Company URL: http://www.avalere.com/portal/

BLOG POST : Steve’s IT Rants

Iron Mountain quietly bought the assets of start-up Avalere, who had some pretty big and interesting plans in the area of data categorization and classification.  Those ideas turned out to be much bigger than their funding source, however.

Company Name: Third Screen Media Inc.
Company URL: http://www.thirdscreenmedia.com

Citation URL: http://www.bizreport.com/2007/03/third_screen_media_to_power_fox_news_mobile_ads.html
Formation Date: Q3 2005
Funding Status: Acquired for profit
Investors: TD Capital Ventures, Blue Chip Venture Company.

Founders or Execs past companies: M-Qube, Britemoon, Fast Channel, CollegeLink.com

Industry: Mobile Advertising
Offering Descripton: TSM|Network, the world’s largest, single-source mobile ad network and MADX, the only web-based, mobile ad management and delivery platform that connects agencies, publishers and carriers.

This is mostly old news, but it makes sense to point out some of the relatively quick liquidity events that have happened in 2006 - 2007.

Most recently Tabblo an on-line photo sharing and printing company was acquired by HP.

In 2006 Onfolio was acquired my Microsoft. Don’t quote me but I think it was less than a year old with less than 10 employees.

In april of 2006 SiteAdvisor was acquired by Mcafee. SiteAdvisor was founded in April 2005

So it is obvious that we are entering a bubble again right! Not really. The difference is that all three companies had proven teams and founders that had previous experience.

Tabblo’s Antonio Rodriguez had previously founded two other companies.

Onfolio was founded by J. J. Allaire of Allaire and Cold Fusion fame.

SiteAdvisor was founded by two past founders of Vividon and an X VC from Bessemer.

The point of this post is to show the difference between 2000 and 2007. Better ideas, better founders, better value propositions.