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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Springpad springs out of Charlestown startup to iPhone
By Mass High Tech staff
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Spring Partners Inc. has launched its first iPhone application, which marks the Charlestown startup’s shift in how it both applies its technology and how it makes money from it. The new application is designed to allow the user to capture a note, a picture, a website or other information, which can be organized into usable data.
“Springpad — think of it as a remember service. You come across stuff everyday — whether on the web, from a friend or just when out and about — that you want to remember,” said Spring Partners CEO and co-founder Jeff Janer.
According to Janer, the way we remember such things today — using a post-it note, a browser’s bookmark or just jotting it down somewhere, is inherently disorganized. What the Springpad web service and its new iPhone app will do is allow you to capture something of interest that you want to remember and then, using its own semantic database capability, organize your items of interest to make them easier to find.
Janer cited an example of a user being on a web page that had a recipe on it. By using the Springpad browser plug-in, you could “Spring it” as they say, and the Springpad service will launch in a separate pop-up window that will see the content on the page, automatically pull the data out of the page and compile it as a recipe for your Springpad account.
The iPhone app allows both capturing of such information when away from your browser, and also access to your information and Springpad page on the iPhone.
The accumulated data is where the company’s monetization strategy comes into play. Spring Partners has already entered into advertising deals with a number of brands that will show ads on your Springpad page for something that matches the data you are looking at — a sale on peas at a grocery chain, for example, might show up when you are looking at a recipe with peas as an ingredient.
In addition to the ads, Spring Partners has partnership deals with about 100 different data services, such as Yelp, which would bring back revenue when, say, reservations are made through a Springpad user’s page. But, unlike most live, location-based services and applications, Springpad isn’t about what you are doing now, but what you might want to remember to do sometime later.
“We are kind of ‘counter real-time’ in some ways,” Janer said.
The company, which was started in January of 2008, was launched by Janer and two other former veterans of mobile advertising startup Third Screen Media, president Jeff Chow and CTO Jason Horman. Third Screen was bought by AOL in 2007. Spring Partners has taken one round of funding, a $4 million Series A round in June of 2008 from Fairhaven Capital, which Janer said was also a backer of Third Screen Media.
The company first launched notes-based mobile web applications that would allow a user to make lists and get organized. But it wasn’t long before launching into a public beta that Janer and company heard from users that having an easier way to capture the information they want to organize was key to Springpad’s future. That caused the light bulb to go off, as the founders realized using that data was the way to monetize the product. So the focus shifted to capturing and organizing the user’s data of interest, and the list-making apps — which are still part of the overall service — have been relegated to just one function among many.
With 15 employees, Spring Partners will likely need to go back to the VC well within three to six months, Janer said, to really start boosting the marketing of its service. And a version of the app for Android and the Blackberry is in the works.
While Janer couldn’t give out a target date for profitability, Chow did say that he would hope that within six months, Springpad could count the number of users into the hundreds of thousands.
“Somewhere in the hundreds of thousands would be a really great goal for us,” Chow said. “A million would be a nice stretch goal.”
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