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Web 2.0 - Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Israel's Xpanity Raises $1.5M For Group Browsing

Israel's Xpanity says that it is raising a $6M round. The company had raised $300K from its founder plus an additional $1.2M from angels.

Xpanity launched an IM chat tool that allows Web surfers of like minds to chat amongst themselves while looking at the same page. We expect the usual porn surfing suspects will be early adopters but also we can see the MySpace crowd jumping on it. The challenge will be that the technology hurdle here is low and there are several other competitors.

Interestingly, Xpanity says that its app is just the starting point. Xpanity's goal is to use the same technology that categorizes user's content interests with their advertising interests. The notion seems to be to share ad revenue with site owners. In exchange it would seem that Xpanity expects site owners to promote Xpanity. The challenge here will be to get high paying ads across many contextual channels. Google Adsense wasn't built over-night. For now, Xpanity will have to rely on low paying feeds of ads. They seem to be interested in poor CPM countries like India and Brazil which will put them on less competitive ground.

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