IIn a move certainly unprecedented in the local marketing communications industry, global giant WPP has consolidated its five Seattle subsidiaries — and a staff of 200+ — under one roof in South Lake Union. The new offices in the six-story Alley24 building, a Vulcan Real Estate project in the fast developing South Lake Union neighborhood, will house Young & Rubicam and Wunderman (with a combined 86 employees, and plans to expand to 120 by this summer), JWT Employee Communications (23 employees), Cole & Weber United (formerly Cole & Weber/Red Cell with 80 employees)and Rockey Company/Hill & Knowlton (13 employees). Cole & Weber is occupying the sixth floor, with all the others on the fifth floor. [24×7]
Apgar Starts Up Ookla
Is it a spin-off or a whole new show? The P-I reports that Mike Apgar, who founded Seattle Internet service provider Speakeasy in 1994, is returning to his entrepreneurial roots with a new startup called Ookla. Apgar will continue as chairman of Speakeasy, which will hold a 25 percent stake in Ookla.
Apgar’s new venture includes two technologies from Speakeasy: Filecloud and Speed Test. Filecloud, which was created by Apgar and the Speakeasy team last year, is a Web-based file distribution service. As its name suggests, Speed Test is a tool that helps users determine the speed of their Internet connections. Filecloud has 300,000 registered users. Apgar and additional investors will control 75 percent of Ookla. [24×7]
Webaroo Launches Search to Go
Webaroo is launching a new permutation on Web search, with a free service that scours a subset of the Web without a live Internet connection. The simple twist is that Webaroo allows users to download onto a laptop or mobile device, such as a smart phone, focused and algorithmically derived portions of the Web, called ‘web packs,’ for PCs (no Mac yet) on a variety of topics, such as sports, news and localities. Some human editing is applied to build packs.
According to company co-founder and CEO Rakesh Mathur (also a co-founder of Junglee, which was sold to Amazon before the bubble burst), the general idea is to take a one million gigbabyte index and compress it to 40 gigabytes and solve for both relevance and coverage. Rather than finding millions of hits for a search like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, Webaroo’s technology attempts to index pages that are high quality, broad coverage, and small size, he said.
Webaroo downloads come in three sizes–small, medium and large–to accomodate the storage and memory limitations of different devices. The Webaroo search content is updated everytime a user goes online. [24×7]
Sounders Use Internet & Technology to Upgrade Broadcasts in 2006
The Seattle Sounders announced today the launch of a new online digital play-by-play broadcast in 2006. Starting with the home opener on May 13th against the Minnesota Thunder, the Sounders’ new internet broadcast will sound like ”air-waved” radio, and be streamed around the world from the team’s website www.seattlesounders.net.
”We’ll maintain the same high quality play-by-play programming and talent, but this year, broadcast home games only through the Sounders website,” said Terry Ryan, executive producer of Sounders Radio. ”Now we’ll deliver Sounder action to a wider audience with the expanded reach of the internet and advanced, state of the art digital audio technologies.”
”Fans who like listening to the game while attending matches at Qwest Field will still be able to listen to traditional radio broadcasts of Sounders action by tuning to 107.3 FM.
The technological advancement now allows Sounders fans to enjoy a clear broadcast of every home match from anywhere in the world. [24×7]
