StartUp Beat

Featured Pitch: Veeple

2009-02-10T18:53:06Z

Web Site: www.veeple.com
Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
Year Founded: August, 2007
Founders: Scott Broomfield, CEO, and Craig Sproule, CTO
Investors: Self-financed and friends-and-family
Employees: 12

By Scott Broomfield, Veeple CEO

The Insight:

Two years ago, my co-founder, Craig, brought me an idea. It was one so simple that I was surprised that no one had implemented it on the Web. That is, however, the essence of technology start-ups: great ideas abound. The idea was visioned out of the observation that the Internet, a lean-in medium, was showing passive video where a viewer just sat and stared. Why not, Craig and a few others reasoned, make the video interactive and marry the passive video paradigm to the active Internet paradigm? The idea was compelling so we decided to build an alpha version of the product and test our thesis by testing the market.

We created clickable video through a YouTube type model we called Veeple Labs. It was in this laboratory where we learned what people thought was cool and interesting, and equally important where we learned what people felt was not interesting. This direct market feedback was critical to the creation of the Veeple service. In parallel, we studied the market to determine the size of the business opportunity. The best way to describe the business opportunity is with a simple metaphor: If one were to take all the video that is forecasted to be viewed on the Internet by 2012 (Cisco’s Zettabyte Era) and put all that video onto DVDs and then stack those DVDs, the stack would reach over three-quarters of the way to the moon, or 207,000 miles high. Amazing! By 2012, nearly every Web site in the world will have rich, interactive video telling one’s story in ways much more compelling than a static Web site. Our decision was to go for it!

The Advent of Clickable Video:

So we built a fully encapsulated, turnkey solution. If you use Veeple you get everything you need in five easy pieces: 1.) a content management capability to keep track of all your video; 2.) a content-delivery capability so you don’t worry about how your video gets to the Web; 3.) a configurable and branded player so it is what you want; 4.) a full suite of all things clickable, including annotations, attachments and rich media files; and 5.) comprehensive video analytics, including analytics related to anything you made clickable. How you measure the performance of your video is imperative. Items four and five above are unique to Veeple.

In addition to the five items above, Veeple was built with three overarching design principles in mind:One Click (Amazon): When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon he had a design goal that his customer should be able to purchase a book with just one click. We wanted the Veeple experience to be similar for our customers. We met this goal. Using Veeple is simple. If a person knows how to drag and drop a text box or an image onto a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation, then one can use Veeple. One Degree (YouTube, plus one): We all know the story; everyone in the world is connected by a mere six degrees of separation. Six degrees, however, is far too many degrees of separation when one is talking about user behavior on the Web.

So we chose to follow the video paradigms that existed on the Web and then added one simple step: to make a video clickable—our unique and compelling value. Think of the great stories that you can tell by having the information inside the video instead of the video being inside a static Web page.The traveling Web site: have a look at www.lehdmedia.com as a great example of the use of Veeple. Take note that it is a video you are watching, not Flash.

One Feel (“Cover Flowish”): We cannot often describe it before hand, but we know it when we see it. We wanted the Veeple experience to have a ‘feel’ to it that would be clearly Web2.0 and Flash. Our site is an example of how the service feels. If you like our site, you will like our service.

The Veeple Business – Video as a Service (VaaS, or “Cloud Computing”):Similar to SaaS, VaaS is cloud computing for video. For you, this means there is nothing to download and no software to license. When you sign up for Veeple, you simply register for an account and you are up and running within minutes. Veeple is a service where businesses large or small simply subscribe to the service and pay an initial fee of $49 per month to get started. No storage fees. No streaming fees. No one time set up charges. No hidden fees. Simple! Further, if you anticipate over 100,000 streams a month, then contact us directly and we will set you up with our premium model. And by the way, we’re offering a 30-day free trial to get started.

People’s Reaction So Far?:

Incredible! We launched our B2B service in October and have surpassed 530 confirmed registrations. Veeple is seeing a great deal of press coverage. Interest in our service and in our business model is high because it is simple to understand and compelling in value. Last—and this is especially cool—people love using the service, claiming to have a great deal of fun using Veeple. As for funding, stay tuned for some good news on that front, but we cannot comment at this time. So hang on, 2009 will be an amazing year.

Q&A with Vineet Jain, CEO, Egnyte

2009-01-13T16:02:54Z

SUB: What is your primary value proposition for users?

Vineet Jain: Egnyte provides an on-demand file server for small businesses to store all corporate data, share within and outside the company and allow backup of personal computers. It eliminates all hardware, point solutions like tape based backup, ftp, vpn, etc., and all management overhead with the server in the cloud. Best of all, you get this on-demand file server with unlimited storage at 1/8th the cost compared to doing it yourself.

I strongly believe that the key to fast adoption is to keep the learning curve as low as possible. This was done by leveraging the best known paradigms–My Computer on Windows or Finder on Mac. Egnyte allows the users to access the file server natively from their desktop, in addition from any web browser. We are learning from experience that if the user does not get the product in 5-to-7 minutes, the chances of them continuing to use it go down dramatically. Therefore, we have made an intense effort to provide a simple, yet not simplistic, product.

SUB: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Vineet Jain: Previous to Egnyte, I founded a startup called Valdero, funded by KPCB, Trinity and MDV. After having cut my teeth on how to successfully build a company, I and three others, were looking at what do next after a successful exit in September, 2005. The SMB market was quite appealing since the opportunity is large.

We focused on the three trends–a.) commoditization of storage; b.) easy availability of broadband; and c.) teams getting more distributed or remote. All these three coupled with the gradual acceptance of hosted solutions, got us convinced that this was an idea to pursue. The idea to provide “Infrastructure On Demand” was born as a result. The Egnyte On Demand File Server is the base foundation of the macro idea.

We self-funded Egnyte for almost two years and only recently, decided to raise our first round that we closed a couple of months back.

SUB: Who do you see as your competition?

Vineet Jain: On the surface, this market appears quite crowded. One end of the spectrum you have a lot of consumer oriented solutions. Frankly, some of them are features on Egnyte. On the other end of the spectrum are enterprise class solutions like Sharepoint from Microsoft, that are trying to morph down for the smaller businesses.

There are very few SMB-focused solutions from ground up. Keep in mind that even though SMBs cannot spend the same amount as money as the large companies and also does not have the same level of IT competency, their needs in terms of security and privacy are not any different from large enterprises. This is more true for information centric businesses. From day one, Egnyte has focused on the SMB market paying via the subscription model.

SUB: Can you describe the underlying technology behind your product, and how it works for users?

Vineet Jain: You sign up for your file server via www.egnyte.com. When you sign up, we provide a company-specific web address, e.g. mycompany.egnyte.com, with which you will always access your file server. Within minutes, we provision this for you and your can start setting up users and folders. You can optionally, download and install a small Egnyte client that maps the file server as a drive on your computer—XP, Vista, Mac and Linux—and also allows you to back up personal email and file folders. This client, written primarily in python, is platform agnostic.

The back-end application layer is on Linux with our own RAID6 storage. They key technologies are in providing LAN like speeds over the public Internet using a variety of caching and compression techniques, design for security in all layers—physical/network/application and to scale globally, ability to add servers at an incremental cost.

Egnyte – www.egnyte.com

Featured Pitch:Vidoop

2009-01-05T19:58:10Z

Web Site: www.vidoop.com

Headquarters: Portland, Oregon

Year Founded: 2006

Founders: Joel Norvell, CEO, and Luke Sontag, President, Technology

Investors:

Employees: About 30

By Joel Norvell

How many passwords do you currently have to remember? How often have you tried to log onto an important Web site, such as your bank or retirement account, and struggled to remember which username and password you registered with? On the flip side, do you worry that your financial information is unsafe, because you use the same username and password at every location?

Vidoop got its start in 2006 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I met co-founder Luke Sontag. Luke had gotten a glimpse of the security problems that plague large financial institutions when he worked as a security analyst at a bank. We knew that that there had to be an easier way to handle secure logins.

We founded Vidoop to provide a solution to the problem of remembering complex passwords that provided a great user experience while still maintaining the strong login security required by our most sensitive online accounts. At the same time, we discovered there was also the opportunity to turn logins into a revenue generator for financial institutions.

Protecting users’ identities has become a hot topic lately. The increase in hacking, from keylogging malware to phishing attacks, has made it vital that online financial accounts be able to protect their consumers. At the same time, our research shows that 69 percent of Web users who connect to financial institutions online have at least four or more passwords.

Enter Vidoop’s ImageShield. Instead of making consumers remember a static password, Vidoop uses the human mind’s superior ability to recall pictures. Sites protected with Vidoop present their users with an ever-changing grid of photographs in different categories—cars, boats, cats, flowers, etc. Each image is tied to a one-time sequence of letters, which the user types in like any other password. Only the user will know the correct categories, since automated hacking attacks are not able to interpret images, and the actual letters entered onto the site change with each login.

To provide even more security, Vidoop offers a range of multi-factor authentication options. In addition to the ImageShield, financial institutions can elect to have one-time passwords sent to a user’s cell phone or to have a confirmation by voice phone. With these methods, Vidoop makes sites easier to use and harder to breach.

Furthermore, the cost of deploying stronger authentication has been prohibitive, but Vidoop can lower cost and potentially eliminate it from the equation.

While Vidoop’s authentication solution is licensed per a financial institution’s user base, Vidoop can change authentication from being an overhead cost to a revenue generator by selling the images in the grid to advertisers for product placement. So, instead of seeing a generic flower in the image-grid, consumers might see a bouquet from Flowers.com.

It sounds simple, but it has great potential. For financial institutions willing to share ad revenue, we can provide Vidoop’s strong authentication for free in exchange for sharing revenue from the ad sales. For financial institution sites that choose this option, the advertising version of this model works like this: Vidoop provides the image grid application. The financial institution simply integrates this application with their existing authentication infrastructure. Vidoop supplies the image and advertising content, and they share viewing-related data, such as how often each image was shown or clicked on.

It’s pretty simple, the financial institution keeps its users, and Vidoop provides usable security, stronger authentication, and a better user experience. And with sponsored images the everyday login suddenly becomes a revenue generator and marketing asset.

So where are we today?

Physically, we moved the company to Portland, Oregon, in September to take advantage of a stronger economic environment and talent pool for our company. Our headquarters are now closer to our customers, partners and West coast engineering talent, which will further drive the development of our products and solutions.

As a company, Vidoop has rolled out its platform for financial institutions, and we have also launched a free password manager—myVidoop.com—that is available to anyone on the Web. Like any start-up, we welcome interest from investors, but we are also aggressively marketing our strong authentication to financial institutions and other higher transaction businesses.

Multi-factor authentication shouldn’t come in the form of expensive key fobs, tokens, or USB drives. It should be simple and secure as image recognition, and it should be easy, fun and an opportunity to generate revenue. Vidoop’s authentication solutions finally allow profitable, usable, secure access.

That is a solution everyone can embrace.

Vidoop - www.vidoop.com

Featured Pitch: BizTrader.com

2008-12-29T19:59:28Z

Web Site: www.biztrader.com

Headquarters: New York

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: Colby Sambrotto, CEO

Investors: Private Investors

Employees: 3

By Colby Sambrotto

Launched in April 2008, BizTrader.com is a global hub for business. Users can buy, sell and value businesses, find value-added advice about all three processes, and get access to financial services and consulting. Think of it as a global exchange for small business. There are currently more than 25,000 businesses listed for sale on the site.

BizTrader.com’s wide range of services include Web 2.0 functionality such as video capability, mass listing syndication and distribution, RSS feeds, chat boards, and real-time, automated translation between English and Spanish. This improves the ability for small business owners and buyers to easily connect on a global scale.

I founded BizTrader.com after serving as COO of ForSaleByOwner.com, the world’s largest resource for buying and selling real estate without a broker.

ForSaleByOwner.com was sold to Tribune in 2006 and after going through that process, I was inspired to start BizTrader.com to meet the needs of entrepreneurs and investors. The company’s start up was funded by the original team of partners that created ForSaleByOwner.com.

At BizTrader, I am responsible for all executive and operational aspects of the business including overseeing business development, Web development and strategic planning. We currently have three employees, and we utilize a team of more than 20 consultants domestically and abroad. Over the course of the next few months we will make strategic hires in our business development area, and in marketing and sales.

Based on industry statistics that tell us only 25 percent of businesses for sale in a given year are actually sold for any of a variety of reasons, BizTrader.com has created a blended sales model, which enables owners to list their enterprises for a potential by-owner – no-commission sale. Clients may reach out for the assistance of a professional broker if necessary should their by-owner sales efforts prove difficult or unsuccessful.

Significantly, our “blended” model offers owners a far better potential of selling their businesses than surprisingly abysmal industry averages.

According to the IRS, there are about 25 million small businesses in the U.S., which includes home businesses and very small businesses with no employees. And of the 25 million approximately 5 to 6 million small businesses have one or more employees.

Our primary targets are those enterprises with at least one employee (5,547,000—of which 80.5 percent have annual sales of less than $1 million). At any given point, it is estimated that as many as 20 percent of the owners of these enterprises are actively considering the sale of their businesses. That’s roughly a million enterprises.

Significantly, only 25 percent of these enterprises (250,000) will sell in a given year and business brokers will be responsible for about 50 percent of that total. The low level of success is most often blamed on owners overpricing their businesses—not the performance level of the brokers.

Almost unbelievably, 75 percent of the businesses for sale remain unsold every year while 90 percent of the potential buyers remain on the sidelines.

At BizTrader.com, we primarily derive our revenues from three sources:

All-Inclusive Listings – Priced at $49 Until Sold, enable sellers to highlight their ventures on BizTrader.com as well as numerous related sites. Owners may attach up to six pictures of their ventures and use as many as 3,000 words to describe their ventures adequately;

Web Site Advertising – For entities such as financial institutions and franchisers who want to reach BizTrader’s sellers and buyers;

Exclusive “Blended” Broker Model – Brokers are able to list their client businesses-for-sale on the Web site for free. Additionally and exclusively, BizTrader.com provides sellers the opportunity to seek the assistance of a professional broker should they encounter difficulties with their “by-owner” efforts.

In the blended model, owners needing help are directed to brokers who have contracted with BizTrader.com to serve the needs of prospect clients forwarded to them. BizTrader is paid a “finder’s fee” of 10 percent of the total commission received by the broker should a sale eventually take place. BizTrader’s management believes that there is an outstanding opportunity for a new player to address the deficiencies in the current market approaches, which fail to address the needs of the bulk of the marketplace.

Led by a seasoned, successful management team, BizTrader.com is moving aggressively into the businesses-for-sale industry with an array of new and unique tools for business owners and business brokers to help them sell effectively.

BizTrader – www.biztrader.com

Featured Pitch: PrismaStar

2008-12-05T16:45:07Z

Web Site: www.prismastar.com

Headquarters: Chicago

Year Founded: 2005

Founders: Joshua Z. Tabin, CEO

Employees: 30

By Joshua Z. Tabin

PrismaStar has developed a patented product search tool that helps shoppers find the best products and services. It is designed for use on the web, in kiosks or from mobile phones. Founded in Prague, Czech Republic, in January 2005, PrismaStar has recently opened offices in London and Chicago. The company is growing quickly, and currently employs thirty staff.

Our vision is simple: To be the leading provider of e-commerce and consumer guidance technology. Consumers have been neglected far too long. PrismaStar is here to change that by creating the most comprehensive and unbiased tools available for making purchase decisions. By helping shoppers find and decide on the very best product for their individual needs, we give shoppers confidence to move forward with a purchase. After all, we’re consumers too. Our goal is to make shopping fun again!

AnswerOil

PrismaStar’s product selection engine, AnswerOil (www.answeroil.com), uses patented interdependent slider technology to help consumers make better, faster, decisions. AnswerOil revolutionizes the online and in-store kiosk shopping experience by focusing on what and why consumers buy. Shoppers can search for any product feature or specification and trade-off the importance of different features; fine-tuning their search, and sorting and ranking relevant results in real-time. Because every shopper’s needs and priorities are different, our technologies are designed to allow each shopper to choose what they are searching for rather than have it dictated by the retailer. We put the shopper in control of their search.

The AnswerOil user interface allows fast, easy comparison of multiple products based on any and all specifications. As shoppers tweak their search, the results dynamically sort in real-time. For retailers, AnswerOil brings higher sales conversion rates, higher customer satisfaction, fewer product returns, more repeat business and, ultimately, higher revenues.

Happy Customers

Jessops

In July 2008, PrismaStar signed Jessops, the UK’s largest photography retailer. The cornerstone of Jessops’ success has been its exceptionally high standard of customer service. PrismaStar has brought this standard to an even higher level since implementing AnswerOil for the Jessops web site (www.jessops.com).

123Shop

AnswerOil was implemented at 123Shop, a camera retailer in the Czech Republic (www.fotoplaneta.cz). This resulted in a two-fold increase in their sales conversion rates.

“The ratio of visits to orders placed has doubled and user feedback is also assuring us that we hit the mark,” says Pavel Včíslo, Director of Sales, 123shop.cz. “Potential customers going through the decision-making process were frustrated by the difficulty of finding relevant and accurate product information. The AnswerOil Product Selection Engine is our response to this problem. The system makes it significantly faster and easier for a shopper to find and choose the best camera for them.”

Award Winner

PrismaStar was awarded the first-place 2007 Internet Effectiveness Award by Economia Online, a leading Czech business publication, for its implementation of AnswerOil in 2007 on a Czech and Slovak hotel search site at www.hotelselector.cz.

Mology

We are very excited about the imminent launch of Mology, a social networking site for online consumer electronics shopping (www.mology.com) powered by AnswerOil. The site currently features just a camera selector, but other product categories will be added soon, followed by a unique feature that will allow users of Mology to create their own personalized selectors to use AnswerOil to help them make virtually any decision.

More functionality will be added to the site to make Mology the place where Techthusiasts go to discuss, rate and buy consumer electronics online.

Business Model

By licensing our patented AnswerOil technology, PrismaStar provides retailers with a solution that quickly and easily identifies what consumers want, increasing the likelihood of making a purchase. Retailers pay a monthly licensing fee and we take care of everything else.

DataOil is part of the back-end of AnswerOil and is a proprietary system that gathers, integrates, and validates highly detailed and accurate product specification data, which is also available for purchase. Another component of the technology is Real-time Performance Metrics (RPM), which stores and analyzes every purchase made via the AnswerOil selection engine. The result is unique, unsurpassed market research data—captured in the natural act of shopping—that tells our customers WHY shoppers are purchasing their products. This data will also be sold in the future.

Finally, Mology generates revenue via a variety of affiliate programs and by bringing the power of AnswerOil to the world.

The Brains

I began my career in 1982 as a computer programmer on the CDC Cyber/PLATO mainframe at the Computer Education Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois. In 1986, I worked for SuperValu Corporation as a programmer working on Burroughs (Unisys) mainframe computers and PC-based database systems. In 1990, I transitioned into the field of Corporate Sales and Management for ComputerLand. In 1993, I moved to Chicago to work for Elek-Tek, where I leveraged relationships with large companies such as Case Tractor, GE, Philips and Tribune to build a sales team whose annual revenue reached $30 million in just two years. In 1996 I started Tabin Corporation (www.tabin.com) and by 1999 it was the 83rd fastest-growing company in the United States (according to Dun & Bradstreet).

In 2000, I was awarded the Chicago-Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame Award. By mid-2001, Tabin Corporation’s monthly revenue grew to nearly $4 million per month from offices in Chicago, Dallas, Texas, and Seattle, Washington. Sales growth of 4,250 percent for the five years from 1997 ($600,000) to 2001 ($26.1 million) would have placed Tabin Corporation number 26 on the Inc. 500 had it not been sold to California-based EnPointe Technologies in October 2002.

My energy comes from collaborating with my staff—a multi-cultural collective of inspired young technology enthusiasts, whose creative spark is constantly turning ideas into reality, thereby making a positive difference in people’s lives, in ways they did not previously think possible!

PrismaStar – www.prismastar.com and www.answeroil.com

Featured Pitch: rSitez

2008-11-22T00:52:14Z

Company: rSitez, Inc.

Web Site: www.rsitez.com

Headquarters: Sparks, NV

Year Founded: 2007

Founders: Rohan Hall, Sylvie Hall

Investors: Private Investors

Employees: 10

By Rohan Hall, Founder and CEO

Web 3.0 - Monetizing Social Networks

Web 3.0 will be about monetizing social networks. Entrepreneurs will use social networks to create revenue from advertising, membership fees and service fees. Non-profits and associations will collect donation, association fees, event fees and convention fees online. And corporations will be able to target products and services to specific audiences while having full control of their brand. They will not be able to do this with the current large generic social networking sites. They will need to do this with their own targeted branded site where they have total control of the site, content, and revenue.

I had a discussion about this concept with my wife, who is also my business partner, two years ago. My wife was an EMEA Manager at Oracle. I owned an ERP technology consulting firm whose clients included PeopleSoft, Honda, Sierra Pacific Resources and other multinational organizations. It was clear to us that the benefits of online social networks had not yet reached many corporations, groups and organizations—some of which had offline networks with millions of members. In addition, I realized that entrepreneurs like myself had not yet figured out how to capitalize on social networking.

Many could not afford or did not have the ‘know how’ to build a complex application like this from scratch. The unexplored value of social networking is found in its potential to easily attract and monetize existing or new networks, but this value was not available to everyone.

rSitez evolved from this epiphany. We provide an application where entrepreneurs, corporations, associations, non-profits, and any other group, individual or organization can create an online social network in minutes and monetize this network. The entire process to create and start monetizing a new social networking site with our application takes less than 30 minutes. What’s great about this for our clients is that we do practically everything for them. We create a full-featured Web 2.0 site with blogs, chat, IM, photos, video, personal profile, groups, forums, newsletters, email and a variety of other features; we host the site for them or our enterprise customers can host the site themselves; we provide 7 days/24 hours support for our customers; we provide regular upgrades and add the latest technology innovations at no additional cost to the product; we provide daily backups and security features; and we provide a variety of monetization features. We also provide full customization services to clients who want to modify the software to further meet their business needs.

Because no technical skills are needed to create or manage our sites, we believe that our platform will continue to provide opportunities for everyday individuals and groups who would like to benefit from the social networking trend. Not only are our clients able to turn on monetization features, but they can easily turn these features off as well. Our customers are given full control of the site, content, members, revenue, and other features.

The results have been extremely successful for both us and our clients. We continue to grow our customer base and revenue month over month. We were profitable the 2nd month after launching the business and continue to be profitable today. We generate revenue from licensing fees, hosting fees, advertising, and consulting fees. We will also introduce transaction processing fees in the future. We are privately funded and will be seeking investment to expand our market presence in the near future.

This month is our one year anniversary and we are in the process of releasing Version 3.0 of our product where we will release a variety of new features and additional monetization options for our clients. We look forward to continued success for both ourselves and our clients in the coming future.

rSitez - www.rsitez.com

Q&A with Ludwik Zon, CEO, Miri Systems

2008-11-14T18:13:20Z

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Miri Systems is the developer and marketer of the MiriPay system. Its members include software developers and banking experts with decades of experience in custom software and credit card solutions as well as experts in quantitative analysis of complex systems and intellectual property development.

StartUp Beat: What is your primary value proposition for users?

Ludwik Zon: Security. Users of the Miri Card will have the ability to shop anywhere, anytime confident that their account number information is protected. Fear is the number one reason cited by U.S. consumers for not making purchases over the Internet or on their mobile phone. However, credit cards are the global currency and fraud is a global problem. A secure payment vehicle makes everyone a winner through increased commerce, reduced rates of identity theft and reduced values of the stolen information on the black market while improving customer loyalty. Clearly, the advantages of a Miri Card for the global economy in burgeoning e-commerce and m-commerce markets are enormous.

StartUp Beat: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Ludwik Zon: Miri Systems was founded in November 2007, but the idea for the solution began in 1999 when Paul Vasil, our CFO and also an accountant, along with Ron Sandstrom, a software architect and our CTO, conceived the idea of an “intelligent” payment card. They submitted a U.S. Patent application in 2000 for imbedding intelligent information into a payment number. The Patent was granted in September 2007. I joined the company that same year as CEO.

We know that the stakes are high for consumers, banks, card associations and merchants. In 2007, there was an estimated $3.2 billion USD in online credit card fraud. I frequently have credit cards that have to be cancelled as a result of fraud. Consumers are now asked to dig deeper into their pockets to purchase identity theft protection. Real protection is taking away the power of stolen information, and that’s what the Miri Card does.

StartUp Beat: Can you describe the underlying technology behind your product, and how it works for users?

Ludwik Zon: Miri Systems has designed a unique solution that allows users to make purchases via the Internet, mobile phone or in-store through virtual credit/debit card account numbers. We are the only company that provides a stand-alone application that can generate a dynamic account number for card purchases anyplace, anytime and does not require Internet access. This unique and patented solution, the Miri Card, uses an encoder to generate a virtual account number at the point of sale for each purchase. This encoder resides as an applet on a computer, mobile phone or smart card, and again it does not require Internet access—a key advantage. The payment card transaction is processed like any other transaction except the virtual account number can only be decoded by the host: the credit card association, the issuing bank or card processor. Since the actual card number is not used or stored at the point of sale, the customer’s original account information is never compromised, thereby providing a secure payment vehicle.

StartUp Beat: Who do you see as your competition?

Ludwik Zon: There are other companies that provide virtual account numbers. However, the Miri Card is the only solution that allows virtual account numbers to be created anytime and anywhere, does not require Internet access and does not pass original account details. It works with both credit and debit cards, supports card present transactions and provides useless account data if stolen. This is the uniqueness of our solution. Only the Miri Card provides a secure solution that adapts to evolving consumer purchasing behavior in growing access channels for commerce.

Miri Systems - www.mirisystems.com

Featured Pitch: PlanDone

2008-11-07T17:25:33Z

Web Site: www.plandone.com

Headquarters: Petaluma, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: A.J. Wacaser

Investors: Privately funded

Employees: 4

By A.J. Wacaser, Founder and CEO

PlanDone is a disruptive project planning tool that is transforming the web-based project collaboration market. Designed to help companies and their teams complete projects on time, PlanDone is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) social project planning application that utilizes web 2.0 features such as instant messaging and wikis to help distributed teams work together more efficiently and effectively.

After managing a team of software engineers in India and California while reporting to managers in California, Illinois, and Amsterdam, I grew frustrated with missed deadlines and incomplete projects using complex, bulky tools not designed for efficient communication. I found the use of email, traditional project software and document editors ineffective and I knew there had to be a better way to collaborate.

After many years of research and development, in 2006 I developed what would later be called PlanDone, web-based project collaboration software to help small-to-medium sized businesses manage and complete their projects.

Most project team members have no formal training as professional project managers and are left to use linear, static tools and processes in isolated meeting spaces. PlanDone prevents commonly experienced problems with managing projects such as accessing the most current document. These problems are solved by providing a centralized, interactive platform designed to gather and capture critical pieces of information such as files, guidance, goals or ideas within an open, flexible framework.

PlanDone also organizes, prioritizes, schedules and enables better communication in a maintenance-free, hosted application that is easy to use for staff members at every level of the company. The software was designed to support people in the way they work naturally—not forcing them to change their working style based on the confines of the software features.

Unlike other products, PlanDone has a built-in wiki system for tracking recent changes, a priority ranking system for differentiating task importance, an instant message system that captures chat information directly into the supporting documentation and a projected deadline system for accurately pinpointing end dates with certainty. PlanDone avoids the back and forth document version confusion by dynamically tracking the most current version in the wiki and providing clear expectations as action steps to team members of their prioritized tasks and due dates. Teams report higher productivity, more accurate deadline projections, greater ability to get back up to speed, and reduction in miscommunication and confusion over shared roles.

Business Model

IDC forecasts that the small and medium-sized business (SMB) enterprise applications market will grow to $80.3 billion by the end of 2012, representing a 10.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2008-2012 period. PlanDone fits nicely in this market and offers users a subscription-based model—either month-to-month at $16 per user for up to three users or discounted six and 12 month packages. PlanDone’s services are best suited for small-to-medium sized business in the following industries: consulting, healthcare and manufacturing, but any industry that wants to cut costs and save time with distributed team planning and task management implementation can benefit from PlanDone’s solution.

Current Needs

We are currently evaluating early stage investment firms that have experience in the web 2.0 field to bring in seasoned management teams.

AJ Wacaser has more than 15 years of experience working in public and private software companies in desktop and web development. He has managed numerous teams around the globe.

Previously AJ was the Web Development Manager at KnowledgePoint, an HR software company in Petaluma, Calif. He helped guide development through the dot com boom/bust and helped many small businesses with a suite of pay-per-use, on-demand HR productivity tools such as HRTools.com, JobDescription.com, PerformanceReview.com and PersonnelPolicy.com. These products are currently owned by Administaff. When HRTools.com launched in 1999, the site was selected as a Codie Award finalist.

AJ graduated from Augustana College, and earned a M.A. in Environmental Planning from the University of Illinois.

Q&A with Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox

2008-10-31T17:28:01Z

www.jivox.com

SUB: What is your primary value proposition for users?

Diaz Nesamoney: Jivox helps small businesses reach customers with online video advertising. We provide advertisers with an online, self-service tool to create high-impact video ads using stock footage, images, music or their existing video assets. Jivox ensures high-quality placement of customer ads through the Jivox Publisher Network, a locally-focused network of premium publishers that includes more than 500 local TV stations, newspapers, weather and other specialty web sites, and offers geographic ad targeting at the city level as well as demographic and contextual targeting.

The Jivox video ad creation and distribution platform is cost-effective and easy to use, putting video advertising in reach of smaller and local businesses for the first time. With Jivox, advertisers don’t need to undertake the expensive and cumbersome process of hiring a video production agency, engaging a separate ad creative agency and then lining up disparate video ad networks to place their ads. They just log onto Jivox, create their video ads with drag-and-drop functionality, and then instantly get the ads placed across web sites on the Jivox Publisher Network, which today reaches more than 60 million engaged Internet consumers.

SUB: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Diaz Nesamoney: I founded the company in early 2007, because I had just sold my previous firm, Celequest, to Cognos. I wanted to start another business, and I thought hard about what was missing in the market. It was obvious to me that video advertising is going to be the next wave of Internet advertising, but that the way the video ad creation market works today, it’s largely out of reach of smaller businesses. And yet smaller and local advertisers are eager to spend on video advertising. Recent research from The Kelsey Group estimates that the local online video advertising market in the U.S. will grow to $1.5 billion by 2012, up from just $10.9 million in 2007, and that local businesses will spend nearly 12 percent of their ad budgets on video by 2012. So I started Jivox to make video advertising accessible to smaller and local advertisers. We also work with creative agencies, which use Jivox to create compelling, engaging video ads for their clients—without breaking the budget.

SUB: Who do you see as your competition?

Diaz Nesamoney: Some companies we consider to be in our space include Mixpo, Spotmixer and Spotrunner. But none are exactly like our model, which combines self-service video ad creation, optimization, targeted placement on our own Publisher Network made up of hundreds of quality web sites, and advanced campaign reporting.

SUB: Can you describe the underlying technology behind the site, and how the
site works for users?

Diaz Nesamoney: The Jivox platform combines state-of-the-art ad serving and targeting with a sophisticated video editor. The platform supports business decisions with robust reports and dashboards.

Jivox is easy to use. Creating an ad on Jivox is a simple three-step process that can be completed in minutes. Advertisers and agencies simply create an account, launch the Jivox AdSlate video ad maker, and start browsing our library of stock images, video clips and music to create a video ad. They can also upload existing materials, such as a digital picture of a storefront, product shots, headshots, or logos, and insert contact information, web site address, and a direct response element such as special discounts, promotions or coupons. Once they’re happy with the ad, advertisers use Jivox AdSlate’s point-and-click targeting system to set up a target audience for their ad distribution. Lastly, advertisers enter their budget parameters for the campaign, specifying a maximum budget, campaign run dates, and identify specific times of day, days of the week, and other important choices that impact the ad performance. Unlike most other forms of TV and web advertising, with Jivox, advertisers pay only for ads that are actually viewed.

As soon as a video ad starts running, the advertiser can use Jivox Ad Campaign Reports to get details on how it’s performing, and then easily optimize the ad on-the-fly to obtain better results.

Featured Pitch: Replay Solutions

2008-10-24T16:30:30Z

Web Site: www.replaysolutions.com

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Year Founded: 2004

Founders: Jonathan Lindo and Jeff Daudel

Investors: Hummer Winblad, Partech International, Sigma Partners and UV Partners

Employees: About 30

By Jonathan Lindo, Co-Founder and CEO

Software defects are an inevitable part of building and running applications in today’s complex environments. Companies spend incredible amounts of time and money working to reproduce and resolve defects, keeping them from far more important tasks that will actually contribute to building their businesses.

The first challenge when fixing defects is to reproduce the conditions that caused the error. It sounds simple enough, but for an enterprise application, this is a very complex process. Recreating the environment, re-populating the database, and then generating the required traffic and load on the servers is a tedious, manual process.

Replay Solutions was created to solve this problem. Jeff Daudel and I founded the company in 2004 as a result of being inspired by another revolutionary technology: TiVo. With the ability to record and replay television content on-demand, you were finally in control of the viewing experience. We quickly recognized the potential of applying this concept to software applications. As developers ourselves, we had become tired of watching software ship dates slip because bugs could not be reproduced. We began building Replay, and became known to many of our customers as a “TiVo for software.”

Replay Solutions’ core technology focuses on simplifying problem resolution in all phases of the software lifecycle. Companies that build or run enterprise software need the ability to locate the source of software defects quickly to meet demanding software release schedules, and to keep applications running smoothly in the data center. Replay accomplishes this by doing the difficult work of reproducing the root cause of any software defect. The technology captures every input and event that can affect an application, and then replays these inputs and events during playback, allowing problem analysis with common tools such as a debugger. Because the application is actually running during replay, common techniques and tools such as Eclipse can be used to isolate and resolve the defect. This is a revolutionary concept that takes a dramatic step forward from traditional logging and screenshot techniques commonly used to capture and understand defects.

Defects that can crash applications and bring servers down may be inevitable, but with Replay Solutions, application teams can playback recordings and actually “fast-forward” the running application to the moment of error, exposing the root cause of any issue. Replay instantly reveals what is happening in the code, and within minutes developers and testers are able to identify the source of any software issue.

Replay is not an improvement on existing technology, but a completely new approach to solving a problem that has plagued the application problem resolution process for the last 30 years. Fundamentally, Replay Solutions technology is designed with an understanding of the importance of collaboration between teams. ReplayDIRECTOR, our flagship product, is transparent and lightweight, allowing recordings to be shared between teams around the world seamlessly.

Replay recently raised a $13 million series B financing round, and we look forward to growing our company and rolling out future products that transform the application problem resolution process.

Q&A with Michael Choupak, CEO, Unison

2008-10-16T17:07:05Z

StartUp Beat: What is your primary value proposition for users?

Michael Choupak: Unison simplifies and improves business communication. It puts email, IM, telephone calls and voicemail in one desktop app, so staff can talk to each other and store communications more efficiently. By eliminating the time people waste due to old systems like Microsoft Outlook and separate telephones, Unison can increase a company’s productivity by 15 percent. In cost terms, Unison is up to 85 percent cheaper to buy and deploy than traditional servers such as Microsoft Exchange. All business communications can run on one server. For SMBs that don’t have the IT budget to roll out massively complicated unified communications systems, engineered to handle many thousands of users, this is really a no-brainer. You can be up and running in a few hours, connecting all of your employees, and ultimately achieving the end goals everyone wants—increasing employee efficiency and improving overall business operations.

StartUp Beat: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Michael Choupak: The company was founded in 2006, but is the product of years of testing and refining through our work with multiple companies in the email and telecoms industries. Like the product, the idea of the company was also based on simplicity—to make business communication truly unified, and to break through the cluttered market with truly innovative technology. Increasing productivity, particularly in small and mid-sized companies, is something that is invaluable to business, and my background suited me well to help take this issue head on.

StartUp Beat: Who do you see as your competition?

Michael Choupak: Our chief competitor has a large marketing budget, its fingers in a lot of pies and more recognizable name: Microsoft. We see customers remaining with them due to general inertia and a fear of change. However, it also has technology that is not appropriate for the SMB market. A giant like Microsoft, which has been updating its business communications technology for upwards of 20 years now, has not been able to overhaul Exchange and Outlook to meet the challenges businesses face today. Due to the fact that every new version must be built to support to some degree with the old version, we have a great opportunity with our fresh approach to unified communications, which is modern and built from the ground up.Other competitors in the market are emerging, though they don’t offer the complete package that Unison does. For example, Google Apps and Zimbra are gaining popularity in the groupware market, while Lotus v8 offers a software-solution similar to Microsoft unified communications.

StartUp Beat: How are you differentiating yourself from Microsoft?

Michael Choupak: As discussed earlier, we differentiate ourselves from Microsoft in terms of overall functionality (we have more features and better integration), manageability (one server to manage opposed to several) and cost (85 percent less). Essentially, Microsoft is at an inflection point where their three monopolies—Exchange, Outlook and Office—are threatened. Unison is one product that will begin to crumble this empire.

StartUp Beat: Can you describe the underlying technology behind your product, and how it works for users?

Michael Choupak: The Unison solution has two parts: Unison Server and Unison Desktop. On the server side, the software runs on a single Linux server. At this level, you have your PBX telephone, email, calendars, contacts and IM all being stored on the same box. This includes one admin control panel for easy manageability on the back end. On the desktop side, we have our own native client that runs on either Windows or Linux. The client was designed to be familiar to people used to common clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, to minimize the confusion of switching to a new system. However, while looking similar, it also provides important extra features and simpler usability. Some other exciting features are click-to-call right on your desktop, receiving real-time presence updates on your contacts including if someone is on the phone and for how long, as well as intelligent search features.

StartUp Beat: What is your business model—how do you make money?

Michael Choupak: Unison has created a business model that allows for revenue in a few ways. First, we offer support that ranges from $2,000 for 10 support “incidents” (calls or e-mails), or $12,000 for unlimited support to make sure your platform is running optimally. Secondly, above 20 users (which is the limit to which users can utilize Unison for no cost), we sell the commercial version for an extremely affordable price of $50 per user/per year, or $36,000 for a perpetual license and unlimited seats. There are also plans for software add-ons and additional services. However, we have some other plans in the works that are sure to shake the foundation of traditional giants like Microsoft, so make sure to stay tuned in the coming months. Regular updates are available on Unison.com and our blog: http://blog.unison.com/.

StartUp Beat: The SMB market has been a hard one to crack for many companies. How are you reaching new SMB customers?

Michael Choupak: You are certainly right that this market poses some challenges, namely that there is confusion over which communications products are truly unified, and how to measure ROI on IT investments. However, Unison provides such simplicity that it’s been an easy sell to IT directors and CEOs of SMBs. Our main path to market is via resellers, who can make more money selling Unison than they can selling Microsoft technology, and who have an existing client base of SMB customers.

StartUp Beat: What is your “sweet spot” in the SMB market, in terms of size of company, by employees or revenue?

Michael Choupak: The sweet spot that Unison reaches is currently companies with 20-1,000 employees, though we have tested up to 2,000 users on a single server. We have seen that it’s especially difficult for massive corporations to overhaul their communications systems due to the complexity of housing hundreds of thousands of users on them. However, for the 69 million SMBs in the world that are eager for a simpler, more cost-efficient alternative, this is the perfect product.

StartUp Beat: How many employees and offices do you have?

Michael Choupak: We have approximately 60 employees in three offices (New York, Boston, and St. Petersburg, Russia), and are growing. With Unison, we are at the cusp of something very big, and expect rapid expansion. Unison – www.unison.com

A successful serial entrepreneur, Michael Choupak is the founder of several companies in the messaging and telephony space, including Intermedia, the world’s leading business email software-as-a-service provider, and StanaCard, a major provider of international calling services. As Unison Technologies founder and CEO, he leads the company in its mission to be the leader in unified messaging software.

Q&A with Alan Silberberg, CEO, You2Gov

2008-10-09T17:38:29Z

StartUp Beat: What is the site’s primary value proposition?

Alan Silberberg: The primary value proposition is to empower citizens to be stronger owners of the government by providing the tools to conduct deep research on political and governmental issues, to form groups and to directly contact elected officials from the web site. So You2Gov makes citizen advocates out of all of us, and in essence creates the “armchair lobbyist” tool kit to make each and every citizen become a more accountable and demanding owner of the government at the federal and state levels.

StartUp Beat: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Alan Silberberg: The company was formed in the spring of 2008, and the site was launched in alpha mode in mid July, 2008. The idea was conceived by the chairman of You2Gov, Ralph J. Shapira. He was extremely concerned that the “Super Delegates” might determine the outcome of the election. He wanted to make sure that all citizens understood and had the power to influence their government through the same levers of power available to lobbyists, corporations and trade groups.

StartUp Beat: Who do you see as your competition?

Alan Silberberg: While there is no direct competition as evidenced by You2Gov being the only social networking site on the PC Magazine list of top 20 political web sites, there are lots of politically oriented web sites. But few, if any, combine the news, research, and real action tools inside the social environment familiar to MySpace and Facebook users.

StartUp Beat: Can you describe the underlying technology behind the site, and how the site works for users?

Alan Silberberg: The web site is open source, written in Joomla. We established the social engine as the base, and layered the research, news, and action tools on top of this social engine, so every data point on the web site is shareable and subject to comments, rating, etc. We strived to create a web site that was dynamic and easily changed from a content perspective and that would be robust in every feature offered. We have succeeded at achieving that part of the vision so far, and are working every day to improve the user experience and add to the features found on You2Gov.

StartUp Beat: Have you raised any outside funding to this point?

Alan Silberberg: At this point the company has been entirely privately funded by the owners of the company, with no outside financing, loans or other vehicles at this time.

StartUp Beat: Explain the idea of the “armchair lobbyist.”

Alan Silberberg: This is not so much a “feature” as it is a state of mind. You2Gov is a platform for anyone sitting at their office, in their home, or even on their mobile phone to instantly reach out and communicate in an informed way with their representatives, regardless of party. We have flattened this process, and taken the mystery out of it. Package the same services with legal and PR people and you would have a lobbyist. So the term “armchair lobbyist” comes from individual people being almost, if not as powerful as, a lobbyist when they start using our group function for the formation of political groups that are untraditional and can harness the power of the social media tools available, both on You2Gov, and on the Internet in general.

StartUp Beat: In terms of competition, what about social networking tools that are offered directly by campaigns or parties? Do you see these potentially taking some of your audience?

Alan Silberberg: This is a very good question. You2Gov thinks that these tools and the use of them are at a nascent stage, and we designed our site from the ground up with the ability to share, compare, email, chat, use forums, rate, and give overall depth and context to communications about civic affairs and politics. The You2Gov site is all about the long process of being an engaged citizen. Elections and campaigns will come and go. The tools for communicating to those in power will always be needed. Those users who are on campaign sites or political party sites are potential new users of You2Gov. They already understand social networking. They are used to having an online presence. A lot of those web sites will become less functional and useful after the election, while You2Gov will be there to absorb those looking for a refuge and those looking for the best social site for the tools to be informed and to directly connect to their leaders.

StartUp Beat: Do you see a decrease in your audience/memberships in off-election years? What features do you offer to offset the potential for this?

Alan Silberberg: See above, but will repeat. You2Gov is the tool kit for people to directly and immediately engage their leaders, regardless of party or who is in power. Elections will come and go. So will election-related web sites. We have over 60+ feeds coming into You2Gov. Not one is from a candidate, a party, or a campaign. We deliver news from known and respected news sources, and do not take any direct communications for posting from any campaign. We have designed our tool kit for the purpose of being an engaged citizen over the long term and using the various participatory democracy actions over the course of their civic life. The whole point is to put into the hands of the people the power long protected for the elite and wealthy, by means of their computer or smart phone. We are not dependent on elections, and will probably end up picking up our growth curve even more as some of the “election” press, media and attention goes away, leaving people looking for their daily fix of politics and hard truth. You2Gov users spend a lot of time on the site digesting media from other sources, whether through text, Google mapping of news, video or from user generated content on the Forum and in the Groups areas. You2Gov has seen a growth curve in less than three months of being online that exceed traffic growth of over 12,000 percent, and a traffic rating increase of over 20,000,000 web sites. Our users stay on the You2Gov site for extended periods of time averaging well over 15 pages per user per visit (according to Alexa and Google Analytics reports). So, these users will stay with us, and we will absorb new ones from election sites that will be no longer plus we are growing organically at a clip of a few new registered users each day. You2Gov is going to continue being a powerful political site because we are not about the elections, but rather about making all of us more powerful on a day-to-day basis.

StartUp Beat: What is your revenue model? How do you make or plan to make money from the site?

Alan Silberberg: We have started off with a mixed media advertising model, utilizing a blend of network supported ads and we will be launching our own ad program shortly to complement those ads. Additionally some of the media that is embedded is advertising supported in subtle ways. You2Gov is in the process of rolling out a private data and IP model that consists, roughly speaking, of packaging certain data generated on the site into new and different groupings to be marketed primarily to small business, trade groups and non-profits. Additionally, we are examining the potential of various types of strategic partnerships as they would relate to long term revenue models.

StartUp Beat: Are you planning on seeking outside funding in the near future?

Alan Silberberg: You2Gov is a private company and we generally do not comment on funding. The startup capital we have is sufficient to build a viable business. In the future, You2Gov may consider some kind of expansion capital. But the company is well on the path towards a long term and growing company based on a modest start up amount. You2Gov has chosen to keep our staff small and use a smaller development company while outsourcing (within the U.S.) parts of our marketing, communications and development work to keep costs low. The operations have always been designed to be flexible, and create a long term, powerful growth company.

Featured Pitch: SightMind

2008-10-03T16:54:10Z

Web Site: www.sightmind.com

Headquarters: Fremont, California

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: Angie Wong

Employees: 4

By Kim Rubin, CEO

SightMind is a national Internet Protocol-based (IP) video surveillance, networking and security company. We utilize IP-based digital video technology to provide local government agencies, educational institutions and large industrial facilities with the most technologically advanced service in its industry. We have distinguished ourselves among more than 16,000 vendors and installers in the U.S. market today through the recent launch of our new SightMind franchise opportunity.

The company is a one-of-a-kind business opportunity in a highly fragmented market. For independents, others in related industries or even newcomers to the field, the SightMind business investment comes with a proven business model, processes and necessary support tools to gain a significant competitive advantage.

As a seasoned entrepreneur with four prior technology businesses under my belt, I plan to grow the business from its home market in Northern California eastward across the country through franchising.

With the networked video surveillance industry reaching a sustained 44-percent annual growth rate, the switch from ageing analog cameras to sophisticated networked security systems will further propel the segment’s growth to new heights. The sophisticated, reliable IP-based digital surveillance systems are proven to reduce theft, vandalism and injury claims. System software delivers core business values such as locating parking spaces and reading license plates automatically, using a resolution 32-times greater than that of an average analog camera.

The sophisticated capabilities of our networked video systems not only provide direct cost-savings to many of our business-to-business customers, but also improve customer service and can help organizations focus on running and growing their business. Every system we install has network monitoring, redundant storage and a system maintenance contract with up to a five-year service agreement. Today’s systems deliver proven business benefits, which is what is driving the extreme industry growth.

Zooming in on experienced business investors including electricians, information technology (IT) resellers and existing security professionals, the SightMind franchise opportunity gives investors the ability to work directly with high-end, business-to-business clientele. Plus, SightMind has distinguished itself from competitors in the low-end residential and small commercial market by offering a suite of open standards-based hardware and software that are the most reliable, manageable and effective in the industry.

SightMind is one of the most advanced technology businesses in the franchise arena today. We are offering an opportunity for experienced and existing business owners to get into business at the ground level in the rapidly growing IP video surveillance (IPVS) industry.

As part of the SightMind franchise model, franchisees receive four weeks of comprehensive training in technology, institutional sales, project management, and proven, proprietary tools to assure that every system works properly. Unique franchise services provided by SightMind include unlimited support, a web site, back-office productivity software, all product R&D, and a promise to franchisees that every system they install works properly or SightMind will fix it for free. Two options available to SightMind investors include a single operating unit starting at $60,000 or an add-on profit center to an existing business with startup fees beginning at $40,000.

SightMind was founded in 2006 with the goal of bringing highly reliable IP-based video surveillance systems to major institutions and organizations in North America, including high schools, colleges, natural resources, utilities, transportation, public safety, shopping centers, industrial facilities and large commercial sites. SightMind’s IP-based systems include expanded storage, higher reliability, and high resolution sufficient to provide clear identification of people and vehicles, easier administration, cost savings and customer service benefits far beyond the original security motivations.

SightMind currently has eight outside Angel investors who either currently own, or do own businesses within this space. As for plans for the future, is more likely after SightMind achieves a significant amount of headway domestically, we may look towards institutional money for global expansion.

Tech Startups and the Downturn

2008-10-02T16:30:02Z

As the U.S. House of Representatives moves to vote on another financial bailout plan, many technology entrepreneurs are anxiously wondering how the economic crisis is going to affect technology startups. Here are a few articles from around the blogosphere that provide some commentary on how tech ventures may fare.

From TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld: Things will get bad for startups – VCs (And Startups) Won’t Be Immune To The Credit Crunch

From VentureBeat: Interview with David de Weese, Paul Capital Partners, about the capital markets in light of the downturn – David de Weese of Paul Capital Partners on the economic turmoil’s effect on the secondary market

And, With A Slightly Edgier Perspective, Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb Offers Advice – The Great Credit Crisis Swindle - How Entrepreneurs Can Survive It

More Financial News

2008-10-02T16:21:57Z

Revised Bailout Bill Includes R&D Credit for Tech – (from VentureBeat) Senate passes federal bailout plan, House set for new vote Friday