Hacker Angels mentors and raises cash for technical founders

Gabe Weinberg of Duck Duck Go and Hacker Angels.

Many computer programmers can piece together a functional web application in days. Dealing with investors for their new creation? That’s another story.

Hacker Angels, an informal group of angel investors that includes local entrepreneur and Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg, is challenging the conventional wisdom that successful startups need at least one founder with business experience to be successful.

The group has already received coverage in ReadWriteWeb, among other places and hopes to mentor technically-minded founders as they wade through the often complicated and insider-y world of tech angel investing.

Read more

Startup Roundup: Monetate real-time marketing platform helps power ModCloth

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

DEFINITE READS

First Round Capital-funded ModCloth—which has been all over the news this week for its $19.8 million round of fundraising—happens to be local Conshohocken-based real-time marketing platform Monetate‘s first client. In 2008, ModCloth generated $3.2 million in revenue. In 2009, it shot up to $19 million. We covered the tech behind Monetate—and by extension, ModCloth—back in February.

Old-school-style Final Form Games, which we covered in December celebrated its first birthday last week. In three blog posts, the company talks where it’s been, where it’s at and where it’s going. The game design company is still working on its 17th-century sci-fi thriller tentatively called Jamestown. Looks sharp and slated for a 2011 PC release.

Read more

Links: MC Hammer at Wharton, chatting Jimmy Wales and More

DEFINITE READS

• Pittsburgh Tribune Review reports that that city will put a bid in for Google’s announced ultra-fast Internet product.
• Keystone Edge has a Q&A with University of the Arts professor and tech-art entrepreneur Slavko Milekic.
• The Inquirer reports that MC Hammer will be appearing at a Wharton event, and, yes, TP will try to crash the party.

Below, Gabe Weinberg talks with Jimmy Wales, comic book classes and more.

Read more

Links: Malcolm Gladwell review, redditt interview and More

DEFINITE READS

Our friend at Stubborn Dreams shares a fine roundup of Malcolm Gladwell’s lecture at Penn, which we tweeted out.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

The Inquirer’s Joe DiStefano profiles ListenLogic, a Fort Washington firm that helps companies track what people are saying about them online.

Below, big cuts at a pharma giant and Gabe Weinberg interviewing a social news agggregator.

Read more

Friday Tech Links: SEO with Duck Duck Go, 8-bit music and More

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

The blog from incubator DreamIt Ventures features some knowledge spilled at a lecture on search engine optimization by Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of Duck Duck Go, the Valley Forge search engine we’ve covered.

After the jump, business leaders playing squash, video from the Philly Startup Leaders barbecue and six other tech stories, including our best read story of the week.

Read more

Duck Duck Go launches shopping search filter to test advertising waters

Valley Forge-based Duck Duck Go has updated its snappy, no-frills search engine with the option to filter shopping results.

By typing a query and choosing between shopping, information and normal- mode, you can decide whether you’re looking to buy, looking for info or something in between.

“A top complaint about search engines is that you often have trouble finding real information about topics that have lots of shopping results,” Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg said in a statement. “We built this new feature to address that problem.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 38 percent of users say they are unaware that search results are a mix of search content and sponsored links.

Currently, Duck Duck Go displays no sponsored advertisements, but in an interview with Technically Philly last month, Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg said the company was planning to monetize the site with ads.
Read more

Friday Q&A: Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go. It’s a name that’s sure to bring the Valley Forge-based search engine company attention just by folks trying to figure out what it means.

Some have called it silly. Others have mentioned a common childhood game by the same name.

CEO Gabriel Weinberg says it isn’t named after anything special.

“I wish I had a good answer for you. I don’t. It came to me one day and I really liked it,” he says during a telephone interview.

If anything, Duck Duck Go is just something different. In the Web search industry, that’s important. It might be one of few ways of chiseling away at Google’s dominating market share the search giant currently queries 63 percent of U.S. searches.

That’s OK with 29-year-old Weinberg. He says Duck Duck Go offers features Google can’t: uncluttered, human-sourced, friggin’ fast search results. Direct to you from the ‘burbs.

Last week, the company unveiled its Firefox toolbar, a search tool that redirects users from parked domains and spam sites, part of Duck Duck Go’s fight against typo squatting. It’s the second Duck Duck Go-branded software release, the first, a search app for Apple’s iPhone. Traffic has been good to the company, increasing steadily month by month, Weinberg says.

We spoke with Weinberg about what makes Duck Duck Go special, how the two-employee company plans to continue growing, and his vision of the future of search, after the jump.

Read more