Superfeedr is a website that can pull real-time data from Flickr and Twitter, then feed it into the standard ATOM format so that you can “parse one sort of feed no matter where it came from.” The company makes money by charging web developers for tracking over 1,000 feeds. Its a very niche service and I am not aware off-hand of anyone I know that would use this service.
DailyBooth is a real-time photo blogging website that launched out of Y-Combinator. The website launched this past August and has been receiving a good amount of traffic ever since. Now the company has raised $1 million from investors such as Sequoia Capital, SV Angel (Ron Conway), Betaworks, Kevin Rose, and Caterina Fake (Flickr founder). DailyBooth was co-founded by Ryan Amos and Jon Wheatley.
The service encourages users to send messages along with webcam photos. DailyBooth receives about 6 million monthly visitors and a majority of their visitors are 15-25 year old women. The company said that they plan to use the funding for developing a premium offering and photo-printing distribution platform. Below is a screenshot of the service.
Micro-payment service Tipjoy attempted to sell itself, but it turns out that they will be shutting down instead. Facebook even offered Tipjoy $5 million in stock. Facebook walked away from the deal and Tipjoy shut down shortly after.
Even though Tipjoy decided to shut down, Facebook was able to hire one of the company’s executives. Facebook hired Tipjoy co-founder and CTO Ivan Kirigin. Although it is uncertain about what Kirigin will be working on, it is expected to be something related to Facebook Payments.
The reason why Tipjoy shut down was because Kirigan was not around after Facebook made him an offer. PayPal and Twitter were both interested in buying out Tipjoy too. Y-Combinator, Chris Sacca, The Accelerator Group, and Betaworks invested over $1 million in funding.
Twitterfeed was started by Mario Menti. Menti created Twitterfeed in London through the BBC developer program. The service converts a blog or website’s RSS feed into tweets. The tweet contains the title and a link to the article of an individual blog post or news story. About 170,000 publishers are converting 330,000+ feeds as of right now. Earlier this month, Betaworks and The Accelerator Group bought a majority stake in the Twitterfeed.
Twitterfeed is becoming so overused that Menti was having a hard time scaling the service. However Twitterfeed relaunched earlier this week in order to offer an analytics service. The analytics reports how much traffic a website is receiving through Twitter and how many people are clicking on short URLs. The new Twitterfeed analytics service also offers a side-by-side comparison of what Feedburner RSS is doing for them.
To create a Twitterfeed account, an OpenID account is needed, but now they are starting to accept Google, AOL, and Yahoo login capabilities. One of Twitterfeed’s biggest drawbacks is the length of time that is between RSS conversion to Twitter reporting. TechCrunch is reporting that in some cases, it takes Twitterfeed half an hour. That is way too long considering that Twitter prides itself on reporting real-time data.
Twitterfeed is a service that allows blogs and news agencies to syndicate their articles through Twitter. Twitterfeed is able to syndicate the articles using the RSS feed of the website and combine it with a URL shortening service. In some cases, using Twitter to syndicate articles is working better than RSS because of the speed difference.
Twitter is able to deliver news instantly. As a matter of fact, one of the most followed Twitter users is @BreakingNews. BreakingNews is generally able to deliver news much faster than 24/7 news agencies like CNN.
Twitterfeed has 170,000 users syndicating 300,000 feeds. Twitterfeed accounts for 10% of all the tweets that are sent out. This is why Betaworks and TAG have bought a majority stake in the service. Before the investment, Twitterfeed was merely a side project.
Analytics is one of the newest additional services made on Twitterfeed. The analytics helps track what is going on with the links that are sent out.
Betaworks is a previous investor in Summize, which was eventually purchased by Twitter itself. Other Twitter-related services that Betaworks invested in includes TweetDeck and Bit.ly.
TweetDeck, an application built for aggregating content spread on Twitter and status updates on Facebook built on Adobe AIR has raised $300,000 in funding led by Betaworks. TweetDeck was founded by Iain Dodsworth.
Basically TweetDeck takes all of the information contained in Twitter and places them into manageable columns. For example, you can have a column that displays all the tweets your friends recently sent out, replies that you were tagged in, and direct messages you have received. You can also organize your Twitter contacts into groups using the software.
Most recently the software added a support for Facebook. You can directly update your status on Facebook using Tweetdeck and monitor a column of all the status updates that your friends have sent out. Currently TweetDeck is offered as a free download, but a Pro version may be created down the line.
Yesterday Betaworks announced that they have raised $2 million for Bit.ly. Part of Bit.ly’s growth is responsible by the automatic shortening URL feature built into TweetDeck.
Bit.ly has been growing rapidly with the help of Twitter. People are constantly using Bit.ly to shorten URLs of stories, images, and videos that people want to share with their Twitter followers. Bit.ly was created under Betaworks, an incubation firm that helped sell Summize to Twitter last year. Betaworks has taken Bit.ly and is spinning it out as a separate, well-funded company.
O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several other investors plugged $2 million into the URL shortening service. Other investors include Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly will join the Board of Directors at Bit.ly.
Just last week alone, about 20 million URLs have been shortened using Bit.ly. That number is increasing by 10% every week. The only source of revenue Bit.ly has is Google Ads that are scattered around their homepage. This is a similar approach to their biggest competitor TinyURL.com. TinyURL depends mainly on donations and Google Ads too.
Amit Chowdhry | September 18, 2008 | 453 views | Comments Categorized under Betaworks
Betaworks is a New York-based incubation company for technology companies. Betaworks has just raised $10-$15 million to invest into several start-ups. Betaworks is led by John Borthwick (former Time Warner exec) and Andy Weissman. Betaworks raised $2 million in funding last year and they spent a majority of that investment on 15 companies. One of those investments was Summize, a Twitter search engine that was acquired by the micro-blogging company.
This new round of funding will allow Betaworks to make larger investments. The average investments will jump from $75,000 to about $150,000 according to AlleyInsider. The investors of the $10-$15 million includes Jean-Marie Messier, Pilot Group, Hank Vigil, Gordon Crovitz, Taavet Hinrikus, Paul Cappuccio, Ken Lerer, Tim Armstrong, and Ron Conway.
Through Twitter’s acquisition of Summize, Betaworks became a shareholder in Twitter. Betaworks is also an investor in Iminlikewithyou.com, Outside.in, Someecards.com, and Songkick.com. Summize was acquired for $15 million.
I often times write blog posts about companies that raise money and immediately think to myself, “how could a company with an idea that an elementary schooler can come up with raise this much?” I’m In Like With You is no exception.Â
The site even boasts how many hours have been wasted on the site on each game: over 2 million on Draw My Thing itself. I have to admit that the design of the site is pretty sweet, but $1.5 million for a site with a few Flash games is pretty substantial.Â
What are they doing with the money?  Founder Charles Forman will be expanding the I’m In Like With You team starting with Poojitha Preena from Skype as the company’s COO.
The funding was led by Spark Capital. Baseline Ventures, Betaworks, Ron Conway, and Marc Andreessen also participated in this round. This is I’m In Like With You’s first round, but they received seed funding last year too. I’m In Like With You used to be a social network for flirting before they switched to online gaming.
I’ve tried a couple of the games and they were sort of fun, but I became bored pretty quickly. Sometimes the experience can be unpleasant because chatroom bots and send mass messages that prevent you from being able to communicate with other users.
I think I’m In Like With You is an interesting idea, but how will it continue to make itself useful to society in the long-run? That’s the 1.5 million dollar question.
