August 28, 2007
SeatSmart Raises Angel Round For Meta Ticket Buying Search
NYC-based SeatSmart says it has raised an angel round of funding for its event ticket search engine. Seatsmart can be used to search for tickets across Stubhub, Razorgator, eBay, Craiglist and elsewhere. We put the system through the motions and it does appear to produce an impressive list of responses, although sakes alive it takes some time to search. On the other hand it would take much longer to hunt and peck around the net to find the perfect seats for Stevie Wonder.
Smart was founded in September 2006 by founder and CEO Larry Kokoszka. The secondary ticket market has been a boon to investors and this seems like this is a logical extension.
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BabyCenter Buys Maya's Mom
Johnson & Johnson's Palo Alto-based BabyCenter has bought Maya’s Mom for an undisclosed amount. The site is a social network for - you guessed it - moms. It is led by Ann Crady who was with Yahoo.
BabyCenter has a great reputation amongst mom's but we wonder if Maya's Mom can be a dominant site. We have seen the rise in a number of small but local mommy networks. With platforms like Ning making it easy for any local group of moms to do what Maya's Mom does, while keeping it among friends, it could be rough going for a single social network for moms to stand out.
Palo Alto-based Maya's Mom raised $1M in angel funding from angels Yahoo's Caterina Fake and Jeff Ralston, Tickle founder James Currier, Jeff Clavier and True Ventures.
Read - PaidContent
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VoIP's Jaxtr Raises $8M A Round
Jaxtr has raised a $10M Series A round and the company now claims to have 1M users. Jaxtr is a VoIP startup that markets voice to social networks and blogs. jaxtr users can link their phones to their sites or social network page to receive calls, voice messages while keeping phones numbers private.
We imagine there will be all sorts of uses discovered for services like Jaxtr but clearly it is great for online dating. Founded in September 2005, Jaxtr comes with a fair number of features. Users can choose the phone where you receive your calls and they can block callers or specify on a per-caller basis who can ring your phone and who gets routed to voicemail.
Jaxt is led by Konstantin Guericke, who co-founded LinkedIn. Its founders are Touraj Parang and Phillip Mobin. The funding round was led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital.
Read - TechCrunch post
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Goldman Sachs Funds Reklaim To Make Tire Recycling Eco-Friendly
Bellevue, WA-based Reklaim Technologies has secured $7M of a $10M Series B round led by Goldman Sachs, says PEWire. The startup is developing an eco-friendly process to recover materials and energy primarily from old tires as well as from computers and automobile plastics.
Once a tire is shredded at Reklaim, the pieces are fed into a processing unit. The tire pieces are then heated to remove gases, leaving carbon and steel behind. The gases are then condensed into oil and sent to holding tanks for shipment and reuse.
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Sketchy A Place For Mom Gets Sketchier Still
A Seattle tech scene monitor tips us off to the continuing controversy over at A Place For Mom. The Web-based retirement-home business APlaceForMom.com raised $9.5M from Battery Ventures back in February 2006, part of which went to buy shares from the founders.
As we have reported, the husband and wife-founded company sells what it calls an online CRM for leads to nursing home companies (aggressively called You've Got Leads!), while at the same time offering a portal to advise children of seniors who are searching for a nursing home, which is supported by advertising.
The Inc. 500 company is a clear financial success story. On the one hand, we appreciate that there is a tremendous business case to be made here. But in our opinion last year, we wrote that we expected that as the company become a bigger name, it will face marketing migraines for pimping moms to Big Retirement.
It seems the company will face another PR battle, as its employees and former employees are expressing their disappointment at the lousy wages paid by A Place For Mom. The startup has a very high headcount with ambitious plans to continue it ramp rate. However, some voice the opinion that pay promises are met that cannot be approached. One commenter on the Seattle PI asks if the firm indeed pays $20-$30K base plus commission with six figure potential after a year. Another responds: "A base salary? Yeah right! The advisor position is commission ONLY with very few perks. You will be told about the glorious ramp up bonuses offered for making quota- but beware that is ONLY if you make quota. If you are good at the advisement you can expect a boom in your paycheck at around 6 months. Then you are pushed off to find business on your own with little support from the company. If you are successful you can make big money, if not then you will starve. I wouldn't do it unless you have sufficient savings to survive 12+ months without steady income."
One of the more balanced commenters tells her story:
"I lasted over 1 year with A Place For Mom, but had to give up. There is good and bad with the job. The view and mission of the company is a good one but there is much left for them to figure out. Helping families is rewarding but being a bill collector is not. Making $5000 in a month is rewarding but making $300 the following month is not. Don't be fooled into thinking this job is all about hard work. There is luck involved too. If you want an inside view of how employees are truly supported then ask the recruiters how the company helps advisors market themselves. There are no materials available to promote individual advisors unless they create and print them on their own. I loved my job with A Place For Mom. But when I looked up one day and realized that my headset and my computer looked more familiar to me than my children did then I knew it was time to go. I work part-time now and make the same amount of money as I did with A Place For Mom and I see my kids all the time. If you have it in you to ride out the rough times I think this company will go places but they still have some lessons to learn. If you are looking for family time and a decent income you may want to wait until they have a better representation of truly successful advisors under their belt."
We don't want to take the high moral ground here, but it does seem like this startup is building a strong business but putting it in jeopardy by not taking into account PR black eyes.
Read - A Place For Mom Controversy (Seattle PI)
Read - Sketchy Retirement Home Biz "A Place For Mom" Gets $9.5M
Read - Seattle PI story
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August 27, 2007
Stealth-mode Hooja To Launch Mobile Organizer
Set to launch by the end of the year, Hooja says "Through a dynamic, intuitive interface, consumers will be able to capture data of all descriptions on the go and store it in an online account they can instantly access at any time." The idea is that you as you are stuck in traffic or in a dull meeting you can key in some jots on your cell phone and that will be published to the Web. Sounds like Twitter. Pretty vague, we know, but hey they are in stealth mode.
Hooja was founded in April 2006 and is led by Na'ama Moran, who was an analyst at Greylock after graduating from Cornell. Our hunch is that the company has raised at least some angel funding as they have been and continue to hire.
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Having Raised $5M, Wis.dm Relaunches With Better Reception
Wis.dm was founded by Founded by Martin Clifford, who sold his prior company uDate to Interactive Corp. for $150M in 2003. For his latest venture, Wis.dm, he has raised $5M, reports Time.com. North Bridge Venture Partners is an investor with its GP Michael Skok on the board. When he launched his new business Wis.dm in February it was a standard issue social book marking site and wasn't terribly well received as it didn't really stand out from the crowd and competitors had been around for a while. One report indicates that Wis.dm went offline to retool and has been relaunched with a reason for being. Wis.dm's platform is not much different but its marketing is. Users are now encouraged to go their to pose tough questions and to answer them.
Now that it is an FAQ about any topic under the sun, he site appears to have more users, although, we find most of the questions to be random and/or dull.
View - site
Read - Is Wis.dm Your Next Web Obsession? (time.com)
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Silicon Valley Fixture Mike Homer Has Rare Disease
Netscape alum and serial founder Mike Homer has a rare disease that has no known cure. 300 donor/friends have contributed $6M in the past 3 months to fund a program to save Homer's life (as well as others who suffer from the disease).
Homer is just 49 and is a father of 3 who resides in Atherton. In addition to running marketing at Netscape he also helped to launch Opsware, Tivo and Palm. Homer's last 2 videeo startups were KonTiki (sold to Verisign) and Open Media Network OMN, a non-profit "PBS of the Web" venture .
Ten months back, Homer started to lose short term memory but thought it was sleep apnia. His friend Marc Andreesen was concerned and intervened, urging him to visit Standford Hospital, where Andreesen is on the board. Stanford gave him the bad news that he actually had Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, a neuro -degenarative disorder. Victims are born with it and by the time symptoms are apparent when people hit in their 30s or 40s, there is typically only a year or two left to live. Homer is currently being treated at UC San Francisco Medical Center which is home to the world's foremost experts in this disease.
Friends of Homer's including angel investor Ron Conway and former Intuit CEO Bill Campbell have stepped in to raise funding for Homer's cause.
If you want to help:
Homer Family Foundation for Brain Disease Research
PO Box 10195
Palo Alto, CA 94303
Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease Foundation
Read - The Fight of his Life (SF Business Times - password protected)
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Fotolog Bought By French Ad Network For $90M
NYC-based Fotolog has been acquired by Paris-based, publicly-traded Hi Media for $90M (77% in Hi Media stock and the remainder in cash). Fotolog says it serves 10M users, 15M monthly unique visitors and 3.3B page per month. Founded in 2002, Fotolog has done three rounds of funding, most recently a $4.1M round with 3i, BV Capital and angel investors.
Fotolog has been an Alexa top 20 site however because its user base tends to sit outside North America, it has a tough time monetizing them. Fotolog had just signed a deal with the ad network that best monetizes international traffic - Google. It is interesting to note that Hi-Media is itself an ad network that and says it will look to increase payout performance, so there must be some inventory on the site that Google doesn't get.
It's good to see that with Fotolog, one of the inventors of modern social networking - Adam Seifer who launched Six Degree back in 1996 - should get some financial reward and recognition. Fotolog is led by John Borthwick who was an SVP of Alliances at Time Warner.
Read - announcement
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In IPO Dog Days, Sonics Inc. Files $80M IPO
Sonics makes Interconnect products and memory management products for systems on a chip in the embedded systems markets. The company today filed to do an $80M IPO. It has raised funding from Cadence, Toshiba, Samsung, Xilinx and a host of venture firms.
For the three months ended June 30, Sonics reported profit of $2.8M compared with loss of $900K during the prior-year period. During the same period, Sonics increased its revenue to $4.3M from $4.2M.
Sonics has three main customers: Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.
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Global Trade Software's Tradebeam raises $29M
TradeBeam Holdings, which sells on-demand global trade management software closed Series C funding of at $29M. It has now raised a total of $57.5M since it launched in 2001. The San Mateo-based startup was previously known as Open Harbor.
In April the company signed a 10-year partnership with China International Electronic Commerce Co. to sell TradeBeam in China. CIECC says it trained nearly 120 sales people across China and about 20 Chinese companies are using TradeBeam.
Read - announcement
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Federated Media Raises $4.5M In Series B
The a:c's ad representation firm FM Publishing has raised $4.5M in Series B funding from its prior investors - JPMorgan Partners and Omidyar Network, says PEHub. Given our ties to FM, we field plenty of questions from other publishers and other ad networks on our opinions of FM. In general we think the company is off to a very strong start. It's very difficult for an ad network startup to get a balance of strong publishers and advertisers. All in all, Federated has pulled off the balance well only losing a handful of publishers since it launched.
+ Solid payouts. Unless you are going to hire your own ad sales force, we don't know of another ad network that is able to reward its publishers as well as Federated can.
+ Interesting campaigns. For advertisers Federated has done some clever campaigns that we think provide hard to quantify branding bonuses. For sure there have been some controversies over at least one campaign that perhaps had bloggers go too far in connecting their editorial voices to paying advertisers. But you can't fault FM for trying go to work with advertisers to try some new angles on the same old banner ad concept.
+ Perhaps the only topics that we can go negative on are that by FM's own admission they skew their attention to their very largest publishers (who doesn't) and their payment policies are a bit unorthodox.
View - FM site
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August 24, 2007
Draper Funds Vadver For Video Discovery Social Network
Founded in January, Vadver will be launching in September a video discovery network today that it calls "an operating system for the video experience of the future." Vadver is led by Patrick Koppula wh was Founder and COO of iLike and CEO of its sister company GarageBand. Vadver plans to launch a Web-based social network as well as applications for Tivo and Facebook.
NewTeeVee reports that Vadver has raised $1.7M in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
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First Look Set To Launch Online Fashion Shopping Club
We have been reporting on the rise of online shopping clubs in Europe on our sister site. An example is VC-backed Buy VIP.
Now an a:c mole tips us off to a to-be-launched shopping club out of NYC called FirstLook (aka Gilt) which is focused on online membership-only sample sales of high end fashion items. Its sample sales last 24 hours and feature luxury goods that is says list for around 70% off. Like the European sites, it aims for air of velvet ropes with an invite only policy. Only members can buy and to become a member you must be cleared by another member.
The company says it is funded, and the founding team includes the founder and former CEO of Doubleclick (Kevin O'Conner we assume), as well as a founding eBay team member. Its CTO is Michael Bryzek who was CTO of United eWay.
BTW - the URL firstlook.com is owned by a domain company and it once belonged to another startup called First Look that was Kleiner-Perkins and idealab!-backed that existed in around 1999-2001 as a music, TV and film portal. This site has the URL First-look.net.
View - about us page
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Super Joe Montana/Ronnie Lott Back YouBeQB Launch
In development for the past 10 months, Bellevue, WA-based YouBeQB has just launched. The startup is backed by San Francisco 49er greats Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana, and Harris Barton via their VC fund fund HRJ Capital. Angel investors include former Seahawks President Bob Whitsitt, Neah Power CEO Paul Abramowitz and Vulcan Ventures' former Prez Bill Savoy.
YouBeQB is led by 26 year old jock Kris Billmaier, whose father is successful investor and startup exec Jim Billmaier. His concept is a variation on fantasy football, but it awards players points for correctly predicting which play a team will run. Certain conditions like 4th and long where a punt is very likely get less points.
Given how much Lott and Montana are idolized in the Bay Area, as word gets out of their interest in the deal, we would expect to see users sign up in droves.
Read - Seattle PI blog
View - YoubeQB site
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Pre-launch PeerMeta Funded For Mobile Social Networking Tech
Pre-logo PeerMeta has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding the company says. The Boston-based startup is "developing applications around iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, etc."
The start-up was co-founded by Cheng Wu who was VP and GM of content networking at Cisco Systems. He was He was founder, chairman, and CEO of ArrowPoint Communications, which he sold to Cisco in June 2000 for $5.7B Prior to that he was with Cascade Communications which was sold to Ascend for $3.7B. His co-founder is Jo Tango of Kepha Partners.
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Veveo Raises Another $14M For Mobile Video Search
Andover, MA-based Veveo has raised a total of $28M, including $14M in a recent 2nd that has just come to light. Investors are: Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix and North Bridge Venture Partners.
This may sounds like a lot for a pre-launch company but we remind ourselves that any company that can grab marketshare in a search category can be very valuable. Veveo has created a mobile search application that it says is particularly adept at searching video. It plans to launch in September 10 with support for Windows Mobile and for the iPhone.
Veveo has gone out to beat up some press coverage with stories today in StartupSquad, Webware, Moconews, Marketing Pilgrim and VentureBeat and got great reviews. . VentureBeat doesn't name its source but says that it has learned that Veveo has signed a deal with Verizon. Veveo has been quite as it has tough competition from Blinkx, Truveo, and Google, and AOL.
Read - VentureBeat post
Read - Moconews
Read - Webware
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August 23, 2007
Stealth Mode Roost Raises 1st Round For Home Moving eService
San Francisco-based Roost says it has "a mission to fundamentally change how customers find & move into their next home." The stealth mode startup also says in hiring posts that it has closed Series A by "world-class venture capital in the real estate and living space."
Founded in May 2007, Roost is led by Alex Chang who was: SVP Operations/Strategy at TotalMove.com; Sr. Director, Services at Walmart.com; and VP Marketing at VacationSpot.com.
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This Week in Euro Tech Ventures
Investments
+ Helsinki's Aito Technologies raised a first round but didn't disclose the size. it is targeting mobile operators and service providers with software solutions that enable the users to "segment their customer base more accurately, analyze the adoption patterns of new services, and reduce support calls.
+ Amadeus Capital Partners and Northzone Ventures have acquired a majority stake in EPiServer, a Stockholm-based web content management platform developer.
+ French codec startup Actimagine to raise capital - going international.
M&A
+ Munich mobile ad business Actionality bought by Yahoo.
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