Fwix
What it does: Organizes website content by location
Founders: Darian Shirazi, 24
Website: fwix.com
Based: San Francisco
Revenue 2010: $1 million
Revenue 2011 (projected): $5 million
Darian Shirazi was on a train in Bosnia during a trip through through Eastern Europe when homesickness set in. He not only wanted to know what was happening back in his native California, but also in the lands he was passing through. He began thinking of ways to organize news online by the places to which it was relevant. Shirazi, a veteran of Facebook and eBay (EBAY) who dropped out of University of California-Berkeley, launched Fwix in October 2008 as a news aggregator that attaches locations to online content, a process known as geotagging. “We take an article and determine that piece of content’s location or where it’s talking about,” Shirazi says. Fwix then sells that data to companies, including Groupon, the New York Times (NYT), and NBC, that use it to target online ads to local consumers. The 25-employee company has 10 clients and handles 300 million data queries per month, Shirazi says. Although he's raised $6.75 million in venture capital, the name Fwix is a mark of leaner days. “I didn’t have a ton of money, and I wanted to buy a cheap domain [name],” Shirazi says. It doesn’t mean anything. —Victoria Stilwell
Founders: Darian Shirazi, 24
Website: fwix.com
Based: San Francisco
Revenue 2010: $1 million
Revenue 2011 (projected): $5 million
Darian Shirazi was on a train in Bosnia during a trip through through Eastern Europe when homesickness set in. He not only wanted to know what was happening back in his native California, but also in the lands he was passing through. He began thinking of ways to organize news online by the places to which it was relevant. Shirazi, a veteran of Facebook and eBay (EBAY) who dropped out of University of California-Berkeley, launched Fwix in October 2008 as a news aggregator that attaches locations to online content, a process known as geotagging. “We take an article and determine that piece of content’s location or where it’s talking about,” Shirazi says. Fwix then sells that data to companies, including Groupon, the New York Times (NYT), and NBC, that use it to target online ads to local consumers. The 25-employee company has 10 clients and handles 300 million data queries per month, Shirazi says. Although he's raised $6.75 million in venture capital, the name Fwix is a mark of leaner days. “I didn’t have a ton of money, and I wanted to buy a cheap domain [name],” Shirazi says. It doesn’t mean anything. —Victoria Stilwell
