The company announced today that Prashant Gandhi, a senior director at Cisco who led development of its own SDN efforts, will join Big Switch as vice president of product management, starting today.

It’s an important hire for Big Switch because there are few people who have as much history in the world of traditional enterprise networking who also have as much history working on efforts to remake it with software. Gandhi worked on some of Cisco’s most important mainstream switching products, like the Cisco Nexus 7000. But he also worked on Cisco’s Nexus 1000v virtual switch and its Cisco One software controller.

His move is occurring at a crucial moment. In recent weeks Cisco has been talking a lot about its interest in contributing to the OpenDaylight project, an open-source SDN consortium. Cisco has contributed code from the CiscoOne product to the project, and Gandhi would have been intimately familiar with the substance of its effort. BigSwitch is a member of OpenDaylight, too.

Big Switch, on the other hand, hails directly out of OpenFlow, another open-source networking project that was born at Stanford University.

I talked with Jason Matlof, Big Switch’s marketing VP, who described Gandhi’s move as a big vote in favor of Big Switch’s approach over Cisco’s. “No one is better qualified to make a judgement on Cisco’s contribution to OpenDaylight versus ours. He has worked on Cisco’s contribution and he is voting with his feet to come to Big Switch.”

Big Switch, you’ll recall, came out of stealth mode last year, backed by $37 million in combined funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs. Its plan is basically to turn networks into a software platform around which companies can build their own applications.

And yes, SDN technology is still new, and most of the battles now are about building foundations for future business that lie years down the road. Indeed, companies like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper still sell a great deal of old-school non-SDN networking gear, though HP in particular has been going to a lot of trouble to call attention to its shift in favor of SDN-ready gear.

Gandhi is a Cisco veteran, having joined that company first in 1999 in a technical marketing role that lasted six years. He then went on to start Rohati Networks, which Cisco snapped up during an acquisition spurt in 2009.

Big Switch didn’t make Gandhi available for an interview, but in a statement announcing his hiring, he alluded to Rohati and called Big Switch a “unique opportunity:”

“Since the successful completion of the integration of Rohati technologies within Cisco’s Data Center Group, I have been searching for a unique opportunity in the rapidly forming software-defined networking market. … Big Switch Networks is the leader in SDN with the best team, the best technology and the best customer traction, so the choice was clear. Customers are very eager to bring commercial-grade SDN solutions into their networks, and I look forward to helping this market move quickly to maturity.”

Justin Kitch — the founder and CEO of Web 1.0’s Homestead small-business site that was sold to Intuit in 2007 — is returning with Curious, a lifelong learning startup aimed at connecting teachers and students on “subjects as varied as salsa dancing, integral solving, pipe soldering, jewelry making and knife sharpening.”

A little eclectic, perhaps, but the new company has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, as well as prominent individual investors such as Bill Campbell.

That amount is a lot, but is part of a new rush to fund a range of educational startups of all kinds. Most recently, Lynda.com raised $103 million in January for its popular software, creative and business video courses. Other high-profile and well-funded MOOC — massive online open course — providers include Udacity and Coursera.

Curious will offer short-format video-based interactive lessons, noting that it currently has about 500 of them collected from a private beta phase, with 100 teachers and 10,000 learners in 140 countries.

In a post on the new effort, Kitch wrote: “To be clear, the earth would still be rotating on its axis without our launch today. But it would be without one little new idea that just might turn into something big.”

Here’s the official press release:

CURIOUS LAUNCHES NEW MARKETPLACE TO TEACH OR LEARN ANYTHING ONLINE

Platform Designed for Lifelong Learning Gives Teachers Tools to Easily Build, Market and Monetize Content

Already More than 500 Interactive Video-Based Lessons on Everything from Brewing Beer and Creating Excel Spreadsheets to Learning Conversational French

May 1, 2013 — Menlo Park, CA – Curious.com, Inc., today unveiled a new marketplace for lifelong learning where students and teachers can connect around subjects as varied as salsa dancing, integral solving, pipe soldering, jewelry making and knife sharpening. The company debuts as the home to hundreds of short, engaging video-based lessons for consumers interested in learning about anything, anytime. Founded by former Homestead CEO and founder and Intuit executive, Justin Kitch, Curious also provides teachers with the tools to market, share and monetize their lessons as well as interact with their students. The company has received $7.5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, individual investors Bill Campbell and Jessie Rogers, and a personal investment from Mr. Kitch.

“No matter what you want to learn, there is a great teacher somewhere in the world who could teach you. However, those teachers often don’t have the tools or the marketing expertise to teach online. The internet hasn’t caught up to them yet, which means that people trying to learn on the web are too often stuck wading through piles of low quality content and are then underwhelmed with the static way content is delivered,” said Mr. Kitch. “We believe online learning needs to be more fun and digestible for the lifelong learner in all of us, and easier and more lucrative for the world’s best teachers. Curious was designed from the ground up with those two objectives in mind.”

Curious Turns Passionate Teachers into Entrepreneurs with Free, Easy-to-Use Tools

With Curious, teachers don’t have to take out loans, deplete their savings or put their professional lives on hold trying to start a web business from scratch. At no cost, Curious offers teachers the Curious Lesson Builder which allows them to build, publish and market informative, entertaining lessons to attract followers and turn their passion into profits by earning supplemental income. Curious also links related lessons, tracks how many views a lesson has received and enables learners to submit projects and create “Curious Cards” to share their achievements and interact with teachers. Teachers can work with students on a highly personal level to answer questions, review projects and provide feedback.

“With Curious, we’re able to reach a whole new audience — and on a much bigger scale,” said Curious teacher Jennifer and Kitty O’Neil. “The Curious Lesson Builder makes presenting our videos easy. Curious takes care of everything else, and we can focus on what we do best, teaching. Now that we’ve connected with Curious, we’re taking our business to a whole new level.”

“I was once asked at a job interview what inspired me as a teacher and I said it was helping people to achieve something they previously thought beyond their ability,” added Curious teacher Guy Badger. “Curious helps show people that they really can accomplish more than they realize and, with the right teacher, learning can not only be fun, but can develop confidence and might just assist someone in landing that dream job.”

Bite-Size Lessons Optimizes Anytime, Anywhere Learning

Through the Curious Lesson Player, Curious allows learners to engage on their own time. Whether they have 10 minutes or several hours, they can watch short-format videos and interact with teachers and the Curious community through a host of multimedia features to discover something new, improve a skill, or follow a passion. No scheduling means students can take lessons at their convenience, stop lessons whenever they want, post questions as they arise, and share projects in-process or upon completion. Curious currently houses more than 500 lessons, adding more each day. Thanks to overwhelming interest during its private beta phase, the Curious community is already comprised of more than 100 professional teachers and over 10,000 learners from 140 countries who share perspectives, knowledge, and experiences at launch.

Curious includes free lessons as well as lessons that cost a few dollars. The company has introduced its micropayment system, Curious Coins, to make it easy for learners to securely purchase premium lessons whenever they want without repeatedly using their credit cards for nominal transactions. To celebrate its launch, Curious will offer new learners $20 of free Coins. Because most premium lessons cost only a dollar or two, learners have ample opportunity to explore all that Curious has to offer.

Founders Reunite and Secure Funding, This Time to Transform Online Learning

Curious rejoins the leaders of Homestead, which became the world’s largest small business website platform before being acquired by Intuit. Mr. Kitch, Thai Bui, (Homestead co-founder and CTO; Curious CTO), and John Tokash (Homestead Director of software development; Curious co-founder and Head of Engineering) applied their key learnings from growing Homestead, helping businesses quickly and easily build excellent, user-friendly websites, to Curious. The Curious founders have since directed their vision, energy and talents to develop an unparalleled interface and learning community that teachers and students will embrace. Similar to Homestead, Curious revolves around empowering the “little guy” with all the tools and marketplace presence of larger competitors to bring the best content to the largest audience.

“Justin, Thai and John wanted to create a home for learning where consumers make every second matter,” said Redpoint Ventures general partner and lead investor, Tim Haley. “As industry veterans, these guys know how to build compelling consumer products and services. Curious already offers a wide-range of outstanding content, an array of expert teachers from around the world, and a highly engaged user community — all from its beta period. The result is that anyone who comes to Curious on Day One will find compelling lessons on the topics they want and they’ll fall in love.”

To start teaching and learning now, please visit www.curious.com.

So, how about this coincidence: Larry Fitzgibbon, Joe Perez and Steven Kydd have launched a new company together. It’s called Tastemade, and it’s another YouTube-centric programming network that produces some of its own clips and bundles other video-makers’ stuff, as well.

A click to the site or its YouTube channel will spell out what these guys are up to. But in case you can’t or won’t: It’s Machinima for food. Which means it’s also not a coincidence that early Machinima backer Redpoint Ventures has led a $5.3 million series A round this time around.

One thing that differentiates Tastemade from some other YouTube networks is that it has built its own 7,000-square-foot kitchen/studio in Santa Monica. Another is that the company assumes that it will help generate revenue for some of its content partners by brokering things like book deals, sponsorships or TV shows; if that happens, it plans on keeping a piece of those deals.

An obvious challenge here is that YouTube does not suffer a shortage of food videos, many of which are very good. And even the ones that aren’t still provide utility and/or entertainment. The notion that Tastemade can aggregate many of them under its own brand is presumably part of the pitch here, but if that was easy to do, somebody would have already done it.

Speaking of easy:

People familiar with CEO Steve Hansen’s plans say he intends to lay off about 50 of the company’s 240 employees, and will end up hiring another 25 people in the coming months.

The company also plans on shifting its focus away from its blog advertising network business, and to concentrate on a core group of music and pop-culture sites it owns, including Celebuzz, Idolator, and Spin, the magazine it bought last year and turned into a digital-only property.

Earlier this year, the company raised a new $15 million round from existing investors, including Redpoint Ventures and Focus Ventures.

Hansen, a digital veteran whose resume includes GeoCities and Yahoo, was hired as BuzzMedia’s president last summer; he was elevated to the top job amid chatter that the company had missed sales targets. In a letter to the staff he has distributed this morning, Hansen describes the firings and hirings as a “rebalancing of existing skill sets and the addition of new ones … There is a lot that is right at Buzz, but much that still needs to change.”

Some of the changes may not come as a surprise to BuzzMedia’s staff; other Web publishers say they’ve been seeing BuzzMedia resumes circulate in the last few months.

Here’s the full memo:

Note to The Company

When first joining BuzzMedia, I told you that while successful, the company needed to evolve in order to achieve it’s true potential. Today we will be making a number of difficult, yet necessary organizational changes across all departments and levels of the company in order to achieve that goal.

Transformation sometimes requires making very hard decisions. Make no mistake about it, today will be difficult for all of us but our success is dependent upon greater focus on our audience, evolving our portfolio of brands, all supported by powerful technology and data. We need to align the organization around those objectives and today is a first step, albeit a very hard one.

Proper organizational alignment requires a rebalancing of existing skill sets and the addition of new ones that focus on those key areas that will help us keep pace and grow stronger within our industry. Embarking on that path necessitates a number of painful personnel reductions that will directly or indirectly impact all of us. The fact that so many friends and colleagues will be effected by what is happening today is not a referendum on them as contributors. On the contrary, today we will be saying goodbye to a group of people that have shown great passion, commitment and sacrifice for BuzzMedia. We owe these individuals a debt of gratitude for they were an important part of what Buzz is today and I’d like to thank them all.

These changes are not made lightly. Over the past several months I’ve met with many of you to better understand how the company works. I’ve taken great pains to personally review structure, process, priorities and people. There is a lot that is right at Buzz, but much that still needs to change. Success in our world will come down to having the right people focused on the right tasks and providing them with the resources they need to succeed.

While difficult in the short term, the changes being made today will make us a healthier company in the long run.

In 2013 we really need to focus on doing three things very well:

• Drive higher level of audience and audience engagement on our owned and operated sites
• Provide better solutions for our advertising partners and users
• Create a technology/publishing/knowledge platform that will support all of our sites

Successfully achieving these goals will allow us to legitimately lay claim to being a market leader in the digital publishing world. That is my goal for 2013. The world that we live in is getting more competitive by the day and doing a much better job for our audience, advertisers and editors is essential.

Although today is a difficult but necessary step in the evolution of our company. we make these changes from a position of market leadership, strong financial support and historical revenue momentum. And because we move forward from this position of strength, we can use these challenging times to become even better.

I think at a time like this it’s particularly important to reaffirm to you my commitment to transparency, accountability and high standards — both internally, with our partners and throughout our industry. Our reputation and how we treat each other is just as important to me as our financial success. I want each and every one of us to be proud of what we’re builing here — and how we’re doing it.

Affected employees will be notified mid-day today. I have also scheduled a company wide call for Friday at 10:30AM PST. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have questions.

From everyone on the executive team, I wish you all the best moving forward.

Steve

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.

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 site was initially a peer-to-peer swapping service, where parents listed and shipped boxes of clothing to each other, but now ThredUp has taken over processing and distributing all the used clothes itself.

Even though dealing with inventory is more expensive and difficult, customers are willing to pay for an experience that’s more reliable, said ThredUp CEO James Reinhart.

“The expectations in e-commerce are so much higher these days,” Reinhart explained. That’s the same tune we’ve heard from some ThredUp competitors, like Twice.

Some 7,000 new customers now join ThredUp per month, with a 46 percent retention rate, Reinhart said.

And now that things have clicked, investors have thrown down some more funding for the company to expand into clothing for juniors and adults and to open additional distribution centers.

The company has raised $14.5 million in Series C funding led by Highland Capital Partners and including previous investors Trinity Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, for a grand total of more than $23 million raised.

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.

The round includes a venture portion led by Redpoint Ventures, and $15 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane

Alongside the funding, Zendesk is launching a complete rewrite of its service, as well as a new app platform.

Given its familiarity with customer service pitfalls, Zendesk is trying to avoid alienating users who don’t like the change. The company promises to keep its old version running indefinitely and give users the option to switch back and forth, said CEO Mikkel Svane in an interview Tuesday.

Some 20,000 companies use Zendesk for customer service, and the company plans to apply at least part of its new funding to expanding around the world.

Svane mentioned that it took him less than a week to land those tens of millions in funding. Other investors included Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Why were investors so raring to go? Svane said they had heard about Zendesk increasing its monthly recurring revenue by 500 percent since its last funding round, in November 2010.

Also, this notion of “enterprise 2.0″ is pretty hot right now. Where people used to love talking about “the consumerization of enterprise” because consumer was sexy, now the emphasis seems to be more on the enterprise part.

I asked Svane whether he thought investors were flocking to enterprise because they liked the sound of paying customers, after all the problems ad-supported consumer tech businesses have been having as they try to enter the public markets.

Svane laughed it off and said that was just a storyline reporters like to tell. (I told him I’d bet that if he were Aaron Levie from Box, he would have said “Absolutely,” and run with it — and probably gotten some IPO innuendo in there, while he was at it.)

But no, Svane is a straight shooter, and an incredibly amiable one. See more in our video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120912/enterprise-is-so-hot-right-now-zendesk-raises-60m-for-customer-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120821/gokos-html5-game-portal-goes-back-to-beta-after-failed-launch/ http://allthingsd.com/20120821/gokos-html5-game-portal-goes-back-to-beta-after-failed-launch/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:30:32 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=243451 After a splashy launch last week, Goko has decided to put its HTML5 game platform back into beta, after experiencing multiple problems.

By doing so, it will be even harder for the start-up to convince developers that HTML5 is indeed ready for large-scale projects.

In an apology on its site, the company explained: “As we moved out of beta and into the live world, we learned that we had problems with our backend and weren’t able to scale fast enough to support the load. As a result, we experienced numerous problems and created a really bad experience for the fans trying to access our games or even get on our website.”

As part of last week’s launch, Goko attempted to demonstrate how well its HTML5 platform worked by releasing the Dominion card game across Facebook, Google+, Goko.com, Android and iOS simultaneously. All of those games are now back in beta for further testing, which won’t help to change popular opinion about the technology.

Goko did not provide a timeline for repairs.

“We will go live again when it’s ready,” the statement said. “We’d love to say that will happen tomorrow or next week, but that’s not the right way to proceed.”

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is backed by $8 million from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120821/gokos-html5-game-portal-goes-back-to-beta-after-failed-launch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120816/in-the-war-between-apps-vs-html5-goko-trying-to-make-cross-platform-gaming-work/ http://allthingsd.com/20120816/in-the-war-between-apps-vs-html5-goko-trying-to-make-cross-platform-gaming-work/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:30:26 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=241922 Today, Goko is unveiling its platform that helps developers build cross-platform games using HTML5, the controversial technology that many say isn’t ready for primetime.

But, contrary to popular opinion, Goko argues that it is possible — and has games to prove it.

The reason why the subject is worth debating at all is because HTML5 offers one major advantage over other technologies, like Flash: It allows developers to create one version of a game that can run across multiple platforms, including Facebook, the Web and mobile.

Not only does that save developers money, it also lets consumers play the same version of the game on whatever device they choose.

As a demonstration of its platform’s capabilities, Goko is releasing Dominion — a real-world card game with a huge following — across multiple digital platforms.

It goes live today on Facebook, Google+, Goko.com, Android and iOS.

Goko is also launching a few games exclusively on its own Web site, including Catan World, based on the popular board game, Settlers of Catan; Forbidden City, a tile-placing digital game; War Factory, a puzzle and war strategy mashup; and All the King’s Men, a tower defense game.

The problems with HTML5 have been well documented. For example, in June, Wooga, a social game developer in Germany, said it was no longer developing games in HTML5, after encountering a number of problems, including long load times, lack of sound and reliance on Internet connection.

Ted Griggs, Goko’s CEO, acknowledges that there are some limitations to the technology, but for most card and board games, it’s good enough today.

To prove that its platform is up to the task, Goko secured licensing deals with 150 well-known board and card games.

Starting today, the company’s platform will also be available to developers looking for help creating, distributing and monetizing games across multiple platforms.

As part of the launch, the company is announcing that it has raised $8 million in a first round of founding from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners.

Previously, Griggs and Goko’s other founder, Kevin Binkley, started Electric Gravity, which was acquired by Microsoft and renamed MSN Gaming Zone. Other members of the team are from OpenFeint (now Gree), Digital Chocolate, Playdom and Zynga.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120816/in-the-war-between-apps-vs-html5-goko-trying-to-make-cross-platform-gaming-work/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120807/freemonee-grabs-34-million-to-compete-in-the-digital-coupon-craze/ http://allthingsd.com/20120807/freemonee-grabs-34-million-to-compete-in-the-digital-coupon-craze/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:00:46 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=238432 FreeMonee Network has raised $34 million to join one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: Digital couponing.

The three-year-old company in San Mateo, Calif., follows other big-money rounds, including WhaleShark raising $150 million, CouponCabin raising $54 million and Coupons.com raising $30 million.

Who knew it was so expensive to save money?

FreeMonee’s round was led by Charles E. Ryan, current chairman of UFG Asset Management and former chief country officer and CEO of Deutsche Bank Group in Russia. Returning investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Opus Capital Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures, also participated.

To date, the company has raised $45 million in total.

FreeMonee falls somewhere in between a Groupon and a rewards program, like the ones offered by American Express.

The first time I wrote about FreeMonee, I explained: “The idea piggybacks on concepts that have been in existence for years. Today, credit card companies reward customers with points when they visit certain hotels or rental car companies, so why can’t that be applied on a much wider basis? Why can’t your credit card company track how much you’ve spent at particular retailers, and calculate what rewards you may qualify for?”

The offers don’t need to be purchased in advance or printed out. Consumers automatically get the discount when they use the same credit card that received the offer. The offers can appear in a number of formats, from a Web site to an email or a line item within their bank statement.

While there are a dozen or so companies competing in this general card-linked offer space, FreeMonee has another spin on the concept, too.

They aren’t actually offering coupons, but are handing out gifts. Merchants, retailers and restaurants sign up with FreeMonee to grant consumers $5 or $10, in the hope that they will come into the store and spend much more. Once the purchase is made, a credit appears on the consumer’s card within three to 14 days. Cardholders can’t directly enroll in the program, but must access promotions through their financial institution. By this definition, the company is competing with Wrapp, a social gifting company.

The massive funding round will go toward hiring and to build out the support teams in charge of managing bank deployments.

Here’s the full release:

 

FREEMONEE NETWORK RAISES $34 MILLION,

MORE THAN THREE TIMES ITS SERIES A ROUND

Fueled by Rapid Expansion with Top Retailers and U.S. Card Issuers,

FreeMonee is Driving Marketing Spend Shift—Changing the Economics of Advertising

SAN MATEO, CALIF. – August 7, 2012 – FreeMonee Network, the world’s first and only provider of consumer gift incentives, today announced $34 million in investment funding led by Charles E. Ryan, current Chairman of UFG Asset Management and former Chief Country Officer and CEO of Deutsche Bank Group in Russia. Returning investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Opus Capital Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures also participated. This round is more than triple the initial $11 million 2010 Series A round and brings the company’s total raise to $45 million. The new funding will fuel FreeMonee’s rapid expansion.

“FreeMonee Gifts are a new class of consumer incentive that will change the economics of advertising forever, marking the death of coupons,” said Gadi Maier, CEO, president and co-founder of FreeMonee. “The FreeMonee promise may seem too good to be true—and our early results extend that perception, with sales lift of 400–700 percent and return on ad spend of 500–900 percent. These amazing results far surpass the performance of existing marketing products, so demand is exceeding our early expectations. The new funds will help us to expand FreeMonee to even more retailers and broaden programs with top U.S. banks and credit card issuers.”

FreeMonee’s product addresses three key challenges facing the market today: retail marketers struggle to drive growth without resorting to brand-eroding coupons or discounts; consumers labor through floods of offers and deals; and financial institutions seek new products to positively engage customers. FreeMonee Gifts are unique consumer incentives that meet these challenges head-on and deliver clear benefits to each group:

1) Retailers generate profitable new sales at scale.
2) Consumers receive relevant and irresistible incentives.
3) Card issuers engage customers while increasing card usage.

FreeMonee Gifts link directly to a consumer’s credit or debit card, delivering cash gifts that can be spent on any purchase at designated stores or restaurants. Unlike a coupon, the consumer is free to spend any amount they want—there are no conditions.

To deliver a no-strings-attached incentive to consumers, that is profitable for retailers, is extremely difficult. FreeMonee invested two years in developing a proprietary Gift Underwriting Engine that matches the right gift, to the right consumer, at the right amount. The results are response rates that are 10–50 times that of traditional promotions or coupons and profitable new sales for merchants.

“FreeMonee is attractive because it is a simple, powerful idea that will change how marketers reach customers. The company should be the beneficiary when marketers shift their ad spend from less efficient vehicles to the FreeMonee approach,” said lead investor Charles E. Ryan. “This is the first really big idea to come along in the retail marketing space in a long time, and I believe it will change the game. I was excited to lead this round, because I want to be part of the sea change in advertising that FreeMonee will create.”

Of the $300 billion merchants spend annually on promotions and direct marketing initiatives, much is wasted because it doesn’t shift consumer behavior. Offers, even in their newest forms, are not motivating consumers to act in a substantially different way. The FreeMonee Gift is proven to be different. Consumers love the simplicity and freedom offered by a FreeMonee Gift and go out of their way to visit the store or restaurant and use that gift before it expires. As a result, more of the dollars spent by marketers go directly into the hands of consumers, creating a far more effective and efficient way for merchants to generate incremental sales.

Since its November 2011 consumer launch, FreeMonee is experiencing rapid growth. FreeMonee currently delivers gifts through partnerships with four of the top eight banks and card issuers, and is in development with several others. Fueled by unprecedented initial results, FreeMonee now delivers FreeMonee Gifts to millions of customers each week from a variety of merchants across 30 categories.

About FreeMonee Network

FreeMonee is changing the economics of advertising by enabling stores and restaurants to attract customers on demand using FreeMonee Gifts. With its unique new consumer incentive, FreeMonee delivers gifts of money directly to cardholders of the largest financial institutions. Customized to precisely match consumer interest, gifts allow consumers to purchase anything they want at designated stores or restaurants—no strings attached. The gifts are made possible by FreeMonee’s proprietary Gift Underwriting Engine, which accurately determines the right gift to ensure the highest level of consumer interest and the best return on ad spend for a merchant. Unlike traditional coupons or offers, FreeMonee Gifts feel like a gift card from a friend—money to spend at places consumers like. For retail marketers, FreeMonee Gifts enable brands to attract large volumes of profitable, incremental customer visits—without discounting. For banks and credit card companies, FreeMonee provides the opportunity to positively engage customers and strengthen loyalty.

Founded in 2009 and located in San Mateo, California, FreeMonee is led by former executives of Google, Visa, Oracle, Cisco, Procter & Gamble and Coca- Cola. To date, FreeMonee has raised $45 million in funding with investments from Charles E. Ryan, Opus Capital Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, among others. Through continued partnerships with the top U.S. financial institutions, the company expects 50 million households to have access to FreeMonee Gifts in 2012. For more information, please visit www.freemonee.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120807/freemonee-grabs-34-million-to-compete-in-the-digital-coupon-craze/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/20120524/following-layoffs-betterworks-shuts-down-its-product/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/following-layoffs-betterworks-shuts-down-its-product/#comments Fri, 25 May 2012 00:59:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=212382 BetterWorks, the employee rewards start-up used by companies like Hulu, Tesla and Docstoc, is shutting down its site at the end of the month. The bad news from the Redpoint Ventures-backed start-up comes on the heels of significant layoffs last week. However, a spokeswoman said that the company itself is not shutting down entirely, but rather trying to use its remaining team and capital to reformulate itself.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/following-layoffs-betterworks-shuts-down-its-product/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120521/yep-googles-in-the-content-business-and-now-its-fessing-up-to-its-machinima-investment/ http://allthingsd.com/20120521/yep-googles-in-the-content-business-and-now-its-fessing-up-to-its-machinima-investment/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 22:18:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=210761 Like we told you earlier this month: Google has invested in Machinima, one of the most popular networks/channels on Google’s YouTube. Google — that’s Google Inc., not Google Ventures — now confirms that it led the $35 million round, along with previous investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. My sources previously told me the deal would value Machinima at around $190 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120521/yep-googles-in-the-content-business-and-now-its-fessing-up-to-its-machinima-investment/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120415/confirmed-redpoint-leads-40m-funding-round-for-path/ http://allthingsd.com/20120415/confirmed-redpoint-leads-40m-funding-round-for-path/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:23:39 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=196583 Path, the mobile social networking start-up, is planning to announce it has raised Series B funding as early as tomorrow, according to sources.

Redpoint Ventures led the $40 million round, which values Path at $250 million.

Path CEO Dave Morin

That Path was fundraising was not a secret, and Business Insider had already reported that Redpoint would lead the round.

Path CEO Dave Morin said in February that the app had two million registered users. It was rejuvenated after a successful redesign late last year to become a personal journaling app, with ways to share travel, sleep, photos, locations and workouts through a Nike partnership.

Path is often mentioned as a buyout target, but Instagram is the app Facebook scooped up for $1 billion last week. Instagram, which is all about sharing photos, closed a $50 million round of funding just before it got bought that valued it at $500 million.

Path’s last funding was $8.65 million from $8.65 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and Digital Garage Japan at the beginning of 2011.

Morin did not reply to requests for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120415/confirmed-redpoint-leads-40m-funding-round-for-path/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120224/caterina-fake-fast-growth-for-a-social-app-is-a-very-bad-thing/ http://allthingsd.com/20120224/caterina-fake-fast-growth-for-a-social-app-is-a-very-bad-thing/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:00:12 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=177742 Social Web entrepreneurs with successful careers just can’t seem to find their way to a happy and boring retirement. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake just announced Pinwheel, joining Ev Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter and now Obvious, Joshua Schachter of Delicious and now Jig, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and now Delicious, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning of Napster and now Airtime, among others, back at the drawing board.

Sure, the new start-ups from these people have a long way to go before achieving the impact of their predecessors, and fresh new innovators like Pinterest and Voxer are popping up all the time. But the good thing is that the repeat entrepreneurs keep evolving their ideas about how people interact, share and express themselves online.

Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble

If you get her started, as I did yesterday, in a conversation at Pinwheel’s office in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, Caterina Fake sounds almost like a professor of social networking philosophy.

One particularly interesting theory of Fake’s is about how an online community should grow in its early days. She thinks the answer is very clear: Slowly.

That’s why Pinwheel, a tiny service that helps users create and find geotagged notes, already raised $9.5 million in funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks and others.

The funding is a way for Fake to beat back elevated expectations of how fast Pinwheel should grow, given her prior success, she said.

“My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” she said. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.”

The worst thing a social network can do is force growth, she said, pointing to Google’s work on Google+.

She pulled up a growth chart depicting the time it took for various services to reach 50 million users. Google+ took a stunning 88 days, versus 1,046 days for MySpace, for instance (shown here, chart credit goes to Leon Håland).

Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, Fake argued.

“Being an incumbent, you can get seduced on this,” she said, pointing at the steep line for Google+. “It’s like getting high on your own supply.”

Fake added emphatically that the worst thing a start-up social network can do is to buy advertising to attract users. Growth should happen because users find value in a site, and then get their friends to join, she said.

And if users don’t come? Start-ups should try harder to make a better product.

That’s why Pinwheel plans to only slowly let in the tens of thousands of people on its email list, Fake said. And it’s why Pinwheel will ask users to write original notes, rather than filling the many empty places on its map with existing location-based content from around the Web. “We’re not going to suddenly metastasize by adding Wikipedia content,” Fake said.

Of course, 10 million dollars only gives Fake a window of time; there’s no guarantee that location-based storytelling will be a hit, or that Pinwheel will be the one to do it right.

If Pinwheel does end up working out, what it does may well change significantly, Fake admitted. Her advice to herself, and others: “You shouldn’t get attached to a feature set. You should get attached to a problem you’re solving.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120224/caterina-fake-fast-growth-for-a-social-app-is-a-very-bad-thing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120124/twitter-while-you-watch-tv-bluefin-labs-is-watching/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/twitter-while-you-watch-tv-bluefin-labs-is-watching/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:00:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=166690 Are you the kind of person who uses Twitter or Facebook while you watch TV — to comment on the TV show you’re watching while you use Twitter or Facebook?

Turns out there are lots of us, and we’re not just engaged in a new, postmodern behavior. We’re building valuable data sets for marketers, who would like to know what we’re saying and what we’re watching, and what that means.

Eventually they’ll use that data to show us more ads. And perhaps we’ll comment about those, too.

That is the theory, at least, behind a slew of “second screen” start-ups. And Bluefin Labs, one of the most prominent ones, has just raised another $12 million in a B round led by Time Warner’s investment arm and SoftBank Capital. Earlier investors, who have poured in some $8 million, like Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures, have re-upped.

Bluefin has a fancy-pants pedigree — it uses technology hatched at the MIT Media Lab — but the idea is quite simple. It harvests comments we leave on social networks — primarily on Twitter, and to a lesser degree via Facebook, where more of the data is locked up — and analyzes it to see what we’re saying, and when.

That stuff can be used to create cool infographics like the one on the right, about last Sunday’s Giants-49ers game. But TV networks like CBS, and ad guys like Starcom MediaVest, want the data for themselves, for obvious reasons.

Given that Facebook and Twitter are deep in the ad business themselves, it will be interesting to see what kind of access they provide to the Bluefins of the world down the line. If this gets really big, it seems like they’d want a very active role.

And while we’re on that subject, we should note that Bluefin CEO Deb Roy says his company isn’t using Google+ data yet. Which is interesting, given all of those big user numbers.

Down the road, Roy says Bluefin could expand his business in different directions. He could measure other data points that tell us about the way people are watching TV: What are people saying on blogs? What are they saying when they reach call centers? And he could also measure other mass mediums. But for now, TV will keep him busy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/twitter-while-you-watch-tv-bluefin-labs-is-watching/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120120/the-mad-men-years-are-giving-way-to-the-math-men-era/ http://allthingsd.com/20120120/the-mad-men-years-are-giving-way-to-the-math-men-era/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:50:28 +0000 Chris Moore http://allthingsd.com/?p=166001

“Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing … It’s okay. You are okay.”

Don Draper, “Mad Men,” Season 1, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

I wonder what Don Draper would think today when the 23-year-old digital media buying whiz quips back, “Maybe, but let’s load it up into the system, along with 5,000 other versions of copy, and measure how many Facebook ‘Likes’ it drives within our target demo.”

I love the “Mad Men” version of the ad business. The storytelling. The simplicity. The glasses of scotch at 10 am. But these days in digital, it feels like the Math Men media buyers (with their terabytes of data) are taking over for the Mad Men creatives. It may not make for great TV drama, but they’ve got the performance data to prove that it’s their turn in the driver’s seat.

For years, digital ads were bought and sold by young media buyers from ad agencies and smooth salesmen from online publishers and networks, sealed over the modern version of the “three-martini lunch.” But with the steady advancement in online advertising technology over the last ten years, the geeks — I mean the Math Men — have gained the upper hand in determining how to spend these digital marketing dollars. Today, ad buying and selling is automated across nearly every digital channel, driven by complex algorithms crunching terabytes of data, all employed to meet rigorous ROI objectives — typically measured by new customer acquisition, profit margin, or revenues.

It all started in search, where Overture introduced (and Google perfected) a keyword ad marketplace for search pages. We take that marketer proposition for granted now, but it was heretical at the time — only pay us when a user clicks on your ad (versus every time we show your ad), and you decide how much to pay for that click (versus the same price for every advertiser). And sophisticated marketers took full advantage by leveraging technology platforms from Math Men companies like Efficient Frontier to maximize the efficiency of their search ad spend across millions of keywords, bids and text ad copy.

Since then, several major advances in advertising technology have further enabled the Math Men:

• Six years ago, Right Media introduced the first ad exchange for display ads, enabling the Math Men and their algorithms to buy and sell banner ads and skyscrapers across the Web. Google subsequently perfected the display exchange via their DoubleClick acquisition as well.
• Three years ago, Blue Kai introduced the first ad targeting-data marketplace, enabling the Math Men to leverage anonymous audience targeting data to further enhance marketers’ campaign performance.
• A year ago, Facebook launched its own ad platform API to enable Math Men and their algorithms to bid for Facebook ads based on user attributes. It seems likely that Facebook will eventually extend its monetization platform to third-party publishers, similar to what Google did with AdSense, as Facebook already has a strong distribution foothold via Facebook Connect.

It feels like we are witnessing the tipping point in digital media buying. Measured by dollars or by impressions, greater than 50 percent of online advertising is bought via APIs today (granted, most of this is still search). In a few years, I believe that 90 percent of all digital ad impressions, and more than 75 percent of digital ad dollars, will be bought and sold programmatically.

As we witnessed with search marketing, once a) marketers get a taste of the increased spend efficiency offered by these emerging platforms, and b) these platforms (and the associated marketer tools) become sufficiently easy to use, the dollars will flow, and quickly. The Math Men at Efficient Frontier are leveraging these display, data and social platforms to deliver superior ad spend performance for marketers across all digital channels today. It’s no longer just about search.

And the Mad Men are taking note. In the last few years, the ad agency holding companies have rolled out their own technology-driven digital ad “trading desks” to help their clients take advantage of these ad trading platforms. I wonder if they’ve replaced the scotch in the mini bars with the Math Men’s drink of choice, Red Bull.

Chris Moore is a partner with Redpoint Ventures and has been enabling the digital Math Men with investments in Efficient Frontier, Right Media, Blue Kai, Auditude, Inadco, Extole, Intent Media and eBureau. Follow him on Twitter @Redpointvc and @Moorski.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120120/the-mad-men-years-are-giving-way-to-the-math-men-era/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20111216/adobe-adds-another-400-million-to-its-ad-business-shopping-spree/ http://allthingsd.com/20111216/adobe-adds-another-400-million-to-its-ad-business-shopping-spree/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:35:31 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=154575 Last month, Adobe said it was buying search marketing firm Efficient Frontier, but didn’t disclose a purchase price. Yesterday, it came clean: The deal will end up costing around $400 million.

That brings the price tag for Adobe’s two-year ad business shopping spree to $2.4 billion. The bulk of that comes from Adobe’s 2009 acquisition of Omniture for $1.8 billion; it has also recently picked up Auditude and Demdex.

Adobe’s appetite for ad technology has been good news for a handful of investors who have been betting on the sector. In the case of Efficient Frontier, the deal is a big win for Mitsui & Co., Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures, who put less than $15 million into the start-up.

But while lots of VC cash has gone into ad tech in the past few years, there haven’t been a ton of big exits.

Beyond Adobe, the only other active buyer has been Google. And industry executives say that some ad tech firms looking for more funding are having trouble getting the dollars they want.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111216/adobe-adds-another-400-million-to-its-ad-business-shopping-spree/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111103/first-class-ticket-time-social-travel-start-up-gogobot-raises-15-million-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20111103/first-class-ticket-time-social-travel-start-up-gogobot-raises-15-million-in-funding/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:00:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=139916

Gogobot, the social travel site, said it has raised $15 million in a funding round led by Redpoint Ventures.

Sources said the valuation for the Silicon Valley start-up was around $70 million.

Gogobot said it would use the funds to expand its business. Battery Ventures and CrunchFund also participated in the financing round. Currently, the company’s revenue is mostly tied to lead generation based on its user recommendations.

“We really think we have a lot of momentum in the space and we want to keeping pressing forward in pushing social travel,” said Gogobot CEO and co-founder Travis Katz. “Travelers want to share their experiences and it is a trend that is only getting larger.”

To compete with rivals such as TripAdvisor, Gogobot recently released a number of new features, such as an Apple iPhone app and Trip Portfolio, a scrapbook experience via collections about different destinations.

The company, which launched late last year, has raised $4 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and angel investors Chris DeWolfe, Keith Rabois and Oren Ze’ev.

Here is a video interview I did with Katz last year, talking about the site, followed by the official press release:

Gogobot Announces $15 Million in Funding Led by Redpoint Ventures

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (November 3, 2011) – Gogobot (www.Gogobot.com), the world’s largest social travel site, announced today that it has completed a $15 million round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures. Gogobot will use this new financing to expand its global footprint through marketing, partnerships, and outreach.

Gogobot transforms how we explore new places and capture and share our travel experiences by allowing users to harness the power of their social networks to exchange trusted travel advice and share trip plans and rich visual travel memories. This announcement comes on the heels of the launch of Gogobot’s mobile app available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which is currently a Top 10 Travel App in 31 countries around the world.

“With its unique offering and seasoned management team, Gogobot is the industry leader in the social travel space. We believe with its vision and timely and unique service, Gogobot is poised for exceptional growth,” said Satish Dharmaraj, general partner of Redpoint Ventures.

Gogobot users can browse reviews from friends as well as share their photos, reviews and other details about the places they stayed, dined, and traveled on the Gogobot site. Gogobot automatically packages these elements into magazine-style albums, allowing friends to experience your travels with you in real time, see a map of where you were when you caught that sunset, or even make a reservation at the hotel where you stayed.

“Travel is all about discovering new experiences and sharing them with your friends and family,” said Travis Katz, Gogobot co-founder and CEO. “With this new funding, Gogobot aims to continue to grow and pave the way for a new era of travel — harnessing social media to provide users with trusted, insightful, and enriching reviews at the tip of your finger.”

Battery Ventures and CrunchFund also participated in the financing round.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111103/first-class-ticket-time-social-travel-start-up-gogobot-raises-15-million-in-funding/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111019/meet-qwilt-creator-of-smart-video-caching-gear-and-new-member-of-the-flash-madness-club/ http://allthingsd.com/20111019/meet-qwilt-creator-of-smart-video-caching-gear-and-new-member-of-the-flash-madness-club/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:59:23 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=134475 Some interviews go faster than others, especially when I can figure out what a company does before they tell me what they’re about. It was like that with Qwilt, a video network infrastructure start-up that is coming out of stealth mode today.

I was on the phone with its two founders: Alon Maor, CEO; and Dan Sahar, VP of marketing. They had just started telling me about how they plan to sell network appliances that network operators — like, say, Comcast or Time Warner or Verizon — might put on their network in order to help them meet the growing demand for video content. The aim, Maor told me, is to get the most popular content as close as you can to the customer.

The first thing that popped into my mind was creating an appliance that sits on the network; close to, but not in the customer’s house. Maybe in the nearest network hub or central office. It turns out I was right. Then I wondered aloud what Qwilt might be using as storage technology. Could it be, maybe … flash memory? The chips that have so revolutionized the data centers of companies like Facebook and Apple and the banking systems of Credit Suisse, among others, when put to use by the likes of Fusion-io and Violin Technology?

Why yes, it does use flash memory, they told me, making them the latest member of the steadily growing “Flash Madness” club, which gives me yet another excuse to use the image taken from the cover of Flash Comics #1, circa 1940. For reference, the other members are Fusion, Violin Memory and Pure Storage.

Maor and Sahar laughed on the other end of the line at my guesses. “Would you like a job in our engineering department?” Sahar kidded me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t done guessing things like how Qwilt does what it does. “You must use some kind of algorithm to figure out what’s popular,” I said. Right again, mostly. The interview hadn’t been going for as much as five minutes, and I hadn’t even asked a single question and pretty much had it all figured out.

Well, not everything. There was the small matter of funding. Qwilt has raised $24 million in two rounds from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and the Crescent Point Group, a fund based in Singapore. Maor is a Cisco veteran who got absorbed into that company following its $200 million acquisition of P-Cube. Before that, he was an engineer at Seabridge, which is now known as Nokia Siemens Networks. Sahar was director of marketing at Crescendo Networks, now part of F5 Networks. Tom Dyal, a Redpoint partner, is on Qwilt’s board.

Video is so popular with consumers that Internet services providers are struggling to get their networks scaled up to meet the demand, Maor says. The traditional way to solve that problem when everyone is watching the same show on Hulu, or the same movie on Netflix, is to just add routers and pray. That’s expensive. What if you could add some extra piece of gear that works with the existing network infrastructure? If you could figure out what was the most popular show in a particular neighborhood, make a copy of it right in that very neighborhood, and deliver it from there rather than all the way back from Hulu’s or Netflix’s data center, you’d lessen the network’s burden.

So that’s exactly what Qwilt does: It has three patents pending on processes for determining what video applications are being used on a network, and for figuring out what content is most popular in a particular area. So if you’re in a neighborhood full of “Jersey Shore” fans, the Qwilt box would figure that fairly quickly, and keep copies of it close at hand so that everyone gets their required daily dose of Snooki.

Also on Qwilt’s board is Rich Wong of Accel; Peter Wagner, an independent board member who has previously worked at Accel; Ohad Finkelstein, a partner at Crescent Point; and Giora Yaron, the former chairman of Mercury Interactive, which is now part of Hewlett-Packard. Also investing is Rob Glaser, the former CEO of RealNetworks.

Got all that? I told you it was an easy interview.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111019/meet-qwilt-creator-of-smart-video-caching-gear-and-new-member-of-the-flash-madness-club/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110908/what-bad-economy-three-big-silicon-valley-vcs-poised-to-haul-in-2b-in-new-fund-raises/ http://allthingsd.com/20110908/what-bad-economy-three-big-silicon-valley-vcs-poised-to-haul-in-2b-in-new-fund-raises/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:15:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=118408

Three of Silicon Valley’s more prominent venture firms — Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and the Founders Fund — are nearing the closing of new funds that will total almost $2 billion.

This despite a bad economy, turbulent markets and lackluster venture returns of late. That said, limited partners looking for an investment edge apparently seem to still be adding more dough to the VC kitty.

Sources familiar with the fundings, in fact, said the raises have been much easier than previous ones.

Khosla has raised almost $2.4 billion since 2009, including $1.3 billion in 2010. Its fourth is now nearly completed, at just under that, which the firm had previously signaled in regulatory filings it planned to raise.

The third fund has been spent on cleantech companies, but also on early-stage high-profile Internet start-ups such as Square.

Redpoint will focus its fund — which sources said was $400 million — on growth opportunities.

Its last fund in 2010 was $400 million, too. It has invested that money in start-ups, such as Jumptap, Kabam and Pure Storage.

Lastly, the Founders Fund — with high-profile partners Peter Thiel and Sean Parker — is aiming at a $350 million fund with a $150 million “cushion” to raise more. Its last fund of $250 million was raised last year.

Founders Fund has recently made investments in Path, Azumio and Topsy.

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