start-ups

SchoolFeed Turns High School Reunions Into a Facebook Social Game

Liz Gannes in Social on February 8 at 5:00 am PT

SchoolFeed, which is building a sort of Facebook social gaming version of Classmates.com, already has six million monthly users. Now it has raised $1.75 million in funding.

Klout Acquires Local App Blockboard

Liz Gannes in Social on February 7 at 10:00 am PT

Social media influence scorer Klout has made its first acquisition: A local app maker called Blockboard.

Viddy Scores $6M for Social Mobile Video

Liz Gannes in Social on February 7 at 6:00 am PT

The category of social mobile video start-ups is going to stick around for a while, if only because it seems to keep attracting investment dollars.

News Byte

Ridejoy Collects $1.3M for Matchmaking Road-Trippers

Liz Gannes in Social on February 6 at 6:00 am PT

A good way to raise start-up funding these days seems to be saying you do “collaborative consumption.” (It’s about helping people share underutilized resources; probably the best-known example is Airbnb.) The latest such deal is San Francisco-based Ridejoy‘s seed round of $1.3 million from Freestyle Capital, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and others. Ridejoy matches drivers and passengers — who are screened using their Facebook profiles — for trips of at least 50 miles on the West Coast of the U.S. A direct competitor is Zimride.

Path Now Has 2M Users, Having Doubled Since It Relaunched Two Months Ago

Liz Gannes in Social on February 3 at 5:00 am PT

Path got the second version of its product a lot more right than the first — and two months in, the numbers bear that out.

Pulse Creates a One-Stop Shop for Election News

Liz Gannes in Media on January 31 at 5:00 am PT

Want to pull yourself out of the “filter bubble” and read political news from a wide variety of sources?

Social Discovery Start-Up Hyphos Helps College Students Find Activity Partners

Liz Gannes in Social on January 29 at 11:56 am PT

Hyphos is a social discovery start-up focused on finding offline activity partners for college students.

News Byte

Xobni Contact Manager Hits the iPhone

Liz Gannes in Mobile on January 24 at 6:15 am PT

Does your mobile address book need an overhaul? Xobni’s Smartr Contacts app became available on the iPhone today, a platform the company had previously neglected while it launched on Outlook, Gmail, Android and BlackBerry. Smartr Contacts aggregates and maintains email and phone information, conversation history and social media presences for each contact. It orders people by relevance, rather than the alphabet.

News Byte

SendGrid Raises $21M to Send Even More Emails

Liz Gannes in Social on January 17 at 6:00 am PT

SendGrid has raised $21 million in a Series B round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The Boulder, Colo.-based company sends 2.6 billion personalized emails per month to users of services like Pinterest, Airbnb and Path — with 26 billion total emails sent over the past two-and-a-half years.