The funding is particularly notable because Topsy is part of the much-maligned Twitter ecosystem. The San Francisco-based company’s search index consists of more than eight billion tweets.

Perhaps the only other Twitter ecosystem start-up of Topsy’s magnitude is UberMedia, which has raised some $21 million in VC funding and gobbled up various Twitter clients. Twitter blocked some of the company’s apps for three days last month, saying they violated multiple
policies.

Twitter competes with both start-ups, offering its own search site and software clients for various platforms.

Besides running its search site, Topsy also provides analytics tools for marketers and widgets for publishers including IDG Media, The Huffington Post and Discovery Communications. The company brags that its search is super speedy (capable of processing over 1 million documents per second) and smart (ranking results based on social graph analysis, which Google and Bing are only starting to do).

Asked whether creating a real-time search engine is a viable start-up business, Campbell answered quickly: “No.” His company’s pivot is the latest of multiple efforts in the space; last year, OneRiot gave up its search business to pursue real-time advertising, and Ellerdale sold to Flipboard to help add relevance analysis to its social magazine app.

The exit of Collecta and its competitors from real-time search is remarkable given they had swarmed to the space only a couple of years ago.

In 2009, many entrepreneurs and their investors bet that real-time search was the next frontier, recognizing that search engines were having trouble handling the onslaught of status updates and fresh information streaming onto the Web from Twitter and elsewhere.

Given the companies’ emphasis on speed, perhaps it’s not surprising that they failed and moved on so quickly.

Campbell would not say how many employees Collecta had laid off as part of the change, but he maintained the company has plenty of money in the bank from the $4.7 million it raised last spring from Dace Ventures and True Ventures. Mashable reported earlier today in its story about the Collecta changes that co-founder Jack Moffitt is no longer with the company.

Campbell said Collecta will apply its “very serious technology” to other real-time projects, but it will not become a real-time ad engine like OneRiot.

Who’s left in real-time search? There are still a few, including Wowd and Topsy.

Topsy’s tweet search is much more comprehensive than Twitter’s own, and it serves half a billion queries per month, mostly through its API, Topsy co-founder Rishab Aiyer Ghosh told NetworkEffect via email today. And while Google and Bing also index tweets (and Bing has an extensive relationship with Facebook), they have not fully incorporated social updates into their core search engines.

“With TweetMeme, CrowdEye and Collecta all pivoting out of it, Topsy may be the only real-time/social search engine left,” Ghosh said. He maintained that there’s still an opportunity to build an independent real-time search engine “done right,” despite the competition dropping like flies. Topsy has raised $15 million in funding from investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners and the Founders Fund.

The San Francisco-based company has accumulated 550,000 iPhone downloads and 300,000 monthly Web site visitors, and has just released an Android app. It launched only last year.

Foodspotting is competing with the likes of Yelp, which is known for restaurant reviews but also includes all sorts of local businesses. However, Foodspotting allows only positive reviews of food, with the idea that a user would show up at a restaurant or in a neighborhood and glance at the app to quickly zero in on the best dishes to order.

Check out this recent NetworkEffect post on the bountiful competition in the sharing-pictures-of-food sector.

Foodspotting had just raised $750,000 from Felicis Ventures, 500 Startups and High Line Venture Partners in July 2010.

We have a video interview with Foodspotting CEO Alexa Andrzejewski that I’ll post later on, but unfortunately the press embargo on this announcement was broken before I’d encoded the video. In our interview, Andrzejewski justified how such a seemingly narrow project, especially in such a competitive market, could have broad appeal.

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. Other hyperlocal aggregators include Outside.In and EveryBlock. Some, like Patch, have their own staff, while others, like Fwix, mostly organize news written by bloggers and community members.

Now Fwix is launching a new advertising product, AdWire, and agreeing to split revenue with the people who write the local information, laying down the gauntlet against big news aggregators from Google on down.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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 minds out of the the gutter!

It’s because it is one of the few Web 2.0 companies that is trying out a subscription business model, as opposed to every other online company these days, all of which are chasing ad-supported nirvana.

Today, the San Francisco-based Zivity is nabbing that $7 million from BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund, both of which have backed social-networking widget phenoms like Slide.

In fact, Zivity co-founder Scott Banister is on the board of Slide and was one of its earliest investors. (Banister, whose wife, Cyan, is also a founder and model on the site, has also been involved with a wide range of start-ups, from Overture to PayPal to IronPort.)

So instead of, say, Viagra banner ads, Zivity users pay $10 a month to look at the “tasteful” naked ladies pictures uploaded by users. The company must approve of the professional-quality photos, using a series of guidelines (no sex acts or close-ups, for example).

“Look, Lindsay Lohan just did a whole photo session similar to what we have on our site, so what’s wrong with 3 million other women wanting to do it,” joked Banister in an interview last night, referring to the recent series of pictures the troubled actress did a la Marilyn Monroe for New York magazine. “We are creating a place where the more controversial material can be published online without worrying whether advertisers are willing to underwrite it.”

Well, we will not get into a debate as to why we probably should not be playing copycat with the train wreck that is Lohan. But Banister does have a point about the need for different kinds of business models that don’t rely on advertising.

In fact, Zivity–which was seeded in 2007 with $1 million in funding–pays contributors who are more popular in a revenue-sharing plan via voting. Right now, for example, the most popular “photo sets” includes images of Cupcakes, Pearl and Damanda (pictured here).

There is also an increasing element of social networking, among the models, photographers and others, which does mimic more straight-laced sites.

In the press release for the funding, Banister compares Zivity to the popular cable channel HBO. “We think of Zivity as the HBO of the Internet,” he said. “Unlike free social networks and other user-generated content platforms underwritten by advertisers, our subscription-based business model offers us real freedom–to publish uncensored content and to pay our content producers generously.”

While the site is only comparable to HBO if it ran only “Taxicab Confessions” and “Real Sex” in an endless loop and you had never heard of “The Sopranos” and “Entourage,” its sure-fire subscription base might allow Zivity to be one of the few Web 2.0 companies that survives the coming washout.

But before you fire up that browser, the site has only 10,000 beta users now, with another 30,000 on its wait list. While you can sign up to get an invite or be invited, the open public launch is not until 2009.

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 on Facebook and MySpace, was completing a round of funding that could value it at many times a multiple of its most recent $60 million to $80 million valuation.

The investment from the pair of private equity funds gives them a 9% stake in the maker of widgets and other social-networking applications.

Allen & Co., the media-connected New York-based investment firm, helped Slide execs in raising the latest round.

Don’t think we did not notice that the venture investors already in Slide did not pony up more funds at this–let’s just say it, shall we?–crazy valuation.

But it is noticeable that such mainstream investors are jumping into the giant pool of Kool-Aid that the social-networking industry has been swimming in over the last year.

Slide’s last round–an investment of $20 million–took place in November of 2006 with investors that included Khosla Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Founders Fund and the Mayfield Fund.

So Slide’s investors, of course, were smart to get in on the ground floor to take advantage of the bubble that is expanding at alarming rates.

The ground-zero of that trend came when Facebook got a $240 million investment from Microsoft that valued the company at $15 billion.

Of course, while garnering revenues, neither Facebook nor Slide has the kind of business yet to deserve being worth this lofty amount, except for the fact that investors are counting in its potential and recent quick growth.

Slide’s business plan includes making money from selling premium versions of its widgets, as well as selling advertisers on its large, although disparate, audience.

The company calls itself the “largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers each month and 30% of the U.S. Internet audience.”

But the company recently said reports had put that number at 144 million, excluding its 50 million users on Facebook. Its competitors include other widget-makers like RockYou.

Slide makes a wide range of software, called widgets, that have been attracting many millions of users each. They include everything from slide shows to a program called SuperPoke that allows a user to, well, poke another in a super way.

A lot of Slide’s current growth has been through taking advantage of the huge spike in users first at MySpace and now at Facebook, which is promising, but also not certain.

To say that we have seen this story of fast growth, insane valuations and then the inevitable drop-off would be an understatement.

But Slide Founder and CEO Max Levchin and his team consider the company to be a new kind of distributed content and application company that is not dependent on large platforms like Facebook and MySpace and has huge potential.

Minor blogging annoyance: Of course, in a fit of pique since we revealed the funding without their help, Slide hand-fed the details of the deal to the New York Times and BusinessWeek, both of which somehow forgot to link to our post that said Slide was landing the deal. (Brad, Sarah: Please, please don’t tell us you figured it all out on your own this morning over eggs.)

UPDATE: A New York Times deputy tech editor just wrote an email to tell me its reporter already had a “previously scheduled” meeting with Slide about the deal–like I said, hand-fed!–this morning, which “inspired” its post and did not know of BoomTown’s news of the funding (even though it was up since 12:06 a.m. and noticed by everyone else, including Slide). Also, they had the hand-fed details! They did! I admit it! I went hungry, since I did not agree to an embargo! “In light of this we didn’t feel that a link was warranted,” he wrote me.

But we’re not bizarrely ungenerous like that, so here is the link to the New York Times story, in which Slide’s Levchin said his company makes Facebook and MySpace worth using. (And here is the BusinessWeek link too.)

“It’s impossible for social networks focused on scaling the network itself to build all the niche applications that bring people and keep people on these sites,” Levchin said, noting Slide widgets “add the bulk of perceived value to the consumers of these Web platforms.”

He also said he would use the money to expand its repertoire, but said Slide would try to develop in-house.

But others close to Slide said this was not exactly so, and that the company would also look around for good acquisition targets, using stakes in the newly valued Slide as currency.

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.

That would be a large leap from a round that Slide announced in November of 2006 with investors that included Khosla Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Founders Fund and the Mayfield Fund. Sources said the investment then was $20 million.

Slide is reportedly using Allen & Co., the media-connected New York-based investment firm, to help them in raising the latest round.

The reason for getting more funding, said sources, is to be able to acquire other companies and expand, using cash and the stakes in the higher-valued company, much in the same way that Facebook has done.

The social-networking universe was recently shaken up, when Facebook got a $240 million investment from Microsoft that valued the company at $15 billion.

Slide makes a wide range of software, called widgets, that have been attracting many millions of users each. They include everything from slide shows to a program called SuperPoke that allows a user to, well, poke another in a super way.

The company calls itself the “largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers each month and 30% of the U.S. Internet audience.”

But the company recently said reports had put that number at 144 million, excluding its 50 million users on Facebook. Its competitors include other widget-makers like RockYou.

A lot of Slide’s current growth has been through taking advantage of the huge spike in users first at MySpace and now at Facebook.

But Slide and its founder Max Levchin, as well as its investors, have grander dreams than riding on the coattails of bigger players.

They consider the company to be a new kind of distributed content and application company that is not dependent on large platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

More to come about the funding, but here is a post of a visit I made to Slide in September of 2007 and also a video interview I did with Levchin: