Update: My favorite, Article One, was just anointed winner by both the crowd and the judges.
Here are the companies that presented at the Startup2009 competition, hosted by the Silicon Alley Insider today, competing for a $50,000 cash prize. Each company had five minutes on stage. To qualify to present, the companies could not have raised more than $1M. The group was winnowed down from more than 100 companies. I’ve ranked them in order of my preference.
Article One Partners — This site helps companies conduct due diligence on patents, to help them litigate, or fight off litigation, or assert their freedom to operate in a particular area. For example, if Motorola gets sued for patent infringement, it can submit a study on the Article One site, and the site lets technologists respond to the report by doing research to see whether there are prior patents or other work that might help fight off the suit. This was my favorite, perhaps because it stood out from the usual gaggle of Web marketing and software-as-a-service products we saw most of the day. But it’s also quite novel: I’m not aware of any other company doing this yet. It encourages people to participate by giving them a portion of the profit share (five percent of annual profits are distributed back to the community of researchers, who gather points based on their participation). Participants are often the authors of patents being discussed.
Expensify — Offers expense reports that “don’t suck.” The San Francisco company went through its five minutes, but never offered the sexiest part of its offering until the second to last question from the judge: It has an iPhone app that lets you take a picture of your receipts on your iPhone and it ships it straight to your expense report. This got the biggest applause from the crowd for the day. The service is free. Web service imports receipts straight from your credit card, submitting PDF expense reports by email, and allowing reimbursment online. It’s trying to hook individuals on the service on the service, on the hope those individuals will recommend the service to their colleagues, ending up with the entire business unit using the service. At that point, once a company division or entire company wants to use the service, Expensify starts charging for more features, such as inserting cross-company expense limits (some companies have a $25 or $50 expense limit for dinners or other things, for example). It might also be able exploit the information it gets for lead generation activities, but the company said it wouldn’t let advertisers target users individually based on their actual purchases. Company said it can save costs of doing expense reports by 50 percent. Main challenge: The small and medium-sized business market is tough to crack and scale. The San Francisco company was founded in April of last year, has raised $40,000, and is looking for $750,000 (a good amount; shows it can do a lot on fumes!) in capital. Competition: A company called Concur serves corporate customers with complex features (I’ve used it at my previous employer, and its an awfully clunky system by the way), with a $1B market cap, and $215 annual in revenue, with 8000 customers.
Path101 — This company lets jobseekers find jobs by letting them supply data about their career interests and matching them up with new careers by parsing that data intelligently (see our earlier story about this company). It finds employers seeking employees with the skill-sets and interests they’re looking for. We’ve written about this company before. Despite the scores of job companies out there tackling the job market, the company’s focus on data matching helps it stand out (it uses semantic technology, for example to find that you may know how to code in Python, even if you haven’t explicitly mentioned it on your resume). The New York company has raised $550,000, and is looking raise $2M more.
BeliefNetworks – The company combines semantic intelligence and predictive analysis to broaden ad targeting, beyond consideration of basic things like keywords and tags. It extracts the most relevant “concepts” from a web page of a publisher, then searches the database of ads available for placement, and performs a similar analysis of “concepts,” pinpoints the overlap, and recommends which ads to serve. BeliefNetworks can recommend to ad network what sort of advertisements to place on certain Web sites and pages, and also let publishers offer up content to users that may be related to what they’re already reading. The Charleston, South Carolina, said a test with an ad network partner showed that click-through rates improved between 20 and 75 percent on display advertising. Chief executive Lisa Mackey came across as credible. She’s been a software product developer since 1989. However, as one judge worried, the ad network industry is full of competitors: This “train has already left the station.” Indeed, even Mackey said her business model “is under development,” saying only she expects a software licensing model. Another point is that lifting click-through rates by 20 to 75 percent may not be all that sexy, given that other semantic offerings are promising similar or better lifts. It has raised $1.4 million, and is searching for $500,000 more.
Portfolio Monkey — The service tracks your individual investments into stocks or other securities, and then offers up an analysis of your habits, and rates you on how you are doing against other people who have similar goals. Specifically, it rates you on things like “expected return” “volatility,” and “efficiency ratio.” It then offers up recommendations of where you can invest to boost your ratings. It says its main differentiation from all the other stock sites is that it offers an analysis of your entire portfolio. Most other sites, including the dozen or so social investing sites, focus on letting you do things like track successful investors and comparing your own picks against others’ picks. Although even here, companies like Coinvest do offer some portfolio analysis. I thought the company’s presentation was earnest, but wasn’t enough to really convince me to use it, when there’s a ton of other companies offering portfolio advice, albeit mostly at a higher costs (individual brokers, advisors, etc.). The San Francisco company is seeking $500,000 after only taking $50,000 so far. Globefunder Ventures — This company offers a service called IOUSOS that offers a way for consumers to get discounts on their health care debts. This happens with providers decide that debt might be better written off because its not worth their time chasing you up to pay their bill. So they send the collections to IOUSOS, who then comes to you with an offer to pay off your debt at a discount. The company plans to target only those consumers with debts of around $500 or less — or those bills too small for health providers to really care about. By targeting masses of these consumers in debt, Globefunder hopes to use economies of scale to create more efficiency in the billing process. The Kalamazoo, MI company has already raised $1M, and is raising $4.5 million.
Micronotes — This service, based in Cambridge, Mass., wants to offer discounts to you as you pay bills online. Here’s how it works: When you’re about to pay a bill through your bank’s online site, you’ll be presented with a way to pay your bill at a discount, in return for answering a few questions and/or being confronted with offers from vendors. For example, HP may submit a small message on the page (while you’re making your payment) offering a special price on its printers. The main challenge for this company Micronotes is how to actually insert itself into this transaction: How will banks see it as in their interest to provide this middleman position to Micronotes. The company, founded in July 2008, has 7 employees. The potential market for this company is an alleged $2.5 billion, via 33 million people who currently pay bills online. It’s raising $900,000 after having already raised $500,000.
Adzoomi — This company wants to let brands market themselves virally across the Web, but wasn’t very convincing when explaining exactly what would drive users to participate through Adzoomi. Adzoomi says it would initiate the campaigns by creating widget with a video player to let brands create ads, which they send to their user base. The hope is to have those users tweet or post about the video to their Facebook or MySpace pages, thus setting off a viral chain of marketing across multiple people — the idea being that those users will have friends who also see the marketing. Once the video is sent on in the form of a Twitter link, for example, the friend opens it up, sees the video, and message. The video also offers a way to immediately buy the product. The company would charge five cents per engagement for non-profit marketing efforts, and 10 cents for other advertisers. Advertisers would decide how they incent people to participate, either through points that could be redeemed for products, or through dollars, etc. Campaigns can be built in “15 minutes.” Dan Frommer of BusinessInsider raised a good point: If a user decided to share a video on YouTube, he could do so outside of Adzoomi’s system, and thus the viral activity would seep outside of Adzoomi’s system. Competitors in this area are companies like Geniusrocket and Brickfish. The New York company has raised $600,000 among family and friends, and is looking for $2.5 million.
AMMG — This company wants to be an online provider (SaaS) of marketing performance management systems for marketers, media companies, and advertising agencies. The chief executive, Adam Gelles, was frustratingly vague, and kept saying his service provides a “end to end” service for marketers, letting them see information across their marketing operations, however was frustratingly vague on specifics. There are tons of competitors in this area (he himself mentioned only a subsection, including Hudson river group, Marketing Evolution, MMA, Young and Rubicam, etc), but there are far more trying to do something similar. The company was founded two years ago, and was cash-flow positive last year, which is a good sign. It has two clients. The question is how it scales from here. It’s raised $250,000 and wants to raise $500,000 Good Health Advertising — This company wants to be an ad network for health related publishers. It wants to serve ads to publishers across their sites, newsletters, or applications. It has created a few health related sites, and so has become a publisher itself. It has managed to get into the top-ten list for health networks on Comscore, a statistic the company uses to assert its credibility. However, this company had the weakest presentation, because there are other health ad networks that are offering more robust services, and Good Health Advertising provided no examples of clear ways to differentiate itself. HealthSTAT, for example, is a service launched by Healthline, that has built a taxonomy of different “health concepts”, so that if a website mentions different bronchitis symptoms (scratchy throat, watery eyes) but not the keyword itself, the network can still serve bronchitis-related ads. The New York-based Good Health Advertising has raised $650,000 and is raising $350,000.