VentureBeat

updated
Today, SeedFund, an Indian VC firm backed with Google cash, announced a $1 million investment in Lifeblob, a Bangalore-based lifecasting company whose awkward name just about says it all.

Lifeblob is a kind of digital diary that maps the media you share and thoughts you write onto a timeline. You can adjust the scale of this timeline to reflect the history of your online life in increments ranging from every day to a somewhat ambitious 100 years. Each entry appears as a “blob” that you can click on to expand. Sound a bit confusing? Take a look for yourself:

Lifeblob joins an increasing number of start-ups doing variations on this theme. These include Dandelife, Dipity, AllofMe and, in some ways, Plurk. Of the batch, Dipity and AllofMe are the most similar.

The key difference is that Lifeblob allows you to tag each entry with friends and events and inserts overlapping entries from other people’s timelines into your own. In concept, this means that if the VentureBeat team goes to dinner and everyone shares photos and comments about it, we get to memorialize the points in time and space where our lives intersect. In practice, it means an overwhelming degree of visual clutter that is difficult to understand.

Both Dipity and AllofMe have designed cleaner, more navigable interfaces and Dipity has implemented a number of applications for the concept that are arguably more compelling than lifecasting. For example, Dipity allows users to create historical timelines that other users can then edit and expand, which can result in awesome visualizations of the history of internet memes or virtual worlds. It’s easy to see how this could evolve into a great tool for visual search.

Considering how fast Dipity continues to add appealing features and the overall superiority of its execution, it’s hard to see Lifeblob as anything but an also-ran, despite a few extra “social” bells and whistles. That being said, $1 million goes a long way in Bangalore, and the company will have time to change the game plan.

The company, which has been in beta for months, opened up to the public today.

[Update: Mint broke the news about the Lifeblob announcement. Also Pluggdin mentions several other investments by SeedFund, including Printo, RedBus, Agencyfaqs, Carwale, and notes that SeedFund is looking to raise another $30M fund.]

Google has committed money to two Indian venture capital firms, saying fledgling companies in India with good ideas have too few avenues for financial support.

Google invested undisclosed amounts into small venture firms Seedfund and Erasmic. The amounts were likely in the single digit millions.

This continues Google’s experiment with different forms of corporate development. The move is significant because the rap on corporate investors is that they’re unreliable — enthusiastically supporting companies when times are good, but then withdrawing when their stock price is down and shareholders demand renewed focus on core business. Last year, Google began investing directly into start-ups, including WiFI router company FON, and another WiFi router company Meraki. Overall, these investments have been very small, relative to the hundreds of millions invested by other large companies, such as Intel.

Red Herring first wrote about the Google VC move a couple of weeks ago, and Samir Sood, Google’s head of corporate development in South Asia has since sent out a statement, explaining the move: “While the rush of large amounts of venture capital into India is well-documented, very little of this trickles down to the really small firms, the early-stage start-ups.”

Silicon Valley firms Sierra Ventures and Mayfield reported investments into India’s Seedfund (see here and here). Mayfield said Seedfund’s fund will be $15 million in total. Other Seedfund backers are Motorola Ventures, Reliance ADA Group, SVB Financial Group, an affiliate of Silicon Valley Bank, reports VentureWire.

Venture capital firms are pumping more money into Indian companies, and a new study confirms those companies are growing faster than other companies.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s Mayfield Fund becomes the latest firm to start investing there, announcing today it has joined a $20 million round of investment in Tejas Networks, an Indian optical networking company (see our earlier mention of Tejas), and is backing the Seedfund, an Indian firm that makes investments very early stage companies.

Venture and other investment firms pumped a record $7,460 million in over 299 India companies last year, more than three times the previous year.

That these Indian companies are growing more quickly than other Indian companies isn’t a surprise; you’d expect this after they take cash from an outside investor. But a new study from India’s Venture Intelligence (sorry, subscription required, so no direct link to study itself) confirms this, and suggests the venture capital model pioneered in Silicon Valley is taking root nicely there:

The study looks at Indian companies taking money from so-called “private equity” firms, which includes firms that give venture capital to early companies, but also those that give money to more mature companies. It found the following:

Sales at publicly-listed PE-backed companies grew at 22.9% over the five year period between 2000 and 2005, compared to 10% at non PE-backed listed firms and 15.8% at Nifty Index companies.

Wages at publicly-listed PE-backed companies grew at 32% over the five year period between 2000 and 2005, compared to 6% at non PE-backed listed firms and 16% at Nifty Index companies.

Also today, Norwest Venture Partners, another Silicon Valley firm, said it has led an $20 million investment in Mumbai’s Adventity (see our story).

Some of the Indian investments comes from internal sources, but much of it derives from Silicon Valley and other U.S. firms.