Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has found a buyer for Performics, a Chicago, Ill. subsidiary of DoubleClick.  The buyer is France-based advertising company, Publicis.  Publicis stated that they are aiming to generate 25% of all of their future advertising sales on the Internet by 2010.  The value of the transaction was undisclosed.

Publicis’ new Internet entity where Performics will be rolled into is called VivaKi.  VivaKi is a consortium of advertising company that draws on the strengths of each other.  VivaKi includes firms such as Digitas, Starcom MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia, and Denuo with new services and tools. 

Performics launched in 1998 and has about 200 employees. Performics has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Singapore and Beijing. 

“Publicis Groupe has been a leader in the advertising industry for decades, and we believe Performics’ growing business will benefit from being a part of it,” stated Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “We look forward to working with Performics as a partner.”

Related Links:
1. Performics
2. Publicis
3. Reuters

DoubleClick, the digital advertising firm that Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) bought for $3.1 billion in March 2008 has announced today that they will be powering online media advertisements on NBCOlympics.com.  DoubleClick has the ability to embed ads within the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Silverlight 2 player. 

This feature is called DoubleClick In-Stream.  In-Stream supports Flash, Real Media, and Windows Media player.

“With hundreds of advertisers, multiple platforms and large site traffic spikes, we needed to work with a partner that could provide an integrated, scalable, robust solution,” said Steven Gold, Vice President, Sales Planning and Operations, NBC Universal Digital Media. “Thanks to DoubleClick In-Stream’s new support for Silverlight 2, we are able to monetize our groundbreaking online video coverage on the same platform we already use for display and mobile advertising. This lets our sales and operations teams work together really efficiently.”

Words from Google and Microsoft spokespeople

“Microsoft has always had a strong commitment to working closely with partners and the industry to enable them to leverage our tools and platform to deliver great user experiences. With Silverlight, we’ve extended that commitment to the advertising space,” stated Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division. “We’re pleased to see the investment DoubleClick has made to enable customers such as NBCOlympics.com to take advantage of Silverlight to offer compelling packages to their advertisers.”

“DoubleClick’s vision is to help publishers grow their revenues by creating great user experiences and providing compelling value to advertisers,” said Google Group Product Manager Ari Paparo. “By expanding the capabilities of DoubleClick In-Stream to work with Silverlight 2, we can make it possible for clients to create unique entertainment and advertising experiences without increasing their workload or creating new complex processes.”

Related Links:
1. Google press release
2. InformationWeek

“As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well,” wrote CEO of Google Eric Schmidt on the Official Google Blog. “We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we’ll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.”

The European Union regulators have given Google the thumbs up.  Google can finalize their acquisition of DoubleClick Inc.  The Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine company acquired Double close to a year ago for $3.1 billion.  Through this acquisition, Google will once again put Yahoo! and Microsoft in their sights.  Over the past year, Yahoo! and Microsoft have picked several digital advertising companies of their own.

According to analysts at J.P. Morgan, search advertising will be valued at $28.6 billion by 2010.

While regulators were waiting to approve the acquisition, Google did not have the opportunity to create a plan on integrating DoubleClick with the search engine.  Over the next few weeks, Google will be taking DoubleClick employees and aligning them within various Google divisions.

Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity previously invested $300 million for stake in DoubleClick.  After the acquisition, Hellman & Friedman collected $2.5 billion.

[Information Source: WSJ]

Metuchen, New Jersey based photo-sharing company, Phanfare recently raised $2.5 million. This is Phanfare’s third round of funding and the investment was lead by Azure Capital Partners. Phanfare als received funding from Acadia Woods Partners. Other investors include Dwight Merriman, DoubleClick’s (co-founder), Kevin Ryan (former CEO of DoubleClick), and Fabrice Grinda (founder of Zingy).

Phanfare makes money by selling subscriptions and competes directly with Photobucket and Flickr. The disadvantage that Phanfare has is that it is already competing against major photo-sharing players that are backed by major corporations. Flickr is owned by Yahoo! and Photobucket is owned by News Corp. However this could also work out in Phanfare’s favor because adding features around the website won’t require as much bureaucratic approval.

Phanfare has roughly 10,000 customers.

Information Source:
[1] paidContent: Phanfare Raises $2.5 Million Third Round For Photo Storing by Joseph Weisenthal

“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.

Microsoft just poached a Google client big time. InterActivCorp is the owner of Ask.com, Excite.com, Expedia.com, Hotwire.com, iWon.com, Live Daily, Match Ticketmaster, TicketWeb, Match.com, Citysearch, and Evite.com. And InterActivCorp just left Google’s DoubleClick and signed with Microsoft’s aQuantive. Both DoubleClick and Google are digital advertising companies. Google announced that they were buying DoubleClick for $3.1 billion on April 13, 2007 and Microsoft announced that they were buying aQuantive for $6 billion on May 18, 2007.

“The relationship with IAC is a fairly comprehensive partnership that is, in essence, designed to take advantage of the Atlas Ad Manager technology for IAC publisher sites and manage the full spectrum of their business online in terms of inventory forecasting, analytics, targeting, etc.,” stated Scott Ferris, a senior VP and GM of the publisher and emerging media divisions for aQuantive. “It’s designed to encompass all of the IAC publisher and media property over time^[1].”

Google’s DoubleClick acquisition is still being investigated for potential monopolistic practices. The acquisition is not quite finalized yet.

References:
[1] ClickZ: IAC Leaves DoubleClick for Atlas

Google is reached a deal to buy DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion.  This is almost double the price that Google would pay for YouTube. 

DoubleClick is a digital advertising company that would make a great add-on to AdSense.  Microsoft and News Corp. are other potential buyers.

DoubleClick was founded in 1996 and displays advertisements on AOL, MySpace, WSJ, etc.  “Keeping Microsoft away from DoubleClick is worth billions to Google,” stated Jordan Rohan, an RBC Capital analyst.

[Previous DoubleClick coverage]

[Information Source: NY Times]

[Update: see official Google blog announcement]

Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a veteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, “In the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

 

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

 

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

 

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

 

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

 

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.