Friday, September 19, 2008

Websites offer hangout, track stocks

By Christopher Calnan

Two local startups represented New England’s web community with two very different Internet-based businesses at last week’s TechCrunch50 event in California.

Boston’s Hangout Industries Inc. and Cambridge-based Emerginvest publicly launched at the three-day conference organized by the West Coast-based technology industry website, which fielded 50 presenters from about 900 applications for the event.

The conference came about one month before Hangout plans to launch its 3-D social networking website designed for users to create their own virtual rooms, said CEO Pano Anthos. Hangout’s virtual rooms include avatars that users design, which interact with 3-D versions of brand-name products that can be purchased. The company plans to make revenue by taking a percentage of online sales from the wall posters, clothes, music or videos sold through the website, Anthos said.

“It’s really about (creating) your personal portal,” Anthos said. “All the web is coming to you.”

The company was founded in March 2007 with a $6 million round of funding from Lexington-based Highland Capital Partners and Waltham’s Polaris Ventures.

Hangout is a hybrid application combining two concepts that have been widely adopted on the Internet — 3-D gaming and social networking, Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland said. “What we’re seeing is the collision of these two worlds,” he said.

Before Hangout, Anthos was the CEO of Waltham-based Pantero Corp., a software company he founded in 2003. In 2006, Bedford-based Progress Software Corp. (Nasdaq: PRGS) acquired it for a reported $6 million.

Hangout plans to publicly launch in October. Since March, it has been conducting a private beta test with about 1,000 users, Anthos said.

Emerginvest CEO Andrew Waterman, previously an economic consultant at Cambridge’s Lexecon Inc., said he founded Emerginvest when he couldn’t find a single source for all of the world’s public markets. He launched the company in January 2007 with $100,000 in capital from friends and family.

The Emerginvest site is designed to give users a bird’s-eye view of all the markets as well as as what brokers and funds to contact. The company generates revenue by charging fees to the funds and brokers for providing them customers, Waterman said.

Emerginvest is bridging the gap between financial services applications commonly developed in New England and consumer-based websites that are developed in Silicon Valley. And Waterman said he felt proud to represent Hub-based technology companies at TechCrunch.