Startup Roundup: Monetate real-time marketing platform helps power ModCloth

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

DEFINITE READS

First Round Capital-funded ModCloth—which has been all over the news this week for its $19.8 million round of fundraising—happens to be local Conshohocken-based real-time marketing platform Monetate‘s first client. In 2008, ModCloth generated $3.2 million in revenue. In 2009, it shot up to $19 million. We covered the tech behind Monetate—and by extension, ModCloth—back in February.
Old-school-style Final Form Games, which we covered in December celebrated its first birthday last week. In three blog posts, the company talks where it’s been, where it’s at and where it’s going. The game design company is still working on its 17th-century sci-fi thriller tentatively called Jamestown. Looks sharp and slated for a 2011 PC release.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

At a barbecue to celebrate the launch of its non-search display offerings, Google execs spilled their guts to advertising geeks that the recently acquired Philadelphia-based Invite Media will remain independent to work with other networks and exchanges, which should settle the nerves of folks that complained of a conflict of interest.
Duck Duck Go‘s Gabe Weinberg—who might as well just take over this column—analyzes the success of running a DDG ad with aggregator reddit. He says that compared to Adwords, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, MySpace and StumbleUpon, the tight-knit community provided the highest return on investment. But it’s that exclusive tech community that would be most interested in the product, we bet.
In other DDG news, version 2.0 of the zero-click search engine’s iPhone app has been released on iTunes, including enhanced UI and features and support for the iPad.
GSI Commerce has extended its ecommerce agreement with the National Basketball Association, a contract now in ink until 2017 since signing in 2007. It’s a big win since last week’s SkullCandy announcement.

GIVE A GLANCE

User-generated ad company Poptent writes that La Quinta Inns and Suites recently purchased two of its community-created spots for $5,000 each, double its standard offering—companies typically buy just one.
123LinkIt now allows users to add keyword suggestions to the plug-in’s database and also provides the ability to make recommendations on which advertisers or category of products you’d like to see with the service.
And for the sports fans out there, SeatGeek‘s blog has a great post about the Phillies-Mets rivalry broken down by ticket sales. As the post notes, Mets fans pay more for tix overall while Phillies fans are willing to shell out higher than face value more often. There’s much, much more—but we’re just not smart enough to break it all down. Go, statisticians!
Startup Roundup will post weekly on Wednesdays until there’s not a Philly startup story left to link to on the Internet. See others here.