Irvine based Local.com is an interesting public company.  It is a local content and search aggregator, that launched back in 2005.  They've been making headlines in the last few months with a major patent approved for local search, as well as partnerships to aggregate business review content from the two biggest user generated content sites: Citysearch and Yelp.

Riverside based Thembid is a reverse auction marketplace, where you post a service need and let businesses bid on the job.  They have been live to the public since early summer of 2007, and have notably demoed at the TechCrunch40 and recently at Twiistup.  

Clupedia is a Santa Ana based startup that is trying to take a hybrid wiki concept and apply it to semantically marking up websites. They've received at least 1.3M in Series A funding from the Tech Coast Angels, the Pasedena Angels, and the Frontiera Group as well as 2M in funding from their founder Dr. David Saad .

The Good
Clupedia has an interesting concept on their hands that, at the very least, it is a sort of web2.0 model that hasn't been beaten to death. The metag everything idea has been around for a long time and we are just now getting around to realizing it, with things like semantic user generated layers on Google earth, the new Yahoo/Flickr geotagging map photo explorer, etc, etc. Clupedia is taking it to another level by letting you tag and review anything on the Internet; your reviews for one site/product you write about then get displayed on any other relevant website you visit.

Clupedia also apparently has a strong pitch as they've received good response from the early stage investment community. Besides the money, their pitch has been well received on the popular entrepreneur video site vator.tv. Clupedia's vator.tv success alone has generated a lot of their user interest and downloads.

Finally they have a pretty good scheme for building their community (which is always the hardest part in making a service built on user generated content). They give iphones and other gifts for contributions and referrals. From what I can tell the requirements to get things seem quite high (100 clues and 100 referrrals), but I guess its working, so thats a good thing.

The Bad
Despite my comment that their pitch has been well received, my personal opinion after seeing their Vator.tv video is that their pitch was not at all impressive. The whole clue thing is confusing, if I wasn't TRYING to figure out what Clupedia was for this review, I would have checked out long ago. It took me a bit of time to really get what clupedia was trying to do, and I follow this stuff daily, I honestly don't think the mass consumer is going to latch on to what the heck Cluepedia's "clue" concept is.

If anything I think, I think the strong investment support is probably less about a mind blowing business and more that they have confidence in the founder's background. With a PhD in Computer Science and a successful background launching a company previously, the leadership seems like a good safe bet. I'm not so sure of this, especially since I'm usually leery about "safe bets" but then again, I've never met Dr Saad, so I could certainly be wrong.

The biggest gripe I have with Clupedia was actually using it. I was expecting a slick toolbar like del.icio.us that integrated simply and cleany with a nice web 2.0 style website. My experience was nothing like that. First, the toolbar layout seemed to lack a clear thought on the user interface experience for discovering "clues". I'm sure if someone showed me what I was looking at it would have been obvious, but using it like most users (just downloading it and blindly trying it) finding clues was not easy or addictive. In fact the entire time I felt like I was missing something, even after reading through the FAQs. Whatever clues I did find just seemed like useless bantor. When I went to add clues it was also buggy, as selecting a category would not scroll beyond the first few entries, then when I actually submitted a clue about good ole Tech Coast Review nothing happened. So I'm not sure if that meant that the review was submitted or what.

Finally, beyond the Clupedias toolbar, the website itself highly bothered me. The look and feel of clupedia.com reminded me of some annoying flash site, not a hip web 2.0 company. Besides the asthetics, I could never get the actual website to work. Although I was logged in, and the clucast toolbar was working, I could never search, add, or look at any clues on the site directly. I tried on both Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Maybe it would have worked in IE, but I didn't have much interest in changing browses just to see if I could view clues. And frankly even if it did work, Im pretty sure that my hope of slick, simple del.icio.us like experience of tooolbar to website integration would not have been seen. This of course is troubling to me, as I use the website version of del.icio.us as much, if not more than the toolbar version of del.icio.us, and if Clupedia actually interested me, my behavior would probably be the same.

The Overall
Theoretically Clupedia could become a more evolved version of StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is highly addicting, very useful, has great traction, and has a good business model. By adding a more intelligent semantic engine for reviews, and a slightly more evolved twist, Clupedia has the potential to be even better and become highly sucessful. Do I think they'll pull that off? Frankly, no, but might as well give them a chance. In the end I'd rather review a startup that may be rather bad in its current implementation but has a vision that COULD beat the industry leader if all the right things happen, then a startup that may be more polished but in the longterm really has nothing innovative to differentiate it from the competitors. Clupedia is the former.

Website: http://www.clupedia.com

Screenshot:

A little holiday note for those in the Southern California startup and investing world, people are starting to recognize what you already know: the Tech Coast is Hot. The LA Times covered a story a couple weeks ago about the thriving tech scene in LA. They quoted some strong stats from E&Y:

• Venture Capatilists invested $1.3 billion in Southern California tech companies in the first three quarters of this year, compared to $4.4 billion in the Bay Area over the same period.

Which in a lot of ways, shows that while Southern California does not yet rival The Valley, it is a highly emerging area that needs to be watched. Entrepeneur magazine picked up the story in their blog as well. In fact people often forget that, Entrepeneur, one of the biggest magazines in the country that tracks startup founders is located in Orange County (Irvine).

Another point of relevance is that bub.blicio.us recently covered that Dealmaker is expanding into LA. This is another good sign because it helps address, probably the biggest problem that the tech industry faces here: we are just not connected like the boys up in the valley. The more, we can get established tech companies mixing with startup entrepeneurs, mixing with new media, mixing with investors, the better. Feeding a more cohesive industry here will help produce more creative energy, better oppurtunities, and obviously stronger economic growth. Twiist-Up and Lunch 2.0 have been a good start in 2007 and hopefully the Dealmaker events will help as well.

It will be interesting to see if 2008 brings the Southern California web startup world more major success stories, beyond the ever lame Myspace.

While technically a Korean company they are partnered with K2 Network located in Irvine, CA (Orange County) and they are hiring and basing their U.S. activity out of Orange County as well.

While Storyblender isn't live yet, they are already building some early buzz leading up to their December release by their inclusion in the TechCrunch Top 40. What they've demonstrated so far is a service that allows users to collaborate in editing and "blending" their text, audio, video, and image clips online. Once the blending is complete people will be able to share their "blended stories" with their friends in the Story Blender online community.

The Good
It just sounds fun being able to turn a fat kid with a baton...

Into a fat kid with a light saber; so with the help of a few friends I foresee endless hours of entertainment.

There is also a fertile market for Story Blender in music mixing as well as video editing for more practical purposes like school projects, action sports, and work presentations. The social network could really prove useful; not only because it will allow users to share their artistic talents but it has the ability to facilitate a teaching and learning process that might be keeping many people away from editing their own videos.

Finally they have $1.5MM in funding and are headed by Yong Joon Hyoung who is the founder of Cyworld a popular social network in South Korea.

The Bad
Most video editors that I know (even the ones who only dabble) are very particular to their programs, whether it be Final Cut Pro, Abode Premier, or iMovie. Most video editors aren't going to start utilizing a new way of editing when its unlikely that Story Blender will be able to match many of the features of "real" desktop video software.

TechCoastReview is a new weblog dedicated to tracking newly launched tech startups located in Southern California. In addition to new companies, we will profile existing southern California based companies that are sufficiently innovating in the areas of Internet and Technology.

Tech Coast Review is a response to the "Bubble 2.0" phenomena. A notion that the Internet and Technology Industry is in a rebirth of sorts; a gradual return to the highs and lows of the Internet bubble of the late 90's. New companies are forming everywhere, and many are touting the "power of web 2.0". While the definition of Web 2.0 continues to be fuzzy (Wikipedia entry on web 2.0), the excitement of leveraging, wikis, blogs, social networks, mashups, etc, through application frameworks like AJAX and Ruby on Rails, and open APIs such as Google, Yahoo, Flickr, et all. is palatable.

New companies are emerging at a rapid pace, and the venture capital and angel community have once again began bullishly investing in the online tech market. None of this, is "new" news to anyone who has been following the industry for the last 2 years or so. It is all well covered in the "valley".

But apart from Silicon Valley, areas such as Seattle, New York, and Southern California are hotbeds for innovation and investment. Despite the relatively small geographic distance between Socal and the Valley, cultural differences abound. In many ways the net result is that technology companies in Southern California tend to get underrepresented. Yet companies that have the potential to make a profound impact are emerging from areas like Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. This collective region, known as the "Tech Coast", has some of the greatest concentration of R&D efforts in the world, and its high time that someone was profiling it. So welcome to Tech Coast Review.

If you’d like to contact us with suggestions, comments, corrections, errors or announcements, feel free to email us at editor@techcoastreview.com.