StartUp Beat

Featured Company: Envysion

2008-07-23T19:50:14Z

Web Site: www.envysion.com

Headquarters: Louisville, Colorado

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: Dan Caruso, Executive Chairman

Investors: Columbia Capital; High Country Venture; Bear Equity

Employees: 29

By Matt Steinfort, CEO

Envysion provides a web-based video management service that enables organizations with multiple locations to use remote video to improve performance and profitability. Envysion Video is an enterprise-level solution that transforms traditional surveillance video into a strategic management tool that enables increases in efficiency, quality, brand consistency and the bottom line.

Envysion Video solves two main problems. The first is how to make video of multiple locations accessible to people throughout an organization. Envysion Video allows authorized users to view, search and share live and recorded video of any number of locations via a single password-protected web interface. Users can watch, analyze and improve whatever aspect of the organization they are involved with, whether it is security and loss prevention, operations, marketing, training or human resources.

The second is how to enable users to quickly find specific video. By integrating video with a customer’s point of sale (POS) or other event-based business data, Envysion enables users to click on events in a report (such as "voids" or sales of a certain product) and immediately see the associated video. Users can also create custom reports and receive automatic alerts when business rules that they define have been broken.

Founder's Story

Dan Caruso, Chairman of the Board of Envysion, Inc., was one of the founding executives of Level 3 Communications. From inception in 1997 through 2000, Dan was responsible for engineering, construction and operations. Between 2001 and 2003, he was responsible for most of the company's lines of business and marketing functions.

Between 2004 and 2006, Dan was president and CEO of ICG Communications. In 2004, he led a buyout of ICG and took it private. ICG, at the time, had about $100 million of debt and was burning their remaining $30 million of cash at a rate of $8 million a month. Columbia Capital and M/C Venture Partners, who backed the buyout, invested a total of $8.7 million. In 2006, ICG was sold to Level 3 for $170 million, resulting in a total distribution to the buyout group and management of over $225 million and a total return on investment of 25 times. The company was founded by former telecom executives who saw an opportunity to use their networking expertise to create a video service that takes full advantage of the power of the Internet. Thus, Envysion is the first video company to converge the full networking power of the Internet with the world of video surveillance. Video cameras are becoming ubiquitous, but until Envysion Video, there hadn't been an easy way to manage large numbers of geographically dispersed cameras and make them accessible to multiple people. As is often true with the best new technologies, Envysion Video is spurring users to create their own ideas for how video can be used, moving beyond traditional security and loss prevention functions and into other areas such as marketing, human resources, operations and training. This is the most significant impact of Envysion: it is enabling organizations to use IP communications in new ways and demonstrating that there are still many new uses and benefits of IP communications to be discovered.

Business model

Envysion’s business model is based on earning recurring revenue from software subscriptions. Each Envysion Video sale has up to three parts: hardware, software and installation. The hardware includes the cameras and recorders plus any accessories such as monitors or integration with a POS system. Envysion Video is camera-agnostic, so customers can provide their own video cameras rather than purchasing them from Envysion. The hardware can be paid for up front or spread out over the period of the software subscription. The software subscription includes licenses for accessing the Envysion Video application on the Internet for a specific period of time and for the number of cameras connected to the video recorder at each site. The software is usually licensed for 36 or 60 months, and we encourage customers to pay on a monthly subscription basis, although some choose to pay for the software subscription up front. The installation fee is always paid at the time of the installation of any cameras or recorders.

Current needs

Envysion recently received another round of $3 million funding from an existing investor. In the first half of 2009, the company will seek raise another round of capital.

As CEO of Envysion, Matt Steinfort is responsible for both the strategic direction and the day-to-day operation of Envysion. Prior to Envysion, Matt was SVP of Corporate Strategy at ICG Communications and held a variety of executive roles at Level 3 Communications, including VP of Consumer Voice, VP of Strategy and VP of Finance. Matt’s early career included stints at management consultancy Bain & Company and IT consultancy Cambridge Technology Partners. Matt received a BSE in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and an MBA from the MIT-Sloan School of Management.

Cloning Facebook; Mixed Signals on the VC Front; Notable Funding

2008-07-21T19:39:59Z

German Facebook Clone – An interesting example of how the Internet has changed the world of intellectual property. One wonders how StudiVZ could so blatantly copy Facebook, one of the most successful and well-known Internet startups of the last ten-or-so years: StudiVZ Won’t Comment On Facebook Lawsuit, But Will Talk Smack In General

VC Funding Shrinks for Startups – While VC investment overall appears to be holding steady, this MoneyTree report suggests that capital investments may be shrinking for startups: Venture Investments Are Up, But Not For Startups

Funding of Note:

Just How Well Is Tech Weathering the Economy?

2008-07-18T19:19:54Z

Tech Doing A-Ok in Bad Economy? – From the Wall Street Journal: Tech Firms Rise Above Economic Turbulence

On the Other Hand – There are indications that hard economic times may be affecting the online ad market. From Barron’s: ValueClick Warns On Q2; Trouble In Online Ad Market?

Geeking Up the Birthday Cake – Ok, so it’s been a slow week for tech news if you don’t cover the iPhone. So I couldn’t resist this one. Talk about putting the “geek” in baking: Millennium Falcon Cake Can't Hyperspace, But is Best Birthday Cake Ever

Tech Coast Angels Touts Success; Top Storage Startups; VCs—Maybe Not So Bad Off; Funding News

2008-07-16T19:00:41Z

Tech Coast Angels Passes Billion Dollar Funding Mark – The Tech Coast Angels, which funds startups based in Southern California, has announced that it has now supported more than 150 companies and helped them raise 1 billion in third party and venture financing. Here’s the announcement from TCA: Tech Coast Angels Surpasses One Billion Dollars in Third Party and Venture Capital Funding to Portfolio Companies

10 Storage Startups to Consider – There are so many technology startups in so many different sectors that it’s inherently difficult to keep up with them all in all verticals. A critical sector that doesn’t get a ton of attention is storage, so I thought this list of storage startups from Byte and Switch was interesting. Check it out: Top 10 Storage Startups to Watch

Who’s Worried About VCs? – Despite the current well-documented downturn in the economy, and talk about a crunch in the venture capital world, venture investment worldwide isn’t decreasing. In fact, it’s growing. Here’s BusinessWeek’s take: What Capital Crunch?

Notable Funding:

Recurrent Energy - $75 million

Become.com - $8 million

Editor's Notes: Five of the Most Interesting Apps from Startups

2008-07-11T19:10:05Z

So, while nearly all tech news coverage today (I exaggerate, but just a bit) is about the iPhone 3G launch, I figured I’d venture out and highlight five of the most interesting and useful applications from startups that I’ve seen over the last year. This is completely unscientific, so feel free to chime in with your own!

So here they are:

Xobni: Email management app. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco.

Shopit: Bringing e-commerce to social networking in a way that seems intuitive and easy. Founded in 2007 and based in Brentwood, Calif.

kannuu: Working to enable easier search. Founded in 2006 and based in Irving, Texas.

Syncplicity: Not a new idea—data access across multiple devices—but perhaps the most comprehensive solution to date. Founded in 2007 and based in San Francisco.

Overlay.tv: Not sure if this will catch on with consumers, but an innovate step in advertising technology. Founded in 2007 and based in Ottawa, Canada.

Editor's Notes: Yahoo! Looking at Demand Media?; New Funding

2008-07-09T16:20:37Z

Yahoo! Looking to Purchase Demand Media? – In the midst of its on-again/off-again drama with Microsoft, Yahoo! may be courting Santa Monica, California-based Demand Media, a search marketing firm founded by the former CEO of MySpace. Here’s TechCrunch on the rumors: Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes

Notable Funding:

Editor's Notes: Venture Capital Hits the Skids; Shopit Expands to AIM

2008-07-03T15:58:49Z

Venture Capital Crisis? – After a second quarter without any venture-backed IPOs, the National Venture Capital Association is declaring a VC “crisis.” Whether or not you buy this, the numbers do look pretty bad. Here’s an excellent analysis, courtesy of TechCrunch: The “Crisis” In Venture Capital

Some more perspective on the state of the VC biz, from Matt Richtel at the New York Times – A Quarter for Venture Capitalists to Cringe

On the same note, some banks are finding opportunity in the IPO drought – From The Wall Street Journal: As High-Tech IPOs Dwindle, Start-Ups Look to Private Money for More Backing

Shopit Releases AIM App – Social-commerce company and past StartUp Beat featured company Shopit this week announced the availability of an application that it says allows AOL AIM users to buy and sell items from their buddy lists. Here’s the release: Shopit Mini-Store Application Now Available To AOL's AIM Users

Notable Funding:

Boomi

Intelligent Energy

Featured Company: Mocana

2008-07-01T15:39:02Z

Web Site: www.mocana.com

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Year Founded: 2004

Founder: Adrian Turner, CEO

Investors: Southern Cross Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures

Total Capital Raised: $12.1 million

Employees: 30

Company News: www.mocana.com/press.html

By Adrian Turner, Founder and CEO

Mocana is a security software company that delivers comprehensive protection for any embedded device or “thing” connected to the network. This includes smartphones, PDAs, routers, switches, printers or VoIP phones, but also more everyday items like automobiles, home appliances, cash registers, power meters and HVAC equipment. These “attached devices” are quickly outnumbering PCs. Forrester Research predicts that there will be more than 14 billion devices on the net by 2010—and that 95 percent of these devices will be something other than a PC.

Product Line

Mocana offers its Device Security Framework (DSF) to deliver comprehensive protection for any device connected to any network, wired or wireless. The Device Security Framework is made up of over a dozen separate Mocana product offerings that reside at different places on the device, network, or application stack to provide comprehensive device security and management. Some of the DSF offerings are NanoSSL, NanoSSH, NanoUpdate, NanoBoot, NanoRadius and NanoSec. Mocana’s DSF is designed for device manufacturers and service providers and includes design processes and software that are embedded into devices during the manufacturing process. All components of the Device Security Framework feature an asynchronous event driven architecture, very high performance and very small memory footprint specifically designed for the special challenges that embedded device security engineers face.

The newest addition to the Device Security Framework is NanoDefender, an embedded Intrusion Prevention System technology that secures all aspects of a device: communications, identity, access, privilege, control and execution. The new product, now being offered to device manufactures, enables product engineers to create a rules base of acceptable behavior for any applications running on the new device. If an application begins behaving erratically due to malware or some other security threat, NanoDefender terminates the application so that the malware can’t spread across the network or impact the functioning of the device.

It’s clear that the existing “signature-based” model of detecting and eliminating viruses and malware can’t work forever—and it can’t work at all in the device environment. That’s because there’s just too much bad stuff out there. With millions of malware signatures required inside any antivirus product today—and 3,000 new viruses and malware signatures being added every hour of every day—there’s just no way an attached device would be able to keep updated or dedicate the processing power needed to screen all traffic against all virus signatures. By turning the current “virus signature” security model on its head, NanoDefender monitors behavior against a rules base of acceptable actions, and thereby frees up administrators from having to monitor this rapidly-expanding army of viruses, trojans, worms and other malware at all. It also provides a broader net for catching future Internet-based threats, since it does not rely on specific signature-based fixes.

The “Internet of Things”

The rate at which mobile devices are proliferating is staggering. In fact, there are predictions that the number of devices on the Internet could reach far into the billions in the next three years. According to a white paper by Harbor Research, there are approximately 2.8 billion mobile phones in use today, with 1.6 million new ones added daily. Whether you call this phenomenon “the network of devices” or the “Internet of things,” the underlying message is the same: connectivity permeates our society. Nearly everything in our day-to-day lives—from TVs and cell phones to cars, medical devices, networking equipment, thermostats, industrial sensors, aircraft and home appliances, and everything in between, connects (or will soon connect) to the network to operate.

Swift consumer adoption is driving mobile market growth but it is also creating increased complexity and security risks. The Internet is tremendously more complex due to the number and diversity of devices connected to it and the expansion of communication (voice, video and data) that traverse it. Security is a big concern in our newly connected society.

When it comes to device security, engineers and the manufacturers have the most responsibility and control, and also the most at stake. Even if the device is connected via carriers, the consumer only sees that his or her device isn’t working and assumes that it is the fault of the device manufacturer. Devices connected to the network are exposed to viruses that can infiltrate a machine without the user ever knowing it. Support calls increase, device manufacturers get stuck with the blame and devices get shipped back for trouble shooting. So while device security is important to get right, deploying security on a device isn’t easy. Security software and protocols designed for PCs don’t map well down to the constrained memory, low power and mini-processing environment of devices. Many engineers look first to open source packages, like OpenSSH or OpenSSL. But those packages just can’t fit into the super-tight device implementations that we’re talking about. And the performance of these freeware kits is rarely optimized for specific hardware or software environments, either. This is where Mocana, and our specially optimized offerings including NanoSSH and NanoSSL, can help.

To address the device security challenge and maximize the potential of “the network of devices” everyone—device manufacturers, service providers and enterprises—must assume security responsibility and recognize the need to centralize and standardize how device security is dealt with on all devices, wired and wireless. We must take a more holistic security approach and apply an extensible framework that secures all aspects of device data access and communications for any connected device. Securing devices is an industry imperative—and our specialty—and doing it the right way will pay for itself in multiples in our increasingly connected world.

Mocana’s Device Security Framework (www.mocana.com/device-security-framework.html) offers a unified, end-to-end approach to embedded device security management by authenticating devices and device applications to the network; securing communications between devices and resources; and by enabling reliable, secure firmware updates. Elements of Mocana’s Device Security Framework are characterized by their easy implementation, mix-and-match interoperability, small memory footprint and high scalability and performance. Applications in the Device Security Framework, which we now brand with a “Nano” prefix, are extremely portable, working across more than 15 operating systems and 50 CPU’s, making it an ideal choice for securing heterogeneous networks of connected devices.

Adrian Turner has more than 15 years of international business experience. Prior to founding Mocana, Adrian was responsible for west coast business development and Alliances for Kenamea, an enterprise communication firm specializing in reliable, secure communications. He also had P&L responsibility for developing infrastructure to support Philips Electronics' (NYSE:PHG) connected consumer and business devices. Mocana was recently named one of RED HERRING’S “Top 100 Privately Held Technology Companies” in North America, and just closed their B-round of venture funding. They currently have 30 employees and are hiring. Mocana - www.mocana.com

Q&A with Communicado

2008-06-26T15:55:31Z

Communicado is a Unified Communications Management company that offers software to help businesses of various sizes manage their communications environments. Its flagship product is its Streamline software. Based in Santa Ana in Southern California, the company was founded in 2001 as SyncVoice by Kerry and Kevin Shih. StartUp Beat connected with Kerry Shih, now Chief Strategist at Communicado, to find out more about the company.

SUB: What primary need does Communicado address?

Shih: Microsoft’s focus of current and future releases of Office on Unified Communications dotted the “I”, and IBM’s billion-dollar investment crossed the “T”. Companies need the reduced human latency and improved process flows of Unified Communications, or UC, to compete. Companies are looking to their trusted local Value Added Resellers (VARs) to implement Unified Communications for them because it’s a very complex melding of IP telephony and advanced collaboration applications. They also want to minimize the risk of making this complex new technology mission critical by having VARs with UC expertise manage it for them. Communicado Streamline allows VARs to remotely manage their customers’ Unified Communications infrastructure.

SUB: How do you make money? What is your revenue model?

Shih: Communicado Streamline is Software as a Service sold by subscription. Our revenue-share model allows resellers to move into high-margin Managed Services very quickly and without big capital expenditure. As a result, adoption of Streamline by the channel is rapid and results in a recurring annuity revenue stream to Communicado.

SUB: How did the idea for the company come about?

Shih: Channel partners asked SyncVoice, the previous incarnation of Communicado that sold call accounting software to Telecommunications departments, to give them a platform for managing their customers’ ever-more-complex converged and unified communications environments. We renamed the company Communicado to reflect the broader agenda of enabling real-time person-to-person communications. Streamline combines what we’d learned managing more than 1,000 customer sites with the know-how and requirements of strategic partners to launch Communicado with Streamline as our flagship product.

SUB: How do customers use the service?

Shih: Our Value Added Reseller customers use Streamline to become Managed Service Providers to their customers. Streamline’s flexibility allows management responsibilities for the end-user organization’s infrastructure to be fully outsourced or shared, depending on the end user’s abilities and preferences. Advanced end user organizations can even use Streamline’s tools and operational workflows to manage their central and remote converged network environments themselves.

SUB: Who do you consider your competition?

Shih: Streamline competes with a set of products organizations integrate to provide the same functionality. They might combine the Managed Services enablement of N-Able with two products from NetIQ that provide the ability to assess the network before deployment and a second to manage and troubleshoot the Quality of Service issues that bedevil IP telephony, then add a product from BMC that provides the ability to manage complex interdependent application environments.

SUB: How has the company been financed to this point? Who are your investors?

Shih: SoftBank Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners invested $11.6 million in Series B financing into Communicado.

SUB: Who are your target customers, and how many do you currently have?

Shih: Communicado has more than 400 customers, with Streamline being sold by major Service Providers and medium-to-large Value Added Resellers. End user organizations using Communicado products range from Fortune 500 to SMBs.

Communicado: www.communicado-inc.com

Editor's Notes: Startup Sparks Privacy Concerns for Cable Subscribers; Online ID Cards?; Funding of Note

2008-06-25T18:03:01Z

NebuAd and Privacy – Due to concerns from the public and privacy experts, cable company Charter Communications has temporarily shelved a controversial plan to implement a “targeted” advertising program for its high-speed Internet subscribers that apparently tracks, to some extent, where they go on the web. The technology comes from Bay Area startup NebuAd. Here’s an overview from Ars Technica that addresses why NebuAd’s technology is so controversial: Report: NebuAd ads inserted via "man-in-the-middle attack"

Is an Online ID Card the Solution to Password Overload? – A technology industry consortium is tentatively endorsing the idea. From the New York Times: Technology Leaders Favor Online ID Card Over Passwords

Notable Funding:

BridgeWave Communications

Featured Company: Reliant Solutions

2008-06-24T16:45:41Z

Web Site: www.reliantaudit.com
Headquarters: Laguna Niguel, California
Year Founded: 2006
Founder: Dipak Shah
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 26
Company News: www.reliantaudit.com/news_events

*Updated 6/24/08

By Dipak Shah

Reliant provides software and consulting services for chief audit executives who want to reduce the high cost, complexity and uncertainty of enterprise-wide audits. To effectively manage risk, auditors need efficient audit processes, reliable test data and continuous visibility into risks, controls and audit results at any time. Reliant delivers all of these and more with the only continuous risk management solution for auditors. With Reliant, organizations can continuously monitor controls, streamline audit operations, automate control testing and remediation, and implement a dynamic risk framework that shows up-to-the-minute status of audit programs. Using pre-packaged, standards-based controls for compliance, operational and financial audits, we help organizations reduce risk while gaining efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.

Audit has traditionally been a labor-intensive effort that requires huge amounts of manpower and time at the end of every quarter and fiscal year. During this time, other operations can come to a screeching halt as resources are poured into the audit efforts. As everyone who has gone through an audit will tell you, this is not an efficient process. But there’s something else that gets lost; the business intelligence and business process management improvements that you can derive from continuous risk management.

And that’s how Reliant is different. It would be hard to find a company today that is looking at risk in a continuous manner. A controller may know the balance in bank accounts at any given time. Your COO may know the inventory at any time. There are even compliance managers who can look back and identify where risk has occurred using spreadsheets. However, if you ask a CEO or CFO if they know where the risks are high for their business on a given day, all they will have are some static reports from the past. This is where Reliant’s continuous risk management will fundamentally change how businesses view audit. We enable companies to observe, understand, manage, and remediate risk continuously throughout the quarter, instead of waiting until the end of the quarter for the avalanche of financial reports.

Reliant Solutions helps to improve efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.

Reliant manages the audit process the same way Chief Audit Executives do: beginning with Risk Assessment, which drives the Audit Plan and Work Programs, which define in-scope Control Testing, which generate test data that is used to further evaluate risks. Reliant then uses an integrated Continuous Monitoring engine to feed real-time information about business transactions and operational conditions into the audit process, helping CAE’s to quickly and easily identify control violations as they occur. The results of work program steps, control tests, and risk assessments are all automatically updated in a Dynamic Risk Framework. While other approaches may help to automate one or two of these processes individually, only Reliant has created an end-to-end solution for the entire audit process.

My inspiration for starting the company came when I was a managing director with investment banking firm Morgan Keegan. As a banker, I encountered situations many times where we would be ready to do a deal, but the auditors and accountants would leave the company, even though the company was ready to launch an IPO or secondary offering, because there was a lack of visibility into the numbers. Our team would not be given clarity on the financials until the 11^th hour. This experience in banking got me to thinking about how visible operations are to the executives at the top and whether or not they have a grasp of everything that is taking place. It was also about this time that Enron, Worldcomm and their ilk were grabbing all the headlines, for all the wrong reasons.

After I retired from Morgan Keegan in 2001, I knew I had a good hunch about a big market need but before I committed to building a business I talked to many CFO’s, and heads of Audit of companies in the Dow 30, including Boeing and Disney. What I heard reinforced my thinking about a possible market opportunity. When talking about assurance and visibility at the top, do executives have the same visibility and clarity into risk as they do about inventory and cash position? Today they don’t, which is what led me to launch Reliant.

Reliant targets the Chief Audit Executive at companies of any size, both public and private. One might think this is something for the accounting firms, but research has proven that these firms are not yet ready for automation. Reliant has been able to customize this tool for the internal catalysts, which are really the Chief Audit Executives and the CFOs.

We compete with several different categories of companies. First, in the GRC / Compliance framework space, which includes documentation and process management solutions designed specifically for the GRC process, we are the only solution to provide continuous controls monitoring, automated control testing and automated sampling. We do this within a dynamic framework that is automatically updated as controls are tested.

Then you have the continuous controls monitoring space, which includes solutions that monitor ERP transaction to detect controls violations. Reliant is the only solution that includes a robust risk and controls framework that provides true continuous auditing. Unlike our competitors in this space, our audit operations are automated and we have full enterprise risk assessments.

In the Segregation of Duties / ERP GRC space, you will find solutions that use embedded techniques to implement preventive controls primarily for SOD, but that can also address master data controls and configuration management. Here we are separated from our competitors by our ground up focus on the audit executive when we were developing the solution. Unlike our competitors we automate audit operations and enable continuous auditing. We have strong continuous monitoring and an integrated risk and control framework that address operational, financial, entity and value-add controls. And all of this is supported in heterogeneous environments.

In the Analytics and Fraud Detection space, solutions are offered that perform data extraction from any data source and apply complex analytic rules to identify fraud patterns. We’re the only company in this space to offer a risk/control framework with support for audit plan management or business risk assessment and an executive dashboard with comprehensive reporting—again, designed with the Chief Audit Executive in mind from the beginning.

And finally, the documentation and content management solution providers offer multi-dimensional repositories with complex workflow and version control capabilities for broad enterprise use beyond just compliance. But what these folks provide is “generic” documentation repositories with workflow engines, not designed for auditors, audit processes, compliance or corporate controls. Additionally, these solutions require extensive customization to support audit operations and risk management, with no support for transaction monitoring or continuous auditing. Reliant does all of this, while being easy and much more cost effective to implement.

In the next iteration of our solution, you’ll see us expand our library to include measurement, value-add and vertical industry and regulatory controls.

What do you think about Reliant Solutions? Leave your comments below. Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Q&A with kannuu

2008-06-20T15:30:45Z

Kannuu offers an accurate, easy to use word completion technology for devices like MP3 players and mobile phones that enables data entry without a keyboard or number/letter pad. The company, based in Irving, Texas, was founded in 2006 by current CTO Kevin Dinn. StartUp Beat got the scoop on kannuu from CEO Sean-Michael Daley.

SUB: What primary need does kannuu address?

Daley: The need to be able to find exactly what you are looking for in only a matter of clicks. No need for a keyboard. There are large amounts of digital content and data available to us now, and kannuu empowers users with the easiest way to navigate through massive digital libraries and find precisely what is queried all in just a few clicks. No need to know correct spelling, and it’s not frustrating T9.

SUB: How do you make money? What is your revenue model?

Daley: Licensing the technology to online and on-device needs.

SUB: How did the idea for the service come about?

Daley: Long story short, our founder was “in the labs” at a major mobile device manufacturer looking for a more efficient way to do text-entry, and discovered—and later patented—the algorithms.

SUB: How do people use the service?

Daley: On line, on device. Wherever there is a database and a device with four-way directional arrow keys, kannuu can be used—set-top boxes, GPS, iPhone/mobile phones, MP3 players, etc.

SUB: Who do you consider your competitor(s)?

Daley: There’s really not one, there are lots of “search/lookup” solutions out there, but none of them come close to providing the depth and breath of what kannuu offers, with such ease of use for the end-user. I guess if I had to name one, I suppose it would be users not knowing what they are missing. We have a saying, “People don’t know what they don’t know.” In other words, no one has solved this look-up/finding solution until us, so people don’t know what they are missing, if they’ve never experienced the accuracy and elegance of our solutions.

SUB: How has the company been financed to this point? Who are your investors?

Daley: We are Angel funded, currently. However, we are gearing up to raise capital.

SUB: As a company, what have your big wins been so far (customers, partners, etc.)?

Daley: We just announced our first commercial deal with Coby Electronics, where we are powering their MP3 music player user interface and search/look-up functionality. We recently launched our kannuu Developer Network (kDN) and we are inspiring innovators to use our SDK in their applications. More deal announcements are coming soon.

kannuu: www.kannuu.com

Editor’s Notes: Managing the Social Net; Funding Roundup

2008-06-18T18:44:01Z

Startups Helping to Make Sense of the Social Networking Jumble – With the explosion of social networking services, it only makes sense that a potentially profitable niche exists for companies that can help people organize and make sense of their social networking. Here’s a roundup from the Wall Street Journal of some of the startups addressing this problem: Ways to Follow Your Friends on the Web

Recent Funding of Note:

Control4 – $20 million

LinkedIn – $53 million

Solarflare – $26 million

Chumby – $12.5 million

Featured Company: TickerMine

2008-06-17T14:38:43Z

Web Site: www.tickermine.com
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Casey Ryan, CEO; Maureen Ennor, COO; Sean McKenna, Board Member; Andy Jenks, Technical Adviser/Board Member
Investors: Friends and Family
Company News: www.tickermine.com/pages/press-releases

*Updated 6/17/08

By CaseyRyan, CEO

TickerMine is a collector of real-time channel and point-of-sale market data. The company allows its customer base to integrate TickerMine’s real time data into current analysis of stock investment ideas, or a portfolio review. Data can also be used by business professionals to track competitors, identify trends, or spot new opportunities in the market that are being revealed daily at the point of sale.

TickerMine was founded by me and three additional partners who were experiencing the significant changes in the financial research industry on a first hand basis. Before founding TickerMine (and currently serving as CEO), I worked as a sell side equity research analyst. While working at Wells Fargo Securities and then Nollenberger Capital Partners, I saw the strong need for primary data on the companies and industries that I covered. The ability to source accurate, real-time information did not exist in equity research departments and the money to hire outside consultants did not exist, as trading commissions were squeezed and revenues for broker dealer firms fell between 2000 and 2007.

My partners and I developed a method to collect large sets of primary point of sale data, efficiently and cost effectively. The view became one of offering this valuable service to the broader financial community with the belief that if analysts needed this type of data it meant that most investors and money managers needed the data as well.

TickerMine was formed in March of 2007. During 2007 and early 2008 the TickerMine team built out and improved the large scale research processes. The company also completed work on its subscription web site, www.tickermine.com. TickerMine was announced to the world on March 11, 2008, and we anticipate growing our subscriber base to 15,000 to 20,000 members over the next three years.

We offer strong feedback channels for the company to add research of interest to subscribers and also provide proprietary data sets to customers seeking out private research. In addition to the web presence, we have found opportunities in creating audio and video content for third parties.

Today, TickerMine operates with six full time employees and employs another seven independent contractors. We are currently seeking to add senior business development professionals to our team. We are also looking to add software engineers to build out new features in the data collection process, and we are seeking to add a senior level financial professional.

We are closing our “Friends and Family” round of financing in June and will begin seeking “seed” round funding from Angel groups and early stage venture capital firms this summer.

What do you think about TickerMine? Leave your comments below. Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

Editor’s Notes: Cash Strapped Companies Get a Chance to Pitch at Launch

2008-06-12T14:35:08Z

“Launch” Summer 2008 – Last week’s big Silicon Valley tech startup conference was Under the Radar, this week it was Launch: Silicon Valley 2008, held at the Microsoft Mountain View campus. Presented by big Silicon Valley VCs, the conference gave 30 startups the opportunity to present in front of an influential audience of tech leaders and financiers. Here’s a list of participating companies: Launch: Silicon Valley 2008

A highlight of the show was the selection of “Most Promising Company” in six categories, as determined by the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE). Here’s the list of winners: SVASE Announces the Companies Selected for the `Most Promising New Company' Award at Launch: Silicon Valley 2008