Ad networks pride themselves in offering targeting options for optimal ad placement, and Resonate Networks is one such ad company that provides options for niche advertising as well. As an ad network specific for public affairs, political and corporate campaigns, Resonate Networks launches as a differentiated solution for a unique set of industries.
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It’s almost time for TECH Cocktail DC 4. Coming up later this month, the 4th TECH Cocktail in DC will be held on Thursday, February 26, from 6:00 - 8:30 pm. The location for TECH Cocktail DC is at LeftBank wired bistro lounge in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.

This is a new location for the TECH Cocktail DC event, but it’s got a laid back vibe to match the casual and welcoming theme that TECH Cocktail is known for. The event is free to attend, as usual, but you’ll still need to RSVP. Get there early enough to grab a drink before it gets too crowded.

The TECH Cocktail series has grown a great deal in the past couple of years, starting in Chicago and making its way across a number of cities, including DC. Hosted by Eric Olson and Frank Gruber, the TECH Cocktail events have proven to be a great way to meet others on the tech scene and get the word out about your company. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event or learning more about TECH Cocktail DC, click here for more details.

Yesterday PeHub reported that Koofers, a Reston, Virginia based startup which was one of the first round participants in the LaunchBox Digital fund, “has secured $500,000 of a $2 million Series A”. I’m guessing that more cash will be delivered as various benchmarks are met. Matthew Jacobson of LaunchBox Digital says that “5 of the companies in LaunchBox Digital’s LaunchBox08 class have received additional formal funding.”
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I’ve always wondered if a marketplace for “used” music digital files would fly. There are some sites out there like GrooveShark which do support a marketplace for such activity, but it isn’t necessarily the primary premise of their service. Bethesda, Maryland based Bopaboo, however, has created a service that’s dedicated to the buying and selling of “used” mp3s.

This sounds silly to some, especially when you think about the word “used.” The files aren’t really “used,” and you’re not really transferring authorization to play an mp3 to another person since you get to keep your copy of the file. But with the $5.00 credit bopaboo gave me to try out the site, I was able to get the entire 808s & Heartbreaks album, along with about 10 other songs.
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There’s been something bubbling in D.C. for the past year or two and more recently, it’s become boiling hot: the convergence of the technology crowds from around the area. It’s something that I’ve been pushing for at least two years and a number of other people have been supporting as well. Something that has increasingly become apparent is that there are simply people that get it and those that don’t.
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Today the DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer and iStrategyLabs announced the winners of the Apps for Democracy Contest. Within the final week, the program received a large influx of new submissions resulting in 47 total submissions with the winners announced this morning by Adrian Fenty at One Judiciary Square.

This was the first large new media contest by the Office of the CTO and I’d expect more of these to come in the future. If you are looking to still have an influence in the contest, there is the People’s Choice Award which will come from users voting on the Apps for Democracy site. You can head over and vote if you are interested in participating.

Tomorrow night the People’s Choice Award will be decided at 7 pm. Tonight there will also be an awards ceremony and celebration downtown. This is a really exciting event for D.C., emphasizing the government’s commitment to supporting local technology innovation. I had the opportunity to speak with Vivek Kundra, CTO of D.C., last month and he emphasized his ongoing commitment.

In the coming months there will be some very large announcements related to building the D.C. metro area’s emerging digital economy. I’m personally excited to be part of this growing community. For those of you wondering about the contest winners, the top two are below, and the rest have been posted on the Apps for Democracy website.

Indie Gold
iLive.at

Agency Gold
DC Historic Tours

If you are like me, there’s a good chance you are frequently looking for a great place to eat but don’t want to spend much time searching. You may also want to have an easy way to review sites in a simple manner right after you finish eating at a restaurant. If you are knowledgeable of all things web then you are probably aware of other services offering similar services.

Numerous Competitors

Yelp, for example offers a robust iPhone application for finding restaurants, bars, banks, drugstores, and more. You can then filter each of the stores or restaurants based on their rating, price, and distance from you. It’s a pretty useful application aside from one thing: you can’t review restaurants after you’ve visited them from the application.

A couple weeks ago I also wrote about the LivingSocial iPhone application. One of the many features that the application is the ability to write reviews on the go. This was immediately an open void in the market as Yelp has yet to fix reviews on the go. The additional benefit of LivingSocial is their integration into all the existing social networks which offer developer platforms.

The social recommendation space is rapidly getting crowded and as we rush to fill data into the system, there are going to be some serious challenges. One of those challenges includes consistency of recommendation engines within your personal networks. If half your friends are on one network and half on another, it’s difficult to determine which one to use.

Thummit and Simplicity

While numerous competitors exist in the mobile food recommendation space, Thummit is attempting to simplify things by limiting users to 140 characters, the same way Twitter does. The focus is to build out a robust SMS service and then extend the service to support as many communication platforms as possible. You can tweet your Thummit recommendation, text it to text it to the service, or update it from the Thummit website.

While the initial beta test is focused on the D.C. area, you can currently use the service anywhere in the country. For example I just ate at “The House” in San Francisco for lunch and was able to post a review directly to the site. The service then pulls in other reviews from around the web so that no sites appear to have a lack of content.

When I saw the demo at the LaunchBox Digital offices in D.C. last week, Sean Greene, the brain behind this new product, emphasized that the company is working to integrate many more features that make it easier to review restaurants. That includes automatically determining whether or not someone likes a place automatically via sentiment analysis.

It also appears that they want to take recommendations and simple voting beyond just restaurants. Food is simply the first place to test it out. For now the service is limited to restaurants but they may expand beyond that in the near future. I think keeping the service as simple as possible will be their key to success. What services to you use for social recommendations and social voting?

Also, if you’d like to register for the site, visit the Thummit site and use the invite code “hamburger”. Let us know what you think!

Yesterday, D.C. Based SB Nation announced a “mid-seven-figure” funding round. The round was led by Accel Partners and included Allen & Co., Ted Leonsis, Brent Jones, who previously played for the San Francisco 49ers, Dan Rosenweig and Jeff Winer who were previous Yahoo! execs, and a few others. What is SB Nation? Ultimately, it’s a sports blog network.

The company is run by Jim Bankoff, who used to be the programming chief at AOL. The network includes a group of high quality sports blogs, each of which uses a similar design across the network. The company provides equity in SB Nation in exchange for full ownership of “the content, URLs, and related assets”. Bloggers also receive a portion of the ad revenue.

It’s great to see another D.C. based digital media company generate substantial buzz, but one has to wonder how the company will justify what can only be assumed as a sizable valuation. Then again, if we run the numbers, the company could easily come up with a nice exit. With 2 million unique visitors a month, and the average blog receiving less than 2 page views per visit, at a $20 CPM, that would result in monthly revenues of $68,000 per network ad spot.

With 4 ads on each site, the company could easily surpass $3 million in revenue per year. If a high traffic blogger received 1 percent of the company and it eventually is sold for around $30 million, each blogger might walk away with $300,000. Not exactly a large sum if you’ve been slaving away at your blog for a few years. Conversely, that’s at the company’s current size. If they can grow (as most networks do) significantly, there could theoretically be a much larger exit.

I don’t know any of the details though on how equity was swapped but networks tend to favor the owners of the networks and not the bloggers. In this complex new media landscape, it is pretty challenging to figure out a successful business model where the bloggers benefit. Creating a network definitely adds a lot of value for a potential acquirer though so at least it’s nice to see the creation of a valuable company.

The real question is when will we start seeing a large number of blog network acquisitions? As newspapers continue to decline, one can only assume that each company will expand their digital media presence. I’d guess that the next 12 to 24 months will be ripe for acquisitions in this space.

Looking for a way to find tickets to your favorite band’s upcoming concert? Maybe you are looking for football tickets but all of them appear to be sold out. Well look no longer. Potomac, Maryland based Ninja Tickets has announced the public beta of their event ticket search engine. The site crawls all tickets to sporting events, concerts and theater shows.

I had a chance to test out the system and it works pretty well. When you search it will automatically group events which you can click through to. The event page then displays links to the various tickets and an image of the event venue. There is also space for conversation on every event page. So far the company is boasting that it has over $16 billion worth of tickets indexed so far.

I’m not quite sure what that amounts to in the actual number of tickets but if the average ticket price is $100, that would be approximately 160 million tickets. I don’t know their average ticket cost though so this is just a random estimate. One of the interesting features provided by Ninja Tickets is its “Price Rating” system which “calculates where each event ticket should be located based on its offered price — in effect displaying seats that truly offer the best ‘market value’ for consumers.”

Ninja Tickets also makes an interesting claim: “Ninja Tickets is the only search engine that can pull ticket data from online ticket sites in real time, allowing consumers to see all tickets available at time of search.” I have no proof to suggest otherwise! This is most definitely an interesting concept and I think it could definitely succeed. The real key is gaining critical pass and then negotiating referral fees with those that don’t offer affiliate program currently.

Let us know what your experience is with Ninja Tickets! I’m not quite sure about the name but the service appears to work pretty well. I’m interested to see how quickly this service grows.

Today the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) announced the launch of Apps for Democracy. The program, which was developed with the help of iStrategyLabs, is a competition for developers to create interesting ways of visualizing DC’s public data. The incentive for developers? Cash prizes of course!

How much exactly? Well there will be over $20,000 in prizes with the largest prize being $2,000 for any individual or group. Developers will also receive public recognition for creating winning applications that will be used by the government, citizens, visitors, and businesses in the District of Columbia. It sounds like a pretty great program and there is some interesting data that is available for developers.

This competition reminds me of existing data mashups with maps on the web that record local criminal activity as well as housing prices. I can also envision a useful iPhone application that leverages GPS to provide you with locally relevant data. The competition is open to all developers and has the intent of fostering innovation in the DC technology community.

Will this transform the community overnight? Definitely not, but this is most definitely a step in the right direction. It is clear that the Office of the Chief Technology Officer is determined to integrate the startup community within the government. I had the opportunity to speak with Vivek Kundra, CTO of D.C. a few weeks ago and he emphasized the organization’s commitment to supporting a thriving start-up community.

If you are a developer or work with a group of developers, I highly suggest checking out the Apps for Democracy contest. Also, please let us know your thoughts on the program!