In it’s first year of formation, BSG secured $20M in funding, acquired The Concours Group, acquired Industrial Sciences, and acquired New Paradigm. To cap off the year, they’ve announced that Dr. James Cash has joined the board.

Jim Cash serves on the board of some of the largest corporations in the world, including GE, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Chubb. He retired in 2003 as the James E. Robison Professor and Senior Associate Dean of the Harvard Business School. He joins Steve Papermaster, Warren Weiss of Foundation Capital, and Mitch Kertzman of Hummer Winblad who already sit on the board.

iTaggit is wrapping up it’s first year of operations, and announcing that the number of users on the system has grown over 200 percent since July 2007. "The success of iTaggit can be contributed to
the overwhelming need for an easy-to-use service that helps individuals
organize and manage their things," said iTaggit CEO David Altounian.
"The passion of our members is what keeps iTaggit growing and constantly
improving to better meet the needs of our community."

Recent cool features include the iTaggit Wishlist (which came just in time for the holidays), a Facebook app, and the ability to list any of the items in your collection on eBay from without the iTaggit site. We think iTaggit’s Parting Price feature is conceptually a big hit.

Time Magazine is revisiting that tried and true, never-gets-old, hardcore journalistic technique of publishing Top 10 lists at the end of the year. In the list of Top 10 Websites, you will find Austin-based Indeed.com. Pretty cool. The number one gadget of 2007 — what else, but the iPhone. What? It’s not a "gadget" anyway, it’s an important piece of productivity technology! W00t!

Stay tuned for our own list…

Click Forensics announced the availability of Click Forensics for Publishers today. It allows websites to automatically block sources of click fraud and poor quality traffic from hitting Pay Per Click advertisements.  The news is a little short on details, so I suspect that they are customizing their technology for specific customers. There doesn’t seem to be a way to just submit your credit card and copy some HTML code to your website in order to use the service. But click fraud is a sticky subject.

Nobody knows exactly how big of a problem click fraud is, but Click Forensics is also the publisher of the Click Fraud Index. So presumably they can tell us. A week ago the company released some figures stating that click fraud on content networks (like AdSense) was 28.1%. A whopping number by any measure.

They say that can block "poor quality traffic" but I wonder what that means. It certainly would be cool to block international click traffic if you only sell to the U.S. market. Or to block traffic from people who don’t have cookies from major retail sites already on their computer. The possibilities are interesting.

Here’s what’s going on today around Austin technology.

• Boundless Network has promoted Jeremy Kraybill to the position of CIO.
• Vignette announced three new patent awards. One of them is rather interesting in that it is a patent award for a feature that can capture, store, and play back web interactions. It could be used to understand consumer behavior, resolve disputes around a customers web interactions, or maybe assist with audit requirements.
• ReachForce announced their seventh patent award, the latest for a system to generate web-based leads through pre-emptive profiling.
• Rules-Based Medicine signed a huge deal with EMD/Merck, under which EMD will be the exclusive distributor of RBM’s comprehensive immunoassay testing products.
• The City of Austin approved the Austin Technology Incubator’s $325K funding for the biotech and wireless divisions of the incubator.