UserVoice raises $800K for customer feedback systems
UserVoice, provider of online tools used to gather and organize customer feedback, complaints and product requests, has raised $800,000 in a first round of venture capital from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, Accelerator Group, and several individuals.
Based in Santa Cruz, Calif., the company says it aggregates the data to show what customers want most, and to help developers prioritize the changes they make. When new features are rolled out, UserVoice allows sites… Continue Reading
Huffington Post’s Lerer teaches journalism students to think like VCs
[Editor's note: As newspapers watch their business models crumble, journalism schools are moving fast to restructure their curricula to emphasize technology and new media. Below, Columbia journalism graduate student Chikodi Chima reviews a new seminar with an entrepreneurial bent.]
Cub reporter Kenneth Lerer was sure his days as a journalist were numbered when then-Saturday Night Live star Chevy Chase stopped him in the middle of an interview to ask why he wasn’t taking any notes. Few… Continue Reading
Twitter app TweetDeck raising angel round
TweetDeck, an application for organizing messages (”tweets’) received via microblogging service Twitter, is raising an angel round of funding. The round will total less than $500,000 and is led by Betaworks, according to All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka. Not bad for a one-man operation.
The application was built by Iain Dodsworth using Adobe’s AIR platform, which is used for creating hybrid web-desktop applications. TweetDeck’s big goal is to help users sort through the many tweets posted… Continue Reading
Outside.in gets fresh funding for local news
Local news and discussion site Outside.in has raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from existing investors. Let’s hope the New York startup has enough money now to keep the going during a tough time for many media and news organizations.
Local search sites like Judy’s Book have failed, but it looks like Outside.in co-founder John Geraci may have been right when he told us the competition just launched too early; Outside.in says traffic grew 400… Continue Reading
Iminlikewithyou raises $1.5M for social gaming site
Iminlikewithyou, a startup that began as something close to a dating site and has become closer to a casual game portal and social network over time, has raised a $1.5 million second round tor expansion.
The New York-based company only features its own games on the site, and is based entirely in Flash. Co-founder Charles Forman has said that he based many of his ideas off South Korean sites.
We’ve written more about the company as part… Continue Reading
Outside.in gets $3M and a new CEO for local news
Outside.in, a site for community news and discussion, has raised an additional $3 million and appointed a new chief executive.
The Brooklyn, New York startup named Mark Josephson, former president of marketing company Seevast Corp., as its new CEO. Josephson doesn’t appear to have experience in local news or local content, but that may not be a problem, since sites like Outside.in are still experimenting to find the best approach. His most relevant experience may be… Continue Reading
Songkick’s concert recommendation engine: It goes to 11
Behind the online service Songkick is a simple motivation: To make going to a concert as easy as going to a movie.
Some 70 percent of U.S adults did not go to a concert last year, according to Songkick chief executive and co-founder Ian Hogarth, who I met in Austin, TX last week. Does that mean they don’t like music? No, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t like some form of music. Instead,… Continue Reading
Lotame Solutions takes funding for social media advertising
Lotame is an advertising platform for social media and networks, with a targeting technology that it calls “Crowd Control”.
The company says that it is “capturing previously unavailable data based on engagement,” and feeding it back to advertisers and publishers to increase ROI. Such behavioral targeting is increasingly becoming a buzz-word as publishers look beyond traditional analytics data to find ways to monetize better.
The specific amount of funding was undisclosed, although Lotame called it a “multi-million… Continue Reading