PixPulse Your LIfe!

The PixPulse WAP portal for mobile phones has just been exchanced with new features this morning (yikes it's 5:51am as I write this post!). You can now organize your media via your mobile phones when you're on the go or not around a computer.

Check it out on your phones at wap.pixpulse.com. We've adding quite a few new features to our wap portal and more cool stuff is on the way :)

OT: GO SEAHAWKS!!!

FedEx just dropped off 2 packages today. (5) 250gig drives from NewEgg and the Infrant ReadyNAS X6. Now I have 750gigs of storage on a RAID5 setup with a spare HD (too bad it's not a hot spare).

Hats off to the guys at Infrant. Their product rocks! Put in the drives and the RAID array builds itself and I was up and running in less than 1 hour. Their web-based management console is easy to use. I am using it to backup PixPulse via rsync. I do daily incrementals at 4 hour intervals and weekly full backups which are all automated. This backs up the codebase, database and filesystem. PixPulse is also backed up offsite to another server as an added failover precaution.

For anyone running a web service on a single server, please please please backup your files. This doesn't have to be on a RAID 5 system, but hard drives do fail and that's millions of dollars of equity that you lost which will be very hard to build back. I actually know a few consumer startups that have 20 - 100k users and don't backup anything--at minimum backup your database.

Here are the Seattle startups I really like (in no particular order), these are companies that have strong sales revenue and/or innovative technology:

Farecast - This is a startup that wants to become a travel portal by predicting future prices for airtickets to answer the question "Should I buy now or in 2 weeks?". Leisure travel is a huge market and they just might be able to carve out a niche with strong partnerships. Their service is still in development and testing, but will be launching shortly.

Zillow - Founded by Rich Barton, the former CEO of Expedia. Zillow is tapping into the huge real estatement market and bringing it online by helping consumers buy and sell properties-a la HouseValues but with a twist. They are launching in early 2006 as well.

Revenue Science - A startup with Bay Area money that has been around for quite sometime. Formerly DigiMine, Revenue Science provides targeted contextualized and behavioral online advertisements. What this means is that the know the profile of who's visiting your site and can send them very customized ads. They have a great pipeline of deals and I expect to be an IPO candidate or very large M&A.

Isilon Systems - Company headed by the former top sales exec at F5 Networks. Isilon provides smart clustering file storage for databases and filesystems. Companies who store lots of photos, videos, data and other media who required load balancing and redundancy should take a look at their solutions--MySpace uses them and hopefully PixPulse will one day too. The company has had strong sales revenue since their product completed beta.

Honorable mention to Lockdown Networks:

Lockdown is a network security startup offering Network Access Control (NAC) solutions in direct competition with Cisco and other NAC vendors. The company's vision is spot and all they have to do is deliver a GA product that delivers and vision and execute, execute, execute. Their products allows computers and other network devices on the network according to IT or government policy.

There's a few more I like, but they are in stealth :)

David Berlind is putting together Mashup Camp which will happen somtime between Feb 18 and Feb 25 somewhere south of San Fran. People that are interested in taking the Google or Yahoo maps API and mashing it with some webapp should find it interesting.

Startups represented so far: EVDB, Ning, JotSpot, Flock, Zazzle, Mobido, LinkedIn, Sharpcast, etc. Full List and event signup page

I'd really like to see the Seattle startup community get together more with events, forums and collaborate on ideas. Everytime I'm back in the Bay Area I always meet amazing people and get really "hooked" into the startup community--this needs to get replicated in Seattle and the eastside.

We've been busy making updates to the site with lot of behind the scenes stuff as well. Members can now send videos and photos directly from the PixPulse website to their mobile phone. We've also make it easier to activate notifications and made the following pages cleaner: login, accounts, upload, help and enchanced the WAP site for mobile users quite a bit.

Thank you to our members for their feedback and suggestions on features--quite a few of them made it to our most recent release.

Here's one of my favorite recent photos:

Photo from PixPulse.com