Searchles signs on with Washington Post

Searchles, the local DC startup that provides “social search, has made another big step.  Recently we reported that they received a $300k round of funding, bringing their total up to the $2 million mark.
Mashable is reporting that they have signed a deal with the Washington Post and their newsreaders social network called MyPost.  What Searchles is bring to the table is

Now, when browsing the profiles of other MyPost members, you will see Searchles’ “Related Users” widget, which shows you other people who have taken an interest in similar stories on washingtonpost.com, based primarily on comments.

This seems like a pretty interesting idea.  As we all know, old media is struggling with way to stay relevant in todays climate and I think the Post has been doing well to stay ahead of the curve.  This is another good step for them, especially since it is two local companies and would seem to be a good fit.  A look over at the offical Searchle’s blog gives us a little more insight into the deal.

The widget is part of our Searchles Discovery® technology - geared towards online publishers, bloggers, and social networking sites and priced based on set up fee and a revenue-share working scenario. Social Discovery tools offer a set of customizable solutions for boosting site-engagement, realizing full value of site content by using it as a foundation to build and utilize networks of trusted peers, as well as enhancing social search features and capabilities for targeted advertising.

In addition to the widget, a ‘searchle it!‘ bookmarklet will be added to teh Post stories, with the hope of getting more good content pushed to the Searchle user base.

It will be interesting to follow this deal and see how the integration works to help both companies.

Local News: Livingston Communications Acquired !

I guess the hot news today, on a very hot July day here in the nations capital, is the announcement by Geoff Livingston that his company, Livingston Communications, has been acquired by Canada’s Social Media Group.

I have enjoyed meeting Geoff over the last few months and learning about him and his team, Qui and Larissa.  They are all really great and we should all take a moment to wish them well in their new venture.

Geoff has a post up today, his Top Ten Resons He Sold Out.  Head over and chaeck it out to get a little insight into the move.

It is funny, because I was on the Aarron Brazell show Saturday night and at one point in the show Aaron asked me if I had heard any rumors of acquisition talks for Geoff’s company .. I had not and we laughed it off and moved on .. well Aaron really had the scoop !!

Anyway, we wish Geoff and his team well and congratulate them !  Make sure to stop by and wish them all well.

Event Recap: DC Twin Tech

Well I can only say “Wow!”.  For all of those who were not in the know about this event, it was thought up and put on by Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs to bring together what some would label the “old school” and the “new media” communities of the DC area.

There was a lot of anticipation and it did not fail to deliver.  Peter did an amazing job of securing a great venue and gathering a lot of unique groups and people together.  I wish I could say I had video or pics to show you … I did take my Flip video to gather some interviews, but was having such a good time meeting and chatting with new folks an re connecing with old friends, I totally forgot about it.

There was such a wide variety of people, I was pretty amazed.  I saw everyone from Champ Mitchell, Chairman of Network Solutions to Sarah Lacy, author of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” to Craig Stoltz, author of a Time magazine Top 25 blog Web 2.Oh .. really? and everyone in between.

I was going through all the business cards I got and was amazed at the varied backgrounds of all the people.

There was some great coverage of the event by the local TechBisNow and also by Zack Goldfarb of the Washington Post.

This was the event of the summer so far and we hope it spawned great conversation and relationships that will carry over and produce some equally great working relationships between the two diverse ecosystems here in the area.

Watch out Satellite and Terrestrial Radio, Here comes the iPhone

I have not been fortunate enough to get myself a new 3G iPhone, but I did get to upgrade my first generation iPhone to the 2.0 firmware and have been completely impressed with the apps so far in the App Store.

The developers have done great work and I look forward to many more great titles to be released in the coming weeks.

I did have a thought today while at work about some of the apps, in particular AOL Radio and Pandora.  I totally love the regular Pandora site and when at my desk at work, this is the web site I always have up, playing a never ending stream of music I like.  Well with their great iPhone app, I now get that same experience on my iPhone.  I was hesitant at first, wondering how the music would stream over the “slow” Edge network, and was surprised by the quality.  It played without pause.

So as I sat at work, I wondered to my friends, “Do you think that the Pandora app will play through the fm transmitter in the car ??”  We thought about it for a moment and talked about how cool that would be.  So after work, I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised that Iwas able to stream the AOL and Pandora apps right through my fm transmitter !  What a cool surprise.  I sat in my car and thought about this for a moment.  I have had Sirius radio for about that past two years and I love it.  I have not looked back to terrestrial radio in the least bit.  But now it occured to me that this may being another turning point.  Besides my Sirius I listen to my iPod/iPhone for mainly podcasts since I catch most of my music on Sirius.  But now what if my iPhone could go so far as eliminate the need for Sirius, music and talk.  With Sirius, I bounced between several stations for my music and would catch some talk shows no and then.  Well now with my iPhone, I not only get my fix of talk shows that I want to listen to through podcasts, I also get a music station that is totally personalized just for me, without a single commercial !  Pandora’s algorithm is such that is finds music you like and adds it to your station.  I have several personal stations set up, an Alt Indie, Jazz, and so on and the Pandora app lets me play any one of them.

This is an interesting time for both the satellite and terrestrial radio businesses.  Traditional radio has been looking in their rear view mirror as the new kids on the block, XM and then Sirius crept up to take a larger and larger share of the market.  And now those same satellite providers are trying to merge in order to not only stay alive, but also to continue to fight the traditional outlets for listenership.  Well now with the ability for a platform like the iPhone to stream content you want with no commercials for free, those new kids on the block better watch their mirrors as well.

The Age Old Question: East vs West

As many of you know, I am an east coast guy (although I would leave you all for a job in the bay area .. sorry) and I am always looking for other’s insights into the differences between the startup scene between the east and west coasts.  The other day, I came across another great piece written by Tim Marman, co-founder of Notches,  on CenterNetworks called “Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Start a Tech Company in Silicon Valley“. 

Tim brought up many great points to include:

Money

The more relevant piece is that there is more early stage capital available. The area is stock full of entrepreneurs with previous successes willing to pump that money into potentially new successes. But there’s also a dark side to this. First, Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places around  - and if you factor in the need for a car (or two, if you’re a married couple and work in different place) and so on, it can even be more expensive than New York (which is usually one of the biggest knocks on our beloved city). Contrast this to raising a small friends and family round in Austin, Pittsburgh, or Colorado – you may have less available cash, but talent and office space (by far the two biggest drains) are a small fraction of what they are in NYC or Silicon Valley.

Talent

Again, though, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t great technical talent elsewhere. The cities I mentioned before - Pittsburgh, Austin, Boulder - all have great engineering programs producing local, young talent.

There has been a lot of talk about talent.  What I think is interesting as noted in another one of my posts is the fact that talent is really scarce in the valley.  Not only that, but the talent there is a little jaded as well.  Everyone is out for the quick hit, come on and get your options and hope they make it big.  Not that we all don’t want to make it big, sometimes you need talent to be with you for the long haul, and I think that you find that more outside the valley.

Tim makes some other great observations but the one I thought was most important was to “Avoid the Echo Chamber”

It’s really no secret that the tech community – and Silicon Valley especially, it seems – are huge echo chambers.

I think this is a really important point and a trap that many of us may fall into.  As we have seen in the local DC area, we have fallen into a dual ecosystem noted in a recent Washington Post article.  We tend to circulate inside our own ecosystem without venturing out to get a broader view of the scene as a whole.  Peter Corbett of iStragegyLabs is looking to help mitigate this with the Twin Tech event coming up this week in DC.  We need to remember that a better gauge of our ideas can be gotten outside the chamber we have created.

PolicyMap, a Wealth of Data at Your Fingertips

At the recent SocialDevCamp, one of the great points by Dave Troy was that we must really start to think a littel more broad about the tech scene in our area.  He proposed a term “Amtrak Corridor” that basically represents the tech communities along the east coast to include Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC.

So while the stuff I cover here is really centered around the DC area, I took that to heart and was happy to see recently when a reader from the Philly area tipped me off to a new product released by TRF, The Reinvestment Fund, a leading non profit in revitalizing neighborhood revitalization.  The new product they released is called Policy Map, and their tag line:

All the Data You Need

All In One Place

All Online

is absolutely true.  I got in and registered and played around and was amazed a the data I was able to pull together in such a short amount of time. In a matter of seconds I was able to outline my local Congressional District and layer on the per capita income.

Many in our area are in the PR, Social Media relations, and other fields where having good demographic information at their fingertips would be awesome.  Well now they do.  It is hard to even describe all that you can do, but the good folks at Policy Map have put together a great video demo of the featureset.

Go HERE to check it out.

Local Startup: 600Block, Discover Baltimore !

Recently while attedning SocialDevCamp in Baltimore, I met up with the founders and creators of a new local review site called 600Block, Patti Chan and Tom Poe.

Patti took some time to tell me about the project and what it was all about.  It sounded really cool and I was anxiouos to learn more.  600Block is a local review and discovery site for the Baltimore area only in its curretn state.  There is a social aspect to it, as you can add friends to see what they have discovered and reviewed in their area.  In addition there are some really cool features, like Daily Specials.  This is a listing of specials places are offering that you can take advantage of.  It may be $1 drafts or a special on steaks.   Check out the video here with an overview of the site and all the features.

As you can see there is some really cool ideas packed in here.  I think they are onto something really cool and look forward to them succeeding in Baltimore and adding new cities, maybe DC ! soon.

Our area has some people doing some really great things, like the Loladex guys and their Facebook app for local “trusted” reviews, the Localist team (also from Baltimore) which we reviewed recently.  I think Patti and Tom are onto a good thing here and I ask you all head over and support them in their beta and forward.

Event: Twin Tech Party !

I was totally excited when I saw the invite for this one pop in the inbox the other day from Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs.   It is fresh on the heels of the Scoble and Vaynerchuk event last week at 1223.  That was supposed to bring a cross section of the local tech community out, but as we saw later from a post in the WashingtonBiz Blog of the Washington Post, there is still a divide between the two cultures.

So Peter has taken the next step:  bring those two worlds together and see the sparks fly.

It’s ‘very special’ because we’re going to bringing together what the Washington Post has called “Washington’s Twin Tech Towns”. You can read what the Post has said here and here

By mixing together the so called ‘new tech’ crowd with veterans in the industry, we think sparks will fly: deals will get done, startups will get funded, partners will meet, companies will find talent and our tech ecosystem will become stronger as a result.

We’re happy to have the support of the Northern Virginia Technology Council in bridging that gap.

I am really excited about this and I hope all of you are as well.  GO HERE TO REGISTER to make sure you get in !

Here are the details thus far:

What:

The Potomac Region’s technology community keeps growing and innovating with each passing day. Keep the pace by grabbing a drink with the leaders in broader technology community: do a deal, find some talent, or just hang with your friends on July 17th at TBD location in the metro area.

Please make sure to RSVP now as you’ll need to be on the list to get in and we may run out of room!

When:

Thursday, July 17th, from 6:00pm-9pm

Where:

More than likely a bar/lounge with a roof top (TBD based on RSVPs)

Searchles Gets Second Round of Funding

Local DC search and social networking startup Searchles has secured a second round of funding.  A post in the Washington Business Journal notes that the newest round is for $300,000 bringing the total they have raised this far to $2 million.

This round will help fund their new social technology developed for online media companies, called Searchles Discovery.

“We took note of the disconnect most online publishers are experiencing in networking their like-minded users and set out to develop a set of tools that provide a ready channel for this social discovery,” said Elias Shams, chief executive officer of Searchles. “As proposed partnerships with a few major media properties move forward, this additional funding will help us in keeping pace with demand for these dynamic and customized social solutions for online publishers.”

So far all funding is by angel investors, but they are looking for another $3 - $4 million to build out, but as many have found, they are finding the going a little tougher here on the east coast.

Maryland Gets Friendlier to Biotech

Maryland has long been a bastion of biotech companies lining the sides of the 27o corridor.  However, recently, some not so firendly taxes have forced some to move their headquarters out of the region.

Apparently Governer O’Malley has taken notice and is putting in some measures to curb that tide.  According to a story in the Washington Post today, the Governer outlined a plan to

invest $1.1 billion in the state’s bioscience industry over the next decade or so, expanding tax credits, bolstering stem cell research and providing new support for start-ups.

O’Malley is looking to leverage more funds through the Federal government with the hopes of generating thousands of new jobs in the next 12 years.

Under the multi-prong initiative outlined by O’Malley, the state would double its biotech investment tax credit next year and then double it again within the next five years, leading to an increase of $24 million.

Maryland would invest at least $20 million each year into stem cell research, one of the three largest state stem cell funds in the nation, O’Malley said.

He pledged to help new companies establish themselves by investing $60 million and increase incubator space for startups by 50 percent.

The state should also invest $300 million into life science facilities, he said.

There are some other provisions to help startups out of university research and also some equity investment in new and established start ups as well.  This looks to be a fairly ambiious plan by the Governer, one that hopefully pays dividends to all of us in the local techology fields.

« Previous Page — Next Page »