Liz Gannes in Social on February 8 at 5:00 am PT
SchoolFeed, which is building a sort of Facebook social gaming version of Classmates.com, already has six million monthly users. Now it has raised $1.75 million in funding.
News Byte
Kara Swisher in Social on February 8 at 3:00 am PT
TastemakerX, a San Francisco start-up that is developing a social mobile platform focused on “targeted taste graphs,” said it had raised $1.8 million in funding from a variety of venture firms, including Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures and Tekton Ventures, as well as angel investors. The company said it will release its TastemakerX Music mobile app as a private beta in early March 2012.
Peter Kafka in Media on February 7 at 7:00 am PT
Ashwin Navin used to run BitTorrent. Now he’s making another stab at video, this time with help from August Capital.
Liz Gannes in Social on February 7 at 6:00 am PT
The category of social mobile video start-ups is going to stick around for a while, if only because it seems to keep attracting investment dollars.
Peter Kafka in Media on February 7 at 4:00 am PT
The start-up specializes in “rich media” Web ads, which isn’t a new idea. But Google’s Eric Schmidt liked it last year, and Safeguard Scientifics likes it, too.
News Byte
Liz Gannes in Social on February 6 at 6:00 am PT
A good way to raise start-up funding these days seems to be saying you do “
collaborative consumption.” (It’s about helping people share underutilized resources; probably the best-known example is
Airbnb.) The latest such deal is San Francisco-based
Ridejoy‘s seed round of $1.3 million from Freestyle Capital, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and others. Ridejoy matches drivers and passengers — who are screened using their Facebook profiles — for trips of at least 50 miles on the West Coast of the U.S. A
direct competitor is
Zimride.
News Byte
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on February 1 at 7:30 am PT
Tel Aviv-based
Bday, a gift-finder on Facebook, has raised $2 million in a first round of funding. The company also announced the launch of its Bday Gift Finder app on Facebook, which helps users identify good gift ideas, including gift cards for friends based on their “Likes” and other data. The round was raised by Tel-Ad Electronics, and will be used to expand the company’s product offerings.
Kara Swisher in News on January 27 at 3:40 pm PT
Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future entrepreneurs can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.
Peter Kafka in Social on January 27 at 1:04 pm PT
The “check-in service” explains why it’s not really a “check-in service” at all.
Stu Woo, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on January 25 at 12:12 am PT
SquareTrade Inc., which sells warranties for electronics products directly to consumers over the Web, said it is raising $238 million from affiliates of the private-equity firm Bain Capital LLC.
