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Social Networking - Friday, May 25, 2007

The Startups That Made Facebook's First Cut

Facebook yesterday announced that it is working with a number of public and private companies that will be allowed to run widgets or other services on Facebook. Some we had seen, others we had not, so we decided we needed to take a closer look at the list, especially given that the Facebook channel should reward them with major traffic spikes. Facebook will be admitting other startups but it does seem like a big advantage to get in first.

Games

We profiled Pickspall here after it raised $2M from Canaan Partners. PicksPal allows users to wager for points on a number of outcomes other than the winner. Want to bet if Paris Hilton will wear a hat as she enters jail. You'll get odds on that. On Facebook, you can publish your picks and display including scores and rankings. View - site

We covered Seattle-based Fantasy Moguls here when Amazon invested in them. Amazon has followed Second Avenue Partners' lead in a $1.05M investment in Atomic Moguls (aka Fantasy Moguls), a fantasy game start-up led by former NBA exec Brenda Spoonmore. This is another example of the startup trend towards online contests. FantasyMoguls.com is a movie-based fantasy site that reminds us of Hollywood Stock Exchange. Players act as movie agents or producers and marketing their movies across their social networks. The company plans to launch themes other than movies in the future. View - site

Bunchball raised $2M from Adobe Ventures; Granite Ventures. Bunchball is a provider of social gaming services to personals sites, social networks, and online communities so its a natural fit with Facebook's program. Its hosted gaming service enables members to start and play games with each other, without leaving Facebook. View - site

A no-brainer. The bootstrapped startup that asked kids to rate the hotness of other kids has been hiring techs to build out its widgets. View - site

Finance

Lending Club is a P2P lending service that competes with Zopa and Prosper. We discovered the startup and posted on it a few weeks ago here. VentureBeat reports that the Sunnyvale-based company has raised $2M in angel funding. It is led by Renaud Laplanche who was the Founder & CEO of TripleHop Technologies, a VC-backed enterprise software company acquired by Oracle Corporation in June 2005. View - site

Facebook didn't play favorites here and let Lending Club's competitor Prosper in as well. It's hard to imagine their widget will be a hit. Prosper's Fantasy Banker serves a scoreboard that tracks users against who are betting on real-time loan listings. When the listings players pick gets funded, they earn points. We'd rather watch paint dry. View - site

Shopping and eCommerce

We profiled Oodle a few weeks back when it raised $11M. Oodle's listings cover a broad territory so it competes with CraigsList and eBay but also: Vast, Trulia, Propsmart, Jobster, Simly Hired, Backpage, Edgeio, Yahoo Classifieds, Google Base, Windows Live Expo, Indeed, Rent.com, Cars.com, Apartments.com and many more. For Facebook, Oodle created a want list widget. Oodle also threw up a BandTracker widget which tracks and shares information about over 200K bands and concerts. View - site


We covered Glimpse.com here when Greylock and Redpoint invested in this online fashion retailer. Friends can create their own Glimpse lists, and also receive notifications when friends’ styles are updated. View - site

Viagogo is a ticket scalping site that has emerged from Europe that competes with eBay's Stubhub. The only European startup to make the list. Read our profile here. The startup is backed by Index Ventures' Danny Rimmer and Lord Jacob Rothschild. Last Summer it raised £10M in venture financing and big-league football club backers. View - site

Travel

Travel search engine Sidestep has raised $32M from Trident Capital, Leader Ventures and Saints Capital. Our profile here. The Sidestep widget let you list future trips and wanderlust. Users can also search for other Facebook users with similar travel interests. Competitor left out in the cold include: Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, Cheapflights, Kayak, Qixo, Yahoo's Farechase, and Mobissimo. Visit - site

EF CollegeBreak is a 40 year old Swedish company that has been orchestrating international student travel. Their application is an interactive travel map, allowing Facebook users to run maps on their profiles, showing the countries they’ve visited, and what's on their wishlist. This seems like more of a promo for the EF CollegeBreak than a core, money-making business. View - site

Jobs

It looks like Jobster got the jobs category all by itself. That's huge. View - site

Music

We covered MOG here. Mog is a music recommendation service that beat out a number of competitors including LastFM, Musicmatch.com, Slacker.com, Soundflavor.com, Goombah.com, and Pandora. Competitor iLike did make the list. View - site

We covered iLike here when it raised $13M from Ticketmaster. Widget users will be alerted as to when your bands of interest are going to be jamming in town. It will also tell you which of your Facebook friends will be attending. Users can also search and add streaming music to their profile, and discover new music based on what their friends are listening to. View - site

Video and Photo

Since launch, the Picnik photo editing application has been the 2nd most popular widget on Facebook. The company is bootstrapped by a trio of ex Microsoft coders who have turned down funding. View - site.

We profiled the startup here when it raised $1.5 in seed funding from Mohr Davidow and angels. Fliptrack's slideshow application allows Facebook users to create music videos and slideshows by mixing images, text and effects tapping its music library. View - site


Splashcast lets you create your own channels to which programming from across the web can be added, including videos and images. These can then be embedded into your Facebook profile. Splashcast began life as QMind and raised $1.3M for an enterprise e-learning product they were planning to offer but switched to the consumer angle. View - site

The company's video viewer comes built in. We would expect to other viewers built in - what no YouTube - but will wait to see. View - site.

Channels is self-funded with an angel investment from former Kleiner Perkins partner Will Hearst. The site aggregates TV show clips. View - site

We cover the Paypal co-founder's startup here first. Slide was built from the ground up to be built for sites Facebook.
View - site

Facebook users can rate movies and read reviews from other Flixsters users from their Facebook page. View - site

Qoop allows people to publish printed coffee table books - as well as posters, postcards, mugs, and t-shirts - from their photo collections. Qoop competes with Sharedbook and Blurb. But Qoop has been fast with deals and has them in place with Flickr and Buzznet. View - site

The inclusion of Photobucket shows how open Facebook wants to be, given that Photobucket has been bought by Facebook's nemesis Myspace and News Corp. It will also be interesting to see if Facebook becomes a rival to Myspace as a revenue driver for Photobucket. View - site

We first crossed ScrabBlog last month when it raised $2.5M from Longfellow. Scrapblog is a platform for users to mix their photos, videos, audio, text and other creative elements to create multimedia scrapbooks. Competitors include Photobucket, along with RockYou, Slide, Tabblo (bought by HP), and OneTrueMedia.
View - site

Uplayme is new to us. The startup was launched with roughly $1M in seed capital from individual investors, many of whom are venture capitalists. It was founded by Dan Pelson who had founded Bolt.com. The New York-based Uplayme has developed software that tracks activity on users' iTunes accounts and matches them with other people playing the same songs to make recommendations. It expanded that to cover videos, TV shows and movies. View - site

Radar was launched by Tiny Pictures. We profiled the company when it raised Series A from Mohr Davidow. Radar’s Facebook widget lets users share photos and videos and embed browsing/commenting tools. View - site

Uber is led by former Friendster CEO Scott Sassa. Uber is making its customizable music player available for Facebook users.
View - site

News

Feedburner has been in the news based on reports that Google has bought it for $100M. FeedBurner has built a headline animator for Facebook and it will display the latest headlines from your FeedBurner blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds to Facebook users. View - site

College Humor has been majority owned by IAC since last year and has a obvious connection to FaceBookers. Their widget gives you single click additions of CollegeHumor content: videos, images or articles. View - site

LocalPlatform is a Beverly Hills-based startup that seems a bit half-baked at present. It seeks to partner with local newspapers to get in front of the youth of today online. So it competes with Topix. View - site

We profiled Attendio when it won seed funding from angels. Attendio lets you know what's happening in your local area: music, flee markets or other events. It made the cut over older competitors: BusyTonight, Zvents, Eventful, MingleNow, ILCU and Upcoming. View - site

We covered Chumby here when it raised funding from O'Reilly. The company has developed a wi-fi enabled device that downloads widgets llike: Digital clock, flickr photo viewer, Google News and Calendar, NOAA weather, moon phase, stock quotes and daily horoscope. View - site

We first covered Platial here when it was funded by Kleiner Perkins. Platial is a social network for Google Map-making. In addition to themes like Yoga studios in LA, users map photos, video, feeds, stories, neighborhoods, travels, and friends. the business was hit for a loop when Google Maps launched a similar service. View - site

Voice

Backed by Cardinal Venture Capital, Labrador, and Storm, Jangl is a voice applications startup that allows users to dial someone if you only have their email address. Enter an email address through Jangl on your Facebook page, and you'll get you a Jangl phone number to leave a message for that person. View - site

Recently spun out and launched from Ingenio, Ether is a voice commerce application that allows Facebook members to place a “call me” button on their profile and potentially make some beer money from market researchers and others over the phone. It competes with Keen. View - site

We didn't know that Omidyar had invested in Yackpack. First Round Capital also invested. VackPack's WalkieTalkie app lets Facebook users talk to each other without registration just by clicking the buttons on each others’ profile pages. View - site

File Sharing/storage

We profiled Box.net when it raised funding from DFJ. Box.net + Facebook lets users display files from their profiles. View - site

Mosoto allows you to share files and chat with friends via a desktop layout, where you control different mini applications. The project is self funded and was created by a of a team of five recent University of Arizona graduates. It has an auto connection to box.net. View - site

Tagging and Shared Bookmarks

Plum let Facebooks users save and display digital stuff – web pages, videos, photos, documents, emails, and feeds. View - site

Ma.gnolia’s social bookmarking application makes Facebook member’s bookmarks available for friends to view. View - site

Rapleaf raised close $1M in Series A led by angels led by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, as well as former Google employee Aydin Senkut, French VC Jeff Clavier and Ron Conway. Rapleaf is a reputation manager system. View - site

Terralever has transitioned from its mainstay ineractive services business to launch a couple of widgets on Facebook. stuffCLOUD is a interest visualization tool that allows user to compare their interests to their friends and the Facebook community as a whole. It also launched FlipBook that allows you to take Facebook albums and present them as a Flipbook on your profile page for others to browse.
View - site

Widget Collections

Former Wired.com front-man Ed Anuff has apparently raised funding for this startup from Sequoia. The company has directory of code snippets which can be used to enliven Facebook profiles. Widgetbox has a tie-in with RockYou which gives that startup its Facebook foot-print. View - site

Dogs

Dogster is the only dog-oriented startup to make it to Facebook. Dogster's Rescue widget allows Facebook users to feature photos of dogs stuck in the pound. They also have a cutest dogs and puppies widget. Sister site Catster will do the same. View - site