The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Wetpaint is out to make blogging easier by allowing groups to collaborate. Call it a wiki-meets-blog mashup. Accel Partners said Tuesday it liked the idea, backing the Seattle start-up in a second round of funding worth $9.5 million.

The Wetpaint Collab-a-blog (our words, not theirs) addresses the fundamental problem with the idea of blogging - that of fatigue.  One person, acting alone, can get weary of posting every day, but many hands can make the work lighter.

Joining Accel in the round were existing investors Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $14.8 million, and will be used to further develop the company’s software tools.

Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a general partner at Accel Partners has joined Wetpaint’s board.  Wetpaint has signed up 150,000 community sites ranging from church and gaming groups to civil air patrol outfits. It’s also caught the attention of prominent brands including AOL, major broadcast networks like ABC and CBS, as well as American Express Publishing, and T-Mobile.

Competitors include small start-ups like Berkeley-based PersonalBee and titans like Google and Yahoo.

Now People Can Share All Their Digital Media Any Way They Choose

Twango launched a next generation media-sharing service offering a comprehensive, integrated solution for people seeking to organize, share and republish all their media online. Unlike previous generations of media-sharing services, Twango enables people to share all media types such as pictures, video, audio, Microsoft Office documents and PDFs — more than 110 file types in all. Plus, people can share their media in a wide variety of ways, without being locked into a “one way fits all” style of sharing.

Twango is uniquely designed to appeal to the broad market of people who are eager to share their media, but want a more versatile and sophisticated service than Flickr, YouTube or Photobucket. Twango is a free service with unlimited storage and no required software downloads. Read the rest of this entry »

The Puget Sound has welcomed yet another new real estate brokerage that leverages technology like Redfin and Zillow while maintaining a high level of customer interaction and service. Ezdigs.com was created as a hybrid between the newly emerging Internet brokerages and traditional brick-and-mortar real estate companies. The company will initially focus its service on the Greater Puget Sound area, including properties in King and south Snohomish counties.

“The Internet has changed the way consumers buy and sell real estate, putting the power of information in the hands of the consumer — shifting the role of the real estate agent from purveyor of information to provider of services,” says Mike Satterlee, ezdigs.com founder, president and chief executive officer.

EZdigs will allow sellers to pay a 1 percent commission on home sales, instead of the 3 percent commission charged by traditional real estate brokers.

Seattle podcast search service Pluggd has introduced a revolutionary Podcast search feature called  “Hear Here” that makes it possible to locate content inside of podcasts by concept, rather than keyword. Search for “golf,” and the sections of the podcast related to the subject will be detected through speech recognition and semantic analysis. The results are highlghted in a progress bar with a heat map overlay so you can locate the section and listen in just the right place.

For the official unveiling of this featue at this week’s DEMO trade show, there is only one podcast, aptly dubbed demo,  that is so configured. Many more heat-synched podcasts are promised in the pipeline as are transcripts. For the time being, Podzinger and Podscope are the leading choices for transcripts but the accuracy is less than impressive.

This blog will focus on the pulse of the Seattle Web marketing scene, a community that undulates with the currents of Search and interactive marketing in all of its many manifestations. The Silicon Valley may have its its Yahoo!, its eBay, its Apple, and, (gulp), its Google; the Silicon Forest of Oregon may have its WebTrends; but the Emerald City of Seattle and its surrounding areas can stake its rightful claim to a tradition of innovation, imagination and missionary zeal that has transformed it into one of the top Internet marketing capitols of the world.

Consider the reigny atmosphere: Microsoft, encompassing MSN adCenter, MSN Shopping, Windows Live, X-Box, and more; InfoSpace, the purveyors of mobile directory content plus the MetaSearch engines of WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, Dogpile and Excite; Amazon.com and its gold standard for shopping personalization and product search, not to mention A-9, and RealNetworks among many.

Read the rest of this entry »