We are honored to have been selected as a FASTech 50 company – a DowJones VentureWire list of top venture-backed start-ups sourced from thousands of nominations from Twitter and hundreds of start-ups in the Dow Jones VentureSource database. The Top 50 finalists were selected for “paving a unique path technologically.” And that’s exactly what we’re doing at TellApart by helping online retailers think about retargeting and their own customer data in a new, massively profitable way.

We were judged against the following criteria:

“Not only must [the companies] be U.S. based, privately owned with at least one venture capital firm as an investor, but they also must have a product or service on the market that launched no earlier than three years ago. Most importantly, the start-up’s innovation should break from conventional methods, introduce novel technology or markedly advance an existing product or service. “

As a result of our inclusion on the list, TellApart CEO Josh McFarland has been invited to speak at the VentureWire FASTech conference in November. We are in good company: Yammer, FlipBoard and a slew of other disruptive startups rounded out the list.   Congrats to the other winners!

Please get in touch if you’re a retailer that’d like to find out how TellApart can help your company pave a unique technological path and revive your display efforts with data-driven retargeting.

Our announcement last week of closing a $13M round of funding highlighted a current theme in online advertising: Display is thriving and data is the reason. We had great conversations with top tech and advertising journalists about our funding news, our technology, our unique business model and the rapid growth in the industry in general. What’s exciting for us is the chord our news struck with many of the reporters, especially around the idea of how data’s pumping new life into display advertising. It’s what we’ve been saying all along — customer data is a retailer’s most important (and likely underutilized) asset.

GigaOm published an article that highlights how display advertising is performing better than it ever has, highlighting our performance stats, and points to a recent eMarketer report that shows how some of the tech world’s biggest and brightest stars (Facebook, Microsoft, Google, others), are expected to grow their display ad businesses in 2011.

TechCrunch wrote about how TellApart’s technology is enabling new advertising alternatives for retailers and offering them low risk/high return business terms in the process.

Why the big change? Display advertising is no longer the misdirected spam of years past – it is now a precision marketing channel that can be directed at very specific targets. As an example of recent innovations in display, the article mentions how TellApart’s sophisticated technology allows retailers to collect and organize all of their customer data – and then make that data do the heavy lifting in their marketing efforts.   Data, specifically a retailer’s own customer data, is the fuel that is helping display advertising to perform at levels that seemed unthinkable just 2 years ago.

For more on the revitalization trends in display advertising, and TellApart’s key role in leading the way, read these articles from The New York Times and AllThingsD.

Clearly, as far as the future of display advertising goes, it’s all about the data. At TellApart, we’re helping retailers to use their own customer data and turn display advertising from a channel of diminishing returns into a significant profit driver of incremental revenues.

If you’re a retailer that’d like to catch up with the competition by harnessing the power of your own customer data, please drop us a line. We’d love to boost your incremental revenues by helping you “tell apart” your best prospects and customers from the rest.

Recently MIT’s Technology Review published a comprehensive article about TellApart in their Business Impact section.  The theme of this section for the month of May is ‘understanding the customer’ – something that is at the core of what we do so well.

Mark Ayzenshtat, our CTO & co-founder,  discussed how our cloud-based platform can tell apart casual website visitors from those who are the most likely to buy and then address them with personalized ads across the web in real-time.  This activity brings potential customers back to our client’s websites with amazing effectiveness and ultimately leads to a massive amount of new revenue.  

The big lift in incremental sales we produce is not lost on Jeff Steeves, Director of Customer Acquisition for CSN Stores (and a great client of ours.) Jeff stated that CSN sees “significant lift to their conversion rate” thanks to TellApart – giving us credit for doing all of the ‘heavy lifting’ in this complicated process. Thanks, Jeff!

Link: Founders’ Cameo in the New York Times

Today’s Sunday NYT article, “Google Grows, and Works to Retain Nimble Minds“ features a great photo of TellApart co-founders Josh and Mark in our game room.

If you’re also feeling the itch to get out of a BigCo and get into a thriving startup, you know what to do.

Link: TellApart named AWS Start-up Challenge Finalist!

We are extremely excited to announce that TellApart has been named a regional semi-finalist finalist(!) in this year’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) Start-up Challenge. 

The AWS Start-up Challenge is an annual competition designed for promising startups that use the AWS cloud computing platform to compete for a chance to win $100,000 in cash and AWS credits. 

We were selected as one of 16 regional semi-finalists  one of 7 global finalists and will compete on Dec. 8th in Palo Alto for a shot at the title.

Congrats to the other finalists and Happy Thanksgiving to all! 

Mashable held a “Fast Pitch” competition on November 12th for top startups to present their vision, business model, and market traction to an audience of entrepreneurs.

To see a two minute overview of TellApart’s vision, Data Platform, and Transactional Retargeting Application, skip to minute 27:50 to see the short presentation. 

One of the most popular questions we field from online retailers is, “Is the revenue from retargeting incremental?”

On the popular industry blog, AdExchanger, TellApart CEO Josh McFarland lays out how TellApart proves the incremental nature of the revenue that we drive for our clients.

To read the full Q&A, click here.

To download the full case study, entitled “Can Retargeting Yield Incremental Revenue?”, click here.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve spent a tremendous amount of time speaking with (and learning from!) our clients and other online retailers about retargeting, specifically how to ensure its value is incremental to the bottom line.  We have a simple answer to that, of course:  pay only for clicks that convert!

When we started our crusade on this topic, we were a lone voice.  However, it is becoming clear that online marketers are quickly learning of the perils of paying for view-through conversions, and the sentiment is quickly growing into a crescendo.  Below, we’ve curated a few of the best like-minded articles on the web:

Kevin Lee of DidIt posted a great article on ClickZ last Friday where he cleanly laid out the hazards of paying for conversions on a view-through basis. He writes “if view-through orders” are to be paid for on a CPA basis… then the retargeting provider has “an incentive to buy below-the-fold, less expensive inventory on the hope” that the conversions would have happened anyway.  This is the definition of view-through conversion spam: charging for conversions that were not incremental to bottom-line revenue.

The Crosspixelmedia team elaborates on the definition and makes it easier for retailers to recognize if they’re being duped. They write:

        “Ad networks spam our computers with useless ads to get credit for sales that they didn’t generate.   If an ad network is delivering an inordinate number of view conversions vs. click conversions, it is likely they are engaging in view spam, and your advertising dollars are being wasted.”

Harry Gold’s article on ClickZ brings up two more concerns with paying for view-through conversions:

[VTC] grossly inflates the network’s reported conversions and ROI. I’ve taken over many accounts where a client had raved about a network’s conversion/ROI success. As soon as I showed them how to drill down on the conversions to take out the view-based conversions, the whole story changed. It wasn’t good news, but it was critical to show the real picture. Agencies, sites, or networks shouldn’t take credit for view-based conversions in the same way they take credit for click-based (where the banner was actually clicked on) conversions.

Second, when you count view-based conversion the same as click-based conversion, you can end up double-counting conversion when you bring all your data together into a consolidated dashboard.

Young Bean Song of Microsoft sums up view-through conversion accounting simply in “The Dirty Little Secret of View-Through Conversions.”  He writes: “view-based conversions are a measure of targeted reach, not direct response.” He points out that view-through conversions are appropriate for brand advertisers who want to know where their target audience lives online, but that “it’s time to drop the ROI moniker where it isn’t sincere.”

At TellApart, we’ll go further and say “there is no valid way to enter into a pay-for-view-throughs agreement with a retargeting provider. If you want an agreement that works for retailers and retargeting vendors, pay only for clicks, and, specifically, only for clicks that convert.”

Last night TellApart co-founders Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat sat down with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to discuss our data platform, our technology and some of our client success stories.

The link to the full article can be found here.

And yes, it was a very small table