AllThingsD » Howard Lindzon

Mobile Marketing Start-Up PlaceIQ Raises $1 Million From Angels, Ad Guys

Peter Kafka — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:30:45 +0000

You know all those cool Android and iPhone apps you’re using to check in to places, take photos of places, and tell friends about places you’re going to? All of that information might be useful to marketers, right?

Of course it could be, which is why lots of companies are trying to build businesses around the idea (while trying to avoid privacy landmines). Here’s another one: PlaceIQ, a Boulder, Colorado-based start-up that promises to turn “unstructured disparate sources of geodata into actionable business intelligence.”

Co-founders Duncan McCall and Steve Milton formed the company last year and have a small team with a low profile, but they’ve been able to round up $1 million in funding from some interesting investors: Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage, hedge fund star Jim Pallota, Jerry Neumann and Stuart Davidson are all in.

So is kbs+p Ventures, the new investment arm of ad agency Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, which has begun making bets on start-ups with potential for marketers. This is kbs+p’s second investment, and I gather we’ll see more soon.

Klout Gets Some More Clout–$8.5M in Funding and a Big (Actually, Bing!) Board Members

Kara Swisher — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:30:30 +0000

Online influence measurement site Klout got $8.5 million in new funding, led by Kleiner Perkins from its socially focused sFund.

Kleiner’s wack-tastic venture partner Bing Gordon will join the board.

Greycroft Partners is also participating in this round, as well as some of its initial angel investors.

So far, the San Francisco-based start-up–which tries to measure influence across the social Web–has raised $10 million in total.

Here is Klout’s blog post and also its official press release:

Taking Klout to the Next Level

January 10th, 2011 by Joe Fernandez

Every day here at Klout HQ we are humbled by the passion people have for their Klout Scores, the amazing ways our API is being utilized and the innovative brands that leverage Klout to connect with influencers. We can’t thank you enough for your support. We are obsessed with helping the world understand the power of influence and I am proud to announce that we have added some key partners that are as passionate about this mission as we are. We have closed an $8.5m round of funding with Kleiner Perkins leading as part of the sFund and with participation from Greycroft Partners.

Measuring influence across the social web is a monumental task. Kleiner Perkins is the firm you turn to when your goal is to change the world. As part of the sFund, we look forward to working closely with many of the companies that define the social web. The team here at Klout is thrilled to have Bing Gordon from Kleiner Perkins joining our board of directors.

Greycroft Partners is also a critical new partner for us. Greycroft offers unique insight and connections with the media and advertising world. As we continue to experiment with connecting brands and influencers this will be a big help. We are also proud to have many of our angel investors participating including ff Asset Management, Tom McInerney, Paige Craig, Bobby Yazdani and Howard Lindzon.

This new funding will be used to continue to expand our engineering team (if you want to build something awesome, come join us!). Providing accurate, understandable and actionable data about influence is the kind of challenge we love, but we have a lot of work to do here still. With this money we will be adding even more services beyond Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to the Klout algorithm. We are also investing heavily in the Klout consumer experience to help the people who influence us the most, our users, better understand and leverage their social capital.

Personally, I look forward to devoting more time to our community. The Klout Score is quickly becoming the standard measurement for online influence. We love the passionate debate that influence invokes. To us, influence is the ability to drive actions. The way influence is measured and applied is going to continue to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. Fundamentally, we believe in the power of the individual and I think it’s critical for us to continue to offer transparency and open communication with the community as Klout evolves.

Thank you again for your support! There is a lot of hard work still to come but we are incredibly excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Klout Raises $8.5 Million to Enable Everyone to Understand and Leverage their Influence

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 10, 2011–Klout, the leader in online influence measurement, announced today that it has raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer (KPCB) sFund™ and participation from Greycroft Partners. Prominent angel investors, including ff Asset Management, Paige Craig, Howard Lindzon, Thomas McInerney, Bobby Yazdani, and others, also participated in the round, which brings Klout’s funding to more than $10 million to date.

“It’s been amazing seeing the passion the social media community has for their Klout Scores,” says Joe Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Klout. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, though. We intend to invest heavily in increasing the performance of our system to deliver the accuracy, clarity and actionability commensurate with being the standard for influence. To do so, we will need to greatly expand the number of services that are analyzed in calculating the Klout Score and provide a much richer consumer experience.

KPCB partner William “Bing” Gordon, a preeminent visionary on the future of the social web, will join Joe Fernandez, John Frankel and Allen Morgan as a member of Klout’s board of directors.

“People are hungry to get even more meaning from their daily social media use, and Klout is creating an important and new standard measure of relevance.” Says Gordon. “I hope everyone who reads this shares this message so my Klout score goes up!”

“In a very short period, Klout has established itself as a generic noun in the lexicon of the web,” says Alan Patricof, managing director and founder of Greycroft. “We believe Klout will continue to grow and be the standard measurement of influence.”

TicketFly Rounds Up $3 Million to Fight Ticketmaster

Peter Kafka — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:30:10 +0000

Average concertgoers go to two shows a year, and there’s a very good chance some of the money they spend on those shows goes to Ticketmaster, which dominates the ticketing business.

So here’s a company that wants a piece of that: TicketFly, a New York-based start-up that just raised a $2 million Series A round led by High Peaks Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners. The company had previously raised $1 million in convertible debt last year, via angels Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg, among others.

If TicketFly works, there’s a good chance you won’t ever know about it, because it’s a B2B business: Consumers fund the operation via surcharges on their tickets, but the real customers are the concert venues, which strike exclusive deals with ticketing companies.

So most of the features are designed with the venues and promoters in mind. TicketFly says it can help with Web site design and management, promoting shows on Twitter and Facebook, tracking sales data in real time, etc.

All of this sounds like fairly straightforward stuff, but the ticketing business is an old, archaic one. And Ticketmaster, the industry’s eight million-pound gorilla, now owned by Live Nation (LYV), is particularly slow-moving when it comes to all things tech. So some of this really will feel fresh for the concert guys.

More interesting are TicketFly’s plans, which involve giving venues the chance to sell tickets using the same dynamic pricing/yield management techniques hotels and airlines use: That is, prices for hot shows may shoot up, and if you want to see a band no one else wants to see, you may end up paying very little.

TicketFly has about 50 venues signed up so far, and most are fairly intimate places like Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., or the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis–the kinds of of places where you could see Nirvana before Nirvana became Nirvana.

They’re also the kinds of places that used be served by TicketWeb, another Web-based upstart that Ticketmaster acquired a few years back. No coincidence: TicketFly co-founder Andrew Dreskin used to run that company.

Here’s a little wayback machine: Nirvana at Maxwell’s in 1989. Audio and video quality is about as rough as you’d imagine:

Twitter App Investors Still Writing Checks: StockTwits Raises a Round

Peter Kafka — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:00:51 +0000

Nope, Twitter still hasn’t trotted out a business model yet–a couple of sponsorships from the likes of an AT&T (T) don’t cut it. And that may or may not be a problem for potential acquirers like Google (GOOG) or Microsoft (MSFT). But it’s a nonissue for a growing number of start-ups hoping to succeed simply by positioning themselves in Twitter’s general vicinity.

Today’s example: StockTwits, a day trader-meets-Twitter site that just raised $800,000 from venture capital firm True Ventures. It’s not a ton of money, but StockTwits doesn’t need a ton of money. The site, which launched last fall with an $800,000 angel round, employs all of four people.

And it’s yet another bet that investor Howard Lindzon has made in Twitter: He’s also put money into bit.ly, a Twitter-centric url-shortner, and Tweetdeck, a useful Twitter client, alongside incubator Betaworks, which in turn invested in the StockTwits angel round. Cozy! (Cozier: Lindzon was an early investor in Silicon Alley Insider, my former employer).

Like all of those companies and just about every other company that’s trying to make money from Twitter, StockTwits doesn’t have any kind of formal relationship with Twitter. It doesn’t need one: If you want to take advantage of Twitter’s data and users, you can just plug right in for free via its open API.

As a wise man once said: “All of [these companies] are part of the burgeoning ecosystem that revolves around Twitter, which powers all of their companies by letting them plug into its data stream. In exchange, all of these companies make Twitter more successful, by bolting on frills and features to its bare-bones service.”

Name aside, StockTwits may be less dependent on Twitter than any of the other Twittery start-ups. StockTwits users employ Twitter to pass along investment ideas, but beyond that, it’s a fairly straightforward stock message board, the kind we’ve seen since the first Web boom.

Lindzon and co-founder Soren Macbeth plan to make money via ads and by publishing newsletters/blogs on behalf of some StockTwits users, (two of whom are already selling their investment advice for $60 a month). Basically, Twitter is a lead-generator for the site.

Come to think of it, that could be a business for the Twitter team. Right?

Here’s a video interview I shot with Lindzon last week in which he declined to hand out any stock tips of his own. Presumably he’ll rectify that today.

[ See post to watch video ]

Is a Shorter Web Address Worth Big Money? bit.ly Raises $2 Million

Peter Kafka — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:30:36 +0000

Here’s another Web 2.0 riddle that seems particularly hard to solve post-Lehman: What’s the value of a service that takes a long Web address and makes it shorter?

One answer: Several million dollars.

Oh, and did I mention there’s no business model attached to said Web service?

Still with me?

OK. Here are the details: Betaworks, the incubator/start-up platform best known for selling Twitter a search engine for $15 million last year, is taking in-house project bit.ly and spinning it out as a separate company. A group of new investors, led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has poured about $2 million into the company, which implies a valuation in the midseven figure range.

Other investors include Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage group, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and uber-angel Ron Conway. O’Reilly’s Bryce Roberts will join the board of the four-man company.

bit.ly is one of roughly a gazillion url-shorteners, all of which do the same thing. They take an unwieldy Web address like, say, this one: “http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/huffington-post-pays-for-content-after-all-via-175-million-investigative-fund/” and turn it into something concise like this: “http://bit.ly/14WdlB.”

If you spend much time on Facebook, Twitter or any other Web service where brevity is useful, you’ve encountered a shortened URL, and you’re likely seeing more and more of them all the time. The bit.ly guys say people clicked on 20 million of their shortened Web addresses last week, and that the number is increasing by about 10 percent a week.

Great. So where’s the money? Many of bit.ly’s competitors, like the aptly named tinyurl.com, generate modest revenue by running Google (GOOG) ads against the many eyeballs that come to the site to use the service. But bit.ly won’t sell ads, and it plans on distinguishing itself by tracking all the clicks and streams that come through the service and using the data to provide interesting analytics and insights into who’s looking at what on the Web, in real time.

The logic: If you’re impressed with the possibilities of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities (see above), you’ll love bit.ly.

Great. So where’s the money? bit.ly is free to users, and the company says it doesn’t plan on selling its analytics or other tools to publishers. Team bit.ly says revenue will come sometime down the road, from something else–when they figure out what that is.

That kind of shrugging was par for the course during Boom 2.0 days. But in the dark days of last fall, even the sunniest Web optimists, including Betaworks founder John Borthwick himself, were telling start-ups that they had to face reality and start making money.

So either things have gotten much better than we realized or the bit.ly investors think it’s still worth betting on fast-growing, revenue-free start-ups. It’d be nice if both things are true.

Twitter Launches Another Business It Doesn't Make Money From: Trading Site StockTwits Raises $800,000

Peter Kafka — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:44:34 +0000

Twitter’s executives and investors tend to roll their eyes when people ask them when they’re going to start, you know, generating revenue. Maybe that’s because there’s a really obvious answer: Start collecting money from the many companies that are using Twitter’s infrastructure and service to create their own businesses.

Newest example: StockTwits, a Twitter-based bulletin board/chat room for individual investors. The company has raised more than $800,000 from a big group of angels that includes Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon (disclosure: Ehrenberg and Lindzon invested in my previous employer). Ehrenberg has provided a long list of investors at his blog; other notable names include Betaworks, the New York-based start-up investment company, and Todd Stottlemyre, the former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher turned investor and Twitterer.

The idea is fairly simple: Users toss off quick thoughts about trades, companies, markets, etc., using “$” or “$$” signs to identify their messages as StockTwits. The site compiles and sorts them, and will eventually start ranking users based on their following, track record, etc. The service is free, but will try to upsell users with premium products like research, etc.

You could do all this without Twitter, if you wanted to. But the service is perfect for the rapid-fire bursts of text/thought that a certain breed of investor treasures. And, of course, Twitter does all the heavy lifting for free, so why not build a business off its back?

Twitter isn’t the only Web 2.0 business to let other people build services based on its API, of course. It’s standard practice for everyone from Google (GOOG) to Facebook. But usually those businesses benefit because users end up more closely tied to their core businesses, which… is a business of some sort. Since Twitter has yet to actually generate any business, it’s just a giveaway.

That could change sooner than later: Twitter is hiring a “Business Product Manager” who is supposed to “lead the definition and execution of the products and features that will lead to monetization of the Twitter platform.” Perhaps step one will be a phone call to StockTwits and the other members of the Twitter ecosystem.