VentureBeat

Richrelevance, a new San Francisco company offering personalized recommendations for online shopping businesses, has raised $4.2 million in a second round of financing.

The company joins a host of other companies — including Amazon, Aggregrate Knowledge and Wunderloop (see our coverage ) — that track what decisions you make while shopping online. Like these other companies, it then peers into its archives to find other users who have made similar decisions to you, so that it can recommend to you things that people with similar tastes have also bought.

We haven’t written about this company before. It has been secretive, raising a single round of financing last year from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and angel investors.

The latest financing comes from Greylock Partners and Tugboat Ventures.

The company plans to make more of public splash in June.

Notably, the company’s chief executive, David Selinger, previously managed Amazon’s data mining and personalization R&D team, including its personalization engine. Amazon was a pathbreaker in personal recommendation area. Also, his most recent post was as at Overstock.com, where he led data mining. Overstock was an early customer of Aggregate Knowledge. So Selinger knows his competitors — Amazon, and Aggregate Knowledge - well.

The company says its product outperforms competing collaborative filter companies by using “more than fifteen recommendation types combined with transparent messaging, continuous optimization, and merchandiser controls.”

We’ll try to find out more on this company and see if see if it lives up to its hype.

Online entertainment network LiveUniverse has purchased struggling video site Revver, according to NewTeeVee.

The purchase price was substantially more than the $500,000 to $1.5 million Revver was supposedly asking for, says NewTeeVee’s unnamed source, but it was also under $5 million. Revver’s staff will continue to work under the new ownership.

The deal isn’t a huge surprise — more than a month ago, Contentinople reported that it was in the works, and since then, plenty of other blogs have reported their share of Revver-related rumors. When the rumors started, a Revver spokesperson said: “We’re constantly pursuing content and business partnerships, and that activity seems to invariably generate acquisition conversations and rumors. … If we commented on all the rumors, we wouldn’t have time to focus on our core business.”

Los Angeles-based LiveUniverse is run by former MySpace exec Brad Greenspan. The company owns LiveVideo, and apparently wants to add Revver to its network.

Revver, meanwhile, has been going through some shake ups, with chief executive Steven Starr stepping down last June, following the departure of cofounders Ian Clarke and Oliver Luckett in December 2006. The company appears to have suffered from the same problems afflicting plenty of other video sites: Difficulty making money from its content, as well as competition from video giant YouTube.

In the past two years, Revver raised around $13 million from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III.

Considering the number of competitors in the product review market and the difficulty of establishing a successful destination site, it seems somewhat staggering that Power Reviews, the company that runs the product review site Buzzillions, has raised $15 million.

We’ve covered Power Reviews before, and it stands out from the pack by offering more comprehensive reviews and an innovative means to browse them. The site lets you filter reviews according to your personal preferences, so, for example, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use camera, you can select reviews of cameras for lay people — and filter out those recommended for professional photographers — with a click.

The company, which aggregates reviews by powering product reviews on e-commerce sites for free, has been doing a solid job partnering with major retailers. Its partner sites include Staples, Toys ‘R Us, REI, and a number of specialty stores.

It has an inventory of about 400,000 reviews of 120,000 products from over 1,100 online stores.  Andrew Chen, the company’s chief, expects Buzzillions will become truly useful across multiple categories once it manages to rope in enough retailers to scale to around two million. He says that Power Reviews raised so much money in part to give it an aura of staying power and credibility. It also intends to build a self-service interface that will allow e-commerce sites to plug-in easily.

Lehman Brothers Venture Partners took the lead on the round, and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards invested more, as well.

Jaxtr, a service for dodging international calling fees using your phone, has raised $10 million in series A round led by August Capital.

It says it has doubled in size in the last month to a million users.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company (more detail from our past coverage here and here [update: first comment below]) allows you to make free phone calls over the web or your mobile and landline phones, including low local rates for international calls.

When you sign up and make your first call on the web, you get a unique Jaxtr phone number and web address, such as www.jaxtr.com/mattmarshall.

People who want to call you can simply click on the web address link and get directed to your current phone number, as you have it pre-selected on Jaxtr — without you having to reveal your real number.

The company also lets you embed its widget on web pages so you can make or receive calls, say, on your Myspace account; it also launched a Facebook app in late May, but it only has a little over 12,000 users three months later.

Jaxtr has between 70 and 80 percent of its total users making and receiving calls from mobile phones simply because a Jaxtr number can be entered into a mobile address book like any other number, chief executive Konstantin Guericke tells us.

While Skype, Jajah and other internet-based phone services also provide ways to make free international calls, Guericke says this alternative phone number is more convenient for mobile users because they don’t need to download a mobile application, like Skype, or access a web browser, like Jajah. It’s similar to GrandCentral, the company bought by Google, which provides a single number you can use anywhere — although it gives you a single URL instead.

Eighty percent of total Jaxtr users live in 220 countries outside of the US, although Guericke says US users are three times as active, overall.

More than 16,000 users are now registering per day, the company says, with nearly three quarters of users in their 20’s.

Jaxtr was almost acquired recently, Dave Hornik of August Capital tells us — from another private company headed to an IPO (but not Facebook), he says.

While the offer would have been a good return for Jaxtr and its investors, Guericke says Jaxtr took the funding to try to replace the multi-billion dollar industry of selling calling cards with minutes for making international calls.

Jaxtr plans to make money by charging people who use more than their allotted 100 minutes per month; he hopes to get 20 million users in the next twelve months and is planning for only around one percent of these users to pay for additional minutes.

Other returning investors include the Mayfield Fund, The Founder’s Fund and three early Skype backers: Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital.

Jott, the convenient voice-to-text service we reviewed favorably in March, has raised $5.4 million in its latest round of financing.

Jott, of Seattle, allows you to call a number, record a message, and then have that message translated into text and e-mailed to you or one of your contacts.

Bain Capital of Boston led the round with money from its new early-stage fund. The round included previous investors Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners and Atomico.

Founder and chief executive John Pollard won’t disclose numbers of users, but says response has been strong without a penny spent on marketing. People are using Jott to manage soccer teams, communicate with their families, and to send themselves book or movie ideas they’ve schemed up and don’t want to forget, he says.

Jott is still free, and doesn’t plan to be otherwise for at least the next few months, after which it will consider using advertising or an ad-free premium service to bring in cash. Among other reasons we detailed in our earlier post, this makes it more appealing than its competitors SimulScribe and Spinvox.

Kyte.tv, the service that wants to be your own interactive TV channel, has finally launched.

We wrote wrote about the company two months ago, after first getting a demo.

You can host your photos, slide-shows, videos all in one place — the Kyte channel — and lets you post the channel player anywhere you want. It also lets you do mashups with things like surveys and music, and is integrated with live chat –distinguishing it from Slide and Rockyou, its closest competitors.

There’s even more to this player, as you’ll see from the example below. We’ve embedded our “VentureBeat channel,” and you’ll see several clips that demonstrate different parts of Kyte. (Click where it says “VentureBeat” underneath the player to see all of the clips). There’s also a brief interview I had Thursday with Draper Richards’ Howard Hartenbaum, the earliest investor in Skype, and also a backer of Kyte. His challenge was to force founder Daniel Graf to release the player — Graf kept holding on to it, to stuff in more features. Once Graf finally agreed to April 23 as launch date, Hartenbaum ordered a stone and had April 23rd etched into it (the stone sits in Daniel’s office).

The challenge for Kyte is whether it can rise above the noise of other players out there. Its multiple features may appeal more to the video/photo aficionado than to the average user.

There are more compelling Kyte channel examples at Kyte.TV itself. See the one at Mashuptown.com, the author of which says he prefers Kyte to YouTube for posting his videos because he can keep them all in one place. Each video within the player has its own URL.

Kyte has made a few changes since we last saw it: While your most recent content shows in the player, there’s a dashboard below giving visitors a glimpse of your earlier content (by clicking on “VentureBeat” in the example above, or easier seen here). If a friend posts to your channel live with a photo from their mobile phone, there’s a red blinking button in the player to show it is real time. Also new: Kyte shows who else is posting your channel on their site, and also trackbacks to show who is viewing your channel (so you can see who on MySpace or Facebook is watching it). The editing tools also let you drag songs over your photos or videos — something that competitors Slide and Rockyou don’t let you do. For now, it doesn’t let you upload music, for legal reasons, but gives you a choice of ten songs it has licensed (more coming) and the option to buy music from from iTunes.

Graf says he’s focused first on growing distribution, but is thinking of ways to make money. One is to take a cut when people purchase music.

At the least, Kyte should be commended for testing the limits of all that we have today — mobile, the Web, music, video and photos and real-time communications — all in one place.

Have you ever searched for product reviews online at and come away unsatisfied?

We have. Sometimes we can’t find reviews for a niche product. At Amazon for books, or at Yelp for restaurants, we often get that sneaky feeling a reviewer is biased (written by a friend of the author, or owner). And for cameras or computers at CNET or Yahoo, we’re not sure whether the revenue is targeted to an expert, or beginner. We’re dependent on the reviewer, and don’t know what the masses think.

Enter Buzzillions.com, a new site that claims to rectify these shortcomings. Judging from its stated traction, it is on to something.

Buzzillions gets its reviews from retail clients of its parent company, Power Reviews, a two-year-old Millbrae, Ca. company. Power Reviews gets the reviews in return for offering retailers technology that helps generate reviews. Each retailer sends out a survey after a purchase is made, asking the buyer to rate their product, and to provide other information. If they bought a camera, for example, they’re asked whether they are a beginner or expert photographer. These products are then put on Buzzillions. This way, a person surfing reviews at Buzzillion can search for reviews written people that match their own interests.

See below for partial screenshot. Note the users get to “tag” a product with certain words, and list pros and cons.

Buzzillions makes money charging retailers for the traffic it sends back to them when people click through to products after reading reviews. It charges either by CPC or CPA.

Over four months of testing, Buzzillions.com has generated more than 140,000 reviews on 45,000 products, covering primarily digital cameras, sporting goods, footwear and concerts and theater events. Its customers include Ritz Camera, Abt Electronics, Smart Bargains, Mountain Gear, Journeys. By year end, it expects to double the number sites it pulls reviews from, chief executive Andrew Chen said in an interview with VentureBeat. The company released a launch statement Sunday evening.

By targeting actual buyers with surveys shortly after purchase, Buzzillions’ retailers reach buyers when they are still in a cooperative state in mind. This contrasts with Amazon or other review sites, such as Epinions, where there is little incentive for users to fill out review.

Most retailers have an incentive to maximize the number of reviews they get–even if some are negative–because the assortment builds trust. Studies show that customers are more likely to buy at a site when they see both positive and negative reviews (they’re assured they’re not getting snowed). While Epinions collected two million reviews in eight years, Buzzillions will get a million reviews in a year, Chen said. By also catering to specialty retailers, Buzzillions has a wider a selection of reviews.

Other competitors include comparison shopping engines, such Shopping.com and Pricegrabber.com, which are introducing widgets for their retail partners to collect reviews, though still elementary. Become.com scrapes the Web for reviews, but it collects from everywhere: Some reviews are three stars, others have five, others none, so it has difficulty creating a unified feel. Google could enter the market. Amazon has added product wikis, and expanded reviews.

The company raised $6.2 million from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in December 2005, and will be raising another round in July.

Tomorrow, Buzzillions will introduce a feature that lets people add a review to their own blog.

Jott rocks.

Jott, a company based in Seattle, offers a convenient new service that lets you speak messages and send them to yourself or others — as a transcribed text message.

Or as a voice message, if you prefer.

Sign up at Jott.com takes a minute, with no hassle. Then all you do is call Jott’s number, 1-877-568-8486. Jott asks who you are sending the message to. You tell Jott (the name of your friend will be contained in the contacts you’ve imported), and then record a message, and hang up. It ends up in their inbox, translated into text. Or you can choose to send voice message instead, by immediately pressing a “1″. The message then shows up as an audio file in their email.

This is a really easy and useful service, and we may be hooked. Here’s the intriguing part: Jott sends your messages to India for transcription. There, cheaply paid workers are listening to your voice message, and typing down the text in an email, which they then shoot off to the recipient. It took us about five minutes to receive our transcribed message tests — and they were perfectly done. A new meaning of the phrase “Passage to India.”

This is perfect for those professional messages you want to send to people, say while driving in your car. You don’t want to bug someone with a phone call, but texting or emailing someone is hard to do • steering with your knees isn’t very safe.

Jott more convenient than Spinvox and Simulscribe. Spinvox is great for people who get power voicemail. It transcribes incoming voicemail, and sends them to your inbox in written form. But we couldn’t get Spinvox to recognize our phone number during the registration process, and besides, it isn’t free. Simulscribe also isn’t free. It asks for more info than Jott during the sign up, and gives you a week’s free trial, but then forces you to cancel if you don’t want to get billed.

Pinger, another service that lets you leave voice messages for people, doesn’t do voice-to-text.

There was a bug in Jott. The contact import process didn’t work for us. Presumably, they’ll fix this soon. It worked when we manually entered our addresses.

So how does the business model work, if Jott pays Indians to subscribe, but offering the service for free? Jott founder and chief executive John Pollard tells VentureBeat he wanted to see how people reacted to the product before charging. Jott plans to support a free version with advertising. They’ll charge for a premium version, for those want to avoid ads.

Our hope is, this isn’t too good to be true. If it stays free, we’ll keep using it, and it may become part of our daily workflow.

The company raised less than $1 million from Draper Richards, Seattle firm Ackerley Partners in Seattle and Skype founder Ziklas Zennstrom’s investment group, Atomico in London.

Flurry, a San Francisco company that offers an easy download for your mobile phone to let you email and read news for free, has raised $3.5 million in a first round of financing.

Flurry is useful because it helps you get email without having to buy an expensive smartphone. It lets you read news via RSS.

Now it hits crunch time. After signing up 140,000 users over the past year (we don’t know how many of them are active), it is about to start rolling out advertising to pay for the free service.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round, and was joined by Draper Richards and previous investor Borealis Ventures. Here’s the announcement.

More on how Flurry works here. It is a Java client download. You can sync your contacts on your phone. You manage your account on your PC or with your phone’s Web browser.

There are a ton of “video player” companies out there, and they’re starting to blur.

It takes a lot to impress these days. A video player in 2007 should be able to upload any video file — from your desktop or from the Web — and then have it run from any Website from a widget.

Just when we thought innovation was running out, we hear about Kyte, a video player that allows live video and chat communication over the Web and mobile phones, and is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It is the latest investment by Howard Hartenbaum (pictured left), the early investor in Skype (see our blog about him here, and Mercury News story here). Hartenbaum has been on a tear recently. We mentioned his investment in the new behavior advertising engine, Wunderloop, yesterday. He’s also an investor in DimDim, the new open source competitor to WebEx, which we’ll get to in a sec.

We first heard of Kyte a couple of weeks ago. We followed up with Daniel Graf, founder and chief executive of Decentral.TV, which owns Kyte.

Graf, who is jealously guarding Kyte’s distribution, until public launch sometime this quarter, has delayed release. The product is in closed testing, so we haven’t gotten our hands on it. You get an idea, though, by perusing examples on the Web (click on image below, for example. There are others here, here and here.)

These Web examples are just half of it. The other half is mobile.

Here’s how it works: The Kyte player is your own interactive TV channel. You can distribute it on the web, or through the mobile phone. On it, you can host videos and photo slide-shows — uploaded from your computer, or elsewhere on the Web, such as YouTube. The most recent content shows in the player, but you can use a back arrow to see earlier content. The example above is player of MySpacer Justin, 26, of San Francisco, and his videos are interesting.

Ok, so what? Well, Kyte appears to do everything. It lets you brand the player as your own. It gives you drag and drop tools to make uploading files easy. You can overlay questionnaires on the player’s screen. Friends can follow your channel on their phone. There’s an IM mashup, too, so friends can respond with messages instantly, and other people watching the video see those messages in real time and can respond. Photos are transferred real-time, says Graf. In other words, if I have Jason’s player on my phone, and he has it on his phone, we can not only live chat about it — more significantly, if Jason turns on camera and takes photos, I can see his surroundings live. “If you see a hot girl on the beach, boom, you can ask him take more shots,” says Graf. [Clarification: He wants to make videos live, too, but that will take some time]

Graf stresses the significance of Kyte as a “full-blown interactive application on the phone.” While Skype, and IM work real-time on the web, this is a real-time, or live video and chat over the phone and the Web. The players get their own URL. You can also open your player channel, so that others can load information too.

Kyte has just signed a deal with a major European carrier, which makes this easier; but it can work without a carrier. The big question remaining for Graf is whether he can actually get this product out of the door!

For now, Kyte supports Java-enabled phones. The product is developed on Flex2 and the latest versions of Flash.

We’ve talked about other mobile video players, including Radar, which transfer mobile videos and photos on mobile phones, but none do this live.

Graf raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Hartenbaum’s firm Draper Richards, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and several others.

DimDim, meanwhile, is an open-source version of Web conferencing software WebEx.

It is Hartenbaum’s other investment. DimDim is free, and so plans to disrupt WebEx — just as Skype undercut telecom providers. WebEx charges a significant $39 a month, which is out of reach for many cost-conscious companies. DimDim is still mulling its business model, but plans to place ads in the video, and/or offer premium services. (If you’re an employee being forced to watch a boring training video by your company, perhaps ads might break the monotony?) There are other competitors in this area, but DimDim is the first to go open-source.

It is the second startup of CEO Deb Dutta Ganguly. He founded Advanced Internet, which he sold to Computer Associates in 2001, and built a team of 1,000 people. DimDim is ready for use now, though your firewall may get in the way (DimDim is fine-tuning some of these compatibility issues). This month, downloads are reportedly hitting 2,000 downloads a day.

DimDim has raised $2.4 million in a first round from Hartenbaum’s Draper Richards, along with Index Ventures and Nexus India Capital. The DimDim financing was first reported by PE Week. WebEx controls more than a third of the Web conferencing market, according to research by Goldman Sachs cited by PE Week. Microsoft follows, with 13 percent.

The company is based in Burlington Mass. Our big question for this company is, how do you make money?

The eye-opening performances claimed by new behavioral advertising start-ups Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop are sure to grab the attention from online retailers and publishers.

Take the little announcement by the nine-month-old Menlo Park company Aggregate Knowledge yesterday at DEMO: It drove more than 20 percent of all of the holiday purchases at major discount retail site Overstock.com. Considering that the annual revenue of Overstock is in the range of $700-800 million, our rough estimate is that Aggregate Knowledge pushed at least $100 million in sales. Aggregate Knowledge wouldn’t comment, but if we’re right, this is downright impressive, considering Overstock is just one customer. AK gets paid for boosting sales (we don’t know exactly how much). We do know that it was making millions even before the holiday period (see our earlier coverage).

The easiest way to understand Aggregate Knowledge is that it takes Amazon.com’s feature, “People who bought this book, also bought these books,” and applies it across the Web. For example, if you are browsing at a retail site, and looking at a particular gift basket for Valentine’s, AK proposes other gift baskets that others like you have ended up buying. It does this for news articles, and even advertisements.

No wonder Aggregate Knowledge is getting competition. Germany’s Wunderloop has been working steadily on a similar technology since 1999, but had stayed small and conservative through the downturn between 2001 and 2003. But now, with online retail flourishing, it is going for the big-time too. It has just raised cash from Klaus Hommels, of Benchmark Europe, Howard Hartenbaum, an early investor at Skype with Draper Richards, Skype founder Ziklas Zennstrom’s investment group, Atomico, and the European Founders Fund.

Hommels told VentureBeat last week the investment was in the “single digit” millions. That’s comparable to the $5.5 million invested in AK by Kleiner Perkins and others.

Hommels says Wunderloop has the most advanced behavioral technology in Europe. Like AK, Wunderloop assesses the clicks you make in real-time, making judgments about your tastes, without ever knowing who you are. Then it lets a travel insurance advertiser, for example, target the user profile that Wunderloop has determined to be at least 25 percent interested in finance, and 25 percent interested in travel. It can deliver ads, videos or content, dependent on the user’s tastes. The price of the average shopping basket bought by customers at Web sites using Wunderloop is 48 percent higher than without Wunderloop, Hommels said. Wunderloop serves several large European customers, including AOL, T-Online, Tiscali, Lycos and Freenet. Wunderloop has closed 100 percent of the customers it has started negotiating with, Hommels said. The new chief executive has revamped the Wunderloop management team, he said. It has about 30 employees.

Updated

Attributor, a Redwood City start-up, is scanning the Web to fingerprint pages for copyrighted audio, video, images and text, to give publishers a way to request that Web sites take down priated content — or pay for it, at least.

The company’s statement is here; there’s a good summary in the WSJ today.

This service has an obvious market, highlighted by YouTube’s continued hosting of pirated video and music. Publishers need tools to find that content, in order to request YouTube take it down.

The company has just raised a second round of venture capital, bringing its total to $10 million. Led by Sigma Partners, the latest round includes Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital. Ron Conway is also a seed investor.

It is the latest company of Jim Brock, formerly a Yahoo senior vice president of Yahoo, and Jim Pitkow, former chief executive of Moreover, who has done extensive research in information retrieval.

Its also the latest company with a name ending with the active/aggressive suffix, “-tor,” as in termina-tor and. Another product, Xcavator by CogniSign, is also looking at ways to help publishers find copyrighted ads online.

Indigo Stream Technologies, based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that does something similar to Attributor — it assesses a Web page and then uses Google’s search engine to look for a pirated copy elsewhere the Web.

Attributor is still in testing mode, but should be released next year. We first mentioned Attributor in June.