The new behavior advertising upstarts: Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop
The eye-opening performances claimed by new behavioral advertising start-ups Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop are sure to grab the attention from online retailers and publishers.
Take the little announcement by the nine-month-old Menlo Park company Aggregate Knowledge yesterday at DEMO: It drove more than 20 percent of all of the holiday purchases at major discount retail site Overstock.com. Considering that the annual revenue of Overstock is in the range of $700-800 million, our rough estimate is that Aggregate… Continue Reading
TextDigger, Hakia say they can improve search
TextDigger is the latest company seeking that Holy Grail: Improving on Google’s results by understanding the sense of the words you’re looking for.
TextDigger’s search engine is called Digger, and it just launched at the DEMO conference.
First, some context: Digger, of San Jose, joins Powerset, the San Francisco start-up, and Hakia, of New York, and others which are trying to do something similar. Our piece on Powerset sparked debate within the search industry, namely because some… Continue Reading
DEMO mentions: GetaBuz, Pairup
Here are two new Silicon Valley companies that launched at DEMO. We’re not certain whether they are features or have potential for more, but they are aiming for more:
Buz Interative lets you create voicemail greetings with music — We got a preview of the Palo Alto company’s product, GetaBuz, last week from VP of Marketing, Steve Ehrlich.
You use it to mix together with a voice message, and then — here’s the technology part —… Continue Reading
Report from the trenches
(Editor’s note: VentureBeat hadn’t heard from Silicon Valley start-up Bunchball in a while, so we asked CEO Rajat Paharia to tell us what it is like out there on the front lines. Here’s his report.)
In January 2005, I left my job with no idea what I was going to do next. I talked to a lot of smart people at startups and in venture capital, and they all said that if I had an… Continue Reading
Roundup: Bombs, don’t do Delaware, MySQL IPO & more
The latest Silicon Valley round-up:
Correlation between bomb building and entrepreneurship? — Former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel reportedly says four of six founders of the online payment service built bombs while in high school. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson designs rockets.
MyYearbook.com, a social networking site for teens, raises $4.1M – The site looks like a Facebook knock-off. It raised the first round of finance from U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and First Round Capital. The… Continue Reading
Farecast, the airfare prediction site, raises $12.1M more
Farecast.com, the young Seattle start-up that now owns the niche of predicting airfares, and which continues to roll out new features (like letting you guarantee low fares), has raised $12.1 million more.
The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, and includes PAR Capital Management, Pinnacle Ventures, and Farecast board member and former Expedia CEO, Erik Blachford. Existing investors, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and WRF Capital also participated — it has raised a total of… Continue Reading
DartDEVICES, the DEMO conundrum company, has $2.8M from Motorola
DARTdevices, of Mountain View, is a start-up that launched at DEMO today, that until this evening remained unintelligible to us.
It proclaims a technology that lets multiple devices interact with an application over a shared connection. Gigaom’s Katie Fehrenbacher sat down with the company, but even she was left wondering how it really matters. The idea appears to be, if you want to share photo content or game app between two otherwise incompatible devices, it… Continue Reading
Losing politician Steve Westly heads — where else — into venture capital
Steve Westly, the former state controller and eBay executive who failed in a gambit to become state governor, is headed back to Menlo Park, the center of Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry.
He may have lost the California Democratic primary to Phil Angelides, but he’s joining Angelides (who won the primary but who subsequently lost to Schwarzenegger) in retreating back to the next best thing — a career in the sexy world of venture capital.
Just… Continue Reading
Western VC group on corporate governance — Don’t play with your Blackberries, among other things
A major West Coast venture capital organization today endorsed corporate governance guidelines for board members of private companies.
It lists do’s and don’ts board members should follow, from the attitude they should exhibit toward entrepreneurs during board meetings, to refraining from fiddling with their Blackberry’s during board meetings, and much more. Our flippant headline aside, these appear to be very solid guidelines, and worth a read for board members — many of whom have never had… Continue Reading
Zing, developer of WiFi mobile devices, raises $13M
Zing Systems, a Mountain View company developing WiFi mobile audio and entertainment devices that are “always connected,” and which don’t require connection to a PC, has raised $13 million in a third round of funding, according to VentureWire.
The funding, which closed last month, was led by new investor IDG Ventures Boston with participation from previous investors Redpoint Ventures and Camp Ventures. Zing Chief Financial Officer Doug Sinclair said the company has now raised less than… Continue Reading
My Currency, lets “wisdom of the crowds” estimate real estate prices
My Currency is a new real estate company that tries to turn Zillow on its head.
Zillow, you’ll recall, is controversial, because it estimates values of homes. Some people love to gawk at the estimates for their neighbors’ homes, others are irked when they feel Zillow gives a low-ball value to their home. Zillow works because it is top-down. Unlike other Web 2.0 companies, it didn’t require lots of user-participation to get where it is now…. Continue Reading
Mobio — the useful mobile service
Mobio, a Cupertino start-up, is distinguishing itself by creating simple, useful services for the mobile phone.
We wrote about the company when it released its movie service — which lists movie reviews, times and maps.
Today, Mobio kicks off a 100 more services, many of them handy for kicking round town. There’s everything from OpenTable, flower-buying, dating services to flight-time checks.
Mobio is just the latest mobile company to ditch your stupid, slow cellphone Web browser. Forget… Continue Reading
With Bling, translate your Web site to mobile AJAX
Bling Software, a start-up that launches today at DEMO, helps translate your Web site into a visually rich mobile version.
Your regular site can not be duplicated on a cellphone’s tiny screen, so you have to customize it. This can cost serious bucks.
Now, Pleasanton’s Bling has unveiled an AJAX-based software that publishers can use to transform their sites into visually rich mobile versions. Bling’s chief executive, Roy Satterthwaite, tells VentureBeat the company is the first to… Continue Reading
Devicescape, which connects your device to WiFi hotspots, raises more “millions”
See our story here.
Devicescape connects your device to WiFi hotspots
Devicescape releases a software today that connects any of your WiFi devices automatically to a WiFi hotspot or muni network.
This is significant, because more cellphones are being equipped with WiFi, as the cost of WiFI chips hit bottom rates of $2. And by accessing WiFi with a Skype or other Internet (VoIP) phone, you can make cheap calls.
The service, a software download, automatically detects when there’s a Wifi network nearby; you can set the… Continue Reading
Nexo, the social network for families, or small groups
Nexo bills itself as the social network for families, or small groups.
What? Not another social network! Well, the thinking of co-founder Craig Jorasch is that there’s still need for one more. There’s no site on the Web, he argues, where you can slap together a private network for a few trusted contacts – family members or others — and do it EASILY.
Nexo, of Palo Alto, launches at the Demo conference today. It has… Continue Reading
Zink: A printer that doesn’t use ink
Zink, a company presenting at the DEMO conference today, announces a novel printing technology: A printer that needs no ink.
Zink printers heat up a printing element and roll plastic paper past the print head once, and presto, a 2-by-3-inch picture comes out dry in 30 seconds.
Dean Takahashi, of the Merc, has the scoop (here’s the link) on this Waltham, Mass. spin-out from Polaroid. This will usher in a range of new devices. Later this year,… Continue Reading
Whisher tackles FON — launches its own WiFi nation
Honestly, we never got FON, the company that sells a WiFi router so that you can share your WiFi with others.
FON claims 50,000 nodes, and that it is the “largest WiFi network in the world,” so it appears to be having some traction.
Whisher is a new Spanish start-up flogging a similar model — but its offering may be more palatable than FON’s. Whisher has just raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Benchmark Europe… Continue Reading