There’s a wealth of experience and expertise around us every day. We probably don’t give most people we pass running around our respective busy cities a second look, but rushing by you are people with interesting expertise and experience. Artists and actors; olympic athletes and monks; sailors and graffiti artists.

SideTour looks to unlock this community and enable them to market and generate income off of their unique expertise. These experts – “hosts” in SideTour’s terminology – use the SideTour platform to advertise their experiences. SideTour helps them market these experiences and handles bookings, billing, refunds, etc. on their behalf. SideTour events are designed to be shared in groups – often people who haven’t met each other before the experience (although the platform does allow for group booking). And the entire experience ultimately becomes about the event, about the host and about the participants. The results so far have been fantastic.

Importantly, SideTour isn’t just a listing service for events, as some other companies pursuing similar models are. And SideTour heavily curates the experiences hosted on its site to ensure that they are both unique and that the hosts have true expertise. The variety of experience on SideTour really show the effect of this curation (and you thought I was kidding about luging and monks).

I met the SideTour team at the beginning of TechStars NYC and immediately loved what they were up to. And I love the story of four founders, friends and colleagues for over a decade, coming together to form a business (sounds like the Foundry story). They’ve made incredible progress over the summer at TechStars.

The company announced today a $1.5M seed financing led by Foundry and RRE (there’s a great write-up on TechCrunch here). This money will help the company further build out the functionality of the SideTour platform and begin expansion to markets beyond its launch market of New York City.

It’s great to have the chance to work with them!

This morning Federated Media announced that it has acquired Lijit Networks in a private stock deal.

I’m incredibly proud of what the Lijit team has accomplished in the almost 4 years we’ve been investors in the business – charting a course that wasn’t exactly always a straight line, but one that has always placed publishers first. As a result of this never wavering focus on web publishers, Lijit has built a large and ultimately very valuable company.

I’ve always thought that Federated was the natural acquirer for Lijit (and we’ve been partners with Federated for some time now). Federated shares Lijit’s focus on publishers (“the best of the independent web”), but unlike Lijit, who helps publishers generate revenue through better monitizing their non-premium inventory, Federated sells unique, high value premium inventory across their federated group of publishers. For a time, Lijit pursued a similar model and having bumped into Federated in many a sales process we can attest to the strength of the Federated sales team. Ultimately Lijit chose a different path – integrating with over 30 buying channels and standing up their own RTB exchange. All the while, Lijit has been rapidly growing the list of publishers they work with by providing not only an advertising channel, but search, analytics and insight tools to help Lijit publishers better understand and engage with their audience.

The fit is a natural one. Federated brings to the combined entity a large and established sales force and the ability for Lijit publishers to access premium content relationships and advertising. Lijit brings a strong technology background, a rapidly scaling publisher base and the ability of both Federated and Lijit publishers to place their inventory to auction through the Lijit exchange.

As part of the acquisition I’ll be joining the Federated Media board of directors (along with Federated founder, John Battelle, FM’s CEO Deanna Brown, FM’s early investor from Panorama Capital Chris Albinson and Fred Harmon of Oak Investment Partners, who led the large Federated financing in 2008). I’m thrilled to be working with such an accomplished group and to continue my close relationship with Lijit through my continued role at Federated Media.

I’d also note that, while the financial details of this transaction haven’t been released, this is a significant win not only for Lijit and its investors, but also a nice outcome for Boulder (Lijit’s offices are in the heart of downtown – just upstairs from the Foundry office, in fact). While ultimately the exit will be measured by the outcome of the combined Lijit/Federated business, based just on this deal’s value alone this ranks as one of the larger transactions for a Denver or Boulder based business in the last decade.

You can read the FM release here (or on their home page, which they’ve completely taken over with the deal announcement), Lijit’s founder and CEO Todd Vernon’s thoughts here and FM’s founder and chairman John Battelle’s post on the deal here.

Congratulations to both the Lijit and Federated teams! This is big!

Forbes published an article yesterday by Maureen Farrell stating that there’s a “signaling problem” for TechStars Boulder companies who don’t raise money from Foundry Group.

“… one byproduct of [Foundry Group’s] generosity for any young Boulder company is that, if it hasn’t been funded by The Foundry Group, it must explain why. Otherwise it has a signaling problem, something that happens when a VC invests in an early round but doesn’t show up for later rounds.”

And while I’m going to argue (forcefully) here that neither my partners nor I either believe this to be true or even wish for that kind of market power, I should acknowledge that I’ve heard this before. And not just in relation to TechStars companies, but for tech companies based in Boulder more generally. I’ve been in a couple of meetings where a founder has suggested that if Foundry didn’t invest, no-one would (in both cases we didn’t invest and they did indeed find another capital source). I’ve also received calls from other investors asking why Foundry had “passed” on something (although in none of those cases did I think they were fishing for a reason to pass – but rather trying to get another data point on the business). And many, many people around town talk regularly about the overall lack of venture funds in the Colorado market (which leaves Foundry at the top of a very short list of active local investors, in large part where this perception likely stems from).

I’m extremely proud of the vibrant tech ecosystem in Boulder and the role that my partners and I have played in helping shape it, however we don’t welcome the notion that Foundry somehow controls the Boulder market. Whether Foundry has this kind of negative drag on Boulder companies or TechStars is an extremely important topic to us. We spend untold time and energy helping Boulder tech companies (not just TechStars companies and certainly not limited to companies in the Foundry portfolio) be successful, and the implication that not getting funding from Foundry is a negative mark on a business is the kind of market power that we certainly DO NOT want to have.  It’s not good for Boulder, not good for Foundry and not good for other venture firms (in part because it suggests that other venture firms simply aren’t capable (or willing) to do their own work). And while all four Foundry partners are involved with TechStars, our funding support for the program (and those in other cities) comes from us personally, not from our fund (we do this in part to try to avoid the perception that TechStars is in any way captive to Foundry, which it most definitely is not).

It is my belief that this sentiment, to the extent to which it even exists, is much more perception than reality (and at that, the perception of a very limited number of people). And while writing about it might drive some traffic Forbes.com, the reality is that there’s no due diligence line item on other venture firms’ checklists for Boulder companies that says “find out why Foundry passed”. There is no signaling problem.

And the numbers support me. Strongly.

Foundry has 28 companies in our 2007 fund (we have yet to close an investment from the new fund that we announced last week). Nine of them are based in Colorado (all of those in Boulder). Since we raised Foundry Venture Capital 2007, 64 Boulder-based companies have received funding, meaning that we’ve funded approximately 14% of the local companies taking in institutional funding since we raised our fund. Furthermore, 101 different venture firms have funded Boulder-based companies during this time period – reflecting the strong national reputation that Boulder is building among technology investors. The Forbes article cites Boulder’s funding total for 2010 through 9/31 – $91M that has been invested in Boulder businesses since the beginning of the year. With $13.6M of this total, Foundry represents just under 15% of the dollars invested in Boulder in 2010. The numbers for our participation in TechStars are similar (easy to look up since TechStars openly publishes its results).  Since the founding of TechStars Boulder 39 companies have gone through the program. Of these, 22 have received outside funding and another 5 have become profitable without the need for external financing (as an aside, this is a great track record!). Foundry has funded 3 (thats 13.6% of those receiving funding and less than 8% of all the companies that went through the Boulder program).

The conclusion here is pretty straightforward – while Foundry’s presence might seem to loom large over Boulder the numbers are pretty clear – we’re in no way driving a significant percentage of the investment activity in the area.

I recognize that my partners and I carry a certain amount of weight in Boulder and are viewed as leaders of the Boulder tech community (there are many tech leaders in Boulder – it’s one of the things that makes Boulder such a fantastic entrepreneurial city). But we don’t have the corner on TechStars nor the Boulder tech market. In fact we work hard to try to avoid this. As strong supporters of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem we recognize that it benefits no one for us to behave in a way that isn’t in the interest of the entire community.

While it may be a catchy title to a magazine article, it’s just not the case. Simply stated, there is no TechStars Boulder Foundry Group Signaling Problem.

A note of thanks to Emily Mendell of the NVCA for pulling the Boulder data for me from the PWC/NVCA database.

StockTwits announced two great new features in the last week that are worth checking out.

The first is a partnership with SecondMarket to expand the StockTwits platform to include private company streams. So just as you’d tag a post with $AAPL you can now tag private companies (think $ZYNGA,$4SQ, etc). Just as it is for public equitites, tagging your posts (tweets, blogs, etc.) with private company symbols is a much more efficient way to identify the company you’re talking about and become a part of the broader conversation about a company. StockTwits has put together an impressive database of private company symbols and is adding to this list daily.

The second feature was launched with less fanfare – a WordPress plugin that takes any ticker symbol in the body of a post and links them to the realtime discussion of that company at stocktwits.com. You can see how this works in this post – check out $GOOG, $CSCO and $AAPL. Very cool stuff. From a very cool company.

Clearly a hot topic in online ad-tech right now is the rise of exchange-based buying and the advent of real-time bidding platforms (RTB) that allow advertisers and publishers to transact on an impression by impression basis. Given all the focus on RTB I sometimes have to remind myself that true real-time trading is less than a year into its existence. And given its nascence, the landscape of companies (buy side platforms, sell side platforms, data providers, agencies, brands, publishers, etc.) that are playing a part in these exchanges is changing rapidly.

We’ve long been believers in audience based buying and selling of ad inventory. Our investment in Lijit is largely around this concept and more obviously, our work with AdMeld, which is a leader in the RTB world, falls squarely into this thesis. And while I’m not one for sweeping (and superlative) predictions around the future of the ad ecosystem (here I’m specifically not predicting the death of all ad networks), it’s clear from my vantage point that more and more inventory – both remnant and non-remnant – will be processed through real-time platforms. This leads to some interesting questions about how publishers will need to alter the decision making engines in their ad stacks and how blurry the line will become between premium and remnant inventory (there’s a continuum there that technology such as RTB is clearly stretching out; as an aside, we need to come up with a word for inventory that’s between house sold premium and what we traditionally called remnant).

Clearly the rise of sell side platforms such as AdMeld and AdEx needs to be matched by new thinking on the demand side. And while there are a number of companies creating DSP’s (including, of course, Invite Media who recently sold to Google) few (if any) were built from the ground up to exist in the exchange world as it’s currently evolved to. And as a result, the demand side as a whole seems to be lagging in its ability to handle the rapidly increasing scale and complexity of supply.

The ability to handle this massive transaction volume is what first attracted us to Triggit, a company we announced an investment in today (see the Triggit blog, AdExchanger, MediaPost and TechCrunch). However it was their application of additional technology to this supply to allow advertisers and agencies to run more effective campaigns that really made the company stand out.

Triggit was the first DSP to develop a self service interface which allows buyers to plan and schedule campaigns across exchanges. Triggit has also been a leader in enabling advertisers to better target audience by allowing them to append both third and (importantly) first party data to their transaction decision engine. The Triggit team – lead by Zach and Susan Coelius and Ryan Tecco – is fantastic. Both in their ability to push the limits of technology in the DSP world as well as their ability to work with leading agencies and Fortune 500 marketers to enable their exchange buying. We’re joined in this investment with Spark Capital’s Santo Politi, with whom I’ve developed a close relationship over the past several years.

We’re thrilled to have Triggit in the Foundry family.

[Updated with the new video link/embed]

You may not have realized this, but Niel Robertson is not only building a unique SEM marketplace, but he’s also a passionate knitter. The video below shows off both of these passions and is well worth watching.

On a more serious note, I’m a big fan of companies producing these sorts of fun but informative videos. People respond so much better to highly visual, straightforward media such as this.

Earlier this week, Medialets made a significant announcement: the launch of their universal mobile ad SDK. This is an initiative that the company has been working on for months and is truly groundbreaking in the industry. The Medialets universal ad SDK allows app developers to have complete flexibility in how they manage the ad inventory available through their applications. Publishers can serve Medialets rich media ads, ads from other mobile ad networks as well as ads from their own first party ad server – all from one SDK. The Medialets SDK is already up and running with major publishers (Washington Post, NPR, Variety, Fandango, etc.).

This represents not just an achievement for Medialets, but a step forward in the evolution of mobile advertising (which is much too fragmented). We’re excited that Medialets is in the middle of the mobile ad revolution.

While search marketing is already a huge business, more and more companies each day are discovering the advantages of advertising directly to customers through search engines. Companies like that they can directly measure the impact of their spending – from the clicks they are generating all the way through the products they are selling as a result of those site visits and that they can quickly and easily scale up their spending on what’s working in their search campaigns. With different ad groups, ad copy and landing pages, search marketers can customize their campaigns to fit their business needs.

If there’s a downside to search, however, it’s that effectively managing search campaigns is extremely difficult. Even if you confine your efforts solely to Google the complexities of creating ad groups, generating keywords, pricing each keyword, creating deep links into your product catalogue, managing spend variants by day, figuring out broad match vs. phrase match vs exact match vs negative match, etc are daunting.

One of the ironies of search is that while technology of search itself is in many ways disaggregating the relationship between marketers and consumers (and bringing them directly together), the business of search itself isn’t something that can easily be disaggregated by technology in the same way.  Search is simply not something that lends itself well to machine automation. And while there are a few software platforms available for managing search campaigns (mostly focused on the high end of the market spending > $100k/month on search) these packages are primarily designed for people who are already search experts. It’s almost impossible to take search knowledge and put it into an algorithm. As a result, companies that lack this expertise are at a huge disadvantage in the search game (this is true of many agencies as well who use search marketing as a lead-in to offer other more lucrative services).

Today we’re launching Trada. And fundamentally changing the game in search marketing.

Trada has been working in stealth mode for the last 18 months to build a system that harnesses the power of a “crowd” of search experts to work on behalf of advertisers. The Trada system easily allows advertisers to upload campaign information and connect with hundreds of search experts. It’s not a referral site – the Trada experts work together, through the Trada platform, to create the broadest possible campaign for each advertiser. These experts get paid only for generating clicks and/or conversions for Trada advertisers (depending on whether a campaign is in pay per click or pay per action mode). We work in the middle to enable these campaigns and make our margin based on our search experts’ ability to beat your pre-determined CPC or CPA rates.

The company opened its system to a small group of advertisers in January 2009 as it worked out the specifics of the platform. Trada has served over 70 customers in that time period. The average campaign in the Trada system has over 100 ads (most proposed by Trada optimizers), 6,200 keywords and an average of more than 20 optimizers working on behalf of each advertiser. If you’re working in search marketing, these numbers blow you away. Advertisers can currently run campaigns – through a single Trada interface – on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

This company is near and dear to my heart, as I’ve been with CEO Niel Robertson and the rest of the Trada team from the very start of the business (and together with them am a co-founder of the company; read Niel’s post launching the company on the Trada blog). I’ve known Niel for almost 10 years now and one of our goals with Trada has been to step away from the traditional VC/CEO relationship. We’ve done that over the last 18 months of the business and developed an unusually close partnership – the initial result of which you see today. There’s a ton more to come with Trada. Stay tuned!

Learn more about the search revolution at www.trada.com.

This is a cross-post from our Foundry blog entry on our latest investment – in the microblogging company StockTwits. I’ve been working closely with Howard and Soren from the company as well as StockTwits investors Roger Ehrenberg and Tony Conrad as we’ve looked at the investment and worked on the financing. These guys are fantastic! For me it’s the chance to work with this team that’s the most exciting thing about today’s announcement. If you haven’t tried the service I’d encourage you to do so – there are links in the post below to grab the desktop client or directing you to the site. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Today StockTwits announced (release here) that it had raised a $3m Series B financing led by Foundry Group and returning investor True Ventures. For us, StockTwits represents a unique opportunity to leverage the increasingly active conversation taking place on (and off) the Twitter platform around stocks and markets. We’ve witnessed in other investments the power of 3^rd party networks to drive the scale and reach of new businesses and we believe StockTwits represents a huge opportunity to harness the Twitter community’s ongoing conversation around stocks and investing.
If you’ve ever tagged a tweet with the $ tag or tweeted a stock symbol using that tag you’ve participated in the StockTwits conversation. StockTwits uses the familiar Twitter microblogging format (140 characters) and allows users to seamlessly cross-post from and to their Twitter stream. Users can tag their Twitter posts with the $ tag to be picked up in StockTwits, use the StockTwits web interface or download the StockTwits desktop for even greater functionality (we’d highly recommend the desktop client – you can get it here if you don’t already have it). Below is a screenshot of the desktop client to give you a sense of what’s available. This view can be customized to follow specific tickers or topics as they’re mentioned. You can also see StockTwitsTV on the right half of the desktop – look for more programming as we roll out additional content in the coming months on the StockTwits Network.

But can stock advice really be offered in 140 characters or less? The answer is a resounding yes. There is a large and extremely active conversation taking place in StockTwits (to get a sense of it click over to the StockTwits site and watch the dataflow). And large trading organizations are taking notice. The NASDAQ recently released an iPhone application that features StockTwits data (see the screenshot to the left). Look for other StockTwits integrations to be announced soon as the company uses this new round of funding to accelerate its pace of development as well as its work with partners. You’ll also see the company releasing additional features in its desktop client and on its site as well as rolling out new data features and the ability for users to create custom data feeds from the StockTwits datastore.
Of course great investments require great people. And we couldn’t be more excited about working with StockTwits founders Howard Linzdon (whom we’ve known for years) and Soren Macbeth. We’re joining Roger Ehrenberg of IA Capital Partners and Tony Conrad of True Ventures in this investment – two experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists with whom we’re extremely pleased to be teaming up.
Look for more announcements about the company soon.

Lijit quietly released a very cool new widget for users of their service (that’s you, right?). The new Lijit Welcome Wijit greets site visitors who come to your site via a search term and gives them a relevant roadmap of your site as it relates to the search query that brought them there. It’s great for your site visitors who now have additional context for their interest in your content. It’s also great for publishers who can now create a more sticky experience for their users and expand the cross pollination of their content. From Greg Keller’s post on the Lijit blog, the Welcom Wijit is about:

• Welcoming new readers to your site when they’ve linked in from somewhere else…e.g. a search engine, blogroll that includes your site, etc. They land on your property and they get a true ‘greeting’ to say thanks for stopping by!
• Better content discovery: Readers landing on your site for the first time will have an initial experience right off the bat of mining your content. What is old to you is all new to your new readers! Welcome Wijit will help them find it easily.
• Tools tools tools for your readers: The Welcome Wijit by design is about improved loyalty and return visits. The Wijit offers features to quickly add your feed to RSS readers, My Yahoo and iGoogle home pages to ensure they have you earmarked for return visits.
• Pre-selected search results: When a reader is searching the web for something and they stumble upon your site, Welcome Wijit knows that search term and will provide a pre-selected list of the top 3 relevant items fitting that search on your blog, within your content and throughout your network…given them a true ‘feel’ of the Lijit search experience.
• Advertising opportunities: We’re committed to doing what we can to make you more money! Similar to your Search Engine Results Page advertising, Welcome Wijit provides Google Ads to ensure more relevant ads are seen and clicked through by your readers.

Below is an example from VC Adventure, which shows what you might see if you come to my blog after searching about how to get a job in venture capital:

You can see the Welcome Wijit under the main nav bar – set up with a welcome message, easy way to subscribe and a search box set to expand the search term the user arrived on to the entire blog. Readers can easily see my Lijit Network, view my RSS feed and search my site. The reader also has the option to expand the wijit view for even more information (the search is then populated with results from my blog and tabs to expand that to additional content I’ve generated elsewhere and my expanded network).

Installation is a breeze (it took me about 2 minutes) and can be done from your Lijit account (if you’re already using Lijit search there’s no new code to insert into your blog. Check out the Welcome Wijit page at Lijit for more info.