SmileBox Inc. is a photo sharing website that has greeting cards, slideshows, and scrapbook features driven by user submitted photos.  SmileBox announced today that they are now support Mac’s iPhoto.  Using SmileBox, Mac users will be able to take their pictures on iPhoto, glitter it up with SmileBox designs, and then embed it into their blogs and social network pages.   

“We look forward to welcoming the Mac community to Smilebox. It is a natural extension of the Macintosh application experience and it will provide Mac users with a whole new way to connect and communicate,” stated Andrew Wright, founder/CEO of Smilebox, Inc. “Smilebox for Mac truly extends what Mac users can do with iPhoto and iTunes, making it easy for them to combine their photos, videos and music and share them in creative new ways.”

Smilebox is supported on OS X Tiger and Mac OS X Leopard.  Smilebox works on iPhoto, iTunes, and Photo Booth.  The interface is based around drag+drop.  Smilebox sells premium services a la carte ($1.99 to $3.99), monthly ($4.99), and annual ($39.99).

The download is available for free.

The Numbers
Over 3.3 million people have installed the SmileBox application on their desktop.  The site receives 2.6 million monthly unique visitors.  The Smilebox catalog has about 700 designs from Hallmark, Making Memories, Madison Park Greetings, K & Company, etc.

Management & Funding
The founder and president of SmileBox is Andrew Wright.  Wright is the VP of Games at RealNetworks.  Wright is a former Product Unit Manager at Microsoft Corporation.  Smilebox previously raised a total of $12 million in funding from:

• Bessemer Venture Partners,
• Frazier Technology Ventures,
• Rob Burgess (former Chairman, Macromedia Inc.),
• Paula Chen Su (VP of Design & Marketing, Making Memories Inc.),
• Rob Glaser (CEo, RealNetworks Inc.),
• Jonathan Gay (former CTO, Macromedia Inc.),
• Garr Godfrey (Founder and General Manager, Gamehouse),
• Peter J. Goldie, (former VP, Macromedia Inc.)
• Stuart Lombard (Principal, John Albright Venture Partners),
• Mark Surfas (Founder, GameSpy Industries),
• Paul Thelen (CEO, Big Fish Games),
• Richard Wolpert (President, Chance Technologies, Inc.),
• and Susan Wright (Managing Partner, Compass Partners, LLC).

“If LinkedIn is able to achieve its goals and objectives in the coming years, this valuation of a billion dollars will be looked upon as very cheap,” stated Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital partner/LinkedIn Board of Director.

LinkedIn is making some Facebook-like moves.  LinkedIn has a fraction of the features of many other social networks, but apparently the “professional” card works.  Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have combined their investments and gave LinkedIn a $53 million round of funding.  This gives LinkedIn a valuation at $1 billion.

What does the investors get in return?  Between the 5 companies, they received a combined 5% equity in LinkedIn.  Some of the investors have joined LinkedIn’s Board ofDirectors as well.  Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for 1.6% equity.  Other valuations in LinkedIn’s sector include Ning at $500 million, Facebook at $15 billion, RockYou at $200-$300 million, and MySpace acquired for $580 million.

LinkedIn has about 23 million users in 150 countries.  LinkedIn is aiming for $100 million in revenue this year.  LinkedIn has raised $80 million in funding so far.  Although analysts are guessing News Corp. or Microsoft may make a bid for LinkedIn, but Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn stated that he preferred to remain independent.

Information Source:
[1] AP via Wired]

OLX is a classifieds site that has listings of vehicles, services, jobs, real estate, personals, and classes.  OLX makes it easy to quickly design HTML listings, send and accept PayPal payments, promote classifieds on social networks and blogs, search for items around various cities and view the site in different languages.

The company has raised $13.5 million Series B from DN Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.  OLX has raised a total of $23.5 million to date.  The same venture capitalists that provided OLX with the second round of funding were also a part of the 1st round.

About 11 months ago, OLX announced a partnership with Friendster.  This was around the same time that Facebook announced that they are launching a classifieds section as well.

OLX is a New York-based private company that launched in March 2006 by Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford.  Fabrice previously started a company called Zingy, a mobile ringtones company–which was acquired by For-Side for $80 million in 2004.

About 1 million new classifieds are added to OLX per month and the website receives over 200 million pageviews per month.   OLX solely depends on Google Ads to make money since adding classifieds are free.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Craigslist Competitor OLX Raises $13.5M by Mark Hendrickson

“Yodle has put together a phenomenal management team, and, by filling a local void overlooked by Google and Yahoo – one estimated at $100 billion – has become one of the fastest growing players in local online advertising,” stated Iggy Fanlo, the CEO of AdBrite and the newly appointed member of the Yodle Advisory Board.  Fanlo joins Dr. Michael Kearns, a Professor of Computer and Information Science and the University of Pennsylvania.  Fanlo is also the former President of Shopping.com.

Yodle is a 2 year old company that enables small businesses to become part of local online ad market companies.  The technology behind Yodle is ClickRank, which uses a bidding algorithm for online ads to get the name out for these small businesses.  The unique model that Yodle pushes is to direct visitors of the small business websites to actually call the businesses from the web.  This provides a more of a rapport between the potential customer and business-owner.

This model worked so well that the revenue increase for Yodle was 224%.  To date, 87,609 calls were made.  And in November 2006, Bessemer Venture Partners funded Yodle to help keep the model running.  In the About Us page, I also noticed some more interesting information.  David Rosenblatt also joined the Board of Directors earlier this month.  Rosenblatt is the CEO of DoubleClick, a company that Google agreed to acquire for $3.1 billion.

Google Inc. [a.k.a. Earchsay Engineway Uggernautjay (Pig Latin for "search engine juggernaut")] will be acquiring web communication security company, Postini Inc.  The amount paid for the company is $625 million.

Postini’s services will be a valuable add-on for Google Apps.  As 1,000 small businesses are signing up for Google Apps per day, Postini will most likely be used to protect the information transferring between these businesses.

“Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they’re also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules. This isn’t a tradeoff that any business should have to make,” stated Dave Girouard, VP & GM of Google Enterprise on the official Google Blog.

“We realized that we needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community. That’s why we’re excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Postini.”

Postini is a private, San Carlos, Calif.-based company.  August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mobius Venture Capital, Pacifica Fund, Summit Partners and Sun Microsystems Inc. are all investors in Postini who will potentially see a nice return on investment.

Postini intends on using Google technologies to develop a new suite of products.  The synergy created through this acquisition also aligns Google’s partnership with Salesforce.com.

References:
[1]  Reuters: Google to buy Web security co Postini for $625 mln (via Yahoo! News)
[2] The Official Google Blog: Welcome, Postini team
[3] Pulse 2.0: Google AdWords Officially Merging Into Salesforce.com Apps