Next Net News

The Quest for the 3rd Generation Search Engine Continues!

2007-10-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

A few months ago New York Times probed a bunch of start-up search engines as possible way to go in beating Google's dominance on the search market. These days yet another influential media giant Newsweek seems to be going against Google. In a quest for the best search engine Newsweek, in a story titled "Searching For The Best Engine", claims a global effort is underway to invent a better way of finding things on the Web and asks the rhetorical question "Could Google be vulnerable?" .

Aside the French, German and Japan's governments pouring hundreds of millions in an effort to establish local search companies as well as the traditional Google rivals in the face of Microsoft, Yahoo and somehow Ask.com, Newsweek seems to be focused on the so called 3rd generation or alternative search engines emerging upon us with innovative ideas, concepts and technologies promising to deliver better results than Google in one way or another.

In 2005 and 2006, venture-capital firms invested $350 million into 79 search-related start-ups. Knight, the author of AltSearchEngines.com's blog tracks no fewer than 1,000 search contenders, mostly U.S.-based, that have something to recommend the old guys in the sector.

The story mentions a number of innovative and highly promising start-up search engines, technologies and approaches as follows:

Hakia – Relies on natural language processing.
Wikia - The one the Wikipedia's founder stays behind.
Naver* - a South Korean search veteran, has been around for pretty much the last decade.
Quintura – A visual engine started out by Russians but now said to be based in Virginia.
NosyJoe – A Social search engine that employs intelligent tagging technologies and runs on a semantic platform.
Mahalo - Hard to say search engine it more looks like a directory with quality content handpicked by editors. Jason Calacanis is the one behind the company.
ChaCha – Real humans try to help you in your quest for information, via chat.
Powerset – Still in closed beta, well over-hyped and seems to be also relying on understanding the natural language.
Clusty* - founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists.
Ask.com* - Today's #4 search engine immediately after Google, Yahoo and MS.
Lexxe - Sydney based engine featuring natural language processing technologies.
Accoona – What's interesting for the company is that they have recently filed for an IPO in US planning to raise $80M from the public.
KartOO – A French initiative entirely done in a flash, visual meta search engine.
KoolTorch – Seems to be yet another visual search engine, it is said to be also French one. Weak point could be that they don't use their own index and seem to be using the Dmoz.org's results.
Squidoo – It has been started in October 2005 by Seth Godin and looks more like a wiki site, ala Wikia or Wikipedia where anyone creates articles on different topics.
Sproose – Appears to be also using third party search feeds; ranks the results based on the users' votes.
Trulia – A real estate search engine
Healthline - Enables you to plug in symptoms and track down possible causes and treatment, health search engines, a heavily competitive area where Microsoft is also playing a role in, among others
Globaspec – Searches for industrial information and is aimed at engineers.
Like.com – Product search engine.
Spock – Focuses on people information, people search engine, and there are other competitors in the sector.

* Note that Naver is not a start-up search engine; it has been around for quite long time and is the lading search engine in South Korea . Ask.com and Clusty.com are also among the old guys from the sector.

Very interesting fact is that right now all these underdog search engines are said to have a combined market share of less than 5 percent of all queries, which is an impressive number knowing that 1% of the search market is today valued at the staggering amount of more than $1B, according Don Dodge.

The story is scheduled to appear on the Nov 5, 2007 print issue of Newsweek.

Just like a few months ago when we covered the NYT's story today we again think that only the time will tell us who will be the big winner at the end of the day. On the other hand whatever the case is any of the above search engines may get acquired sooner or later for anything in the 8 digit range (excluding some of the major players from the list above which may hunt amounts down in the 9+ digit range), which, in our feeling, is the main goal of most of these start-ups.

On the contrary, many IT experts and professionals do believe that undermining Google is most likely a task that will not be accomplished by a search engine in our traditional understanding, but rather would come from a concept that is anything else but not a search engine. Such concepts, including but not limited to, are Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and LinkedWords. In other words finding information on web doesn't necessarily mean to search for it.

Some more information on the topic:

www.newsweek.com/id/62254/page/1
altsearchengines.com/2007/10/05/the-top-10-stealth-search-engines/
altsearchengines.com/2007/10/30/why-is-altsearchengines-in-newsweek-magazine/
userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2007/10/30/searching-....
www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24digi.html
dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing...

Review of the August 2007 Web 2.0 Deals

2007-10-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

LinkedIn Competitor Viadeo Raises €5 Million
Viadeo, a European social network for business contacts which is quite similar in idea and execution to LinkedIn, has raised a further €5 million in funding from its existing investors, AGF Private Equity and Ventech. The extra cash will be used to fuel the growth of Viadeo in Asia; so far, the network has been doing very well in Europe, with over 1.3 million members.

DailyMotion Raises $34 Million; Another Copyright Infringing Success Story
French social video site DailyMotion has raised a $34 million round from Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity, a division of Allianz AG. The new round comes on top of $9.5 million in previous financing from Atlas Ventures and Partech International. The round puts DailyMotion’s total financing beyond that of their competitors, even MetaCafe’s $45 million total financing. Dailymotion’s executive chairman, Mark Zaleski, said the new funds will ‘allow us to reach operating profitability‘.

VersionTracker Acquired by CNET VersionTracker, an online publication for software updates, has been acquired by CNET. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. With this integration deal, VersionTracker and its sister sites iPhone Atlas and MacFixIt will be incorporated into the CNET family as well. This gives VersionTracker a larger audience and access to more resources, while CNET expands its niche sites and grows its offerings of Mac information on the web.

Microsoft Acquires Enterprise Group Chat Company Parlano
Microsoft has announced that it has agreed to acquire Chicago-based Parlano, the maker of the enterprise group chat platform MindAlign. Microsoft said that it would use Parlano’s group chat functionality to improve Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator.

SayNow Lands $7.5 Million Series A
SayNow, a service that enables ‘celebrities to connect to their audience over the phone’ will announce $7.5 million Series A funding September 12, in a round led by Shasta Partners. Tugboat Ventures’ Dave Whorton, a SayNow advisor since early 2006, also participated in the round as did Costella Kirsch. Rob Coneybeer, MD of Shasta Ventures will join the SayNow board of directors …

Zivity’s Model Contest Site Raises $1M in Funding
Zivity, the social network aiming to be a user-generated Playboy Magazine online, has received $1 million in funding in a Series A round of funding, from private investors. We mentioned Zivity yesterday and you can read about it here…

The New York Times to Acquire Freakanomics Blog, and More
The New York Times is acquiring the popular Freakanomics blog, which was launched as a sort of spin-off to the success of the book, keeping up with its momentum. This will be the first blog that the New York Times acquires and adds to its larger media family, but there’s word that the newspaper plans to acquire even more blogs in the not-too-distant future. Seems like blogs are getting acquired left and right these days, which is good for the creators, writers and publishers of these blogs, and good for the economics surrounding the blogosphere.

TheFind.com Acquires Glimpse
Shopping search engine startup TheFind has acquired the high-fashion shopping site Glimpse.com for an undisclosed amount. It’s an early deal for Glimpse, which just launched this year. TheFind is a comparison shopping search engine that crawls many shopping sites across the internet (190 million products at over 500,000 stores).

Maya’s Mom Acquired by BabyCenter
Maya’s Mom, the social networking site for mothers, has been acquired by BabyCenter, the mom-centric parenting network, making this its first acquisition. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. According to the deal, Maya’s Mom will remain a standalone product, and its back-end software will be utilized across BabyCenter’s network of global websites.

SeatSmart’s Ticket Search Funded in Angel Round
SeatSmart, the search engine dedicated to finding tickets for concerts, games and events, has raised a round of angel funding for an undisclosed amount. The company is a ticket search aggregator of sorts, perusing Stubhub, Razorgator, eBay, and other major ticket-selling sites to bring you a variety of search results.

Jaxtr Closes $10 Million Series A; Announces 1 Million Users
Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.

SpiceWorks Raises $8 Million; Google Adsense Even Supports IT Software
IT software maker SpiceWorks just closed an $8 million in series B financing. The funding round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Spiceworks series A investor, Austin Ventures. Their series A was $5 million. Shasta Ventures co-founder and managing director, Ravi Mohan, and former Dell senior executive, John Hamlin, have joined the Spiceworks board of directors. The money will be used to support over 120,000 users as well as software development and sales and marketing.

Wis.dm Raises $5M for Bookmarking and Media-Sharing Site
Wis.dm, the social bookmarking and media-sharing site that’s relaunched with a Q&A slant, has received $5 million in funding. The funding was provided by North Bridge Venture Partners, with its Michael Skok joining the board.

MocoSpace Raises $3M for Mobile Network
MocoSpace, a mobile social network, has received $3 million in a Series A round of funding. The round was led by General Catalyst, and Pilot Group and Michael Daring, a former eBay executive, participated as well. The funding will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing.

Fotolog Acquired by Hi Media, French Ad Network
EXCLUSIVE: We had previously speculated that New York-based Fotolog would be the next one to get acquired. And we were right. It has been acquired by Hi Media, a Paris-based interactive media company for roughly $90 million - a combination of cash and stock, according to well-placed sources. The announcement is likely to be made later today.

FM Raises Another $4.5M; Are They Having Difficulty Filling Inventory?
Reports from PEHub and Mashable indicate a new $4.5 million Series B round of funding for Federated Media. Congrats! Federated Media provides advertising for some of the world’s largest blogs including: TechCrunch (TC is in “open warfare” and looking for a replacement), Read/WriteWeb, GigaOm, Mashable, ArsTechnica, TechDirt and about 100 other blogs.

DivX Acquires Veatros to Create Enhanced Video Search & Discovery for the Home
DivX has acquired Veatros, creators of a video identification technology, for $4.25 million. The acquisition of Veatros will be used for DivX to create an improved video search and discovery service on the DivX Connected platform, incorporating metadata like cover art, information on videos’ directors and actors, and titles.

LendingClub To Close $10.26 Million Series A
Peer to peer lending service Lending Club will close a $10.26 million series A round of financing from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners tomorrow. This comes a few months after the company’s $2 million angel round. Coinciding with the investment, Jeff Crowe and Dan Ciporin (former ceo of shopping.com) are joining Lending Club’s board of directors.

Conduit Labs Closes $5.5 Million Series A Funding
Conduit Labs, a yet-to-launch gaming virtual world, just closed a $5.5 million series A round with Charles River Ventures and Prism Venture Works. In addition to the financing, CRV’s Susan Wu and Prism’s Will Kohler have joined the company’s Board of Directors.

SINOHUB Receives New RMB 23.5 Million Letter of Credit Line from Commercial Industrial Bank
SinoHub Technology Company, Ltd. today announced that it has successfully closed a RMB 23.5 Million Letter of Credit facility with the Commercial Industrial Bank . The company will use the funds to expand its electronic component procurement fulfillment business in China. Already a leading company in the rapidly growing field of electronic component supply chain management services in China (import, buffer inventory, procurement fulfillment, VMI, just-in-time delivery, export and other services), SinoHub will use these funds to propel itself into a dominant position in this field.

StreetBee Acquires JamJunky; Rebrands as GetYourGrooveOn
StreetBee has acquired JamJunky, a music composition review service. CN reviewed the service when it launched three months ago and JamJunky added a Facebook application in July. CN described JamJunky as, ‘Basically JamJunky is a way for you to upload your own authored music and get feedback from your friends and other song writers to help perfect your songs.’

Google reveals stake in Chinese social Web site
Google revealed on Monday that it had acquired a stake in Chinese community Web site Tianya.cn, indicating a foray by the global search leader into social networking in the world’s second-largest Internet market.

Global Grind’s Pageflakes Clone Raises $4.5M in Series A Round Global Grind, the niche start page for hip-hop news and information, has raised $4.5 million in a Series A round of funding. The round was led by Accel Ventures. New York-based Global Grind was founded by three creators of 360hiphop, which is a social network which was acquired by BET Interactive.
The Filter Brings Home $5M in Second Round of Funding
The Filter, a UK-based music recommendation company, has received $5 million in a second round of funding. Peter Gabriel has led the round, along with Eden Ventures, with both parties participating in the first round of funding, bringing the grand total to $6.8 million.

TripAdvisor Reportedly Acquires Where I’ve Been for $3 Million
In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million. The acquisition marks the first major successful exit of a Facebook application since the Platform launched just under three months ago. With 2.3 million users, Where I’ve Been established itself as by far the biggest travel application on Facebook, leading #2 Cities I’ve Visited (also TripAdvisor owned) by over 1 million users.

Kongregate Closes $5 Million Series A For Casual Gaming
Casual gaming community Kongregate has closed a $5 million series A round led by Greylock today. This is on top of a $1 million angel round they raised from Reid Hoffman, Joe Kraus, Jeff Clavier and Richard Wolpert, among others. The casual gaming category consists of all those addictive online flash games that often distract you during your downtime (remember desktop tower defense?). James Slavet of Greylock pegs the casual game market at $500 million and expects it to grow even larger.

MTVN Acquires Another LGBT Network
MTV Networks has acquired DowneLink, a multicultural, LGBTQ (Lesbian / Gay / Bisexual / Transgender / Questioning) social networking site. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. DowneLink has a reported 400,000 members, more than 72% of which are African-American, Asian or Latino, making it a good buy for MTVN, which seems to be broadening its scope of LGBT sites and demographics.

YFonGlobal Acquiring Splinternet Holdings
YFonGlobal, the turn key, white label solution for social networks and their necessary platforms, has begun the process of acquiring Splinternet Holdings, the developer of Internet telephony products and services. The financials of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal is scheduled to close within the next two months.

SocialMedia Raises $1M for Facebook App Network
SocialMedia, the aforementioned Facebook apps and MySpace widgets company that will combine hosting, promotion and an ad network, has raised $1 million in funding in a round led by CRV Ventures, SoftTech VC and the Hitforge seed fund.

Doppelganger Gets $11M in New Funding
Doppelgagner, the company that offers programmed virtual worlds for the teen demographic, has raised $11 million in funding, led by new investor ComVentures, and existing investors Draper Fisher Jurveston, Trident Capital, Draper Richards, KPG Ventures and Greycroft Partners. That brings the grand total to $25 million.

Diet Television Trims Name, Takes $2 Million
Later this week, weight loss community Diet Television will announce it’s shortened its name to DietTv.com and raised a $2 million series A. The round was led by MentorTech Ventures.

Kontera closes second round, faces competition by Vibrant Media and LinkedWords
Kontera, an Israel-based startup (officially headquartered in San Francisco), is raising $10.3 Million second round from Sequoia and other investors. It seems that the ad networks online are very hot these past months after the major acquisitions done by Google, Microsoft, AOL and others.

VOIP Startup Fring Raises $12 Million Series B
Israeli-based VOIP start-up Fring has closed an estimated $12 million second round, led by US VC fund North Bridge Venture Partners. VenFin and previous investors Pitango, Veritas and Yossi Vardi also participated. If the investment estimate is accurate, it would be one of the larger rounds for a VOIP company.

Technology Blog Xconomy Funded
Xconomy, a Boston-area-based technology and news blog, has received funding in a Series A round, led by CommonAngels. CommonAngels is an investment group in Lexington, MA, and it contributed funds from its investment pool as well as individual members. The financial terms were not disclosed.

CyclingTV Acquired by JumpTVJumpTV, an online video aggregator, has acquired CyclingTV for around $4.95 million, which is broken down into $2.21 million in cash, and $2.74 million in common stock, to be issued later this year.

The NBC and News Corp. joint venture Gets $100M in Funding
The NBC and News Corp. joint venture, which has been dubbed the YouTube Killer, has received $100 million in funding from Rhode Island-based investment firm Providence Equity Partners.

Pay Per Call Company VoiceStar Acquired by Marchex
Pay per call advertising service VoiceStar has been acquired by local advertising company Marchex. Marchex total anticipated investment to acquire VoiceStar will be $28 million, consisting of approximately $20 million in transaction consideration and $8 million in company investment.

Blockbuster Desperate To Do Something, Buys A Loser
Blockbuster announced the acquisition of movie download site Movielink this evening. The price is not being disclosed (meaning it isn’t ‘material’ to Blockbuster’s shareholders), although the Wall Street Journal says it was less than $20 million.

Pickle Purchased For $4.1 Million
Photo and video-sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month.

JS-Kit Closes $1.2 Million Seed Round
Web widget provider JS-Kit has been doing a lot of growing up since starting as a simple commenting widget, founder Lev Walkin’s pet project in his off hours. Since then, that single widget has grown into a company with the addition of CEO Kris Loux, 12 engineers from Filmloop, and today’s $1.2 million round of financing led by the Entrepreneur’s Fund III.

Scrybe Closes Series A
Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR. In what is becoming an annoying trend, the company is not disclosing the size of the round.

Kaboodle Acquired by Hearst Magazines
Kaboodle, the social shopping site that looked like a better fit for eBay than a media conglomerate, has been acquired by Hearst Corporation for an undisclosed amount. Kaboodle had taken $5 million in first round funding from 10 investors including Ron Conway.

Acquisition for Clipmarks
New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side. The service allows users to bookmark all or a portion of a web page and annotate it.

Amie Street Closes Series A Financing Led By Amazon.com
Social music marketplace Amie Street has closed a Series A round of financing led by Amazon.com, along with some new partnerships and a site redesign. The amount of Amazon’s investment and the terms are not disclosed.

Worldwide Biggies Funded by NBC and Hearst
Worldwide Biggies, a digital entertainment studio headed by former Nickelodeon and Spike TV President Albie Hecht, has closed a $9 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by NBC Universal and Platform Equity, also getting a large chunk of that change from Hearst Corporation, Alan Patricoft’s Greycroft Partners and Prism Venture works.

Insightful Corporation Sells InFactInsightful Corporation (NASDAQ: IFUL), announced today the sale of its InFact search technology and associated intellectual property rights to Hypertext Solutions Inc. for $3.65 million in cash. Hypertext is a Seattle-based startup company focused on making information on the web more ‘intelligent’. The transaction closed today.

College Boy Stalwart eBaum’s World Bought For $17.5M
Today San Francisco-based HandHeld Entertainment says it is acquiring Rochester, NY-based eBaum’s World. HandHeld said it will pay $17.5M for eBaum’s World ($15M in cash, $2.5M in stock, and $2.5M in stock with a one-year hold back.) The company also said that it may pay up to $32.5M in earnouts over three years to the owner’s of eBaum’s world.

Online Travel White Labeler EZRez Raises $15M
EzRez was founded in 2002 in Honolulu, Hawaii where it built a white label system for regional airlines, wholesalers, rental car companies, hotels, activity providers and more. Today the company raised $15M led by Canaan Partners with Azure Capital Partners and existing investors.

Content Personalization Widget Maker Minekey Raises First $3M
Sunnyvale, CA-based Minekey has raised $3M in Series A funding for their personalized news recommendation widget. The funding round was led by NEA IndoUS Ventures, which had previously invested $600K in a seed round.

Stealth Mode TuneUp Media Raises VC Funding To Help You Manage Your Music FilesGabe Adiv, who previously worked the biz dev levers at Gracenote, has a new startup in stealth mode called TuneUp Media, that he claims has raised VC funding. What problem will the startup address? Our digital music lives are too complex the company finds and needs a better system.

Associated Content Raises $10M For Crowd-sourced NewsNYC-based Associated Content has raised $10M in a 2nd round from Canaan Partners. The company is slightly controversial because of the backing of Google sales exec Tim Armstrong who invested in the company’s first $5.4M round and is back in at this round along with Softbank.

Streetline Funded For Smart Cities Tech
Streetline has completed pilot projects and studies for Los Angeles and San Francisco. The LA project has learned that despite two-hour time limits, the average driver stays parked for four hours. In San Francisco, Streetline learned that only 5.4% of parking violations in San Francisco receive tickets. Streetline has raised $250K+ so far from individual investors including Internet pioneer Gordon Bell and it is planning a Series A round. They indicate on job postings that they have raised venture capital so that round may be closed but the company has not responded to confirm.

DecisionView Announces $7 Million in Series C Investment
DecisionView, Inc., the leading provider of business performance optimization applications for the Life Sciences industry, today announced the close of a $7 million Series C round of funding led by new investor, firstVentury, as well as existing investors Partech International and Granite Ventures.

Accoona Files for IPO
Internet company Accoona Corp. filed Friday for an initial public offering of its common stock. The Jersey City, N.J.-based company said it expects to use proceeds from the offering for research and development, business expansion and general corporate purposes. Accoona may also use a portion of the proceeds to acquire or invest in complementary companies and technologies.

SEM Firm iCrossing Buys Web Builder Proxicom
Arizona-based SEM giant iCrossing has acquired Proxicom for an un-disclosed amount from Gores Technology. The deal was financed by a funding round last week by iCrossing where it raised $62M from Goldman Sachs and some VC firms.

Compete Ups Ante With $10M In Funding
Today Compete has raised another round of funding at $10M in Series III funding from return backers Charles River Ventures, idealab, Split Rock Partners and William Blair Capital Partners. Compete has raised $43M since 2000.

Disney Acquires Club Penguin For Up To $700 million
Club Penguin, a social network / virtual world that has been on the market for some time, was acquired by The Walt Disney Company and announced today. An earlier deal with Sony fell apart over valuation and Club Penguin’s policy of donating a substantial portion of profits to charity. The company, which launched in October 2005, has 700,000 current paid subscribers and 12 million activated users, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

Discovery Acquires TreeHugger.com For $10millionDiscovery Communications has announced the acquisition of TreeHugger.com for what is believed to be $10 million. TreeHugger.com started as an environmentally focused blog in 2004 and grew to include forums, green guides and other related features. The site sits in the Top 20 blogs worldwide according to Technorati and is said to have 1.4 million unique visitors a month. Alexa ranks the site at 5,395.

PayScale Gets $10.3M in Series C Round of Funding
PayScale is an online service that lets you know how you compare to others that do the same job as you. It’s just raised another $1.5 million in a Series C round of funding, led by SAP Ventures. This closes the round at $10.3 million. Previous investors include Allen & Co., Corporate Executive Board, Trinity Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Fluke Venture Partners and Buerk Dale Victor.

Vringo Raises $12M in Series B Funding
Vringo, the video ringtone provider, has closed on a $12 million Series B round of venture capital funding. The round was led by Warburg Pincus, a global equity firm. The funding will be used to take Vringo around the world, as it expands markets in the US, Europe and Asia.
Curse Raises $5M in Series A for MMOG Network Curse, the gaming portal, has received $5 million in a Series A round of funding. The round was led by a French venture capital firm AGF Private Equity, and some angel investors participated as well. The MMOG company already raised about $800,000 in funding from angel investors prior to this Series A round.

Via EPR Network Blog

Is NosyJoe.com the next Clusty.com?

2007-09-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

Clusty.com is a well known search engine project basically a spin off from Vivisimo. Vivisimo on the other hand was founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists who decided to tackle the problem of information overload in web search. Rather than focusing just on search engine result ranking, they thought that grouping results into topics, or "clustering," made for better search and discovery.

Clusty in general is a word derived from clustering, in our best guess, and the search engine itself became popular with its function to cluster the web, basically explained. Yet it is know that Clusty queries several top search engines which in its basic means a metasearch, i.e. no own index.

Initially planned to take on Google (Carnegie Mellon University vs. Stanford) Clusty seems did not make it at all and failed to gain the basic popularity necessary to rank among the first 10 search engines in terms of market share. The latest phrase seen in the public about Clusty is: “It (Vivisimo) also has a consumer search engine, Clusty, that allows Web browsers to query several search engines at once.”

On the other hand their clustering technology is considered pretty good one but seemingly other start ups are working on similar ideas, one of them, is NosyJoe -- a small start up search engine -- that is taking the content clustering to the next level.

NosyJoe is still in private beta, however, it was mentioned in NYT this last June and since then the project gained some traction among the search experts on web.

Basically NosyJoe extracts the meaningful sentences, phrases and keywords from the content submitted by the users. It then makes the information pretty much meaningfully searchable, web visible and findable and also clusters it into contextual channels and tags and applies a set of algorithms and user patterns to further ranking, mashing and sharing.

From our quick tests on the site the search results returned were presented in form of meaningful sentences and contextual phrasal tags (as an option), which turns their search results into -- something I have never seen on web so far -- neat content components, readable and easily understandable sentences as search results unlike what we are all used to, some excerpts from the content where the keyword is found in. When compared to other search engines’ results NosyJoe.com’s ones appear truly meaningful. You can check it out for yourself, we have submitted the about page of Clusty to NosyJoe and here is what the site shows it has for the Clusty.com’s domain: http://www.nosyjoe.com/website/www.clusty.com

Another search query done in NosyJoe for Clusty yielded pretty good meaningful results too:
http://www.nosyjoe.com/search.php?q=clusty

Another start up search engine known to be playing in the clustering arena is Quintura, a US based company started out by Russians.

So is NosyJoe.com really the next clustering engine or it is yet another social search experiment.

Hot end of July on the web 2.0 scene

2007-08-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Action Engine Raises $20 Million
Mobile applications developer Action Engine has raised $20 million in new round led by Baker Capital. Previous investors Northwest Venture Associates and The Spangler Group also participated in the round. The company develops mobile device software that allows media companies and mobile operators to provide music , video and other content on mobiles.

Alibaba confirms IPO
China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba has submitted its first initial public offering (IPO) application to the listing committee of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and may become the largest high-tech share on the Hong Kong bourse. Alibaba’s Chairman Jack Ma confirmed the news in the company’s annual meeting over the weekend. Tao Ran, a company spokesman, said there was no timetable for the market listing and also declined to disclose any details of the IPO.

Scribd Competitor Gets Angel Funding
Docstoc , the online document exchange community, has reportedly raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding , and may prove to be a Scribd competitor. The site is still in private beta. With Docstoc, you can share any document type, from Word, to PDF and Illustrator.

Boo-box Gets $300K for Contextual Ads Service
Boo-box , the contextual marketing company, has raised $300,000 in a round of seed funding , led by Monashees Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. The funds will be used for product development and expansion of the Brazil-based company.

Big Hedge Fund Investment in Zazzle
Silicon valley based Zazzle will be closing a second round of financing in the $30 million range, at a $300+ million pre-money valuation. The round is expected to be led by an as-yet-unnamed hedge fund.

Reid Hoffman invests in Care.com
The company which has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, is also the latest investment by Reid Hoffman, godfather of Web 2.0 start-ups , and also co-founder of LinkedIn. Care.com, a Waltham, MA.-based outfit that connects families to ‘qualified care givers with a national network of trusted providers.’

NowPublic Gets $10.6 Million For Crowd Sourced News
‘Crowd sourced’ news network NowPublic.com has closed a $10.6 milion series A round of financing led by Rho Ventures with seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund participating. Crowd sourcing is part of the widely expanding ‘ citizen journalism ‘ category, which encompasses all the new ways non-professionals can participate in the news reporting process.

BuddyTV Gets $2.8M for Fan Site
BuddyTV , the online television informational community, has raised about $2.8 million in a Series A round of funding , with Gemstar-TV Guide International leading the round. The site lets you create a profile listing your favorite shows and actors.

CoolIris Gets $1M of its $3M Series A Round
CoolIris , the link preview service , has secured about $1 million of a $3.05 million Series A round of funding . The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufiled & Byers. Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, has also taken a seat on CoolIris’ board.

3Jam Nabs $4M in Series B Funding
3Jam , the text messaging service, has raised $4 million in a Series B round of funding . The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, and return investors New Enterprise Associates and NetService Ventures also participated.

MediaWhiz Buys AuctionAds
Performance marketing company MediaWhiz has snatched up eBay affiliate marketing service AuctionAds , which launched back in March. The price was not disclosed. AuctionAds is an advertising widget that serves contextually relevant eBay auctions based on tags supplied by the publisher.

Wikia Acquires Grub from Looksmart
As part of their ongoing quest to create an open, people-powered search platform, Wikia has acquired Grub, a ditributed web crawling technology , from Looksmart, Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced this morning during his keynote address at the at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon.

Microsoft Acquires Advertising Exchange Platform AdECN
Microsoft announced today that it had agreed to acquire AdECN , an advertising exchange platform company based near Santa Barbara. AdECN offers a real-time, auction-based, neutral exchange for online display advertising that works in a similar way to stock exchanges. A member of the AdECN exchange buys on the exchange for its advertisers and sells on the exchange for its publishers.

Twitter Gets Their Venture Round
Twitter has raised a round of financing , led by Union Square Ventures. The size of the round has not been disclosed (yet), but additional investors include Charles River Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant. The service, which has around 300,000 users, has grown rapidly in recent months. Pownce, Kyte and others are competitors.

Family-friendly social networking start-up lands VC, will hire 4
CircleBuilder , a family-friendly church-oriented social networking site , has raised $800,000 from Great Lakes Angels and other venture capital organizations. CEO and co-founder Howard Brown currently runs the start-up from his Franklin home, having relocated to the area from Silicon Valley to be closer to family.

Business.com Sells for $350 Million
Business.com has closed another chapter in its long journey from a $7.5 million million domain name bought on a hope and a prayer, selling to RH Donnelley for $350 million ( WSJ reporting up to $360 million). RH Donnelley beat out Dow Jones and the New York Times during the bidding .

Going.com Lands $5 million
Event based social network Going.com has taken an additional $5 million in funding , in a round led by the sites original investors General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

Grockit Raises Cash, Prepares ‘Massive Multiplayer Online Learning’ Product.
When we last wrote about San Francisco based Grockit , in late 2006, they were unfunded. Their business idea of holding low-cost GMAT prep courses over Webex was just getting off the ground. Now they are funded - $2.7 million total ($2.3 million from Benchmark, $400k from angel investors Mark Pincus, Rob Lord, Reid Hoffman Thomas Ryan and others) in a Series A round was closed last month. And they are changing their model completely.

Respectance Gets $1.5 Million
Respectance , which is unique among social networks since it’s dedicated to remembering those who have died, has taken $1.5 million in a series A funding in a round led by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures. The site also launches officially today, and says it has taken funding at a ‘pre-user’ stage.

GuildCafe Raises Funding for MMORPG Network
GuildCafe has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from IDG Ventures Boston. The service that enables groups to build websites for gamers to find friends and new game content launched late last year, and has done well to create a hub for people that are heavily involved with MMORPGs like World of Warecraft, Guild Wars and Lord of the Rings Online. Users can connect with each other through their gaming avatars and form groups (guilds) that can move between virtual worlds together.

AOL Gets Its Ad Network
We hear that AOL will announce the acquisition of New York-based Tacoda this morning, a behavior targeting advertising company that was founded in 2001. The deal size, which we haven’t had confirmed, is likely far smaller than Microsoft’s $6 billion for aQuantive , Yahoo’s $680 million for RightMedia , or Google’s $3.1 billion for DoubleClick . The price might be low enough that it isn’t being disclosed at all.

UGO Acquired By Hearst, Should Be Announced Today
We got a tip earlier this evening that Hearst acquired New-York based UGO and will announce the deal tomorrow. It sounds like Forbes got a tip as well, and a better one: they’re saying the price should be around $100 million . UGO is a popular new media site that was founded in 1997 and, according to Forbes, is generating around $30 million/year in revenue.

Nokia acquires Twango
Nokia and Twango today announced that Nokia has acquired substantially all assets of Twango ( http://www.twango.com/). Twango provides a comprehensive media sharing solution for organizing and sharing photos, videos and other personal media. By acquiring Twango, Nokia will be able to offer people an easy way to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.

HP Acquires Opsware For $1.6 billion
HP has acquired IT Automation company Opsware for $1.6 billion. Whilst any acquisition of this size is interesting in itself, the back story to Opsware is even more so; Opsware was originally LoudCloud, a Web 1.0 company that took $350 million in funding during the Web 1.0 boom.

Cfares Raises $4.5M & Offers New Comparison Tools
Cfares , the airfare search tool, has announced a round $4.5 million of venture capital and has appointed a few new members to its team. The round was led by Claremont Creek Ventures, with previous investor Garage Technology Ventures partnering as well.

Google Acquires Image America for Aerial Imaging Tech
Google’s acquisition spree continued today with the announcement that they’ve purchased Image America , a company that builds ‘high resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery ‘. The Clayton, MO-based company provided high resolution black and white imagery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and supplied imagery to Google Maps and Google Earth.

hi5 Takes $20 Million Funding
San Francisco-based social network hi5 has taken $20 million in funding in a round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures. The site reports 30 million members and 200 million pageviews/day, making it one of the largest players. So why the lack of hype?

FaceBook’s First Acquisition: Parakey
Their first acquisition : Facebook has bought Parakey , the yet-to-launch ‘ web operating system ‘ created by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. The price isn’t being disclosed, but Facebook should be issuing a press release this afternoon.

Loopt Calls Down $2.25M of a $12M Series B Round of Funding
Loopt , the service that lets you geo-locate friends with mobile phones, has called down $2.25 million of a $12 million Series B round of financing . This means that while Loopt has raised $12 million, its requested access to $2.25 of this larger amount, possibly to increase its working capital costs.

Deals within the web 2.0 sector for the first half of July

2007-07-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

$15 Million For Shopping Search TheFind
Mountain View based shopping search site TheFind has raised another $15 million in a third round of venture capital , bringing their total capital raised to $26 million. Bain Capital Ventures led the round.

Redfin Takes $12 Million Series C Financing Amid Realtor War
Seattle-based Redfin, a real estate website that allows users to bypass most of the fees associated with using real estate brokers, has closed a $12 million Series C round of financing . This is on top of the approximately $8 million they raised in their previous two rounds. The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Previous investors Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, BEV Capital and The Hillman Company also participated

TVtrip’s Multimedia Hotel Directory Gets $4.8 Million
A month after launch, TVtrip has secured another round of financing from Benchmark’s European Branch, Balderton, and Partech, which will be announced tomorrow. Along with the financing they’ve also expanded their directory of hotel videos and added some more travel executives to their board.

Jupitermedia Corporation buys Mediabistro.com
Laurel Touby turned her popular cocktail parties into a high-traffic Web site for job-seeking media and creative professionals. Yesterday, she sold Mediabistro.com, the company that sprang from those mixers, for $23 million. The Jupitermedia Corporation, an Internet research company that also sells photos and art, agreed to pay $20 million in cash and an additional $3 million over two years for the company, which is based in New York City.

Google to Buy Web Security Company for $625M
Google on Monday acquired e-mail security company Postini for $625 million, a move intended to attract more large businesses to Google Apps. More than 1,000 small businesses and universities currently use Google Apps, but ‘there has been a significant amount of interest from large businesses,’ Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise, said in a Monday teleconference.

Jamendo Gets Cash for Creative Commons Music
Online music has been one of the most tumultuous categories online. Ever since Napster launched in the late 90’s, the music industry has been scrambling for a new model. DRM was once thought the industry’s saving grace, but consumer frustrations and movements from big players like Apple have reversed the trend. Some are even streaming it for free. They just closed their series A round of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners today for an undisclosed sum.

ValueClick Acquires Comparison Shopping Operator MeziMedia For Up To $352million
ValueClick has acquired MeziMedia for up to $352 million, in a deal consisting of $100million in upfront in cash, with an additional sum of up to $252 million to be paid depending on MeziMedia’s revenue and earnings performance through to 2009.

Answers.com has purchased Dictionary.com
Question and answer reference site Answers.com has acquired Dictionary.com’s parent company, Lexico Publishing, for $100 million in cash. Lexico can really serve all your lexical needs because it also owns Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. The deal is expected to close later this fall.

Connectbeam Lands $3.5million Series A
Social networking for the enterprise startup Connectbeam has closed a $3.5million Series A round lead by Gabriel Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures. Connectbeam social software for business provides a corporate focused product that includes support for social bookmarking , social networking, live profiles, project spaces and intranet search integration.

Healthline Get’s $21 Million and Some New Friends
Healthline has dipped it’s hand into a $21 million series B financing led by GE/NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture between GE Commercial Finance’s Media, Communications & Entertainment business and NBC Universal. This is on top of their $14 million round last January. The round also includes smaller investments from Aetna Ventures, LLC, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, U.S. News and World Report, and previous investors VantagePoint Venture Partners and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

Promising start-up search engines according to NYT

2007-06-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

NYT has just published a comprehensive article focused on a dozen of innovative and promising start up search engines that may loosen Google’s grip.

According New York Times the next Google could probably raise from the names listed below:

We think that only the time will tell us who will be the big winner at the end of the day, but whatever the case is any of the above search engines may get acquired soon or later for at least $100M, which, in our feeling, is the main goal of these start ups. NYT also mentions that just 1% share of today’s search market does worth around $1B, which somehow justifies the price tag set forth above. In our view with best chances for the crown are any of the above start-ups, yet hakia.com and NosyJoe.com sound most appealing to us.

Read more…

Deals within the web 2.0 sector for June 5 - 13

2007-06-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

Lijit to Close on $3.3M in Second Round of Funding
Lijit , the personal network search tool, reportedly has plans to close on a $3.3 million venture round this month. The company had already raised $900,000 in venture capital and angel funds earlier this year (covered here ), with investors including Colorado Fund, Brad Feld, Seth Goldstein and Paul Berberian. It also landed a partnership with Feedburner to provide search services for Feedburner’s network.

Kyte Gets Investment from Nokia
Kyte , the video-sharing and distribution site, has received investment from Nokia Growth Partners for an undisclosed amount. See our initial review of Kyte here . The deal hits at an upcoming mobile distribution strategy for the video content, which is designed to offer more control from the user and a way of broadcasting multimedia content across the web.

PodZinger, Now EveryZing, Raises $10M in Funding
PodZinger, the search engine for podcasts and videos, has been renamed EveryZing, and has raised $10 million in funding led by Fairhavent Capital, Accel and General Catalyst, bringing the company’s total funding amount to $15 million.

Rifftrax Acquires Cuts
About four months since launch , web video editor Cuts.com has been acquired by Rifftrax, a site featuring DVD commentary by Michael J. Nelson of MST3K . No word on the price. The online video editing space has become increasingly competitive. Click.tv recently joined the deadpool , with plans to reorganize.

Openads Opensource project Raises $5 million
Openads , the developer of a popular seven year old opensource ad server , have spun out of London based ad network Unanimis and raised $5 million in capital to fund their business. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Index Ventures’ Saul Klein joined the company’s board of directors. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital also mentioned their investment it on his personal blog.

Team and Concepts Raises $1.25million Series A
Team and Concepts Limited , the Hong Kong based company behind online spreadsheet service EditGrid , has announced a $1.25 million Series A investment from the WI Harper Group . WI Harper’s previous investments include Laszlo Systems and Maxthon.

Me.dium Lands $15M in Funding
Me.dium , the social browser add-on, has raised $15 million in a second round of funding , bringing its funding to total $20 million, and coming from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld and Elon Musk. Read here for our initial review.

ESPN acquires Cricinfo website
Leading cricket website Cricinfo has been acquired by ESPN as part of the US broadcaster’s push to grow its global presence in online sports reporting. The site, much loved by statistics-obsessed cricket fans across the world, has been bought from The Wisden Group, publishers of the sport’s ‘bible’ the annual Wisden Cricketers Almanac, for an undisclosed fee.

PayPerPost Raises $7 million More
Controversial pay-per-post startup PayPerPost has raised $7 million in a second round of financing , bringing their total raised capital to just over $10 million. Like their previous round from last October the financing was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with participation from Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures. New investor DFJ Gotham, a fund affiliated with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also participated.

PermissionTV Gets $9M in Third Round of Funding
PermissionTV , an online video platform for creating branded Internet television channels, has closed on its third round of funding for $9 million. The round was led by Castile Ventures and Point Judith Capital. Existing investors include Common Angels, CramerOnline, inflection Point Investors, the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp., SAS Investors and the Venture Capital Fund of New England, bringing the total amount raised for PermissionTV to $18 million.

CBS Invests in TicketReserve, Plans to Integrate On and Offline
CBS has announced its investment in TicketReserve , the online marketplace offering consumers the option to purchase advanced tickets to events at face value. TicketReserve lets you buy tickets for a specific team, artist or event, guaranteeing them the ability to get tickets at face-value, with a FanForward reservation.

ThisNext Raises Round of Venture Debt
ThisNext , the shopping and discovery website, has raised a round of venture debt for an undisclosed amount. The round was backed by Western Technology, Inc. See our initial review of ThisNext here . This round of funding will go directly towards an extension prior to the company’s Series B funding in the fall, giving ThisNext a better position to boost valuation in preparation of raising additional funds.

MeetMoi Gets $1.5M in Funding
MeetMoi , the mobile dating site , has raised $1.5 million in funding in its first round of financing .The funding was provided by Acadia Woods Partners. MeetMoi is a service that operates in a similar manner to Dodgeball or Rabble , where you can find someone in your local proximity to meet up with you right now. But with MeetMoi, you can find a date, not just an existing friend.

Amazon May Be Looking To Acquire Netflix
Netflix stock jumped up 5.66% today on rumors that the company may be in acquisition talks with by Amazon. The funny thing about public company rumors: when they affect stock prices, it becomes AP-reported news…

FameCast Raises $4.5M in Funding
FameCast , the online talent show , has raised $4.5 million in funding from Austin Ventures. FameCast hands out $10,000 in cash prizes to the winner of each of its twelve ’stage’ contests, spanning art genres such as spoken word, animation, and stand-up comedy, along with the expected music categories for Pop, Country , R&B, etc. Contestants submit videos of their work to their respected ’stage’. Users vote for who they like best, and the contests last for an entire ’season’. FameCast’s recent funding will go towards expanding its marketing efforts in the U.S. and around the world.

PeakStream Trail Leads To Google
Google’s acquisitions are usually pretty smooth deals; at most, a ‘welcome, Google!’ statement shows up on the lucky company’s homepage. Now, a report indicates that PeakStream has been bought by Google, yet the company no longer even has a front page - the whole site is gone.

Scribd Banks $3.5 Million from Redpoint
Scribd , dubbed the ‘YouTube for Documents’, was the dark horse of their Y Combinator class, but the social document sharing site now gives its critics pause to think. Since launching, traffic to the site scaled quickly to 75-100,000 uniques per day with a little help from popular link aggregation sites like Digg. This past month they logged 1.73 million unique visitors. Today Kinsey Hills is back, investing another $210,000 alongside $3.5 million from Redpoint, with Geoffrey Yang joining the company’s board.

VCs re-up SocialText
SocialText, a startup that makes collaborative wiki platforms for enterprises, has raised $3 million toward a $6.5 million Series C venture financing , according to a regulatory filing. The company is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP and the Omidiyar Network, from which it has already raised $3 million in its Series B. Other backers include tech executives Mark Pincus, CEO of Tribe.net which sold the majority of its assets to Cisco earlier this year, Reid Hoffman, the Chairman of LinkedIn.

Deals within the web 2.0 sector for May 17 - 23

2007-05-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

Clupedia gets $1.3 million
Santa Ana, CA, based startup Clupedia announced that it has raised $1.3 million in funding from Tech Coast Angels, a group of 270 investors in Orange County. Clupedia’s founder David Saad claims that he has put down $2.3 million of his own money into startup. David Saad is a serial entrepreneur who had previously founded Braintec that was sold to Technisource. To add weight to the startup’s story, Johannes Larcher sits on Clupedia’s board. James had served as VP of Friendster and prior to that he was the chief of staff at Overture, which Yahoo bought in 2003 for nearly $2 billion.

Confirmed: CBS Acquires Wallstrip
Wallstrip founder Howard Lindzon confirmed the deal on his blog on Monday - presenter Lindsay Campbell and producers Adam Elend and Jeff Marks will become full-time employees of CBS, says Gigaom . The show had raised $600,000 from angels and friends, including Fred Wilson and Brad Feld. It’s a great exit for Wallstrip, and may give hope to other videoblogs that want to make the leap.

Second Life Acquires Winward Mark for More Realistic Game Play
Linden Lab, parent company of Second Life , announced today its acquisition of graphics technology from Windward Mark Interactive, for an undisclosed amount. From the deal, Linden Lab will acquire WindLight, an atmospheric-rendering technology , Nimble, a 3D cloud simulator , and associated intellectual property and interests.

The Travel Channel Acquires Travel Blog for Editorial Content
The online component for the Travel Channel announces today that it has acquired World Hum , an online travel magazine blog, for an undisclosed amount. As part of the deal, Travel Channel visitors will be able to access exclusive content from World Hum’s editors and contributors. Internet giant Google Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc., a pioneer in online services for businesses, are discussing an alliance that could help them compete more effectively with Microsoft Corp., according to people familiar with the matter.

Yahoo’s Rumored $1 billion Talks With Bebo
Rumors about social networking site Bebo being for sale come up every few months. First it was British Telecom for $550 million in July 2006 (we started that one), then the Financial Times reported they were in talks with Viacom a month later.

Naturally Curly Raises $600,000 in Funding
Naturally Curly , the online community for people with curly hair founded in 1998, has raised $600,000 in a round of funding led by James Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers, a computer manufacturer which was bought by Compaq in 1997.

Deals within the web 2.0 sector for May 17 - 18

2007-05-18T11:02:00.000-07:00

Rumour: Google to buy Feedburner
I have just heard from a VERY trusted source that Google is buying Feedburner in order to get into the rapidly evolving RSS Ad market. The delay in announcing the acquisition deal, I am told is solely due to the delay in closing out the DoubleClick deal. If true this deal makes a lot of sense for both parties. Today many of us predominately read blogs via our RSS readers and thus never actually visit the original blog source and/or see the sites supporting adverts.

Microsoft to buy Web ad firm aQuantive for $6 bln
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it would acquire aQuantive Inc. for about $6 billion, or $66.50 a share, an 85 percent premium to the online advertising company’s closing price on Thursday. Shares of aQuantive shot to $63.95 in pre-opening trade, following news of the deal. The all-cash deal tops a dramatic one-month consolidation spree across the online advertising market sparked when Google Inc. agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Calacanis, who is starting a new company called Kokua (scroll down) , has gotten funding from Sequoia
The Insider has learned that Jason Calcanis’ stealth start-up backed by Sequoia Capital has closed on a round of funding from Sequoia, News Corporation and CBS. The undisclosed funding is interesting. Two strategic investors and the hottest Silly-con valley VC.

Fabrik raises $24.9M more for file storage and sharing
Fabrik , a company that offer online storage and easy sharing of big files, has just closed a $24.9 million funding deal and added Ross Levinsohn, former President of Fox Interactive Media, to the board. Its financing came primarily from 3i , with a small chunk from ComVentures.

Club Penguin In Acquisition Talks With Sony For $500+ million
It’s been rumored for a while that Montgomery & Co. is representing virtual world Club Penguin in a sale transaction. It looks like the company is locked in talks, possibly exclusive, with Sony, and the price is ‘at least half a billion’ says a source close to the deal. AOL Acquires ADTECH AG
AOL announced today that it has acquired a controlling interest in ADTECH AG, a leading international online ad-serving company based in Frankfurt, Germany. The acquisition provides AOL with an advanced ad-serving platform that includes an array of ad management and delivery applications enabling website publishers to manage, traffic and report on their online advertising campaigns.

mTracks Gets Funded, Launches Beta Site
mTraks, the online music community and digital music marketplace, announces its public beta launch and the $550,000 it has raised in angel funding represented by Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati.

Veotag Gets $750K in Angel Funding
Veotag, the video tagging service, has raised $750,000 from professional angel investors . See our initial review of Veotag here . Veotag’s deep tagging service lets you create an interactive table of contents for your video clips, perfect for finding the exact portion of the video you’re looking for.

WPP Acquires 24/7 Real Media for $649mOnline advertising services firm 24/7 Real Media is to be acquired by the WPP group for $649 million. The old time internet advertising firm had its origins serving ads for Yahoo! and Netscape in 1994 and was formerly founded the following year as Real Media. After numerous acquisitions it took its current name and grew to have 20 offices in 12 countries, serving over 200 billion advertising impressions every month.

Deals within the web 2.0 sector for May 16

2007-05-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

MySpace To Acquire Flektor
MySpace will acquire Flektor , a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Stockalicious raises $50k in funding
5 months old Singapore based startup Stockalicious is claiming that it has raised $50K in funding from angel investors . The startup enables users to keep track stocks, create portfolio, compare their portfolio performance against the market, and provides a embed code for portfolio to bring it up blogs and websites. Stockalicious currently supports Nasdaq , NYSE , AMEX and OTCBB .

Deals within the Web 2.0 sector from May 15

2007-05-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

Kyte Gets More Funding from Swiss Telecom Provider
Kyte , the online video-sharing and broadcasting website, has just announced new investors, telecommunications provider Swisscom and Holtzbrinck Ventures, which have invested in Kyte for an undisclosed amount. Swisscom and Holtzbrink Ventures is the venture capital arm of one of Germany’s most influential media companies.

IMified Acquires Real-Time Feed Alerts Leader Feedcrier.com
We’re very happy to finally announce the acquisition of Feedcrier.com , the leading provider of IM based feed alerts . This one has been in the making for some time now, and we officially welcome Adam Kalsey and the Feedcrier community to IMified.

Cork’d Acquired by Wine Library Vlogger
Cork’d , the social networking site for wine lovers, is being acquired by a team led by Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library , and includes Erik Kastner of Rails, for an undisclosed amount. Cork’d has a reported 20,000 members, and provides a space for you to rate and review wines you’ve tasted. You can make a wine wish list of sorts, and track those you’d like to try as well as purchase.

Swedish Game Site Power Challenge Raises $8 Million From Benchmark Capital
Benchmark Capital put $8 million to work with Swedish game site Power Challenge , the company will announce today. Power Challenge is a rich Internet application - a game that runs in java and plays very much like a video game . Users build and customize their teams and play against others for points and status. The quality of game play is high and is designed to push the boundaries between traditional PC gaming and online gaming.

Amazon Acquires dpreview.com
Amazon have announced the acquisition of the digital camera information and review site dpreview.com . UK based dpreview.com was founded in 1998 by Phil Askey as a site that publishes ‘unbiased reviews and original content regarding the latest in digital cameras , and offers a host of features and forums designed to make it easy for consumers to find the camera that’s right for them’.

Deals within the web 2.0 sector for May 9 - 14

2007-05-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

CBS Acquires WallStrip for $5 million
Jossip is reporting that corporate focused video blog WallStrip has been acquired by CBS News for $5 million. The report states that an announcement is expected early this week and involves WallStrip host Lindsay Campbell being the next Amanda Congdon for CBS, fronting online shows. I spoke to some one close to the deal who confirmed Jossip’s story. He told me that New York based Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson , who had previously invested $500,000 in WallStrip, negotiated and sealed the deal. The deal is said to be focused on signing Lindsay Campbell. CBS was keen to have Campbell on board and a cast iron contract meant that acquiring WallStrip was the only way they could get to her.

Mogulus Gets $1.2M in Angel Funding
Mogulus , the online video company aiming to make you all the next Justin.tv rock star, has raised $1.2 in angel funding , including $1 million from a New York-based Swiss private investor. The video broadcasting site is currently in private beta, and their differentiating factor is their ability to mix videos in real time for the creation of your own live broadcast.

JAJAH Lands $20 million Series C Funding From Intel
VOIP provider JAJAH closes Series C funding of $20 million today, with the lead investment coming from Intel Capital , the venture capital arm of Intel. Previous TechCrunch coverage here . As part of the deal Intel will provide JAJAH access to their community of product dealers, OEM customers and developers, as well as access to Intel’s range of VOIP patents.

videoNEXT Secures $5.4M in Series B Financing
CHANTILLY, Va., May 8 /PRNewswire/ — videoNEXT Network Solutions, Inc., a developer of innovative security management solutions , today announced that it has closed $5.4 million in series B financing and has appointed Joseph Costa as its president and chief executive officer. Christopher Gettings will continue in the role of chairman and assume responsibilities for business development for federal customers and strategic partners.

Encyclopedia of Life: Better Than Wikipedia? Formally announced during the week with funding of $12.5 million
Formally announced during the week with funding of $12.5 million, Encyclopedia of Life aims to be an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on earth. Encyclopedia of Life is a collaborative effort. Tens of thousands of citizen scientists with expertise around the world are responsible for the creation of content.

Source

Minglebox Gets $7M from Sequoia

2007-05-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

Minglebox, the India-based social network for college campuses, raised $7 million in funding, backed by Sequoia Capital India. Minglebox started with a concept similar to facebook (though less elitist), and Ning, creating customized networks for people on college campuses. The goal is for each network to be a close knit community, working like a college intranet. As with many other social networking sites, you can share videos, music, blogs, photos and events with friends and the group at large.

Axis Open Source and Kaboodle Team Up

2007-04-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona, March 8, 2007 – Axis Open Source, a leading developer of Linux, PHP and MySql solutions and Kaboodle Ventures LLC a Web Technologies holding company announced today a partnership to develop, market and distribute a new series of Web 3.0 consumer driven media applications in the B2C, B2B and C2C market space.

“As what’s been deemed Web 2.0 applications like social networking, video, audio, podcasting, user-generated content, blogs and what have you continue to rapidly gain mass acceptance we’re excited about partnering with Axis Open Source to develop the next generation of web based applications…ones that actually generate revenue and create ease of use for both businesses and consumers,” stated Christopher Conlan, CEO of Kaboodle Ventures.

“The Axis OS and Kaboodle Ventures partnership enables our companies to leverage our strengths on the programming and development side with Kaboodle Ventures experience and team on the content development, media and marketing side to really exploit the ever growing business and consumer demand for user-friendly, search engine enabled cross-media destinations that fill broad and niche market requirements,” commented Dr. John Horn, CEO of Axis Open Source.

Read More

Google Spends 3.1B Cash for DoubleClick

2007-04-14T02:51:00.000-07:00

NYT: Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion
Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year.

Yahoo Biz: Google to Acquire DoubleClick
Combination Will Significantly Expand Opportunities for Advertisers, Agencies and Publishers and Improve Users’ Online Experience. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG - News) announced today a definitive agreement to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a global leader in digital marketing technology and services, for $3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco-based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity and management. The acquisition will combine DoubleClick’s expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google’s leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.

GoogleBlog: The next step in Google advertising
At Google, we are constantly looking for new, innovative ways to make the information you want more accessible and more relevant—and to deliver it as fast as possible. Since Google’s inception, it has always been our intention to present users with highly targeted, useful advertisements when appropriate—ads that unobtrusively complement users experience. We have always believed in, and tirelessly pursued, the idea that serving relevant, unintrusive ads would best serve our advertisers in the long term.

Twitter's Buzz

2007-04-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

If you ever fancied yourself a blogger but didn't have the time or energy to post thoughtful or silly missives at regular intervals, a new service called Twitter could set your inner blogger free. While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.

Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't have much to say. Or maybe you're just lazy. Not a problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group text message to your friends' mobile phones from either your own phone, an instant message or an online form at twitter.com. All your notes are then stored and displayed on your personal profile page on the site, which includes links to your friends' Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choice, and a short bio. You can even send text updates directly to your MySpace page. Just remember to keep it short: posts are limited to 140 characters, and the topic is, invariably, "what are you doing?"

Read more...

DoubleClick to kill Right Media

2007-04-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reported this morning that DoubleClick plans to launch an exchange for online advertisements. The system is described as follows:

"DoubleClick, based in New York, views the exchange as the centerpiece of a growth plan and may derive the majority of revenue from the new service within five years, said David Rosenblatt, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview yesterday. “We already have the largest sellers and the largest buyers,” he said. “This will link them for the first time.”

He described the exchange as a mix of eBay and Sabre, the airline reservations system that travel agents use. The service will let advertisers see information about what competitors bid for particular ads, in the same way that eBay shows visitors past bids. And it will let publishers try to ensure that they sell their ad spots at the highest possible price, the way that airlines try to do with the seats they sell."

The most important player in the advertising exchange space is known to be the New York based Right Media. In October of 2006, they closed a $45 million round that was lead by Yahoo. Especially interesting in the context of today's announcement was the following quote:

"Right Media helps match display advertisers with Web-site publishers, and it hopes to do for display ads what Google has done for search ads. It's an idea Walrath [Right Media's CEO] began exploring while working as director of direct marketing and senior vice-president of strategy and development at DoubleClick, the maker of online-advertising and media-management tools."

So the question here is how DoubleClick's plans relate to and affect the RightMedia's core business?

Only the time will tell...

Synapse Life Sold for $60K

2007-04-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Synapse Life got acquired for $60,000 on ebay, yet another web 2.0 company sold on auction, the most famous sale on ebay was kiko.com.

The latest eBayquisition: SynapseLife, a suite of web-based applications that are available on your mobile phone, sold for $60K on eBay in the last few hours. The founders are now switching their focus to Down2Night, a much sexier social app that will soon have integration with MySpace.

SynapseLife was well-made, but a little dull - we’re looking forward to what they’ll serve up now they’re thinking about the social space.

Source

Zopria was deleted from Wikipedia

2007-03-26T04:41:00.000-07:00

Zopria was deleted from Wikipedia’s entry list sparking protest from Zorpia members. Press Release Body = Wikipedia have removed the entry ‘Zorpia’ from their site recently, sparking protest reactions from thousands of Zorpia.com members. Zorpia.com, a Social Networking Site with 5 million global members, had been included in the famous online encyclopedia for approximately one year, but has recently been removed.

Wikipedia editors stated ‘lack of notability’ and a ‘lack of reliable sources of notability’, as the main reasons for removal. “Whilst we ultimately respect Wikipedia’s decision, and support their quest for quality content, we do feel that our company’s ongoing growth deserves a mention in the history of the SNS phenomena” said Jeffrey Ng, CEO and founder of Zorpia Co. Ltd “It is also confusing to us that so many other less notable sites, manage to retain their place in Wikipedia content”. Wikipedia guidelines however, do not allow for the existence of one entry, to support the existence of another. In a show of support, members of Zorpia have attempted to make themselves more visible to the rest of the web by creating pictures of themselves with Zorpia slogans, and posting videos on sites such as YouTube.

EPR Network Blog

EPR Network PR

YouTube lawsuit may help rivals

2007-03-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

Viacom's billion-dollar legal gambit against Google could lead to more media industry lawsuits and give a boost to rival online video services in the emerging marketplace.

Media executives and analysts are awaiting the outcome of the lawsuit against Google and its video-sharing site YouTube, which Viacom said is intended to defend the notion of intellectual property and the concept of the Internet media marketplace.

Viacom, owner of MTV Networks and Comedy Central, demanded in February that YouTube pull more than 100,000 video clips uploaded by users on to the online video-sharing service. Google and Viacom had tried and failed to negotiate a deal to allow some of Viacom's content on to YouTube and split the advertising revenues.

More...

Viacom vs. YouTube

2007-03-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

Reuters
Media conglomerate Viacom Inc. said on Tuesday it filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google Inc. and its Internet video sharing site YouTube over unauthorized use of its copyrighted entertainment.The suit accuses Web search leader Google and YouTube of "massive intentional copyright infringement" of Viacom's entertainment assets and seeks an injunction against further violations.Viacom contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of its programming have been uploaded onto YouTube's site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Techcrunch
They said that Google’s acquisition of YouTube would be the act that saved it from the fate of Napster - lawsuit oblivion.And they may have been wrong, if today’s $1 billion lawsuit is a sign of things to come. Viacom, the plaintiff, has been on a warpath against YouTube lately. Unlike Fox’s behind the scenes chats with the Wall Street Journal to get the message across that they were displeased with the Google/YouTube, Viacom has chosen the frontal assault: Massive takedown notices and now the simple request for $1 billion in damages.

Top Free Press Release Sites

2007-03-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

We have always been thinking that aside the well known web 2.0 influencers, web 2.0 start ups can also use free press release sites to get the word out for their innovations and technologies…
Here we list some of the top and free press release distribution sites that are known to bring some good results on making your web site more visible on web.

Our top selection:

-- PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com/) -Perhaps the oldest one
-- EPR Network (http://www.express-press-release.com) -A Network of 14 PR sites across the states (on our tests it ranked higher on the search engines, mostly Google)
-- PRLeap (http://www.prleap.com/) -Very clean and neat PR site

Aside the above sites, the top ones according us, below you will find more press release sites you can use to get the word out for your web 2.0 site.

http://marketwire.com
http://businesswire.com
http://www.1888pressrelease.com/
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com
http://www.addpr.com/
http://www.california-press-release.com
http://www.click2newsites.com/
http://www.clickpress.com/
http://www.e-xl.com
http://www.ereleases.com
http://www.florida-press-release.com
http://www.free-news-release.com/
http://www.free-press-release.com
http://www.freepressreleases.co.uk/
http://www.georgia-press-release.com
http://www.i-newswire.com/
http://www.illinois-press-release.com
http://www.maryland-press-release.com
http://www.massachusetts-press-release.com
http://www.media-press-release.com/
http://www.newyork-press-release.com
http://www.ohio-press-release.com
http://www.pr.com/
http://www.pr9.net/
http://www.prbot.com
http://www.press-base.com/
http://www.press-service.net/
http://www.press-world.com/add
http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
http://www.prfree.com/
http://www.PRnewswire.com
http://www.texas-press-release.com
http://www.theopenpress.com/
http://www.virginia-press-release.com

Become a partner in a huge web 2.0 site

2007-03-09T08:12:00.000-08:00

The huge contextual platform LinkedWords, we are covering and using since its launch back in July 2006, went out this Saturday (March the 10th) with an ad in the The Economist looking for investors!

Below is an extraction from the page as found over here: http://linkedwords.com/admin/investors.html

LinkedWords.com™ is a unique and innovative concept built upon massive web 2.0 contextual platform. With 38 Million English words, phrases and whole sentences built-in, which web sites use to get contextually linked with, it aims to maximize the contextual linking on web.

Currently the platform is rapidly growing** and reshaping the way web sites do links on web by shifting the focus from off-text links (links outside the content / simple links) to in-text links (links in the context / contextual links). By linking strategic words in the text, web sites connect in a contextual way to LinkedWords.com's platform and to other sites with the same content, which results in dramatically increased web visibility and precisely targeted visitors for the sites involved. Our ambitious vision for the future is to start helping the common web users find information in the context of the subject they are reading by clicking on the same contextually... linked words.

We launched in July 2006 and since then the site had tremendous growth and the last month (February '07) it ended up with:

More than 38 Million static pages;
More than 5 Million+ page views;
1 Million+ visits;
200,000+ unique visitors;
226,000+ back links according to Yahoo!;
30,000+ contextual links (in-text linked words);
6/10 Google PageRank™;
300,000+ indexed pages;
Alexa Ranking in the range of 8,000/16,000, the highest so far was 4,888;
Quantcast measured traffic ~270,000 uniques/month.

The company has its own well-established back-end IT firm based in the European Union
Interested?

We are looking for one or two more private investors*** or partners*** to accelerate our growth further.

Email them at: info@linkedwords.com

*38,000,000 and counting web pages

**More than 5 Million+ page views (February '07)

***Only serious investors will be considered and replied further

Geni raised a $10 million

2007-03-06T07:46:00.000-08:00

Seven week old Geni raised a $10 million second round of financing last week, led by Charles River Ventures with a post-money valuation of $100 million. George Zachary from CRV is joining the Geni board of directors.
This is a 10x increase in valuation for Geni. The company’s first round of financing, led by Founders Fund, was $1.5 million, at a $10 million post-money valuation.

Geni is a unique approach to solving the problem of genealogy, which is the question of how everyone is related. Geni lets you create a family tree through our fun simple interface. When you add a relative's email address, he or she will be invited to join your tree. That relative can then add other relatives, and so on. Your tree will continue to grow as relatives invite other relatives. more...

Colin Dowling has commented on:

This information is easy to monetize, even without repeat users. Need to send out wedding invitations or birth announcements? Pull the addresses from Genie. Putting together a family reunion? Pull the family info from Genie. Want to send an e-birthday card to your mom’s 2nd cousins daughter but don’t want to have to remember? Set Genie to do it for you.

Now, imagine if Genie had affiliates printing the wedding invites or birth announcements and mailing them out for you? Affiliates for making T-shirts for the family reunion. Affiliates for buying Christmas gifts and having them sent automatically…on and on and on.

Data about relationships between people is perhaps the most valuable kind of data there is simply because “relationships” lead to transactions, which can cost money. Genie is compiling a network of the most valuable of those relationships: family.

With that kind of early growth, they are going to really have to screw up not to be a nice, viable, profitable site. On the other hand, if they just cover it with Google Ads (LAZY), I’ll be the first to pile on.

On the other hand many other people and experts pointed out that there are other competitors in the field such as myfamily.com, ancestry.com, or CMGI and geni is not different from them aside the fact it uses flash, which makes it not better.

WorldFriends Networks Gets Funded

2007-03-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

Shanghai-based Meta4 Group Ltd., which operates WorldFriends Networks, the world’s leading provider of private label multi-lingual online personals announced US$2.5 million in venture capital funding from industry veterans including the co-founders of leading Internet dating service Lavalife.com.

WorldFriends Networks will use this capital infusion to greatly accelerate its rate of growth in parallel with the rapidly expanding Internet socializing and advertising markets, particularly in North Asia. WorldFriends Networks currently serves over 200 website partners and 1,000,000 registered members.

More...

Content Owners vs. Content Mash-Ups

2007-02-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

There is an on-going discussion how far the content mash-up start ups can go in their relationship with content owners and how much content can be grabbed from a page without jumping into copyright infringement or going against the content owners' interest.

Web2innovations.com thinks that as long as the service/application that grabs snippets of text/content does not recompose the content in a readable format where you can read it at 100% just like you’d be if you were on the original content but offers a link to the source (content owner) instead, then it is OK.

A guy named “AP” made an interesting comment at Techcrunch, which summarized represents the following:

“this is an excellent site for the consumer. but does this mean that the content owners would be screwed over? for example, if enough people clip techcrunch, clipmarks could get the ad dollars piggy backing on techcrunch content.
http://www.clipmarks.com/tags/techcrunch/
saving clips for personal consumption is one thing. re-distributing it probably needs
more thought.“

Yes, we, just like w2i (web2innovations.com), think if enough clips are made over a given content, Clipmarks could make a few ad dollars, pretty fine by me, yet you would not be able to read the whole content based on the snippets alone, therefore as long as you cannot meaningfully read over these clips but, instead, you are sent to Techcrunch as the content owner (the source), then it is OK, in my view.

After all this is what Google does too (as well as all other search engines out there), it just extracts parts of the content and serves the searchers with, but none of us can read the whole content based on what the search engine’s results are and still we need to click on the links to go to the original sources… etc, etc..

web2innovations.com mentions about an interesting concept called NosyJoe that is, by the way, planned to be a new breed of social search engine that semantically extracts the meaningful components in the content (meaningful keywords, phrasal components and whole meaningful sentences) and then serves the searchers in a proprietary way by linking to the source and those guys there gives us pretty much the same explanation about the relationship between content owners and content mash-ups.

Amazon Invests in Shelfari

2007-02-26T16:08:00.000-08:00

Amazon has invested $1 million in Seattle based Shelfari, beating out at least one venture firm that competed for the deal. Shelfari is a website where users input all of the books they own, and have an online visual representation of their library to share with others. Users can share their library through the Shelfari website or via a widget, and make money by linking to the books for sale at Amazon. They launched well after competitor LibraryThing, which was itself partially acquired last year by ABEbooks.

People say they like Librarything.com for their book collection, and SwapSimple.com for books swapping.

For UK readers, http://www.readitswapit.co.uk is quite similar but also allows you to swap your books for free. It has around 100,000 books now and is the UK’s largest book swapping site.

SocialWay.com, on the other site is a generalized version of the “book sharing” sites - it allows you to build a list of things you have (books, tools, movies etc.) and share it with people you trust (e.g, friends, friends of friends, or the general public). The mission behind the site is to be environmental friendly by reducing co2 emissions due to sharing resources.

FOX ACQUIRES STRATEGIC DATA CORPORATION

2007-02-23T06:45:00.000-08:00

FOX INTERACTIVE MEDIA ACQUIRES INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING TECHNOLOGY COMPANY STRATEGIC DATA CORPORATION

Enhanced Media Network to Bring Hyper-targeted Ad Serving to Reality

Fox Interactive Media (FIM), a division of News Corp (NYSE: NWS), announced today that it has completed the acquisition of interactive advertising technology company, Strategic Data Corporation (SDC). SDC's advanced, proprietary technology is designed to optimize the delivery of online advertising.

SDC’s technology will enable FIM to deliver highly-targeted graphical performance-based advertising on literally billions of Web pages viewed each day across its growing network. Fox Interactive Media, which spans MySpace, IGN, Direct2Drive, AmericanIdol.com, AskMen.com and more, is among the most visited networks on the Internet with more than 135 million worldwide unique visitors each month and is the number one most viewed network in the U.S. with over 40 billion pages viewed each month.

More...

Mozes Raises $5m

2007-02-21T07:18:00.000-08:00

SMS call-and-response service Mozes will announce in the morning that the company has raised $5 million in series A venture funding from Northwest Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
Mozes connects you with your friends and the things you care about (it sounds like yet another social networking site). Your Mozes keyword is the easiest way to create and share content on your mobile phone.

There you can:

Connect with your favorite bands
Update your friends
Text your friends from the weband send them quick polls

More...

The site: Mozes

Odeo Looks for Buyers

2007-02-20T07:22:00.000-08:00

gigaom.com:
Ever since founder Ev Williams decided to buy back San Francisco-based Odeo from his investors and shift his attention to fast growing SMS-alerting service, Twitter, it became clear that Odeo brand and domain might be up for grabs.
More...

techcrunch.com:
Evan Williams, the man who co-founded blogger.com foundation Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, has put his beleaguered startup Odeo up for sale. Odeo is a consumer facing audio service that’s been remarkably high profile about its struggles over the past year; Williams discussed mistakes candidly and bought the company back from investors in October.
More...

mashable.com:
Ev Williams’ Obvious Corp, which bought Ev’s Odeo property back from investors in October ‘06, is now looking to sell the podcasting site. The site is self-sustaining he says - AdSense pays the bills - but the company wants to focus on Twitter and doesn’t want to see Odeo die of neglect.
More...

obvious.com:
In the last few months, we here at Obvious have been increasingly focused on Twitter. As a result, our original product, Odeo, has not gotten the attention it deserves.
More...

We guess Odeo could take anything between $5M and $10M based on the current popularity, site usage and brand awareness. We’ll see…

Google Bought Adscape for $23 Million

2007-02-16T10:01:00.000-08:00

After some rumors of a deal these past weeks, Google has expanded it’s advertising reach by moving into video game advertising with their $23 million acquisition of Adscape. Adscape is a video game advertising company whose AdverPlay product lets developers place dynamic ads right inside the game and Real Virtual Gateway product enables two-way text, audio and video communication via SMS Text or eMail.

Microsoft seems also to have acquired a pretty similar in-game advertiser Massive to run advertising across its Xbox Live and MSN gaming platform.

Silicon Valley still the best for innovations!

2007-02-13T10:24:00.000-08:00

From NYTimes: "Just ask Sim Wong Hoo. About seven years ago, I met Mr. Sim in Singapore, where he was born and was then living. He talked about the rising creativity of Singaporeans and with a flourish, as if to dramatically make his point, he pulled out a prototype of a hand-held music player that he insisted would replace Sony’s famous Walkman.

Mr. Sim’s device was breathtaking, possessing all the elements of what we now know as the MP3 player. Yet today, a Silicon Valley icon, Apple, dominates the market for MP3 players with the iPod. In recognition of its emergence as a music powerhouse, last month Apple dropped the word “computer” from its name."

Also G. Pascal Zachary from NYT says: "When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny"

We pretty much agree with these conclusions/opinions and we also had a previous post on the matter called "Silicon Valley is Non Replicable".

Another post at Read/Write Web contains lost of comments on the subject.

Magnify.net Got Funded

2007-02-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

Magnify.net, one of the video sharing startups that launched at demo, has raised $1.2 million in a first round of funding led by NextStage Capital and New York Angel investors. Other investors included Chris Anderson of the TED Conference, Active Angel Investors of Washington DC, and Stage 1 Ventures.

Magnify.net lets you find, filter, and share video from the web and gather it your way.

» Put video on your web site
» Program your own video channel

More...

LinkedWords.com maximizes contextual linking

2007-02-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

LinkedWords.com is a professional platform, whose mission is to maximize contextual linking between websites across the web, so that eventually the common user finds information easier, better and in the context of the subject he/she is reading. By the same time any website which maintains a maximum number of contextual hyperlinks becomes more visible and consequently more visited on the web.

To accomplish this mission a maximum number of key words, key phrases and sentences must be linked through LinkedWords.com's unique concept built upon an innovative web 2.0-based contextual platform.

Therefore, web masters who want to improve the visibility and the targeted traffic of their websites, must make as many as possible contextual links through LinkedWords.com, it's free, and here is how it‘s done

Web masters can browse 38,000,000+ English words-, phrases- and sentences-based pages and categories to get contextually linked with

find out more at: LinkedWords

NBC Universal & Viacom vs. YouTube

2007-02-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

Jeff Zucker, on his first day as chief executive of NBC Universal, came out swinging at YouTube, accusing the online video site of failing to deploy its technology to protect the copyrighted materials of traditional media companies.

“YouTube needs to prove that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It’s proven it can do it when it wants to,” Mr Zucker said, referring to the site’s controls to block pornography and hate speech. He added: “They have the capability. The question is whether they have the will.”

That frustration boiled over on Friday when Viacom, which owns MTV, Comedy Central and other youth-oriented brands, demanded that YouTube remove all of their clips from its site. Viacom executives have been eager to see whether other traditional media companies will follow their lead.

More...

Video Site Putfile Sells for $7.1M

2007-02-07T10:26:00.000-08:00

HandHeld Entertainment, a small consumer electronics firm that is known to be buying up web content sites, has acquired video and photo upload site Putfile for $7.1 million in cash and stock, the company announced today.

The site is known to be owned and operated by one guy, 22-year-old Gordon Page of Guildford, England, with the help of his parents and some friendly forum operators. It first went online in May 2004. Pretty good deal, cheers.

Digg.com Fights Spam, Scam, Games

2007-02-02T11:10:00.000-08:00

In a long blog post, Digg's founder Kevin Rose explains why they have removed their list of top users, who were ranked based on how many stories they’ve been able to promote to Digg's home page. Most of the post talk about the steps Digg has taken to fight spam, scam and gaming of their system, it is reasonable to conclude that this is yet another step in that battle.

Top Digg users are often requested to help stories get the the home page, sometimes in return for cash payments. By removing the list, Digg makes it harder to figure out who those users are, yet many experts and Digg's users find this step lame...

Kevin is definitely sending mixed signals. when you have a system that works like digg, of course there will be people wanting to organize and promote stories that they like. you cant expect people to vote as an individual, they have friends, they have jobs, they are involved in communities. they should have focused into the tech news at first and stay there. now digg is becoming mainstream with inaccurate, sensationalist, boring news.

Unless you want to see articles about Digg or the newest Free collection of fonts, the stories are crap. Removing the top users list won’t matter, people can just look at the profile of submitters for articles on the home page. The only articles that make it to the home page are the ones submitted by the top users anyways.

We have written before about Digg and why nobody wants to buy them, and aside other reasons given there the spam, manipulations and the gaming on the site are seen as major issues. In other words the Digg's concept is organized in such way so that it will always carry out spam and manipulations.

A user datter recently commented on one of the leading tech blogs:

"Digg is a great idea which has grown faster than it’s creators ability to administer it.
In a perfect world, they’d be ahead of these sort of problems, rather than playing catch-up trying to fix scenario after it’s proven to be broken. I suppose broken is a bit harsh actually, but the site is definitely being gamed with Rose et al trying their hardest to implement some rules/policies that will keep it together without destroying the essence of what the site is all about.

Being forerunners in this sort of self-run community, they get to sort out all the pain for those similar sites that will follow later and improve on the idea. Slashdot lead the way for a long while in this regard, and Digg.com came along and improved on the model without having to figure out a lot of the issues Slashdot had already been through. Now Digg is leading the way and having to wade through the mire themselves.

Sucks to be out front sometimes, but that’s the price of success."

We think that Digg is great success, and with the success all the issues come along, but it takes on old media outlets, which puts fire under their feet and unless they figure this out and find their niche, they are under the risk to have their concept and popular site ruined.

Flixster Gets Funded

2007-02-01T11:45:00.000-08:00

Flixster, a San Francisco based social network where users rate and discuss movies, closed a round of financing today with LightSpeed Ventures. This seems to be a small round of financing - $2 million or less. Blogs reported that Sequoia Capital was competing LightSpeed Ventures in the deal (even Kleiner Perkins was involved). Flixster has recently seen very heavy user registration and page views growth, "so a sub-$10 million valuation, which this deal almost certainly was, could be considered quite cheap" reported TechCrunch.

The end of Revver, Guba and Metacafe

2007-01-30T08:24:00.000-08:00

Just now that YouTube announced that they plan to launch their own revenue sharing system and start displaying ads on the videos there, we see how companies like Revver, Guba and Metacafe will start losing ground under their feet, considering the fact that YouTube is hugely popular and reaches the mainstream on the web!

Here is what Techcrunch wrote today: "YouTube competitors have worked to differentiate themselves by compensating video content creators, but once YouTube enters this game with their top-dog status already -I question what would make a user go to a lesser-visible video site such as Revver, Guba, Metacafe, etc. Competitors have been struggling of recent — Revver lost two founders and Guba lost its’ CEO and two executives."

more plus some interesting comments

News Corp. Invests in ROO

2007-01-30T05:49:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal reported (behind paywall) this morning that News Corp would announce a $12 million investment in online video startup ROO.
News Corp. is expected to announce today that it agreed to buy as much as 10% of ROO Group Inc., an online video-technology provider.

The deal, valued around $12 million, puts ROOTV's valuation at more than $120M!

More Funding for Brightcove

2007-01-30T05:32:00.000-08:00

Brightcove Raises $59.5 million!

Brightcove, an online video platform and destination start-up has raised $59.5 million in new funding from strategic and large-scale institutional investors. The new investors include Maverick Capital, Brookside Capital, AllianceBernstein, The New York Times Company and Transcosmos. Existing investors such as Allen & Company, AOL, and Accel Partners participated in this round of financing.

Joost - peer-to-peer video

2007-01-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

Mr. Zennstrom last week took the wraps off a previously secretive start-up, Joost, that intends to provide a peer-to-peer approach to distributing video online, so it seems Joost is all about peer-to-peer video, just like Kazaa which was file sharing platform and the Skype, peer-to-peer Internet telephony.

“We’re trying to take the good things about television and the good things about the Internet and put them together,” he said.
Just like its previous ventures, Kazaa and the Internet telephony company Skype, which was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005, Mr. Zennstrom now tries to reshape the video industry, which many experts, after the YouTube's sale, predict to be the next big thing on the web...

Wikipedia vs. Microsoft

2007-01-24T11:17:00.000-08:00

There’s been a discussion over the last few days over a Microsoft employee offering to pay an Australian blogger named Rick Jelliffe to edit certain Wikipedia pages relating to open office standards, including this page. Rick Jelliffe writes about the offer over here.

Doug Mahugh at Microsoft freely admitted to doing this in a comment to a Slashdot article on the matter.

Wikio Raises $5.3M

2007-01-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

Luxembourg-based Wikio, Europe’s best hope against Digg, Google News and Technorati (it is sort of a mashup of all three), has closed a €4 million ($5.3 million) Series A round of financing. This follows a previous angel round of financing of an undisclosed size (investors in that round included as Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Freddy Mini, Ouriel Ohayon, and Jeff Clavier). The financing round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.

More...

Wize Gets $4 Million

2007-01-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

Silicon Valley based Wize is a site that tracks expert and user product reviews across the Internet and churns them through an algorithm to create a single, 1-100 “WizeRank.”

Tonight, they are announcing a first round of financing - $4 million from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners.

eBay Bought StubHub For $310 million

2007-01-14T07:12:00.000-08:00

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) today announced it has agreed to acquire privately held StubHub, a leading online marketplace for the resale of event tickets.

The acquisition will enable eBay to expand its presence and offering in the online tickets segment, while allowing StubHub to continue to scale its business with the e-commerce expertise and resources of eBay.

"StubHub has been extremely successful in the online tickets segment, and it's a perfect complement to eBay's tickets business," said Bill Cobb, president, eBay North America Marketplaces. "Together we can strengthen both businesses and provide fans with more choice and better service."

More from their official press release

ShoutCentral Sold for $13,800

2007-01-14T06:55:00.000-08:00

We just noticed that Write/Write Web reported yet another eBay sale of web 2.0 site.

Ever wondered what a MySpace-like social network site, which are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, is worth on the open market? Well the developers of ShoutCentral.com, which claims to have "over 1,000 users", has just sold their SNS for $13,800 on eBay. The sellers were originally after $15k, so it was close to what they wanted. This was the eBay auction write-up:

"Now is your chance to buy a premier social network already generating buzz around the Internet. With over 1,000 users and a completely custom coded network you can become the next Tom from MySpace!! I have spent the last year building this website from the ground up using PHP and AJAX on a MySQL backend and poured my sweat and tears working many a late night to add new features. The reason I am selling the site is due to my lack of time to update and improve the site. Hopefully the right someone can acquire it and continue to make the site better and grow the community. The code can be easily modified to add whatever you choose."

News Corp really paid about $200M for MySpace

2007-01-14T06:48:00.000-08:00

An interesting comment made by Jon on read/write web about MySpace's deal.

"This is nitpicking, but people always say NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580M. I was a shareholder, and the fact is NewsCorp bought InterMix for $580M. InterMix had many highly profitable divisions, from gift card sites to office supplies, and had a public marketcap of $300M long before they ever started MySpace. So one can estimate NewsCorp really paid about $200M for MySpace. That translates to about $7.40 per MySpace user. You have to hand it to Rupert Murdoch, he got the deal of the century."

We think the deal of the century is Google's purchase of YouTube, since they just surpassed MySpace.com by popularity, and who knows they might become more popular than Google itself !?

Only No-Search-Engine Can Beat Google

2007-01-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

Last week Read/WriteWeb has written an article about the search engines that are going to beat Google. Here is our commentary on the topic:

Beating Google on their own game - the search engine - seems to me like mission impossible…they have invested billions so far in improving their technologies and data centers. By knowing some of the tiny start-ups outlined there, it seems to me pretty unserious and unprofessional to compare them to Google (perhaps it is PR). I believe that, if ever there is a chance for a company, web site or product to be able to compete with Google on the search engine’s arena, that hypothetical site should be taking a whole lot different approach, i.e. NO search engine, No indexing, regardless it is semantic based or people powered… forget about it..

The web site that would potentially, NOT beat, but undermine Google would look like anything else BUT not search engine in the traditional aspect…It should help the people find web information on demand with an ease, no toolbar needed, No specific site visited, no java scripts, no other annoying tricks as well as should be helpful to the little guys on the web manage their sites respectively. It could be a form of symbiosis or a hybrid of new breed, but without being a search engine…this hypothetical site should as well be search engine independent to be successful…

None of the profiled there sites match that profile, so we keep on looking ahead for the site that will potentially lessen the Google’s importance on the web, not beat…

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

2007-01-01T07:42:00.000-08:00

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) seems to be the latest scientific approach within the search engine industry. It promises to bring more human sense to the results where the focus is over the context of the content rather than the keywords inside. The idea is simple and can be described that way: If we were to manually search through web documents to find information related to a particular search term we would be likely to generate our own results based on the theme/context/meaning of the site, rather than whether a word exists or doesn't exist on the page.

For example, Latent Semantic Indexing should be able to recognize that the word "engine" in "search engine optimization" is not related to searches for terms like "steam engine" or "locomotive engine" and is instead related to Internet marketing topics. In theory, LSI results give a much more accurate page of results as well as providing a broader range of pages still geared towards a particular topic.

It is widely acknowledged that Google is the search engine at the forefront of latent semantic indexing. Essentially, they have always been trying to generate results pages that are literally filled with genuine, useful results and LSI certainly provides another string that helps Google’s existing algorithms. Yahoo and MSN, for now, seem more than happy to go along with keyword specific indexing although Yahoo are known to look at singular and plural keyword variations as well as keyword stemming when judging keyword density.

Aside Google, Yahoo and MSN, there are many smaller companies taking different semantic approaches in organizing the information on the web and one in particular appears really helpful to Google’s LSI approach, LinkedWords.com, which simply does semantically precise in-(con)text hyperlinks of meaningful words, phrases and whole sentences connecting thus to other content areas with the same context.

Let’s assume that Google has already implemented the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Model and LinkedWords.com has significantly expanded over web, it now becomes interesting to see how LinkedWords.com’s unique contextual approach would become pretty helpful to Google’s semantic bots in their journey indexing the huge massive of information on the web on a much more contextually, grammatically and meaningfully precise basis.

Aside LinkedWords.com’s simple yet pragmatic contextual approach, there is another company that takes it more scientifically, Telcordia Technologies, Inc. Their demo machine called Telcordia Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a novel, patented information retrieval method developed at Telcordia Technologies, Inc. By using statistical algorithms, LSI can retrieve relevant documents even when they do not share any words with a query. LSI uses these statistically derived "concepts" to improve search performance by up to 30%.

Why Nobody Buys Digg.com?

2006-12-30T01:51:00.000-08:00

Here we go again with lots of speculations for one of the top and most popular web 2.0 websites: digg.com. In our understanding there must be something wrong with either Digg, its business/revenue model or the momentum is simply lost, or something else.

Here are our bets on why Digg.com did not get sold so far:

1) They have looked for a price way above $150M;

2) Not profitable enough toward their claims of having 20M visitors a month, in other words too many visitors, too much popularity that seem hard to be monetized;

3) Digg.com is Slashdot.org 2.0., how much did Slashdot.org go for? $20M something...;

4) Their technology and concept is not distinctive and definitely not defendable. Too many followers and competitors, including Netscape.com. Digg set the standard, under no doubt, but it seems too many old media companies are about to build up the same technologies within their web properties which will additionally undermine Digg.com’s popularity;

5) They might have something in mind to expand to areas beyond news like digging for stuff like products, people, films, music and more, which might forced them to go for funding rather then acquisition;

6) They have new products and services in their R&D department;

7) Series B funding is known to be always the beginning of the end;

8) Digg.com was and still is widely criticized for being corrupted in getting manipulatively different news stories promoted to the home page by a handful savvy Digg.com users;

9) Geeks are not clicking on ads, as many people say, so the advertising model seems highly unlikely to be the panacea for Digg.com;

10) Digg.com and News Corp negotiations failed for one or another reason, which might have negative impact toward other potential inquirers, the situation seems pretty similar to what happens to Facebook;

11) If they wait long enough they would get more;

12) ComScore reported far lower figures than Alexa’s and Digg’s own stats. That report may cause some investors to rethink the decision of buying Digg.com;

13) Being unable to sell for $150M before the round, now that more VC money is poured in, it means that they now need to aim much higher to get comparable ROI, which might make a potential acquisition much harder for Digg.com.

Despite anything said above, Digg.com, in our view, does cost more than $150M at the very current moment, with or without steady revenues, simply because of its popularity, leadership, reach and target audience. Yet we cannot get rid from the feeling that there must be something wrong that the general public does not know about, which might have been the reason behind the decision, once the due diligence is conducted, of one or more of the potential acquirers to back off, for now.

Wikipedia’s Founder Plays Unfair Toward Google

2006-12-30T00:13:00.000-08:00

These days it became clear that people from Wikipedia are working on and planning to launch a search engine that is aimed to go against Google. Pretty unfair game, Google helped a lot (keeps helping) of Wikipedia in getting to the point where it is today, mainstream popular site... In my view more than 50% (I’d bet on 70%) of all searches performed on Google are organically directed to Wikipedia’s web properties...

free411.com Faces Competition from AT&T

2006-12-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

The massive success of Jingle’s 800-Free-411 service, which allows people to get 411 information without the outrageous fees charged by cell phone carriers and other telephone companies (up to $3.50 per call), has finally caught the attention of at least one of the big guys. AT&T acquired InFreeDA, a competitor to Jingle and operator of the 800-411-Metro service, for an undisclosed amount, and announced a free 411 service.

More at Techcrunch...

Are startup IPOs return?

2006-12-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

Many experts predict that 2007 would be the return of the IPOs for web 2.0 startups. Paul Kedrosky may not know much about the power of Blackberry (hence no need for Blackberry 2.0), but he does know the stock markets… very well. He has been calling for a comeback² of the technology IPOs in 2007. And he is right about that. We are beginning to hear rumblings of many companies looking to tap the IPO markets. For instance, Michael Arrington is reporting³ on a possible IPO for NetSuite, which is looking for a $1 billion valuation.

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CoComment Gets Funded

2006-12-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

CoComment Gets $1.5 Million

CoComment, the site that lets you track comments around the blogosphere, has just announced a $1.5 million funding round from Japanese investor Netage Capital Partners. Netage now has a 40% stake in the company, which was launched by Swisscom in February.

More...

Silicon Valley is Non Replicable

2006-12-20T22:12:00.000-08:00

Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?

It wouldn't be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a silicon valley even here?

What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.

That's a striking departure from the past. Up till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities. All great cities were located on waterways, because cities made money by trade, and water was the only economical way to ship.

Full essay at Paul Graham's blog

FanNation Worth $60 Million?

2006-12-20T19:25:00.000-08:00

Mashable was the first to cover the launch of FanNation, an upcoming sports social network that debuted in September. I also covered the news that Sports Illustrated has partnered with the impressive high school sports network Takkle. Now the Sports Business Journal (behind a paywall) is reporting that Sports Illustrated/Time Inc has a “deal in principle” to get a 40% stake in FanNation for $25 million - that would mean the sports social network is valued at a staggering $60 million already.

Full story

Google Acquires Endoxon

2006-12-19T10:54:00.000-08:00

Google announced the acquisition of part of a business called Endoxon, an Internet mapping company located in Switzerland. This deal looks like it’s part technology and part team. Cash daily says something about 35M CHF.

Fact: Endoxon had AJAX maps long before Google Maps.

Some experts guess that Google wants to get rid of DeCarta’s technology (www.decarta.com) who currently provides mapping, routing & local geo-search for Google Maps & Earth. With Endoxon, they will actually own the technology to do this in-house without having to pay usage fees to DeCarta.

Either way, this shows that Google is getting more serious in local search & mapping.

More

Minti Raises More Money

2006-12-14T05:20:00.000-08:00

In a blatant attempt to raise their profile in the niche category of the upcoming social networking awards, the Minti folks are putting out a release tomorrow to say that they (or more correctly, their owners Vibe Capital) have raised a further AU $1.2M in funding, on top of the AU $1.2M they raised previously. They’ve also purchased a strategic stake in Market United, the contracted developer of the vibEngine platform that Minti runs on. Also mentioned in the release: they’ve secured shareholder debt facilities to “fund capital requirements into the foreseeable future”.

Google Copied From Yahoo

2006-12-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

At 5:06 pm last evening Techcrunch wrote that Google had apparently stolen the content and the look of a Yahoo page promoting IE7, even showing the Yahoo toolbar with the Yahoo logo blurred out. Six hours later, Google has replaced the site in question with an entirely new one. This one thankfully shows the Google Toolbar prominently installed.

I can only imagine the email strings being fired around Google HQ this evening. New site is below. Robert Scoble, who has lots of experience with PR headaches of this kind while working for Microsoft, gives some advice to Google.

More...

Did Facebook knew about $1.62 billion from Yahoo?

2006-12-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

Did Facebook knew about $1.62 billion from Yahoo? Things really heated up mid year. Yahoo proposed a $1 billion flat out acquisition price based on a model they created where they projected $608 million in Facebook revenue by 2009, growing to $969 million in 2010. By 2015 Yahoo projects that Facebook would generate nearly $1 billion in annual profit. The actual 2006 number appears to be around $50 million in revenue, or nearly $1 million per week.

These revenue projections are based on robust user growth. By 2010, Yahoo assumes Facebook would hit 48 million users, out of a total combined highschool and young adult population of 83 million.

Sources say that Facebook flatly rejected the $1 billion offer, looking for far more. Yahoo was prepared to pay up to $1.62 billion, but negotiations broke off before the offer could be made.

So, did Facebook knew about $1.62 billion from Yahoo?

Full story

Does Metacafe Really Worth $300M?

2006-12-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

The rumors around a possible Metacafe acquisition continue to swirl around silicon valley, with Yahoo being considered the most likely acquiror, at a $300 millionish acquisition price. Another potential acquiror is a rumored industry consortium looking to buy its way into the space. We’ve gotten confirmation from a number of potential acquirors that the company hired Lehman Brothers to shop them around, and were asking for $200-$300 million.

But those discussions may have stalled due to the recent release of November Comscore traffic numbers. The number of monthly unique visitors to Metacafe continues to decline...

More...

$800,000 for VideoCodeZone.com

2006-12-11T07:24:00.000-08:00

A number of social networking services are up for sale at the moment. Two in particular - VideoCodeZone and Mojungle, are MySpace add-ons that have been covered extensively on Mashable. VideoCodeZone, according to Mashable Labs, was the number three video site for MySpace users in September. How much is that worth? According to the founders, they’re receiving 200 million monthly pageviews and make $47,000 per month. We think 200M page views for this small site is a number hugely exaggerated.

We also think that after the youtube.com's purchase, lots of small video sites are trying to exit the market, simply ASAP.

More from the story...

Wikia Gets Funding From Amazon

2006-12-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

Wikia, a for-profit sister site of Wikipedia, received a second round of funding today, all of it coming from Amazon. No word yet on how much Amazon has forked over.

Just this week, Wikia announced that they would purchase ArmchairGM, an online sports community, for $2 million in cash and Wikia stock.

Full story

Mojungle.com on eBay

2006-12-05T06:50:00.000-08:00

It seems that the web 2.0 created a new precedent, new and small web 2.0 sites to offer them up for sale on eBay... yet another one did that and the starting price is at $60,000 --Mojungle.com -- while the expected end price is $250,000! Couple of months ago Kiko, an AJAX calendar, sold out on eBay. Mojungle is a mobile media-sharing startup, and is Los Angeles-based startup. Just less than a year old it has just three full time employees. Mojungle CEO Ophir Tanz said they are shooting for at least $250,000 for the sale of the entire company including the technology, the design, and the domain name.

More information at GigaOm

Wikia Acquired ArmchairGM for $2 million

2006-12-05T06:41:00.000-08:00

Wikia will announce the acquisition of ArmchairGM sometime this week, according to a source close to the transaction. The company was bought for $2 million in cash and Wikia stock. As expressed by many experts it looks like hire-through-acquisition deal...

More plus comments at TC...

Deals.com - Digg for Deals

2006-12-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

Deals.com, a social site created by Demand Media, has launched in beta (in fact, the site went live on Thanksgiving, but they’ve kept it on the down low while they build up activity on the site). Deals.com is, quite simply, Digg for deals - it lets users create a profile, submit deals on the site itself or via a bookmarklet, vote on deals, leave comments and track their Dealer Rank. It’s simple, well-designed and could easily make money through ads and affiliate relationships. Rivals include Dealplumber, Clipfire and Crowdstorm, to name a few.

Story in details...

Censorship, Pressure or what?

2006-12-01T06:18:00.000-08:00

As from Techcrunch: Sometimes it isn’t until a blog post gets deleted for one reason or another that it grabs people’s attention. That happened today when a relatively new blogger named “Kevin” deleted a blog post titled “The JotSpot Google Merger,” where he complained that JotSpot left them stranded as a partner after Google acquired the company last month.

Many people commented on this story, some negatively others in doubts but it is obvious that here we are witnessing some form of censorship, pressure, corporate influence or dictatorship or what? We just decided to post this story on our blog since it outlines an important trend on the web lately, and namely Google's tend to become the web's authority (we just assume that Google stays behind this story removal)

More from the story, the original blog posting and lots of comments over here...

Google Properties - which is most porpular?

2006-12-01T05:01:00.000-08:00

It seems the Google's main web site dominates with 78.42% visitors share toward the rest of Google's web properties.

This morning I had the pleasure of filming a segment with Bambi Francisco about, among other things, the holiday season, and the dominant role search plays in the online retail sector. Specifically we talked about the holiday season and the continued dominance of Google as the #1 referrer of traffic, sending over 15% of the traffic to the 19,000+ retail sites that we track.

Graph plus more from the story at Hitwise.com

Yahoo Rebuffs Google on Digital Books

2006-11-30T11:05:00.000-08:00

Yahoo has rebuffed Google’s attempt to learn more about its efforts to create digital copies of books, dealing Google another setback as it prepares to fight a copyright infringement suit.

In rejecting Google’s request, Yahoo adopted the same stance taken last month by the Internet retailer Amazon.com, and called Google’s request a brazen attempt to pry into its trade secrets.
Google says it believes it can defend its plans to provide online access to millions of library books by obtaining more details about similar projects involving rivals.

Full story...

BitTorrent Raises $25 million, Totals $34M

2006-11-29T11:21:00.000-08:00

Om Malik posted a rumor today regarding a new BitTorrent financing and possible ouster of CEO Bram Cohen. Techcrunch did some independent digging and have come up with what they believe is accurate based on multiple sources and a leaked document: BitTorrent has raised a $25 million Series B round of financing from Accel Partners and previous investor Doll Capital Management, bringing the total capital raised to just under $34 million.

Google Closes Google Answers

2006-11-29T10:51:00.000-08:00

Google announced that they would be closing the service by the end of the week.

So if you’ve got a pressing question, ask now or forever hold your peace.
“Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product,” wrote Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, software engineers for Google, on their blog. “Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people’s minds.”

One is for sure, Google knows how to admit that a product is not going very well.

More...

New troubles in Digg.com

2006-11-28T09:55:00.000-08:00

The crisis at Digg — Digg, the San Francisco company that lets users rank news, is facing a credibility test. A fake story about Sony recalling its PlayStation 3 stayed on the site’s front-page for several hours, even though the content was clearly questionable — people blindly digged the article nonetheless. This led to some sleuthing by Niall Kennedy, who turned up evidence of some major spamming. This and other problems are causing some people to give up on the site.

Online video sites are stealing viewers away from TV

2006-11-28T05:56:00.000-08:00

At least in the UK. YouTube and other online video sites are stealing viewers away from TV in the UK, according to a report by the BBC today. 43% of online video viewers said they watch less TV as a result of YouTube and similar sites, while 20% of those say they watch “a lot less”. Only 3% watch more TV than they did a year ago, while 54% watch the same amount. Three quarters of these viewers watch more online video than they did a year ago. However, it’s worth noting that these are the stats for those who watch video online at least once a week - 67% of the UK population don’t watch online video at all, and don’t plan to within the next year. Unsurprisingly, it’s young people who are leading the way: 28% of 16-24 year-olds watch online video at least once a week.

More plus comments on Mashable...

LinkedWords.com declines a deal!

2006-11-27T10:24:00.000-08:00

As we noticed today in several announcements on the web, LinkedWords.com, the contextual platform has just declined a deal with an OTC-traded public company. More information from the news below as copied from their blog

"Bellevue, WA, Mountain View, CA, (MARKETWIRE) - Nov.27 2006 - EXIM Internet Group Inc. (OTC: EXGN.PK), operator of B2B web properties and LinkedWords.com, a large-scale and rapidly growing contextual platform changed their strategic options announced earlier this year.

The license agreement announced in May 2006 has changed over time and under the most recent deal terms EXIM was pursuing a 20% equity stake in LinkedWords.com plus an exclusive license to operate the site in return of 70% of its stock plus $5M equally payable over the next 5 years to the owners of LinkedWords.com.

Although EXIM and LinkedWords.com generally agreed upon the terms of the proposed license/participation deal, the ratification of this deal did finally not take place, because the majority of the LinkedWords.com shareholders have changed their strategy and decided to remain a fully private company.

The fact that LinkedWords.com's marketing, business and financial strategies should not be subject of the stringent reporting and publicizing requirements of a public company was the reason for the decision of the LinkedWords.com owners to stay private. These strategies concern - among others - the following:

a) The web 2.0’s dynamically changing environment does
require flexibility;
b) The rapid expansion models employed and widely adopted within the web 2.0 industry require LinkedWords.com to act quickly;
c) In regard to the innovativeness, uniqueness and highly proprietary nature of LinkedWords.com’s concept, idea & business model LinkedWords.com owners prefer not to comply with the reporting requirements by a public entity;
d) Technologically unique architecture of the 38-million-page large web 2.0 contextual platform;
e) Rapid growth in the traffic demonstrated over the past 5 months since its launch in June '06 calls for rapid decisions on a daily basis;
f) Obvious potential of rapidly becoming a mainstream popular web site needs sensitively strategic movements, decisions and implementations, which only a private structure can offer;
g) The Web 2.0 industry’s nature, trends, expansion
models and beyond; and
h) Only few companies from the Web 2.0 age are publicly traded in the first years of their existence.

Both companies, however, decided to further keep exploring options for a possible cross participation in the future, mutually beneficial to both parties.

“We in EXIM Internet Group, Inc. respect the decision of LinkedWords.com shareholders, and look forward to potentially find a way for some form of reciprocal participation,” said EXIM’s CEO. “The shareholders and the management of our company, which is a major and well-known b2b web site operator within the minternational trading and import / export industry, will now continue to concentrate on its core corporate strategy to retain the leading position in this growing world market of international trade.”

About EXIM Internet Group, Inc. (OTC: EXGN.PK)
(http://eximinternet.com)EXIM Internet Group, Inc. is an operator of B2B web sites with more than 1,500,000 content-rich industry specific pages under management. The company intends to acquire and operate companies, web sites, projects, and ventures in Export/Import and International trading industries.

About LinkedWords.com
(http://linkedwords.com)
LinkedWords.com is all about finding relevant information on demand at the right time and place within the content's context of any possible page around the web by clicking on hyper-linked words contextually incorporated by the web publishers within the text one reads there. It is a unique concept built upon a 38-million-pagelarge WEB 2.0 contextual platform."

~~~

Will Google Develop a GoogleOS?

2006-11-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting discussion going on and we decided to give it a link to:
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus. There's no such thing as the GoogleOS in reality - but despite that, it is one of the most talked about Web products. People can't stop discussing it - and even imagining screenshots for it! Seems like everyone expects Google to get into direct competition with Microsoft, by releasing an operating system. However Google refuses such claims and even makes fun of this kind of buzz.

Full story + comments...
Poll: Will Google develop a GoogleOS?

Hakia.com Raises $11 Million

2006-11-24T05:49:00.000-08:00

Hakia said it has raised $11 million in its first phase of funding from a panoply of investors scattered across the globe who were attracted by the company’s semantic search technology, which the upstart aims to make superior to Google’s search engine.

The New York-based company said it decided to snub the usual players in the venture capital community lining Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and opted for its international connections instead, including financial firms, angel investors, and a telecommunications company.

Among them were Poland’s Prokom Investments, an investment group active in the oil, real estate, IT, financial, and biotech sectors. ...

Full story...

Google vs Microsoft Heats Up

2006-11-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

I know, a predictable (almost tabloid-y) blog headline. But in this case, there really is some interesting back and forth going on between Microsoft and Google currently - especially with regards to office software.

Firstly Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an article for The Economist, in which he takes aim at Microsoft with this:

"In 2007 we’ll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today’s desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs."

Full story...

web2innovations.com launches

2006-11-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Innovations -- Discovers, tracks and ranks web 2.0 innovations, inventions, concepts, ideas and beyond. It also discovers, tracks and connects web 2.0 news, web 2.0 acquisition and funding deals as well as strategic comments on Web 2.0 events, news, companies and projects from the blogs, forums, news sites and the web. We live in interesting web times by witnessing the major web transformation taking place all over the Internet. From innovative social software, artificial intelligence experiments, multi-user collaborative AJAX-based tools, semantic applications, next-net contextual approaches, sharing knowledge gigantic sites, bookmaking facilities and photo, video and music tagging, sharing and transferring mixtures to ultra-modern server-, client-, and web-based platforms, surrealistic concepts and TV/Multimedia/Web mashups, they are all hire. Some of the sites listed below might be the next Microsoft, Yahoo! or Google or all them together. Web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond is not only on technological level, it is also on a conceptual aspect. What does web 2.0 really mean; one can find out the basics over here: Web 2.0. In our view, it is all about the long waited web evolution where static web sites from the nineties step down and give the freedom to community driven, user-centric, multi-channel distributed, search engine independent, next-generation, cross-platform concepts, applications and programs. Obviously, the web transforms, but what is next? Perhaps any of the innovations below might give you the answer.

What about the ranking criteria? Innovativeness, of course, uniqueness, effectiveness, potential for enormous growth, huge web properties, disruptor, web 2.0 concept and technologies, popularity, buzz and beyond. Suggestions at info [at] web2innovations.com.

More can be found on the web site at: http://web2innovations.com

Google shares surpassed the $500 mark

2006-11-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

Google shares surpassed the $500 mark on Tuesday as the search king captured 45.4 percent of the search market in the United States.

Google shares hit a high of $505.72 in morning trading, up $10.68 from Monday’s close of $495.05. Part of the reason for that news was new data from comScore Networks showing that Google led the pack in the U.S. search market, rising from 45.1 percent in September to 45.4 percent in October.

The Mountain View, California, search giant led over its nearest rival Yahoo, which had 28.2 percent of the U.S. search market, up from 28.1 percent to 28.2 percent. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s share of the market declined from 11.9 to 11.7 percent.

IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com held steady at 5.8 percent and Time Warner’s AOL fell slightly from 5.6 percent to 5.4 percent. The percentages also included affiliated search sites in the various companies’ networks.

Full story...

Gather.com Totals $17M Investment

2006-11-20T11:56:00.000-08:00

Gather.com, the social network and citizen journalism site that was seriously lacking when it launched at the start of this year, has completed a further $10 million round of financing led by Pilot House Ventures Group that also included media companies Hearst Corp and McGraw-Hill Cos. Money also came from Jack Connors, chairman of ad agency Hill Holliday, and Gather.com’s founder Tom Gerace. They want to use the funding to partner with leading media properties and expand internationally, they say. This company has raised a substantial sum - add this to the funding they received in 2005, and they must have raised around $17 million so far (PaidContent did the math).

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MyBlogLog Acquired by Yahoo for $10M

2006-11-19T02:56:00.000-08:00

In the second social media acquisition by Yahoo! story in the last 12 hours, news has emerged that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a blog community and analytics tool used here on TechCrunch (see sidebar) and many other blogs around the web. Just recently out of beta, the site gained traction in a hurry. The company is rumored to have gone for about $10 million. Requests for comments by different media outlets haven’t been replied to yet.

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Bix.com Acquired by Yahoo!

2006-11-17T07:52:00.000-08:00

Yet another site has just been acquired in the web 2.0 age as reported by TechCrunch today:

Online karaoke and contest site Bix has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo! Bix CEO Mike Speiser will continue running Bix but will also take on responsibility for product management for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos under the title VP of Community.

Speiser was previously the founder of Epinions. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com (then DealTime.com) in 2003, which in turn was acquired by Ebay in 2005. Epinions had an estimated valuation of $30 million at the time of acquisition. The terms of the Bix acquisition weren’t disclosed but it was probably for much less than Epinions; Yahoo! was rumored to have paid $15 million for online video editing company Jumpcut last month. Bix probably got a little less than that but Yahoo! got a seasoned social media man to put in charge of a number of product management at the company’s most social products.

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SEO is Still the Top Traffic Source

2006-11-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

Today we saw in several blogs a story about About.com, the old network of guided how-to sites purchased in March 2005 by the New York Times Company for $410 Million, where it says that About.com gets 80% of its total traffic from search engines. It seems the SEO works very well for many top web properties as long as they are trusted Google sites...

About.com is made up of 500 "Guides", people who are experts on a certain topic. In a way About.com was the precursor to topic-focused blogs. Only the guides are more renowned for writing how-to articles, rather than the analysis and commentary of the best blogs. About.com these days also has a lot of reviews and product comparisons, similar to a site like CNET.

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Rupert: MySpace Worth $6 Billion

2006-11-16T06:47:00.000-08:00

In an investors meeting in Australia yesterday, Rupert Murdoch said that MySpace could now be sold for $6 billion — about a 10x return on the original $580 million that News Corp. paid for it.
In other news, one of the many MySpace alternatives, Facebook, is rumored to be in talks with IAC — or at least Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) and Jason Rapp (IAC SVP of M&A) were seen mingling together at the Foursquare conference in NY. Facebook has been in acquisition talks with Yahoo in the past, but either the price was too much or acquisition activity halted due to poor stock performance.

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YouTube against TechCrunch

2006-11-16T06:24:00.000-08:00

YouTube Sent TechCrunch A Cease & Desist!

"Buried in my email this evening I found a cease and desist letter from an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, representing their client YouTube. We’ve been accused of a number of things: violating YouTube’s Terms of Use, of “tortious interference of a business relationship, and in fact, many business relationships,” of committing an “unfair business practice,” and “false advertising.” The attorney goes on to demand that we cease and desist in from engaging in these various actions or face legal remedies."

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StumbleUpon Wants to Sell for $50 Million

2006-11-16T05:12:00.000-08:00

Two sources have confirmed that the rapidly growing StumbleUpon recently approached at least one large Internet company to be acquired. The asking price was $50 million.

The deal doesn’t appear to have been widely shopped - one potential acquiror said that they met with the company recently, but only to explore possible business development deals, and that an acquisition was not discussed. I spoke briefly with StumbleUpon CEO Garret Camp this afternoon but he refused to comment, saying “we do not comment on rumors.” Fair enough.
The real story may be a disconnect between the company’s executives and investors.

StumbleUpon has only raised a single seed round of financing - $1.5 million - and angel investors often informally shop a company, with or without the company’s permission, in the hope of an early cash out.

Full story plus comments...

AboutUs.org lands $1M

2006-11-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

The site widely criticized for extracting data from web sites and Whois sources just announced it got $1M from 16 private investors.

Portland, Oregon based AboutUs announced this week that it has closed a Series A round of funding and raised $1 million. The site is a wiki directory of web sites, mostly populated automatically but with a healthy amount of traffic and a growing number of edits being made daily. If you look up your website on AboutUs, you’ll probably find an entry there. I expect most people who aren’t wiki lovers to think this is a strange business and to some degree I think it is too. It’s also very interesting and has some good people behind it.

Sixteen investors total participated in the round, with Capybara Ventures and Northwest Technology Venture providing institutional backing. AboutUs founder Ray King was co-founder and CEO of SnapNames. The Board of Advisors for AboutUs includes wiki forefather Ward Cunningham, Stephen Babson of Endeavour Capital and Keith Teare of Edgeio. The AboutUs site went live in August and has seen healthy traffic growth. The site’s traffic after only a few months is one of its primary selling points.

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Is text from a website raising copyright hackles?

2006-11-15T05:15:00.000-08:00

Text from a website raising copyright hackles? Gimme a break. I’d say YouTube’s copyright challenges are just a wee tad bit more serious? And, for that matter, is this any different than any search engine scraping?

As for value here, seems to me pretty obvious. The site has virtually no value today; BUT, if the traffic trends are a harbinger of these guys become the de facto wiki people go to for editing or viewing info on companies, this becomes the wiki version of Hoovers, which is something I would invest in…

Comment by VCMike on November 15th, 2006 at 1:29 am

BubbleShare bought by News Corp

2006-11-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

Today Techcrunch reported that the Toronto-based photo sharing site BubbleShare, which they’ve followed since its December 2005 launch, has been involved in aquisition talks with News Corp., the parent company to MySpace, according to a source close to the deal. News Corp. would not comment on the rumor.

Techcrunch held off on reporting this as in their understanding the deal is not yet finalized, but rumors of the possible acquisition popped up on blogs earlier today.

The deal is rumored to be south of $5 million, which is in line with other recent online acquisitions by News Corp., including NewRoo and Ksolo.

Original story...

Pluck Lands $7 Million, Totals $17 million

2006-11-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

Pluck, the Austin, Texas-based RSS and publisher services company, has raised $7 million from Reuters, along with return backers Austin Ventures and Mayfield. That takes Pluck’s VC funding to $17 million in total since the company formed in 2003.

Pluck is less focused on consumer-facing sites now, having shut down the Pluck RSS reader at the end of October. I had some correspondence with the Pluck folks, however, and it seems that the RSS reader is being pulled simply because the other part of their business is taking off so quickly. The plan was to phase out the RSS reader less hastily, but changes to IE7 and FireFox created compatibility issues that convinced them to wrap it up. The core RSS technology continues to be used.

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Reviewme.com - another pey per blogging site

2006-11-13T05:39:00.000-08:00

Reviewme.com is offering bloggers up to $250 for reviews of advertisers products or Web sites. And, as part of a promotional offer, the company set aside $25,000 to pay bloggers to review Reviewme.com itself.

"The $25,000 is almost used up, and we want to keep the promotion alive, so we're probably going to extend it," said Andy Hagans, president of ReviewMe,, on Friday.

The Pay Per Post (payperpost.com), which launched in July, in playing broker between advertiser and blogger. Among the differences in the two sites is that advertisers with PayPerPost dictate the kind of review or write-up they want. ReviewMe, on the other hand, requires that bloggers be allowed to write responsible reviews based on their honest opinion.

Full story...

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Acquisitions

2006-11-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

An interesting Ajax-based timeline for all the acquisitions made over the years by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Drag and Move features...

See it at Shmula.com

Wink Launches Social Network Search

2006-11-13T04:44:00.000-08:00

Wink, the social search engine, has evolved beyond recognition since I first reviewed it over a year ago. The site began by offering a web search that let you rate and tag the results - the idea was that you could find what you were looking for more easily based on the collective judgment of all the users. In some ways, it was like Digg for search.

In September this year, Wink 2.0 launched, with a complete redesign and more focus on Wink Collections - this meant you could create a group of interesting links and share them with friends. They also added social networking. On November 4th, they notified users of a much cooler feature: support for YouTube videos within collections. This means you can visit YouTube, find your favorite videos on any topic and post them to your Wink collection by hitting a bookmarklet in your browser - it’s pretty similar, in fact, to the new Share feature from Facebook, which also supports rich media.

Full story...

Venture Frms Pour Money Into Web 2.0

2006-11-10T07:10:00.000-08:00

Venture firms are pouring money into Web 2.0 startups in hopes of funding the next MySpace or YouTube. But is the frenzy getting out of hand—again?

Venture capital investors have finally found something they're excited about.
After a sharp decline in investments following the tech bust of 2000 and 2001, venture firms are beginning to pour money into a new crop of Internet companies, in businesses such as social networking and online video. Together, they're called Web 2.0 companies. Venture firms have put a total of $455.5 million into 79 of them during the first nine months of the year, according to a study released on Nov. 7 by market researcher VentureOne, which is part of Dow Jones & Co. (DJ). That's more than twice the amount of money that was invested in such companies during the same period in 2005.

One of the reasons for the surge is the success of several high-profile Web 2.0 companies. Last year, News Corp. (NWS) bought the parent company of MySpace for $580 million, and the surging growth of the social networking leader has since made the deal look like a bargain (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/19/05, "News Corp.'s Place in MySpace"). Then in October, Google agreed to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube, the online video sensation (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/10/06, "YouTube's New Deep Pockets" and "Google Competitors Beware").

Full story...

Google Video is Being Sued

2006-11-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

After all the moves to protect YouTube against litigation, it looks like a lawsuit has been filed against Google’s own video service, Google Video. The company is being sued over copyright infringement, Google said a few hours ago, without providing details. The news follows a claim today by Google CEO Eric Schmidt that they haven’t set aside $500 million to cover the legal costs of YouTube, despite blog rumors. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, he also said that Google is committed to tackling copyright concerns. In fact, it’s known that both Google and YouTube have been working on systems to track down and remove copyrighted content.

Full story...

Relegence sold for $65M

2006-11-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

AOL, the Internet division of Time Warner Inc., on Wednesday said it had purchased Relegence, a company specializing in financial news and information search technology.

Privately held Relegence offers subscription services that provide readers with real-time notification and delivery of financial information to their desktop computers. The company was founded in 1999 and has 60 employees in offices in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

The agreement to buy Relegence was signed and closed on Monday, AOL said.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Israeli business daily Globes reported the deal was worth as much as $65 million.

AOL has said that users who download its desktop computer software to access company products, like e-mail and instant messaging, tend to stick with their services more than those who only access AOL on its Web site.

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Web 2.0 companies have raised 455.5 Million

2006-11-09T09:28:00.000-08:00

U.S.-based web 2.0 companies have raised $455.5 million in 79 deals so far this year, according to Dow Jones VentureOne figures published today. That’s out of $1.63 billion total invested in 198 consumer technology companies so far this year, and it’s more than twice the amount invested at web 2.0 deals at this point last year.

ChaCha search engine with live guides

2006-11-08T07:33:00.000-08:00

ChaCha, which describes itself as "the world's largest live search engine," is now available in beta form. The interesting feature is the defining one - ChaCha can supply "a human guide who assists you in real-time via an instant-message chat."

"Even expert searchers don't always have the answers," reasoned CEO Scott A. Jones. "ChaCha's search-with-a-guide process connects you to a live person who has knowledge about your particular topic and who knows the best resources on the web for that topic."

Search Engine Watch's Greg Sterling has reviewed the site in both its alpha and beta forms, and writes that "there have been some significant improvements." He provided a transcript of his experience with one guide, though, and it's not overly encouraging - Sterling's inquiry about non-toxic household cleaning products led to what he called a "philosophical argument."

Full story

Off content links vs. in-text links

2006-11-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

In the light of the recent acquisition of Text-Link-Ads, Inc., which de-facto is a simple text link broker many web professionals asked themselves: are the simple off content text-links still working on the web? The purchase of the TLA (Text-Link-Ads, Inc.) answers positively to that question and it seems obvious that static text links continue to bring results on the web if you buy strategic ones (with high PageRank, well trafficked, for SEO purposes, etc.) although they are not contextual and generally placed off the page content.

As many experts agree that buying simple text links put off the content seems to be working well for many web sites on the web in the past years, they also outline the new trends on the web today and that there are already sort of more pragmatic contextual approaches on the rise presently, one of which seems to be http://linkedwords.com/, which goes far beyond simple text links and helps web sites link to each other for free on a content-area per content-area basis by using a precise contextual, grammatical and meaningful method that organizes the links within the content’s context, etc, etc…

Are concepts like LinkedWords.com a treat for simple off-topic text links that Text-Link-Ads, Inc., and other companies of that sector sell? Perhaps not, but definitely the future belongs to links positioned within the text of your content page which are contextually relevant links to your surrounding sentences rather than a simple non-contextual and off-content link.
Simple off-context text links approach seems a thing of the past.