AllThingsD » Aardvark

Google Officially Shuts Down the Neglected Aardvark

Liz Gannes — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:37:42 +0000

Google will close its social search tool Aardvark, which had been seemingly left untouched since being acquired in February 2010. The move comes as part of a larger housecleaning that includes cutting Google Labs and Slide. The Aardvark founders said in a blog post that they are excited that Google+ is already a bigger “place to share knowledge online” than vark.com was.

The Landscape Around Google's Hiring Binge

Liz Gannes — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:38:35 +0000

After a year or two of stagnancy, the Google employee count is growing rapidly again. But the growth spurt and retention efforts seem forced, and unlikely to be the perfect formula to keep the company at the top of the Web heap, despite its clout, market share and massive revenue. Part of the problem is that the company’s executives seem out of touch with how the Web is evolving.

The search giant has 2,076 job openings, as tabulated in a story by Reuters last night. It has acquired more than 20 start-ups this year, it’s giving all employees a 10 percent raise and it’s still adding search market share–even if only measured in tenths of percentage points. The company is even building a new 1.2-million-square-foot corporate campus in Mountain View, Calif., that is to include housing. Google now has more than 23,000 employees. It’s currently adding about 100 people per week, said a source.

But it’s an awkward time at Google, where a group of employees can leave, create a start-up and come back two years later through an acquisition with $50 million in their pockets. And the stories about competitive hiring wars with Facebook just keep getting more fantastical.

According to a source, a Google engineer recently ended a counteroffer war with Facebook by accepting $6 million worth of Google stock to keep her job there. Apparently she was not in a senior role at Google, but part of what made her so coveted was the fact she’s a female engineer. And this was Google’s second counteroffer after she had already told them she was going to Facebook.

At this point, Facebook (narrowly) has fewer employees than Google has job openings.

Google needs to find a way to foster its employees’ entrepreneurial desires and talents. The promise of exponentially growing stock options versus a simple raise still tempts many people.

Part of why Google needs to “get social” so badly isn’t just on a product or market level, but to impress its own employees. At a place where the top management is firmly ensconced and immutable, younger employees, especially, say they are turned off by their bosses’ lack of social media savviness on a personal level. It’s clear that tomorrow’s tech leaders are already blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking, so why are today’s leaders still resisting?

Here’s a quick tally (tell me if I’m getting any of these wrong): Eric Schmidt has a Twitter account that he updates every week or two, mostly to promote Google stuff. Sergey Brin’s last blog post and Tweet were both in January. Larry Page doesn’t seem to do much of anything personal or professional online; there’s not even a LinkedIn account or a Google Profile that I can see. Marissa Mayer seems to be the most active high-profile Google exec on Twitter, and actually responds to people there, as well as syndicates some Foursquare updates. As for the folks leading Google’s social stuff: Vic Gundotra’s last Tweet was in May. Bradley Horowitz isn’t blogging much anymore, and his last Tweet was a month ago.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Ask Adds to Consensus: Social Is the Way to Compete With Google

Liz Gannes — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 21:00:24 +0000

IAC’s Ask.com is giving up the ghost on algorithmic search and Web crawling. Rather than continuing to wilt while competing directly with Google, Ask said today it will devote its resources to Q&A search. That will strike 130 engineering jobs in New Jersey and China, according to Bloomberg.

Ask will now concentrate its efforts on a recently launched Q&A search tool with the team at its Oakland, Calif., office.

Ask has long been the fourth-place player in search, despite some innovative spurts like its origin as a natural-language search engine using the fictional butler Jeeves, and its early efforts to visually parse search results and media into snippets–now features of all major search engines.

IAC CEO Barry Diller, who has recently publicly disparaged Ask, told Bloomberg today, “We’ve realized in the last few years you can’t compete head on with Google.”

Ask launched a new Q&A approach in July, following a recent trend but also playing back to its roots. Sixty percent of questions on the service are now answered, up from 30 percent, Ask.com president Doug Leeds told SearchEngineLand today.

So, is Q&A and social search the way to compete with Google? It could be. Despite buying Aardvark and launching some minimal social search features, Google hasn’t done much in the area. There’s a lot of value in getting your network of friends to give recommendations, as many people do on Facebook and Twitter, and building communities to add knowledge to the Web rather than just crawl it, like on the small but promising Quora. These more recent innovations follow the surprising strength, in a Googlefied world, of products like Yahoo Answers and Korea’s Naver.

IAC hopping out of algorithmic search and crawling doesn’t change much in the market, but it does reaffirm Microsoft’s Bing as the other major player investing in search after Google. Elsewhere, I don’t even want to try to parse the Yahoo-Microsoft partnership. Facebook processes a ton of search queries already, despite a very basic offering, and also is working with Microsoft on search. And Twitter has seen serious growth in search–it says it gets a billion queries a day–but the company seems to count just about every time someone pings its service as a search.

"Super Angel" Aydin Senkut Talks About VCs, Start-Ups and Shaking Up Tech Investing

Kara Swisher — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:11:12 +0000

While in Vancouver last week, BoomTown got some time to chat with Aydin Senkut about his recent announcement of a new $40 million investment fund, which is part of a “super angel” trend in Silicon Valley.

In many ways, the concept of a super angel was pioneered by well-known tech investor Ron Conway, whom Senkut mentions in the video interview I did with him, below.

But now the market is getting very crowded, with a $30 million fund being raised by Dave McClure just one of many similar efforts by others, from Chris Sacca to Michael Dearing to Conway himself, again.

Apparently, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, these super angels have some kind of mysterioso “magnetic” effort–which means entrepreneurs like them and other investors pay mind.

Also, they compete with VCs, which–IMHO–simply means more VCs of different shapes and sizes. Oh joy!

In all seriousness, via Felicis Ventures, Senkut has been a serious regular-size angel investor for many years, since he left a post at Google (GOOG), with wins that include Mint, which sold to Intuit (INTU), and the Google-acquired Aardvark.

Here’s my chat with Senkut, which touches on all these topics and more:

[ See post to watch video ]

Question: How Many Q&A Services Does the Web Need?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:00:17 +0000

You can see why an ambitious engineer or venture capitalist would be interested in a Q&A service: They’re very hot right now!

Old fogies like Yahoo (YHOO) and Answers.com have been at this for a while. But in the past 12 months or so, everyone wants in.

Google (GOOG) bought Aardvark earlier this year, and Facebook is working on its own flavor of so-called “social search” (which means that human beings ask questions, and other human beings answer them). Start-up-of-the-moment Quora was supposedly valued at $86 million before it ever opened its doors. Etc.

Okay. But why is Ask.com adding a questions feature to its offering?

Easy: Because it’s tried everything else, and there’s no reason not to. IAC’s (IACI) search unit has had less than five percent of the domestic market for a very long time, even though it has gone through multiple CEOs, tech overhauls and branding campaigns.

Don’t want to be reflexively negative here (really!). So best to say that if this gambit moves the needle, it will be a pleasant surprise.

Hunch Gets It Right, Adds a $10 Million Series B Round Led by Khosla Ventures

Peter Kafka — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:40:15 +0000

Hunch, a buzzy start-up that answers questions using crowdsourced recommendations, has resolved one query of its own: Who’s going to fund our B round?

Sources tell me that Khosla Ventures is leading a new round that will add another $10 million to $12 million to the start-up’s bank account. General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway, who put $2 million into the company a year ago, are reinvesting.

I’m told that Gideon Yu, the former CFO of both Facebook and YouTube, is steering the investment for Khosla.

Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake, who founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2005, and Chris Dixon, who built SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee (MFE) in 2006.

Hunch is still a modest-sized site–its internal numbers put it at 1.2 million unique visitors–but Fake and Dixon are well-regarded entrepreneurs. And while they don’t like to be compared with Aardvark, which has a vaguely similar concept, the linkage does have some upside: Last month, Google (GOOG) bought that site for $50 million.

I asked Fake, Dixon and Yu for comment. Until I hear from them, you can read up on Hunch in Kara Swisher’s story from last month. Or you can watch this interview.

[ See post to watch video ]

Confirmed: Google Acquires DocVerse in Office Faceoff With Microsoft [UPDATED]

Kara Swisher — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:12:39 +0000

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

[UPDATE: Google confirmed the deal in a blog post, which you can read below, as well as in interviews BoomTown did today with execs at DocVerse and Google.]

Continuing its acquisition spree, Google has snapped up DocVerse, a start-up that allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web, said several sources.

Sources said the price was in the $25 to $30 million range.

Founded by two ex-Microsoft (MSFT) execs in 2008, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, San Francisco-based DocVerse has raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

It’s yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow by Google (GOOG), along with a range of other digital arenas such as cloud computing and mapping.

Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs, but it struggles against the Office juggernaut. Thus, a link with Office via DocVerse is a smart move.

Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager on the Google Apps team said that while some perceive the search giant as trying to compete directly with Office (a claim I openly scoffed at during the interview), Google did hear from customers that it wanted cloud-based functionality with Office.

“We heard from customers that there is a great need for help in the cloud,” he said. “This acquisition helps users move over the to cloud and expands our product.”

DocVerse CEO Sinha said his small company–under 20 employees, who will be moving down to the Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., immediately–had been talking to Google for a while.

“We were gaining traction in the product in large enterprises…so, it made sense, because we have a vision of a world of Web-based collaboration,” he said.

While Sinha said he admired what Microsoft had done with Office, he noted there is a need for more, and a hook-up with the powerful Google will help DocVerse do that sooner.

“Microsoft is doing a lot of great things for its customers who use its stack of software,” he said. “But we see a whole other world interested in the Web-based approach that is not being served very well right now.”

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is clearly the future of Office.

In fact, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a significant statement related to cloud computing in a speech, noting, “This is the bet for the company. For the cloud, we’re all in.”

In an interesting side note, this is the third company that Harrison Metal has invested in that has been acquired by Google over the last several months. Other sales have included AdMob for $750 million and Aardvark for $50 million.

There had been a post in TechCrunch back in December that the deal was nearly done, but it was apparently not completed until now.

Here is the blog post on the deal from Google:

Google Docs welcomes DocVerse

Friday, March 05, 2010 at 10:48 AM

?The future of productivity applications is in the cloud. We’ve always believed the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information, and Google Docs has already helped millions of people become more productive. But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.
?
For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they’ve enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

A huge “welcome” to the DocVerse team and their customers! Current DocVerse users can keep using the product as usual, though we’ve suspended new sign-ups until we’re ready to share what’s next. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Apps team

Series Seed Documents Legal Guru Ted Wang Speaks! (Plus Get Your Free Term Sheet Here)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:30:38 +0000

BoomTown finally got to meet Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang today, which was kind of a thrill since most tight-lipped attorneys run in the other direction when they see me coming.

But Wang–who works for Fenwick & West and is a popular legal adviser to a spate of digital start-ups, such as Facebook, Aardvark and Twitter–has a lot to talk about with the launch of a new Web site called Series Seed Documents earlier this week.

It’s a laudable effort at simplifying the complex–especially since most lawyers mostly like to complexify the simple.

Instead, Wang has made templated but flexible legal documents available for free for entrepreneurs to use in seed-stage deals, and his effort is getting support from the top venture and angel investors in the arena, such as Andreessen Horowitz.

The point: So new companies don’t waste time and money negotiating often unnecessarily complicated–but usually standard–legal papers.

Wrote Wang in a blog post on the Series Seed site, titled “For the Faithful”:

Up until now, various smart people have talked or blogged about reducing the transaction costs associated with seed stage investment without rallying around a particular attack. Of course both entrepreneurs and investors would rather see their investment dollars used toward developing a new product and bringing it to market than toward what are usually routine transaction costs. The problem has been crafting a set of documents that provide adequate protections without being unduly burdensome. While traditional financing documents give broader rights and protections to investors, for a seed stage investment the benefits of simplification in the Series Seed documents outweigh the value of these additional rights and protections…

This endeavor will only be successful if the Documents gain widespread adoption–and that will require lawyers to get out of their comfort zones and think about the trade-offs suggested in the Documents. It will not be easy, but once a practitioner takes the plunge and makes the effort to think through the changes, I am convinced that a well thought-through standard set of seed documents will emerge. Moreover, if folks in our line of business do not come up with a set of documents that enable seed financings at a reasonable cost, the market is going to solve this problem in another way. To quote Gen Shinseki “[i]f you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”

Andreessen Horowitz, which was the first to agree to use Series Seed Documents, has been joined by a spate of high-profile angel and early-stage venture investors.

The group includes SV Angel’s Ron Conway, First Round Capital, “micro-cap” investor Mike Maples, SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier, True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Harrison Metal.

For a legal look-see, I embedded the four documents from Seed Series Documents below, which include: A Restated Certificate of Incorporation, an Investors’ Rights Agreement, a Series Seed Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement, and a Terms for Private Placement of Series Seed Preferred Stock of [Insert Company Name], Inc.

And here’s Wang talking about the effort–which he has been blogging about since 2007, actually–at Fenwick’s Mountain View, Calif., offices, with an impressive range of legal tomes behind him:

[ See post to watch video ]

SeriesSeedFormCOI

SeriesSeedIRA

SeriesSeedFormSPA

SeriesSeedTermSheet-1

Series Seed Documents–With an Assist From Andreessen Horowitz–To Help Entrepreneurs With Legal Hairballs

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:03:48 +0000

Series Seed Documents, templated documents for entrepreneurs to use for seed-stage deals, will be launched today, part of an effort by Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang and pushed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The point: So new entrepreneurs don’t waste time and money negotiating often unnecessarily complex legal papers.

Series Seed Documents was planning its announcement tonight, after briefing reporters. But BoomTown was alerted to the move by a tweet last week from Fenwick & West lawyer Wang that read: “Excited about launching Series Seed documents next week.”

Oops!

The Twitter post has since been taken down (but here is an image of it, below, natch!).

“Who even knew that a corporate attorney would have a Twitter account?” joked Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz in an interview this morning.

Actually, Wang (pictured here) is Twitter’s lawyer!

His practice, which focuses on representation of “emerging companies,” as noted on his Fenwick & West Web site, also includes Aardvark, Billshrink, Clicker, Facebook, Flixster and Widgetbox.

Andreessen Horowitz, which was the first to agree to use Series Seed Documents, will be joined by a spate of high-profile angel and early-stage investors.

“We want to make the process as transparent as possible, which is to say, we want to take all the mystery out it,” said Andreessen. “And it is online for everyone to understand.”

Of course, noted Andreessen, the price for the round is still open to negotiation, but wrangling over typically standard legal issues often hurts deals.

“The big reason we are doing it is that we think for these early stage round, bashing over these terms does damage only brings mistrust,” he said.

Andreessen noted that this template approach is only appropriate for small, early rounds of about $500,000 to $1 million.

“VCs who do angel rounds should be acting like a VC in a VC round and acting like an angel in an angel round,” he said. “The problems come when VCs act like VCs in angel rounds.”

Andreessen said using Series Seed Documents would cost start-ups about $7,000 compared with a low of $15,000 and up to $100,000 in many similar deals.

“It helps streamline the process and makes starting a company easier and more efficient,” said Conway of SV Angel, who is a well-known angel investor. “And cheaper–all in all, it is a benefit to both the entrepreneur and the investor.”

Weekend Update 2.20.10–Set It and Forget It Edition

Drake Martinet — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:33:18 +0000

We’re all about value and ease of use at AllThingsD. That’s why, if you keep reading right now, you’ll get all of the following at no extra charge. You’ll get the Walt’s Personal Technology column with the full line of Mossberg’s Mailbox and Mossberg Solution accessories. You’ll also get a full installment of Boomtown, complete with the snark and analysis you rely on. But wait, there’s more! If you call in the next five minutes, you’ll also get the matched set of Peter Kafka and John Paczkowski, perfect for an evening at home or a night on the town. Yes, that’s the complete set of AllThingsD for the incredibly low price of however long it takes you to read Weekend Update. So order now and get expedited shipping right to your screen. Offer not valid in some states, Weekend Update bears no affiliation with Billy Mays, Ron Popeil or that ShamWow guy.

Whoa! Sorry, we may have gotten just a little over excited about Walt’s Personal Technology column this week. He responded to popular demand and submitted a full review of the magicJack. Yes, that magicJack. No one can ever accuse Walt Mossberg of not being a man of the people. So what did he find? Well, the little plastic USB dongle that ranks up there with rotisseries, Chia pets and The Clapper in the pantheon of hard-sell TV adds actually delivered on its promise. MagicJack connects via USB to a computer, and has a standard land-line telephone jack on the other end. Walt started it up, made some calls, and even tried out the customer service center, which turned out to be efficient and helpful. Among the few drawbacks were the need to use the phone number that comes with the device and the fact that it only works when your computer is on and connected to the Internet. Mossberg’s Mailbox was full to the brim this week with some pretty targeted questions about security, the grim future of the dedicated PDA and e-readers for libraries. As it turns out, running a virtual Windows machine on a Mac can lead to a very real virus if you aren’t careful. Katie’s piece at Mossberg Solution made sense of this week’s biggest question mark. What the heck is Google (GOOG) Buzz? She broke the new social network from Google down to its bare bones and explained some of the controversy surrounding how it decides who’s added to you Buzz list. The new social feature is now built into Gmail, but it seems the exact relationship between your Gmail contacts and Buzz is still being worked out. Katie nails it all with an expertly simple explanation of the service and controversies.

BoomTown started the week off with a little insider info about Micheal Dearing, the hottest angel investor you’ve never heard of. Dearing, a former eBay (EBAY) exec and current professor at Stanford’s design school, has been inside early on high-profile start-ups like Aardvark, Xoopit and Mixer Labs. Kara shared a meal with the start-up whisperer and got more out of him than most, even if he still kept pretty tight-lipped. Kara also shared some viral video love featuring some hardcore Avatar fans. We can’t tell if these live action Na’vi role players are kidding. Maybe we’ll ask their king, James Cameron, when he joins Kara on stage at the next D conference. Toward the end of the week, Kara posted about what may be the strangest love triangle of the modern era. The Facebook-Snickers-Betty White trifecta is so strange we can barely even comprehend the letters in it. It seems that Facebook users loved the Betty White Super Bowl ad for Snickers so much that they held a social media gun to Lorne Micheals’s head until he got the Golden Girl to host “Saturday Night Live.” The only thing that could unseat the Betty White triangle from weirdest social media moment of ’10 is the much rumored Barry White-KFC-America’s Next Top Model episode we’ve been hearing about. There: Rumor started.

MediaMemo led off the week with Weekend Update’s favorite sort of post. It was yet another beautiful e-mag concept, this time from Condé Nast’s Wired. The mag looked snappy, beautiful and functional–even if no one, besides maybe Stephen Colbert, has a device that can display it yet. Peter also covered the second instance of an emerging trend in the video rental business. It looks like Redbox, the ever-present rental kiosk company, has agreed to go the way of Netflix (NFLX) and keep recently released DVDs out of the rental pool in exchange for a cash break from Warner. Peter rounded things out with a post about Web TV service Hulu and the likelihood of a Hulu player for the iPad. Peter’s post explores the probability that an iPad Hulu would not be a free Hulu. This situation is pretty bounded and specific, but the deeper question is one facing a great many media companies right now. Will users be willing to pay for convenience of displaying a service on the iPad that they can get for free on there home computer, and by extension, will they pay by the app or pay for the content? Weekend Update can’t wait to see how that one shakes out.

Over at Digital Daily, John started early in the week with a quick peek at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone, the new smartphone operating system from the maker of Windows Mobile and Windows Vista. As it turns out, Windows Phone looks pretty slick. The interface isn’t a shrunken version of the desktop OS, which is a very good thing. Midweek, John scaled a mountain of tweets to report from the very top. It seems that Twitter’s traffic has grown over 1,000 percent since last year, according to comScore’s (SCOR) January report. It may now be impossible to shut the flock up. To button up the week, John covered a decision by the Federal Trade Commission that allows Google to buy and sell power wholesale, just like an energy utility. Google execs insist that the move doesn’t signal their intention to enter the power arena as a utility. They just want to buy power like anyone else. After all, electricity is the raw material of Googling.

We’re so confident that you’ve enjoyed this Weekend Update that if you aren’t 100 percent satisfied, you can send it back for a full refund of your purchase price, no questions asked. You can look for all your favorite AllThingsD accessories next week. John, Peter Kara and Walt will be back to ship top-quality content directly to your door at no extra charge. Top quality, easy to use and in a variety of colors, there’s something for everyone at AllThingsD.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Hunch's Fake and Dixon Speak (And They've Got a Hunch, You Might Not Get Exactly What It Is Yet)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:42:18 +0000

When Aardvark was sold to Google (GOOG) for $50 million last week, a lot of folks wondered about the fate of Hunch, another hot start-up in the space.

Except, as correctly noted by two of its four co-founders, Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, in a chat BoomTown had yesterday, Hunch is quite different–more of an algorithmically hopped up recommendation service that makes use of a mass of data from user-generated questions and answers than a simpler social search site.

That doesn’t make Hunch into either a Yahoo Answers or a Wikipedia with more charm or allow for annoyingly querying your friends on Facebook or the masses on Twitter.

Personally, Hunch reminds me of a crowd-sourced decision-making mosh pit without the sharp elbows, making all kinds of cool, if odd, connections.

This mass of varied data is what Dixon and Fake think is key to making better decisions.

Got it?

The New York-based Hunch launched about last June to a lot of hype–somewhat due to Fake’s success with her last start-up, Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site Yahoo (YHOO) bought in 2005.

And so far, Hunch has been growing decently, with 1.2 million unique monthly visitors now and tens of millions of questions asked and answered.

(Its other founders are Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis.)

With $6 million in funding, where Hunch goes from here will be interesting to watch, as it adds perhaps more profiling features, both fun and helpful.

The business goal said Fake: Basic lead generation, for which Hunch will presumably be paid by all kinds of vendors.

Listen in on all this and more in my video interview with Fake, who works on product design at Hunch, and CEO Dixon, who has had his own serial entrepreneurial success selling security start-up SiteAdvisor to McAfee (MFE) in 2006:

[ See post to watch video ]

The Start-Up Whisperer: Michael Dearing Is the Hottest Angel Investor You've Never Heard Of

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:30:07 +0000

Anyone paying attention to the heated-up acquisition market in Silicon Valley knows all about AdMob, the mobile advertising start-up acquired by Google for $750 million last November.

Or Xoopit, the social email firm, which Yahoo (YHOO) bought last summer for $20 million.

Or Mixer Labs, creator of GeoAPI, which Twitter picked up in December.

And then, there’s last week’s purchase of social search phenom Aardvark by Google (GOOG) for a reported $50 million.

What a lot of people might not know is the prescient but very low-profile angel investor all these companies have in common: Michael Dearing (pictured here).

The former top exec at eBay (EBAY), who has worked at Bain & Company as well as Disney (DIS), is now a Stanford University professor.

But more to the point, Dearing has quietly become very successful at picking innovative winners from a wide range of mostly consumer Internet start-ups, mostly in Silicon Valley.

Along with his recent series of hits, other investments include Widgetbox, CafePress, DocVerse, FanSnap, Lumos Labs, Polyvore, Doostang, BloomSpot and MocoSpace.

He invests in all these start-ups via an investment vehicle called Harrison Metal, which he runs with another former eBay exec, Erik Rannala.

Harrison Metal is named after John Harrison, the inventor of the marine chronometer, which allowed for accurate measuring of longitude. According to its Web site, it “invests in early stage, technology driven businesses led by exceptional entrepreneurs.”

While I had a delightful lunch with Dearing recently, at which he nicely managed to convince me not to give him the BoomTown video treatment, he also politely declined to be interviewed for this piece.

Thankfully, his investees did not decline, and quickly sent large bouquets of gratitude when I asked for comments about Dearing:

Aaardvark co-founder Max Ventilla:

“Michael was among the very first angel investors to get behind Aardvark and stayed critically involved until the end, providing whatever the Company needed. Dearing is an 11 out of 10.”

AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui:

“MD is a great strategist and provided us with very thoughtful advice during some of the formative days of the company. It’s exciting to see him step more fully into the role of early investor/advisor with Harrison Metal.”

And, finally, Xoopit co-founder and CEO Bijan Marashi:

“Michael Dearing has the very rare skill of being able to quickly spot and render the core elements of strategy surrounding a project–the things that matter and those that don’t. In a matter of a few brush strokes, I’ve seen him help teams focus and evolve their activities into actions that generate tremendous value. Moreover, he’s a deep listener and an inspiring mentor. At Xoopit, he got behind the team and helped us stay on-point to our mission, which can sometimes be tricky for an ambitious startup in a big space.”

So, while he might not like the attention, Dearing is likely to be getting more if this record keeps up.

Rob Go wrote a sharp piece on Harrison and what he calls “Micro VC’s,” before the Aardvark deal–which I had not seen until someone on Twitter pointed it out to be, but which you can read here.

Aardvark Confirms It Has Been Acquired, but Not by What Company (But It's Google)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:20:44 +0000

Aardvark, the social search engine that has been the subject of much attention since it was founded in late 2007, confirmed that it has been acquired.

“We can confirm that we signed a deal to be acquired,” wrote CEO Max Ventilla in an email to BoomTown this morning.

But Ventilla would not reveal the buyer, which a report by TechCrunch earlier this morning said is Google (GOOG), for $50 million.

The Silicon Valley search giant has since confirmed that it is the buyer. “We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don’t have any additional details to share right now,” said the company in a statement.

There have been other possible suitors along with Google, from Facebook to Yahoo (YHOO) to Microsoft (MSFT) to IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), which gave the San Francisco-based start-up a serious look-see to differentiate that company’s lagging Ask search service.

The 30-person Aardvark has raised a total of $6 million from August Capital and others to perfect and distribute its service.

It uses social networks, such as Facebook, to get relevant answers via email and instant messaging. It also has a Web version.

In many ways, Aardvark is yet another version of the iconic Six Degrees, mixed with Yahoo Answers or expert sites, a cup of Twitter-like sociability, and completed with a big dollop of algorithmic calculation.

Its founders, including Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, worked at Google and wanted to try to solve the problem of data that cannot be easily reduced to a keyword query.

At least that’s the goal of the innovative Aardvark.

Here is a recent video interview I did with Ventilla and Horowitz, in which they tried their best not to answer the potentially multimillion-dollar question about being bought.

The video also includes a tour of Aardvark, whose offices are, of course, called the Mechanical Zoo:

[ See post to watch video ]

Aardvark's Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz Speak (Plus a Tour!)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:11:20 +0000

Earlier this week, BoomTown motored over to the San Francisco HQ of Aardvark, the social search engine that has been the subject of much attention since it was founded in late 2007.

While there, I got a tour of the 30-person start-up, which has raised a total of $6 million from August Capital and others to perfect and distribute its service.

Aardvark uses social networks, such as Facebook, to get relevant answers via email and instant messaging. It also has a Web version.

Its founders, including Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, worked at Google (GOOG) and wanted to try to solve the problem of data that cannot be easily reduced to a keyword query.

At least that’s the goal of the innovative Aardvark, unless it ends up selling itself off to any of a wide range of companies, from Google to Facebook to Yahoo (YHOO) to Microsoft (MSFT) to IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), to differentiate that company’s lagging Ask search service.

Or not.

Ventilla tries his best not to answer that potentially multimillion-dollar question in this interview with Horowitz.

The video also includes a tour of Aardvark, whose offices are, of course, called the Mechanical Zoo.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

The Mechanical Moo-Lah?

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:33:50 +0000

BoomTown has officially selected The Mechanical Zoo–a super-secret-shhh-onthedownlow start-up that already got tons of attention due to its passel of ex-Googlers and its mashup plan to mix social and search–as its next candidate for excessive Web 2.0 funding.

And, according to several sources, the San Francisco-based company is working on closing a mega-Series-A round right now, with all the usual big VC suspects in the running.

The Mechanical Zoo has already raised $750,000 in seed funding from angel investors and has access to other funding from institutional investors.

I am not sure as yet how much and at what valuation any new round will be pegged, but sources said it is likely to be larger than is typical this early in the game.

Why? Well, a hot concept and the fact that The Mechanical Zoo has the fancy team of pedigreed geeks–including former Google (GOOG) News product head Nathan Stoll and CEO Max Ventilla, another ex-Googler, along with other prominent techies.

Its first product offering is an invitation-only alpha version of a “subjective search” application that is inexplicably called Aardvark (see the graphic below; click on it to make it larger).

The motto on the site says: “Just ask. Someone knows. Aardvark connects you on the spot.”

It also notes:

“For information you can trust, a person is better than a webpage.

Tap into the knowledge and experience of the tens of thousands of people in your network–friends, people your friends trust, classmates and co-workers.

Send Aardvark a message by IM or Email and Aardvark will find the one person who can help you out, in the moment.”

The Mechanical Zoo site says its first product will be released this fall.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.