Get Ready to be Blowtorched!
News of the Blowtorch launch has appeared in:
– Variety
– HollywoodReporter
– TechCrunch
– Reuters
– NewTeeVee
– VentureBeat
– The Deal
The company was established by senior executives in entertainment, technology and advertising from firms including Leo Burnett, MTV, Ogilvy & Mather, Starcom MediaVest Group, Verizon and major Hollywood studios. It has raised more than $50 million in financing.
Watch for more exciting news from Blowtorch in coming weeks and months.
Dell to Acquire LaunchSquad Client Everdream
The same week it launched its “Yours is Here” social media campaign, enlisting celebrities to promote its consumer PC line up, Dell also took a big step in the enterprise managed services space, announcing its intent to acquire LaunchSquad client Everdream.
For more than a year, Everdream has been promoting a bold vision for SaaS device management and we’re excited to see this vision be validated by an industry leader like Dell.
As Dell moves aggressively into delivering managed services through the channel, Everdream’s platform provides a highly scalable, flexible solution and helps solve important end customer challenges in areas such as security, compliance and data protection.
Congrats to the Everdream team on the successful acquisition!
Third Annual Thanksgiving Pie Bake-off
A foggy morning set the tone for LaunchSquad’s Third Annual Thanksgiving Pie Bake-off last Friday. In its grand tradition, the day was filled with controversy, chaos and even disqualifications. Bake-off Official Jason Throckmorton once again disappeared during the tasting, leaving his only committee member (yours truly) to police the floor and follow his sentiments: “For this is a winner takes all pie contest! There is no runner up.”
Here’s how things “rolled” out:
WINNER – ‘Mixed Berry’ by Monica Miller of Eagle River, Alaska, where pie baking is a hobby. “That pie is sick, but in a good way,” repeated Jesse Odell over and over again until he was finally ousted from the pie tasting arena for lobbying. Was he in cahoots with Monica? The hubbub continues: The rumor of frozen berries led some bakers to insist that only fresh ingredients constitute a true Thanksgiving Pie. Miller confirmed that although these berries were indeed at one time frozen, she picked and froze them over the summer to make what is, in her own words, “a traditional Alaskan Thanksgiving Day Pie.” Miller further commented that she grew the berries in her Oakland, California backyard, Alaska-style, using moose nuggets to fertilize the earth. Will berry pies be allowed in the competitions of tomorrow? Only time will tell.
And even though we don’t allow a second place and so on this is how it might have been…
SECOND – ‘Kentucky Derby Pie’ by Melissa Biles, a true southerner. “What I loved about this pie,” said Brett Weiner, “was the distinct taste of booze.”
TIED FOR THIRD -
‘Pumpkin’ (non-traditional sort) by Reed Lyon. While we were impressed by the LaunchSquad logo on top, we are pumpkin pie purists.
‘Pumpkin Mascarpone’ by Zoe Vandeveer. Lovely flavor and texture; a little too upper east side for this crowd.
‘Triple Pumpkin Spice’ by Nicole DeByl . Triple the fun & triple the flavor, but just like having LaunchSquad dogs in the office, more that one spice is one too many.
‘Pumpkin Cheesecake’ by Miko Mercer. Perfect consistency, but is cheesecake really a pie?
‘Sweet Potato’ by Lori Savageau. The Bake-off Official’s favorite, but he wasn’t allowed to vote.
‘Sweet Potato’ by Ryan Leverenz. Even Oprah would have loved this one, but where were the bacon bits?
TIED FOR FOURTH -
‘Fudge Pecan’ by Monica Miller of Eagle River, Alaska. Wait a minute, two pies? Some bakers cried foul. Others loved the fudgy consistency.
‘Pumpkin’ (traditional) by Virginia Zimpel. “There’s nothing better than a plain ole’ pumpkin pie,” said Corey Lewis, helping himself to a double slice before the competition ended. Because of this breach of conduct (small tastes are only permitted up until the end), will he be allowed to vote next year?
DISQUALIFIED – ‘Kentucky Liquid Pie’ by Brett Weiner. The Bake-off Official’s ruling: “While we appreciate the baker’s innovative spirit, you need to be able to eat a pie with a fork. In addition, due to the flammable contents, I will be personally confiscating this pie.”
And finally, the protests:
Would-be second place winner, Melissa Biles, persisted that her pie full of bourbon would have won the blue ribbon had votes for disqualified Kentucky Liquid Pie been redistributed. The Bake-off Official quickly refuted her claims by repeating one of the bake-off committee’s goals: “A pie competition is to teach us about the hard knocks of real life. Bake-offs, like life, are not always fair.”
Non-pie baker Adam Metz has formerly disputed the results of this competition because he believes voting is not the proper way to select a winner and that the true champion should be based upon the social interactions created around each pie. He is working on a formula for next year’s competition. After five slices of the Kentucky Liquid pie, Metz slurred, “It’s all about the network.”
It’s Official: Attributor Enterprise Product Launch
There’s been a lot of news and discussion lately around the reuse and protection of online content, with User Generated Content Principles being announced from major publishers like Disney, Viacom and Fox as well as proposed solutions from Google for monitoring videos on YouTube. Our client Attributor offers a neutral approach for the online “Content Economy” with a monitoring and analysis platform for all types of content across the entire Web. While the company has made several large customer announcements with the Associated Press and Reuters, we just recently announced the official enterprise product launch.
Given the timeliness and importance of Attributor’s solution, the news was very well received by content creators and the press, with stories in The New York Times, Editor & Publisher and a couple posts on TechCrunch, among many others. Attributor’s product offers a big picture solution because it’s focused on increasing business and revenue opportunities (as opposed to policing and blocking content) in order to help the Content Economy grow and enable content owners to get their due.
In addition to the product unveiling, and to highlight the potential for marketing and sales opportunities, Attributor released some really interesting research about the reuse of song lyrics online, showing how unofficial lyrics sites are ranking higher in search engines than official sites that are paying royalties to content owners. The effect is that sites copying the material get more traffic and gain revenue opportunities from ads plastered next to the copied lyrics. Nobody (except of course those inappropriately grabbing the original content) would agree that this is a fair and sensible model for the future. Content owners need an easy way to request attribution or compensation for their work and Attributor provides the platform to enable these connections.
Attributor is off to a fantastic start, and it’s been very rewarding to work closely with their execs for the past year and share their technology and vision with the world. More to come!
Cheese, Brats, Beer and Technology (aka, Networked Insights Launch Event)
This past weekend, Jesse and I left our respective coasts and headed up to Madison, Wisconsin for the Networked Insights launch event. While the Midwest is not unfamiliar territory to me (go Cubs!), this was both of our first visits to Wisconsin. The jokes were flying about cheese, brats and beer leading up to the trip, but Madison proved to be a really great town that seems to perfectly connect state government, a huge university, a growing technology industry and some big name companies such as American Girl and Trek Bikes all in one modest-sized city. According to Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights, Madison also has the highest number of restaurants per capita in the U.S. (and he’s a foodie with a deferred acceptance to the Culinary Institute of America, so I’ll take his word for it.)
Friday night was the Networked Insights launch party at the new Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in the heart of Madison on State Street. It was a great venue and brought together a great crowd of techies, socialites, and friends and family of Networked Insights. Networked Insights, who launched officially on November 7th, gives companies a way to create customer communities on their website and then tap the conversations and interactions customers are having in that network to gain rich insights and inform their business. It’s a new form of market research that is driven by the customer, not by the questions a company wants answers to, and is changing the way companies, such as The Guild, are going about understanding their customers.
Saturday delivered the classic Madison experience, beginning with a University of Wisconsin football game against Michigan (quite the rivalry!), a bratwurst and a tailgate…oh, and some beer, of course.
Madison is definitely a growing technology center with several cool startups like Networked Insights and JellyFish beginning to populate the business scene. The University of Wisconsin also has one of the premier computer science programs in the country, which, as can be seen in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, is a vital component to a vibrant technology ecosystem. The university also provides quite a bit of funding to various early stage ventures in the Madison and greater Wisconsin area. The challenge seems to be getting the talent to stay in Madison, but as the technology industry continues to grow and more opportunities become available for these students in Madison, retention will become far easier and will continue to power and grow the great things in tech going on in “Mad Town.”
(L to R: Jesse Odell, Dan Neely – CEO of Networked Insights, Michael Mitchell – Chief Experience Officer of Networked Insights, Jeremy Frank)
Are You Daptiv?
Change is in the air and The New York Times has taken notice. This week, our client eProject officially changed its name to Daptiv. eProject, one of the largest and fastest growing software-as-a-service companies, made the change to better reflect its evolving offering and widespread use by customers in things beyond its initial project management mission. The eProject name, while recognizable, was truly a product of its times; there was even a magazine in the late 90s called eCompany Now to cover the trend.
The name change was announced Monday along with a new product from Daptiv, which helps companies better understand and manage all the work that is getting done inside the enterprise. Stuart Elliott, long-time advertising columnist at The New York Times, covered the inside story about the name change, which was spearheaded by the company’s head of marketing Tim Low (in conjunction with naming firm Catchword Branding, who also worked with us on the re-branding of Awareness from iUpload).
As Daptiv’s PR firm, we’ve been working closely with the Tim and the management team for several months to make this launch a success. It’s a big deal to change the name of a company, especially one that has 700+ customers; there are a lot of moving parts and complexities that go into it, and Daptiv made it look easy.
New LaunchSquad Clients
We’ve added some top-notch clients to our roster recently, including two in the green/clean technology area. Here’s a quickview:
- Acorn Factor (Delaware): public company that specializes in funding and accelerating the growth of emerging ventures in the energy sector.
- Blowtorch (San Francisco): a soon-to-be-launched media company.
- Digital Fuel (San Mateo, Calif.): software that helps businesses and service providers manage service agreements.
- Leverage, Inc. (Irvine, Calif.): a free consumer application to manage gift cards and loyalty and rewards programs.
- Optimal Technologies (moving U.S. base to North Carolina): just raised $25 million from Goldman Sachs to build out a platform that improves how power companies, consumers and businesses manage and utilize energy.
Here’s our full client list.
The Constantly Evolving Advertising Market
One of our newer clients, AnchorFree, had a coming out party this week in conjunction with ad:tech and received quite a bit of attention from folks like GigaOm, ClickZ and MediaPost. The company has for the past couple of years been building out a platform and aggregating thousands of free wireless hotspots, and then allowing advertisers to reach consumers in a very targeted manner. It’s a really smart idea and exciting opportunity.
AnchorFree also builds on LaunchSquad’s experience with many of the pioneers in online marketing that we’ve worked with over the past dozen years or so. From folks like Flycast (ad network) and Digital Impact (email marketing) in the early days of the Web, to some of our more recent clients like Jingle/800-FREE-411, Adify, Pheedo, Unwired Nation and now AnchorFree, it’s been fascinating to watch the advertising world navigate through a period of constant, rapid change.
Internet advertising has gone from essentially zero to $20 billion during this time. Think about that for a moment! eMarketer projects that number to further double by 2011, and comprise a whopping 13% of all advertising spend.
I’m sure it’s been extremely challenging for marketers and agencies to stay on top of all of these new technologies and models, and more important, figure out exactly where the people and returns are. Ten to twenty years ago that was a far easier proposition: everyone knew that people were for the most part watching television, listening to the radio or reading the newspaper. It was much easier to figure out where and when to put your advertising spend.
But today, audiences are fragmenting exponentially and that will only continue for the foreseeable future. And even as these markets progress and shake out, there’s no end in sight to the innovation opportunity that emerging companies like AnchorFree will tackle.