Browse > Home / Archive by tag 'lijit'

Lijit raises an additional $7.1M

August 12, 2008

Lijit continues to rock as it is now reporting that is has raised an additional $7.1M in venture funding from The Foundry Group, Boulder Ventures, and High Country Venture. This brings Lijit’s total funding to around $11M (it raised angel money and 3.3M previously) . Lijit will use the money to to launch their search powered ad network.

To me, Lijit is a great example of a company that “got the right people on the bus” and then “listened”. It started life as OutFoxed, which I covered here in mid-2006. The company quickly morphed the product from a plug-in which enhanced search results with social context to one which helped publishers to become the focal point of search, allowing them to expose a search box (like you see on ColoradoStartups.com) which leveraged the trusted network of the individual publisher to return more relevant results to the searcher.

Over time, Lijit developed the idea of “re-search”, which allowed publishers to intelligently include lijit-based search results as readers moved across enabled sites and pages. Here’s an example of what this functionality looks like:

As you can see, anyone who has searched for “colorado startups outfoxed” using Lijit and was led to my content gets to automagically see other content that is in my trusted network that might be related. The magic of this is that it tends to increase page views for me and those that I choose to include in my network.

More page views tend to be good for publishers, especially when more capability for the reader is being provided. Dave Taylor is a good example - he’s reporting that the re-search functionality on his popular AskDaveTaylor site is generating about 150,000 extra impressions each day.

The next challenge for Lijit is to build out the ad network which will allow targeted ads to be placed in these search results. This will allow publishers to monetize these extra impressions simply and effectively.

Congrats to Todd, Micah, Tara and the gang at Lijit on this next step in their evolution. It’s great to see VC money continuing to be deployed widely here in Boulder.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

Never enough office tours

April 20, 2008

If you just couldn’t get enough of Gwen’s office tour of Lijit last month, now you can also watch the Somewhat Frank TV version. It’s really fascinating. You get to learn about “half-paralyzed” legs, fake bands, green balls, tattoos, highly branded foosball tables, turning people into search engines and of course… pie charts. Oh, and there’s the usual rock band talk.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Lijit Office Tour & Million Page View Party!

April 2, 2008

Yesterday was a very special day at the Lijit offices. Whenever the team doubles the number of page views in a day, they take a shot (out of customized Lijit shot glasses). Lijit’s CEO Todd Vernon was kind enough to show us around.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Micah Baldwin on SXSW

March 17, 2008

I didn’t get the chance to head down to SXSW this year, but from the sound of it Colorado was well represented. Gwen wrote a bit about her experience down there, and what follows below is a guest post by Micah Baldwin on the same subject. Micah asked if he could chime in with a guest post, and I love Micah’s hilarious and occasionally-straight-up blog (Learn To Duck) so I thought he would have some interesting perspectives. Micah is the VP of Business Development at Lijit.

micahcartoon.png
Guest post by Micah Baldwin

Every year, thousands of people in the interactive space descend on Austin, TX for SouthbySouthWest Interactive (aka “South By” or SXSWi). The Colorado tech community was no exception, with representatives sponsoring events, speaking on panels, and in the case of SocialThing, using the conference as a platform to launch their company publicly.

Here is a quick rundown of what Colorado startups were involved in at SXSW.

SocialThing:

Of all the Colorado companies at SXSW, SocialThing considered the conference highly important in their marketing plan.

Following on the heels of DodgeBall in 2006 and Twitter in 2007, SocialThing hoped that SXSW would be the launching pad for their digital life management application. Prior to coming to SXSW, SocialThing had developed an iPhone version of their application, that they wanted to see on every iphone at the conference. In addition to sponsoring a party at the Pure Volume Ranch (the only venue in Austin to stay open past 2am), they had two exhibit booths, with Rock Band setup (there were no less than two Rock Band parties, and several Rock Band setups in the exhibit hall, clearly everyone loves this game).

Their party was a relative success, with a packed house and internet luminaries such as Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv attending, and more importantly, during the party SocialThing was TechCrunched.

While I am not sure if they could be labeled “the break out app of SXSW 2008″ (In fact, Michael Arrington tweeted and blogged that their competitor, FriendFeed, might in fact be), they did a great job of creating awareness and buzz. One tweet, from Ben Brightwell, the SocialThing CTO, showed that SocialThing had gotten 10x the signups that they normally get in a single day. Time will tell if the expenditure and effort will push SocialThing in front of a very crowded space.

Survey Gizmo:

Scott McDaniel and Derek Scruggs of Survey Gizmo headlined the panel: Core Conversation: GTD for Startups: Getting Things Done in the Real World. The Core Conversation panels are some of the most insightful and attended panels at SXSW.

Villij:

Another TechStars company, Villij’s lead investor brought the team to SXSW, and among other things, Anthony Dimitre’s logo for the greatest Rock Band band of all time, could be seen everywhere.

StartupWeekend / VCWear:

While these are two very different companies, they are lead by one dynamic individual, Andrew Hyde. Andrew was on the panel Bankrupt your Startup in Five Easy Steps, which was covered in Wired (best line of the article: “Since the whole panel was about failing at startups, it was appropriate that Strebel, Tierney and Hyde failed at their panel”, and attended by a unicorn. He also was interviewed by Loren Feldman of 1938Media about StartupWeekend, and many of the past attendees of the event were at SXSWi. But, the real breakout of SXSWi was VCWear, an (almost) joke that has grown into a profitable Colorado based company, with a distribution deal and several celebrity endorsers, including Guy Kawasaki and Techstars Mentor Eric Marcoullier.

Several panelists and keynotes also repped VCWear, including Gary Vaynerchuk and Kathy Sierra (at about 1min into the video).

Lijit:

Lijit co-sponsored three events: The Colorado Interactive Party with PocketFuzz, The BlogNetworkCamp and Ranch with b5media. Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, spoke on the panel: Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! and was interviewed by Robert Scoble, who is a Lijit user. I (Micah) was interviewed for BlogTalkRadio and got the greatest Rock Band band’s logo tattooed on my arm. Tara was interviewed by b5media’s Aaron Brazell, The Conversation Group’s Deborah Crooks, Deborah Schultz and Jason Falls, of Social Media Explorer TV.

One by One Media and RonaldLewis.com:

Jim Turner, Social Media expert and Daddy Blogger, attended SXSWi, as did our very own Ronald Lewis, who spoke on a panel: Where Are The Black Tech Bloggers?

PocketFuzz:

PocketFuzz headlined the wildly successful Colorado Interactive Party (co-sponsored by Lijit). With more than 3,000 attendees and a line that got so long that at 3:30am more than 500 people were sent home. Danny Newman of Pocketfuzz continues to throw the biggest party of SXSW. Their SMS to screen technology was showcased especially during the Digg party where thousands of SMS messages were displayed on two screens, and the SMS messages came from all over the world.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado rocks on

October 5, 2007

When I first heard about this idea, I was psyched. I have blogged about the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado extensively before. Suffice it to say that it’s an easy way to get your company involved in philanthropy from day one.

I was glad to see that while I was sitting on a beach in Mexico, more great companies joined in the fun. Lijit got in on the fun as did Solidware Technologies.

“We’ve made our home here because of the lifestyle Colorado affords us, and we want to ensure that this lifestyle can continue for future generations.” - Sue Kunz, Solidware Technologies

“Our one percent pledge allows us to share our future success with the community that has been so critical to our success to date.” - Todd Vernon, Lijit Networks

Nice work guys. I hear there are a bunch more companies about to join into the Foundation. Maybe you should add your new company to the list. Think of all the free publicity you’ll get here on the blog! ;-)

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Overheard

September 7, 2007

  • LgDB (covered previously) has recently completed their Series A funding round led by eonBusiness. I see that the mysterious 5280 angel has participated as well. Congrats to Scott Yates and the LgDB team.
  • I love Lijit. Every month or so they rip out some ridiculously cool new feature, like this. Stan - you’re a madman.
  • I recently stopped into a local Subway and saw that I could pay by cellphone on Mocapay. I figured, uh-oh, a competitor to Feed Tribes (covered last year). Turns out Mocapay is Feed Tribes, just renamed.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

June in Boulder

June 30, 2007

it’s been a fun June in Boulder. Not just with the first 30 days of TechStars, but in general. Last week I went to the Fuser open house (I hear there are still some closed beta invites available), but had something come up right before the Lijit open house, so I couldn’t make it over the celebrate their recent round of funding. However, I did send one of my spies who grabbed a few pictures for me.

lijitopenhouse.png
Tom Higley (iggli.com), Stan James (Lijit.com), Alex King (Crowd Favorite), and a few TechStars get their game on at Lijit.

Then, last night I headed over the the Six88 Rooftop Finale. These guys have thrown some pretty fun parties on Pearl street in the last couple of years. Congrats to Six88 (first covered here) who due to continued success is moving to newer, much larger offices in Boulder. But sadly, not on Pearl, and without a rooftop.

jasonandbill.png
Bill Flagg (RegOnline) and Jason Eckenroth (Six88) mug it up

Boulder is just a fun place for startup junkies. It looks like at least four of the eight out of state TechStars teams have already decided they’re not leaving, no matter what. Every day, I seem to be reading about another, another, then another move to Boulder by really interesting folks. The energy here just keeps growing.

On to July.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Lijit funded

June 25, 2007

Lijit (all my past coverage here) announced today that it has received 3.3M in funding in a round led by Boulder Ventures. The company recently turned one year old. They’re so cute at that age, aren’t they?

The Lijit widjit is on the right side of my blog. It lets you search through my eyes - either just my content or the content of my trusted network. If you’re a blogger, you can get one too.

Lijit is holding an open house this Thursday at 4pm (details here). You can come check out their digs and hear first hand what they’re up to. But don’t get too familiar with their current space in Louisville. Rumor is they’re Boulder bound in the next few months - woot!

I talked to Todd Vernon briefly about the funding, and he was very excited to have Peter Roshko and the gang at Boulder Ventures on board. He was also excited about the new positions they plan to add in the short term.

“We are lucky that an old time Raindance’r will be joining the team in 2 weeks, Mike Merideth. He has lead the IT team at Raindance for years and will be joining us Director Information Technology. We are all doing backflips over him as he will be key to our fast growth and system operations, he is simply the best guy in town and in addition an amazing photographer. Of course, we’re hiring and we need a rock star DBA to join the team as well as a few more software engineers.” - CEO, Todd Vernon

Congrats to Todd, Stan, and everyone who’s too Lijit. Well deserved - I can’t wait to see where you take it next.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 1 Comment 

VCIR Presenting Companies

February 23, 2007

VCIR had 33 presenting companies in three tracks this year. 22 were IT related, and 11 were life sciences. Unfortunately, I only got to see about a third of them.

Envysion - Broadband video surveillance. This targets food service, hotel and retail businesses who want to use the Internet to manage surveillance. They’ve landed customers such as IHOP, Qdoba, Shell Oil, Papa John’s, and Dominos. They compete with startups such as RemoteReality, CoVi, iControl, and 3VR. They’re getting ready to launch their subscription SaaS product. They’re up to about 15 employees and have 6.5M in funding. It’s a matter of time before surveillance turns into a game of cheap cameras coupled with web based software and storage. I’m sure these companies don’t really want to manage all that infrastructure. To me SaaS makes perfect sense here in the long run.

Feed Tribes (covered previously) is making a huge bet - The future of payments will be the mobile phone. The challenge here is distribution - can they do enough deals with POS vendors and establish a presence with merchants? The argument to the merchant is certainly compelling - they pay $0.19 per transaction instead of the traditional base + percentage model. They’ve chosen the path of least resistance and are using SMS for both authentication and opt-in promotion. According to experts, this is very secure. And FEED has a very strong team with great industry experience. And they’re right, I don’t leave home without the phone.

I remember being impressed with Lijit founder Stan James from the day I met him (at BarCamp, I think). Stan had been thinking a great deal about trusted sources on the Internet, and this had turned into a browser plug in where users could vote up or down on various web sites, feeding information about the credibility of sites to each users personal network. I was an early beta tester when it was still OutFoxed, and have been talking about Lijit for a while on this blog. The early focus was on re-ordering Google search results based on user feedback and recommendations. Post-investment, Lijit seems to have changed direction for the better. They’re now focused on vertical search of your personal network and expert identification. For example, you can search my personal network from my blog (in the right column) and you can do the same with the TechStars mentors. The idea is that there are cases where you’d trust these networks and get more efficiency from your search over the general population which is what Google returns. Long term, Lijit wants to be in a position to identify and control search for networks of experts so they can inject highly targeted ad placements.

I’ve come across LogRhythm CEO Andy Grolnick on the tennis court a few times, so it was nice to see him in this “other” setting. LogRhythm is providing enterprise class log management and analysis software in order to help companies deal with regulations like SOX, PCI, HIPAA, and FISMA, or just to enhance their own security and audit capabilities. Early customers include Wild Oats, PetCO, and Amtrak. LogLogic has a strong lead in this category and it’s unclear to me what LogRhythm’s real differentiators are. Splunk also seems to have a nice grass roots following. I’m interested to see if LogRhythm can raise a substantial venture round this year, or if it will just not be sexy and different enough.

Me.dium has been getting tons of buzz lately (both before and after their recent DEMO appearance). It’s just so different, and as Kimbal likes to say “Being around people (on the web) will change everything.” Me.dium is at a distinct disadvantage in 15 minute pitch formats, because their idea is just so radical and hard to grasp. It took me a while to get it. I’m not a huge fan of the “visual map” as I think it adds confusion. I’d rather see an option to get some kind of a text listing sorted either by relevance or simply by what my friends are doing. I think you could also convey more information this way. This will be part of the trick - how to effectively map the intention of seeing the crowds to the UI. I think the company should also experiment with an iFrame based approach to let people get a sense of Me.dium right away without having to install the plug in. Either way, Me.dium is one to watch. I like the mission, and given the team and backers, I expect the execution/UI to improve over time.

Right now, I think that NewsGator is my favorite Colorado company (would have loved to have been an angel investor on this deal). They make my life easier every single day - the sign of a great company. I’m a huge consumer of RSS, and haven’t read a newspaper in over a year. I get my information from RSS and my social network. I use Go on my BlackBerry, NetNewsWire on my laptop, and once in a while I’ll use the online version. I can’t imagine using an RSS reader that wasn’t synchronized perfectly like NewsGator does it. The business for NewsGator, of course, is in the enterprise. So far, they haven’t forgotten the consumers like me and I feel fortunate that’s the case.

The basic idea of OpenLogic is to make it easier and safer to adopt open source. They’ve certified and aggregated over 200 open source projects and have landed some nice customers including AIG, Bank of America, General Motors and Lockheed Martin. When open source projects are versioned, OpenLogic takes the time to figure out if they can certify the new release, and what dependencies need to be considered, etc. Makes me think they’d be a natural early partner for Solidware, whose products can automatically identify areas of risk in code, including the change in risk distribution over time.

Oxlo is one company I had heard quite a bit about, but wasn’t exactly sure what it was they did. Basically, they’ve build a web-based messaging switch that provides a way for extended business partners to inter-connect their processes and workflows. They’re focused on automotive as an initial vertical and count many of the major auto dealers as customers. I love the idea in general - find industries still using older communications infrastructure, get in between disparate systems, handle and monitor message flow, then provide business analytics for your customers to give them new insights into their business that they can’t easily get on their own. If I had to guess (based on not much more than the obviously auto-centric logo and the fact that large industries like vertical focus), I’d say the company may end up with different brands in each vertical, simply reusing the technology and infrastructure in each market. I really like the idea (and execution thus far) of this business.

Rally Software Development says it’s the SalesForce.com of agile software development. Agile is a huge and growing trend in the software industry (even my 13 year old public safety company has recently adopted it). I’ve used web based development toolsets in the past (feature/project/bug tracking, test tracking, etc), and they really work great for distributed teams. With the off-shoring movement, this is even more important today. Incidentally, at one point CEO Tim Miller was talking about how Rally applies to open source. He said - “80% of CIO’s ‘admit’ to using open source.” I’m sure Tim meant nothing negative by that, I just had to laugh out loud though.

Skyetek is an RFID software and hardware company who wants to unlock RFID’s “real” potential by making it an embedded product feature that “provides internet connectivity, customer visibility, and personalization”. The pitch started off with CEO Rob Balgley putting “supply chain management” up on the overhead, then crossing it out - essentially informing the audience that this is not just another RFID tracking play. The company is “tagnostic” in that they don’t manufacture or dictate with tags are used, but supply software and universal readers that are 2 times smaller and two times cheaper than the closest rivals. Not much to say here, except, um, is WalMart a customer? ;-)

Thought Equity Motion is cool. Having no idea what they did and never having heard of them, I was fortunate that somebody dragged me in there and told me I’d like it (I’d about had it by then). Basically, these guys aggregate licensed video content and then make it highly searchable so that producers can view it as a huge library of high quality stock video footage. They have licensing deals in place with Sony Pictures, National Geographic, HBO, the NCAA, etc. I had heard of the competitors in this space such as Getty, and didn’t even know there was a major player here in our back yard. In addition to content deals, the company hopes to grow via acquisition and by enticing producers to create the content that they see demand for in near-real time. Play around with the video search engine - it’s pretty nifty.

Umbria is a new-media consumer market research firm. They want to try to give you tomorrows news today, by listening to the blogosphere and applying natural language processing techniques to try to assess the age, gender, and sentiment of the speaker. I’m very skeptical that this can work well in an automated fashion for a vast majority of cases. CEO Janet Eden-Harris gave the example of a teenager saying something like “Umbria is so cool. Not.” We’ll have to give them the benefit of the doubt. I suppose on the high end where Umbria plays (typical customers are Verizon, Citibank, Mattel, Hallmark, etc) this sort of insight into not just general sentiment but rather into how specific types of people are reacting to your brands is important. I think that for SMBs, who could probably never afford this sort of analytics based approach - the larger problem is that they simply have no idea that people are talking about them on blogs, forums, or social networks at all. Umbria is not trying to solve that particular problem, and is a much higher-end solution. There’s a big market for this, but I expect it to just get more and more crowded. I know nothing about it, and have no idea if it’s true, but I do hear stories of internal rumors of trouble and management rifts within Umbria. Hard to imagine with only 26 employees, huh?

I didn’t get to see about 10 of the other IT presentations, but I was told they were all excellent and interesting. There has been some nice national reaction to the VCIR conference, which is nice to hear.

I previously promised I’d cover a few of the life sciences companies that I got a glimpse of. Instead, I’ve asked Adam Rubenstein (who writes the Colorado Life Science Dealflow and OnBioVC blogs) to guest post on ColoradoStartups with his thoughts on the life sciences companies from VCIR. That will save me from sounding any more like a dork than I already do, as I know almost nothing about this world. I’m expecting that from Adam later tonight, and will post it as soon as I receive it.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 1 Comment 

A tidbit on the Lijit wijit

January 22, 2007

Todd Vernon of Lijit (covered previously) just pinged me to let me know they’ve just announced the general availability of their personal network search widget. You can see that I’m running it on the right hand side of this blog.

I’ve been Lijit for about 6 months now (according to my profile) and I’ve entered in various blog feed and identities that I have on the web, such as my LinkedIn profile and my YouTube account. Now you can use the widget to search my personal network and the networks of my trusted sources.

I’ve long thought that there’s lots of untapped power in peoples defined social and business networks that nobody is leveraging. When I’m approached by “the next myspace” I always ask them first if the power of what they are doing is in defining the social network or leveraging it. Most of these plays are really looking to leverage known relationships and influencers. However, even though this is the case I often find that they are building a social network to support it. Lijit is using a tactic that I often recommend to folks like this - leverage the existing social networks that people give you access to. That way, you don’t force them to change their behavior (and jump over to “your” social network site) but you still give them focused benefits like Lijit is doing with search.

Let me know if you think the Lijit wijit is a hit or a bunch of.. well, you know. ;-)

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 1 Comment 

Next Page »