Today Mocavo announced that Foundry has led a Series A investment in the business. Since launching in March of 2011, Mocavo has worked to create a genealogy search platform that provides users with the best tools available to find information on their ancestors. And while the genealogy is a large (and growing) market, the companies that have focused on this space have generally concentrated on building proprietary data assets that they have made available to subscribers to their services, rather than focusing on the tools by which genealogists access those data.

With more and more historical information now coming online, with more of these data tucked away in disparate corners of the internet, and with the horizontal search engines not indexing these data, Mocavo has recognized the need in the market for a vertical search tool focused on genealogy. Additionally, genealogy searching is an inherently social experience, often something undertaken by several members of a family. But existing tools lack social features – either for working collaboratively or for sharing the results of that work with other family members. Mocavo is addressing these shortcomings as well by adding to the Mocavo search platform the ability for users to easily work collaboratively and to share their work with others either on the Mocavo platform or on other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

We’re thrilled to be working with Cliff, Richard, Andy, Ryan and the rest of the team at Mocavo with whom we share a vision and a passion around the future of genealogy search.

We are pleased to announce that we have made an investment in SEOMoz. Based in Seattle, SEOMoz is the leading provider of software for search engine optimization (SEO) and hosts the web’s most vibrant SEO community.

SEOMoz has a set of basic rules they refer to as the TAGFEE code (transparency, authenticity, generous, fun, empathetic, and exception). TAGFEE is on display in SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin’s awesomely detailed post about the financing titled Moz’s $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future.

We are incredibly excited to be partners with Rand and his team.

We are pleased to announce our initial investment in Singly, Inc.  The company, located in San Francisco’s Mission District, is creating a software platform and service for personal data.

Through investments in our Glue theme, we’ve seen companies like Gnip and Next Big Sound build valuable businesses by making it easy for developers to obtain and interact with big sets of public data from web applications.

And the volume of private/people data (and information related to people) is exploding: tweets, photos, videos, click-streams, social interactions, check-ins, data from real-world sensors like heart monitors, email, Fitbit-like devices, health records, financial records, transaction histories, location information and much more.  This growing, fragmented world is rich with possibilities and nascent in its organization and infrastructure.

Singly is focused on empowering this personal web – adding value for developers by making personal data routable, structured and available via a single API.  With Singly, developers can skip the hassle of building custom code and data connectors for each service they support; won’t have to maintain APIs as they change; and won’t need to do the tedious work of normalizing similar data sets with uncommon patterns.  For the next several months – with its current closed alpha – the company is getting the platform into the hands of developers for feedback, working with a handful of launch partners, hosting hackathons and growing the breadth of services it supports.

This enormous opportunity extends well beyond social data as wireless service providers, credit card companies, automobile manufacturers, utilities, and countless other companies open up people’s data to them for reuse in other applications.  Things like shopping engines, content discovery, search results, restaurant guides, travel sites, serendipity applications and more will become incredibly powerful.

As computing experiences become increasingly personal, Singly plays an equally important role for end users as a trusted intermediary – ensuring applications, web services and devices behave responsibly and that people are in greater control and explicitly aware of what is happening with their digital assets. As regulators, web service providers and consumers grapple with the implications of how data are used, Singly is positioned to power a trustworthy, user-centric future. This is an exciting and important opportunity.

Singly was founded by Jason Cavnar, Jeremie Miller and Simon Murtha-Smith.  Jason has a diverse background as a multi-time startup founder.  Jeremie is well known as the developer of XMPP/Jabber, the open source protocol that powers most Instant Messaging and many real-time web applications.  Simon has a background in both mechanical and computer engineering. The three of them came together to found Singly after separately working on social readers and social search applications that required similar engineering efforts to solve the same problems.

We are excited to help the Singly folks be successful and welcome them to the team.

The question of how we handle companies within the portfolio company hiring from each other has come up a number of times recently and we thought it would be a good idea to hit the subject head on, publicly.  With over 40 companies in the Foundry portfolio, and with many of these companies concentrated in specific geographies (in particular Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle and New York) there are often times when an employee from one company in which Foundry has an investment applies for a job or is approached by another company in which Foundry has an investment.

To be absolutely clear, Foundry has no policy relating to the hiring of employees by one portfolio company from another. We believe in the free and fair movement of people and ideas and we don’t ask that portfolio companies refrain from hiring employees from each other. Ultimately it’s up to each company to determine their own hiring practices based on what they believe to be the best interests of their business.

We are pleased to announce that we have made our initial investment in Awe.sm.  The company provides a powerful analytics platform for social media to developers, marketers, agencies and publishers.  We first met Awe.sm’s co-founder and CEO Jonathan Strauss at the Glue Conference in 2009 and have been following the evolution of Awe.sm with interest since then.  As Awe.sm’s user adoption increased and their platform vision evolved and came into sharper focus (see today’s launch of the new awe.sm for developers platform), we decided it was time for Foundry Group to invest in Awe.sm.

For the first decade of the web’s existence, the largest single contributor of traffic to a web site was search-engine referral traffic, explaining the rise of Google and its current status as one of the pillars of the web.  Following the emergence and hyper-growth of Facebook and Twitter, a new fundamental user behavior has emerged:  sharing.  As Facebook and Twitter have grown their user base to hundreds of millions of users, referral traffic from social networks has become an equally important traffic source to most web sites.  More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month, while over six billion monthly tweets generate more than three billion clicks per month on Twitter.  Social sharing is now a critical user acquisition and engagement driver for any consumer application or site.

However, while search-engine referral traffic is relatively easy to measure, attribute and analyze, understanding how sharing behavior drives traffic is far more complex:  understanding which users and actions drive more traffic, user conversions, revenue, etc. to a site requires a social native-attribution model and detailed analytics that can be deeply integrated at the application level and integrated with third-party and proprietary conversion funnels to measure and optimize key performance indicators that are relevant to each specific application developer, marketer or publisher.

Awe.sm has built a powerful on-demand platform and toolset aimed at providing application developers, marketers and publishers with the easiest and most flexible way to harness social data in their applications.  The company’s goal is to become the key infrastructure powering quantitative performance marketing across the social sharing channel.

Awe.sm has been adopted by numerous Foundry portfolio companies including Topspin Media, Stocktwits and Big Door.  Notably, each of the customers in the Foundry Group portfolio came to Awe.sm without any help or influence from Foundry Group’s partners, and feedback from the developers who have integrated Awe.sm into their applications has been uniformly positive with respect to the flexibility and power of the platform.

Awe.sm fits firmly into our Glue and Protocol themes and is most analogous to companies like SendGrid, Gnip and Urban Airship.  With the massive (and still growing) importance of social as a channel to drive traffic, we believe that the social sharing gesture within an application will become as important a part of basic application infrastructure as email or mobile app notifications, which presents a compelling opportunity for Awe.sm to become an important developer infrastructure and analytics platform used by a huge number of application developers, marketers and publishers.

We are very excited to be working with Jonathan and the rest of the Awe.sm team, as well as our co-investors GRP Partners, Neu Venture Capital and kps+p Ventures.