The venture arm of the world’s biggest chip company joins other investors — including Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures — and brings the total amount of capital raised to $45 million.

Remember, software-defined networking (SDN) aims to do to networking gear what virtualization companies like VMware have done to servers. In the same way that one server can be virtualized into many, all with different configurations, the point of SDN is to make networks as easy to spin up, configure and expand as virtual servers in the cloud, all of it done via software. VMware, for its part, is in the game via its purchase last year of Nicira, the first SDN company I ever heard of.

The idea is considered a metaphysical threat to established networking companies, specifically Cisco Systems; analysts, specifically J.P. Morgan’s Rod Hall, have worried that Cisco isn’t ready to meet the threat.

I had a quick chat with Guido Appenzeller (that’s him in the photo above, at the left of president and co-founder Kyle Forster), and he said that Intel, which does make some specialized networking chips, sees some alignment of interest with Big Switch in the future of SDN.

As I noted before, Big Switch’s approach has a lot of industry support. Its partners include Juniper Networks, Citrix, F5, Dell, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

OpenX Software said it had raised $22.5 million in a Series E funding round, with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation as lead investor.

All told, the Los Angeles-based online advertising technology company has raised $70 million. Along with Samsung, existing investors — Accel Partners, Index
Ventures, SAP Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc. and Presidio Ventures — were also part of the new round.

“We have been building the company to continue to grow,” said OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan, who noted that the company had doubled its size and revenue in the last year. The company now has 260 employees.

He said that OpenX had a partnership with Samsung that it evolved into a financial arrangement to bring the Korean electronics giant “a little closer to the company.”

Cadogan said the new funding would be used for acquisitions and other expansion, especially into mobile, as it competes with rivals such as search giant Google.

“We are building a truly viable revenue program that goes across screens,” he said, pointing to two recent strategic acquisitions — LiftDNA and JumpTime.

Samsung’s Brannon Lacey said the company invested in OpenX because it was pioneering in the space. “As an investor, it is a fragmented market and there will be consolidation,” he said. “And OpenX is best positioned for that.”

OpenX said that it had grown its transactions from one trillion to four trillion from 2011 to 2012.

Skype investor Index Ventures and Twitter Inc. backer Spark Capital say they are leading a $42 million investment in 1stdibs, an 11-year-old online marketplace that is little known beyond the circle of well-heeled customers, antique shops and art dealers who use it. Part of the new funding comes from Benchmark, an early supporter of eBay Inc., which last year paid $60 million for a big stake in 1stdibs.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The latest funding round comes courtesy of Earlybird Venture Capital, which led Socialbakers’ previous $2 million round, and from Index Ventures, which led this most recent fundraising effort.

First launched in 2009, the company offers analytics for businesses running marketing campaigns across various social media platforms. In essence, it’s a way to gauge the effectiveness of pushing out products via social tools like Facebook Pages, tweets, Google+ and LinkedIn updates (among others).

The company has expanded since receiving its $2 million capital injection in February, growing to upward of 160 employees across 10 offices around the world.

It’s not a bad space to be in, either, as similar companies have done fairly well for themselves. As my colleague Peter Kafka reported not too long ago, Salesforce acquired Buddy Media for upward of $700 million in cash and stock. The acquisition came little more than a year after Salesforce snapped up Radian6 — one of the leaders in the social analytics space — for $326 million.

Surprise, surprise — Socialbakers CEO Jan Rezab said his company will use the newfound cash to keep up its expansion efforts, and to tack on more measurement features to the existing product.

Since then, there have been other moves around virtual (software-defined) networks. Oracle nabbed Xsigo Systems, another virtual networking player. A start-up called Plumgrid landed $10.7 million in funding. Then, networking giant Cisco Systems — which notably reports quarterly earnings today — started insisting that, after a couple of decades of selling gear for networks that are fundamentally defined by their hardware, it has considerable expertise in software-defined networking, too. We’ll see.

Anyway, there’s now a new player to keep track of, and its name is Big Switch Networks. It comes out of stealth mode today, and it is also launching a general-release product with an army of partners and $37 million in combined funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs.

Yesterday, I talked with CEO and founder Guido Appenzeller (that’s him in the photo above, at the left of president and co-founder Kyle Forster) about what Big Switch plans to do. Essentially, it is software-defined networking writ larger than other players have sought to do. Specifically, Appenzeller says, Nicira aims to bring make networks programmable in software, but really only the data center. It is what he calls a “narrow stovepipe approach” that doesn’t take into account the larger opportunity. “It’s a single application without any open architecture support for other vendors, and there’s no support for anything other than the virtual switch that they have built. They’ve done a good job with what they’ve built, but customers want a platform; they want an open architecture that supports multiple vendors and devices, and which supports the deployment of many applications.”

Appenzeller has a strong background in OpenFlow, an open standard that allows software to determine how data is handled on a network. He was on the team at Stanford University’s Clean Slate Lab, and he led the research team that developed the OpenFlow standard.

The basic idea behind SDN is that networking environments should be as programmable as other parts of the IT infrastructure. Networks have grown incredibly complex to manage and, more often than not, when more flexibility or capacity is needed, the answer is to buy more hardware. The more you can customize a network in software, the less hardware you have to buy. SDN is also a departure from the way networking gear has generally been run before: Up to now, they have not been open for programmers to tinker with.

Big Switch’s approach has a lot of industry support. Its numerous partners include some pretty big names: Juniper Networks, Citrix, F5, Dell, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks are but a few. One key name is not among them: Cisco Systems.

While Cisco does support OpenFlow, it has been slow to get serious about it, Appenzeller says. “Cisco has been timid in the SDN space. It has announced OpenFlow support on some of its switches, but right now it doesn’t have the API support to configure existing functionality on the switch, not to create new applications that run on it.”

Yet Big Switch doesn’t see Cisco as a competitor: It doesn’t sell routers and switches. “We would wholeheartedly embrace Cisco if and when it supports a data-abstraction layer like OpenFlow, but right now it doesn’t,” says Big Switch marketing VP Jason Matlof.

To be sure, Cisco has been trying to get ahead of the marketplace chatter around SDN for awhile. For one thing, it poured $100 million into an SDN-focused start-up called Insieme Networks. But it has argued that OpenFlow is just one approach to SDN. It has offered its own API kit, called the Cisco One Platform Kit, to work with Cisco gear.

It’s too soon to tell if SDN technology represents a fundamental competitive threat to Cisco, which has for so long thrived by selling proprietary networking gear. In a research note to clients dated Nov. 9, analyst Paul Silverstein of UBS Credit Suisse called SDN technology a “long term competitive threat to Cisco in the data center switching market,” and noted that data center switching amounts to about 10 percent of Cisco’s sales. Silverstein also noted that a large number of companies had partnered with Big Switch. He went on to write that, in the eyes of some industry sources he consulted, Cisco’s SDN approach is looking “increasingly cogent.”

Brian Marshall, an analyst with ISI, said in a short note today that, while SDN is promising, the threat to Cisco and established players is still off on the horizon. “Big Switch and Nicira have emerged as the early leaders in SDN with commercially viable solutions. We believe SDN momentum is solid and will create a longer-term headwind to traditional networking vendors, but do not expect a significant impact to financial models over the next 12-18 months.”

Whatever threat it may or may not represent to established players like Cisco, it’s clear that Big Switch sees the network as having reached a point similar to where smartphones were in, say, early 2007, when the iPhone and Android burst onto the scene and made creating smartphone apps so easy. “The point is to make networking a peer of the open computing environment, just like computing, just like the mobile world,” Matlof said. “Look back five years at what you could and couldn’t do with a smartphone, and what you can do now.”

A similar transformation is coming to networks that will make them a lot more flexible and customizable, and will allow companies to build their own custom applications to manage their networks in ways not possible before. “Those companies that are committed to open architectures will be our partners,” Appenzeller says. “Those that aren’t, won’t.”

The company, which over the summer landed an impressive $20 million Series A round of venture capital funding from Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, has started to ratchet up its hiring. Sometime today, it will announce that it has hired Michael Knappe, an early pioneer in the voice-over-Internet-protocol industry and a founding member of the VoIP Forum Industry Consortium. Knappe’s title will be director of engineering.

Michael Knappe

Over that time, he was deeply involved in the VoIP Industry Forum, one of those industry-standards-setting efforts that is so often helpful in making a new technology mainstream. By the time of its peak in 1997, companies as varied as Microsoft, Intel and Cisco were all participating members, and now VoIP is indeed mainstream.

The company is certainly moving along. FuzeBox powers 60,000 hours of audio conferences every month, but more impressively, it handles 78,000 online meetings everyday. Its customers include Amazon, CBS, Thomson Reuters and Verizon Wireless — which also resells FuzeBox to its business customers.

Criteo, the performance display advertising company, just nabbed about $40 million in additional venture funding.

The Series D round, led by SoftBank Capital, gives the Paris-based company an $800 million valuation, according to sources, although Criteo declined to comment on the figure.

Previously, Criteo had raised just over $23 million from investors that include Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures.

In an interview, CEO J.B. Rudelle said the money would be used for growing its footprint in the U.S., as well as Japan and Asia, more quickly.

The company has seen quick growth here and the market has already become profitable. But Rudelle said, “This funding is obviously a big step. We are going to use it to accelerate our efforts in key markets.”

Criteo now operates in 32 countries, he said, and it hopes to extend its global footprint as more companies are looking for better performance from online advertising.

“The need for performance to drive display advertising is enormous,” said Criteo president Greg Coleman, referring to “personalized retargeting,” which delivers highly targeted ads to consumers.

Ad tech such as Criteo has become a hot arena of late with larger companies such as Yahoo and Facebook interested in acquiring assets in the space.

For now, at least, it looks like Criteo filled its kitty to stay independent.

Here’s the official press release from Criteo:

Criteo completes €30 million Series D led by SoftBank Capital
Syndicate of investors includes Yahoo! JAPAN, SAP Ventures, Adams Street and Bessemer

NEW YORK — 26 SEPTEMBER 2012 – Criteo, the global leader in performance display advertising, today announced a €30 million round of financing led by SoftBank Capital to support the company’s hyper-growth trajectory.

Profitable since 2009, Criteo has continuously delivered growth, exceeding all forecasts since the company’s founding. The company now serves more than 3,000 advertisers worldwide, with the US being the number one revenue generating market. This new investment will help Criteo to continue reinventing the online display advertising market, with a goal of making it as efficient as search marketing.

JB Rudelle, CEO and Co-Founder of Criteo said: “In a period of high-growth for Criteo, this new financing enables us to invest substantially in innovation, technology and people. In addition, we are very excited to leverage the knowhow and footprint of SoftBank and Yahoo! JAPAN for our expansion in Asia, a very strategic region for us. Overall, the fact that such a sophisticated syndicate of investors has decided to join us is a powerful validation of our unique model.”

Matt Krna, Principal at SoftBank Capital added: “We are delighted to partner with Criteo and help the company extend its leadership in the cost-per-click performance display advertising sector, particularly in Japan and throughout Asia. In speaking with Criteo’s clients and partners, it became clear to us that the company’s analytical, performance-based model offers clear advantages to the entire online ad ecosystem, including consumers.” Mr. Krna will join Criteo’s board as an observer.

Recently Criteo announced an exclusive partnership with Yahoo! JAPAN — in terms of cost-per-click personalized display advertising, it is the first time that a third party technology company has had access to its inventory. To support its growth, Criteo has also recently invested in a state-of-the-art 100,000 square foot R&D centre in Paris, France.

Here’s the premise: Familiar automatically shares photos among multiple generations within a family.

So, as parents snap photos and upload them to Facebook, Picasa, Instagram, Flickr and iPhoto, their own parents can get an updated stream of pictures of their grandkids.

(People without kids can try the app too, but families with children are the main demographic so far.)

Familiar, which first came out for Mac and Windows late last year, now has Android, Kindle Fire and iOS apps. These viewing apps display screen savers (how terribly old school!) or slideshows shared by users within a private circle of family and friends.

Driven largely by being featured by Apple, Familiar already has some loyal fans. In August, Familiar users displayed 21 million of each others’ photos (which is not a terrifically useful stat, but it’s all I have at the moment, as the company isn’t sharing actual user or usage numbers).

Apparently, a lot of investors love the idea of a nifty app to share pictures of their kids. Seattle-based Familiar, whose team came out of music start-up iLike (acquired by Myspace in 2009), has now raised $1.3 million from a large group of backers, among them Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, Acequia Capital, Allen & Company, Hadi and Ali Partovi, Nat Brown, Dave Goldberg, Blake Krikorian, Emil Michael and Owen Van Natta.

I could tell you that the company does real-time collaboration; meetings, complete with video and the ability to share what’s on the a computer screen; that the technology is both incredibly flexible and incredibly robust; and that the meeting doesn’t crash even if the host loses connectivity (which, oddly enough, happened during the demo). I could tell you that it works on iPhones and iPads.

And yes, you’d probably say you’ve heard all this before. Cisco Systems has WebEx and Citrix has GoToMeeting and, frankly, I spend far too much time attending virtual meetings on those platforms, which haven’t evolved or improved in any meaningful way since, well, since ever.

But you don’t have to believe me: Perhaps you’ll think I’m on to something when I tell you that Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures have just teamed up to make a $20 million Series A investment in FuzeBox. Mike Volpi, a partner at Index, is joining the FuzeBox board of directors.

Jeff Cavins, FuzeBox CEO, kept me interested in the demonstration well past the point at which I usually tell companies to wrap it up. We watched some HD video footage together, and at one point he gave me control of the video — he was in his office in Silicon Valley, and I was in my apartment in New York, so that I could scroll back and forth to different points in the footage, as if we were talking about edits we’d like to make. No herky-jerky waiting for the video to catch up, just smooth scrolling back and forth.

FuzeBox’s secret appears to be the ability to adapt on the fly to the bandwidth conditions of the people using it. You might be on an iPhone, with just a 3G network handy. Or you might be at the office, on the super-fast corporate LAN, or on the Wi-Fi network at home.

Its customers include Amazon, CBS, Verizon Wireless — which also resells FuzeBox to its business customers — and Thomson Reuters. FuzeBox is used to run 78,000 remote meetings per day and has been used in 122 countries.

Basically, if virtual meetings were more like FuzeBox, I wouldn’t hate them nearly as much as I do. That tells me that the established players need to have their worlds rocked by new, cooler, more capable competitors. Watch out, WebEx and GoToMeeting: FuzeBox is coming.

The 10-month-old company has raised a $10 million B round, led by Index Ventures, along with Kleiner Perkins, Richard Branson and Yuri Milner. Many of the investors who chipped in on its $2.5 million A round last year are back, too.

Codeacademy was one of the buzzier start-ups of the last year, and helped kick off the “everyone should learn to code!” meme, at least among people who hang out around coders.*

So there was a lot of competition for the round. Co-founder Zach Sims won’t talk about valuation, but earlier this year I was hearing talk that the deal would end up in the $55 million range.

Sims will say that one of the reasons he’s happy to be working with London-based Index is that Codecademy has big international aspirations. So far, the start-up has served up 100 million coding lessons, and about half of its users live somewhere besides the U.S. “We’re going to hopefully be much bigger outside the U.S. than inside the U.S.,” Sims says.

Codeacademy relies on outsiders to create its online lessons for free, and it doesn’t charge users to take them, but at some point it will start figuring out how to generate revenue. Perhaps more important will be a move into teaching stuff besides computer programming, but Sims says that won’t happen soon. “For now, coding is at the forefront.”

*The counterargument to this is a must-read.

I talked to Index’s partner Mike Volpi about the new investment money and more, which it will be aiming at early-stage investments in the U.S., Israel and Europe.

We talked about a range of issues, including the future of start-up investing, and the innovation climate going forward.

Here’s the video of the interview I did with him:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120618/index-ventures-volpi-talks-about-new-fund-and-the-state-of-the-vc-market-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120618/sonos-raises-145-million-from-kkr-redpoint-elevation/ http://allthingsd.com/20120618/sonos-raises-145-million-from-kkr-redpoint-elevation/#comments Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:00:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=221144

Wireless music systems maker Sonos has a round of primary and secondary financing of $135 million, a figure that is more than double what it has previously raised in total, according to sources close to the situation.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts led the round, along with investors Redpoint Ventures and Elevation Partners.

Previous investors in Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Sonos — which has been around for a decade and introduced its first product in 2005 — include BV Capital and Index Ventures. Index invested $25 million in the company last year.

About one-third of the new funds — or $45 million in primary financing — will be devoted to growth efforts for its popular and innovative multiroom music systems, sources said.

The company recently hired a former Research In Motion exec as its new head of global sales.

As part of the financing, sources added, KKR’s David Kerko and Fred Anderson of Elevation have joined the board, along with John Maeda, who is president of the Rhode Island School of Design. BV Capital’s Andreas Von Blottnitz will leave his post as director.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120618/sonos-raises-145-million-from-kkr-redpoint-elevation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120617/index-ventures-raises-442-million-in-new-fund/ http://allthingsd.com/20120617/index-ventures-raises-442-million-in-new-fund/#comments Mon, 18 Jun 2012 04:21:20 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=221002 Index Ventures said it had raised 350 million euros ($442 million) in a new sixth venture capital fund, which will be aimed at early-stage investments in the U.S., Israel and Europe. The London-based Index, which raised its last fund in 2009, opened an office in San Francisco last year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120617/index-ventures-raises-442-million-in-new-fund/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120509/etsy-secures-40-million-for-international-expansion/ http://allthingsd.com/20120509/etsy-secures-40-million-for-international-expansion/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 16:43:37 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=206037 Etsy, the online marketplace where people sell their arts and crafts, has raised $40 million in funding. Investors include Index Ventures (which led the round), Accel Partners, Union Square Ventures, Hubert Burda Media and Glynn Partners. In a blog post, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson said the company will expand internationally. To date, Etsy has raised $91 million in capital.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120509/etsy-secures-40-million-for-international-expansion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120430/brit-media-raises-1-25m-and-launches-wedding-web-site-tools/ http://allthingsd.com/20120430/brit-media-raises-1-25m-and-launches-wedding-web-site-tools/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:00:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=201346 Former Google TV product lead Brit Morin is disclosing today that she has raised $1.25 million in seed funding from an impressive list of investors, including Marissa Mayer, Aileen Lee, Tina Sharkey and Seth Goldstein, Kevin Colleran, Annabel Teal, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Founders Fund Angel and DMGT. The company — called Brit Media — is aiming to build a new lifestyle brand (think Martha Stewart), and kicks off today with Weduary, a customizable and social wedding Web site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120430/brit-media-raises-1-25m-and-launches-wedding-web-site-tools/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120416/chartbeat-raises-9-million-for-more-real-time-web-publishing-analytics/ http://allthingsd.com/20120416/chartbeat-raises-9-million-for-more-real-time-web-publishing-analytics/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:00:05 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=196678 You can make money running a Web publishing business, but that’s a difficult and uncertain proposition. Better bet: Selling tools to Web publishers.

This seems to be working for Chartbeat, a company that sells a low-cost, lightweight analytics system that lets Web publishers see how their content is performing in real time.

The New York-based company has more than 4,000 paying customers (AllThingsD is a user), and now it has a bunch of money to go find more, via a $9.5 million B round led by DFJ and Index Ventures.

Revenue? CEO Tony Haile says he’s been generating millions a year for “quite some time,” and while he won’t get more specific, he does say revenue was up 3.5x in the last year. Profits? “If I’m profitable, I’m not growing my team fast enough,” he says.

Alrighty. Chartbeat also has a zippy new interface with even more information porn than before — the new look seems directly inspired by the infographics that Web publishers have been chucking up with abandon for the past year or so, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Which brings me back to the question I have every time I think about Chartbeat or any of the other analytics services available for Web publishers these days — what exactly are we supposed to do with all of this data?

Every time I write about Chartbeat, I end up having the same conversation with Haile, so this time I figured I’d just be more efficient and rerun the last interview I had with him, from back in January 2011.

And here, because I can — some Thomas Dolby:

(Happy Birthday, Jonah!)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/chartbeat-raises-9-million-for-more-real-time-web-publishing-analytics/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120308/sequoia-leads-10-million-round-for-songkick/ http://allthingsd.com/20120308/sequoia-leads-10-million-round-for-songkick/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:59:47 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=181694 Songkick, the four-year-old concert notification start-up, has raised a $10 million round led by Sequoia Capital. Earlier investors such as Index Ventures also re-upped. Songkick makes money via lead generation, taking fees of up to 10 percent from concert promoters like Ticketmaster. The New York Times has a nice interview with CEO Ian Hogarth.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120308/sequoia-leads-10-million-round-for-songkick/feed/ 0 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/20111103/kaggle-solves-big-data-problems-with-contests-and-now-has-big-funders-on-board/ http://allthingsd.com/20111103/kaggle-solves-big-data-problems-with-contests-and-now-has-big-funders-on-board/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:00:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=139879 What if the Netflix Prize model — solving hard problems about big data sets using contests — could be applied to all sorts of other things? A remarkable start-up called Kaggle is doing exactly that, and already seems to be making it work.

Kaggle has facilitated breakthroughs in NASA’s analysis of dark matter, improved Allstate’s actuarial methods, predicted many of the top finishers of the Eurovision Song Contest, and is currently hosting a $3 million prize to devise ways to reduce unnecessary hospitalizations.

The company, which started last year in Northern Australia and has now relocated to San Francisco, has been endorsed by some of the tech industry’s best-respected brains via a new $11 million round of funding that was apparently highly competitive.

Led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the Series A round included PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian and Factual CEO Gil Elbaz, as well as SV Angel, Yuri Milner and the Stanford Management company.

Kaggle founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom, a former statistician for the Australian treasury, says his company addresses “a serious market failure.” That is: Companies have data and can’t analyze it as well as they’d like, and academia is desperate for real-world data sets.

Kaggle’s short history is full of charming anecdotes about its democratic approach to yielding better and unanticipated results. Goldbloom wrote in a recent blog post, “In past Kaggle competitions, breakthroughs in astronomy have been made by glaciologists, chess rating systems have been beaten by non-players, and bioinformatics problems have been solved by SEO specialists.”

Goldbloom hired Kaggle’s most successful competitor, Jeremy Howard, and made him president and chief scientist.

Today, Kaggle’s 17,000 participating data scientists — which happen to include former Netflix Prize winners — participate mostly for the challenge and the chance to prove themselves. But Goldbloom and Howard want to make it worth their while.

“In five years’ time, I want to do 10,000 competitions per year,” Goldbloom said. “I’m hoping competitors can earn a full-time income from Kaggle.”

On that front, Kaggle will now start paying small groups of data scientists — selected based on their past performance on Kaggle — to analyze sensitive data sets for which companies require NDAs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111103/kaggle-solves-big-data-problems-with-contests-and-now-has-big-funders-on-board/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111027/soundcloud-lands-on-the-ipad-waits-for-other-music-services-to-join-it-there/ http://allthingsd.com/20111027/soundcloud-lands-on-the-ipad-waits-for-other-music-services-to-join-it-there/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:28:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=137244 SoundCloud, the buzzy music-sharing service/utility, has arrived on the iPad, via a new free app. If you’re one of the 3.7 million people who have downloaded one of the company’s iOS, Android or Mac apps, you’ll have a pretty good sense of how the tablet version works. For the rest of you, here’s a quick demo video:

Introducing the SoundCloud iPad app from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

“Company X has an iPad app” isn’t an inherently interesting story, but for music start-ups, moving to the tablet isn’t a foregone conclusion. Music services absolutely must be available on the iPhone and Android handsets, but they aren’t necessarily rushing to the iPad.

Spotify, for instance, has yet to show up on Apple’s tablet. And when it does, I have a hunch it will function more like a remote control than a full-fledged client version. And while Pandora’s move to the iPhone hypercharged its growth and allowed it to eventually go public, iPad use isn’t a core part of the story the company pitches to investors.

SoundCloud makes a lot of sense on the iPad, though, because it’s not a pure-play music service: It’s partly a utility that allows people to easily post sound files anywhere they want on the Web, and it’s partly a social service designed to let people discover those files. This app lets you do all of that, and seems to put the iPad’s screen space to good use while it does.

Meanwhile, the Berlin-based start-up, which raised $10 million from Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures last year, seems to be a on a tear. It says it now has eight million people creating files for the freemium service, up from seven million less than two months ago, and up from 2.6 million when I spoke to CEO Alex Ljung in January. Here’s a video of that conversation:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111027/soundcloud-lands-on-the-ipad-waits-for-other-music-services-to-join-it-there/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110906/api-marketplace-mashape-raises-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20110906/api-marketplace-mashape-raises-funding/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:53:00 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=117213 Mashape, an up-and-coming marketplace for APIs, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding — which seems like a pretty small amount given the investors it came from: NEA, Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, among others.

The San Francisco-based company, which originated in Italy, helps Web services connect with each other — so for instance the creators of a new social site wouldn’t have to build their own image resizer, and the maker of an image resizer tool would have less trouble getting it distributed.

Mashape has nearly 200 APIs on its platform so far, including Tinypay.me and Rapleaf. No big API companies — like, say, a Twitter — have signed on, but CEO Aghi Marietti said he hoped to graduate up to larger players like the code-sharing site GitHub has.

Mashape plans to make money by taking a cut of any fee its users charge for their APIs, and will help them with things like billing systems.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110906/api-marketplace-mashape-raises-funding/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110613/mind-candy-brings-virtual-monsters-to-the-real-world-through-toys-r-us/ http://allthingsd.com/20110613/mind-candy-brings-virtual-monsters-to-the-real-world-through-toys-r-us/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 02:01:58 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=86088 Facing bankruptcy three years ago, Mind Candy bet its last remaining VC dollars on building a kid-friendly gaming platform.

Already, the idea is starting to pay off.

Since then, the company’s game network (plus aspiring social network) called Moshi Monsters has registered 50 million users, mostly between the ages of 6 and 12 years old, and is adding a new player every second. It’s also on pace to generate $100 million in gross retail sales this year.

At E3 last week, I caught up with Mind Candy’s CEO Michael Acton Smith to hear about how he believes he can leverage the company’s social game roots to build a Facebook alternative for kids under the age of 12 and create an entertainment brand worth billions.

Acton Smith’s ambitious plans include bringing the monsters and other characters from the online virtual world into the physical world.

Mind Candy, which is based in London and has offices in New York, plans to officially announce tomorrow the availability of plush stuffed toys and mini-figurines based on the characters from Moshi Monsters. The toys will be sold exclusively at Toys “R” Us online and in stores nationwide starting in July.

The launch of toys in the U.S. follows the popularity of Moshi Monster-branded toys, books, video games, trading cards and a magazine in the UK and Australia, where the game is more popular. Of the 50 million users, only 15 million are in the U.S. today.

Acton Smith’s ambitions are like Harry Potter or SpongeBob SquarePants on steroids.

In addition to toys, he says they are working on music, live tours, a Moshi film and a videogame for the Nintendo DS.

In the game, players choose from one of six virtual pet monsters to name and take care of. They also get to personal and decorate a page and can post notes to a friend’s pinboard, which is a lot like the wall in Facebook. Subscriptions cost $6 a month, but not all users pay.

The company, which has 50 employees, has raised $10 million in venture capital from Index Ventures and Accel Partners.

Here’s a video interview with Acton Smith from the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, where his Jimi Hendrix-type attire easily stood out from the rest of the hardcore gamers:

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