Today we are pleased to announce our investment in Demand Side Platform (DSP) Triggit and welcome Zach and Susan Coelius, Ryan Tecco and the rest of the Triggit team to the Foundry family.

Triggit has developed technology that helps advertisers and agencies buy media across various real-time bidding exchanges. Seth has a longer post up on his blog describing some of the changes in the online ad ecosystem – and specifically the rapid rise of exchange-based buying and selling – that lead us to this investment. Along with Foundry portfolio companies AdMeld and Lijit, we see Triggit standing at the center of this fundamental shift in online advertising and in Triggit’s case bringing unique technology to brands and agencies transacting on the real-time exchanges that will help advertisers more effectively target specific online audiences.

We’re joined in this investment by Santo Politi of Spark Capital and a handful of well known Silicon Valley angel investors.

You can read the company’s blog on the investment here as well as see articles in AdExchanger, TechCrunch and MediaPost.

We recently closed a $4m investment in BigDoor Media. Based in Seattle, BigDoor provides a platform for non-game publishers to integrate game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods, into their web and mobile applications.

The web has become increasingly social. While many simple social features, such as sharing, liking, and favoriting content are appearing on publisher’s sites, users are increasingly engaging with each other in other ways as evidenced by the dramatic success of social games.  As a result, many non-game publishers are now exploring ways to incorporate “game mechanics” into their web and mobile applications.

BigDoor provides the underlying infrastructure that enables publishers to quickly, easily, and inexpensively accomplish this.  Since BigDoor uses an API approach, their system can be configured to be tightly integrated into any publisher’s site.  Due to their cloud-based approach, they can aggressively scale to meet any publisher’s need.

BigDoor is part of a new theme we have been investing in that we call Distribution.  It also overlaps nicely with our Glue theme.  As a cloud based service with a simple API driven pricing model, its deployment and pricing model is similar to SimpleGeo, another recent investment we have made.  Finally, we are very comfortable with its publisher driven adoption model, which is similar to Lijit and modeled after an investment we had previously made in FeedBurner.

Seattle is now home to two Foundry Group investments – BigDoor and Gist. We are also mentors and investors in the Techstars Seattle program, which is led by Andy Sack whom is an investors and board member of BigDoor and introduced the company to us.

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has invested in SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo, based in Boulder, CO, provides a hosted geospatial platform for web and mobile application developers, enabling third party app developers to build sophisticated location-based functionality into their applications on web-based and mobile platforms, including Android devices and the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

With the widespread availability of GPS-enabled smartphones, the market for location-based applications and services is going mainstream. Once the province of luxury automobiles and expensive single-purpose devices, hand-held turn-by-turn navigation applications have become commodity items that are either free or very low cost. Beyond basic map-based navigation apps, entirely new categories of applications have emerged based on the widespread availability of location-aware mobile devices. These include location-based advertising platforms, social/gaming “check in” tools like Foursquare and Gowalla, augmented reality applications like Layar and more.

As market demand for applications with location-aware features has increased, developers have struggled with the complexity and domain specialization related to building geospatial functions into their applications. As a result, a market opportunity has emerged for a company to provide an easy-to-use and scalable geolocation infrastructure platform to third-party application developers.

SimpleGeo was founded by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. Previously, Matt founded SocialThing, a Boulder TechStars 2007 company acquired by AOL in 2008. Joe was previously Chief Architect at Digg and left the Bay Area to come to Boulder to create SimpleGeo.

SimpleGeo began life as CrashCorp and was focused on building augmented reality games for mobile devices. As they began development, they quickly discovered that the biggest challenge in building their game was implementing the geolocation infrastructure services it would require. Given the growing popularity of apps with location-based functionality, most notably the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, the company shifted its focus towards building a robust geolocation infrastructure layer that third-party app developers could use to easily integrate sophisticated location-based functionality into their applications. Thus, SimpleGeo was born.

SimpleGeo offers a scalable cloud-based infrastructure for geodata that enables developers to store check-ins, points of interest, virtual goods and media in a private layer. This data can be retrieved by performing geospatial and spatiotemporal queries. In addition, SimpleGeo offers a rich marketplace of third-party geodata that is accessible to developers via the SimpleGeo Marketplace. The company has forged data partnerships with companies such as ESRI, deCarta, Skyhook Wireless, Quova, MetaCarta and Weather Decision Technologies.

SimpleGeo fits handily into our Glue investment theme, which includes other Foundry Group portfolio companies such as Gnip, AdMeld, Trada, Medialets, Standing Cloud, Next Big Sound and Topspin Media.

We are thrilled to be working with Matt again. Our partner Jason was one of Matt’s mentors for SocialThing during TechStars’ inaugural summer program in 2007, and we’ve followed the evolution of SimpleGeo with great interest since Matt and Joe began brainstorming about the business.

Additionally, we are fortunate to be co-investing with some great firms that we really respect and have had the pleasure of co-investing with in other portfolio companies: Redpoint Ventures and First Round Capital.  Last, but not least, we’re excited to be co-investing for the first time with Chris Sacca at Lowercase Capital and with Josh Felser and Dave Samuel at Freestyle Capital. We’re looking forward to working closely with Matt and Joe and the rest of the SimpleGeo team and our co-investors to help build SimpleGeo into a great success and a fundamental infrastructure layer of the web.

For more details from around the web, check out the following: TechCrunch covered SimpleGeo’s funding announcement this morning, and SimpleGeo blogged about it as well, detailing not only the funding, but also a bunch of great new hires.

Oblong founder John Underkoffler was recently profiled where he spoke about the origins of the company. 

When we speak about the history of Oblong, we tend to start with the movie Minority Report, where John was Steven Spielberg’s science advisor.  If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, check it out.  It is one of the only movies that we’ve seen that holds up in its vision of the future even 8 years later.

And while there was a working prototype of the system during the time the movie was being filmed, that was hardly the beginning.  In fact, John had worked at the MIT Media Lab to create what was called The Luminous Room. 

The Luminous Room was Oblong’s g-speak platform version 0.5 (perhaps).  When we first considered investing in the company, we were amazed to see how long John had been thinking about the larger issues of GUIs and the data implications of operating systems.

If you are interested in seeing John’s early work, the Luminous Room link has videos which will show you the building blocks of what we think is one of the most interesting companies that we’ve ever invested in. 

With our HCI thematic investing strategy, we think often about the future ways we’ll connect with computers.  We aren’t the only folks who think the mouse and keyboard are dead.  If you want to read what John thinks of the future of UI design, read the article. 

We are excited to announce that Foundry Group has invested in Sifteo, Inc. 

Sifteo is a game-platform development company that has developed “Siftables” the world’s first table-top gaming platform. Siftables are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities that act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them by piling, grouping and sorting to interact with digital information and media.

As cool as this sounds, it’s not nearly as cool as the company’s TED talk and demo below.

Sifteo is another investment in our Human Computer Interaction theme along with Emsense, Oblong, Organic Motion and Smith and Tinker.   

Founded by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, out of the MIT Media Lab, we believe that Sifteo is developing the next generation popular gaming platform that will go beyond the early successes of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPad/Pod/Touch. 

The Sifteo platform will have an easy to use SDK that will allow developers to create and sell games on the system.  The tools includes a gesture recognition system that abstracts user actions, such as grouping and sorting, into events the designer can easily attach to software events. Overall, the system radically simplifies and speeds game development.

Most importantly, Siftables are fun.  The embedded video shows but a couple of possibilities, but we really look forward to seeing all the of the creative content that is developed on the platform. 

We really look forward to working with Jeevan, Dave and the rest of the team, including returning investors and our friends from True Ventures.