My apologies for the slight delay in updates. I have been travelling a little bit the last couple days to Chicago and Minneapolis. But here’s a fresh update of tech deals:
Dollar Amount Involved: $114 Million
On Friday, March 30, Academy Music Group Holdings, Ltd. (AMG) confirmed that now a majority of the company is owned by Gaiety Investments [no website available] and Live Nation, Inc. Both Gaiety and Live Nation paid $114 million to purchase 56% of AMG from RJD Partners. AMG owns 12 music venues that host over 2500 events and attracts over 3 million in audience. AMG also owns Carling Academy Brixton and Shepherd’s Empire. Live Nation has the technology needed to stream concerts and events live so through this investment, AMG would constantly provide web content as well.
“AMG has one of the strongest live music venue brands in the UK,” stated Live Nation’s CEO Michael Rapino. “The venues that we are acquiring are among the best in the world. The acquisition of AMG will enable us to grow our UK venue network with a brand that music fans know and love.”
Dollar Amount Involved: $1 Million
Hercules Technology Growth Capital stated on Friday that they would be investing $1 million into Wallop. Wallop was launched on April 25, 2006 by Microsoft Corporation’s Research division and is based in Silicon Valley. The project is led by Karl Jacob and was backed with $13 million from
Microsoft’s IP Ventures,
Norwest Venture Partners,
Bay Partners, and
Consor Capital.
Dollar Amount Involved: $4.35 Million
CARTASITE is a Denver, Colorado based company that monitors remote assets in real time and uses a Network Operation Center (NOC) to interconnect with wireless carriers. Last year, authorities in Gainesville, FL recovered $1.5 million worth of art from a Budget truck driver that tried to run away and sell its cargo on eBay. However, the GPS system used in the truck was monitored by CARTASITE.”The irony is that Budget didn’t purchase our system as a theft recovery device,” stated David Armitage, the CEO of CARTASITE. “They are utilizing it as an inventory management tool that allows them to have enough vehicles in the right location at the right time.It’s a huge operational benefit for them. The fact that it can also be used to handle rare situations like this is just a bonus.”It is because of this technology that
Canterbury Partners and
Arcadia Partners invested $4.35 million Series A into CARTASITE.
Dollar Amount Involved: $7 Million
iUpload is a company that develops content manager, community publisher, and personal publisher online applications. The company is based in Burlington, Ontario Canada and serve major customers such as McDonald’s, Kodak, Northwestern Mutual, the New York Times and Newsweek. iUpload was founded in 1998.The Series A funding comes from
Greylock Partners and
North Bridge Venture Partners. Many customers are currently utilizing iUpload to set-up wikis, blogs, forms, and workflow diagrams.
Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
Sportsvite is a New York based company where users can invite each other to participate in various sports events. Sportsvite has roughly 20,000 members. The investor of Sportsvite is Grace Drive Management [no website available]. Although the website was funded last month, the amount was just declared to be $2 million as a first round.Sportsvite was created by
212Media, who also operates 3 other companies: Bodvod, New Play Media, and Conscious Content.
Dollar Amount Involved: $5 Million
Games2Win is a company based in Bombay, Maharashtra India that designs Adobe
Flash games with comedic twists.
Clearstone Venture Partners partnered with
SVB Financial Group and led the $5 million recent investment into Games2Win.Games2Win also plans on launching multiplayer Flash games. Games2Win was founded by Mahesh Khambadkone and Cyrus Oshidar. “Internet users in India are still highly underserved when it comes to online entertainment that’s relevant and compelling. With its unique blend of topical, irreverent and action-packed games we are confident that Games2win will be a dominant player in the rapidly growing
online gaming marketplace in India. With Clearstone’s track record of building category leading consumer internet businesses like Paypal, MP3.com and Etoys we look forward to building Games2Win into a globally recognized brand” stated Clearstone Director, Rahul Khanna.
Dollar Amount Involved: $600,000
Austin, TX based company, Naturally Curly (
www.naturallycurly.com) has recently announced that they have raised $600,000 from Jim Trebig,, Dr. Philip Sanger, and Tim Wall. The website was founded 9 years ago and has about 10,000 daily visitors.NaturallyCurly.com will use the funding for technical development and marketing. “Companies like NaturallyCurly have been able to see opportunities that have gone unnoticed by high-tech nerds like me,” stated Treybig. “The movement to communities like NaturallyCurly is the foundation for the future of advertising.”The founders of NaturallyCurly are Michelle Breyer and Gretchen Heber, who have also launched
CurlyKids.com. NaturallyCurly.com was nominated in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition in Austin.
Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
John Mackay, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc. financed spiritual social network, Zaadz. Zaadz is based in Los Angeles and Brian Johnson is the founder and CEO. The social network has close to 50,000 users and calls itself a “place of political refuge for MySpace immigrants.”
Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Search Physics is a startup that has developed a search engine capable of extracting content from websites, store additional information, classify links, and narrow down search results.Search Physics is based in San Francisco and raised an undisclosed amount of funding. The investors of Search Physics are Stanley Wong and David Shen, both from Yahoo! The founder of Search Physics is Dr. Minh Duong-van, a theory of chaos and quantum theory physicist.
Dollar Amount Involved: $505,000
NeoSaej Corporation is a start-up that is currently in “stealth mode” (quiet about its idea for now). The company is based Burlington,
Massachusetts. NeoSaej is looking to address “the severe inefficiencies in current online marketplaces, and greatly improves the e-commerce experience for all participants.”NeoSaej has received $505,000 of a $1 million Series A, led by Stata Venture Partners. The company was founded by Rohit Goyal in August 2006. Goyal is a former network engineer at Enterasys Networks.Another investor in NeoSaej is
NeoNet Technologies, LLC.
Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
TRACE.TV has recently made a new partner: Universal Music Group. Universal Music Group will be providing TRACE with music and video rights. Universal will also provide TRACE.TV a weekly slot in Universal’s International Music Feed. TRACE was launched in 2003 in Paris, France and started out as True Magazine in London.TRACE is looking to expand to U.S. markets next year. Goldman Sachs is a previous investor.
Dollar Amount Involved: $1.53 Million
Fliptrack is a website where users upload photos and videos and sync it with music provided. To keep the audience captive, the music is mainstream. Fliptrack is based in Mountain View, CA and has raised $1.53 million Series A funding by
Mohr, Davidow Ventures, and other angel investors. Fliptrack raised $500,000 in angel funding. Fliptrack was founded by Stewart Putney.
Dollar Amount Involved: $13.5 Million
Safeguard Scientifics has announced that it has provided $13.5 million in funding to
Beyond.com. Beyond.com is based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and has more than 15,000 online communities. “Beyond.com is aligned with Safeguard’s focus to partner with entrepreneurial technology companies that have a competitive advantage in Software as a Service (SaaS), Technology-Enabled Services and Internet-based businesses,†stated Peter J. Boni, the President and CEO of Safeguard Scientifics. “We’re executing upon our game plan to deploy capital in innovative and attractive companies to generate increased value for our shareholders. We welcome Beyond.com to the Safeguard team.”
See [Pulse 2.0 -
Greylock Partners Leads $4 Million Series A Investment In Payoneer]
[Information Source:
Alarm Clock]
Hilary Duff, popstar/actress has announced that her pet Chihuahua, Lola now has a profile on niche social network, Dogster.com.
“Lola is the best, and she has such a great personality. I am excited that she is part of the Dogster community so people will get to know her, and she’ll be able to get to know all the other top dogs out there,†Duff said.
What is “Thrift?” Thrift is a software platform created by Facebook developers that enables programming languages to convert to other programming languages seamlessly. The programming languages include C++, JAVA, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift is used to power various Facebook products such as Search, Mobile, Sharing, and Notes. Facebook has 
“We have taken traditional consumer research to the next level. For the first time ever marketers can understand all aspects of consumer activity, including critical links between online and offline behavior,” stated Gian Fulgoni, Co-Founder of 
