All around town, spring is in the air—and so is new software from some prominent local tech startups. In case you missed them while trying to make it through tax week, here are the most interesting software releases we learned about in the past seven days.
—Seattle-based AdReady announced a new suite of services to help companies more easily and efficiently buy and sell online display advertising. AdReady works to drive down marketing costs for advertisers and publishers (like the New York Times and MSNBC) by making display ads work more like Web search ads. The startup has now introduced a premium edition for advertisers. “The idea of being able to generate, optimize, and measure display [ads] in the same way you can with search, and have it perform like that, is pretty powerful,” says board member Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group. “I’m as excited about AdReady as any company we’re working with.”
—Azaleos, an e-mail and communications management firm based in Seattle, unveiled a new service to help IT professionals manage and monitor Microsoft Office SharePoint Server installations. It’s the latest step in Azaleos’s efforts to go after bigger corporate IT clients. “Customers want the benefits of outsourcing, but don’t want to trust a cloud service to host all their data, for security reasons,” says Scott Gode, Azaleos’s vice president of product management and marketing. “We’re the perfect choice for them.” Last month, Azaleos merged with North Carolina-based M3 Technology Group, doubling its size and solidifying its position in the Microsoft Exchange e-mail management market. The company is backed by Ignition Partners, Frontier Capital, and Second Avenue Partners.
—Evri, the Seattle-based startup that’s trying to change the way people browse the Web and discover content, deployed “a major new product release,” according to founder and CEO Neil Roseman. Evri lets you see relationships between entities on the Web (people, places, things) and also suggests related articles of interest if you’re reading a piece on the Washington Post or The Times of London, say. Now the software also lets you browse through millions of profile pages by category, and view quotes and Twitter tweets (which are surfaced automatically) about whatever you’re interested in. Evri is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.
