Conduit offers way to search 12 million toolbars
Conduit is a company that lets Web site owners and bloggers build a customizable toolbar for their visitors, and it says it is growing quickly.
We wrote about the company last year. It boasts 12 million sites using its toolbar. Today, the Israeli-Redwood Shores, Calif. company lets Web surfers find toolbars with preloaded groups, for example of top tech blogs, including ours.
It also lets you search for any of the toolbars, on a network called MyConduit. Once you’ve downloaded one, you can then add others to a drop-down menu without a separate download. This lets you use the toolbar of your favorite site, but also subscribe to countless others, which you can then carry around with you latently — accessing them from the pull-down menu. VentureBeat’s toolbar can be found here.
The company raised $2 million last year, and is now looking to raise another round of capital. It says it is profitable (cash-flow positive), and is now nearing $10 million in revenue a year — which is striking. It relies solely on ad revenue it shares with Google by letting that company power the search on the toolbar. See a shortened version of our toolbar above, and longer one below (shrunk)
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
