Two Crunchie Nominees -- Very Cool!

As the Web 2.0 has become enamored with all things social media, I have increasingly lost interest in investing in the next Facebook clone.  So imagine my surprise this morning as I saw the Crunchies nominees.  My companies, Radar Networks (a.k.a. Twine) and Riya.com (a.k.a Like) are two of the five companies nominated in the category of Best technology / innovation / achievement. 

A few years ago when I decided to return to Web investing, I made a decision that I would invest in companies that had real technological advantage.  This is more capital intensive than lots of web investments and has a longer gestation, but I figured it would pay off in differentiation and, hopefully, a better user experience. 

These companies are not without their challenges.  The change at Riya as is moved from photo classification to e-commerce has been well chronicled by Munjal.  I am happy to say that the business is doing extremely well.  The daily graphs I get on CTRs, Revenue, and Revenue/Visit  all been consistently up and to the right on a monthly basis, all year long.  Congratulations Team -- a better user experience is paying off, literally.

Twine is the still gated-beta application from Radar Networks.  I have been using Twine for about 2 months now.   I can say the promise of better information management by the use of semantics is definitely there. We still have a long way to go.  The platform is very fast and very reliable, now we are tuning features to improve the workflow. Being a gated app, I doubt we have chance to  win the Crunchie Award at Twine, even if every beta user voted.  I guess it truly is "just an honor to be nominated."

There is no guarantee that this technology-focused investment strategy will really pay off in great venture returns.  That remains to be seen. But this is still nice.

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Well, earthmine won.