VentureBeat

WooMe, a video speed-dating site whose claim to fame is a speedy, no-frills interface and the ability to attract people who would never touch a traditional dating site (it calls itself an “introductions platform”), has raised a fresh round of capital to continue expanding.

NewTeeVee had the scoop on the funding news, however its report said the company was valued at $30 million after the money, and had a deal with MTV, both of which WooMe representative called “inaccurate”. WooMe says its post-valuation is significantly higher, at $41 million, and that there’s no deal at all with MTV.

By all appearances, WooMe has been growing rapidly. Three months after the site launched, co-founder Stephen Stokols told me that the site was running about 1,000 video sessions between users (read our past coverage for more on how WooMe works). Today, the company is claiming 15,000 sessions each day, with 350,000 registered users. It also says the average amount of time active users spend on the site is doubling each month.

One does get the impression, though, that WooMe hasn’t grown quite as quickly as its founders hoped. One whisper I’ve heard is that WooMe attracts new users easily, but has had trouble user retention, despite some high-profile media appearances, including the BBC and Fox’s Morning Show.

An ongoing “bridge round” that saw its initial funding extended to $7.5 million from $1.9 million may have indicated the site had trouble convincing investors it’s really rocket-fueled (bridge rounds are sometimes made on less favorable terms, though we don’t know the details here). But this is just speculation on my part. With the significant valuation of this round, it appears that any worries have probably been set aside, for now. [update: Stokols says the bridge round raised in December was actually done because the numbers were well beyond what was expected.]

The $12.5 million round was led by Index Ventures, with existing investors Atomico and Mangrove Capital Partners participating. The round has also been left open, with about $500,000 left to raise for “strategic angels” who may come in. WooMe has its offices split between San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.

If you’re like me and split most of your “online time” between your smartphone, your computer’s chat client and your Facebook/LinkedIn page, Nimbuzz may be for you.

It’ll make all those communications smoother.

My Facebook friends sometimes leave me wall messages that I take forever to respond to. Now they can call me or chat with me directly via a widget embedded on my Facebook profile page. The Nimbuzz widget detects presence and shows if I’m online. If I’m offline, Nimbuzz also includes a “Buzz” feature to alert me that people are trying to reach me. The head spins with the potential for abuse of this well-intentioned feature, though. Calling me from overseas from a PC? Nimbuzz can help. Sending international SMS? No problem, you can use Nimbuzz. Theoretically, you could use some combination of Meebo/ebuddy/Trillian, Skype, Fring and your phone’s native IM/text messaging to do all that, but Nimbuzz packages it well and makes it simple. Simplicity comes from the unified interface across devices; I don’t have to import IM contacts into Skype and vice versa, for example.

Conversely, the service makes it even harder for technology junkies to unplug to enjoy downtime, but that’s a separate post.
The company has recently launched a phone, chat and file swap application that works across desktop, email, social network and mobile phone environments.

If your head’s not spinning from these features, well, it should be. Nimbuzz really is doing a lot; the question may be whether it’s doing too much.

While lots of companies are working on some combination of voice and IM features, Nimbuzz’s differentiation is its support for a wide variety of mobile handsets (currently at 500 devices with native support for Symbian and Windows Mobile) and good integration with several social networks. I downloaded the Nimbuzz social networking widget here, which made it brain-dead easy to add a Facebook application to my profile page. I was able to send messages and files from Facebook to a mobile phone Nimbuzz client as well as to a Windows desktop version of Nimbuzz. Call quality was good enough for day-to-day usage.

On the down side, I did find the Windows desktop program clunky in comparison to other similar applications like Skype for voice calls and Trillian for instant messaging. Another downer: If you own a Mac, you’ll have to rely on the web-based client.

Nimbuzz’s new release features everything and the kitchen sink: It provides PC to PC/mobile calling, IM aggregation across several communities, group chat and conferencing, free voicemail, file sharing, a Facebook application, a social networking and email call/chat widget, a WAP site, a Symbian/Windows mobile application as well as a desktop program. It also goes without saying that the company is working on an iPhone-specific version. But competitor Fring recently launched a nifty VoIP client for iPhone and beat Nimbuzz to the finish line.

While the company has seen reasonable traction thus far — it says it has 500,000 registered users and 10,000 daily software downloads — it says it hopes to capture 10 million users by the end of the year with the upgraded product suite. The company is also attempting to do distribution deals with European carriers as well as regional European social networks like StudiVZ. The current launch is restricted to the UK with expansion plans in five major European markets.

Nimbuzz is operating in an extremely cutthroat space (Tariq Dag Khan, the company’s CMO, claims to know of at least 130 direct competitors!) — and the recent demise of Jangl may point to a similar fate for many such free-call startups. The company must also take on that entrenched 800-pound gorilla named Skype. We’ve previously mentioned Nimbuzz as complementary with free conferencing services like Lypp (our coverage), which are also part of the landscape.

Finally, the company needs to grapple with mobile carriers that are bound to be nervous about the cannibalization of their existing voice business. After all, when users start making mobile VoIP calls over a WiFi network, their cellphone minutes usage will fall. This situation is made worse in the U.S. because carriers generally offer unlimited data plans for smartphones such as iPhone and Blackberry. Little wonder, then, that Nimbuzz isn’t addressing the U.S. market for now. While acknowledging these problems, Khan mentioned that there are several forward-looking European carriers that treat mobile VoIP as an opportunity to increase data usage.

Nimbuzz is funded by Mangrove Capital Partners SA, which also funded Skype. The company also took funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures and MIH Group. The company is based out of Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Wikileaks judge restores restores site, slaps self on wrist
2) AllPeers’ peer-to-peer scheme fails to capture users
3) Chevron, Weyerhaeuser join up for cellulosic ethanol
4) Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech
5) Akamai wins patent fight, but not happy with ruling
6) Woz points out flaws in Apple’s latest products
7) Global warming, now with double the lethality
8) LinkedIn’s new features look a little more like Facebook
9) Fastcompany.tv launches with Robert Scoble
10) Fortune tops “Most Admired” list with Valley companies

Wikileaks judge restores site, slaps self on wrist — A federal judge who ordered that whistle-blower site Wikileaks be scrubbed from the web not only reversed his own order, but has since released a statement suggesting that he overstepped his bounds and possibly violated the First Amendment, acknowledging that free speech on the Internet is a tricky issue.

AllPeers’ P2P sharing extension fails to capture users, closes — AllPeers, a clever Firefox extension that allowed the peer-to-peer sharing, is dead. The prognosis: Not enough users to satisfy the investors, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. There’s a brief obituary at TechCrunch.

Chevron and Weyerhaeuser join forces for cellulosic ethanol — Ain’t green great? Take Chevron and Weyerhaeuser, two giant companies known for environmental damage — the first for oil exploration, the latter for logging and creating Superfund sites — add an impending global crisis, and come up with Catchlight Energy, a new joint venture to research cellulosic ethanol. The company will employ up to 40 researchers, making it one of the larger cellulosic efforts.

Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech — Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is keeping up with the Joneses by setting up its own nanotech research lab, which will put most of its efforts toward solar energy. The Jones here, in case you missed it, is Abu Dhabi with its $15 billion Masdar City initiative.

Akamai prevails in patent fight, but unhappy with the winnings — Akamai won a patent battle with rival content distribution network Limelight, but the amount — $45 million — was less than half of the $100 million the company thought it deserved, according to Xconomy. Limelight, for its part, would prefer to multiply the amount by 0; it’s appealing the case.

Woz points out the flaws with latest Apple products — Acting as the super-ego to the ego of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak spent some time criticizing the Apple Air and iPhone to the Sydney Morning Herald. (The id, we’ll assume, is represented by Apple fanboys.) The brief version: He thinks that some fairly vital features were unnecessarily left out of the two devices.

Global warming, now with double the lethality — According to a study cited by the New Scientist: “A rise in CO₂ increases the temperature and water vapour content of the atmosphere, which in turn accelerate ozone production and encourage particulates to hang around in the air.” That means more lung damage, and ultimately, more deaths.

LinkedIn’s new features make it more like Facebook — Unfair perhaps, but the business networking site will inevitably be compared to Facebook. Web Worker Daily explains why new LinkedIn features like status updates make it more like its chattier rival.

FastCompany.tv launches entrepreneur-focused web shows — Robert Scoble has the first two shows on the new video portal, Fastcompany.tv.

Fortune ranks “Most Admired” companies, tech firms top list — Apple is number one and Google is number four on Fortune’s new list of the 20 most admired companies, which doubles as a clever way for Fortune to get 20 pageviews from a single article.

Seatwave, a European market place for event tickets where fans can buy and sell directly from and to each other, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding.

The financing continues a — yes, a large wave — of interest in the secondary ticket market, where people buy tickets, but then turn around and sell them to someone else. These markets can serve people who are legitimately caught with tickets and want to get rid of them because the can no longer go to an event, or they can also benefit scalpers trying to make a few bucks through arbitrage.

In the last year, we’ve seen a frenzy: Stubhub, TicketsNow and GetMeIn have all been gobbled up in the last 12 months by eBay and Ticketmaster (see our coverage).

The funding comes from Fidelity Ventures, a Boston based venture capital firm that is betting strongly on online marketplaces. It backed marketplace companies like China’s Alibaba and money lending company Prosper. Indeed, the firm’s partners are going around saying that Alibaba’s recent IPO represented a watershed event ushering in a new era of successful marketplace companies. Another firm making a big bet here is Benchmark, which is also an investor in Prosper.

Seatwave offers tickets for theater, sports, music and other live events. Other investors in Seatwave include Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest.

The company was launched last year by Joe Cohen, a former exec at Ticketmaster and Match.com.

The company said it has 500,000 tickets available for sale and is the most-trafficked ticket exchange website in the UK. The money will be used to expand into other countries, the company said.

The company estimates the secondary market to be worth around $1.9 billion in the UK alone, and $6.8-9.7 billion Europe wide.

The online advertising world continues to get shaken up.

OpenAds, a company based in London, is the latest to drive change, undercutting the old guard with a low-cost offering. It offers Web site owners something called an “ad server,” a device lets them take control of their online advertising management. It provides the technology needed by Web sites to control advertising creative, insert into the right place on a Web site at the right time, and then monitor how the advertising performs.

Today, OpenAds announced it is offering a free hosted version, letting Web companies avoid the need for their own server. It also announced it has raised $15.5 million more in financing to expand.

Ad servers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, they can note if you arrive at a site for the second time in an hour and be programmed to show you a different ad than the one you saw the first time — to improve efficiency (here’s a demo of how it works).

There’s also a huge and growing market for ad management, as more and more people go to the web to research and read.

OpenAds’ server is open source, and therefore so cheap that it is undercutting the incumbents, such as Microsoft’s aQuantive, and giant Doubleclick, the company Google is acquiring. While the basic version is free, OpenAds gets paid by offering support.

The second round of financing is led by Accel Partners, with previous investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. It follows a first $5 million round last year.

OpenAds says it is used by more than 30,000 publishers worldwide.

Paris-based Zlio, a company that helps you easily create your own web page “shops” to sell merchants’ goods online, has raised $4 million from Mangrove Capital Partners.

See our previous coverage here.

The site now attracts more than 2.5 million unique visitors per month. More than 100,000 shops have been created — double the number of shops it had in March — according to chief executive Jeremie Berribi. Zlio provides a simple tool for you to pick a “shop” name, choose a template and select products from a catalogue of merchant products, for example an iPod or a book. Then, you can choose from a wide range of merchant’s goods to resell on your own site. Here’s a sample site, for scuba gear:

Zlio creates makes money through revenue-sharing with merchants and users. This is a way for community sites, such as forums and blogs, to make money: They can pick and choose merchant products most relevant to their readers.

Amazon apparently banned Zlio in May, upset about its policies: Zlio was making half its revenues through Amazon as an “associate” partner, where it referred users to buy things at Amazon and received a fee. Additionally, Zlio had been providing rebates to users (splitting revenue with users is part of its model). However, Amazon’s terms don’t allow partners to return referral fees to users. The Amazon-to-Zlio ban letter, via Mashable:

It has come to our attention that you may be paying some of your referral fees back to customers as a form of rebate. While we are certain that your idea would meet with some success, we have decided against working with any Associates who employ this rebate model.

A similar idea about online merchant-stores popped up during the (first) Internet bubble: Sequoia-backed Affinia.com. That company imploded, as this “site explains, pissing off thousands of loyal customers.

When we wrote about Zlio in March, Berribit told us that he was looking to close a $3.5 million round in April. Two months later, a half a million dollars more, a ban from Amazon — and some solid growth. Congratulations.

updated

Quintura, a company offering a visual search engine, said it has raised “several millions” of dollars in a first round of venture funding from Luxembourg’s Mangrove Capital Partners.

(Update: Some reports have put the round at “around $5 million”; we haven’t confirmed.)

With Quintura, you search for a term, and Quintura offers you a “cloud” of words related to your term that helps you refine your search.

For example, if you search for iPhone (see screenshot below), you can mouse over the word “launch,” and Quintura will dynamically update its results on the right of the screen to tell you more about the iPhone’s launch details. You can download software that helps you create more detailed search scopes.

The company first emerged about a year ago, and in November raised seed capital from Mangrove, the ABRT Venture Fund and OpenView Venture Partners of Boston. At the time, it said it was the first Russian Internet company to raise funds from a Western venture firm.

While there is no sign that Quintura has gained any significant following, the funding comes at a time when visual ways of interacting with the Web are becoming more popular. The explosion of the popularity of video is one example of that. Investors are looking for ways to invest in that trend.

Quintura also offers a way to switch results to show video and images.

Quintura’s chief executive Yakov Sadchikov tells us the company will soon offer websites and blogs a version of Quintura to replace their standard “site map. ” A Quintura interactive cloud for site search and site navigation will give users a more intuitive sense of what subjects the blog or site covers. This, for one, would be useful. Sites could use it for free, and accept ads, or they would pay a fee.

Quintura also released a version for kids, Quintura Kids that limits results to kids-specific terms and safe navigation of kids-related web links.

Quintura uses results from any of the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, or Technorati.

updated

Piczo, the social networking company that tries to distinguish itself as the safer place for teens, has raised $11 million in a third round of funding, it tells VentureBeat.

Piczo is one of handful of sites gunning for “second place” behind MySpace, the overwhelming leader with 65 million unique users a month. Facebook is around 17 million. Piczo boasts 10.5 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, mainly in Europe and the U.S. Bebo and Hi5 are around that. Like other networking sites, Piczo offers video, photo-sharing, and other communication tools. However, it doesn’t allow people to search profiles, creating more of a sense of security for young people. It’s also invite-only.

The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and Mangrove Capital Partners. Piczo’s existing investors, Sierra Ventures and Catamount Ventures, also participated in the third round of funding.

The company has now raised $18 million since 2005

Chief executive Jeremy Verba tells VentureBeat the company has hit saturation point in the UK, and Canada, but is growing rapidly in Germany, with a million uniques now, up from nothing last summer. Overall, Piczo is adding 30,000 registered users a day, he says.

Piczo is also seeing a lot of overlap with MySpace. MySpace, which is open to search, is like a wide-open “disco,” says Verba. Piczo is like a private party, in comparison — where many of the same people using MySpace go to link privately with their friends, typically ten or 15 people. Another difference is freedom of expression. MySpace keeps users to similarly structured profile templates. Piczo lets users play with their pages more creatively. Its target age group is 13 to 16. Girls make up 70 percent of users.

Verba says there’s no deadline to hit profitability, but there are multiple ways to make money — through advertising and other means. Piczo’s users don’t seem to mind pop-up notes, for example telling them about a Justin Timberlake Piczo page, where they can go and get wallpaper, links to Timberlake’s music videos and pictures and chat with fans. Piczo makes money because Timberlake’s label, Sony BMG sponsors it.