VentureBeat

Identity thieves are everywhere. A teenager snatched the login of his real-estate agent father and threw wild parties at homes that were up for sale. Students get someone else to take a test for them. Loan officers get hacked and the profiles of 7,000 of their customers are stolen.

This is the problem that AdmitOne Security is trying to solve. It uses the novel technology of keystroke identification. That is, it uses software to detect the patterns of the way someone types in their username and password. Then it compares that to past records and determines whether it’s really you logging in. The recognition is nearly instant and it adds an accurate factor for authentication.

“Even if you stole somebody’s username and password, we can figure out if you’re not really that person,” said Matt Shanahan, senior vice president of marketing and strategy at the Issaquah, Wash.-based company.

The company is targeting the technology at businesses, but it could eventually trickle down to consumers. Besides the typing authentication, the company also uses IP address verification and computer device identification. This so-called risk-based authentication — where three factors are used to identify someone — is becoming more popular because of growing identity theft scams.

The keystroke identification is important. Other means of identifying someone, such as voice recognition, aren’t always convenient. When you’re logging into a laptop, you may not always be easy to reach on the phone for the verification call.

The authentication works, judging by the company’s 50 percent growth in the six months. AdmitOne now has more than 125 customers who pay $25,000 a year and up, based on the number of users they screen. The company says it has a 25 percent increase in customers this year and a 60 percent increase in its average selling price. There are 38 financial institutions among the customers. (The chart above shows the differences in typing patterns between a user and an imposter.)

Shanahan said that the technology can scale to screen millions of users. The technology came from a some longstanding research. The U.S. National Science Foundation funded a research project at the Rand Corp. in 1980 about computer security and keystroke dynamics. SRI International took up the research into typing rhythms. The SRI technology was able to identify users with 98 percent accuracy. The company acquired the patents in 2002 and applied its own engineering to the problem and came up with something that worked.

With just 12 keystrokes, the software can recognize a user. On those keystrokes, the software records 47 different measurements. Among the important measurements are “dwell time,” or the amount of time someone holds down a key. And another is “flight time,” or the time between keystrokes. Yes, I’m afraid that we all have “typing signatures.” I myself have to pause my keystrokes now and then while my brain stops working.

The Stanford keystroke recognition technology by itself wasn’t good enough to catch everything. But used in combination with other authentication means, it’s pretty effective, Shanahan said. The company was founded in 2005 under the name BioPassword. It was rebranded as Admit One in April.

The service debuted in April. A new release is coming out this quarter. The company has 32 employees. It has raised three rounds of funding for a total of $32 million to date. Investors include Benaroya Capital, Ignition Partners, OVP Venture Partners, Citrix Systems, and RRE Ventures.

With any luck, Avvo is going to make finding lawyers and getting legal advice a lot less intimidating.

That’s because the company, which formally launched its site today after more than a year of beta testing, applies Web 2.0 techniques that keep the lawyers honest and give consumers more options.

We already know it works — not least because of the controversy it has stirred. When Avvo first launched, negative ratings poured in on certain lawyers, and some fought back. One, John Browne, sued Avvo after a profile of him noted that he’d been disciplined by state authorities. But that only increased traffic, bringing more people — and thus more opinions — to the site.

Avvo is the brainchild of Mark Britton, who named it Avvo for the Italian word Avvocato, or lawyer. (He was teaching in Florence, Italy, when he cooked up the idea). Even while away in Italy, he still had to field queries from friends and family on how to find a lawyer.

Today, the Seattle-based company runs a site with three valuable services for consumers. It has a directory of lawyers in 18 of the most populous states. Each lawyer can be rated by their clients or peers, with the best rated lawyers rising to the top. It has an advice section where consumers can anonymously ask questions which real lawyers voluntarily answer in forums that everyone can see.

And it has a new service that debuted today: an understandable guide to the law, written by Avvo’s staff, which individual lawyers can customize depending on local legal systems. For instance, the Avvo staff can write a primer on immigration law for consumers that a Los Angeles attorney could tailor to the enforcement practices in the Los Angeles area.

“The mission is to create a free resources for consumers to handle their legal matters with confidence,” Britton said. “Normally, when you need a lawyer, the process of finding a good one can be frightening.”

Britton, who has 16 years of legal experience and was the top lawyer at travel site Expedia, is betting the three legs will generate traffic. He expects to make money through advertising and other means. The site is already making an impact.  (The aforementioned suit was tossed out on First Amendment grounds). Most lawyers are responding positively; in the state of Washington, about 17 percent of lawyers have already filled out their profiles on the site so that consumers can read more about them.

“We can bring more transparency and understanding to the process of getting a lawyer,” said Britton.

Some of the lawyers are aggressively answering questions posed by consumers because they know that such consumers may eventually need to hire a lawyer. Attorneys are now answering thousands of questions a month, with about 90 percent of the questions getting an answer. I asked a question about legal advice for journalists and got a couple of answers within a few hours.

The site is far from just a Yellow Pages site. Avvo collects disciplinary records and makes them available. Britton started the company in 2005 and it now has 24 employees. It has raised $13 million to date from Benchmark Capital and Ignition Partners. Its closest competition are the online Yellow Pages, paid directories such as Lawyerfinder.com and search engines such as Google.

Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson moves to Juniper Networks — Microsoft’s lead on the failed Yahoo acquisition has called it quits, heading for the top post at software and device firm Juniper Networks. Johnson was the president of Platforms and Services, which meant he oversaw most of Microsoft’s web initiatives.

Xobni’s first employee heads to the Xobtuo — Gabor Cselle, a vice president and the first official employee at email startup Xobni, has resigned, stating that he wants to start his own company. Given his past experience and expertise, the new venture will almost certainly be email-focused as well.

Hackers continue to step up attacks in 2008 – Security firm Sophos has published research on the first half of the year, showing that malware levels continue to rise on the web. Businesses, also, are increasingly being used as both targets and launching points for attacks.

Humanoid robot soon for sale — No, it’s not the next-gen Realdoll. A French company called Aldebaran Robotics is preparing to sell its NAO humanoid robots for about $15,000 each. That’s far cheaper than the competition from Fujitsu and Honda. Of course, quality is the real issue, which is why you should actually use the money to go buy a whole herd of Pleos.

Space: The last (solar power) frontier — Sending up satellites to harvest solar energy and beam it back down to earth might be a bright idea, according to this New York Times Op-Ed. The solar crowd already contains many space cadets, so the scheme should work well.

Amazon doubles net with soaring sales — The web retailer bucked the market trend and posted unexpectedly strong results, reporting doubled second-quarter profit on a 41 percent increase in revenue.

Google’s Schmidt says the iPhone is good for Android — Top exec Eric Schmidt told an interviewer that he believes the iPhone is good for Google’s upcoming Android platform, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech event. The device, he said, has forced competitors to step up and make their own versatile handsets combining GPS, a camera, a computer and a browser.

Cisco acquires Pure Networks — The communications and IT giant paid $120 million for Pure, which was funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, Mayfield and Intel Capital, according to John Cook.

Passwords safe, San Francisco accuses admin of IT terror — The bizarre tale of a San Francisco city employee imprisoned for refusing to hand over the passwords to a city network continues, even now that the man has passed the password to smooth-talking mayor Gavin Newsom. The new accusation is that the felony suspect rigged the network to “implode”.

Classic Nintendo controllers at risk of extinction — The judge in a patent case relating to three of Nintendo’s older controller designs will ban sale of the controllers this morning. Nintendo can temporarily get out of the ruling by posting a bond, which it will do, along with filing an appeal.

Photo credit for Kevin Johnson: Fortune magazine.

WidgetBucks, a self-styled ad network for e-commerce widgets, doesn’t offer ads for the sorts of widgets that you see on social networks. Rather, it offers interactive ads that otherwise look like more traditional banner ads. See screenshot, below.

Sites can add WidgetBucks widgets to their own sites, somewhat similar to Google’s Adsense. Advertising revenue is based on both cost per thousand page impressions (CPM) ads, which pays based on the number of times an ad is seen by users, and cost per click ads, which pay when a user actually clicks through to another site through the widget.

The Seattle company, which launched eight months ago, says it has grown to a total of five billion ad impressions in its first eight months, and is averaging around a billion impressions per month now. In May, it was ranked among the top 30 US ad networks by Comscore, coming in as the second-largest niche widget maker. Around 100 million unique visitors were served a WidgetBucks ad, which spanned more than 20,000 publishers.

WidgetBucks parent company Mpire Corporation has recently secured $10 million in a second round funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with participation from previous backer Ignition Partners.

Updated

Job site Jobster has raised another $7 million in a fourth round of funding. It’s not a huge amount of cash, but it comes on top of the $48 million that Jobster previously raised at a $100 million-plus valuation.

With all the job sites out there, we’ve been skeptical about Jobster’s (and other sites’) ability to be heard above the noise. Since we voiced that concern more than a year ago, even more sites have emerged — for example, I’ve covered NotchUp, which has the novel hook of paying job seekers for an interview, and there were two very different job sites making their pitch at the most recent Y Combinator demo day.

Some of our concerns were assuaged by chief executive Jason Goldberg’s salesmanship, and the fact that Jobster has signed up a bunch of corporate customers. But Goldberg actually left in December, replaced by Jeff Seely, who helped sell trading site Sharebuilder. Presumably, the new funding is part of Seely’s efforts to revitalize the Seattle startup. Investors included Ignition Partners, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

Update: I asked Christian Anderson, Jobster’s director of corporate communications, what the funding means for the company, but he told me he can’t say anything. It sounds like there may be more news (perhaps some new features, or a new focus?) in the pipeline.

updated with info on who is behind Triad

The Federal Communications Commission has gotten bids for more than the minimum of $10 billion it had set for its 700-megahertz spectrum auction, and there’s word that AT&T has been an active bidder.

Google and Verizon are also assumed to be bidding on a chunk of the spectrum. The auction is significant, and closely watched in technology circles, because it could open up innovation in the wireless industry — providing the chance to a provider like Google to bypass the powerful carriers.

One of the relatively unknown accepted bidders in the auction, Triad 700, of Silicon Valley (Burlingame, Calif.), however, has quietly raised $90 million from investors, VentureBeat has learned, but neither the company nor its investors are returning our calls. The $90 million is a piddling for the billions of dollars that are needed to bid successfully in this auction, but perhaps the company is leveraging it with debt. Triad’s backers are traditional venture capital firms, including Battery Ventures, Highland Capital, Ignition Venture Partners and M/C Venture Partners. Anybody know anything more about this company?

Update: The rumors are rolling in. One source says Triad is run by Sanjiv Ahuja, former chief executive of Orange; we haven’t confirmed.

Update II: Dan Primack follows up, and finds that the Triad principals are Barry Lewis, Craig Viehweg and John Mason, who once were part of the executive team at rural operator Triad Cellular, a Silicon Valley company bought last year by Western Wireless. They’ve participated in nine spectrum auctions, according to Primack.

Along with alternative energy generation comes a host of attendant technologies, from storage and transmission, to grid management, and measurement and analysis. Fat Spaniel is in that final category, with a set of tools used to measure power output of installations like solar cells.

The company has taken a substantial $18 million second round of funding, which it plans to use to expand in Europe and reach profitability in mid-2009. It has done more than a thousand installations in 12 countries, it says

Fat Spaniel makes software which works with hardware supplied by third-party manufacturers. Together, the two can accurately track output from alternative energy sources such as solar cells. Without such tools, it’s a matter of guesswork to determine how much energy is being produced.

The typical users are system installers, or companies that actually set up energy generation systems, whether for individuals or for giant corporations like Wal-Mart.

Fat Spaniel is working on adding more advanced data analysis, including visualization tools and granular viewing which could help pin-point trouble spots. Continuing to improve on its software will also help the company when a large competitor like GE or Agilent enters the market, which chief technology officer Chris Beekhuis told us he expects to happen within a year and a half.Ignition Partners led the $18 million funding, while Chrysalix Energy and Element Partners (formerly called DFJ Element) also participated. To date, Fat Spaniel has taken a total of $25 million in venture funding.

These days, it’s easy to shout “bubble” in the crowded theater of online video startups. Only YouTube has been a runaway success — but even YouTube hasn’t proven it can make money. Yet online video sites continue to raise millions of dollars in funding.

Blowtorch, a California company that has just launched with $50 million in funding, joins the crowded field. But it has a new twist at least: It will produce films based on ideas proposed by users and voted on by others. Users will be able to vote on casting, music, wardrobes and other aspects of each film.

In other words, group-created movies. Call it Hollywood 2.0. It will offer feature-length films, professional-quality short films, along with a social network and a mobile site.

The funding will be used to produce and market eighteen feature-length movies over the next three years.

Sony-owned Crackle does something similar: It produces videos from the ideas of its audience members. A sort of minor league for Hollywood. As we reported in September, the plan is already resulting in a traffic surge and millions in advertising revenue.

Blowtorch’s vision is more grand: It’s goal is to produce low-budget hits like Napoleon Dynamite, a movie that cost $5 million to make, then made $17 million at the box office and $90 million in video rentals and sales, according to chief executive Kelly Rodriques. He wants people to say “I helped pick the cast” when they watch a Blowtorch movie.

This is exact opposite of the rigid artistic control maintained by a genius Hollywood director, say Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola.

It’s also unproven.

Part of its plan is hold live events, such as movie nights on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at more than 600 movie theaters across the country — and focus on inviting students at colleges and universities. During these movie nights, users’ short films will run before feature films and audiences will be able to vote for their favorites on company’s social network, through the web or mobile devices.

The full plan won’t be in place until next year. Right now, the company is running a user-generated short-video contest on its site where the best video creators will get paid, go to LA, and get team of pros to re-shoot. It is still working out the details of how users will be paid for their work, once the rest of the plan is implemented.

The company will spend a significant amount of money advertising its movie nights and its site to college students.

It will distribute its own films and is negotiating distribution deals with a variety of theater owners while Vivendi will distribute feature films in DVD form.

Feature films won’t necessarily bubble up from Blowtorch’s audiences. It says it will produce some on its own, or acquire the rights to others. For starters, it will juice its efforts with a feature film called “You Are Here,” which will debut in theaters in spring 2008. The movie is being produced by veteran filmmaker and Blowtorch board member and advisor Paul Schiff. It will be directed by Henry Pincus, and features a cast that includes Bijou Phillips from “Almost Famous”, Danny Masterson from “That 70’s Show,” Michael Biehn of “Grindhouse” and “Terminator,” and Patrick Fleuger.

The company was conceived a year ago and has been funded for the last six months. The team comes from various media and advertising backgrounds. For example, Rodriques helped found the interactive marketing group at Ogilvy and Mather and was the chief executive interactive media company Novo, now known as Arc Worldwide and part Publicis’ largest interactive unit. Rodriques was most recently the president and chief executive of Totality, a telecom services company bought by Verizon.

Other Blowtorch founders and board members come from Leo Burnett, MTV, Starcom MediaVest Group, and major Hollywood studios.

The company has offices in both Sausalito (on northern edge of San Francisco) and Los Angeles — in an effort to stay relevant to Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Its close relationships with Madison Avenue include an unnamed marketer that has agreed to partner with Blowtorch, hoping to get better access to the lucrative college demographic.

The company says it has combined different forms of financing, including from an unnamed hedge fund, but the only named investor is venture capital firm Ignition Partners.

It’s working with unnamed technology partners to provide its movie-making infrastructure. It’s also looking for ways to use Facebook’s developer platform and the OpenSocial developer platform to reach its audience, it says.

Judy’s Book, a site that let you search business listings for discounts and coupons, has hit the end of a $10.5 million runway and shut down, raising more questions about local business listing and community sites.

The collapse of the Seattle-based company follows the closure of BackFence this summer. BackFence said it had experienced unspecified “internal” problems, suggesting its failure was company specific. But the subsequent failure of Judy’s Book raises more questions about the sector at large. Judy’s Book started as a place where neighbors could share information about their communities, and shifted its model over time to search business listings.

Did both of these companies face a problem of execution or are there deeper issues with the local web site model as a whole? Regardless, locally focused sites continue to raise money, and it’s not clear that the sector is doomed. Yelp, for example, has done a solid job of local business and event search and continues to grow steadily, with around four million users.

Judy’s Book, like Yelp, aimed high and expanded nationally quickly. But unlike Yelp, its traction never kept pace with its ambitions or the expectations of its investors. As the company’s chief executive, told the Seattle PI, “our investors were tired…The board members said there wasn’t enough terminal velocity to see the types of returns that they were looking for.”

The company was backed by investors that included Mobius Venture Capital (itself going out of business), Ignition Partners, Ackerley Partners and angel investors.

DocuSign, a company that eases the process of electronically signing documents, has received a $12.4 million cash infusion.

Last year, the Seattle company laid off some of its workers and earlier this year recruited a new CEO, according to the Seattle PI. It has been making a recovery since, and claims that it tripled its business in the first nine months of 2007.

To electronically sign documents, users generally have to check off a box to signify agreement. However, more serious contracts like mortgage agreements require a legally binding signature, which takes more steps, as well as a special authentication code.

Simplifying and speeding up the process of electronically signing important documents for end users is big business for DocuSign; The company estimates that it has processed over four million signatures since its launch in 2003, charging $3 to $5 per “envelope”.

DocuSign counts some highly recognizable names like Expedia, RE/MAX and Sony among its 1,500 customers. Its competitors include EchoSign and Verisign.

The funding was led by WestRiver Capital, although previous investors Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners and Sigma Partners participated. Together with two previous investments, the total amount of investment in DocuSign to date is about $30 million. The company has 45 employees.

updated
Visible Technologies, one of the more prominent companies that helps people and companies track their online identities, has raised $12 million in financing.

Like competitors Buzzlogic, Radian6 and others, Seattle-based Visible Technologies has developed software that tries to find mentions of clients on web sites.

Its Truview product analyzes search engine results on clients, tries to determine if the mentions are positive or negative, then sends a report to the client and tries to connect them directly to the site where the mention was made. Its TruCast product analyzes conversations on blogs, forums and other community sites.

Visible Technologies shows trends in how a company’s brand is being received over time, who the influential people are who are talking about the company, and what parts of the web are giving the company the most attention.

Public relations on the web is a tricky business: The near-limitless amount of information freely available means more things can always be said about a company than a company can realistically respond to, even with such tracking technology. When companies do respond, they risk sounding fake. A string of uniformly bland and positive statements about themselves sounds like PR spin to most people, not independent opinions.

Buzzlogic (our coverage) provides rival products to help clients measure overall traffic to a source site, that site’s number of inbound links and relevance to a client. It also checks for how frequently a site publishes on the topic and how much traffic it sends to the client.

Radian 6 (our coverage) tracks information on sites by analyzing incoming RSS feeds.

The funding was led by Ignition Partners. Visible Technologies previously raised $3.5 million from WPP Group, an advertising conglomerate.

Update: The company is now worth about $30 million, according to some reports.

Avvo is a new company that lets people find good attorneys, letting them seeing how others have rated the lawyers, and whether they have been disciplined. It lets users rate attorneys too.

Avvo is bound to stir controversy. Lawyers given bad ratings are already disturbed. See the story by John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. One poorly rated criminal defense lawyer calls it “a joke.”

This can be a very valuable service. However, it is open to abuse, because many clients don’t fully grasp some matters, and can easily get upset with their attorneys because by default, attorneys lose about half the time. This is the same problem we discussed about Thefunded, where entrepreneurs leave comments about venture capitalists. It also has similarities to Zillow, a a company that places an estimated value on peoples’ homes and which has upset some homeowners

See screenshot below, showing an example of the criminal defense lawyer rating page. For the lowest rated attorneys, the site warns “extreme caution.”

Other competing directories exist, including Martindale-Hubbell, FindLaw and AttorneyPages, but Avvo providers more ways for consumers and other lawyers to provide feedback.

Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital and Bellevue, Washington’s Ignition Partners invested $10 million into Avvo in April. We first wrote about Avvo a year ago, when it was still secretive, and after it got its first $3 million batch of capital.