Web 2.0 - Thursday, January 10, 2008
Musical Widget Startup Kadoink Raises $7M
Kadoink is a social network platform that combines widgets, SMS, audio and music. Based in San Francisco, Kadoink creates mobile fan clubs for bands and artists and enable those artists to send group texts and music to their mobile fan clubs, as well as creating mobile communications groups for universities and corporations.
The company has closed a $7M round from Sutter Hill Ventures and angels. That's a lot for a widget maker - not a lot of tech talent required for that - but with startups like Slide, Rockyou and iLike seeing their traffic fly off the charts, investors want to join the party. Plus CEO Scott Cahill has a nice resume. He as CEO of Signature Wines, GM for Kinecta which was bought by Stellant and VP Sales for Impulse Buy Network which was bought by Inktomi.
Among the many widget startups that Kadoink competes against are Gydget, which raised seed funding in November - as well as Rockyou and Clearspring. The difference is that Kadoink is more focused on bringing mobile phones to the game.
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Behavioral 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...
Ask.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...
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