Web 2.0 - Thursday, April 3, 2008
NBC and Telefónica Back Recommendation Service Loomia
San Francisco-based Loomia has raised $5M in Series A funding from strategic investor Peacock Equity (NBC) and Telefónica Capital as well as Asset Management Company.
Loomia provides media and retail sites with recommendation and personalization services to help visitors find things they like, increase site activity, and improve merchandising. It recently launched its SeenThis application for Facebook users.
The Loomia recommendations service is a hosted service that can be used for all types of retail goods and media items as well as news, financial information, and travel and entertainment listings. It works transparently within the pages of a site, taking user input in the form of site activity, purchases and ratings, and then producing lists of relevant items for display throughout the site.
The firm is led by CEO Dave McMurtry who was a Director of Corporate Development at Intuit. Among Loomia's competitors is Kleiner Perkins-backed Aggregate Knowledge.
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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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