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Social Networking - Friday, May 2, 2008

Sports and TV Apps For Facebook Maker Watercooler Raises $4M

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We discovered Watercooler back in August 2007 when we started to use one of its apps - the South Park app on Facebook. We noted then that Watercooler had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Canaan Partners. Now we learn that Mountain View's Watercooler raised $4M in first-round funding from Canaan Partners last October.

Watercooler claims to be the largest distributed community online for TV and Sports fans. With over 20M registered users, Watercooler connects people who are passionate about TV and Sports on Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Friendster, and Bebo. Moreover, the nature of the apps is to engender long play so those users are racking up impressive page views - in the hundreds of millions per month.

Watercooler is led by Kevin Chou who was with Canaan Partners before launching Watercooler. Since setting to work in July 2007, Watercooler has built over 700 Facebook apps. If that sounds like a lot its because 100% of Watercooler’s content is created by its users. Fans of sports teams or TV shows use Watercooler tools to create polls and trivia quizzes, upload photos, etc.

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Watercooler plans to make a living primarily via advertising but also through media partnerships and selling tickets and other sports gear.

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