AllThingsD » True Ventures

Led by Greylock, Social App MessageMe Raises $10 Million

Mike Isaac — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:00:25 +0000

MessageMe, the mobile application that offers free text, photo and video messaging between smartphones, announced Tuesday that it had raised a $10 million round led by John Lilly of Greylock Partners — who will join the board of MessageMe makers LittleInc Labs — with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, True Ventures, Social+Capital and others. The company said it currently has more than five million users on its service.

Orchestrate.io Closes $3 Million Seed Round

Mike Isaac — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:30:38 +0000

API service startup Orchestrate.io announced on Tuesday that it had closed a $3 million seed investment round. The round was led by True Ventures, with participation from FrontLine Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners. The funds will be used for hiring, as well as for expanding infrastructure to work with multiple partners across the world in the coming year.

Madison Color Raises $4M for Home Hair Care

Liz Gannes — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:00:24 +0000

As the tech industry scratches its metaphorical head and wonders what needs transforming today, perhaps the answer is at its metaphorical fingertips: Home hair care.

Shutterstock/YuriyZhuravov

A yet-to-launch company called Madison Color says it will source its own healthier and less harmful products, and will help people buy them via personalized color-matching mobile apps, stylist consultations and other modern e-commerce sorts of things.

Madison Color’s CEO is Amy Errett, formerly a venture capitalist at Maveron, and before that CEO of Olivia. The founding team includes Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader.

“We felt like there was a big opportunity relative to a market that’s had zero innovation,” Errett said in an interview today, quoting industry numbers that place the U.S. home hair care market at $48 billion, including $15 billion for hair color and 45 million women who color their hair at home.

Set to launch its first hair color products in the fall, Madison Color has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by True Ventures and including Maveron.

Actually, Amazon Paid About $150 Million for Goodreads

Kara Swisher — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:32:26 +0000

According to sources, Amazon paid about $150 million for Goodreads, the popular books recommendation service. But that number could close in on $200 million, if certain performance metrics are met.

And, while BusinessWeek ran a we-are-just-guessing story today that posited a self-described “overly simple, back-of-the-envelope estimate” of $1 billion, sources said that number is simply wrong.

I am still trying to determine how much of the deal was cash — most of it, said sources — and how much was stock.

The San Francisco-based Goodreads had raised close to $3 million from a range of angel investors, as well as True Ventures. The sale is a big win for the firm, which apparently owned between 20 percent and 30 percent of Goodreads.

The online retail giant bought the company to help its book-y social discovery efforts for customers.

Amazon declined to comment, but the Seattle-based company said previously that the deal should close in the second quarter. It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site — in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari for under $10 million.

Just.me App Wants to Be a Switchboard Operator for All Your Messaging Needs

Liz Gannes — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:00:16 +0000

Many of us now have phones loaded up with mobile messaging apps, photo-sharing apps, social network apps, email and SMS and private journal or note-taking apps. Just.me is a new product that wants to tie all those different things into one place.

Keith Teare

Just.me has been in development for two years now, and starting today it will be released in small batches to the thousands of people who have signed up to try the beta. But because anyone who receives a Just.me message from someone using the product can download the app (for iPhone now and Android in the coming months), the beta process will be mostly out of the company’s control.

Well-connected Just.me founder Keith Teare previously helped found companies like TechCrunch and RealNames, and he has raised $2.75 million for Just.me from Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, SV Angel, CrunchFund and others.

The basic notion of Just.me is that users can send photos and messages to whomever they choose: 1) only themselves, 2) address book recipients, or 3) lots of people via Twitter or Facebook or the public Just.me feed.

Instead of creating its own centralized social network, Just.me is riding on top of users’ existing phone address book and email contacts.

“We think the center of gravity about choice in sharing is moving to the individual,” Teare explained today. “It’s not about the individual as an isolated atom; it’s about the center of gravity being an individual and their phone, not a cloud and a service.”

Just.me, of course, is indeed a service that connects all these messages, but it doesn’t necessarily control their end points. In a way, it’s kind of like the original Circles concept of Google+, but without a whole additional new social network that users have to manually configure.

My take? This could perhaps be a radical re-imagining of how we communicate, but it will also be just another ambitious app that many people will ignore and be totally fine without.

Teare cautioned that because Just.me includes so many features, “there will inevitably be bugs” during beta testing.

One thing Teare thinks he does have figured out is how Just.me will make money. Users will be able to choose to add participating brands to their contacts, in order to be alerted to various offers. So it’s sort of like a Twitter follow, except brands and users will be able to more directly communicate back and forth. Teare’s team has filed for a patent on this idea.

Streetline Gets $25M to Solve Parking

Liz Gannes — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:01:01 +0000

There’s just no way that helping people find and pay for parking is sexy. But it’s an industry that many people think can be helped by technology, and investors are now putting big money into their startup picks.

Streetline, a Foster City, Calif.-based company that works directly with cities to embed sensors in parking spaces, is announcing today that it has closed $25 million in Series C financing led by True Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, on top of $15 million it raised a year ago.

There are many others in the space, including Barney Pell’s QuickPay, and BMW’s ParkNow, a $10 million project whose leaders I met with this week.

They all cite the same statistics: Parking is a $25 billion industry in the U.S., and as much as 30 percent of urban traffic congestion is due to people looking for parking. And they all have various strategies for getting apps into people’s hands and cars (Streetline’s mobile app is called Parker), and helping parking providers dynamically manage demand.

Streetline has 30 deployments at cities and universities in the U.S. and Germany. What makes it distinct from other players is this network of wireless sensors that the company deploys within cities. That gives it the added distinction of calling itself an “Internet of Things” company — definitely a sexy startup topic.

And Streetline actually doesn’t help people make mobile payments for parking itself, but instead integrates with other players in the space, like Parkmobile and PayByPhone.

One Less Groupon Clone: J.P. Morgan Chase Acquires Bloomspot

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 02:56:19 +0000

Bloomspot, one of the smaller players in the coupon and loyalty market, is being acquired by Chase Bank, a subsidiary of J.P. Morgan Chase.

The acquisition was reported by several media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources close to the transaction as saying that Chase paid $35 million for the San Francisco company.

Bloomspot’s roughly 100 employees are expected to be offered jobs at the lender and payment processor.

Together, the two should be a good fit.

In general, banks and card issuers are looking for new revenue streams after the Durbin Amendment capped the amount that they could charge merchants on debit card transactions. Additionally, many banks have already begun sending targeted ads or deals to consumers based on their spending habits.

In a recent story, I named financial companies, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express, as potential acquirers for Groupon. However, one impediment with Groupon is its price. Even though its stock is down around 80 percent since its IPO, it would still cost billions to acquire.

The purchase today by Chase shows that there is an interest, just at a lower price point.

In a release, Jeff Kinder, president of Chase Offers, said, “Merchant partners are continually looking for ways to engage the right customers, and consumers have shown a clear interest in receiving offers from their favorite merchants. We believe Chase has a unique set of assets to bring these customers together and deliver highly targeted, relevant merchant offers at scale.”

Over the past few years, Bloomspot, which was led by former Yahoo executive Jasper Malcolmson, has tried hard to disassociate itself from both Groupon and LivingSocial. Even though on the surface it seems as though Bloomspot distributed similar offers, Malcolmson said he was focused on bringing merchants profitable customers rather than just getting new people in the door.

The company’s motto was, “Great Offers. Great Customers.”

But this deal may not have been so great for investors.

Last summer, Bloomspot raised $35 million in a second round of funding just before Groupon’s public offering. Prior to that, it raised nearly $11 million, for a total of about $46 million. Investors include InterWest Partners, Columbia Capital, Menlo Ventures and True Ventures, among others.

Jeff Ma Talks About TenXer Raising $3 Million More to Help You Judge Yourself (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:00:15 +0000

On-the-job personal productivity start-up tenXer has raised $3 million in a Series B round, which it said it will use to accelerate growth outside its software industry market.

The San Francisco company, which was founded by longtime entrepreneur Jeff Ma, makes tools to allow a user or perhaps a company, track performance and progress using a number of different metrics. The presumable goal is to use social and gaming elements, along with this activity data, to help you do your job 10 times better.

Get it with the tenXer name now?

The new funding is led by True Ventures, and its partner, Puneet Agarwal, will join tenXer’s board of directors.

Radar Partners and Khosla Ventures, as well as angel investors, participated in the new round, for what the company describes as a “human capital management platform.”

Currently aimed at tracking the work of software engineers, tenXer integrates current tools such as GitHub, Pivotal Tracker and Jira.

Here’s a video interview with Ma — who gained fame for his gambling prowess as part of the MIT blackjack team, and also was one of the co-founders of Citizen Sports, which was bought by Yahoo in 2010 — about the new round, and also about where tenXer is headed next:

[ See post to watch video ]

Silicon Valley Investors Flock to Massive Upstart Humor Site 9GAG

Liz Gannes — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:00:36 +0000

9GAG — the fast-growing community site for memes, comics and other Internet humor — has raised $2.8 million.

I wrote a profile of 9GAG — which went through Dave McClure’s 500 Startups incubator, kind of — back in April. That story mentioned this round of funding and the names of some of the investors, though the company wouldn’t confirm it at the time.

What’s interesting to note now is who has invested, particularly since there’s a lot of derision for 9GAG from the denizens of message board sites like Reddit and 4chan, who say it rips off their content. Of course, Reddit and 4chan aren’t exactly traditional investment opportunities.

Silicon Valley investors have flocked to put their money into Hong Kong-based 9GAG. The seed round was led by True Ventures and Freestyle Capital, with Greycroft Partners, 500 Startups, Scott Banister, Chris Sacca, David Tisch, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ben Ling, Karl Jacob, James Hong, Philip Kaplan and others.

Why? Because 9GAG is huge. It has more than 70 million global unique visitors and more than a billion page views — per month.

For instance, investor Tony Conrad of True Ventures talked up the “potential of 9GAG as a viral distribution platform” in a statement.

9GAG today is also releasing an iPhone app, and said an Android version is on the way.

Smarterer Wins $1.75M for Skills Quizzes

Liz Gannes — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:03:41 +0000

The skill-quizzing site Smarterer has raised $1.75 million in Series A funding from investors including True Ventures and Google Ventures. Smarterer’s Microsoft Excel test has been taken more than 42,000 times, and all together users have answered more than 10 million questions so far.

Flint Mobile Raises $3 Million in Capital for Mobile Payments App

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:30:08 +0000

Flint Mobile said it has raised $3 million in a first round of capital, and that it is launching its new mobile payments app, which enables merchants to process payments with a mobile phone. But rather than requiring a merchant to buy a card reader, the app allows the merchant to snap a picture of a credit card. The round, which will be used on product development and hiring, was led by Storm Ventures and True Ventures.

Tello Raises $2.7M to Help Businesses Get Mobile Feedback

Liz Gannes — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:00:08 +0000

Tello, which helps businesses solicit feedback through iOS and Android apps and text messages rather than just waiting for it to pop up on Twitter or Yelp, has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and Bullpen Capital. Katie reviewed the consumer version of the Tello product last year. Google bought a similar start-up called Talkbin last year.

Caterina Fake: Fast Growth for a New Social App Is a Very Bad Thing

Liz Gannes — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:00:12 +0000

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.”

GigaOM Buys paidContent (Like Peter Kafka Said)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:19:06 +0000

GigaOM finally fessed up and said that it had bought tech and media news site paidContent, as AllThingsD.com media ninja Peter Kafka had reported earlier this week it would.

The price is reportedly low, according to sources, but we’ll find out for you, since neither GigaOM nor the former paidContent owner, Britain’s Guardian News & Media, is talking. As part of the deal, though, the Guardian has gotten some sort of stake in GigaOM, and someone there is joining its board as an observer.

PaidContent founder Rafat Ali left his company a couple years after selling to the Guardian in 2008. The Guardian put it up for sale in the fall.

Malik has sold off chunks of his own business — one of the pioneering tech and media news blogs — to venture capitalists such as True Ventures (where he is now a venture partner) and Reed Elsevier Ventures, who have invested a total of $15 million.

In a blast from the past, here is a video interview I did with Ali in mid-2007 in Santa Monica, Calif., at what was then its new offices, talking about the bright future ahead for paidContent (sorry about the quality, but whatevs!):

[ See post to watch video ]

Here is Om Malik’s blog post on the subject, which goes into all (or almost all) the deets:

First the news: Yes, the rumors are true. We are indeed buying the assets of ContentNext Media from Guardian News & Media Limited. And no, we are not disclosing the terms of the deal, except that we are buying the entire group of properties — paidContent.org, mocoNews.net, contentSutra and paidContent:UK and that a representative of Guardian News & Media will join our board of directors as an observer.

A few weeks ago when Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM, came to the board and suggested that we should try and acquire paidContent, my fellow board members — Jon Callaghan (True Ventures), Ammar Hanafi (Alloy Ventures) and Kevin Brown (Reed Elsevier Ventures) — didn’t hesitate for a minute. The ethos of paidContent and our company are in sync. GigaOM’s core belief is that as connectivity becomes ubiquitous, it changes everything from society to business to we the people. paidContent from the very beginning has been built on the idea that connectedness is and will change media. It makes perfect sense for us to team up. Since then, Paul and his team worked tirelessly to make it happen.

OK, now you know what. Let me tell you why.

Now, why are we doing this deal, clearly the biggest of our five-and-a-half-year history? Two simple but equally powerful reasons — the first and perhaps most important reason: people. I have been an admirer of paidContent’s editorial team from the very beginning of its journey. Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer were two of my favorite writers in the early days of professional blogging. And while Rafat (who is on our board of advisers) has moved on to new things, I am glad to have Staci join us. She has been instrumental in building ContentNext from the ground up, and in addition to writing, she has been building the company’s event business. I am thrilled to announce that she will remain the editor of paidContent.

Ernie Sander who spearheads the ContentNext editorial operations is the kind of veteran everyone on our team, including me, can learn from. And for that precise reason, Ernie is going to become the executive editor of our sprawling online editorial operations. Our managing editor, Nicole Solis, is being promoted to VP of Editorial Operations. And then there is the most awesome team of journalists — Robert Andrews, Tom Krazit, Daniel Frankel, Laura Hazard Owen, Jeff Roberts and Amanda Natividad. In addition there are a wonderful group of technology, business and sales people who are joining our company. I welcome them all to our growing family and can’t wait to break bread with them in weeks to come.

Location, location, location

These fine folks are actually going to help bolster our presence in New York and help increase our footprint in Europe, a region of key strategic focus for GigaOM. (We will be hosting Structure:Europe in Amsterdam, October 16-17.) With this deal, we are really pleased that one of the most forward-looking media outlets around, Guardian News & Media, will become a shareholder in our business.

As you all know, I am (and will always be) a displaced New Yorker; New York City is my spiritual home. By increasing our footprint in the capital of the world, I would get a chance to go back more often. But it’s not an emotional tug that is driving us to this decision. New York is fast becoming a major technology hub, as Ryan Kim outlined in his recent post. And we want to expand our coverage to Boston — thanks to Barb Darrow who joined us several months ago — and the Washington DC corridor as well. paidContent’s New York City offices are now GigaOM East.

Media is the new Wild West

We are quite strategic about our acquisitions — we acquire media entities only if we love the people and believe that we are at the starting phase of a trend. In 2008, we acquired jkOnTheRun as our tip of the hat to the growing demand for mobile devices and the changes it would bring into society. Later that year, we brought in The Apple Blog because we knew the best was yet to come for Apple. Both of those acquisitions have helped GigaOM cover the issues that matter most to our ultimate customers — you, the reader — in a smart, sensible fashion.

“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?” We are now starting to see that question being answered.” — Clay Shirky

Shirky’s observation means that we are in a time of chaos where the very idea of media is being questioned. And as a Chinese proverb says, from chaos emerges opportunity. I believe the best is yet to come for media.

Over the past few years we have started to see the transformation of media by new technologies, new methods of distribution and newer ways to consume information. Mathew Ingram has been writing about these disruptions on a regular basis, and now we are going to double down on what we think is a great new chapter in the media industry.

I have always believed that we’ve got to stop thinking of media as what it was and focus on more of what it could be. In the world of plenty, the only currency is attention and attention is what defines “media.” Zynga is fighting Hollywood for attention (and winning). Instagram is taking moments away from other media. They have attention. There are old companies that are dying and new ones that are being invented. We’re eager to expand our coverage of social and digital media editorially, in our research and at our events. paidContent is the best chronicler of the media industry, and by blending their coverage with ours, we hope to watch this fast-changing industry ever more closely.

Please join me in welcoming the ContentNext team!

TasteMakerX Raises $1.8M for Mobile Social App Platform

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:00:32 +0000

TastemakerX, a San Francisco start-up that is developing a social mobile platform focused on “targeted taste graphs,” said it had raised $1.8 million in funding from a variety of venture firms, including Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures and Tekton Ventures, as well as angel investors. The company said it will release its TastemakerX Music mobile app as a private beta in early March.

Amid Increasing Competition, Fitbit Scores $12 Million in Funding

Lauren Goode — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:00:16 +0000

Fitbit Inc., maker of a popular fitness device that clips to clothing and tracks users’ activity levels, has raised $12 million in Series C funding.

The new round comes entirely from existing investors Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures.

The company said it plans to use the funding mainly for hiring and for aggressive product development. Fitbit declined to elaborate further on what type of new product or products it has up its sleeve, except to say that it is now looking ahead to other connected and affordable health-and-fitness devices for the year, and is hiring top engineers to get the company there.

But Fitbit’s next steps — no pun intended — probably need to be very strategic ones.

The funding round comes amid increasing competition from other makers of wear-’em-and-forget-’em data-tracking devices. While Fitbit has been a leader in this area of health-and-fitness tracking, Jawbone, a maker of audio products, launched the $99 UP wristband tracker late last year, which was initially received with enthusiasm. And Nike just introduced its version of a polymer-encased wristband, the FuelBand.

The Jawbone UP has since suffered technical difficulties, forcing the company to refund unhappy customers and temporarily pause production.

But with the $149 FuelBand, Nike has brought big-brand cachet to activity tracking. And Nike isn’t just targeting the serious athlete or runner anymore — it’s going after the casual athlete and the desk jockey, too.

While some fitness devices involve the use of pedometers, accelerometers or galvanic skin-response sensors, Nike’s band promises to combine oxygen uptake with the activity tracked through the device’s tri-axis accelerometer for a high-tech reading. To be fair, it’s not entirely clear yet how that differentiates the FuelBand, and we won’t be able to gauge how well it works until we can get our hands on one and test it.

The Fitbit also uses a three-dimensional accelerometer to measure users’ steps and activity levels. When the $100 Fitbit device launched in 2008, it punched up the idea of the average pedometer, and offered hassle-free, wireless uploading of 24-7 personal analytics and activity data. Fitbit also created a Web dashboard through which users can monitor their activity levels; for $50 a year, Fitbit users can view even more detailed analytics.

In October 2011, the company introduced the Fitbit Ultra, which added a digital clock, a stopwatch and an altimeter that measures elevation gain; a Fitbit iPhone app was launched, too.

San Francisco-based Fitbit, which recently started selling Fitbits in Canada and the U.K., declined to say how many units have been sold to date. In the U.S., the Fitbit recently became available in Target stores through a retail partnership.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, Fitbit also unveiled the Fitbit Aria, a Wi-Fi-enabled “smart” scale, as Forbes reported here. The company plans to ship the scale starting in April.

(Fitbit photo courtesy of Redefinery/Flickr)

Salesforce Pays $50M for Assistly Customer Service Platform

Liz Gannes — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:01:18 +0000

Salesforce said today it has acquired the customer service platform Assistly for $50 million in cash. Assistly helps companies manage customer service through various channels like Facebook, Twitter, chat, email and phone, and is a competitor to Zendesk. That marks the third (and biggest) acquisition in one day for Assistly investor True Ventures: WeGame was bought by Tagged and VodPod assets were bought by Lockerz.

MakerBot Raises $10 Million for 3-D Printers

Peter Kafka — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:05:43 +0000

MakerBot, a start-up that makes (relatively) affordable 3-D printers, has raised a $10 million round led by Foundry Group. Other investors include RRE, True Ventures, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s personal investment group Bezos Expeditions.

Metamarkets Raises $6 Million To Help Big Web Publishers Corral Big Data

Peter Kafka — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:00:57 +0000

Big web publishers sell lots and lots of ads, and that generates lots and lots of data. It’d be pretty useful to keep track of all that information.

That’s the basic premise behind Metamarkets, a 2-year old startup that just raised another $6 million.

This was an inside round, with most of the folks who invested $2.5 million a year ago re-upping: Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures led the round, and previous investors including Village Ventures, True Ventures, Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley chipped in.

CEO David Soloff says Metamarkets now has 3 paying clients, and is recording between 3 and 5 billion “events” — ad impressions bought and sold – per day. Metamarkets stores and analyzes all of that data — it’s up to 500 terabytes so far — and the publishers are supposed to use it to help them figure out how much to price their inventory in real-time. It’s also supposed to let them predict what kind of business they’ll be able to do in the future.

Originally, the company thought it would also compile that data to create the equivalent of stock index, which buyers and sellers could use to gauge the state of the ad market.

The idea: If you were buying inventory from, say, Google, it’d be good to know how the rest of the market was performing. But for now Soloff says they’re busy with the proprietary products they’re selling directly to ad sellers.

Metamarkets will use the money to build out its 14-person engineering team. But the company’s existing workforce is already doing something right: I’m told that Twitter, among other potential acquirers, did some tire-kicking before the company closed this round. Soloff wouldn’t comment on that line of questioning; I’ve asked Twitter but don’t expect to hear much from them, either.

Video: Om Talks About $6 Million Giga-Funding

Kara Swisher — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:14:38 +0000

Yesterday, I slogged through the rain to the downtown San Francisco HQ of the GigaOM Network to visit with tech blogging pioneer Om Malik.

He just got $6 million more in funding, bringing the total for the tech news and research company to $15 million. Reed Elsevier Ventures is the newest investor, along with current ones, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures.

Malik, who founded GigaOM five years ago, is also a partner at True. He said he still owns a substantial stake in GigaOM after the funding, which apparently valued his company at $40 million.

GigaOM–which is better known for its popular tech news and analysis blog–will use the money to turbocharge its premium subscription service, called GigaOM Pro. That service charges $199 a year for deep-dive reports in areas including mobile, clean tech and cloud computing.

Here’s my video chitchat with Malik:

[ See post to watch video ]

Showyou: An iPad Experience for Shared Videos

Liz Gannes — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:00:17 +0000

Watching videos your friends recommend on Facebook and Twitter can be awkward. You often lose your place on the page, or have to grab headphones, or want to come back to something when you have more time later. Or all of the above.

Showyou is a new iOS app with an imaginative interface built for social video consumption. It’s meant for spurts of time dedicated to watching videos.

The main Showyou view is a never-ending tiled video wall intended primarily for use on the iPad. Scroll horizontally or vertically and you’ll find videos shared by your friends (the organization seems somewhat random, but more recent videos are generally up and to the left, and popular older videos are down and to the right). Click on a video and it pops out from the wall and plays immediately.

Videos keep loading on one page as you move, giving the (somewhat overwhelming!) sensation that there are infinite options to watch. It might be disconcerting not to have a playlist function or a way to filter videos by any sort of topic, but Showyou does also offer a more traditional feed view that shows just the activity of other Showyou users you follow.

The app comes from San Francisco-based Remixation, a True Ventures-backed start-up which for the last four years has been working on a video curation tool called Vodpod. Vodpod still exists, but the Remixation team has in the last six months shifted almost entirely to work on Showyou, in part inspired by iPad consumption experiences like Flipboard.

At launch, Showyou only supports YouTube, Vimeo and TED videos (in part because they are available in HTML5 for display on iOS). There are also a smattering of social tools in the app, so you can click to share a video, “thank” your friends or comment on videos within Showyou. And Showyou is living-room-ready at launch–that is, if you have Apple TV 2.0 with Airplay.

Special Delivery for All: Message Bus Launches Email Service

Liz Gannes — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:15:15 +0000

The co-founders of Webshots and Twitter’s early infrastructure and operations lead have started a new email services company called Message Bus that’s already backed with more than $3 million from True Ventures and Polaris Ventures.

Message Bus, which is coming out of stealth today, helps businesses deliver emails.

Web companies these days often enlist infrastructure service providers like Chargify, Twilio, SimpleGeo to implement their billing systems, voice and SMS services, databases of places, and other projects. Start-ups don’t have to spend as many precious resources hiring specialists and building things from scratch that aren’t their main product, and afterwards can more easily scale as they grow. Some people call this phenomenon “infrastructure apps,” and many of the providers are themselves built on top of Amazon Web Services.

Message Bus is not the first or only company to apply this concept to email; for instance, there are already start-up SendGrid (see our video interview) and Amazon Simple Email Service.

However, Message Bus aims to be different by providing live analytics about what happens to emails (similar to Chartbeat for Web site monitoring), by not requiring users to set up their own email servers, and by dynamically scaling to match customers’ needs, said co-founder Narendra Rocherolle in an interview last week.

Message Bus is run by Rocherolle (as president) and his long-time business partner Nick Wilder (as CEO). Its CTO is Twitter Director of Operations Jeremy LaTrasse, who had been with Twitter since it started at Odeo until leaving last spring. While being responsible for Twitter’s infrastructure might not always be something to brag about, LaTrasse had among other things built the Twitter system that sends users notification emails, a direct precedent for Message Bus.

Message Bus was founded out of Rocherolle and Wilder’s Start Project incubator in Mill Valley, Calif. Its technology team is currently working out of Pivotal Labs in San Francisco.

Rocherolle said he wants Message Bus to ultimately be “an agnostic messaging architecture,” calling this “Twitter’s road not taken.” He explained, “You used to hear Twitter talk about all these objects communicating– even parking meters are going to have tweets–but now they are much more concerned with the content.”

Rocherolle added that Message Bus hopes to get approval from major email providers to eliminate relaying email through SMTP from certain senders, and to add other forms of messaging like SMS.

SoundTracking Gives Music Its Own Check-In App (Video)

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:31:29 +0000

It used to be the smallest unit of personal expression online was a blog post. Then it got easier: A status message or a location check-in. And recently even easier, with mobile photo uploads. On that continuum, perhaps the next step is using an app like the newly launched SoundTracking to automatically detect and share with your friends and followers the song you’re currently experiencing.

Sharing a single song is intimate in the sense that it says something about your personal taste, but the amount of work and preparation it takes to post is next to nothing.

SoundTracking, the first application from a small start-up called Schematic Labs, was rushed to launch last week after it came out that AOL was launching a competing app (though the new AOL Play is Android-only, while SoundTracking is iPhone-only). Oddly, AOL Ventures is an investor in SoundTracking, but that’s a different unit of the company. (Other investors are True Ventures, Google Ventures and angels.)

Probably the easiest way to think of SoundTracking is a social version of the ambient song recognition technology many are familiar with from apps like Shazam and SoundHound. Or, you could compare it to Foursquare, but with check-ins for music rather than locations.

It’s not like the idea of detecting and publishing what music a user listens to is new; Last.fm, for instance, has been doing it for years. But there’s a sense that by building something to be mobile and social “from the ground up,” every technology concept can be reborn.

At SXSW, I ran into Schematic Labs co-founder Steve Jang, who was previously head of marketing and business development at Imeem, the spectacularly failed music start-up. Jang said Schematic Labs isn’t going to be a music-focused start-up, but rather plans to develop similar apps for categories like shopping and movies.

In a video interview, Jang explained to NetworkEffect how the app works and how he plans to make money from it.

Another social music app that launched at SXSW is Roqbot, a sort of virtual jukebox allows users to collectively set the playlist at a party or public venue by contributing music picks from their iOS or Android phones.

[ See post to watch video ]

Former Google Social Lead Launches Ditto Discovery App

Liz Gannes — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:00:50 +0000

Ditto, an iPhone app and new company to help users get quick recommendations about restaurants and movies, launches today.

The app is notable because it was created by Jyri Engeström, who previously founded Jaiku, a Twitter competitor that Google bought in 2007. Engeström was then Google’s “head of social,” but left dissatisfied in 2009. Pieces of the never-released product he’d been developing at Google showed up in Google Buzz, Profiles and Latitude, according to Engeström.

Engeström, a sociologist by training, said the rise of the mobile touchscreen was part of what brought him back to the game, because he thinks he can create a meaningful and fun experience without requiring users to do much typing.

Ditto users press big colorful buttons to indicate what they want to do–for instance, eat out. Then a user receives recommendations for nearby restaurants directly from friends but also from processing friends’ historical check-in data. That seems similar to Foursquare, but Engeström said it’s more useful, because users turn to Ditto before they make a decision about where to go or what to do. In that way, it’s a bit more like a social Q&A service.

The current Ditto app also supports movie recommendations, and will add other categories like books and music, with the idea that a user could consume recommended content directly on the phone from Netflix, Spotify or Kindle. Engeström also said the company will develop for Android next.

This horizontal approach to discovery will likely be hard to pull off, because users with app-filled smartphones aren’t sitting around waiting for the perfect all-purpose social recommendations app.

So if attracting users does prove to be hard, would Engeström sell out, given his negative experience with Google? What about in the context of Beluga, the group messaging app that already sold out to Facebook this week, before its inevitable larger competitor had even launched anything like it?

Engeström said one advantage he has over Beluga (whose founders worked for and with him at Google) is that recommendations are monetizable through advertising and affiliate relationships–whereas SMS costs money and doesn’t have an obvious business model. He also attested that Ditto has already had acquisition inquiries before it even launched.

Ditto has raised $775,000 from Betaworks and True Ventures, and has a team of three based in San Francisco.

Assistly Extends Customer Service to Facebook Walls

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:08:59 +0000

When something breaks, we users ask for help wherever we think we can find someone responsible. Or maybe we just stand up on our social media soapbox and whine.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.