Add-on-Con is the only industry conference focused on web browser extensions, and this year’s event is going to highlight some dramatic changes occurring in the industry.
Join the conversation on Dec 8th and 9th in Mountain View, California.
Especially for SF New Tech fans: Use the discount code SFNewTech on checkout to save $50 off the registration price. That is over 30% in savings right there!
Registration includes lunch, goodies and hands on training. Click here to register!
On Tuesday evening, December 7th, come and join SMAC (Social Media Advertising Consortium) board members Bonin Bough, Global Director of Social Media at PepsiCo and Heidi Browning, President of Rally, the social media agency at Universal McCann as they lead a conversation in what’s working in Social Media for brands and start-ups.
Joining Bonin and Heidi will be Chris Perry, President of Weber Shandwick Digital and Nichole Goodyear, CEO of Brickfish and Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati. This is the first San Francisco SMAC Event, so don’t miss it!
The event is hosted By Technorati and brought to you by Brickfish & 33Across.
Join SMAC members and fellow social media thought leaders for networking, wine & light hors d’oeuvres.
SMAC, short for Social Media Advertising Consortium, is dedicated to responsible scale, innovation and evolution of the social media industry. Their 3 main objectives (as stated on their website) are
For more information, and to become a member to join and contribute, visit smac.org
SF New Tech gold sponsor CALinnnovates has just announced the Grateful Tech “What Technology Are You Grateful For?” Contest where you could possibly win
All you have to do is record a 30 second (max) video telling them what technology it is that you are grateful for, upload the video to youtube, and enter the youtube url along with your contact info on the contest page here.
Your video could be serious, funny, heart-warming or anything else, so long as it is “clean” (before uploading to youtube, think about whether you could watch it with your mom AND grandmom !).
"Technology I am Grateful For? 'Nuff Said!"
In addition to the prizes above, each winner will get 100$ donated to Kiva.org in their name for them to invest in an entrepreneur of their choice.
Deadlines and Dates: The contest runs from November 23rd 2010 until December 15th, 2010 and online voting runs from December 15th, 2010 until December 31th, 2010.
For a full list of contest rules and terms, click here.
Photo: via joshfassbind
CALinnovates is a statewide coalition focused on championing the conversation about the future of California’s critical technology sector. For more information, check out calinnovates.org
You can also stay updated and follow CALinnovates on twitter @calinnovates and fan them on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CALinnovates
This just in from our Tip Line*!
Skyara, a marketplace for experiences just launched a campaign of donating an experience to charity to raise money for the UCSF Children’s Hospital.
MySpace.com co-founder Aber Whitcomb has donated a chance to win a trap and skeet shooting experience with him for a few lucky people who donate to the UCSF children’s hospital. Details here.
Please note, NO living creatures will be harmed in this event! Whitcomb promises it will be a fun event!
Trap-Skeet With MySpace Co-Founder Aber Whitcomb (Photo by Britney McIntosh)
Our tipster notes that YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim has also promised to join in supporting the UCSF Children’s Hospital by donating an experience soon.
We are on top of it, so stay tuned to SFNewTech.com!
( Tips? News? Stories? Let us know at tips @ sfnewtech.com )
This just in from our Tip Line*!
Skyara, a marketplace for experiences just launched a campaign of donating an experience to charity to raise money for the UCSF Children’s Hospital.
MySpace.com co-founder Aber Whitcomb has donated a chance to win a trap and skeet shooting experience with him for a few lucky people who donate to the UCSF children’s hospital. Details here.
Please note, NO living creatures will be harmed in this event! Whitcomb promises it will be a fun event!
Trap-Skeet With MySpace Co-Founder Aber Whitcomb (Photo by Britney McIntosh)
Our tipster notes that YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim has also promised to join in supporting the UCSF Children’s Hospital by donating an experience soon.
We are on top of it, so stay tuned to SFNewTech.com!
( Tips? News? Stories? Let us know at tips @ sfnewtech.com )
We’re working with a few great companies that will be a part of the upcoming launch of a new business service we’re calling “Friends of SF New Tech”.
In sum, Friends of SF New Tech is designed to further support the startup and tech community of the Bay Area– and beyond.
If you serve startups, you want to be a Friend of SF New Tech.
We’ll be announcing it formally soon but if you want to learn more now email myles at sfnewtech.com.
btrax - Platinum Sponsor of SF New Tech
SF New Tech hasn’t really been known for its design prowess. Until now!
We’re pleased to announce the grand entrance of btrax as our newest Platinum Sponsor and creative partner!
You may remember, btrax helped organize our first SF Japan Night demo event that attracted a sell-out crowd! btrax is a San Francisco-based creative agency that’s been serving global markets for over 6 years. Their team has a wide range of experience from handling UI Design, User Experience Consulting, Social Media Marketing, Branding and Identity, Startup Prototypes, Mobile development, to website localization for the Asian market.
Now you’re thinking, “Wow, maybe it’s time that *I* build our user-base and revenue through licensing or joint ventures in Asia!”
You’re in luck! btrax is extending a free 30 min strategy session (worth $100) limited to the first 30 people from the SF New Tech community.
Contact them to schedule your appointment and before you know it, you’ll be Big in Japan too!
Peter Rojas is the co-founder of gdgt, a crowd sourced, bottom-up, social platform about consumer electronic gadgets. Rojas’ past includes being the founding editor of wildly successful technology sites Engadget, Gizmodo and Joystiq. He sold Engadget to AOL in 2005 and soon after started his 4th venture: gdgt (pronounced, “gadget“) with co-founder Ryan Block.
SFNewTech caught up with Peter at GDGT 2010 event here in San Francisco (on Nov. 12, 2010) to find out what he’s up to these days and his vision for gdgt.
GDGT Co-Founder Peter Rojas at the GDGT 2010 Event in San Francisco (Photo: Shiva Manjunath)
SFNewTech: What came first? gdgt, the website or gdgt, the event?
Rojas: We started with the site first and our first event was kind of like a launch event. It was very similar to this, but we just meant it to be a party to celebrate the launch of the site.
SFNewTech: When did you launch the site?
Rojas: We launched the site in July 2009. Our first event was in August 2009.
SFNewTech: Where was the launch held?
Rojas: At the DNA Lounge, with about 24 companies and a similar format to this event. Then we did another launch event in New York in October 2009 and decided that maybe we should keep doing these.
So we decided to do a handful, about 5 this year, probably 6 or 7 next year.
SFNewTech: Any plans for taking gdgt to the rest of the world?
Rojas: We’d really like to, but logistically it’s just more difficult outside the U.S. We’ve definitely thought about it. We’d love to do London, because we have lots of UK users, so that would make sense at some point. I don’t think it’ll happen in 2011, but it’s definitely possible in 2012.
SFNewTech: Are you positioning gdgt as a blog or as a website?
Rojas: We’re not in business as a blog. gdgt.com is a crowd sourced, bottom-up, social platform about consumer electronics gadgets, to share what you know, and either write reviews and ask or answer questions about your gadgets.
SFNewTech: Do people have to sign up see it?
Rojas: You have to register to contribute, not to just look at it.
SFNewTech: How many users do you have?
Rojas: We have a lot, but we’re not releasing the number yet. (editor’s note: according to the Wall Street Journal, as of April 2010 gdgt has hundreds of thousands of users, and 17,000 products in its database)
SFNewTech: Are you funded or looking for funding?
Rojas: We’ve raised two rounds of funding, totaling 3.6 million. Our biggest investors are True Venture, Spark Capital and Betaworks.
SFNewTech: Who founded the company?
Rojas: It’s myself and Ryan Block. My background is I was a founder of Gizmodo, Engadget and Joystiq, this is actually my 4th company. Sold Engadget to AOL, left AOL about 2 years ago to start gdgt. (editor’s note: Ryan was editor-in-chief of Engadget)
SFNewTech: How do you compare to say the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), or is it a totally different market or audience?
A; Our biggest difference is that our event is obviously much smaller and open to the public. The CES is for trade only, so members of the general public can’t go to CES. You need to be a member of a company or the press.
SFNewTech: Awesome, anything else you’d like to add?
Rojas: Check out the site, it’s the best place to ask a question about a gadget.
GDGT.com Co-Founders Ryan Block (left) and Peter Rojas. (Photo: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.snapfoc.us)
Want an easy way to jazz up your blog or just repost interesting web content? That’s what serial entrepreneur John Pettitt and partner Tim McElreavy desired too, so they went out and created curate.us – a means for copying rich media, repositioning or “clipping” it, adding visually appealing highlights like stickies to draw attention and then re-posting it elsewhere, all the while tracking where it goes along the way.
The kicker is that Curate.Us helps you reposition and customize text or graphics, then tracks the re-post, using their own analytics to see click through, content reuse and where exactly that re-posted graphics is used. Because all clips are fully attributed, according to Pettitt, “it drives traffic back to the sourced graphic or text”, which can be a blog or web site, graphic or rich text or HTML.
Co-Founder John Pettitt presents Curate.Us at 10Nov2010 SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
On the flip side, though Curate.Us regenerates a page every time you look at it, it will never clip anything copy protected, a confidence booster for any company who values their personal data and content.
For those curious about the technology, Pettitt offered that, “It’s hosted on EC2 runs ubuntu using lighttpd, mysql, php, gearman and uses memcache for caching.”
What’s Next for Curate.Us? Deliver more technology in the future that Pettitt promised will be, “something disruptive that builds on this technology”.
Website: Curate.Us
Twitter: @CurateUs
Blog: http://curate.us/curate/blog
Co-Founder: John Pettitt @jpp123
Co-Founder: Tim McElreavy @FreeRangeTim
Dark Overlady of Engineering Kate McKinley @sigkate
Community Czarina Tia Marie @tia_marie
If you feel overwhelmed by content overload – and who doesn’t these days – Sameer Yami’s WikiSeer might just be the solution you need.
According to co-founder Yami,
WikiSeer siphons through textual content, figures out what’s most important, presents it to you succinctly, and then as a bonus, allows you to share it with friends.
That’s after all the genesis of creating the product, frustration while browsing massive amounts of data
Think of it as Cliff Notes for web content. Yami noted, “you can find book abstracts everywhere, but there was nothing even close for web pages on the net”, thus WikiSeer was born.
Sameer Yami presenting WikiSeer at 10Nov2010 SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
Using sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) and several patented techniques, WikiSeer culls the results and sends them back to you, a natural time saver for any reader. WikiSeer is content neutral. It can provide a synopsis of the most relevant sentences of any page, whether you’re seeking the best dishes at a restaurant listed on Yelp, or reading a lengthy book and just want the essence of the content. It can do so using graphics or text as a foundation for that input.
“We built WikiSeer to find the most informative content in any English text”, explained Yami.
Wanna try it? Take the website – http://WikiSeer.com/ – for a test ride. You can also summarize any webpage without leaving the site using the Firefox Addon or the Chrome Addon.
Check it out and let them know what you think!
Website: http://WikiSeer.com/
Twitter: @Wikiseer
Co-Founder: Sameer Yami
Co-Founder: Sanika Shirwadkar
Contact: Via the Contact Page.
Feedback: Click here to give feedback about your experience.

While the rest of the world depends on electronic communiqués, the medical industry lags behind, given, according to Michael Kleiman, VP Product Management at OneMedical,
90% of providers don’t accept emails, but OneMedical does.
Given creating a positive user experience is a mantra for all startups, that is the essence of OneMedical’s value proposition. And they know they’re on the right track as they continually expand, while just taking off.
Michael Klieman presents One Medical at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
The cost? The member based service costs $149 per year. For that fee, if you have insurance they will bill insurance for you, if you don’t have insurance they will offer you a discounted rate for service. “Both ways, it’s a good way to stay on top of your health,” insisted Kleiman.
OneMedical’s iPhone app works in tandem with their website, delivering a spectrum of help: answers to simple medical questions;Â physician referrals for personal consultation;Â guidelines for handling billing questions; access your health records and renew prescriptions.
OneMedical’s free iPhone app walks you through a series of question to identify the nature and details of your issue.At one end of the spectrum, if the issue can be handled by the patient accessing information on their own (eg: by onemedical providing links to you) the quick answer is in hand. At the other end of the spectrum, if you have an urgent issue, they’ll ease the process by calling the provider to arrange an immediate office or emergency visit.
With 6 offices in SF, 2 in NY and huge demand to continually expand, it’s clear the service fills a void.
Whether you have insurance, or not, this could be the wave of the future for medical care.
Want to see for yourself? Next office opens Nov. 30th 2010, at 201 Spear Street, and SFNewTech fans are invited to the open house event 5:30 – 7:30 PM where wine and cheese will be served, for health purposes only, of course!
Michael Klieman presents the One Medical iPhone App (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
Website: www.onemedical.com
San Francisco Website: www.onemedical.com/sf
Founder: Tom X. Lee
Vice President, Product Management: Michael Kleiman
Twitter: @onemedical
Facebook: One-Medical-Group
Contact Email: admin @ onemedical.com
OneMedical Mobile App: www.onemedical.com/mobile
While in high school, Andrew Sutherland needed help studying French vocabulary, so he created electronic flashcards for his own use. Soon, word about Quizlet caught on in a so called flash, which is one reason their user base doubled every year since inception.
With 1 million registered users and about 3 million visitors a month, it’s a concept whose time has come.
Quizlet works like paper index cards, one side for questions, flip side for answers. Users can generate their own flash card content, or use those developed by others on the site, as you can opt for private or public cards. With topics ranging from languages to math, science and history, Quizlet instantly provides access to a wealth of learning material.
Product Manager Phil Freo Presenting Quizlet at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
In various modes, Quizlet combines a spectrum of proven techniques with technology to ensure “lessons are learned”, by: shuffling incorrectly answered cards back to you until you get the answer right; true and false cards; and repetitive testing, ensuring you type an answer that you either don’t know or get wrong, again increasing sticking power.
More fun learning games available: matching words and graphics; terms and definitions; and a “Space Race” game, where terms fly across the screen as you try to fill in the definition before the terms fly off the screen’s edge.
Quizlet is a free service, but for just $10 a year, you can even upload your own graphics to enhance the flashcards.
Quizlet’s goal ? According to product manager Phil Freo
We want Quizlet to be recognized as the best place on line to learn or study
With an API for the iphone, 15 apps pull content in to Quizlet. Next up: they’re creating Quizlet groups so you can invite your friends to learn with you.
Product Manager Phil Freo answers questions about Quizlet at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
Website: http://quizlet.com
Blog: http://quizlet.com/blog/
Twitter: @quizlet
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/quizlet
Contactl: info @ quizlet.com
Founder: Andrew Sutherland
CEO: Dave Margulius
Product Manager & Developer : Phil Freo , Twitter @philfreo
Tonight in San Francisco, come and meet 50 amazing technology companies who will be showing off their latest gadgets and technology at the 2010 GDGT Show in downtown San Francisco.
Get your hands on brand spanking new gadgets! Did we say..
WHEN: Friday, November 12th from 7 – 10pm
WHERE: SFDC Galleria, 101 Henry Adams St. (click here for map)
The event itself is completely FREE and the first few 100 peeps will get free gdgt t-shirts and cellphone cases. On top of that, there are a whole bunch of cool giveaways and, of course, tons of hot new gadgets to play with!
Another awesome GDGT Event (This one in Seattle).
Want even more? Well, how about…
The event is for all ages and open to the public.
RSVP on Facebook and let the peeps at GDGT know if you’re thinking of dropping by!
So don’t forget your Grandpa’s BIG DUFFEL BAG, because 2 hands are not enough to take home all the FREE schwag!
Track down that lead! Here are the 60 Second Spots from the event last night.
See what SF MusicTech Summit, gdgt, Pisces, Stella & Dot, Page90, Bloomspot, and a guy looking for a start-up partner had to say . . .
Click HERE.
While our leaders are busy bickering over Healthcare reform in Washington, OneMedical is bringing reform to our personal health care experience, with their state of the art technology platform that is a combination of their website and a (newly released) iPhone App.
One Medical iPhone App
With their proprietary technology and business processes, One Medical Group has re-invented primary care, enabling practices to deliver patient-centered, high-quality care at a lower cost than other high-service models.
Their iPhone app makes the practice even more accessible and convenient by extending a number of their services right to your phone! You can schedule appointments, renew prescriptions and access your health records from anywhere using their iPhone app or by visiting the website from your mobile device.
Tonight at SFNewTech, One Medical will be showing off their awesome technology and their iPhone App.
When high school sophomore Andrew Sutherland needed a good way to study a list of 111 French animals for his French class, he came up with an ingenious idea. A FlashCard site online that he could use to learn the french animals himself and share it with his friends anywhere in the world.
And so Quizlet was born. Since then Quizlet has spread to millions of students around the globe!
Quizlet - The best way to study languages, vocabulary, or 111 French Animals 😉
Quizlet is a fun, free, way to study languages, vocabulary, or almost anything. It is the largest and fastest growing educational flashcards site on the web, providing powerful online study tools and games to millions of students.
Tonight at SFNewTech, Quizlet will be showing off the latest in educational technology, with its online study games and tools used millions of students.
Frustrated with the information overload (that we all face) while browsing or searching for information online, the husband & wife team Sameer Yami and Sanika Shirwadkar created WikiSeer, a service that finds the most informative sentences in any web page instantly and automatically; shrinking the original by upto 99%
WikiSeer provides a faster and smarter searching and browsing experience. By simply hovering over any HTML link, you can gain insights into web pages without leaving the current page or without spending too much time on it.
Get Keynotes and Summaries from WikiSeer!
How do they do that? With a lot of complex Natural Language Processing, mathematical linguistics, statistical analysis and mathematical modeling.
Tonight, at SFNewTech Sameer and Sanika will be showing off the WikiSeer frontend, which is a Firefox Addon. Don’t miss it!
Online tickets are sold out but we will have tickets at the Door!
After working on some other web publishing projects John Pettitt and Tim McElreavy realized that no matter how good a site is the vast majority of web users will never see it and that bare links are just not a compelling way to share. So they went out and created Curate.Us
An SFNewTech article on a new Facebook App gets clipped on Curate.Us!
Curate.Us gives end users a simple and visually compelling way to repost content, instantly boosting the impact of blog posts, e-mail, websites, and social networks. The visual clips and formatted quotes generated by Curate.Us drive a 5x greater click-through to the original publisher than content distributed via traditional links.
See it to believe it! Tonight, at SFNewTech, Curate.Us will be presenting their awesome service live to a Bar full of Geeks and Technology lovers! They will show you how clips drive 5x more traffic than a bare link and tell you where readers are engaging with content.
The Geo-location War just got hotter! If you thought FourSquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places are cool, wait till you see Wondershake, a brand new geo-location iPhone App that promises to help you “visualize your inner taste, and connect you with other like-minded people around you in the REAL world!”
Wondershake iPhone App - See it at SFNewTech tomorrow!
Conceived in California and raised lovingly in Japan, the WonderShake iPhone App is set to hit the App Store in December. But as you know, SFNewTech peeps get to see it before the rest of the world! So tomorrow, at the Nov 10th 2010 SFNewTech event WonderShake Founder and President Satoshi Suzuki and his Team will present this exciting geo-location App.
Satoshi promises that
With WonderShake your everyday lives will be filled with fresh encounters with people and discoveries of new places!
Come and find out what all the hype is about tomorrow! Satoshi will also be giving out stickers of their cute dolphin mascot.

If you own a company or e-commerce website, the Video Genie platform will help you capture and broadcast customer testimonial videos on the web. It is real people talking about your brand in a genuine (un-scripted) way, so you can imagine the effect it could have on other potential customers!
Justin Nassiri (founder) and Katiya (with co-founder Rob Starling in the audience), presented the Video Genie platform that, in Justin’s own words, was
Word of mouth marketing on Steroids.
Using local San Fransisco based product company DefaultCase (who make cases for iPhones) Justin showed everyone how customers or fans can quickly record a video testimonial by visiting the product/service website (even from their iphones and other mobile devices). By forcing recording time limits and other configurable constraints on the customer, you end up getting short, crisp, interesting (and hence useful) video testimonials.
The management dashboard of Video Genie notifies you as and when new videos start coming in. You can then review the video, make sure it matches your brand and then post it to your website.
Justin Nassiri and Katiya presenting Video Genie at SFNewTech
Video Genie also gives you a lot of analytics insight, including the ability to see which videos are driving conversions, which ones are more effective in engaging other viewers and going viral etc. You can then promote just those videos to create an even bigger viral sharing effect and dramatically increase your brand reach in a brand safe way.
Another neat feature is that the individual customers can be notified that their video testimonial is featured on the company’s website. They get a link to their video, which they are very likely to forward to their friends and family, thus increasing the sharing and marketing of the brand in a very social way!
Justin started VideoGenie while at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His co-founder is Rob Starling. Video Genie received funding from Eric Schmidt (Google) in 2009. The service was one of the 20 companies that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in May, by which time Video Genie was already profitable.
website: videogenie.com
twitter: @video_genie
facebook: www.facebook.com/videogenie
contact email: accounts @ videogenie.com
If you own a company or e-commerce website, the Video Genie platform will help you capture and broadcast customer testimonial videos on the web. It is real people talking about your brand in a genuine (un-scripted) way, so you can imagine the effect it could have on other potential customers!
Justin Nassiri (founder) and Katiya (with co-founder Rob Starling in the audience), presented the Video Genie platform that, in Justin’s own words, was
Word of mouth marketing on Steroids.
Using local San Fransisco based product company DefaultCase (who make cases for iPhones) Justin showed everyone how customers or fans can quickly record a video testimonial by visiting the product/service website (even from their iphones and other mobile devices). By forcing recording time limits and other configurable constraints on the customer, you end up getting short, crisp, interesting (and hence useful) video testimonials.
The management dashboard of Video Genie notifies you as and when new videos start coming in. You can then review the video, make sure it matches your brand and then post it to your website.
Justin Nassiri and Katiya presenting Video Genie at SFNewTech
Video Genie also gives you a lot of analytics insight, including the ability to see which videos are driving conversions, which ones are more effective in engaging other viewers and going viral etc. You can then promote just those videos to create an even bigger viral sharing effect and dramatically increase your brand reach in a brand safe way.
Another neat feature is that the individual customers can be notified that their video testimonial is featured on the company’s website. They get a link to their video, which they are very likely to forward to their friends and family, thus increasing the sharing and marketing of the brand in a very social way!
Justin started VideoGenie while at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His co-founder is Rob Starling. Video Genie received funding from Eric Schmidt (Google) in 2009. The service was one of the 20 companies that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in May, by which time Video Genie was already profitable.
website: videogenie.com
twitter: @video_genie
facebook: www.facebook.com/videogenie
contact email: accounts @ videogenie.com
Benjamin Berube of D2Soft Technologies presented nimbb, a fast and easy webcam video recorder for websites at the Oct 20th SFNewTech event. The idea for nimbb was born when Benjamin was working on a web project that needed to capture video using a webcam. He quickly found out that there was no easy solution to do this. So he started working on a video widget that he could reuse in other projects, and that’s how nimbb was created.
Benjamin Berube showing off nimbb on SFNewTech
nimbb is a video recording service for websites. Benjamin said that there were already big names like McGraw-Hill, BBC, Cirque du Soleil, WPP and webs.com using the nimbb service. The French Government also started using it recently to get video feedback from users.
Benjamin then proceeded to show a demo of recording video from his laptop webcam by visiting nimbb.com and clicking the record button. He said how nimbb is all about simplicity with only 2 buttons (record and save). Actually it is 3 buttons (there is a play button in the middle, to review the video you just recorded) but you get the point.
Once you record the video, you can click play to review it and re-record if necessary. When you are satisfied with the recording, you can click the save button. At that point, you will get a video url (web address) to share with others.. You can also get video embed codes to post the video to a blog or on other websites. This is all for the individual users.
On top of this, nimbb has a commercial API (application programming interface) that large corporations and website owners can tap into, to integrate the nimbb player as well as the nimbb web service into their website or online service.
Benjamin also showed everyone a live example of a website using the nimbb player and recorder on their website via the API feature and webservice subscription model.
The first 30 seconds of video recording on nimbb are free. But the videos get deleted after a month. Cost for the paid service is based on a subscription plan. The current rates are listed on nimbb.com in the pricing / subscriptions page.
Company: D2Soft Technologies Inc.
Company Twitter: @d2soft
Founder: Benjamin Berube
Founder Bio: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/benjaminberube
Founder Blog: http://blog.d2soft.com
Product: nimbb webcam video recorder
Product Contact: http://nimbb.com/Help/
Product Twitter : @nimbb
Business, Investor Contact: benjamin @ d2soft.com
Paying full price sucks! Paying at the door sucks even worse.
Try your hand at scoring a discounted (or free!) ticket to the November 10th edition of SF New Tech!
Over a hundred codes available!
But they’ll go quick … so if you’re feeling lucky, drop what you’re doing and get in on the action. 🙂
November 10, 2010 SF New Tech
Drinks, Demos, and Discussions with
Wonder Shake, One Medical, WikiSeer, Quizlet, Curate.Us and more!
25 tickets are 10% off with the code 1110-isnoozed
25 tickets are 25% off with the code 1110-whatadeal
25 tickets are 50% off with the code 1110-yeahbaby
26 tickets are 100% off (free!) with the code 1110-seeyouthere
Registration and information @ http://nov10sfnewtech.eventbrite.com/
GO!
San Francisco based AdRoll is on an ambitious plan – to make really sophisticated display advertising campaigns available to smaller companies that had previously only been available to large brands and agencies with deep pockets.Search is getting tougher and tougher to make work. It’s very competitive and large brands come in and buy up all the high value keywords. If AdRoll pulls this off, they would’ve essentially succeeded in leveling the playing field for aspiring brands and start ups of all sizes.
Adam Berke presenting AdRoll display ads retargeting platform at SFNewTech
Adam Berke, co-founder and VP of Business Development, presented AdRoll at the Oct 20th 2010 SFNewTech event. Adam said that AdRoll got started in 2007 and their goal in starting AdRoll was to make display advertising easy and effective for brands of all sizes. This involved creating solutions for small and medium sized business such as ecommerce brands, start ups, niche, and local business. These companies have not historically used display advertising because they lacked the proper tools to generate the ROI they require with sufficient control and transparency. And when you talk about ROI positive and display advertising, the 1st place to start at is retargeting.
Imagine a potential customer has visited your online shopping or e-commerce site a while back, performed some actions on your site, and then got distracted or went off to do comparison shopping. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could “recapture” that lost customer? This is what retargeting is all about. AdRoll places a piece of code on the site, cookie people on the site and based on where they go on the site, adroll can display relevant ads on the other sites that the visitor is going to, in an effort to recapture that customer / sale.
Adam then proceeded with his demo, in which he showed everyone how to set up a retargeting campaign using the AdRoll display advertising platform, and how to measure the results. Starting with valuation (for traffic, demographics etc) of a demo site selling e-commerce products, he showed how AdRoll gives you an approximate ROI estimate for your campaign as well as a daily recommended budget for the campaign. Adam also showed how you can add segments to your campaign to target very specific type of customers. For example, people who are shopping for shoes, vs people shopping for pants.
The adroll dashboard is very much like search analytics dashboards and provides a lot of visibility and transparency into your retargetting campaign. AdRoll also offers a 2 week free trial for new customers.
Backstage, we spoke to the AdRoll founding team about other players in the retargeting space, and how similar or different AdRoll’s service was. This was what they had to say.
AdRoll Team: Fetchback was the first mover in the retargeting space. As a first mover, they went with what was quickest to market, which is a service model for larger budgets. If you go to their site, you’ll notice there’s no way to launch a campaign or to get started in any way without requesting contact from a salesperson.
Because we want to service any size budget, we focused on building a scalable technology platform. This includes self-service options, transparent reporting, and the ability for marketers to manage their own campaigns much in the way they manage their SEM campaigns. We do this through automated integrations with our ad inventory sources and optimization algorithms that do a lot of complex stuff behind the scenes. That way we, don’t need to have people doing manual work, so they can focus on helping our customers with stuff machines can’t do (campaign strategy, etc), even if the customer’s budget is on the smaller side of spectrum.
Also, of course Google is making a major push into display advertising. However, since this is for your own benefit, I assume you’ll want to do better than the generic “can’t Google just do this” question one can ask any web start up.
AdRoll has server over 3.5 million (and counting) ad impressions since inception! They’ve been able to accomplish this enterprise level service that scales nicely, in part due to the technologies they use to power their service. This includes a 100% geo-distributed cloud based infrastructure, geo-distributed serverside cookie store built in Cassandra, Ad servers written in Erlang and Python stack starring Pylons (web framework) and SQLAlchemy.
Aaron Bell – Co-Founder/CEO. LinkedIn
Adam Berke – Founding Team/VP of Business Development. LinkedIn. Twitter @adamberke
Peter Krivkovich – Founding Team/VP of Sales. LinkedIn.
AdRoll Display Advertising Platform
website: www.adroll.com
twitter: @adroll
contact email: info @ adroll.com
contact form: http://www.adroll.com/company/contact
This Thursday, Women 2.0 PITCH Night on November 4, 2010 brings together hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors, and startuppers in San Francisco.
Both men and women are invited to join Women 2.0’s biggest event of the year — featuring women-led startups and successful women entrepreneurs in technology.
Speakers include Diane Greene (VMware), Carol Realini (Obopay), and Lynn Jurich (SunRun).
Watch the finalists of the Women 2.0 Startup Competition pitch live to a panel of judges including Naval Ravikant (AngelList & VentureHacks), Janice Roberts (Mayfield Fund), David Weekly (PBworks), Maritza Liaw (Kleiner Perkins), and Rachel Pike (Draper Fisher Jurvetson).
For full agenda, visit the registration page. Register now to attend PITCH Night!
If you are a bootstrapping startup founder or currently a student, you are eligible to get an even better discount to join Women 2.0 at PITCH Night. Write to them at women2.0@gmail.com and find out if you qualify.