July 02, 2007
Mainstream Data Buys Newcom Joint Venture
Mainstream Data has acquired global content rights aggregator Newscom, LLC, from its prior owner, joint venture between Tribune Media Services and The McClatchy Company. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded in 1985, Newscom sells photos and articles to publishers around the world. It sells more than 19M rights-managed and royalty-free photos, graphics, illustrations, news stories, and feature stories. Newscom has 115 partners, including the Agence France Press, the BBC, Deutsche Presse Agentur, Dorling Kindersley, Getty Images, Jupiterimages, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, Reuters and Splash News.
Photo for sale on Newscom
Read - announcement
Posted at 10:51 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 06, 2007
Land Of Misfit Web Sites: Canada's Privately Held Geosign Raises $160M
This deal is bound do put behind-the-scenes player Geosign on the map. The Canadian company has quitly build a collection of 180 web sites covering a broad range of topics that appeal to advertisers. These sites get over 35M unique visitors monthly.
The company has taken $160M from American Capital Strategies Ltd. (Nasdaq: ACAS). Geosign recently teamed with Go2 to get a foot in the door of the nascent mobile directory marketplace and may have invested $13M in Go2.
Read - Geosign® Completes $160 Million Private Placement With American Capital (Release)
Posted at 03:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 31, 2007
Web Shared Sticky Note Company Trailfire Funded
Seattle's Trailfire has raised funding fromVoyager Capital and WRF Capital for its service that allows users to annotate and share web pages with other users, and to view information and comments on web pages by other users. It reminds us of Swiss Co-Comment.
Users can now leave comments on annotations. Each "trail" gets its own Web page as a "trailhead." That's so Google will pick up the trails and index them.
Anyone can read Trailfire notes and follow trails without a browser add-on. Users do need the the Trailfire software to create trails.
CEO John O'Halloran was the CEO of Netpodium, a web conferencing company he co-founded and sold to InterVU, which was subsequently acquired by Akamai. He was also CEO of MediaLink, a private networking company funded by Vulcan Capital.
At this point its not terribly clear how the company plans to make a living off this but we assume they will figure out a way to integrate advertising.
Posted at 11:47 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 09, 2006
Blog Platform FreeWebs Beefs Up With $11M
Earlier this year, we posted on Silver Spring, MD-based blog platform FreeWebs' impressive traffic growth. The company has now closed an $11M first round from Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Columbia Capital. Freewebs had earlier received a $1M bridge loan from Bobby Yazdani, the founder and CEO of Saba Software [NASDAQ: SABA], VC firm Amidzad and Aydin Senkut, a former early Google employee.
The company is profitable and generated nearly $1M in Adsense revenue 2004. It made a minor acquisition of Rome, Italy-based Mad4Milk.net, a developer of blogging applications. In blogging, attention goes to the battle between Six Apart and WordPress but there are several other contenders, including Freewebs.
Posted at 04:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 31, 2006
Angels Give Bellingham, WA's YapTA! $750K
The Seattle PI sniffs out a stealth-mode start-up called YapTA! based just south of Vancouver in sleepy Bellingham, WA. Nobody knows what they are up to other than some Web 3.0 mumbo-jumbo, but it claims to have raised $750K from angels. A mole does some digging and learns that the startu's new CEO is Thomas Romary, formerly with FogDog and HouseValues. Former FogDog exec and London-based VC Brett Allsop is the founder and Chairman.
Read - YapTA! says welcome to "Web 3.0"
View site - Yapta
Posted at 06:57 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 11, 2006
Custom Book Publishing Outfit - Blurb - On Road to Big Round
SF-based Blurb has secured $7.16M of a $13M Series B for its self book-publishing platform. Just like a user can create a calender on Shutterfly, Blurb users get templates that automatically lays out the book pages and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting.
Most of the books that we found on Blurb were photo essays. Blurb's costs are not bad. One can build a book less than 40 pages and buy it for just $29.95. The more pages the greater the costs, but there are also bulk discounts.
My Life Starring Boswell - a 25 Page Coffee Table Book - Can Be Had For $29.95
From the book-store reading with Boswell:
Q: What gave you the idea to write a book?
A: At first, I just wanted to make the cats jealous. But then I realized that I had a unique, dogly voice of my own that was just crying out, begging to be heard, as opposed just to begging for leftovers. And I’ve still made the cats jealous.
Posted at 01:59 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 13, 2006
Web 2.0 Roll-up Watch: GoingOn
Junto Boyz' Bernard Moon over at Going On points out that his startup - led by frontmen Tony Perkins and Marc Canter - fits the bill as a Web 2.0 roll-up, whereby one company is integrated functionality from an assortment of Web 2.0 gizmos. The company remains pre-launch but it and a couple of other startups that we have caught wind off, are headed in that direction.
Read - WEB ROLL-UP?... WELL, GOINGON IS LIKE HALF A ROLL (Junto-Boyz)
