@seth

stickybits launches first social object network- connects physical & digital worlds

Company closes on $300,000 in financing from Mitch Kapor and Polaris Ventures

March 9, 2010 – stickybits has launched a new platform for connecting the physical and digital worlds. stickybits are unique codes that can be attached to physical objects.  Using the stickybits mobile app, codes can be written to or read by any iPhone or Android device.  Scanning codes shows information associated with the objects, and can notify users when their objects have been scanned, augmented, or moved.

According to stickybits investor Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus (IBM):

“stickybits is a platform with an open architecture for connecting the physical and digital worlds.  This will come to be seen as completely obvious and wonderfully powerful, so I am very excited to get involved at the outset. There are great opportunities for innovation here; people will use our codes in ways we can’t even imagine.”

stickybits is the first service that enables users to attach their own electronic content to physical objects and share this content across social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.  Billy Chasen, Founder and CEO created stickybits “because I kept finding myself wanting to leave pieces of the digital world around my physical world and there was no easy way to do this.”

Peter Flint, Partner at Polaris Venture Partners described their decision to invest in stickybits:  “When Billy and Seth shared their vision for stickybits with us, we immediately knew this was a business that could scale.  The combination of an innovative application, a business model that had many use cases, and great founders, made the investment decision easy.”

Users can purchase stickers at www.stickybits.com, where they can download the iPhone and Android apps, print their own codes, and share use cases with others.  At SXSW, each Interactive Festival attendee will receive a free pack of stickybits in their conference bags, along with a pre-stamped postcard that they can put a sticker on, attach a video greeting, and send to a friend across the country.

About stickybits
Based in NY and SF in Dogpatch Labs, stickybits was founded in January 2010 by artist and software developer Billy Chasen and serial entrepreneur and angel investor Seth Goldstein. Its seed investors include Mitch Kapor and Polaris Ventures.  stickybits has partnered with Occipital, creators of the popular “Red Laser” application to provide its barcode scanning technology, as well as with SimpleGeo to enable users to locate and track the movement of codes.

Ten years ago I joined Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners as its Entrepreneur in Residence and helped launch a program in Pervasive Computing:

Companies focused on pervasive computing develop hardware, software and services for post-pc gadgets. Flatiron is betting that as people become more connected to the Internet, they will want increased access to online services. According to Flatiron, “as information appliances proliferate, we will soon be interacting with the Internet in our kitchen, in our car, and through our PDA’s, smart phones and clothing.”

I remember hosting a dinner featuring Jim Balsillie, co-founder of Research in Motion. At the time, I was one of the few people I knew of in New York carrying around this geeky email pager:

Little did I know that ten years later it would come to define mass market email use.

Consistent though this history has been the importance of the thumb as an input mechanism.  The original ridged thumbwheel moved to the side of the device in subsequent years and then emerged on the front of the device as a trackball.  The latest instantiation in the Blackberry 9700 is a smooth touch sensitive trackpad that seems to telepathically anticipate which message you want to read:

The number of technology inventions these past ten years is astounding; still, I believe that the Blackberry’s particular relationship with the thumb is an insightful lens through which to trace the history of Pervasive Computing.

I think the lesson here is, like any smart business, relentless focus on a core benefit. The Blackberry has always been the best device for reading and writing email.  It has never done well as an entertainment device, as compared to the iPhone with its music and videogame applications.  Nor do I think it will become an app platform like Android.  Instead, RIM perfectly fuses its keyboard and thumb-input interfaces with the latest email protocols to create an optimal email experience.

People may scoff at the ease at which Apple or HTC or Sony or Samsung might copy the Blackberry form factor and surpass it with better software.  And yet, over the course of ten long years, the Blackberry has not only fended off these competitive threats, it has greatly expanded its market share.

Last November, Dick Costolo COO of Twitter said that they were working on a new ad product and that their ads would be great:

DC: We will have an advertising strategy. You will see that from us in the future. It will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.

MA: What’s new about it?

DC: We want to do something that’s organic, like the way it happened with Google. It will work with the tweets. People will love the ads when they see it.

MA: Talk more about the ads. Mixed in with the tweets?

DC: I didn’t say that but the message I want to send is that is that there is an advertising idea and it will come next year.

That was it.

It was a philosophical statement, not a product roadmap nor an economic model.

Yesterday on stage at the IAB I moderated a great panel with Tim Kendall of Facebook, Jed Nachman of Yelp and Anamitra Banerji.  Despite the fact that Tim has helped create a billion dollar display and CPC business at Facebook, and Jed drives a sales force that regularly sells ads at $200 CPM and higher, the only thing that people seem to want to talk about today is the speculation about when and how Twitter will be launching their new ad product.

First off, I want to apologize to Dick, Anamitra and the rest of the team at Twitter for suggesting that I knew any more than I actually do.  All I was referring to was the public statement from November and that based on that, a Twitter ad product was “imminent.”  Anamitra has a deep understanding of ad product development going back to his work at Overture and then Yahoo!  He shared a great slide at the IAB Annual Meeting about the correlation of Super Bowl game and ad - related tweets.  It is unfortunate that our casual conversation about potential Twitter ad directions has been taken out of context to become “news” when there really isn’t any.

Second, it is incredible how powerful Twitter has become as a disruptive media force.  It reminds me of the briefcase theory: how Wall Street investors in the 90s paid close attention to the size of Alan Greenspan’s briefcase as a sign of what his plans were for interest rates.

The lesson here is less about what Twitter will or won’t do in terms of advertising products.

Instead, the lesson is about recognizing the influence that Twitter already has as an advertising platform regardless of the fact that they currently offer no advertising products or generate any advertising revenue.