July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Consumers these days expect their favorite brands to tell a story, and Skyword helps them tell it. Skyword has announced closing $6.7 million in growth financing for its content marketing solutions.

This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish and effectively distribute content. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow.

“The art of content marketing is in the beauty and quality of the writing itself – its voice and ability to speak to an audience in a personal and compelling way,” the company said on its site. “To excel at the science of web content creation, you need a technology framework to adhere to the 3 Ses of successful content.”

The three in question are “searchable, snackable, and shareable.” Once content is created, Skyword recommends keywords and suggestions for SEO and provides built-in tools for sharing across social media. Skyword also includes analytics so publishers can track marketing and writer performance, social media metrics, and search engine rankings and make editorial decisions accordingly.

Clients include IBM, MarketWatch, and AutoTrader.com. Cox Media Group led this round which will expand the team and help the company meet increasing customer and partner needs, “as content marketing becomes an integral part of brand marketing initiatives.” Skyword was founded in 2010. This brings its total capital raised to $12 million.

Photo Credit: Mike Cogh/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Reading is generally a quiet activity, but today Bookshout! is proclaiming that it has raised $6 million.

Bookshout offers multiple tools to support reader engagement.

On the consumer side, Bookshout has a social reading app where people can find books and connect with their friends and authors. However, the company has shifted to a stronger focus on publishers and authors.

On Bookshout’s platform suite, publishers and authors can promote their content and deepen engagement with audiences. Authors create branded pages that highlight their work and form communities around the pages, known as “circles.” Whenever someone buys a book through Bookshout, it adds them to the author’s circle. Authors can communicate directly with their fans regarding announcements, upcoming events, or new releases and distribute branded promotional codes and gift cards for their books.

Bookshout recently added a channel for publishers to conduct digital bulk, custom, and corporate sales and gather analytics. The Dallas-based company said it works with more than 250 publishers and is currently generating revenue. This round, which was led by Texas venture capital firm Ambassador Enterprises, will build out the bulk sales and analytics for e-books tools.

This is Bookshout’s second round of funding, and significant for the North Texas investment community which the Dallas Morning News called “lackluster.” The company previously raised $2 million from Ambassador in 2011. It is based at the Plano incubator Gravity Centre and has 12 employees.

Photo Credit: Puuikibeach/Flickr 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Y Combinator seed rounds are getting so big, they seem more like Jack’s beanstalk than the beans that sprouted them.

Billing itself as the “video ad network for the modern age,” Virool has raised a whopping $6.62 million “seed” round, the largest round in Y Combinator’s history.

Considering the size of the round and the inclusion of institutional investors, calling this a “Series A,” or the first round of institutional funding, may seem more accurate. However, founder Alex Debelov said the entire round was raised in on covertible debt and Virool is not taking any members on its board. Hence, it is a seed round.

Virool offers a self-service social video advertising platform to make video content go viral. Advertisers can use it to blast their content out to multiple online publishers, who get paid for the videos they show inside their properties. Developers can also integrate Virool’s API into their apps to more easily execute wide-reaching video advertising campaigns, and companies have access to real-time analytics to track their success.

According to Debelov, many social video ad platforms require a minimum of $100,000 to promote sponsored video content, which makes it inaccessible for smaller advertisers. Using Virool, anyone can start a video campaign for as little as $10 and only pay for the ad when someone watches their content for 30 seconds or longer.

Video advertising is predicted to skyrocket in the upcoming year, a trend investors are clearly paying attention to. Since launching in March, Virool has grown from 200 to more than 30,000 customers, ranging from independent artists to large corporate clients like Intel, Samsung, K-Swiss, Sony, and Orbitz. The platform apparently reaches 750,000 people a day and more than 22 million a month.

The list of contributors include big names in venture capital and angel investing, and Virool will use the funds to meet high demand for its product. Institutional investors include Thomvest Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Yuri Milner, Phenomenon Ventures, TMT Investments, DominateFund, and FundersClub. Individual investors include Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Troy Carter, Dave McClure, Farzad Nazem, Erik Moore, and Garry Tan. Virool was also the first company to officially receive investment from online investing platform FundersClub.

In October, FundersClub broke Y Combinator’s record with its $6 million round, which was subsequently broken by ZenPayroll’s $6.1 million raise in December. And let’s not forget about YC startups Pair, Ark, and SocialCam which all raised over $4 million in seed funding.

Many in the startup community advise against huge seed rounds because it involves giving away significant equity and freedom early on. Ironically, Virool investor Dave McClure spoke just last week about the importance of not taking excessive amounts of seed financing and keeping valuations in check. Often in the bubble that is Silicon Valley, people in all parts of the ecosystem focus too much on fundraising and equate large investments with validation or success.

Only time will tell if this funding lifts Virool up to the new heights, or if it gets crushed by the weight of the beanstalk.

Check out Virool’s video called “The Secret of All Viral Videos” to learn more … kind of.

“We’ve got about 10 minutes. Please keep your questions focused on Techonomy,” one of them said.

Dorsey spoke at Techonomy last week in Detroit. I was there to hear him, among others, and visit Detroit startups. But I had a very specific question for Dorsey, and it had nothing at all to do with Detroit, or tech economies, or the speech he had just given.

It had much more to do with what Twitter is becoming.

The social network of now has massively tightened down access to its API recently, reducing the amount of Twitter data that third-party developers can use in their applications. Applications need to be certified, and authenticated, and likely, at some point, paid for. That’s causing some angst for developers, who — with some justification — feel that third-party applications are part of what made Twitter a massive success in the first place.

Source: John Koetsier

Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey at Techonomy Detroit

The tactic seems to be part of a larger strategy that takes Twitter away from its roots as a communication utility with open access for all and towards an old-school media and publishing company that jealously guards its crown jewels. O’Reilly Media’s Edd Dumbill calls it a “bait-and-switch,” saying that Twitter is now cable TV, or even Comcast, Verizon.

In other words, no more rip-mix-burn here.

So I decided to be a little rude. And I asked the question: what, with the API changes — and extended tweets that suck even more content into Twitter, discouraging user exits — is Twitter becoming?

Dorsey answered thoughtfully, as he always does.

“Whatever its users want it to be,” he said. “Twitter is a communication utility … ask 100 people what Twitter is and you’ll get 100 different answers, and that’s OK.”

Dorsey said that this was just the same as asking what the world is — again you’d get hundreds if not thousands of different answers, as each replied according to his or her own perspective.

“We’re just focused on building the best platform and making sure it’s up and stable,” he finished.

There’s no question that throughout Twitter’s history, users have played a huge role in determining the uses of the site. Retweets, hash tags, lists, search, and many other Twitter features were started by users and migrated into the core product as they gained traction.

But it’s hard to believe that users have asked for the Twitter API to be restricted.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen any demonstrators outside of Twitter headquarters asking the company to shut down small third-party apps in the consumer space that Twitter has claimed for its own. Nor have we seen hundreds of thousands of retweets on a Twitter-would-be-so-much-better-if only-we-killed-RSS-access message.

And so it’s hard to believe that the it is only interest for users that is driving the future of Twitter.

photo credit: ~Ilse via photo pin cc