It’s a great story on the surface but I like the lesson being delivered by the list of angel investors,several who will also be advisors. It is a close-knit group of other local startup veterans.  This “local networking circle” brings together not only the necessary funds, advice and connections to grow the business but also helps to nurture the startup climate here in Boston.  The future for a sustainable and vibrant tech startup culture here in the area would be very bright if the next round of startups followed this example over and over again.

There was an excellent set of articles from Scott Kirsner (Boston.com) and Xconomy’s James Geshwiler and Time Rowe covering the concepts of fostering local innovation and entrepreneurship back in August that you should read if you have not already.

Here is the list of investors for Shareaholic (posted on CenterNetworks & Xconomy).

• Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
• Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
• Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
• David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete (also founder of Lookery where Jay is the VP of Products)
• Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
• Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

Shareaholic is a very simple browser plugin that makes it easy to cross post links to the top social sharing services on the web like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.  Here is a video tour that was posted on the TechCrunch article covering the announcements.

I wonder if the timing is right for my own long neglected social sharing toolbar service, The Web 2.0 Toolbar, to capture a bit of funding?

More on the announcement from around the web:

• Browser Plugin Shareaholic Passes 1 Million Downloads, Closes Seed Funding from TechCrunch

• Shareaholic Grabs a Round of Angels from CenterNetworks

• Shareaholic Collects Angel Funding Round from Xconomy

Congratulations Jay!

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Congratulations to our own HubSpot for pulling down $12M in funding as reported on TechCrunch.  The Series B round led by Matrix Partners is in addition to the $5M the company raised last September in a round led by General Catalyst.

This may give the HubSpot team another reason to celebrate at tonight’s PopCocktail…I mean PopSignal event!

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93Startup Profiles are submitted by the companies themselves. If you would like to have your startup profile on the site, please read this post.

What do you think of Bizak? Let Boston Know.

BIZAK
Location: Brookline, MA
Funding: Self funded
# of Employees: 1
URL: www.bizak.com
Blog: www.tomokeefe.com
Submitted By: Tom O’Keefe

What’s your elevator pitch?

Bizak is a business network which computes the profitability and valuation of Internet startups. Startups can compare their visitors, revenues, costs and valuation to their competitors and industry benchmarks. Investors use this analysis to discover new funding opportunities and professionals utilize Bizak’s traffic analysis to form new business partnerships.

Who is your target market?

Bizak’s geared specifically for Internet entrepreneurs and investors interested in funding their startups.

What makes you different or stand out?

Bizak is different from most web analytics firms in that if you tell us what your statistics are then we’ll tell you how you stack up against your competition.

Who are the founders?

Bizak is founded by Tom O’Keefe. Tom is the president of TOKiBiz, Inc. which helps entrepreneurs create profitably startups and will also launch infoMedMD in June.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

I was a financial analyst out of college (BC) and I’m very familiar with the benchmarks used to analyze public companies. With Bizak I thought why don’t we create a benchmark to analyze and value internet startups?

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View Profile
on Genotrope

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WorkLight was founded in 2006 with an initial round of funding from Genesis Partners, Index Ventures and Shlomo Kramer totaling $5.1 million.  It produces a technology that connects enterprise technology to popular existing networks like Facebook.

Courtesy of Mashable.

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The current GuildCafe.com site, a social network built to organizing groups within MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, will still operate and continue to improve as the company focuses on building out the new gamerDNA service.

Congratulations!

Courtesy of Xconomy & FLYBRIDGE.

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Chelmsford’s Ourstage.com, which came out of beta last September, recently announced a music distribution partnership with AOL. The site runs monthly contests to discover the best in new music from up-and-coming bands and has a 3,851 Compete ranking.

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For example, check out the profile for .406 Ventures (the first on the list) that shows their recent investments.

Genotrope is a great tool for both company research and recruiting by attempting to use a visual mapping technology to show a companies "heritage" through it’s management team, investors and other key information.  

This posts key question…do you like how I fit in the current buzzword of the day in the post title? 

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Flybridge Capital Partners focuses their investments on early-stage consumer, healthcare and information technology companies.  As part of the name change announcement, they also announced that they have added $280 million fund to their fund. This brings the firm’s total capital under management to $560 million.

Flybridge has made some great investments in the mobile and online space.  Here is a sampling of their investments from their consumer portfolio.

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Invoke Solutions Grabs 7M – First reported in the BBJ, on Xconomy and now TechCrunch, Waltham, MA based online and mobile research firm announced $7 million in venture funding from North Atlantic Capital, Bain Capital LLC and BEV Capital.

Also reported on Xconomy and now on Techcrunch, Loki / Skyhook Wireless launched a new location service that will tell everyone where you are via wifi positioning technology. Do I actually want this? Reminds me of my Stalker.com post from back in 2006. Actually for mobile browsers and us iPhone users, this has great application to enable your map based programs know where they are.

Writers looking for a little extra cash? Andover’s Helium launched their writer marketplace yesterday. It’s basically a elance like platform for publishers to post submission requests including the what they are willing to pay for the article. When I looked yesterday, there were a decent load of requests with prices ranging from 70 – 180 per 700 – 1000 word article. Scott and the guys who actually get paid to write can tell me if this works out to a good per-word rate!

Finally, although I may have missed other stories, the New England Patriots released their Newenglandfootball.com site in an effort to expand their reach to the local fans through high school football teams. I love this story because it shows an innovative attempt to use social media by a major sports franchise but also because it gives the SEO expert in me a legitimate opportunity to reference the Tom Brady And Gisele Bundchen sex tape in a blog post. You dirty pigs are searching for it right now…or you will after this post!

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Technorati Tags: Boston Web 2.0,Tech,Helium,Patriots,Loki,Skyhoow Wireless,Invoke,Waltham,Boston,Andover,Football,Tom Brady,Gisele Bundchen

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The Cambridge-based social shopping site most recently launched a new design and social sidebar application this August as covered in an earlier post.   The site helps users stay up on trends by creating social shopping lists.

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