By Ellen McCarthy
Thursday, February 9, 2006

R iptopia , a District start-up that landed $3.2 million in angel funding last month, promises no less than to help the world "achieve digital bliss."

1999, anyone?

Despite its ethereal rhetoric -- the company urges customers to "Join the Revolution," rather than simply place an order -- Riptopia offers a pretty pragmatic service: transferring personal collections of CDs and DVDs onto a customer's computer or portable music player.

Through partnerships with audio-visual firms that wire homes with tricked-out digital entertainment systems, the two-year-old company is targeting an audience already proved to have money to spend and a certain dedication to their mass media.

Many of its more than 1,100 customers, who often turn out to be middle-aged, according to chief executive Kurt Beyer , send Riptopia boxes with hundreds or thousands of CDs they've been collecting for years. (The company is expecting a package next week from one man with 18,000.) For about $1 a disc, Riptopia will transfer the customer's media library onto a DVD, hard drive or a mobile music device -- and in the case of the man with 18,000 CDs, a special server with seven terabytes of space. Riptopia is an Apple reseller, so some of its money is made outfitting customers with new hardware.

The company has plenty of competition, including firms such as New York-based RipDigital and MusicShifter.com , of Northfield, Minn., and its market is certainly finite. Eventually most of the music and movies people buy will already be in a computerized format. But the company's partnership with installers such as Electronic Interiors Inc., of Addison, Tex., could give it an advantage over competitors, and it may have the right model at the right moment. For all the people in the world who pay to have their groceries delivered, dogs walked and laundry taken out, more than a few of them will probably pay to avoid the tedious task of converting their own CDs.

So in the end, Riptopia might be less revolution, more convenience.

If righteousness is the key to success in the search industry, then Dumbfind.com is well on its way. The fledgling company is not quite finished building its product, but it has issued two news releases in the past three weeks -- the latter taking on Google for filtering some content from the Chinese version of its search engine.

"Dumbfind to Google: Censorship is Evil," read the headline of the District-based start-up's second news release.

"We are in the business of informing all people what is available in the world, and I believe we have a duty to be consistent in this task," wrote Dumbfind Inc.'s 30-year-old founder, Chris Seline . "We challenge the Chinese authorities to block us and are confident that Chinese users will find their way around the firewalls."

Dumbfind, which refers to itself as "the most searchiest search engine on the web" and was one of 13 companies presented at the DC Tech Council's Early Stage Capital Forum, is Seline's second venture in the industry. Seline co-founded 2Wrongs.com Inc. , a company that failed to make money with its search offering, turned itself into a data-mining software firm and was sold in 2001 to Cyveillance Inc. , an Arlington firm now focused on Internet security.

Dumbfind's twist on search is that it allows users to enter terms into two search boxes instead of one. The second box provides a "context" term, Seline said, a method he thinks provides better results than combining the terms in the same box with an "and" operator that weights them equally.

He says his hope is to "become people's second choice for a search engine. We don't have the ambition to overthrow Google. That's a pretty lofty goal."

And as for Seline's message chastising his giant rival: "I was hoping to voice my opinion and put some pressure on them to hopefully change their mind," he said.

Plateau Systems , an Arlington company that sells online training software, may soon be assessing the competencies and career paths of federal workers across all agencies. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management is recommending the 10-year-old company's software for training and assessment of government employees in "mission critical" occupations -- initially information technology workers and human resources professionals. Terms aren't being disclosed, but Plateau's executives said this is their most significant contract to date, because while the firm has an established relationship with the Defense Department and some civilian agencies, this gives them an in-road with all federal agencies.

Dexter , the autonomous vehicle created by engineers from Falls Church-based Ensco Inc., got a flat tire 90 miles into the winding Nevada course of the Grand Challenge and was disqualified from the Defense Department's highly publicized race. Another team won the contest, and it's unclear if there will be another Grand Challenge. But Ensco isn't ready to give up the quest.

The company recently recruited Anthony Levandowski, the 25-year-old leader of a rival team out of the University of California at Berkeley and set up an unmanned systems group.

"Business opportunities exist for creative solutions to the enormously demanding challenges of unmanned ground systems," said Ensco President Greg Young . Indeed, by 2015 the military wants a third of all its vehicles to be driven remotely or autonomously, which could lead to big bucks for companies with expertise in the discipline.

For Levandowski, who became something of a Grand Challenge sweetheart with the motorcycle-like vehicle his team designed, it means a good job with a company that will still let him spend two weeks a month in sunny California.

This is the last Download. The column was started by my predecessor, Shannon Henry, in 1998 and peaked during a time when venture capital was fueling hoards of start-up companies-- rationally or not -- and the world was captivated by the promise of the Internet. But the local tech scene has since changed, and it's time we changed with it. The Post will keep up its coverage of Washington's thriving technology industry, paying particular attention to its crossover with government contracting. But we'll do it through daily news and feature stories, rather than through this column. Please continue to send tips, comments and insights.

Ellen McCarthy writes about local technology and government contracting companies. Her e-mail ismccarthye@washpost.com.