AllThingsD » August Capital

Seven Questions for Splunk CEO Godfrey Sullivan

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:00:58 +0000

You can’t get very far in any discussion about enterprise technology these days without hearing about “big data.” That’s the notion that there is useful business intelligence to be gleaned from combing through the huge volume of data generated by day-to-day operations in order to learn patterns that tell you things you wish you had known a lot sooner. Measuring customer buying patterns, traffic flows on a highway system and supply chain data are all examples of big-data problems.

Usually the phrase refers to the kind of heavy-lifting computing that involves big databases and specialized software to sort it all out — usually sold by the likes of large, serious software or hardware companies like Oracle or IBM.

But there’s another kind of data worth sifting and sorting, and while strictly speaking it may not seem as big at first, it’s turning out to be equally sizeable. It turns out there’s a lot of useful data being generated by machines of every kind. When I say machines, I mean it in a fairly broad definition: Web servers, cellphone towers, air conditioners. If a machine does something that repeats many times a day, hour or minute, then it is generating data that can be measured. And if it can be measured, there’s a pretty good chance you can do so using Splunk, software put out by the privately held company of the same name. It’s aimed at keeping minute-by-minute track of almost any kind of machine and turning that information into useful data that might help solve a problem before it starts, or yield useful information that improves a business.

Backed by venture capital investments from August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, JK&B Capital and Ignition Partners, Splunk is rare among private start-ups in that it discloses its annual financials: In 2010 it reported $66 million in sales, which amounted to 96 percent growth over the prior year. And this year it has grown about 70 percent again, which would put it on track to break the $100 million mark. Chatter about a possible Splunk IPO is already starting to bubble. CEO Godfrey Sullivan is a veteran of running public software companies, having helmed Hyperion Solutions from 2001 until its $3 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2007. I asked Sullivan about Splunk’s IPO intentions and many other things in a conversation earlier this month.

AllThingsD: At a high level, what is Splunk and what does it do?

Godfrey Sullivan: We have a proprietary database. Our core intellectual property is the ability to harvest all that data that gets generated by a machine. Splunk sucks it all in at a very high speed. We also have a user interface on top of it that looks a lot like Google. You can do command-line scripting and search for a particular combination of events, or you can build your own dashboards and say anytime some set of conditions reach a certain point, you can generate an alert.

Who uses Splunk and what do they do with it?

Our biggest user is probably Salesforce.com, but we’re also seeing a lot of use from Zynga, MetroPCS, T-Mobile. They index more than a terabyte a day. Zynga uses Splunk to monitor the performance of all its games — FarmVille, Mafia Wars and the like — all in real time. At first they started using it to identify problems, but now they use it for quality assurance in their development and test environment. All the developers at Salesforce use it for quality assurance, and to monitor performance and user behavior on Chatter.

We’re also in 150 government agencies, mostly for security. Agencies use Splunk to watch for attacks coming from bad IP addresses, and then watching to see if any employees have a history of touching those IP addresses.

You’ve also seen your use cases grow outside of Web servers recently, correct?

We’ve seen an explosion of use cases, and we’re trying to respond to that. Our user interface is one that IT administrators really love, because you can search on it or create reports very easily. But this explosion of use cases is people who don’t want to do that. They want it to manage windmills or smart buildings. We’re starting to get a lot more brand awareness of Splunk as the way to manage machine data. It could be knowing where a box of wine is somewhere out on a UPS truck, or it could be pulling call-history data off a cellphone, and so we’re really trying to respond to this big explosion in new use cases.

Have there been any examples that have surprised you?

There was a guy in London who said he was managing a greenhouse with it, taking temperature readings and driving levers to open and shut. There was another one in Japan, just after the tsunami. The local aid agency there was using Splunk to help distribute food. They were pulling weather data and information about which roads were open or impassable, to understand where to send food and in what direction on any given day, and to keep it from spoiling en route. There was another we heard about in China that was for tracking husbands and wives from cellphone data. We got called in to appear on a TV talk show about that once.

Do you have anything new teed up for the remainder of the year?

We just announced our first cloud service. We’ve always been run in the cloud, because our customers would install it to monitor an app, and their infrastructure was in the cloud. But for the first time we’ve started offering Splunk as a service. We call it Splunk Storm. The essence is that it’s aimed at developers in the cloud. If you’re a developer, you can go out and turn on a Splunk instance, and set the dials for how much indexing and data storage you want. And once you’ve done that, you can Splunk all of your development work as you do it in the cloud.

Splunk is unusual in that it is privately held and venture-backed, but you report some of your financials. Why is that?

We publish numbers once a year, and we did $66 million in revenue last year. And we just announced that in our second quarter we grew 70 percent over the year-ago quarter, and that comes on top of 68 percent growth in the first quarter. So life is good. We have 3,000 customers in 70 countries.

These days, hitting $100 million in sales is considered sort of a magic number for going public. If you do that — and it looks like you will — will you consider going public?

I am no longer allowed to answer that question. I will tell you we’ve recently hired a CFO, a general counsel and a CIO. Beyond that, I really can’t answer that question.

RelayRides Tops Off the Tank to Fuel Car Sharing Service

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:00:20 +0000

RelayRides, a car sharing service which connects people with available cars nearby, has added an additional $3.6 million to its first round of capital. It has now raised $10 million. Shasta Ventures and Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, are joining Google Ventures and August Capital in the round, which will pay for its expansion in San Francisco and Boston.

Pixazza Changes Name to Luminate, Launches Image Apps Platform

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:00:14 +0000

Pixazza is dead. Long live Luminate.

Well, from a brand perspective, at least, as the image advertising start-up changes to an easier-to-say name and also launches a new platform for image applications.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up — which is backed by Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as by angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb — aims to do for Web photos what the search giant did for text.

The new name for the company that called itself “AdSense for images” pretty much speaks for itself.

In addition to Luminate’s previous sharing, commerce and advertising apps, the company will offer information, navigation and public service apps, which you can see below

Luminate says its interactive images are viewed three billion times per month.

Here’s the official press release for the name change, as well as the image app platform:

PIXAZZA, INC. REBRANDS ITSELF AS LUMINATE, INC.

New Name Better Reflects Vision For Making All Online Images Interactive

Company Enables Images at Rate of 30 Billion Image Views per Year

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011 — Pixazza Inc., the worldwide leader in making images interactive, today announced its new company name — Luminate, Inc. With its new services and the introduction of a groundbreaking new platform (see separate release: Luminate Launches World’s First Platform for Image Apps), the company opted to rebrand itself with a name that better reflects its bold vision of making every image interactive.

“We started the company to change the web by offering information relevant to online images, engaging consumers in a novel way while offering advertisers and publishers additional revenue streams,” said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate. “We’ve since developed the technology and scale to enable images to do even more. Moving forward as Luminate, we will continue to elevate the role of the image and dramatically improve the web experience.”

Rapidly scaling to accommodate the new demand for interactive images, Luminate now reaches more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

Its publisher network also has grown to more than 4,000 publishers, and the company enables images at a rate of 30 billion image views per year. This is significant because just as page views are commonly used to measure web site traffic, Luminate tracks image views, which count the number of times a web publisher serves up a Luminate-enabled image. It is a clear marker of audience interest.

The name change and announcement of the Luminate™ platform for image apps, comes on the heels of an innovative partnership with Hearst Digital Media. The company’s explosive momentum has also been a draw for top talent including CRO and head of publisher development, Chas Edwards, formerly of Digg; Terry Murphy, CFO, formerly of LiveOps. Luminate also added Elliot Schrage, the Vice President of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy at Facebook, as a strategic advisor to the Luminate Board.

Please visit www.luminate.com to learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers, publishers and advertisers use and interact with online images.

LUMINATE UNVEILS WORLD’S FIRST PLATFORM FOR IMAGE APPLICATIONS

Company Brings Images to Life with Image Apps Designed to Create Rich Consumer Experience

Luminate Transforms Images Into a Canvas to Shop, Share, Comment, Examine, Curate, Search and Socialize

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011, Luminate, Inc., formerly known as Pixazza, Inc., today unveiled a groundbreaking new platform for image applications. For the first time ever, consumers can launch applications within the individual images on their favorite websites.

With this exciting new platform, Luminate opens a new world of image apps, breaking down a wall and bringing flat, static images to life. Online images become more than visual stimuli — they become a gateway for accessing rich and relevant content across the web. The apps available on the Luminate™ platform will allow consumers not only to conduct their favorite everyday online activities such as shopping, sharing, commenting and navigating directly from the images, but can also facilitate entirely new services made possible by the development of apps specifically for images.

“Image apps transform images from static pixels into interactive experiences,” said Luminate CEO Bob Lisbonne. “Just as phones evolved from merely voice calls to smartphones with apps, now consumers can enjoy relevant apps inside every online image. The explosive use of images fueled by mobile, social, and cloud computing trends sets the stage for Luminate’s pioneering new image apps platform.”

How It Works:

When a consumer sees the Luminate icon in the corner of an image, it indicates that the image is interactive. Consumers simply mouse into the image and choose from a variety of image apps. They can easily share an image or specific points within an image with their friends, discover statistics about their favorite athletes, see where to purchase similar products to those featured in a photo, uncover the latest information about a particular event, reveal geo tag or Wikipedia information, read more content about the people or places featured in an image, listen to music or see a movie trailer related to an image.

Image Applications:

Image applications will span a number of key categories including: Commerce, Information, Social, Organization, Advertising, Navigation, Public Service, and Presentation. Luminate’s platform currently offers such applications as: unique Twitter Share, Facebook Share, and Email Share apps that give consumers the power to select precisely what they want inside an image and share it with others; an information app called Annotation that allows publishers to quickly and easily tag any spot within an image and add information relevant to that image; a commerce app called Products, which enables consumers to mouse over the image and interact with tags on the picture; and an Advertising app that offers publishers a seamless way to place relevant advertisements within an image.

Luminate plans to roll out new applications frequently to address the varying needs of consumers, publishers and advertisers. Its platform is designed to ultimately enable the development of any conceivable app that is relevant to a particular image. It is this capability that will help define the future of web images.

This cutting edge platform for image apps comes from the company that pioneered the use of images as real estate for delivering ecommerce and advertising three years ago as Pixazza, Inc. With the introduction of the new platform, the company has been rebranded as Luminate, Inc. (see separate release: Pixazza, Inc. Rebrands itself as Luminate, Inc.) as it takes the next step in executing its vision to make every image on the web interactive.

The Luminate Approach:

What makes the Luminate platform so compelling is its breakthrough ability to link images with applications and content beyond the website where the image is viewed. To create the best possible consumer experience, Luminate focuses on all of the data relevant to a particular image or part of an image. Luminate has long employed a unique recognition system that combines visual algorithms with human crowdsourcing. With its new platform, the company has multiplied the sources and ways to uncover information about images. In addition to the data derived from its team of experts, the company can avail itself of information from end users and publishers with the goal of creating a richer, more immersive experience for the end user. Luminate has the most sophisticated system in the industry for tagging relevant content.

“The reason images remained stagnant for so long is because it is remarkably difficult to contextualize their composition and link them to other pieces of relevant content across the Internet,” said James Everingham, CTO of Luminate.

“We were the first to develop the technology to overcome these complexities, turning images into an even more valuable asset. With our platform and the introduction of image apps, we believe that the entire Internet can become connected in a more meaningful way.”

To learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers interact with images, please visit www.luminate.com.

Reputation.com Raises a New $41 Million Round

Pui-Wing Tam — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:31:43 +0000

Reputation.com has raised a $41 million round of funding, as the online privacy start-up aims to expand its business with new offerings.

The new round was led by venture-capital firm August Capital, with participation from Insight Capital and existing investors including Jafco Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners, said Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The round, which Fertik said was oversubscribed, brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $65 million. It was the company’s fourth round of institutional financing, otherwise known as a Series D.

Fertik said Reputation.com decided to raise more money because it is planning a big push into a new line of business. To date, the company has offered several services that help consumers manage their privacy, information and reputation online. Now Reputation.com has also built a dataset business–essentially, the start-up has collected data on individuals and layered that information with its own technologies–which allows the company to come up with assessments on people, among other things.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Video: Pixazza's Bob Lisbonne Talks About "AdSense for Images"

Kara Swisher — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:50:34 +0000

Recently, BoomTown took a walk down digital Memory Lane with Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza, the photo-tagging service that has nicknamed itself “AdSense for images.”

That’s because Lisbonne used to be a big wheel at Netscape Communications, the iconic Internet browser company that truly changed the digital world–before crashing and burning in a very public way.

We talked about the old days, of course, but more about the new days and his business focused on putting all kinds of advertising within online images.

The Mountain View, CA, start-up–which is backed by Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as by angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb– aims to do for Web photos what the search giant did for text.

At least that’s the hope.

Pixazza is selling itself as a win-win for online publishers–who certainly could use one.

Essentially, the company lets publishers match and link images of products or places with its network of advertisers, via a single line of code.

When users on that site mouse over the photos, they get rich information about pricing and more, as well as a clickable way to purchase the items.

Quite possibly annoying, but Pixazza is growing quickly anyway, with the company claiming 20 billion image views per year and reaching 70 million unique visitors a month on sites deploying its technology.

There are rivals in the space, of course, such as GumGum and Vibrant, but Pixazza does come armed with $18 million in venture funding, as well as that relationship with Google.

Here’s Lisbonne talking about it all in a video interview I did at Pixazza’s Silicon Valley HQ:

[ See post to watch video ]

StumbleUpon's Second Wind Continues as It Raises $17M

Liz Gannes — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:00:39 +0000

StumbleUpon, the content discovery service, has raised $17 million in new funding, according to sources close to the company.

The round is from Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.

StumbleUpon is on its second run as a start-up. The company raised $1.5 million in angel funding in 2005 and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million in cash. In April 2009 it spun out of eBay with its founders and most of that list of investors providing Series A funding. This new round is being counted as a Series B.

StumbleUpon–which helps users serendipitously find new sites, photos and videos based on recommendations by friends and other users–has become a major traffic provider for blogs. Recent stats put out by the publisher tool provider Lijit had StumbleUpon delivering almost as much traffic as Facebook to sites within its network, and far more than Digg, Twitter and Reddit.

StumbleUpon is now up to 14 million registered users and makes 800 million content recommendations per month.

Bubbli, Push Pop Press and Bluefin a Hit at TED

Liz Gannes — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:00:38 +0000

Some of the biggest hits so far at this year’s annual TED–the well-known conference now taking place in Long Beach–have come from tech start-up founders’ talks and show-stealing demos.

Here are three companies you’ll likely be hearing about again:

In recent weeks multiple people have told me about Bubbli, saying it’s a see-it-to-believe-it experience. At TED on Wednesday, the company gave the first public demo of its augmented reality application, which creates navigable photos.

Basically, Bubbli enables you to take a picture with your phone camera that shows not just what’s directly in front of you, but also what’s all around, above and below you. Then, other people can navigate the view of the world captured by that “bubble” by holding their own phones in front of them. When their phone is moved up or down or left or right, they see what you would have seen in that same direction.

At least, that’s how I think it works. The Bubbli demo was a bit raw, in part due to connectivity issues.

Bubbli co-founder Ben Newhouse gained recognition for building the Yelp Monocle feature, which was the iPhone’s first augmented reality app. It uses the phone’s built-in compass to overlay Yelp restaurant ratings onto a camera view of the surrounding area.

Bubbli, which is funded by August Capital, describes its goal as to “build the matrix by defining a new medium to express the physical world around us.”

Meanwhile,

Bluefin Labs co-founder Deb Roy used his full-length speaking slot to describe the process of surveilling his house with video cameras to capture the process of his son learning to speak. In order to analyze more than 90,000 hours of video, his MIT team created machine learning systems that helped trace the evolution of his son’s learning moment by moment.

Roy has now taken a leave of absence from MIT to extend these machine-learning techniques to social media discussions of television programs. His company, Bluefin Labs, raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures.

In a previous conversation with NetworkEffect, Roy told me that Bluefin now analyzes 30 television channels 24/7 and computes their intersection with Twitter Firehose data, Facebook updates and blog posts in real time. Bluefin’s customers are big brand advertisers, agencies and media companies, who want to better understand how ads and programs resonate with online audiences.

TED attendee and financial commentator Paul Kedrosky was effusive about Roy’s talk on Twitter, calling it the best ever.

“Epic, moving and wondrous. Generated biggest standing O in ages,” Kedrosky tweeted.

And on Tuesday,

Push Pop Press showed off a reimagined digital version of former Vice President Al Gore’s book “Our Choice” built for the iPad and iPhone with interactive infographics, videos and voice overs. For instance, one demonstration of wind energy generation can be manipulated (as pictured) by a user blowing on the device’s screen. That was a big crowd pleaser.

TEDsters (you’ll notice they’re an effusive bunch) called the demo “mind-blowing” and “amazing.”

I’ve written before about how Push Pop Press is highly anticipated given its founders’ background. Mike Matas, who showed off the app on stage at TED, was formerly a design prodigy at Apple.

Caveat: I am not at the conference myself, but have a press pass for the live stream. TED continues through Friday, and session videos will be posted online in the coming weeks.

Photo credits, via TED:

Terrence McArdle + Ben Newhouse, Inventors, in Session 5: Worlds Imagined, on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Deb Roy, Cognitive scientist, in Session 4: Deep Mystery, on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Mike Matas in Session 3: Mindblowing, on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Will Car-Sharing Among Strangers Catch On?

Tomio Geron — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:14:12 +0000

Would you lend your car to a stranger?

A new start-up, RelayRides Inc., hopes to encourage people to rent their wheels to others, the same way sites like Airbnb Inc. have popularized the notion of people renting out their homes.

RelayRides, backed by August Capital and Google Ventures, has built out the technology, infrastructure and perhaps most importantly, insurance, to support people borrowing and lending cars to one another.

The service enables car owners to set the price and the day and time of the week of availability. The borrowers, meanwhile, can search for nearby cars and borrow from their neighbors at rates that start at $6 an hour.

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Memolane Makes Web Memories Last

Liz Gannes — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:20:33 +0000

Social media has a memory problem. Services like Facebook and Twitter exist primarily in the present. If I deleted my account on either site tomorrow, it would be a chafe to recreate all my connections, but I could start where I left off content-wise without feeling that I’d lost much. Though so many of our lives’ moments now exist online, rarely do we sit back and reminisce.

Facebook now allows users to “Download Your Information” into a Zip file, and Twitter has gotten somewhat better at storing older tweets so you can scan and search through them (they used to seemingly drop off a cliff). But there’s still an opportunity to help people enjoy the archive of their lives by making beautiful mashups and skins for these services.

The best-designed site I’ve seen to help create digital scrapbooks is named Memolane, and it calls them “web time machines.” If you want to try Memolane out, the Copenhagen-based company is doing its first public release of beta invites today.

Memolane’s interface is a horizontal timeline (partially pictured above). You plug in your social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, TripIt, Spotify, etc., and Memolane imports everything you’ve ever done on them and organizes it chronologically. Then use the arrow keys to scan through your life, or click on the expandable time line to see a specific day. You can keep your Memolane account completely private, make it public, or create a shared account where people can add items related to a specific group experience (say, all the pictures taken at a wedding).

Memolane is a lot like FriendFeed and other services that don’t make sense for people who don’t already express themselves in multiple places online. And there may not be a strong enough reason for some people to come back. This is basically a presentation layer for data that’s stored elsewhere, with no real interactions happening on Memolane itself (yet).

But I could see Memolane being useful in a number of different ways: in addition to personal scrapbooking, you might want to create a Memolane of your public-facing feeds and turn it into a personal splash page, something that’s more dynamic than alternatives like About.me. Or you might want to write a collaborative story of a major event in your life like the founding of a startup, as Memolane itself has done.

The company has already built some neat integrations; for instance, if you plug in your history from Last.fm or Spotify and then scan to a day where you were listening to music, you can replay those tunes inline. Overall, the HTML5 interface is responsive though not terrifically customizable.

Memolane has raised $2 million from Atomico Ventures and August Capital (CEO Eric Lagier is connected with both firms from his work running mobile for Skype from 2005 to 2008). Lagier said like to move the company to the San Francisco Bay Area if he can; for now its official headquarters are an SF mailing address on Market Street.

In terms of competition for Memolane, there are some direct ones like OurStory and AllofMe but they are not nearly as well designed. Dipity is a nice service that helps people build interactive timelines on any topic. There’s also the angle of making your archive of data more interesting by making it searchable, which is what Greplin is doing. But I don’t even want to look up the market research for how much money was spent on scrapbooking in the last year.

Memolane – Your time machine for the web from Memolane on Vimeo.

Gravity Wants to Instantly Personalize Any Content Site

Liz Gannes — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:45:44 +0000

Today Gravity is unveiling its plans to be an information filtering service. The idea is to combine social and semantic understanding of users to identify content they are likely to be interested in.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company is demoing this idea as a personalized newspaper app called The Orbit (to be released soon). The Orbit takes a user’s Twitter account and computes the topics a person is interested in and the network she is connected to. For any one Web page, Gravity might look at how recent it is, how popular it is, how relevant it is to a person’s interest and how many of that person’s friends have shared it.

Eventually, said Gravity CEO Amit Kapur, the company wants to offer personalization services to publisher sites. So when I go to the New York Times with Gravity enabled, for example, I would be able to get a view of the site’s content that’s weighted to what I am likely to be interested in.

I think that’s an awesome idea (though I do appreciate the roles of editorial curation and serendipity in bringing me my news). This is similar to what Facebook is trying to do with its controversial Instant Personalization product, where a user logged in to Facebook arrives at a new site that already knows who his friends are.

The problem is, what Gravity is setting out to do–both the natural-language processing and computational side, and the nitty-gritty of integrating into other peoples’ Web sites–is really freaking hard. And, no offense guys, but the Gravity team’s big experience to date was working at Myspace–not exactly a pinnacle of technical achievement.

When the company briefed me on what it was doing, it prepared a poster-size personal interest graph based on analysis of my Twitter account (that’s it at the top of the post; click to enlarge). Well shucks, guys–it seems to be just a bunch of words and topics I’ve mentioned in Tweets over the last few years, connected by lines. Doesn’t really convince me that you understand that much about me and what I want to read.

Still, Gravity has quite a bit going for it: A good idea, and $10 million from top investors at Redpoint Ventures and August Capital, plus advising by machine learning and computational linguistics professors at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Exclusive: Digg Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Departs for Start-Up

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:04:11 +0000

Chas Edwards (pictured here), the publisher and chief revenue officer for Digg, the social news discovery service, is leaving the San Francisco company, according to sources.

The exec, who came to Digg in May of 2009 from Federated Media, will move to a start-up called Pixazza, a photo-tagging site for advertising, “by enabling consumers to simply mouse over images to learn more and see related products.”

Edwards’ title at Pixazza–which confirmed the move–will be as Chief Revenue Officer and Publisher Development.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has garnered almost $18 million in funding from Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as from angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb.

The departure from Digg, sources said, is amicable, and Edwards will remain an adviser to the company, which has been undergoing some turmoil of late.

That’s been due to a much-criticized new version of the once-hot service, as well as some management upheaval.

Digg recently appointed Matt Williams as its new CEO. He quickly apologized for the bungled relaunch of the news aggregator and has promised to fix its problems.

Swipely Nabs $7.5 Million in Series A Funding for Social Spending (And to Attack Blippy!)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:59:50 +0000

Oh, joy: More venture bucks for more socializing of credit card information.

Today, it is Swipely’s turn to grab the spotlight in the ever-crowded space to, as the start-up’s press release so aptly says, “turn purchases into conversations.”

Yes, it says that.

BoomTown excitedly awaits the next big thing to be intrusively socialized, such as these start-ups: Wipely (it records and shares every time you clean your bathroom), Diaply (don’t let your friends miss every diaper change!), and, of course, Hypely (every time a social category is overfunded by VCs, you get a poke).

In any case, Swipely–now in private beta, founded by Tellme co-founder Angus Davis and backed by some top venture firms and Silicon Valley angel investors–got $7.5 million in funding to try to take on sites such as Blippy.

Index Ventures is leading the latest Swipely round, which includes Greylock Partners and First Round Capital, as well as investors such as Ron Conway and Chris Sacca.

Swipely said Danny Rimer of Index Ventures will join its board of directors, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners will serve as an observer.

Swipely had previously raised $1 million.

Blippy, its presumable rival, has raised close to $13 million from its own fancy-pants group of moneybags: August Capital, Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures, Conway (again!), Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams and other well-known investors.

To differentiate itself, the Providence, Rhode Island-based Swipely is trying to go for a more circumspect approach to what is essentially a service that encourages digital blabbery about purchases.

Swipely’s take on making shopping social will involve sorting out credit info and giving you, your friends and retailers a lot of options to share, and the service is stressing opt-in over automated sharing–as well as better security, taking aim after a recent Blippy breach–via a “swipe.”

Get it?

Unlike Blippy, Swipely does not show the amount of money spent–for now–and lards in data, such as catalogs, on some purchases to encourage others to buy too.

Swipely seems, most of all, to be aiming for the high-minded version of social spending. But, please let us not forget: All these attempts are trying to get people to spend more, no matter how pretty you dress it up.

Here is another screenshot (click on it to make it larger):

And here’s the official press release:

Swipely to Reinvent How People Shop, Share and Save

Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, First Round Capital and Industry Luminaries Unite to Back New Start-up with $7.5 Million in Series A Funding

PROVIDENCE, R.I.–May 11, 2010 – Swipely (swipely.com), an online service that gives users an easy way to turn their purchases into conversations, announced it has completed its Series A round of financing, and a new preview version of its service is now available by invitation. Index Ventures led the Series A round, with participation from Greylock Partners, First Round Capital, and a number of well-known angel investors.

“Our mission is to fundamentally change the way consumers shop and share by adding value to every swipe,” said Angus Davis, Founder and CEO of Swipely. “Our service will transform everyday purchases at restaurants, movies or online retailers into conversations with friends, personalized recommendations and opportunities to save money.”

Founded and backed by veterans of Tellme, Microsoft, Netscape, eBay, LinkedIn and PayPal, Swipely provides a secure platform for consumers to recommend purchase experiences, discover new places and products through trusted friends, save money, and have more fun shopping.

Enter Swipely

On Swipely, every purchase is a “swipe.” Users start swiping by following an easy and secure sign-up process to import purchases from their credit or debit card accounts. Users can also import purchases from email for purchases made at any online store.

Users can rate their swipes and add comments or photos. Many swipes are geo-located automatically to specific store locations. Swipely also supports product details by integrating catalogs and menus from more than 250,000 retail and restaurant locations, allowing users to start conversations around specific outfits, meals, songs, movies, gadgets and millions of other products.

Discovering a new restaurant, movie or pair of shoes is easy on Swipely when users follow their friends. Upon seeing a great swipe for a new restaurant, users can click to see it on the map, and add it to their wishlist. Discovering music, movies and apps is easy, too–users can just press play on select swipes to hear a song preview, see a video trailer or browse app screen shots.

Swipely places a strong emphasis on protecting consumer privacy and security, and has passed reviews and audits from leading third party security and privacy organizations. Users have complete control over swipes get posted, and the specific amount spent remains private.

Industry Leaders Across Coasts and Continents Unite to Back Swipely

Swipley’s Series A funding was led by Index Ventures, with Greylock Partners and previous investor First Round Capital also participating. Danny Rimer of Index Ventures will join Swipely’s board of directors, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners will serve as an observer on Swipely’s board. To date, Swipely has raised $8.5 million in funding.

Swipely will use the funding to continue to grow the team and explore other benefits for consumers and businesses, including new ways for users to shop, share and save, and new tools to help businesses, understand and reward customers.

“We believe that the convergence of payments and social media is the natural next step in the evolution of the web. The notion of being able to use day-to-day transactions as a conversation element makes a great deal of sense and we expect it to be extremely popular,” said Danny Rimer, General Partner at Index Ventures. “Angus and the team have created the most compelling approach to enable this behavior and we’re very excited to be investors in Swipely.”

“We have been working with Angus since day one, when it was clear he had identified a huge opportunity with Swipely to change the way we shop and save on the Web,” said Josh Kopelman, Managing Partner at First Round Capital. “I’m excited to continue my support of Angus and his team as they take what started out as a visionary idea and turn it into a reality that will reinvent the way we talk our shopping experiences.”

“Swipely gets it right. Swipely offers a great service that helps consumers benefit from their card swipes,” said Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock, and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn.

“Furthermore, the company has a great team: Angus is a seasoned tech entrepreneur with an impressive track record and it is great to work with Danny and Josh.”

Other Swipely investors include Lowercase Capital led by Chris Sacca, former head of special initiatives for Google; Keith Rabois, EVP of Slide, and former PayPal and LinkedIn executive; SV Angel led by Ron Conway; Anton Commissaris, previously SVP of revenue and business development at Mint.com and now director at Intuit; Lee Hower, venture capitalist and angel investor; Charles Moldow, former Tellme executive; and Emil Michael, White House Fellow and former Tellme executive. Davis is also a significant investor in the company.

Aardvark Confirms It Has Been Acquired, but Not by What Company (But It's Google)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:20:44 +0000

Aardvark, the social search engine that has been the subject of much attention since it was founded in late 2007, confirmed that it has been acquired.

“We can confirm that we signed a deal to be acquired,” wrote CEO Max Ventilla in an email to BoomTown this morning.

But Ventilla would not reveal the buyer, which a report by TechCrunch earlier this morning said is Google (GOOG), for $50 million.

The Silicon Valley search giant has since confirmed that it is the buyer. “We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don’t have any additional details to share right now,” said the company in a statement.

There have been other possible suitors along with Google, from Facebook to Yahoo (YHOO) to Microsoft (MSFT) to IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), which gave the San Francisco-based start-up a serious look-see to differentiate that company’s lagging Ask search service.

The 30-person Aardvark has raised a total of $6 million from August Capital and others to perfect and distribute its service.

It uses social networks, such as Facebook, to get relevant answers via email and instant messaging. It also has a Web version.

In many ways, Aardvark is yet another version of the iconic Six Degrees, mixed with Yahoo Answers or expert sites, a cup of Twitter-like sociability, and completed with a big dollop of algorithmic calculation.

Its founders, including Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, worked at Google and wanted to try to solve the problem of data that cannot be easily reduced to a keyword query.

At least that’s the goal of the innovative Aardvark.

Here is a recent video interview I did with Ventilla and Horowitz, in which they tried their best not to answer the potentially multimillion-dollar question about being bought.

The video also includes a tour of Aardvark, whose offices are, of course, called the Mechanical Zoo:

[ See post to watch video ]

Aardvark's Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz Speak (Plus a Tour!)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:11:20 +0000

Earlier this week, BoomTown motored over to the San Francisco HQ of Aardvark, the social search engine that has been the subject of much attention since it was founded in late 2007.

While there, I got a tour of the 30-person start-up, which has raised a total of $6 million from August Capital and others to perfect and distribute its service.

Aardvark uses social networks, such as Facebook, to get relevant answers via email and instant messaging. It also has a Web version.

Its founders, including Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, worked at Google (GOOG) and wanted to try to solve the problem of data that cannot be easily reduced to a keyword query.

At least that’s the goal of the innovative Aardvark, unless it ends up selling itself off to any of a wide range of companies, from Google to Facebook to Yahoo (YHOO) to Microsoft (MSFT) to IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), to differentiate that company’s lagging Ask search service.

Or not.

Ventilla tries his best not to answer that potentially multimillion-dollar question in this interview with Horowitz.

The video also includes a tour of Aardvark, whose offices are, of course, called the Mechanical Zoo.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Kara Visits The Lobby Party on Sand Hill Road (As Opposed to the Sandy Beaches of Hawaii)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:55:23 +0000

Last night, BoomTown went to a lovely party thrown by David Hornik, the August Capital VC who also runs The Lobby conference in his spare time.

He threw the event because those who attend the annual invitation-only gathering in Hawaii wanted to get together again during the year in Silicon Valley for even more schmoozing.

I went to the first Lobby in the fall of 2007 (you can see my video of that below too), so Hornik let me in to have some pizza and beer at August’s offices on Sand Hill Road and use my Flip video to ask those in attendance where they thought the digital sector was in terms of the economy and innovation.

So here’s Hornik, angel investor Brett Bullington (who is also in the 2007 video, but in shorts) and BillShrink’s Peter Pham, as well a merger of MINIs.

Here’s the video (with my 2007 one below it):

[ See post to watch video ]

StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp Speaks (About Being a Born-Again Start-up)!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:00:47 +0000

Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”

The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, had come to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy angel investors, who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.

Then, StumbleUpon was bought by eBay (EBAY) two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0′s high points.

End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.

Soon enough, due to both buyers’ and sellers’ remorse, rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by its new owners swirled around it, although there was no sale.

Instead, last week, StumbleUpon announced that a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital, would return it to its roots.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith were included, with Camp as CEO.

In a video interview he did with BoomTown, here’s Camp talking all about the latest shift for his start-up, including discussing some more changes on the site, such as an even more personalized Webification of the content discovery service.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

StumbleUpon Stumbles Out of eBay's Arms to Be Reborn as a Start-Up (Plus the Entire Press Release)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:20:55 +0000

The content-discovery service, StumbleUpon, has gotten itself back to start-up status, after being bought by eBay two years ago.

It announced today that it was returning to being an “investor-backed startup” by a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith are also back, with Camp now in place as CEO.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp, stating the very obvious.

That’s quite a boomerang since it was acquired by the auction giant in 2007 for $75 million.

Before that event, which was at the height of the Web 2.0 fervor, the Canadian-born social-bookmarking start-up, which launched several years ago, came to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy venture investors (Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Shriram and others) who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.

But rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by eBay (EBAY) have swirled around it almost since it was bought, although there was no sale.

The same has been true for eBay’s other purchase, of voice-over-IP service Skype. A recent report in the New York Times said its founders were also considering buying Skype back from eBay.

Under eBay, the site has floundered a little bit, but made some changes, such as unveiling a new Web-centric look and feel and a new partnering program last fall that represented a major shift for the online discovery service.

In that change, users no longer had to register for the service or download its toolbar to “stumble” the Web.

Terms of the deal were not released, but we’re digging! Um, stumbling!

More to come, but here’s the full press release from the company, as well as a video I did at the party StumbleUpon threw after getting acquired by eBay, including an interview with then-thrilled Camp:

StumbleUpon Goes Independent; Backed by Founders and New Investors

April 13, 2009 – StumbleUpon, the best way to discover new content on the Internet, today announced that after nearly 2 years as a subsidiary of eBay Inc., it has returned to the ranks of an investor-backed startup. StumbleUpon is now backed by the original company founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, as well as a number of well-known investors including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. Camp takes on the role of CEO of StumbleUpon.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp. “This change makes it possible for StumbleUpon to continue to innovate and focus on becoming the Web’s largest recommendation service.”

“StumbleUpon helps users discover the best of the web–it’s a way to find interesting content you wouldn’t think to search for,” said Shriram. “StumbleUpon’s personalized recommendation engine brings serendipity back to websurfing, and lets users sift through socially-endorsed content with a single click.”

StumbleUpon will remain focused on helping people discover interesting content by increasing the accessibility of the StumbleUpon service and the quality of recommendations. In addition, StumbleUpon has plans for several new products and features to be released in the upcoming months.

[ See post to watch video ]

A Tale of Two Parties in Silicon Valley, Part 1: Tony Schmoozing at August Capital

Kara Swisher — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:41:33 +0000

There’s is nothing lovelier than a sun-dappled summer night, terrific food and drinks and a giant gathering of khaki-wearing venture capitalists.

OK, strike that last one, but the valet parking was nice.

Last night, it was hearty partying in Silicon Valley, with two big events that attracted the digerati in numbers. Tech folks, for all their earnest seriousness about changing the world, like nothing better than schmoozing (and, last night, bellyaching about the iPhone price cut).

That was all to be found at the luxe affair thrown by August Capital at their even more luxe offices in the heart of Sand Hill Road last evening after work. It has long been one of the industry’s favorite events.

This is your quintessential top-line Silicon Valley party–heavy on VCs talking deals, entrepreneurs sucking up to them and also reps from big acquiring companies like eBay and Google and a passel of press drinking mojitos and being alternately snarky and annoying. Not so trendy, as the later iLike bash, but classic tech festivities.

Ah, it’s a grand life here.

But see for yourself:

[ See post to watch video ]