VentureBeat

Meebo raises $25 million; Matt to eat his hat [Updated]

VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall would write this post but he’s busy getting ready to eat his hat.

Last month, we learned that instant message company Meebo was working on raising a round that would value it at up to $250 million. At the time, Marshall wrote: “I’m quite ready to eat my hat, if this funding happens,” because recession concerns have made investors more concerned about putting money into companies like Meebo that are still working… Continue Reading

Meebo close to raising large round, starts to focus on making money

Instant-message startup Meebo is closing a round that will value it at between $175 million and $200 million, according to a Techcrunch rumor, which says the company has only made $1 million since launching in 2005. And the company’s announcement today that it’s hired a veteran advertising executive, Carter Brokaw, to be its chief revenue officer seems to lend credence to that rumor.

A few weeks ago, we reported that Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo was aiming… Continue Reading

Roundup: Quattrone is back and banking, LiveJournal rebellion and more

Frank Quattrone is back as a banker — Quattrone and associates are starting a new boutique investment banking firm, called Qatalyst Group. During the (last) bubble in the ’90s, Quattrone was a top deal-maker, helping many promising (and unpromising) startups of the era go public. Some of his more illustrious clients included Amazon, Cisco Systems, and Netscape. After that bubble burst, he spent years fighting legal charges that he had somehow misled consumers about his clients’… Continue Reading

Meebo raising round, valued up to $250 million. Bear Stearns sold for $236 million

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Meebo, the site that lets users send instant messages from a single page — across various IM platforms — is trying to raise $25-$30 million at a nose-bleed valuation of between $200 million and $250 million, I’m hearing from multiple sources. This is quadruple its valuation from its previous round of between $60-$70 million last year, and a big bet that its fast-growing user base is worth something.

(Readers, let us… Continue Reading

Even as Bebo’s big sale happens, lofty valuations will elude other start-ups

Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer internet companies. The sale of social networking company Bebo (our coverage) comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.

Until January, life was groovy as an internet start-up. Over the past 18 months, hedge funds and other large investors eagerly swooped in and invest hordes of cash into consumer… Continue Reading

Meebo hit its stride in 2007, with growth of Meebo Rooms

Meebo Rooms, the chat room service offered by IM company Meebo, is experiencing eye-popping growth. After just seven months, its attracting well over twice the monthly unique users that Meebo’s own web site gets. And Meebo’s own site is no slouch.

People apparently want to IM with each other on sites across the web. You’ve long heard that destination sites are no longer “in,” and Meebo’s experience is a confirmation of that.

Rooms, which you can can… Continue Reading

Meebo introduces real-time chat in Facebook applications

Meebo, the cross-platform instant messaging company, has built a Meebo Rooms widget especially for Facebook applications, which it makes available today.

It is significant because it could help make applications on Facebook more social, thanks to real-time communication. However, it will also let people chat using their real names, and these conversations can be found by search engines — and so will test anew the Facebook community’s tolerance of such things (privacy, in case you haven’t… Continue Reading

Meebo partners with VideoEgg to help app developers make money

Meebo, the Silicon Valley company that lets you message across multiple IM services from a single Web site, is taking significant pains to make money from its millions of users.

Last month, it launched a way for outside developers to produce games and other content to be offered on the site, allowing them to keep half the revenue. A few weeks later, the Mountain View company gave the developers an option to run their own advertising… Continue Reading

Meebo aims big, introduces games

updated
Meebo, the online instant messaging company, has been picking up users at a rapid rate, breezing along with high-profile backing by VC firm Sequoia Capital.

But its move today to deliver games on its platform is its most ambitious move yet to take it from a comfortable, small startup into the big-leagues where “the rest of us” will finally hear about it. It is also allowing game makers to insert ads, and make money from them.

Today… Continue Reading

Meebo introduces developer platform, third party voice and video apps

Instant messaging service Meebo has opened its platform to third party developers, which will put it in competition with Facebook, Google and other communications platforms. The new applications on Meebo already include voice and video services.

We wrote last week, here, that Meebo had a great opportunity to become a platform. It’s an instant messaging service that lets people IM across multiple protocols, including AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk and MSN. It’s web-based, requiring no download. It has… Continue Reading

IM service Meebo unveils file sharing

Meebo, provider of a popular instant messaging service, is unveiling a useful service tonight: File sharing.

The Mountain View company is letting users share files with each other, from office documents to photos to music.

Any file under ten megabytes is fair game, although each user is restricted to 30 megabytes per month, and Meebo stores files for only four hours after they’re sent.

As the school year gets going, this service could be a hit.

High school and… Continue Reading

Meebo, Google and IMVU fastest growing instant messenging services

Meebo, an instant messaging service, has grown 354 percent between now and ten months ago, according to Nielsen (pdf). Perhaps this is no surprise, considering the range of viral products it has been releasing, such as its embeddable chat rooms.

Other Silicon Valley tech companies also have fast-growing services. One is Google’s GTalk, at 149 percent, which integrates IM with Gmail. The other is IMVU.

IMVU is more similar to virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel or Second… Continue Reading

Meebo introduces “partner” rooms, featuring music industry

Meebo, a web service that lets you use different instant messaging services from a single page, has been busy working to monetize their month-old IM chat room feature (our previous coverage here).

Partners using Meebo’s online chat rooms on their Web sites (using an embedded Meebo widget) can now run their own advertising within Meebo’s rooms, and track performance: Partners’ ads will appear within a player that carries the media files — a so-called “queue” because… Continue Reading

Meebo launches Meebo Rooms, to stay ahead

Earlier today, we wrote about the IM players, and noted that start-ups such as Meebo and eBuddy will have to work hard to to keep from getting swallowed by the big guys.

Coincidentally, Meebo had been working quietly on a project that launches tomorrow: Meebo Rooms. They are web-based IM chat rooms where people can gather and discuss a video or other media file that plays from a central media player. The company showed us the… Continue Reading

Instant messaging: feature or product?

Web-based instant messaging services, such as Meebo and eBuddy have had high growth rates over many months. They’ve raked in a lot of funding from hungry VCs. But we see IM becoming a commodity.

So far, these non-aligned startups have offered an advantage. They’ve let everyone communicate with everyone. They’ve aggregated the various IM clients in a single web site, so that someone with GTalk can IM with someone from Yahoo Messenger.

Some, such as EQO, combine… Continue Reading

Roundup: WSJ on sale?, 4Info’s SMS network, plankton, PropertyShark, more

Here’s the latest action:

News Corp makes $5 billion takeover bid for Dow Jones — If the bid is accepted, the owner of Fox News would own the old, gray business media icon, the Wall Street Journal. What next?

PropertyShark takes property snooping a step further — If you thought Zillow, the housing site that slapped a value on your house, was controversial, take a look at PropertyShark. The four-year old New York company outdoes Zillow on the snoopy… Continue Reading

IM service Meebo growing quickly, raises more cash

Meebo is an instant message service loved by students, because they can use it from any computer, even at school. Its usage keeps growing — it doubled registered users to more than a million over the past three months.

The meta-instant messaging service (it works across Google, AOL, Yahoo Messenger, etc) announced tonight it has raised $9 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson — a round we’d hinted was coming. In its statement, the… Continue Reading

Web 2.0 shakeout continued: What’s up at Insider Pages, Backfence, Meebo, others?

(Updated, rumor that Backfence is shutting down is wrong, see fresh post here)

Roelof Botha is one of the hotter venture capitalists these days. The Sequoia Capital venture capitalist led that firm’s investment into video-sharing site YouTube — and saw that company sold within a year to Google for $1.65 billion.

Now he’s apparently reviewing the progress of his companies. Palo Alto’s Meebo, the site that lets people use integrate their instant messaging service online, has been… Continue Reading

“Young Guns” form secret Silicon Valley society

That’s what Rolling Stone wants you to believe, in its latest edition. In a story called “Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley,” Rolling Stone catches up with a group nine entrepreneurs who get together to strategize. This is another hype job, since none of these people are billionaires. (Update: Blake Ross, in comment below, says this is no secret society, and headline is wrong.)

From the piece:

That’s why they’ve gathered here tonight. This is one of the… Continue Reading