CreativeLIVE is an online classroom company that has raised $8 million in Series A funding from Creative Artists Agency (CAA), William Morris Endeavor (WME), CrunchFund, and Google Ventures. Existing investor Greylock Partners also participated in this round. James Slavet of Greylock joined the board of directors at the company.
Airbnb is growing at a rapid pace. Last year, they hit over 10 million total nights booked with over 200,000 active properties listed on their website. They are growing like crazy in London because of the Olympics too. About 20% of the company’s bookings happen through mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Android, and mobile web browsers. Airbnb has acquired DailyBooth and brought out on their CEO Brian Pokorny to head up the design and engineering team.
Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX). This Act would allow the Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement that would prevent online ad networks and payment facilitators from doing business with those websites. Opponents in this bill believe that this is Internet censorship. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang oppose the bill. Their letter will appear as a paid ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.
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eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) will be announcing that they have acquired Hunch for around $80 million according to Michael Arrington. Hunch was started by Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake, Tom Pinckney, and Matt Gattis. Hunch has raised about $20 million in total funding since they launched.
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1000Memories has raised $2.5 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners. Angel investors Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Paul Buchheit, Mike Maples, and Chris Sacca also participated in this round. David Thacker of Greylock will be joining the board of directors at 1000Memories. 1000Memories is a website where loved ones can express words about people in their lives that have passed away. The appeal of 1000Memories is that it does not have ads and the website design is stylish. [TechCrunch]
Stack Overflow is a website where users can ask technical and programming languages. The website has just raised $6 million in their first round of funding led by Union Square Ventures. Other investors include Ron Conway, Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon, Bob Pasker, Micah Siegel, Naval Ravikant, Nirav Tolia, and Joshua Schachter.
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Hunch is a startup service that allows users to answer questions using crowd-sourcing techniques. Khosla Ventures is rumored to be leading a $10-$12 million round of funding in Hunch. Other investors include General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway. Hunch was started by Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr. Chris Dixon is also a co-founder in Hunch. Dixon started SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee in 2006. Hunch receives about 1.2 million uniques per month according to internal numbers. [AllThingsD]
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.
