Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Dave McClure

.Co Domains Come Up Strong: Google Snags G.Co, 500 Startups Gets 500.Co

Riley Kennysmith — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:46:43 +0000

Google bought G.Co as the official shortened domain for Google services. 500 Startups is also rebranding to 500.co in the fall, and co-founder Dave McClure recommends .co domains to all of his startups. The .co registry is about to turn 1 year old and already has more than 1 million registered domains. [TechCrunch]

Punchd Officially Acquired by Google

Riley Kennysmith — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:47:08 +0000

Punchd, a service that provides digital loyalty cards, is now a Google property. The acquisition is confirmed on the Punchd site, which reports that the team will be moving to Google’s offices. TechCrunch reports that Google may have paid more than $10 million for the acquisition. Punchd’s team includes Reed Morse, Xander Pollock and Niket Desai, and is part of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

InternMatch Raises $400,000 In Angel Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 06:59:34 +0000

InternMatch is a start-up company that has raised $400,000 in angel funding from Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Kenny Van Zant, and Raj Agarwal. InternMatch is part of the 500 Startups incubator program. The company intends to help college students find internships at SMBs.

Those seeking internships and employees can search for recommendations on InternMatch. This service would have been very helpful for me when I was in college several years ago when I was begging for a job at career fairs and on-campus recruiting.

If an employer does not find an intern within 60 days, then they get their money back. InternMatch plans on using this funding to expand their team and increase traction on the West Coast.

Y Combinator Startup ReadyForZero Aims To Help You Reduce Credit Card Debt

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 06:03:57 +0000

ReadyForZero is a startup that received seed funding from Y Combinator. ReadyForZero aims to help consumers reduce their credit card debt. Users can connect their credit card accounts online to find out how they can pay off that debt. Users can register a certain date that they want to be debt free by and how much they are willing to pay each month.

Then ReadyForZero sets up a payment schedule and other tools for paying off that debt. ReadyForZero raised $260,000 from Y Combinator, Dave McClure, and Steve Chen.

“Some of this stuff is actionable on your own, we can’t force you to do it,” stated ReadyForZero CEO Rod Ebrahimi. “But we can see whether you’ve done it or not, and we’re able to show [users] some tools they haven’t considered.”

[VentureBeat]

TextualAds Raises $650,000 From Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:44:14 +0000

TextualAds parent company Qlique Labs Inc. is a small San Francisco based mobile social media company that gives marketers an easy way to target mobile devices. TextualAds recently started serving targeted SMS campaigns for brands, retailers, and small businesses.

TextualAds launched in September and has announced a $650,000 seed round of funding. The seed round was provided by angel investors Dave McClure (500 Startups), Chris Redlitz and Peter Boboff (Transmedia Capital), Marcus Segal (Zynga), Erik Moore, and Shawn Simpson.

TextualAds has a sign-up application for small and media businesses that can be installed on Facebook pages. The application encourages users to input age, gender, zip code, and telephone number. Once this is inputted, then the TextualAds platform can send buckets of text messages to those users. TextualAds has about 1,200 clients.

[TechCrunch]

MyBlogLog Co-Founders Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson Launch OneTrueFan

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:00:17 +0000

Just in case you were wondering what the co-founders of MyBlogLog are up to, Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson have started a new website called OneTrueFan. OneTrueFan is known as the “Foursquare of websites.” OneTrueFan lets you earn badges for checking into and interacting with different websites. The website has a game format for visitirs that lets you see who is reading content from within websites.

OneTrueFan users can earn points and badges directly from the publishers. Each website will have a leaderboard to see who their top users are. Publishers can now install OneTrueFan on their website.

OneTrueFan now also has a news feed that is integrated with your Twitter news feed so that you have a list of links to visit based on what the people you are following share. OneTrueFan has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, David Cohen, and Bob Pasker. As for MyBlogLog, Yahoo! has decided to “sunset” the service.

[TechCrunch]

E-Commerce Service For Moms EcoMom Raises $1.1 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:46:49 +0000

EcoMom.com is a parenting focused e-commerce service that has raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from angel investors and venture capitalists. Investors in this round of funding include Dan Gould (Newroo/Namesake), Cyan Banister, Scott Banister, Dave McClure, Paige Craig, Sizhao Yang, Kima Ventures, and David Pell.

EcoMom sells products to new moms while keeping safety in mind. EcoMom compares themselves to Diapers.com and Amazon.com’s Babies section. EcoMom even has 13,000 mommy bloggers that write product reviews. EcoMom currently has inventory of over 2,000 childcare-related items. The funding will be used for redevelopment of the website and to hire additional people.

[TechCrunch]

OtherInbox Raises $1.5 Million From Several Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:37:48 +0000

OtherInbox is a startup based in Austin, Texas that has just raised $1.5 million in funding from angel investors Dave McClure, Naval Ravikant, and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

OtherInbox was founded by Joshua Baer, who also serves as a managing director at incubator Capital Factory. OtherInbox tries to make your Yahoo! or Gmail e-mail inbox manageable. It prioritizes messages for you and puts less important messages into separate folders.

OtherInbox has about 500,000 users and makes money by selling aggregated data to e-mail marketing companies. Gmail recently created a Priority Inbox feature. OtherInbox delivers a daily summary of messages. OtherInbox raised a total of $4 million in funding.

[VentureBeat]

InDinero Raises $1.2 Million From Prominent Angels

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 23:19:32 +0000

InDinero claims that they are like a Mint.com for Quickbooks. The company has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from several prominent angel investors.

The investors include Dave McClure (500Startups), Fritz Lanman (Microsoft), Jude Gomila (HeyZap), Andrew Warner (Mixergy), Paige Craig, Christina Brodbeck (YouTube), Ben Ling (YouTube), Russ Siegelman (Microsoft), Michael Powers (YouTube), Geoff Ralston (Lala), Karl Jacob (Coveroo), Steve Blank (Stanford University), David Wu (Intuit), Jawed Karim (YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Eventbrite), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp.com), Keith Rabois (PayPal), Elad Gil (Twitter), Ali Partovi (iLike), and Hadi Partovi (iLike). Initially InDinero founders Andy Su and Jessica Mah were planning to raise $500,000, but the company received so much interest that this round may top out at $2 million.

[TechCrunch]

Rapportive Raises $1 Million From Several Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:28:44 +0000

Rapportive is a startup that created a plugin for making GMail work better. It provides contextual information about your GMail contacts. As a result, Rapportive has raised $1 million in seed funding from several angel investors.

The investors include Jason Calacanis, Scott Banister, Paul Buchheit, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, and Roy Rodenstein. Other investors include 500Startups (a fund created by Dave McClure), Nivi & Naval Ravikant’s VentureHackers angel fund, Charles River Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and BOLDstart Ventures. Rapportive is a Y-Combinator company.

The plugin that Rapportive created is a browser plugin that displays information about your contacts in the GMail sidebar. It replaces the ads in the sidebar. The information about the contact includes profile photos, occupations, and social network links. Rapportive was founded by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann, and Sam Stokes.

[TechCrunch]