Jacoby, First Round back new Philly adtech startup, Circulate

Tom Paine

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Ari Jacoby / Circulate
(LinkedIn)

Solve Media, the Philadelphia/New York adtech company which revolutionized the use of the CAPTCHA by turning it into valuable advertising real estste, was acquired recently by Somerville, NJ-based Adiant , price so far unknown. But Solve's founder, Ari Jacoby, one who's truly earned the "serial entrepreneur" designation, had already started another venture, Circulate. Its website states: "Founded in the City of Brotherly Love, Circulate now has offices in Philadelphia & NYC." Its received funding from First Round Capital (according to FRC 's website), which also backed Solve and Jacoby's previous venture, VoiceStar.

Circulate describes itsef as "The World's First Data Supply Side Platform (DSSPP)". "Circulate helps publishers (Web and App), networks and SDK providers maximize their first-party data monetization strategies with one simple integration, on a privacy friendly basis. Circulate advances the science of targeting and media attribution by enabling industry partners to utilize match Data as a Service." Examples given include website onboarding and cross-device targeting. I don't pretend to completely understand all of this.

Circulate has been operating in an early startup stage for a while, snd Jacoby has been CEO since the middle of last year, aacording to his LinkedIn profile. Most of the founding team members came from Solve Media.

I reached out to Circulate for more information but have yet to receive a response.

Six Philly-area companies on Forbes' 'America's Most Promising Companies'

Tom Paine

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Forbes Magazine recently published a list of what it calls America's Most Promising Companies, its "third annual ranking of high-growth, privately-held companies with under $250 million in annual revenue."

Six Philly-area companies are among the 100 included:

CardCash (#14), East Windsor, NJ; Revenue: $56 million, Employees: 55. Resells giftcards online. Raised $6 million from Guggenheim Partners in November 2013.

SevOne (#33), Wilmington, DE; Revenue: $40 million, Employees: 256. Network monitoring software and appliances. Raised more than $150 million from Bain Capital and Osage Ventures.

Petplan (#46), Philadelphia; Revenue: $53 million, Employees: 105. Sells veterinary insurance to pet owners. Raised $2.6 million from angel investors in 2008. Vernon Hill, founder and former CEO of Commerce Bank, serves as the company’s Chairman.

Solve Media (#48), New York/Philadelphia; Revenue: $13 million, Employees: 42. Replaces
"CAPTCHAs" with advertising slogans. Has raised $16.7 million from First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures and others.

Prepay Nation (#52), Berwyn; Revenue: $110 million, Employees: 10. Helps immigrants and expats transfer small amounts of money across international borders via mobile phones.

LiquidHub (#67), Wayne; Revenue: $115 million, Employees: 1400. IT consulting company that helps clients with systems integration. Has raised $22 million from PPM American Capital Partners, New Spring Capital and Credit Suisse, among others.

Forbes, in discussing its selection process, says "The final assessment is based on growth (both in sales and hiring), quality of management team and investors, margins, market size and key partnerships. Then we spoke to each company to make sure we didn’t miss anything."

Any ranking of private companies, without a definitive market-derived value, is going to involve a certain degree of subjectivity.

I don't know much about CardCash or Prepay Nation. I would guess that they do considerable outsourcing to achieve so much revenue with so few employees.

Daily Links 7/5/2013: Solve Media raises another $6 million; PA legislature passes $75M tech-funding program

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Solve Media Raises $6 Million to Continue to Transform CAPTCHAs Into Ads (All Things D)
First Round Capital participated again in latest round in the New York/Philly-based startup. CEO Ari Jacoby recently said that Solve would do $13 to $16 million in revenue this year.

PA legislature passes $75M tech-funding program (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Silver Lake Abandons Hulu Purchase Effort, as Final Bidding Deadline Arrives Today (All Things D)

Dell: Bloomberg Reports CEO Dell Won’t Increase $13.65 LBO Offer (Barron': Tech Trader Daily)

Verizon pursues all-wireless phone service in seaside N.Y. town
(Washington Post)

Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG
AG thinks Verizon should be fined $100,000 per day for pushing wireless plans. (Ars Technica)

BuLogics Returns to Philadelphia, Continues to Recruit Software Developers (BuLogics Press Release)




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Daily Links 6/24/2013: Oracle, Microsoft meet in the cloud

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Suite revenge
Rutledge a ‘Charter’ member of move to merge (Claire Atkinson/New York Post)

Vodafone in $10.1 Billion Deal for German Cable Giant Kabel Deutschland (Hollywood Reporter)

Oracle databases head to Microsoft's Hyper-V, Azure (ZDNet)

Microsoft Joins Oracle in Cloud-Computing, Rivalry Thaws (Bloomberg)


Solve Media Launches Effective Mobile Advertising Platform That Delivers Measurable Results Across All Screens (Business Wire)
Could be significant expansion of product line; Solve also entering EMEA market.

Greenphire and Oracle Work Together to Automate Clinical Trial Planning, Budgeting and Payments (Applied Clinical Trials)

New Cloud-Based Investigator Portal from Veeva Systems Speeds Clinical Study Start-Up
Single source for sponsor, CRO and investigator collaboration (PR Newswire)



Fab.com’s Ascent to $1 Billion Valuation Brings Missteps (Bloomberg)

Zeebox Gets Personal with Digitalsmiths
Digitlasmiths Brings Video Discovery to the Zeebox TV Companion App (Multichannel
News)

US tech firms look abroad for engineers (BBC News)

AgileSwitch helps lead digital energy revolution (Philadelphia Daily News)

Clear Align Acquires irZoom, Computer Optics, and Hudson Machining (PR Newswire)



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Daily Links 6/17/2013: Comcast Ventures in Fullscreen investment

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To keep Comcast case alive, lawyers propose a smaller class (Reuters)

Is cable holding back superfast broadband adoption on purpose? (CNET News)

CORPORATE SPEAK: Comcast Ventures Strategy Apparent in Fullscreen Deal (Wall Street Journal: Venture Capital Dispatch)

America's Leading Metros for Venture Capital (The Atlantic
Cities)


CAPTCHA Ad Startup Solve Media Says 2013 Revenue’s On-Track For $13M-$16M, Should Reach 4B Engagements (TechCrunch)

Cloud customer win chatter escalates: Wooing Workday (ZDNet)

SAP Survey Shows Insurance Executives Target Integrated Platform for Core Systems Modernization (PR Newswire)



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Daily Links 1/30/2013: PE firm to acquire Newtown-based BioClinica for $123 million, along with NJ firm

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JLL Partners to Acquire BioClinica and CoreLab Partners
Transaction to Create an Industry Leading Provider of Medical Imaging and eClinical Solutions for Clinical Trials (Business Wire)

Drexel U. to launch entrepreneurship school with gift from Close Foundation (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Ticketmaster Launches New, Innovative CAPTCHA Solutions, Making The Fan Experience Better (PR Newswire)
Partners with Solve Media, which is based in New York and Philly.

Unisys watches ClearPath mainframe sales climb
Plans to build a channel, push Windows and Linux (The Register)

How Dell Computer's Philly-born president learned to sell (Philly.com: Philly Deals)


Salesforce.com 'aggressively investigating' database error
Salesforce.com has long used Oracle under the hood, but is also embracing other database technologies (Infoworld)

Oracle Has Big Plans To Beat Salesforce And Amazon In A $72 Billion Market (SAI: Enterprise)



Amazon Makes Murmurs About Its Video Business (All Things D)

Comcast Business Services Offers Hotel Industry an All-in-One Communications Suite (Business Wire)



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First Round Capital Portfolio job board: Interesting Reading

Tom Paine

First Round Capital's job board, covering all of its 130+ portfolio companies, makes for interesting reading, and not only for job hunters. It currently shows about 1,000 open positions. It can tell you a great deal about the developments taking place within some of the most interesting web/mobile startups, and the directions they may be going in.

For example, San Francisco-based social recommendation and sharing engine StumbleUpon, which historically has been a fairly small operation, shows 32 open positions, most of them in San Francisco. First Round Capital was an early investor in StumbleUpon, which started life in Alberta. It was acquired by eBay in 2007, an experience that didn't work out too well, and it was reacquired by an investor group that included the founders and FRC in 2009. Recently StumbleUpon has experienced accelerating growth and increasing monetization.

Conshohocken-based ecommerce software vendor Monetate has 12 open positions listed, 11 of them in Conshohocken.

Other FRC portfolio companies with Philly area openings listed include Curalate (one in Philadelphia), Solve Media (one in Philadelphia), PackLate (one in Conshohocken), Relay Network (two in Radnor), Lifeshield Security (one in Yardley), OpenX, which has a King of Prussia presence through its acquisition of LiftDNA early this year (two), and one position with New York-based Warby Parker in Philadelphia. Warby Parker is looking for 19 people in total, according to the job board.

A startup named PerformLine, which has its headquarters in Morristown, NJ and provides online advertising compliance services, has two openings. New York-based Fab.com, which apparently has warehouse & fulfillment operations in Edison, NJ, lists several openings there.



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Daily Links 6/5/2012: Invite Media founder Nat Turner leaving Google, eyes healthcare IT startup

Comcast shareholders approve proposal to dump ‘poison-pill’ defense
(Philadelphia Inquirer)

Google Fiber GFHD100 'IP set-top box' breezes through the FCC, doesn't say where it's headed (Engadget)

Forget the CDN players, Netflix is caching its own video (Gigaom)

After Selling A Startup To Google For $81 Million, 26-Year-Old Nat Turner Now Wants To Solve Healthcare (Silicon Alley Insider)


Dell's Boomi adds crowd sourced regression testing in latest update (ZDNet Blogs)

Oracle Buys Collective Intellect for 'social Intelligence' Tools (PC World)

Social Climbers: Salesforce.com, Oracle…SAP? (Wall Street Journal: Overheard)

There's Something About Larry
Oracle badly needs to articulate a customer-centric vision. The cloud seems like a great place to start--and here's what Larry Ellison should say. (Information Week)

Solve Media Launches Brand-Research Tool Disguised as a Captcha (Ad Age)



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First Round Capital Roundup 4/13/2012

Tom Paine

First Round Capital has been a very lean firm in terms of overhead as it has grown its portfolio to some 120+ companies (according to its website). But recently it has taken some steps towards adding more support infrastucture. Early this month First Round announced the addition of Jack Leidlein, previously Head of Business Operations & Recruiting at Scribd, as Head of Talent. Late last year FRC added Cece Cheng, a Princeton grad whose background is mostly in PR and corporate communication, as an Associate. Other staff (excluding Partners or Principals) are Brett Berson, who was recently promoted to VP of Platform, and CFO Jeff Donnon, who goes back with Josh Kopelman to Half.com. I'm sure there must be some other support staff, but don' know how many or where they are located. I believe Berson and Donnon are based out of Conshohocken, but Cheng is based in San Francisco and Leidlein will split time between New York and San Francisco.

To what extent FRC may add additional centralized support resources is unknown. As a seed stage investor, First Round's assets under management are still relatively small (a few hundred million as opposed to $1 billion plus), and it is difficult to support the type of overhead some larger venture firms are developing.

Chances that FRC might move from Conshohocken to Philadelphia (in a job ad earlier this year caught by Technically Philly the firm said it was considering such a move) could get a boost if Mayor Nutter signs a bill recently passed by City Council 16 to 1 exempting investment funds and their general partners from the city's 6.5 percent business tax on profits. The Inquirer reported early this month that Mayor Nutter was "leaning toward" signing the bill.

Josh Kopelman took an active role in publicly supporting the JOBS Act, which in an amazing event for this day and age was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President on April 5.

Portfolio company Monetate lists 18 open positions on FRC's job board, about 7 of which appear engineering-oriented. The Conshohocken-based eCommerce software firm recieved seed funding and a follow on round led by FRC and later a much larger round lead by Boston's OpenView Venture Partners.

FRC is moving to larger quarters in the same building on Union Square in New York, so it is offering a sublease on its old 3,000 square foot office on 200 Park Avenue South.

FRC is one of many (big name seed and angel) investors in mobile development startup Cabana, which has just launched a product called Fan Page Mobilizer aimed at bringing small businesses' Facebook fan pages to smartphones. The goal is to provide an easy to use tool that non-technical small business users can set up by themselves. Cabana is based in San Francisco.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that New York-based Fab continues to do very well since its pivot and relaunch last June. The FRC-backed fashion-oriented site now has a $100 milion annual run rate and 225 employees.

Forbes has a piece on New York-based SinglePlatform, which as its name implies provides one platform from which a small business can manage its content across all of its social media sites. Sales are expected to grow from $2 million last year to $15 million in 2012.

LA-based DogVacay raised $1 million led by FRC to address a need any dog owner can relate to: it matches people seeking a nice environment for their dog to stay while they're away with qualified people willing to take in and care for the dogs in their own homes. And Yummly, a recipe site with an emphasis on eating healthy, came back for a second helping of funding ($6 miilion) from a prestigious investor group, including Unilever. FRC was a return investor. Co-founders David Feller and Vadim Geshel are both veterans of Half.com who moved to California (where Yummly is based) after its acquisition by eBay.

I wrote about myYearbook (in which FRC was an early investor) and its now parent company Quepasa's decision to rebrand as MeetMe. They reportedly paid a good deal of money for the rights to the Meet.me domain name. I also covered Solve Media's intoduction of its CAPTCHA-like offering for opting out of pre-roll video ads, and got some info on the size of Solve's current presence in Philly.



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Highlights: Last week on Philly Tech News (3/5/2012 to 3/11/2012)

I reported on Bentley Systems' 2nd annual corporate update conference call; growth seems to be picking up again and the main message I took away from the call was the emphasis on China.

I wrote about Philly & New York-based Solve Media's effort to expand its CAPTCHA branding business to pre-roll advertisements for online videos.

Netflix is looking for cable operators to partner with, but Comcast quickly said it wasn't going to play that game.

The FCC signaled that it wasn't going to give Verizon Wireless and several cable operators a quick pass on their proposed spectrum sale and marketing joint venture, requesting more (unredacted) information from all parties involved.

Fortune Magazine profiled Comcast's strategy for its NBC Sports Group to double down on sports.

The New York Post broke a story that Google was looking to unload Motorola Mobility's Horsham-based set-top box business even before the acquisition was completed. Although there has been no confirmation, many industry observers would not be surprised if it were true.

PE Hub reported on SAP Ventures' plans for its next fund. SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said in an interview at CeBIT that collaboration software would be the company's next product category to expand in; that doesn't necessarily require an acquisition but nonetheless his comments got the rumor mills going again. SAP also rolled out at CeBIT what it referred to as a multitenant Cloud version of its Business One ERP suite for smaller enterprises, although some analysts questioned whether it was a true multitenancy architecture.

Exton-based Scala introduced several new offerings at Digital Signage Expo 2012, including what it calls CxO Board, a digital display scoreboard that enterprise managers can use to monitor key performance metrics.

Fisker, with its plans to produce autos in Delaware delayed, had a Karma it delivered to Consumer Reports break down almost immediately on the testing grounds.

And a somewhat altered group now said to be headed by Lewis Katz and Gerry Lenfest apparently has exclusive rights to bargain for Philadelphia Media Network; Ed Rendell's position in the group is not clear at this time.

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Daily Links 1/4/2012: CloudMine, ElectNext and SnipSnap are chosen for Project Liberty incubator

Why Enterprise Software Will Never Be the Same (PC World)

Ben Franklin Announces Project Liberty Digital Incubator Inaugural Class (Ben
Franklin Technology Partners Press Release)
CloudMine, ElectNext and SnipSnap are chosen.

Disney and Comcast Link Up for Another 10 Years (All Things Digital)

Comcast, Disney Reach Major Carriage Deal
UPDATED: ESPN available online to Xfinity subscribers (Broadcasting & Cable)


Amazon staffs up for new digital media service effort (Gigaom)

MetroPCS Launching Live Mobile TV Service Later This Year (TechCrunch)

TiVo shares soar after AT&T settlement (AP via CBS News)

Roku Streaming Stick delivers TV apps in a flash drive package (VentureBeat)

Solve Media Now Works With 3,000 Publishers And It's Closing In On A ~ $6 Million Series B Round (Silicon Alley Insider)
Solve Media was started in Philadelphia and backed by First Round Capital; moved to New York but still has office in Philly.

Echo Therapeutics Announces $3.6 Million Warrant Exercises (PR Newswire)

Independence Blue Cross gears up to launch mobile apps (Mobile Health News)

Shell completes transition of SAP-based HR application services to Accenture
(Computerworld UK)

Infor shows strong growth (ZDNet Blogs)



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Daily Links 10/11/2010: Comcast officially unveils WiFi Hotspots for Xfinity users

Comcast Launches Xfinity WiFi in Areas of Greater Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware
Thousands of Hotspots in Parks, Train Stations and Shopping Districts Accessible to Xfinity Internet Customers for No Additional Cost (Business Wire)
Comcast Cuts The Cable, Rolls Out 2,000 Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspots (Gigaom)

Google TV Guns for Cable Deals (Light Reading Cable)

Microsoft, Comcast, Yahoo: no zombie cookies here, Congress! (Ars Technica)

Inside The M&A East Conference (The Bulletin)

HP Chairman Lane Smacks Back at NYT’s Nocera: The Poison Pen Letter! (All Things Digital: BoomTown)

SAP TechEd to Go Deep on Mobility, On-demand (PC World)

Travel advertisers use CAPTCHA for branded type-ins (Tnooz)

About.com Founder Scott Kurnit Launches Huge New Startup Called "AdKeeper" (Silicon Alley Insider)
First Round Capital's latest ad tech investment.


Epic, Cerner Dominated CIS In 2009 (Information Week)

Pepperjam Launches More Than 160 Affiliate Programs, Including BJ’s Wholesale Club
GSI Commerce performance marketing network continues to expand client portfolio (Business Wire)

XTel Communications serves up wholesale Ethernet service suite
(FierceTelecom)




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