Web Ventures: Wrapup

It was a little disappointing that few of the VC panelists at the end of the day were willing to name companies they found interesting or not. Perhaps they didn't want to give away investments they were considering. But here are some who did.

• Brian Ascher from Venrock thought that in the advertising category, if you want to monetize the long tail you need to specialize. He liked HispanoClick for focusing on Hispanic sites. BigTribe helps people plan vacations by aggregating service providers by location.

• In the enterprise, everyone felt the nice thing is that widgets are coming in the back door, with people buying small programs and expensing them. Ascher liked the idea of offering incentives to give people reason to participate, because otherwise "folks may be reluctant to act on behalf of the enterprise." He mentioned Jive Software for collaboration tools with reward points, and H3 for converting people's social networks into job referrals with cash rewards.

• Chip Meakem at Kodiak Ventures mentioned Widgetbox, which inserts tools into blogs, social networks, web sites and auctions, as well as Voxant, which aggregates video, audio, print, and photo news sites. But he was unsure of the monetization potential. In social networking, he thought Kaboodle's social shopping network "makes tons of sense."

• Chris Moore at Redpoint Ventures praised ClickFacts for trying to detect click fraud, but was unsure of monetization.

• Ken Elefant from Opus Capital also liked Kaboodle. In search, he liked Cognition Technologies and Powerset for offering a natural language program for making searches easier (AskJeeves redux?) In social networking he liked Flixster, a social network based around people's favorite movies.

• Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners mentioned Lijit for plugging search into blogs.

• Eric Hippeau at Softbank also liked Flixster as a "highly capital efficient business model," and Powerset for its natural language.

Panelists also debated whether the potential for a major new general-purpose search engine was over, given Google's entrenched psoition. Elefant and Hippeau thought it possible, although Hippeau noted that it was "not for the faint of heart."

Most everyone else thought there was no chance, because Google had everyone's dedication, even though blind taste tests showed it no longer gives better results than other search engines. In the conference's most embarassing moment, Liew demonstrated his point by asking who in the audience used Google as their primary search engine. Every hand in the audience seemed to go up, so he asked who DIDN'T use Google first. Only person raised her hand -- Anke Audenaert from Yahoo. But then, I remember a time when people said no one could displace Yahoo in search, either.

- Richard Brandt