9 posts and columns on BlueRun Ventures

Social Search Start-Up Topsy Nabs Cisco Exec as CEO

in News on December 6, 2011 at 11:48 am PT

The social search start-up has hired Duncan Greatwood, the founder who sold PostPath to Cisco Sytems in 2008.
duncan_greatwood

New Banjo Social Discovery App Uses Other People’s Check-ins

in Social on June 22, 2011 at 5:00 am PT

A new start-up called Banjo is today launching a local discovery app that aggregates location-based information from various social Web services.
Banjo

Defying the Twitter Ecosystem Curse, Topsy Rakes in $15M More

in Social on March 10, 2011 at 8:00 am PT

Topsy Labs, the real-time search engine, has raised $15 million in Series C funding from BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund, Scott Banister and Western Technology Investments. This brings the company to about $30 million in total funding since it was founded in 2006.

Collecta: Another Real-time Search Engine Bites the Dust

in Social on January 19, 2011 at 6:09 pm PT

Los Angeles-based start-up Collecta has shuttered its real-time search business, including a destination site, API and publisher widgets. The company follows OneRiot, Ellerdale and other competitors that have hightailed away from indexing status updates from social services, which a couple of years ago had seemed like an enormous opportunity.

Foodspotting Captures $3M Series A

in Social on January 10, 2011 at 11:51 am PT

Foodspotting, the maker of visually pleasing apps for recommending particular restaurant dishes, has raised $3 million in a Series A funding round led by BlueRun Ventures, the mobile-focused venture capital firm.

Fwix Unveils Revenue-Sharing Plan for Hyperlocal Bloggers

in News on November 12, 2009 at 7:47 am PT

An online news start-up is going where Google and other giants haven’t: sharing revenue with the people who write the news. Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level.

"Tasteful" Naked Ladies Online Get $7 Million

in News on March 10, 2008 at 12:00 am PT

While BoomTown does not usually do funding announcements, the $7 million that the adults-only social network Zivity will be announcing today is interesting for one reason. No, not the fact that it builds its business model on the back–well, back ends, to be more precise–of photos of women in various stages of undress. Get your [...]

Slip-Sliding Into a Fortune

in News on January 18, 2008 at 2:32 pm PT

It’s Bubble Time! As BoomTown broke the news in its post earlier today, Slide grabbed a big pile of cash from new investors–$50 million from Fidelity and T. Rowe Price–which puts the value of the company at $550 million. In our post, we said the San Francisco start-up, whose widgets are among the most popular [...]

Slide Gets Big Funding?

in News on January 18, 2008 at 12:03 am PT

Call it the Facebook Funding Effect. I am still collecting details, but Slide–the San Francisco start-up whose widgets are among the most popular on Facebook and MySpace–is completing a round of funding that could value it at many times a multiple of its most recent $60 million to $80 million valuation.