Mr. Gross.

Smart pivots can pay off handsomely. Earlier this week, Percolate, a fast-growing New York City-based startup that helps brands curate content, announced a sizable Series A led by GGV Capital, the same Silicon Valley VC firm that backed Buddy Media, which was acquired by Salesforcefor a eye-popping $698 million. Existing investors First Round Capital and Lerer Ventures also participated in Percolate's latest round.

Roughly a year ago, Percolate shrewdly changed its focus from helping users find the most relevant top stories toward a (more profitable!) service that helps brands figure out the most compelling content to push out to their followers--a process that starts by helping them interest graph, something that comes more naturally to humans.

The company now boasts a staff of 28 and more than 30 Fortune 500 clients. It has also achieved something of a startup novelty: profitability! The company's cofounders, Noah Brier (formerly of the Barbarian Group) and James Gross (formerly of Federated Media) have the right pedigree to assist their blue chip clientele.

By phone, Mr. Gross attributed Percolate's growth to "a rapid rise in social," he said. "For a long time marketers were waiting out to see if Facebook was going to be the zero sum game should they just focus on Facebook." But with Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr, "brands acquire audience in these channels and then they have to sustain and communicate with their audience in these channels and tumbl and tweet and Facebook all day long."

Demand has outstripped even Percolate's aggressive forecasts. "Marketers need technology solutions that relate to social," he explained. "It’s less about buying media and more about buying technology to help their operations."

Silicon Alley tends to specialize in companies that address the socialization of everything for enterprise customers. But Percolate stands out because it's "the only software that doesn’t assume the brand knows what they wants to say," Mr. Gross said. "Social is full of empty boxes, a status update on Facebook, what do I tweet about, a Tumblr box, Pinterest box, and what we’re trying to help the brand do is fill it with the right content that they can create in real-time."

In talking to marketers, he explained, "The biggest problem they have is that they’re going from  a production model where they create things like television commercials and billboard ads and they’re moving to a content model where instead of creating something every 3 to 6 months like a TV commercial is, they need to create something every 3 to 6 minutes. They don’t know what to put into that blank box." The biggest publisher on Facebook, he pointed out, is Coca Cola with 52 million fans. "If you think about it, these brands are massive publishers in these channels and of course what we know is that the bigger the audience, the more content you need."

So in essence, Percolate is helping brands do what the rest of us do everyday. "This is how you and I, as people who tweet and tumbl all day long, consume content," based on our interest graphs. The company's software figures out "the things they should be following to create content around and be relevant in real time." Mr. Gross offered the example of Intel posting a photo mash-up of the Intel robot against the backdrop of the "Gangam Style" video or Oreo taking the cookie "which is their most valuable asset, and placing it against things that are happening that day like the Mars Rover or gay pride."

The transition for Percolate's clients is moving from stock to flow. "The idea of 'stock and flow' is that brands are traditionally good at creating what’s called stock content. They’re like durable assets--it’s content that’s based on very slow moving trends. This is the content that’s created traditionally like television commercial you should know an agency studies trends and research and then you create a big piece of media from that. The average television commercial costs about 3 to 5 million dollars to create and 18 to 22 weeks to create and then it stays in market for 3 to 9 months." That kind of thing brands excel at, but they're less sure-footed when it comes to flow.

"Where our technology really helps in the systemization standpoint. If you’re a multinational global brand and you support 35 markets which means you support 35 languages stuff like that, then you need to do that at sort of a local relevant level as well. You can sort of see where brands are dealing with these massive challenges globally," he said. Chief marketing officers want to be able to do through technology "as opposed to the infinite amount of people you’ll need to hire in order to reach the 15 million people you reach from a social audience perspective."

But don't mistake Percolate's ambition or investment from GGV Capital--partner Jeff Richards will be joining the company's board--as a sign that it will follow Buddy Media's acquisition strategy.

"The big thing we liked about Jeff is that he sees the tremendous opportunity in social and he sees the tremendous opportunity in the marketer becoming the person that takes over social and is buying software to scale their organization." Rather, the model Mr. Gross is looking to comes from the private markets. "I admire companies like Bloomberg, which is a private company but the way they’ve built that company for the past 20 some odd years, they have a very different model, they run from a software perspective. From a lot of financial models in New York City, it’s something we emulate."

Baby! (Photo: Percolate)

Much of Silicon Alley is still without power, and so New York's startup workers remain scattered across the city. But time and the tide of the internet wait for no man, and so many are currently working remotely--from their apartments, friends' couches, coworking spaces, accommodating coffee shops, even bar stools.

One of the companies affected is curation engine Percolate, based in Soho. In a charming show of solidarity, each of the displaced employees has taken a picture of his temporary workspace, and they've all been posted on Percolate's Tumblr.

(By the way, if that baby is seeking employment, Betabeat might be willing to look at an adorable résumé. It's never too soon to start planning our next Poachables!)

To pull the right articles from the social media deluge, News.me's iPhone app analyzes the links shared by your friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook to determine what's relevant to you, using some metadata from Bit.ly (another Betaworks company) to help figure that out.

News.me already has a pared-down email product (of the top five links a day) and an iPad app that launched last April, albeit without the Facebook connection. But as general manager Jake Levine told us yesterday, the iPhone app is where things get social. The clean interface displays a nicely-formatted photo, headline, and, immediately below that, what your friends have said about the article, including their tweets and Facebook status updates as well as reactions on News.Me.

To make responses sound more meaningful than a generic "Like," the startup offers a shortlist of other one-word responses, including Ha!, Wow, Awesome, Sad, and Really? As much as it makes us groan a little inside every time a startup thinks slapping on some social = $$$, in this case, it sounds utilitarian. Seeing your friend's response is a great indicator of the likelihood that you'll want to click through--depending on the friend, of course. When Mr. Levine demoed the product to us via Skype, for example, we saw reactions from Reuters newshound Anthony De Rosa (alongside his sister and other Betaworks employees.)

How long did it take them to choose those five little words? "Oh my god a long time," Mr. Levine responded with a combination laugh/groan. "We actually decided on this the day before submissions." He said News.me reached out to five people to brainstorm ideas, including Wall Street Journal and Nieman Labs alum Zach Seward, who offered the following inspired suggestions: Woah, Huh, Damn, Uhhhh, and tl;dr.

The new iPhone app also supports offline reading--phew--and saves articles to your News.me Reading List (you can automatically import your Twitter favorites, as well as integrate with Instapaper and the News.me iPad version). One can always tell which products are built in New York vs. San Francisco, said Mr. Levine, based on how much they care about how it works underground.

News.me's six-man team has a strong technical bent, steeped in news and discovery, including CTO Michael Young, the former lead technologist for the Times's R&D lab, as well as the iOS developer behind Epicurious, and the designer behind Wired's iPad app. Which may be why they offer a thoughtful approach to modern media consumption. "We’re of the philosophy that Twitter and Facebook will kind of form foundational layers of the social web on which purpose-built social networks and applications will emerge," explained Mr. Levine.

"Instagram and Foursquare are the best examples of that," he added. "These are networks that are built for one type of conversation, one type of sharing. We think news is a similar category in that it's big enough to be interesting as a business and it’s a big enough part of people’s day, it helps make important decisions, but its small enough to benefit from a focused network."

News.me competitor Summify was recently acquired by Twitter, and some of its users migrated over to News.me. With other players like Percolate and XYDO moving over to the enterprise side of things, by offering their news curation products to other companies and brands, "We’re the lone vestige for actual consumers," said Mr. Levine.

As for the Summify acquisition, Mr. Levine anticipated that, "The challenge [Twitter] is going to face is that people build their networks on Twitter for a bunch of different use cases, which means that people are sharing a bunch of different types of content so to make meaning out of that content is incredibly challenging from a discovery perspective."

True enough, which made us wonder if you could limit News.me to a particular Twitter list (to keep your movie and food friends, say, out of your tech stream)? Not yet, said Mr. Levine, but they're working on it.

Dashboard for American Express OPEN Forum.

Percolate, the New York-based curation engine that helps brands source relevant content for their social media presence, just raised $1.5 million. The seed round was led by First Round Capital. Lerer Ventures and SV Angel also invested, as well as Path founder Dave Morin and Rick Webb, who used to work with Percolate co-founder Noah Brier at the Barbarian Group.

Along with the added cash, which will be used to hire a sales team and engineers, Percolate moved its platform from alpha to beta and unveiled a new design with a focus on helping brands generate content for "the social web"--in other words their Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter profiles or other branded sites.

The last time we spoke to Mr. Brier, Percolate was being bootstrapped by its founders and had just announced that it would be powering Counterparties, the Reuters owned website, for its editors Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy. Since then, the company has helped find content Amex OPEN Forum's Tumblr and taken on a similar role with sites from Mastercard and GE.

Betabeat caught up with Mr. Brier this afternoon to talk about focusing on brands over consumers and why they need a service like Percolate.

Percolate was originally built as a filtering engine to send consumers their top five links. Individual subscribers had their own dashboard and could sign up for "Daily Brew" emails of the most shared and relevant links based on their social graph.

"We’re totally focused on the brand side now," Mr. Brier told Betabeat. "This is how the site has been working the entire time. This is how we’ve been profitable and able to sustain ourselves and build our business is working with these brands. And after three months of being live and having people use it, it was very obvious that this was the direction where the company was best focused," he added, mentioning that Percolate just picked up its seventh client.

"The only product we have now for consumers is the Daily Brew email. The dashboard is now for brands only--we hit a full overhaul [of the dashboard], which is what they use to publish out to Tumblr and Twitter and their dot com from Percolate. We launched that last Friday, sort of quietly put it out to our current customers and switched up the site for consumer users," explained Mr. Brier. "We also added some light analytics for brands, so they can essentially see how their posts are performing when they post them."

When a brand first signs up, Percolate helps them build out an interest graph. “We call it the calibration,” he said. Just as consumers build out their own interest graphs based on who they want to follow on Twitter or what they add to their RSS feeds, “We work with brands at the very beginning to set that up with them and look at a subset of the millions of sources that we scrape on a daily basis and really assign them to the brand based on what they’re trying to accomplish and their campaign goals.”

In the case of OPEN Forum, the sources were related to small business. "The algorithm looks through all those sources to bubbles up those stories that it’s going to suggest they comment on and push back out to Tumblr," said Mr. Brier. "They have a brand editor who chooses the two or three or five or 10 posts a day that are going to get pushed out. They write a short comment. From there we track how it’s doing and we allow them to add more sources, so the small business graph gets better for them over time."

Going forward, Percolate predicts that need for content will explode. "We think over the next two years, brands will need to create somewhere between 30 and 50 pieces of content a day across all these channels. Ten to 15 on Twitter, another five on Facebook, another 10 on Tumblr. The number gets big really quickly. You need to have a mix of longform original content, whether it’s a video asset or original writing, you need to augment those one or two pieces a week with what we call flow content—links off to Betabeat or the New York Times [Ed. note: Betabeat! Yes definitely Betabeat!] whatever fits into your brand ideals."

In the near term, Percolate is looking to hire folks to fill four or five open positions and larger office space than its current digs on Bond St. "We have 9 people now, it’s like a real company," said Mr. Brier.

Percolating?

Yesterday, Betabeat friend and neighbor Kat Stoeffel told you about Counterparties.com, a new Reuters blog that, in short, teaches you "to read like Felix Salmon." The site, which features the most relevant and talked about articles from Mr. Salmon's Twitter and Google Reader, is powered by Percolate, a seven-person East Village startup co-founded by Noah Brier, former head of strategic planning at Barbarian Group, and Federated Media vet James Gross.

Betabeat talked to Mr. Brier about why Percolate hasn't tapped the local froth in the venture market, whether the Barbarian offices are coming down with startup fever, and why no one looks at Twitter anymore.

When did you know you wanted to launch your own startup?

I left Barbarian Group in January. I had actually built another product in the past, BrandTags, which I sold last year, so I had sort of been in the middle of it. I met up with James Gross my co-founder and we got really excited about what I had built. I had a lot of faith in him as someone to start a company with.

How did you meet James?

We got introduced by mutual friends. He used to run publishing a company called Federated Media and I started a thing called LikeMind, a coffee meetup in the West Village, and a number of other cities.

So is there a case of startup fever going around Barbarian Group?

I think there’s a lot of tinkerers there. A lot of really smart people. If you looked at some of the side project that have come out of there like Cinder. I think they also just did a food truck app. It's a great place to work.

Why did you think there was a need for something like Percolate?

It was originally a filtering engine. It sucked it in and filtered down and then sent you an email with your top five links. Where we got really excited was the second part of it, the publishing. Counterparties is a pretty good example for that. The idea is that Percolate is really a curation platform, we have a Ph.D in mathematics on staff and we find interesting stuff with the intent of prompting you to react.

Did you think the existing curation engines were missing something?

I just don’t think that we saw this happening somewhere. When you look around the web, there are very few people doing what you do. Most of us are just finding interesting links and adding a sentence or two and pushing them out. So this felt like something. We’ve been thinking of it as curation engine that tells you what to blog about.

How did you end up hooking up with Felix?

Felix was an early power user on Percolate and got excited about it and brought us in at Reuters. They’re licensing our API, they’ve got a Counterparties account, filled with all Felix’s sources, and they comment on it and it gets pushed out.

If it’s an engine that tells you what to blog about, why is Reuters your first media partner?

We totally meant for this to be a consumer platform. Ultimately we’re seeing that brands and media companies have the same problem that consumers have, which is sort of like: What should I talk about?

Your brand clients pay $10,000 to $20,000 in licensing fees a month. Does Reuters have the same arrangement?

Yeah, roughly. We don’t talk specifically about the numbers for any of the clients. But it’s in the same ballpark.

Most startups go for the consumers first and then try to bring on paying clients based on consumer adoption. You went the opposite route.

We’ve used the money from our brand licensing deals to fund the company. We have not taken any venture capital up to this point. So having a business model for us was a pretty natural thing. At the end of the day the product that the brands and media companies are using is the exact same product the consumers are using.

VC money is so easy to come by these days. Why did you opt against it?

I don’t know that there’s any specific reason. We felt good about the product we had for brands. At some point we may raise some venture capital--or maybe we won’t, but at least we have the choice. We’ve been able to support ourselves to this point, we have seven people who work for us now, so we have a pretty reasonably-sized company. We’re not opposed to venture capital. For us and the partners we have in place, it was the right decision.

Where are you working?

We’re on Bond Street and Bowery. We’re in an office with the folks from PSFK, the trends website.  We just rent some desks in here.

Right now Percolate pulls from your Twitter and RSS. But how do you determine which stories are the most popular?

So it’s not actually "most popular." The algorithm works across about 15 different factors. Popularity is certainly one of them. So it looks at how many people in your network were linking to that thing. But it’s also looking at recency, you know, how old is that link. So if you go on now and two hours from now, there will be probably different links on the top of your brew--because we’re basically saying links lose value over time. Then there’s some secret factors that we keep under our hat. We also try to calculate authority--how important do we think this source is to you, which we try to figure out in a bunch of different ways. The system also learns over time. So that’s a big part of the publishing piece. When you comment on something, when you tag something, you’re also training the algorithm on what you like most.

Is Percolate is going to be free for consumers when you open it up to the public?

Yup. It’s free for them now and it will continue to be free. We’re in alpha now. We’re building out a couple key features and testing out the product and refining designs and stuff like that. But when we open up in the not-too-distant future it will be free for consumers. It’s free for brands to sign on as well. Really, the paid license for the API piece is the one piece that there’s a charge for.

Part of the reason for building Percolate must have been overload from too much information. So do you envision Percolate being a substitute for Twitter, or another site you have to check?

A little of both. With something like Twitter--more and more it’s becoming embedded. When you look at the iOS integration, it only becomes more of that. I don’t think even think about checking it directly anymore.