Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

Greg Coleman, the online advertising sales exec who keeps making bank after bouncing from top Web jobs, has a new one.

The former Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post sales leader has just taken over as president of Criteo, a “personalized retargeting” company–essentially, it delivers highly targeted ads to consumers.

Coleman said in an interview with BoomTown last night that he will be focused on expanding Criteo’s U.S. business.

“Performance advertising is a huge opportunity in a high-growth arena,” he said. “I couldn’t pass it up.”

While the 300-person company has offices in Silicon Valley and New York, its HQ is in Paris.

So, Coleman (pictured here)–who has grabbed huge sums of exit cash, first when AOL management changed and then when AOL bought the HuffPo–now gets to visit the City of Lights all the time.

Zut alors! As I have previously written, I’ll have what Coleman’s having.

Toby Coppel, an investor in Criteo who is also on its board, worked with Coleman at Yahoo.

Criteo has raised almost $24 million from Coppel and other investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures.

Its competitors are other start-ups, such as MyThings.

Here’s the official press release on Coleman’s new job:

CRITEO TAPS GREG COLEMAN AS PRESIDENT

Former Huffington Post president and Yahoo! sales chief will take retargeting leader to the “next phase of phenomenal expansion”

PALO ALTO, CA – (April 7, 2011)–Criteo, the global leader in personalized retargeting, today announced that Greg Coleman, former president and chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post and EVP global sales for Yahoo!, will join the company as president. Coleman will oversee global operations and lead the U.S. expansion of the company, whose platform for delivering personally relevant ads to Internet users has enabled the largest e-commerce marketers to post significant incremental sales for the past three years.

“Greg is a visionary who raises the bar,” said JB Rudelle, CEO of Criteo. “With his experience and relationships, we will extend our e-commerce solutions to new clients, deepen our engagement with existing customers, and bring industry appreciation of retargeting to new levels.”

Coleman has caused explosive sales growth for several of the world’s most influential media and technology companies. As the president and chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post, he built a $30 million ad business in one year. As EVP global sales at Yahoo!, he assembled a pre-eminent sales team that grew ad revenues from $600 million to more than $6 billion. As president of U.S. Magazine publishing for Reader’s Digest Association, he turned advertising from an afterthought to more than 25% of corporate profit. Coleman’s experience has translated to the top-ranked class for three years running at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

“Performance advertising is marketing’s new frontier, and it’s still wide open,” said Coleman. “Technology and sales will determine leadership. Criteo has the premier technology for personalizing the advertising experience. The company originated the worldwide market, is the leader in Europe, and has a secure foothold in the U.S., because the technology is the most reliable and scalable. I’m here to spur the next phase of phenomenal expansion.”

Criteo tripled operations in 2010, grew to 300 employees and served more than 50 billion personalized ads on behalf of more than 1,000 e-commerce companies across 20 countries globally–driving an 11x increase in incremental post-click revenues for clients. Criteo technology enables merchants to win back the consumers who leave their websites before completing purchases, and gives advertisers a single source for complete retargeting campaigns–design, buying, serving, optimization and reporting.

By colleagues’ accounts, Coleman has the assets to increase Criteo’s momentum. Former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau calls him “a true innovator” and says he “created the model for selling social marketing.” And former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel calls him “the most wired, successful and liked sales executive in Internet marketing.”

“Greg creates unique partnerships with advertisers and merchants,” added investor and Criteo board member Toby Coppel. “He can make Criteo the industry standard.”

I came up with the phrase “data mercenary” to describe in a fun way what Factual aims to be. If you’re developing an application or a Web service, and you need lots of data, you’re faced with several big problems up front. Where is that data going to come from? How up to date is it? How will you keep it fresh? These are questions that Factual aims to answer, both by supplying the data and helping ensure that it’s maintained. They’re big, complicated questions, and if you were going to ask someone to try and wrestle with them it would be Elbaz. He sold his first company, Applied Semantics, to Google, which went on to turn it into AdSense. Earlier this week I caught up with Elbaz in advance of his Web 2.0 talk.

NewEnterprise: So it’s been a few months since your funding announcement. How have things been going at Factual since then?

Elbaz: They’ve been going really well. We moved into a larger office. We’ve been bringing in lots of good people every other week, and we’ve accelerated the adoption with lots of leads. The places data is really taking off. We decided on a vertical approach to marketing and improving our data, so local is where we’re putting a lot of our resources. We are dabbling in other verticals and when we feel comfortable we’ll invest heavily in other areas. We just haven’t figured out which ones yet. We did recently launch a database of US physicians, which was a pretty significant effort. That’s an example of seeding the environment and starting conversations around a second vertical.

So everyone is talking a lot about “big data” and your talk at the Web 2.0 Expo is about data “haves” and “have-nots.” What do you mean by that?

The focus is to talk not just about big data as in a set of tool you need to process that data, but how do you get access to that data in the first place. The brand new startup in many cases doesn’t have any access to data, so that’s a big challenge, versus someone like LinkedIn, which has a huge batch of data to work from. But then I think every company really needs to act like they need access to much more data. Because no matter who you are there’s a lot of information you can’t access. The question is how does the ecosystem grease the wheels of efficiency of information movement, so that everyone can build much better information services. It’s still fairly stuck in my opinion in terms of easily getting information into your app.

So what do you suggest is a solution?

I break it down into many problems. There are six or seven categories of problems, and there’s many solutions for each one. One is findability, that is finding the information you need to access. The Web was built to make information findable by humans, it doesn’t necessarily mean its easy to find data you want to download. It may be government data, or data you want to license from someone. Or it could be an API. There are no big catalogs of structured data, though there’s been some progress from places like Infochimps and Microsoft Data Marketplace, though its just starting to happen. Another key issue is if you know a resource that’s available, is it easy to integrate. Many legacy data companies don’t have APIs. A lot of government data you have to request on tape and have it shipped to you. But with the advent of faster and cheaper networks, that’s improving. But it’s a chicken and egg. People have to push for these things or they don’t get fixed.

That’s two problems. Do you think people are figuring out that if they have data they need to make it useful by providing some kind of API support?

I think so. A typical Web site is much more likely to use several data sources than it would have several years ago. But I think the average will become greater and greater each year. Really there’s no limit to how many information services you want to access and integrate. That leads to my third issue which is standards and semantics. A big reason why developers will usually choose only a few sources to integrate is that they tend to be difficult to merge, unlike APIs, because of the lack of common languages for integrating. So if you have several feeds of business information, there’s no universal public identifier for businesses. You’d have to do a lot of work to integrate that information. At Factual we’re trying to popularize our own unique business identifier that we’re happy to distribute and hope that people use. We’re also trying to publish other people’s identifier, like Foursquare’s. In some way we really don’t care which one people use as long as a standard emerges.

That’s three problems. What’s number four?

Another one is the economics of data sharing. While in some cases the data that is moving around can be made free by a government or by an e-commerce site that has a big motivation for sharing it, there are many cases where there aren’t any fully fleshed-out models of sharing data, because a lot of companies are worried that if they share their data they’re not going to get paid for it, and they put effort into collecting it. The data marketplaces I mentioned before are a start. There are sites like Mashery that help you monetize your APIs. At Factual we’re trying to build a new model where companies share data with us and we share it back with the community free for most developers, that is our API stays free. We charge for high usage rates via service level agreements, but for most developers it ends up not being an issue.

So someone like say Starbucks might share data about store locations, and this one closed and this one just opened, and this one was just renovated etc. They could share that data with you?

When I usually talk about a larger company, I’m usually thinking an app developer who going to be doing millions of data lookups a day. But in terms of integrating Starbucks’ own data on their own site, it’s probably more accurate than data from anyone else. Which brings me to a fifth issue, which is how do you test data and decide which data you can trust. It’s easy to decide based on the brand, whether its the United Nations or Starbucks. But it’s hard to scale it out and be automated. We have some of our own internal tools. But it’s not something people tend to ignore. People assume that if they’re paying for data it’s probably good.

By my count that’s something like five problems you’ve identified, which means we’re somewhere near the bottom of your list.

I’ve covered most of them. Another is ownership and rights. If you’re a search engine and you access data on the Web, it doesn’t scale well to understand the terms and conditions of publishing data because a computer can’t read terms and conditions agreements. If you’re a search engine the fine print can probably be ignored. That’s maybe not surprising, but it is interesting that ignoring them has become the norm because it’s simply impossible for a computer to consider them. Creative Commons created six different designations for how you can use content from a given site, say for commercial use or for non-commercial use with attribution. Flickr is an example of a service that’s put Creative Commons tags to use. But I’d love to see more automation happen around this. But there’s fewer standards when someone doesn’t want to give their information away for free, and how they get paid when someone re-uses it. I’d love to see more automation around that. And there’s a little of that happening around APIs. But the state of the art today is a lot of phone calls and business development. And that’s fine, but if we’re really going to scale the integration of Web-wide information into information services, there’s going to have to be a better way.

Flipboard, the high-profile and highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, is out raising another round of funding at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

The Palo Alto, CA, company declined to comment on its new funding efforts, which sources said had recently accelerated.

While that valuation might change, several sources considering the investment said it is unlikely to go down in the current frothy financing market in Silicon Valley, especially given Flipboard’s splashy profile and top-drawer pedigree.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

That included $10.5 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angel investors, such as Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

At the time, it was unclear what Flipboard’s valuation was. But now, said several sources, it’s clocking in at a hefty $200 million, which is perhaps no surprise at a time of increasingly lofty investments in tech start-ups.

Suddenly, Foursquare’s $95 million valuation seems like a bargain! (Sorry, Dennis Crowley, for comparing you to the Kool-Aid pitcher dude.)

In any case, the elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this offering, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Flipboard has since added a number of features and will be launching its new iPhone app later this year.

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

It will be interesting to see who will jump into this leader in a nascent market, besides its current investors. Sources said one likely target group for Flipboard could be a large traditional media company.

Until the financial dust settles, here is the video of an onstage interview by the Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret with McCue at the All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, in December:

(Full disclosure: ATD is part of Flipboard’s publisher beta program.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110323/pretty-flipboard-fundraising-at-an-even-prettier-200-million-valuation/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/spanish-private-sales-site-privalia-expands-to-germany-via-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/spanish-private-sales-site-privalia-expands-to-germany-via-acquisition/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:46:04 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3355 The online private-sales retailer Privalia, which operates in Spain, Italy, Brazil and Mexico, is buying Germany’s Dress for Less. Reuters said that according to its sources, Privalia paid between $210 million and $280 million. On Monday, Privalia raised roughly $123 million from private equity firms General Atlantic, Highland Capital Partners, Index Ventures and Insight Venture Partners to fund the transaction, which also included debt and shares. Together, Privalia is forecasting that they will achieve triple-digit revenue growth this year to around 400 million euros. In December, eBay purchased Germany-based brands4friends for $200 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/spanish-private-sales-site-privalia-expands-to-germany-via-acquisition/feed/ 0 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/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/20110210/abes-market-raises-3-4-million-to-target-e-commerce-niche/ http://allthingsd.com/20110210/abes-market-raises-3-4-million-to-target-e-commerce-niche/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:35:46 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2634 Investors are betting they’ve found the next Diapers.com, Etsy or ModCloth, but instead of being a niche marketplace for baby products, crafts or independent designers, this one’s focused on natural and organic products.

Accel has led a $3.4 million round of funding in Abe’s Market, with Index Ventures and other angel investors also participating.

The Chicago-based company was founded by Richard Demb and Jon Polin, who wanted to replicate the idea of a farmer’s market online by selling natural and homemade items and letting consumers get to know the merchants.

“The Web is a great place to learn about products. It’s like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but they don’t sell online,” said Demb, who had previously started an all-natural popcorn distribution company.

Abe’s Market, which launched in October 2009, works with about 300 small businesses, ranging from a New Zealand company that sells organic nail polish, to a woman who was previously a private detective and now sells homemade jam, to three skater dudes who make all-natural play dough in a former funeral home.

Demb said in addition to the homemade and organic products, it introduces the merchants through online videos. “We are trying to be as innovative as possible. We want you to be proud to buy our products. Organic nail polish is something I want to tell my friends about. It’s not Revlon.”

Those willing to share their checkout cart with a few of their friends get 10 percent off their whole tab. Sales at the company have been growing 50 percent month over month.

The company, which has seven full-time employees and had raised only $1 million prior to this round, will use the money to expand the number of merchants it can support.

In a release, Accel’s Adam Valkin said, “We have seen tremendous growth in specialty e-commerce. With its fragmented base of passionate sellers and a fast growing population of motivated buyers, we see natural products as a particularly attractive category.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110210/abes-market-raises-3-4-million-to-target-e-commerce-niche/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/path-raises-8-65m-from-kleiner-index/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/path-raises-8-65m-from-kleiner-index/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:15:21 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3121 Path, the personal media-sharing app, has raised $8.65 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and Digital Garage Japan. The company said today it had facilitated the sharing of “over 2 million moments,” a.k.a. iPhone photos and short videos. Path is expanding ever so slightly to allow users to email pictures from within its iOS app, which makes sense since many people’s close friends and family don’t all have iPhones.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/path-raises-8-65m-from-kleiner-index/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:13:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39499

Two of Index Ventures’ high-profile partners–Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi–are opening a new Silicon Valley office for the Europe-based venture firm in September.

The move is actually more of a return home for both men, now located in London, who had lived and worked at tech epicenter for much of their careers.

Among other things, before their stints at Index, Rimer was an Internet analyst at Hambrecht & Quist and also at the now-defunct Barksdale Group, while Volpi was an exec at Cisco.

BoomTown had been hearing about the possibility of the move for months, but Rimer and Volpi finally confirmed it in an interview yesterday.

“We thought we would be better positioned to support our entrepreneurs by being in Silicon Valley,” said Volpi (pictured here), who left the area when he became CEO of the then-hyped Joost premium online video service. “Having two solid investors from Index on the West Coast was important, as opposed to a chipshot.”

Volpi noted that of Index’s $1.3 billion in investments in 173 companies, $400 million was in 58 U.S.-based start-ups. In addition, the firm had helped another 35 move here.

There are currently nine investing partners at Index, which is actually headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Rimer noted that initially it will just be him and Volpi here, as well as some support staff. But it was likely they would expand their office, which will be located in either San Francisco or around Palo Alto, Calif.

“It has been a challenge to be a European firm and also be present in the Valley and be considered an insider here,” said Rimer (pictured here), who often traveled to California. “There is a lot to have an immediate ability to be face-to-face with our companies.”

Recent investments by Index in California include Flipboard, Swipely, Boku and Factual.

Rimer and Volpi said the move did not mean deals were only to be found in Silicon Valley, as Index is not focused on geographical investing.

In addition, the pair will continue their focus on cloud computing, infrastructure and social, wherever the investments were to be found.

“We’re not coming to the U.S. to do only U.S. deals,” said Volpi. “But there is a lot to be said for being part of the daily mix in Silicon Valley.”

In other words: Party at Mary Meeker’s house!

(The well-known Morgan Stanley analyst has also recently moved to the West Coast from New York to join Kleiner Perkins.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/youtube-for-music-thats-soundcloud-says-alexander-ljung/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/youtube-for-music-thats-soundcloud-says-alexander-ljung/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:00:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27875

YouTube for videos. Flickr for photos. SoundCloud for music.

That’s Alexander Ljung’s pitch, and while it’s an audacious one, it has a couple things going for it. For one thing, people are flocking to his four-year-old music file-sharing service: Last May, the company had a million registered users; now it’s up to 2.6 million. Prominent placement in Apple’s new Mac App store won’t hurt, either.

And SoundCloud’s ambition is now being underwritten by two name-brand investors: Late last year Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures led a $10 million funding round for the company, a follow-up to a $3.3 million investment from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything like the YouTube or Flickr userbase for SoundCloud, which makes it very easy to post and share audio files. Especially if SoundCloud is serious about making sure it isn’t used as Napster-like pirate service.

Because even though it’s easier than ever to make music — or any other kind of audio — it doesn’t mean it’s easier to make good music. And while people might flip through mediocre vacation photos you took, or a scan a semi-funny video of your kids, there’s a very limited audience for your guitar noodlings.

Still, 29-year-old Ljung (a Swede who has set up shop in Berlin, but is expanding into the U.S. via a San Francisco outpost) and his backers don’t need to reach YouTube-scale to be a success. And if they keep growing at the rate they’re going, they might find Google, Yahoo or other deep-pocketed buyers showing up sooner than later.

Here’s a quick interview I taped with Ljung this weekend, just after he’d announced his newest funding round.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/youtube-for-music-thats-soundcloud-says-alexander-ljung/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110108/music-sharing-service-soundcloud-raises-10-million-from-index-union-square/ http://allthingsd.com/20110108/music-sharing-service-soundcloud-raises-10-million-from-index-union-square/#comments Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:52:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27864 Music start-ups have been a money incinerator for a long time, but that doesn’t stop investors from trying again. Here’s the latest example, which I first wrote about back in October: SoundCloud, a German-based file-sharing service, has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures.

While lots of music services are still trying to figure out how to make money by distributing copyrighted music you’ve heard of, SoundCloud is taking a different tack. As I wrote last fall:

It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud for less enlightened purposes, like sharing music you don’t own. But the company has recently implemented an audible “fingerprinting” service, like the ones Google’s YouTube uses, which allows copyright owners to take down files they don’t want on the Web. And that should give the company legal cover, unless the YouTube/Viacom case takes a very different turn.

In a blog post announcing the funding, SoundCloud says it will use the money to scale faster and “be more present in the US.” It also posts short clips, using its service, from its new investors–Index’s Mike Volpi and Union Square’s Fred Wilson.

Here’s Wilson:
Thoughts on SoundCloud by fredwilson. Uploaded with SoundCloud Android

And Volpi:
Mike Volpi Audio Blog on Friday morning by mvolpi. Uploaded with SoundCloud iPhone

And if you’d like something more entertaining, here’s a very long mix of classic hip-hop, via Cut Chemist:

Cut Chemist – Hip Hop Lives (1985-1996) by Cut Chemist

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110108/music-sharing-service-soundcloud-raises-10-million-from-index-union-square/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101210/catching-up-with-factual-ceo-gil-elbaz/ http://allthingsd.com/20101210/catching-up-with-factual-ceo-gil-elbaz/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:58:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=425 When you want to build an application that uses lots of data–say, a directory of auto-repair shops or hotels in the U.K.–one of the fundamental questions is this: Where does the data come from, and how do you get it into the application?

Gil Elbaz, the man who in 2003 sold a start-up called Applied Semantics (now known as AdSense) to Google, has what he thinks is the solution. His latest effort is Factual, and it attracted a $25 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures with SV Angel and former Disney president Michael Ovitz participating. Ben Horowitz and Danny Rimer are joining Factual’s board of directors.

I caught up with Elbaz by phone yesterday to talk about the vision of Factual and his plans to grow the company.

NewEnterprise: So at a high level, what is Factual and what do you intend to do?

Gil Elbaz: We see this as an emerging category. We think of it as a data platform that offers data and data services to all sorts of developers, to build cooler, more innovative applications more quickly, especially when it comes to apps that are data-driven. Finding the right vendor for that data, and then integrating it, then managing and maintaining that data is costly and expensive. Developers can move that much more quickly by tapping into our knowledge base. We’re marketing certain verticals where our data is really good. We’re putting some extra marketing muscle behind our places database.

NE: Give me a use case. How might someone use the platform?

GE: Our places database is a good example where we’re getting quite a bit of traction. What we’ve done is built one of the most comprehensive databases of business listings and points of interest. This data is easy to browse, and it’s complete. It contains address and phone and contact info and latitude and longitude. If you want to a build a new service like Yelp or Foursquare, or something that relies on knowing what’s in close proximity, a mobile app can make a simple API call, send over the current GPS coordinate and fulfill the request very quickly. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we can do, but it’s making serious waves because it is very hard to get that data, especially if you’re going mobile. It’s very hard to get that good data for locations around the world.

NE: Do you have other datasets?

GE: We’re being market driven and being focused on that because that’s what our customers have been asking for. But we do have others. We have data from other vertical segments like health and entertainment. In the area of education we built a database of high schools that Newsweek magazine uses in their fairly important annual ranking of high schools. They not only use the data that we were able to generate and build, but they were also able to benefit from our crowdsourcing API, so that their users get not only a more engaging experience but the great partnership comes back into our central database, so the information can be improved. That’s a nice virtuous circle that makes us confident that our data is going to keep getting better because of these partnerships.

NE: I’m trying to come up with a metaphor, and the closest thing I can think of is data–information–as a utility supplier of data. If I want to build an application that contains a lot of data, I can come to you for the data I want to use so I don’t have to go out and gather it myself. Is that fair?

GE: I think that’s a pretty good metaphor. It’s really the access that’s important. When you use our pipe you’re going to know that you’re getting good data, that’s up to date and that we stand behind it, and that other people are participating to make it better, and update it, and that you can get it quickly. Looking ahead, there’s going to be times when it’s not strictly our data. Sometimes it will be data that has been uploaded from other people or from people in the community who want to take advantage of the data platform. So it’s really the pipes and the platform that we’re building that make this kind of data and sharing possible.

NE: You sold your first company to Google. The issue came up that you don’t need the funds. You could fund this on your own. Explain why you sought funding.

GE: I did fund the company for a little while. But I knew that our mission is very audacious and in order to become the ubiquitous data layer for the Internet, to be the obvious place that a developer would go to first to get data into their application, it’s a huge, tall order, and something that’s going to take a lot of technology and marketing effort and strategic guidance. The types of people that we brought in on our angel round and then the people we’re bringing onto the board have a lot of operational experience. Also, you never know when an idea is so big that you want to raise money down the line. If you want to do that it makes sense to build bridges with the financial community as early as possible, in case it does become a more capital-intensive business. This is a new category and we feel like we have a good understanding of it, and things can change quickly, and if it does, we want to be positioned with a good team who can help us navigate the different opportunities that will certainly arise.

NE: So now that you’ve landed the funding, what’s the first order of business?

GE: The challenge is always scaling correctly and quickly. I think we’re positioned well for this. We have a humming machine here. The management team is in place and we’ve been working on this for a few years now. And we have a great culture in place with people who are really passionate about making data available. However, hiring the engineering talent is taking up a huge amount of time. That’s the number one thing on my priority list for the short term.

NE: How do you find the best engineers? Is there a trick to it?

GE: I’d have to say that having worked at Google for three and-a-half years was the perfect place to learn what a deep and strong engineering culture was all about. I also got a lot of hiring experience at Google’s Santa Monica office. I don’t think there’s one trick. I think there are signals that a person is not just looking for a job, but for an opportunity to make extremely important intellectual contributions. And also I’m looking for people who want to make contributions not just to a project but to the world. You look for quick thinking and passion, and a history of doing things beyond what the job requires. I love it when I see people who have contributed to open-source projects on their own time. That demonstrates that they’re trying to contribute to society but also that they like working on important tools that make a difference.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/catching-up-with-factual-ceo-gil-elbaz/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101114/path-the-social-app-thats-not-viral-by-design/ http://allthingsd.com/20101114/path-the-social-app-thats-not-viral-by-design/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:00:26 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=324 Silicon Valley is in the midst of a mini photo-sharing app boomlet. We have Instagram (which started adding 100,000 users per week as soon as it launched last month), Picplz (which beat out Instagram to get a Series A round with their shared investor, Andreessen Horowitz) and as of tonight Path, from former Facebook exec Dave Morin.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101114/path-the-social-app-thats-not-viral-by-design/feed/ 18 http://allthingsd.com/20101025/venture-firms-hit-the-jackpot-with-betfair/ http://allthingsd.com/20101025/venture-firms-hit-the-jackpot-with-betfair/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:33:29 +0000 Ty McMahan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31518 Ten years ago Index Ventures took a chance on an online betting service called Flutter that merged two years later with a rival called Betfair. That gamble has paid off handsomely for the European venture firm, as Betfair Group Ltd. went public Friday in a high-flying IPO.

Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, said Betfair will be one of the firm’s best investments in terms of return multiple. Betfair’s shares traded up 19 percent from its initial public offering price, closing Friday at GBP15.50 on the London Stock Exchange. The firm sold 493,000 shares in the offering for GBP6.4 million, and still owns 2.3 million shares worth GBP35.7 million at the current price.

Betfair’s major shareholders also include SoftBank Corp. and European venture firm Balderton Capital, which sold part of its stake to Softbank for about $554 million in 2006.

Betfair pioneered online person-to-person sports betting by developing the Betting Exchange, a market place that allows consumers to bet at odds sought by themselves or offered by other customers and thereby eliminating the need for a traditional bookmaker. It now has about 3 million registered users betting on sports events and playing online poker and other games.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101025/venture-firms-hit-the-jackpot-with-betfair/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101015/index-union-square-like-soundclouds-web-based-tune/ http://allthingsd.com/20101015/index-union-square-like-soundclouds-web-based-tune/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:25:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24601 Here’s another bet on Web-based music: SoundCloud, a start-up that makes it easy to share streaming music, is about to land a funding round from high-profile investors.

Sources tell me that Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures are leading a “significant” new round for the Berlin-based company. I don’t have a dollar amount, but I’m told that VCs were competing fiercely to get into the three-year-old company, which raised a $3.3 million round from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in 2009. The round hasn’t closed yet.

Online music has been a black hole for investors for a very long time. So what’s the attraction here?

In large part, it’s because SoundCloud isn’t dependent on deals with the major music labels. It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud to share music you didn’t create and don’t own–and a “private sharing” option makes it easy to do so discretely. That could leave the service open, theoretically, to copyright claims, a la YouTube.

But so far the company has signed up a million users without attracting the ire of the big labels. And recent court decisions in the Veoh/Universal Music and Google/Viacom cases seem to give user-uploaded services like SoundCloud a lot of legal leeway, at least in the U.S.

I’m told that the company also plans on using Audible Magic’s “fingerprinting” technology, which will make it easier for copyright owners to pull content off the service.

SoundCloud, Index and Union Square all declined to comment.

Here’s an example of SoundCloud at work–a 43-minute (!) mix that Beck has posted to his Web site, which we can also embed here:

Melted Lemons by planned_obsolescence

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

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