In the war for third-party mobile messaging clients, textPlus is making a strong case for why it’s the market leader.

Gogii, the maker of textPlus, shared with PandoDaily that its users spent an average of 8.5 hours per month on the app in April. That’s 21 percent more time than Facebook’s users spend on both its apps and the mobile Web combined, according to comScore.

The power of any network of this type, beyond a simple feature war, is reach. TextPlus has grown to over 30 million registered users and now sends more than three billion messages each month. Even at 160 characters, that’s one helluva talkative bunch.

The app offers users free, unlimited text messaging. It also offers group messaging, photo messaging, voice notes, a la voxer, and communities. The company is able to continue offering this free service, because it serves two billion ad impressions per month.

Alongside the messaging app, Gogii has released TextPlus Free Calls, allowing users to call other textPlus users for free and make calls to cellphones and landlines via WiFi or mobile data connection. Users can either buy minutes or earn them by completing tasks, such as viewing advertising.

The free calls app is currently localized in Canada (meaning users can get a local number), and the company has plans for further international expansion, starting with Germany and the UK. While Free Calls is currently a standalone app, it actually represents the new foundation onto which all services will soon be merged as a single app.

This is not a market without competition. Each individual feature and the package as a whole have multiple competitors. At the high end, Skype, Google’s Talk and Voice apps, and Apple’s iMessenger and Facetime require mention (only Apple is platform-restricted). Additionally, there are Facebook Messenger, Voxie, and a multitude of instant messenger clients.

Gogii is one of the oldest and most established companies competing in this space. It was co-founded by Scott Lahman, Zack Norman, and Austin Murray,who previously co-founded JAMDAT Mobile which had a successful IPO in 2004 and sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million in 2006. Gogii has raised a total of $28 million through its February 2011 Series C from investors including Matrix Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and GRP Partners.

Recent reports of declines in traditional text messaging have validated the market and demonstrated the impact of solutions like textPlus and its competitors. Speaking to the issue, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson went on the record last week saying, “If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

Michael Carney

Michael Carney has spent his career exploring the world of early stage technology as an investor and entrepreneur and has participated in building companies in multiple countries within North and South America and Asia. Ultimately, he is an enthusiast of all things shiny and electronic and is inspired by those who build businesses and regularly tackle difficult problems. You can follow Michael on Twitter here.

TechNexus

Co-Founder Terry Howerton wasn’t immediately comfortable with being placed on Forbes’ list. The company didn’t self-identify as an incubator for the first five years after its launch. Howerton says, “We very purposefully didn’t use the term ‘incubator’ in the beginning. It had a lot of baggage. Today, the term ‘incubator’ has become a little more in vogue, but back [when we first launched] it had a lot of baggage and negative connotations.”

TechNexus’ status as a top-ten incubator, then, isn’t the result of cheerleading. Instead, the company’s claim to fame is based off the one thing that matters: the companies that call TechNexus home. Some 160 companies have launched from TechNexus’ office, and have raised around $80 million collectively. Broken down, this comes out to $500,000 per company on average, which is pretty good for a market like Chicago.

But it pales next to the two incubator giants. 81 companies that pass through TechStars have raked in around $150 million, collectively. With an average hovering around $2 million, TechStars companies ultimately raise four times more than their TechNexus counterparts. And TechStars isn’t even number one on Forbes’ list; that spot belongs to Y Combinator, whose 172 companies have collectively raised $7.8 billion.

Despite the huge discrepancy in funding raised, Howerton isn’t afraid to throw stones. He points to the homogenization in the startup scene as a byproduct of the market’s emphasis on big-league players in the incubator space.

“In a typical accelerator, you bring in a class of 10 companies that all look the same, 10 entrepreneurs that all have the same experiences and the same goals,” he says, “and mash them with a torque of mentors that build them in a very rigid, formulaic way. That’s not all that entrepreneurial, is it?”

It isn’t difficult to find evidence of this homogenization in the tech sphere. More location-based applications were launched in the weeks and months leading up to SXSW than I can even count, each one performing similar functions with only slight differences. The press latched on to each of these companies for about five minutes before moving on and leaving the companies to continue working in relative obscurity.

TechNexus was founded specifically to avoid the homogenization trap. The companies and entrepreneurs that call the office their own range from leaders of multi-million dollar companies to students that want to get a taste of startup life. “We wanted to be thought of as a collaboration center, as a place where people could come together and serendipity could happen,” Howerton says.

Emphasizing interaction between entrepreneurs appears to be a growing trend in the startup sphere. We recently wrote a story about N Combinator (which since has been renamed “nReduce”), the “open source” Y Combinator, built to foster community and encourage the exchange of ideas after its founders were barred from Y Combinator’s class. While TechNexus is a bit more formal than N Combinator’s “grab a beer” approach, the basic premise is the same: Meeting people and talking to them will help companies succeed.

The “it’s who you know” ideology doesn’t just apply to first-stage investments. As VCs are throwing capital around like so many grains of rice, companies focus more on the reach and reputation of the firm than the amount of capital they’re being offered. (Not that a large offer hurts.) By commoditizing capital, investment firms are now trading on their expertise and what they have to offer beyond their bank accounts.

As Piccsy founder and CEO Daniel Eckler puts it, “Investors validate business in technology online. You get more press, you get more interest from people that want to be employed. [Piccsy doesn’t] necessarily need the money today, but there are reasons to take it.”

Howerton is acutely aware of the fact that institutions like Y Combinator and TechStars give entrepreneurs access to deeper pockets, and he’s careful to point out that he doesn’t see TechNexus as a competitor to the leading incubators.

“I think if you can open your mind and redefine what you believe an incubator is, if you can let go of thinking that an incubator is the same thing attached to a university or the government, or understand that the thing we’re doing is different from Y Combinator,” he says, “we’ll take and own that term ’incubator’, but we’re going to have to redefine it.”

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Superangel Ron Conway addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs, developers, and investors today at a Betaworks conference in New York. My takeaway? Conway is pumped about the future of ecommerce.

He repeated a stat we’ve heard once before: Only 6 percent of commerce is conducted on the Web today. Conway believes that figure could reach 25 percent. That’s a huge market when you consider that ecommerce companies did $194 billion in sales last year.

“That is a massive, massive opportunity, and it’s early days,” Conway told the crowd. “Facebook’s open graph is a huge gift to the Internet that will allow that commerce to take place with a lot less friction.”

There’s a perfect storm brewing for ecommerce companies, he said. “Most of the ways we will shop online hasn’t even been thought of yet,” he added. “It’s going to create an explosion.”

That explains his firm’s flurry of deals in the space. SV Angel has invested in ecommerce companies like Priceonomics, Gumroad, Everlane, Endorse, and Shoptique.

Separately, Conway dispensed a piece of advice for companies worried about falling into the dreaded hype cycle valley of death. They can avoid that, he said, by positioning their marketers to work closely with the engineers. “The engineer is doing the A-B testing and firing out the viral co-efficients, and the marketer is right there working with the hacker,” he said. Those roles will become increasingly collaborative.

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

On Monday I broke my third iPhone in the last six months. These slippery devils have now shimmed into puddles, toilets, and in this most recent case, off my lap and onto concrete. I know, I need a case. I bought two Monday, so stop with the lectures.

But you know what? At some level, if I have to mess up the phone’s gorgeously simple hardware design by effectively putting a rubber condom on it to keep it from breaking, THERE’S A DESIGN FLAW.

But that’s not really the point of this post. I am working in Vegas this week, so instead of my usual trip to the Union Square – Genius Bar (holla, guys!) I went to the Apple Store out by the Vegas airport. We didn’t have an appointment, and the service was tremendous. They worked us in and were incredibly nice.

And yet, there was someone standing behind me that was nit-picking about it not being even better. She said to another disgruntled customer the line something you hear a lot when you eavesdrop in Vegas, “Well, I work for the company that has the best customer service in the world so…”

She was, of course, talking about Zappos, and it was clear by listening to the ensuing conversation that this woman works at Zappos for one big reason. It’s not the discounts on shoes or the crazy headquarters with different noisemakers on every aisle or the almost cultish, feel good all hands meetings. It’s because she’s insanely, ridiculously proud to work at the place that made insanely expensive customer service that almost no company could justify into a $1 billion exit. She lives her life looking for reasons to brag about that very fact to complete strangers.

That alone is an astounding fact, if you think about the trend corporate America was on with outsourced, voice recognition software and endless phone tree call centers just a few years ago. And Zappos isn’t alone. Increasingly, middle America is reclaiming the call center. Don’t call them “fly-over states” anymore, you coastal snobs. Thousands of people in America’s heartland may no longer be farming or building cars, but thousands more are making all of our lives way better every day call by call.

Last week I did a story on Scottsdale-based GoDaddy, another dot com survivor that has grown to $1 billion in revenues, largely by refusing to outsource call centers when everyone else did. The company’s take on customer service was outrageously expensive, and when GoDaddy was looking to go public in 2006, it was one of the things that bankers balked at. They demanded cost cuts there, and instead CEO Bob Parsons pulled the S1. GoDaddy does more than 12 million calls a year, and it only has 10 million customers.

Monday, I wrote about a $70 million investment in a little-known company called Qualtrics, based in Provo, Utah. Even though Qualtrics was bootstrapped until now, the company never skimped on customer service. Sirens go off at the company’s headquarters, if a phone rings more than three times. It rings on every single person’s desk — even founder and CEO Ryan Smith. “There is no automated phone tree,” he says.

Smith credits this attention to customers with Qualtrics insane growth, which has been almost entirely word of mouth. It’s a company founded on the idea that the Web can automate market research, and yet its own business relies heavily on human beings answering phones. This is amazing really: The company had no outside funding and yet didn’t skimp on customer service.

And several months ago, I spoke with Bill Ready of Braintree Payments, a Chicago-based company (sensing a trend here?) that powers payment back-ends for more than 2,000 online companies such as OpenTable, Fab, and Airbnb. It’s processing some $4 billion in payments annually. The company’s big edge: You can talk to real people. The company’s white glove service warns clientele of potential fraud, rather than just cutting payments off at what can be a vendor’s biggest sales push of the year. PayPal’s system, in contrast, is so automated that it’s hard to even get a person on the phone to explain why payments have been shut down. This has won the small company huge accounts.

Something well beyond Zappos is happening here. And it’s similar to the move from commerce mega sites to curated content-driven experiences. It’s not too dissimilar from our own ethos at PandoDaily that page views are not what build a big business, rather seemingly crazy investments in what we consider to be good work does. It’s a move from a slavish reliance on machines and metrics towards things that humans are uniquely good at, things that can not be automated. It’s a reaction against the phone tree, voice-recognition software, the algorithm and any too-good-to-be-true shortcut that companies embraced over the last five to ten years.

Is it too much to say that the outsourcing wave was wrong, that the business pendulum is swinging back en masse to expensive investments in making customers happy? Probably. (Unfortunately.) But these four companies — and doubtlessly others like them — are setting an important precedent in how short-sighted the outsourcing and automated customer service boom was.

I’ve noticed anecdotal differences as a consumer — even with non-tech companies. I used to dread calling my bank to tell them I was traveling and not to cut off my debit card if someone tried to use it in, say, Nigeria. It was so awful navigating the phone tree, keying in information, saying “menu,” and all that hoop-jumping that I usually just gave up and hoped the card didn’t get cut off. But the other day when I called the bank for something, I was immediately given an option to route the call to a real person who was incredibly helpful. I was stunned.

There is simply no such thing as a shortcut when it comes to customer service. You can provide an alternate service, if you don’t want to invest in a local call center of friendly competent people armed with helpful databases of customer information. But don’t call this customer service, because it isn’t. To call a person reading from a script a customer-service representative is like calling a middle school play Broadway. You might as well not have an 800 number.

Zappos, GoDaddy, Qualtrics and Braintree have proven that spending money on customer service isn’t throwing money away — it’s investing in the business. Done well, good customer service is the difference between a mediocre business and a great one. You can get shoes anywhere, and Zappos’ site design has never been that amazing; its entire success is wrapped up in treating people well. GoDaddy doesn’t view its call center as a “cost center,” arguing it has actually generated more than $100 million in annual revenues. And Qualtrics — and loads of other new enterprise companies like them — have effectively substituted these call centers for expensive sales people and marketers.

Everything in business moves in cycles. If this is the beginning of a move back, it’ll be a temporary one. At some point, skimping on customer service will again be on the vanguard of cost-cutting. But until then, let’s enjoy the pampering.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

For social media, Facebook is that tide. And thanks to the madness surrounding the company’s $100 billion IPO, it’s going to lift a lot of boats.

Plenty of VCs invest in social media and have for years. But public market investors, the ones that’ll be snapping up $12 billion worth of Facebook shares, have only begun to whet their social media appetites.

Which is to say, many mutual funds, hedge funds, and various other institutional investors now have a “social” allocation. They typically allot certain percentages of their portfolios to companies in specific sectors for the sake of diversity. The social allocation is notable because usually these things break down very broadly — energy stocks, consumer products stocks, industrials, etc. But now, within a tech portfolio, things are getting more specific.

It’s not unlike 1996, when fund managers began realizing that, within technology portfolios, “Internet” was an important category. Now Internet stocks dominate tech portfolios and there are plenty of Internet-focused funds specializing in the category. Similarly, I’ve heard of several social media-focused funds being formed to satisfy investor demand.

Thus far the allocations to social are extremely small, because we haven’t exactly been drowning in opportunities. Startups are waiting longer to go public, so firms like T. Rowe Price and Fidelity have invested in hot social media companies while they’re still private through the secondary market.

Not all funds have flexible enough terms to make those kinds of deals. Their large cap social options are limited to LinkedIn or international players Yandex, RenRen, and Quepasa. Smaller options include Jive Media, Zillow, and Yelp. As of Friday, they’ll have Facebook.

Public social media companies have already seen Facebook enthusiasm buoy their stock prices. Upcoming social media IPOs will have no problem rounding up the funds.

Facebook will have a huge impact on social allocations, because the demand is going to far outstrip the supply. Valued at over $100 billion, Facebook will only offer $12 billion to investors. Tiny floats like this lead to giant pops in first-day trading — look at LinkedIn, which only floated just $352.8 million at a total valuation of over $3 billion. First day trading ran the stock up 109 percent; the company’s market cap now hovers over $11 billion.

When investors can’t get into Facebook on day one, and then, when they can’t get Facebook at a reasonable price, they can’t just shrug and give up. They have to put the money in the social bucket to work somewhere, which means second and third tier social media companies will have to suffice.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many of those in the pipeline. Glam Media, which has recently hired bankers for its IPO, could probably call itself social. LivingSocial, which has the word social in the name but really isn’t very, could try for that angle perhaps The company will likely hold off on an IPO after it’s $400 million round of funding last year. Most of the 2012′s upcoming tech IPO’s can’t really call themselves social at all: Kayak, Workday, ExactTarget, CafePress, and Brightcove.

Fear not. Renaissance Capital optimistically counts Airbnb, Dropbox, LivingSocial, and Spotify among its “shadow” backlog of IPO candidates.

Erin Griffith

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

As was reported two weeks ago Evernote has raised a whopper of a new round of financing: $70 million at a $1 billion valuation. Evernote’s founder and CEO Phil Libin has never been one to maximize the valuation for the sake of bragging rights. The price was a nod to two things: Evernote has built a truly impressive business, and it was a round many investors were dying to get into.

What hasn’t been reported is that amid this wildly oversubscribed round, Libin decided to carve out a $7 million allocation for a handful of mentors who helped him out when he’d just arrived in Silicon Valley and was a relative nobody.

The “CEO club,” as Libin calls it, includes a mix of names you don’t see everyday: Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Jerry Yang of Yahoo, Sky Dayton of Earthlink, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Hiroshi Mikitai of Rakuten, and Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Le Web. ”One of the things I loved most about Silicon Valley is how open and welcoming everyone was,” Libin says. “I was blown away by the attention I was given by some pretty impressive people.”

It’s a reflection of his very personal journey to build Evernote into a billion dollar company and the advice and help he got along the way. Le Meur was one of the first friends Libin made when he moved to the Valley. Yang gave him advice on keeping a company’s culture as it grew. Mikitai had one of the biggest impacts on him, inspiring Libin to try to build a company that could live for 100 years — something many people in the valley are skeptical can even be done. “These were all people who really shaped my thinking,” Libin says. “Most of the conversations were around how you scale a team without losing your culture, and how you remain innovative when you have 1,000 people.”

That weighs heavily on Libin: His company has tripled in size of the last year and will triple again in the next twelve months. “These are all founder CEOs, and four of them have built multi-billion dollar public companies from nothing, and each of those companies had huge significance,” he says. “When I started hanging out with them, it simultaneously made me realize how far we have to go and that their first time they hadn’t done it before either. It was humbling and encouraging.”

The idea of the CEO club hit Libin after a conversation with Benioff, where he asked to invest. Beset with VCs trying to get in the round, Libin was avoiding conversations like these. He’s not the kind of guy who likes to tell people no when they believe in his company. He started to tell Benioff there was no room, when it struck him that relationships like these was part of what had helped build Evernote to this stage. He decided on the spot to carve out a chunk of the round for guys like Benioff instead of saying no.

Being a first time CEO myself, I can totally relate to the gratitude and sense of awe Libin is describing. I’ve been blown away by how many people have helped me in PandoDaily’s short journey so far. And since Libin is one of the CEOs I look up to, I asked his advice for first time entrepreneurs and CEOs like me.

“Evernote is my third company, and I guess the advice I would have given myself is just only build for you,” he says. “Just build the stuff you love. I’d built two other companies and sold them and done pretty well, but it never occurred to us we could be the target audience. The whole trick of Evernote is that on our third company we finally got wise to the fact that we’re the customer. So I guess if I could go back and talk to me years ago, I would make Evernote my first company, not my third.”

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

Hachi

When I first heard about the intelligent social referral platform, I called it “One Social Contacts Portal to Rule them All.” This was a fair description, but it only encompases a fraction of the value proposition.

Yes it helps you organize the people you know across all of your social networks. More importantly, it helps you discover the most efficient path to those who you want to know. Upon logging in, I was told that I have a true reach of 25,144,840 people.

On LinkedIn, users are limited to contacting those who are one degree of separation away (in-network only) by asking for referrals from others in their contacts list. On Hachi, it’s possible to hopscotch across social networks and to go well beyond one degree. For example, it’s possible to contact John, whose wife your LinkedIn contact Jane went to school with and is friends with on Facebook.

Or at least that’s the long term plan. Hachi is launching into public beta today (invites below) and at this point only offers the ability to map and rate the most promising of these paths to new connections. The ability to facilitate introductions within the platform is coming soon.

With today’s roll out, the company is also adding the ability to integrate Twitter networks, in addition to LinkedIn and Facebook which have been live for alpha testers for a number of months.

Hachi founder Rachna Singh says, “The shortest path isn’t always the best. Often, the strongest path is the one through people who interact with one another regularly and on a deep level.” Hachi determines the “Path Score” or the strength of relationships based on the number of networks contacts share, the frequency and speed of their interactions, shared educational or work history, and other factors.

It turns out that my best path to contacting Barack Obama is directly through my LinkedIn contact Paul in Orange County. This path is rated a 4.5 out of 10 based on Paul’s strength of connection with POTUS. This is a much shorter path than most of the unreachables I searched. Now that I know, Paul should expect to hear from me.

In response to strong demand from alpha users, the company released a mobile version of its website today and plans to introduce an iOS app later this summer. Its product roadmap also calls for it to incorporate Google and Outlook address book integration in future releases.

What I like most about Hachi is that it doesn’t try to replace my existing social networks. It enhances the existing networks I’ve built across multiple platforms by connecting them and allowing me to navigate them to extract real value. Play with the service enough and you’ll get an unbelievably clear idea who the real connectors in your life are. They’ll be the people all of your paths run through.

Other alpha testers seem to be quite impressed with the product thus far as well. In a guest post on its blog, Hachi quotes early user and Fetchnotes CEO Alex Schiff as saying:

“Very rarely does a startup come along that I fall so madly in love with that it becomes a need-to-have staple in my life. Spotify did it for music, Mint did it for my personal finances, but Hachi has now done the same for the way I conduct business…This has been an absolute god-send for fundraising since investors will typically only talk to you if you can find a warm introduction…Hachi is the roadmap to your social graph.”

Schiff’s comment does illustrates one potentially challenging scenario. Powerful and influential people in this world have no problem connecting with anyone they want. Accordingly, the request for referrals typically happen in an upward direction on the social ladder. Unfortunately, the higher one climbs the ladder, the less likely the recipient is to be open to receiving unqualified introductions. But, this is not a problem unique to Hachi. LinkedIn and old school in-person introduction requests encounter the same issue.

Currently, Hachi is free to use. The company says that there will always be a free version, although a freemium or enterprise model is likely down the road (there was one enterprise customer among the alpha users). Also, it is already fielding frequent requests for an API and is considering ways to develop additional offerings in the future.

Hachi has been entirely bootstrapped to date by its founder.  Singh, who describes herself as lightly-technical, built much of the initial product herself with the assistance of only a few interns and outside advisors. With proof of concept via her alpha test, she has grown her full time team to five and says that she’s now fielding inbound investment offers for seed financing.

Singh is overflowing with passion for the project. She says, “Hachi is actually solving a meaningful and real problem. If we crack it (which I won’t stop till I do), we think we can have a huge impact on the way people connect with each other.”

There are 500 spots in Hachi’s private beta available to PandoDaily readers who email “Pando” to hello [at] gohachi [dot] com.

Michael Carney

Michael Carney has spent his career exploring the world of early stage technology as an investor and entrepreneur and has participated in building companies in multiple countries within North and South America and Asia. Ultimately, he is an enthusiast of all things shiny and electronic and is inspired by those who build businesses and regularly tackle difficult problems. You can follow Michael on Twitter here.