VentureBeat

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 the black since I launched, and I’ve hired writers as cash afforded. Now that we’ve got our feet on the ground, its time to get to the next phase.

We’ve raised $320,000 cash from a number of angel investors, including Georges Harik, a very early employee at Google and manager of several of its early products; Aydin Senkut, another early Google employee who is now running a small angel fund called Felicis Ventures; Mike Brown, an investor at Foundation Capital, but who invested on his own accord; Philippe Cases, an investor specialized in open source; MHS Capital; Amidzad; and Elliott Donnelly’s White Sand Group among others.

Obviously, with investors come potential conflicts. Each one of the investors is aware of VentureBeat’s determined focus on independent reporting, and we won’t be changing that. If we write about a topic where we feel we have a conflict, or a perceived conflict, we’ll disclose it clearly in a story.

Update: We’ve just seen a piece published by PEHub, which suggests our traffic is falling. The reporter who called me up just now didn’t even bother to ask me about it. Too bad, because our traffic hit a record high last month, and it’s been growing strongly. That’s confirmed by all our direct-measurement stats, from Google Analytics to FM’s page tracker. We’ve got syndication deals, too, plus growing RSS feeds. Alexa and Compete, the sites PEHub cites, are notoriously unreliable, especially for relatively small sites (read this), because they rely on non-direct methods. Wow, now even I know how it feels to be raked over the coals by an aggressive reporter. Though he’s a competitor, so I guess we should expect that.

Imo.im, an instant message services aggregator, has just launched a Facebook application that turns your Facebook friends into IM friends. In other words, you can now IM with your Facebook friends directly through Imo.im without having to use AIM, GTalk, or other standard IM services.

There could be a bigger trend here. I wonder if services that pair social network data with IM will eventually render AIM and other IM services obsolete. More on that in a moment.

Pairing social networks with IM: Imo.im, Social.im, and 8hands

First, more details on Imo.im’s new service. You and your friends need to install and open the Imo.im application in order to use it. See screenshot, above.

Other startups are also experimenting with the idea of pairing social network data with IM. Social.im just launched a similar service this week (our coverage). It’s a desktop application for Facebook IM, currently available for Windows. Both Social.im and Imo.im rely on users installing their respective Facebook applications in order to access who your friends are. Note: Early Googler Georges Harik is both an angel investor in Social.im as well as a cofounder and angel investor in Imo.im (our coverage).

Another competitor, 8hands already claims to turn a number of social web sites, including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube into IM friends. I became aware of the company due to a snarky comment it left on my post on Social.im. Strangely, Myspace and other sites it claims to work with don’t offer ways for third-party developers to extract lists of friends. I’m not sure how its service works and I haven’t had the chance to try it out, as it’s a desktop Windows application and I’m on a Mac. Please try it out and let me know what you think in the comments section. Meanwhile, I’m trying to contact the company for more details.

Imo.im, meanwhile, wants to be the place you go for all your IMing needs. It already lets you aggregate all of your standard IM services. You sign into the site through Gtalk, AIM, MSN or Yahoo, then you can “link” all of these services, so that when you sign into one — say, Gtalk — you sign into them all. It also includes a convenient webcam feature.

Other social networks, like Bebo, are also introducing application programming interfaces that let third-party developers extract data about you and your friends, that can be used on other sites. I expect these IM services to integrate with social networks that open up.

Why might social network data, together with IM, replace AIM, GTalk?

If you want to add a new contact into your list of IM contacts on AIM and other services, you need to do it manually. With imo.im services, friending somebody on Facebook means you don’t need to separately add them as an IM friend — you’re killing two birds with one stone. Even Google’s method of automatically turning your Gmail contacts into Gtalk contacts works one contact at a time.

Of course, the lasting power of existing IM services is already clear, as AIM has been around since the 90’s, and it is still popular today. Gtalk, a more recent arrival, seems to be gaining IM market share, however, largely — from what I can tell — through integrating with Gmail. As younger generations grow up with their social lives revolving around social networks, maybe they’ll find it easiest to just turn their friends into IM friends.

A number of well-executed personal finance management web startups have been in the spotlight in recent months, including Mint — which won the Techcrunch 40 startup competition — Wesabe and Geezeo. Buxfer, however, has been flying under the radar, and it shouldn’t be.

Beyond a clean interface for tracking your purchases, payments and trends in your spending habits (see screenshot, below), the company has been developing some impressive new features. One is a use of Google Gears that lets you store sensitive financial information on your machine, which is sure to please those concerned about online financial privacy. It also has new, useful Twitter and iPhone integration.

Also, Buxfer is a two-man team with only angel funding, facing large teams that have venture backing.

Like Mint and the others, Buxfer has introduced a way to let you easily synchronize your financial accounts from Bank of America, American Express, Citibank credit cards, Chase credit cards, and more than 300 others with your personal finance information on its site. It uses Google Gears to download your financial account information — your username and password — to an offline Buxfer component that lives on your computer, that syncs with your online Buxfer account. It’s the company’s policy to never store this sensitive user information on its servers. It accesses the data stored on your Google Gears database on your computer, and authenticates you and your information with your financial institution. You can delete the data or make it unavailable to Buxfer whenever you want.

Mint has received some heat from those concerned about letting a web startup store their personal data on its servers. Wesabe, like Buxfer, offers a set of financial information upload tools, so you can store your data on your own computer, then sync it with that site — we’ve found Buxfer’s implementation of this offline component to be easier to use.

For the more stylish geeks among us, Buxfer also offers iPhone and Twitter integration.

You can send transaction information to Buxfer and receive Buxfer alerts on Twitter (details here).

Last week, the company has released a Buxfer iPhone interface which it says has quickly become popular with its users.

When we first met the Buxfer team, almost a year ago, it was comprised of some grad student buddies who had developed a somewhat complicated interface for managing group purchases, instances like figuring out who owes who after a group dinner. While still a small site, the company has come a long way on a shoestring — considering the tiny team as well as the site’s many new features and constantly improving interface.

Buxfer first got seed funding from Y Combinator, then raised a $300,000 angel round last April, from Carnegie Mellon professor Eric Cooper and early Googler Georges Harik.

Ex-Googlers are bringing Google-y best practices with them to Silicon Valley startups. Latest example: Imo.im, a new company started by some former Google employees showcases how to launch early, then iterate often in a product launch with one — or in this case, two — killer features.

Until last Friday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company has offered an instant-messager aggregator, similar to sites like Meebo or eBuddy. It has added a way to easily start chatting with your IM frieds via a web camera, a one-click way for web cam owners to video-chat with each other that’s directly connected to your IM networks. One person starts video-chatting, they invite another friend via an invite button on the imo.im site and the invitee receives a link to join. You can also paste in a link. The invitee sees an option to start video-chatting, with no download. The only requirement is that you have Flash 8.

If you want to do three-way video chat, the first two chatters need to each open a separate window with the third person — a triangular conversation, with each person having two chat screens open (see screenshot).

There are a number of other startups working on video chat services. Most recently, we’ve covered video chat service Tokbox.

The second killer feature: Imo.im has been testing out a way to let you have a group conversation across multiple IM networks. Meebo, for example, needs you to create a separate Meebo site ID to chat with people. Imo.im has taken this feature offline while they improve it.

The company’s site has been up for around six months and has more than 70,000 active users. The interface is simple and gets the job done, but is headed for more iterations. The audio and video breaks up at some points during conversations, although that problem can also be related to the quality of your internet connection.

It also has a Facebook application.

The early-launch tactic can also be seen in another Google-y startup, Mogad, a social bookmarking site built around the concept of a well-designed feed of popular news, somewhat similar to Facebook’s news feed.

The company has received angel funding from co-founder Georges Harik, one of the first ten Google employees.

Mogad is the latest startup building a peer-recommendation web service, similar to Facebook’s “news feed” feature.

Unlike Facebook’s closed system, however, Mogad wants to be a “news feed” for the whole web, that can give you recommendations from anything they do. For example, if you’re purchasing a book, Mogad will show you what books your friends are most interested in.

This field is a daunting one, because it’s filled with players. Plaxo’s social network, Pulse, Forbes’ newly-purchased Clipmarks and a number of other sites are working on variations of this same idea. However, Mogad says none of the existing players have provided an adequate way to securely select and invite your friends and control what they’re seeing from you.

Mogad is still in early days, and it’s almost premature to point people to its site — the company is planning a wider launch in the next couple weeks.

It hits the radar mainly because it has just received a first round of investment of half a million dollars from former Google employee Aydin Senkut, who manages Felicis Ventures, and angel investors Peter Thiel and Georges Harik.

The San Francisco-based company uses a browser plugin to collect information about what you and your friends are viewing, then it makes recommendations about things you might find interesting: articles, videos, and so on. It uses both explicit recommendations from your friends and its own software to figure out what you’ll most want to see.

See screenshots below. The plugin has two buttons: One that shows you what friends who have joined Mogad have recommended and one that allows you to send a recommendation to your friends.

For example, if you want to share a part of an article, you can select text from an article and send the text and a link to your Mogad friends.

Mogad offers a range of privacy settings so you can choose to allow only friends or yourself to see what it collects. You can also share your Mogad’ed items with the public on Mogad’s site — or turn the thing off completely if you have very private browsing to do. If need be, you can delete whatever Mogad collects from you.

The plugin is only available for Firefox now, but the company is also working on an Internet Explorer browser plugin.

The company’s founders have computer science backgrounds. One founder, Blake Commagere, a recent Plaxo employee, also developed the popular Facebook third-party applications Zombies and Vampires. Yanda Erlich used to work in product management in both Google’s advertising and consumer web products divisions.

Senkut, who has invested in a number of companies, says this is the first time he will join a company’s board.