NY-based Simparel has announced that it's taken $4 million in a Series A round of venture capital today. The funding has been provided by Israeli VC firm L Capital Partners. Simparel notes that the funds will accelerate the continued product development of both the core platform and the new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. The funds will also be used for sales and marketing.

Simparel is a b2b play focusing on the apparel, footwear, accessories, costume jewelry, as well as home furnishings and toys industries.  The software is offered as a service (SaaS) and will be marketed towards companies who typically can't afford larger ERP systems. 

Funny note - if you go to the Simparel site, you get to select whatever beta you'd like. Currently there are three listed and you can pick one and follow that path.

“Was she being supremely Machiavellian? Or had she simply lost her mind?”
– John Hielemann, on Hillary Clinton’s final weeks campaigning

Today, I’m announcing my plans to close BricaBox, LLC.

This decision, which has taken place over the last few weeks, was as complicated as are my feelings about it. Nonetheless, I can tell you most of this decision revolved around issues of money, traction, team, and vision: the four essentials of a successful startup.

I think it’s fair to say that a startup deserves to live if it has good quantities of at least three of those four things, and BricaBox is now out of all but one of them.

Perhaps, even, it was out of them sometime ago — this is where that quote about Hillary Clinton comes in — and we’ve just been in denial.

Whatever it is, I’m going to take a tremendous amount of experience, lessons, wisdom, etc with me. And, over the next few weeks, I intend on blogging diligently about every aspect of this failure. I’ve taken extensive mental notes on these lessons, and I look forward to sharing them with you. I think this process will help me institutionalize these lessons for myself, and of course I hope you can learn something from them as well.

For now, I’ll give you a table of contents for what’s to come. Subscribe to my RSS feed to be alerted to when I post and see below for some teasers.

As for what I intend on doing next, you can be sure that it will be something entrepreneurial. A few weeks ago, I spoke to a few of the companies I admire most in New York (about joining their ranks), but realized quickly that I was not ready to take my hand off the entrepreneur’s tiller.

So, I plan on doing a mix of things: consulting for media and technology companies, launching some exciting small projects with my friends (soon to be announced), and exploring new startup opportunities.

Of course, with all these things, I now have the perspective of building and launching BricaBox — and I’m excited to put those lessons to work. Also, I bring with me my entire life experience, dating back to my first company (Westheimer Family Plants and Produce), building and running Brandeis Television, directing new media operations at National Public Media, and working with political organizations like David Pepper’s campaign for Mayor and now TruthThroughAction.org’s project.

I’ve realized that I’m a “new media mechanic” — one part technical, one part zen — so, if I can help you tune-up your online media operations, please let me know.

As for what I intend on doing with BricaBox itself, time will also tell. We’ll keep the site live for now. However, if there’s a media company in need of a proprietary platform to scale thousands of user-generated content websites, I think BricaBox could be of great use for them. Of course Open Sourcing is another option, though that would also require a certain level of interest from the community.

Last of all, I want to thank several people who made the experience with BricaBox wonderful (though there were countless who had a great effect on the experience): Thanks to the nextNY community for free business school and for the friendships; thanks to Evan Bartlett, Michael Galpert, Charlie O’Donnell (my biggest — always constructive — critic), Alex Lines, and to David S. Rose, for his mentorship. A big thanks goes to my dad for his watchful eye. Many thanks go to Gary Vaynerchuk for his commitment to my success. To Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, the great guys at Silicon Alley Insider and Caroline McCarthy of CNET, thanks for promoting New York Tech companies!

Thanks to Mike Hostetler for stepping into the technical lead when we were most in need.

And lastly, thanks to everyone who loved BricaBox like I did. We had some awesome users and fans, like Nichelle Stephens, Andrew Watson, Ari Greenberg, and more. Asking them to say goodbye to BricaBox hurts the most!

As I write the final words of this post, my mind is still coming up with reasons and ways not to do this; alas, it must be done — it is that time. Now, I get to look onwards and upwards. As I look at the table of contents (below) to my startup’s postmortem, I get excited about working on what’s next. The opportunities I have coming are incredibly exciting, and applying all that I’ve learned to the next Big Thing will make it all worth it. That’s for sure.

---

Postmortem Table of Contents (complete posts to come)

Companies should tackle Market Problems, not Technical Problems.
BricaBox was a solution to a technical problem I had. While it’s good to scratch itches, it’s best to scratch those you share with the greater market. If you want to solve a technical problem, get a group together and do it as open source.

Start with a real team.
There are a million things a startup needs to do and a dozen skill sets. If you get more people involved from the get-go, you can better distribute responsibility, and grow on the cheap.

Lightweight or heavyweight? Choose one. It matters how you spend.
Does your startup have a burn-rate? If it’s above $0, think about concentrating it and speeding up development. BricaBox was fed-but-anemic and and slowly roasting its cash. Do it again and I’ll concentrate those costs at the beginning. We would have had twice the product in 2/3 of the time.

When in doubt, build off Open Source.
One of the first questions I had to deal with, while building BricaBox, was why we weren’t modifying an existing Open Source solution, like Wordpress MU. We were a CMS at heart, after all. Next time, I’ll give more consideration to building off and participating in existing Open Source project.

Go vest yourself.
When a co-founder walks out of a company — as was the case for me — you’ve already been dealt a heavy blow. Don’t exacerbate the issue by needing to figure out how to deal with a large equity deadweight on your hands (investors won’t like that the #2 stakeholder is absent, even estranged, from your company). So, the best way of dealing with this issue is to take a long, long vesting period for all major sweat equity founders.

More to come…

NY-based Hakia is announcing the launch of their white-label semantic Web search (they call it Syndication Web Services) today. The idea is simple - you can now add Hakia's services to your site offering more intense search functionality for your visitors.

The business model is welcoming; offer 30,000 searches per day free of charge and free of advertising then they will discuss a relationship with you past the 30,000. What this means is that small social networks may never pay anything for using the Hakia service but provide a great benefit for their users.

The Syndication Web Services include Web search, News search, Vertical search, Summarizer, Categorizer, Characterizer and Text Meaning Representation. The services provide an XML feed, and options to customize the feed. The first company using the new service is Berggi. Berggi has created a worldwide mobile search application.

This month Hakia added PubMed to their search index and also checkout our comparison of Hakia and Powerset.

The New York Times* just soft-launched "Times People," a simple and compelling social networking tool. By following other Times People users you can see stories they recommend, their ratings of movies and restaurants, and their comments on stories and blog posts. In turn people following you can see your Times activity. I've been using it for a few weeks, and I love it.

It's available right now as a Firefox plugin; support for other browsers may come later. There's also a Facebook app, which ties Times People into your mini-feed.

While I applaud the decision to keep this first release dead simple, I hope it evolves into a proper profile system for the Times, and replaces the existing "member center," which needs to be put out to pasture.

The Times has launched some cool stuff lately, and this is by far my favorite. It's elegantly straightforward and truly useful. Unlike most social networks, where adding to your contact list doesn't give you much more than the queasy sense of being an acquisitive stalker**, your Times People network gives you something immediately useful, in the form of great stuff to read.


*I work at the Times, but wasn't involved with this, other than as fanboy. The project was lead by Derek Gottfrid, the same guy who wrote TimesMachine.

** One reason Wordie doesn't have 'friends.' Everybody stalks everybody.

Appointment planning and physician review service ZocDoc continues to expand their offering. Today they are announcing that dermatologists are now available in the ZocDoc system. From what I understand, getting an appointment with a dermatologist can take weeks. ZocDoc shows you who is available same-day and next-day along with booking appointments with your normal dermatologist. The service is currently offered in NYC only.

Dermatologists are an important part of the ZocDoc system because this is one of the areas they are monetizing. They don't charge any fees for primary care doctors, only for specialists. Some of the services include: skin cancer examinations, acne treatment, mole inspections, and laser hair removal as well as Botox and collagen injections.

When I signed up for the Freelancer's Union insurance recently, I used ZocDoc to help me pick a primary care doctor. The reviews are really solid and I feel more confident with them since the reviews come from actual patients so there's no padding. If you are new to ZocDoc, check out their video demo below.

Hakia announced yesterday that they have added 10 million health articles from the U.S. government run PubMed search engine. You can now search PubMed from a special PubMed Hakia search or any nornal Hakia search will also return PubMed results. This announcement comes after Hakia announced the launch of the "credible health search".

The Hakia blog post on the PubMed announcement is well worth a read if you are into semantic search. Apparently the PubMed search has holes that may return incorrect or no results. Hakia uses their intelligence to return relevant results.

Check out our comparison of Valley darling Powerset vs. NY-based Hakia.

As Father’s Day approaches, it is the perfect time to reflect on the fundamental shift in the role of men in parenting. As father’s continue to take back paternity and become empowered in the raising of their children, four dads from Austin, Texas have made their mark in the complex world of parenting and online video. The parenting video network DadLabs – Taking Back Paternity has rapidly become the father go-to site for parenting tips, advice and a healthy dose of humor.  With a blend of video, social media and fatherhood, DadLabs has built a strong parenting community and their fans stretch from coast to coast proving that our dads know dads.

So who are these super dads? Whether expecting, new or veteran, these socially networked fathers play a more active and creative role in the lives of their children, than the average father. The most active online fathers are expecting fathers, called “due dads” by DadLabs, they are almost thirty years old. Most of these due dads are college grads and, according to demographic data retrieved by TubeMogul from onsite Viddler video plays on dadlabs.com, live in cities like Astoria (NY), Austin (TX), New York (NY), Louisville (KY), Houston (TX), Chicago (IL) and Washington (DC).

When it comes to the health of their families, most of the DadLabs dads are actively involved in keeping up to date with all the current issues and ways to improve their children’s health. This is particularly evident in the grocery shopping with half the DadLabs dad becoming the primary grocery shoppers for their families. Grocery shopping has been a mother exclusive domain for quite some time.

“Working and stay-at-home dads are all becoming much more active in the lives of their children and are interested in learning what it takes to be a great dad,” says Clay Nichols, co-founder and co-host of DadLabs. “We want to provide dads with the most honest, informative and entertaining information and support all through our guy-colored lenses.”

These fathers are not your typical men when it comes to media consumption. The DadLabs dad watched less than 15 hours a week of television compared to the average of 40 hours. When it comes to Internet usage most spend at least 10 hours a week and up to 20 hours on average. A lot of this time is spent doing research on parenting topics, and getting sports and financial information and watching videos on dadlabs.com. By far the most popular DadLabs video of all time is a very informative Lounge episode called, “What Makes a Great Babysitter”, in which a panel of parents talk about what they look for in a baby sitter while enjoying a cold beer.  

The websites that have sent the most traffic to dadlabs.com are mega-parenting sites like babyzone.com and babycenter.com, which offer a wealth of parenting information but lack the understanding of fathers. A  many of the DadLabs dads visit is parenthacks.com, a collection of practical parenting tips and, of course, hacks.

 “DadLabs is the most focused and unique online video resource that is for dads by dads,” says Paul Kontonis, CEO of For Your Imagination, executive producers of DadLabs. “They are everymen and are smart about how they approach their site, their audience and their content and we’re proud of the network’s value to fathers.”

Most importantly, DadLabs gears their resources and social community for a Web audience, serving up content in small, easily digestible pieces, perfect for the dads that are spending less and less time watching traditional television.  With over 250 short form online videos, DadLabs has covers the most important and frequently discussed parenting issues for fathers. DadLabs videos have been viewed over 2 million times and won the 2008 Yahoo! Video Best New Uploader Award since its relaunch in late 2007. New episodes can be seen on www.dadlabs.com as well as popular online video sites such YouTube, Viddler, Yahoo! Video and iTunes.

Daisy Whitney from TVWeek and the New Media Minute wants to know how to fund a Web 2.0 startup, especially a video startup. She points out that bootstrapping and self-funding are sexy terms to reporters like herself and that sometimes venture capital cash works as well. For Your Imagination is cited as an example of a company which not only produces original content that can be monetized through advertising and sponsorships but a company which also produces web video series for TV networks and brands.

The Advertising 2.0 conference was one of the central events of Internet Week New York. Mochila CEO Keith McAllister participated in a panel on Publishing 2.0 and ‘re-imagining of the newspaper and magazine industries’.

The next gathering of the fabulous online video content creator's Meetup, BigScreen LittleScreen, will be on Tuesday, June 10th at 6:30pm at For Your Imagination's studio during Internet Week. Get ready for hot one, with New York City temperatures forecast to be almost 100 degrees and with great videos from Zoom In Online, Break a Leg, Mediocre NY and The Underminer in Yoga plus a quick demo by Pond5. The cold beer will be provided by the best online TV guide, Tilzy.TV, so register today, come early, kick back and enjoy the videos.