14 posts tagged “company & product profiles”

Word about social network Hi5’s $20 million financing leaked earlier today. But that isn’t it for social networking funding news. We hear it from a good source, but without confirmation by the company, that Tagged has raised its own $15 million round, on a $102 million pre-money valuation.

We do not know who made the investment. This is Tagged’s third round of financing. They previously raised two rounds - $1.5 from angel investors in September 2005, and $7 million from Mayfield three months later.

Like Hi5, Tagged is profitable. Back in May they were adding more new users per day - 350,000 - than MySpace.

With nearly $1 billion in venture capital invested in new web startups from April - June 2007 alone, its clear that silicon valley is rolling in money again. With all the hype around Facebook, second tier (but still huge) social networks are an easy bet to get big money. Let’s all just hope for a soft landing.

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Data due to be released by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne today shows that investment in information services companies, including Web 2.0 startups, hit $979 million in the second quarter of 2007.

The figure is 52% up on the same period last year and the highest figure recorded since the 2001.

In laymen’s terms, we are now officially in a boom; not that we’d probably need figures to prove this.

For those who may prophesize that the figures foretell an impeding crash, data released earlier in July showed that IPO’s for the entire Information Technology sector (which includes hardware, semiconductors and communications companies as well) totaled 10 for the quarter, and 17 year to date vs a peak of 41 IPO’s in the first quarter of 2000 and 106 in that year. $11 billion+ was raised by IT related IPO’s in 2000 vs $2.4 billion year to date. The hype of the dot.com bubble is not being repeated on equity markets.

(in part via MSNBC)

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After a week where Ask launched AskEraser, a product that allows users to erase their search history, and Google announced a reduction in retained data time from 2038 to 18 months, more privacy initiatives are on their way.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will officially announce Monday “new policies and technologies to protect the privacy of users of its Live Search services” and Yahoo will announce plans for “a policy to make all of a user’s search data anonymous within 13 months of receiving it.”

The same report goes on to detail plans by Microsoft and Ask to start an “industrywide initiative” to establish standard practices for retaining users’ search histories.

The 4 major search engines with major privacy initiatives in the space of a week and attempts to establish industry wide practices. Privacy would appear to be the new black. But why, and why now?

The Wall Street Journal correctly notes that in part, growing concerns among consumers and privacy groups is driving the move towards improved user privacy. It then goes on to cynically suggest that with Microsoft and Ask it may be a case of the search minnows trying to find a marketing edge over the much larger Google and Yahoo.

A stronger reason lies with Government pressure. In Europe, Google is currently being probed by an Independent EU panel that is investigating possible breaches of EU Privacy Laws. Although the probe is currently focusing on Google, it’s not an unreasonable assumption to make that it could easily be extended to other search companies. The FTC probe into Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick may also consider privacy issues relating to the acquisition along with anti-trust considerations.

No matter the reasons, the steps towards improving user privacy are welcomed. Expect to hear a whole lot more about privacy in the coming weeks and months.

Update: Microsoft has released details of its privacy changes here and its corporate initiative with Ask here.

(image credit: NewSchool)

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San Francisco based social networking site Hi5 has raised $20 million in a new round of funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Hi5 doesn’t get a lot of coverage (we last covered it in January), however whilst Facebook has been getting all the press, Hi5 has become a global success story.

According to Alexa, Hi5 is now ranked as the 11th most popular site online above Facebook at 13th. If you’ve never heard of the site though, there is a reason; most of Hi5’s traffic doesn’t come from the United States. Hi5 is the No. 1 ranking site online in Portugal, Ecuador, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala, and ranks at No 2 in Jamaica, Honduras and The Dominican Republic. 16.2% of visitors to Hi5 come from Peru and 7.7% from Portugal, by comparison visitors to Hi5 from the Unites States make up only 2% of the sites traffic.

As of December 2006, Hi5 claimed to have 50 million registered users.

(via Gigaom)

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Only heavy Facebook users will be interested in this post.

Lots of bloggers are complaining about the fact that Facebook has removed the “skip this step” option when asked for how you know a person while accepting them as a new friend. The “bug” appeared over the weekend.

First of all, it probably is a bug and will be fixed, but there is an easy way to sidestep it. Just hit “Cancel” and it has the exact same effect as hitting “skip this step” used to have. You don’t have to figure out the right way to say how you know the person from the very limited options. Just hit cancel. Trust me, when you go to your profile the person has been added as a friend.

What everyone seems to have missed here though is the fact that late last week Facebook removed the whole page redirect every time you add a friend and replaced it with the pop-up box. Not a big deal for most people, but I tend to add a lot of friends (I have over 1,200), and the few seconds it took to confirm each one with multiple page refreshes was a huge pain. Now the whole process is down to a second. Huge productivity gains, and Facebook sacrificed page views to give us this feature. Golf clap for Facebook.

Update: bug is gone. skip this step is back. everyone chill.

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Three weeks ago we noted that blog news engine TailRank was looking like a ghost town: No new news was showing on the site, and people noted that the Technology section had been a blank for weeks. Founder Kevin Burton was outraged, said our post bordered on “complete journalistic incompetence,” demanded an “apology and a retraction” and promised big news within a week.

That week has come and gone, as have two additional ones. No news. And today the top story on TailRank is a viagra spam post. The second headline story is a porn spam post. Below that are real stories but they’re months old. This is from the site that was “designed with spam prevention in mind.”

There’s absolutely nothing in the technology section.

Should TailRank be added to the TechCrunch DeadPool or, as Burton commented on our last post, is it at “healthiest point we’ve EVER been as a company?” You decide below.

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VisualSize, a Southern California based company, will be launching shortly with a service that will give accurate three-dimensional measurements of things inside of 2D photos.

To measure things accurately they need two photos of the same thing, but from different angles. The VisualSize algorithm automatically detects feature points in the two pictures and finds the matching pairs. It then uses the matching pairs to calculate coordinates of the two camera positions (x, y, z axes and origin in a 3D coordinate frame), and uses triangulation from the image to plane to the 3D coordinate frame to reconstruct the 3D scene. VisualSize can then measure length, angle, area and volume with a high degree of accuracy. The screen shot shows an example of raw output, but the service itself is pre-alpha.

This isn’t as sexy as, say, what Fotowoosh is doing by creating 3D images from a single 2D photo. But it does have commercial value. Home improvements, interior design, general contracting estimates, crime scene investigation, military planning, insurance claim assessments, etc. all need accurate measurements. VisualSize says they can create them with measurement errors of 0.1 to 5%.

The company says they will offer the service on their website. More importantly, there will be an API to allow others to build applications around the service.

The founders are Yuan-fang Wang (a UCSB professor) and Ping Liang (a UCR professor). They are self funded via liquidity events from previous startups.

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I was very pleased to see Google publicly wade into the upcoming FCC auctions for the 700MHz spectrum that will occur early next year. Should all go well, the new spectrum could be used to create a new open-access wireless broadband “pipe” into people’s homes and devices. If things go less well, the existing wireless giants would buy the spectrum and impose similar usage restrictions that exist on cellular networks in the U.S. today, putting us further behind Europe and Asia.

CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin stating that they would commit to bid at least $4.6 billion in the auctions if four key platform rules are adopted. These rules will define what types of services the winner could offer, and would require third party access to the bandwidth:

1. Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
2. Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
3. Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
4. Open networks: Third parties (like internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee’s wireless network.

Given the sorry state of the mobile landscape in the U.S., I’d expect the FCC to adopt these pro-consumer rules without any fuss. But the incumbent players, including AT&T and Verizon, are saying they are opposed to open access and may not participate if these rules are adopted. Google’s public move was made to let the FCC (and the public) know that there are companies very happy to bid in an open-access world.

AT&T’s response to Google’s letter was breathtaking in its audacity:

Not satisfied with a compromise proposal from Chairman Martin that meets most of its conditions, Google has now delivered an all or nothing ultimatum to the U.S. Government, insisting that every single one of their conditions “must” be met or they will not participate in the spectrum auction. Google is demanding the Government stack the deck in its favor, limit competing bids, and effectively force wireless carriers to alter their business models to Google’s liking. We would repeat that Google should put up or shut up— they can bid and enter the wireless market with any business model they prefer, then let consumers decide which model they like best.

For anyone who doesn’t look too closely at the issue, AT&T’s response seems very reasonable: keep government regulation out of the spectrum let the market decide which services win. But that isn’t really what would happen at all. If fewer government restrictions are placed on the bandwidth the auction winners will be able to extract more profits at the expense of competitors and consumers. So naturally they don’t want to see open access rules like those recommended by Google. The incumbents also don’t want to see Google play in their sandbox and bidding against them - so they have yet another reason to oppose their proposal.

The FCC has competing goals of maximizing revenue from the auction (suggesting less regulation) and protecting the public (suggesting more rules to force competition). Having open access requirements like those suggested by Google will spur competition and grow an economy around this spectrum. It will also put commercial pressure on mobile operators and broadband companies to reduce the restrictions they have on current broadband and mobile services.

Google isn’t always not evil, but in this case they are going to bat for all of us against some players with pretty bad history when it comes to offering consumer products. I’m behind them on this. And to the FCC: please learn from past mistakes, ignore the lobbyists this time, and do what is in the best interests of the public.

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Flower power, The Vietnam War, Nixon, The Beatles, Social Networking. OK, so social networking is the odd one out on that list but the folks behind BOOMj.com want to change that.

BOOMj.com is a “lifestyle and social network” for Baby Boomers. According to BOOMj, Baby Boomers make up the Web’s largest constituency, accounting for one-third of the 195.3 million Web users in the United States.

BOOMj.com offers the usual variety of social networking features including blogs, video, friends, relationships etc… as well as travel deals, financial information, health and wellness and celebrity gossip. By their own description BOOMj.com is MySpace meets Amazon.com for the over 40’s.

Overall it’s not a bad offering, perhaps a little too commercial but I’m not in the target demographic. If you’ve flung underwear at Tom Jones or can remember when LSD was legal in the United States, then BOOMj.com is for you.

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Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, may be extending their crackdown on “Broadly Offensive” behavior to Bestiality, following attempts to remove virtual pedophilia (or Age-Play) from Second Life in March.

The Second Life Herald (NSFW) goes on to ask whether consenting adults dressing up like animals and partaking in virtual sex with each other or with human shaped avatars (virtual bestiality) constitutes broadly offensive behavior.

“Furries” have a long history in Second Life, and new users are presented with the option of taking an animal form when first setting up their avatars.

Second Life fans will argue that sex-based play in Second Life only makes up a small portion of Second Life, but it remains a popular pursuit; the popular destination lists for Second Life regularly feature nightclubs and dedicated sex spots (or as is sometimes the case, nightclubs that are sex spots as well).

The arguments for and against this sort of behavior can and does result in heated debate; on one hand what consenting adults do virtually with one and other should be strictly up to them, on the other hand these acts aren’t being done in complete privacy but in a virtual world were others may be exposed to it.

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