The San Francisco-based company is somewhat similar to the teen-oriented book series by Ann M. Martin, in which a group of middle-school students help parents find babysitters.

But in this version, instead of an elaborate phone tree, it uses modern communication tools like Facebook. The UrbanSitter site helps parents find sitters based on their availability, and even on their experience working for Facebook friends and friends of friends.

UrbanSitter has secured $1.75 million in seed funding from First Round Capital. Rustic Canyon Partners, Menlo Ventures and several angels also participated.

In September, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes reported that the company had launched in one market, and had assisted with 300 babysitting bookings.

Since then, it has expanded to San Diego, Napa and Sonoma Valleys, Seattle, Boulder and Lake Tahoe. Next month, it will roll out in New York, Chicago, Denver and St. Louis.

The funding will be used for product development, such as mobile bookings, and new features, including online payments to sitters. The capital will also go toward expansion into new cities.

Here to rectify that is Charlie O’Donnell, who is rounding up investors for Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, which he’s describing as “the first venture capital fund to be based out of Brooklyn.” (Google points to a Brooklyn Ventures, whose logo alludes to the borough’s famous bridge. But the company appears to be Dutch, just like Brooklyn’s early residents.)

O’Donnell is a former principal at First Round Capital; his resume also includes a stint as an analyst at Union Square Ventures, as well as at Path 101, an unsuccessful “career discovery” start-up.

He says he’s closed a first funding round, but won’t identify his backers or say how much they’ve put in; people familiar with O’Donnell’s plan say he’s trying to raise a total of $7 million to $10 million.

You could argue that focusing on a single slice of New York is a bit narrow, but O’Donnell’s kickoff announcement explains that he “will generally invest in the Greater Brooklyn Area.” So even if you’re based in Hoboken or Yonkers, pitch away.

Bigger picture: A slew of zippy start-ups have cropped up in New York over the past five years or so, including some that have quickly made money for their investors (see: Invite, GroupMe, etc.) and some that haven’t exited yet but may eventually do so at a very big price if things go right (see: Tumblr, Foursquare, perhaps AppNexus, etc.). So it’s easy to see why some people would be willing to make a bet or two on the city.

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Oh, dear — Silicon Valley VCs acting like teenage girls.

And there’s not even a hot start-up in sight to chase and scream over.

It must be the holidays and First Round Capital’s annual digital greeting card, which is based on one of the popular viral videos of the year.

In 2008, First Round did its own version of “Dancing Matt.” In 2009, the firm’s CEOs sang as if they were Susan Boyle in “I Dreamed a Dream.” And last year, it was partner Josh Kopelman wearing a body suit to mimic the Old Spice guy.

This year, it spoofs one of the more irksome music videos of 2011 — Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

I like First Round’s version a lot better.

Along with the rhythm-impaired VCs, you can see a wide range of their start-ups here, such as Xobni, Path and — thank goodness, since they can sing — Birchbox.

Enjoy:

It’s also bringing former Disney chief executive officer Michael Eisner on board as a strategic adviser.

TaskRabbit has nabbed $17.8 million in a Series B round of funding from existing investors, as well as from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Allen & Company and the Tornante Company, the investment firm run by Eisner.

Photo Courtesy of Robert Godwin/Flickr

Lightspeed managing director Justin Caldbeck and Shasta Ventures’ Sean Flynn will also join the board of directors.

TaskRabbit CEO Eric Grosse said the company plans to spend the money on hiring engineers and designers, building out more mobile products — including an upcoming Android app — and expanding its presence in U.S. cities and abroad. Fans of the service can expect to see it become available in Seattle and Portland in the next couple of months, while international expansion could happen by the end of 2012.

While the funding is notable in itself, the addition of Eisner as a strategic advisor could bring to light the possibility of entertainment opportunities for TaskRabbit. Eisner approached after seeing an ABC News special with Diane Sawyer this past September; the segment featuring TaskRabbit drove 6.5 million users to the company’s Web site and overwhelmed its servers.

“He really saw the potential in what we’re building. Every single task that’s posted and completed is a story, and even the TaskRabbits themselves are stories,” said TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, adding that Eisner’s experience in entertainment is a big asset to the start-up.

TaskRabbit was founded in 2008 by Busque, a former IBM-er, who now holds a chief product role at the company; tech veteran Grosse acts as chief executive officer. Busque has said the idea came to her when she and her husband were looking for a friend or neighbor to get dog food for them on a cold winter night in Boston.

The company works by creating an online community of runners — a.k.a. “rabbits” — who perform errands, and bidders, who are willing to pay the rabbits. TaskRabbit takes a 15 percent cut of each duty performed. According to Busque, who joined us on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show this past fall, the runners are vetted through a multi-step approval process, which includes background checks and video interviews.

The company just received $5 million this past May from Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and others, following a $1.8 million round of seed funding. TaskRabbit says that since closing its Series A funding in May it has tripled its monthly task volume and net revenue, while increasing its customer base sevenfold, though it declined to say how many customers it has in total.

TaskRabbit isn’t the only start-up looking to outsource garbage-hauling, laundry-washing and dog-walking (and in some cases, even worm-bin managing): New competing platform Zaarly raised $14 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sands Capital Ventures this October, and also added Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman as a board member. Another company, GigWalk, takes a slightly different approach, with a mobile app that utilizes the power of GPS to create a marketplace for on-the-spot small jobs.

In October, the online fashion magazine attracted 4.3 million visitors, generating 40 million page views; it has 600,000 subscribers signed up for local editions in five cities nationwide.

To date, though, it has mostly monetized the company through advertising.

Co-founder Philippe von Borries said that 80 percent of the revenue this year will come from ads, and 20 percent from commerce. Next year, he hopes the ratio is closer to 40 percent from commerce.

“Content drives incredible engagement, and now that we have built such a sizable audience of women who tune in every day through email, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — we are building exciting new opportunities to shop our content,” he said.

Today, the company is relaunching its e-commerce component, called Reserve. The site, which is separate from the editorial, will offer only a few items a day, and could be connected to the content that appears in the magazine; it is currently offering a selection of boots and handbags.

To support the launch, the company raised $4.5 million in funding this summer in a first round from Floodgate and First Round Capital.

Von Borries said the New York-based company is hiring aggressively to add to its current 49 employees, and that its revenues are on an annual run rate of $15 million. Last year, its revenues totaled $2 million.

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt will join the board of Kno, the online education start-up.

He is currently the principal at REH Advisors.

The Silicon Valley-based Kno began its life offering a student-aimed tablet and education platform, but now is focusing solely on the software part of its business.

The company announced plans this summer to allow those who buy textbooks from Kno to read them on Facebook and via the Web. It also has an Apple iPad app that takes the product beyond just an electronic version of a traditional textbook.

Kno’s current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen, as well as co-founders Osman Rashid (also CEO) and Babur Habib (also CTO), are also on its board.

Here is the official press release about Hundt’s appointment as a Kno director:

FORMER FCC CHAIRMAN REED HUNDT JOINS KNO INC.’S BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Hundt Brings Unparalleled Experience in Education and Communications

Santa Clara, CA, November 1, 2011 — Today, Kno, Inc., www.kno.com, a pioneer in education software, announced that the company has named Reed Hundt, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to its Board of Directors.

“I’m very excited to join Kno’s Board of Directors because the company shares my passion for education,” said Reed Hundt. “While I was at the FCC, one of my highest priorities was making sure our nation’s classrooms were connected to the Internet, precisely in order to foster a software revolution in learning. I believe that Kno’s student-focused software will bring education into the 21st century and help transform the way students learn now and in the future.”

Hundt brings decades of relevant experience to Kno’s Board and is a long-time advocate for technological innovation in education. He is currently the Principal at REH Advisors, an advisory firm that serves clients on a variety of issues. Prior to establishing REH Advisors, Hundt served as an Adviser to McKinsey and Company for more than 10 years, as well as a Member of the National Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, among other distinguished roles.

Hundt served as Chairman of the FCC from 1993-1997 and played a major role in implementing the Snowe-Rockefeller program that directs more than $4 billion annually to connect all classrooms to the Internet and is hailed as one of the largest single national commitments to K-12 education in American history.

“The work Reed accomplished while Chairman of the FCC makes him an exceptional addition to our Board and his expansive knowledge of the education technology space will serve Kno tremendously in its efforts to improve how students learn,” said Osman Rashid, co-Founder and CEO of Kno, Inc.

Babur Habib, co-Founder and CTO of Kno, Inc. continued, “Hundt brings decades of relevant experience to Kno’s Board and is a long-time advocate for technological innovation in education. We look forward to working closely with Reed to help guide us as we extend our reach to professors and administrators.”

Hundt has also taught seminars at the Yale Law School, Yale School of Management, Yale College, and Columbia Business and Law Schools, demonstrating his passion of education. He also serves on the Boards of Intel Corporation, Serious Energy and UNCF, an educational assistance organization.

Hundt holds a B.A. in History from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He also is the author of “In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship and You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics.”

The service, which is available as a Web site and iPhone app, comes from Gina Bianchini, the co-founder and former CEO of Ning.

Mightybell’s content management tools try to anticipate the ways its guide creators might use them — to offer a packing list for a trip, for instance, or to set up a communal photo gallery for everyone who uses the guide. It helps creators add pictures, videos, times and locations, and encourages them to make their steps measurable so users can confirm that they have each been completed.

Mightybell also has extensive and pretty tools for creators to analyze how people use their guides, including feedback on how every step was received by users, visualizations of conversion rates from various referrers like Facebook and Twitter, and details about which of their followers are most engaged. Registered guide users also get a multicolored timeline of everything they’ve ever done on the site.

Mightybell doesn’t yet have a directory of its guides; for this first launch, it is focused on people who want to create them, said Bianchini. She’s also employing an unusual beta testing gate: Users who want to try the product now can pay $1; others can sign up for free to get access at a later date.

That doesn’t mean the service is eventually going to require users to pay to create guides, necessarily — though they can, if they wish, elect to charge $2 to $1,000 for use of their guides, of which Mightybell takes a 25 percent cut.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Mightybell has nine employees and raised seed funding from Floodgate Fund, First Round Capital and Founder Collective.

When Bianchini stepped down last March from the CEO role at Ning, another social toolset provider, she had joined Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen as an EIR at Andreessen Horowitz. But she left after only three months, and AH is not an investor in Mightybell.

Prior investors General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.4 million. Avalon’s Brady Bohrmann will join Backupify’s board.

I talked with CEO Rob May, who told me about his plan to accelerate marketing and adoption of Backupify by users of Google Apps, the search giant’s Web-based business suite of applications that is proving popular with businesses. So far, Backupify is being used to back up the files on 5,000 Google Apps domains. He says he would also like to offer Backupify for several other services that users have been requesting. In addition, May wants to boost Backupify’s visibility among the many third-party partners — like, say, Cloud Sherpas — who work with businesses deploying Google Apps.

The outfit is growing fast. It has 175,000 users and stores 200 terabytes of data for its users, not just from Google apps, but also from Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, and the Zoho Web-based office suite. One public customer is New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which uses Backupify to back up the Google Apps data generated by some 1,000 users. The data is all backed up to Amazon Web Services, but users can also download local copies of their data.

Why would you need to back up data that’s on a supposedly reliable cloud service? Because you might goof up — and delete something you didn’t mean to — just as easily in the cloud as on your PC. May says that roughly one-third of all data loss occurs because of user error. “We hear a lot of different things. When you delete something, Google assumes you meant to delete it. Sometimes things get deleted maliciously by a hacker, or someone who gets ahold of a password that wasn’t taken care of,” he says. “IT administrators want their own backup copy they can restore from. They trust Google not to lose it, but they don’t always trust their own users.”

Backupify’s $4.5 million A round was also led by Avalon and joined by General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital. Prior to that, First Round Capital led a $900,000 seed round, which was joined by Betaworks and several individual investors, including Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis.

Aside from the horror at the events in Norway, the incident gave me new insight into the language chasm that still exists on the Web. For one thing, that there may have been lots of people turning to Norwegian news sites from outside that country, many of them non-Norwegian and probably non-English speakers. Why isn’t it easier, I wondered, to have text written in a language other than your own, more readily available in the language you do speak?

It turns out there’s a company right here in New York that’s doing just that. Smartling describes itself as a Translation Delivery Network, and uses the cloud to give sites the tools they need to easily serve up their pages in pretty much any language. Its customers already include foursquare, Scribd and SurveyMonkey, and it just landed a $10 million Series B funding round from IDG Ventures, with prior investors US Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital also participating. Its Series A was $4 million.

I talked earlier this week with Smartling’s CEO and founder Jack Welde. He’s a former Air Force pilot who still flies today. He came up with an interesting language problem: In one context, “going into a bank,” means walking into a financial institution; in another it means maneuvering a plane. Most translation engines use a statistical method and so assume that “bank” means the financial building, without allowing for the fact you may be reading an aviation site. Context is kind of a big deal.

Welde tells me there’s a significant opportunity for companies on the Web to reach out to speakers of other languages. Four-fifths of U.S. residents are already on the Web, but only about 30 percent of China’s population is on the Web, to say nothing of other countries like Brazil, India and elsewhere. “The growth in Web users is occurring outside the U.S., and language is a key component to taking advantage of it,” he says.

Welde compares Smartling to Akamai, the Web-caching specialist that caches content to make its delivery more efficient. Smartling serves up on-demand versions of Web content from the cloud. Site owners choose the languages they want their content translated into, and redirect their domain name servers to point to those controlled by Smartling. There are three options for translation: One is machine translation, one is crowdsourced by a network of volunteers, and there’s also an option for professional translation. There are three tiers of service, starting at free and going up to $249 a month.

One advantage over relying on static translations like those delivered by Google Translate, Bing Translator or Yahoo’s Babel Fish is that the content becomes searchable in the translated language. That’s Smartling’s cloud network dynamically serving multilanguage versions of a client’s site, and then discarding them a few hundred times a second. It’s currently serving about 500 million page views a month.

Smartling has also partnered with CloudFlare, the Web security start-up to offer Smartling’s translation service as an optional add-on for its customers.

Led by CEO Jason Goldberg, the site’s opening offers are on the sorts of things one might find at a design museum gift shop — fancy plastic chairs, fancy energy-saving light bulbs and fancy signed posters.

With future deals appearing to include personal electronics and apparel, Fab.com is entering a space currently dominated by Gilt Groupe, which offers deals on luxury goods in several categories through its Web site and apps.

In an email, Goldberg said the launch was made possible by a new round of seed funding that included the likes of Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade fund, SoftTechVC and First Round Capital, the Washington Post Company, and Baroda Ventures.

While the amount of the round was not disclosed, Goldberg added that Kutcher will advise the company.

I wrote about the company last month, noting that a number of travel applications have launched recently to take advantage of booking rooms or flights while on the go.

HotelTonight’s round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from Accel Partners and First Round Capital. Additional investors include travel industry veterans Rich Barton and Erik Blachford, both formerly of Expedia, Brad Gerstner, the founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, and former Farecast CEO Hugh Crean.

Since launching in January, HotelTonight’s app has been downloaded more than 300,000 times.

The company said it will use the capital to expand the product to new mobile platforms, add new features, support marketing campaigns and expand into new markets.

The HotelTonight app is free and currently available on the iPhone. New customers receive a $25 credit toward their first booking. The app provides last minute hotel rooms at discounted prices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., Miami, Seattle, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Denver.

PeerPong “wound down just this past month,” Choy told NetworkEffect, and a couple other members of the PeerPong team joined Formspring as well. To be clear, Formspring did not acquire PeerPong, but at least three of its employees moved over together.

TechCrunch reported Choy’s hiring today, but glossed over the mention of PeerPong. Choy said PeerPong had six employees before it closed.

A cached message from the PeerPong home page reads:

We’re Sorry, but PeerPong is in end of life mode.

When we launched Peerpong.com in early 2010 we believed we could use advanced semantic technology to let people access expertise across social media. We succeeded in finding and indexing over five million people by their knowledge and expertise whether on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, and helped answer questions from hundreds of thousands of users from these ridiculously smart people over the last year.

Unfortunately we find ourselves in a tough position where the service alone can’t support our business goals and sadly need to discontinue the site. I want to thank everyone who committed their time and effort to Peerpong, including the many members who had great answers for all types of questions, from technology to food to dating, and to the Peerpong team directly for the many months trying to unite NLP/semantics with an engaging user experience. There’s no pithy comment to summarize the experience of trying to make something incredible and falling short, only deep gratitude and few, but significant regrets.

Ro Choy – CEO

PeerPong had raised $2.8 million from Partech International, DCM, First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures after being incubated at Partech under the name Muchobene. PeerPong, which Choy joined as CEO in January 2010 after leaving social app maker RockYou, promised to help connect users to subject matter experts through social media.

Earlier this year, PeerPong was experimenting with a so-called pivot to offer a new service called Rendezvous that would have semantically analyzed users’ Facebook profiles to find events and people they might be interested in. But that didn’t work out either.

Formspring, meanwhile, says that as of this week users of its service will have submitted three billion answers to each other’s questions.

According to sources close to the situation, Intel Capital and Advance Publications will lead a $30 million investment round in Kno, the high-profile student tablet start-up.

In addition to the funding from its venture capital arm, Intel itself will consult with Kno on its tablet design. Kno, which is getting out of the hardware business, will now focus on its software to manage the devices that are aimed at the college market.

Intel will not manufacture tablets either. Instead, its engineers will consult with Kno on power management, graphics, display, systems integration, which it does for a variety of its customers.

Along with Intel Capital and Advance, current investors will also participate in the round, said sources. But Intel Capital and Advance, the owner of the Condé Nast publishing empire, make up a big part of the funding.

Sources said Intel Capital’s investment is $20 million and Advance and others make up the rest of it.

BoomTown reported in February that the much-funded and high-profile Silicon Valley start-up–aimed at making tablet computers focused at students–was considering selling off the entire hardware part of the business.

Sources said Kno execs have recently decided that the quicker-than-expected uptake in tablet production by a multitude of powerful device makers had made its efforts to package a seamless offering less critical.

Instead, the company will now focus on its robust software and services to offer students on the Apple iPad, as well as upcoming tablets based on Google’s Android mobile operating system and others.

The move is a dramatic shift for the company, which had not shipped significant numbers of the touchscreen device as it has long touted.

In fact, Kno said in November that it would ship a $599 and $899 version of the tablet by the end of the year.

The lower price was for its single-screen device, while the clamshell double-screen version was more expensive.

And, although it has been reported no pre-orders were fulfilled, Kno did indeed ship several hundred of them, built by China’s Foxconn, before stopping doing so earlier this year.

Many have been dubious about Kno’s ambitious hardware efforts.

That’s because marketing a new and complex product like the Kno takes a lot of effort and cash, especially since it is an increasingly competitive market for mobile and portable computing products that includes Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Amazon, Dell and many others.

Before this $30 million, Kno has raised another $46 million in funding to add to an earlier $10 million round.

Sources in February said that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company considering going back out to raise even more.

Its current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with angel investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

Sources said the shift to deliver textbook and other student-related delivery system would be a better path for all that investment money, since Kno has established a wide range of partnerships with colleges and universities.

In addition, Kno co-founder Osman Rashid has a lot of experience in digital education market. He was also the co-founder of Chegg, the textbook rental business that is reportedly aiming for an IPO soon.

BusinessWeek was first to report that Intel Capital was making the investment in Kno, but the post did not mention Advance’s involvement or that Intel itself was licensing the hardware design business from Kno.

If you had to pick the hotsy-totsy start-up to win the media darling of South by Southwest award for 2011–following in the precious footsteps of Foursquare and Twitter from years past–it would probably have to be GroupMe.

The group messaging/conference call/location/photo sharing service has, as these things tend to, garnered a lot of heat since its debut less than a year ago.

That has, of course, also meant the requisite big venture funding–$11.5 million in total–for the New York-based GroupMe, including from SV Angel, betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Khosla Ventures.

And, no surprise, the dead-simple idea now has many start-up rivals, all vying to use combine mobile, texting, social, location, groups and smartphones into some unholy megatrend.

Still, GroupMe has built a slick little offering, which is likely to get scooped up by some bigger entity (or perhaps just copied, which is the sincerest form of flattery in tech).

Until then, its Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are enjoying their day in the sun–quite literally, at their free grilled-cheese-and-beer giveaway at SXSW this weekend in Austin, Texas.

Here is my video interview with their-future-is-so-bright-they-have-to-wear-shades pair:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-groupme-dudes-talk-group-messaging-phenom-and-drink-beer-at-the-same-time/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110309/stumbleupons-second-wind-continues-raises-17m/ http://allthingsd.com/20110309/stumbleupons-second-wind-continues-raises-17m/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:00:39 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4109 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110309/stumbleupons-second-wind-continues-raises-17m/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110228/weatherbill-raises-42m-for-weather-insurance/ http://allthingsd.com/20110228/weatherbill-raises-42m-for-weather-insurance/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:42:27 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3872 As those of us who hoped to go sledding in San Francisco last weekend know too well, weather forecasting is not terrifically precise. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be a technology business. WeatherBill, a company that sells weather insurance to farmers, just got a big vote of confidence from folks in the high-tech world for its weather simulation modeling.

Four-year-old WeatherBill is announcing today $42 million in Series B funding from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures as well as previous investors NEA, Index Ventures, Allen & Company, First Round Capital, Atomico and Code Advisors.

WeatherBill CEO David Friedberg was previously a member of Google’s corporate development team, while CTO Siraj Khaliq led technical projects such as the company’s distributed computing infrastructure. They are actually some of the first former Googler co-founders funded by Google Ventures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110228/weatherbill-raises-42m-for-weather-insurance/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110225/online-trackers-rake-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20110225/online-trackers-rake-in-funding/#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:00:36 +0000 Scott Thurm http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36859 Venture capitalists are plowing money into companies that help target online advertising, despite public concern about privacy and potential government restrictions.

In the past three months alone, online-tracking specialists Lotame Solutions Inc., Media6Degrees Inc., eXelate Media Ltd., [x + 1] Inc. and Turn Inc. each secured new investments from prominent venture-capital firms. In January, Millennial Media and Tapjoy Inc., which deliver ads to smartphones, each said it had raised more than $20 million.

“It’s a huge market and it’s growing,” says Chris Fralic, a managing partner at First Round Capital, which ranks among the venture firms most heavily invested in tracking the movements of Internet users. “We saw a lot of things jelling around those spaces.”
First Round, a six-year-old firm that primarily invests in young companies, has backed 33Across Inc., which analyzes users’ social networks, and Demdex Inc., which boasts a “behavioral bank” of user profiles.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110225/online-trackers-rake-in-funding/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110221/exclusive-kno-student-tablet-start-up-in-talks-to-sell-off-tablet-part-of-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20110221/exclusive-kno-student-tablet-start-up-in-talks-to-sell-off-tablet-part-of-business/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:16:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40897

Kno–the much-funded and high-profile Silicon Valley start-up aimed at making tablet computers focused at students–is considering selling off the entire hardware part of the business and is in talks with two major consumer electronics manufacturers to do so, according to sources close to the situation.

Sources said Kno execs have recently decided that the quicker-than-expected uptake in tablet production by a multitude of powerful device makers had made its efforts to package a seamless offering less critical.

Instead, the company will focus on its robust software and services to offer students on the Apple iPad, as well as upcoming tablets based on Google’s Android mobile operating system and others.

BoomTown could not determine which two companies Kno was in serious discussions with about unloading its hardware business, but the company has signed an NDA with one of them.

But, if a deal is struck, the move would be a dramatic shift for the company, which has yet to ship significant numbers of the student-focused touchscreen device as it has long touted.

In fact, Kno said in November that it would ship a $599 and $899 version of the tablet by the end of the year.

The lower price was for its single-screen device, while the clamshell double-screen version was more expensive.

And, although it has been reported no pre-orders were fulfilled, Kno did indeed ship several hundred of them, built by China’s Foxconn, before stopping doing so recently.

Many have been dubious about Kno’s ambitious hardware efforts.

That’s because marketing a new and complex product like the Kno takes a lot of effort and cash, especially since it is an increasingly competitive market for mobile and portable computing products that includes Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Amazon, Dell and many others.

Kno recently raised another $46 million in funding to add to a $10 million round, and sources said that the Santa Clara, Calif., company was considering going back out to raise even more.

Its current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

A Kno spokeswoman declined comment.

But sources said the shift to deliver textbook and other student-related delivery system would be a better path for all that investment money, since Kno has established a wide range of partnerships with colleges and universities.

In addition, Kno Co-founder Osman Rashid has a lot of experience in digital education market. He was also the co-founder of Chegg, the textbook rental business that is reportedly aiming for an IPO soon.

You can see Rashid here, along with the Kno tablet prototype in the full demo video that the company did last year at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference:

(Want to see it bigger? Click here.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110221/exclusive-kno-student-tablet-start-up-in-talks-to-sell-off-tablet-part-of-business/feed/ 18 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/venture-capitalists-actually-slightly-more-active-than-angels-on-angellist/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/venture-capitalists-actually-slightly-more-active-than-angels-on-angellist/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:00:35 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3588 While the start-up fundraising process often seems like a clubby game of relationships and calling in favors, a service called AngelList helps relatively unknown entrepreneurs efficiently show their wares to potential investors. But putting “angel” in the name hasn’t thrown traditional venture capitalists off the scent, especially in this frothy funding environment.

AngelList ran the numbers this week and found that venture capitalists are actually more active than angels on its year-old service.

Essentially, AngelList facilitates introductions between people with money and people who want to raise money. Founders Babak Nivi (pictured) and Naval Ravikant screen potential deals and send them to potential investors. Currently, 725 angels and 557 venture capitalists subscribe to their matchmaking service. (Nivi counts 378 of the VCs as multi-stage investors, and 179 as seed-fund investors.)

Interested investors reply to get “intros” with posted companies, and potentially invest in them. AngelList doesn’t formally track the investments that occur due to those intros, but Nivi estimated that the service has helped orchestrate funding for 219 start-ups from 384 investors.

AngelList counts about half of the investors in each category as active participants. Active seed fund investors have taken 5.6 AngelList intros on average, active multi-stage VCs have taken 5.4, and angels have taken 5.

Of the VC firms, General Catalyst Partners has the most intros, at 64 spread among five partners. The rest of the top five are Atlas Venture, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures.

Some examples of recent AngelList VC deals include Storenvy and Kleiner Perkins, LawPivot and Google Ventures, LearnBoost and Atlas Venture, and MightyMeeting and Charles River Ventures.

Nivi estimated AngelList plays a role in “a good chunk” of seed financings in New York, and a smaller portion–maybe 10 percent–in Silicon Valley.

But it’s hard to say. While AngelList may be a mostly open book, angel investing transactions are usually much less public.

As AngelList has expanded, it now facilitates funding rounds from seed stage to Series B. Nivi said he sees the differences between rounds lessening as fundraising becomes more efficient and fluid.

That’s in part because Web start-ups are breaking from the pack more quickly than ever.

As Nivi put it, “If those companies experience a breakout, they often skip A and go straight to higher-priced rounds, so VCs that were traditionally players at Series A almost have to invest at the seed level.”

In other words, go seed or go home.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110215/venture-capitalists-actually-slightly-more-active-than-angels-on-angellist/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:04:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40732 UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million, in a round led by Accel Partners.

The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross (pictured here)–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.

Accel’s Jim Breyer will join the board of UberMedia, maker of social media reading and posting tools, which is currently largely aimed at the Twitter ecosystem.

“We are hoping to work very closely with Twitter, which is certainly our goal, as well as other social media platforms like Facebook,” said Breyer in an interview with BoomTown this morning, answering a question about previous tensions between Twitter and UberMedia. “There will be a lot of efforts to monetize Twitter and there is no silver bullet.”

Index Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated in the round.

The company did not reveal the amount raised, nor the valuation for UberMedia.

But many like him are trying to find a way to monetize the huge microblogging platform–including Twitter–and take advantage of its enormous scale.

Gross founded the start-up last spring.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, including Index, Revolution, betaworks, First Round Capital and angel investors such as Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

Started in Gross’s Idealab start-up incubator and called TweetUp (and then PostUp), it was initially cast as a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

TweetUp also offered an organic search service to surface the best tweets. This put it at odds on several fronts with Twitter, which began to aggressively move to take over key parts of its business that had largely been left to third-party developers.

That still remains UberMedia’s essential goal, and Breyer hopes that the new investment will show Twitter that UberMedia hopes to work in harmony with it, as other developers have done successfully with Facebook. (Accel and Breyer himself are big investors in the social networking giant, so he should know.)

“Like Twitter, we want to drive the customer experience,” he said, pointing out successes such as the Zynga gaming service. “This is a lot like Facebook several years ago and cooperation worked out well for everyone.”

Here’s the official press release:

Accel Partners Leads Investment Round in UberMedia, Jim Breyer Joins Board of Directors

PASADENA, Calif.–February 14, 2011–UberMedia, the leading independent provider of applications for reading and posting to Twitter and other social media platforms, today announced that it completed a financing round led by Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures. Existing investors Steve Case of Revolution Ventures and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures also participated.

“At UberMedia, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience with functionality in our clients and to be the best partner with Twitter in growing and enhancing their ecosystem,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO. “In particular, the addition of Jim Breyer to our board will really enable us to succeed at this mission. His experience on the boards of Wal-Mart, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Dell and so many other high-profile consumer brands will be particularly helpful.”

“We’ve been watching closely Bill’s efforts at UberMedia to build upon the ground-breaking communications platform created by Twitter,” said Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “We see a tremendous business in the kinds of innovations in user experience being developed at UberMedia. The result of these efforts will be an expansion in the number and variety of people engaged with Twitter as well as a method for advertisers to reach consumers in highly targeted and relevant ways.”

And here are two video interview I did with Gross last April when the company was founded:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110211/one-kings-lane-raises-23-million-from-kleiner-perkins-greylock-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20110211/one-kings-lane-raises-23-million-from-kleiner-perkins-greylock-others/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:00:52 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2697 One Kings Lane, which is competing in the trendy flash sales market, selling home décor, furnishings and accessories, has raised $23 million in a second round of funding.

The round was co-led by existing investor Kleiner Perkins and new investor Greylock Partners. Also participating is First Round Capital and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, as well as new investors TriplePoint Capital and Marissa Mayer.

If you haven’t heard of it, San Francisco-based One Kings Lane is an online retailer that sells designer home items, ranging from large oriental rugs to sophisticated and modern side tables, at deep discounts. The offer, which is sent to your inbox on a daily basis, is limited and can sell out in five minutes or five hours.

Typically, the merchandise comes from unsold inventory at luxury or high-end interior designers, which is why it can be sold for so much lower than retail.

The concept is part of a burgeoning new industry that is being called “private sales” or “flash sales.” Companies in the space include Gilt Groupe and Rue La La, which are mainly focused on fashion and clothing.

One Kings Lane has another differentiator: It is not building big warehouses to store all the items it wants to sell, nor is it committing to purchasing any of the inventory in advance. Therefore, the costs are lower because One Kings Lane doesn’t get stuck with any excess inventory.

On the other hand, it doesn’t have complete control over the shipping process, meaning shipments can sometimes take one to two weeks to reach customers.

CEO Doug Mack said he doesn’t expect the model to change with this funding.

The site was founded in late 2008 by Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus (who is married to Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, the social games company that has also raised funding from Kleiner Perkins–albeit on a much larger scale). One Kings Lane launched in the spring of 2009.

Last year was a pivotal time for the company.

Mack, who was hired in June, quickly ramped up the management team, hiring other executives from Hotwire, eBay, Walmart.com and Zappos.

It grew revenues five times over 2009 and boosted its membership base to around one million. It launched an iPhone app in November that generated two to three percent of its sales on the first day. Since then, the app has sustained those revenue levels.

Mack says the home furnishings are top of the line, and are compelling because they’re nothing you’d ever see at Ikea, or even in a department store like Macy’s.

While quality is hard to convey over the Web, he says the company has slowly gained customers’ trust over time. Often, customers will start by purchasing something small, like a candle. From there they might work their way up to a cashmere blanket, and eventually take the plunge into something as large as an armchair or area rug.

One of the more telling statistics that supports this is that 70 to 80 percent of sales are from repeat buyers.

This round of funding follows its Series A, which it raised back in December 2009. That was led by Kleiner Perkins, with Hoffman also participating. Hoffman introduced One Kings Lane to Greylock, where he is also a partner.

Mack says the capital will be used for three things: Accelerating the growth of its membership base, expanding the catalog of merchandise and scaling customer service as its membership grows.

To attract more members beyond the viral growth the company has already experienced, Mack says it will begin its first meaningful Web campaign, addressing its target of middle- to upper-class women, ages 35 to 55, in metro areas.

“In the grand scheme of things, we are only scraping the surface. Anyone with a home or apartment could use one of the things we sell,” Mack said.

In relation to the funding, James Slavet of Greylock will be a board observer, joining Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins, who has a board seat,  and Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, who is also an observer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110211/one-kings-lane-raises-23-million-from-kleiner-perkins-greylock-others/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110127/on-deck-which-helps-small-businesses-get-capital-lands-some-of-its-own/ http://allthingsd.com/20110127/on-deck-which-helps-small-businesses-get-capital-lands-some-of-its-own/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:50:15 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2411 If the small business is indeed the engine of growth for the American economy, then most of the indications are that the engine is not yet running on all of its cylinders. One of the biggest problems facing small businesses–the dry-cleaning shop on the corner, your neighborhood bakery or pizza place, or the new plumbing-supply shop in town–is access to capital.

Small businesses have a hard time getting loans because the banks that make loans look primarily at an owner’s personal credit information and not at the day-to-day financial data related to the business itself.

The recession hasn’t made it any easier. Data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council show that in 2009, banks originated $73 billion in loans to small businesses, representing a decline of 47 percent since 2007. And the overall number of loans fell by 69 percent to 1.6 million loans, from 3.6 million loans during the same period.

Raising capital doesn’t seem to be a problem for On Deck Capital. The New York-based start-up announced today that it has landed a $15-million C Round led by SAP Ventures, the venture capital arm of the German software company SAP. Its previous investments include stakes in LinkedIn, WebEx, MySQL and Red Hat Software.

On Deck is something of a right-time, right-place story, emerging as it has during a period when small businesses are struggling for needed capital. Launched in 2006, its software gathers live digital data from a business’s operations in order to help evaluate the business’s health. The point is to give banks and potential investors a tool to realistically evaluate the risk of making a loan that goes beyond the simple credit rating of the business owner. On Deck has been used to make $100 million in loans over four years.

Even in 2006, when credit was plentiful, most small businesses were able to secure loans because the banks treated them as consumers, not as businesses, says On Deck CEO Mitch Jacobs. For banks, it’s also a question of time and attention “Banks simply can’t afford to spend 80 hours to underwrite a flower shop that needs $30,000 for a relatively short period of time. It just doesn’t make economic sense.”

But at the same time, small businesses started embracing digital tools to run the shop. They started doing their banking online, and using QuickBooks to handle invoices and payroll. They started taking credit cards more often, and selling their goods and services on the Web. All of these are streams of useful data that can be captured to help paint an accurate picture of the business’s financial health, Jacobs says.

Combine that with technology that makes the repayment process both simple for the business owner and reliable for the lender, plus real-time monitoring of financial data from companies that get loans, and it’s not hard to see why On Deck is growing: Revenues tripled in 2010.

Not just any company can apply for an On Deck loan. The typical borrower company has been in business for at least a year and has at least $3,000 in credit card transactions per month. Loans range in size from $5,000 to $100,000 but average about $30,000, Jacobs said. Payments on the loan are made daily using an automated direct debit system. The small daily payments help prevent that moment that causes headaches for lenders when unexpected expenses crop up and the monthly loan payment ends up at the bottom of the priority list.

On Deck also announced that David Hartwig, managing director at SAP Capital, has joined its board of directors. Other investors include Contour Venture Partners in New York, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and Village Ventures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110127/on-deck-which-helps-small-businesses-get-capital-lands-some-of-its-own/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110111/salescrunch-raises-1-4-million-for-a-social-network-for-salesmen/ http://allthingsd.com/20110111/salescrunch-raises-1-4-million-for-a-social-network-for-salesmen/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:59:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27924 A reminder that you don’t have to be a pre-revenue app-maker to grab investor funding these days: Here’s SalesCrunch, a 9-month-old a “social network and sales training platform.” The New York-based company has only a few hundred users, none of whom pay, but it has still gathered $1.4 million in a round led by First Round Capital. Other investors include Accel Partners and Alfred Lin, former COO and CFO at Zappos. SalesCrunch founder Sean Black used to head sales at Trulia.com.

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