for online shopping by offering data analysis that helps people find the right item at the right price. 

Mpire gets paid on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis when we deliver a shopper to merchant's virtual door step whether through our consumer site mpire.com or thru our private-label shopping services off of Mpire through our API.  

2.  Why did you start this company?
Despite advances in many areas of technology, we feel ecommerce innovation has remained relatively flat over the last 10 years.  So we created Mpire to offer a more universal, well-rounded shopping experience for consumers.  Shoppers shouldn't have to visit 15 sites to find the best deals or the right item, and Mpire solves that problem.  Ultimately, Mpire is the only shopping service to bring together new and auction items, reviews, coupons and proprietary pricing analysis.

3. What's your background?
Prior to becoming Chairman and CEO of Mpire in spring 2006, I was President of the corporate travel division of Expedia, Inc., the world’s largest online travel company. Prior to Expedia, I was a founding partner of the interactive entertainment provider AtomFilms and was President of Atom Entertainment, a firm backed by both Sequoia Capital and Macromedia (MACR) purchased by Viacom for $200M. Under my direction, Atom captured over 20 million unique monthly users and became a leading consumer destination for online interactive entertainment. I also had leadership roles at RealNetworks and at AttachmateWRQ, a privately held provider of enterprise software.

4. How do you plan to build a community of users and what are the benefits of using Mpire for shopping research?
With our flagship service firmly established at Mpire.com, we are now aggressively pushing our distributed shopping service through widgets, our Mpire Plug-in and custom services.  We are firm believers in not being  dependant on paid search to yield traffic and feel delivering compelling, relevant content in snippets across the Web, along with a universal shopping experience on our site, can help us build our user base.

5.  Have you entered into any partnerships with other companies? How did you go about finding opportunities and negotiating deals?
We have entered into a number of partnerships, the largest of which has been our extensive involvement with eBay.  In just the last year, we have developed more than 10 applications and sites for eBay, including a trend and culture site called eBay Pop, widgets that are served on the eBay home page, one of the most trafficked pages on the Internet today, and high-profile auction sites. We launched our B2B business recently and are working with many companies on creating custom shopping experiences for them. 

6.    Are you funded? What was the process for you to raise capital? How did you decide what investors to work with?
Mpire was founded in 2005 and is backed by Ignition Partners and former eBay executive and Pay Pal angel investor Richard Rock.

7. What does the future look like for Mpire and internet shopping in general?
We are very excited about where things are headed for Mpire as we aggressively push our universal shopping experience along with our distributed shopping strategy.  We feel our proprietary technology and innovative approach to shopping will only help shoppers have a more enjoyable finding and buying experience online.

8. What are some of the technologies that make Mpire a reality?
Two key pieces of proprietary technology – our relevance engine and our data analysis engine – have enabled much of our innovation to date.  When it comes to finding relevant items through an item search, results across the Web, including those on eBay, are marginal at best.  Our relevance engine algorhythm has a much higher success rate based on our unique approach (which we can't share, of course).  Data analysis, and the displaying of historical results, has also triggered our distributed shopping strategy and partnerships with companies such as eBay.

A good review for PowerReviews (and Buzzillions.com while we’re at it)

June 21 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.powerreviews.com
http://www.buzzillions.com

For an ever growing class of people shopping is becoming a science. Of course in any scientific endeavor, resources that aid the pursuit of knowledge (or in this case selvedge) are needed. That's where PowerReviews comes in.

PowerReviews aims to make it easier for consumers to make informed decisions, and easier for retail sites to close the sale. They do that by providing PowerTags which allow users to quickly and accurately provide a review for a product. Those reviews are then used to judge a products usefulness to other customers. PowerReviews provides ‘trusted’ comments and reviews for client sites, after all, a product is  a product, no matter who is selling it. If it warrants a good review then any site that sells it should be able to leverage that information.

In the demonstration they've set up at Buzzillions.com, the system is quick and intuitive as it narrows down the suggested products based on what you say you want. Based on my needs (as assessed by exceedingly short mini surveys) the system scanned through all of the available inventory to find the camera which matched my preferences. Partly because my professional photography career ended with that mishap in Gary, Indiana and partly because I stated I would be a casual user, the PowerReviews interface removed the thousand dollar Nikon D200 Digital SLR Camera right at the start. Gradually, contender after contender lost their bout with my picky taste, until only an ultra thin 3.2 mega pixel Hello Kitty camera was left standing.

With their system's ease of use and the naturally trustworthy nature of the verified buyer as a featured critic/reviewer, PowerReviews is a deal closer.

Pick a Winner at Under The Radar

June 20 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

In addition to all the accolades and attention that presenting startups will be getting at next week’s Under The Radar Entertainment and Media conference, the selected winners will be getting some pretty awesome prizes:

• Adobe CS3 Premium Web Bundles
• Nokia E61s and Nokia accessory kits.
• Microsoft XBOX

Their future is in your hands – Review, Evaluate and VOTE. We have several rounds of voting – Judges Choice, Audience Choice by Category and Overall Event Winner so there are lots of chances for presenters to cash in!

Thanks to our sponsors for these great prizes: Adobe, Nokia and Microsoft

A lot to like about iLike

June 20 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.ilike.com

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2413267546

Simply put, social media site iLike gathers all the music you like and allows you to share it with everyone. While apps like Pandora and Mystrands direct the listener to new music using their own algorithms and patterns, iLike is a refreshing glimpse of that same power as it is manifested organically.

On iLike fans are able to extend the reach of their favorite bands by sharing their music preferences with their friends and other users. As they share or simply listen to songs, their actions are analyzed and they affect what's recommended to other users. In essence, iLike puts the power to make a hit in the hands of the fans. With their current status as Most Popular Facebook application the site is brimming with new users – 3,752,201 as of this morning. That, combined with the pedigree and competency of all of the people associated with the company, make iLike one of the most interesting companies in all of social media. If you haven't already, take a tour of the site and find out what's to like about iLike.

-iLike will be presenting at Under The Radar Conference on June 28th in Mountain View, CA. Don’t miss your chance to hear, and ask,  about their ever-evolving business strategy and plans for sustaining growth, up close and in person.

YuMe Networks delivers video ads to any device

June 19 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.yumenetworks.com

Ideas in the tech world seem to spring up across the board all at once. As such, it is no surprise that there are more than a few online video advertising sites to go around. Web advertiser YuMe, hopes to be the cream of the crop. YuMe delivers the basics of online video advertising with flourish, including: the ability to create content channels, enabling advertisers to ‘precision target' content for use with their video ads, and ensuring relevant branding across channels.

The major difference, however, is that YuMe has gone above and beyond the fundamentals. The company has extended it's reach into the previously wild world of peer-to-peer downloads (On April, 2 the company launched a campaign for Eidos Interactive over the popular file sharing system Bittorent, on April 16 they linked with Azureus). With this distinct advantage YuMe seems ready to take over the world, or at least the online video advertising industry. We sat down with YuMe co-founders Jayant Kadambi, and Ayyappan Sankaran to discuss YuMe:

1. What is YuMe about? What is your business model?
YuMe is the first video monetization solution created and optimized for broadband video.  YuMe provides publishers the unprecedented ability to identify, classify and track content to ensure brand safety, contextual relevance, controlled syndication and consistent delivery to any device – PC, Mobile, TV – whether streamed or downloaded.  Advertisers get access to ad-ready channels of video content, campaign optimization and tracking tools and interactive ad placements that engage and encourage interaction. 
 
YuMe's business model is a revenue share of advertising revenue generated by YuMe and/or its publisher partner sites.  
 
2. Why did you start this company?
When we realized no good broadband and IP-based video ad monetization infrastructure existed and that video ad solutions offered were just incremental modifications of existing text and banner networks.  Video is fundamentally different than text and banners and in order to properly monetize, transport, traffic and reliably report against, we felt a new type of network was needed that provided advertisers contextual relevance, transparency and visibility into campaign placements and performance in real-time. 
 
3. Does YuMe compete with traditional advertising agencies? Who are your main competitors?
YuMe does not compete with advertising agencies.  We work with ad agencies to place and optimize video advertising campaigns on behalf of their clients.  Our benefit to advertising agencies is that they can buy ad-ready channels of video content that is contextually relevant to their client's brand across multiple devices and get one holistic view of how the campaign is performing.
 
4. Have you entered into any partnerships with other companies?
Yes, we have partnerships with traditional online video streaming companies (web sites), P2P streaming and download
companies, online TV broadcasters, as well as mobile video companies.
 
5. What was the process for you to raise funding? How did you decide what investors to work with?
We chose investors based on their experience in the partnership in digital media, specifically in online advertising.

The fund raising process was quite prototypical, business plan generation, followed by a friends/family round, followed
by a working prototype, market validation, followed by a series A.
 
6. What are you bringing to the market that's innovative and groundbreaking?
YuMe is the only video ad network built exclusively for the new web video world, capable of delivering video advertising that is brand safe, contextually relevant, customizable and deliverable to any device.  With YuMe content producers are now able to syndicate and track where and when their content is consumed and advertisers get a centralized and holistic view of how a campaign performs across all screens. 

-Yume Networks will be presenting at Under The Radar Conference on June 28th in Mountain View, CA. Don’t miss the opportunity to discuss P2P technology, streaming video that’s not device dependent, and how Yume is using these technologies to keep their business growing.

Vidmetrix: Online Video Analytics Authority

June 18 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.vidmetrix.com

As video publishers seek to monetize their content, services spring up on every side to aid them. While video advertising services abound, few focus on providing relevant information to publishers about the performance of their videos.

Vidmetrix is an online video tracking service from leading video viewership rating system, Vidmeter. The site allows publishers and advertisers unprecedented access to information about the performance of their videos across a variety of online video platforms. Data is gathered on everything from: consumer response (buzz reporting) and views (traffic reporting) to how much time users spent watching your video (viewer engagement reporting). With their sight set on providing useful information for online video publishers and advertisers, Vidmetrix has a unique service that is more than worth a look. We sat down with Managing director Bri Holt to discuss what Vidmetrix has to offer:

1. What is your company about? What's your business model?
Vidmeter's goal is to be the online video analytics authority – we want to track what people are watching online, where they're watching it, and how they're responding to it. Our flagship product right now is Vidmetrix, which is a service that allows marketers to see detailed reports on their online video campaigns on their microsites and across 51 major video sharing sites.

2. Why did you start this company?
We've had a lot of experience in online analytics with Dataplain.com, Tracksy.com, and Socialmeter.com. With the explosion of online video, we saw a pressing need for an analytics service to bring ordered information to an otherwise chaotic environment.

3. What's your background?
I've lead the development of many web-based companies including Dataplain.com, Tracksy.com, Engrade.com, Zurpy.com, and Socialmeter.com

4. How do you plan to build a community of users and what is the benefit of using Vidmetrix for video tracking?
We've had extraordinary success in our online PR with the launch of Vidmeter, the YouTube copyright report, the launch of Vidmetrix, and the revamp of Vidmetrix 2.0. We've definitely made a splash in the online video publishing world and we continue to expand our user-base through our one-to-one business development efforts that capture new producers and marketing firms as they enter this quickly-growing field.

5. Have you entered into any partnerships with other companies? How did you go about finding opportunities and negotiating deals?
We have entered into several partnerships. I cannot discuss any in detail at this time. I can say that our PR efforts lead to a massive income of inquiries from the marketing and online video community and we've developed many great partnerships from that.

6. Are you funded? What was the process for you to raise capital? How did you decide what investors to work with?
Vidmeter is largely financially funded by Holt Labs.

7. What does the future look like for Vidmetrix and social media in general?
All I can say about Vidmeter's future is that we're expanding to offer more products in the online video market. As far as social media, you don't need me to tell you that it will grow exponentially over the next few years.

8. What are some of the technologies that make Vidmetrix a reality?
We have patents-pending on our core methodologies, but we don't think of ourselves as a tech company. At our center, we're a professional services company that is built on our relationships with a little bit of technology mixed in.

-Vidmetrix will be presenting at Under The Radar Conference on June 28th in Mountain View, CA. Don’t miss your chance to talk with them about leading edge video analytics and how they’re bringing their technology to market.

Under The Radar Success Story: Smartsheet.com

June 15 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.smartsheet.com

Congratulations to Under The Radar Office 2.0 Best in Show winner Smartsheet.com – they just announced a Series A funding deal for $2.69 million with Madrona Venture Group in Seattle.

Smartsheet also took away the Best in Category award at UTR, their online project planning software aimed at the huge SMB market. They’ve already gained traction in the marketplace, teams in 10K+ companies such as T-Mobile, The Gap and Specialized Bicycles are using the service.

We knew smartsheet.com’s great UI, technology and business acumen was a sure bet. The VCs at Madrona agree. Can we pick ‘em or what?

MTV and Doppelganger Go Live with Virtual Lower East Side

June 14 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://www.vles.com

Doppelganger  has been working with MTV on a pretty amazing virtual recreation of New York City’s Lower East Side, it’s now in alpha, go take a look. The VLES platform is a social network  where users create their own avatars (though that feature is not totally live yet), blog and hang out, virtually, of course. There's a BIG emphasis on music; the platform is setup as a place for bands to establish a presence, not just a profile page. There's an underlying game challenge that pits bands against each other, with players acting as promoters, working to get audience attention. The payoff? Virtual VLE$ currency and the chance to play a show at an actual club, this is in real life, in the fabulously happening Lower East Side. The venues, like Cake Shop and Arlene's Grocery, get a chance to promote themselves too, with virtual representations of their “space” they can host events online that may (or may not) be happening concurrently in real time (with real bands).

Of course, retailers are getting in on the action – there's a virtual American Apparel store, surely others will be popping up soon. I'm wondering if all the fancy restaurants that are opening up like spring flowers all over the LES will eventually get in on the act. Virtual visit to Stanton Social, anyone?

Seen and Heard:

Famed game designer Raph Koster blogged about VLES last night and  concluded [of Viacom/MTV]:  “The way in which these guys are looking at virtual worlds simply isn't the same way anyone else is. “

And it wouldn’t be New York if someone didn’t have a few snide remarks to add about virtual anything; the Gothamist has it nailed.

Join the Conversation – Building and Designing the Next Web

June 13 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

Web designers and developers today face a plethora of choices and new environments. How do you make the right bets for your next Web site or company?  Re-MIX07 SVC will attempt to help you sort them out and pick up some new tricks while you are at it.  The event is a free opportunity to join the conversation on how to harness the latest technologies, unlock new revenue opportunities, and improve the customer experience. The agenda is here. You can register here for all these sessions:

• When does it make sense to buy vs. build Web services from companies such as Amazon or Microsoft? Learn from companies that have made these decisions.
• Learn how leading Web sites are using Windows Live to bring more compelling user experiences to market at lower cost and more quickly than ever.
• See how to use Silverlight and Microsoft Visual Studio to create rich interactive applications � how to create a UI using XAML markup, retrieve data from a Web service and build a custom control.

 
Our personal favorite is the session using the �Top Banana� case study to demonstrate animating 2D objects and simulating 3D environments.

Much Ado About Zattoo

June 12 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

http://zattoo.com

I've become used to the idea of internet television. Complete with choppy video streams and sub-par content. Now, internet television company Zattoo delivers crisp, streaming television straight to your computer.

The major thing with Zattoo isn't that the company boasts an impressive catalog of television stations (everyone from Al Jazeera to British commercial television network Itv1 has a presence), but that the video quality is amazing. The company's trademarked P2P IPTV broadcast provides television quality delivery other internet television can only dream of. Their delivery paired with the quality content they offer makes Zattoo a company to watch (pun intended).

-Zattoo will be presenting at Under The Radar Conference on June 28th in Mountain View, CA.

Under The Radar Success Story: EditGrid

June 11 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

We’re happy to announce some major successes for Under The Radar presenting company Editgrid!

Editgrid is an online spreadsheet application that’s gotten lots of praise and attention for it’s highly developed function set. Team and Concepts Limited is the Hongkong-based parent company that launched EditGrid in April 2006. They have gotten a lot of traction since pairing up with Salesforce AppExchange; salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, named EditGrid as “the best online spreadsheet he has ever seen.”  A few days ago they announced a partnership with ThinkFree to replace the ThinkFree Quick Edit Calc, now EditGrid and ThinkFree Office Online will work together. David Lee, Editgrid CEO attributes this deal as a direct result of their participation at Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference in March 2007. TJ Kang, CEO of ThinkFree, came to Editgrid at the event and said, “Let's work together!”

So here’s even bigger news: Editgrid announced today that they’ll be getting US$1.25M series A funding by WI Harper. WI Harper is a U.S.-based venture capital firm that works to bridge business between the United States and Greater China. WI Harper invests in early expansion stage companies within Internet, wireless, digital media and life science / healthcare sectors.

Congratulations to David Lee and the team at Editgrid, see you in the Graduate Circle!

Doppelganger CEO Tim Stevens Weighs in on Virtual World Domination

June 8 by Jasmine Antonick / No Comments

Doppelganger is building the most ambitious and feature-packed virtual environments for their own audience (at TheLounge) and for big name entertainment and media companies. We caught up with CEO Tim Stevens and got his take the virtual world lifestyle.

1.  What is your company about? What's your business model?

Doppelganger is about social media and entertainment for the youth generation. We enable immersive and emotionally connected experiences that revolve around the things teens care about—community connection, self-expression, music, fashion and entertainment.  Our business model is built on immersive advertising, allowing select partners to integrate with our virtual environments and our visitors.

2. Why did you start this company?

The founders wanted to do something creative, entrepreneurial and game-changing.

3. What's your background?
I've built my career around the Internet, advertising, content, discovery, intellectual property and software industries at a number of private and public companies.  (Inktomi Corporation, Borland Software Corporation, Fios, Inc., Bazaar Advertising Solutions, Tumri, Inc. and 3VR, Inc  to name a few)

In terms of academics, I've got BS degrees in both Finance and Management from the University of Oregon, and a JD degree from the University of California, Davis.

4.  You're obviously working with a coveted demographic.  How do you plan to build a community of users and what is/will be the benefit of having a profile on The Lounge or one of your future worlds?

We plan to build our community by promoting this rich emotional experience through organic growth and through collaboration with our content partners.  We give teenagers a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be a part of celebrity life—indeed become celebrities in their own right in doing so—everyday.  What's more, we offer teens something “real” in the sense that when Alex from Nebraska meets virtual face to virtual face with members of Maroon 5, it's not make-believe–it's really happening, and that's immensely valuable.

5. Have you entered into any partnerships with other companies? How did you go about finding opportunities and negotiating deals?

We have and are in discussions with many more.  We find these
opportunities through our investors, Board Advisors and employees.  A lot of them find us; they download our product, and after checking it out give us a call.

 6.  Are you funded? What was the process for you to raise capital? How did you decide what investors to work with?

We are funded.  The process has gone pretty smoothly so far and we have great investors who we selected because their vision for what we are building is very similar to ours.

7.  What does the future look like for virtual communities?

Three main thoughts on this..

1. Virtual worlds will become similar to e-mail and IM; everyone is going to have a virtual identity. Even more interesting, people will be able to go from one world to another and back, seamlessly between networks.

2. Virtual worlds will become a increasingly integral part of a person’s
entertainment experience both in terms of consumption and
participation. By 2011, Gartner says that 80 percent of Internet users will be a part of virtual worlds, so we believe there's a lot of space in this sector for expansion.

3. Virtual communities are going to increasingly become niche specific—people will visit and live in virtual worlds that cater to their specific interests and aspirations.

8. What are some of the technologies that make The Lounge a reality?

We have invested a significant amount of focus in the actual architecture of Doppelganger's worlds—it's a beautifully built and carefully thought out environment that's not cartoonish or thematically disjointed. This allows visitors to live a lifestyle that reflects real-life aspirations: become a celebrity, embark on a dream career, wear the coolest clothes, have tons of friends.  It's not about having a third head or sprouting wings.