Today is the public launch of Trada – a company we’ve been working with for the last 18 months to develop a platform that we believe will revolutionize search marketing. The fundamental premise is pretty straightforward: search campaigns are better managed by experts. The Trada platform brings together a “crowd” of search marketing experts to work on search campaigns of Trada advertisers across multiple search engines (currently Google, Yahoo and Bing). These experts propose ad copy, manage ad groups and keywords and deliver clicks (and conversions) to Trada advertisers for an advertiser determined price. Because the company leverages a group of experts, campaigns in the Trada system have more keywords (6,200 on average), a larger number of people working them (the system average is 24 optimizers per campaign) and as a result better success (the company’s customers see reductions in cost per conversion in some cases of over 25% even while increasing their search spending).

You can read more about the business at www.trada.com, on Seth’s post about the launch here and in this morning’s TechCrunch piece here. Trada founder Niel Robertson also has a great post about the genesis of the company up on the Trada blog.

One of our portfolio companies, Organic Motion is hiring.  They are a really exciting company right in the middle of our Human Computer Interaction Theme.  In the company’s own words:

“Organic Motion is a global leader in the development of breakthrough markerless motion capture and analysis technologies. Our software products utilize state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and high performance graphics hardware to deliver an industry first set of production, entertainment, and research tools for use in a variety of industries.

We are seeking to expand our Manhattan, NY based engineering team with applicants who have a solid mastery of practical C/C++ development skills combined with strong analytical and problem solving skills in a variety of areas including computer vision, computer graphics, networking, pipelining and optimization, biomechanics, and more.

We are looking for candidates having 2 or more years experience in a professional development setting in addition to a PHD, Master’s degree, or an exceptional Bachelor’s.

Required skills include some of the following:

* C, C++ (required)

* Stereo vision – 3d reconstruction / mesh creation & optimization 
* 3D programming (DirectX, OpenGL, Shaders, HLSL, CG, GPU) 
* Multi-threaded / multi-process programming

* Networking – sockets, RPC, streams, low latency hardware

* Computer vision / image processing

* Low-latency / real time 

Secondary skills:

* Game development
* Distributed systems
* Motion capture creation / analysis 
* Physics

* Scripting languages (Python, Lua, Bash, Perl, etc)

* UNIX, Linux

* Mathematical modeling, filtering, signal processing
* Biokinematics
* GUI development (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets) 
* Autodesk 3d animation suite API

Responsibilities include: 
* Optimization (single-core / multi-core / multi-process) 
* Algorithm development (raw 3D data analysis) 
* Application development (server and client side)

* Code maintenance and troubleshooting
* Supporting conferences and shows (past shows: SIGGRAPH, GDC, CES, I/ITSEC)

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic team with potential for rapid growth and access to a great deal of compelling technological resources. We are looking for individuals with fresh ideas and the skills to put those ideas to the test. This is a unique opportunity to have a major impact on a growing company!

If you are an excellent candidate, then please reply with your resume in Word or PDF format to [email protected]. A code sample would also be a big plus!”

Today, Foundry Group portfolio company Memeo announced the newest product in their suite of applications: Memeo Connect for Google Apps, which leverages new functionality announced by Google: the ability to upload all file types to Google Docs’ cloud-based storage. In addition to providing the ability to upload arbitrary file types to Google Docs, the Official Google Enterprise Blog also announced that Google Apps Premier Edition users will soon be able to use the Google Documents List Data API to upload files to Google Docs in batch, or to purchase applications offered by third parties to enable users to migrate and sync their files to Google Docs.

Memeo Connect is a cross-platform application that allows Google Apps Premier customers to access, migrate and synchronize files between their desktop and Google Docs.   Simply put, Memeo Connect allows users to have local copies of all the files and folders in their Google Docs collection synced in real time to any number of their computers (Mac or Windows).

This provides two huge benefits to users: first, it enables users to access and edit their docs while offline, and, second, it allows batch upload and conversion of Microsoft Office documents (and other formats) to Google Docs. If you’re interested in learning more, PC World provides a good analysis of Memeo’s and Google’s announcements, while Memeo has provided a nice screen-cast demo of Memeo Connect on YouTube:

We’re very excited that Memeo and Google have teamed up to offer this strategically important functionality to Google Apps Premier Edition customers. Memeo Connect helps resolve some of the biggest hurdles potential Google Apps customers have when contemplating moving from Microsoft Office to Google Apps: namely offline access and the ability to migrate legacy document collections to the cloud.

Memeo Connect helps bridge the divide between the cloud and the desktop and addresses the simple reality that Google Docs and Microsoft Office documents are going to co-exist in real-world environments for the foreseeable future – even if an enterprise commits completely to Google Apps for its office productivity suite, MSFT Office docs will still find their way in to their environment via partners, vendors and customers.

When we invested in Memeo in 2007, we saw the potential of Memeo’s technology platform to provide consumers and business users with sophisticated, real-time, content-aware backup, sync and media sharing tools, functionality which falls squarely into our Digital Life investment theme. Since our investment, Memeo has released and iterated on an entire suite of award-winning products which include Memeo Instant Backup, Memeo AutoSync, Memeo Share, Memeo Send and, now, Memeo Connect for Google Apps. To date, Memeo has distributed over 45 million licenses for their software to users in 150 countries and 35,000 companies, 144 of which are in the Fortune 1000. With the addition of Memeo Connect for Google Apps to their product line, we see the potential for Memeo to reach millions more users. Congrats, Memeo!

Today StockTwits announced (release here) that it had raised a $3m Series B financing led by Foundry Group and returning investor True Ventures. For us, StockTwits represents a unique opportunity to leverage the increasingly active conversation taking place on (and off) the Twitter platform around stocks and markets.  We’ve witnessed in other investments the power of 3^rd party networks to drive the scale and reach of new businesses and we believe StockTwits represents a huge opportunity to harness the Twitter community’s ongoing conversation around stocks and investing.

If you’ve ever tagged a tweet with the $ tag or tweeted a stock symbol using that tag you’ve participated in the StockTwits conversation.  StockTwits uses the familiar Twitter microblogging format (140 characters) and allows users to seamlessly cross-post from and to their Twitter stream. Users can tag their Twitter posts with the $ tag to be picked up in StockTwits, use the StockTwits web interface or download the StockTwits desktop for even greater functionality (we’d highly recommend the desktop client – you can get it here if you don’t already have it). Below is a screenshot of the desktop client to give you a sense of what’s available. This view can be customized to follow specific tickers or topics as they’re mentioned. You can also see StockTwitsTV on the right half of the desktop – look for more programming as we roll out additional content in the coming months on the StockTwits Network.

But can stock advice really be offered in 140 characters or less? The answer is a resounding yes. There is a large and extremely active conversation taking place in StockTwits (to get a sense of it click over to the StockTwits site and watch the dataflow). And large trading organizations are taking notice. The NASDAQ recently released an iPhone application that features StockTwits data (see the screenshot to the left). Look for other StockTwits integrations to be announced soon as the company uses this new round of funding to accelerate its pace of development as well as its work with partners. You’ll also see the company releasing additional features in its desktop client and on its site as well as rolling out new data features and the ability for users to create custom data feeds from the StockTwits datastore.

Of course great investments require great people. And we couldn’t be more excited about working with StockTwits founders Howard Linzdon (whom we’ve known for years) and Soren Macbeth. We’re joining Roger Ehrenberg of IA Capital Partners and Tony Conrad of True Ventures in this investment – two experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists with whom we’re extremely pleased to be teaming up.

Look for more announcements about the company soon.

As we previously reported, we’ve recently invested in a computer vision company called Organic Motion. This is another one of our Human Computer Interaction investments.  To give you an idea of one of the markets they are targeting, check out the these marketing materials designed for the defense industry. In it, you can see some specific use cases that the company can deliver today.  (Be patient, it’s a 5mb file, so it takes a bit to view).