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Photo Software - Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Stock Photo Filter BrightQube Closes $650K 1st Round

Thumb Tech Coast Angels has completed funding of a $650K for BrightQube. The angel group led the seed funding of $200K. Founded in September 2007, BrightQube is an online creative resource for stock photography. There are any number of stock photo sites on the web so what BrightQube is selling here is a feature they call Dynamic Mosaic, which allows users to view a great number of images at once. So rather than click from page to page you can mouse-over photos and see them enlarge. Interview with CEO Lee Corkran. He was VP Products at Digital Railroad and Program Manager/Experience Architect, Digital Photography at Hewlett-Packard View - site... Continue...

Wireless - Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Mobile RSS Reader Viigo Onward With C$7.9M Round

Thumb Toronto's Viigo (formerly Virtual Reach) has raised C$1.5M in further Series A funding from RBC Venture Partners. It had previously held a C$6.4M first close. Viigo has built a super fast and lightweight RSS reader for the mobile market. The company's CEO says not to judge Viigo by what you see today as it is about to launch its Project Tango. Speculation is that they will make it easier to get large file audio onto your blackberry. Microsoft has selected Project Tango as a showcase at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.A potential hickup is that Research in Motion's Blackberry announced its upcoming version and that includes iTunes support. View - site... Continue...

More Recent Articles

ThumbB2B Video's Veodia Raises $8.3M in First Round

Monday May 12, 2008

We continue to think that the B2B video market is the place to be right now given the death march that has taken place in B2C. YouTube just isn't right for B2B and there is no clear leader there. Looking to take some leadership here is San Mateo's Veodia which has raised $8.3M in Series A from Clearstone Venture Partners, DE Shaw and angels. Veodia lets users easily create and broadcast video recordings. They remove the hassles of capturing, encoding, uploading, and streaming across the spectrum of video players. The product is free Free up to 500 MB and 5 concurrent users. After that they charge, although they are currently not charging. Top competitors at this point would be Blip.tv to UStream.tv. At this stage of the game, reference clients count for a lot. Veodia has been able to tap MIT Tech Review which says that is has saved $500K per year thanks to Veodia. It's interesting to note the Veodia has a French founder and management team. Another top prospect in online video. Fellow Frenchman Loic Le Meur is doing it with Seesmic. View - site...

ThumbZeppelins Coming to Bay Area! Zeppelin Ventures Funded

Friday May 9, 2008

Oh man are we pumped up on this one. Back in June, we reported that Zeppelin Ventures' founders were looking for investors to put in around $12M. They wanted to import a Zeppelin from Germany for use as a tourist trip that would embark from Moffet field and cruise to Napa and back. The plan was to launch the service in 2008. The crew was speaking at Esther Dyson's conference in Aspen on space travel. Today, Zeppelin Ventures announced that they have closed a first round at $8M from from six individual investors including Dyson. This still plan to launch this year, sometime in the fall. They have indeed set up shop in Moffett Field in a partnership with NASA and are taking advantage of the enormous Hangar 2, built in 1942 to house Navy blimps, and which looms over Highway 101. You still can't buy a ticket to fly but if you are a Zeppelin pilot you can apply for a job. Our own tour of Coney Island View - site...

ThumbSite Performance Management's Gomez Files $80.5M IPO

Friday May 9, 2008

Lexington, MA's Gomez has filed for an $80.5M IPO. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq with the ticker symbol GOMZ, with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank Securities as underwriters. Say the word Gomez and we tend to think of the patriarch of The Adams Family. But this is a nine-year-old Web analytics company that sells through an on-demand model. Gomez's annual revenue has climbed from $14.8M in 2005 to $21.7M in 2006 to $32.6M in 2007. During the same three-year period, its operating income rose from $231Kin 2005 to $1.3M in 2006 before tumbling to a loss of almost $1.5M last year, the filing said. Gomez customers include Yahoo, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, as well as 13 of the 20 most visited US websites. All that sounds great but the financials leave a sour taste and unless they have a special story to tell we think Wall Street will pass. The company raised over $66M between 1999 and 2004, with shareholders including: Dolphin Equity Partners, AdAstra, Doughty Hanson & Co. and ABS Ventures. View - site...

ThumbVenrock Leads $3M Investment in Powerpoint's Slideshare

Friday May 9, 2008

SlideShare has raised $3M in series A funding led by Venrock. SlideShare is a site and service for sharing presentations. The site claims to be one of the biggest ruby on rails sites in the world. It has offices in San Francisco and New Delhi. SlideShare had raised angel funding from the cool kids in the Valley: Hal Varian (chief economist at Google); Guy Kawasaki, founder (Garage Technology Ventures); Ross Mayfield (Socialtext); Dave McClure Marc Cuban (Dallas Mavs owner); Jonathan Abrams (Friendster) and Saul Klein (The Accelerator Group). We have heard people wonder outloud what gives with Slideshare? It couldn't be eaiser to port PowerPoint slides to the Net. True enough but its also very easy to run Flash movies on the Net but that hasn't stopped dozens of companies from getting crazy traffic. Slideshare has an advantage in that slides are low bandwidth and less expensive to host than video and we can see advertisers paying good money to appear next to business presentations. View - site...

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