Getting caught up on some startup news around town… Two new ones emerging from semi-stealth mode in the field of content-linked deals, and one gaming and communications veteran going direct-to-consumer for the first time.
—Indivly is a social Web startup led by founder John Clark, perhaps best known as half of the creative team behind this week’s “Bostlandia” video spoof. The company, which is going live next week, lets you earn points for sharing content (videos, photos, articles) with your network. The points can be used to get rewards or buy deals from brands that form marketing partnerships with Indivly.
—Swoop, the company formerly known as Shopximity, revealed its plan to insert links to local deals into content sites, starting with food and recipe websites. The startup is led by CEO Ron Elwell and co-founder Sim “Making Ads Suck Less” Simeonov. The latter tweeted today that “it was an epic adventure” to get the Swoop domain name (I bet it was).
—Vivox, the voice-chat and communications company led by CEO Rob Seaver, is going back to its gaming roots this week with a new direct-to-consumer product. The new offering, called C3 (a little less explosive than C4), lets gamers invite other players and communicate with them inside or outside the game on basically any device. The big deal, apparently, is that the application is free for gamers and doesn’t require any server setup, so it should reach a pretty broad community of gamers and publishers.
