VentureBeat

Zivity, the start-up featuring semi and fully nude women in different poses, has a simple model: Make a social network similar to Facebook or MySpace, but with two separate user bases — one being subscription-paying members, and the other being models and photographers who post (artistically) nude photo-sets on the site.

Zivity has proven itself something of an anomaly by raising $8 million to date from some well known venture firms. The first million came last year, and $7 million was just added on by Bluerun Ventures and Founders Fund.

Investors normally shy away from anything that might be labeled porn, mainly because everyone else in the world also shies away from it. Advertisers, especially, tend to avoid even slightly controversial sites. Hence the subscription model, which is pretty much standard for the industry. With this investment, San Francisco’s Founders Fund continues to assert its maverick status among firms.

However, it was John Malloy (left), of the Menlo Park, Calif. office of global venture firm BlueRun venturesFusionOne, who took the risk of being quoted in the funding announcement press release. Malloy, who previously backed more IT-focused companies like Riya, Slide and Varoli, was quoted as saying: “Zivity, much like Slide and PayPal before it, has a driven and talented team focused on challenging the status quo and creating a large new market opportunity.” Founders Fund Luke Nosek also joins the company’s board.

Aside from the nudity, Zivity is keen on selling itself as a social network, not as a porn site. When I talked to him, co-founder Scott Banister — who previously co-founded the decidedly non-sexy Ironport Systems and helped sell it for $830 million last year — repeatedly referred to MySpace’s policy of removing any sort of nudity from its site.

“If the MySpace anti-nudity team took a month off, they’d come back and there would be nudity everywhere. In the world we live in now, people want to be famous, they want to be creative,” he said. He’s hoping they want money, too — Zivity will share 40 percent of all its revenue with the models and photographers who post up sets, based on votes given out by members.

The site will also feature blogging and videos. There’s no requirement for nudity, but it’s obviously going to be the big selling point for members to shell out $10 a month.

I agree with Banister that there’s no point in being a prude. If nudity makes for a good business model, then go for it. On the other hand, the Internet is filled with porn. It’s not hard to be skeptical about Zivity. Why would attractive women spread around nude (or even half-clothed) photos of themselves on a social network with several hundred thousand or even over a million members — and where will all those paying members come from in the first place?

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Unlike a site like SuicideGirls (which Banister says is just a niche site), that pays both models and photographers up-front, models will have to wait for money to accumulate from paying members. On the other hand, members won’t start paying unless there’s plenty of content.

And there is still social stigma attached to being a member of a site like Zivity, even if it looks more like Web 2.0 than Penthouse. It’s worth noting that PlayBoy has dealt with some of the same respectability issues. For more on that, read a recent interview on Freakonomics with its editorial director, Chris Napolitano.

Zivity will begin charging its 1,000+ beta members within the next three months, so we’ll soon see whether it can work. Banister says there are about 75 models with sets up on the site so far (and from a quick glance, some of them are pretty good-looking). The company, which is based in San Francisco, will remain in an invitation-only beta until early 2009.

This just in: The winner of the Techcrunch40 event is Mint, the personal finance company (see our coverage here).

Meanwhile, below is the last batch of Techcrunch companies, from Tuesday’s afternoon session. After hitting VentureBeat readers with 40 start-ups over the past two days, we’re going to try our best fast on Web 2.0 for at least a day. Frankly, this latest batch wasn’t that impressive. Here’s the ranking: WooMe, Zivity, mEgo, Wixi, Xtr3D, Metaplace, Flowplay, Broadclip and Kaltura.

WooMe, speedating through live video online — We reviewed the company here. Lots of dating sites exist, but its pushing the envelope somewhat, and making dating extremely cheap. However, other big brands are likely to enter the market if it proves successful.

Zivity , adult network for model photography – This is the adult company VentureBeat first wrote about last month. It’s promise is to let models and photographers of the models get paid for their work, by making members pay a dollar for each vote they make on best models. Eight cents gets split between the model and photographer, and 20 cents goes to Zivity. You get five free votes, and then have to pay if you want more.

mEgo, a character-based user interface — Simply put, a mEgo is a cutesy avatar that can be posted on a social network and used as a content aggregator. Users build a unique character on the mEgo site, connect in other accounts that they want access through it — Flickr or Facebook, for instance — and then post it on their profiles around the internet. Anyone who clicks on the mEgo can then access content from all the sites it’s linked through to. The problem is that there’s a hundred other cross-platform aggregators already present or in the works, bringing the noise level in the space to a dull roar. And the question always remains the same: Why use one over another? With mEgo, at least, there’s an answer: It’s cute, and kitschy. The combination may be enough to win some hearts and minds, if only from the teenaged set.

Wixi — Simple concept: If you’ve got content on your computer that you want to share with someone, but you don’t want to go to the trouble of file transfers, you can drag and drop the files from your desktop to your Wixi site. Whether it’s music, movies or some other sort of content, your friends can then go and enjoy it through the Wixi Universal Flash Player. This brings up some questions on copyright: How long will it be until people use their sites to share their copy of, say, the newest Disney movie? And will it be different enough from competitors like Pando, Docstoc and others, for it to get above the noise? The company is based in France.

Xtr3D, a lot of hand-waving — No, really, it is. Xtr3D is a 3D human-machine interface, which is a fancy way of saying that you can move things on your screen by making specific gestures with your hands. The Nintendo Wii does this with a long motion-sensitive paddle that you move around. Xtr3D, instead, tracks your movements through a camera mounted on the computer screen. During the presentation, the company’s founder used the program to manipulate a Google Earth map, rotating and zooming in and out. While the demonstration was interesting, the program didn’t seem to be as fast at responding to the gestures as it would be to mouse clicks. Additionally, his gestures obviously had to be very clear and slow enough for the computer to recognize. Without taking away from the accomplishment of the company, it seems obvious that the software isn’t mature; we’ll have to wait a bit longer, it seems for a Minority Report-style computer. In fact, it reminds us of a near-identical company, Softkinetic, which we wrote about a year ago, and which we haven’t heard much about since. Xtr3D couldn’t tell us clearly how it was different from Softkinetic (Update: This appears to be our misunderstanding. The company has since explained that Xtr3D uses only software and a single camera, while Softkinetic requires infrared as well. Xtr3D argues this makes it less expensive.) The company is positioning the software as a platform for developers, with an emphasis on gaming.

Metaplace, an open standards virtual world, that lets users mashup games and other activities — It’s a small download, 30k. We reviewed it separately here. Again, it enters a very crowded field, and questions remain about business model.

Flowplay , yet another avatar virtual world – This site lets you build a 3D avatar, and do familiar things such as play games and win points so that you can build out your wardrobe. It renders in Flash. It wants to build a large number of settings for avatars (apartments, lounges), like Doppelganger’s vSide (our coverage), except no downloading. You can connect and chat with friends. The site looks clean, however, we’ve been there, done that. There are way too many avatar-game sites now, and this one doesn’t break the “originality” threshold. We don’t see much here to stop people going to MSN or Miniclip to play games. Flowplay has raised $500K on a bridge note from Ambient Sound Investments.

Broadclip, a system for sharing music online — The presentation consisted of someone coming on stage, saying hello, and turning on a video for everyone to watch. All of which might have been fine, had the presentation been good, or particularly informative. Broadclip’s “MediaCatcher” software aggregates music for its users through a recommendation engine. Once found, the music can be played anytime. MediaCatcher works independently, on a mobile device or through platforms like Facebook. Despite some attractive features, the company didn’t seem unique or impressive; perhaps it was the grandiose claim of being the “Web 3.0″ solution for music. Napoleon complex, anyone?

Kaltura, letting you collaborate with video – This is an also-ran. This company’s slogan is “YouTube meets the Wiki.” Instead of sharing text, you’re sharing video. Take an example of a music band. The band can go to Kaltura, create a Web site, record an introduction video, and then others can upload their own content, and then mix it all up in a big video mashup. We’ve seen scores of iterations of this, and the only thing surprising about Kaltura is that it has 20 employees working for it, and has $2 million in venture backing from Avalon Partners. It is based in Tel Aviv and Manhattan.

(This post was co-written with Chris Morrison.)

Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.

It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.

Zivity is based on voting system. Paying subscribers vote on the images of women they like, and Zivity passes on a portion of the subscription revenue to the most popular women. There will be some free content to lure users, however you’ll have to subscribe to do things like leave messages for models. There will be blogs, and other social networking features, but video will be rolled out much later, if at all, according to the company.

A representative said a comparable site is Suicide Girls (brace yourself if you click on the link), only with fewer tattoos, less tongue-rings. Models will also not be as locked into the extensive contracts governing the Suicide Girls.

Several former PayPal executives are among the investors. Zivity is run by former execs and employees at Ironport Systems, a company bought by Cisco for $830 million earlier this year. When you’ve made it, what else is there left to do in life than launch an adult site? Jeffrey Wescott, an former Ironport engineer, is chief executive; Cyan Banister, who led Ironport’s customer support, is co-founder. Her husband Scott Banister, co-founder at Ironport is an advisor and investor in the company.

It is apparently based on ruby+rails, python, and/or perl, according to its job list.