SchoolFeed helps users find out whatever happened to their freshman crush, of course — as well as plan reunions, scan their yearbooks and play games together. It also uses a lot of the standard viral persuasion techniques from Facebook social gaming apps, like rewarding users with virtual coins and gifts, and constantly urging them to add and share with their friends.

Instead of mining school directories, the company reverse-engineers high school class lists by getting its users to contribute their Facebook data. In my experience, the app seems to automatically include all your Facebook friends, regardless of what high school they say they went to.

Former RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda founded schoolFeed last year and is conducting a sort of RockYou class reunion of his own, having recruited former RockYou employees and RockYou investors like First Round Capital, SK Telecom and Nicolas El Baze of Partech. (Crosslink Capital and InterWest invested, as well.)

SchoolFeed really does look and feel like a cross between Classmates.com and a Zynga-style game. Tokuda pointed out that Classmates still makes significant revenue in the age of Facebook. But where Classmates charges its users, schoolFeed plans to monetize through ads and virtual goods. Its first in-app game is Bingo.

Speaking of Bingo, Tokuda told us he’s hoping to attract a relatively older audience with SchoolFeed. That’s in part because Facebook itself already serves as a sort of living yearbook for many younger people.

“We’re targeting people age 36 and older, who graduated before the Internet was born,” Tokuda said.

Flingo is best known as “the video start-up run by the guy who used to run BitTorrent.” And so far, CEO Ashwin Navin has been concentrating on building “smart TV” apps that you’ll find on sets from Samsung, LG, etc.

Now the plan is to put the new money into software that will automatically figure out what viewers are watching. That way, it can bring them more information about what’s on the screen, and/or help them tell their pals about it.

And that, theoretically, could help Navin grab a piece of the very big TV advertising pie.

But that plan puts Navin in the same place as several other “TV check-in” services, like GetGlue and Yahoo’s IntoNow. And all of them face the same really big challenge: How do you get people to use this stuff?

It’s not that people aren’t interested in telling their friends what they’re watching. It’s just that they’re already doing that, on Twitter and Facebook.

That doesn’t mean a specialized social service that works with the existing ones can’t take off — that’s one of the big takeaways from Foursquare and Instagram.

But it does mean these check-in apps have to provide something pretty great. Or the second-screen real estate is going to get claimed by folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Dick Costolo.

But seriously, Viddy — which makes an iOS app that has attracted celebrity users like Snoop Dogg and Linkin Park, and limits video clips to 15 seconds — has now raised a $6 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures and including Greycroft Ventures and Qualcomm.

Viddy CEO Brett O’Brien says his company is stronger than the competition, for a few reasons: First, Viddy’s in-app editing effects — which include 99-cent premium promotions for content from partners like the Muppets and Linkin Park — help make compelling, shareable content.

Second, the Venice, Calif.-based company is trying more of a public Twitter-like approach than a private social network, so the star users it recruits can bring in their fans.

And third, Viddy seems to have already built a pretty significant audience — with a reported 40 million video views in January.

Some of Viddy’s recently funded competitors included Mobli (where Leonardo DiCaprio is an investor), Socialcam and Klip. Also, though mobile social apps seem to be doing better than ever before, this isn’t a new category; older mobile video start-ups included Kyte.tv and Qik (bought by Skype).

Viddy, which has 10 employees, also took investment from Bessemer Ventures, Sky Dayton, Jarl Mohn and Christina Brodbeck, and is advised by Biz Stone.

Here’s a Viddy shout-out from Snoop Dogg, who is rocking a great Angry Birds hat:

This is the pitch, more or less, for Spongecell, a start-up that helps produce “rich media” Web ads. That’s not a new idea, by any stretch, and there are plenty of competitors that do similar stuff. But last year the company’s story still attracted angel investors like Google chair Eric Schmidt.

And now the company has new funding: Tech investor/holding company Safeguard Scientifics has taken all of a $10 million B round.

The money will go to help Spongecell expand smaller product lines, like video ads, and eventually move into new ones, like mobile ads, says CEO Ben Kartzman.

Spongecell is a full-fledged “pivot”: Prior to 2008, it had raised $3 million and was trying to sell some sort of “event management” widget that Kartzman readily admits got no traction. Then it moved into ad tech, and things have been humming since. Kartzman says that last year he grossed around $10 million and cleared “seven figures” of profit.

Big picture: Smart people keep telling me that the ad tech ecosystem has too many start-ups funded with too much money, and that something has to give. But then I keep hearing about another ad tech start-up raising another round. Assume we’ll see more of these for a while.

Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.

The irony of the pair of legendary entrepreneurs dropping out — decades apart — of the even more legendary university to start two of tech most significant companies, Facebook and Microsoft.

No longer, apparently.

The early-stage incubator, which will award funding to four to six start-ups in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000. It will focus on seed ventures in the Cambridge, Mass. area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Experiment Fund came from an idea born Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which involved NEA. Today, SEAS Dean Cherry Murray hosted an event that unveiled the initiative.

But, while faculty members will advise for the fund, Harvard has no financial stake.

In an interview NEA’s Patrick Chung said the intent was to enable talented students to “build a company here in Boston rather than have to go elsewhere.”

NEA will have full-time staffers working on the fund, investing in a wide range of companies. It has already backed a health app company, as well as a live Internet television offering.

“There has been an envy of the left coast, certainly,” said Chung. “Now, these talented engineers don’t have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed.”

Added Chung: “They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real.”

In other words, let’s hope the third time’s a charm.

Here’s the map of exactly where the Experiment Fund is and official press release:

XFund press release

“Save money and unlock rewards” based on stuff you and your friends like. Now that sounds like a pretty interesting service.

And one that makes a whole lot more sense than “You’re supposed to ‘check in’ when you go some place. And also you might get a ‘badge’ or something,” which is where Fourquare has been for most of the past three years.

Of course, during that time Foursquare has racked up plenty of gaudy growth statistics, and big piles of VC money, and seems to have fended off would-be competitors from Gowalla to Facebook to Google. So you could argue that they’ve been communicating just fine, thank you very much.

But even though everyone you know knows about Foursquare, 15 million users — and a much smaller, and undisclosed, number of active users — isn’t close to a full-on mainstream service. So this kind of messaging is important as the company tries to grow into something much bigger.

Also important: Actually delivering on the promise of the video above. The idea is that you give Foursquare lots of data about what you like and what you do, and it offers up value to you in return, in the form of suggestions, or deals, etc.

We’re starting to see glimpses of that now, but my sense is that this is still more aspirational than anything else, and that Foursquare’s management and backers agree. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, in a meta post where he comments about someone else’s comment about his video, hints that there’s much more to come. Fun to watch.

The company said it will use the funds to boost marketing so it can further compete against brick-and-mortar retailers that sell extended warranties to customers at their stores. Best Buy Co., for example, offers warranties and repairs through its Geek Squad business.

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Turns out there are lots of us, and we’re not just engaged in a new, postmodern behavior. We’re building valuable data sets for marketers, who would like to know what we’re saying and what we’re watching, and what that means.

Eventually they’ll use that data to show us more ads. And perhaps we’ll comment about those, too.

That is the theory, at least, behind a slew of “second screen” start-ups. And Bluefin Labs, one of the most prominent ones, has just raised another $12 million in a B round led by Time Warner’s investment arm and SoftBank Capital. Earlier investors, who have poured in some $8 million, like Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures, have re-upped.

Bluefin has a fancy-pants pedigree — it uses technology hatched at the MIT Media Lab — but the idea is quite simple. It harvests comments we leave on social networks — primarily on Twitter, and to a lesser degree via Facebook, where more of the data is locked up — and analyzes it to see what we’re saying, and when.

That stuff can be used to create cool infographics like the one on the right, about last Sunday’s Giants-49ers game. But TV networks like CBS, and ad guys like Starcom MediaVest, want the data for themselves, for obvious reasons.

Given that Facebook and Twitter are deep in the ad business themselves, it will be interesting to see what kind of access they provide to the Bluefins of the world down the line. If this gets really big, it seems like they’d want a very active role.

And while we’re on that subject, we should note that Bluefin CEO Deb Roy says his company isn’t using Google+ data yet. Which is interesting, given all of those big user numbers.

Down the road, Roy says Bluefin could expand his business in different directions. He could measure other data points that tell us about the way people are watching TV: What are people saying on blogs? What are they saying when they reach call centers? And he could also measure other mass mediums. But for now, TV will keep him busy.

The new round comes entirely from existing investors Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures.

The company said it plans to use the funding mainly for hiring and for aggressive product development. Fitbit declined to elaborate further on what type of new product or products it has up its sleeve, except to say that it is now looking ahead to other connected and affordable health-and-fitness devices for the year, and is hiring top engineers to get the company there.

But Fitbit’s next steps — no pun intended — probably need to be very strategic ones.

The funding round comes amid increasing competition from other makers of wear-’em-and-forget-’em data-tracking devices. While Fitbit has been a leader in this area of health-and-fitness tracking, Jawbone, a maker of audio products, launched the $99 UP wristband tracker late last year, which was initially received with enthusiasm. And Nike just introduced its version of a polymer-encased wristband, the FuelBand.

The Jawbone UP has since suffered technical difficulties, forcing the company to refund unhappy customers and temporarily pause production.

But with the $149 FuelBand, Nike has brought big-brand cachet to activity tracking. And Nike isn’t just targeting the serious athlete or runner anymore — it’s going after the casual athlete and the desk jockey, too.

While some fitness devices involve the use of pedometers, accelerometers or galvanic skin-response sensors, Nike’s band promises to combine oxygen uptake with the activity tracked through the device’s tri-axis accelerometer for a high-tech reading. To be fair, it’s not entirely clear yet how that differentiates the FuelBand, and we won’t be able to gauge how well it works until we can get our hands on one and test it.

The Fitbit also uses a three-dimensional accelerometer to measure users’ steps and activity levels. When the $100 Fitbit device launched in 2008, it punched up the idea of the average pedometer, and offered hassle-free, wireless uploading of 24-7 personal analytics and activity data. Fitbit also created a Web dashboard through which users can monitor their activity levels; for $50 a year, Fitbit users can view even more detailed analytics.

In October 2011, the company introduced the Fitbit Ultra, which added a digital clock, a stopwatch and an altimeter that measures elevation gain; a Fitbit iPhone app was launched, too.

San Francisco-based Fitbit, which recently started selling Fitbits in Canada and the U.K., declined to say how many units have been sold to date. In the U.S., the Fitbit recently became available in Target stores through a retail partnership.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, Fitbit also unveiled the Fitbit Aria, a Wi-Fi-enabled “smart” scale, as Forbes reported here. The company plans to ship the scale starting in April.

(Fitbit photo courtesy of Redefinery/Flickr)

The company has been doing CrashPlan since 2007. The point then was to rethink the whole mind-numbing notion of backing up data from a Mac or PC, aimed at consumers. The next year, following some prodding from companies, it made an enterprise version of CrashPlan that is focused on backing up the data on corporate notebooks and desktops.

Code 42 now manages nearly 100 petabytes of data in the cloud for some 4,000 customers around the world, including at companies like Adobe, Google, Groupon, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, and NASA. Last year, it launched a version aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.

Co-founder and CEO Matthew Dornquast told me the picture has always been bigger than just about data backup. “The funny thing about backup is that when you have a continuous protection engine that knows within seconds what new unique information is being created on every desktop within your enterprise, there’s a lot you can do with that information,” he says. Companies now use it not just for backup but also for discovery when lawsuits happen, and as a recovery service. “Companies also like that they can quickly change their policies for backup and retention across the enterprise very quickly,” Dorncast says. “We can change a policy for the entire enterprise in seconds.”

It’s that policy-management part that makes sense to Ping Li of Accel, who’s leading Accel’s investment in Code 42. “The proliferation of devices in the enterprise — phones and tablets — makes the whole data management problem a lot more complex,” he says. “Having a central policy for managing all your information across all the places where employees touch it is more important than ever before,” Li told me.

Li said it’s not a typical VC investment. Code 42 has been profitable since launch, but it could use some cash to expand its sales and marketing efforts and to build some extensions on top of the original product.

As it happens, this is the first investment by Accel’s Big Data fund announced in November.

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)

As has been widely reported, well-known TechCrunch columnist and Silicon Valley journalist Sarah Lacy has a new gig: Running her own new tech news site, which debuts today.

(She’s pictured here with another recent adorable start-up of hers, named Eli.)

Not so widely reported? The site, called PandoDaily.com, will feature three of TechCrunch’s most high-profile former bloggers: Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler and Paul Carr.

That’s right, Lacy is Arrington’s boss this time around — even though his CrunchFund venture firm will also be an investor, in a funding round of more than $2 million for PandoDaily.

Other investors — whom Lacy described as “people I like and respect” — include a panoply of tech movers and shakers, including personal investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Matt Cohler, Jeff Jordan, Josh Kopelman, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Saul Klein, Tony Hsieh and Chris Dixon, as well as seed investments from Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures.

There will certainly be questions about all these funders who are also topics of PandoDaily’s posts, which Lacy acknowledged. She said the large number of funders was calculated so that none had undue influence.

Of course, many in Silicon Valley will be watching her carefully for any conflicts of interest or punches pulled. Lacy insisted that there will not be a problem and joked that she will definitely not become a VC, referring to the controversy around Arrington becoming one while at TechCrunch.

That issue blew up like a Roman candle, of course, leaving everyone with powder burns — I called the incident a “giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.”

Interestingly, Lacy did manage to stay out of the spotlight (she was, in fact, having her baby during the worst of the controversy, which was likely more painful).

Ignoring the delicious epic revenge part of this on AOL — which bought TechCrunch and then promptly presided over a tech version of the War of the Roses (and is, ironically, an investor via CrunchFund) — PandoDaily will focus on start-ups in Silicon Valley and everywhere else that homegrown spirit of innovations reaches.

Here’s a screenshot of the cleanly designed and handsome site:

In an inaugural post, titled ““Why I Started PandoDaily,” Lacy compared the site to a colony of trees in Utah, saying, “We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.”

Which is kind of like TechCrunch, which she left earlier this year.

“This is not TechCrunch 2.0,” Lacy said to me in an interview last week. “But, of course, we will be compared to TechCrunch.”

Of course, especially because of the presence of its star lineup on PandoDaily — who will write regularly, along with an initially small staff of other writers — and also its plans for conferences and other gatherings.

(An AOL source, by the way, said there were no contractual noncompete issues for PandoDaily to worry about.)

Here’s a longish interview I did about PandoDaily with Lacy, who has written two books focused on entrepreneurs, worked at Businessweek and was founding co-host of Yahoo Finance’s daily show “TechTicker.”

She talks about the site’s unusual name, her wrangling over leaving TechCrunch, and the prospect of now running her own show.

Welcome back, Sarah (and call me if you need help with those dudes, as we have wrangled before).

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120116/sarah-lacy-debuts-new-tech-site-pandodaily-and-guess-whos-working-for-her-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120108/frequency-a-tv-guide-for-web-video-tris-a-new-look/ http://allthingsd.com/20120108/frequency-a-tv-guide-for-web-video-tris-a-new-look/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:00:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=161381 You watch a lot of Web video, and you will watch a lot more. Who will serve as your TV Guide?

There are a whole lot of people who want to be in that game, and Blair Harrison is one of them. His Frequency, which launched last year, has gone through an overhaul, but its gist remains the same: It wants to let you pick and choose feeds of stuff you know you like. It wants to show you stuff your friends like, too, by incorporating cues from your social networks.

Harrison, who made his money and reputation building iFilm and selling it to Viacom during the beginning of the Web 1.0 boom, raised $3 million last year, and since then has rounded up another $1 million.

More important, his new Web site is slicker, and now features a dashboard that you can program with feeds you select, along with ones that use suggestions from Facebook, Twitter, et al. And the service now offers an iPad version, as well as one that will be featured on some Samsung TVs. Here’s what it should look like on the big screen:

Harrison’s challenges also remain the same: He needs to convince people that they should use a Web video hub, period. Facebook already does a great job of surfacing cool videos my friends think I should see (thanks for the Wilco clip, everyone), and Twitter is getting better at it.

And if I am inclined to use a Web video hub, chances are I’m already doing it via Google, at YouTube.

Google is particularly interesting for Harrison, since it’s both competition and de facto partner. YouTube is in the process of dividing itself up into niche channels that will work particularly well with Frequency’s new scheme — if you like the indie music that myISH serves up on YouTube, it should be easy to bring that feed right into Frequency.

But Google would very much like to be the program guide for Web video, too, via Google TV. That means, for instance, that some Samsung models will feature Frequency, and others will feature the one from the giant company with enormous resources. Tough fight.

Harrison isn’t asking consumers to fund his fight, either. The Web sites and apps are free, and the only ads that show up on the videos are the ones that the original distributors add in there, so right now Frequency is revenue-free.

Harrison says he needs to build scale and can figure it out later, but there are some obvious sponsorship/customization routes that he can try, just like Flipboard is trying out with magazines for its Web app reader. In fact, if you said that Harrison was trying to build Flipboard for Web video, he wouldn’t stop you.

Anyway! No point in writing about Web video without showing Web video. Here are a couple of clips Frequency tells me my friends think I would like:

Now-65-year-old David Bowie, from way back in 1973, via Facebook:

And, for whatever reason, a weather balloon, via Twitter:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120108/frequency-a-tv-guide-for-web-video-tris-a-new-look/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120106/piazza-raises-6m-for-college-class-discussion-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20120106/piazza-raises-6m-for-college-class-discussion-platform/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=160877 Piazza, a Q&A service for discussions of college coursework with the approval and participation of instructors, has raised $6 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and including Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures. The company said it has 100,000 users — many of them in computer science and math classes — and that its average daily login lasts four hours.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120106/piazza-raises-6m-for-college-class-discussion-platform/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120104/ifttt-raises-funding-for-its-digital-duct-tape-service/ http://allthingsd.com/20120104/ifttt-raises-funding-for-its-digital-duct-tape-service/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:01:03 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=159845 Ifttt, a start-up that helps even nontechnical users manipulate and connect Web services to do their bidding, has closed its first funding round.

It’s not unexpected that the hot young two-person company would get some cash; in fact, before the round closed, some of it was already reported by ReadWriteWeb.

To be specific, the Ifttt funding was $1.585 million, and came from backers including NEA, Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, Greylock Discovery Fund and CrunchFund.

Ifttt stands for “if this, then that” and rhymes with “lift.” The name’s awkwardness shows a bit of the technical/nontechnical line that Ifttt is trying to straddle.

Users can set up “recipes” to do things like notify themselves with an email when a type of item is posted on Craigslist, cross-post their Flickr photos to Facebook, or archive their Instagram photos to Dropbox.

My colleague, Drake Martinet, who was first to report on Ifttt back in February, called it “digital duct tape.”

Ifttt co-founder Linden Tibbets said this week that the funding will be used to help his two-person operation hire more people. He said some of his goals for Ifttt are to create tools so developers would incorporate his service within their apps (though Ifttt functions on other people’s APIs, it doesn’t yet have an open API of its own), and also to manage the messy smorgasbord of notifications that spray out of social apps. “We could be what RSS could have been,” Tibbets said.

While Tibbets didn’t say how many people are using his service, he did say that, so far, Ifttt users have created 500,000 total tasks that have been executed 90 million times.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120104/ifttt-raises-funding-for-its-digital-duct-tape-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120104/some-venture-funds-hit-pause-on-big-deals/ http://allthingsd.com/20120104/some-venture-funds-hit-pause-on-big-deals/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:30:12 +0000 Pui-Wing Tam http://allthingsd.com/?p=159578 Over the past year, Marc Andreessen invested in a series of high-profile Web companies, including Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Groupon Inc. Now the Silicon Valley venture capitalist is hitting the pause button on such big-name deals.

Since participating in a $112 million funding of Web darling Airbnb Inc. in July that valued the online room-rental company at more than $1 billion, Mr. Andreessen said his venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has “taken a step back.”

With some deals for private companies “definitely on the expensive side” amid a choppy stock market and concerns over a European debt crisis, Mr. Andreessen said he is looking to invest in fast-growing tech start-ups that aren’t as well known and where “pricing is still under control.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120104/some-venture-funds-hit-pause-on-big-deals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120103/a-55-million-silver-lining-for-beyond-oblivions-backers/ http://allthingsd.com/20120103/a-55-million-silver-lining-for-beyond-oblivions-backers/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:26:36 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=159407 Last week, Beyond Oblivion, an overly ambitious music start-up, shut its doors before it ever opened. But things could have been worse for the New York-based company’s investors, who had pledged $87 million for the venture — they only lost $32 million.

That’s because the remaining $55 million never got spent, according to sources familiar with the company. That funding was contingent on the start-up hitting certain milestones that were never met.

So that’s a bit of good news — or at least coulda-been-worse news — for Beyond Oblivion’s backers. That list includes Allen & Co., the nonprofit Wellcome Trust and News Corp., which owns this site.

Beyond Oblivion’s pitch — a subscription music service that came bundled with hardware — was always a head-scratcher, in large part because an earlier incarnation had already failed, even though it had been backed by Nokia and Universal Music Group.

But then again there still aren’t many people that have really figured out digital music. If you place Pandora and Spotify in the “jury’s still out” category (Pandora has yet to turn a profit, and Spotify is still in its early stages), then the only companies that have really made digital music work have been Apple and Amazon — two giants that don’t depend on digital music at all.

So, my guess is that we’ll continue to see other folks like Beyond Oblivion’s Adam Kidron, who was convinced he’d cracked the code. Here’s an interview I conducted with him back in March, when he was still very much an optimist.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120103/a-55-million-silver-lining-for-beyond-oblivions-backers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111219/exclusive-houzz-brings-home-11-6-million-in-series-b-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20111219/exclusive-houzz-brings-home-11-6-million-in-series-b-funding/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:02:17 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=155047 Houzz, an online community for homeowners and home renovation professionals, has secured a fresh round of financing as it continues to expand amid an improving renovation market.

Houzz has brought home $11.6 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital and other investors, including earlier-stage investors Don Katz, Gary Ginsberg, Oren Zeev and Amos Wilnai. Alfred Lin, a VC at Sequoia and former top executive at Zappos, will join Zeev and others on Houzz’s board of directors.

Co-founder Adi Tatarko said Houzz has increased its traffic tenfold since its last funding round of $2 million in 2010, the site has also introduced e-commerce features to drive purchases of home goods.

Houzz first launched in early 2009, a few years after Tatarko and her husband, Alon Cohen, purchased a home and had a hard time finding the right contractors for home renovations, even with friends’ referrals. (Despite the wealth of options now at their fingertips through their own site, Tatarko says they haven’t yet completed the renovation of their own home.)

Tatarko and Cohen eventually quit their full-time jobs and focused on building up the site to what it is today — a fast-growing (and slightly addictive) home renovation Web site that consumers can browse to create idea books and where designers, contractors and renovation experts can upload their portfolios to in order to attract more clients.

There are now 30,000 professional profiles on the site, Tatarko says, spanning 50 metro areas in the U.S.; Houzz sees more than 50 million page views a month and 2.5 million uniques. Users of the Houzz iPad app, which has been downloaded a million times, browse for one hour on average.

The site also now offers more options for sharing through social media, as well as virtual price tags on certain items — a lamp, for example, or a love seat in a living-room setting — that will direct a user to a place where those items can be purchased.

Houzz is currently free for consumers and professionals using the site; Tatarko says they plan to keep it that way, generating revenue through a direct-advertising model. Houzz, she adds, is on track to become profitable in the next year.

Houzz’s growth comes as the U.S. home remodeling market is seeing signs of recovery. This follows a 12 percent drop in spending between 2007 and 2009, due to the financial crisis, according to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Home remodeling fared relatively well compared to new construction in 2009, with remodeling climbing to more than two-thirds of total residential investment; the market for renovations in the U.S. was said to have approached $300 billion in 2010. (The Harvard report does note, though, that all homeowners aren’t kitchen-gutting and paint-slapping-happy: Housing prices are depressed, and a record number of home owners are late on mortgage payments.)

Tatarko says she and Cohen will use the funding to invest in more engineers to continue to build out Houzz.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111219/exclusive-houzz-brings-home-11-6-million-in-series-b-funding/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20111214/content-recommendation-doesnt-come-cheap-outbrain-raises-another-35-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20111214/content-recommendation-doesnt-come-cheap-outbrain-raises-another-35-million/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=153541 You know those “recommended” links at the bottom of this post? Turns out that’s a huge business.

At least it should be, based on the $35 million that investors just plowed into Outbrain, the content recommendation engine that works with AllThingsD and lots of other publishers. Index Ventures led the round, joining existing investors Carmel and Lightspeed; the New York-based company has raised $64 million to date.

Outbrain makes money helping funnel traffic from one publisher’s site to another. It gets paid whenever someone clicks on its sponsored listings (those are the ones labeled “From the Web” at the end of this story), and gives the originating publisher 60 percent of the revenue. Publishers (again, like AllThingsD) also benefit, because Outbrain provides recommendations for other stories that will keep readers on the original site.

Like most of the Web, this is a business that’s supposed to work at scale, and Outbrain says it has that now, generating 200 million clicks a month. Earlier this year, Outbrain bought former rival Sphere from AOL.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/The Bezz)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111214/content-recommendation-doesnt-come-cheap-outbrain-raises-another-35-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111213/taskrabbit-raises-17-8-million-brings-in-eisner-as-advisor/ http://allthingsd.com/20111213/taskrabbit-raises-17-8-million-brings-in-eisner-as-advisor/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:59:18 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=153349 TaskRabbit, the Bay Area-based start-up that outsources human “rabbits” to perform odious chores for neighbors, has raised its second cash pile in eight months.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111213/taskrabbit-raises-17-8-million-brings-in-eisner-as-advisor/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20111213/how-to-avoid-a-vc-shotgun-wedding/ http://allthingsd.com/20111213/how-to-avoid-a-vc-shotgun-wedding/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:43:50 +0000 Charles Moldow http://allthingsd.com/?p=153471 As a former entrepreneur, I can empathize with the intense pressure surrounding financing for a new venture. In the current market, where the future is less certain than the recent past, many entrepreneurs may find themselves ready to jump at the first term sheet, or the best valuation.

To all those entrepreneurs, I offer my advice: Don’t do it. Shotgun weddings don’t work in romance, and they don’t work in venture capital, either.

Solutions that offer the best valuations, without the close-knit partnerships required to build successful long-term businesses, are never going to be sustainable solutions.

In my experience, a lack of shared understanding between the parties upfront can lead to bigger problems down the line.

I recently read a statement from Founders Fund boldly declaring that VCs impose “value-destroying distractions” with the “intrusion of adult supervision.” As I reflected on this thought, I began to wonder — if any entrepreneur shares these feelings, why then would he ever enter into an arrangement with a venture firm?

The fact is, a VC’s value can vary widely. Just like you’d be better off not going under the knife of a neurosurgeon who graduated med school with a C- average, you’d be wise not to choose a sub-par venture investor who doesn’t share your values. Take the time to find the right one.

If both enterprise and investor don’t understand each other upfront, there is going to be a lot of dissatisfaction about where — and how — the relationship ends. When you look at the start-up and venture capital sectors separately, it seems they both understand this principle. For each, building relationships is a prerequisite to building up businesses.

In the start-up world, founders take a long-term approach when searching for co-founders. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford on Larry’s first day of class before founding Google; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were friends in high school and spent every day together before founding Apple.

Similarly, while you probably won’t find a VC partner after a single meeting, there are a few things to keep in mind that can increase your chances of success over the long run.

First and foremost, do your homework. It’s shocking to me how few entrepreneurs actually make due diligence calls to other portfolio CEOs. At Foundation Capital, we provide contacts for every company we have ever funded. Use those kinds of resources. Ask for references beyond what is on the Web site. Don’t expect glowing reviews from every single reference, but weigh the feedback carefully and decide if you like what you hear overall.

Second, dig deeply into how the firm works with founders on a day-to-day basis. Consider how much — and in what capacity — partners participate in their portfolios. Think about the proposed value-add, and if it will complement the existing capabilities of your executive team. Decide if the VC firm’s approach fits your style.

Third, don’t get seduced by the name of the firm. This isn’t choosing a college or buying a car. Set the prestige factor aside. Frankly, a firm’s name counts for little when it comes to predicting the success of your venture. It’s really about the individual partner who will be working with you. Decide if you want to work with that particular person.

Finally, ask the tough questions:

• How will this investor help out during difficult times?
• Will he or she understand the process and need for more funds if or when that time comes?
• Is the investor’s approach to the venture truly collaborative — one in which both parties are dependent on each other to succeed?
• Are your prospective investors passive-aggressive, or do they come out and tell you what they’re thinking?

Strong entrepreneur/VC partnerships are based on mutual respect and a true drive to succeed. You don’t want an investor who simply hands you a check and pushes you out the door with nothing more than an expectation of flawless execution — and, of course, a significant return on that investment.

At the end of the day, accepting an investment is like committing to a relationship — there will be ups and downs and disappointments, and even a few failures along the way. But the best partnerships — like the strongest relationships — are lasting ones. Granted, we’re talking about a decade and not a lifetime, but it is still critical to understand the people you are bringing into your business and whether you can work with them over the long haul — through thick and thin.

Understanding a prospective partner takes time. So do yourself a favor: Play it smart. Take your time. Do your homework.

Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, where he primarily focuses on consumer Internet companies. A former entrepreneur, Charles was a member of the founding executive team at TellMe Networks and on the founding team of @Home, and has a background in general management, sales, marketing, product management and business development.

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