Posts Tagged ‘D.C.’

Today the DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer and iStrategyLabs announced the winners of the Apps for Democracy Contest. Within the final week, the program received a large influx of new submissions resulting in 47 total submissions with the winners announced this morning by Adrian Fenty at One Judiciary Square.

This was the first large new media contest by the Office of the CTO and I’d expect more of these to come in the future. If you are looking to still have an influence in the contest, there is the People’s Choice Award which will come from users voting on the Apps for Democracy site. You can head over and vote if you are interested in participating.

Tomorrow night the People’s Choice Award will be decided at 7 pm. Tonight there will also be an awards ceremony and celebration downtown. This is a really exciting event for D.C., emphasizing the government’s commitment to supporting local technology innovation. I had the opportunity to speak with Vivek Kundra, CTO of D.C., last month and he emphasized his ongoing commitment.

In the coming months there will be some very large announcements related to building the D.C. metro area’s emerging digital economy. I’m personally excited to be part of this growing community. For those of you wondering about the contest winners, the top two are below, and the rest have been posted on the Apps for Democracy website.

Indie Gold
iLive.at

Agency Gold
DC Historic Tours

If you are like me, there’s a good chance you are frequently looking for a great place to eat but don’t want to spend much time searching. You may also want to have an easy way to review sites in a simple manner right after you finish eating at a restaurant. If you are knowledgeable of all things web then you are probably aware of other services offering similar services.

Numerous Competitors

Yelp, for example offers a robust iPhone application for finding restaurants, bars, banks, drugstores, and more. You can then filter each of the stores or restaurants based on their rating, price, and distance from you. It’s a pretty useful application aside from one thing: you can’t review restaurants after you’ve visited them from the application.

A couple weeks ago I also wrote about the LivingSocial iPhone application. One of the many features that the application is the ability to write reviews on the go. This was immediately an open void in the market as Yelp has yet to fix reviews on the go. The additional benefit of LivingSocial is their integration into all the existing social networks which offer developer platforms.

The social recommendation space is rapidly getting crowded and as we rush to fill data into the system, there are going to be some serious challenges. One of those challenges includes consistency of recommendation engines within your personal networks. If half your friends are on one network and half on another, it’s difficult to determine which one to use.

Thummit and Simplicity

While numerous competitors exist in the mobile food recommendation space, Thummit is attempting to simplify things by limiting users to 140 characters, the same way Twitter does. The focus is to build out a robust SMS service and then extend the service to support as many communication platforms as possible. You can tweet your Thummit recommendation, text it to text it to the service, or update it from the Thummit website.

While the initial beta test is focused on the D.C. area, you can currently use the service anywhere in the country. For example I just ate at “The House” in San Francisco for lunch and was able to post a review directly to the site. The service then pulls in other reviews from around the web so that no sites appear to have a lack of content.

When I saw the demo at the LaunchBox Digital offices in D.C. last week, Sean Greene, the brain behind this new product, emphasized that the company is working to integrate many more features that make it easier to review restaurants. That includes automatically determining whether or not someone likes a place automatically via sentiment analysis.

It also appears that they want to take recommendations and simple voting beyond just restaurants. Food is simply the first place to test it out. For now the service is limited to restaurants but they may expand beyond that in the near future. I think keeping the service as simple as possible will be their key to success. What services to you use for social recommendations and social voting?

Also, if you’d like to register for the site, visit the Thummit site and use the invite code “hamburger”. Let us know what you think!

Yesterday, D.C. Based SB Nation announced a “mid-seven-figure” funding round. The round was led by Accel Partners and included Allen & Co., Ted Leonsis, Brent Jones, who previously played for the San Francisco 49ers, Dan Rosenweig and Jeff Winer who were previous Yahoo! execs, and a few others. What is SB Nation? Ultimately, it’s a sports blog network.

The company is run by Jim Bankoff, who used to be the programming chief at AOL. The network includes a group of high quality sports blogs, each of which uses a similar design across the network. The company provides equity in SB Nation in exchange for full ownership of “the content, URLs, and related assets”. Bloggers also receive a portion of the ad revenue.

It’s great to see another D.C. based digital media company generate substantial buzz, but one has to wonder how the company will justify what can only be assumed as a sizable valuation. Then again, if we run the numbers, the company could easily come up with a nice exit. With 2 million unique visitors a month, and the average blog receiving less than 2 page views per visit, at a $20 CPM, that would result in monthly revenues of $68,000 per network ad spot.

With 4 ads on each site, the company could easily surpass $3 million in revenue per year. If a high traffic blogger received 1 percent of the company and it eventually is sold for around $30 million, each blogger might walk away with $300,000. Not exactly a large sum if you’ve been slaving away at your blog for a few years. Conversely, that’s at the company’s current size. If they can grow (as most networks do) significantly, there could theoretically be a much larger exit.

I don’t know any of the details though on how equity was swapped but networks tend to favor the owners of the networks and not the bloggers. In this complex new media landscape, it is pretty challenging to figure out a successful business model where the bloggers benefit. Creating a network definitely adds a lot of value for a potential acquirer though so at least it’s nice to see the creation of a valuable company.

The real question is when will we start seeing a large number of blog network acquisitions? As newspapers continue to decline, one can only assume that each company will expand their digital media presence. I’d guess that the next 12 to 24 months will be ripe for acquisitions in this space.

Looking for a way to find tickets to your favorite band’s upcoming concert? Maybe you are looking for football tickets but all of them appear to be sold out. Well look no longer. Potomac, Maryland based Ninja Tickets has announced the public beta of their event ticket search engine. The site crawls all tickets to sporting events, concerts and theater shows.

I had a chance to test out the system and it works pretty well. When you search it will automatically group events which you can click through to. The event page then displays links to the various tickets and an image of the event venue. There is also space for conversation on every event page. So far the company is boasting that it has over $16 billion worth of tickets indexed so far.

I’m not quite sure what that amounts to in the actual number of tickets but if the average ticket price is $100, that would be approximately 160 million tickets. I don’t know their average ticket cost though so this is just a random estimate. One of the interesting features provided by Ninja Tickets is its “Price Rating” system which “calculates where each event ticket should be located based on its offered price — in effect displaying seats that truly offer the best ‘market value’ for consumers.”

Ninja Tickets also makes an interesting claim: “Ninja Tickets is the only search engine that can pull ticket data from online ticket sites in real time, allowing consumers to see all tickets available at time of search.” I have no proof to suggest otherwise! This is most definitely an interesting concept and I think it could definitely succeed. The real key is gaining critical pass and then negotiating referral fees with those that don’t offer affiliate program currently.

Let us know what your experience is with Ninja Tickets! I’m not quite sure about the name but the service appears to work pretty well. I’m interested to see how quickly this service grows.

Today the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) announced the launch of Apps for Democracy. The program, which was developed with the help of iStrategyLabs, is a competition for developers to create interesting ways of visualizing DC’s public data. The incentive for developers? Cash prizes of course!

How much exactly? Well there will be over $20,000 in prizes with the largest prize being $2,000 for any individual or group. Developers will also receive public recognition for creating winning applications that will be used by the government, citizens, visitors, and businesses in the District of Columbia. It sounds like a pretty great program and there is some interesting data that is available for developers.

This competition reminds me of existing data mashups with maps on the web that record local criminal activity as well as housing prices. I can also envision a useful iPhone application that leverages GPS to provide you with locally relevant data. The competition is open to all developers and has the intent of fostering innovation in the DC technology community.

Will this transform the community overnight? Definitely not, but this is most definitely a step in the right direction. It is clear that the Office of the Chief Technology Officer is determined to integrate the startup community within the government. I had the opportunity to speak with Vivek Kundra, CTO of D.C. a few weeks ago and he emphasized the organization’s commitment to supporting a thriving start-up community.

If you are a developer or work with a group of developers, I highly suggest checking out the Apps for Democracy contest. Also, please let us know your thoughts on the program!

D.C. based Mixx.com has released statistics about their growth just one year after their launch and the numbers are impressive. In September, the site attracted just under 4 million unique visitors to the site, a more than 10-fold increase in just the last six months. The company has continuously posted exceptional growth statistics.

Just a few months ago Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb suggested that these growth statistics were not sufficient given that at the time it was only 5 percent of the traffic that Digg was attracting. Only a few months later the site appears to have grown closer to 20 percent the size of Digg. Kirkpatrick has yet to post any update but Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb did state that the most recent stats are definitely impressive.

While it’s not clear what the future holds for social news sites, growth continues to be impressive despite a lack of monetization models. Much of Mixx’s most recent growth can be attributed to the company’s Mixx Communities feature which lets users create their own custom social news site focused around topics that they think are most important.

As the Mixx Communities project begins to mature it will be interesting to see if the company can continue to post such impressive growth statistics. For now we will have to wait and see but definitely a great showing by Mixx just 1 year in.

D.C. based Mingle360 will soon release a device called the “MingleStick” which simplifies the process of exchanging contact information typically provided by the exchange of business cards. The device does not actually exchange contact information with others but instead exchanges a unique identifier which references a user’s identity on the Mingle360 network.

Numerous companies have developed tools that attempt to resolve the challenges of organizing contact information. Even social networks have jumped in the game. Facebook for example has built in a contact list into their mobile application which lets users keep track of their friends’ latest contact information. Numerous companies are fighting for a piece of the personal contact management pie but nobody has yet to really dominate the market.

One of the most significant value propositions presented by Mingle360 is that which is offered to sponsors at trade shows. When users visit sponsor booths at trade shows, sponsors get access to the visitor’s contact information for lead generation purposes. When the user returns home and plugs the MingleStick into their computer, sponsors that they visited throughout the day become visible.

Mingle360 is definitely looking to solve an extremely important issue. The primary challenge for the company will be user adoption. Without a MingleStick, users cannot take full advantage of the Mingle360 system. If you thought getting new users to register for your site was hard, try getting them to purchase a device that they keep on them at all times integrate that experience with a physical device.

For more information on the service and MingleStick device, check out the Mingle360 website. Would you be willing to purchase a new device to exchange contact information? What contact management solutions do you use?

Update
According to a Mingle360 representative, you can technically use Mingle360 without a MingleStick, but the MingleStick provides the in person networking capability. Also, the representative mentioned that the business model is not focused on users paying for the device but instead sponsors pay for the device and consumers are handed the device for free.

Last week I had the pleasure to sit through Fred Wilson’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. While the history given by Fred is not comprehensive, it does provide great insight as to how New York has grown to become one of the fastest growing (if not the fastest growing) web industries in the U.S. There were a few key components listed in Fred’s keynote which I think is important for any other bubbling center for web and entrepreneurship.

First, Fred references the launch of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU back in 1979. Today, in D.C. there is not a single program in the area that I know of that has been able to duplicate what the ITP has accomplished. While many reference the University of Maryland and their Dingman center for entrepreneurship as a hub, not a single program in the area has had the success which ITP has. Go take a look at their course guide for some clues on why this program has been so successful. One thing to note is that this did not come out of an engineering school, it came out of an art school!

Second, Fred references the heavy media presence in New York City. There was the launch of the “Connect Times” in 1989 by Josh Harris. Over the years there was the launch of numerous other digital media outlets including Ziff Davis’ ZDNet and CMP’s TechWeb in 1991. One of the things that I’ve consistently highlighted as being important for any emerging technology and entrepreneurship community is media coverage. In D.C. we are still somewhat behind in our reach but our coverage has improved substantially over the last two years.

Third, in 1995 Mayor Giuliani and Bill Ruden launched 55 Broad St. It was a building from a failed investment bank which was turned into a technology oriented building including high speed internet and incubator space. This is something which still does not exist in D.C. today. The closest thing is a co-working space in Adams Morgan called Affinity Lab but there is nothing supported by the local government.

Finally, there was a large presence of ad networks, new media startups (Silicon Alley Reporter, @NYC, etc), agencies (which were rolled-up) and more. Things quieted down temporarily and then blogging emerged, events launched and the buzz built. We are witnessing the buzz building in D.C. and within the next 12 to 24 months I think we are going to witness D.C. turn into a nationally recognized center for web technology.

D.C. isn’t the only city facing the same challenges though. Chicago, Boston, Austin, Denver, Miami, Atlanta, L.A. and others all are trying to build centers for web technology. Unfortunately for those cities, D.C. is going to beat them to the punch but hopefully they can learn from our success! Check out Fred’s video below for more insight.

This morning I wrote about the launch of the BuzzLogic ad network. I also said that we will most definitely begin to see more ad networks launch before consolidation starts to take place. Well here’s another to add to the list! BrandClick is launching an in-text advertising network which “tags specific brand name keyworks and creates links to a chose destination”. What’s unique about the service?

Aside from the company being based in the D.C. area I’m not quite sure what makes this different then existing text-based ad networks. The critical partnership which the company is touting is with the National Newspaper Association. Currently the company has a number of locally-based content providers and advertisers. It’s clear that this company is at the extremely early stages but it’s great to see another company in the D.C. metro area giving it a shot.

The company has a lot of work to do on their design but then again when your company is dealing with text links, I don’t think design really matters that much. In an already saturated market getting the attention of publishers requires networks to generate high CPM rates. Only the large ones in addition to a few niche players have been effective at generating great CPMs.

I think BrandClik is going to need to find some big advertisers before they hit it big. Additionally it makes sense to focus on a specific industry. Rather than discount them before they’ve had a chance to succeed, I’ll give this company a few months to see if they can put together an impressive list of publishers and advertisers.

One of my own personal missions over the past couple years has been to contribute to the D.C. web-startup ecosystem as much as I could and help foster a more thriving environment for entrepreneurs. Over the past couple years a lot has changed and a lot continues to change. Over the coming weeks Social Times will be working on some interesting projects which I hope will continue to contribute to the local technology and entrepreneurial environment.

It’s only one component though as it truly takes a community to build the ecosystem. I’m hearing about more and more events and slowly we are beginning to see signs of an emerging hotbed of technology and entrepreneurship. I also believe that we are slowly witnessing the meshing of what was previously distinct sub-communities. There are still serious challenges facing the local environment though.

Entrepreneurship & Technology Education

In the D.C. metro area there are a number of leading universities but when it comes to entrepreneurship and technology, none of them have the national exposure of universities like MIT & Stanford. That’s not to say that the local universities aren’t capable. The University of Maryland for example has the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship dedicated to creating a healthy environment for startups and has a great group of venture advisors as well.

The biggest problem is that many of the people filtering through the local universities are not gaining much experience as it applies to technology. In an article yesterday, Howard Anderson highlighted some of the primary factors that help germinate successful tech startups: “sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to”.

D.C. has plenty of sophisticated money, at least one template success: AOL, but no leading technology universities. So this is something that local universities need to focus on.

Conclusion

I would list off a number of other factors but I honestly believe that we have everything else in place. The local media is becoming more active in what has become a highly active community, a local startup incubator has succeeded in getting their first company a Series A (I’m assuming more will come in the near future) and the local events are getting bigger and bigger.

While D.C. is filled with extremely intelligent individuals, many of them are coming here with jobs already filled. Many of them aren’t young enough to take ridiculous risks and learn from a series of failures. Not that you can’t launch a startup at any point in your life, it just becomes harder when your responsibilities increase.

What do you think the next steps should be to build a thriving ecosystem? How can we get the universities building more technical programs?