VentureBeat

Updated

Job site Jobster has raised another $7 million in a fourth round of funding. It’s not a huge amount of cash, but it comes on top of the $48 million that Jobster previously raised at a $100 million-plus valuation.

With all the job sites out there, we’ve been skeptical about Jobster’s (and other sites’) ability to be heard above the noise. Since we voiced that concern more than a year ago, even more sites have emerged — for example, I’ve covered NotchUp, which has the novel hook of paying job seekers for an interview, and there were two very different job sites making their pitch at the most recent Y Combinator demo day.

Some of our concerns were assuaged by chief executive Jason Goldberg’s salesmanship, and the fact that Jobster has signed up a bunch of corporate customers. But Goldberg actually left in December, replaced by Jeff Seely, who helped sell trading site Sharebuilder. Presumably, the new funding is part of Seely’s efforts to revitalize the Seattle startup. Investors included Ignition Partners, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

Update: I asked Christian Anderson, Jobster’s director of corporate communications, what the funding means for the company, but he told me he can’t say anything. It sounds like there may be more news (perhaps some new features, or a new focus?) in the pipeline.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg out
2) US delegation to Bali pisses off Al Gore
3) Opera sues Microsoft over Explorer
4) VC Heidi Roizen sheds weight while crafting songs
5) The guidelines for online video success
6) Five hundred ways to customize stuff
7) John Lennon’s son invests in MyStore
8) Most popular search term: iPhone beats Facebook
9) DecentralTV (Kyte) and PermissionTV raise more cash, Podtech on rocks?

Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg out — Jason Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of the job site Jobster, is headed to the Big Apple to work on a new company. Jeff Seely, who just helped sell Sharebuilder, an online share trading site, for $220 million, is stepping into his role. A sign of more trouble for Jobster, or the beginning of a turnaround? As we’ve noted before, despite its $50 million in funding Jobster hasn’t yet done much to put itself ahead of the pack.

US delegation to Bali pisses off Al Gore — Al Gore, the newest star of Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, doesn’t like what the official US delegation to Bali is up to. Neither do John Kerry or Michael Bloomberg, who have teamed with Gore to become an unofficial delegation at the world climate summit, according to the WSJ. “People are turning away from the official delegation…” a WWF director said, referring to how senior diplomats are snubbing President Bush’s team in order to dine with Gore, et al. Ah, sweet liberal revenge.

Opera sues Microsoft over Internet Explorer — The underdog web browser Opera accuses Microsoft of being a monopolist because it packages Internet Explorer with Windows — the standard fare for eliciting lawsuits against the Redmond, Wash., software giant. However, the suit also complains Microsoft refuses to abide by the design principles of the internet, even with the newer IE7. If the complaint finds footing, Microsoft may be forced to mend its ways, which could make web designers happy.
Venture capitalists Heidi Roizen slims down — Roizen has closed down her venture capital firm, as already reported, and instead has slimmed down, and crafted a collection of songs to help other women lose weight while grooving to her tunes. Details here.

The guidelines for online video success — Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan and others share their insights about the economics of online video with TVWeek. First guideline: You need 50,000 to 100,000 pageviews per month before advertisers will take you seriously, and 500,000 before it can be a full-time job. Read the rest here.

Five hundred ways to customize stuff — Startups or VCs toying with the idea of mass customization in a business may want to take a look at the cyLEDGE International Configurator Database. The people behind it have managed to collect what looks like every product customization tool on the internet, providing a handy reference to those building their own.

Julian Lennon, son of Beatles icon John Lennon, invests in MyStore — MyStore emerged as a response to MySpace’s restrictions against selling within its network, letting artists become their own distributors with a button on their MySpace page. It is now an online service that serves all sorts of sellers, not just artists. Details here.

The iPhone dominates, here and abroad — This year’s-end Zeitgeist reflects both the most popular and the fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com over the past year. To see the results, visit http://www.google.com/zeitgeist.

PermissionTV and Decentral.TV both raise more cash, while Podtech struggles — Details here, for the fundings of video sites DecentralTV and PermissionTV. Podtech, another video site, however, has lost well-known blogger Robert Scoble. We’ve asked Podtech’s investors for comment, given increasing rumors the company is on the rocks. We haven’t heard back yet. Scoble is reportedly considering joining Fast Company, but he isn’t confirming yet.

Job searching is still painful for most people.

The standard job search today means sifting through masses of listings to find jobs that fit, a process that is always exhausting, and often ineffective.

However, there’s a new set of companies that want to turn the process upside-down. They want to do the search for you. They include Trovix, JobFox and to a lesser extent Jobster, which lately has headed in this direction.

Mountain View’s Trovix, a company that launched its public service yesterday, is the latest. You simply upload your resume to Trovix’ site, and Trovix automatically determines your qualifications, searches through an index of millions of job posting, and extracts those that match. Voila!

The job search market is estimated at $55 billion. Eric Yoon of JobThread, a company that offers job boards, broke down the numbers for us: $8 billion is spent on job boards, $6-7 billion on newspapers, and the rest goes to executive and contingency search. Other research has found that companies only find a small portion of their new hires through traditional job boards like Craigslist, Monster, CareerBuilder or HotJobs. Even specialized sites like Guru and Dice aren’t doing the job. As Yoon notes, the huge issue is not job search, but getting access to top talent.

That’s what makes JobFox, yet another company, sound like a more likely winner. JobFox is similar to Trovix, but only shows jobs from the companies it allows onto its site, where Trovix instead searches across the entire internet.

Where JobFox really shines is in offering different levels of confidentiality. With Trovix, no one has access to your information until you choose to send it. JobFox prefers to actively market the skills of its users, even if they choose to keep some personal details anonymous.

One of a new breed of “personal branding” sites, candidates can build a JobFox profile akin to those on a social networking site, highlighting special skills and knowledge for employers. The site also aims to attract people who already have jobs, but would like to anonymously market themselves in case a better opportunity presents itself.

Because its best users are assumed to already be employed, with less time or inclination for job hunting, Jobfox attempts to make the signup process as easy as possible. During a test configuration, the site asked a series of multiple-choice questions relating to career and experience. In a fairly short period of time it had built an interactive job-skills map that, alongside a summarized resume, is the centerpiece of the personal profile page.

Other facets of the page include a tag-cloud of “dream job” characteristics, a space for work samples and links, and a personal summary. Overall, the Jobfox profile page compares well to a Jobster or LinkedIn profile, offering more information with a sleeker design. Another recent entrant, MyCredentials, looks amateurish by comparison.

With its focus on the more lucrative section of the job market, executive headhunters and managers looking for qualified workers, JobFox would appear to be aiming for the right section of the market.

In the “personal branding” niche, where no site has yet gained a significant toehold, will Jobfox succeed? In a sense, it’s already failed; it actually began life two years ago as Market10, a site that billed itself as being “like eHarmony for job seekers.” Accused by users of poor user interface and bad design, it quickly fell off the radar.

Jobfox CEO Rob McGovern’s team appears to have addressed the user concerns and built a solid new product. In all, it may be the best personal branding site yet to appear. And you can’t dismiss the man himself: Although Careerbuilder took a few years to gain traction, having begun life as now-forgotten NetStart, McGovern sold the site to a newspaper consortium in 2000 for a whopping $200 million.

The number of new job-focused companies is overwhelming.

The latest is Zubka.com, a new European company that pays people for referring suitable job candidates for listings on its site. Here’s your chance to win $3,600 for referring a Java architect for a job in Florida.

However, Zubka is just the latest in a barrage of companies doing similar things (H3.com, BountyJobs, and Blue Chip Expert). The opportunity is significant because no one company dominates the multi-billion-dollar market for hooking up employees with jobs. However, the noise is terrifically loud. Very little new technology here; merely refinements of social networking strategies that are the rage.

Zubka said it has raised an undisclosed amount of money from venture capital firm Benchmark. This is predictable, because Benchmark has a long track record of investing in online marketplaces (ever since it won big by backing auction site eBay). In Zubka’s marketplace, the buyers are employers looking to pay for job referrals, and the sellers are you and me. There’s nothing else that really distinguishes this company — at least from what we can see. And with a market filled with brands like Monster, a name like Zubka is difficult to remember.

In just the last few weeks, you’ve seen Simply Hired announce a new initiative letting any site-owner create their own job boards, which will probably create hundreds of mini job marketplaces. You’ve seen Jobster revamp its site, letting employers and employees express themselves in new ways. LinkedIn lets you recommend professionals for various tasks.

There’s money pouring into all kinds of other job related ventures, many of them quite similar: Doostang, of Palo Alto, last month raised seed capital for an invite-only job site, where users let their friends see information on job leads. Blue Chip Expert is a sort of reverse job board, which lets people register their skill sets, and allows hiring managers to search for specific skills they need for project. There’s a referral incentive here too, much like Zubka. We’re told it is raising an angel round of financing.

There’s Trovix, a Mountain View, Calif. company that sells job-search software for employers, which recently raised a $13 million. SnagAJob.com raised $9 million for a site that helps people find part-time work. Whew!

Strangely, despite all this, employers tell us they’re having problems finding decent employees. There’s this impression that the recruitment process is broken. Could it possibly be that this is a classic market constraint problem, i.e. that there’s really no one out there right for your job opening?

Jobster, the Seattle job search engine, armed with $50 million in financing and aiming to be profitable this year, announces two big moves tomorrow (Thursday).

First, it jettisons its comfy neutrality with other sites. Until now, it has remained a search engine, listing excerpts from job postings at Monster and CareerBuilder, and sending users to those sites to view the full postings. Going forward, Jobster will still do that. But it will also let employers post jobs at its site • and for free. It now becomes a direct competitor to Monster and CareerBuilder, but cheaper.

Second, it has signed a deal with Facebook to exclusively host the popular networking site’s career center. That’s huge, given Facebooks’ popularity among college students. If students start their careers with Jobster, the site can presumably win customer relationships for life.

Jobster’s move to free postings makes Jobster resemble Craigslist. Jobster has far less traffic than Craisglist. But it is more modern. Jobster offers users a way to tag themselves according to the jobs they’re seeking, upload resumes, photos and videos features, and create their own profile pages. Similarly, Jobster gives employers better ways to portray the candidates they’re looking for. If an employer posts a job with certain tag descriptions, the system pulls up the employees who have chosen same tags (see screenshot below). These profiles are separate Web pages, so they can be searched with an engine.

As reported, the three-year old company recently gutted its sales and marketing team, and instead has focused more on its online features.

It makes money by serving large companies with job-filling services, and plans to boost that business with traffic forwarded from the more robust Web site.

Chief executive Jason Goldberg told VentureBeat the site had a million unique users in January.

This year has become the “show-me” year. Internet start-ups showing no traction are getting shut down, or trimmed — abandoned by once wide-eyed investors.

The Web 2.0 bubble is bursting, but VentureBeat agrees with others that this is more like an “oozing.” New, innovative companies will continue to get funding from VCs, but with more caution. Investments amounts in Web 2.0, while booming, are so far nowhere near the absurd levels seen during the 1999-2000 period (see the Hornik-Dagres debate about this here), so the wreckage won’t cause as much pain. Back in 2000, trillions of dollars of market value were lost, because the entire U.S. economy had gotten sucked up into it. This time, not so.

Still, some pain there is.

Peerflix, the DVD-swapping company, is the latest company to lay off employees, VentureBeat has learned. The Menlo Park, Calif. company has shut its Canadian office, cutting an undisclosed number of workers, founder Billy McNair confirmed. We heard the company may have cut a quarter of its workfroce, but McNair wouldn’t provide any details. These appear to be the first layoffs hitting the “swapping platform” sector. See our piece last year about Peerflix, where McNair’s optimism stands in stark contrast to today. This company’s business model has been controversial from the start, as you’ll see from the comments.

In other developments:

FilmLoop close to death — FilmLoop, of Palo Alto, Calif., has reportedly laid off most of its staff of 30 employees after failing to find a buyer. The company raised $7 million in venture capital just eight months ago, from ComVentures. Co-founder Prescott Lee and a few others remain. FilmLoop let users create photo slide shows on websites, something that several other players let you do — from Slide, to Rockyou and Photobucket. Note our skepticism back when it raised its cash. It was very late to the game.

Jobster confirms layoffs — Rumors began last year. Jobster confirms 60 people, or 41 percent of its worforce, have been cut (its entire sales and support staff).

…meanwhile, consolidation in social networking continues — The German Facebook clone, StudiVZ has been sold for a reported 85 million Euros (less than the earlier reports suggested), to Holtzbrick Verlag, a German publishing giant that had invested earlier in StudiVZ.

…and the new ideas don’t seem that compelling — Decentral.tv, the San Rafael, Calif. start-up raised $2.3 million several months ago to launch “interactive broadcast broadband communities,” which we called vague at the time, but said we’d wait to see. Now it is apparently launching Kyte.tv, which offers video channels you can watch online or on mobile phones. We could be wrong (we’re relying on other accounts), but it doesn’t seem to push things forward. This follows plans by Old Media folks to launch Next New Networks, the latest niche video company — having raised $8 million — with nothing yet to show. Are they getting religion too late, or can they leverage their network to launch something compelling anyway? Time will tell. But companies that raise cash first, before launching and getting users, are rarely successes — though there are exceptions.

Similar thoughts, too for Twistage, based in San Francisco and New York, yet another start-up offering companies a way to use video on their own sites. It has raised under $1 million in angel funding, and moved into the Looksmart building in SF, reports Liz Gannes. Backers are Computer Associates chairman Lewis Ranieri and Jerry Colonna, formerly of Flatiron Partners. Several other companies are doing this, including Brightcove, Reality Digital (see our post here), vSocial and GridNetworks. On the hopeful side, thousands of companies will want to incorporate video into their sites in sophisticated ways, but on the downside, the technology is quickly becoming a commodity.

Othes putting off VC plans — Some companies are giving up looking for cash, in part because many VCs are getting skeptical. One very well known Web 2.0 investor tells VentureBeat he’s made his last Web 2.0 investment, though he didn’t want his name disclosed. One valley-based company Mojeo, originally told VentureBeat it would look to raise VC money to bolster its service to let people find out more local information on their mobile phones — by sharing their location with companies Yahoo, Google and Upcoming. Co-founder Mike Prince told VentureBeat that he and co-founder Dave Sutter have instead returned their focus to their day jobs, and passing on getting cash for now — though will continue to push Mojeo forward.

Here’s a round-up of the latest tech stuff:

Jobster may cut a significant portion of its 145-person workforce? — Reports of major pending layoffs at Jobster are ironic, not merely because the company helps employers find employees. But because the company appears to doing the cutting to attain profitability, five months after boasting to VentureBeat that it would be profitable were it not hiring so many people so quickly all over the place. This company got very big very fast. Could this be another example of how massive amounts of venture capital do strange things to companies? We caution that we haven’t confirmed the layoff reports, and that note the CEO says “a lot of falsehoods are being bandied about.” But John Cook of the Seattle PI, has talked with the company, and confirms a review is underway, and job cuts could be part of the announcement in early Jan.

IBM cooling on Second Life hype — Shortly after IBM launches 12 islands on virtual world Second Life, complete with press conferences from its chief executive, tour guides and trains to show visitors around its virtual complex and auditorium, David Berger, manager of strategic communications for Big Blue concedes it’s time to ask questions about Second Life claim it has two million residents. Why wasn’t he more skeptical in the first place? (Update: Forgot to add, and why does it take gossip site Valleywag’s debunking of a good part of mainstream media’s coverage of Second Life to push him there?)

Shotspotter actually works — Earlier this year, VentureBeat wrote about Santa Clara start-up Shotspotter, which said it could help police locate the origin of gun shots, to help them combat crime. It is working. It helped Minneapolis police nab their first suspect, a mere seven hours after implementing it. This is the company backed by Gary Lauder, scion to the Estee Lauder fortune. It has since raised more than $10 million.

News ranking sites Megite and Tailrank launch video — With news-ranking site Digg bolstering its photo and video offerings recently, you’d expect competitors Megite and Tailrank to follow. The difference is, Digg method relies on voting by users, whereas Megite and Tailrank measure popularity by the number of links a video gets. All this is leaving another player, Techmeme, looking rather bare. (See the new video offerings at Megite Video and Tailrank Video.)

Speaking of Digg, spammers continue to target it — CNet reports that Karim Yergaliyev, 19, one of the top 30 “diggers,” agreed to digg a story for JetNumbers in return for a favor.

Simply Hired, the Mountain View job search engine, continues to expand its distribution network aggressively in this competitive industry.

The start-up will announce tomorrow that it will power the online job search of the nation’s fifth largest newspaper, the New York Post. It will also introduce “Resume Post” on MySpace. This lets job seekers at MySpace also post their resume to six different job boards at once, including Monster, CareerBuilder, Job.com, GettingHired, Net-Temps and Beyond.com.

Simply Hired calls itself the largest job search engine, with more than 5 million job listings and counting. The deals are just the latest in an aggressive push by the company for to maximize the reach of its search. It is signing up big sites and little sites. It already powers the search of MySpace Jobs and LinkedIn Jobs. It also sports a range of specialty job searches, for example at companies that are eco-friendly, elderly friendly, gay friendly, and dog friendly. Some of its competitors are Indeed, Jobster, and a new company called itzBig

Simply Hired has raised $17.7 million in funding from News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, Foundation Capital, Garage Technology Ventures and individual investors.

Updated

The latest round-up from tech-land:

Second Life hype continues — Sun holds a conference in the virtual world, and pisses off a journalist, who has a point. Why make it so tough for people to get to your message? But that hasn’t deterred others from joining the trend. Dell did something similar. And now Second Life has launched a business plan competition for “resident” entrepreneurs. The prize is a little less than US$2k, but it does include help from real marketers (Edelman) and panel of real judges (including Charles River’s Susan Wu, who told us several weeks ago she is a big fan of Second Life; update: She responds with comment below).

Snap provides link previews — This is a pretty cool feature. Snap is offering Web site owners a short snippet of code they can place in their Web site, which gives users a preview of pages linked to, without them having to click. We’ve written about the Pasadena company before. (Similar to Browster and Cooliris which let you download
a tool so that you can get previews of search result pages — but they serve the user, not the Web site owner.

Zoo supposed to be safe for kids– Launched by Infospace, zoo.com is a search engine that removes adult and unsafe wording and phrasing, but John Battelle makes a single search, and finds it wanting. Still, it looks like a great start.

Noteworthy calendar mashups by 30 Boxes — See here for example . 30 Boxes allows calendar updates with RSS feeds from Flickr and other sources.

Motorola bought Good for $500M — At least that’s what the Deal is reporting. That’s a decent outcome for investors, who’d pumped in about $200. We heard that investors Crosslink and BA Ventures doubled their money, but haven’t confirmed this with a second source.

Quintura, visual search engine, is first Russian investment by a Western VC? — That’s the claim of this story in Read/Write Web. [Update: This claim seemed bizarre to us, and we should have been more skeptical. Turns out, Intel Capital alone has made three investments in Russia: Akella (aka Digital Storm), Electro-Com (a power-line telecom company), and Infinet Wireless. See this page, and scroll down. There are no doubt many more. Update II: Quintura Chief exec Yakov Sadchikov points out we misread the Read/Write Web story, which says it's the first Western VC investment into a Russian Internet company (see original release). Intel's Akella publishes games online, but isn't Internet driven at its core, so we stand corrected once again...]

Update on RockYou — We updated our earlier post about the lawsuit against Rockyou founders charging intellectual property theft. In case you missed it, here’s the complaint, the IM conversation, and the order, thanks to Venkat. Finally advice by attorney Todd Rumberger about how to not get sued when leaving your company. Lots of people think you can move freely in California, but not always.

Lots of executive changes lately — First, there was the Live shakeup. Next, Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs and head of the new version of Netscape resigns from AOL in the wake of the departure of AOL CEO Jon Miller, who some say was pushed out. Some say it is strange that he is replaced by president of NBC Universal, Randy Falco, an old media guy — but others suggest Miller hadn’t made any progress, so who knows. Finally, Fox Interactive chief Ross Levinsohn, architect of News corps’ purchase of Myspace, resigned to pursue “other opportunities.” Peter Levinsohn, his cousin, take his place.

AboutUs is a wiki site, and we don’t get it — The traffic of AboutUs has risen steadily, prompting various articles, including recently one on Techcrunch. Some people are skeptical, though, including Jeff Nolan. Jeff notes the local “puff” piece coverage of AboutUS from the local paper (blow). Now the site appears down (but here’s a cache)

Ray King hasn’t had a home run yet. But investors in his newest venture, AboutUs Inc., think King could be building the next Google.

King’s Portland company has just closed a $1 million initial financing round for its wiki, or collaboratively created Web site, listing the names of Web sites and information about them.

….While freely admitting he doesn’t use wikis, and doesn’t really understand them, “Ray is a very intelligent guy, and people are finding the site,” [investor] Holce said.

Nokia hasn’t bought Ryze — For the record, Nokia has not bought the social contact company, Ryze, a competitor to LinkedIn, chief executive Adrian Scott assured VentureBeat. (We mention this since it was making the rounds.)

O’Reilly forms venture fund — It is true that O’Reilly has formed a venture fund called AlphaTech Ventures. The effort began late last year. However, the two partners of the fund, Bryce Roberts and Mark Jacobsen, aren’t willing to talk until all the paperwork is done.

13 Buyout firms sued for collusion — The defendants include Silver Lake Partners, of Menlo Park. Dan makes some good points. See the full complaint.

Will Hansen Medical save the valley’s long-time venture firm, Vanguard Ventures? — Hansen, one of Vanguard’s companies has finally gone public, which could give the struggling Vanguard what it needs to stay alive. The firm desperately needs some results, especially after one of its other hopes, Asthmatx recently withdrew its IPO offering.

Two widely covered stories:
–Tivo DVRs to allow Internet video programming — Story here.
–Microsoft’s music player, the Zune, has been slammed universally. One example. Next we find out it isn’t even compatible with Vista.

(Updated with confirmation that Kleiner and others made money)

Motorola will buy Santa Clara wireless messaging company Good Technology for an undisclosed amount, in an effort to compete for big business clients.

Research In Motion’s Blackberry has dominated the corporate mobile email market, and Motorola’s Q device has failed to make significant traction. Moreover, Motorola’s rival, Nokia, bought mobile email provider Intellisync in February.

The market for wireless email has been brutal, with players like Visto, of Redwood City and NTP, the Virginia-based patent-holding company, filing suit against others and extracting large licensing fees. NTP forced RIM to pay a $612.5 million settlement. While Good has licensed technology from NTP, it is still the subject of a lawsuit from Visto, which itself has raised fresh cash even while losing money.

That competition and costly legal battles most likely pressured Good to sell, though it’s unknown whether all investors made money from the deal. Investors Kleiner Perkins, BA Ventures, Crosslink Capital and several other firms collectively invested more than $200 million into the company. (Update: We since confirmed that Kleiner, at least, made money from the deal.)

Here’s the Mercury News story about the deal, which shows there is disagreement about how well Good is doing. Here is Good’s annoucement on the deal.