June 11, 2007
Lejit To Close $3.3M Round For Favorites Sharing
A number of companies are pushing the boundaries of user's willingness to surrender privacy. We had thought that MyBlogLog pushed he envelope on privacy but two startups that we cover today - Lejit and Me.dium take it a step further.
We had covered Lejit when it raised more than $900K in VC and angel funds. We now learn that it plans to close on a $3.3M venture round in this month. Investors have included Colorado Fund, Brad Feld, Seth Goldstein and Paul Berberian. This is nothing for CEO Todd Vernon who had raised $150M when he was at Raindance Communications.
Louisville-based Lijit Networks provides a search tool that bloggers place on their blogs so that readers can search that blogger's bookmarks, blogroll and site.
VC Josh Kopelman is apparently obsessed with Nick Denton and Paula Abdul
Lejit tells us the Kopelman installed Lejit 2 weeks ago and Fred Wilson launched his Legit before that. Does that mean they are a new Lejit investors? We'll have to see.
From what we see here, Kopelman is also interested in a pre-launch startup called PopCluster.
View - site
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Another Netvibes/Pageflakes Entrant: Jared Polis Funds Confluence Commons
Boulder, CO-based Confluence Commons is creating a "consumer-oriented content aggregation" Web site that it says will look and feel like Pageflakes and Netvibes.
The startup is founded and funded by Jared Polis - who creating and sold BlueMountainArts.com and ProFlowers.com which sold for a combined amount of over $1B.
View - site
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
From VC To Fashionista. Asim Abdullah Buys Ungaro
We have seen VCs and tech founders get into the film business, wine, and real estate but we haven't seen fashion. Asim Abdullah of Atherton bought the French fashion house Ungaro for a reported $84M in 2005 and it attempting a turnaround. Abdullah says he wants Ungaro to update its designs to appeal to a broader, younger market, and to offer more in the way of accessories.
Asim Abdullah is a Partner with Global Access Capital. Abdullah was founder and CEO of VEO Systems, which was acquired by CommerceOne in 1999. Abdullah remained with CommerceOne through its IPO in 2000. Prior to VEO, he co-founded eTrust, a Web security authentication service.
Says Abdullah: "To tell the truth, I was getting a little bored with technology. It wasn't enough for me. We went with through such a high with the dot-com revolution. ... When you get done with that roller coaster and you're asked to ride the bunny train, it's not that fun."
Abdullah with his wife Isha
Read - The fixer (SF Gate)
Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Pre-launch Iggli Angel Funded For Music Social Network
Pre-launch, Boulder, CO-based iggli (formerly Vault Alliance) says it plans to marry social networking with music services. iggli plans to launch in fall 2007. The startup was founded last October.
iggli is aimed at 13- to 24-year-olds, a demographic the founder says is somehow underserved. iggli plans to gather music and make it available for downloading with discussion area omung friends. "Think MySpace meets iTunes," founder Tom Higley says. The 10-employee company hasn't raised VC but angel investors so far include Higley and fellow board members Niel Robertson (CTO at Newmerix) and Howard Diamond. Higley isn't saying how much the trio has put in. Higley had previously founded network infrastructure company StillSecure.
View - site
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Cisco Invests In Israel's P2P Startup Oversi
Petach Tikva, Israel-based Oversi has received funding from Cisco as part of an extended second round of funding, totaling $8M, led by Carmel Ventures together with StageOne Ventures and TempoPark Fund.
Oversi sells its technology to ISPs, which are struggling to cope with increasing bandwdith demands from P2P video on demand and P2P TV.
View - announcement
Posted to Networking | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
FastSoft Funded To Speed WAN Traffic
FastSoft says that one of the major drawbacks of the TCP protocal is that even minor glitches in the network can make connections very sluggish because it is designed to slow down whenever packet loss is detected. To speed up corporate WANs, FastSoft sells appliances that sit between your LAN switch and your firewall which modify TCP to get around such slugishness.
FastSoft's patented technology tracks the delay between packet transmission times and the time it takes to receive acknowledgment. It then fine tunes packet transmission rates to match network congestion. While maintaining a steady data transmission pace, which increases throughput, packets don't need to be retransmitted, thereby doubling throughput, FastSoft claims.
By way of example, the company says that one of its beta sites, Honda, used to require 16 minutes to transmit a large CAD file, but now it only takes them 30 seconds."
Today, Monrovia, CA-based FastSoft has raised $4M in Series A funding led by Miramar Venture Partners.
View - site
Posted to Networking | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Data Domain Seeks $700M Valuation In IPO
Santa Clara-based Data Domain, which makes storage appliances for backup and network-based disaster recovery, has set its proposed IPO terms to 7.39M common shares being offered at $11.50 - $13.50 per share. At the high point, Data Domain would be valued at almost $700M.
Founded in 2001, DataDomain plans to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol DDUP, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as co-lead underwriters. Data Domain has raised around $41M in VC funding since 2002. The company had 2006 revenues of $46M with surging growth.
DataDomain investors Pre-IPO Stake
Greylock Partners 30.3%
New Enterprise Associates 28.9%
Sutter Hill Ventures 16.8%
View - site
Posted to | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
WiFi Funded To Hotspot Your Digital Camera
Pre-launch Eye-Fi says that when you pop in its card into your digital camera and configure its software, if you enter a WiFi hotspot your photos will be auto transferred to your computer or straight to Flickr. While there are several makes of WiFi enabled cameras from Nikon and others, Eye-Fi is targeting the millions of cameras in peoples hands that were not made for WiFi.
WiFi cards slot into your SD connection point, although only 60% digital cameras have the SD port. You should be able to pick up a WiFi card for $100 in the Fall.
Eye-Fi announced today that raised $5.5M in a first round from Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures. The company is led by Yuval Koren who was with Cisco.
View - site
Posted to Wireless | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Pixtronix Gets $20M For Mobile Video Display
Wilmington, MA-based Pixtronix has raised $20M in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Gold Hill Capital, Atlas Venture and Kleiner Perkins. Pixtronix says that its displays deliver 2x the color gamut vs. competitors.
Founder, Nesbitt Hagood, developed piezoelectric technology at MIT that can convert mechanical vibrations into electrical pulses. In 1998 he launched Continuum Control which developed a tennis racket that dampens vibrations following a volley.
View - site
Posted to Video | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Social Widget Me.dium Raises $15M
Boulder, CO-based Me.dium has raised $15M in Series B. Commonwealth Capital Ventures led the deal, and was joined by return backers Spark Capital, Appian Ventures and VC Brad Feld. The startup is led by Kimbal Musk (brother of Paypal founder Elon Musk), who was a founder of Zip2, which he sold to Compaq. Musk is currently on the boards of Space X, Tesla Motors; Keith Glen Media; and ProgressNow.org.
We suspect that Me.dium took on increased interest from investors after comparable StumbleUpon was bought by eBay. Like Stumbleupon, Me.dium monitors your browsing and maps that data to what other Me.dium users are viewing, then makes recommendations. An additional twist is that you can IM people on Me.dium who share your tastes and interests.
View - site
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
ESPN In Cricket Mood With Buyout of Cricinfo
Cricinfo.com claims about 7M monthly users to its site, making it the world's largest of its kind. Founded in 1993, publishes stats on all 3K international and 45K first class cricketers to have played the game. The business also launched a print magazine companion.
Today, Disney-owned ESPN says it would buy Cricinfo for an undisclosed amount. This comes after Cricinfo gots its start with a few years of bootstrapping, Cricinfo received its first major investment in 1999 from Sify, an Indian IT company, which acquired a majority stake in the company. It changed hands four years later when the Wisden Group, which then ran its own cricket website, wisden.com, bought Crickinfo.
Read - ESPN Buys CricInfo announcement
Posted to Media | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
June 10, 2007
Sharper Image Founder Launches Online Competitor RichardSolo.com
Sometimes successful company founders should know when to fold them. Case in point is Richard Thalheimer who founded Sharper Image and has now founded an eCommerce site called Richard Solo that painfully displays that Thalheimer doesn't understand modern eCommerce.
Thalheimer founded Sharper Image and built the company into a chain of nearly 200 stores nationwide. But last fall, after several years of poor sales, he was forced out as chairman and CEO under pressure from the board. To add insult to injury, the board cut more than $3M from his severance package to offset gains he made in previous years from favorably-priced stock options. Thalheimer then sold all of his shares, pulling down $25M.
Richard Solo is an ugly site that has now competitive advantages. You can find better prices on Amazon, eBay or Froogle and you can discover cooler gadgets via Gizmodo or Engadget. We almost feel sorry for the guy, trying to stick it to his old company but making an inept attempt at it.
View - site
Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
June 09, 2007
NexTag Enjoys $1.2B Valuation In Buyout
San Mateo-based Nextag has sold two-thirds of its equity to private equity firm Providence Equity Partners for $830M, valuing the company at $1.2B. Prior investors Morgenthaler Ventures and management will continue to own stakes. Its seems a market fair valuation for a company that likely did more than $200M in revenues last year and has been profitable for ages. The company was founded back in 1999 so there surely was some motivation to gain liquidity after all these years.
Nextag Founder/CEO Purnendu Ojha
NexTag is one of the largest comparison shopping business on the Web. NexTag makes a good living both through advertising and by charging retailers for directing leads to their site. The company grew substantially through the sale of leads of items like mortgages and student loans.
Despite its impressive revenues, NextTag was apparently not viewed as a buyout candidate of strategic importance - as online ad companies have been viewed of late. Apparently, Nextag also was not feeling the love from Wall Street to take the company public. Providence Equity and Nextag ownership clearly believe that they can replay the huge, quick profit that Hellman & Friedman made from the planned $3.1B pending sale of DoubleClick to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).
Most of NextTag's competitors have already been bought, which we would think we up its valuation. These include: MySimon, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and Shopzilla.
Comparison Engines and Gigagom teamed on this nice graph. Many of these deals are very old, but it illustrated how consistently valuable comparison shopping has been.
View - site
Read - Wall Street Journal Post
Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
June 08, 2007
This Week In Euro Tech Ventures
Investments
+ German Digg clone Yigg.de financed.
+ Amsterdam's Bliin funded for GPS-based blogging.
+ Manchester's LiveLink funded for raw video portal.
+ VCs lining up behind Seatwave vs Viagogo to be best Stubhub clone.
+ Berlin startup called Dreifach Einfach (Triple Easy) fits city tours into little red multimedia box.
+ Paris-based eCommerce business Vente-Privee.com employs more than 600 people and is on track for €300M in sales this year. The company sold a 20% stake to Summit Partners.
+ French online travel's Go Voyages raises Euros55M for buyout.
+ Optogan has raised €5M to finance the development of LEDs that will compete with bulbs on price.
+ London's GreenVoice Social Network wins funds for enviro activism.
+ Bertelsmann invests in mobile social network developer Qeep.
+ Ireland's Adaptive Mobile in $14M round for wireless security.
News and analysis
+ Mashing up its own wireless data network that exploits a ubiquitous radio protocol in ships and Google maps is the business of Vesseltracker.com. This early stage company based in port city Hamburg is off to fast start selling subscriptions.
+ Hot Betas: Ziki, Steek, Sclipo, and 5min.
+ Beyond the consumer internet: 10 ideas for tech startups.
Posted to News & Updates | Permalink
Poker All-Star Angel Invests In Video Widget Startup Splashcast
It's nice to know that one of your angel investors tends to win. Poker ace Phil Hellmuth is now using SplashCast (he's pretty entertaining) to video blog from this year’s World Series of Poker. Hellmuth is also joined Splashcast's angel investors. The company has raised $2M to date and says it is looking to close Series A by the end of the year.
Splashcast riffs off of YouTube but is better for programming. So if you subscribe to Hellmuth on poker and you accessed it via some random poker blog, you will get updated versions of the Hellmuth at the event. If you were using YouTube you'd get whatever version they posted at the time.
Read - NewTeeVee Post
Posted to Video | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Report: PeerWisdom Funded For Patient Info Sharing
Pre-launch PeerWisdom.com has been launched by two former Amazon.com executives. The site is intended to connect consumers with pertinent disease and health care information.
One of the founders is Ruben Ortega, the former CTO of Amazon.com's A9 search engine.
The Seattle PI cites a source familiar with the company said that PeerWisdom recently raised about $2M in angel financing, though executives declined to comment.
Read - Venture Capital: Startup to get patients talking
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
MobileMax Preps Israel IPO
Israeli's MobileMax launched it IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE). The company has raised NIS 24M (roughly $6M) at a company value of NIS 100M (or $20M).
Founded in 2004, the company sells software and hardware that enable low-cost international calls from mobile telephones in leu of calling cards. Mobilemax's two product lines are;
+ An electronic calling card in the form of a plug connected to the data port of the mobile phone. Functioning as a calling card, the plug diverts costly calls through low cost service providers.
+ A downloadable application installed on the subscriber’s SmartPhone, diverting international calls through calling service providers. This application is applicable with most SmartPhones based on Windows, Symbian & Palm OS.
View - site
Posted to Wireless | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Mojo Watch: Solazyme, Pixsy, Revver, Nanosolar, Metrofi, eEye Digital
Mojo Found
+ VC-backed Pixsy will be indexing Photobucket photos using Pixsy search engine. Pixsy partnerships include iStockPhoto, PureVideo and SuperStock. Pixsy also indexes images for ABC and CNN.
.
+ Solazyme, which turns algae into transportation fuel, has signed a contract to supply oils to Imperium Renewables, the fast growing biodiesel refiner.
+ Security and compliance software company Postini may be doing an IPO on $75M in revenues.
Mojo Lost
+ YouTube competitor Revver let go its CEO as troubles mount.
+ VC-backed Nanosolar loses its Chief Scientist and an analyst calls it significant.
+ Metrofi. More bad news for WiMax as Metrofi's rollout in Portland, OR was panned.
+ Shortly after hiring a new CEO, eEye Digital Security is laying off many of its employees.
+ Video tagging service Click.tv has shut down.
Posted to News & Updates | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Vid Game Pioneer Signs On with Video Ads' NeoEdge
Famed video game pioneer has put his stamp of approval on video game advertising by taking the Chairman position of NeoEdge Networks. Bushnell had founded Atari (we also learn that he founded Chuck E Cheese.)
Mountain View-based NeoEdge Networks has just secured $3M of an $8M Series B round. Return backers include Jefferson Partners and Vimac Ventures.
NeoEdge has launched the MostFun.com Game Network - a consumer destination site for casual games. But its primary business is its white label program for third party gamer sites. To date the business has been focussed on building its ad server and doesn't boast of partnership wins.
Founded in 2002, Neodge's business has become a hot sector with Microsoft buying competitor Massive and plenty of other startups gaining venture funding.
View - site
Posted to | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Do You Trust Your Haddock? CleanFish Raises Funding.
San Francisco-based CleanFish has raised $2.1M in Series A funding led by Mindful Capital Partners. Cleanfish is a sourcer and distributor of "substainably-produced seafood."
We have to say they are good at making your mouth water. Here are their current selections:
+ Hooker’s Haddock of Cape Cod.
+ Wreckfish: (Atlantic Stone Bass). Succulent sea bass from the Charleston Bump area. "These fish are caught in a way that causes no destruction of bottom habitat and leaves no discarded by-catch."
+ Sockeye Salmon: Comes from the Lummi Island reefnetters who fish the Pugent Sound/Fraser River ecosystem
+ Loch Duart Salmon. Loch Duart was recently awarded the prestigious Gold medal for Best Food in The London Daily Telegraph’s Taste of Britain Awards
+ Queen Conch. "CleanFish partners with C Farms to offer the only fresh Queen Conch available in the US. Queen Conch meat, ranging from white to pale golden orange with purple speckles, is delicious raw or flash-cooked, when it picks up a slight nutty nuance."
View - site
Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Swedish Nanoradio - Chipmaker To WiFi - Raises $27M
Sweden's Nanoradio, which makes chips for low power WiFi (W-LAN) on cell phones and other consumer devices, has raised $27M. Investors are the Norwegian firm, Ferd Venture, together with the previous investors: Nordic Venture Partners, Innovacom, Teknoinvest and Industrifonden.
Founded in March 2004, Nanoradio's chipset targets demand for mobile VoIP. Demand is being driven by fixed-to-cellular convergence. The technology is supported by standards such as UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). In addition to mobile VoIP, Nanoradio's applications include wireless headsets.
View - site
Posted to Semiconductors | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
RocketShip Maker XCOR Gains Angel Funding
Boston harbor Angels have invested in Xcor Aerospace t support development of XCOR's new suborbital vehicle. Mojave, CA-based XCOR XCOR has been developing rocket engines for space travel. The company is building a vehicle capable of taking one pilot and one passenger on a suborbital round trip. To date the company says it has been primarily funded from customer contracts and angel investors. Angel investors in XCOR Aerospace include Esther Dyson, Stephen Fleming, Aneel Pandey, Joe Pistritto and Lee Valentine.
XCOR was recently awarded a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase 1 contract from the Air Force to design and analyze a rocket-powered vehicle that will reach 200,000 feet altitude and supersonic speeds. Using private investment matched with USAF resources XCOR will construct an all-rocket powered vehicle that will fly suborbital missions for the Air Force SBIR.
XCOR will compete with a number of other well known commercial space travel companies, including those being launched by Virgin's Richard Branson and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Read - announcement
Posted to Aircraft | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Limelight IPO Above Range
Akamai-rival Limelight Networks has the Internet video craze to thanks for its smooth IPO. It raised about $240M, priced 16M shares at $15 per share under the symbol LLNW.
Limelight raised $130M in VC funding last year from Goldman Sachs, which owned a 45.2% pre-IPO stake and Oak Investment Partners at 9.2%.
Revenue in 2006 came in at $64.343M as compared to 2005 at $21.3M . Cost of revenue for 2006 was $35.978M as compared to 2005 at $11.888M.
Posted to Networking | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
June 07, 2007
Former AOL CEO Running Laser Startup
Barry Schuler, who was CEO of Time Warner's AOL unit until 2003, has raised $25M in VC funding for his his laser startup Raydiance and has recruited former Senator Bill Bradley to join the board. The startup is very early stage but is looking to get going with military and surgical applications by both making faster lasers and making them much smaller. The company says it recently won a $10M contract with the US Navyaser applications that most likely will be deployed in remote sensing systems..
Florida-based Raydiance took out a 17K sq foot office in Petaluma, fairly close to Schuler's winery and is staffing up there.
The current team is a second-generation executive group for Raydiance, which was founded four years ago in Orlando, partially funded with grants from the defense agency. Making a decision to pursue commercial markets as well as military business, Raydiance obtained about $10M in Series A and B equity funding. Among its investors are Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Barry Schuler
The company says it has been in semi-stealth mode but says it can now deliver the benefits of short-pulse laser technology from an inexpensive, rackmount-sized product that operates on standard 110 V power. Up to this point, a commercially available short-pulse laser would be laboratory scale size, require special power and cooling and could only be operated by pros. The Raydiance system is designed to be software-controlled, which reduces human intervention.
Read - Is This Really The Next Big Thing? (BusinessWeek)
Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Ireland's AdaptiveMobile Raises $14M Against Mobile Spam And Other Fresh Deals
Investments
+ PARIS, FRANCE Vente-Privee.com sold a 20% stake to Summit Partners (Members-only offsale event online)
+ AUSTIN, TX StorSpeed has raised $13M in Series A funding (Network storage performance)
+ HUNT VALLEY, CA Reactive Nanotechnologies has closed $10.5M of a $17M Series C round led by Siemens Venture Capital (Nano-scale furnaces for soldering)
+ DUBLIN, IRELAND AdaptiveMobile has raised $14M in 2nd-round funding (Mobile security software)
Posted to News & Updates | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Former Clif Bar CEO Angel Funded To Stick It To Chuck E. Cheese
Former Clif Bar CEO Sheryl O'Loughlin
We heard from a pal today who was complaining about the poor quality of Chuck E. Cheese pizza. Even his kids don't like it. So we are receptive to a new venture being launched by Sheryl O'Loughlin, former CEO of Berkeley-based Clif Bar. Despite being a huge success as CEO, O'Loughlin was asked to leave recently when the company's founder and owner decided he wanted to come back from retirement. O'Loughlin took some time off to travel in South American where she developed the idea for a startup she calls Blue Sky Family.
Because it's a slow burn operation, the venture is not a good candidate for VC funding, so O'Loughlin has lined up $300K so far from angels and she has put in $100K out of her own pockets. She says she will need $3M to open the first venue. The goal is to open in 4 additional locations in 5 years. They're targeting Danville, Palo Alto and Fremont.
Blue Sky would be a healthier alternative to Chuck E Cheese with lighter food and less dark atmosphere. Sports, crafts, and dancing would replace Chucks' video games.
The a:c's take: this idea is a winner and so is O'Loughlin. Its just too bad that it will take so long for Chuck E Cheese to feel the heat. (We don't know O'Laughlin but know people who worked for her at Clif.)
Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
How Fast Is Your Idiot Son Driving?
Spying on your kids is becoming easier and easier. A Vancouver company called Guardian Mobile Monitoring is selling this GPS beacon that you can place in your car, coupled with software that allows you to keep track of the car. It also tells you how fast the car is moving and you can even set up alerts to text message your phone if your kid is exceeding the speed limit.
Guardian Mobile Monitoring Systems has closed the first tranche of its Series B round with over $3M. BC Advantage Funds led the deal, and was joined by Canadian and American angels. In addition to products that help you track your kids, Guardian also markets products to track your parts and physical assets. This is becoming a pretty competitive field - what is not? So Guardian success will be built on quality marketing.
View - site
Posted to Wireless | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Chinese Wireless Chip-maker Spreadtrum Files $100M IPO
Shanghai-based wireless chip maker Spreadtrum Communications has filed for a $100M IPO on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol SPRD, with Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers as co-led underwriters.
It looks to us like this IPO well do well. Founded in 2001, Spreadtrum went into mass production in 2006. From 2003 to 2006, revenues have surged from $2.4M to $107.1M and the company reached profitability in the first quarter of 2006.
Shareholders Pre-IPO stake
New Enterprise Associates 24.24%
Fortune Venture Group 11.61%
Pacific Venture Partners 7.7%
View - site
Posted to Semiconductors | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
WhiteFence Buys-Out Competitor ConnectUtilities
Houston-based WhiteFence and Baton Rouge-based ConnectUtilities offer similar Web-based pricing comparisons and ordering services for folks have have just moved and require residential hookups such as home telephone, high-speed Internet, natural gas and cable television. Both services will save you time and then they get a reward from the utilities for doing the matchmaking.
WhiteFence said the deal was made possible by a recently completed second round of funding, having raised $14M led by new investor Chicago-based Adams Street Partners. But at this point the companies are not saying how much was raised.
View - site
Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Chinese In-Game Ad Network Captiv8 Gets $1M Funding
Captiv8 says it has closed $1M in series A funding led by Qiming Venture. The startup was founded by former ESPN China ad executives in 2004. Last September, Tencent's popular QQ Game used Captiv8's platform for hosting China E-Sport Games. Tencent's instant-messaging platform QQ regularly sees more than 25M concurrent users, and its integrated QQ Game platform saw a peak of 3M concurrent users this March.
Captiv8's chief competitor is InGameAd Interactive. Also, Shanghai-based Asian gamevertising firm GameGlance announced in January that it had received a $2M investment. And Shanda says it is developing an in-game advertising platform and may soon form a joint venture with Shenzhen-based 4A Advertising Agency to further its in-game advertising business.
Read - China Web 2.0 Review
Posted to Games | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Infinera Storms Out of IPO Gate
What an IPO for Sunnyvale-based Infinera. The stock is up nearly 40% as of this posting. The company sells digital optical networking systems and raised $128M in its IPO. Infinera priced 14M common shares at $13 per share, above the $10-$12 range), which gave it a market cap of approximately $1B at the start of the day but is now well above that.
Infinera is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol INFN, with Goldman Sachs as the lead underwriter. It had raised over $336M in total VC funding since 2000.
Major shareholders & Their Pre-IPO stake
Advanced Equities 9.3% pre-IPO
Kleiner Perkins 9.3%
Mobius Venture Capital 7.8%
For 2006, Infinera said its net loss increased to $89.1M from $64.6M in the previous year, while revenue increased to $58.7M from $4.1M.
Posted to Networking | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
YP Pays $12M For LiveDeal
YP Corp. (OTCBB:YPNT), which operates Internet Yellow Pages sites has bought out online local classifieds site LiveDeal for $12M in an all stock deal. LiveDeal shareholders received 15,968,514 shares of YP common stock.
LiveDeal was founded in 2003 by Rajesh Navar, an early member of eBay’s engineering team. In October 2005, LiveDeal.com raised $4.9M in series B funding so a $12M buyout is non mind blowing but is not too shabby either. Investors were Canadian media company Torstar Corp., Draper Richards, and individual investors.
A challenge for LiveDeal is that there is so much competition in classifieds, as there should be. Classifieds is a $30B sector and is the 3rd largest Internet ad category, with 18% of online ad spending says the IAB. In addition to the stalwarts like eBay and Craigslist, LiveDeal has faced newer innovating startups like Edgeio and Oodle.
View - LiveDeal site
Read - announcement
Posted to | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Video Online Recruiting's Standout Jobs
Standout Jobs gets in touch to let us know that they have recently closed CDN$1.5M in seed and angel financing from Garage Technology Ventures Canada and Brudder Ventures. The site's functionality is pre-launch but the sneak peak that they give us is conceptually impressive. We are easy to please as we agree the the online job search and recruiting field is ugly.
StandoutJobs wants to bring social media and video to the field. Its founders offer a video where they are looking to recruit techs to join their site. Once you see it, video recruiting is a natural. Even the most impressive companies put out stale, uninspiring job posts. Video jobs posts will force recruiters to show who they are and what they want.
View - site
Posted to Video | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
ContentNext Bags Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer of CBS Marketwatch fame has joined the board of VC-backed ContentNext, which publishes sites like PaidContent.org and MocoNews. This news comes about a month after Heather Harde, former SVP of M&A at Fox Interactive Media was named CEO of TechCrunch. Gigaom is next up to tap a big media face.
Rafat Ali
Why would someone like Larry Kramer want to associate with ContentNext?
+ Far more upside than joining the board of a dead wood publisher.
+ When Rupert Murdoch owns it all, readers will seek outlets that have independent expression.
+ With the success of its conference series, ContentNext has the ear of the top global media heads.
Here is why ContentNext may be a big media acquisition in 2008 or so:
+ They have taken funding so require some liquidity event.
+ They have been schooling the blogosphere for some time, since 2002 to be exact.
+Like CBS's buyout of video blogging site ContentNext could introduce needed Web journalism DNA to a media conglomerate.
+ Prestigious conference series to rival Wall Street Journal's D.
Read - story
Posted to Media | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Wireless Dating Startup MeetMoi Spins The Wall Street Journal
We read a Wall Street Journal article this morning and were disappointed at the lazy reporting. We wondered why the story focussed on a startup called MeetMoi. It turns out that MeetMoi raised a round of funding today ($1.5M in first round financing led by Acadia Woods Partners).
The reason we thought the article was lazy was that there are a number of fast growing mobile dating sites that are well ahead of MeetMoi but the New York-based startup got all the attention. Must be a New York thing. We would call attention to London-based Flirtomatic, or Seattle-based Crush or Flush, which has just closed a $7.2M round.
To be fair, the WSJ names some competitors:
+ Match.com, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp which is about to launch its mobile biz.
+ Zogo, owned by Wireless Introduction Network of Englewood, NJ
+ Jumbuck Entertainment's Fast Flirting service
Read - Finding a date on the spot (WSJ)
Posted to Wireless | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Wine Review Network Snooth Launches W/Angel Funding
If we were as discerning as many wine aficionados, we would not rate Snooth highly. The site looks fine and has data on just about any bottle that we entered but we fail to understand why it is helfpul. We do a search on Kazmer and Blaise Pinots and we get one person's review. We can post our own review but it feels like a tree falling in the woods. The trouble with wine is that there are so many brands and years that it is very tough for a startup to get a critical mass of reviews. Snooth says it has pages for 300K wines and has has accumulated 1.4M wine ratings. A Digg like site that focussed on the most interesting bottles and themes for the masses might be more interesting.
Snooth has just launched after having raised some angel funding ($300K raised in 2/07. Snooth does not sell wine, but has partnered with several leading wine merchants, such as Astor Wines & Spirits, Wine.com and K&L Wine Merchants to enable its users to buy wine. It also provides a direct link to 300 wine brands sold by top wineries through its partner Inertia Beverage Group.
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Social Shopping's This Next Gains More Funding
It doesn't take much time spent on ThisNext to realize that this is the future of eCommerce. The site has a look that will impress big spending urban shoppers and just like their time spent on Facebook or LinkedIn, they can network with like shoppers.
If you have spent time on metrosexual shopping sites like CoolHunting, then you will be in familiar territority with ThisNext and in fact ThisNext powers shopping for CoolHunting.
Santa Monica's ThisNext has raised a round of venture debt. The funding comes via Western Technology The startup had previously raised equity funding Clearstone Venture Partners.
View - site
Read - ThisNext Raises Round Of Venture Debt (SocalTech profile)
Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
June 06, 2007
Brijit Set To Launch "Future Of Journalism" Site
Mountain View-based Brijit, an angel-financed, online media company with teams based in Washington, DC, Silicon Valley and Beijing is close to launching. The Company was founded in 2006 and employs a distributed team of editors and writers. Brijit.com is currently in QA testing for launch and boasts that it will represent the future of journalism.
View - site
Posted to Media | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
This Week In Tech Jobs
Post your job here.
+ Business Intelligence Product Manager - Portal YAHOO! Santa Monica, CA
+ Online Marketing Director Red Ventures Charlotte, NC
+ Director, Web Analytics Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, CA
+ Web Analytics Manager Apple Cupertino, CA
+ Client Services Manager FeedRoom New York, NY
+ MySQL DBA/Engineer Six Apart San Francisco, CA
+ Mobile Application Engineer Six Apart San Francisco, CA
+ Project Manager IT Encore Capital Group San Diego, CA
Jobs are shared across a network of top technology sites including alarm:clock, tech:gigger and ReadWriteWeb.
Also, check our job blog at tech:gigger for these deals:
+ Marketing VP for SF's Keibi
+ Vice President, Network Operations For LinkedIn
+ Direct Marketing For Digg
+ Home Decor Software's Swatchbox Needs VP Engineering
+ Head Engineering In Honolulu For Funded Widget Startup Chipin
+ Ad Sales Head For Global TV/Internet Co. JumpTV
Posted to Jobs | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
In-store Local TV Network Danoo Raises Funding
Still in semi-stealth mode, Danoo says it has raised funding from top tier VCs, is rolling out product for testing, and is hiring up.
Danoo was launched by ex-McKinsey consultant David Liu. The idea is to offer stores an LCD screen that can be hung in a store window to enable retailers to promote their goods from a distance or in cafes to entertain customers. The monitors hang on walls behind counters at eateries and in other venues, with a screen divided roughly in thirds. One-third of the display is devoted to advertising, menus or other features for the store in which it’s located, while the larger section displays outside advertising and promotional content.
Earlier this month, Danoo posted on MyLocalBands.com to entice musicians to submit upcoming gig information and promotional materials, which the company said it would display on its network of screens, called DanooTV.
Says Danoo: "We will install a danooTV in your store, and (if you need) provide you with internet service and WiFi that you can offer your customers. We'll also show you how launch your danooTV promotions and advertisements, all for FREE."
Danoo will compete with other in-store video advertising companies like Captivity Network, but it appears that Danoo will take more of a local advertising and content angle.
View - site
View - DanooTV
Posted to Advertising | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
