“It’s Time. Demand a Plan to End Gun Violence,” reads the ad, which was signed by a plethora of major digital players.

They include, in part: Lerer Venture’s Ken Lerer (who organized the effort); SV Angel’s Ron Conway, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Skype President Tony Bates, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, adviser Bill Campbell, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Findery’s Caterina Fake, Emerson Collective’s Laurene Jobs, Code Advisors’ Quincy Smith, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Zuckerberg Media’s Randi Zuckerberg.

In addition, there is a large-scale social media effort under way for Demand a Plan, which signee and venture capitalist Fred Wilson likens on his blog to other Internet-wide campaigns.

“Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful,” he wrote.

Here’s the ad itself:

Asa Mathat | AllThingsD.com

Earlier this month Twitter bought Vine, a three-man video-sharing start-up that has yet to launch. Twitter may build its own video hosting system, so it’s possible Vine may play a role in that effort one day.

But the main reason Twitter bought Vine is more concrete: Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to buy Vine.

Multiple sources say the Twitter co-founder was the one who decided that the company should buy the start-up, and pushed hard to make the purchase happen.

While CEO Dick Costolo ultimately signed off on the deal, “this happened because Jack wanted it to happen,” says a person familiar with the transaction.

And while this isn’t a mammoth transaction by 2012 standards, it’s still one of the biggest acquisitions Twitter has made. If the Vine guys stick around and hit their numbers, the company may end up paying north of $30 million for the start-up.

Lesson: Whatever else Jack Dorsey is up to at Twitter, he still has significant clout there.

Here’s the longer version of the Twitter/Vine story, as relayed to ATD by people who know both companies:

Vine, which is supposed to let users share brief video clips from their iPhones, formed in June and was supposed to launch this fall. SV Angel’s David Lee, who had backed Vine, showed Dorsey the app in the hope that the design guru would give it his seal of approval.

Instead, Dorsey ended up pushing to buy the company — not as a standard “acqhire,” but with the notion that the Vine guys would keep working on the app and release it on their own.

The arrangement is supposed to echo the one that Facebook and Instagram reached earlier this year, and that’s not a coincidence. At one point, Dorsey had pushed Twitter to buy that photo-sharing app, as well.

Vine and its investors turned down Twitter’s first offer. They accepted a second, much larger one.

Vine’s backers got Twitter stock, and Vine’s three-man team got a mix of cash, stock and incentives. The Vine guys are now Twitter employees, but they won’t go to work there. Instead, they’ll stay in their New York headquarters and keep working on their app.

Can’t wait to see it.

We don’t have terms for the deal, but this looks a lot like an “acqhire”: Vine is a three-man company, based in New York, which formed in June. It has yet to launch publicly. (Update: Maybe not a garden-variety acqhire, we’re told. For instance, there’s a possibility that Vine could still live as a standalone service.) Twitter declined to comment.

Vine’s landing page describes it as “the best way to capture and share video on your iPhone”, specializing in very short clips — a few seconds apiece.

It’s different than the slew of other video apps currently on the market. Usually when you shoot with your smartphone, the camera captures one continuous shot. Vine allows for punctuated recording. Grab a few quick snips of video, and Vine auto-generates a longer cut stitched from those shots. It’s a novel idea, and hones in on the sweet spot of our ever-dwindling attention spans.

Here, for instance, is a contribution from CrunchFund investor MG Siegler. Here’s another, shot by Vine co-founder Dominik Hofmann at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, from box seats he says were provided by SV Angel, another investor.

Hofmann and cofounder Colin Kroll used to work at JetSetter, Gilt Groupe’s travel site. Other funders include RRE, IAC’s High Line Venture Partners and David Tisch; we hear the total investment was around $1 million.

If Vine had launched, it would have had plenty of competition from other video-sharing services, like Viddy, Keek and Tout; Tout raised a $13 million B round this summer.

There’s also Vyclone, a collaborative video app that auto-remixes clips from up to four users simultaneously. And of course, there’s Socialcam, the app that exploded Facebook over the summer and was eventually acquired by Autodesk to the tune of $60 million.

Getting paper out of the health care process is widely seen as a key step in getting some control over constantly skyrocketing costs, by increasing efficiency. Though there is some debate on the issue.

One company I’ve been following intermittently in the space is the start-up Practice Fusion. It provides a free Web-based system for storing and retrieving health records, and is available to doctors and health clinics.

A little more than a year ago, I noted that Practice Fusion had raised $23 million in a Series B round of venture capital funding. Today it announced that it has landed a $34 million C round led by Artis Ventures. As is typical in VC deals, prior investors are also chipping in. They include Band of Angels, Felicis Ventures, Glynn Capital, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Founders Fund, Morgenthaler Ventures, Scott Banister, SV Angel and Ghost Angel.

The round brings Practice Fusion‘s total capital raised to an impressive $64 million.

The company is moving along in other ways. When I last looked in on it, there were 75,000 healthcare professionals using Practice Fusion, and its system stored data on 9.5 million patients. Today, those numbers have swelled to 150,000 health care professionals and 40 million patients.

Part of the motivation for health care providers to switch to using digital health records (Why does everyone insist on calling them electronic?) is the federal funds that come with it. Since doctors’ offices are often small businesses, they can get some government help to defray the costs of making the transition. Doctors and clinics using Practice Fusion have received a total of about $30 million worth of those funds.

As I said, there is some debate about the overall benefit derived from moving to digital records. In March, a study published in the journal Health Affairs found that doctors who had digital access to testing results tended to order more tests, not fewer. This is key, because one of the conventional arguments about digital health records has been that it discourages repeat tests that result from paper-based errors or lost records. A lot of people had problems with that study, however.

Another handful of other studies questioning the benefits came out in January. Though as Steve Lohr of the New York Times points out here, the debate is less about whether it makes sense to move to digital records, and more about how and at what pace.

The pace seems just fine for Practice Fusion: Remember the 40 million patient records it has on its network? That amounts to about 10 percent of the U.S. population, and is double the size of the combined patient populations of the Kaiser Permanente and U.S. Veterans Affairs systems. That makes it an emerging power in the business of electronic (I still want to say digital) health records. This latest investment will only accelerate that.

It’s just a seed round, but a significant one — the company isn’t disclosing the amount, but it should tell you something that the lead investor is Benchmark Capital, which doesn’t usually do seed investments, as a matter of practice. Other investors include SV Angel, CrunchFund, Andy Bechtolsheim, Charlie Cheever and Ariel Poler.

Highlight, which was just released a month ago, has persuaded an impressive selection of VCs and techies to share their actual locations with people they don’t know. Just in the past few weeks, I’ve been notified on Highlight that a VC was within 150 meters of me at a ski resort, that an early Facebook guy was merging onto 280 at the same time as me, and that a Google exec was a block away from my home in San Francisco. And I was officially “friends” with only one of the three people — the others just had mutual connections in common.

What seems to make people feel comfortable with automatically sharing their location on Highlight is that it’s not shared all the time. Users get pinged when someone with mutual friends or common interests on Facebook is nearby, with a one-time snapshot of that person’s location.

Highlight is also making its app available outside the U.S. starting today. Co-founder Paul Davison told me he’s especially eager for people to use Highlight when they travel. There’s currently no setting to only get Highlight notifications about people you are already friends with — by design, the app is meant to encourage serendipitous connections. For me personally, that’s a bit of a chafe in my hometown, but I can see how it might be exciting to meet friends-of-friends while traveling.

Davison also said a new version of Highlight will be released before the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, next week that’s built to decrease its pull on users’ batteries (which is indeed an issue with constant location-sharing), and to give users tools to mark people as interesting and friend them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

Highlight started when Davison was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark and still has a team of just two people, based in San Francisco. Competitors include Glancee.

That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.

As has been widely reported, well-known TechCrunch columnist and Silicon Valley journalist Sarah Lacy has a new gig: Running her own new tech news site, which debuts today.

(She’s pictured here with another recent adorable start-up of hers, named Eli.)

Not so widely reported? The site, called PandoDaily.com, will feature three of TechCrunch’s most high-profile former bloggers: Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler and Paul Carr.

That’s right, Lacy is Arrington’s boss this time around — even though his CrunchFund venture firm will also be an investor, in a funding round of more than $2 million for PandoDaily.

Other investors — whom Lacy described as “people I like and respect” — include a panoply of tech movers and shakers, including personal investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Matt Cohler, Jeff Jordan, Josh Kopelman, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Saul Klein, Tony Hsieh and Chris Dixon, as well as seed investments from Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures.

There will certainly be questions about all these funders who are also topics of PandoDaily’s posts, which Lacy acknowledged. She said the large number of funders was calculated so that none had undue influence.

Of course, many in Silicon Valley will be watching her carefully for any conflicts of interest or punches pulled. Lacy insisted that there will not be a problem and joked that she will definitely not become a VC, referring to the controversy around Arrington becoming one while at TechCrunch.

That issue blew up like a Roman candle, of course, leaving everyone with powder burns — I called the incident a “giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.”

Interestingly, Lacy did manage to stay out of the spotlight (she was, in fact, having her baby during the worst of the controversy, which was likely more painful).

Ignoring the delicious epic revenge part of this on AOL — which bought TechCrunch and then promptly presided over a tech version of the War of the Roses (and is, ironically, an investor via CrunchFund) — PandoDaily will focus on start-ups in Silicon Valley and everywhere else that homegrown spirit of innovations reaches.

Here’s a screenshot of the cleanly designed and handsome site:

In an inaugural post, titled ““Why I Started PandoDaily,” Lacy compared the site to a colony of trees in Utah, saying, “We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.”

Which is kind of like TechCrunch, which she left earlier this year.

“This is not TechCrunch 2.0,” Lacy said to me in an interview last week. “But, of course, we will be compared to TechCrunch.”

Of course, especially because of the presence of its star lineup on PandoDaily — who will write regularly, along with an initially small staff of other writers — and also its plans for conferences and other gatherings.

(An AOL source, by the way, said there were no contractual noncompete issues for PandoDaily to worry about.)

Here’s a longish interview I did about PandoDaily with Lacy, who has written two books focused on entrepreneurs, worked at Businessweek and was founding co-host of Yahoo Finance’s daily show “TechTicker.”

She talks about the site’s unusual name, her wrangling over leaving TechCrunch, and the prospect of now running her own show.

Welcome back, Sarah (and call me if you need help with those dudes, as we have wrangled before).

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120116/sarah-lacy-debuts-new-tech-site-pandodaily-and-guess-whos-working-for-her-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120104/spool-raises-funding-to-help-you-take-the-web-offline/ http://allthingsd.com/20120104/spool-raises-funding-to-help-you-take-the-web-offline/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:00:02 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=159582 Spool, which offers a nifty service for saving Web videos and articles for later viewing offline on Android, iOS and HTML5-compatible devices, has raised $1 million in funding from SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Vivi Nevo and others.

The Spool service is made for commuters, travelers and people with limited mobile data plans. It automatically downloads and syncs content between devices when possible. It’s still in limited beta testing, but Spool co-founder Avichal Garg said to expect broader availability in the next few months.

This isn’t just a storage service. Users can store links for their own private use, and also in the process send them to one or more of their Facebook friends.

While Spool might be most easily compared to services like Readability, Read It Later and Instapaper, Garg made other comparisons.

“We’ve built more network effects than Dropbox or Evernote,” Garg said. He added, “This is like a Path for content. It’s not about broadcasting.”

If users install a Spool plug-in for easier saving and sharing, they can also optionally see Spool buttons scattered throughout popular aggregators like Google Reader, Twitter, Quora and Hacker News.

Garg said he is prepared to fight for users’ rights to keep a personal copy of Web content for their personal use. Spool doesn’t work with content from services like Netflix that require a log-in, for instance, and it limits saved videos to 90 minutes in length.

Plus, the San Francisco-based company’s investors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and former YouTube VP Kevin Donahue, and the company is already working with attorney David Kramer, who led YouTube’s copyright defense against Viacom.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120104/spool-raises-funding-to-help-you-take-the-web-offline/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111107/orchestra-raises-a-quick-5m-for-social-to-do-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20111107/orchestra-raises-a-quick-5m-for-social-to-do-app/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:01:08 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=141317 Orchestra, which calls its iPhone and Web productivity and collaboration app “group chat disguised as a to-do list,” has raised $5 million in funding less than two months after it launched (we broke the news here). The new funding for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company led by Apple and Ideo alums comes from Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111107/orchestra-raises-a-quick-5m-for-social-to-do-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110921/angel-investors-agree-to-kiss-make-up-fund-communications-start-ups-together/ http://allthingsd.com/20110921/angel-investors-agree-to-kiss-make-up-fund-communications-start-ups-together/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:16:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=123327 Dave McClure and Ron Conway, the two investors most publicly associated with last year’s “AngelGate” scandal over power struggles between seed-stage investors, have set aside their differences to invest in the second round of the Twilio Fund, dedicated to start-ups built on top of the Twilio communications platform.

The new Twilio Fund consists of $125,000 from McClure’s 500 Startups and another $125,000 from Conway’s SV Angel. Chosen start-ups get at least $10,000 each, according to McClure.

Highlights from the last batch included WorkersNow, Proven and FastCall411, McClure said.

McClure said he and Conway — who has been called “the godfather of Silicon Valley” — have worked on a few investments together lately, and joked, “It’s OK to kiss the ring every now and again.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110921/angel-investors-agree-to-kiss-make-up-fund-communications-start-ups-together/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110822/exclusive-yammer-now-works-with-salesforce-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20110822/exclusive-yammer-now-works-with-salesforce-com/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:00:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=112529 I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The workplace is getting social. Enterprise software companies are taking a page or three from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to create social streams that keep people informed about what’s going on within a company.

One of the social enterprise companies getting a fair amount of buzz is Yammer. Initially known as a “Twitter for work,” it’s now transforming itself into something of a catchall for updates generated by numerous workplace applications.

Today, Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com — Salesforce’s development platform — and Yammer’s own API to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream.

In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. “A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,” he says.

Yammer did the integration with help from Appirio, a cloud apps developer that gets tapped to do a lot of third-party integration work.

But doesn’t Salesforce already have its own social software? Why, yes it does. Its Chatter.com service launched to much fanfare with a pair of expensive TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl, which in turn kicked off a bit of a skirmish within Google search results that Yammer took part in.

It’s not as if Yammer were partnering with Salesforce here. Sacks says that Yammer just, well, did it. “The nice thing about the open API world that we live in is that you don’t necessarily have to seek permission to use these APIs.”

The wider point of Yammer, Sacks says, is to pull social data not just from one application, but from many. Not everyone in a company is going to be using Salesforce.com in the first place. The sales department might, and senior management might, but it’s of little use to, say, the human resources department or the accounting department. So Yammer talks to other applications, too. Case in point: Netsuite. Yammer announced an integration with that cloud-based business management suite of applications in May. It also works with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Active Directory.

And there will be more, Sacks says. “We’re seeing a trend with all these various line-of-business applications to build their own social networks into what they do,” he says. “And we’re already seeing customers and potential customers complaining about this, because they wind up with a dozen different social networks in their company and that defeats the whole purpose.” Yammer, he says, will be the middleman application that brings all those social streams into one place for everyone in a company. The comparison to Facebook is no accident: Yammer’s technology is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.

So what happened to Chatter? Well, ask Salesforce and you’ll see some impressive stats and customer wins. Salesforce says that Chatter is used by 100,000 companies, among them Dell, Qualcomm and Lenovo.

But Yammer’s got 100,000 customers of its own, boasts three million corporate end users, and is adding them at a rate of about 200,000 a month. And there are some pretty impressive names among them, including chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, LG Electronics, eBay and Thomson Reuters. And it got those without having to spend tens of millions on Super Bowl ads. A half-million of those customers are using the paid version of Yammer.

It’s a fast-moving business and there are numerous players. Another big one to watch is Jive Software, which was said last week to have hired bankers for a pending IPO, and which is being valued at $1 billion.

No wonder Yammer has done so well in raising funding. It has brought in a combined $40 million, which was topped off last November by a $25 million round led by US Venture Partners, with Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and the Founders Fund also participating. Ron Conway’s SV Angel was an early investor as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110822/exclusive-yammer-now-works-with-salesforce-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110801/angelpad-gets-vc-firms-to-commit-100k-to-all-its-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20110801/angelpad-gets-vc-firms-to-commit-100k-to-all-its-start-ups/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:31:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=104951 AngelPad, a San Francisco-based start-up incubator led by former Googlers, will now offer all participating start-ups $120,000 — its usual $20,000, plus a convertible note for a hundred grand from two “large well-known Silicon Valley VC firms” that it’s not naming.

The funding is intended to alleviate founder stress and encourage faster product progress, said AngelPad’s Thomas Korte. Competing program Y Combinator has a similar deal to give participating companies $150,000 from DST investor Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the so-called “Start Fund.”

Korte said the AngelPad money is not the same: “It’s different. It’s a real investment from a VC firm, rather than just plain capital or quote-unquote free money.”

Korte acknowledged that having funding from the get-go will put more pressure on the companies in his program to make a return for their investors. “It’s probably more of a sense of responsibility,” he said.

AngelPad is two weeks away from starting its third class of 15 start-ups, but has left one spot open for a company that may be enticed by this new funding offer, Korte said.

Korte declined to specify which VCs are putting up the money, but said they focus on investments in B2B, mobile and e-commerce, like AngelPad.

Though AngelPad has a close relationship with Google Ventures, a spokeswoman for Google Ventures said that the firm was not one of the two participants in the new funding program.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110801/angelpad-gets-vc-firms-to-commit-100k-to-all-its-start-ups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/ http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:03:48 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=86266 Remember how Josh James, the former CEO of Omniture, left Adobe to start a mysterious new company, for which he was found to be raising a boatload of venture capital money? Of course you do.

When we last looked in on his efforts to fund this new venture, James had raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, and had also gotten a commitment from Ron Conway’s SV Angel, both as part of a seed round worth more than $5 million. On top of that, he’s already pretty far along in raising a Series A round, and Benchmark Capital had already committed up to $30 million.

Remember also that though he had acquired Corda Technologies, a company based in Lindon, Utah, near his home, he said that company was to be the basis for the new one, only with a much bigger vision? The thing is, he hadn’t decided on what to name the new venture.

Well now, he’s apparently decided on the name, but he’s just not ready to tell the world yet. Instead he’s going to let you guess. And there are clues. He’s announced on his personal blog a contest to work out the name, and to guess it you have to figure out a mathematical equation. A $10,000 prize goes to the first one with the answer, as explained in the fine print from James’s personal site. Send your answers to info@corda.com.

The $10,000 prize for solving the math equation and puzzle will only be awarded to one person, as determined at our sole discretion. The recipient will be the first person who we determine has found the answer key, signed a non-disclosure agreement, and then finished the equation and puzzle and demonstrated proof of his or her solution after obtaining the key.

Think you’ve got the brains to do it? Well here it is, smarty pants. Get to it. Or maybe, just maybe, there are some clues you can find in James’s recent video interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Probably not, but it’s worth watching all the the same.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/listia-raises-cash-from-andreessen-horowitz-for-bartering-marketplace/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/listia-raises-cash-from-andreessen-horowitz-for-bartering-marketplace/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:32:30 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4645 Listia has raised a round of funding totaling $1.75 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Others participating include: SV Angel, Founder Collective, High Line Venture Partners, Max Levchin, Naval Ravikant, Alex Zubillaga, James Hong and others. The company’s marketplace essentially allows people to barter, handing out credits when you give something away that can be cashed in to buy something for free. The funding will be used to hire developers and to continue a move into mobile that includes the recent release of an iPhone app.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/listia-raises-cash-from-andreessen-horowitz-for-bartering-marketplace/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/bloom-io-raises-funding-for-playful-data-visualization/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/bloom-io-raises-funding-for-playful-data-visualization/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:44:29 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5384 Bloom.io today announced it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Betaworks, SV Angel and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

The San Francisco-based company–which has already made some basic demo apps to show Facebook and Twitter updates as a series of pretty blooming bubbles–says it will make data visualization applications for iOS and the Web to help users discover personally relevant information, streaming audio and video content.

Bloom’s team comes from Stamen Design, Trulia and The Barbarian Group. Bloom President Ben Cerveny told NetworkEffect that the company’s first apps will be for the iPad, introducing different metaphors such as space travel or sand in a sandbox for ambient and active views of social media data.

Cerveny calls these “post-textual experiences,” and you can imagine a big, trippy personalized screensaver or social playlist on your tablet.

Bloom promises that its apps “aren’t merely games or graphics,” but rather “new ways of seeing what’s important.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110411/bloom-io-raises-funding-for-playful-data-visualization/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-groupme-dudes-talk-group-messaging-phenom-and-drink-beer-at-the-same-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-groupme-dudes-talk-group-messaging-phenom-and-drink-beer-at-the-same-time/#comments Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:01:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41586

If you had to pick the hotsy-totsy start-up to win the media darling of South by Southwest award for 2011–following in the precious footsteps of Foursquare and Twitter from years past–it would probably have to be GroupMe.

The group messaging/conference call/location/photo sharing service has, as these things tend to, garnered a lot of heat since its debut less than a year ago.

That has, of course, also meant the requisite big venture funding–$11.5 million in total–for the New York-based GroupMe, including from SV Angel, betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Khosla Ventures.

And, no surprise, the dead-simple idea now has many start-up rivals, all vying to use combine mobile, texting, social, location, groups and smartphones into some unholy megatrend.

Still, GroupMe has built a slick little offering, which is likely to get scooped up by some bigger entity (or perhaps just copied, which is the sincerest form of flattery in tech).

Until then, its Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are enjoying their day in the sun–quite literally, at their free grilled-cheese-and-beer giveaway at SXSW this weekend in Austin, Texas.

Here is my video interview with their-future-is-so-bright-they-have-to-wear-shades pair:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-groupme-dudes-talk-group-messaging-phenom-and-drink-beer-at-the-same-time/feed/ 1