Monday, April 28, 2008

Awareness

Genotrope Record: Awareness

Formation Date: 2005

Funding Status: First Round

Investors: Greylock, North Bridge Venture Partners

Founders or Execs past companies: Microsoft Canada, Sqa, Authentica

Industry: Enterprise Social Networks

Offering Description: At the core of the Awareness solution is an on-demand social media platform that combines the full range of Web 2.0 technologies—blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social networking, podcasts, RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, etc.—with security, control, and content moderation.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Playhard

Genotrope Record: Playhard



Formation Date: 2008

Funding Status: Series A

Investors: NEA

Founders or Execs past companies: Turbine

Industry: Consumer Web, Online Sports Games

Offering Description: Play Hard Sports is the first sports network in North America focused exclusively on developing, publishing and distributing exceptional sports games and entertainment across the Internet.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Coming Soon ! TechCrunch Puppet Show

A lot of bits have been generated regarding the recent swipe TechCrunch took at the departing Chief Architect of Twitter. The personal taunting and Tabloid aspect have ticked off a few people. Of course the article had the desired effect from the TechCrunch perspective and the page views and comments are flying.

The point I want to bring up is that this method of personal "dissing" seems to be directly influenced by the recent visit of Loren Feldman to the TechCrunch "compound". Feldman has recently caused a bit of controversy on his own by singling out Shel Israel to personally ridicule and generally try to make his life miserable. He has gone to the lengths of registering the shelisrael domain where he hosts puppet show parodies of Shels FastCompanyTv show interviewing Web personalities. While I have to admit that some of the bits made me laugh, the unrelenting and apparent meaness can get old quickly. If you look in the background of some of the interviews which were shot at the Arrington enclave, you can see Mike Arrington in the background assuming the role of grip as the puppet works his magic. At that point I had an ah ha moment but didn't know why. Now the latest controversy makes it obvious. Has TechCrunch taken a step closer to the ValleyWag approach. You be the judge. Next up a scathing animated feature starring Zuckerboig and a parody of the recent Facebook chat app.

So what is next? Loren is obviously taking a page out of the Howard Stern, start a beef, playbook. Even on this relatively tiny scale, it bumps up traffic. So how about an East Coast vs. West Coast beef or "Social Media is for Wussies" campaign led by Amanda Chapel.

Bottom line, there is not really a major point to this post, but I was hoping do my little part by fanning the flames to jack up the pageviews with a manufactured controversy and link bait headline.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

POPSignal event May 15th

For those of you that attended Techcocktail last September, you will remember the great event put on by Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle and Geezeo. Well they are at it again with POPSignal. http://popsignal.eventbrite.com/

If you missed it last year be sure to try to attend. Don't wait to sign up. See you there.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Doink.com DK Pictures

Genotrope Record: Doink

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Seed, Alpha test, accepting new user registration

Investors: Self Funded

Founders or Execs past companies: Dome Imaging, Mindreef

Industry: Consumer Web, Animation and Web Graphics

Offering Description: DoInk is a place to enjoy art and animation, and make your own. Company is DK Pictures.

Buzz in theHub covered this company previously but they were in stealth mode. Now they are in Alpha and accepting new users. We usually refrain from making any comments on an application or review the capabilities, but in this case having been present during demos to users, I can say that the app is universally accepted and blows away any engineer familiar with what it takes to build such an app. I hope to see good things from Doink and a funding by a local Web VC.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Affine Systems

Genotrope Record: Affine Systems

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Series A

Investors: Highland Capital

Founders or Execs past companies: Microsoft, Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)

Industry: Online Video, Online Advertising

Offering Description: Our technology analyzes the visual content of videos and images "not just the metadata" to provide superior contextual advertising and brand protection to our customers.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Aprigo

Genotrope Record: Aprigo

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: First Round

Investors: Cedar Fund

Founders or Execs past companies: EMC, NetApp

Industry: Storage, Data Management

Offering Description: aprigo is about data and the people that manage it on a daily business