TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

DuBois

Denis Du Bois: "Excitement...fear. Opportunity...risk. Urgency... indifference." Pacific Northwest Clean Tech Open Co-chair Byron McCann opened last night's regional awards ceremony with a dramatized series of opposites.

It fit, because the theme of the evening was contrast and anachronism. The region's hottest new technologies were showcased in Seattle's second-oldest theater. Our governor headlined the ceremony for a cleantech business plan competition that blossomed with no state financial support.

"We must all make these choices," McCann continued. "Urgency is critical. The one commodity we don't have a lot of is time."

Silicon Florist's Rick Turoczy

Rick Turoczy: Welcome back to part 2 of the Venture Northwest recap. If you missed part 1 yesterday, you can catch up over here. What's Venture Northwest, you ask? It's a pitch event put on by the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN). No cash prizes. Just the opportunity for startups to pitch potential investors.

Think DEMO or TechCrunch 50 only on a much smaller scale. Got it? Good. Let's get to the remaining folks with pitched their companies on stage.

Constantine

Hutchison

Last week, we conducted a poll for the upcoming Seattle mayoral election. Interestingly, the techie -- T-Mobile USA executive Joe Mallahan -- was just edging out the environmentalist -- Mike McGinn.

But there's another important race happening on November 3, which could have even bigger implications for the region's tech industry. In the race for King County Executive, County Council Chair Dow Constantine is facing off with former TV news anchor Susan Hutchison. Hutchison has some interesting connections to the tech industry, having served as the executive director of former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi's foundation.

In this race, transportation is a key issue. And Hutchison has come out in favor of a plan to route light rail over the Highway 520 bridge -- a direct pipeline to Microsoft. Constantine supports the voter-approved plan to take light rail over the I-90 bridge. We're curious where the tech industry is coming down on these two candidates, so cast your vote in the poll above.

Karl Siebrecht

Former aQuantive executive Karl Siebrecht was very close to taking another job when a friend and one-time competitor, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, introduced him to Seattle-based AdReady. After taking a look at the technology, which allows small advertisers to quickly set up and manage online display ad campaigns, Siebrecht was instantly hooked.

The 40-year-old exec -- who cut his teeth in the ad business over the past 10 years at aQuantive's Atlas unit and Microsoft -- immediately wanted to be a part of what he viewed as a revolutionary product in the online ad space. So, he asked whether there was room to get involved. AdReady Chief Executive Aaron Finn quickly obliged, tapping Siebrecht as president and chief operating officer.

Siebrecht's been on the job for less than a month, but we caught up with him to chat about competition from Google, the effectiveness of display ads and his previous career as a diver in the U.S. Navy.

Why did you join AdReady? "In a nutshell, my view is that AdReady has a great technology, a great team and it is serving a market that I think has vast potential. I have been in this online ad industry now for over 10 years.... I have watched this industry grow and mature from a point where no one really thought it was an industry to now -- it is however many tens of billions of dollars. It has evolved pretty quickly, but I still think there are parts of it that I would consider are greatly underserved, and in particular it is the display part of the business."

from iprojectideas.blogspot.com

Are you a parent who likes to do science experiments with your kids? Well, then you might be Balloon Boy’s father, and you should probably lay low for a while. But if you’re anybody else, check out oursciencefair.com.

Our Science Fair is a web service for schools and parents who host or participate in science fairs. It modernizes the registration process, turning it from one dependent on convincing hundreds of preadolescents to take a paper packet home to their parents, get it filled out, and then bring it back to teacher in a timely manner; to one dependent on the parent spending 30 seconds or less online signing up their little Dr. Kevorkian -- ahem -- Einstein.

The service is Sammamish resident Rajeev Goel’s brainchild, inspired by his brave commitment last spring to coordinate his daughter's science fair at Cascade Ridge Elementary.

The Seattle online brokerage ShareBuilder Securities is likely to be sold by its parent company ING, an annoucement that comes nearly two years after the Dutch financial company gobbled up the firm for $220 million. The announcement, made today by ING Direct CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann at ShareBuilder's new Pioneer Square office, comes after ING said it plans to sell its U.S. operations by 2013.

Nonetheless, The Puget Sound Business Journal's Kirsten Grind reports that the ShareBuilder unit -- led by Dan Greenshields -- still plans to double in size to about 600 employees in the next two years. More from Grind's report here.

Silicon Florist's Rick Turoczy

Editor's Note: Rick Turoczy, publisher of the Silicon Florist blog, is covering the OEN Venture Northwest conference in Portland. Here's one of his reports from the front lines.

There's always something about gathering a room full of potential investors together to listen to pitches from promising young startups. Especially in this economy. And especially when it's a tech heavy event.

That's what's happening today in Portland, Oregon, during OEN Venture Northwest, the premier opportunity for Oregon companies to pitch potential investors. And a few Washington companies made the trip, too.

This year, the Venture Northwest theme was all about "mythbusting." What kind of myths?

Well, the myths that masquerade as deeply held truths around these parts. And those selfsame myths that keep a great number of us from pursuing our startup dreams. Myths like you can't grow a company here, it's impossible to raise VC, there are no major ventures in town, and no liquidity events.

This totally slipped under my radar last week, but the Seattle construction giant McKinstry announced that it plans to open a new 24,000 square foot facility next Spring to jumpstart new clean tech businesses. The facility -- designed by architects NBBJ -- will be developed in an "neo-industrial" style.

Xconomy's Greg Huang gathered some reaction on the new facility today, chatting with folks like Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners and Michael Butler of Cascadia Capital.

Business incubators are a tough business, as many folks found out during the dot-com bust. And while we've seen the idea revisited more recently in the Internet realm in the forms of Y Combinator, TechStars and The Founder Institute, we haven't seen as much energy going into the idea of a clean tech incubator.

It was great to see so many people at the TechFlash: Women in Tech event last night. It was a packed house, and we learned a lot from a fantastic panel and illuminating conversations in the halls.

Before things got rolling, we took some time to ask a few of the women in attendance how they got interested in technology and what advice they'd offer to young women looking to break into the tech business now. Read on for excerpts from their answers.

I just got done looking through Alley Insider's list of the most valuable Internet startups. And here's some disappointing news for those entrepreneurs hoping to create the next big Internet idea in the Pacific Northwest. You've got to scroll all the way down to number 57 -- that's right 57 -- before a Seattle company makes an appearance.

Thanks to all of you who joined us last night for our first TechFlash Women in Tech event. It was a great night, packed with Seattle-area technology leaders and lots of insights into the technology industry. Here's a video with highlights from the night, including one of the most interesting and engaging panel discussions we've heard in a while.

WhitePages ranking of names

I have a very common name. After all, there's a famous golfer by the name of John Cook (an Ohioan just like me) and even another technology journalist who holds the name. But just how popular is the combination "John Cook," or any other name for that matter?

Thanks to a new offering from WhitePages, I now know that John Cook is the 537th most popular name in the U.S. In fact, John is the most popular first name, while Cook is the 54th most popular surname. Tapping into the new WhitePages name database, I also learned that 3,244 people have the name John Cook and the state where the most John Cooks live is Texas.

I am not a Twitter follower of Sen. John McCain, so I appreciate the reader who passed on the former presidential candidate's Tweet stream from today. McCain -- who has 1.5 million followers -- started a new feature recently called "Pork Barrel Wednesday" where he Tweets information about government projects that in his mind are wasting taxpayer's money.

Today, McCain took on the Energy & Water conference report, pointing specifically to a $2 million project for "Algae Research" in Washington state. It was unclear from McCain's Tweet where that money was going or why he objected to it.

Vigilos -- a Seattle company that provides video surveillance technologies to government agencies and corporations -- appears to be on the brink. A source tells TechFlash that employees were notified of the pending closure earlier this week, with a shutdown slated for sometime next week.

The Vigilos press contact is no longer at the company, and an employee who answered the phone said no one at the company is doing media relations at this time. Asked for comment about the company's status, the receptionist transferred us to an employee who declined to comment before hanging up the phone.

The troubles at Vigilos come six months after the company announced a $1.4 million round of funding in a deal led by Northwest Venture Associates. Founded in 2000, the company previously raised about $18 million.

InfoSpace is a distant player in the Internet search business when compared to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. But the Bellevue company is still posting solid results.

InfoSpace today announced third quarter revenues of $54.4 million, a 38 percent increase over the same period last year. Meanwhile, the company reported net income of $1.8 million, or five cents per share. That compares to a net loss for the same period last year.