You’ll be coming up with the taglines, building the marketing metrics, devising pricing strategies as well as making CES happen end-to-end and helping out on customer service phone calls.

For a video demo of the product, see: http://sifteo.com/

Siftables are gesture-sensitive video tiles that form a smart, distributed system for games and education. The technology has been spun out of the MIT Media Lab and has been featured on the Science and Discovery channels, presented at the TED conference, and has been written up by Engadget, Gizmodo, New Scientist and Wired.

The following is what they are looking for in an ideal candidate:

- 5+ years of professional experience in marketing consumer electronics and/or interactive games (this isn’t your first rodeo)
- organized: you are thoughtful and meticulous in all you do
- agile: you are willing to dig into (and adapt) our target customer profile as we learn more about product/market fit
- creative: you love to execute low-cost, grassroots outreach events
- writing skills: you can dash out tight copy with your eyes closed
- communication skills: you love talking to engineers and designers (maybe you are or were one), understanding their ideas, and working with them to deliver a great product
- resourceful: you can win big results on tight budgets
- decisive: you can pare away good ideas from the great ones and focus on measurable plans
Please send resumes to jobs@sifteo.com with subject "Marketing Lead"

Triggit has developed technology that helps advertisers and agencies buy media across various real-time bidding exchanges. Seth has a longer post up on his blog describing some of the changes in the online ad ecosystem – and specifically the rapid rise of exchange-based buying and selling – that lead us to this investment. Along with Foundry portfolio companies AdMeld and Lijit, we see Triggit standing at the center of this fundamental shift in online advertising and in Triggit’s case bringing unique technology to brands and agencies transacting on the real-time exchanges that will help advertisers more effectively target specific online audiences.

We’re joined in this investment by Santo Politi of Spark Capital and a handful of well known Silicon Valley angel investors.

You can read the company’s blog on the investment here as well as see articles in AdExchanger, TechCrunch and MediaPost.

The web has become increasingly social. While many simple social features, such as sharing, liking, and favoriting content are appearing on publisher’s sites, users are increasingly engaging with each other in other ways as evidenced by the dramatic success of social games.  As a result, many non-game publishers are now exploring ways to incorporate “game mechanics” into their web and mobile applications.

BigDoor provides the underlying infrastructure that enables publishers to quickly, easily, and inexpensively accomplish this.  Since BigDoor uses an API approach, their system can be configured to be tightly integrated into any publisher’s site.  Due to their cloud-based approach, they can aggressively scale to meet any publisher’s need.

BigDoor is part of a new theme we have been investing in that we call Distribution.  It also overlaps nicely with our Glue theme.  As a cloud based service with a simple API driven pricing model, its deployment and pricing model is similar to SimpleGeo, another recent investment we have made.  Finally, we are very comfortable with its publisher driven adoption model, which is similar to Lijit and modeled after an investment we had previously made in FeedBurner.

Seattle is now home to two Foundry Group investments – BigDoor and Gist. We are also mentors and investors in the Techstars Seattle program, which is led by Andy Sack whom is an investors and board member of BigDoor and introduced the company to us.

With the widespread availability of GPS-enabled smartphones, the market for location-based applications and services is going mainstream. Once the province of luxury automobiles and expensive single-purpose devices, hand-held turn-by-turn navigation applications have become commodity items that are either free or very low cost. Beyond basic map-based navigation apps, entirely new categories of applications have emerged based on the widespread availability of location-aware mobile devices. These include location-based advertising platforms, social/gaming “check in” tools like Foursquare and Gowalla, augmented reality applications like Layar and more.

As market demand for applications with location-aware features has increased, developers have struggled with the complexity and domain specialization related to building geospatial functions into their applications. As a result, a market opportunity has emerged for a company to provide an easy-to-use and scalable geolocation infrastructure platform to third-party application developers.

SimpleGeo was founded by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. Previously, Matt founded SocialThing, a Boulder TechStars 2007 company acquired by AOL in 2008. Joe was previously Chief Architect at Digg and left the Bay Area to come to Boulder to create SimpleGeo.

SimpleGeo began life as CrashCorp and was focused on building augmented reality games for mobile devices. As they began development, they quickly discovered that the biggest challenge in building their game was implementing the geolocation infrastructure services it would require. Given the growing popularity of apps with location-based functionality, most notably the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, the company shifted its focus towards building a robust geolocation infrastructure layer that third-party app developers could use to easily integrate sophisticated location-based functionality into their applications. Thus, SimpleGeo was born.

SimpleGeo offers a scalable cloud-based infrastructure for geodata that enables developers to store check-ins, points of interest, virtual goods and media in a private layer. This data can be retrieved by performing geospatial and spatiotemporal queries. In addition, SimpleGeo offers a rich marketplace of third-party geodata that is accessible to developers via the SimpleGeo Marketplace. The company has forged data partnerships with companies such as ESRI, deCarta, Skyhook Wireless, Quova, MetaCarta and Weather Decision Technologies.

SimpleGeo fits handily into our Glue investment theme, which includes other Foundry Group portfolio companies such as Gnip, AdMeld, Trada, Medialets, Standing Cloud, Next Big Sound and Topspin Media.

We are thrilled to be working with Matt again. Our partner Jason was one of Matt’s mentors for SocialThing during TechStars’ inaugural summer program in 2007, and we’ve followed the evolution of SimpleGeo with great interest since Matt and Joe began brainstorming about the business.

Additionally, we are fortunate to be co-investing with some great firms that we really respect and have had the pleasure of co-investing with in other portfolio companies: Redpoint Ventures and First Round Capital.  Last, but not least, we’re excited to be co-investing for the first time with Chris Sacca at Lowercase Capital and with Josh Felser and Dave Samuel at Freestyle Capital. We’re looking forward to working closely with Matt and Joe and the rest of the SimpleGeo team and our co-investors to help build SimpleGeo into a great success and a fundamental infrastructure layer of the web.

For more details from around the web, check out the following: TechCrunch covered SimpleGeo’s funding announcement this morning, and SimpleGeo blogged about it as well, detailing not only the funding, but also a bunch of great new hires.

When we speak about the history of Oblong, we tend to start with the movie Minority Report, where John was Steven Spielberg’s science advisor.  If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, check it out.  It is one of the only movies that we’ve seen that holds up in its vision of the future even 8 years later.

And while there was a working prototype of the system during the time the movie was being filmed, that was hardly the beginning.  In fact, John had worked at the MIT Media Lab to create what was called The Luminous Room. 

The Luminous Room was Oblong’s g-speak platform version 0.5 (perhaps).  When we first considered investing in the company, we were amazed to see how long John had been thinking about the larger issues of GUIs and the data implications of operating systems.

If you are interested in seeing John’s early work, the Luminous Room link has videos which will show you the building blocks of what we think is one of the most interesting companies that we’ve ever invested in. 

With our HCI thematic investing strategy, we think often about the future ways we’ll connect with computers.  We aren’t the only folks who think the mouse and keyboard are dead.  If you want to read what John thinks of the future of UI design, read the article. 

Sifteo is a game-platform development company that has developed “Siftables” the world’s first table-top gaming platform. Siftables are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities that act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them by piling, grouping and sorting to interact with digital information and media.

As cool as this sounds, it’s not nearly as cool as the company’s TED talk and demo below.

Sifteo is another investment in our Human Computer Interaction theme along with Emsense, Oblong, Organic Motion and Smith and Tinker.   

Founded by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, out of the MIT Media Lab, we believe that Sifteo is developing the next generation popular gaming platform that will go beyond the early successes of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPad/Pod/Touch. 

The Sifteo platform will have an easy to use SDK that will allow developers to create and sell games on the system.  The tools includes a gesture recognition system that abstracts user actions, such as grouping and sorting, into events the designer can easily attach to software events. Overall, the system radically simplifies and speeds game development.

Most importantly, Siftables are fun.  The embedded video shows but a couple of possibilities, but we really look forward to seeing all the of the creative content that is developed on the platform. 

We really look forward to working with Jeevan, Dave and the rest of the team, including returning investors and our friends from True Ventures. 

SendGrid offers a powerful and flexible cloud-based transactional email platform that enables companies and application developers to easily send and receive emails to and from their users, while enhancing their email delivery rates and providing rich analytics. The SendGrid platform easily scales to handle millions of users, providing access to world-class email infrastructure services, freeing developers from the hassles of managing the complexities of email servers and technologies.

Historically, companies have sent two categories of email to their customers and/or users: bulk emails, which are typically marketing messages sent out to their entire user base, and transactional emails, which are user-specific emails that update a particular user about changes activity in his/her account, provide purchase confirmations, send password reset notifications, etc. There exists a large and mature ecosystem devoted to outsourcing and optimizing the sending of mass- marketing emails to end-users. These emails are often regarded as spam by their recipients, despite the fact that most users likely opted-in to receive such emails when they registered for an account with the website sending these messages.

Interestingly, no such ecosystem has developed around transactional emails, despite (or perhaps because of) the greater challenges and message volumes associated with supporting an effective transactional email system in-house. As an example, it is estimated that Facebook alone sends well over one billion transactional emails to its users per day. Unlike mass-marketing bulk emails, transactional emails are seldom perceived as spam by end-users, and both the sender and the receiver have a vested interest in these transactional emails arriving at their destination.

Managing a transactional email system in-house results in increased costs associated with supporting the email system, while poor deliverability rates of an application’s transactional emails can decrease user engagement, site traffic and revenue.

Most web application developers are not proficient with mail server technology or the SMTP protocol that underlies it – the expertise required to deeply understand the email technology stack is very different from the HTTP/XML/HTML expertise that the average web developer possesses.

SendGrid moves transactional email functionality to the cloud and allows web developers to access sophisticated email processing capabilities through a simple API (application programming interface) that frees the developer from having to deploy, scale or manage an email server. SendGrid’s cloud-based email services enhance transactional email deliverability and scalability, while also providing rich analytics and enhanced email capabilities without requiring the developer to write custom email-specific code.

Integration with SendGrid is simple for the developer, requiring only a change of DNS settings to redirect outbound and/or inbound email through SendGrid’s servers. SendGrid provides a free entry-level demo account that allows a developer to send up to 200 emails daily free of charge. When customers move above the 200 emails/day limit, they are required to upgrade to a paid account, with monthly charges based on volume.

SendGrid was a graduate of the Boulder TechStars Class of 2009, and Foundry Group partner Ryan McIntyre acted as a mentor for SendGrid’s CEO and co-founder Isaac Saldana throughout the summer program. Following SendGrid’s “graduation” from TechStars, the company raised a $750k seed round in late 2009. Since their launch in the Fall of 2009, SendGrid has landed thousands of customers and has delivered nearly 1.2 billion messages on their behalf.

As we observed SendGrid’s rapid customer growth, which has occurred through word of mouth and without formal sales or marketing efforts, we made an offer to invest in SendGrid, and, thankfully, they accepted our offer to lead this round. We’ve got a long history of investing in the email ecosystem, most recently via our investments in Postini (acquired by Google in 2007) and Return Path. SendGrid is in many ways architecturally analogous to Postini (and shares Postini’s simple DNS-based deployment model), but instead of serving as an inbound email filter to enterprise email inboxes, SendGrid provides its cloud-based email infrastructure in the service of application generated emails sent to (and received from) users of a web-based application.

SendGrid sits squarely in the middle of our Protocol investment theme, which subsumed our Email, RSS and Implicit Web themes. We are excited to welcome the company to the Foundry Group portfolio and look forward to working with SendGrid’s founders Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, Tim Jenkins and the rest of the SendGrid team to build the company into a huge player in the email infrastructure market.

You can read more about the business at www.trada.com, on Seth’s post about the launch here and in this morning’s TechCrunch piece here. Trada founder Niel Robertson also has a great post about the genesis of the company up on the Trada blog.

“Organic Motion is a global leader in the development of breakthrough markerless motion capture and analysis technologies. Our software products utilize state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and high performance graphics hardware to deliver an industry first set of production, entertainment, and research tools for use in a variety of industries.

We are seeking to expand our Manhattan, NY based engineering team with applicants who have a solid mastery of practical C/C++ development skills combined with strong analytical and problem solving skills in a variety of areas including computer vision, computer graphics, networking, pipelining and optimization, biomechanics, and more.

We are looking for candidates having 2 or more years experience in a professional development setting in addition to a PHD, Master’s degree, or an exceptional Bachelor’s.

Required skills include some of the following:

* C, C++ (required)

* Stereo vision – 3d reconstruction / mesh creation & optimization 
* 3D programming (DirectX, OpenGL, Shaders, HLSL, CG, GPU) 
* Multi-threaded / multi-process programming

* Networking – sockets, RPC, streams, low latency hardware

* Computer vision / image processing

* Low-latency / real time 

Secondary skills:

* Game development
* Distributed systems
* Motion capture creation / analysis 
* Physics

* Scripting languages (Python, Lua, Bash, Perl, etc)

* UNIX, Linux

* Mathematical modeling, filtering, signal processing
* Biokinematics
* GUI development (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets) 
* Autodesk 3d animation suite API

Responsibilities include: 
* Optimization (single-core / multi-core / multi-process) 
* Algorithm development (raw 3D data analysis) 
* Application development (server and client side)

* Code maintenance and troubleshooting
* Supporting conferences and shows (past shows: SIGGRAPH, GDC, CES, I/ITSEC)

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic team with potential for rapid growth and access to a great deal of compelling technological resources. We are looking for individuals with fresh ideas and the skills to put those ideas to the test. This is a unique opportunity to have a major impact on a growing company!

If you are an excellent candidate, then please reply with your resume in Word or PDF format to careers@organicmotion.com. A code sample would also be a big plus!”

Memeo Connect is a cross-platform application that allows Google Apps Premier customers to access, migrate and synchronize files between their desktop and Google Docs.   Simply put, Memeo Connect allows users to have local copies of all the files and folders in their Google Docs collection synced in real time to any number of their computers (Mac or Windows).

This provides two huge benefits to users: first, it enables users to access and edit their docs while offline, and, second, it allows batch upload and conversion of Microsoft Office documents (and other formats) to Google Docs. If you’re interested in learning more, PC World provides a good analysis of Memeo’s and Google’s announcements, while Memeo has provided a nice screen-cast demo of Memeo Connect on YouTube:

We’re very excited that Memeo and Google have teamed up to offer this strategically important functionality to Google Apps Premier Edition customers. Memeo Connect helps resolve some of the biggest hurdles potential Google Apps customers have when contemplating moving from Microsoft Office to Google Apps: namely offline access and the ability to migrate legacy document collections to the cloud.

Memeo Connect helps bridge the divide between the cloud and the desktop and addresses the simple reality that Google Docs and Microsoft Office documents are going to co-exist in real-world environments for the foreseeable future – even if an enterprise commits completely to Google Apps for its office productivity suite, MSFT Office docs will still find their way in to their environment via partners, vendors and customers.

When we invested in Memeo in 2007, we saw the potential of Memeo’s technology platform to provide consumers and business users with sophisticated, real-time, content-aware backup, sync and media sharing tools, functionality which falls squarely into our Digital Life investment theme. Since our investment, Memeo has released and iterated on an entire suite of award-winning products which include Memeo Instant Backup, Memeo AutoSync, Memeo Share, Memeo Send and, now, Memeo Connect for Google Apps. To date, Memeo has distributed over 45 million licenses for their software to users in 150 countries and 35,000 companies, 144 of which are in the Fortune 1000. With the addition of Memeo Connect for Google Apps to their product line, we see the potential for Memeo to reach millions more users. Congrats, Memeo!