May 23, 2007
Qualcomm Invests In Mobile Streaming Media's Streamezzo
Qualcomm Ventures says that Stremezzo is its first direct equity investment in Europe. The Paris-based mobile media startup develops TV-on-mobile applications, as well as music applications, portals and user interfaces for enhanced mobile browsing ergonomics.
This closes the investment round announced in April 2006. QUALCOMM joins existing investors: AXA Private Equity, T Source, France Telecom Technologies Investissements and GET Valorisation, as well as new investors Sofinnova Partners and Sofinnova Ventures.
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Venrock Invests In Green Auto Fuel Injenction Startup Transonic Combustion
Transonic Combustion is an R&D outfit developing technologies that is says will enable conventional automotive engines to run at ultra-high efficiency on gasoline and on bio-renewable flex fuels. The company explains that key to the technology is a "revolutionary new type of fuel injector." With this new fuel injector, economical mixtures of renewable plant products can be utilized which are not practical in either spark ignition or conventional compression ignition engines.
Transonic has raised an undisclosed amount of second-round funding led by Venrock which was joined by return backers Rustic Canyon and Khosla Ventures.
View - site
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Petra Solar Raises $14M In First Round
Whereas many of the solar startups that we have seen focus on retailing solar energy or on energy capture, NJ-based Petra Solar is focused on products that manage power out of solar modules and into the grid, batteries and loads. Petra has raised $14M in Series A led by DFJ Element and BlueRun Ventures. National Technology Enterprises also participated.
Petra was founded by Shihab Kuran , Ph.D., who was VP of Development at Fairchild Semiconductor.
View - site
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Angels Invest in Local Ad Network Pica9
Pica9 has raised $2.8M in angel funding. Pica9 was set up to allow local brand reps to customize their materials without getting in trouble with the brand police at HQ.
Pica9 recently unveiled an ad server that allows the local marketing teams of major brand advertisers to generate broadcast-quality on-air commercials for their markets "in less than 90 seconds." With this addition of TV ad customization, Pica9 now has a toolset for local users to customize and generate brand-consistent materials of many kinds—from business cards to print ads to online banner ads to e-mail campaigns. IPica9 says its user community spans more than 40 globally recognized brands and more than 80K local business.
Pica9 was founded in 1999 and has been bootstrapped to date. the company. The company’s lead angel investor, John Buckner, joined the company as COO.
To some extent, Pica9 competes with VC-backed Spotrunner, however, we don't imagine that large brands will use Spotrunner. The two companies just overlap as they target local TV advertising.
View - site
Read - Pica9 raised angel funding (The deal)
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Disney's Steamboat Invests In Greystripe's Mobile Game Ad Insertion
San Francisco-based Greystripe has raised $8.9M in it 2nd round ed by Steamboat Ventures. The company previously raised $1.1M. The startup has developed an ad server for mobile games. It says it is currently serving ads into games from Konami, Handy Games, and about 10 other smaller publishers.
Greystripe white labels its product for publishers. It also runs an ad network to sell ads on behalf of its publishers.
View - site
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Confirmed: Google Invests In 23AndMe. Biz Founded By Sergey Brin's Newleywed Wife
We had speculated last March that perhaps Sergey Brin was the sugar daddy behind fiance Anne Wojcicki's genetic data startup 23andMe. At the time, the company was not discussing its funding but it was clear from its hiring push that the pre-launch company had raised funding.
Today, 23andme announced that it has indeed closed its Series A round, indicating that it has raised funding from from Google. Other investors are Mohr Davidow, Genentech, and NEA. 23andme is not saying how much it raised but a regulatory filing discloses that Google invested $3.9M this month. Indeed Brin's personal bank account was tapped to fund the company to date. Brin provided $2.6M in interim debt financing to 23andMe but this loan was repaid as part of the financing of 23andMe.
While the investment might raise some eyebrows, it does make sense as a Google investment. 23andme says it will allow people to search their genetic code and it is Google's mission to separate itself by allowing all forms of search.
Read - Google Investing in Company Started by Co-Founder’s Wife (NY Times)
View - 23andme site
Read - Is Sergey Financing Fiance's Start-up?
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May 22, 2007
Blog Murdoch Nick Denton Invests in Curbed
Gawker Media's Managing Editor Lockhardt Steele is leaving Gawker to run Curbed, a network of real estate blogs that Steele founded. Curbed claims that it gets $500K visitors per month to its New York site but also has sites for other major metro areas. In addition to real estate, the Curbed Network also covers food and is reported to be launching a shopping site(s).
MediaBistro reports that Nick Denton will help fund Curbed as the site searches for investment capital. In addition to his Gawker Media holdings, Denton has provided support to green activism site Treehugger and the social shopping network Wists.
Read - Mediabistro story
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Sugar Publishing Sales Past $5M
With $5M invested by Sequoia's Michael Moritz, Sugar Publishing's Brian Sugar says his company also had revenues of $5M. He also says that his current expenses are running around $500K per month, or $6M per year.
To recap, Sugar Publishing began as a celebrity blog site at Popsugar by husband and wife Brian and Lisa Sugar. They say they invested $250K of their own cash to get it started. With success of their first site they launched more targeting affluent females, such as the recently launched BellaSugar a beauty blog exclusivly sponsored by Sephora. forthcoming LittleSugar (babies), SavySugar (career and finance).
Sugar Publishing competes with Glam Media, Daily Candy, BellaOnline and the recently launched Gawker Media title Jezebel.
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Bebo's Michael Birch: Your Questions Please
Bebo co-founder Michael Birch has kindly accepted our request to respond to questions from the a:c readership. Please send you questions to comments@thealarmclock.com
Over the weekend, a UK newspaper put out the word that Bebo was in negotiations with Yahoo to be bought out for $1B. Several pundits disputed the story because Birch and has wife co-founder Xochi had indicated they liked running the Bebo ship and didn't want to sell her off. What few would dispute, however, is that the social networking site Bebo has become a hot property. Here are some facts.
+ In April 2007, MySpace again topped the social networking category, according to Hitwise, taking in 79.7% of visits to sites in this category for the Month of April, 2007. Facebook is second, with 11.47% of visits, and Bebo comes in third with 1.28% of visits. Bebo currently has around 25M users.
+ Bebo, however, is larger than MySpace and Facebook in the UK. In fact, Bebo made the decision to target the UK where adoption to social networks lagged that of the US.
+ Birch founded Bebo after selling their first social networking site, Ringo, to Tickle for an undisclosed amount. In 2001, he also co-founded BrithdayAlarm, which he still owns .
+ Benchmark Capital's London-based Barry Maloney noticed Bebo when his 3 teen-age daughters began spending most evenings on the site. He then invested $15M in the startup's only funding round.
+ Bebo is ad supported but Birch is very specific about ads he will accept. Skittles, for example, serves a watercolor skin that members can use as a background for their page. In March, Bebo began an exclusive partnership with UK-based wireless giant Orange to offer social networking direct to Orange subs.
+ Birch studied physics at University in his native UK.
Posted to Social Networking | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Steve Case Wants A Slot In Your Wallet
In 2005, Visa and Mastercard generated $25.1 billion in what are called
"interchange fees" on more than $1.1 trillion in credit card purchases, an
average of 2.2% per transaction, according to The Nilson Report, a payment
industry trade publication. Debit cards charge about 1.75%.
What if there were a credit card that charged merchants just .5% (half of
one percent)? No chance, right? Visa, MasterCard (now public, NYSE: MA)
and the gargantuan banks behind them like JP Morgan, Bank of America and
Citigroup, sitting atop 330 million credit card accounts, are just too
muscular, correct?
But say the upstart firm (GratisCard) is backed by Steve Case's
Revolution.com, where Case has put about $500 million of his money to
work. And imagine that GratisCard's chief executive, Jason Hogg, not only
was a founder of MBNA Canada, now part of Bank of America, but is also the
son of credit card veteran Russell Hogg, chief executive of Mastercard in
the 1980s...and on the Board at GratisCard.
And in an era of rising nervousness regarding traditional plastic, say
that GratisCard transactions are encrypted and routed over the Internet.
And customers have to use a personal ID number, which can be changed
regularly, to authorize purchases. The oblong card has no name or account
number embossed on it.
A typical credit card purchase of a $100 pair of pants costs retailers
$1.80 in fees, eating into already thin profit margins. In fact, in 2003,
MasterCard and Visa settled a suit filed by Wal-Mart Stores-- later joined
in a class-action by hordes of other retailers— agreeing to pay back $3
billion in hefty interchange fees.
And yes-- GratisCard also works within the existing point-of-sale
infrastructure so merchants don't have to buy additional equipment.
Indeed, reducing the costs for merchants gives them more leeway to provide
instant rewards to GratisCard holders, instead of the profoundly complex
rewards programs that have been foisted upon us for years (and take years
to earn).
Sure, on paper, St. Petersburg, FL-based GratisCard has no chance. It's
the "Tucker" car, and Visa/MasterCard/The Big Banks are Detroit. But the
web can help disrupt the most calcified of markets. Look for the stylized
"G" logo of this new card (first) on websites and (later) on window
stickers of merchants soon....
===============================================
With our partner MarketIntellNow we go DEEP on eWallet Technology-- click
here to learn more.
Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Virutal State of CA Sells For $53K on Weblo
It's fair to say that Second Life did not pioneer virtual world and avatars, but it did break paths on the buying and selling of property and goods in virtual worlds. Weblo.com is following this same business but just making the virtual world more real. Users can buy and sell their virtual home. The company reports that a buyer recently paid $53K for the state of California. In addition to reselling properties, users can also become mayors or governors and collect taxes and set laws.
In addition to properties, users can also buy virtual versions of domains. So you could buy a Weblo version of Youtube for much less than google paid. You can also buy and own a celebrity like Pam Anderson or David Hasselhoff.
This is impressive for a startup that only launched last December. Fresh off its big pay day from its aQuantive deal, Oak Investment Partners just invested in Montreal-based Weblo along with former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt. The company's Founder/CEO Rocky Mirza says he has 27,000 members, which is doubling every 2 months.
Very impressively, the company claims that it will pull in $2M in revenue in the second quarter of 2007, and $10M in revenue by the end of 2007.
The a:c's take: we grew up thinking we didn't want to work on wall street because they didn't create anything real, so we thought. So virtual world economies make us feel as if we have gone insane. For $53K, one could buy nice real property in Central America, why would one waste that on pixals? The answer is because its liquid. Still we have the nagging feeling that Weblo and its users are going to suffer a nasty fate.
Weblo CEO/Chairman Rocky Mirza
Read - Virtual World Gold Rush (BusinessWeek)
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China's MyEtone Buys Out Comparison Shopping Rival AskYaya
Chinese Internet product comparison website MyETone.com has acquired rival Askyaya.com. EastDay, a unit of Shanghai Media Group, has been the majority owner of Askyaya, along with Line Fan Technologies.
There is not 100% overlap between the products. MyETone provides user-generated product reviews on a range of topics including cosmetics, mobile phones, and children's toys. In contrast, Askyaya delivers price comparison data.
In September 2006, MyETone.com says it received a new round of funding. The amount of the funding was not disclosed, but the company says funding come mainly from private and institutional investors in the US, including the founders and execs of several of the most successful international shopping and comparison shopping sites.
View - Myetone.com
View - Askyaya.com
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Water Purification's Aqua Pure Gains More Funding
Israel's Aqua Pure has raised another $1M at a $3M valuation. The company has developed an approach to water purification. The company has developed a chemical-free technology for treating water and wastewater using a combination of voltage pulses.
The company's CEO said it recently completed a series of successful trials of its technology on fuel-related water contaminants, including a gasoline additive MTBE, which now contaminates 14% of the municipal drinking water in the US. The US Environmental Protection Agency says that it will invest up to $85B in solutions to this problem over the next decade.
Read - Water technology co AquaPure raises $1m (Globes)
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Accel's Abhay Parekh To Launch Wowkast
Abhay Parekh is currently a partner at Accel Partners and he's also Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley, EECS thanks to a robust MIT educations. Previously he was CEO, co-founder at FastForward Networks. Parekh is getting back in the gaming with the founding of Wowcast Technologies which got underway in Feburary 2007. We know the startup plans to make widgets. More later.
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More Open Source Deals: Zmanda, Snaplogic
Sunnyvale-based Zmanda sells open source software for data backup and recovery. The company's Amanda Enterprise Edition is a commercial-grade version of the open source Amanda backup and recovery technology. Zmanda also offers Zmanda Recovery Manager or MySQL. Licenses range from $100-$250.
Zmanda has secured $8M in its Series B round of funding. Led by Helion Venture Partners, current investors BlueRun Ventures and Canaan Partners. The startup's CE Peter Childers was VP at Red Hat for nine years and joined Zmanda last month.
View - site
San Mateo-based SnapLogic raised $2.5M in financing from Dhillon Capital. The company was co-founded in November 2005 by Gaurav Dhillon, SnapLogic's chairman who also seeded the company and recruited co-founder Mike Pittaro. Dhillon was co-founder and former CEO of data integration company Informatica. Like Mulesource, which was also funded today, Snaplogic is a open source integration software company.
View - site
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SOA's MuleSource Raises $12.5M
Passing observation: Geeks seem to be drawn to animal metaphors. Guess its all those O'Reilly books with animal images. MuleSource is no exception as the company just hauled in $12.5M in a second round, led by Lightspeed Ventures, thanks to the popularity of its open source ESB and integration platform. The company claims more than 700K total downloads and more than 1K enterprise production deployments to date.
Mulesource was founded in 2003 by Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSource who said he was frustrated by integration "donkey work."
View - site
Posted to Enterprise Software | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Cisco Buys Video Surveillance's Broadware
Deal-making in the IP-based video surveillance market has come at a fast clip. Cisco Systems today says that it has bought BroadWare Technologies. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal. Broadware has raised around $33.85M in VC funding since 2000, from New Vista Capital, Sigma Partners, Defta Partners, Hitachi, mc3 Ventures and Dali Hook Partners.
Just yesterday, Motorola Invests in Broadware competitor VidSys. Other competitors are LiveWave, ADT Security Services, GE Security and IBM. Cisco previously paid $51M to acquire SyPixx Networks.
View - site
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MSFT Social Networking Spinoff Wallop Unveiled
The VC-backed social networking startup spun-out of Microsoft is getting some pre-launch coverage. Pronet advertising gives Wallop glowing reviews here. Wallop is not building anything previously unseen, however, the UI is stellar.
View - site
Read - A Microsoft startup in SouthPark (The ac)
Posted to Social Networking | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Bear Stearns Invests $5.5M In Online Video's Origin Digital
Weehawken, N.J.-based Origin Digital has raised $5.5M in Series A funding from Constellation Ventures [Bear Stearns.] The company positions itself as a video ASP [application service provider.] Origin boasts that it was the first company to offer an on-line production center in the market; the first to launch a Video Serving Portal; and the first to deliver live pay-per-view entertainment over the Internet.
Origin has an long past. It was the Digital Media Services division of SAVVIS which spun Origin out into the now privately held company currently known as Origin Digital. The company was founded in 1997 as Live Online, a leader in Digital Media acquired by Digital Island in 2000. The company's assets, employees and intellectual property have survived through various transitions and M&A activities through Digital Island, Exodus, Cable and Wireless and then SAVVIS. Origin is now lead by former SAVVIS exec Darcy Lorincz. Bear Stearns' Cliff Friedman is Chairman of the company.
View - site
Custom Gift Card Printer Arroweye Raises $14M
When Cardways.com (unit of Chicago-based Arroweye Solutions) first offered consumers the option of adding photos to greeting cards five years ago about 15% used the feature, compared to around 45% today. The company has been pushing this angle and now has deals with 20 retailers that let consumers put a picture of their pet, children, vacation or anything else on two-thirds of the gift card. The other third of the card displays the retailer's logo. Those retailers include Overstock.com, Linens 'n Things and Circuit City.
Cardways.com also has a deal that will allow users who upload their pictures to Yahoo! Photos to add those images to gift cards. Cardways.com charges the consumer $4.50 above the value on the gift card to customize the card, and the retailer gets 28% of that fee.
Today, Arroweye Solutions has raised $14M in Series C funding. Baird Venture Partners led the deal, and was joined by Adams Street Partners.
View - site
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Wallstrip Bought By CBS
This deal was so well covered before it was officially announced that coverage today will be that a bit ho hum. Wallstrip acknowledges that it was bought by CBS for a sum in the single digit millions, although they say it was not $5M. Lindzon acknowledges that he was shopping the business around rather than trying to raise another round.
For those of you who want to be acquired by CBS, WallStrip founder Howard London offers some advise. Lindon says that CBS digital front-man Quincy Smith liked WallStrip's broad syndication approach, where fans could view it on Wallstrip.com, TheStreet.com, YouTube and elsewhere.
Another key here was that Wallstrip pounded the boards of the blogosphere, networking hard to gain visibility.
Lindzon, an investment advisor and fund manager, says he created the short-form show to provide an alternative to unnecessarily complicated stock market analysis. In fact its really more of an entertainment and humor program that happens to be about busienss.
Wallstrip had raised $600K from a group of angel investors including VCs Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, but still had much of that money in the bank, according to Lindzon. The talen and crew will all have jobs with CBS.
Wallstrip does a self deprecating announcement video that features Quincy Smith. View it here.
Read - CBS Does Indeed Buy Wallstrip (New TeeVee)
Read - CBS Acquires Wallstrip - You Can Make Money From Blogging!!! (Announcement)
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Angels Invest $1.3M in Browser Plug-in Clupedia
Tech Coast Angels have invested $1.3M in Santa Ana, CA-based Clupedia. Clupedia has developed a browser plugin for Firefox that provides ratings, reviews, related blog posts, etc. The toolbar might stumble upon audio, text, and video. In terms of the plugin finding relevant content, the idea seems similar to Sphere.
Clupedia's founder is David Saad whose previous company, Braintec, was sold to Technisource. Johannes Larcher is now on board with Clupedia. Larcher was a top exec with Overture before it was sold to Yahoo! and recently left Friendster as GM.
View - site
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Intelliden Raises $10M And Other Fresh Deals
Investments
+ COLORADO SPRINGS, CO Intelliden has raised $10M (Software for monitoring and maintaining enterprise networks)
+ EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS FluXXion has raised €6.4M (Micro filtration)
+ THE NETHERLANDS Minoto Entertainment has raised an undisclosed amount of seed financing (Muliplayer gaming)
+ PARIS, FRANCE Digicompanion has raised €1.7M (Platform and services to enable companies to offer free digital downloads)
+ ATLANTA, GA CNN invests in Internet Broadcasting Systems (Internet publishing for TV stations)
M&A
+ AUSTIN, TX SolarWinds has acquired Neon Software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. (Discovery, mapping, and visualization software for the networking market.)
+ SAN FRANCISCO, CA Linden Labs [aka Second Life] Buys Windward Mark (3D software)
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TrendWatch: Coworking
Jelly is a NYC coworking group that convenes in a Garment District apartment.
We keep hearing from people about the opportunity cost of working for the man. There is so much more upside to owning 100% of your business than getting 0.5% of a Pre-IPO startup, you're an idiot to take job, goes the logic.
The NY Post profiles the a trendlet, coworking offices. Coworking is for people who run their own small, usually online businesses, but want to spend time, and share office expenses with other people at like companies. 
So why do we write about this? It seams to us that there is a business to be built here. Money to be made. But so far we have not seen any startups being formed to cater to the co-working community.
Read - ARISING NUMBER OF "COWORKING" SPACES BRING FREELANCERS AND OTHER SOLO WORKERS TOGETHER
(NY Post)
View - Coworking New York City wiki
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Solar's Sunlink Does 2nd Round
SunLink has closed its Series B round of financing. The Larkspur, CA-bassed startup sells an aerodynamically designed mounting system that it claims lowers installation costs, reduces the risk of roof leaks, enhances building aesthetics and improves energy output. The financing was led by Clean Pacific Ventures.
View - site
Sunlink is led by CEO Chris Tilley who was President & CFO at Prevalent Power which was acquired by Energy Innovations 2004 and renamed EI Solutions.
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This Week In Tech Jobs
Jobs are shared across a network of top technology sites including alarm:clock, tech:gigger and ReadWriteWeb.
+ Release Engineer Spock Redwood City, CA
+ Web Designer - Cars.com Classified Ventures Chicago, IL
+ Sr. Manager, JavaScript Development Apple Inc. Cupertino, CA
+ Open Source Software Developer The Open Planning Project New York, NY
+ UI Designer with Aspirations The Open Planning Project New York, NY
+ Product Manager, Applications Visible Path Foster City, CA
+ Software Engineer Lulu.com London, GB, United Kingdom
Also, check our job blog at tech:gigger for these deals:
+ CEO For Russian Wireless Entertainment Startup Playfon
+ VP Sales For French Subsidiary At Reevoo
+ CTO For Dallas' Gas Price Futures Startup Pricelock
+ Marketing VP For LA's Big Stage Entertainment
+ Marketing VP For San Diego Stealth Co.
+ VP Of Worldwide Retail Sales For Smart Padlock Startup
+ Products VP For SF's Green Co. Terrapass
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Limelight Inches Closer To Its Ballpark $200M IPO
Limelight Networks which filed for its IPO in March has priced its proposed shares with14.4M shares at $10 - $12 apiece. The company will sell 11.4M shares plus shareholders will sell 3M shares. The underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, will have the option to buy another 1.16M shares.
Tempe, Arizona-based Limelight reported a loss of $3.7M on sales of $64M in 2006. Goldman Sachs took a controlling stake of Limelight in July 2006 with a $130M investment.
If you invested in Vonage's IPO world of pain you might want to think twice about Limelight. Akamai and the MIT in June 2006 filed a lawsuit against Limelight alleging its content delivery network infringes on their patents. Akamai and MIT have successfully sued others over the patents, according to SEC documents filed by Limelight.
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May 21, 2007
The Job Site Craze: StandoutJobs and Techtribe
We are doing our best to stay abreast of the new jobs sites that keep launching. We truly think that nobody - not Hotjobs or Monster or even LinkedIn - has nailed the market, plus there are all the niches and regional flavors - so we think this is a huge growth market, especially given the global shortage of talent.
What the New wave job sites have in common is founders who say they found the recruiting process inefficient. No argument here.
Tech Tribe Networks is a job recruitment site for the Indian market. The startup says it has raised VC funding. The company is led by CEO Rohit Agarwal who founded the company in December 2006. TechTribe developed a membership platform for networking that is built on the ability to connect with people in ‘Tribes’, which focus on a common passion or an entrepreneurial idea.
Standout is in stealth mode and plans to stay there until this summer, so we have no screen shots. The Montreal-based startup was founded by Fred Ngo, Benjamin Yoskovitz and Austin Hill. Yoskovitz also runs blog consultancy Business Blogs Now, which ghost writes for business people. Ngo was an ASIC engineer and Austin Hill is an angel who runs Brudder Ventures which seed invested Standout.
View - Standoutjobs site
View - Techtribesnetwork site
Honolulu's P2P Fund Raising Widget Chipin Says Aloha To Angels
Honolulu-based Chipin acknowledges that it is on its third business model since founding the company it launched in May of 2006. It launched as an online money collection service. The original service enabled users to organize small amounts of money collection for gifts or group lunches. A Chipin user would invite others to chip in for the event; and then use the site to collect and distribute the money.
At launch, The Hawaii Business Journal get a bit over-heated in describing the startup: "The initial concept became the impetus for a dot-com startup with the potential to be not just Hawaii's – but the world's – hottest tech phenom in recent memory."
The Journal got it wrong as the launch of the business however, was killed by spam attacks. Thanks to spam filters, less than half the emails sent out, inviting people to chip in to events, were ever even opened.
In October 2006, the Chip-in site not only went dark but they canned their next version knowing that it would fail as well. The company founders brainstormed for almost 2 months and came up with version 3 - fund raising widgets.
For its seed round of funding, which closed in mid-January 2006, ChipIn secured $200K from two small angel groups. CommerceNet founder angel investor Marty Tennenbaum also invested.
Chipin competes with Carebadges and with change.org widgets.
View - site
Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
Halo Founders To Launch Fyreball
A game/movie startup called Fyreball has set out to launch out of Portland, OR. We understand this is a game that is intended to become the theme for a movie. The game is played with the use of a ball that is equipped with a wick that is then ignited and thrown.
The company's CTO is Michael Evans who was engineering lead at Bungie Studios - maker of the franchise game series Halo - which is now part of Microsoft. If you are not a gamer you should know Halo. Halo 2 did $125M in sales in its first day. Fyreball was founded by Pete Parsons who was Executive Producer on Peter Jackson's Wingnut Interactive and also was Exec Prod at Bungie for Microsoft.
View - site
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Russian Wireless Entertainment Startup PlayFon Looking For IPO
European mobile entertainment company Playfon did revenues for 2006 totaling more than $14M, says CNews. This places PlayFon in the top 100 Russian IT companies. Comparing to the financial year 2005 revenues rose 11%. The company employs over 150 people working in Sweden, Russia and Ukraine.
With such results, the company has put out a search for a CEO who can take the company public. The company's current CEO and owner, Muslim Shortanov, is apparently vacating the position.
Playfon operates in UK, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States.
Playfon's mobile adult group Hotfon may account for a significant portion of the company's revenues.
In addition to its adult content, Hotfon sells java games, ringtones, video, wallpaper, and dating.
View - site
Posted to Wireless | TrackBack (0) | Permalink
PriceLock To Launch With Gas Pre-bought Gas Price Guarantee
We came across an interesting eCommerce startup today - Dallas-based Pricelock says it will allow people to buy gas today at the going rate - say $3.50 and get that price in two months whether or not the price has gone up or down. Pricelock plans to offer other commodities under this system in the future.
The startup's CEO is Brian Reed who was Vice-President - Internet at Capital One Auto Finance.
Pricelock first offering will involve gasoline price management and price protection solutions. Through website and through instant messaging and emails, Pricelock says it will provide its community of member customers with advanced tools and other services that will allow them to
+Evaluate current gasoline purchase options, assess future gasoline price trends
+ Obtain flash news briefs on events that may impact gasoline prices
+ Purchase gasoline price management and price protection solutions
+ Monitor and manage their “virtual price-protected gasoline reserves” in real time and
+ Take physical delivery of gasoline using a proprietary Pricelock gasoline fuel purchase card and/or credit card accepted at retail locations.
Future offerings are envisioned providing commodity pricing and management solutions for natural gas, home heating oil, electricity and other high volume commodity groups that experience significant price volatility.
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Finish Video Compression's Hantro Bought By On2 For $58M
VC firm Nexit Ventures has sold its share of Hantro Products to On2 Technologies (AMEX:ONT). Finland-based Hantro develops compression technologies for wireless video. Hantro says its technology has been implemented on more than 200M devices on mobile phones produced by 5 of the world’s top 6 handset manufacturers.
The stock deal is valued at $8M. Nexit Ventures owns approximately one third of Hantro shares. Other investors include Capman and Atine as well as the company's founders and key personnel. Nexit has been a co-lead investor in Hantro since 2000.
View - Hantro site
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Seriosity - Maker Of Corporate Email Game - Hunting For 2nd Round
Palo Alto-based Seriosity is meeting with investors to close a second round of funding for its corporate email gaming system, which it has been testing with several corporations. Stanford communications professor Byron Reeves co-founded the company in 2004 and raised $6M from Alloy Ventures in 2006.
Seriosity released a beta version of an e-mail add-on called Attent, which it says is being tested by about a dozen companies. With Attent, employees assign one another a virtual currency called Serios. More valuable email will gain more Serios and will most likely be read. Using Attent, office workers would receive weekly allowances of Serios, about 100 Serios. That number would be the same for everyone, no matter who they are. But the idea is that managers and higher-level executives would accumulate more of the currency because they receive more messages. That means, in turn, that they have more Serios to spend on responses.
Office workers can sort messages by numbers of Serios attached, allowing them to sift through the hundreds of e-mails they may get every day and see which ones that senders have deemed the most important. So to some extent this is an attempt to apply Digg to corporate email. People who send great email are also awarded with merit badges.
Read - Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game (NY Times)
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Marchex Pays $10M For Key Spanish Domains
Several domain name squatters that have been sitting on Spanish language URLs hit payday when Marchex recently swept through.
Marchex has paid $10M to acquire URLs like futbol.com, deportes.com, mujer.com, peliculas.com and cocina.com. Marchex acquired more than 100 Spanish-language Web sites from two separate parties
It strikes us that the English language equivalents of these domains would sell for far higher, so Marchex is making some good investments.
Marchex said that it will work with Fox's Latin American Channels division to develop the Web sites with specialized content. Together, the newly-acquired Web sites attracted more than 1M visitors last month.
What $10M Will Buy You In Spanish
Read - announcement
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Checkfree Pays $28M For Upstream
CheckFree (Nasdaq: CKFR) plans to acquire Upstream Technologies, a Boston-based startup that sells investment decision support and trade order management tools. IN 2003, Upstream raised strategic Series A financing from Lava Trading.
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Travel Channel Buys Blog WorldHum
The Travel Channel has paid an undisclosed amount to buy Travel site WorldHum. World Hum was founded by a couple of experienced travel writers Jim Benning and Michael Yessis in 2001.
Reading about Fajitas made in France made us barf in our mouth.
Read - announcement
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On Deck: Starent IPO
Tewksbury, MA-based Starent Networks, which sells mobile multimedia infrastructure, has set its IPO terms to 10.5M shares being offered at $9 - $11 per share. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol STAR, with Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers as co-lead underwriters. Starent raised around $95M in VC funding since 2000.
Starent did revenues of $27.6M and net income of $2.3M in the three months ended March 31. In the same period a year ago, Starent reported revenues of $14.4M and a profit of $252K. A major red flag, however, is that Verizon Wireless accounted for about 60% of Starent's revenues.
Ownership Pre-IPO stake
Matrix Partners 20.1%
North Bridge Venture Partners 20.1%)
Highland Capital Partners 18.4%
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Chinese Interactive TV Content Startup C9 Media Seed Funded
C9 Media, which plans to produce interactive TV content for China, has raised a $750K in seed financing from Dragonvest Partners. C9 Media has partnered with a European supplier of participation TV, Ostrich Media, which says it operates the most successful participation TV model in Germany, Spain and the UK. Ostrich Media is a British company, best known as the owner of interactive quiz show Quiz Call. It has been purchased by iTouch, a provider of interactive television services.
The unfortunately named C9 Media has the same name as a Canadian producer of online porn.
Read - Dragonvest: C9 Media Inc Raises $0.75 Million in Preferred Seed Financing
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Motorola Invests in Video Security's VidSys
Motorola has invested an undisclosed amount into VidSys. The company's technology is used in local, state and federal command centers as a platform for controlling and managing video feeds. The video data is coordinated in the command center, as well as among the necessary agencies that need to respond, be it fire, police, security or public safety.
In September of 2005, VidSys was spun out from parent company Dynamic Technology Services, supported by $3M in series A funding led by IDG Ventures. The competition is stiff in the industry, among them is LiveWave, ADT Security Services and GE Security as well as Cisco and IBM. Cisco paid $51M to acquire SyPixx Networks.
The company recently hired new CEO Chuck Teubner who was COO of Groove Networks, which was bought by Microsoft.
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Read - announcement
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Nuclear Fusion's Tri Alpha Energy Raises $40M
This startup is in super stealth mode. Foothill Ranch, CA's Tri Alpha Energy, a nuclear fusion research company, has raised $40M in Series C-2 funding, according to a regulatory filing posted by PEWire. Backers include Goldman Sachs, Venrock, Vulcan Capital, Enel Produzione and PIZ Signal. Directors include Dick Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates.
TriAlpha is the brainchild of fusion researcher at UC Irvine Norman Rostoker. One academic site notes that: "TriAlpha has so far have raised nearly 12 million dollars, beginning in 2000. This is mostly from two billionaires." It looks like Paul Allen of Vulcan Ventures is one of the billionaires. The report goes on to disparage Tri Alpha's work.
How does Tri Alpha plan to earn a living. We understand it plans to apply its technology to the economic and safe destruction of high-level waste from nuclear weapons development and spent fuel rods from nuclear fission plants.
If you were good at physics and can follow, here is a description: "He had previously collaborated with another researcher, Maglitch, on the MIGMA approach to advanced fuels. This approach involved shooting two counter-circulating beams of ions at each other in a confining magnetic field. It was not very workable, as the ion densities would always be very low. Rostoker combined this idea with another device, the Field Reversed Configuration, sending the beams into the FRC. The FRC is essentially a large-scale plasmoid centimeters rather microns across, with much lower densities and magnetic fields than with the DPF."
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TalentSpring Seed Funded For Recruiting Reputation Tool
We all know how absurd the recruitment and interviewing process can be. In particular, nobody trusts reference checks but everyone does the to CYA. So we welcome Talent Spring, a new startup launched by a Microsoft programmer that seeks to shake the trees here by verify who peers would work with and who freaks them out. The company wants to create the employment version of a FICO score.
TalentSpring uses a ranking system to rate resumes so that the cream of the crop rises to the top of TalentSpring and resumes with low marks fall..
Resumes are ranked by others who have submitted their resume. Upon signing up and submitting your resume, to have your details included on TalentSpring you must score 12 sets of other candidates in your own professional area (eg software developer, accounting, etc.)
Employers will pay an annual subscription fee of $5,895 for unlimited access to the site or pay $195 to fill just one position.
TalentSpring says it has raised $600K of a $1.4M financing round, and says it has enough money in the bank to last through 2008. The company has been in stealth mode for a while and was known as NimbleBee.
So what is to prevent a malcontent to go in and rate great candidates poorly and vice versa? "Erroneous votes will be detected and discarded using our advanced mathematics," says Talent Spring. If you develop an unusually large pattern of incorrect votes your account will show a voting score of "F".
The a:c's take on TalentSpring is that they stand a great chance of success. LinkedIn has come out of nowhere and from conversations that we have had with many companies, people trust the quality of its job search much better than larger job databases. Moreover, the LinkedIn proved that people will go to great lengths to keep their resume up to data and to get references to support them. For sure, TalentSpring has a long road ahead to get LinkedIn's momentum but the road has been walked before.
Read - Startup puts resumes side by side (Seattle PI)
Read - TalentSpring Aims To Disrupt Resume Marketplace (techcrunch)
View - TalentSpring site
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Slick Electric Scooter Maker Vectrix To Do AIM IPO
Newport, RI-based electric scooter maker Vectrix said it plans to raise £37.44M through an IPO of about 259.36M shares. The company will have a market capitalization of about £135M. Trading is expected to begin on May 24.
While Vectrix was founded way back in 1996 , it is only just now selling its first mass-produced vehicle, the MAXI Scooter, primarily in Italian cities, and in other European cities in Spain, the UK, Greece, France and Switzerland, as well as markets in the US and Australia.
There are some definite issues with the scooter, most notably its steep price. However, for some this is a dream vehicle, especially for greens. It has zero emissions. it is very quick. The MAXI is comparable to a 400cc scooter with the torque of a Ducati 900. Top speed comes in a 62mph. A standard three-pin plug is all that is required for a charge. And a two-hour charge will give you around 68 miles of riding. So this is a sweet ride for tooling around Milan but not the vehicle for people who want to Easy Rider it across the US.
Prior to the IPO, Vectrix raised significant funding from industrial giant Parker Hannifin. In March 2003, Parker acquired a 50% interest in Vectrix’s fuel cell hybrid patent. Other investors include Morgan Stanley and GH Venture. The company's COO is Carlo Di Biagio who was CEO and CFO of Ducati Motors.
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May 19, 2007
iWin Losers Admit Role In Hacking Big Fish Games' Data
In a law suit filed May 8 in the US District Court in Seattle, Big Fish Games alleges that iWin obtained information on Big Fish's sales, revenues, marketing, and customer lists. iWin allegedly did so by using stolen or counterfeit log-in ID's to gain access to Try Media's (owned by Macrovision) online reporting system. Big Fish uses Macrovision for DRM and and reporting.
Lawyers representing iWin say that though they admit some liability, they will fight against damage claims.
Getting to the specifics, three employees at iWin are accused of violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and rackateering and criminal profiteering. In particular, the lawsuit alleges that a former Try Media employee, took proprietary data on Big Fish and other game companies including contracts, game sales data, and customer lists and created multiple false ID's to access Macrovision's system. Big Fish alleges that Try Media notified them a month ago of the breach and that iWin used the information in talks between the two companies.
Things could get uglier for iWin as it appears they may have also grabbed Try Media data from other online game companies. Try Media represents Yahoo, Disney, EB Games, and hundreds of other gaming companies.
San Francisco-based iWin is a casual games portal. In June of 2003, the company acquired iWin.com from Vivendi Universal. It also got into the multiplayer business by purchasing Playsite.com from InfoSpace in August 2003.
Read - Gamezebo
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May 18, 2007
Long Tail Ad Network Gorilla Nation Gets $50M Investment
We have heard very good things about LA-based site advertising representation firm Gorilla Nation. The company represents popular long tail sites like x17 (celebrity photo site), Mixcast (urban music videos) as well a many top gossip blogs like Pink is the New Blog, Jossip, The Superficial and more. It currently reps about 400 sites. Site categories include movies, gaming, television, music, male lifestyle, sports, consumer technology, Latin and urban, science fiction and fantasy, comic book and animation.
Boston-based private equity firm Great Hill Partners has invested $50M into Gorilla Nation for a significant minority position. This is Gorilla Nation's first round of financing since it was founded in 2001 by Aaron Broder and Brian Fitzgerald.
Gorilla Nation plans to spend the money on:
+ New online ad technologies and products and broadening its marketing services offerings.
+ International expansion
+ Acquisitions
Gorilla Nation says it has over 120 employees and is planning to expanding staff to exceed 200 in 6 offices in 4 countries by year's end.
Gorilla primarily does brand-based CPM deals and has done some big campaings for Hollywood studios, video game advertisers, tv studios, and Coca-Cola.
Read - announcement
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FIM's Levinsohn Joins MyFabrik Board. Co. Raises $25M
A few weeks after Fabrik acquired the consumer product business of SimpleTech, Fabrik has secured $24.9M of a $34.2M Series D round and former Fox Interactive Media chief Ross Levinsohn has joined the board.
Based in Santa Ana, CA, SimpleTech is the No. 3 US provider of hard disk drive-based external, portable and network storage solutions for consumers and small businesses. Fabrik acquired the consumer business unit in a cash transaction valued at approximately $43M.
Fabrik is a San Mateo, CA-based host of online storage for large files. We reported on this competitive market recently and found that Amazon Services connected Jungle Drive has a competitive advantage over companies like Fabrik. 3i Group led the deal, along with return backers ComVentures and Intel Capital.
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Rehashed Rumor - GOOG To Buy Feedburner
Vecosys is reporting on a rumor that Google siting on an announcement that it has acquired Feedburner. This must be the 3rd time that this rumor has circulated over the past year+. We do agree that it is a logical fit. Google likes smart metrics and Feedburner has that plus it has loyal users across the Web. Feedburner doesn't have much in the way of revenues but given M&A valuation benchmarks, Feedburner investors might now negotiate a compelling return.
Read - Vocosys
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Enernoc IPO Smoking Hot
Boston-based Energy management's EnerNOC saw its IPO price soar 21% with the stock trading now at $31.58. It started the day pricing 3.75M shares at $26 per share, for an IPO take of approximately $97.5M. It had originally planned to offer the shares between $21 and $23 each, but later raised the range the $23-$25.
Enernoc is trading on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol ENOC. Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley were the co-lead underwriters. EnerNOC has raised around $28M in VC funding, from Foundation Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Braemar Energy Ventures and DFJ New England.
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AQNT Revenues: Last Q = 5 Days Work At GOOG
While the AQNT deal is huge by any standard, the company is tiny, tiny compared to Google. If we did our math right, Google is making about $30M in revenues each day, while aQuantive needed a whole quarter to make revenues of $142.6M. So in less than 5 days Google matches aQuantive's output.
One viewpoint that we have seen repeated again and again in the wake of this deal is that it is game over for new companies in the online ad business. We certainly agree that there are now just a handful of companies that can give big advertisers and publishers what they want. But we also expect to see a number of companies that can exploit new channels and compete well against the big companies.
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