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Are you tired of jumping from emails to instant messages to text messages, depending on who you’re talking to? A company called Chatterous feels your pain, and according to VentureWire, the Seattle startup has raised a small amount of angel funding (less than $500,000) to help.

There are other startups taking on this problem, but usually from a different angle. Companies like Orgoo and Digsby, for example, bring your email, IM and SMS accounts together in a single page or service. Twitter and its associated applications let you post short messages from the Web, your computer desktop or your phone, but the focus is on public messages on the Twitter Web site, not private groups.

Chatterous, on the other hand, lets you stick to the mode you like best, and you should only visit the site to sign-up for different groups. So if you hate instant messaging, you can just use email, but your friends can send and receive all your messages as an SMS. I was impressed by Chatterous at the recent demo day organized by incubator Y Combinator, where the various founders used the service to communicate between themselves as they pitched their ideas to investors. Chatterous looks easy to use, and it could be really useful because the rapid proliferation of communication tools is becoming a headache.

Of course, the company’s challenge — as cofounder Kenshi Arasaki acknowledges — is making the different modes work together smoothly. For example, it would be pretty annoying if you received an SMS every time someone sent you an instant message. Judging from the company blog, it looks like Chatterous has been tweaking the details of its service so that users are kept up-to-date on their conversations without feeling like they’re being spammed. I like their solution for email, where the number of emails you receive from a particular group is determined by how often you email the group yourself.

Chatterous was one of the initial nominees for startups to feature at our MobileBeat 2008 conference on July 24.

Update: Cofounder Kenshi Arasaki just emailed me to confirm that the startup has raised an angel round of “less than $1 million.”

VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall and I attended the Spring 2008 Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday, where we were both pretty blown away.

Okay, so I’m easy to impress, but Matt’s a tougher nut to crack — just ask some of the start-ups who’ve been on the receiving end of his criticism. Yesterday, however, both of us found ourselves constantly saying, “Wow, that looks cool.”

Y Combinator is a Mountain View-based incubator company that funds and nurtures early-stage start-ups, then unveils them twice a year at its demo days. Of today’s 19 presenting companies, here’s our roundup of the 10 most promising, innovative or just plain cool ones (our favorites, from top down), followed by brief descriptions of everyone else.

Matt and I argued this out between ourselves, and we also tried to get some sense of the buzz among others who attended. Still, these are just first impressions. If you’re impressed by any of the companies, let us know in the comments.

The Top 10:

1. Deluux — Deluux’s goal is to bring the functionality of Facebook and other social networks to any page on the web. The company is in stealth, so all we can say is that it’s very promising. Co-founder Paul Mckellar says the company’s goal isn’t to replace Facebook, but rather to extend its “viral mechanisms” to the web at large (which is a vision that Facebook itself has, in some sense). Mckellar previously developed Socialmoth, a freestanding website that became a successful Facebook application last year.

2. 8aweek — 8aweek wants to make you (or, perhaps, your employees) more productive, and tracks your web-browsing habits to do so. There are plenty of other companies claiming to do this, including another one presenting today (see below), but what 8aweek adds is a bunch of other tools that will make greater productivity a reality. For example, you can draw up a list of sites you’ve identified as addictive, but giant time sinks (Myspace, Facebook, for example), and then set a timer that reminds you or even boots you off entirely when you’ve been on for too long (you choose when the timer goes off; see screenshot below). 8aweek does a lot more. It can also filter out a lot of the “noise” on a website by removing the items you’ve already read, and it can point you to those items and links that are the most popular. For a job like mine, where procrastination and research start to bleed into each other, I can definitely use 8aweek to make sure I don’t spend too much time on Valleywag. The service launched last month.

3. Wundrbar — Wundrbar bills itself as a next generation search bar. It looks a lot like the main Google page, but instead of just using the bar to search for results, it makes the bar a command line of sorts: For example, you can type “Amazon Harry Potter” and it’ll take you to the Amazon search results for Harry Potter. It allows you to perform basic tasks on other websites too, interpreting words in a way that is most intuitive. In some cases, you don’t even need to leave the Wundrbar home page — you can type “twitter going to san diego!” and it’ll automatically send out a Twitter message about your trip. The service is available now, and the company hopes others will use Wundrbar as a platform, adding the functionality of other websites. It wants to make money from referrals and targeted advertising.

4. FathomDB — We can’t say anything about this company, because it’s still in stealth mode, but keep an eye out. It’s definitely drawing a lot of buzz. A venture capitalist with DFJ remarked that it was his personal favorite.

5. 280 North — 280 North hopes to create a full suite of online tools that have the richness of desktop applications like Microsoft Office. So far, the company has made a PowerPoint-style presentation creator. The founders cop to the fact that they’ve aped PowerPoint’s interface, but the product benefits from being online. The great thing here is that you can build it all online, but ship presentations as PowerPoint files to people (something you can’t do with, say, a Google presentation).

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off
2. Startup employees headed to big companies?
3. Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one
4. Sprint’s fate unclear
5. Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble
6. Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once

Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off — Web metrics service Compete reports that leading social networks MySpace and Facebook saw traffic plateau in the US between January and February, with smaller sites growing fast. One must be cautious about interpreting monthly numbers — large networks have seen seasonal dips in the past, and obviously no social network can grow forever (our coverage). Regardless, the largest, fast-growing social network is high school social network MyYearbook, which has grown 284 percent since February of last year, to more than 20 million visits this past month.

A host of Silicon Valley companies also have reason to be happy. Business network LinkedIn grew 729 percent to more than 11 million visits. White-label social network provider Ning, which we’ve previously questioned the potential of, is doing well for itself, having grown 4,803 percent to nearly four million visits. Likewise, messaging service Twitter, which generally keeps a tight lid on its internal numbers, grew 4,368 percent to more than four million visits.

But the fastest-growing site of them all is Fubar, an online bar and happy hour — and not a dating site, as its founders made clear to us last year (see comments). It grew to 3,272,217 percent to more than 6.5 million visits last month. Cheers!

Startup employees headed to big companies? — The Wall Street Journal puts together some evidence — and more speculation — that there’s “a new flight to safety [at big companies] among tech-industry workers as the economy struggles.”

Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one — The aftershocks of DivX’s decision to close popular online video site Stage6 are continuing. Today, Greg Sandoval reports that MySpace cofounder-turned-investor Brad Greenspan still has an offer on the table, even though Stage6’s core team has quit and the site has all but shut down. We’ve also spoken with a number of investors who said they would have been interested in funding Stage6 if it was spun out — as was DivX’s original plan. As of today, the site’s front page features a final message about the closure in a rather bizarre-looking format. The site has otherwise been wiped clean, except for a message at the bottom of the homepage (pictured) encouraging Stage6 users to go to Veoh, another online video site.

Sprint’s fate unclear — A host of rumors are circling the company. One is that T-Mobile is looking to buy it. Another is that Nextel will be spun off. More here.

Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble — Last year, Comcast tried to selectively slow down sites and services that use a lot of bandwidth, in order to prevent peer-to-peer file-sharing. It used network management software provided by Sandvine. Comcast’s actions got it in trouble with the FCC (our coverage). Now, not surprisingly, the market for Sandvine’s software is withering, TorrentFreak reports.

Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once — Chatterous lets you send a single message to friends across SMS, IM and email. Mashable has the details on this Y Combinator-backed company.