Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Plaza on biodiesel; Twilio; Fanzter; Paul Allen; and more

In an opinion piece for The Seattle Times, Imperium Renewables CEO John Plaza rails against the state's policies regarding biodiesel and calls out a recent report which says Washington should delay the implementation of biofuels for a another year. "Unfortunately, in the past 18 months, the state has sent mixed messages and pushed inconsistent policies regarding biofuels. This has had a chilling effect on investors, biofuel producers and farmers who are key to producing feedstocks needed for fuel," writes Plaza, whose Seattle company has laid off employees and idled production.

Twilio, the maker of voice communications technologies, narrowly won the top prize at the nPost demo event in Columbia City Tuesday night. It beat out Gist, Mpire, eVenues and Viafo, with audience members choosing the winner through the loudest applause.

Fanzter, the Connecticut company which operates the Coolspotters.com fashion and style Web site, has acquired Richmond, Va.-based Mustache. Fanzter has numerous ties to Seattle, including investors Second Avenue Partners, Curious Office Partners and Zillow.com CEO Rich Barton. It was founded by Aaron LaBerge, a former ESPN.com vice president.

1Cast, the Craig McCaw-backed startup that allows users to create personalized online video news segments, has named Jack Hallahan as vice president of global advertising sales. He most recently worked at MobiTV. The Kirkland company also announced that car maker Infniti has expanded its video advertising deal with the company.

The Vholdr Wearable Camcorder has quickly climbed to the number one spot in Amazon.com's camcorder category, with CEO Marc Barros telling TechFlash that the Seattle company is in the midst of "an awesome week." He also notes that it is "unheard of doing that as a start-up with no VC funding."

This deal flew below our radar earlier this month. But Wavelink -- a 17-year-old mobile software company led by former Loudeye CEO David Bullis and backed by Digital Partners, WaMu, Cascadia Capital and others -- was recently recapitalized by WestView Capital Partners. " We have developed the leading brand in our industry and anticipate continuing our success in partnership with WestView," said Bullis in a release.

Seattle's Varolii has introduced a new communications product called Flight Team Management that's designed to help airlines better schedule flights crews through automatically delivered voice calls, text messages and emails. More than 20 percent of all flights in the U.S. are canceled, with one of the primary reasons being that crews aren't available to fly.

Following the news of Paul Allen's new email management startup Xiant, The Wall Street Journal takes a look at another one of the Microsoft co-founder's personal projects that's being rolled out to the public. The software is called DrumCore, and it allows people to play along with famous drummers. “Over the years we’ve scratched our heads and thought, ‘Wow, Paul’s ideas are five or six years ahead of consumers,’” Vulcan's Chris Purcell tells The Journal.

Headline of the day comes via Fierce Wireless: "Sprint CFO says new iPhone not impacting Pre sales."


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