On Monday, the company is officially taking the wraps off its plans. Nicira — which I’m told is pronounced like “nice era” — aims to be the vendor of a new networking technology that’s built specifically for the age of cloud computing.

One of the most important enabling technologies of the age of the cloud is something called “virtualization”: As computers have gotten more powerful, thanks mainly to the progress of Moore’s law and ever-better chips — a single computer can, with the aid of software like that created by VMware, act like it’s 10 or 20 or 40 different computers, all at once. Each “virtual machine” has, to its user, all the properties of a physical computer, and ensures that a single machine is used in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. Customers who use cloud services can quickly “spin up” new virtual machines as needed to meet new demands, usually within minutes.

But generally speaking, networking hasn’t kept up. The pipes through which bits pour in and out of data centers have gotten faster, but they haven’t gotten much smarter. Where cloud servers are flexible, precise and easy to manage, networks are, by comparison, blunt instruments. Meeting new demand means adding new capacity, and that usually means adding new hardware to the mix, and that usually takes weeks, if not longer.

If you’ve ever wondered if it were possible to “spin up” a virtual network as readily as you do a virtual machine, wonder no more, for that is precisely what Nicira wants to offer you, without the addition of a single new piece of hardware, but rather only some software that runs on your existing server. You don’t even need to have especially advanced networking hardware.

Its the kind of thing that could give big enterprises some new flexibility in managing their network infrastructure, particularly as need and demand peaks and drops, whether by the day or because of a seasonal change that happens just once a year.

The company already has customers: AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace and the Japanese telecom giant NTT are all using Nicira, the company says.

Nicira calls its product an NVP, or network virtualization platform, and it is being described as the sort of advance that comes along perhaps once every quarter-century. That’s a bold claim, but the argument on which the company is making it holds water. On a day-to-day basis, where you deploy an application in a data center is as much a function of how much networking capacity you have available as it is one of computing capacity.

Virtualization on servers allows you to spread a single app over as many physical machines as needed, but the network connecting those machines is what it is, and if it isn’t up to snuff, you can either enhance it by adding new routers and switches, or live with it. The result is that you can’t be as flexible with deploying apps as you’d like, and that certain machines end up being underutilized by as much as one-third, which is costly over time. You end up having to buy more servers, then pay to run them and cool them.

The Nicira NVP, as CEO Stephen Mullaney told me, “decouples” a virtual network from the physical network hardware. “All of the intelligence, all of the control, all of the services now get done in the virtual space.” The result, what was once a dumb networking pipe carrying bits into two different virtual machines running on the same one, can now be programmed to act in vastly different manners, according to rules in the virtual realm. In much the same way a single computer gets turned into a dozen, a single network can be subdivided and act like a dozen individual networks. Or the reverse: Several networks can be cobbled together to act like one. And a virtual network can be created on the fly in minutes, just like a virtual machine.

A network you can deploy in minutes saves a lot of money, because it allows you to move quickly as your networking needs change. Most big companies who demand the heaviest network loads have agreements with their service providers — usually big telecom companies — that a request for new capacity requires a week or more, because it requires the physical presence of technicians who have to install and provision new gear. But what if you can reconfigure your network in 30 seconds to meet the needs of some new application? That’s exactly what eBay’s Cloud Architect JC Martin found he could do after installing Nicira’s software on the company’s servers. EBay is a Nicira reference customer.

Other reference customers had other interesting experiences and uses to report. Japan’s NTT uses cloud data centers to run some 10,000 virtual desktops — think PCs that are all virtual machines — and found that it was easier to quickly switch between data centers during the rolling blackouts that have become the norm since that country’s earthquake last year.

There is, of course, a great deal more technical detail, but the point you have to get is that this company is out to disrupt the networking industry in a way that it hasn’t been disrupted in a long time. The traditional solution to networking problems is more, better, faster hardware, and companies like Cisco, Juniper, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to sell more of that hardware.

But what if you could look a sales rep from one of those companies in the eye, and tell them that their latest million-dollar router or switch isn’t needed? Once upon a time, before the days of virtualization, if you needed a new server, you had to buy one and have it installed somewhere. Now you can, in most cases, rent space on one within minutes, or literally provision another with a few clicks of a mouse. It changed the expectation and much of the calculus of the IT industry. Many companies never buy their own servers at all, and rent space from cloud providers like Amazon, Rackspace and Joyent.

Exactly what a similar disruption might mean for networking vendors is a little hard to imagine, but if the folks at Nicira are right about the potential this technology of theirs has, it looks like that disruption is coming, one way or another.

I’m told Nicira has just made another key hire, again from Cisco Systems. Bruce Davie, a longtime Cisco employee and a Cisco Fellow, has joined Nicira as its Chief Service Provider Architect.

Davie is pretty well known in networking circles, and is one of the co-inventors of MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, which is a fundamental basis for the high-end business class Internet service that many carriers deliver.

Davie joined Cisco in 1995, and has been a Cisco Fellow since 1998. Since 1997, he has worked in the Internet Technologies Division at Cisco, and leads a group that represents the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force. If there’s anyone who truly understands how the Internet’s pipes really work, he’s probably among them.

Before Cisco, Davie worked at Bellcore, a.k.a. Bell Communications Research, the old research and development arm of the regional phone companies, or “Baby Bells,” that resulted from the 1982 court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. Bellcore is still around; it eventually became Telcordia and ended up in the hands of Swedish telecom concern Ericsson, in a deal that closed earlier this month.

Davie has a B.E. from Melbourne University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. He is the author of three books on networking, and lots of technical papers. He is also an active participant on both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force; a senior member of the IEEE; and has, in recent years, been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Davie would appear to be the eighth person at Nicira (by my likely incomplete count) with a Cisco connection. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, ShoreTel and Cisco. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Last January, the outfit also hired Rob Enns, a veteran of Juniper Networks, as its VP of engineering.

There’s still no official word about what Nicira is doing, but all these hires are making it look ever more interesting by the day. Nicira is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Data center networks today are too inflexible, complex and costly, especially in the age of the cloud, when everything is on-demand, flexible and cheap. Nicira’s Web site says the product is a software solution that runs on existing networks, requires no new hardware and is aimed directly at large-scale cloud data centers. Interesting, indeed.

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)

LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy

According to sources familiar with the company, the funding will be used for day-to-day expenses and to fuel its expansion efforts. The funding was confirmed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission today.

Both existing shareholders and new investors participated in the round.

J.P. Morgan was one of its latest investors. LivingSocial’s previous investors include: Amazon, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Revolution Fund, Grotech Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners.

The round will give LivingSocial enough financial flexibility over the next few months to decide when the timing is right to file for an initial public offering.

Most notably, a source tells us that all of the funding will go toward the company’s operations without previous investors or anyone from the management team cashing out. That is much different from Groupon’s last round, where nearly all of the $1 billion was paid out to management and other shareholders.

In April, the company raised $400 million at a $3 billion valuation. To date, the Washington, D.C.-based company has raised close to $776 million.

Earlier last month, the leader in the space, Groupon, successfully raised $700 million in its public debut; however, its stock has struggled to maintain its opening price.

Hadoop is an open source technology known for its cute cartoon elephant mascot (hence the photo). It has its roots at Google and was inspired by MapReduce — one of the fundamental technologies that makes the Google search experience what it is — and was created at Yahoo, which donated it to the open source community by way of the Apache Software Foundation. That means it’s free.

It’s used by companies as varied as Facebook, Groupon and AOL to turn workloads involving huge sets of data into manageable tasks. It’s so popular, in fact, that several companies have sprung up hoping to turn a profit by helping other companies run Hadoop, in much the same way that Red Hat makes money by helping companies run Linux.

I’ve written here in the past about Cloudera, and Yahoo’s Hadoop team recently spun out as Hortonworks (again with the elephant references).

Now there’s another Hadoop company on the scene — MapR — and it has just secured a $20 million round of venture capital funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates also participating. This comes on top of a strategic relationship with storage giant EMC, in which the hardware maker is offering MapR’s Hadoop distribution with some of its systems.

So what does MapR aim to do? Create an industrial-strength version of Hadoop that’s ready for the enterprise. I talked with CEO John Schroeder. “We created a reliable and dependable platform that’s built for high availability so clusters don’t fail. And we also added data protection, so you can back up your data and recover to a point in time that works in large clusters,” he said.

MapR also tuned its version of Hadoop for speed. It’s not uncommon, he said, for MapR to run two to five times faster than other distributions on standard benchmark tests. As you might expect, faster is better. You can arrive at your analytical answers sooner, or run more workloads on larger data sets, or you can run the same ones on cheaper hardware. So Schroeder is only half kidding when he says it’s “cheaper than free.”

I talked with Satish Dharmaraj, a general partner at Redpoint, and asked him what he sees in MapR. The market for “big data,” he says, is real. “It’s pretty clear to us that the MapReduce method of crunching big sets of data is the easiest and most cost-efficient way of doing things, and it’s disrupting the analytics and software industry in how they process big sets of data.”

Dharmaraj also likes the team. Schroeder was previously CEO of Calista Technologies, which he sold to Microsoft, and before that, CEO of Rainfinity, now part of EMC. His co-founder and CTO is M.C. Srivas, who ran one of Google’s search infrastructure teams, and so has an intimate familiarity with the original MapReduce to which Hadoop is so closely related. Srivas was also chief architect at Spinnaker Networks, now part of NetApp; before that, he ran the engineering team at Transarc, now part of IBM.

Finally, Dharmaraj likes MapR’s approach. “Hadoop is great, but it’s an open source project, so there’s nobody really building all the things around it that an enterprise would need, like disaster recovery. It’s also really fast. Jobs that take 30 hours on other versions are taking five hours,” he said. “That, to us, makes this the first version of Hadoop for the enterprise.”

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Ning has been talking recently to a large pool of companies about selling itself, including Google and Groupon, as well as to a number of private equity companies.

Interest has been both incoming to and outgoing from Ning.

The talks around the fate of the high-profile social networking platform — co-founded by Silicon Valley icon and investor Marc Andreessen — are still early and might not result in a sale, although a number of sources said the company was being valued at up to $150 million.

That price is well below previous loftier valuations for Ning and would mean only a break-even for investors, who have put close to $120 million into Ning since it was founded in 2004.

Among its investors: Andreessen, LinkedIn Chairman and investor Reid Hoffman, Legg Mason, Allen & Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

There are no bankers involved in the preliminary efforts, in which Andreessen has been involved, although discussions with Google and Groupon have been substantive in nature.

Several other companies — including AOL, Demand Media and Go Daddy — have also been approached or are kicking tires at the site. Most would be interested in Ning’s technology for creating premium social networks.

Ning bills itself on its site as “The World’s Largest Platform for Creating Social Websites.”

The sales effort grew out of a parallel one to possibly raise more money for the start-up. Sources said there was some incoming interest, so talking to a larger pool of buyers was undertaken recently.

Such a move would be an interesting one for Ning, which has undergone a series of ups and downs over its history, including dramatic management and business plan shifts.

Its most recent plan has been to go all-premium, trying to find a way to turn the start-up into a profitable enterprise.

That’s worked out well, the company has previously said, with strong growth. Since its business shift a year ago, Ning has said, it has had 400 percent year-on-year revenue growth, going from 17,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers and with 60 million monthly active users.

Ning’s shift has been under the leadership of Jason Rosenthal, who had been COO of Ning until he replaced its founding CEO, Gina Bianchini, in early 2010.

Ning has also recently tried to get into the highly competitive mobile social communications arena, with a service called Mogwee. The traction for the product does not appear to have been significant.

Ning’s Rosenthal declined to comment about any sales efforts when reached by me today.

It is in stealth mode no more. The company today took the wraps off at least some of its plans and revealed the closing of a $9.2 million Series A funding round that also includes investments from Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Levine is joining Bromium’s board.

Its founders are Gaurav Banga, the former CTO of Phoenix Technologies; Simon Crosby, the former CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division of Citrix; and Ian Pratt, the current chairman of Xen.org and another Citrix veteran. Both Pratt and Crosby joined Citrix after it acquired the open source virtualization company Xensource in 2007.

Bromium is turning out to be a bit of a reunion of former Xensource execs: Frank Artale, a managing director at Ignition who was also a Xensource exec, is joining Bromium’s board as well.

So what does Bromium plan to do? It won’t say, but I got a few hints from Simon Crosby, Bromium’s CTO. “The timing of this is perfect to what is going on right now with all the attacks that have been going on recently,” he said.

The attacks against EMC’s RSA security products, and also on Google’s Gmail, he says, were carried out via the client — that is, end user devices like a PC, a smartphone or a tablet. “Bromium believes that getting to a secure era in cloud computing requires securing both the client and the cloud.”

And how to get there? Again, he wouldn’t say exactly, but he did point the way: Virtualization. The technique of creating numerous “virtual” computers that run concurrently on a single physical host computer has been a fundamental development in the evolution of cloud computing. “Everyone I think knows that virtualization can help with security, but no one has really delivered an elegant solution that enhances security through the use of virtualization,” Crosby told me. “This is where I think we can strike a blow for the good guys.”

For another hint, look at Intel’s recently closed acquisition of security software concern McAfee. “Intel gets that security needs to move closer to the hardware, and we would agree with that,” Crosby said. McAfee’s CTO, George Kurtz, is on Bromium’s board.

Bromium marks the second security start-up that Andreesen Horowitz has invested in recently. The other was Silver Tail Systems. And it probably won’t be the last. As AH founder Marc Andreesen said in his appearance with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D9, he loves security. Why? “The threats keep morphing.” Indeed they do.

Banjo and similar companies like Sonar.me are building on top of the small but growing treasure trove of location info from sources like Foursquare, which make user check-ins available to developers through APIs.

Banjo users can see updates from their friends and other people nearby on social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook Places. Banjo itself is not a check-in service, but rather a layer on top of these other social networks.

Banjo users don’t have to be in the near vicinity of other users to see their updates, and they don’t necessarily have to be their friends. They can see the locations of the nearest 16 people to them at any one time.

If you’re in the middle of nowhere, the list of 16 people might include someone miles away. Banjo CEO Damien Patton says this “elastic radius” is a key feature of his service, because Banjo won’t have the loneliness problem of other location aggregators like Color.

And Banjo users can key in any random place to find out what’s going on there. So if you’re going to Paris next week, you could see what people there are doing and saying now, while you’re planning your trip.

It will be interesting to see how users of location-based services react to services like Banjo. Even though their updates may be semipublic by design, users don’t necessarily realize who can see where they are, and how that data can be transformed when it’s aggregated and mapped. We discussed that issue in a video interview with Patton that’s embedded above.

Banjo, which will be available for both iPhone and Android at launch, is backed by BlueRun Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Patton, a former Nascar mechanic and manufacturing entrepreneur, attracted the attention of VCs last summer when he won a Google-sponsored hackathon with an HTML5 location-based graffiti app called SweetGeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110622/new-banjo-social-discovery-app-uses-other-peoples-check-ins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110513/shoedazzle-walks-away-with-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20110513/shoedazzle-walks-away-with-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 22:45:20 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=5400 ShoeDazzle, a two-year-old company building a subscription-based e-commerce business, has raised $40 million in capital.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, which contributed $30 million. Other participants included existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners.

John O’Farrell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz will join the board.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company sends members a monthly selection of shoes, handbags and jewelry based on their preferences. They can choose to buy one item every month for $39.95, or they can skip a month. The packages are sent in the mail in a pretty box tied up with a ribbon. If subscribers don’t do anything, and forget to pick an item or opt out, they will be charged and have $39.95 in credit.

So far, the service has attracted three million subscribers.

The company was founded by Brian Lee, along with fashion celebrity Kim Kardashian. To date, the company has raised $60 million in capital.

Lee said the cash will be used for launching new product categories and expanding into international markets. In a couple of months, it will launch in the U.K., and then Asia and South America. Today, it operates in the U.S. and Canada. Lee also expects to grow the size of the company from its current base of 135 employees.

A “tiny” amount of the round was used to cash out the stock of the founders, Lee said. Lee previously co-founded LegalZoom.com.

O’Farrell said that they’ve been looking to invest in a new e-commerce company for awhile, and that ShoeDazzle stood out from the pack. “It has a strong financial model and delights customers with fashionable products.” And, he notes, it’s a business that can make significant profit.

ShoeDazzle’s business model is a little different and is a bit similar to the old CD clubs, where members would get a new album in the mail every month based on a particular genre. However, subscribers can easily skip a month if they don’t like any of the products. It also has strong ties to Facebook, where it has nearly a million fans.

The entire product line is branded “ShoeDazzle,” and is sourced by the company directly. That’s one of the aspects that O’Farrell really liked. “One of the key things in e-commerce is inventory management and the supply chain. ShoeDazzle is able to have really high quality products at acceptable prices and still get margins,” he said.

Already, there are companies following in ShoeDazzle’s footsteps. In March, Nordstrom-owned HauteLook launched Sole Society, a monthly shoe club.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110513/shoedazzle-walks-away-with-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/exclusive-wal-mart-paid-300-million-plus-for-kosmix/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/exclusive-wal-mart-paid-300-million-plus-for-kosmix/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:46:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42783

According to sources close to the situation, Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix.

The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

The acquisition by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant was announced earlier today.

Wal-Mart did not disclose terms of the deal, which is focused on building out its social and mobile e-commerce offerings.

The price for Kosmix is a pricey one to do so, but traditional retailers need to jump into the digital market now dominated by app-happy, smartphone-wielding customers.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs, the company said.

Kosmix was founded by the team that sold pioneering e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon in 1998.

After that, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and angel investors Jon Miller and Ed Zander.

As eMoney’s Tricia Duryee wrote earlier today:

The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

One interesting aspect of the deal: Accel’s senior partner Jim Breyer–who was not the principal VC in the Kosmix investment–is on the board of Wal-Mart. Presumably, he recused himself from the decision.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110418/exclusive-wal-mart-paid-300-million-plus-for-kosmix/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/wal-mart-acquires-kosmix-to-move-into-social-and-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/wal-mart-acquires-kosmix-to-move-into-social-and-mobile/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:18:05 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4574 Wal-Mart is buying Kosmix, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic.

The company did not disclose terms of the agreement, but said the acquisition would be instrumental in building out both its social and mobile initiatives.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley, the company said.

Wal-mart said the @WalmartLabs team will work on building out its social and mobile commerce strategy to link together its bricks and mortar stores with e-commerce. Today, Wal-mart operates physical stores in 15 countries and e-commerce businesses in nine countries.

Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who sold their first company, Junglee, to Amazon.com in 1998.

The six-year-old company Kosmix has raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Jon Miller, and Ed Zander.

In explaining what the company does on its Web site, it writes: “On any given day, people share 830 million items on Facebook, upload 6.1 million photos to Flickr, add 2.1 million minutes of video to YouTube and send 65 million tweets. Kosmix cuts through this noise to find content that matters to you.”

It’s not particularly clear how Kosmix leads to better mobile and social interactions. The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

The transaction is subject to the customary closing conditions; the company anticipates it will close during the first half of this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110418/wal-mart-acquires-kosmix-to-move-into-social-and-mobile/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:47:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42066

Recently, BoomTown reported that Flixster–the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site–was in early acquisition discussions with several suitors.

Now, said sources, Warner Bros. appears to be the frontrunner in various talks to buy the entertainment site, while Internet giant Yahoo has dropped out due to price concerns.

The reason for interest from the Time Warner-owned studio, said sources, is due to a spate of recent digital efforts, including its expansion of a movie rental experiment on Facebook.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote last night:

Facebook users watch “The Dark Knight” on the social network for $3. Now it has added five more movies, and is asking more money for three recent releases: It will cost you 40 Facebook Credits–the equivalent of $4–to rent “Inception,” “Life As We Know It” and “Yogi Bear” on the site. The first two “Harry Potter” movies, however, are at the original price.

Flixster has a strong presence on the Silicon Valley social networking giant, which could make it a good vehicle to attract people to the movie rental effort, as well as a popular mobile app.

Interestingly, Rotten Tomatoes was once owned outright by another traditional media giant: News Corp.

It is now only a minority shareholder, after trading Rotten Tomatoes for a 20 percent stake in the combined entity a little over a year ago.

News Corp., which owns 20th Century Fox Studios, is not bidding for Flixster, several sources said.

The price being discussed for the San Francisco-based start-up is between $60 million and $90 million.

Any acquisition negotiations could always fail, of course. In fact, Flixster held advanced discussions in late 2007 with IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Flixster trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings and news and even posts user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook, and on mobile devices.

Co-founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering angel investments, such as from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The combination with Rotten Tomatoes and its more robust Web presence made a lot of sense. It features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news.

The site is famous for its clever fresh and rotten tomato rating system for movies.

I have not received a response from emails sent to Flixster and Warner Bros. requesting comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/100-percent-fresh-exclusive-flixsterrotten-tomatoes-in-acquisition-talks-with-yahoo-and-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/100-percent-fresh-exclusive-flixsterrotten-tomatoes-in-acquisition-talks-with-yahoo-and-others/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 07:02:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41652

Flixster–the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site, as well as BuddyTV–is in early acquisition talks with several suitors, including Yahoo, said sources close to the situation.

The price being discussed for the San Francisco-based start-up is between $60 million and $90 million, said several sources, in talks that are “substantive.”

Nonetheless, any acquisition negotiations could always fail. In fact, Flixster held advanced discussions in late 2007 with IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Along with Yahoo, which is interested in bringing in a strong team to bolster the entertainment offerings of the Silicon Valley Internet portal, sources said several media giants are also eyeing Flixster in order to strengthen their ties to entertainment consumers. Likely candidates in this regard include Disney and Warner Bros.

Interestingly, one of Flixster’s big shareholders is News Corp., which traded its Rotten Tomatoes unit for a 20 percent stake in the combined entity a little over a year ago.

But its minority stake gives News Corp. little influence over Flixster’s fate, although its IGN gaming unit head Roy Bahat is on the Flixster board. News Corp.–which has been shedding Web properties, such as its current effort to sell MySpace–is not bidding for Flixster.

But the interest in the site by Yahoo and others is obvious.

Flixster has attracted a huge online audience, which trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings, news and even post user-generated movie reviews on the Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook. Its recent mobile app efforts have been successful.

Co-founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering angel investments, such as from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The combination with Rotten Tomatoes and its more robust Web presence made a lot of sense. It features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news.

The site is famous for its clever fresh and rotten tomato rating system for movies.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment and I have not received a response from emails sent to Greenstein.

Until he does, here’s my video interview with Greenstein, Chari and COO Steve Polsky, in which they talked about the deal to combine Flixster with Rotten Tomatoes:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/100-percent-fresh-exclusive-flixsterrotten-tomatoes-in-acquisition-talks-with-yahoo-and-others/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101203/livingsocial-groupon-riding-deals-frenzy-but-will-it-last/ http://allthingsd.com/20101203/livingsocial-groupon-riding-deals-frenzy-but-will-it-last/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:26:21 +0000 Tomio Geron http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33538 Just a couple of years ago, the idea that start-ups offering modest local business discounts would be the hottest properties in the tech world would have brought snickers.

Now, Google may be on the verge of buying one of those companies, Groupon Inc., for $6 billion or so, and another one, LivingSocial Inc., just bagged a $175 million investment from Amazon.com Inc.

Snicker no more. Daily deals are big money, and big money is required to gain dominance.

“The size of the round is enormous because the size of the opportunity is enormous,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which added $8 million of its own to the round.

The Amazon investment, as well as the potential acquisition of Groupon by Google, signals the quick explosion of and high expectations for an online-to-offline local small business advertising industry that just three years ago did not exist.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101203/livingsocial-groupon-riding-deals-frenzy-but-will-it-last/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/livingsocial-gets-175-million-amazon-investment-like-boomtown-said/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/livingsocial-gets-175-million-amazon-investment-like-boomtown-said/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:59:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38037

Amazon will invest $175 million in LivingSocial, the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space.

(The press release is below.)

BoomTown reported yesterday that the massive investment was in the works.

The online retail giant’s big bet on the Washington, D.C.-based start-up comes in the wake of ongoing acquisition talks between Google and Groupon, the category leader in the local deals business.

While it appears to be a reaction to those discussions, sources said Amazon and LivingSocial have been talking for some time about a variety of deals between them.

Sources said the Amazon investment put a very hefty valuation of over one billion dollars on LivingSocial.

Interest in LivingSocial has heightened of late, given the $6 billion in cash, stock and earnouts that BoomTown has reported Google is considering ponying up to purchase Chicago-based Groupon, and grab ahold of its 12 million users across the globe and $500 million in annual revenue.

But LivingSocial–which has been thriving even in Groupon’s flashier shadow–has 10 million subscribers worldwide in more than 120 markets and five countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.

And, as LivingSocial noted when it announced its acquisition of Australia’s Jump On It recently, it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to book well more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

And that is what has attracted Amazon, which has almost no profile in this lucrative local space, despite some attempts at its own solution. It bought a small and quirky daily deals site, Woot, for $110 million in June.

But sources said that, rather than sell, LivingSocial management wanted to keep the company independent, and thinks a sale of Groupon will give it a huge opportunity for growth.

Why? Well, even though Groupoogle or Goopon are fun to say, the inevitable regulatory review could drag on, resulting in a slowing down of innovation in the bigger Google culture and the distinct possibility of newly rich Groupon execs flying the coop (in private planes).

More investment money should help LivingSocial move ahead faster. Sources also said there is likely to be deep integration between its and Amazon’s services.

LivingSocial announced in April that it had raised $14 million in a Series C round, after grabbing $25 million in a Series B venture funding only a month before. And it has raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated at the time that the valuation for LivingSocial was several hundred million dollars.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; earlier investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and former AOL head Steve Case.

Lightspeed also invested $8 million more on top of Amazon’s funding.

Here is the official press release:

LivingSocial Announces $175 Million Investment by Amazon.com

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2, 2010 /PRNewswire/–LivingSocial (www.livingsocial.com) has secured a $175 million investment from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). LivingSocial has also secured an additional $8 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners. LivingSocial will use this investment to maintain a steady drumbeat of worldwide launches and overall business growth while continuing to serve more than 10 million subscribers across the U.S., Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia in more than 120 locations. Because of LivingSocial’s rapid expansion, the company is currently booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

“To be the biggest player in the local commerce space there is no one better to work with than Amazon,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial. “As the social shopping space continues to heat up, LivingSocial is committed to staying focused on providing the high level of quality that consumers and merchants have come to expect when working with us.”

As the online source to find amazing experiences at an unbeatable value, LivingSocial lets anyone experience the hottest restaurants, shops, activities and services in their area. The company has dedicated area experts on the ground in every location working directly with business owners, and constantly researching the best in local adventures to bring a savings of 50% to 70% for consumers.

Recently, LivingSocial expanded its business by acquiring adventure company Urban Escapes, and launching three new verticals including LivingSocial Family Edition, Campus Deals and LivingSocial Escapes, a travel site that offers unbeatable savings on curated adventures. In addition, the company continues a regular flow of launches–on average one per day–and has expanded its reach in Australia with a controlling stake in Jump On It, making it live in five countries.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/livingsocial-gets-175-million-amazon-investment-like-boomtown-said/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/amazon-poised-to-make-a-major-strategic-investment-in-livingsocial-to-counter-groupoogle-threat/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/amazon-poised-to-make-a-major-strategic-investment-in-livingsocial-to-counter-groupoogle-threat/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:15:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37889

With the red-hot acquisition dance between Google and Groupon sucking up all the attention, it’s easy once again to ignore the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space–LivingSocial.

But not everyone is–according to sources close to the situation, the Washington, D.C.-based company that also focuses on local deals is in advanced talks for a major strategic investment–as high as $150 million–by online retail giant Amazon, at a very hefty valuation of over one billion dollars.

Sources said there will also be a deep operating partnership between the pair, as part of the deal.

Sources said the investment negotiations with Amazon is not complete yet, of course, and could fall apart.

But interest in LivingSocial has heightened of late, given the $6 billion in cash, stock and earnouts that BoomTown has reported that Google is considering ponying up to purchase the category leader, Chicago-based Groupon, and grab ahold of its 12 million users across the globe and $500 million in annual revenue.

But LivingSocial–which has been thriving even in Groupon’s flashier shadow–has 10 million subscribers worldwide in more than 120 markets and five countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.

And, as the start-up noted when LivingSocial announced its acquisition of Jump On It recently, it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to book well more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

That is what is apparently attracting Amazon, which has almost no profile in this lucrative local space, despite some attempts at its own solution. It bought a small and quirky daily deals site Woot, for $110 million in June.

But, rather than sell, sources said LivingSocial management wants to keep the company independent, and thinks a sale of Groupon will give it a huge opportunity for growth.

Why? Well, even though Groupoogle or Goopon are fun to say, the inevitable regulatory review could drag on, resulting in a slowing down of innovation in the bigger Google culture and the distinct possibility of newly rich Groupon execs flying the coop (in private planes).

More investment money should help.

LivingSocial announced in April that it had raised $14 million in a Series C round, after grabbing $25 million in a Series B venture financing only a month before. And it raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated at the time that the valuation for LivingSocial was several hundred million dollars.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Earlier investors U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and former AOL head Steve Case.

A report of the Amazon interest in LivingSocial was first posted several weeks ago in a in VentureBeat, a day before BoomTown first broke the news of the Groupon and Google discussions.

Both Amazon and LivingSocial declined to comment.

But here is an October video interview I did with LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy on a recent visit to Silicon Valley.

The entrepreneur has worked at AOL, as well as at Case’s Revolution Health in Washington, before moving on to the local deals start-up.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/amazon-poised-to-make-a-major-strategic-investment-in-livingsocial-to-counter-groupoogle-threat/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100917/groupon-and-the-clone-wars/ http://allthingsd.com/20100917/groupon-and-the-clone-wars/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:55:57 +0000 Tomio Geron http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=29896 Thanks to the overwhelming popularity of its local-discount offers, Groupon Inc. now generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, commands a valuation north of $1 billion, and has attracted some $170 million in venture capital–all in less than three years.

But that explosive growth–-Forbes called Groupon the “fastest growing company ever“–-has presented several challenges.

One of them is fending off the many “clones” that have sprung up to copy Groupon, some of which have nearly identical designs and layouts as Groupon’s site. Some legitimate venture-backed start-up contenders have also launched, such as Washington-based LivingSocial Inc., which raised $14 million in Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in April, and New York-based BuyWithMe Inc., which in July raised $16 million in Series B financing led by Bain Capital Ventures. And publicly traded companies such as Travelzoo Inc., OpenTable Inc., and The Knot Inc. are also jumping on the trend.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100917/groupon-and-the-clone-wars/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100429/social-e-commerce-goes-into-overdrive-livingsocial-raises-another-14-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100429/social-e-commerce-goes-into-overdrive-livingsocial-raises-another-14-million/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:30:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27847

Could the social group-buying space get any frothier?

Well, yes, it could.

After the recent $135 million funding of Groupon that valued the Chicago start-up at upwards of an eye-popping $1 billion, rival LivingSocial announced to today that it had raised a more modest $14 million in a Series C round.

The Washington, D.C. start-up had raised $25 million in a Series B venture financing only a month ago. And it raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated the valuation for LivingSocial is several hundred million dollars now.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Earlier investors U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution are also participating.

Ironically, Case’s former No. 2 at AOL (AOL), Ted Leonsis has been an early investor in Groupon.

LivingSocial said it will use the new pile of cash to expand to dozens of new markets, adding it was launching four new cities now: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia.

It now operates in 18 cities across the country.

For those in Silicon Valley who do not consider these prices for all these social e-commerce sites high at all, BoomTown is here to tell you that in the real world the figure is not actually modest, except in comparison.

But LivingSocial will need every penny if it is to compete with Groupon and a growing spate of competitors in the local space, much as is also happening in the social status update arena.

The local outcome for most will inevitably be a sale to a big Internet company like Amazon (AMZN).

Or oblivion, especially since so many similar offerings makes the whole market confusing for both local businesses and customers

In general, most offer a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of products and services–from spas to skydiving–in dozens of U.S. cities, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Using social tools, the idea is use collective buying power to get low prices and push customers to local businesses.

If a deal reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, these services sell vouchers to the consumers and collect a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

The plus for many small businesses is to get a crack at a lot of new consumers–think of it as social networking lead-generation.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones, Mercata, received $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

No matter in 2010!

That’s due to the VC frenzy going on, spurred by winner-take-all theories–Groupon, for example, got most of its recent mountain of cash from champion Russian overspenders, Digital Sky Technologies.

However it turns out, here is LivingSocial’s official press release:

LivingSocial Raises $14 Million Series C Round Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Launches in Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia

Company Also Begins Offering Hyperlocal Deals in Seattle Area–Users Can Now Get Deals Even Closer to their Homes

$14 Million Round Comes on Heels of $25 Million Series B Announcement Last Month

Washington D.C., April 29, 2010–LivingSocial, the social commerce leader behind LivingSocial Deals and top Facebook applications Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five, today announced that it has completed a $14 million Series C round of venture funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC participating. Because of the rapid growth, and high user demand, LivingSocial will use the capital infusion to expand into additional markets–bringing Deals to dozens more cities throughout the U.S. in 2010. This additional funding comes on the heels of the company’s recent $25 million Series B round announced last month.

“We’ve known and admired the LivingSocial team for a long time, and I have bought many of their terrific local offers. They’ve done an excellent job of growing their user base through smart media buying and excellent knowledge of social channels and virality,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “With this financing round, LivingSocial is very well positioned to bring their great offers to even more people.”

LivingSocial is also launching its Deals program in four new markets: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. This brings LivingSocial live in 18 cities across the country with major plans to expand to dozens of markets throughout the year.

“We’re constantly receiving requests from our users to expand and launch in their markets, and this recent funding round will allow us to do just that,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial. “We’re really excited to introduce LivingSocial to Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia to continue generating huge savings for our users and even bigger returns for our merchants.”

LivingSocial users throughout the country saved an average of more than $32 each in March, and have saved tens of millions of dollars since the launch of Deals in 2009. By signing up for LivingSocial’s free daily online service, people are saving an average of 50-70% at their favorite places, such as the hottest local restaurants, spas, sporting events, hotels, and other local attractions.

Because LivingSocial wants to give consumers more availability to the program, the company is launching hyperlocal deals for the Seattle area. Now consumers in areas like Tacoma and Bellevue will start getting deals targeted to their location, in addition to Seattle proper. Hyperlocal deals not only help more consumers explore new things in their city, but these deals also provide merchants with a greater opportunity to reach local audiences on the LivingSocial Deals platform.

LivingSocial is now live in 18 markets including: Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities, Chicago, Raleigh Durham, Denver, San Diego, the San Fernando Valley, Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. Dozens of additional cities are expected to roll out in the coming months. For more information or to sign up your city, go to http://livingsocial.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100429/social-e-commerce-goes-into-overdrive-livingsocial-raises-another-14-million/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20091224/the-flixsterrotten-tomatoesmyspace-mystery-solved-a-christmas-miracle/ http://allthingsd.com/20091224/the-flixsterrotten-tomatoesmyspace-mystery-solved-a-christmas-miracle/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:11:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=22427

About 10 days ago, there was a post in this column about interest by News Corp. and its MySpace unit in Flixster, the popular social networking site for movies.

In the post, titled “MySpace and News Corp. Eye Flixster (But for What?),” I wrote:

Whether this is an acquisition or more of a larger partnership deal with News Corp. digital entertainment sites is unclear. Several sources said a purchase was a possibility, while others talked about a more complex deal that did not necessarily mean a purchase.

Sources said any such deal is not imminent, but that News Corp. (NWS) itself has been conducting extensive due diligence on the San Francisco-based Flixster, part of a plan to combine it with Rotten Tomatoes, another News Corp.-owned site run by its IGN Entertainment division.

Well, BoomTown did more gumshoeing and it is indeed shaping up to be a very complex deal, according to many sources I spoke with, centered on Rotten Tomatoes merging with Flixster in exchange for a stake in the combined independent company by News Corp.

Flixster has attracted a huge audience–upward of 50 million–which trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings, news and even post user-generated movie reviews on the Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook.

Founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering an angel investment from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Rotten Tomatoes features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news. It has a community feature in beta, so it would be a nice fit with Flixster.

In addition, in a separate but related deal, the resulting company could have its social, user-generated and premium content threaded throughout MySpace, which is in the midst of transforming itself from a social networking site into a social media site for music and other kinds of entertainment.

Several sources noted that this deal being contemplated is typical of the overall strategy at News Corp., which has been targeting digital units that are not an obvious fit inside the company any longer for sale or other disposition.

In fact, the deal is not unlike one News Corp. did recently, flipping photo-sharing Photobucket into mobile photo service Ontela, with the media giant holding a large equity position in the the new entity.

The possibility of linking MySpace and the combined social movie site is interesting and yet another signal of one of the new strategies of MySpace: “Playing on other platforms,” as one source described it.

For example, MySpace recently announced it was adding its data stream to real-time search results on Google (GOOG).

And, it seems dead obvious that MySpace is likely to adopt Facebook Connect sooner than later, perhaps beginning with a smaller implementation early next year.

Focusing less on Facebook, which has long surpassed the once high-flying MySpace as the top-of-mind social network, MySpace is likely to value the massive cross-distribution for its much richer media content.

But that’s not all for MySpace, said several sources, all of whom noted that the site will be rolling out a range of significant design and other feature initiatives over the next 45 to 60 days.

These are all aimed by its new managers at juicing MySpace’s prospects, which have declined over the last several years, as have both revenue and engagement with consumers.

“This is not a rocket-ship ride to the moon,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It’s building again step by step.”

A Flixster spokesman declined to comment, as did News Corp. I am awaiting a call back from MySpace’s spokeswoman, but she is stuck in a security line at the airport.

Happy holidays, anyway, Dani!

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091224/the-flixsterrotten-tomatoesmyspace-mystery-solved-a-christmas-miracle/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20091214/exclusive-myspace-eyes-flixster-for-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20091214/exclusive-myspace-eyes-flixster-for-acquisition/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:12:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21949

[UPDATED]

Now that the digital equivalent of a super-vac, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, has sucked up some decent music start-ups–Imeem and iLike–for a song, to bolster the social networking site’s efforts to expand into an entertainment portal, what’s next?

According to several sources, the News Corp. (NWS) unit has turned its omnivorous attentions to Flixster, the popular social networking site for movies.

Whether this is an acquisition or more of a larger partnership deal with News Corp. digital entertainment sites is unclear. Several sources said a purchase was a possibility, while others talked about a more complex deal that did not necessarily mean a purchase.

Sources said any such deal is not imminent, but that News Corp. itself has been conducting extensive due diligence on the San Francisco-based Flixster, part of a plan to combine it with Rotten Tomatoes, another News Corp.-owned site run by its IGN Entertainment division.

Rotten Tomatoes features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news. It has community feature that is just in beta, so it would be a nice fit with Flixster.

A MySpace spokeswoman declined to comment at the moment.

In 2007, the start-up was close to being acquired by IAC/InteractiveCorp (IACI) for $100 million, several sources said. But the deal went south when CEO Barry Diller changed his mind at the last minute.

Founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering an angel investment from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Flixster has attracted a huge audience–upward of 50 million–who trade all kinds of recommendations, ratings, news and even post user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook.

While Amazon (AMZN) unit IMDb (Internet Movie Database) is still larger in terms of traffic, the more innovative Flixster has been growing much faster and is more social, which makes it attractive to MySpace, sources said.

More important is the mobile growth. Flixster is the No. 1 movie app on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and leads on other smartphones too.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091214/exclusive-myspace-eyes-flixster-for-acquisition/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20091112/playdom-investor-tim-chang-on-why-social-gaming-is-hot/ http://allthingsd.com/20091112/playdom-investor-tim-chang-on-why-social-gaming-is-hot/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:09:06 +0000 Tomio Geron http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17825 Interest in social gaming is jumping to new heights. One of the players in the space, Playdom Inc., just raised a giant-sized $43 million round from Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Norwest Venture Partners and Rick Thompson, one of the co-founders and an existing angel investor in the company.

That funding comes just a day after news that competitor Playfish Inc. has agreed to be acquired by Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) for $300 million plus $100 million in potential earn-outs. A third company, Zynga Inc., which also makes games played on social networking sites, has raised nearly $40 million from venture investors and is currently locked in litigation with Playdom over theft of trade secrets.

We caught up with Tim Chang, principal at Norwest, to talk about Playdom’s latest funding. Here’s an edited excerpt of our interview:

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091112/playdom-investor-tim-chang-on-why-social-gaming-is-hot/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090721/ning-raises-15-million-more-at-a-yes-really-750-million-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20090721/ning-raises-15-million-more-at-a-yes-really-750-million-valuation/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:45:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=16197

In a quiet fund-raising effort, Ning has raised $15 million more, a round that is valuing the social networking start-up at an eye-popping $750 million valuation.

In its last fundraising $60 million round a little more than a year ago, Ning was valued at $500 million.

The money for this fifth Series E round comes from a Silicon Valley venture firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ning, founded by well-known entrepreneur and Ning Chairman Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini, confirmed the funding when contacted by BoomTown. It was not actively searching for funding.

Other investors in Ning include LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Legg Mason, and Allen & Co.

The additional funds raised bring the total garnered by Ning to $119 million.

Ning is a platform aimed at offering customizable tools that let users create their social networks about their interests, such as for fans of the movie “Twilight.”

Ning puts online ads on the sites, using Google (GOOG), and is also working on its own advertising platform. It also offers an array of other services and is planning more soon, such as a virtual-gift offering.

Founded in early 2007, it currently has 29.3 million registered users, who are using 1.3 million social networks, and it is adding one million registered users every 15 days, said the company.

But not all its social networks are active, and Ning’s monthly unique visitors are lower, according to various surveys, at about six million in the U.S.

Ning is one of Andreessen’s angel investments, although he recently raised $300 million for a new venture fund he is running with longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz.

In an interview, Bianchini said the goal was to become an even bigger platform for building social networks and the money would be used for possible acquisitions and other strategic options, attracting more talent and also to offer its social networks more tools to be discovered.

“It’s clear to me when you look the market…there needs to be a place for people to express their interests and passions,” said Bianchini, who noted Facebook and Ning do not necessarily overlap. “We want to be the social network for interests and passions online.”

Lightspeed’s Ravi Mhatre, who led the investment for the venture firm, said it was due to a lot of reasons, although he noted that the effort was not a traditional fund-raising effort, but more of an interest by Ning in adding a top VC to its investor pool and by Lightspeed in Ning’s hyper-growth.

“The growth at Ning has been massive in the last year and, combined with the quality of the team and seeing that kind of momentum, it worked out well for us both,” said Mhatre.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090721/ning-raises-15-million-more-at-a-yes-really-750-million-valuation/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/rockyou-raises-17-million-for-asian-expansion-and-new-and-improved-widgets/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/rockyou-raises-17-million-for-asian-expansion-and-new-and-improved-widgets/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:00:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5952

Yet another Web 2.0 wunderkind got itself more shelter from the economic storm–widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures.

The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million from investors, including DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and Sequoia Capital.

It is unclear if the company’s valuation is at the previous $400 million level or not.

In a video interview with BoomTown on Friday (see below), the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the money would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, including onto Xiaonei, one of China’s largest social-networking sites.

As part of the investment, SoftBank–which has major Web investments all over Asia–and RockYou, the company said in a press release, “will also set up a new joint venture company that will develop widget and application products and services for use on PCs and mobile devices in the Asian market, in particular the Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese markets.”

Well, that’s a horse of a different color, what with most Web 2.0 outfits pulling in their horns of late.

Indeed, RockYou said it would also use the money to open offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit and look at making some opportunistic acquisitions, as well as adding to its advertising sales force and developing more brand and vertical channels.

The company’s NYC sales office, previously a one-man shop, is expanding, adds MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka. It hired two people since August and still has one position open and plenty of applicants, says sales boss Paul van de Kamp.

Why all the frenetic activity from RockYou, which says it had over 100 million monthly uniques with over eight billion page views from its popular third-party applications like Super Wall?

Well, a few good reasons, such as: the need to keep up with its key competitor, Slide, which raised its own huge war chest; to find new audiences away from the two top social-networking site, Facebook and MySpace, from which it gets most of its traffic; to improve its products, in order to get better ad rates; and, most of all, to weather the current econalypse in the ad sector.

While RockYou’s execs believe the ad market for widgets and social networking is on the rise in comparison to other kinds of media, it will still be a glum outlook for everyone for a while.

Tokuda and Shen talk about that, as well as the investment, in the video here, and below that is a video I did a year ago with the pair:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/rockyou-raises-17-million-for-asian-expansion-and-new-and-improved-widgets/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080902/google-polishes-off-chrome/ http://allthingsd.com/20080902/google-polishes-off-chrome/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:24:21 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=4324

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