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Archive for February, 2011

Khosla Ventures likes social advertising startup MyLikes. The VC firm is leading the startup’s $5.6 million Series A financing. Lightspeed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures, who participated in the $600,000 seed round, ponied up again.

Additionally, seed investor Paul Buchheit is joining MyLike’s board of directors. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, recently left Facebook to become a partner at Y Combinator (although MyLikes is one of his private investments).

MyLikes tries to match social influencers with advertisers. Anyone can sign up to endorse products and brands to their social networks via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or blogs. MyLikes calculates your social influence based on how many followers you have, how often they click on your endorsements, and other factors. The more social influence you have, the more money you can make.

Today, the company is also launching a mobile app on both iPhone and Android, which allows users to endorse products by uploading and sharing photos or by checking into a business location.


As more businesses turn to Android and iPhones for employee use, there is a need for enterprise-focused mobile security on these devices. Enterproid, which is launching today, hopes to fill this gap by allowing professionals to maintain completely separate professional and personal profiles on a single Android device.

Called Divide, the platform allows users to create a completely separate profile on Android devices that includes enhanced security, access control, remote wipe capability and a set of enterprise-grade versions of applications like email, a web browser, instant messaging, and SMS. Users can switch back and forth between their professional and personal profiles but no data can cross the division, so that no business content is compromised in the personal profile.

Enterproid’s Divide also allows users to manage devices from the cloud. Divide is available exclusively for Android phones and tablets but the startup plans to extend the service to iOS and Windows Phone 7 platforms in the future. For now, Divide is free but will soon adopt a subscription model after exiting private beta.

Founded by former Morgan Stanley, MTV and Smule execs, Enterproid is also a finalist in the 2011 Qualcomm Ventures QPrize competition and was selected as the North American regional winner last month.

While some Android phones already allow you to create separate profiles, Enterproid’s technology gives IT departments the ability to adopt Android phones without making a security compromise. And Enterproid comes with a bunch of useful tools, including the ability to segregate voice and data usage for work, or hand a child a phone without the risk of the child accidentally emailing or calling a contact.


Video chat has been tried countless times on the Web and mostly failed, but a new startup called SocialEyes is giving it another shot. Backed by $5.1 million from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Ignition Partners, SocialEyes is a group video chat service that hooks into your Facebook social graph. SocialEyes is Chatroulette + Facebook, with a little bit of the old video Seesmic thrown in. As soon as I logged on this morning, I was invited into a group chat with CEO Rob Williams and marketing VP Joel Andren (those lurkers!), who are preparing to launch the service today at DEMO.

SocialEyes gets around the Chatroulette problem of creepy guys everywhere by requiring you to sign in with your real identity via Facebook. As soon as you sign in, you see your other Facebook friends who are also members, and whether or not they are online. You can also join groups where you can meet new people. SocialEyes allows you to have multiple video chats the same time, or bring people into a conference call type of situation.

If someone is not online you can leave them a recorded video message (kind of like what Seesmic used to do, except it is one to one or you can leave it to the group). You can also pull in links, photos, and videos to have a discussion around through the text chat feature at the bottom of the page. (SocialEyes uses Embed.ly to embed content from around the Web). The whole thing actually feels more like a Web version of Skype video chat than anything else, but it can support many more simultaneous video streams.

Williams used to work for Glaser at RealNetworks, and before that was a manager of NetMeeting at Microsoft. He believes that the time is finally ripe for massive video chat on the Web simply because of the coming ubiquity of front-facing cameras on most new laptops and tablets. The interface is pretty clean, and SocialEyes does the job out of the gate. The real question remains: do people really want to waste more time on the Web in endless video chat rooms? Wait, don’t answer that.


Amazon still refuses to share how many Kindle devices it has sold to date, short from saying it’s the best-selling product in its history, but you can be sure it will become a whole lot more really soon.

AT&T this morning announced it will begin selling the Kindle 3G digital publication reader in company-owned retail stores across the United States, beginning March 6.

Kindle 3G evidently connects over AT&T’s mobile broadband network, but also over Wi-Fi.

The telecom giant says it will include the Kindle 3G model in its connected devices displays throughout retail stores, offering customers the opportunity to test drive the device on the spot. The new Kindle 3G sells for $189.

According to the press release announcing the distribution deal, the Kindle Store now has more than 810,000 books. Over 670,000 of these books are said to be priced $9.99 or less.


Zipcar, a membership-based car-sharing service that enables members to reserve a car via the Web, phone or an iPhone app, this morning announced the addition of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to its board of directors. She will be replacing long-time Zipcar investor and board member Jim Gerson, who is giving up his seat.

Whitman led eBay from 1998 to 2008. After her tenure, she ran for Governor of California, won the primaries, but lost to Jerry Brown in the November 2 election despite spending roughly $160 million on her campaign.

(By the way, someone please tell her her website is down).

Former AOL CEO turned investor Steve Case is also on the Zipcar board, as is John Mahoney, vice chairman and CFO of Staples.

Zipcar says it now boasts more than 530,000 members and 8,500 vehicles in urban areas and college campuses throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

In April 2010, Zipcar bought London-based car-sharing firm Streetcar for $50 million in its latest bid to expand across Europe.

We reported last June that Zipcar was pondering a $75 million IPO to pay off its debts, but at the end of last year the company raised $21 million in venture capital funding instead.


For parents, organizing your kids’ social lives (i.e. playdates) can be a consuming experience. Today, startup RedRover is launching a private social network for parents to research and share everything from child-friendly restaurants to the closest hospitals in an emergency as well as schedule play dates.

Using iPhone and web apps, sers can check-in to locations, or publicize plans to friends within the app. Users are encouraged to leave their tips, thoughts or “their 2cents” for each other. You have to invite friends to join your network via email, as the app does not include Facebook Connect.

The fact that the app doesn’t include a way to import Facebook friends makes it a little difficult to use. The startup says that the virtue of using its network over email, or Facebook, is that RedRover is completely private and simplifies communication with other parents. Founder Kathryn Tucker said that as a parent, social media tools didn’t satisfy her privacy needs. While privacy is a natural concern for parents, I’m not sure if creating a new social network is the answer.

Information provided by CrunchBase


 
Monday, February 28th, 2011

Is this the iPad 2? Nearly everything lines up with the leaked info: flat back with tapered edges, speaker in the bottom corner, camera up top. It even matches-up with most of the leaked cases. If it’s not the real thing, it’s a damn good render. I’m sold.

The only thing missing is the rumored mystery connection found on a couple of leaked cases. It’s widely thought after last week’s MacBook Pro refresh, this hole is for a Thunderbolt port as it would effectively replace a USB connection while providing additional functions. March 2nd can’t get here soon enough.

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Research firm Forrester this morning announced its forecasts for the online retail industry in both the US and Western Europe this morning. No surprise: Forrester expects both markets to grow steadily over the next few years – not an unsafe bet by any means.

Forrester estimates that both US and European online retail (representing 17 Western European nations) will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015.

Growth will be driven in both regions by new business models such as flash sales and group buying, as well as improved merchandising to provide a broad selection of products available online, Forrester says. Also read: How E-Commerce Got its Groove Back.

In Western Europe, the online retail market grew 18 percent from 2009 to 2010 and is projected to grow 13 percent from 2010 to 2011, but Forrester forecasts that growth rates will slow down a bit after that, as the market matures and buyer penetration begins to level off.

Noteworthy sidenote from Forrester Research: the firm says brick-and-mortar stores will get seriously challenged by the continual rise of online retail as a whole. You heard it here first.

(Image credit: Flickr / Robert Couse-Baker)


Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, is adding real time functionality to its social application monitoring system.

Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers, game studios and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social event interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.

Now, social application developers can gain real-time insights into the behavior and activities of their social applications. Currently, the application monitoring system is regularly processing 10,000 social events per second and growing to tens of thousands a second. One of the virtues of using Kontagent’s real-time platform is that developers can detect technical problems with code release errors or system issues almost instantly.

The company seems to be growing fast—Kontagent is now tracking over 100 million monthly active users and over 15 billion messages per month. Its monthly active user base by over 300% in the past 12 months and counts a number of well known game developers as clients, including EA, Sony, Ubisoft, Take2, THQ, Konami, Perfect World, Gaia and Tencent.

Information provided by CrunchBase


ProspX, developer of an on-demand search and sales collaboration platform for the commercial insurance industry, has scored $8 million round in Series B funding in a round led by Adams Capital Management and joined by HPI Real Estate Services and Investments. ProspX has now raised a total of $14.5 million.

ProspX develops a SaaS platform that combines enterprise search, social networking, and sales collaboration technology to connect insurance agents, brokers, and carriers at the initial point of a business opportunity, as well as throughout the sales cycle.