TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Seattle startup LocalBonus has created a frequent flyer-style program for the "buy local" movement. Customers who shop at local businesses are rewarded with points every time they shop or buy a meal at participating restaurants and stores. Unlike most reward systems, there's no special card or smartphone app to fire up every time you buy something. You just use the credit or debit card you've connected to your LocalBonus account. You accumulate points and get cash back (10,000 point

LocalBonus founder and CEO Derek Webster recently took a few minutes to answer some questions about the company.

What is your elevator pitch?

LocalBonus allows you to use your existing credit or debit card to earn rewards from hundreds of local businesses. For merchants, we offer a great way to attract and retain customers without having to offer deals or discounts, and without having to set up and manage their own loyalty programs. We are now live in five cities (including Seattle and Portland) with over 800 merchants.

Seattle-based ClearSign Combustion Corp. said its initial public offering of its shares raised gross proceeds of $13.8 million.

ClearSign, which trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange with the symbol "CLIR," develops technologies to improve performance of combustion systems such as boilers, furnaces, kilns and turbines.

Mercy Corps photo

A young woman tackles a coding challenge presented by Google engineers at a training day in Gaza last year, part of the Mercy Corps Arab Developer Network Initiative in collaboration with Startup Weekend.

Seattle-based nonprofit Startup Weekend is partnering with Mercy Corps to bring its entrepreneurial-focused technology events to populations around the world.

Startup Weekend hosts 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and wannabe entrepreneurs can connect to launch tech startups. Last year, Startup Weekend helped organize more than 250 events in 65 countries.

Gumroad founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia.

Sahil Lavingia is just 19 years old, but he's already helped develop a music-sharing application, called Turntable.fm, that became a media sensation, and he's been a member of the founding engineering team of Pinterest, which recently became the third-largest social network.

Today, Lavingia said his own startup, Gumroad, has raised $7 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, bringing the total venture capital it has taken to just over $8 million since he founded it last year. The three-person company, of which Lavingia is CEO, runs a platform that people can use to sell stuff, primarily digital content.

Mike Abbott, a Kleiner Perkins partner and former vice president of engineering at Twitter Inc., will join Gumroad's board of directors.

Korrio founder and CEO Steve Goldman

Korrio is the newest Seattle tech company to take on sports, and rather than looking to the pros, they're aiming at the sports most of us do for fun. The name, Korrio, comes from the Maori word for play.

Korrio founder and CEO Steve Goldman took a few minutes to answer some questions about the company.

What is your elevator pitch?

Korrio helps you organize and share your sports life by providing the only integrated service for organizations, teams, families and fans.

We came up with the idea … As a parent and coach of two kids that are actively involved in sports I saw first-hand the lack of easy-to-use solutions in this space. After leaving Isilon Systems and thinking about what I wanted to spend time on, creating a great product for youth sports seemed like the perfect way to blend my passions for my kids, sports and building companies of lasting value.

The word that describes our company culture is … Play. We’re a company focused on sports, so we really try to have fun beyond all the hard work. We’ve taken “play” to heart and use it as an acronym to describe the kind of company we want to be: Passionate, (building) Lasting value, Always innovating and (doing) Your best.

The biggest challenge we face is … Building an integrated service means we have to focus on both administrative features for clubs, and consumer features for parents, players and fans. As a startup with a small development team, making sure we strike the right balance so priorities are appropriately set is a recurring challenge.

SEOmoz, a Seattle company that makes search engine optimization software for marketers, has raised $18 million in financing from Brad Feld's Foundry Group of Boulder, Colo., with additional investment from Ignition Partners of Bellevue.

In a blog post, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin said the funds will be used to add 12-15 new employees to the existing workforce of 60; move its offices to accommodate a larger workforce; increase marketing; and launch new products.

G12 Communications is a Seattle startup created by the team that built 360networks, which was sold to Colorado-based Zayo at the end of last year. The new company offers a variety of voice over IP (VoIP) management services to small, medium and large customers.

We checked in with co-founder Rick Coma for this installment of Startup of the Week.

What is your elevator pitch? G12 Communications provides business customers an opportunity to combine voice communications, email, mobile communications, and other features into a single package. G12 also provides businesses with the tools to better manage their communications requirements online. G12 customers can manage their own calling features, which allows them to communicate when and where they want on whatever device they choose. G12 uses the cloud for its services so customers only need one Internet connection for both voice and web services. Combining these services eliminates the need for additional phones lines, which reduces overall communications costs.

People with physical disabilities that prevent them from walking may soon have hope that they can walk again with the help of a Seattle-based biotech company.

Cadence Biomedical announced Thursday that it has closed $1.1 million in series A2 financing, led by HealthTech Capital.

Other investors included Sand Hill Angels, Tech Coast Angels, ACE Fund, Frontier Angel Fund, WINGS, Alliance of Angels and Keiretsu Forum Northwest.

The Seattle-based biotech company makes an innovative device called the Kickstart Kinetic Orthosis, which uses a series of pulleys and springs to capture energy during the beginning of the step and return it at just the right moment to help propel a person forward. The device, which does not use motors or batteries, helps patients increase leg strength so they can eventually walk unaided.

Google Drive be shamed. Symform will give you up to 200GB of storage for free – if you let them use some of your extra storage space for their cloud.

And several local investors think Symform’s crowdsourced cloud plan is promising. The Seattle startup has closed its series B fundraising round with $11 million, led by WestRiver Capital.

Symform, which started in 2009, is a cloud data backup service that uses the extra space people already have on their computers and backup drives as its “cloud,” rather than the more standard offsite data center full of computers.

“It’s very expensive to store data that way,” said Symform CEO Matthew Schiltz of the traditional data centers.

Instead, Symform farms out the extra space you have to other users, and gives you the offsite backup you need by putting your data on other people’s machines.

Ever wished you could buy something someone tweeted about on Twitter?

Well, now you can.

Portland-based startup Chirpify has created a way for Twitter users to buy products from the people and companies they follow, and the company has attracted $1.3 million from investors backing the concept. The money is coming from Seattle-based Voyager Capital, BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, and former Facebook executive Rudy Gadre.

“There’s no five-step checkout process. It’s really simple,” said Chirpify founder Chris Teso.

A company such as HP or Nestle, or a record label such as Rhymesayers Entertainment (all of which have deals with Chirpify), can sign up for the service and establish a contract. The company can then use its Twitter page to broadcast new products or songs. Followers who have also signed up will just reply to the tweet with the word “buy” and Chirpify will process the transaction using Paypal’s payment system.

Teso said the system has already been used — at the SXSW event earlier this year, where it was branded as the Tweet-a-Beer service that allowed users to buy each other a beer using Twitter.

Seattle startup Decide.com has got your back when you go to buy the newest gadget online. So much so, it's willing to guarantee that.

Decide predicts the best time to buy products with no regrets, based on price change analysis and product history.

The company claims it saves people an average of $87 per purchase.

Decide is so confident that its predictive price analysis is spot on that the company is willing to pay you if it’s wrong.

If a customer purchases a product that is designated “buy” from the site and the price drops within two weeks, Decide’s Got Your Back program steps in and issues you a payment for the difference, up to $200.

“No other online or offline retailer offers anything like Decide's Got Your Back price guarantee as far as we know. We're so sure in the price prediction technology the team has built that we're willing to put money behind it,” said Shauna Causey, Decide’s vice president of marketing.

Alder BioPharmaceuticals Inc. of Bothell said it's raised $38 million in Series D financing, which it said will support the development of the company’s clinical stage pipeline.

Alder said the financing was led by a new investor, Novo Ventures, and was joined by existing investors Sevin Rosen Funds, Ventures West, WRF Capital, H.I.G. Ventures, Delphi Ventures and TPG Biotech.

Opstera CEO Paddy Srinivasan

Opstera is a Bellevue-based startup that provides Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud services to its more than 100 customers. The company launched in January and helps customers by monitoring their cloud-based systems and minimizing downtime. Co-founders Ranjith Ramakrishnan and Paddy Srinivasan also started Cumulux, a cloud services company that was acquired by Aditi Technologies last year.

CEO Srinivasan took a few minutes to explain the new company.

What is your elevator pitch?

Opstera gives customers a new 360-degree view of their cloud operations to reduce downtime and ensure their cloud operations are running efficiently. We also bring enterprise-grade operations management to small and medium-sized customers who are in the cloud today.

We came up with the idea ... because we saw customers, large and small alike, struggle to transition their networks from on-premise to the cloud. We knew we could help companies be successful in this new technology landscape.

The word that describes our company culture is ... Pragmatic

Nordstrom is joining Silicon Valley venture capital firms in a $16.4 million investment round in Bonobos Inc., an online retailer of men’s pants.

The Seattle-based retailer is leading the round with venture capital firms Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Nordstrom (NYSE: JWN) also will sell Bonobos clothing at Nordstrom full-line stores and on Nordstrom.com.

“Bonobos makes great-fitting product and customers are clearly responding to their energetic sense of style. They are a pioneer in leveraging the internet to build great relationships with their customers, a common focus of both organizations,” Jamie Nordstrom, Nordstrom Direct president, said in a statement. “Our investment with Bonobos will enable Nordstrom to participate in the young company’s phenomenal growth, and we look forward to what we can learn from each other as we build the business together.”

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTO | Marcus R. Donner

University of Washington Assistant Professor Shwetak Patel, shown in his office at the UW's Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, holds a device he developed that measures home power use. Patel has launched several companies, at two universities.

Shwetak Patel wants to sniff the air in your home and warn you if there’s lead or mold.

The University of Washington intends to help him do it.

Patel, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering, has developed a device that monitors and reports home air quality — a follow-up to his previous inventions that tracked usage of gas, electricity and water.

UW’s Center for Commercialization has provided him with several thousand dollars to begin the air quality project and helped him with the patent applications.

He has help in the lab, as well.

When he sold his last company, called Zensi, several of his students went to work for the acquirer as consultants.

“Every one of my students has some foot in one of these companies,” Patel said.

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