By Allan Maurer
JACKSONVILLE, FL—Life in cyberspace continues to require booster rockets to keep up with the multitude of social networking sites, blogs, news aggregators, and assorted services and applications. Jacksonville startup Cliqset wants to help everyone get it altogether in one place.
The site, which just opened to the public this spring, lets users hook-up their online activities such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and other pre-existing accounts such as Google, Plaxo, and Yahoo, and group their contacts within Cliqset.
The company raised two angel rounds totaling $2 million from Derek Mercer, founder and former chair and CEO of Vurv Technology, which sold talent management software and was acquired in 2008 by Taleo for approximately $128.8 million.
Cliqset’s Robyn Cobb tells TechJournal South the five-employee company is “A community for people to share, discover, and discuss things they find most interesting online and in realtime. We think your online interactions should happen as easily as offline ones.”
The site integrates with 70 social networking applications, including, in addition to those already mentioned, Newsvine, NetVibes, LiveJournal and Blogger.
“Users have a lot of controls,” explains Cobb. “They can decide who can comment, who can see them, whether or not their contact information is visible,” and more, such as the ability to block spam commenting.
Content can be automatically shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other connected sites or applications.
Cobb says users can discover content and people by staying on top of specific topics with Cliqset’s activity stream filters. Users can select which types of updates they’d like to see in their activity stream including text, photo, comment, or blog post.
An Adobe Desktop AIR app allows users to filter information, organize activity streams, and engage with your community for an easy-to-navigate desktop environment.
The site functions basically like posting on Facebook. It allows users to create groups, called cliques, that determine what posted items you view in a single activity stream. Users can also choose to look at the blogs or photos of people they follow.
The company recently partnered with Boxee, the cross-platform freeware media center software firm, and now has an application that can be used to share comments about a TV show people watch together in real time.
“We expect to see watching parties cropping up,” says Cobb.
Crunchbase tracked users at around 25,000 in October on a graph headed up like a jet gaining altitude.
Cobb says the site has a plan for making money but declined to discuss details. “Right now we’re focused on building the product,” she says, “but we’ll be looking at monetization more aggressively in 12-18 months.”
Online: www.cliqset.com
Southeast Venture Conference, February 29 – March 1, 2012 at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA – Where Smart Money Meets Smart People.
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