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

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Ad tech start-up Triggit has raised a $7.4 million round, and CEO Zach Coelius says it’s a direct result of his company’s work on the Facebook Exchange.

That’s the program that lets advertisers “retarget” Facebook users using their Web-surfing history, a practice that’s increasingly common on all Internet sites.

Coelius has been raving about the Exchange since it launched, and now he can make that argument a bit more explicit. He says that his company, which acts as a middleman between Facebook and “real time” ad buyers, has seen revenue increase 300 percent since it started working on the Exchange this summer, and that more than 90 percent of that growth comes from Facebook.

Next year, he says, he expects to see similar numbers. “The performance is just unbelievable.”

Triggit has now raised more than $13 million; Coelius says he’ll use the new funds to expand in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

This is an inside round, led by previous investors Spark Capital and the Foundry Group. Since the new conventional wisdom on ad tech is that it’s an overfunded category that’s overdue for consolidation, the lack of new money in the company may send up warning flags.

But Coelius insists it was his choice not to bring in new investors; he says the round represents a “very significant step in terms of valuation.”

Aviary said it is used regularly by eight million people across 1,200 partner apps including Flickr, MailChimp, Shopify, Box, TwitPic, and Halftone; in the past 30 days alone, the company has helped to edit more than 100 million photos.

Compare it to Facebook-owned Instagram’s filters, which help brighten or provide more contrast to otherwise drab photos. The difference is that Aviary is building a platform of tools that can be used across a wide range of apps and services. Its tools allow even poorly taken camera-phone photos to become more vivid (see photos on right), or take on different hues, like a “soft focus” or “indiglow.”

Aviary’s advanced features also provide tools for creating music and editing audio.

The company declined to announce who its strategic investors were, but said that the additional capital will be used to support new partnerships and build out the company’s team, with the goal of becoming “the industry standard for photo-editing APIs.”

My colleague, Peter Kafka, wrote about how Aviary raised $7 million from the same set of investors in 2009.

Here’s the full release:

Aviary’s usage skyrockets, raises $6M to grow team

New York – June 27, 2012 – Aviary, the leading cross-platform photo-editing solution, today announced a new milestone, having edited over 100 million photos in the past 30 days. Aviary’s platform is now used regularly by 8 million people across 1,200 partner apps including Flickr, Mailchimp, Shopify, Box, TwitPic, and Halftone.

To support their continued growth, Aviary recently closed a $6 million round of funding from Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and to-be-announced strategic investors. The additional capital will be used to support new partnerships, continue to enhance the team, and cement the company as the industry standard photo-editing API.

“Aviary’s growth over the past year has been nothing short of remarkable,” said Mo Koyfman, General Partner of Spark Capital. “As the mobile photo category continues to explode, Aviary is poised to become the photo editing & creativity solution of choice for developers looking to deliver best of breed photo experiences to their consumers.”

Aviary’s recently launched “Photo Editor by Aviary,” a showcase mobile app for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone, offers developers a way to preview the host of photo-editing features available for implementation into their apps. The app also serves as an opportunity for consumers to install and try Aviary’s technology directly. It was an instant success, having been downloaded nearly a million times in it’s first week alone and recently moving into the App Store’s Top 25 list overall (and top 3 in the Photos category).

“We are thrilled with the positive response we continue to receive from developers, partners, and consumers using Aviary’s technology,” said Avi Muchnick, Aviary CEO & co-founder. “Powering millions of people’s photos every day is an incredibly motivating milestone on our company’s journey to power the world’s creativity.”

About Aviary
Aviary’s mission is to power the world’s creativity. Founded in 2007 and based in New York, Aviary’s technology is used by millions of consumers and over one thousand apps. Aviary’s effects and editing tools, combined with seamless integration, offers app developers unrivaled imaging capabilities at no cost. The SDKs are available for all major web and mobile platforms.

About Spark Capital
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm that partners with exceptional entrepreneurs seeking to build disruptive, world-changing companies. Founded in 2005, the firm is a tight-knit group of partners managing approximately $1 billion across three funds. Headquartered in Boston, Spark maintains an office in New York City and invests across the globe. The firm provides seed and early stage financing to emerging technology companies as well as growth capital to those looking to establish category leadership. Spark Capital invests across a number of key market segments including: advertising & monetization, commerce & services, cloud & infrastructure, social, mobile and content. Spark’s portfolio includes companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, AdMeld, OMGPOP, ThePlatform, IPWireless and 5Min. To learn more, visit www.sparkcapital.com.

About Bezos Expeditions
Bezos Expeditions is the personal investment company for Jeff Bezos.

New investor Jafco Ventures joined the round, with existing investors including Spark Capital and Carmel Ventures also participating.

As part of the news, Group Commerce said it had acquired the U.K. operations of Dealised in April, and has plans to expand to other countries, including Germany.

To date, the New York-based company has raised more than $40 million; it has 125 employees worldwide.

Despite steep competition in the daily deals space, the company has benefited by partnering with publishers, which already have a way to reach millions of potential consumers, and by doing so, eliminating huge marketing costs that other daily deals companies have experienced.

Last year, Group Commerce announced a deal with Hearst; more recently, it launched with CBS. Because of that, it says, revenues have been growing 30 percent every month for the past year.

Considering that the new JOBS Act makes crowdfunding even easier, what sorts of things do you see coming out of the grass roots?

In a continuation of its pivot away from Flash, Aviary, the New York-based multimedia editing start-up, is launching an iPad SDK and several new API extensions today.

If the Aviary name rings a bell, you might be more familiar with the company’s last round of products, which brought Adobe-style media editing programs into the Web browser via — you guessed it — loads of Flash.

Though the SDK products are a huge departure from the company’s direction over the last three years, CEO Avi Muchnick said: “The overall goal has been about democratizing creativity — that hasn’t changed.”

But just about everything else has.

Muchnick said Aviary would no longer be actively adding to their impressive Flash-based editing suite, which includes tools for images, vector graphics and audio, among other things.

Today, rather than hoping you’ll drop an image into their in-browser editor, Aviary makes tools for iOS and Android app developers.

Specifically, Aviary’s kit allows app makers to quickly add image editing features like cropping, red-eye removal and filters into their existing iPhone, Android, and, now, iPad apps.

And as of today’s launch, Aviary’s iPad interface will be available in the Pic Collage iPad app, as well as inside an update to Flickr Studio, a third-party iPad app built on Yahoo’s Flickr API.

The turn-key image editing tools have a look and feel somewhere between Apple’s iOS itself and the old Aviary Flash apps.

But Muchnick is eager to please the new app developer partners Aviary is hoping to win.

“One of my goals was to make this customizable to fit the partner,” he said. “[Partners] can change colors to match their app, or grab just the features they want.”

The new focus on partnerships seems to be moving along well enough.

Aviary claims that mobile and API users edited over a million images last month, and the company has brought on former Microsoft Office’s Paul Murphy to be their VP of business development.

Prior to its new direction, Aviary had raised about $11 million total, most recently from Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Aviary is yet another company abandoning Flash, after Apple and Steve Jobs declared it persona non grata for iOS devices.

The company has cut virtually all of its Flash developers and hired mobile developers to build up its SDK offerings.

Massive organizational and directional shifts are tough on any start-up, but Muchnick says that the new direction is really not that at all.

“Aviary doesn’t need to be a destination anymore,” he said. “We want to power all the photo creativity that happens online, and apps are how that will happen.”

[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed our post in a statement:

"Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson both played important and greatly appreciated roles in our success. Both saw what Twitter could become before most anyone else. We look forward to their continued input as both investors in the company and passionate users of the product."]

Wilson, a high-profile principal at Union Square Ventures, was one of Twitter’s earliest backers, and for a long period helped to steer the company’s direction. Sabet’s Spark Capital was also an early investor.

Both funds have sold some of their Twitter holdings via secondary market sales. But people familiar with the companies say both continue to hold a majority of their stake in Twitter, now valued at $8.4 billion.

If there’s a backstory here, it will be hard to tease out. People familiar with all three companies tell me there’s no bad blood behind the move. The one thing that’s easy to understand — for now, at least — is that Twitter’s board is a little less unwieldy.

It has been swelling over time, and last year got even bigger when Flipboard’s Mike McCue, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt and Silicon Valley advisor-to-many Peter Currie all joined. Other board members include Benchmark’s Peter Fenton and CEO Dick Costolo.

And, for a relatively young company, Twitter’s corporate history is full of twists and turns. The most recent and prominent ones were Costolo’s ascension from COO to CEO a year ago, when he replaced co-founder Evan Williams; and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s return to the company last spring to head its product efforts, after being pushed out in 2008.

I’ve asked Wilson, Sabet and Twitter for comment.

[Image credit: Lachlan Hardy]

Whether or not to sell any of their shares in Twitter is the big decision facing stakeholders of the microblogging service right now, as the second $400 million part of the company’s recent funding by Russia’s DST Global is completed in the next several weeks.

That includes everyone from early angel investors to those who bought it on the secondary markets to Twitter’s 600 employees, all of whom can sell a portion — up to 20 percent, sources said — of their holdings.

It’s all part of a recent $800 million mega-funding by Twitter, valuing the San Francisco company at $8.4 billion.

While $400 million went to Twitter, the second tranche of $400 million of the total was targeted to cash out current investors and also employees of the company.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors, such as Ron Conway.

Whether DST — as well as other smaller buyers, including early Twitter investor Chris Sacca and T. Rowe Price, according to the tender offer — gets them and others to sell enough shares is the big question, especially since few want to get caught in what one shareholder called the “Facebook idiot box.”

That would be referring to those who sold their investments in Facebook two years ago, when the social networking giant allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their stakes to DST.

The financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by the aggressive Russian investor.

At the time, the tender offer valued Facebook at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now. Oops!

That’s why high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is not selling out any of the shares it bought earlier this year in an $80 million transaction in private secondary markets.

Reasons to sell, of course, are also compelling.

Some investors might want to lock in upside, especially if they think the latest valuation is too high.

For venture capitalists in the company, some might want to return a win to their limited partners, while Twitter employees might want to put a down payment on a house after years of toiling in the start-up.

Others might also be worried about Twitter’s prospects going forward and might determine that the recent round was the high point of its market value. Twitter has indeed struggled to find a sustainable and lucrative business model, focused on advertising.

In addition, although it has recently stabilized, others might worry about Twitter’s management changes over the last year, as co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have departed. Twitter creator and other co-founder Jack Dorsey is now running the company’s product efforts, with CEO Dick Costolo (who looks a lot like that Woody Allen shot above from the classic movie, “Take the Money and Run”).

Then again, that was exactly the take on Facebook several years ago, so it is now a case on all sides of seller beware.

Twitter declined to comment and I have not heard back yet from DST about the status of the transaction.

In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.

According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

Along with basic funding needs, this is largely being done this way to give those with stakes in the San Francisco microblogging company an ability to monetize their privately held common stock and also to do this selling in a more organized — and legal — manner.

That is especially important since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more. And, while it could also be sold to a bigger company such as Google, that is also not in Twitter’s immediate future.

Before this secondary follow-on, the first part of the deal will be a $400 million investment for preferred shares by new and also existing shareholders, as was reported by the New York Times last week.

That round will indeed value Twitter at $8 billion, as the Times reported, which is a higher number than in other earlier reports.

This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.

Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.

Key new moneybags are expected to be Russian investing heavyweight DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon; as well as the digital growth fund of J.P. Morgan and perhaps others.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors.

The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.

Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.

It reportedly has $200 million in annual revenue from its efforts, which is still small in comparison to other Web 2.0 start-ups.

Interestingly, that was a similar situation to where Facebook found itself two years ago, when it allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their shares.

That financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by DST. At the time, the tender offer valued the company at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now, so any Twitter sellers might want to consider their options carefully.

It is not clear exactly who can sell their Twitter shares, and in what amount, in the new deal. When Facebook did a similar move, for example, its top leadership could not sell any of their stakes.

A Twitter spokeswoman would not comment about any fund raising.

But, interestingly, in an onstage interview at a Fortune magazine tech conference this week, Costolo criticized stock trading of the shares of popular start-ups on secondary exchanges as a “distraction.” Like other companies, he said, Twitter had instituted stricter policies to limit the ability of its employees and investors to trade on those markets.

The Boston-based company has just closed a round totaling $165 million from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners and Spark Capital.

The funding will go toward expansion both internationally and in the U.S.; for acquisitions; and to support the launch of its new brand, Wayfair.com.

While you may not have heard of the parent company, it’s likely that you’ve stumbled upon some of its major brands, like Cookware.com, Luggage.com and Strollers.com. Going forward, CSN plans to consolidate its more than 200 sites into the Wayfair.com brand in late summer.

Its two other brands of focus are AllModern.com, which offers modern design, and JossandMain.com, which is CSN’s new flash sale site offering high-end items for the home at up to 70 percent off.

In a release, CSN’s CEO and co-founder, Niraj Shah, said the company has been profitable since 2002 despite aggressive growth. The company said it expects revenues to surpass $500 million, increasing from $383 million in 2010.

With 800 employees now, CSN could reach 1,000 staffers by year’s end.

Shah said with the additional cash, the company will be able to grow even faster. “Looking ahead four or five years, we think with the help of our investors, we are on the path to becoming a much larger, publicly traded company,” he said.

CSN estimates that the U.S. home goods market for furniture, decor, housewares and home improvement industry is more than $500 billion, but only a small percentage has gone online. CSN said it attracts more than 100 million visits to its sites every year and offers more than three million items from 5,000 brands for sale.

The Boston-based company has deals with 220 phone carriers in nearly 100 countries, for an astounding 2.1 billion consumers in its database.

Those carriers support the usage of a proprietary messaging protocol with an integrated compensation mechanism that allows Txteagle to ask users questions via text and pay them for their participation by crediting their accounts with money and airtime.

Earlier this year when he was visiting California, Txteagle co-founder and CEO Nathan Eagle explained the company’s business in a video interview with NetworkEffect.

Eagle said the United Nations spends approximately $5 million per year to do surveys on disaster preparedness with face-to-face interviews. Txteagle helped the U.N. with its disaster preparedness surveys this year, and got more than five times as many people to participate via mobile phones in 49 countries for a fraction of that cost.

Meanwhile, customers in Txteagle’s emerging markets average 10 percent of their annual income spent on their phones, so they value participating as well.

Eagle said hundreds of thousands of people have taken Txteagle surveys so far. Potential and current Txteagle customers could be large consumer goods companies, large multinational organizations, market research companies, hedge funds and financial institutions, he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110405/txteagle-has-2-1-billion-phone-numbers-and-8-5-million-dollars/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110404/if-you-want-to-be-a-ceo-work-at-microsoft-instead-of-google-says-top-prospect/ http://allthingsd.com/20110404/if-you-want-to-be-a-ceo-work-at-microsoft-instead-of-google-says-top-prospect/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:00:54 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5128 OKCupid, which was recently bought by Match.com, famously raised its profile with hilarious blog posts that analyzed and illustrated user data to find trends, expose lies and give advice about online dating. Finding a job is kind of like finding a mate, and Top Prospect is hoping to follow the OKCupid data-crunching path to success–or at least attention.

Today, Top Prospect–which uses Facebook and LinkedIn and hefty bounties to help companies recruit employees–is posting on its blog a widget that shows, based on other people’s profile data, how working at a certain company might improve a person’s likeliness of having a certain title later in his or her career.

By aggregating employment histories from the 1.5 million profiles in its network, Top Prospect found that former Microsoft employees were 111 percent more likely to be CEOs than former Googlers, with a 2.9 percent chance versus 1.4 percent chance for Google.

But, as Top Prospect admits, this perspective is skewed since Microsoft has been around for 20 more years than Google. (That’s why I put the asterisk in my headline.)

What would be preferable is if Top Prospect delved deeper and compared what happened to Microsoft and Google alums with similar timing and tenure at each company.

But as is, the data did show that former Google employees are three percent more likely to at some later date have the title “founder” than former Microsoft employees.

In addition, former Apple employees are 74 percent more likely to become CEOs and 15 percent more likely to found companies than people who worked at Microsoft.

Meanwhile, have you heard about the disproportionate Silicon Valley dominance of the PayPal mafia? Well, by the numbers, former Google employees are 33 percent more likely to be founders than former PayPal employees.

The latest Top Prospect post follows a previous one that compared users’ college histories, finding that UCLA grads are one percent more likely than Stanford grads to found companies.

Top Prospect, which launched an alpha version of its main site at the end of last year and raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital, has far fewer than 1.5 million users, but it sucks in profile information for all the people connected to its users on Facebook and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn especially must have more comprehensive information about these same topics, though that company says it is wary of aggregating data in ways its users don’t anticipate.

Not to say the Top Prospect widget isn’t harmless and fun, even if it doesn’t bring the LOLs and the hard-hitting analysis like OKCupid.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110404/if-you-want-to-be-a-ceo-work-at-microsoft-instead-of-google-says-top-prospect/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110309/former-doubleclick-execs-create-groupon-competitor-but-its-not-exactly-a-clone/ http://allthingsd.com/20110309/former-doubleclick-execs-create-groupon-competitor-but-its-not-exactly-a-clone/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:00:11 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3394 Think there’s already too many Groupon clones?

Think again.

New York-based Group Commerce, which is coming out of stealth today, has the funding and the pedigree to be a viable contender.

Founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt, and Andrew Glenn, has raised $8 million in capital.

Investors include: Spark Capital, Carmel Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures, and Bob Pittman, the founder of MTV Networks and now chairman of media and entertainment platforms at Clear Channel.

What’s more, it is coming out of the gate running with four major publishers added to its platform: DailyCandy, Meredith Corporation, Thrillist and The New York Times.

In an exclusive interview with eMoney, Rosenblatt and Kelt explain that unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, Group Commerce is not building its own consumer brand, and won’t be targeting deals directly at consumers. Rather, it’s banking on building a platform that other media companies can leverage.

Rosenblatt, who was the former CEO of DoubleClick, is the company’s chairman, Kelt is CEO, and Glenn is the company’s CTO. All three were at DoubleClick when it was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion

Ironically, they are now building a business that Google desperately wants to get into, but failed after an unsuccessful $6 billion bid to acquire Groupon.

Rosenblatt said:

“Of course, this is going to be a very big market, and there will be many more players than just two. Each participant will have a different approach. Google clearly has one, but we believe collectively that publishers have the strongest advantage. They have the audience and the brand loyalty, but they are missing the mechanics and industry expertise.”

The daily deals space is getting exceedingly crowded.

The market is expected to soar to as much as $3.9 billion in the next four years, and there’s roughly 200 players in the space, according to estimates by BIA/Kelsey.

Rosenblatt compared the market to the early days of online advertising when AOL and Yahoo dominated.

“In the early days of the display market, a big share of the market was dominated by two players, but overtime advertising was redistributed to where the audience was. Groupon and LivingSocial have done a great job creating a market, and they will continue to be very large, but there will be a similar redistribution in favor of publishers,” he said.

Beyond Groupon and LivingSocial, which are considered the market leaders, there’s other companies attacking several niches, ranging from furniture to baby apparel, travel and families. There’s also companies that say they offer exactly what Group Commerce is describing–a white label solution for publishers–including Seattle-based Tippr and ReachLocal, which recently acquired DealOn.

“There’s a huge number of Groupon clones,” Rosenblatt said. “The insight here is that none of those clones have established publishers, they don’t have brands or trusted relationships, or customer lists….We don’t have a b2c business, but that is the case with most of the other white label providers. They also don’t have teams and our breadth of services.”

He says the three components that you must have in order to be successful in the space are: A loyal audience; great content and deals; and a technology platform.

“The publishers we’ve worked with for many years [at DoubleClick] are in the process of transitioning to a new digital economy,” Rosenblatt said. “They have an audience and the ability to match the audience to deals that are contextually relevant. Our role is to offer the third part.”

Group Commerce is not just offering a technology platform, but also is sourcing the deals for its media partners, and finding a large audience and wide range of demographics for the merchants across publications.

Daily deals typically offer discounts at restaurants or other services for as much as 50 to 70 percent off. The customer pays for the voucher up front and then redeems it later. Typically, the merchant only gets half of that cash, while the other half goes to Groupon or another provider. For the merchant it’s a new form of advertising, replacing traditional methods, like Yellow Pages or newspaper ads.

Group Commerce would not disclose its revenue splits, but said it is paid with a portion of gross revenue of each deal, and that it’s a shared risk model. “If the deals don’t work, we don’t get paid,” Kelt said.

Kelt added that they believe their model will work because it combines the publisher’s knowledge of the audience with the merchants. For instance, DailyCandy’s audience is young and female, and a reader may be interested in an offer for a ladies night out at an upscale restaurant.

Although a potential customer does not have necessarily have to be a publisher, Kelt notes. It can be anyone with an audience, including a celebrity with a large following on Twitter.

Today, Group Commerce has 35 employees in New York, Chicago, Florida, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s planning to grow to 100 employees by the end of the year with the majority being sales people.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110309/former-doubleclick-execs-create-groupon-competitor-but-its-not-exactly-a-clone/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/roll-em-up-video-backend-company-kit-digital-buys-kickapps-kyte-kewego/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/roll-em-up-video-backend-company-kit-digital-buys-kickapps-kyte-kewego/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:43:38 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28894 One buyer, three exits: KIT Digital, which helps big companies manage Web video delivery, has picked up three start-ups in the last week. KIT paid a total of $77.2 million for KickApps, a New York-based social media app maker, Kyte, a San Francisco-based mobile video company and Paris-based Kewego, which helps push video to multiple kinds of screens.

KickApps CEO Alex Blum will become KIT’s COO, and Blum and KIT CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman say almost all of the three acquired companies’ employees will hang on to their jobs.

Tuzman said his company paid about $62 million in KIT’s Nasdaq-traded stock for the three companies, and the balance in cash.

KickApps and Kyte had collectively raised some $55 million, so the companies’ backers aren’t going to do much more than break even in these deals. And the deal may be a coulda-shoulda for KickApps, which had talked to AOL about a $90 million deal three years ago, but never got it done.

Blum wouldn’t comment directly about the AOL non-deal, except to note that the spring of 2008 “was a different era.” And he says that all of his investors, which include North Atlantic Capital, Spark Capital and Softbank, have gotten “more than their money back,” and that all of them have taken KIT stock instead of cash. Spark general partner Santo Politi will join KIT’s board.

Tuzman, meanwhile, has an interesting story. During the first bubble he ran GovWorks, a failed start-up that happened to have a movie crew documenting its rise and fall. (Sadly, you can’t get “Startup.com” from Netflix or any other obvious place–can anyone point us to a copy?)

But this Forbes profile documents his efforts to build a second career. And at the very least, his newest company appears to be growing. In its last public filing, KIT reported quarterly losses of $8 million on sales of $28 million, which was up 151 percent from the previous year.

And late last year, KIT raised more than $100 million earmarked for acquisitions. None of that money, Tuzman says, was spent on these three deals.

[Image credit: Tyw7 via Wikipedia]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/roll-em-up-video-backend-company-kit-digital-buys-kickapps-kyte-kewego/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110106/omgpop-wins-a-10-million-round-for-social-games-from-rho-softbank/ http://allthingsd.com/20110106/omgpop-wins-a-10-million-round-for-social-games-from-rho-softbank/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:17:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27714 Here’s that serious investment money for casual/social games company OMGPOP that I told you about in November: The company has raised $10.1 million in a funding round led by Rho Ventures and Softbank; earlier investors Spark Capital and Betaworks have re-upped as well.

The company, which has made a big push into Facebook games in the last six months, says it will use the new money to develop more games for the social network, as well as for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform.

The new money brings OMGPOP’s total funding to $16.6 million over its four-year history.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110106/omgpop-wins-a-10-million-round-for-social-games-from-rho-softbank/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110102/do-you-want-to-save-you-web-ads-adkeeper-bets-35-million-that-you-will/ http://allthingsd.com/20110102/do-you-want-to-save-you-web-ads-adkeeper-bets-35-million-that-you-will/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 05:01:05 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27515 Want to save and store your favorite Web ads? AdKeeper thinks you do. And now the startup has convinced investors to make a huge bet on the concept, too: The company, which has yet to launch, has raised $35 million in a round led by Oak Investment Partners.

Add that to the $8 million AdKeeper rounded up earlier in 2010 from investors including DCM, Spark Capital, First Round Capital, and the New York Times, and you get a sense of the ambition involved here. CEO Scott Kurnit thinks he’ll end up creating a new kind of advertising platform — if Internet users cooperate.

The concept is pretty simple: Web visitors click on ads they like, and store them in a digital locker so they can check them out later. Advertisers will pay AdKeeper a premium.

If it works, it could be huge, but that assumes consumers play along. More than that, really: AdKeeper expects consumers to change their behavior, and start embracing Web ads instead of ignoring them.

Google works brilliantly because it can show searchers relevant ads. But the overwhelming majority of Web surfers ignore conventional display ads — the kind that AdKeeper wants to work with. So who’s going to save ads they’re not looking at in the first place?

Kurnit’s short answer is that he expects marketers to start making ads people will want to hang on to. For a longer answer, check out this AdAge interview. He’s an excellent salesman, and does a good job of banishing the CueCat comparisons I keep thinking of. For now.

This is normally the part in a funding story where a startup talks about its impressive growth in users/traffic/ad impressions or something. But AdKeeper can’t do any of that, because it’s not on any ads yet. Kurnit says that should happen by mid-February.

Instead, the company points to a long list of advertisers, like Pepsi and AT&T, that have said they like the idea. It also points to market research it commissioned which it says shows a majority of Web users would like to save their ads.

And perhaps the company’s biggest selling point is Kurnit, who built About.com during the first Web boom and sold it to Primedia for $700 million in 2001. The company, a forerunner to Web story mills like Demand Media, ended up at the New York Times, where it still makes up a big chunk of the paper’s online business. And its success made Kurnit wealthy and well-respected.

How well-respected? Enough to round up endorsements from people who might not be convinced about AdKeeper, but like its CEO quite a bit.

Here’s the response I got from a member of Kurnit’s advisory board when I asked them to explain AdKeeper to me: “Not sure I get it myself. But I love Scott!”

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