Friday, March 28, 2008

New Boston Venture Firm Directory page has been added

We have added a new page to this blog

Boston VC Directory + Investments


Not fully comprehensive, but a good start. By clicking on the VC firms name you can see what companies they have invested in and what stage the companies have attained. Let us know if you have any firms you want included.

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myhappyplanet

Genotrope Record: myhappyplanet

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Seed Round

Investors: ?

Founders or Execs past companies: Harvard MBA candidate from P&G, Radiosherpa

Industry: Consumer Web

Offering Description: Learn a Language, Make Friends , Have fun

Thursday, March 27, 2008

PicMe

Genotrope Record: PicMe

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status:

Investors: Self Funded

Founders or Execs past companies: Microsoft

Industry: Consumer Web

Offering Description: The photos that you love to share, view and enjoy are now hidden away in your computer like a digital shoe box.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Newsflashr

Genotrope Record: Newsflashr

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Seed Round

Investors: ?

Founders or Execs past companies: InstantBull.com

Industry: Consumer Web, semantice web news

Offering Description: greater ease of use and a story selection process that helps readers understand how the site picks its top news items.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Moborazzi







Genotrope Record: Moborazzi

Citation URL:

Formation Date:

Funding Status:

Investors:

Founders or Execs past companies: Groove Mobile

Industry: Wireless, Consumer Web

Offering Description: Snap, Share, Instantly, Anywhere

Traackr

Genotrope Record: Traackr

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: ?

Investors: ?

Founders or Execs past companies: Optaros

Industry: Consumer web, user content creation

Offering Description: Traackr is the answer to digital content creators' frustration.

If you have pictures, videos, music or even reviews scattered across the Web, and you have no idea how many people are looking at them or responding to them, Traackr is the ultimate answer.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Michael Arrington falls for Y Combinator

In the past weeks we have seen evidence that the founder of TechCrunch has become enamored with the Boston based funding phenomenon Y Combinator.

The first clue was a post that heaped praise upon the YC hosted Digg/Reddit like site Hacker News, which commands a world wide audience of aspiring hacker entrepreneurs. Some have suggested (see the post's comments) this was an attempt to damn the site with strong praise, bringing it down with an influx of the TechCrunch hordes. The following quote and the post's last sentence delivers an ambiguous message. "Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost." If you have read some of the comments on TechCrunch, you will understand why the Hacker News crowd is worried.

Secondly, there have been ten posts mentioning Y Combinator in the last two weeks.

The last sign was a recent positive book review by Arrington on Facebook of YC partner Jessica Livingston's book, Founders at Work, that came out in the summer of 2007.

All of this recognition has me wondering what is up?

I spoke with Mike Arrington for about ten minutes when he was in Boston hosting the TechCrunch Meetup 11 on November 16, 2007. One of the questions I asked "are you planning on bringing someone on board to cover the local Boston startup scene?" His reply was along the lines of "there is nothing innovative coming out of Boston." While I suspect the comment was somewhat tongue in cheek, there is always a little truth in sarcasm. It is well known that the TechCrunch stance is Silicon Valley centric.

Could these recent ministrations be an admission that maybe the Boston scene can contribute to web innovation? Granted, even though the local VC's get there shot at backing Boston's innovative YC companies, most move to the valley to get funding.

So what might this new found love for Y Combinator mean?

Don't be surprised to see another YC clone pop up out in the Valley backed by TC and various associates. It already exists in a loose fashion. A more organized approach might be more effective. It could be a welcome addition for unknown founders to find funding when they are not plugged in to the Ron Conway or PayPal mafia deal flow. This would make sense and fit into the grand scheme of TechCrunch world domination for all things start up, set in motion alongside CrunchBase and TechCrunch 40.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there is some serious flattery going on. Time will tell what materializes from all this admiration.

Of course our speculation could be totally wrong. In any case, TechCrunch has pointed out that the Boston area is innovative and companies started here have an impact in SV.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Jackpot Rewards

Genotrope Record: Jackpot Rewards

Company URL: http://www.jackpotrewards.com/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Series A

Investors: has raised $16.7 million in Series A financing from a group of individual investors including Lynch, Connors, Chuck Clough

Founders or Execs past companies: WNI Inc., Virtual Iron, Cingular

Industry: Consumer Web

Offering Description: Jackpot Rewards will donate half of its after-tax profits to childrenâ??s charities, and two, that everything about the company, from the structure of the rewards program to the rules of its sweepstakes, is designed to maximize the amount the company is able to give away.

Old Road Computing

Genotrope Record: Old Road Computing

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: First Round

Investors: IDG Ventures, Highland Capital

Founders or Execs past companies: Virual Iron, Axiowave, Verisign

Industry: Mobile Security

Offering Description: Old Road Computing (our stealth name) is a hot new start-up in Westford, MA which will solve the growing problem of managing mobile devices on enterprise networks. Using technology only recently available on these platforms we will reduce the cost of managing loosely connected devices while simultaneously increasing their security and reliability.

Viximo

Genotrope Record: Viximo

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007 Q4

Funding Status:

Investors: Sigma Partners, North Bridge

Founders or Execs past companies: Constant Contact, Zoominfo, Pango Networks

Industry: Consumer Web

Offering Description: We're amassing an army of the world's most talented graphic designers and animators. If you've got the talent, the passion and the black-frame glasses, why don't you enlighten us.

See our initial post: Stealth Startup

Monday, March 10, 2008

BizUnite

Genotrope Record: BizUnite

Company URL: http://www.bizunite.com

Citation URL: just begun our pre-launch seeding

Formation Date: July 2007

Funding Status: Privately funded, terms not disclosed

Investors: Funded via an investment from a large Manchester, NH-based organization.

Founders or Execs past companies: Acadient, Carpet One

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Attivio Inc.

Genotrope Record: Attivio Inc.

Company URL: http://www.attivio.com/

Citation URL: http://masshightech.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2008/02/11/story6.html

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: First Round

Investors: Swedish angel investor

Founders or Execs past companies: GetConnected, Fast Search and Transfer

Industry: Enterprise Search, Software

Offering Description: Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) is the first information platform to provide two very basic but critical functions: a universal repository for both data and content, and a real-time alerting system that connects good, relevant answers directly to your corporate processes

Monday, March 3, 2008

Crimson Hexagon

Genotrope Record: Crimson Hexagon

Company URL: http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Seed

Investors: ?

Founders or Execs past companies: Icosystems, Razorfish

Industry: Web Publishing, Consumer Web

Offering Description: Crimson Hexagon is a patent pending text reading technology that allows users to define the questions they want to ask, and crawl the blogosphere for fast, accurate answers.