2008 January Archive - Bilgistic.com

Archive for January, 2008 Page 2 of 12

ShopVisible Sees the Money

Published on January 28, 2008 in Startups and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

ShopVisible, an Atlanta startup that you probably haven’t heard of yet, has just raised an angel funding round of less than $1 million. The company is selling a platform that allows e-commerce to occur in a search engine optimized manner. Websites that use generic software for their storefronts are often hindered by the lack of search engine friendliness.

Consider that even blogging software will default to cryptic URLs, which are definitely search engine and user unfriendly, and you’ll quickly understand why this type of service is necessary. The goal here appears to be to reduce the amount spent on online advertising and instead spend some of the savings on a better designed site. If a site is better designed and optimized for relevant search terms, the site should fare much better in organic search results. Most users, myself included, trust organic search results way more than paid advertising. Truth be told, I use Adblock Plus in Firefox so I don’t even see most ads.

As an example, take a look at one of their clients - Serv-U. They are highly ranked for the search terms bar equipment (currently Serv-U has the top spot on Google), bar supply (#3), bar decor (#4), bar refrigeration (#1), bar glassware (#2), and restaurant glassware (#1). If that doesn’t tell you these guys have something going on, I’m not sure what will.

ShopVisible started as an idea in 2001 but it took on a new dimension in 2005 when inventor Josh Lloyd teamed up with Bryan Kujawski. Bryan was formerly a co-founder of 360i which also does ad management and search engine optimization. Sean Cook joined them as CEO in 2007. By the way, Bryan and Sean you need to make your LinkedIn profile URL more search engine friendly. :-)

Interesting in the funding round is that it seems to have been done through individual angels and without the engagement of an angel group. This is definitely a more time consuming way to raise money but if your deal is worthy of being funded, things get done quickly. I’ll talk more about the angels who were involved in this deal in a future post.

So congratulations to these guys for raising a good chunk of money to help launch their company. I’m looking forward to seeing the progress here and seeing if the ShopVisible platform can gain enough traction with customers.

Comments on Healthcare

Published on January 27, 2008 in Startups and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

Angus McRae had some interesting words about my post on healthcare issues for entrepreneurs so I thought I’d explore them some and make sure everyone got a chance to read his thoughts.

Two important points, I think, come from Angus’ comment. First,

Does the VC want to take on the fiduciary liability associated with becoming a plan sponsor?

And second,

In my mind the viability of the idea is dependent on the size of the VC’s portfolio and its willingness to take on the responsibility of managing the benefits of a varied group of employers.

Traditionally VCs have just provided money and insight and each portfolio company would make other decisions independent of other portfolio companies. Not too long ago, one VC (I’ve forgotten which one now - if you remember, post in the comments) acquired an executive recruiting firm so as to (presumably) help portfolio companies recruit better talent. This clearly leads to value creation for both the entrepreneur and the VC if better employees can be recruited more quickly for the startup.

I think this same thing applies to health care benefits. Having benefits isn’t a competitive benefit and doesn’t create value in the startup. It’s just another thing that distracts the entrepreneur from the important task at hand. The problem, though, may be this issue that Angus points out:

Insurers require there to be common ownership between the employers. This requirement may differ from carrier to carrier, but you should find the Internal Revenue Code definition of a “controlled group of corporations” to be safe ground.

Clearly I’m not a lawyer nor do I know the Internal Revenue Code. If this is the reason that this can’t happen, I think entrepreneurs and investors need to start lobbying their congressional representatives
for help in rectifying this situation.

Deadpool: Wamily

Published on January 26, 2008 in Startups. 5 Comments

I’ve been looking around at companies to cover and I keep hitting companies that are gone or appear to be gone. The one I hit today was Wamily (which was even covered by Mashable). As their site says:

That’s all, folks.

Wamily is offline indefinitely while we re-think and re-work some things. It was great while it lasted, but alas, starting a social networking startup is harder than we thought.

I don’t know if people who went through the trouble of using Wamily got any warning of the plug pulling. I do know the site was functioning a few weeks ago when I went to check it.

I think this highlights that it is really difficult to build a pure social networking site (kinda like the Wamily folks said; I like to state the obvious sometimes). If, as a user, I have to worry about a site going away then am I really going to trust a new site with my data (of course, this then evolves into an argument for data portability). This is one of the reasons I’ve resisted joining new social networks as much as possible. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not a member of quite a few including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr, and probably many others that I can’t remember at this point. The other problem with social networking sites is that you usually have to re-enter all of your data when you join a new site (again, an argument for data portability or rather social network data portability). This makes me really think about the potential value of a new site versus data entry pain (not to mention invite annoyance to my contacts). Usually sites can’t make it over my personal hurdle of value versus pain.

Personally, I think it’s time to move on from working on the newest whiz-bang social network with a twist and focus on something else. Yeah, the current social networks don’t do everything that everyone wants them to do but neither do most other online services. This isn’t to say that a great social networking platform couldn’t be created that kills off all the others. Remember what happened to Yahoo, Excite, Ask Jeeves, and others (anyone remember HotBot, Altavista, and Lycos?) when they stagnated and Google came out of nowhere and reinvented (in some sense) the search business. When Google emerged, everyone thought that search was dead. So it isn’t that it can’t happen, it’s just really hard for it to happen.

I’d love to hear the gory details of what happened at Wamily and why the folks there think it happened the way it did. This would probably make a really good presentation for one of the events in town. I know, it sounds like rubbernecking at a car wreck but you can often learn a lot more from a failure than you can from a success. If anyone hears of this getting set up, let me know. I’d love to attend.

Web Trend Map 2008 by Information Architects

Published on January 25, 2008 in Technology. 0 Comments

Information Architects have just released an update to their web trend map. Like the original map, the new map uses the Tokyo subway system as a guide to organizing popular web sites. Pretty interesting. But then I might find it interesting since I spent so much time in Tokyo subways while I was working in Tokyo.

Dave, Dave, Dave of the JungleDisk

Published on January 25, 2008 in Jobs, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital. 2 Comments

I’m a big fan of doing offsite backups. So much so that I compared a number of offsite backup services a long time ago. But backup solutions that require user intervention is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I’ve tried to automate as much as possible. I’ve set up a RAIDed storage server in my house (for the geeks, it’s RAID 1 with 2 live disks and 1 hot spare, each drive is 250GB) that gets the backups from the other machines in the house (everything executes automatically on a set schedule).

As I mentioned in my post on backup services, I was a fan of Mozy. I still think Mozy is a pretty good solution (more on why below) but having support only for Windows and Macs, it isn’t a complete solution. So I started looking at JungleDisk.

The Background

JungleDisk was started by Dave Wright who is an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Dave was previously one of the co-founders of GameSpy which was then bought by IGN where he was then Chief Architect. Dave started JungleDisk as a side project in 2006 after Amazon announced it’s S3 service. By creating an application that easily allows users to access and backup their files to the Amazon storage cloud, Dave had a hit on his hands. He continued working on the product and released a commercial version in August 2007. He announced pricing at $20 for free lifetime upgrades and support and use on any platform - Widows, Mac, or Linux. Oh yeah, you can use your licensed software on as many machines as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here) directly to Amazon. This fabulous pricing structure was met with user complaints. Why? Because users thought Dave wasn’t charging enough and wouldn’t be able to build a sustainable business with this model. When was the last time you heard users complain that you were charging too little?!?

The Technology

Now for the geek stuff. The one interesting aspect of JungleDisk is that Dave releases clients for all three platforms simultaneously. When was the last time you saw a startup do that? Normally when you see people do that, it’s software written in Java. Personally, I hate full blown applications that are Java based. Sure they are fairly speedy with current interpreters but still, they’re interpreted instead of being fully compiled code. I’m a performance freak and I love my compiled code (don’t get me wrong, interpreted languages do have their place and I dig Ruby). Dave has taken the approach of doing fully compiled code across all three platforms. He does this by writing in everything in C++ and maintaining as much of the code base as possible as common through the platforms (I’d assume everything but some network interface stuff and some filesystem work). He uses wxWidgets to maintain a cross-platform GUI and then some open source libraries like libcurl and openssl.

The Competition

With my previously favorite program, Mozy, I could backup my Windows machines but not the Linux server that houses my RAIDed drives. So I still use Mozy since they give you some free space (if you signup for Mozy using this link, you’ll get an extra 256 MB of free space [so will I] for a total of 2.2 gigs free). It costs $5/month per computer to get unlimited storage on Mozy. Compare this to the flexibility of JungleDisk and the cost I’m paying per month to Amazon (less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost), JungleDisk is overall a better deal. I still use Mozy for random secondary backup purposes (I mean, come on - it’s free!).

Also note, Mozy raised about $2m in venture capital and was recently acquired by EMC for over $70m. Another JungleDisk competitor, Carbonite, has recently raised $15m to bring their lifetime total to $21m in venture capital. Over all the competitors, I think JungleDisk is not only a better solution but a more cost effective and flexible solution.

The Future

JungleDisk is an absolutely phenomenal story. The company has been completely bootstrapped by Dave and now has significant revenue to continue its growth path. In fact, Dave just announced that he’s hiring. If you think you’re a hot shot C++ developer, C#/ASP.NET developer, or product manager in Atlanta, drop a note to Dave and let him know you heard about it through this blog. This is an absolutely phenomenal ground floor opportunity for someone looking for an entrepreneurial experience.

Note, Dave has released JungleDisk Plus which gets him into a recurring revenue stream and provides users with a way to do block updates of incrementally changing files. Given the length of this post, I’ll discuss this service in a future post so I can fully delve into the technical bits.

Disclosure

I paid for my copy of JungleDisk on August 12, 2007 (9 days after it went for sale). This was before I know that Dave and JungleDisk were Atlanta based.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot. I didn’t include a link to the actual company’s site. Sorry about that.