Last October, at the Web 2.0 Launch Pad, the startup voted “Most Likely to Exit First” was CleverSet. Now three months later, CleverSet has sold itself to e-commerce software company Art Technology Group (ATG) for $10 million. It turns out to be a nice exit for CEO Todd Humphrey and founder Bruce D’Ambrosio, who built the company with about $3 million in capital and a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. But it doesn’t quite live up to a lot of the hype surrounding “discovery” right now. CleverSet offers discovery and recommendation engines to e-commerce sites, using a statistical approach to making product matches. The Seattle-based startup competes with the likes of Aggregate Knowledge, Criteo, MyStrands, and ChoiceStream. The investors in those companies are expecting much larger exits. Criteo just raised $10 million in a venture round. And Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million. By those measures, $10 million is either a steal, or discovery just isn’t the next search. CrunchBase Information CleverSet Aggregate Knowledge Criteo Strands Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Today’ Web 2.0 Summit ended with a Launch Pad session where six startups each got six minutes to pitch their companies to the crowd and a panel of venture capitalists. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of each with my initial impressions (For a more thorough take on these startups from a real venture capitalist, read Christine Herron’s post): CleverSet—Best of Show went to CleverSet, a Seattle-based company that takes a sophisticated statistical approach to product recommendations and personalization. This is not exactly an unknown company. It’s technology already powers 85 sites, including Sephora’s, Wine Enthusiast, and part of Overstock (I also wrote about them last summer in Business 2.0). CleverSet is applying some advanced math to improving recommendations, and claims to increase revenues for Websites that implement its technology by 18 to 30 percent, on average. If that’s true, they deserve to win. But then I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult. TripIt—A company that presented at TechCrunch40, TripIt builds a personalized itinerary starting from your airline confirmation. A useful travel organizer. See Mike’s previous post. G.ho.st—All of our data and applications are moving online, why not the operating system? G.ho.st is a Web operating system of sorts that ties together all the data and applications you may be using across different Websites with one password and URL. Conceptually, I’m with them. But getting people to change their behavior and abandon everything on their desktops except for their browser is going to be tough. (G.ho.st was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit) SpiceWorks—Ad-supported enterprise software. Already 160,000 IT professionals use SpiceWorks to help manage their computer networks. SpiceWorks then serves up news feeds and product deals targeted at the specific devices on the networks they manage. It’s a consumer approach to enterprise software. This will work—until the ad bubble pops. ClickForensics—The CEO claims that the click fraud rate is nearly 16 percent (and over 25 percent on distributed advertising networks like AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network). ClickForensics offers a neutral service to both advertisers and publishers that → Read More
