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Posts Tagged ‘Venture Capital’

SeeWhy Aims To Optimize Website Conversions Through Email, Social Media

Andover, MA-based website conversion company SeeWhy today launched Conversion Manager, an automated web analytics service that allows publishers and e-commerce companies to optimize website conversion rates through real-time ‘remarketing’ campaigns.

The company claims that their solution can recover up to 50 percent of website abandoners (i.e. people who start but never complete a sign-up or payment process) by triggering automated campaigns using email and social media.

The company fences with study results that highlight the importance of real-time follow up with website abandoners, citing research from MIT that says 90 percent of e-commerce leads go cold within the first hour. SeeWhy CEO Scott G. Silk compares such leads with fine wine, stating that unlike the latter e-commerce leads don’t get better with age. Cute.

SeeWhy’s new product builds upon the functionalities of its predecessor, Abandonment Tracker Pro, which we wrote about earlier. With added support for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Conversion Manager is able to track individual visitors’ behavior on e-commerce and other websites and trigger automated, real-time messages to shopping cart, online form, and other abandoners by email and social media the moment abandoners leave the site.

Conversion Manager is available now at an annual fee of $15,000.

SeeWhy has so far raised $6.5 million in venture capital: $4.5 million in May 2009 and another $2 million from the same investors in December 2009. SeeWhy’s CrunchBase profile doesn’t list any competitors and a Web search doesn’t immediately turn up potential rivals – if you know alternative services feel free to share their names in comments.

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Free wiki hosting company Wikia to let you create your own question and answer sites

Wikia, a site which allows anyone to create their own free wiki page, has announced a new service, Answers from Wikia, that will enable anyone to create their own question and answer sites as well.

Wikia previously relaunched its Wikianswers service early last year, which directly competed with the likes of  Yahoo Answers, wikiAnswers (a competing service with a very similar name), and Answerbag. With Wikianswers, Wikia allowed users to ask general questions, and receive answers from the community. The new Answers from Wikia service will allow dedicated users who are experts on specific topics to build up their own niche Q&A communities.

Wikia will promote questions asked within these small Q&A communities throughout its existing communities — hopefully generating interest from its more dedicated users. Wikia also doesn’t require users to register to participate in its answer sites, so these niche Q&A sites will be more open than typical answer sites on the web.

After relaunching WikiAnswers in February 2009, the site has gone on to generate over 600,000 questions, with over 150,000 answered. Wikia also recently launched some niche do-it-yourself sites created by individuals, including EverythingAuto, and ClubPenguin.

Wikia was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company raised $14 million in funding throughout 2006 by Bessemer Venture Capital, First Round Funding, and Amazon, among others. In September 2009, Wikia announced that it achieved profitability a year earlier than expected.

Tags: WikiAnswers, wikis

Companies: Wikia

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POLL: What’s the Best Way to Support Startups, Services or Cash?

After wrapping up a panel with a gamut of pro- and anti-VC types at SXSW, I’m left wondering why there aren’t more services-oriented startup firms.

Let me explain: Most of the time, when a startup goes after venture capital, they’re still in the process of building a product and bringing it to market. They need things like servers, developers, marketing tools and sometimes office space. Do they need money per se? Or is capital an increasingly arbitrary and unnecessary step in building a tech startup?

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The fact is, almost every startup needs a little help. Maybe you get that help from the bank of Mom and Dad; maybe you get that help from your good friends at Mastercard. Often, you get that help from folks who want equity; you end up trading part of your assumed long-term success for resources you need in the short term.

We are all familiar with the idea of trading equity for funds through angel financing and venture capital; we’re also familiar with the TechStars and Y Combinator programs that help to incubate and accelerate startups through minuscule amounts of capital and significant amounts of mentorship.

But most of us are less familiar with models such as Mike Trotzke’s SproutBox or Marcus Whitney’s Remarkable Wit. These firms provide services (and sometimes keeping-Ramen-on-the-table amounts of cash) to early-stage startups in exchange for equity. They provide development, marketing and other services that most tech startups need without delving into the complicated issues of valuation and funding rounds. These guys are focused on the absolute bottom line of technology, which has nothing to do with money: Making a great product and finding people to use it.

So, we’re interested to know from our friends in startups who aren’t taking the bootstrapping route, given the choice between pure capital or business-building services, which would you choose? Take the poll, and let us know the reason behind your decision in the comments. We’ll be following up soon based on the results.

What would you rather have for your startup: Services or cash?polls

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Cartoon: Mommy, Where do Hashtags Come From?

You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and vanishing into receivership?

I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades – even centuries – for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse.

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But on Twitter, hashtags can live that entire lifecycle in the course of a day or two. A news story breaks, and competing hashtags vie for dominance. Then a few influential folks adopt the same one. Suddenly the conversation coalesces around it, the term trends, the spammers start using it, and then the conversation peters out as we move on to the next topic.

Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language?

Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation… in 140-character increments.

Meanwhile, people, seriously – “snowicane”?

More Noise to Signal.

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Qype, The Yelp Of Europe, Gets A Look From Google & Nokia

Hamburg, Germany based Qype, a Yelp-like site that’s focused on European markets, has recently had long acquisition looks from both Google and Nokia, we’ve heard from multiple sources. A deal with Nokia in particular was looking extremely likely until recently.

The site was first launched in 2005 and today attracts 9 million monthly worldwide visitors, according to Comscore, just a little less than Yelp’s 11 million. Both likely have far more actual visitors, but Comscore is good for comparision – in December, for example, Qype told us they had 17.7 million unique visitors. A year ago the company brought in a new CEO and have been expanding rapidly across Europe.

Google supposedly took a look at the company and passed, opting instead to just import Qype’s content. Nokia made a run for the company after Google, with one source saying that a term sheet had been signed in the $50 million range.

But another source says that a term sheet was never signed and the deal negotiations broke down over both price and other contract terms.

Qype isn’t helping much with the story, sticking to their no comments. But founder Stephan Uhrenbacher did email to tell us that the site has 500,000 registered users who’ve left over 1 million reviews. They are available in seven languages and have sites in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Ireland.

So for now at least Qype may remain independent. But like Yelp, which had its own acquisition drama late last year, Qype is in the local advertising sweet spot, where billions of advertising dollars (and euros) will be flowing over the next few years.

Qype has raised around £8 million in venture capital.

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Is Jive Software Taking Steps Toward An IPO?

If there is any doubt about the social Web moving into the enterprise, then the news today from Jive Software has to make even the hardest skeptics start to wonder.

The Portland, Oregon company that has built its success on providing a social layer to the enterprise is pursuing a path that may lead it to a public offering.

Fueled by venture capital, the company said today that it is looking for a new CEO.

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Current CEO Dave Hersh is stepping aside from his role to become chairman of the Jive board. The interim CEO will be Tony Zingale, a Jive board member.

Hersh has lead the company since 2001. He will lead the search effort for a new CEO. Zingale is an experienced CEO. He most recently lead Mercury Interactive, a company acquired for $5 billion. He was also CEO of Clarify, a CRM company.

In a phone interview today, company executives said an IPO is a possibility. It’s a move that makes sense. Jive is now competing with the largest technology companies in the market. For instance, Jive has a Sharepoint integration with Microsoft. But the reality is the two companies are vying for the same accounts.

The issue is size. Companies like Microsoft have huge sales channels. Jive does not have that kind of reach. An IPO would give Jive the resources to compete more effectively with the giants of the tech world.

It’s also a clear sign that the market is there for social software in the enterprise. Hersh said to us in an interview recently that there is a mad chase for all applications to be social.

That’s quite true. And Jive’s dreams of an IPO are representative of that reality.

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Build Business Cases, Not Business Plans

In the ancient times before the internet, a business plan was what you wrote to appease the Gods of private equity and venture capital. It was a thick document, full of scientific analysis, market data and of course, a J-curve shaped projection of sales. The problem was that few investors would make it through your epic masterpiece. Instead, they’d skip to the juicy parts. Former CEO of Elance and current founder of Roach Capital Partners, Eric Roach, shares what he’s kept in the business plan to raise $55 million dollars in venture capital in two months.

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In a recent blog post, Roach writes, “I would not waste the time building a big bad business plan, at least as described all over the web.  I’ve come to believe this has become a consultant’s dream, unfortunately, not one filled with gold at the end of the rainbow… When looking at the companies I have funded, I cannot think of a single time when I have read one.  Not one.”

I saw the post moving up Hacker News earlier today and I sincerely hope that entrepreneurs continued reading the article beyond the initial “don’t write a business plan” message.

While Roach dismisses the idea of an epic business plan document, he does encourage entrepreneurs to build a business case. The VC suggests omitting excel spreadsheets and keeping it simple. That being said, you need to know your projections, financials and product market as if those spreadsheets were sitting in front of you. In his experience, he’s raised funding with an executive summary, a powerpoint deck of 10-15 slides, clear financials and an elevator pitch. While he suggests you spend less time on constructing an epic document and more on getting your second meeting, he recognizes that you will be required to justify all of your statements. The point is that it’s not about the paper, it’s about your rationale, product and power to persuade.

Photo Credit: Alex de Carvalho

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One Block Off the Grid Raises $5 Million

One Block Off the Grid, a company that helps residents get competitive group pricing for solar panel installation, has raised a $5 million series A round of venture capital from New Enterprise Associates. The company has gotten pretty far without formal venture cash—facilitating more than 600 installations in 2009, most of that in the fourth quarter. 1BOG, as it’s called, hopes to install five-to-ten times that amount this year, so that NEA cash will help the company hire and grow.

Think of 1BOG like another NEA investment, Groupon, but focused on solar panels. The site groups together customers in large metro areas interested in having panels installed and helps get them the best price. Only one could argue there’s a much bigger need for IBOG than Groupon. Most people don’t know where to start if they want to install solar panels and have no idea how to compare bids between contractors. On average, 1BOG saves customers 15%. And, of course, there’s the whole getting-us-off-foreign-oil/saving-the-planet benefit to 1BOG.

The UI is impressive. You enter your address and it pulls up an aerial view of Google maps. You pick your roof, outline where you want the panels and get a few detailed options including cost, leasing options, local rebates, added value to the house and how much time the panels will take to pay for themselves. Prices and the benefits of solar can vary wildly depending on where you live, local subsidies, what you pay for electricity now, and how much sun you get. “There are some areas where the economics for solar are mindblowing, but no one knows it,” says Dave Llorens, 1BOG’s CEO.

This is less a company saving the world, and more of a company that helps people who talk a good game about saving the world actually go through with it. And that’s the key. While solar investments are down more than 60% in the last year, lean companies that can help bring on the tipping point in adoption have a much better shot at getting some cash.

Speaking of big talk about changing the world, the company is a spin out from Virgance, which we’ve written about before here. In previous articles, Virgance’s founder Steve Newcomb described the company as a startup that would release “Activism 2.0 campaigns” much like EA releases blockbuster games. That model seems to have evolved. Now, he talks about the company in terms of an incubator that helps create and spin-out low-cost companies that will help make the world a better place.

This isn’t a non-profit. The focus is just on greed-based, high-growth companies that will also “do good.” So far, Virgance has four in its stable, and Newcomb is trying to figure out whether there’s a way to scale that up to 40. He doesn’t yet know if that’s feasible, but if it is, expect him to raise a big venture round too.

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