Supernova startup shakedown

These are my notes from a startup pitch session paneled by Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch and Paul Kedrosky, Josh Kopelman, Julie Hanna Farris. All of the companies at least had early stage funding and were given about 5 minutes to present each, sort of startup speed dating :)


Companies
Adap.tv
trying to match online video to advertisers. over 1M ads currently Contextually analyzes video, audio, and metadata. Monitors users interaction with the ads and adapts to their prefs.
Pretty cool. continuously analyzes stream and finds most relevant ad in their ad database.

Adaptive Blue
Semantic web company. People + shortcuts = getting to info faster, also personalized web. Browser add-on -> blue organizer = Personalized Smart Browser. "i'd like to" menu shows contextual intent related actions. Can highlight text, tell the organizer that it is a book, then shows shortcuts to buy the book or see a book review. Has a trademarked piece called "Smart Links" that shows these contextually related links.

Aggregate Knowledge
Six months ago launched at demo conference. Powering discovery for 50M users per month. Discovery happens in offline world all the time. how do you discover online. finding serendipitous piece of content. creating better navigation metaphor for answers.com. Implicit affinity matching on a massive scale. worlds largest implicit social network.

Cast.tv
Video search. Matching users with content they would be interested in. Compared directly to Google. Searches across the web, unbiased compared to Google (why is google biased?) Has generated fan landing pages for all major shows (thousands and thousands of shows).
- crawling and indexing - prop technology to build a better index. gemstar is a customer uses to automatically generate a tv guide
- relevancy - something better than google. blah blah blah.
Tried to get on their site but it said was undergoing some improvements. Pretty lame.
funded by DFJ

Critical Metrics
Music discovery recommendation and search field. lots of competitors. why would they come into this field at this late stage. no matter how much you use the services, they won't keep you up to date with NEW music. Why? because it's pretty much impossible. There's too much music that comes out. Each day there are about 1000 songs. Is a recommendation engine that ploughs through all the music.

Jangl
phone talking company. communications through your social network. Phone is not currently attached. Phone is not part of the profile because of privacy issues. They handle privacy issues. Sends email with voice message to user. Can put a widget up on your page that allows readers to call you. You then permission people as to whether those calls go through.

pando networks
peer assisted media delivery. Cuts cost of deliver a 1G media file from $200,000 to $5000. Currently serving 8.5 million clients delivering 70TB per day.

SodaHead
Just came out 2 months ago. Old school polling with web2.0 social. Can do a lot more now, share poll with friends, comment on poll, answer with video, pictures, etc. Capture aggregate data with individual commentary

Spock
people search engine. Looks pretty cool. Put in blogger, returned Michael Arrington, clicked on related term "Tech Blogger" and Tim O'Reilly came up first. Will need to check it out more. Uses user tagging to build relationships between people and concepts. Good presentation.


Wize
Online product research is still too hard. Hard to help father buy computer. normalizes rating systems across all the prod research sites. Created product sentiment database from user reviews, bloggers, expert opinions, market buzz, and manufacturers sites. WizeRank - consumer report for the future. Aim is to create a true product satisfaction score. Starting syndication relationships now. Should talk to this guy.

ZapMeals
The shortest distance between great food and your tummy. online meal order and delivery service. ebay for takeout.

ZenZui
Cosumer centric services, + power of sync + focus on design. MS research background. "Adaptive and scalable UI" 16 tile customizable views of what's important to you on your mobile device. Updates by polling with any new info, basically a 2 dimensional widget space on your phone. can nav and then zoom in on tiles. viral spread of widgets by monitoring widget heat.

Zing
Untether online services (such as last.fm) so you can access and use from your phone.


13 companies presented, 1 was fake. got to vote via Soda which one was fake. Definitely ZapMeals. I must have missed a couple there. oh well.


Panel Feedback
Kedrosky - interesting that there were no wiki mentions, no ajax this year. Lot's of competitors to google but loathe to mention google name (awaken the monster). nature of demographics on web have changed so much in the last 5 years. Much has moved to entertainment sites and bloggers. Which companies appeal to innate laziness. Likes Cast.tv. Big unsolved problems attract big buyers. Monetizing video traffic is such a big problem, esp. with creating live overlays. Consumer related search technologies must painfully avoid Google or will just become another tab in google (without consent or payout).

Arrington - new phone apps are exciting, perhaps driven by iphone functionality and screen real estate. touch screens are fascinating. not easy to impress with just a web application. Likes Cast.tv. Adap.tv just acquired by AOL. he thinks Cast.tv is better. Better video search is hot.

Julie Hanna - Bias against companies wanting to be destinations sites. Jangl brings two common forms of communication and blends them together.

Overall
Doesn't feel like a bubble. Not enough froth out there. Need more people out the other side getting rich to create a bubble. Lot of companies in tweener stage. Easy to get early stage money, not so easy to get to the next round. Seed stage is used to validate or improve hypothesis. iPhone may be the catalyst for the next rich ecosystem for startups out there.

Dark Internet Economy - interesting acronym

Sitting in the SuperNova2007 conference listening to the Dark Economy panel talk about the underground economy that tries to take advantage of of the huge (and growing) revenue around search marketing economies to siphon that revenue in black hat sorts of ways (splogs, phishing and identity theft to name a few). About 2 of the 4 panelists are fairly good, but I see a whole lot of people cleaning out their email in-box. Seems like a lot of money to spend to clean out your email but maybe just a sign of our hectic work lives that we can only create free time to do these mundane tasks by attending conferences...



Anyway, here are some tidbits from that panel:

Amazing to witness the scope of economic activity that has grown up around search. Google has created a wonderful mechanism to bring buyers and sellers of content together in an affinity area. The reason why search works so well is that there is a high relevance of intent. Google has created a new economy around search. Marketplaces have developed that allow companies and marketers to bid on groups of words. Also entire affiliate economy who use tools and deliver users or buyers at certain price point. It works and is democratized. Has enabled an entire micro-economy around search itself. Mis-spelled URLs account to 10-12% of search engine revenue according to the CEO of Tucows. Yipes!

(Former exec at Paypal) Your personal information, cc number, driver license, ssn, usernames and passwords costs about $14 to access. There's a very vague sense of what's legal or illegal because it crosses international boundaries and subject to a variety of laws. Phishing scams alone acounted for $1B in losses last year. Most states have spam laws on the books but are not really enforceable, more of a public relations effort. One scary example in the spam world is that Six-Apart was using some software to retaliate against spammers and the spammers attacked back, effectively bringing down the Canadian Internet backbone. The service provider effectively gave up Six-Apart so that the other hundreds of thousands of Canadian sites would remain up. I'm assuming that is to say they shut down domain name resolution for Six-Apart and then the spammers stopped attacking the DNS provider.