The Government Wants You To Create Startups Out Of Data... Sort Of

RALEIGH, N.C. — Back on October 3rd of last year, I got invited to a roundtable to talk to the White House about startups. I almost didn't go.

I imagined it would be an auditorium-style set-up with some low-level staffer on a stage giving 200 of us locals a 90-minute slideshow presentation outlining all the incredible ways that the government was here to help.

Well, yeah, there was that, but that was later.

What I got to sit in on was an actual round table. And I was sitting directly to the right of Todd Park, U.S. CTO. To his left were five fellows (actual fellows, not dudes, although four of them were dudes) charged with making the federal government more accessible to startups.

To my right were six Triangle folks who were heavily involved in the startup scene, including entrepreneurs like PlotWatt's Luke Fishback and Relevance's Justin Gehtland.

For the record, I was repping Automated Insights and our work making actionable human-sounding narrative out of big data.

Park is an amazingly genial guy with a lot of energy, and instead of going down that tired “what can we do to help the entrepreneurs here” road, he spent most of his time talking about the five initiatives that each of the fellows represented – everything from more streamlined ways for startups to respond to Federal RFPs to the Open Data Initiative.

The latter program was by far the most interesting, in my opinion and, soon to find out, the opinion of the others gathered around the table as well.

Called It! WedPics Raises an Oversubscribed $1.1 Million Round

You've Come a Long Way, Justin

It seems like ages ago when Justin Miller's dejaMi was getting booted from his basement, thanks to an overzealous neighbor and a City of Raleigh ordinance that went to the letter of the law. The local startup community came together to help him land at HUB Raleigh overnight, and from there, he's been on a tear.

But know this. Every time he calls me, I answer: "What did you get kicked out of now?"

That joke will never, ever get old.

It was even longer ago, July of 2011 to be exact, when Miller threw the impressive dejaFest to launch the original dejaMi app. Not a task taken lightly, it turned into a full-on 2-day music festival, taking up several venues in downtown Raleigh.

Not long after he relocated to the HUB, he and I were both at Startup Summit, where I was moderating a panel and he was pitching WedPics, the company he spun out of dejaMi and into the early but suddenly very frothy social-wedding-sharing space.

Watching his presentation, I knew at that point that WedPics was going to be successful, because Miller was going to beat everyone at the game. WedPics was going to be designed better, work better, and if he had to throw a WedFest to get it onto the public's radar, that was going to happen.

Google Glass is Awesome! Let's Ban It!

The Opportunity Cost of Shortsightedness

I don't like to talk about politics. I like to talk about startups. That being said, when government sticks their hands into the rich dough of innovation, the result is usually a big mess of dough and a complete lack of paper trail on where the money went.

I'm going to try to keep this rant focused less on government and more on a generic shortsightedness that usually accompanies innovation. More often than not, when true innovation happens, it's met with everything from ignorance -- "I don't understand this, so I'm going to stick with this inefficient, bloated, and probably corrupt process that works" -- to Luddism -- "This is going to destroy our livelihoods, so we better get to killing it."

But true innovation almost always wins out over both of those types of direct attacks. Ignorance is usually swept aside by the adoption curve, meaning enough people will assume the new way that it becomes comfortable. Like smartphones, even your grandmother can check her email from the Talbot's now.

And as for Luddism, yeah, when that wins, it sucks, but the smart money usually finds a workaround.

Narrative Reports vs. Dashboards

A Deconstructed Web Analytics Report Shows What the Dashboard Missed

We can all agree that in 2013 web analytics is still a nightmare, right?

The last few years have brought about an enormous expansion in the top of the web analytics information overload funnel, and today I can discover just about any aspect of my web traffic that piques my curiosity.

I know how much traffic I'm getting, who told them to come here, how they got here, how long they're staying, what they're looking at, what they're using to look at it, where they're from, and just about anything else I want to know about them. If I don't like what I'm looking at, I can customize everything from my dashboard to reports to parameters within those reports.

What none of this tells me is how I can be more successful at turning the words I put on the Internet into dollars in my pocket.

Now, I know what you're thinking: “It's all there! More information than you could ever figure out what to do with.”

The problem with that is that it's all there. It's more information than I could ever figure out what to do with. I'm not a web analytics analyst; I run a business, and I don't have the time or inclination to try to find and pay someone to tell me something that reactive. If I could get the guy who does all those Google Panda updates to analyze my web stats, I'd pay him. But he's probably way too busy trying to make sure no one ever comes to my website.

Web analytics still feels like there are still dozens of unwritten rules that can dramatically change the course of your entire revenue stream. I'm constantly worried that if I shift one pixel or use too many or not enough buzzwords that my traffic and ad revenue will plummet into a hole that I'll never be able to dig out of.

Furthermore, these concerns are not unwarranted. I can't tell you how many times my traffic has reached what I was convinced was a new plateau, only to — for seemingly no reason whatsoever — drop right back to where it was before the plateau started. My SEO friends tell me things like “Google did something to the search algorithms, go look at (insert acronym here) and see if that changed.” And when I finally find that acronym and it has or hasn't changed, I still don't know what to do.

It's broken.

Let's take a look at an example.

Exclusive Ad Serving Deal with Reddit Gives Adzerk Huge Boost

DURHAM, N.C. — Adzerk founder and CEO James Avery speaks the truth. He's one of those people who can give me his opinion on anything startup or business related and, even if I don't agree with him, I know I should probably double-check my facts before I make any bets.

It's nice to see good things happen to deserving people, and when that good thing is validation of a product in the form of a high-profile customer for a startup that's been in the trenches for years on both on the customer-acquisition side and the fundraising side, it also makes for a decent story.

Last week, Adzerk announced an exclusive deal with Reddit to do all of their ad serving. For an idea of how big a fish that is, it essentially doubles Adzerk's already substantial capacity. Reddit is also known for its unobtrusive ads, so bringing in the speedy, customizable Adzerk is already being hailed as the right choice.

We celebrated the Reddit deal last night, over beers at City Beverage in Durham, watching the Tarheels, Avery's adopted team, ultimately go down to Kansas in the NCAA tournament.

I first met Avery almost three years ago, right as Adzerk was getting ready to go from beta to publicly available product. He was just making plans to go full time and open an office in the Amercian Underground (one of the first tenants, if my memory serves me correct), had not hired a soul yet, and had just sold off one of his ad networks to concentrate on the software he was building to manage them.

A little over a year later, June 2011, he had raised a $650,000 seed round, landed major customers from Stack Overflow to StatSheet, and was making plans for adOS, which would be an evolution of the Adzerk product and include a marketplace, sort of an app store of ad tech. adOS launched in January 2012.

Today, Adzerk has eight employees, has moved four times, and now has their own front door on Washington Street in downtown Durham. They claim around 100 paying customers (XConomy, HotChalk, Neudesic) and serve ads on thousands of sites.

Triangle Ed Tech Scene Springs Up (Literally) In a Weekend

RALEIGH, N.C. — This past weekend, about 100 entrepreneurs, educators, developers and assorted curious parties spent 47 hours (daylight savings) trying to solve the nation's severely broken education system by throwing a whole bunch of startup at it.

Taking place at HUB Raleigh and organized by the team behind Triangle Startup Weekend, it was the first-ever Triangle Startup Weekend EDU.

Seems like a fabulous idea, right? It is. It's a solid start, if a little late to the game.

TSW-EDU opened its doors on Friday, the day after Bill Gates gave this year's closing remarks at South-by-Southwest-EDU, and while various leaders of the Triangle's public and private sectors were off promoting our area at SXSW Digital, SXSW-EDU would also seem like a natural gathering place for a spot on the planet with world class universities, a healthy amount of entrepreneurial talent, a nice climate, and more than a few Whole Foods.

Except I didn't know that SXSW-EDU existed until a couple weeks ago. And I can count the number of post-seed-stage Ed Tech startups in the Triangle on one hand.

I guess I can be forgiven for not knowing about SXSW-EDU.

You didn't either, right? It's only the second iteration of the conference, and the first attempt by organizers to turn the conference into a “festival.” So I'm assuming there just wasn't enough church-of-startup style hype to get it onto the radar, if you can detect my sarcasm.

Durham Startup BoostSuite Hits 5000 Customers

Something to Shout About

In an era where most startup talk is concerned with who is raising how much and from whom, it's so much more rewarding to talk about who is landing customers, proving out their product, and raising recurring revenues.

BoostSuite, a DIY marketing optimization platform aimed at small businesses, hit 5000 customers this week, a mere six months after their public launch. BoostSuite runs like a plugin on your website, and provides a roadmap for improving online marketing results. Their typical users see improvements of 375% in a few weeks.

It wasn't too long ago, June of last year, when BoostSuite's co-founder and CEO Aaron Houghton showed up at an ExitEvent Startup Social and held an unannounced product feedback session in a back corner of the event. This didn't surprise me in the least, having known Aaron through most of his days with iContact -- the company he and Ryan Allis sold to Vocus for $167 million in 2011.

So when we caught up yesterday, that feedback session was the first thing I asked him about.

"We learned a lot that night," he said. "Specifically that the data formats that exist on the average website were much more varied than we thought. We had to build a system to manage a wide variety of edge-cases that we didn't initially expect. During the beta version our software worked on about 50% of websites. At our production launch on 8/15 it worked on about 85% of websites. Now, six months later, BoostSuite works on effectively 100% of websites."

Identifying a New Niche For Creativity

A Developing Support Structure For a New Kind of Entrepreneur

There is a monthly networking dinner called “groundworkk,” where people present their concepts and take questions from the audience. The audience then votes for its favorite concept.

Here's the twist: Everyone who shows up drops $5 in a jar, and the winner gets the money.

When I heard about groundworkk's event, I thought: I'm either going to really hate this, or I'm going to learn something.

Here's what I learned: The recent, nationwide entrepreneurial movement is fueled mostly by high-tech/high-growth startups.

However, there is another support structure building for a new creative class of entrepreneurs, such as the ones who filled the jar at Mercury Studios in Durham earlier this month.

Mystery Brewing, a craft brewery in Hillsborough, was founded by Erik Myers, a former techie whose real passion is brewing beer.

Myers quit his job and built a business using some of the same methods as high-tech/high-growth startups, including pitching investors, beta testing and blogging.

He also raised more than $44,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, and raised additional funds through private investors. But instead of slinging code, he's slinging hops. Everything else still applies.

Raleigh's Knowledge Tree Raises $4.75 Million Series B Round

You Think You Have Hurdles?

I haven't seen or heard the South African accent of one Daniel Chalef in a very long time. Now I know why. Fittingly enough, the last time we chatted was in downtown Raleigh for the Innovate Raleigh kickoff back in January. Yesterday, his Glenwood South-based KnowledgeTree announced the closing of a $4.75 million Series B round, featuring local VCs River Cities Capital and Hatteras Venture Partners, along with DC-based Core Capital Partners and Series A lead Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa.

So all is forgiven.

KnowledgeTree does SaaS document management for mid-to-enterprise level companies with a social twist. Born in South Africa, the company migrated to the US two years ago, and overcame enormous obstacles with persistence, precision planning, and a long runway.

I caught up with Daniel, the CEO, yesterday over the phone (beers are on me in person at the next ExitEvent Startup Social on August 6th). We talked about Raleigh's growing startup spark, the importance of solid relationships in the startup world and, mostly, the distinct challenges KnowledgeTree faced during this raise.

You know, just stuff you won't read anywhere else.

Review: Motorola Droid RAZR M with Jellybean

Taking on the iPhone 5 and Samsung S3 for the Title of Holiday Gift Phone

I've never quite understood the concept of the mobile phone as holiday gift. Sure, I guess for family members or anyone else you might share the bills with, but even then, it's such a personal decision. Can you imagine if your significant other handed you a Blackberry or Nokia box with a red ribbon wrapped around it?

Have you ever tried to return a mobile phone? Have you ever returned a gift from your wife? Yeah chump, enjoy BB10 when it comes out in... never.

So even if you're not giving your giftee a surprise new monthly bill, and even if you have a solid idea of their tastes, and even if it happens to be time for them to upgrade, you've really only got a couple choices.

You can go latest or greatest.

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