VentureBeat

Martha Stewart, cultural icon of event planning that she is, has given Pingg — maker of software for invitation and event management — her seal of approval, and contributed to a $2.8 million first round of funding via her media network Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO).

The transaction allows Pingg to run content from Martha’s other digital properties on its website and gives MSLO the right to provide Pingg’s unique event tools on MarthaStewart.com. In addition, all advertising affiliated with Pingg will be brokered by the larger media company. Previously, it brought in revenue through some premium paid services and online ads.

It offers customizable invitations that can also be emailed, printed or distributed through social networks, as well as event homepages, reminders, save-the-dates and thank you notes. The exchange with MSLO is a pretty good deal for the New York-based startup, considering it launched in February and faces pretty stiff competition in its field.

About 2.5 million invitations have been sent through the service since its inception. Compare that to its rival eVite, which does all of the above, has 18 million registered users, and claims to send 16 million invitations each month. Smaller players like Socializr have tried to chip away at its dominance to no avail. But Pingg does have an edge in some areas. Several bloggers have declared it a “sexier” site than others, appearing slicker and integrating more Web 2.0 concepts. For example, its Surround-Send option delivers a single invite to guests over email, mobile and Facebook at once. I’m guessing Martha wouldn’t settle for less.

Updated

Socializr, the San Francisco start-up that lets you share information about parties and other events online, has raised $1.5 million in a second round of financing.

The backer is Rembrandt Venture Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif. venture capital firm.

Socializr founder Jonathan Abrams (top) knew Rembrandt partner Richard Ling (bottom) prior to launching Socializr, from partying together in SF nightclubs and other events. Abrams said this time he wanted an investor who understood to the product and users of Socializr, and Ling fits the bill.

At his previous company, Friendster, significant misunderstandings between Abrams and his investors contributed to the downfall of Friendster as a leader in social networking. A New York Times story about the debacle suggested that, among other things, Friendster investors from Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark didn’t really understand the business.

Socializr last year raised $750,000 from a number of angel investors. We first reviewed the company here. Recently the company has tussled with industry leader, Evite. That company accused Socializr of copying some of its art work.

“Most VCs live in Woodside, and hang out at Bucks,” Abrams said, referring to the restaurant on Woodside Road where many VCs meet for breakfast. “Richard’s more hip.”

Socializr has just hired three people, doubling its staff to six. Until recently, Abrams had written every line of software himself. Abrams promises “a lot of cool stuff” from Socializr over the next couple of months.

Update: Here’s Abrams’ comment on Evite:

Evite accused Socializr of infringing upon Evite’s general look and feel, even though that is not protected by copyright. They also complained that a graphic containing snowflakes in a design on Socializr was too similar to a completely different image on Evite which also contained snowflakes (and turned out to be clipart you can buy for $99). One was not a copy of the other. They also complained about two images from Evite that apparently had been uploaded by Socializr users (but not by Socializr itself) to user-generate designs. We only found one of them, and removed it, as per the DMCA. We never copied any of their art work.

Latest action:

Evite vs. Socializr continued — The bad blood between Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster and now founder of online event service Socializr, and the lawyers at Evite, is worse than we realized. The bitterness started during the Friendster days, and worsened when Evite threatened to sue Socializr, saying the start-up had copied Evite’s templates and styles. Abrams now responds with a diatribe, saying Evite is a hypocrite and a bully. We’ve requested comment from Evite.

Voki makes a better avatar — Voki is the latest animated avatar service offered by Oddcast, and is designed for bloggers. It is free, and has made improvements over its former avatar product, called Sitepal, which was for businesses. You can leave audio clips by talking right into your laptop, and your avatar will speak your words from your blog. Fred Wilson, an investor the company, is pushing the company to let avatars speak the words you might leave it with a Twitter message. If you haven’t seen the President Bush avatar, check it out (you’ll have to wait a few seconds for the intro to stop, but then you can change his nose, skin, mouth, shoulders, color of eyes, skin, etc). Similarly, Voki gives you a dashboard that makes it easy to edit your own avatar. It is similar to Meez (our coverage).

Founders of best companies are in the mid-20s or earlier — That’s the observation made by Valleywag. This topic has been controversial for some time. Sequoia’s Michael Moritz has made a big deal about backing young founders. Can you argue with him? He made big money from YouTube, Google and Yahoo — all started by young founders.

Yahoo has a new CFO — Some say the banker-as-CFO heralds more deal-making, more acquisitions for Yahoo. Yahoo did look at Facebook last year, but it’s probably too late now to try again. There’s an independence and pride over at Facebook these days that suggests it may decide to go for an IPO or nothing.

More details on the backing of Jason Calacanis’ company — Calacanis, who is starting a new company called Kokua (scroll down), has gotten funding from Sequoia, as earlier reported, and also apparently from News Corp’s Jeremy Phillips and CBS, if you believe this report. We’re trying to confirm.

Google’s wants to watch you — At least, that’s what this patent filing suggests (see details). The patent would monitor your behavior in PC video games, and seek to serve you targeted advertising based on that behavior.

Amazon.com plans to launch DRM-free digital music store — The iTunes-like service is scheduled for later this year, and will sell songs from EMI without the anti-piracy technology currently demanded by most music labels. However, it doesn’t appear any different from iTunes, which has already announced it is doing the same. Amazon says it will have “millions of songs” without protection.

Warner Music Group sues Imeem — Imeem, a Palo Alto, Calif. music start-up, came out of nowhere earlier this year, boasting in March it was the fastest-growing company on the Web, with 16 million unique users a month. (Hitwise ranks Imeem fourth among multi-media entertainment sites, behind Google Videos, YouTube and MySpace Videos). Users create and share music playlists. The copyright-infringement suit from Warner Music could be bad news for the young start-up, which had labored for two years in relative obscurity until changing its model last year. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Morgenthaler Ventures, a backer, declined comment, as did another backer, Sequoia Capital (Sequoia, of course, backed YouTube, which is a target of a major suit from Viacom.) During the upload process, Imeem does issue a warning to users not to upload media they don’t own, but that wasn’t good enough for Warner.

Sony is in talks to buy online childrens’ game, Club Penguin for $450 million — Club Penguin is a company we’ve covered before — noting its excellent execution of an enjoyable game for kids centered around happily chatting penguins. PaidContent is reporting it has annual revenues of $60 million, and margins of 50 percent. The impressive part is, the company didn’t take any venture backing to do this.

VCs still trying to distance themselves from those job-cutting private equity guys — “We’re in two different industries,” says Ted Schlein, venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins to Fortune. “We recruit. We help companies sell product. We do business development. [Private equity] is not an industry that can talk about creating ten million jobs.” The point, of course, is that any new tax, if there is one, as Washington is discussing, should be levied on the private equity guys.

In other news….
–MySpace announces more video channels featuring content from an array of big-name publishers, in an apparent move to go after YouTube.
–Google, without advertising — Really.
–Coupons, a Mountain View, Calif. provider of printable coupon marketing products, said it has acquired Consumer Networks LLC and its Boodle.com coupon service, from Gannett Co.
–Mozilla is experimenting with “Joey,” a service that lets you select portions of Web sites, including images, text, and videos, and later access them from a cell phone.

Ticketmaster, owner of the popular invitation service Evite, has threatened to sue Socializr for copyright infringement, saying the company’s service looks strikingly and confusingly similar to Evite’s.

In a letter sent April 3, Ticketmaster’s law firm, Quinn Emanuel, said two invitation design templates offered by San Francisco start-up Socializr were exact copies of Evite’s, and another design is very similar. See letter here. The letter also said Socializr’s invitation event creation page, design galleries and guest list options menu were all strikingly and confusingly similar in format, layout and features to Evite’s pages, and demanded they be taken down.

Socializer seems to have pulled down the two exact template copies — the “Holiday” and “Hawaii Luau” designs — but has left up its “Winter Celebration” template (left in image), which looks similar to Evite’s “Winter Hues” (right in image). Quinn Emanuel lawyer Michael Carlinsky said Socializr’s response has not been enough to resolve the issue, even though Socializr has agreed to make certain changes. “Other issues are still being examined,” he said, saying the complaint is about more than specific templates. Socializr has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Socializr, a new San Francisco-based company that wants to help you plan events online, opens to the public today.

It is owned by Jonathan Abrams, the founder of the early social networking site, Friendster. When Friendster emerged four years ago, it was cutting-edge — creating enormous buzz in what is now a booming industry. Friendster badly fumbled its opportunity, though, losing its lead to MySpace and Facebook.

Now Abrams wants to make a comeback. We’ve just tested Socializr, and it works smoothly. It doesn’t try to do too much, like many new competitors. It does have a host of modern features you’d want, like the ability to upload video, photos and other widgets straight into the invitation you send out to friends.

This time, Abrams faces even more of a challenge than he did at Friendster: A host of competitors, from industry leader Evite, to small start-ups such as Renkoo, MingleNow, Skobee, and more recently Mypunchbowl and related site, SuggestLocal, to name only a few.

Many of these new sites, though, have the problem of being too complex.

Here’s how Socializr works: When you sign up, its gives you a number of options. It asks you to supply all your email addresses (you don’t have to give them) so it can search for other information you may have on other sites (Friendster, MySpace, Flickr, etc) to bring into your Socializr profile. It lets you import your address books from other places, such as Yahoo and Gmail, to simplify the process of sending invitations to your friends. It also gives you your own Web site URL, in the form of www.socializr.com/user/name, where you can keep all of your events and let other people see them, if you want.

To send out a new invite, it handholds your through the process. See below for a sample template. To help you choose a location, it has a convenient “search” feature: Type in your zip code, and “chinese,” into the search bar, for example, and Socializr provides you all of the Chinese restaurants in that zip-code. You select one of them, and Socializr inserts the location into the invite. You can customize your invite, to include photos, videos from around the Web (it lets you use VideoEgg to do this), and a host of other widgets.

We first covered Socializr in September here, however the site was still closed to the public.

Socializr has raised $770,000, according to WSJ. The money comes from Rembrandt Venture Partners, and a number of other Silicon Valley players, including Frank Caufield, Jeff Clavier, Colin Evans, Josh Felser, Auren Hoffman, Kent Lindstrom, Richard Ling, Alex Lloyd, Melissa Lloyd, Andrew Lowenstein, Michael Tanne, Jeremy Wenokur, and some others. (Felser, Lindstrom, and Lowenstein were original investors in Friendster.)

It is a three-person team, and has been in testing mode since Sept 2006.

In January, Abrams made some clarifications to our original piece on Socializr. He said he’d wanted Friendster to offer an event invitation feature, but that it had never built one. He’d only raised one round of funding, he added.

The site will rely for now on text advertisements from Google, reports the WSJ.

Renkoo, a Redwood City start-up that has worked in secrecy for a year on a more interactive version of Evite’s event service, has launched.

Evite is the big player in this industry. Renkoo pitches itself as “Evite done right,” seeking to incorporate Web 2.0 features. It has been testing its product with a select group of users for months. Several other start-ups are in the invitation/event management race, including the trio in San Francisco: Skobee, Socializr and Timebridge, all at various levels of testing and development.

Renkoo, though, has taken the technology high-ground. The service lets you correspond with people in real time while arranging events, using an advanced AJAX technology called Comet. You register at the homepage, and then you can invite people (if they are not a member, they get an invite) and chat with them live as if you are in an instant messenger box. The experience is best at Renkoo’s web site, but users can communicate via Renkoo’s site itself, email, SMS or AIM, whatever they prefer. I tried it out. I had a firewall problem at the site, so used email (I did this by by going to the profile tab, selecting advanced notification preferences, and selecting “Deliver event responses to HTML email”).

The technology part is remarkable. I used Renkoo to arrange a meeting with Renkoo co-founders Joyce Park and Adam Rifkin at Prolific Oven at Palo Alto. I typed into a message box within my email, and didn’t need to go up and hit “send.” I simply hit the “respond to this invitation” tab below the message box, and Joyce and Rifkin got my messages immediately on their screen. See screenshots at bottom below (the first is of my side, using email, and the second is Joyce’s side, where she is using the Renkoo site).

After you’ve finished arranging an event, you can export it to your calendar in Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar.

As with trying out any new technology, Renkoo may take getting accustomed to. Little things, like getting in the habit of typing within the separate message box within email. Easy to do, but unexpected at first. Depending on your computer settings, including firewall, you may or may not get off to a quick start. Renkoo will be tinkering with its product going forward, and I’d like to see an easier way to see the full conversation chain through email instead of just the most recent response.

Finally, a word on Renkoo’s technology and backing: Joyce is a former lead engineer at Friendster, and a prolific coder. CEO Adam Rifkin was founder of KnowNow. Renkoo won $3 million in venture backing from big-name venture firm Matrix Partners. Matrix partner Bob Lisbonne was the VP of browser products while at Netscape. Joyce said she was impressed when he mentioned he can code in Ruby. He was also behind the move by Netscape to opensource the Mozilla browser. When she and Rifkin talked with investors, she was surprised, she said, by how few investors wanted to discuss the technology itself. Lisbonne was one of the few who did, she said.

Renkoo is a “Comet” application, which is an advancement on AJAX. It is one of three Comet commercial applications in existence, and notably, two of them are built by women (the other two are Meebo, built by Elaine Wherry, and Gtalk). You’re familiar with AJAX, popularized by Google Maps. You can scroll across those maps immediately, because the application has quietly fetched more data from Google’s server and updated your browser. Comet goes one step further, opening a persistent connection with the server as long as you stay on one page. There is a good description of Comet here.

Renkoo was built using the Dojo toolkit, backed by IBM, AOL and Sun. Other kits are Prototype and Yui.

Here is a partial screenshot of the email interface:

Here is a screenshot of the browser interface: