Zivity is a San Francisco start-up company founded by Scott (husband) and Cyan (wife) Banister.  Zivity’s business model was to sell a subscription fee of $10 per month to people that wanted to look at provocative pictures of women.  I always had my doubts about this company because they were essentially competing against all image search services and image websites.  Why would someone pay to use Zivity when you can find such content free?

Around October 2008, Zivity fired about one third of their staff and now they are splitting the company.  Zivity launched a new website called TopFans.com and it looks… for lack of a better word.. mediocre.  Celebrity websites are found all over the Internet, but TopFans just looks bland compared to all the rest.

When Zivity first launched, the company received plenty of media coverage which may be the reason how they raised $8 million in two rounds.  The company today has $4 million of cash left.  Zivity will retain $2 million and $2 million will be given to TopFans.com.  Thats unfortunate considering that the design of TopFans looks very cheap.  If you gave me $2 million, I could probably build the next Google.

Cyan will remain with Zivity, but CEO Jon Elvekrog will become the head of TopFans.  Remaining employees will be dispersed between the two.

BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund will have ownership in TopFans.com now. Will they see a return on their investment?  Unlikely.

Like.com, the visual search engine started by Munjal Shah, Burak Gokturk, and Azhar Khan has raised a substantial round of funding.  Like.com raised $32 million in Series C from Menlo Ventures, Crosslink Capital, BlueRun Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures.  Through this round of funding, Prazan Vazirani from Menlo Ventures joined the Like.com Board of Directors.

Through this round of funding, Like.com is believed to be above a $100 million valuation.  Employees that have shares in the company also had the opportunity to sell shares through the funding process as well.  Like.com launched in November 2006 and their strongest service is matching goods that are displayed in a picture.

Like.com made about $1 million in revenue in about one year.  Now they are making about $20 million.  And they are planning to launch a UK version of the site.  The company also created an iPhone application called LikeThis that allows phone users to take a picture of an item and find similar items for sale.

A few months ago, Like.com started placing ads on Facebook that matched fashion products that linked to a user’s profile picture.  For example, if I was wearing Oakley sunglasses on my profile picture, the ad will appear alongside with sunglasses that look very similar.

LikeThis is also available on the Like.com website for testing.  To test it out, I uploaded a picture from Entourage.  Then I highlighted the shoes of the guy in the green shirt (center).  After uploading, Like.com will ask you which attributes are most important to you between Color, Shape, Pattern, or all three equally.  I selected all three are equally important to me.  Like.com asked for my e-mail to let me know when they are done analyzing the photo.

Once I get an e-mail back, I’ll let you know how accurate the results are.  Look for an update on this post.

Update: Below are the results

Like.com is a visual search engine with a focus on shopping and consumption.  According to VentureBeat founder, Matt Marshall, Like.com will be preparing to raise double digit funding within the next two weeks.  The round of funding, provided by Menlo Ventures, will complement Like’s revenue success.

Like.com allows users to search for consumer products by specific details, colors, and find goods worn by celebrities.  Like is working on a technology that allows users to upload photos and find similar goods.  When consumers click through the goods on the search engine and buys it from retailers, Like.com shares the revenue.  Like.com’s revenue is rumored to be close to $20 million.

To date, Like.com’s total funding is roughly $19.5 million, provided by Bay Partners, BlueRun Ventures and Leapfrog Ventures.  Like.com is a spin-off from Riya.com.  Riya.com was founded by Munjal Shah in 2004.  Riya was rumored to be courted for an acquisition by Google 3 years ago for roughly $40 mill [GigaOM].

Related Links:
1. Like.com
2. Riya.com

Scott Banister and his wife, Cyan have started a social network called Zivity that promotes the uploading of tasteful pictures of women.  It’s intention is not to porn, but it is to focus on the art of the human body.  Previously, Scott Banister started a company called IronPort to prevent porn spam from entering the inboxes of corporations.  Cisco Systems bought IronPort for $830 million.  The fee to use Zivity is $10 per month.

Using Facebook and MySpace for free comes with a cost.  Most of the time, users are fed inane advertising.  Zivity doesn’t have any advertising.  “We like to think of Zivity as the HBO of the Web [1],” stated Scott referring to his site.

In August 2007, Zivity raised $1 million of seed capital from various investors around Silicon Valley.  The investors include former PayPal executives.  Jeffrey Wescostt is the CEO of Zivity.  The site was built using Ruby on Rails, Python, and PERL.  Zivity bans sex acts, naked men, and extreme closeups. 

Models have to be over 18 and photo portfolios must contain at least 15 shots.  Each user gets 5 votes per month to cast on favorite phots.  These votes turn into dollars distributed towards these artists.

TechCrunch reported today that Zivity raised an additional $7 million.  This round of funding was led by BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.  BlueRun is also an investor in Slide and Riya.  Founders Fund have previously invested in Slide, Facebook, Powerset, Geni and Quantcast. 

I applied to be a Beta tester at Zivity.  If I get approved, I’ll perform a full review of the site. 

Information Sources:
[1] Forbes

Slide.com, the photo slideshow website has raised a third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund. According to VentureBeat, the amount of funding for the third round is undisclosed, but there are rumors circulating that it is over the second round of $8 million. Based on third round funding estimations, Slide is currently worth near or over $20 million.

Creating a slideshow with Slide is done in 3 simple steps from the arrange page. The three steps are: 1.) Create a Slide Show, 2.) Save Slide Show, and 3.) Share Slide Show. There are 4 presets to scroll pictures: Sliding, Stars, Collage, and Checker. Photos can be directly imported from your PC hard drive, Photobucket account, Flickr account, MySpace account, or direct URLs. There are also several themes and sizes to alter these slide shows.

One of the co-founders of Slide is Max Levchin, a co-founder and former CTO of PayPal. Levchin is from Kiev, Ukraine, then moved to Chicago to attend UIUC. After PayPal went public in 2002 and his 2.3% stake was converted into $34 million after the eBay acquired PayPal, Levchin started Slide in 2004.

Levchin had also created Yelp, a review-centric social network. Previous investors include Founders Fund, BlueRun Ventures, and Peter Theil, the other co-founder of PayPal. Levchin aims to make money by adding sponsored pictures in slide show image crawls. Currently, Slide and Yelp are based in San Francisco. SFGate.com has a detailed history of Levchin’s past.