RockYou between a funding rock and an acquisition
RockYou, the fast-growing online widget company — that lets you post images and slideshows in social networks and other web sites — has apparently hit a major juncture in its decision to raise funding or not. And I’m wondering if it may have decided to go a different route.
The company, which is in a cut-throat competition with Slide, needs to raise cash — or sell. It isn’t profitable, and needs to keep up with Slide,… Continue Reading
Aprius raises money for secretive optical company
Aprius, a Sunnyvale start-up that remains secretive, has raised an undiclosed amount of money from Lightspeed Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates.
VentureBeat has heard it is working on an optical communications technology.
Chief executive Marc Verdiell said he isn’t ready to reveal any details. Verdiell founded Lightlogic, a company that provided 10 Gb/s Ethernet optical transceivers, which was bought by Intel in 2001.
Christophe Schaepe, of LightSpeed, and Forest Baskett, of NEA led the investment are on… Continue Reading
Iconix sues founders of photo site RockYou — wins first round
(Update: There appears to be a settlement).
A U.S. district court judge has issued a preliminary ruling favoring Iconix in a suit alleging two of its former employees committed intellectual property theft in forming photo slideshow site, RockYou.
Iconix apparently nailed them by archiving their IM conversations.
PE Week’s Alexander Haislip has done the reporting (link is here, but it is subscription only), and digs up the details from the complaint. Here’s our earlier story on RockYou, about… Continue Reading
MySpace founders shortchanged, Yahoo’s binge over, Timebridge, Mashery, FON, Workday
The round-up of crucial stuff in Silicon Valley:
Did MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson get shortchanged? — VentureBeat has heard that MySpace, the biggest success of the Web 2.0 wave so far, in terms of users, wasn’t such a great a hit for the co-founders. Word is, Chris DeWolfe ended up with a mere $5 million, even though the company was sold as part of Intermix for $580 million. We haven’t been able to confirm this… Continue Reading
Thefind.com, another shopping search engine, aims for comprehensiveness
Updated
Thefind.com is the latest in a long list of search engine companies swinging for the fences.
The Mountain View start-up has just launched its new offering. It aims to be the most comprehensive shopping search engine on the Web. It has crawled more stores (500,000) and products (150 million) than any other search engine, it boasts. While that may be true, and while its model is simple and compelling, Thefind.com also faces some challenges.
The graphic below… Continue Reading