Factery raises $1.2M to find facts in real time
There’s a flood information in all the links posted by users on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. Now a startup called Factery wants to help you dig up the facts in those links with a new technology called FactRank (the name is a nod to Google’s PageRank technology).
Right now, the Factery site is pretty bare-bones, but co-founder Paul Pedersen says the company’s goal is a combination of fact extraction and real-time search. It… Continue Reading
Y Combinator gets a $2M shot in the arm from Sequoia, angels
Seed-stage venture firm Y Combinator is branching out in its funding strategy today, raising about $2 million from Sequoia Capital and a handful of angel investors. Previously, the firm was funded solely by founders Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell.
The money from Sequoia will be funneled into a new investment arm of Y Combinator, which will increase the number of companies it can fund each year from 40 to about 60. With… Continue Reading
Start-up info wiki TradeVibes gets $900K
Mill River Labs has raised a $900,000 seed round for its start-up information wiki TradeVibes, which just launched in public testing mode.
TradeVibes is far from the only website to offer some kind of company database — read our hot-off-the-press coverage of LinkedIn’s new features, for example — but chief executive David Li’s vision goes beyond creating an information repository. TradeVibes, he says, can become the center of not just business facts, but also debate and… Continue Reading
VentureBeat raises $320,000 seed round, traffic growing
updated
VentureBeat has just raised a seed round, and I wanted to be the first one to let you know. The news is beginning to leak after we filed a regulatory document.
VentureBeat has grown steadily since launching more than a year ago. We’ve been hiring writers and we have record traffic. I’ve bootstrapped the company thus far, and while it’s been rewarding, there’s just so much more we’d like to do. We’ve been pretty much in… Continue Reading
Weebly wants to help you design blogs
Weebly, the free AJAX website creator, has just raised a $650K angel round and launched a way for you to create blogs from within your site.
The move pits the young San Francisco company, which has garnered about 25,000 users, against entrenched players like Google’s Blogger, Automatic’s WordPress and SixApart’s TypePad — each of which have millions of users.
The money comes from Ron Conway, Steve Anderson, Paul Buchheit (a creator of Gmail), Aydin Senkut and Mike… Continue Reading
Roundup: Digg’s crisis, Odeo, Amidzad’s touch, Mobio’s movies, HAVA for Christmas
Happy Thanksgiving weekend, folks. Here’s a roundup of the latest.
The crisis at Digg — Digg, the San Francisco company that lets users rank news, is facing a credibility test. A fake story about Sony recalling its PlayStation 3 stayed on the site’s front-page for several hours, even though the content was clearly questionable — people blindly digged the article nonetheless. This led to some sleuthing by Niall Kennedy, who turned up evidence of some major spamming…. Continue Reading
Will statistics mess kill Digg acquisition by News Corp?
San Francisco news ranking start-up Digg has become a symbol of new-age Internet buzz, ever since its hyped cover story on BusinessWeek several weeks ago.
Now TechCrunch reports Digg has been in recent acquisition discussions with a number of companies, including News Corp. — with a price of $150 million being discussed.
Rumors abound of a possible sale. BusinessWeek cited sources saying Digg was worth $200 million, but that value was so out of whack with Digg’s… Continue Reading
Roundup: Digg, MyBlogLog, Sling, Trumba, Kongregate & more
Silicon Valley never sleeps. Here’s the latest tech stuff:
Digg subverted — The news site that ranks stories based on how many users submit them, is being subverted by a group called Spike the Vote. It lets its members conspire to submit certain URLs of stories — thereby lifting the odds those stories will get front-page coverage.
MyBlogLog goes live — This is a site we’ve mentioned before, while it was in testing mode. It hasn’t changed its basic… Continue Reading
Digg founders launch Revision3, a new video studio
Updated
Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, the co-founders of the news ranking site Digg, have started yet another company. Called Revision3, it is an Internet video production house that will exploit the trend toward TV viewing via mobile phone and podcasting.
Digg chief executive Jay Adelson will be interim chief executive of the new company, he told VentureBeat in a briefing last week.
It is the outgrowth of Internet video activities they’ve been developing on the side. They’ve… Continue Reading
Chris Sacca latest Google angel investor
Another Google guy has started investing in start-ups, though this time he is not likely to leave Google anytime soon to do this full-time.
Chris Sacca, a dealmaker at Google and overseer of Google’s WiFi project in San Francisco, says on his blog What is Left that he has invested in popular photo-sharing company, Photobucket — noteworthy, since he’s backing a competitor to Google’s own photo site, Picasa.
But then Sacca isn’t a meek guy. He’s been… Continue Reading
Roundup: Slim Devices, ChaCha, Digg, eBay ibank of Web 2.0, more
SlimDevices to release latest Squeezebox — The come-out-of-nowhere Mountain View start-up sells a device that lets you play your music anywhere in the house, and hooks up with all kinds of services, from Pandora to Rhapsody. Its latest one will sell for $2,000 device; the NYT has the scoop. This scrappy company is run by 20-somthing Sean Adams, and to our knowledge he has made do with a mere $330,000 from angels (though he may have… Continue Reading