February 27, 2007
Australia's Roo Group Buys P2P's Wurld Media
Roo Group is keeping up its M&A work with its buy-out of NYC-based Wurld Media. Roo last bought MyVideoDaily. Roos will pay Wurld Media $10M in cash and stock. Wurld operates a site called Peer Impact, a legal P2P service.
Read - ROO to Buy P2P Company Wurld Media
Posted at 09:20 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 06, 2007
Handheld Buys Putfile For $7.1M
San Francisco-based Handheld Entertainment has acquired Putfile.com, for $7.1M in cash and stock. Putfile says it had 9.5M unique visitors in January of 2007. Putfile is one of the ugliest sites we have seen in a while. It offers a free hosting service where you can upload your videos and photos to your own personalised page.
This deal continues Handheld's M&A strategy of buying high traffic, small company sites:
+ Dorks.com (acquired November 14, 2006);
+ FunMansion.com (acquired December 1, 2006);
+ YourDailyMedia.com (acquired December 18, 2006)
But there is no denying it gets traffic
Posted at 11:52 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Quickoffice Gets More Funds For Mobile Access To MSFT Office Files
Quickoffice out of Plano, TX has raised $7M in Series D funding led by Mayfield and former PalmSouce CEO Patrick McVeigh has joined its board. Quickoffice allows users to open, edit and send their original, native Microsoft files without the need for desktop conversion or synchronization. This is one of those things that Microsoft should be doing but has been too busy to get to.
View - site
Posted at 11:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 08, 2006
Bittorrent Downloads uTorrent For Unknown Price
Plenty of news to digest in the Bittorrnet world these days:
+ Bittorrent buys client software maker uTorrent.
+ BitTorrent Inc receives $20M in funding and lands more move studio deals.
+ Azureus Inc has raised $12M in series B
+ Searching.com is acquiring Bittorrent portals.
By acquiring µTorrent, Bittorent says they now have almost 50% of all BitTorrent users. µTorrent is a lightweight, but feature-rich BitTorrent client that works with Windows. BitTorrent has been falling behind in uptake for its client so it made sense to buy users in advance of the launch of the BitTorrent Video Store.
View - uTorrent
Posted at 05:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 05, 2006
Bittorrent - The 2nd Coming - Azureus Funded
File sharing is a complicated business where you gain ground by being illegal but look to cash in by going legit. Just like the mafia right? Last week we learned that the dog-father of file sharing Bittorrent had raised $20M+ and now we learn that a Bittorrent wannabe called Zaureus -aka Zudeo- has raised $12M from Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital. We are big fans of Bittorrent but are starting to realize that if they manage themselves better pretenders might take the prize.
Read - Azureus 3.0 Launched
Posted at 12:18 AM | Permalink
September 13, 2006
eDonkey Fined $30M For Illegal File Sharing, But It's Already Toast
Metamachine, the firm the once popular file-sharing software eDonkey has agreed to pay $30M to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry. That said the company no longer exists and hasn't for some months. We cannot imagine that any dollars will trade hands. Furthermore, the company's software morphed into eMule, an open source application that cannot be stopped.
Read - eDonkey maker to pay $30M settlement
Posted at 01:10 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 31, 2006
The Pirate Bay Blasted - Hollywood Lawyers Always Win
A year ago we posted on the taunting jibes delivered by the Sweden-based BitTorrent distributor The Pirate Bay. Today we learn that Swedish police have raided The Pirate Bay and detained three men - the file sharing site has been toppled. Hollywood has put relentless pressure on the Swedish government to take action against The Pirate Bay. Despite the fatal blow, a founder of the Pirate Bay may have the last word. He has founded a political party in Sweden - the Pirate Party - to fully legalize IP piracy.
The following open letter was posted on The Pirate Bay until the day the site was torn down...
"Unauthorized Use of DreamWorks SKG Properties"
Dennis L. Wilson, Esq.
KEATS McFARLAND & WILSON, LLP
9720 Wilshire Blvd., Penthouse Suite
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.
Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.
It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on http://www.thepiratebay.org.
Go fuck yourself.
Polite as usual,
anakata
Posted at 04:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
March 07, 2006
Index Makes Another P2P Investment - In AllPeers
AllPeers has raised less than $5M from Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. AllPeers has a an extension for Mozilla’s Firefox browser in beta that allows users to drag and drop files into an IM buddy list window for the purposes of sharing them.
The 7-person company is based in the UK but development takes place in Prague. The company compares itself to BitTorrent and Skype so it has very big shoes to fill but gets good reviews.
Posted at 01:54 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 16, 2005
Six Figure Blog Domain Name Sold
Cleveland Entrepreneur Tony Colan announced today the purchase of www.blogster.com for $100K, the highest priced domain name of 2005. Blogster is a new competitor to Blogger and Typepad. Their press release indicates that they got the money to pay for the domain thanks to the $3M sale of wholesale411.com to Liquidity Services in Washington, DC, an online liquidator for government surplus.
Read - Blogster.com Purchased for $100,000, Making it a Top Domain Name Acquisition in 2005
Posted at 01:32 AM | Comments (60) | TrackBack | Permalink
December 05, 2005
Next Move, Trumba
No sooner do we profile AirSet in the personal productivity/calendaring, and Trumba goes public with the news that it has partnered with Knight Ridder Digital and it has a new version that allows users to publish calendars across other calendars, including Yahoo! Calendar. As we indicated, we expect to see a lot of leap-frogging.
Read - Trumba Delivers New Online Service to Publish and Syndicate Events to Any Calendar
Read - Trumba, Knight Ridder Digital Announce Partnership Enabling Online Community Calendar Publishing
Posted at 05:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
December 04, 2005
Airena (AirSet) - Profile
HQ: Pleasant Hill, CA
Founded: 2003
Management: CEO Brian Dougherty was founder of interactive TV company Wink Communications. Wink had an IPO and peaked at a $1.4B before being sold to Liberty Media in 2002 and later bought again by OpenTV. He also founded Geoworks, a make rof operating systems that developed the first interface for AOL and IMagic, a video game developer. He got his start at Mattel Intellivision - the first good video game console on the market.
Investors: The company has raised $2.5M in Series A funding from Brian Dougherty. The company is working on its first outside round.
Business Model: AirSet offers a free personal productivity tool but charges $4.99 per month for mobile service. Users manage shared calendars, contacts, lists, blogs and Web links via a single interface. The real value is that anyone can enjoy enterprise MSFT Outlook calendar functionality outside the enterprise and for much less dough. It also includes Skype integration, sync to Outlook and Palm, RSS feeds, text message and email alerts. AirSet's first mobile client is slated to launch with Verizon in December. It will enable users to access and update their group calendars, contacts and lists from their cell phones. Users can make a change to an event or contact and over-the-air sync it to everybody in a group.
Making the Simpson's Springfield Better Organized
Competitors: CalendarHub, Zimbra, PlaxoPlanzo, Kiko , Trumba, RSSCalendar.com, Backpack, Yahoo Calendar.
Dirt: We expect that the wave of new Web-based personal information management companies will leapfrog each other with various companies taking turn as the best-of-breed. Today, AirSet appears to be the best thanks to it having the broadest vision, encompassing so many elements that make one productive. The pricing holds together, the functionality is terrific and the management is solid. Given that competitor Trumba recently raised $8M, we imagine Airena will do something comparable.
Posted at 11:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 28, 2005
Joyent Buys TextDrive
More open-source, collaboration joy in the Bay Area. Joyent has taken the open-source Ruby-On-Rails framework and offers a file-sharing and a suite of shared applications including: calendaring, rolodex, email, and a file-server in a Web-based interface. The cost is about $5K flat, no matter how big your office. The product allows users to tag email, reports, etc. and all output can be served via RSS.
The interest is clear. Many small companies do not want to pay for the full Microsoft server deployment and now there are ways to get something like it on the cheap. But there are a lot of choices and many people will be afraid to go with an unknown company that might not be around in a market shake-out.
By acquiring TextDrive, Joyent gains an ASP platform so it has the full stack. The CEO of TextDrive will be leaving San Diego for Europe where he will opening Joyent's office. He swears he will not be laying off employees.
Read - Joyent Acquires Textdrive
Posted at 08:03 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 27, 2005
Central Desktop - Profile
Central Desktop = Salesforce + Wikis + Crowded Market
HQ: Pasadena, CA
Founded: 2004
Management: Isaac Garcia is Co-founder and CEO. He was a founder and VP of Sales & Marketing at Upgradebase. His co-founder and CTO, Arnulf Hsu, worked with him at Upgradebase, which they founded in 1997. That company was a data provider to the computer and consumer electronics industries. In 1999, they also founded Vendorbase, a B2B Marketplace for computer resellers. Both companies were sold to CNET in 2002
Investors: Bootstrapped but actively raising funds.
Business Model: Central Desktop sells a hosted collaboration package that takes advantage of RSS and Wikis. It offers the type of file sharing service that has been popular with consultants and other project-based businesses. The company licenses the software from $25 to $250 per month. For that you get: sales tracking, product development management, installations tracking, knowledgebases, department Intranets, calendaring, file sharing, and more. Central Desktop had its first release in September 2005, and the UI is certainly clean.
Competitors: Jotspot, Intranets.com, SocialText, Zimbra, .
Dirt: We've done project-based work before and can see the value of Central Desktop. We also know that it's one thing to make a valuable product and another to become the Salesforce.com of your sector. Central Desktop needs to figure out how to hype the hell out of their product to get a leg-up over the hoards of other collaboration companies that have been charging of late.
Posted at 02:53 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 20, 2005
Trumba - Profile
Trumba = Plaxo {just calendars} - contact management
HQ: Seattle, WA
Founded: 2004
Management: CEO is Jeremy Jaech. From 1990 to 2000 he was co-founder and CEO of Visio, a developer of business drawing and diagramming software. Microsoft bought Visio for $1.3B. Prior to that, he had co-founded Aldus, maker of PageMaker. It was acquired by Adobe in 1994. Jaech serves on the Board of RealNetworks.
Investors: In November 2005, the company raised $8M in Series B led by Oak Investment Partners with returning investors August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Board memebers from Kleiner and August were previously on the board with Visio.
Business Model: Trumba sells subscriptions to its Web-based, social-networking calendar that it licenses for $39.95 per year to organizations and families. It lets people share calendars across different Web sites or devices — and it automatically pulls in dates from Web sites. Trumba supports unlimited sub-calendars and makes it easy to publish and subscribe to calendars via email and RSS.
Competitors: Airena, CalendarHub, Planzo.com,Zimbra, RSSCalendar.com, Yahoo Calendar, Apple iCalendar
Dirt: Six months ago, a non-tech buddy let us know that he was tired of trying to organize meetings via Microsoft Outlook Calendar and wanted to know what else was available - he even thought of launching his own startup. We investigated and could not find much available as viable alternative to Outlook Calendar. We are now amazed to see so many VC-backed companies are competing in social networked calendaring. The Trumba team has done some amazing things in their careers and by most accounts Trumba is solid, however, it cannot continue to charge for its calender now that if faces probably unexpected competition. With Microsoft Live in place, we can imagine the Trumba guys selling-out to Redmond once again. Yahoo! has a solid calendar application and we can foresee that Google, Microsoft and others will want their Trumba too.
Posted at 11:37 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 28, 2005
eDonkey & BitTorrent - A Tale of Two Lawyers
The past couple of weeks have seen dramatic changes in the file sharing business. BitTorrent received VC funding and moved to San Francisco. Meanwhile a company that has surpassed BitTorrent's popularity, eDonkey, was forced to close its New York office and flee for parts unknown. Another company, WinMX Shuttered itself, and after losing a legal battle with the RIAA, Grokster got an offer from Mashboxx. Today came news that Congress, led by California Senator Diane Feinstein might create a law that is even more aggressive with P2P companies.
It will be interesting to see who was more law-savvy in the end - eDonkey which will probably surface in Gibraltar or some other haven but will have trouble raising capital -- or BitTorrent, which has funding but reamins in the open light and will be at the mercy of legislators and Hollywood copyright freaks.
We also note a rare public slap by one VC to others - this in Businessweek: "I don't think the major media companies are ready to embrace P2P," says George Zachary, a partner at Charles River Ventures. "I could have invested and I didn't."
Read - WinMX Shuts Down After RIAA Threat (BetaNews)
Read - Congress to legislate file swapping? (CNET)
Read - BitTorrent's Grab at Respectability (BusinessWeek)
Posted at 04:36 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 15, 2005
How Skype's Investors Did It
A must read article over at the SJ Mercury documents how hungrier VCs tracked down the Skype founders, who were on-the-run in Europe trying to escape being served subpoenas. Most VCs don't chase down entrepreneurs and most don't want to do business with tech outlaws - so hat's off to the Draper family, Index Partners' Danny Rimmer and those who did.
Read - Skype hunt: How VCs struck gold in Europe (SJ Mercury)
Posted at 02:21 PM | Comments (3) | Permalink
August 29, 2005
eDonkey aka Metamachine - Profile
HQ: New York, NY
Founded: 1999
Management: CEO Sam Yagan is a Harvard grad from the class of ‘99 who previously co-founded study guide company Sparknotes, now owned by Barnes & Noble. He calls himself an old-friend of software designer and eDonkey founder Jed McCaleb.
Investors: Bootstrapped. The company has legal risks that most VCs fear-to-tread.
Business Model: eDonkey is the 'it-girl' of P2P file sharing network - particularly for video downlooads. eDonkey has been downloaded by more than 50M people and is very popular in Europe and broadband-rich Korea. A recent study by Cachelogic found that eDonkey has outsripped BitTorrent as the biggest source for video P2P. eDonkey is faster because it downloads bits of files simultaneously, and then seamlessly puts them into one file after they reach your computer. eDonkey makes money by advertising - it loads up its application with adware - and it offers an ad-free version for $19.95 - although the vast majority of its users opt for adware. Unlike Kazaa, Grokster and other P2P firms, eDonkey users can choose whether to opt in for the ad programs.
Competitors: eDonkey is the only major P2P company that doesn't hide in places where lawyers can find them. Kazaa is incorporated on the isle of Vanuatu; Grokster is in Nevis, West Indies; and Earthstation 5 is run from the Jenin refugee camp in Palestine.
Dirt: eDonkey's rise comes after Hollywood legal campaigns against BitTorrent hubs, which have resulted in the disappearance of many of the most popular sites using that technology. But will eDonkey be next in Hollywood's cross hairs? eDonkey claims that it is just a small 5 person company. Hopefully they have been ammassing a war chest to fend off Hollywood.
Posted at 07:06 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
August 02, 2005
PeerMe - Profile
HQ: Mountain View, CA & Tokyo, Japan
Founded: 2004
Management: Tom Lasater is PeerMe's founder and CEO and Kanji Sakae is co-founder and President. They appear to be a couple of nobodies.
Investors: PeerMe raised $1.5M in July 2005 from Angels. The total angel investment in PeerMe is more than $2.5M.
Business Model: The company has developed an instant messaging platform that supports VoIP and PC to handheld voice communications and file transfer. The beta is due to be released in August 2005.
Competitors: Skype
Dirt: We'll dispatch PeerMe with due brevity. Nobody wants a competitor to Skype that is not as good and lacks resources to catch up. Beat it PeerMe.
Posted at 01:12 AM | Permalink
May 16, 2005
Wists - Profile
HQ: New York, NY
Founded: March 2005
Management: Founder is David Galbraith. He is perhaps best known for his work on developing RSS and his work at Moreover with his college buddy Nick Denton.
Investors: Gawker Media's Nick Denton. Funding amount is not public information, however, this kind of venture would carry modest costs.
Business Model: Like del.icio.us, it isn't 100% apparent how Wists will earn a living. The company brings image tagging/bookmarking to the Internet. It wants to merge the distinction between blogging and bookmarking - and make blogging as easy as bookmarking. Next steps include auto detection of where you are bookmarking from and adding appropriate metadata such as end time for ebay auctions. Galbraith says he wants to build in an interface for blog posts that spans times to allow for events bookmarking. For example, "I am bookmarking this restaurant that I want to visit next Friday and invite appropriate people to attend." We recommend a look at Wists' pages to appreciate it.
View - My top 10 Buildings (David Galbraith.com)
Competitors: To some extent del-icio.us
Dirt: Wists joins a growing list of micro-startups that have aims to introduce a new piece of Web publishing functionality. The hope is to attract millions of users virally as soon as possible. Wists enjoys the benefits of the connection to Denton's cool Britannia empire on the Hudson. Just by using Wists across his sites, Denton can guarantee a high level of exposure to Wists. Also, whenever articles in the press are written about tagging, Wists will surely be mentioned. The risk of all this exposure is that the majors might fairly easily integrate Wists' functionality into their products. However, Galbraith, Denton and dozens of other micro-startups are confident that the majors will be slow to catch on until it's too late.
Posted at 09:18 AM | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 05, 2005
Dyson/Doerr v. McNamee
Tony over at Always-On provides a transcript of a November exchange between some of the biggest figures in venture capital - Esther Dyson, John Doerr, and Roger McNamee, all prognosticating on the subject of electronic medical records. All think that it would be great to live in a world with electronic medical records and that it is a vast addressable market. McNamee calls the Bush administration 'anti-science' and, consequently throws water on the idea that electronic medical records will get off the drawing board any time soon. In contrast, Doerr and Dyson confidently say that this will become a reality within a year. Dyson even thinks that Google and Yahoo will pull it off. Whoever is right, it amazes us that top VCs are so comfortable with making such sweepng predictions when they know full well that nobody knows the answer.
Read - E-Medical Records are Coming (Always-On)
Posted at 01:19 AM | Permalink
January 04, 2005
LimeWire
HQ: New York, NY
Founded: June, 2000
Management: CEO is Mark Gorton. Has snazzy degrees from Yale, Stanford, and holds the coveted MBA from Harvard. Previously worked at Credit Suisse First Boston as a fixed-income proprietary trader. CTO/COO Greg Bildson has a background in developing software for the financial services industry.
Investors: LimeWire is part of a group of companies funded by the Lime Group. Financing details are not available.
Business Model: Free file sharing software. Company makes money by selling ads and by offering an ad-free version of the LimeWire program (LimeWire PRO) which offers technical support and some added features. Company claims to offer faster downloads than Kazaa.
Competitors: Kazaa, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Grokster , Morpheus
Dirt: You can't talk about the prospects of latter-day Napsters like LimeWire without mentioning the looming shadows of the MPAA and the RIAA. These two industry groups have been waging a long battle in the courts to crush the pesky file sharing start-ups. An August 2004 court decision is currently protecting the file sharing companies on the grounds that they are not responsible for the actions of individual users. We're not legal scholars here at the a:c, but we wonder how long this ruling will hold up. And even if it does hold up, look for the MPAA and the RIAA to use crafty legal strategies to exploit loopholes.
