NYC

A new NY-based startup launched today in beta named GigaShift. Gigashift is a file-sharing service which notes several areas that they believe give Gigashift a competitive advantage over the other 9 million file sharing services on the market. These advantages include: your file recipient can begin downloading while you are still uploading the file, all files are encrypted, pause/resume functionality, and the ability to upload a 10gig file in one upload.

The service uses a simple Java applet which provides pricing once you select the files to upload. Up to 200mb is free, and then the pricing model kicks in. I tested a 3 gb file and the price was $3.50 for 7 days of storage and 3 free downloads. There are options to increase the storage to 30 days for 75 cents and the number of downloads can be increased up to 10 - 5 downloads are $7.

Gigashift appears to compete directly with other popular file sharing services including YouSendIt and Rapidshare. Gigashift files can be secured with a password and you need the unique id for each file to download it.

For Gigashift to be successful, they clearly need paying customers. Will the average file sharer want to pay? I'd target agencies who need to share files between offices and clients. Gigashift will also need to pound the pavement to get traction and make sure they clearly communicate their market differentiation - otherwise they will just be lumped in as "yet another file sharing service".

NY-based video sharing service Vimeo has announced the launch of Vimeo Plus today. Vimeo Plus is a paid service that offers additional benefits over the free service. NewTeeVee has a good overview of all of the features of Vimeo Plus which include: $59.95/yr, no ads, more uploads per week, priority uploading and some HD features.

Rick Turoczy at RWW wonders if Vimeo can convert their loyal users into paying customers. He points to Flickr as an example although he says that $60/yr is "nominal" - I'd say up to $30 is nominal, over that is a much bigger buying decision. I do think this is an excellent test for the overall industry.

Viddler has introduced a number of new features that they could have charged a small amount for.

I hope Vimeo has included a Plus badge - I still believe that there is a social factor with badges - you don't want to be the only one in your circle without the Flickr Pro badge.

I came across a NYC startup today courtesy Charlie O'Donnell named Homethinking. Charlie describes the site as, "Homethinking...in the real estate sector whose DNA lies in data--turning vast amounts of public data on housing sales, real estate agents and demographics on its head to empower buyers and sellers. For example, you can lookup the sales record of that agent who keeps pestering you to keep them in mind when you're ready to sell."

While I haven't been through the home buying process in NYC yet, it would certainly be nice if they expanded the service to apartment rental agents. The process is such crap here and a decent percentage of the agents I've dealt with have no training, education or experience. I considered starting a service where people could easily rate apartment rental agents but if Homethinking could add it, that'd be great.

Browsing the service I don't see any actual reviews listed on any of the agents in a variety of locations I tested. Also nearly every option pushes you to a contact form which gets sent to the agent. If you click a home listing, why don't they show the listing before you contact?

Their business model appears to be based on featured search results for realtors. Certain results show up first and in red - I assume these are the paid results since there is no specific wording.

Homethinking added a new feature this week that helps you find a neighborhood just like yours. Let's say you live in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and need to move to San Francisco for a job. Homethinking can tell you which neighborhoods match up in terms of people, lifestyle, culture, etc. Lifehacker has some examples of this new feature in action.

NYC online video studio For Your Imagination announced this week that they have raised a bridge capital round of financing from OmniReliant Holdings. The amound of the financing was not disclosed. OmniReliant gets an equity interest in For Your Imagination. OmniReliant focuses on direct reponse marketing.

For Your Imagination previously raised $1.3 million in seed funding. Co-founder and CEO Paul Kontonis noted, "The round will provide the company with working capital to continue to deliver a high-quality of service before we complete our Series A round."

For Your Imagination was one of the companies we covered in our NY online video review.

Last weekend Mike Arrington wrote that people who blog are basically automatically associated with the companies they work for even if it the content is on their own personal blog. While I disagree overall with his view, I do believe there is one group of people to whom the association does apply. That group are CEOs, more specifically startup CEOs. I've written and spoken for a long time about how tools like blogs and now Twitter will ruin careers because they make it so easy to say something you regret a moment later. With today's Internet services, a moment is all that's needed to wish you could DVR back and change what was said.

I've noticed a number of startup CEOs making comments that are just out of line either about a person, a group of people, a subject, etc. I'd like to share two of the most recent comments that have been pointed towards me in the hopes that if you are a startup CEO, you will pick up some tips on things not to do. Remember, whatever you say today, will follow you forever. Think before you hit the update button.

Last week I posted a column looking at the NY Tech Meetup and what it takes to present. I used iminlikewithyou CEO Charles Forman as my example because he was one of the evening's presenters who was able to present multiple times and was able to use slides when that's not allowed for others. I don't know Charles, the only interaction we've had was saying hello at the meetup. Charles sent me an email after my post requesting that I post his video because he wanted to see it. I obliged and posted the video for him to use an hour later.

Charles Forman, the CEO of iminlikewithyou, decided to post a comment which was picked up on Valleywag. You can read the entire comment on VW but nearly moments after his comment I began to receive emails (including from his friends) noting how horrible it was for him to use personal attacks when they weren't warranted. Here are a couple of the things he said:

continue reading »

A new NY startup launched today in private beta named Baveo. Baveo offers new and expecting parents a simple place to keep information about their baby for their family and friends to access. The service allows you to post text, video and audio related to the baby. One of Baveo's features I haven't seen on the other baby sites is the "delivery date countdown". This allows family and friends to keep up-to-date on when baby may arrive. A fun addition would be a baby pool where everyone can select boxes on when the baby will arrive.

Baveo allows posting via mobile device so new parents can zap text and photo updates back to their family as most new parents might not be near a computer to create typical blog postings. Family and friends can subscribe to updates via RSS, email and SMS. I certainly hope they make the update process easy if they plan to target the mainstream audience.

Founder Ari Greenberg was most recently with NY-based Magnify.net. Ari says there will never be ads on the site. It looks like they generate revenue through affiliate relationships on your baby registries. My hope is that one of these baby services steps up with a pay model -- there's room for it.

Leslie at Mashable reviewed Baveo this morning and noted, "Everything about the site practically screams 'baby!'" I will disagree with her when she says that Baveo is a competitor of CafeMom.

We've covered a variety of other baby services including: Kidmondo, TotSpot, babyZbook and Lil'Grams.

Last week at the Future of Web Apps summit in London, Michael Galpert of NY-based Aviary and Andy McLoughlin of Huddle presented "How to survive outside Silicon Valley". I've embedded the video below and the slides are located on Michael's blog.

NY-based Wix has announced that they have raised a Series B round of funding in the amount of $3.5 million. This is in addition to the previously raised $3.5 million Series A round and $1.2 million angel round. The company notes that this new round of funding came from Mangrove Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Wix also notes that the funding will go towards marketing and product development.

Wix allows people to easily create Flash-based Websites. The company self-reports that over 1,500 Wix sites are created every day. I'd love to hear about their active numbers. A newly released premium version costs $10/month which removes advertising and offers other features like domain name accessibility.

The Deal spoke with Allon Bloch, co-founder of Wix who said that, "the startup got in just under the wire", as venture capitalists grow risk-averse amid the deepening financial crisis."We were fairly lucky," he says, noting that the funding environment "over the past three or four weeks has deteriorated fairly quickly. We definitely felt a change." Bloch also notes that they will probably head back fro more funding in about 18 months looking for another $5 million.

Check out our interview with co-CEO Allon Bloch from earlier this year.

VCs understand that the fundraising process is time consuming, taking entrepreneurs away from building the company. Creating documents for investors can be one of the most time-consuming parts of the process. While not all of the documents are likely to assist in operations, some of the materials can and should be created with operational purposes in mind to make more use of these efforts.

Here are five ways to make the fundraising process more useful to your operation:

1. Create projections in a manner that makes them easy to use for future planning and budgeting,
2. Design your uses of capital raised analysis to play into your short term budgets by making it sufficiently detailed,
3. Leverage the addressable market analysis to identify the most attractive target customer segments,
4. Revisit your competitive landscape when preparing investor materials to look for best practices and opportunities to enhance your model, and
5. Generate a sales pipelines document that can be leveraged by your sales department going forward (you'll probably need an operational version of this document to share with your board in the future).

Fundraising can be a tedious process – try to get as much operational value out of it as possible.

This past week at the NY Tech Meetup, rmbrME provided a demo of their service. RmbrME describes their service as, "rmbrME is the breakthrough Mobile Lead Service that lets you send and receive socially-networked business cards (bzCards) via text messaging."

(apologies for the delay in posting -- the audio came out poorly on the recordings so I had to work on it)