PALO ALTO, Calif.--Another line of start-ups made their case at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit here on Thursday. A mix of more established and fairly new companies with services that are in beta--some that have already had one or two rounds of funding but are now seeking investors' attention again.
Here is a chunk of the start-ups:
Technology enablers
• Flock is a Web browser that lets you add tools and applications to share media and interact online. We have mentioned it before and the last version of the social browser is now up for beta before its official launch later this summer.
• Nextrials is in the Life Science space and has a software solution for clinical research. The company started in 1999 and the CEO James Rogers says their software is already used on 850 sites. Their product manages inventory, patient randomization and brings data together to lower costs and bring products to the market faster. Nextrials is focused on the middle market of biopharmaceutical and medical devices companies.
• Genius.com provides sales companies with a platform to track clients browsing on a company Web site. The company found that many sales representatives send tons of e-mails but there wasn't a way to track them. So they created "Genius e-mail," allowing them to follow customers' page-by-page visits to see "who's hot and who's not," said the CEO David Thompson.
• EffectiveUI is a company using rich Internet applications to provide interface solutions for clients like Adobe Systems, eBay and Discovery Channel. Its eBay platform, which is now in beta, is intended to give eBay customers tools to search and compare companies and products. It has a function that sorts pictures of a product one after another like it's done by hand. But users are accustomed to having the buttons where they've always been so it's a challenge. One admirable thing EffectiveUI did with Discovery Channel is an interactive platform for a cancer collage, where survivors of cancer tell their stories.
• Infopia is a platform where companies can manage transactions, inventory and customers. It feeds Web sites with information and keeps track of orders and market output. CEO Bjorn Espenes says the company has 350 customers and is partnering with companies like eBay and Salesforce.
Web services and collaboration
• Mindtouch provides a wiki platform for online media and brands. It pitched its Nexus--a white-label version publishing platform that can be implemented and customized in a company's own style.
• Box.net offers Web-based online file storage and sharing. This was one of the more straight-forward and clear presentations of the day, but what they're doing is not unique. They have been online for a while and claim to have more than 1 million users who share 700,000 files per day. What is new is a plug-in on Facebook to help share files with friends.
• Leads360 is targeted to the mortgage industry to streamline leads and turn them into customers. CEO Jeff Solomon says they have 10,000 subscribers and 500 clients using their software to get return on their investment on their leads.
• LongJump is offering companies an online platform for secure solutions of their catalog of applications and sharing information with colleagues and partners. They have a drag-and-drop interface where each application can be customized by the users.
• Forterra Systems supplies a virtual world applied to business applications. They want companies to start doing business in a virtual 3D environment with avatars while conducting real tasks like training, collaboration and real-time meetings. Pity though that the sound didn't work during the presentation, so we couldn't see the demo.
• Collarity wants to help companies monetize products online. Its tool is intended to help users to find good stuff. Many sales are lost because visitors can't easily find the products. Through search on what customers are looking for, Collarity generates recommendations such as "customers who liked this also liked this." This is also done by others, such as Cleverset and Aggregate Knowledge.
Mobile and wireless
• Nuvoiz is a Japanese-American company enabling voice over IP with a soft phone through Wi-Fi for small and medium-size businesses. Nuvoiz claims to be "the Skype for the enterprises".
• Azaire Networks is providing a broadband mobility infrastructure. Still it has not reached the U.S. market yet even though it is an American company. It mainly has customers in Europe using the 3G technology. CEO Bill Howe wants to "free my phone" and get more U.S. carriers than T-Mobile to support Wi-Fi.
• Digislide is an Australian company developing video projecting technologies. The device the company demonstrated projected a video from a laptop, but was big and boxy. Its latest project is Digismart Miniature Projection, which is expected to be launched in early 2008, where a projector as small as a finger can be integrated in to a cell phone or a laptop. You can also chose between different resolutions and you get an hour viewing time from a cell phone. Among the competitors are Nokia, Samsung and Light Blue Optics.
• GoWare provides what it calls DoMo--a do more platform, first launched at DEMO in February, with an open API allowing users to create a personalized homepage on your PC that is formatted to be used on your cell phone. The company also showed off plug-ins for World of Warcraft in which users can take their characters to their phone. GoWare is partnering with 4Info for personal ads put into the content.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Crazy parents, pay attention. You'll probably be forking money over to Jason Ma in the near future.
Ma, CEO and founder of VC firm Congruent Partners, is behind Vanteus, an education center that helps high-achieving students boost their SAT scores. Companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review concentrate on a wide swath of students, Ma said.
Vanteus' courses and education modules are geared at kids who want to raise their score from 1800 or 2100 closer to the 2400 maximum. (There are now three modules on the SAT, so an 1800 is equivalent to 1200 in the old system and 2400 is a formerly perfect 1600.)
Students in a testimonial page for the company say they boosted their scores by 160 to 490 points on practice tests. A couple of students scored a perfect 2400 on the actual test. Would they have improved without the course or some other course? Perhaps, but the results seem pretty good.
Right now, Vanteus has centers in Cupertino, Fremont and Pleasanton, Calif. (There are cities where a score of 1500 and an admission letter from Middlebury would plunge an entire family into a deep well of depression.) Ma wants to go nationwide next.
Education--as we've written about--is becoming a big focal point for the Valley. Azure Capital jump-started the growing and several education companies at a recent ThinkEquity Partners event made pitches for venture funds.
I ran into Ma, whom I've interviewed before, near the snack table at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit taking place this week. He's going to probably make a pile with this new venture.
In the interests of disclosure, I'm a big believer in the SAT. My scores helped me get into Cornell (and since then, it's been a long, slow ride down the intellectual achievement curve.) Today, my scores wouldn't get me into Hampshire College.
Yossi Vardi, the guy who helped bring instant messaging to the world, is now trying to speed up video downloads.
Vardi is an investor in Haifa-based SpeedBit, which sells an application for speeding up downloads of games, videos and music. He claimed that by using the application, the download of a movie decreases from more than an hour to 22 minutes.
Downloading movies, of course, will get worse as high definition spreads. Some of these download services have received their share of customer complaints.
"It's the fastest growing application ever," he said, during a hallway conversation at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit taking place this week. "We're growing faster than Skype."
I haven't had time to verify that, but they do have a lot of downloads. They released their first product in 1999, and now claim that 142 million people have downloaded SpeedBit Download Accelerator Plus.
Sales of videos on iTunes have helped business, he added.
Vardi, along with Yair Goldfinger and others, were behind Mirabilis, which created the instant-messaging client ICQ. AOL bought the company in 1998 for around $287 million. It also helped Israel get into the Internet business.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Baynote wants to eliminate the power of the blowhard on the Internet.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has come up with software that allows shopping sites or media outlets to better determine what their customers want by how people interact with their site.
If customers click on the specifications on a road bike offered on a sports site more than the specs of competing bikes, that extra bit of attention is an indication that the bike in question might be a bigger seller, Baynote says. The next time a customer comes to that site, that bike might be highlighted above other models, thereby increasing the odds that the bike will sell.
Tapping into this "invisible wisdom of crowds" through behavior is a far better indication of customer behavior than what people are saying in online reviews, focus groups, customer comments or comments from self-appointed influences on the Web, Jack Jia, Baynote CEO, said during a meeting at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit taking place here this week at the university.
"There are three kinds of people that post comments--people with too much time on their hands, people who are too opinionated, and people with a secret agenda," he said. "Human behavior will tell you what (the general audience) wants."
Web site optimization is a crowded field, but Jia argues that the company's emphasis on unarticulated desires gives it an edge.
The company began selling its software about a year ago. Customers include Glam.com, eBay and Motorola.
One early customer, US Appliance, initially thought the software was buggy. Out of the large number of washers the online site sold, one of the most popular, according to Baynote's tracking data, was a red one. Weeks later, sales data indicated that it was one of the most popular models, he said. Red washers have also become a staple of the Best Buy Sunday insert since then, he added.
With media companies, the software is used for ad placement. "We know which ads are best suited for what spot," Jia said.
How customers react changes from Web site to Web site and product to product. Color might be a telling characteristic in appliances, but meaningless in sporting equipment. The company, however, does not emphasize clicks. Whether or not a person clicks on an item is a function of Web design rather than customer preference, he said. Instead, it examines about 12 different data points, which are determined by past consumer behavior on the site.
What are some of the common mistakes people make when designing Web sites? Sometimes sites are overloaded with content, which makes it difficult to find something, Jia said.
An inordinate amount of time is also often spent on user interface design. "They spend a lot of time on that rather than what people want," he said. "It can be pretty, but it can still be a pig."
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