May 09, 2008
Site Performance Management's Gomez Files $80.5M IPO
Lexington, MA's Gomez has filed for an $80.5M IPO. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq with the ticker symbol GOMZ, with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank Securities as underwriters.
Say the word Gomez and we tend to think of the patriarch of The Adams Family. But this is a nine-year-old Web analytics company that sells through an on-demand model.
Gomez's annual revenue has climbed from $14.8M in 2005 to $21.7M in 2006 to $32.6M in 2007. During the same three-year period, its operating income rose from $231Kin 2005 to $1.3M in 2006 before tumbling to a loss of almost $1.5M last year, the filing said. Gomez customers include Yahoo, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, as well as 13 of the 20 most visited US websites.
All that sounds great but the financials leave a sour taste and unless they have a special story to tell we think Wall Street will pass.
The company raised over $66M between 1999 and 2004, with shareholders including:
Dolphin Equity Partners, AdAstra, Doughty Hanson & Co. and ABS Ventures.
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Venrock Leads $3M Investment in Powerpoint's Slideshare
SlideShare has raised $3M in series A funding led by Venrock. SlideShare is a site and service for sharing presentations. The site claims to be one of the biggest ruby on rails sites in the world. It has offices in San Francisco and New Delhi.
SlideShare had raised angel funding from the cool kids in the Valley: Hal Varian (chief economist at Google); Guy Kawasaki, founder (Garage Technology Ventures); Ross Mayfield (Socialtext); Dave McClure Marc Cuban (Dallas Mavs owner); Jonathan Abrams (Friendster) and Saul Klein (The Accelerator Group).
We have heard people wonder outloud what gives with Slideshare? It couldn't be eaiser to port PowerPoint slides to the Net. True enough but its also very easy to run Flash movies on the Net but that hasn't stopped dozens of companies from getting crazy traffic. Slideshare has an advantage in that slides are low bandwidth and less expensive to host than video and we can see advertisers paying good money to appear next to business presentations.
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April 28, 2008
TheStreet Picks Up Personal Finance Site Geezeo
TheStreet.com (Nasdaq:TSCM) has made "an initial" $1.2M investment in Geezeo. The Street now owns 13% of Geezio, and holds an option to purchase the rest of Geezeo anytime during the next 12 months.
Geezeo is a Web-based personal finance manager that allows users to learn more about their financial situation, explore their options, test-drive various strategies, and find the best financial products.
Geezeo competes with Mint and Wesabe. We use Mint but we like all of these companies. Getting thousands of people to hand over their credit card and bank accounts to a third party is unprecedented and makes for outstanding target marketing.
For TheStreet.com, we also like what they are up to. They have frugally acquired a handful of startups that dovetail with their sales focus. It has bought Stockpickr.com, and BankingMyWay.com, and Promotions.com.
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April 04, 2008
Korea's SK Telecom Backs Avatar Firm Fix8
LA's avatar maker FIX8 (aka Mobinex) has raised $2M in a Series A from SK Telecom. FIX8 says the total for the first round now comes in at $5M as it had previously raised $3M from Vikers Financial Group. The strategic deal with SK Telecom will have FIX8 adapt its 3D avatar animation technology to be used to map a SK's user's facial movements to their online avatar.
We have reviewed Fix8 and think it is sweet. Fix8 has developed web cam driven facial tracking products for entertainment including interactive TV, instant messaging and MMORPG's.Users can easily animate live video on IM services. FIX8 videos can also be saved and posted across Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Now FIX8 Mobile will soon offer animated video chat and sharing on camera phones.
Fix8's Halloween Contest
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April 03, 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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Posted at 01:49 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Blog Analytics Firm Umbria Bought By JD Power
J.D.Power and Associates, a McGraw-Hill company, has bought Denver, CO-based Umbria. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Umbria monitors blog and social network posts to measure and identify new market opportunities as well as to provide market intelligence on brands, companies, and products. Umbria is headed by Janet Eden-Harris who was CMO at I2.
Umbria was backed by Arrowpath Venture Capital, Sequel Venture Partners, and Vista Ventures.
Online market research has been a nice racket with companies like Markettools and GMI (Global Market Insite) getting above the $100M in annual reveunues mark. There is no word yet on revenues at Umbria.
Umbria compiled this poll for CNN back in 2002 for the Superbowl
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March 25, 2008
Anti-Child Predator Startup IMSafer Bought By Rival Crisp Thinking
Beaverton, OR based IMSafer, whose technology lets parents watch for child predators on the Web, has been bought by a Leeds, UK-based rival called Crisp Thinking. IMSafer is not disclosing the price that Crisp paid.
The way that product works is that it scan instant messenger conversations in real time, and look for predator languages. It also has a reputation component whereby parents can approve suitable contacts for their kids. Basic IMSafer service will support up to one monitored IM account. A premium IMSafer account allows for monitoring of an unlimited number of IM accounts, as well as support for MySpace and Meebo, support for MySpace comments, detection of links sent in IM which point to social networking sites and support for Microsoft Windows Vista Parental Control.
In late 2006, IMSafer aised $1.2M from angel investors in a round that was led by Robin Richards, who is co-founder of mp3.com and president and CEO of Los Angeles-based The NTI Group.
IMSafer gets a fair amount of TV news coverage
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March 13, 2008
ShareThis Closes $15M Round
We can't think of many Web 2.0 startups that have raised nearly $25M so quickly. Our understanding of the Web 2.0 tool startup model is to bootstrap or maybe raise a few millions dollars and hope to find a buyer who might pluck down a five or ten times that investment.
ShareThis seems to want to elevate itself above the crowd and perhaps place itself amidst company like Facebook. The startup has just closed a $15M round, bringing its total capital raised to $23M. Get this: Share this only launched last November. This round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Granted, ShareThis' growth is impressive. It claims it is now serving 100M page views per month. Currently, ShareThis is very simple. Clicking on ShareThis' icon launches a popup window that makes it simple for blog or social networking page readers to share posts on the likes of Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Facebook, Technorati, Reddit, and others or to send to others via email, AIM, SMS, MySpace and Facebook.
ShareThis raised $6M last year from Blue Chip Venture Company, Illinois Ventures, DFJ Mercury, Queen City Angels and RPM Ventures. Private equity man CEO Tim Schigel led Blue Chip’s investment in ShareThis.
Now that it has users, its time for ShareThis to make living. Advertising is the sure fire route but they will have to be clever as they don't get much real estate.
ShareThis Demo
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March 05, 2008
Pluck Corp. Goes To Demand Media
Richard Rosenblat's Demand Media continues to do buyout deals. The latest is its acquisition of Austin, TX-based Pluck. As we have documented, VC-backed Pluck made a deft transition from being an RSS reader to a blog syndication network, called BlogBurst, that connects newspapers to blogs. Pluck has another product called SiteLife, which are Web services for their clients to add interactive features to their sites.
Pluck has raised about $17M in funding with Reuters invested about $7M in 2006. Reauters cites a source who put the buyout at $50-60M. Techcrunch reports that the selling price was $75M and that Pluck had $10M in revenues.
The synergies (sorry for dropping that jargon) between Pluck and domain name giant Demand Media are not entirely clear. Demand Media has acquired technology that it can use across its sites to attract more users. PaidContent reports: "Rosenblatt said that Puck fits into its strategy of taking Demand’s network growth off its own network, and helping publishers take those learnings and bake them into the tools." That strategy is a bit hard for us to follow. We suppose that means that Demand Media wants to use Pluck to get its content on the pages of larger media sites. But why does it need to buy Pluck to do that? We'll keep our eye on this.
Posted at 04:23 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 04, 2008
White Label SocNet Builder Mzinga Raises $32.5M; Buys Prospero
Burlington, MA's Mzinga has raised $32.5M led by W Capital Partner with Bluecrest Capital Finance, GE Equity, Knowledge Industries and company management. Mzinga says that part of the financing was used to acquire Littleton, MA-based Prospero Technologies.
While we imagine that most of our readers have not heard of Mzinga, they make a big statement. The company says that it did more than $30M in annual revenues and has more than 125 customers. Customers include ABC, AOL, ESPN, CBS.com, iVillage, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Prudential Financial, Deutsche Post World Net, and United Nations Development Programme. These companies use Mzinga's intranet and wiki tools.
Mzinga actually has a 21 year history in business. As KnowledgePlanet, it created a Learning Management System in 1994 and brought it online in 1996. In 2002 it created the Firefly Simulation Developer tool, which was a simulation-based learning platform. The Mzinga brand was formed in August 2007 after the merger of Woburn-based Shared Insights US and Pennsylvania’s KnowledgePlanet.
Prospero is an old line online business that operates community sites like Talk City and Delphi Forums but mainly has been running private label communities/forums for companies. Prospero was owned by Mallory Ventures.
CEO Barry Libert Wrote a Book Called We Are Smarter Than Me
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February 25, 2008
As It Is Raises $3M For AI-Backed Pageflakes Rival
Truethinker seems like an odd name (so does the parent name As It Is Inc.). But the concept is mainstream. Truethinker wants users to sign up and make it their personalized home page fed by customized RSS feeds. Sounds like Netvibes, Pageflakes and any number of rivals in this space. The trouble for Truethinker is that the UI is not nearly as cool as NetVibes nor Pageflakes. A bigger problem is that Truethinker wants you to pay $24.85 per year. That's not much but this is a non-starter given that you can get comparable applications for free. The startup hopes that it will gain attention and users because it deploys artificial intelligence.
Based in Buffalo, NY As It Is has raised $3M in a first round from undisclosed angel investors. The startup says that this is 60% of their goal for the round.
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Press Release Source: As It Is, Inc.
As It Is, Inc., Secures $3 million, 60% of Equity Funding Goal from Western New York Private Investors
Friday February 22, 7:00 am ET
As It Is, Inc., recently launched new artificial intelligence (AI)-based online tool TrueThinker.com that learns how users organize info; makes growing knowledge easier and faster.
BUFFALO, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As It Is, Inc., an intellectual capital development and holding company, today announced that is has secured 60% of its $5 million venture funding target. As It Is raised the funds entirely from local private Western New York investors. The company will use the funds to enhance the customer experience of its first web-based service, TrueThinker.com, while launching the service worldwide. The company also will build its development and management team while marketing to several new vertical segments.
"With our TrueThinker.com already in use by a growing customer base, we are pleased that we have the funding to build our team, enhance our service, and reach out to new markets," said William D. Koehler, founder, director, president & CEO of As It Is, Inc.
“TrueThinker is the product of 40 years of AI-related research,” said Koehler. “The result of that research is a time-saving, frustration-reducing Internet tool that learns from your use. Ultimately, individual users can start to train a virtual replica of themselves that finds relevant information for them on the Internet.”
About TrueThinker.com
Available today at TrueThinker.com, TrueThinker automatically categorizes your website links, after its patented Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology called the “AutoGnome™” learns about what data you save and how you organize it.
TrueThinker;
* helps you manage files, RSS feeds, links, images and more and;
* allows you to share knowledge easily with – and learn from – communities of people interested in the same topics you are, whether sports such as baseball, bird watching, and fly fishing, or medical issues, such as allergies and diabetes, or any other areas of interest.
The TrueThinker experience includes these features:
* My TrueThinker webpage, a dashboard or homepage that you can personalize as your portal to the Internet.
* My KnowledgeBank, where you can manually, or your AutoGnome can automatically, store your relevant and valued information so you can find it easily.
* My Communities, where you can join or create groups of people with the same social, business, research or other interests to share resources and hold public or private discussions.
What’s more, you can access TrueThinker and your organized bookmarks and files from any computer, making your accumulated knowledge on just about anything accessible from anywhere.
A yearlong subscription to TrueThinker costs $24.95. Sign up for a 30-day free trial at www.truethinker.com.
About As It Is, Inc.
As It Is, Inc., is a private corporation formed in 1999 with an office at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Baird Research and Technology Park. It has assembled a portfolio of technologies and related intellectual property including the AutoGnome™ and recently developed a commercial-ready business venture to exploit and capitalize on over 40 years of development. This first rudimentary application is TrueThinker.com, a revolutionary new subscriber-based IntelliSite™ that will automate and manage the creation and discovery, retrieval, and organization of internet-based information.
The senior management team of As It Is, Inc., comprises:
* Craig R. Arrison – Initiating angel investor, assistant to the president
* Leslie D. Edmiston – Internal relations & assistant to the chairman
* Jack van Geldern – IntelliSite™ systems engineer
* Jon Ray Hamann – Founder, director, chairman & CCO
* William D. Koehler –Founder, director, president & CEO
* Paul H. McAfee – Chief operating officer and interim chief marketing officer
* Jere Northrop – Founder & director
* Deborah B. O’Shea, Esq. – Chief networking officer
* Frederick Reed – Chief AutoGnome™ technology officer
* Edward F. Wright Jr. – Chief financial officer
EDITOR’S NOTE: Technical background available at http://www.asitisinc.com/documents/080220_TrueThinker_Tech_Backgrounde r.pdf. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)
Contact:
As It Is, Inc.
Grace Lazzara, 716-883-5915
Source: As It Is, Inc.
Posted at 02:07 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 05, 2008
Mazal tov: Amidst The Turmoil Yahoo! Buys Israel's FoxyTunes
At the center of Silicon Valley's most intriguing drama - will MSFT get Yahoo! - Yahoo! continues to buy startups. Last week reports are that it bought Boston-based video platform Maven Networks and today word out of Israel is that Yahoo! has acquired Israeli startup FoxyTunes. The amount of the funding was not disclosed. FoxyTunes built a popular Firefox plug-in for music listening.
FoxyTunes says on its blog that the FoxyTunes team will become a part of Yahoo! Music and will continue working on FoxyTunes.
One of FoxyTunes Latest Innovations - Easy use of songs in your sig file
We have to hand it to Yahoo!, their M&A team has good taste. Who knows how much they paid for FoxyTunes or Maven, but but are solid, innovate firms. The trouble is that once these companies spend time on the Yahoo! campus, they quickly realize it's a shit-show and double-over they want to check out as fast as possible.
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February 04, 2008
AOL Buys Widget's Goowy Media
Staying with widgets, AOL has paid an undisclosed amount for San Diego-based Goowy Media. Founded in 2004, Goowy Media was build by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt and Jeremy Suriel and
Sashi Bommakany. Goowy currently has two products in production, the Goowy Webtop and the yourMinis Widget Platform.
The goowy webtop is a set of integrated tools for communicating and sharing, including email, contacts, calendar, file storage, integrated instant messaging, and games.
Yourminis is a personalized dashboard of widgets that let users get information and features from across the web in one place. Users can configure Minis to see their email, check the weather, watch Youtube videos, search the web, browse flickr photos, read news and RSS feeds, save notes & to dos, listen to music, etc.
AOL had worked with Goowy to provide original widgets for myAOL. However, the company's specified that Goowy would be folded into AOL's online advertising unit called Project A.
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WidgetBox Raises $8M To Lure CEO
Lost in the hub-bub over widget gods Slide, Rockyou and iLike is San Francisco widget directory Widgetbox. Nonetheless, the startup has raised $8M in Series B from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, NCD Investors and angel Michael Dearing.
Widgetbox is a platform to create, share and find widgets for websites, blogs, and social network profiles. Widgetbox says it has served over 1.5B widgets on 200K different websites.
Widgetbox was founded by Ed Anuff, who has taken a leadership role in a number of startups from Wired Digital to Epicentric and Vignette. However, Anuff is no longer CEO. His LinkedIn profile indicates that he serves on the company's Board of Directors, and was the company's CEO for the first 18 months of operations. WidgetBox's interum CEO is Michael Dearing. We don't know the reason why Anuff has left but it might have something to do with the loss of marketshare to rival Clearspring
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January 23, 2008
WordPress' Automattic Clears $29.5M Round With NY Times
Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider and their small band of coders at Automattic are an impressive bunch. They took on Google, Six Apart and others in building the world's best Web publishing platform and so far have prevailed.
Automattic, which brought the WordPress blog platform to the world, has now raised $29.5M in Series B funding. The New York Times Co. joined the round which was led by return backer Polaris Venture Partners (which put in $20M in the round) as well as Radar Ventures and True Ventures. Automattic received $1.1M in financing about two years ago. The New York Times says that in the latest round it invested the smallest amount.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Automattic got a bid late last year from a potential buyer but declined to name the larger Internet company that made the buyout bid. That offer valued Automattic at $150M-$200M and helped prompt the new round of financing. The Journal also reports that some of the $29M will be used to help company founders and others cash out some of their holdings.
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January 22, 2008
Net Audience Measurement's Quantcast Raises $20M
Web audience measurement firm Quantcast has raised $20M in a 2nd round of financing led by Polaris Venture Partners and Founders Fund.
Quantcast has taken a different road from competitors comScore and Nielsen which rely on extrapolating from panels (and have little accuracy with long tail sites). Quantcast has publishers use its tags and then it certifies benchmarks that data.
The company does not currently charge for its access to its data, however Quantcast says it plans to find value in matching up advertisers with sites that fit their target audiences.
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January 10, 2008
Musical Widget Startup Kadoink Raises $7M
Kadoink is a social network platform that combines widgets, SMS, audio and music. Based in San Francisco, Kadoink creates mobile fan clubs for bands and artists and enable those artists to send group texts and music to their mobile fan clubs, as well as creating mobile communications groups for universities and corporations.
The company has closed a $7M round from Sutter Hill Ventures and angels. That's a lot for a widget maker - not a lot of tech talent required for that - but with startups like Slide, Rockyou and iLike seeing their traffic fly off the charts, investors want to join the party. Plus CEO Scott Cahill has a nice resume. He as CEO of Signature Wines, GM for Kinecta which was bought by Stellant and VP Sales for Impulse Buy Network which was bought by Inktomi.
Among the many widget startups that Kadoink competes against are Gydget, which raised seed funding in November - as well as Rockyou and Clearspring. The difference is that Kadoink is more focused on bringing mobile phones to the game.
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Posted at 02:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Site Builder WebNode Raises $1.2M
It must take some exceptional self-confidence to launch and raise funding for a Web site building tool in this market, what with all of the competition from the likes of Google, WordPress, Six Apart and others. But that is what the Czech startup Webnode has just done.
Webnode compares itself to Weebly and Google Page Creator but says it has much more functionality. Like Ning, WebNode offers drag and drop functionality additions so that users can drop in eCommerce, polling, external gadgets like Flickr.
At this point it is not clear how WebNode plans to make a living as it is free to use. Unlike WordPress and SixApart it does not currently offer a paid, hosted plan. UPDATE:
The company tells us that there are several opportunities to profit on WebNode through paid services:
- Extension of storage space limit (100MB default)
- Extension of bandwidth limit (5GB default)
- Selling extra e-mail accounts
Webnode tells that a:c that it raised the $1.2M investment from individuals from the Czech republic.
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Posted at 11:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 05, 2007
Google Analytics Has No Designs On Heatmaps; Clicktale Wins Funding
We are here in Las Vegas at Pubcon. One of the better presentations today was on Web analytics. The star was Google group manager and former Urchin co-founder Brett Crosby (rival Bill Schmarzo, VP of Advertiser Analytics no-showed it and took some arrows for that). Crosby explained that Google Analytics had a dearth of updates for some time after Urchin was bought by Google but said that they are on a tear now and he let the audience know about some upcoming features. (BTW, we'd post his prezo but Google now has a policy not to do this as one exec posted a prezo with numbers that were not for public consumption.)
One person in the audience asked if Google Analytics would launch heatmaps or tools to allow web managers to watch user interactions. Crosby indicated that while he thinks such tools are a cool idea, they are low on the his group's product roadmap.
Clicktale's screencast
That might be good news for Israel's Clicktale which today is announcing that it has raised a round of funding.
Alongside their announcement, Clicktale gave us some data to chew on:
+ While most web pages have a vertical scroll-bar, visitors scrolled all the way to the bottom in only 20% of the recorded visits.
+ Users scroll based on relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels.
+ The top and bottom of a web page are the most valuable areas in terms of visitor attention. Users spend an average of 24 seconds near the top and 14 seconds near the bottom as opposed to 8 seconds at the middle.
If you want to use Clicktale, it costs anywhere from $20 - $100 per month.
View - Clicktale site
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November 19, 2007
Former Yahoo Big Mandelbrot Raises $5M For Stealth Site Entertonement.com
Entertonement has secured about $5M in Series A funding, says PEWire. The Sausalito-based startup is led by David Mandelbrot, former VP and GM of media and entertainment at Yahoo. Mandelbrot was with Yahoo since 1999 and left in November 2005. He launched Right Size Media (aka Entertonment) in September 2007. Mandelbrot has hired as his SVP Alex Ellerson who was Head of Entertainment & Premium Content Partnerships, Video at Google and before that was at Yahoo for 6 years.
(an a:c reader points out a side note that Ellerson joins a couple of other folks who worked in the video group at Google who have left for startups. Howcast was founded by former Video Googlers Daniel Blackman and Jason Liebman).
We wrote about Entertonement last March when we learned that Fouad ElNaggar had founded the company while he was at UCLA business school. He is now an Associate with RedPoint Ventures.
Entertonement is pre-launch and at this point they just make elusive statements like: "focused on delivering the right content to the right audience with complete flexibility in the usage." Mashable followed up and said they liked what they saw. It now appears that ElNagar has teamed up with Mandelbrot.
View - beta site
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November 14, 2007
Simple Promo Widget Maker Gydget Raises First Round
It doesn't get much more simple than this. Gydget has created a widget maker that music stars, sports teams, etc. can use to promote their game days or concert dates. Fans then place the widgets on their MySpace pages. The San Francisco-based startup just announced that it had closed an undisclosed amount of Series A financing from SunBridge Partners with Felicis Ventures. Some source have put the amount of funding at $1M, indicating that the financing actually closed last August.
Gygdet competes with rivals Clearspring and RockYou!
Gydget is led by Gerardo Capiel, Founder and CEO. He had co-founded Digital Impact in 1997 and was the company's CTO. He had launched Attendio.com., a city events info provider that shuttered and morphed into Gydget.
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Press Release Source: Gydget
Gydget Closes Series A Financing
Tuesday November 13, 1:22 pm ET
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gydget announced today it closed its Series A round of venture financing led by SunBridge Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm, with additional investment by angel investors. Gydget will use the additional investment to accelerate development of its innovative social marketing platform.
“As Gydget continues to grow its user base from early adopters to major record labels, promoters, artist management firms and sports teams, we need to expand our team and infrastructure to meet market demands,” says Gerardo Capiel, Gydget founder and CEO. “This new round of funding allows us to advance our product roadmap and ensure we are at the forefront of helping our customers more effectively communicate with their fans across Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial, and other social networking platforms.”
“Less than a month after launching gydget.com, gydgets have been adopted by hundreds of new clients including college teams, record labels, artist management firms and artists themselves,” says Ken Ehrhart, General Partner at SunBridge Partners. “New customers such as Paul Oakenfold, Colbie Caillat, Nicole Schoezinger, Jo-Jo and the Auburn Tigers prove that gydgets are becoming integral to fan-based viral marketing strategies. With this round, Gydget will consolidate its position as the partner of choice for world-renowned talent.”
About Gydget:
Gydget provides a social marketing platform that allows music groups, sports teams, non-profits and other organizations to reach their audiences where they congregate most: at social networking and fan-based Web sites. Gydgets, the company's groundbreaking viral fan widgets, make it easy for promoters and bands to share event dates, box-office and merchandise links, news, videos and other information directly with fans and their friends who can, with a simple mouse click, add the gydgets to their personal profile pages, blogs and web sites. Gydget technology is used by many of the world's leading entertainers and sports teams including Beyoncé, Gwen Stefani, The Police, the Beastie Boys, the National Hockey League and the Oakland Raiders. Visit www.gydget.com for more information.
About SunBridge Partners:
SunBridge Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto, Cleveland and Tokyo. SunBridge uses a targeted, research-based approach to identify, invest in and foster leading technology companies pioneering innovations that catalyze dynamic, high-growth markets. SunBridge is a leading advocate of Software as a Service and Internet development through its investment in salesforce.com, the co-founding of salesforce Japan and Miracle Linux, SunBridge’s Open Source Development Network and the publishing of Japanese editions of sourceforge and Slashdot. Other examples of market leading companies within the SunBridge portfolio include Alien Technology—pioneer of low-cost RFID; GaiaX—a leader in private-label online communities; Flarion—broadband wireless innovator acquired by Qualcomm; and G-Mode—world’s first Java-based mobile game publisher. For more information about SunBridge Partners, visit sunbridgepartners.com.
Contact:
S&S Public Relations
Lisa Kornblatt, 847-415-9330
lkornblatt@sspr.com
Posted at 10:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 08, 2007
Forbes Officially Buys Clipmarks
Last August, Venturebeat reported that a Clipmarks insider had whispered that it was being bought by Forbes. It took some time but Forbes now says the deal is done and official. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. CNET indicates that the leak may have peaved Forbes and slowed the deal.
Clipmarks is a news site that enables members to clip and share parts of Web sites rather than just bookmarking them. The NYC-based startup was founded by a lawyer disgruntled with pasting citations from articles into Microsoft Word documents.
While Clipmarks is no doubt a useful tool, Forbes indicates that its editors will use Clipmarks as they browse the Web to show readers what they find interesting, which to us doesn't sound terribly interesting.
View - clipmarks site
Forbes Media Acquires Clipmarks
Popular Service Lets You Capture And Share Online Text, Images & Videos
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Forbes Media, the corporate parent of Forbes.com (www.forbes.com), announced today that it had acquired Clipmarks, a unique Web-clipping service that enables people to clip and share text and other content from Web pages. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Clipmarks’ free browser add-on application lets people clip text, images and videos from Web pages, and then save, blog, e-mail and print what they clip. Their site is home to a vibrant community of clippers who share and discuss their clips, among other uses.
Clipmarks joins the growing family of Forbes Web sites, which also includes Forbes.com, ForbesTraveler.com, ForbesAutos.com, Investopedia.com and RealClearPolitics.com.
In making the announcement, Forbes President and CEO Steve Forbes stated, “We’re very pleased to welcome Clipmarks to Forbes Media as we continue our pursuit of enhancing and growing the company. Web users will find Clipmarks’ technology extremely useful.”
“We’re very pleased to welcome Clipmarks to the Forbes family of sites,” said Jim Spanfeller, President & CEO of Forbes.com. “The technology offers our audience of affluent business decision-makers interesting additional content from around the Web, conveniently located in one place.”
Eric Goldstein, co-founder of Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com), will remain CEO of the Company. “In order for us to fulfill our mission of enabling people to capture and share information on the Web, it became clear that we needed additional resources and a great partner,” said Eric Goldstein. “We are excited to have found such a partner in Forbes and are more committed than ever to create better ways for people to connect with information.”
Forbes.com editors use Clipmarks technology across the Forbes.com site, clipping and posting content from other Web sites that they think site users might be interested in reading.
Forbes Media:
Forbes Media, LLC was formed in August 2006 as a result of an investment in Forbes by Elevation Partners, in which the private equity firm became a minority shareholder in a newly formed company, encompassing Forbes magazine, Forbes.com and other media properties. Forbes.com reaches in excess of 20 million people monthly. Forbes is the publisher of Forbes, the nation’s leading business magazine, and its international edition, Forbes Asia, which together reach a worldwide audience of nearly five million readers. Forbes.com is the company’s Internet business, which is the homepage for the world’s business leaders and the #1 business site on the Web. The company also publishes ForbesLife, and ForbesLife Executive Woman. Forbes also publishes local language editions, including Forbes Nihonban, Forbes Korea, Forbes China, Forbes Russia, Forbes Arabia, Forbes Israel, Forbes Poland and Forbes Turkey.
Forbes.com:
Forbes.com (www.forbes.com), home page for the world’s business leaders and the No. 1 business news source in the world, is among the most trusted resources for senior business executives, providing them the real-time reporting, uncompromising commentary, concise analysis, relevant tools and community they need to succeed at work, profit from investing and have fun with the rewards of winning. Throughout the business day Forbes.com publishes more than 3,000 articles, delivering the best of Forbes journalism and that of its selected partners with all the immediacy, depth and interactivity that the Web allows.
Affiliated sites include: ForbesTraveler.com, ForbesAutos.com, Investopedia.com and RealClearPolitics.com.
Clipmarks:
Clipmarks, headquartered in New York City, is changing the way people capture and share information on the Web. By creating tools that overcome the traditional limitations of copy/paste and bookmarking entire pages, Clipmarks is determined to make discovering and sharing web content more fun and efficient. Clipmarks is a recommended Firefox add-on and was recently named a Top 10 Future Classic Web Site by PC Magazine.
Posted at 10:12 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 22, 2007
Collegiate Professional Network Doostang Raises $3.8M
Doostang has raised $3.8M in first round funding from Shasta Ventures and Tugboat Ventures. The Palo Alto-based startup was founded by Stanford and MIT educated 20-somethings Mareza Larizadeh and Pavel Krapivin. When we last checked in with Doostang, Larizadeh told us that they havdraised a small amount of angel funding to date and were working on this round.
Doostang is an invite only Facebook of LinkedIn that initially targeted the just graduated or graduating elite college crowd. To market the business, Doostang works the elite college pages on Facebook and speaks at career day events at those schools. Doostang is still fairly small with about 300K members and 5000 jobs posted.
View - site
Read - Techcrunch
Posted at 11:05 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Blogging's Tumblr Raises $750K In 1st Round
New York-based Tumblr has raised $750K in a first round from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Tumblr is another blog tool. It follows in the footsteps of tools like Twitter in looking to make blogging simpler and easier. A calling card of Tumblr is that it aims to provide users with exceptional search engine optimization effects. So people are setting up Tumblr sites in 10 minutes for the purpose of getting search engine love for mother ship sites.
Take a tour
Read - SiliconValleyInsider
Read - Lifehacker
Posted at 01:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 18, 2007
Social Mapping Comes Together With Platial Buying Frappr
Portland, OR-based Platial has bought rival Frappr for its map making tool. Frapper had been bought earlier by Slide. Platial is financed by KeyNote Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Omidyar Network, Ram Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon, and Ron Conway among others. Frappr was bootstrapped. At this point, we don't know how much Platial paid.
Frappr Maps is free and can be embedded on any Web page that supports flash embeds, including MySpace, Friendster, Xanga and Hi5. "The merger makes Platial the leader in social mapping with more than 15MM unique users per month and 100MM user-generated location-based information points including photos, videos, reviews, stories and people."
Read - announcement
Posted at 07:13 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Social Media Closes $3.5M For Facebook Tools
Mill Valley, CA-based Social Media has raised $3.5M in its first round. The company is putting together tools to provide social analytics, monetization, and promotion for Facebook applications.
This round was led by Charles River Ventures. Angel investors who have backed Social Media include:
+ Marc Andreesen - Netscape co-founder.
+ Jim Bankoff - Former EVP Programming AOL
+ Ted Barnett - CEO of JamJam; co-founder and CEO of When.com; former COO of Ofoto
+ Jeff Clavier - Manager Director SoftTech VC
+ Naval Ravikant - Managing Director HitForge; author of VentureHacks; co-founder of Epinions
+ Tina Sharkey - Chairman & President, BabyCenter.com; co-founder of iVillage; former SVP Social Networking AOL
+ Jeremy Wenokur - Former VP Corp Dev, Google
+ George Zachary - Partner, Charles River Ventures
One of Social Media's tools is called Appsaholic which tracks Facebook app usage:
Social Media also owns Facebook app tool Trakzor.
Read - announcement
Posted at 10:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 09, 2007
GOOG Buys Twitter Rival Jaiku
Google today announced that it had paid an undisclosed amount for microblogging tool Jaiku. In buying Helskinki-based Jaiku, Google again shows that you don't have to be close to the Google nest in Mountain View to be of interest. Twitter captain Evan Williams who had sold his prior startup Blogger to Google and now finds himself competing against Mountain View. Google likes to have its PhDs and Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström has one.
Engeström
Read - Deal FAQ
Posted at 02:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 08, 2007
Blog Promotion Tool MadKast Raises $300K From Angels
Boulder, CO's MadKast says it has raised $300K in angel funding. This is the 2nd startup that we have seen that has come out of the TechStars incubation program to raise further funding. Madkast is a widget designed to encourage blog visitors to share and promote your site. MadKast encourages users to share content via e-mail, text message, instant message, and social bookmarking sites. Competitors might be ShareThis and AddThis.
The funding is thanks to EONBusiness Venture Capital, VC Brad Feld, David Cohen of TechStars, angel/politician Jared Polis, Paul Berberian of Raindance and Market Force Information, David Brown of ZOLL Data, and Mark Silverman at CTEK Boulder.
Read - Blog announcement via Techrockies
Posted at 07:35 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 01, 2007
Adobe Buys Web Word Processor Virtual Ubiquity
Adobe is turning some heads with its announcements today:
1) It is buying Web-based word processor Buzzword, which is made by Virtual Ubiquity.
2) Adobe added a new file sharing service to its current online document services, codenamed “Share.”
3) It expects to launch more Web-based applications so look for spreadsheets, and presentations to come.
Waltham, MA based Virtual Ubiquity had taken funding from Adobe's venture capital group. At this point there is no disclosure on the size of the buy-out. The company did take this as an opportunity to buy their domain Buzzword.com.
Buzzword uses Adobe Flex 2.0 as the development environment and Flash 9 as the runtime platform. The application is worthy of Adobe's high standards with beautiful typography, n-screen pagination, rich text, tables, and graphics. And friends, teachers, and colleagues can add comments right on the page.
It will be interesting to see who gets better distribution for their Web-based word processor: Google or Adobe? We tend to think that this is a very long term campaign against the dominance of MS Word but that residents of poorer countries will adopt first. Google has the fuller suite at this point and pushes their apps to all Gmail users - and it also has a big marketing efforts behind it - so we would put our money on Google at this point.
Read - Adobe announcement
Posted at 10:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 27, 2007
Mashery Flashes New Clients And Funding
To our mind APIs are driving the new Web economy. Web 2.0 endocrtination etols AJAX, openness, fremiums, and RSS but where would we be without Web APIs? It's hard to imagine that there are many new web business plans to do not include either grabbing or publishing APIs. Probably the biggest splash in tech this year came when Facebook opened its APIs.
So its no surprise that Mashery is trying to build a business by processing and quantifying APIs. San Francisco-based Mashery announced today that it has secured an undisclosed amount of new funding from Formative Ventures and The Accelerator Group, as well as additional funding from First Round Capital.
Mashery also announced some new customers including: FreeWebs, ZoomInfo, JamBase, and Thumbplay.
As Web APIs proliferate, there will certainly be a need for a company traffic cop this intersection and Mashery is well positioned as an independent force.
Read - announcement
Posted at 06:00 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 26, 2007
Angels Back VaultStreet Personal Financial Locker
Santa Monica, CA-based VaultStreet has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding. The pre-launch, invite-only site allows users to manage and share their various financial documents with tax preparers, financial planners, etc.
Founded in June 2006, the startup's CMO says they were able to reach their year 1 goals of just under $1.8M in revenue. He also says that VaultStreet plans to release its first product out of beta within 90 days aimed at partnerships with financial services providers such as brokerages and banking institutions.
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Posted at 07:52 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 17, 2007
Yahoo To Pay $350M For Zimbra
No sooner do we publish a post indicating that Wall Street wants Yahoo to scale back spending and figure out a new strategy and the company is caught doing another M&A deal. This time Yahoo is buying white-label open-source email/online calender/collaboration tool maker Zimbra for a reported $350M.
There are no flies on Zimbra. In fact, last May we added the company to our Mojo Found list for its deal with Comcast where Comcast email users would get to use Zimbra.
In April 2006, Zimbra won $14.5M in strategic series C funding led by Duff Ackerman & Goodrich with Sumitomo in as well. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Inventures Group were also back in the round.
There is already a round of applause to Yahoo for this deal but we have to return to the poor guys on Wall Street. If almost all of the Yahoo business units (save Flickr and Yahoo Answers) are losing traffic then there is something terribly wrong about the way Yahoo manages its content. We understand its purchase of Blue Lithium as that is a growing profit center but if Yahoo can't manage to retain visitors perhaps it should stop buying content application companies and figure out how to better manage the business it has.
Read - Zimbra blog announcement
Posted at 04:54 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 06, 2007
PE Firm Backs FirstBest Insurance 2.0 Startup
Pre-launch FirstBest says it is building a next gen, Web-based platform for property and casualty insurance companies. FirstBest has brought on a deep staff and raised funding from the PE Firm NextStage. The Lexington, MA-based company also has offices in NYC. FirstBest's founders are former executives of BEA Systems and partners of NextStage.
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Posted at 05:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 17, 2007
Jim Breyer Goes Hip Hop With GlobalGrind First Round
Accel Ventures has led a $4.5M Series A round in New York City-based Global Grind, says PEhub.The alpha invite-only stage startup appears to be a Netvibes clone, RSS-driven custom home page concept with a hip-hop edge. The startup has hip hop cred as it was founded by 3 founders of 360hiphop, which was acquired by BET Interactive. So start with a custom home page tool then build social networking off that and if it works Breyer will be hanging with Lil Wayne (maybe he does already).
Read - Tiffany Brown
Read - PeHub
Posted at 05:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 08, 2007
Adobe Funds Scrybe Calendar Maker
Boston-based Scrybe has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Adobe Systems and LMKR. The company which sports the ubiquitous Web 2.0 mirrored logo, is itself a ubiquitous Web 2.0 organizer calendar system. Founded in May 2004, Scrybe was founded by Shehryar Hydri and Faizan Buzdar.
Per the video, Scrybe has built a very nice calendar and list system that allows for both online and offline use.
We just heard this week from VCs we are decrying a frothy Series A market and this seems like a prime example. Hydri and Buzdar have built a lovely tool and they deserve to have buyers beating down there door. But why is this a good investment? How can we expect something like a bidding war for online calendars when there are so many of them and so few potential buyers? Per the investment, perhaps Adobe may end up buying Scrybe but to get a healthy valuation it requires other parties and fewer competitors.
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