alarm:clock

Robots - Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Another Phoenix From The Ashes of Webvan

We have seen several startups doing well by copying Webvan’s business model. The robotics startup Kiva System’s CEO and Founder Mick Mountz says his company was inspired by the challenges of material handling systems while working at online grocer Webvan. Says Mountz: “The complexity of existing equipment and processes and the resulting high cost of filling orders ultimately was the downfall of Webvan.”

Mountz set out to develop a better way to pick, pack and ship and has launched a warehouse system that can walk and talk on its own, where SKUs come to pickers when they need to fill an order.

Kiva Systems has brought in $10M in Series C led by previous investor Bain Capital Ventures. The startup says it did a full-scale test for the Staples.

kiva screen grab.jpg

More Recent Articles

ThumbBehavioral Ad Network JellyCloud Raises $11.5M

Friday May 16, 2008

Redwood City's JellyCloud has called down $6.6M of a $12M Series A1 round, says PEWire. Investors are Softbank America,US Venture Partners , Crosslink Capital and Sand Hill Capital. JellyCloud is led by CEO Scott VanDeVelde who was CEO at Claria (aka adware's Gator). Others in the leadership come from Claria. JellyCloud is in semi-stealth mode but leverages patented behavioral targeting technology on behalf of Advertisers, Publishers, Software providers and ISPs. The key here is ISPs. The trend among behavioral networks is to partner with ISPs to match data that ISPs have on Web traffic with ads that want to be targeted. As with Claira, it looks like Jellycloud is starting to become controversial. We spotted some complains on message boards like this one from Darlene T: "How do i get grape.jellycloud.com to stop coming up as my home page. I don't know what it is.?" and from Woodbrooke "My internet history keeps reporting grape.jellycloud.com, i don't know what this is?" View - site...

ThumbAsk.com Picks Up Dictionary.com After It Was Jilted By Answers.com

Thursday May 15, 2008

Ask.com is buying Dictionary.com parent Lexico (which also owns Thesaurus.com. If it sounds like this is a repeat of an old post that's because Answers.com had announced it would pay $100M for Lexico last year, before that deal went south with Answers' financing. The NY Times reports that Ask.com will also pay about $100M. Ask.com says that buying Lexico will expand its audience by 11% thanks to 145M unique monthly users. An eye-popping number is that Lexico currently only has 20 employees. Wow. View - site...

alarm:clock © 2004-2008