Tonight in downtown St. Louis the second group of companies to be funded by Capital Innovators will be announced. These will receive $50k in seed funding, free office space and credits toward other useful services as part of their acceleration program. We wrote about their innovative program last fall.

Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. Most have felt the program worthwhile and given them a jumpstart on their operations.

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For example, Sam Glines says, "Effectively, NorseCorp, while led by me, born and raised in St Louis, was a stranger in its own town. I spent very little time here in my professional life, so my local business connections were limited. Capital Innovators accelerated access to and recommendations for vetted service providers, two of which we have brought on. One of them is serving a critical role in a new Norse service offering in Web security." The company has some innovative security offerings for payment card processors that we will cover in the near future. They also signed Global eTelecom as a customer, one of U.S.' largest check processors at the end of December. "Our plan is to have seven figure revenues and be profitable by Q3, in addition to to seven new hires by end of the year," he says.

Jim Dolan, the CEO of Action Online, is looking to launch in May and redo their YoJo.com site. Since joining the program, he has seen an increase in ad sales and also received new investment capital.

Anthony Favazza, CEO of DiningCircle has hired a CTO that will be overseeing a rebuild of our product in early 2012. "We also have an intern from Washington University helping with customer satisfaction and retention, and one of the marketing partners from the program was able to deliver a comprehensive marketing plan for us that included a new logo, website, print marketing, mailers, and a clear message."

Ryan Bell, the CEO of Gremln.com says, "We continue to have advisory meetings to discuss how we will convert free users into paying customers. We have begun the sales cycle with a number of potential clients and are nurturing these relationships during private beta stage and are looking to white label our product."

Jim Eberlin, the CEO of Jbara says, "We are continuing to make enhancements to our current product as sales are increasing. Current customers have helped to improve our analytics. Our customer base pipeline is growing as we're in the process of closing several contracts. We are currently the sole sponsor of a meetup and users group for customer success executives. The group is led by Marqueto, and Exactly, one of our current customers. We have two strategic partnerships in the works that could lead to potential exits. These are in addition to our currently existing partnership with SalesForce."

The new ventures include:

Bonfyre is a location-based mobile application exclusively for college students that helps them find what's hot around campus, keep up with friends and save money. Bonfyre was created by Off Campus Media, a company focused on creating value for college students and highly relevant advertising opportunities for local merchants and national brands.

BusyEvent is a profitable live event CRM company monetizing some of the 10 million annual face-to-face transactions at conferences, trade shows and business to business events. They track buyer behavior and present that data as actionable information that multiple stakeholders pay for.

Click With Me Now makes 1-click Web-sharing for consumers possible; with no cost, no downloads and no frustrations. Supporting businesses that connect with consumers online, they provide tools that let their customers instantly invite friends to co-browse with them. Their SaaS-based, platform-independent solution results in richer experiences, greater conversion and increased sales.

Material Mix owns and operates an exchange for reusable industrial byproducts. Each year, U.S. manufacturers pay to dispose of 176 million tons of waste, 34% of which is reusable. The online trade of these recoverable materials represents an unrealized $13.2 billion market opportunity.

RollSale is reducing the need for expensive middlemen in the used car supply chain by providing dealers with a simple, inexpensive, mobile-centric social network for buying and selling inventory.

Systematic Revenue provides growing businesses with an easy to use and affordable marketing automation software application to consistently follow up with all prospects and customers in a meaningful and relevant way.

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"We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it's illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense."

That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alum who are trying to garner support for the "Democratizing Access to Capital Act" (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund startups. Launched yesterday with the hopes of getting $100,000 from 100 pledges, the guys behind WeFunder have already seen near $3 million in promised funds from more than a 1000 supporters if the Senate passes the bill.

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Different From A Kickstarter Project

The notion of crowd funding a startup is fundamentally different than that of endorsing a project on Kickstarter. At Kickstarter, people fund projects and have no ownership over the project once it is completed. It becomes a lot more complicated when the notion of investing in actual companies is taken into account.

Right now, the only entities that can invest in startups are those that are accredited investors such as venture capital firms or venture banks. What the Democratizing Access to Capital Act of 2011 would do would be to amend the Securities Act of 1933 that outlines when and how investments in companies can be made through the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is where a mess of SEC rules and regulations come into play. Many of the regulations that the SEC implements are designed to protect the investor. The Securities Act of 1933 was put in place in 1933, four years after the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression and caused many affluent American's to lose their fortunes. It was a necessary act that helped protect people but also spur U.S. businesses. To a certain extent, the Democratizing Access to Capital Act fits in the same realm.

Sponsored by Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the bill comes three years after the market bust in 2008 that started what we now refer to as "The Great Recession." Many political and business leaders in the U.S. are looking toward the technology sector to lead America back to the heights of economic prosperity. The Wall Street Journal today published an article saying that the next economy will be based on three pillars: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution. It is clear that the U.S. has the technological prowess to create a dynamic new economy. Yet, with capital markets spread thin, the next big American company working on a technological advance could die for lack of funding before it even gets its feet off the ground.

Tremendous Impact

The impacts of the Democratizing Access to Capital Act could be tremendous. It would open up the flow of cash to startups from real people. The act would allow a single non-accredited investor to put money into a startup they has the power to create jobs.

"Think of it as Kickstarter for equity, where everyday non-accredited individuals can invest up to $1k in a startup they believe in," said Daniel Sullivan, one of the founders of WeFunder and the founder of crowdsourcing startup Crowdly. "I think this is a really important issue that involves how the general tech consumer can help drive the economy."

The other two founders of WeFunder are Nicholas Tommarello of Escapist and developer Nick Plante.

Some may think that startups like WeFunder are looking to disrupt the venture capital industry. That is far from the truth. Venture capitalists and bankers are not going anywhere. Startups still need guidance, mentors, legal support and infrastructure that VCs can offer them. They also have more money and better insider knowledge than the individual non-accredited investor. For example, just look to the $2.7 billion that VC firm Andreesen Horowitz has raised in the last three years. What the Democratizing Access to Capital Act does is lower the bar for the transference of money for startups looking to build a great idea. The ability of money to flow freely across the ecosystem should be of great benefit to all involved.

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Optogenetics might be a relatively unknown area of neuroscience, but it's one that, thanks to some new research, could soon find itself (and its rodental subjects) in the spotlight. For the uninitiated, it's the practice of manipulating animal cells using light (with a little help from gene therapy). Until now, optogenetic equipment has been large and unwieldy, making testing on subjects (read: rats) painstaking. Startup, Kendall Research, has changed all this, creating wireless prototypes that weigh just three grams (0.11 ounces). By eschewing bulky Lasers for LEDs and Laser diodes, the equipment is small enough that it can be attached to the rodents. At that point, their brain function can be manipulated with the touch of a button, and different parts can be stimulated without breeding mutant variants -- a controversial practice that doesn't even yield results in real time. The "router" is powered wirelessly by super capacitors below test area, and researchers can conduct experiments remotely, even automatically. Human applications for this are still some way off, but we're sure our future overlords will make good use of it.

Researchers develop 'wireless optical brain router' to manipulate brain cells originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CES hasn't exactly been known as the place where small startup companies catch their big break, but the CEA seems intent on changing that notion this time around. The organization announced today that its new 'Eureka Park TechZone" will feature 94 startup companies occupying some 9,000 square feet of floor space at The Venetian -- up considerably from the 28 companies that were signed on when the new area was first announced this summer. As CNET's Daniel Terdiman notes, digital imaging companies look set to have a particularly big presence in the area, including the likes of smartphone accessory-maker Kogeto (its Dot device pictured above) and the Cornell Research offshoot Mezmeriz, which is focused on pico projector technology. Needless to say, we'll be there next month to see what comes out of it.

Continue reading CES 2012 to feature 94 startup companies in 'Eureka Park TechZone'

CES 2012 to feature 94 startup companies in 'Eureka Park TechZone' originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From “massively small products” shop Particle, itself a startup newly out of stealth mode, comes a new app: Robo.to, pitched to us as a digital calling card.

Although the app first struck us as a skinnier Retaggr with an animated GIF-esque Flash avatar slapped on the top, something quirky and cute drew us back and elicited deeper digging. We read on the Particle blog that their goal was “to design something a user can easily navigate, without really thinking too hard about it.” We turned back to the adorable Robo.to app; had we simply been thinking too hard?

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After a few initial minutes of tinkering around the site, we were able to generate this:

The resulting badge appears in a narrow, mobile-friendly form and links to a page with any pointers we choose to direct visitors to our other online homes. Robo.to let us record a few soundless seconds of video and was then kind enough to help us share that information with a limited amount of text in a few other places on the social web, such as Facebook and Twitter. The app also allows for mobile uploads via email.

It’s an amuse-bouche for the Internet stalker’s palate, and it’s delightful.

The only two questions that remained after Robo.to won our heart are as follows, and they’re the same questions we’d ask any free-to-a-good-home puppy:

1. How will it generate revenue?

2. How we will remember to feed it?

The social web is, metaphorically speaking, an ocean of apps. Some are better designed, some are more functional, some are better integrated with our existing online lives. Within the sea, there are continents (Google’s suite of apps, Facebook, YouTube), and there are islands. Each of us has our own particular haunts in that regard, sites that warrant a weekly or daily check-in or post. I’ve adopted Yahoo! Meme as one of mine to keep an eye on, and I get around to Last.fm just about as often.

Then there are the apps that, while nifty, don’t have the power to become a continent or an island because they can’t consistently draw users back. They become digital jetsam, and adoption declines after initial rounds of publicity are over.

We’re not damning Robo.to to this particular fate, but we want to know: Why will we return to Robo.to and continue to upload content? What will remind us? Is returning even necessary? Has the Particle team succeeded in creating an app so tiny it’s virtually invisible?

And without consistent user traffic prompted by that sticky, infectious property the best new apps have (hel-lo, Twitter!), how will Particle have the leverage to generate revenue?

Also, our Internet friends were way confused on why there’s no sound in the video clips.

What do you make of Robo.to so far? Are you more confused or delighted? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to link to your newly created profile on the site so we can watch your clips.

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Tiny App Confuses, Delights: Check Out Robo.to, Next-Gen Animated GIFs

Pixelpipe, a great service that allows its users to distribute documents and media files to over 100 social media services, just released over 50 new single-purpose applications through the Android Market. The company also submitted the same number of apps to the iPhone App Store and the Nokia Ovi Store. Why so many apps? As Pixelpipe’s CEO and founder Brett Butterfield tells us, the company realized that about half of Pixelpipe’s users only used the service to forward files to one service.

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In order to serve this market better and to link its name closer to the brand names of the services it supports, the company decided to release co-branded versions of its mobile app for 50 of the 100 services it currently supports. Pixelpipe will sell these co-branded versions of its app for $0.99 and a pro version with support for all the 100 services that Pixelpipe currently works with will sell for $1.99.

The iPhone apps still have to go through Apple’s approval process, which can take a while, but the Android apps will be available today and the Nokia apps should be available in about one week.

Pixelpipe’s App Factory

As Butterfield told us, the company has automated most of the app development process, so whenever Pixelpipe adds a new service, a new mobile app can also be created with very little effort.

App Store SEO

Overall, this seems like a very smart move. The company started to experiment with co-branded Android apps for a few services like Facebook, Twitter, and Photobucket a few days ago. As these apps actually include the name of the service in their titles (“Twitter for Pixelpipe”), they are much easier to find for consumers who would otherwise never have heard of Pixelpipe. After all, as we pointed out earlier today, most users rely on Top 10 lists and browsing through categories to find interesting new mobile apps.

As Pixelpipe told us, these apps are already outselling the company’s own app by a significant margin and Pixelpipe has heard from a number of services who would like to partner with the company and promote the apps.

We think this is an interesting story, as it points out some of the problems developers face when trying to market their apps. Also, while social media mavens love the fact that Pixelpipe Pro can send documents, audio, video, and pictures to 100 other social media services, for most users, this is simply overkill and just generates confusion.

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Pixelpipe Announces 50 New Mobile Apps for Android, iPhone, and Nokia

Maybe it’s better to host your own. That’s the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new – but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed’s sale to Facebook, Tr.im’s up and down and Twitter’s denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there’s sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

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Isn’t This What Blogging Does For Us Already?

One of the analogies people are drawing is that we need a WordPress.org-type version of Twitter to put on our own servers as an alternative to the Twitter-hosted version that exists now like WordPress hosts blogs on WordPress.com.

Why do we need self-hosted lifestreaming, microblogging or social networks though when we’ve already got the ability to host our own blogs, own our own data there and set our own rules? Simply because these technologies fill different needs. Blogs are good for longer-form, author-centric communication. Quick, very social conversations around objects like links or media items can best be had in other settings. Thus the interest many people have in both writing a blog and sharing and discussing items on sites like Facebook (social networks), Twitter (microblogging) or FriendFeed (activity streams).

Twitter’s Down Time

Twitter went down again today, possibly for the second time in two weeks because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A swarm of zombified computers, distributed all around the world, is hitting Twitter’s centralized infrastructure over and over again until it can’t stay up.

If we all had a little piece of our microblogging network on our own servers and they spoke to each other, that couldn’t happen.

We’d also own our own data, our archives, our interface design and more. It would be like publishing little messages… like grown ups.

The two systems could co-exist, a hosted service has its advantages and many people wouldn’t use anything else. Realistically, no one is going to build something too much like Twitter if they could build a distributed version of something like FriendFeed or Facebook.

Facebook Eats FriendFeed

Social activity stream discussion network FriendFeed announced that it was selling itself to Facebook yesterday and many of its users were very upset. The acquisition is likely to change Facebook in interesting ways (FriendFeed’s creators were the inventors of GMail and Google Maps) but FriendFeed itself was important to its users.

The feeling of betrayal that comes from a transaction like this makes it hard to trust a hosted social networking company again.

Fortunately, there’s a long and growing list of ways to put all of your activity around the web in one place on your own website. When will those tools begin to include subscription to other peoples’ activity feeds and posting comments from your social lifestream viewing page that will appear back out on everyone else’s?

That’s a big part of the vision articulated by Anil Dash in his recent essay about what he calls The Push Button Web. It’s related as well to RSS pioneer Dave Winer’s recent promotion of a part of RSS called RSS Cloud. Developers are actively building on RSS Cloud and a similar protocol with the humorous name PubSubHubbub.

That’s also part of the vision of the Distributed Social Networking Project (DiSo). We haven’t heard much lately from this project, probably because its founders are busy building the technical standards that will allow the information to flow from one social network to another.

Tr.im Your Expectations

This weekend link shortening service Tr.im announced that it was shutting its doors. It was too expensive and hopeless to run the service without the funding, hype and official blessing from Twitter that competitor Bit.ly had won.

Big deal, right? It turns out that people freaked out. Tr.im’s biggest users were developers who were hip to the opportunities to do interesting things with the service. They had built on it and they felt a lot of frustration when they heard the news.

A dead URL shortener means dead links, broken content, lost data.

There are a number of different solutions being explored in response to this part of the problem. Developer Brian Hendrickson has already begun working on a service called rp.ly, a “community-owned URL shortener” based on cloning the Tr.im API.

There will, no doubt, be any number of other efforts that rise from the ashes of the trust that’s been burnt over the last week or more.

Are all of these circumstances and conversations going to push the social web over the edge, toward a more distributed and less centralized model? Probably not in a big way, immediately, but we’re pretty sure that some interesting innovation is going to come out of this. Dissatisfied engineers, working on a problem that a lot of people are interested in, can produce some fun and important work.

Some will hold out for Google Wave, the forthcoming open-source hyper communication head shift. We’re hearing that Wave may be too complicated, though, and we suspect that the most important innovations will come from coders building the kind of software that many, many people can hack on and help evolve.

In the future many of us may be microblogging, lifestreaming and social networking over technology that we control and can customize ourselves, instead of inside the owned networks of major companies like Facebook or Google. Those companies are seeking to branch out as well, trying to colonize the web (in the words of Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang) with tools like Facebook Connect.

But many of us may decide not to trust them anymore, and to use the tools that are becoming available to build and host our own systems of communication. People who control their own systems of communication can innovate on them outside the boundaries of the financial interests of big communication companies and we can all benefit from those innovations.

This summer is an important period in answering those questions.

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Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?