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The Pitch: “Our tag line is ‘Where everyone’s closet is open for business.’ Members can upload photos of their clothes, mix and match them with items on our site, and receive virtual consultations from professional stylists. This fall, we are launching a marketplace where members will be able to sell their clothes, as well as demonstrate how they should be worn — just like dressing a mannequin in a department store. I think this is a big opportunity. If you could sell everything in your closet that you don’t wear, and get money to buy more stuff, would you do it? I think most women would.” CEO: Christine Elia LOCATION: New York City EMPLOYEES: Four LAUNCHED (BETA): 2008 2009 REVENUE: None 2010 PROJECTED REVENUE: $180,000 2011 PROJECTED REVENUE: $2 million NUMBER OF MEMBERS: 30,000 NUMBER OF UNIQUE VISITORS PER MONTH: 50,000 FUNDING SOUGHT: $750,000 to $1 million IN THE NEWS: Mentions in O, The Oprah Magazine and on Vogue.com The Experts Weigh In An Ambitious Endeavor Closet Couture once applied for funding from us, and we initially had some concern about how many people would be willing to upload photos of all their clothes. The site now has 30,000 members, which tells me that it has an audience it can engage. Opening up an online consignment shop is an ambitious endeavor, but I think it is a natural extension of the site’s existing features. I am curious about how Closet Couture plans to scale certain features — such as services from stylists — to meet demand as more members join. That’s one of the biggest hurdles it faces in execution. Kindra Tatarsky managing director, Golden Seeds New York City Target the Community Closet Couture is in an interesting market. A number of fashion companies, like Gilt Groupe, have built meaningful businesses in recent years. I like the idea of giving users a place where they can mix styles and share their tastes. If Closet Couture can create a recommendation system like the ones on Amazon or Last.fm , it has the potential to create some real opportunities for community and targeted advertising. I’m not as convinced about the used-clothing marketplace. It strikes me that people are probably surfing for ideas more than they are looking to buy used goods. Saad Khan partner, CMEA Capital San Francisco But Most VCs are Men This is a creative attempt to combine several developments, such as social commerce and targeted advertising, into a novel platform. But because of its novelty, there are few precedents that would give investors comfort that this is an effective alternative to other proven sites. Most VCs, who are male, will have no basis for accepting the assumption that women will pay for help in choosing their clothes. On the basis of this pitch, I would consider meeting with the company, but I would need to see measurable proof, like the average amount spent per customer, that the site is gaining traction. David S. Rose chairman New York Angels New York City Gilt Groupe – Fashion – Closet Couture – New York City – David S. Rose

Parsing real-time information that streams down a screen as a list of short text updates isn’t easy. Thanks to two new visualization tools from PostRank , however, the company’s users can now use PostRank’s new entity extraction feature to see real-time updates in your stream on a map and through a tree map interface. These two new features will be available to developers through Postrank’s real-time API . You can also find demos of PostRanks real-time geo and entity trends here and here . Sponsor The tree map view gives news organizations the ability to quickly see which of topics and stories they are tracking are currently trending. PostRank analyzes the updates it receives in real-time and extracts proper names, places and things. The tree map, which updates in real-time, then displays these updates and ranks them according to “share of voice.” PostRank also performs sentiment analysis on these updates and colors the updates accordingly. The geo map works similarly, but instead of extracting proper names, places and things, this algorithm just focuses on places. Thanks to this, a PostRank customer can easily see which cities, countries and regions are currently being mentioned online. The demos are now available in PostRank’s new Labs section – which opened earlier this month. Discuss

In an email to staff yesterday, new Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal wrote that “When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.” With that, he announced Ning would be abandoning its longstanding business model and discontinuing non-paying sites on its network. In light of this, is it time to reevaluate and reign in some of the excitement about the freemium model for startups? Sponsor Offering free services for a product alongside premium fees for advanced or special features – the freemium – has been touted as a promising business model for startups for several years now: “Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.” The Freemium Summit in San Francisco last month featured many companies who’ve been able to leverage the freemium model to great success, including Evernote , Pandora , and Dropbox . A recent New York Times article predicts Pandora could reach $100 million in revenue this year. Finding the balance between what to offer for free and what to charge for is not easy. The trick is to put enough in the free version to get traffic and usage, but not so much that there is no incentive to upgrade. Companies who use the freemium model need to integrate their free service or product into someone’s routine so fully (either by making sure it’s accessible on their computer and on their mobile phone, for example) that users reach the point where they feel they simply must pay. In yesterday’s press release , Ning noted that 75% of its users do pay for some sort of premium service. It may well be then that Ning’s announcements are less a reflection on the freemium model than on the company itself. Despite over $120 million in VC funding, Ning has been unable to develop a sustainable business. Yesterday’s announcement about the end to free Nings was accompanied with news that 40% of their staff would lose their jobs – an indication perhaps that the company’s overhead was simply too high. Nevertheless, the news may serve as a cautionary tale for those startups who think the freemium model guarantees success. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in a post on 37signals , “Eyeballs Still Don’t Pay the Bills.” It remains to be seen if Ning can pull through this reorganization and turn a profit, or if they will also serve as a lesson on what happens when a business that’s used the freemium model dumps all those “freeloaders.” Discuss

According to Dow Jones , some college have banned the iPad from their networks. Princeton and Cornell, for example, are seeing major networking and connectivity issues that mirror the problems many users are seeing with their iPads at home. Princeton also decided to share details about the issues it is seeing on its network in a detailed statement that could help Apple diagnose and fix the connectivity issues that have plagued the iPad since launch. Sponsor As we reported earlier this month, quite a few iPad owners have experienced WiFi connectivity issues with their devices. There seems to be a wide variety of issues, ranging from bad WiFi reception to regular drops on the WiFi connection because of what looks to be a bug in how the iPad connects to some routers. The iPad’s Problem According to Princetion: DHCP According to the report from Princeton, at least one of these connectivity problems can be traced back to how the iPad handles DHCP leases. DHCP, which stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol , is responsible for assigning IP addresses to computers on a local network. Normally, these IP addresses are renewed at regular intervals. If the device doesn’t request a renewal of the address, the DHCP server can hand this address out to another device. The Princeton team found that, under certain circumstances, iPads renew their lease of a given IP address once but then allow the lease to expire. Once the lease has expired, however, these devices still try to use the same address without asking for a new lease, which is bound to fail, as the router doesn’t remember the device anymore and has probably assigned the IP address to another device already. You can find more details about Princeton’s diagnosis – as well as a step-by-step guide for reproducing this issue here . Is This Good News for iPad Owners? If this is indeed the source of most iPad connectivity issues, then this is good news for Apple and iPad owners who are currently experiencing these issues, as a straightforward software update can probably remedy this problem. Discuss

The social networking platform