Video - Tuesday, May 6, 2008
For The Love of GodTube: Investors Bless Startup With $30M
GodTube, a Christian online video sharing and social networking site, has raised $30M in funding from hedge fund GLG Partners, reports PaidContent. The deal gives GodTube a $150M valuation, and follows $2.5M in seed funding from angels led by Norm Miller of Interstate Batteries. GodTube was launched in the Spring of 2007 in Los Angeles by Christopher Wyatt (online student at Dallas Theological Seminary), Dr. Mike Miller (former Executive Pastor of First Baptist Dallas), Lloyd Chartrand (former CEO of Mentura), Michael Riddell (former EVP of New Product Development at Spark Networks), and Jason Martell (creator of Xfacts). Godtube's growth has been, well, miraculous, so we understand investor interest. A problem that we see is that the site's revenues are based on advertising. A look at their ads confirm that they have to be very restrictive about what they will show. We suspect that their eCPMs have got to be low, low, low. An interview with Godtube's founder. It was blocked on Godtube and could only be found on Youtube. View - site... Continue...
Advertising - Monday, May 5, 2008
StoryBids Launches Product Placement Marketplace
Irvine, CA-based Storybids launched a product placement marketplace where online video content creators can hook up with sponsors. Storybids say that they closed Series A in August 2007 from Toronto's STN Labs. Storybids contends that a reason that online video advertising has not taken off is that viewers skip past ads inserted into YouTube vids. By placing product placements into videos you take away that problem. That makes sense. The hard part will be for a startup like StoryBids to get the attention of product advertisers. It doesn't strike us as an immediately scalable concept. View - site... Continue...
Social Networking - Friday, May 2, 2008
Recommendation Site GoodRec Claws Towards $1M First Round
San Francisco-based GoodRec has put together $900K of a $1.05PEHub again. The site is by invite only at this point but its a service that provides content recommendations via the Web and mobile devices. It sounds like old hat so we will have to hold our breaths to see what UI magic they have developed to impress investors. The startup is led by Mihir Shah, Co-Founder and CEO, who was Sr Director, Product Management, at Yahoo! Search for over 4 years. View - site... Continue...
More Recent Articles
Plusmo First-Rounded For Mobile Widgets
Friday May 2, 2008
Santa Clara-based Plusmo has raised $4.41M in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, says PEhub. Plusmo launched in June 2006 with funding from the founders, several ex-Googlers including Felicis Investors' Aydin Senkut. Last summer, Plusmo launched 20K widgets for the iPhone. By Web widget standards, Plusmo is still not terribly big. Plusmo says they average about 10M mobile page views monthly. But they do have less competition so they should be well positioned in a couple of years. Plusmo has been successful at getting publishers to create widgets. View - site...
Sports and TV Apps For Facebook Maker Watercooler Raises $4M
Friday May 2, 2008
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. Watercooler plans to make a living primarily via advertising but also through media partnerships and selling...
Ruby's New Relic Raises $3.5M in First Round
Friday May 2, 2008
Menlo Park's New Relic has raised $3.5M in 1st round venture financing from Benchmark Capitall. New Relic is in beta but sells a subscription-based Rails performance management solution that enables developers to detect, diagnose and fix application performance bugs. New Relic was founded by Lewis Cirne, who was a an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. He got that role as he founded Wily Technology in 1998 and was its CEO for the first four years. View - site...
Bezos Puts $3M Into Online Gaming's Kongregate
Thursday May 1, 2008
Amazon's Jeff Bezos' VC arm has made a few investments recently including TeachStreet, ChaCha and Pelago. Now he has put $3M into Kongregate. We have covered Kongregate in the past and think they have tremendous promise as they have won a strong following of developers. And users are locked in. According to comScore’s February report, Kongregate users stay on the site an average of 59.3 minutes per day and play more than 4 games at a time. Other data points that they release: the site gets over 3M monthly unique visitors. With a monthly growth rate over 25%. Kongregate says it expects to reach more than 10M unique visitors by the end of 2008. The most popular game on the site, Desktop Tower Defense, has been played more than 2.6M times. Kongregate Games Sampler Prior investors include Greylock Partnersand angels Reid Hoffman, Joe Kraus, Jeff Clavier; and Richard Wolpert. View - site...
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