Webware

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.

Here are the last of the notable start-ups from today's Always On conference.

• GroupSystems is a collaboration service that works on desktops and mobiles. Pitched here: the company's ThinkTank product. It's supposed to replace or augment meetings, and record the decisions made in them. The CEO claims that NASA, the CIA, and other giant organizations use the service. The company, which is backed by the nation of Sweden, is supposed to support complex polling and brainstorming--enough for the nuance in financial due diligence, for example. This is an enterprise play.
• Wookah is a multi-engine search tool, pitched as a solution to all the problems search has. I call B.S. on this one. It just looks like another layer on top of "the best sites on the Internet," as the CEO explained it. It's not useless, but there's nothing innovative here that I can see. It doesn't even aggregate search results from multiple engines together into one page, which would be both not hard to do and actually useful. Skip this one.
• Storm Exchange sells information on weather, aimed at every business affected by it--retail, travel, energy, you name it. It's a consultancy, as far as I can tell. But if you need someone to talk to about the weather, you can give these guys a ring. See also WeatherBill, previously covered on TechCrunch.
• Spigit "measures and quantifies interactions on group platforms." In other words, they try to extract the wisdom of the crowds, automatically. That's how the pitch started. Then we heard that corporate customers can use the system to set up games for their employees to play with competing ideas. Which makes it a prediction market. I'll look into this one a bit more.

Somebody's got to help all these Web 2.0 darlings make a few bucks. Here at the Always On Stanford Summit, several advertising and service companies pitched concepts to help companies make money, or save it through more efficient operations.

• Spiceworks is a network monitoring product. It looks like Network Magic, in that it automatically detects what's on your network. Except it's built for business, not home. What's interesting about this IT product: It's free, supported by sponsors and advertisers. I have to try this.
• Baynote is a service that monitors what users do on sites, and applies trendy social science theories to help site operators improve "conversion rate," which is code for getting people to do what you want them to -- buy things, read stories, show relevant ads, etc. See full writeup.
• Ad It Last is billed as the "Travelocity for advertising." It's a system designed to snap up "distressed" inventory -- programs that are unsold and timely. Unlike Google ads, Ad It Last buyers know exactly what they are buying and where their programs will run. This Australian company is hoping to offer its services in the U.S. soon.
• Aleric delivers high-definition media. Here at the conference, they are pitching new channels: ChocolaTV, an educational wiki with video, and Kablu, a high-definition streaming service. "There's no need to copy or download anymore," the CEO says. He must never have used a laptop. This looks like a competitor to Joost (although Joost is not HD), and the company has partnership deals with several content providers, the CEO said.

At the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 07, the virtual world was under scrutiny. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier led a panel with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (Second Life); Irving Wladawksy-Berger of IBM; Chris Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online and Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun.

The big question was whether virtual worlds would be a real business. "Meetings, learning and training may be killer apps of virtual world. Don't underestimate any technologies that help us do that in a more human way," said Wladawsky-Berger.

See the full report over at ZDNet.

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."

Here's the video demo I promised earlier on Startforce, a Web OS that's not yet in open beta in the United States. While not a new idea, this implementation is especially clean. It apes the Windows look and feel, which may not be a great thing from an aesthetic perspective, but it does mean that the system is very easy for new people to get in to.

I find products like this technically stunning, yet it's still an open question as to whether we actually need them. Developers won't build apps for platforms that don't have big user bases. That's why Facebook is brilliant: The company built a large and interconnected user community before it launched its open platform. Furthermore, other technologies may solve the problems that Web OSes address. Online storage services such as Box.net are getting APIs so other Web apps can use them for integrated storage, and OpenID (or competing services) may solve the hassle of having to log in to each service you use separately.

Nonetheless: this is cool.

Here are consumer Web sites from the Always On Stanford Summit.

• Retrevo is a consumer reviews site we've covered briefly before. The CEO says that with all the reviews that are online, there's "no one to trust." So Retrevo's solution: assume the crowd is right even if individuals are not. It aggregates all of the (untrustworthy) reviews into a single review and score. The site also collects how-to info and PDF manuals on products. A new version of the site, Retrevo Snapshot, is coming soon, but the CEO ran out of time before he could get to it.
• PayScale is an online compensation survey. Users describe their work and their pay, and then the system creates a "peer set," so they can compare their income with others. There are over 8 million profiles on the site, the CEO said, which covers about 2 percent of the U.S. working population. The data is sold to companies looking to hire people, so they can tell what to pay people, and to mortgage lenders, so they can figure out risk factors around classes of people but not individuals. As the CEO said, this service is "emotionally compelling." It's also useful.
• PalTalk has a new paradigm, which it calls "Socialcasting." Uh-oh. What it really is: a 9-year-old company that combines broadcasted content (live streaming) with chat and social networking. In other words, you can gab about a show that other people are watching with you. (See Justin.TV for the ultimate version of this.) The goal is that the broadcasters will also watch the chat room and participate. The site goes live on September 10. It will launch with partners like Heavy and Blip.TV, as well as the video stream from some radio shows, including those from CBS radio and Opie & Anthony.
• Booking Angel reminds me of OpenTable. The differences: first, it doesn't rely on the restaurants to be online, although they must be members of the service. When a customer wants to make a reservation, Booking Table makes a phone call to the business and the person who answers can then accept or reject it. Second, it's general-purpose. It can be used by restaurants, mechanics, doctor's offices, or any other appointment-based industry. It's not clear to me how the system knows which appointment slots are available ahead of time, though.
• Iqzone lets you set up online classifieds directly from your mobile phone. It pushes your ad out to various services. See our previous writeup. It's pretty cool, I think, to be able to sell a car from a cell phone, but I'd recommend that people put more effort into selling big-ticket items. On the other hand, as the CEO notes, if you've got an item with time value, like a ticket to an event you can't go to, it could be very useful to create a classifieds listing from your mobile.

I am at the Always On Stanford Summit today. There are two full days of conference in a cool Stanford auditorium, which you can watch live, and down the hall, 68 CEOs pitching their startups in a small, overheated room. I'm the latter. I won't be covering all 68 startups, but I did want to pick out some of these guys.

• Cleverset is a service that "delivers relevance across the Web." It's a system that monitors what users do on various sites, so that when they go to another it can predict what you'll be interested in so you get the best content or retail recommendations. "We're the only company that can understand and predict the behavior of each individual," CEO Todd Humphrey said in his pitch. The company has 78 site customers, and apparently it's driving up click-through and transactions. Scary. But this is really what Web commerce is all about. See also Aggregate Knowledge, Collarity.
• iPolipo is a scheduling utility that we covered earlier this week
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• Startforce is an operating system that lives in your browser. Like Goowy, it's a suite of handy little applications the company has built, and like Netvibes and other single-page aggregators, it's supposed to be a platform for others to build on. The service is already a moderate success in Japan, and today it's opening up in the U.S. I got some video of the Startforce demo which I'll post later. It's very impressive for a Web application: Fast, fluid, and Windows-like. But while I like the idea of more capable Web services, I'm not clear on how Startforce will win over the developers it needs.
• YouSendIt is a large-file-sending service that's getting new enterprise-class services and pricing options.
• cFares is a newish online travel site. It's a membership site ($50 a year) that unlocks "wholesale" airfares. cFares also lets airlines dynamically adjust prices "at the point of sale," to undercut competitors. This allows the customer to "get a fare that doesn't otherwise exist," the CEO said in his pitch. It's like Costco, he said. You make you money back in one or two transactions.