AllThingsD » Omidyar Network

CouchSurfing Finds $7.6 Million Underneath the Cushions

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:09:04 +0000

CouchSurfing, which connects travelers online with a place to stay in someone’s home, is reinventing itself by changing its status from a nonprofit. As part of that, it has secured $7.6 million in venture capital.

Investors in the round include Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network. The San Francisco company also said its co-founder Daniel Hoffer will be taking over as President and CEO.

In order to raise the round, Hoffer explained that the company’s new legal status is listed as a B Corporation, which allows it to sell a stake in the company while also striving to have a higher transparency and social responsibility when compared to other entities.

CouchSurfing is a lot like it sounds.

It enables people to find a place to crash for free when traveling around the world, but Hoffer says it’s much more than that. He describes it as a social network that allows like-minded people to meet and learn about each other. Examples range from organizing a picnic in the park to a party at someone’s house, or a trip to Mongolia, where a farmer will give you a place to stay in a yurt and teach you the local customs.

Matt Cohler, general partner at Benchmark Capital, has joined its Board of Directors, along with Todor Tashev, investment partner at Omidyar Network, as a board observer.

CouchSurfing’s round of capital follows the $112 million investment in Airbnb, which operates in a similar space of connecting strangers online to swap housing — although it charges a fee.

Hoffer said the company’s status is changing, but the mission is not.

The capital will be used for rolling out new features that the seven-year-old non-profit with only 25 employees was not able to support before, including a much-needed mobile application.

Up until now, CouchSurfing has not charged users to find accommodations, nor has it advocated that guests pay hosts for their stay. Instead, it has primarily been making money by charging for identity verification, so that two strangers feel more comfortable with each other.

It will also be looking into new revenues streams. “It’s important for us to collect revenue in a way that’s comfortable to our community,” Hoffer said. “We are looking at premium offerings as one possibility. It’s important to us that core surfing and hosting remains free.”

Hoffer expects to hire a dozen engineers shortly to accomplish its list of objectives.

Following Airbnb’s massive round of funding, questions arose on its ability to safely connect people online as it scales after one customer had an extremely bad experience when her apartment was robbed.

Hoffer said that their service is designed so that people stay with people when they are home.

“Even our profiles are designed to facilitate meaningful connections, so when couch surfers stay with each other, they know each other in a more meaningful and personal way,” he said.

Photo Credit: C.M. Keiner.

Seesmic Raises $4 Million in Funding From Salesforce.com

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:39:29 +0000

In an interesting social enterprise move, popular social networking collaboration tool Seesmic is taking a $4 million investment from Salesforce.com, as well as from Softbank.

The San Francisco-based Seesmic has one of the top desktop and also mobile applications for monitoring a consumer’s various feeds from Twitter, Facebook and more.

So far, Seesmic has received $16 million in total funding. Other investors include Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Moving beyond a consumer app, where it has one million registered users, Seesmic has also worked closely with Salesforce.com on integrating its Chatter social enterprise network offering.

Deeper integration with Chatter and bridging more social communications with its customers is coming, said Seemsic founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur.

“It becomes an amazing internal dashboard if you are a manager,” said Le Meur in an interview with BoomTown this morning. “It has everything we have built for consumers, but internally.”

There are many such apps and software-based services being developed to inject social into the enterprise, including Yammer, Socialcast and Jive.

It will also be interesting to see if the investment is a prelude to an acquisition by Salesforce.com, to further bolster its own efforts in socializing the workplace.

Here is the official press release:

Seesmic Receives $4 Million Investment

SAN FRANCISCO–Feb 1, 2011–Seesmic, the leading maker of applications that monitor social networks across mobile devices, today announced a $4 million investment from salesforce.com, inc. and a Softbank Group company managed by Softbank Holdings Inc.

Seesmic helps companies monitor, engage and build their brands across social networks and mobile devices. The Seesmic Desktop provides a single console that lets companies view and respond, in real time, to comments being made about their brands in Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Seesmic Desktop works with Apple’s iPhone and Macintosh computers, smartphones running Google’s Android or [Microsoft] Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and on personal computers.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, and Softbank group join previous investors Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Seesmic has received a total of $16 million, including the most-recent investment round.

Seesmic and Salesforce.com have worked closely for more than six months to create a seamless integration between Seesmic Desktop and Salesforce Chatter, the industry’s first enterprise social collaboration app and platform. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter–such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds–Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organizational barriers. By integrating with Chatter, Seesmic Desktop will enable salesforce.com users to immediately see comments that customers have posted on Facebook and Twitter.

“Salesforce.com has become a valued partner as we work together to bridge external and enterprise social communication with Chatter. These investments will enable us to reach more enterprise customers” said Loïc Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic.

Early Adopter: Pothole-Reporting App SeeClickFix Raises $1.5 Million to Help You Be a Squeakier Wheel

Drake Martinet — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:00:34 +0000

It started with some simple graffiti that Ben Berkowitz wanted to get removed from a wall near his office in New Haven, Conn.

“And not the nice kind of graffiti,” he added.

Instead of knocking on the door of City Hall to get the unsightly spray paint dealt with, Berkowitz and his fellow co-founders developed SeeClickFix.

The Web and mobile app, from the company of the same name, has been aiming to help users document and report civic annoyances since its alpha launch in 2008.

Now SeeClickFix has just completed a $1.5 million Series A round of funding led by Bryce Roberts at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network also invested.

The round closed very shortly after a major upgrade of its Apple iPhone app and formalization of partnerships with San Francisco’s 311 issue reporting system, as well as Washington, D.C.’s similar service.

So issues submitted in those cities via the SeeCickFix apps will actually create a work order in the cities’ official system, rather than just being directed to the appropriate agency’s email “tip line.”

Berkowitz said the infusion of cash will allow the addition of a sales and business development staff, as well as the hiring of two developers to focus on its apps and Web presence.

The concept behind SeeClickFix is simple, if not entirely original. In fact, Berkowitz admitted, it began as an outright copy of FixMyStreet, a pothole-reporting Web app from the U.K.

“We looked at the FixMyStreet code when building SeeClickFix, and quickly realized that it was built specifically not to scale outside of the U.K.,” Berkowitz said. ”We had to rebuild the concept from scratch so it would be useful here in the U.S. and so it could scale.”

SeeClickFix took the pothole concept and added the ability to report graffiti, speeding school buses, broken infrastructure and just about any kind of civic breakdown one might imagine.

People have even used it to request beautification, other than blight removal, such as asking for a tree in their neighborhood.

Berkowitz claimed the resolution rate for issues filed with SeeClickFix is approximately 45 percent nationally, although he wouldn’t elaborate on given municipalities.

He did say that he hoped the new formal partnerships would close the loop and allow SeeClickFix to more accurately list the issues that had been fixed through municipal reporting, rather than waiting for citizens to document the fixes.

I asked about the somewhat unusual funding situation SeeClickFix is now in, having a venture investor best known for supporting micro-finance and political engagement campaigns in the developing world.

But to Berkowitz, it seemed like a pretty natural partnership.

“Citizens are our users. That’s who we serve,” he said. “Governments just benefit from it.”

Berkowitz actually had quite a bit to say about the larger motivations behind SeeClickFix, and you can watch the video interview below to hear it all from him:

[ See post to watch video ]

(Early Adopter is a new column on early-stage start-ups and ideas that will be written weekly by Drake Martinet.)

Wikipedia: "Free" as in Thanks for Your $2 Million Donation

John Paczkowski — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:44:35 +0000

August has been a lucrative month for the Wikimedia Foundation. Last week, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia received a $500,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Now it has been given a $2 million grant from the Omidyar Network, eBay (EBAY) founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic investment group. Like those donated by the Hewlett Foundation, these funds will be used to support Wikimedia’s goal of bringing free educational content to every person on the planet.

Former-eBay-exec-turned-Omidyar-partner Matt Halprin will become the ninth member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees as part of the deal.

Wikipedia: "Free" as in Thanks for Your $2 Million Donation

John Paczkowski — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:44:35 +0000

Former-eBay-exec-turned-Omidyar-partner Matt Halprin will become the ninth member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees as part of the deal.

Federated Media Will Search for New Leader Says Founder and CEO Battelle (Plus a Web Squared and Double-D Video!)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:32:20 +0000

John Battelle (pictured here), the founder, chairman and CEO of Federated Media Publishing, told his staff this morning that he will begin a search for a new top exec to take the company into its next stage of growth.

Battelle, who is apparently not leaving the San Francisco-based company, wrote that the new exec–whose title could be CEO–would report to him.

In a post on the FM site about the move called “The Start of Something, Again,” he wrote:

“It’s time to take it to the next level. FM is no longer a scrappy startup, and while its leadership team is deep and experienced, we’ve come to the conclusion that to take the company to the place we all know it can go, we need an additional leader on board. So today, I’m announcing that I’m officially launching a search for that position. It used to be you did this in private, but we live in the world of social media, and one of FM’s mores is transparency. I want to honor that value today.

So let me be clear: I am in no way leaving the business. This new leader–the title will depend on the person–will be responsible for running the business–taking all reports and managing to our plan–but he or she will be working very closely with me.”

FM, which sells online advertising for a large group of social-media sites and blogs, raised $50 million in funding a year ago from Oak Investment Partners, giving it a valuation of over $200 million.

The start-up had previously raised about $4.5 million from other investors, including the New York Times, the Omidyar Network and Panorama Capital.

FM reportedly did $40 million in revenue last year and has been cash-flow positive for many years, although the recent economic downturn has impacted its bottom line.

Here is a video interview I did last night with Battelle and others at a dinner he and Tim O’Reilly threw in San Francisco for Silicon Valley movers and shakers, related to the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit that they organize.

He did not mention the exec search at FM, though–instead he talked about the next phase of Web 2.0, which he is now calling “Web Squared.”

No kidding.

Here’s the video–which also includes CBS (CBS) Interactive exec Zander Lurie suggesting a more buxom name for D: All Things Digital:

[ See post to watch video ]

Digg Dugg: $28.7 Million

John Paczkowski — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:29:52 +0000

Digg, the social news site that’s long been rumored to be up for sale, has raised $28.7 million in a Series C venture round led by Highland Capital Partners. Existing backers Silicon Valley Bank, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network also participated.

“Today is a big day for Digg,” CEO Jay Adelson wrote on the company blog. “We’re announcing a major expansion effort–the largest we’ve undergone in our history. With a new round of funding, we’re accelerating many of the programs that we’ve been working on over the past several months, including investments in infrastructure, new feature development, international expansion and hiring all the people we need to get there.”

As noted by Adelson, Digg will put some of the funds toward the rollout of an international growth strategy in early 2009.

Not exactly the sort of announcement you’d expect from a company rumored to be the prize in a bidding war between Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG). But then maybe it’s trying to drive its asking price back up to $300 million from the more realistic $200-$225 million figure recently batted around.

Question is: is Digg worth that much?