Web 2.0 - Wednesday, January 23, 2008
WordPress' Automattic Clears $29.5M Round With NY Times
Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider and their small band of coders at Automattic are an impressive bunch. They took on Google, Six Apart and others in building the world's best Web publishing platform and so far have prevailed.
Automattic, which brought the WordPress blog platform to the world, has now raised $29.5M in Series B funding. The New York Times Co. joined the round which was led by return backer Polaris Venture Partners (which put in $20M in the round) as well as Radar Ventures and True Ventures. Automattic received $1.1M in financing about two years ago. The New York Times says that in the latest round it invested the smallest amount.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Automattic got a bid late last year from a potential buyer but declined to name the larger Internet company that made the buyout bid. That offer valued Automattic at $150M-$200M and helped prompt the new round of financing. The Journal also reports that some of the $29M will be used to help company founders and others cash out some of their holdings.
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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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