VentureBeat

ReputationDefender, a company that helps people manage their reputations and privacy online, has raised around $2.6 million in a first round of institutional funding.

There are a number of businesses providing identity theft protection, such as Lifelock, TrustedID and Debix, but ReputationDefender is a bit different — it doesn’t focus on protecting your finances, and instead gives you control over the information about you that’s available online. Its earliest and best-known product, MyReputation, provides a monthly report on what people are saying about you on the web. Users can also pay ReputationDefender to help take negative mentions down.

But why do you need to pay for something like this — isn’t that what Google is for? Founder and chief executive Michael Fertik says the Redwood City, Calif. company culls through pages that aren’t indexed by Google or other search engines. It’s also easy to see why some people  want to pay someone else to handle the headache of contacting sites that say untrue or mean things about you, or post unwanted photos. (ReputationDefender says it doesn’t target news articles, and it isn’t a law firm.) In fact, Fertik says ReputationDefender’s subscription revenues quadrupled between April and July. The company, founded in 2006, earned $1.21 million in revenue in 2007, he adds.

ReputationDefender’s other services include privacy management, a tool for parents to manage their child’s reputation and MyEdge, which publishes and disseminates positive information about you. Most customers have been individuals so far, but the company is also privately testing a product for businesses.

ReputationDefender actually raised most of the new funding in January, Fertik says. Now it’s considering a second round, although it may also choose to forgo any more venture backing, at least for now. Investors include Maples Investments, RP/JA Investments and European Founders Fund. ReputationDefender raised less than $1 million in angel funding back in 2007.

The online event-planning market is mature. Various event web sites have gotten bought, gone out of business, or gone nowhere in the last several years.

However, two companies, Amiando and EventBrite, allow you to sell tickets to events online, and they’ve emerged with a business model: They take a cut of the ticket sale. This differs them from the slew of other sites that helped you organize events, but never made money.

Notably, the two companies have just announced new rounds of venture funding.

The two companies fill the middle ground between the enormous task of building your own ticket-selling software (not very practical, obviously), and using a large-scale ticket-seller like Ticketmaster. In addition, they help you set up websites to promote those events.

Today, Amiando, a Munich, Germany-based service that says it has the “first mover” advantage in Europe, is announcing its first round of financing, from Wellington Partners and Adinvest.

Eventbrite, the San Francisco-based company that’s likely better known to our United States-based readers, announced its first, and undisclosed, round earlier this week from the European Founders Fund. Eventbrite’s chief executive is Kevin Hartz, an early advisor to Paypal and a repeat entrepreneur who is also the co-founder of angel investing outfit Youniversity.

Both services should be familiar to VentureBeat readers. We’re using EventBrite to sell tickets for our MobileBeat conference in July. Amiando, meanwhile, was the online ticket seller for the Crunchies awards that we co-hosted last January.

Amiando, which also offers a widget that lets you sell tickets on your own site, has been focusing on international expansion. Besides English, it already provides the service in German (of course), as well as Spanish and French. It recently announced a distribution partnership for the East Asian market with Web2Asia, a company that provides business development services for foreign companies looking to expand into Asia. The East Asian region, particularly China, has unsurprisingly shown impressive growth potential for events and related services that go along with general economic expansion. China’s event industry for example is growing 20 percent per year, with the second highest number of trade show visitors and exhibitors in the world, according to a 2007 report by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Anthony Ha contributed to this article.

Worktopia is trying to make it easier for business people to quickly organize small meetings. It offers a searchable online database for places like conference rooms in hotels, airport club conference rooms and other often under-used meeting places. Once you find the meeting rooms with Worktopia, you can make online reservations for your group.

The Harrison, N.Y. company is targeting organizations that want to easily put together a meeting of less than 100 people, making it so organizations themselves don’t have to go through a meeting-site approval process with the meeting-space owner. To find a location, you enter information such as the city and date when you’d like to meet, then you can choose options like the size of the meeting space, the neighborhood in the city, and other information. You can also sort for locations based on whether or not catering is available. After entering the criteria for the meeting place you want, Worktopia provides you with a list of options, including live cost quotes and reservation information.

So, for example, based on a rather general search I did for board rooms with Internet access in San Francisco, I get a list of recommendations — with the number one recommendation being Embassy Suites at the San Francisco Airport.

The company has raised nearly $6 million from the Samwer brothers through their investment vehicle, the European Founders Fund. DFJ Gotham Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners and High Peaks Venture Partners participated in the round; the deal was announced last month.

Buddy Media is a small player in the game of trying to build businesses on Facebook’s developer platform, and on other social network platforms, but it has big plans.

Today, it is rolling out an ad network of its own — meaning it is competing against fairly established companies like RockYou, Social Media, Lookery and others. It has also raised a $6.5 million round of funding led by Softbank Capital, with participation from European Founders Fund, GreyCroft Partners, and angel investors including Ron Conway.

New York-based Buddy Media, the maker of virtual Facebook currency “Acebucks,” bought a set of small applications built by ChipIn, last January, in a bid to grow bigger in the face of market leaders like Slide and Rockyou.

Adonomics, an analytics service for Facebook applications, says Buddy Media has the 33rd largest reach on Facebook, with 5,894,851 total installs and 63,985 daily active users. Adonomics has been criticized for overvaluing Facebook applications (it values Slide at $318 million, for example). But the only people upset about BuddyMedia’s valuation here will be the company itself and its investors: Adonomics pegs it at $964,469.

However, as one of Buddy’s investors says, the company has been approached to do strategic deals with larger companies and instead had its pick of term sheets. The market here is young, there’s still lots of opportunity, and maybe Buddy can yet carve a space out for itself.

As someone who has been home for one weekend of the past six, I know that traveling can be a real pain. While the Internet has eased some burdens such as scheduling and price hunting, it has also created new ones, such as organizing trip details when plans are often made across several sites. That is where a site like TripIt comes in.

There are a lot of online traveling sites such as Kayak (our coverage), but TripIt sets itself apart by organizing your travel information after you have scheduled it.

Using TripIt is as simple as forwarding the travel itinerary email that you get sent when you book a site online to the email address, plans@tripit.com. Assuming you’ve sent the email from an address you have registered to your TripIt account, the service will then build you a new itinerary within TripIt that adds several useful items such as weather information, access to maps of the area, pictures of the area from Flickr and other features. The great thing about forwarding these plans is that TripIt will take several different details such as a flight and hotel booked on separate sites, and place them together one one page.

“We have so many overlapping applications, and the next frontier is getting them to work better together,” says Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, one of the site’s investors.

The service also has social features that allow you to share plans with friends and find out when someone you know is near you on a trip. In this regard, TripIt is similar to a service like Dopplr, but TripIt has offers organizational tools far beyond that service.

The best feature of TripIt is the ease with which you can access all of your organized travel information on a mobile device. Printing out and organizing multiple sheets of paper for various reservations is a hassle. The recently launched TripIt Mobile eliminates that waste.

This latest $5.1 million series B round was led by Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund. The San Francisco-based company previously raised $1 million last year from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (our coverage).

This new investment will be used to expand development, marketing and support for those users who have signed up with the service. Additionally, with the European Founders Fund on board, TripIt hopes to expand its service globally.

The Samwer brothers, the well-known European trio of entrepreneurs, have invested in Frazr, an exact duplicate of Twitter.

They have thus embarked on a reputation of backing blatant rip-offs of successful U.S. companies. They backed Studi-VZ, the Facebook in Germany, for example, in 2005, shortly after Facebook became a major success.

See the images below to see how similar Frazr is to Twitter. Even the question at the top of the pages is same. Here’s a translation of the German: “Everyone wants to know: What are you doing? Tell them. On the Web, in a message, or phone.” Compare that to Twitter’s intro.

Frazr is available in French and German. The amount invested was undisclosed.

Twitter, a San Francisco company, has gained tremendous buzz in tech circles in recent weeks, for the dead-simple way it lets you publish one-liners about what you are doing at any given time. You can select the people you want updates from, to track what your friends are doing, for example. Some techies find Twitter might make for a new type of communications protocol (scroll down). Others think the hype will die off within a few weeks or months. Still, all sorts of mashups have been built to integrate Twitter into things like maps and browsers. Twitbin, for example, gives you a way to follow twitters in your browser sidebar.

Alexander, Oliver und Marc Samwer aren’t dumb. U.S. companies take a while before they focus on foreign markets. And Europeans are more likely to rally behind a local company that specializes in their language. The brothers invested through their European Founders Fund. Christian Vollmann, of Magic Internet, is also an investor in Frazr, according to the German publication OnetoOne.

In fact, more European clones of Twitter have popped up: They include Texeln, another exact replica of Twitter, along with Wamadu, Faybl, 1you and Sloggen. Partnr.de is about to launch, according to OnetoOne.

/

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.

LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals connect, has raised $12.8 million in venture funding.

The venture capitalists, Silicon Valley’s Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund (EFF), an internet focused firm, placed a value of more than $250 million on the Palo Alto company, after the investment.

This catapults LinkedIn to the rarified group of networks that are actually worth something • though granted, this worth is still on paper • held on the books of venture capitalists, untested by the market.

The company raised the capital because it could do so on favorable terms (at higher values, a company gives away less of the company’s shares in exchange for an investment). Keith Rabois, the company’s VP for corporate and business development, said the cash will let LinkedIn experiment with various products, launching them and then killing them if they don’t work out. The company is already profitable.

VentureBeat hasn’t mentioned the European Founders Fund before. Founded by brothers Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, the firm was behind the launch of eBay Germany (Alando), and Jamba, part of News Group, among others.

The LinkedIn network currently has 9 million users. The company says the number is growing at 100,000 members a week, which suggests acceleration.

We’ve written about LinkedIn’s business model before.

The company recently launched LinkedIn Answers, a service that allows members to ask business-related questions to their contacts (this differs from Yahoo Answers, because LinkedIn’s user has to use their name, and can only pose the question to their network).

LinkedIn is seeing competition from new players. One in Germany, called Xing (formerly OpenBC) recently went public in Germany, and has a wider reach in that country. LinkedIn has moved to expand its presence there.

Next, LinkedIn wants to market its new LinkedIn Experts service, launched on Jan 4. It lets people submit requests for expert advice. LinkedIn locates the top five experts it thinks are appropriate for the task, and lets the searcher hook up with the experts they select from the list — at a rate of $500 an hour. LinkedIn keeps $250, and the expert gets $250. (We’re not sure why anyone would pay this much, though. All they have to do is sign up for LinkedIn’s premium InMail service, which lets them contact the expert directly, and arrange to pay them just $250 straight). But then compare this to the Gerson Lehrman Group, which charges you $10,000 a month to sit down with top five experts in the field, and LinkedIn is a great deal, says LinkedIn’s Rabois. This is high-end stuff, designed for people who are time-sensitive, more than price sensitive. For example, LinkedIn hopes to attract hedge fund mangers, who want to research a particular company. LinkedIn also handles billing, so helps avoid hassles for the expert. Finally, it can track people who bypass the system, and eventual may choose not to help those people, spokeswoman Kay Luo said.