Archimedes Labs opens for business

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Palo Alto, CA, 12 December 2011

Today is an exciting day at Archimedes Ventures. We have some announcements to make.

Firstly, going forward we will be known as Archimedes Labs LLC. This is to make clear that we are an incubator, not a venture capital company.

Secondly, we can now announce that in August this year I established a managing entity – Escondido Labs LLC. It has been the sole manager of Archimedes since that time.

Thirdly, we can reveal that in the future investors will be added at Archimedes Labs as partners in the entity.

Finally we are announcing the following members (aside from myself) at Escondido Management LLC:

Kambiz Hooshmand – Former senior executive at Stratacom which Cisco acquired for over $4 billion in 1996; Cisco SVP; and CEO at Applied Micro (AMCC), Kambiz is now CEO and a General Partner at Escondido Management and runs the management of Archimedes Labs.

Jay Borenstein – Lecturer at Stanford University, teaching CS210, former CEO at Integrated Appliance Inc, Jay is a highly technical guy, focused on building great companies. He is a mentor at StartX, the Stanford Incubator.

Patrick Gannon, a founder at Lending Club, Patrick is Chief Investment Officer at Escondido Management.

Kevin Doerr, VP and Chief of Staff (Products) at Yahoo.

Matt Kaufman, VP Product and Engineering at Oodle.

Bess Ho – Mobile Architect, Lecturer & Book Author.

See the team page for more details.

In the first 11 months of 2011 we have incubated just.me, entered into an acceleration agreement as a co-founder at Blurtt and invested in Quixey, Incident Technologies and Broomstick Productions.

In 2012 we intend to do more incubations and accelerations.

Happy Holidays to all….

Quixey Raises $3.8m from USVP and WI Harper

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From TechCrunch:

Quixey, the Palo Alto-based startup that’s building a functional search engine for apps, today announced that it has closed a $3.8 million series A funding round. The investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group, with participation from Webb Investment Network alongside follow-on investment by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The series A round adds to the $400K Quixey raised in April from Innovation Endeavors, bringing total investment to $4.2 million.

We’ve all heard (and perhaps even mocked) the quip “there’s an app for that”. It’s actually a wonderful quality of the mobile revolution: There really is an app for just about everything you can think of, from calling a taxi to managing your schedule to scanning for skin cancer or heart murmors. But, it’s also overwhelming, and searching for the app that you want isn’t easy. There’s a lot of noise, and a lot of imperfect approaches to app search.

Quixey entered the game with the intention to build a new type of search, molded specifically to the unique characteristics of searching for those ubiquitous but sometimes elusive apps. Their solution, coined “functional search”, which not only scans the major app stores, but crawls blogs, review sites, forums, and social media sites to build a truly comprehensive picture of what an app can do — through reviews, word of mouth, and demos.

Quixey’s search engine lets the user type in queries like “baseball scores”, and get a list of applications that provide just that (which they can then can filter by platform). And the best part is that the search engine suppors Windows and Mac apps, iGoogle, extensions, and more. It’s not just iOS and Android.

Though Quixey would seem to be competing with the likes of Chomp and others, the startup also has the added value proposition of being able to power search for other app stores, search engines, and websites — just like Google — to help disseminate its search engine on third party sites across the Web.

Not so surprising, then, that Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors is investing in a great app search tool. Bringing in outside info and data from blogs, review sites, and beyond, really adds an extra layer of depth to app search (especially in being platform agnostic), just as powering search across websites gives Quixey the opportunity to scale and become mixed in with the very sites it crawls. The startup will be using its new investment to continue securing partnerships with app stores and other big third party app resources, and according to the Quixey team, there are more than 25 potential partnerships in the pipeline. The more partners, the more effective the search engine becomes.

It’s an interesting new approach, this “functional search”, and from my experience thus far, works as advertised. Chime in to let us know what you think. More on Quixey here.

just.me closes $550k in seed funding

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We are happy to announce that just.me, Archimedes Labs first incubated company, has graduated to independent status. Keith Teare will become CEO of just.me. The investor list is an all star cast – True Ventures, Google Ventures, SV Angel; Betaworks; Crunchfund; Don Dodge; Patrick Gannon; Michael Parekh; Steve McArthur and The Four Horsemen LLC.

 

As TechCrunch said

just.me…..is focused on the post-PC social network.

just.me will launch in early 2012

Quixey closes seed round – led by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors.

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Quixey announced today that we have joined Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors in seed-funding the company.

Quixey enables searches for apps capable of delivering a specific use case. For example a search for an app that can “Annotate PDFs” returns results as below:

Quixey search result

We are honored to be part of the team and look forward to Quixey fulfilling its potential to be the key search technology driving app discovery across many platforms.

Sign up for the beta here
TechCrunch story here
GigaOm story here.

This is our first investment since the sale of TechCrunch and the addition of Kambiz Hooshmand, Kevin Doerr, Bess Ho and Sean Crotty to Archimedes. See the Team page for more.

The Founders Couch

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All founders need a shrink… I know, I have been a founder many times and it doesn’t get any easier to figure out who is blowing smoke and who is giving sound advice….And even though you are Superman to your team, you know you are mortal.

So… in the past few weeks I have started offering up an event called “The Founders Couch”. It has proven to be wildly popular, and the best thing, if we agree to do it, it is free.

What is the Founders Couch? Well, it depends. For some it is a mentoring session, 1 on 1, with the founder and myself. For others it has involved bringing in the whole team. It focuses on your core issues around your company or your product. Those can be funding strategy, partnerships, technical issues, design issues, features, virality, market focus or anything else, so long as they are your core issues.

If you are interested ping me on email.

edgeio launches at PC Forum

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Although there has been significant discussion on the web about edgeio for several weeks, the company had not formally launched until today. edgeio has formally launched the company at PC Forum in Carlsbad. There is a post on the edgeio blog with a 2 minute video clip of the infomercial that preceeded the formal presentations.The company announced $1.5m in angel funding, led by Ron Conway and including investments from:

Dan Burstein of Millenium Technology Ventures
Frank Caufield Jr. of Darwin Ventures
Jeff Clavier of Softtech VC
Ron Conway
Auren Hoffman
Localglobe II
Louis Monier
Sam Perry
RSS Investors
Michael Tanne
Transcosmos Inc.

… and others not disclosed.

This is the first Archimedes company to secure funding. I (Keith Teare) will be serving as CEO of edgeio and will be discontinuing active work with Archimedes for the time being. I’m thrilled by the challenge of taking edgeio from an idea I had in late 2004, through to a funded company and a launched platform. Many thanks to all those who have helped, but especially to:

Mike Arrington
Matt Kaufman
Vidar Hokstad
Fred Olivera
The VeriSign “real time web” team
Jeremy Zawodny
Jim Piktow
Dave Winer, Dave Sifry, Scott Rafer, Bob Wyman, Salim Ismail, David Hornik, Louis Monier (all of whom saw the early prototype almost a year ago). And the investors who have shown confidence in me and the team.

EasyNet bought by BSkyB

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I have been meaning to post on this for a while and didn’t do so because I wanted to wait for the dust to settle. This seems like a good time.

My old company Easynet has been acquired by BSkyB for something around $375m. I was co-founder of the company, in 1994, with my friend David Rowe. David remains CEO. I left about 12 months after our IPO, in 1997, to start RealNames.

Firstly, congratulations to David and his team. But especially to David. He is an incredibly focused entreprenuer who, despite the market cap getting up to $2 billion or so during 1999 remained dedicated to building out a genuine competitor to the Telco incumbents across many markets in Europe.

BSkyB’s acquisition is testimony to that focus. They need an infrastructure capable of driving a triple play (voice, video and data) connection to homes and businesses throughout Europe. because of EasyNet’s DSLAM presence in many telco head ends, there was really no better optioon.

I can claim no credit for the sale, it’s all down to what David and the team have accomplished over the years since I left. And i get no benefit from it – I sold my shares a long time ago. However I’m still feeling proud. I helped David found a great company. we established it as the first consumer ISP in Europe. Highlights for me include being chosen by Microsoft to launch Windows 95 with them; getting our first customer, 6 weeks after having the idea, and banking our first $10 check; meeting lots of great entrepreneurs in CYBERIA (our cybercafe chain at the time); going public without raising venture capital; my time with David and Eva (his partner) debating strategy and tactics; being on a public company board, and realizing it wasn’t what I excelled at. And so many others.

Again, congratulations to all at the company. And good luck with a future with the Murdochs. Bound to be more interesting times ahead.

Google launches Dbase, circa 1985, but with less functionality

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Google launched GoogleBase last night. What a disappointment. Whilst Google Reader clearly points to somebody at Google “getting” the importance of edge published content and real-time indexing, GoogleBase is a throw back. Basically a dumb flat-file database system for the world to throw content into. It’s actually embarrasing for the whole of Silicon Valley. I know insiders who desperately do not want their name associated with it. Can’t say I blame them.

Not to be abusive but why would millions of people who run web sites, and databases, and blogs, suddenly feed stuff into GoogleBase (an act of duplicating their already web based data into another database run by Google)? Maybe to get better search results. But this is an act of pure laziness from Google. The same results could be achieved in a manner far more consistent with the distributed data model that the world is currently flocking to. Google, just define a few extensions to RSS, make it easy to publish a feed with those extensions, and suck in the feeds. It works!

Oh well. Back to work :-)

Update: well I guess the primary reason this is disappointing is that we expect Google to innovate. This just isn’t innovative. See Mike Arrington’s assessment on TechCrunch