Tom Paine
Subscribe in a reader35 more jobs in jeopardy at papers, website (Philadelphia Daily News)
NJTechWeekly.com recently interviewed Dr. Jared Scherz, founder of ufeud.com, a new social networking website that promotes constructive debate using some innovative technology. What separates ufeud.com from other social networking sites is its ability to obtain measured feedback. The company says it takes social networking to the next level by offering formulated analysis and interpretation of social -interaction behaviors.
UFeud LLC came to our attention last month, at the Posters, Pitches and Prizes event sponsored by the New Jersey Entrepreneurial Network (NJEN) at Princeton University, where the Mount Laurel-based company exhibited for the first time. Until recently, the 4-year-old company was funded by founder Scherz, a clinical psychologist who operates a South Jersey wellness clinic, with additional funds provided by colleagues and friends. Now, however, the company is in negotiations with an angel investor for $100,000 to take UFeud to the next level.
That next level includes a patent for which the company has applied, on commenting, scoring and extrapolating technology for use with videos. UFeud’s ultimate business goal: social media television. The company would like to make the television- and video-viewing experience simultaneous with social networking.
Scherz admits that as a clinical psychologist with no previous technology background, he is an unlikely tech company CEO. His interest in resolving conflict resolution is what drove him to seek out technology that would help people deal with differences, and once the idea took root, the company evolved. Scherz is the author of several books, including one on school violence.
How did the idea for your startup come about?
I was growing increasingly concerned about the way we deal with conflict, both interpersonally and globally. As part of my experience as a psychologist, I continually envisioned ways of facilitating deeper and more sustainable world peace. I stayed up at night envisioning how to have an impact on the way people deal with differences—how to make it more constructive and unifying. My urgency in wanting younger generations to learn conflict resolution and constructive differencing led me to the idea of creating a website based on the theme of exploring differences. I believed I could bring people together by creating a fun, interesting medium familiar to the younger generation while simultaneously offering something substantial for the established older generation.
Who else was involved in the beginning?
I partnered with several people along the way, including my closest friend, Ron Budhi, who helped bring the idea into focus, and John Roskoph, who helped bring it to fruition. Ryan Speakman was one of the most exciting additions to the team. He had been building websites for others for years and turned down many offers to work for sweat equity. His exuberance and willingness to join our project brought a renewed energy that has carried us to where we are today.
Once the idea was set, what came next?
While we were working on completing our first version to launch for beta testing, we came up with an idea. Instead of trying to bring the masses to our site, we thought of a way to bring our site to them. The invention of the uframe allowed our site to be the first social media debate platform that can be integrated into other sites with the push of a button.
Uframes are portals that can be placed on any blog or website in a matter of minutes. They transform blogs and websites into mini social media platforms. With video embedding, email notification, Facebook and Twitter integration and many other features, site owners can select or create any debate topic they want for their site. It’s free, and the same uframe can be placed on an unlimited number of sites, allowing for data syndication and grassroots polling. Being able to self-publish uframes to your own blog or website is very new to the Internet.
With creative energy flowing, our next discovery came quickly: a way for social media to center on video. While YouTube is a rather static site for viewing videos, our uscore tool now makes streaming media the focus of networking. We are currently undergoing patent protection, so I’m limited in what I can share at this point. In short, it will be a first in the technology world, valued by everybody from the entertainment industry to politicians. It’s this technology that has brought investors to us instead of the other way around.
What technology challenges did you face in the past and now?
One of our challenges was integrating different programming languages into all our tools, allowing them to be standalones but also to function in unison. With programming occurring in different states in the U.S. and even in China, we had to overcome some problems including the firewall protection that keeps Chinese citizens insulated.
The greatest challenge was thinking through the application flow and how all the pieces connect with one another. It was also difficult to try to anticipate what the user experience should be and how users would want to interact with the application. You really just have to build an application you hope the majority of users can benefit from. There were also issues related to scaling the application. I think we are there and have solved these issues, all while providing users a unique, interactive experience they would have a difficult time finding anywhere else.
Bootstrapping isn’t easy. How did you initially finance the startup?
Early on the funding came from my personal investment. Feeding money into the project during that first year was a strain, but it was too early to consider revenue streams or investing. Once the project took shape, we approached people in our professional circle to see who was in a position to help out, and we found our first investor. A cardiologist and his physician wife were looking for a project to get involved with, and we quickly got funded. From that point we continued to infuse the company with personal investment until we located our next investor, who was also part of our circle. We’ve taken on a good bit of investment and we are potentially going to cap it soon, because we have more than enough money to last us a while. However, we are in negotiations with an angel investor who is talking about giving us another $100,000.
Did you pitch for money?
We have yet to make any formal pitches to professional investors. In fact, we haven’t finalized any of our marketing material because our technology seems to be advancing so quickly. We have talked with people at some of the major conferences, such as Streaming Media and BlogWorld, about presenting, but we haven’t yet put anything in final form. We have looked at a high-tech small-business incubator and recently met people through the Princeton poster event, but we have grown rather organically up to this point.
How will UFeud make money?
We have quite a few revenue streams. I think the mistake many websites make these days is they rely on too few sources, including advertising, which has really dried up over the past couple of years. One thing we are doing is producing statistics through the complex algorithms we’ve generated, so individuals, organizations and companies can find data. For instance, if politicians want to know how their constituencies are polling on a particular issue, we can provide advanced statistics. If a company is putting out a new product, a film’s pilot is debuting or there is a new TV show, we can give people some pretty interesting numbers on how that item is polling, and that will be a revenue stream.
Data mining is pretty common these days. We are amassing data, which is always a bit of a gray area because you want to protect people’s privacy. At the same time, though, you are gathering information that has value out there, especially using some hybrid technology we are creating around profiling people.
We will be selling the uscore technology and licensing it to the film industry and politicians. We’d also like to do some data syndication, so if people produce really interesting debates, and those debates become popular with uframes, we can provide financial incentives to those people to distribute them. Let’s say someone well known—for example, a local talk show host—puts a uframe on his site with a debate he created, and now 50 other people want that uframe. He’ll be able to sublease that and generate revenue for himself as well as income for the company.
What is happening with UFeud LLC right now?
We are just coming out of beta testing for both our social networking website and uframe technology. The majority of the bugs have been worked out, and we are planning a full-scale launch this year. We plan to provide our uframe technology for free to everyday users for the next year while we build our brand.
A second version of uframe is being developed—adding more features, greater customization for users and a sleeker design—which we will make available for a nominal cost. We are working with other countries right now to incorporate uframe technology into their entertainment industries.
Scalability is the key to our success. We are readying ourselves to grow rapidly. We have been invited to present to members of the film industry and are having initial conversations with media conglomerates about our ability to integrate into cable television. We also have affiliates in five different countries planning launches of our technology.
Every startup has trusted advisors who helped it along the way. Who are yours?
One of our team members, Jura Zibas, is an intellectual-property attorney in New York. We pitched to her four years ago, when we first came up with the idea. She was willing to help us out for a minimum investment. However, we used the Philadelphia law offices of Blank Rome to draw up the actual patent application. Our accountant is the Moorestown firm Boscarelli & Zaiss. Richard Zaiss helped us at the beginning and never charged us a cent.
What’s next for the company?
What we’d like to do is focus our energies on the uscore technology. Because it’s so novel and the Internet is changing so quickly, it will only be a matter of time before someone else comes up with this idea. Uframe technology is going to be self-supporting and doesn’t require a lot of work at this point, and we’d like to popularize it by giving it away for free. We can let that go on its own while we put our time into sales and marketing. Our next meetings will be with the film industry, the auto industry and a television station. All three have expressed some interest in our products.
We are also ready to introduce uframes to education here in the States, believing that high schools and colleges can easily integrate this technology into their curricula. For example, high schools could put up a uframe with a live feed of a presidential debate, allowing students from all over the country to debate right alongside the candidates.
Schools could insert uframes into their social studies lessons to watch a historic speech by Martin Luther King Jr. This tool will help students learn how to make powerful arguments and support their ideas with convincing data.
The potential exists for reducing stereotyping and prejudice through global debates among kids from classrooms in different countries. Students could gain confidence through public speaking using the uframe video option. They could develop an understanding of the polling and election process, and learn conflict resolution through positive peer influence.
Our “smart” technology is also being readied for our social networking site, to be released later this year. This allows for real-time feedback to users about their debate profile, which is completely automated. While other large websites use profiling to become better platforms for advertisers, we are using this advanced technology to help people learn.
Social media television is our ultimate business goal. We would like to make the television- and video-viewing experience simultaneous with social networking, so users can combine the experiences of watching TV and interacting with friends. While I can’t give away too much just yet, we are very excited about the possibilities.
Real estate decisions (leases, expansions, new buildings or offices) are often a good indicator of what's happening within a company or industry. This periodic Philly Tech News feature is a roundup of recent facilities news involving Philly area tech firms.
Newtown, Bucks County-based Steel ORCA is said to be ready to break ground on a huge (700,000 square foot) data center in Fairless Hills. The colocation facility, which is expected to open early next year, is already looking for tenants. Located on the former U.S. Steel Fairless Works factory site, the plant will cost about $750 million at buildout, Steel ORCA says. Financed through equity investments, debt, and investments by some hardware and software vendors, the property is in a Keystone Opportunity Zone that provides some state and local tax breaks.
By comparison, Apple's new data center in North Carolina contains 500,000 square feet (although that may not exactly be apples to apples, no pun intended).
MayoSeitz Media has moved its headquarters to a new business complex, Arborcrest, adjacent to Unisys in Blue Bell, PA. "We simply outgrew our space and the move to new offices afforded us the opportunity for additional technology, space and areas for collaboration”, said Ray Mayo, Co-Founder and Managing Director in a statement. At the same time, MayoSeitz is upgrading its branding, including its graphics, logo, and website. MayoSeitz Media says it is one of the leading independent media agencies in the United States.
King of Prussia-based Devon IT, a leading maker of thin client computing devices and software, is opening a new office in Shanghai to support sales and meet what it says is "growing demand from (its partner) Dell for thin clients and virtual desktops in the region". Dell sells Devon IT products and Devon IT develops products that support Dell's Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DDVS).
Two Pennsylvania-based VC firms will open New Jersey offices after receiving LP investments from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA). The EDA voted to invest $3 million in Osage Venture Partners III and $2 million in NextStage Capital II. NextStage expects to lease space in the Rutgers-Camden Business Incubator at the EDA’s Waterfront Technology Center at Camden, and Osage plans to establish a new office in Branchburg.
Malvern-based ad agency Stream Cos. will open a new office in Old City Philadelphia. The agency, which has 55 employees in Malvern, will have four employees in the Philly office, which will be headed by Bob Weissman.
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Tom Paine
Tom Paine
By most accounts, the digital signage industry is booming as new technologies provide reduced costs and increased capabilities, and new vertical markets for digital displays open up. And Exton-based Scala, a leading player on the software side of the business, had a huge presence at Digital Signage Expo 2012 in Las Vegas earlier this month and made significant new product announcements.
One announcement was the release of Scala's Leading Indicators CxO Board, a digital dashboard designed for enterprise managers to track key organizational metrics, in real time when such data are available. Although CxO Board is said by the company to be available for numerous CRM/ERP platforms, the only one that Scala specifically mentions right now is Salesforce.com. I asked Scala CEO Tom Nix in a phone interview if Scala had any specific relationship with Salesforce on the CXO Board product, and he declined comment on that.
CxO Board consists of three software components: CxO Designer, which enables displays to be built from a series of dashboards created using graphical widgets; CxO Data Connector, which automatically connects customer data from Salesforce.com and other sources to the widgets for display; and CxO Player, which manages display of the complete presentation of widgets on a network of digital signage displays.
CxO Board seems somewhat similar in concept to software being offered by West Chester-based startup Hoopla Software, Inc., which I profiled earlier this year, and is also focused intially on the Salesforce user base. Hoopla, however, is very specifically geared towards goal measurement and motivation for sales and customer service teams, while Scala's language implies that CxO Board is targeted towards higher level executives.
I asked Nix what Scala's go to market strategy would be for what appears to be essentially a new channel for it. But he disputed that premise, saying that Scala is well established in the enterprise market and already has been involved in some CxO Board-like installations, and that what it is doing now is creating a formalized product architecture for that application.
In Las Vegas, Scala also introduced Scala Advanced Analytics, a cloud computing-based predictive analytics application for retailers. Scala says Scala Advanced Analytics "transforms market data and live third-party data streams into marketing messages that positively impact buying behavior". It can analyze massive amounts of data to determine what specific messages to deliver at specific times to shoppers via digital displays, based on predictive analytics-based projections for otimizing store performace or achieving other important goals. Scala says its Advanced Analytics offering is best suited for multi-site retailers with large numbers of SKU’s and point-of-sale data.
Scala does have a partner on the predictive modeling side, though Nix declined to identify who it was. He did say it was a proven application that had been around for a while. Although the SaaS solution is off the shelf, data customization can take considerable effort within an organization.
Scala also announced the release of a new version of it flagship digital signage software (Scala 5, Release 6). The new version is said to offer significant visual enhancements, better dynamic content management, new video and streaming options, and improved IT management capabilities.
More new product announcements are reported to be in the pipeline at Scala.
When asked how the first quarter was going for Scala, Nix said growth was probably stronger than it had ever been. Retail and Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) were probably the fastest growing market segments. Europe was holding up fairly well, he said (something I've heard from others recently), and Asia remains an enormous opportunity.
While Scala faces considerable competition on the software side and has its own challenges, it is in an envious strategic position. There is a crush of hardware vendors trying to get their products to customers, and Scala has leverage since it has a stable, proven software platform and the channel partners to reach them.
Related posts:
Exton-based Scala names Tom Nix new CEO; big opportunities in large global market
Exton-based Scala sees 20% growth in 2011, fine tunes leadership team for future growth
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Oracle: Hardware business decelerates, cloud combat coming into view (ZDNet Blogs)
Oracle defies gravity, not out of the woods yet (Dennis Howlett/ZDNet Bloogs)
Ellison on SAP's database plan: "They must be on drugs" (Bloomberg via Times of India)
Verizon to the Cable Industry: Let’s Be Friends (Susan P. Crawford/Bloomberg)
Susan P. Crawford, a law professor and Bloomberg columnist, served as President Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.
Comcast, Verizon Say They’re Itching to Fight Google, Apple (Peter Kafka/All Things D)
Verizon, Comcast Clash With Opponents Over Cable Spectrum Deal (PC Magazine)
Global Deal: QVC Expands in China Through Joint Venture (Wall Street Journal: Deal Journal India)
The JOBS Act Can Rebalance Risks and Rewards for Emerging Growth Companies, Investors (Jon Callaghan, Jeff Clavier, Josh Kopelman and Jason Mendelson/PE Hub)
Boston's OpenView Venture Partners closes 3rd VC fund at $200M (Boston Business Journal)
OpenView made major investments last year in Philly area startups Monetate, NextDocs and Xtium.
Comcast, Liberty Global Lead $11M Round In Ad Startup Integrate
Company's Solution Designed to Track Ad Impressions Across Multiple Platforms (Multichannel News)
Medidata Gains Raves on Wall Street for Drug Development Tools (Xconomy New York)
Article cites importance of Medidata's 2008 acquisition of Conshohocken-based Fast Track Systems.
CRF Health Announces Record Breaking Revenue and Earnings Growth in 2011 (Business Wire)
Tom Paine
Sqoot , a 2010 (Philly) DreamIt Ventures daily deals aggregating startup now based in Chicago and New York, raised a furor on the web today because of a sexist joke attributed to the company that appeared on an Eventbrite listing for an upcoming Boston hackathon it had organized. 
The comment, which has since been removed and for which Sqoot has profusely apologized for, created a firestorm on the web and led many hackathon sponsors to withdraw, including Philly-based CloudMine (see twitter post) .
Shows the need to have a policy for checking social media postings, or at least make sure you are comfortable with who is authorized to post for you.
More on this from BostInno .
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Calgary-based SMART Technologies, Inc., a leader in the interactive whiteboard market, used the Microsoft Technology Center in Malvern to announce yesterday it had become a Global Technology Partner in the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) Alliances Program, and would be installing its products in all 11 U.S. centers by the end of 2012, beginning with Malvern. It already has installations at several MTC locations internationally.
Each center will have a variety of SMART products, including interactive whiteboards, interactive displays, interactive pen displays, SMART Meeting Pro™ software and Bridgit® conferencing software. Chuck McCann, Director, Worldwide MTC Alliance Program, in a statement cited reduced travel expenses and increased collaboration as being among the benefits gained from using SMART Technologies products.
The event featured a presentation by Bill Emmert, Technical Director/Technology Architect, Microsoft
Technology Center, and John Friscia of SMART Technologies, and a tour of the facilities. During the tour, a SMART spokesperson tells me, Emmert commented that people within the Center fight for the rooms with SMART Boards because they enjoy using the product, it wows customers, and is much more efficient than the regular white erase board because they can save files on a USB and send customers off with it.
SMART says it has the leading share in the interactive whiteboard market in the US. It becomes one of 11 Global Technology Partners in the MTC Alliances Program.
MTC describes its purpose as providing environments and state of the art technology tools to enable world class learning and development experiences. The Malvern, Pennsylvania center opened in March of last year.
SMART Technologies' press release.
