Fididel is seeking a $1 million round of Series A funding for its e-commerce business, VentureBeat has learned.
The San Jose company has raised $761,250 from investors already. Participants include a new venture firm, Quest Venture Partners of Atherton. The company’s web site, www.fididel.com, has very little information except a form to request e-mails for users to join its e-commerce beta program.
Hal Wendell, CEO of Fididel, said that the company is still in stealth and isn’t ready to describe its e-commerce business. He said it started about a year and a half ago. Wendell said this is his CEO position but he is a veteran of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Nortel.
I asked Wendell about the company name. He said, “It doesn’t mean anything. I woke up one morning and had an epiphany. I knew a Mexican restaurant named Fidel’s and played around with that.”
4 Comments
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unitedBIT said:
I found Fididel’s advertising in craigslist. It said that their business model was based on real time negotiation, i.e. the buyer can chat and bargain with the seller to make an immediate sales in real-time. Moreover, they also offer a service where sellers can outsource your negotiation duties to a trained and experienced negotiator. See at : http://detroit.craigslist.org/biz/589986032.html
(I am not sure whether this is the Fididel you mention, but the email of the contact person has @fididel.com) -
oh please said:
the future of ecommerce? please. i hate sweeping statements like that, especially from companies who have 16 year old web designers. here is the future of fididel: they raise their $1M in this bloated investment world and create a quirky useless product then rattle the swords as much as possible to generate free PR which leads to some initial traction by the curious crowd of startup watchers so they raise more money based entirely on their alexa graph which soon reverses course as everybody goes back to life as normal and fididel struggles along for another 6 months of finger-pointing and renewed business models at which point tech crunch throws them in the dead pool and the main engineers from the project form another similar company so they can rinse and repeat.
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Void said:
Go to the Fididel website and attempt to sign up or login with blank data to see the following:
“Your eamil address is not avalability. Please try again!” and “Your password or email is wrong”Hopefully with that $1 million dollar investment they can employ spell checking on their content before it is published.
While this may seem like a small blunder to some, it is very telling of the things to come for this company and doesn’t show well for the quality of the rest of their service.
- Void
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Greeting said:
Go to http://www.fididel.com and have a look. It is really not bad, I think.
4 Trackbacks
9:14 pm
Deal RoundUp: Feb 29, 2008: Veoh, Zoove, NextIO, iSoftStone, SafeNet, DragonFly : unitedBIT said:
[...] He said it started about a year and a half ago. Is it too long for a e-commerce site? Source:VentureBeat [I found an ad of Fididel in Craigslist. It said that their business model is based on real time [...]
11:42 pm
What is Fididel? $1 Million Richer. said:
[...] seen this one crop up several places today, but most recently from Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat. Its being described as a stealth startup and its called Fididel, named after a Mexican restaurant [...]
8:33 pm
What is Fididel? $1 Million Richer. | Social Media News Desk said:
[...] seen this one crop up several places today, but most recently from Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat. Its being described as a stealth startup and its called Fididel, named after a Mexican restaurant [...]
5:00 am
Fididel launches live-negotiation auction business » VentureBeat said:
[...] San Jose, Calif.-based company, which VentureBeat uncovered a couple of months ago, appears to fill a hole in the auctions market that those big companies have long left [...]