As a parent, I continue to be amazed by my children’s innate understanding of how to use technology.  Even at 2 years old, my son can navigate around our iPad and iPhones to watch videos, play games and listen to his favorite songs.  While the benefits are clear, it’s also obvious that parents can use an extra hand when it comes to technology and mobile devices.  AppCertain provides this by creating a simple new service that helps parents by monitoring which apps are installed on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod that their children use.  Every time a new app is installed, we’ll send you an email with a description of the app, along with extra valuable information such as if their are in app purchases, if there are ads displayed, and if the app can track the device’s location.  

Sample Report:

AppCertain is a project that is led by CEO & Co-Founder Spencer Whitman.  Spencer started the company with over ten years experience studying and working at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University in topics ranging from computer security to distributed systems.  He’s also already been quoted in The Guardian’s coverage of parents’ need to better monitor their children’s iPhone and iPad usage.  The team has strong roots with Carnegie Mellon University and brings together a great combination of computer security from CyLab and design.  AppCertain also has an amazing team of rockstar advisors including:

• John Peha formerly Chief Technologist of the Federal Communications Commission and White House as Assistant Director of the Office of Science & Technology Policy where he focused on Communications and Research
• Jose Morales & Lujo Bauer academic thought leaders in malware analysis and security policy
• Dave Mawhinney a serial entrepreneur now leading a variety of entrepreneurship initiatives at CMU

If you’re a parent and want to try the service out, you can sign up for an invite here.   We’ll try to add you quickly and always love to get feedback, so please let us know what you think.

The process of building early-stage web and mobile companies is continuously evolving.   A few of the specific trends enjoyed by today’s entrepreneurs include:

• The reduction and/or elimination of employee’s time and financial capital focused on operations and infrastructure
• The ability to leverage existing platforms for customer growth
• The formalization of processes and tools for customer and business model development

Before launching Birchmere Labs, we spent considerable time thinking about these trends and how they impacted the best entrepreneurs with whom we want to partner.  We also looked at a number of respected early stage investors and accelerators and how they create the most value for their investors.

We believe we’ve come up with an optimal investment model for both these groups that we describe as a “seed and studio” fund.  This means we do BOTH of the following activities within Birchmere Labs:

• Seed Fund – Look for early-stage investment opportunities that fit our thesis and invest in them.   The FAQs about our seed fund activities live here.
• Studio Fund – Identify unserved market opportunities ourselves and through Birchmere strategic partners, then quick test to refine the business model and do early customer development.  We then recruit management teams to build companies around the most promising opportunities.

Beyond this, we focused our activities in this first fund in a few other ways – which we will elaborate on in future posts:

1. All of our seed and studio activities are “community driven commerce focused,” which we view as one of the most promising areas of web and mobile startups today.
2. Partnering with Ogden News gives our companies a proprietary testbed across multiple media channels in which to iterate during customer discovery.

Finally a few important points about our studio fund activities:

1. We aren’t interested in stealing people’s ideas.  If someone comes to us with a great idea, we’re going to look to invest in them as the basis for a partnership.
2. We plan to systematically share best practices with our seed investments that we learn from our studio activities.  Similarly, we’ll certainly be interested in learning from our seed investments’ leadership teams.
3. We expect that our seed and studio companies find ways to work together, but ultimately any partnerships need to be win-win and we’ll let the management teams work out what (if any) business relationships work best for all involved.

If you have a great community driven commerce startup in early development, we’d love to chat with you about becoming a seed investor.

If you are looking to join a startup in it’s early development, we’re always looking for great talent in all disciplines across multiple seed and studio companies.

We’ll be regularly posting on our experience building these companies, hopefully contributing to the continuing evolution of startup launch best practices, and we invite you to subscribe to our feed and follow along.

This is a challenge I’ve personally encountered and in my experience very few decisions in our early parenting felt more significant.  The wonderful thing about Mom Trusted is that it allows parents to conduct this research leveraging personalized search and then connects you local parents and friends (via Facebook Connect) that can provide you more information and support in your search.

Beyond being a promising startup focused on big market with an approach we believe in, we also were very impressed by Chaz Giles  the CEO & co-founder.  Chaz spent six years at P&G and a year as a director at Citi Ventures before launching Mom Trusted.

We’re excited to partner as an early investor with Chaz and the team at Mom Trusted as they build out their solution to support their mission to “help kids learn & grow by empowering parents and providers.”

Update: Here is the TechCrunch coverage of the financing.  

By far, the biggest area of conversation from the manifesto in the first month has been the principal:

We don’t have MVPs but do believe in minimally awesome products (MAPs).

So I thought I’d elaborate on what we mean by this.

First of all as defined by Eric Reis, I have no issue with MVPs.  Eric’s definition is:

that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

However, I think way too many entrepreneurs misinterpret “viable” as “sloppily put together”.   We believe the experience matters and frankly I’ve met with too many entrepreneurs over the years who mistakingly interpreted a lack of demand around a concept when it really was at least partially due to an ugly or unnecessarily complicated interface.  While an MVP should only contain the  core features and trust visionary customers to fill in the gaps, those essential benefits can’t be delivered through a horrible experience.

On one level you could argue this is just a change in vocabulary.   However, I think the semantics matter in all of these agile methodologies.  For example when we deployed scrum at mSpoke, the specific defined vocabulary was extremely helpful.  If I had a conversation with my CTO about “progress” we could end up talking past each other way  too easily.  However, if I asked about the “velocity” and to review a “sprint’s burn down chart” we both knew exactly what I was referring to.

I think the lean startup methodology has provided the same benefit to startups.  If you have an organization which has read the book and  integrated the techniques deeply, then the entire organization knows what “validated learning” is and more importantly what it is not.  However, in the case of MVPs I’d argue  the term “viable” is just putting people on the wrong path to start with.  (As a side note, I also like the acronym MAP better then MVP but that is really just a secondary benefit.)

Another important point, is this even extends to MAPs that are really landing pages & a small budget adwords campaign.  If you aren’t a designer and don’t have a designer on your team, you are crazy not to spend the $300 with DesignPax or a similar service to ensure the landing page isn’t so ugly that it affects the conversion rate.

Finally, the last thing I’d like to clarify is that this also does not mean that every MAP needs to be engineered to scale to millions of users.  One concept that is deeply integrated into the best software organizations I’ve worked with is “reuse ideas not code”.  Given this it’s unlikely regardless of how well architected  your first MVP is that the code base will live on well into the future.  Rather then focus on an architecture that scales to 10 million users focus on the experience, responsiveness and what learnings you plan to validate.

TechCrunch: ReadWriteWeb COO Sean Ammirati Departs, Will Lead New Seed Fund At Birchmere Ventures

ReadWriteWeb:  Former ReadWriteWeb COO Sean Ammirati Starts Commerce Focused Fund, Birchmere Labs

Silicon Filter: ReadWriteWeb’s COO Sean Ammirati Leaves to Start Birchmere Labs Seed & Studio Fund

AlphaLab Blog: Congrats to Sean Ammirati on Birchmere Labs

Pittsburgh Business Times: RWW’s Sean Ammirati heads to Birchmere Ventures

Pop City: Birchmere Labs launches new “community driven” venture fund

Ultimately we want to and will be judged based on the performance of our portfolio.   Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with our progress.

Announcing the launch of Birchmere Labs, an extension of the highly successful Birchmere Ventures investment platform.   Birchmere Labs is an early stage seed & studio fund focused on community driven commerce startups.

Since 1996 Birchmere Ventures has consistently generated first-quartile returns investing in strongly IP-differentiated companies addressing engineering-heavy problem spaces in such sectors as cleantech, medical devices, and technology.

However, the rapid evolution of software development and platforms, together with the advent of the “always on” mobile economy, has given rise to many exciting investment opportunities outside the core Birchmere investment model.  To pursue these opportunities, we’re today launching Birchmere Labs focused on “community driven commerce” startups.  These web and mobile startups will feature strong network effects enabling rapid viral growth, while delivering value from the first user via transaction-based revenue models.

Birchmere Labs is a studio and seed fund:  we will both develop our own startups within the labs (studio fund) and invest in existing early stage startups (seed fund).   This integrated portfolio model, developed after studying numerous web and mobile early stage investors and accelerators, will provide strong synergies to both the companies we launch internally and fund externally.

Birchmere Ventures adds Sean Ammirati to our investment team as lead partner for Birchmere Labs.  Sean is an entrepreneur with experience building and selling businesses in the media and software industries.  Most recently Sean was COO of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most influential web sites about the future of the technology and innovation.  In December 2011, the company was acquired by SAY Media to strengthen its technology channel.   Sean was previously co-founder and CEO of mSpoke, which was the first acquisition of LinkedIn.  Sean is also an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.