VentureBeat

Ad spend declines for first half of year, digital growth slows

Advertising spend works as a bit of the canary in the coal mine in a lagging economy. When the market constricts, one of the first things to go is the ad budget. News showing a decline in overall ad spend for the first half of the year should make everyone uneasy (as if you needed another reason).

Taken as a whole, ad spend declined by 1.6 percent compared to 2007 according to TNS Media Intelligence. More… Continue Reading

Yahoo’s Right Media ad exchange was so broken some turned it off

After Yahoo confirmed it has been experiencing problems with latency at its Right Media exchange on Monday, I’ve heard from those at ad networks using RXM, verifying latency issues were widespread. How bad was it? One Right Media client actually turned off Right Media exchange for a period until latency issues improved. It’s not clear if the problems have been fixed for everyone yet, though, or what the problems were. As of this writing, Yahoo… Continue Reading

Is Latency Crippling Yahoo’s Right Media? Yep.

Right Media, an online ad exchange that Yahoo acquired in 2007, is having some serious technical hiccups, sources within the online ad world tell us. This is leading to problems with capacity and latency. Think messaging service Twitter and its formerly-frequent use of the Fail Whale, but instead of not being able to see what everyone is doing for happy hour, people are losing real dollars on real ad investments.

I’ve heard that when serving ads,… Continue Reading

Stealth online classified ad company The Worldwise Exchange gets $5 million in funding

The Worldwide Exchange, which seems to be some sort of online classified ad provider, received $5 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors, VentureBeat has learned. The company, based in Playa Vista, Calif., must be in stealth mode, as I can find absolutely zero trace of the company on the web.

Behavioral targeting firm Proclivity Systems lands $5.5 million in second round of funding

Proclivity Systems announced a second round of funding today, to the tune of $5.5 million. Proclivity provides back-end analytics in e-commerce sites to help retailers determine what an online shopper may be likely to buy. By mining the data trail someone leaves behind while browsing a shopping website, Proclivity claims it can help send offers and campaigns to consumers at the right time and right price point.

The round of funding was lead by Fung Capital… Continue Reading

Smartphones gobbling up ever more market share

The mobile web is looking a bit smarter lately. AdMob, a mobile ad platform we’ve covered before, put out its metrics for August, and it’s clear that smartphones are quickly becoming mainstream. Drawing on data from the over 5,000 mobile websites the company serves, the numbers point towards smartphones both in the US and worldwide continuing to become more prevalent, but with very different manufacturers dominating internationally versus domestically.

Within the US, smartphones accounted for 23.7… Continue Reading

DEMOfall 08: SpinSpotter aims to clear up media bias

SpinSpotter is a new browser plug-in that hopes to arm online news junkies with the power of pointing out when the media has a dog in the fight.

It works like this: Users install the plug-in, which currently is only available to FireFox users, though an IE 7.0 plug-in is coming down the pike. While browsing news stories, you flag instances of media bias or spin, using the guidelines of what the company calls the “Seven… Continue Reading

Google cuts how long it keeps your IP data by half

Google announced yesterday evening it would change how long it stores the IP addresses of its users without anonymizing the information, down to nine months from 18. The announcement comes a year and a half after Google instituted the 18-month rule – before that, Google held on to IP information, without removing personally identifiable information, in perpetuity.

The Google blog offers the reasoning behind the decision, citing pressure from U.S. and European regulatory bodies to curtail… Continue Reading

Sequoia and Battery raise piles of cash for new funds

Sharpen up those pitches — there’s over a billion dollars worth of newly minted VC funding flowing in the Valley now.

Two of the more respected venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital (arguably top dog in the valley, having invested in Google, Apple and many others) and Battery Ventures, each have disclosed new funds through regulatory filings, with Sequoia raising its largest fund ever.

Sequoia has raised $929.5 million for its latest “growth” fund, designated for investments into… Continue Reading

Mobile marketer Vibes Media nabs $15 million in funding, hunts for acquisitions

In another sign that interest in mobile advertising is perking up, Chicago-based mobile marketing company Vibes Media announced $15 million in a first round of funding today. Never mind that it’s still hard to point to a single company that has been able to go public based on mobile advertising. That’s coming, supposedly.

The privately held decade-old company plans to use the funding to acquire smaller fish in the market, as well as to scale up… Continue Reading

Our review: Chrome more than capable of taking on IE and Firefox

Add web browers to the list of things Google does well. The Mountain View-based search giant debuted its new web browser today in a public beta, and I’ve spent most of the afternoon poking around the web and seeing how Chrome performs. The verdict? While it’s still a few iterations from displacing Firefox as my browser of choice, Chrome already provides a much more pleasant web experience than Microsoft’s newest competitor Internet Explorer 8 (also… Continue Reading

Education.com scores $9.75 million in second round of funding

Online education portal Education.com will announce a total of $9.75 million in its second round of financing today, VentureBeat has learned. The site seeks to become a one-stop destination for parents looking for online answers about their children’s education.

The site’s main appeal lies in its School Finder application, allowing parents to see information such as teacher-to-student ratio, test scores, and other parent’s reviews about local schools. The site also hosts about 7,000 articles, drawn from… Continue Reading

Moblyng launches mobile site and more MySpace geegaws for your phone

Moblyng, a mobile social media company, launched a new mobile entertainment site today, as well as a new feature for artists on MySpace to connect to fans on mobile phones. Moblyng translates Flash videos, play lists, and slide shows found on sites like MySpace or YouTube for mobile phones.

The new mobile website, found at m.moblyng.com, is a entertainment destination for mobile phones. Cell phone users can find videos of artists like The Pussycat Dolls, slide… Continue Reading

Language learning website Babbel nabs first round of funding

Babbel, a website that helps users learn French, Spanish, German, Italian, or English, announced it had received a round of funding from German VC funds Kizoo and VC Fonds Berlin. The company is not disclosing the amount of funding, saying only that it is “significant.”  CNET is reporting that the amount is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Babbel, which is based in Berlin, combines online lessons with a social network of fellow students. This means… Continue Reading

PinchMedia and JumpTap partner up for iPhone apps ad network

A newly formed partnership between iPhone analytics firm Pinch Media and mobile search and ad company JumpTap may connect brand-name advertisers with iPhone application users.

The partnership, announced at MobileBeat, could be a formidable force in the tiny but growing world of iPhone application ads. Pinch Media will provide the analytics platform. JumpTap’s 35-person salesforce has ties to Madison Avenue, including an investment from ad holding firm giant WPP, and will provide a connection between ad… Continue Reading

Movie Set Inc. piles on $1.5 million more for total $5 million in Series A funding

Movie Set Inc. announced an additional $1.5 million from Vancouver-based British Columbia Discovery Funding, part of a total of $5 million in Series A financing. Charles Cook, manager of Discovery Capital Management Corp, will also be appointed to the board of directors at Movie Set Inc. Also participating in this round of financing is Rho Canada, the Canadian division of Rho Capital Partners, Inc. of New York, NY.

Movie Set Inc. is a web platform that… Continue Reading

Yahoo-owned Zimbra moves against Outlook with its own desktop email client

Yahoo’s communication software company Zimbra is making the Zimbra Desktop beta version 3 available for download today, continuing to push against Microsoft’s Outlook by offering to be your all-in-one email client.

I set up the open-source Zimbra Desktop on a laptop running Windows XP. The install requires a smidge under 160 MB of disk space to install, and I was easily able to sync up my Gmail account to it. Overall, the interface is clean, quick,… Continue Reading

Bango rolls out new version of its analytics suite

Mobile billing and metrics company Bango is announcing the third version of its mobile metrics suite today, which includes a redesign of its dashboard and sharpening its ability to track unique visitors.

Traditional desktop analytics can’t track unique mobile visitors accurately, because Javascript can’t be used on the great majority of handsets, and while some handsets accept cookies, many delete them whenever the phone is shut off.

The inability to track unique mobile users is a basic… Continue Reading

Appssavvy makes it easier for advertisers to navigate the demographics of social networks

Appssavvy, a sales company that helps advertisers cull through the thousands of social network applications hitting the web to find the right match, is close to releasing a dashboard tool to make the process that much easier. The New York-based company, which we’ve covered before, sees itself as a bridge between app developers in Silicon Valley and advertising agencies on Madison Avenue.

And so far it seems to be doing pretty well. After only seven months’ in… Continue Reading

Early iPhone App Store metrics: Free iPhone apps get better reviews than paid ones

Medialets, a startup focused solely on providing ads for applications running on the iPhone, is publishing some early metrics about Apple’s recently launched App Store. Some key findings:

Average Prices for Apps Are Falling

Tracking both the number of apps and their average price, the team found that as more competitors move into the App Store, prices for applications are dropping. On Friday, the average price for an app was $4.65, but by Sunday (after nearly a… Continue Reading