I’ve been working with Darryl Siry (former CMO Tesla Motors) on this project since Spring, with us producing a demo for investors in September/early-October. That seemed to be successful because we managed to raise $545k angel round, led by a group of private investors, Darryl and ZelkovaVC (although the note remains open to $750k if anyone wants to get in at this early stage!).

So what are we building?

Well, the problem space we are addressing is the perpetuation of of miss-information and inaccurate information within the online news environment. A piece is written up about your product/service/company that contains some incorrect facts or draws a conclusion that didn’t include a pertinent piece of information. Maybe you are frustrated the journalist didn’t reach out to you during the creation of their article and you want to reach out. Or perhaps a piece on a competitor misses an opportunity to present an alternative perspective around your product/service/company.

The solution is a professional communication platform that allows PR/corporate communication professionals to engage journalists and pro-bloggers in a ‘velvet rope’ vetted environment. There are a number of products we’re building on top of this platform, but we’re not talking about implementation points right now — we have some very interesting ways to solve these problems.

Some of these problems (and solutions) are new. Some are just reducing the friction of the existing communication mechanisms these folk already have in place.

What’s under the hood?

Everything is Ruby on Rails… very agile, very rapid development. It’s my first time working with RoR and I’m really enjoying the experience. Pivotal Tracker continues to be an amazing productivity tool for development, and I’m beginning to wonder how I ever worked before DropBox, EtherPad and BaseCamp.

BTW if this all sounds like fun (which it is) we’re looking for top Ruby on Rails talent right now, working out of our digs in South Park, SF!

Busy bee

Plato’s Forms is obviously going to be my main project and focus moving forward, although for now I will continue to work with Seesmic on a small scale (my BlackBerry app shipped last week) and maintain my advisory board responsibilities with my portfolio.

Oh and I’m going to be in Europe for most of December – MC’ing at Le Web in Paris again, and then Christmas at home in London.

But I’m surprised at just how expensive some of the darlings of the Web2.0 SaaS era work out to be when used at scale.

Like a crack dealer, giving you the first hit free, most of them offer a “free” plan that is clearly designed to be severely limited the moment things begin to work out for you and your business takes off. There’s nothing new with this way of doing business, but have you seen just how much your hits costs once you get addicted?

Two examples that are particularly of mind are Freshbooks and Harvest. Both are great products; built by great people I have had the honor of meeting over the years.

Time tracking service Harvest starts out at $12/month ($144/year) for a single user but at Swordfish Corp there are now three of us, requiring the 5 user plan @ $40/month ($480/year). Not much change short of $500 seems pretty expensive for a year of time tracking.

Invoicing service Freshbooks has a free and slightly limited option for individuals but a company of three would need to use the 3-staff plan @ $39/month ($468/year) but I notice that once we take on a fourth person we would need to skip to the 10-staff plan @ a jaw-dropping $89/month ($1068/year).

When researching these plans, I’m also considering what my future business needs are. With services like these, I want to pick providers who can scale with me as my business (hopefully) grows.

I should point out that one way of getting around this is to share accounts, but for time tracking this doesn’t work and for invoicing, everyone at Swordfish does their own invoicing on their client accounts.

Now, I’m not against paying for these kinds of services in general. Between myself (personally) and Swordfish, I have paid subscriptions to NolaPro (Hosted accounts package), Shoeboxed (receipt and business card data entry) and Flickr.

And I’m not saying that it’s not worth $480 a year to the company for good time tracking. I’m just saying I’m not sure a service like Harvest is offering me $480 of value a year over and above using a simple Google Spreadsheet created in 20 minutes, for free, and shared within the company.

I’m a fan of the Freemium model, but if it’s going to work the numbers can’t exponentially increase as your usage increases – it’s not fair (a form of bait-&-switch from the free accounts) and it’s also not reflective of the true cost of SasS where the cost should exponentially flatten out at scale.

Last week we launched a totally new version of the Seesmic website – with a much improved interface on the front end that builds upon 2008’s rewrite of the back-end. The new has version got some great reviews and I know the whole team is very pleased with the positive feedback it’s received. Do check it out if you haven’t tried Seesmic recently.

This week our concentration has moved to Twhirl, our Twitter (+ Seesmic, FriendFeed and Identi.Ca) client we produce. Once again there’s lots of buzz around some exciting new features in the forthcoming version, including:

• The gathering under the “replies tab” of all tweets that include @yourusername, not just when it’s added at the start of a tweet
• Ping.fm integration that posts your status messages from Twhirl to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Wordpress and a other sites
• One-click recording of new and reply Seesmic videos straight from Twhirl
• Saved search, to keep across the discussion of your favorite terms across the twittersphere
• More url shortening providers, including bit.ly and more

I’ve been using the beta version of Twhirl for a few days now and I have to say it’s excellent. We’ll be releasing the new version of Twhirl soon, but in the meantime you can get immediate access to the preview version by joining our brand new beta test group called “Team Seesmic-Twhirl”.

You can find out more, including where to sign up, on Loic’s blog.

That was my reaction when Tristan first showed me a demo of Apture (which just opened for signups, if you want to add it to your blog or website).

We’d met a few times previously and he’d been teasing with hints about the product he was working on – but refused to show me anything, or even give me any detail about what he and his fellow co-founders were really up to.

All I knew was that we shared a common interest in both grassroots and mainstream media, and importance of innovation given the nature of the content often being communicated. We’d spent several meetings discussing all sorts of interest stuff – from the way the media is often the last resort to keep governments and business in check, the need for informed society, through to the power of building products with a platform-orientated architecture.

Very much a meeting of minds – and so when I finally got to experience Apture, I was delighted that it too was at the intersection of so many of my favorite topics. I’m also proud to say that I am a member of Apture’s advisory board.

Welcome to Apture

For me, Apture is about bringing light-touch context and background to topics within the page you are looking at. In essence, it provides a simple framework to attach background context and ancillary content to subjects mentioned in your page – all without interrupting the flow of your reading and crucially, without leaving the page you looking at. In fact, you have already experienced Apture! (unless you are reading this in a feed reader, in which case check out the page on my blog)

When I saw the first demo of the product, what excited me the most was the implementation – which I think is slick and impressive. The thoughtful UI makes the product simple and intuitive to use, backed up by some pretty tight code that makes the seamless experience possible.

Elegantly handling off-site links and embeddable media

From my days working at the BBC News Website, I’ve seen first hand the importance of providing background information on the subjects discussed in a news story. Not everyone follows the news agenda as deeply as others, and providing a bit of context can really make the difference and ensure the reader is able to engage with the latest developments being written about.

I’d also seen examples of how the BBC had got some of it’s interface and style guidelines wrong – like not using hyperlinks inside body content and completely missing the early emergence of embeddable media (arguably pioneered by YouTube). I have to hold my hands up to these as much as anyone else at the Beeb as I was there at the time these things took off.

On both counts Apture solves these problems in an elegant way.

The concern around marking up body content with hyperlinks is about usability. When the user clicks on them she is taken to a new destination page mid-flow of her reading. Apture solves this concern by providing the essence of the page you want to link to in an easily manipulated floating window that the user can quickly digest and either get back to the copy or potentially elect to click through to a fuller page of content. The point is that the reader makes an informed decision whether to jump to a new page or continue reading. Apture also lets the reader position the window around the content so that they can interact with it later on when they are ready.

Another key part of this is the selection of the media you use to provide that background to your post. Apture helps you there too – by recommending relevant content from across numerous repositories on the internet – including Wikipedia, Flickr and IMDB. Finally, it reformats these pages so that the pertinent information is displayed clearly inside the Apture window that is associated with your subject.

Apture also provides a unique way to embed media, and can even handle certain types of media asset just by it noticing you are linking out to a photograph or a video in your piece.

Open for business

Having been in closed beta for some months, this week Apture was released to the public. Getting Apture on your site is really simple (just a line of javascript or the installation of a Wordpress Plugin) and of course it is totally free.

You can also take a tour of the product and see more demos of it in action.

Seesmic, for those who don’t know, is a video conversation site – somewhat reminiscent to Twitter. However, there is a lot more to it, much of which is still being built – the site is still in alpha.

The start-up vibe at Seesmic is grat, and in complete contrast with the corporate and enterprise clients I also work with. Both environments have their benefits, but for me it’s fantastic to be able to enjoy both. And Loic, VinVin, Gissele, Whit, Kathleen and the rest of the team are a complete blast.

I’m going to be working in a technical product development capacity at Seesmic. That’s a more general role than I tend to work with bigger clients but I like being a generalist and further more it’s kinda the way things are when you’re in a start-up!

However, the uber-cool news is that I’m going to also have my own show on Seesmic too. The current working title of the project is FastBen – a play on my nickname ‘dotBen’. As part of that, I’ll probably be in the daily Seesmic shows (subscribe in iTunes) when I’m in the office (mainly Fridays).

Today was no exception, and here it is:

Let me know what you think of Seesmic, and what I should do for my show!