[photo credit: Wikipedia]

Peter Thiel has been on fire lately.  Thiel started Clarium Capital Management LLC in 1996, a hedge fund worth over $6 billion today.  Clarium has been showing their investors a 30% return over the last 6 years.  Then Thiel co-founded and sold PayPal for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002.  After that Thiel acquired 7% of Facebook when he put in $500,000 seed funding.   After Facebook started taking off, Thiel started The Founders Fund with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek.  The Founders Fund raised about $220 million to invest in Web 2.0 start-up companies.

Thiel, who is only 40 years old, is now worth $1.3 billion.  Thiel made about $60 million from the eBay-PayPal deal.  And when Facebook really started taking off, Microsoft bought 1.7% of the social network for $240 million. 

Here is a list of the other web billionaires published by Forbes:
1. Sergey Brin - $18.7 billion
2. Larry Page - $18.6 billion
3. Jeff Bezos - $8.2 billion
4. Pierre Omidyar - $7.7 billion
5. Eric Schmidt - $6.6 billion
6. Jeff Skoll - $3.6 billion
7. Shi Yuzhu - $2.8 billion
8. Hiroshi Mikitani - $2.6 billion
9. Mark Cuban - $2.6 billion
10. David Filo - $2.5 billion
11. Jerry Yang - $2.3 billion
12. Omid Kordestani - $2.2 billion
13. Andreas Von Bechtolsheim - $2 billion
14. Kavitark Ram Shriram - $1.8 billion
15. John Sperling - $1.7 billion
16. L John Doerr - $1.7 billion
17. Peter Sperling - $1.7 billion
18. Anurag Dikshit - $1.6 billion
19. David Cheriton - $1.6 billion
20. Todd Wagner - $1.5 billion
21. Mark Zuckerberg - $1.5 billion
22. James (Jim) Clark - $1.4 billion
23. Ma Huateng - $1.4 billion
24. Robin Li - $1.4 billion
25. Barry Diller - $1.3 billion
26. Meg Whitman - $1.3 billion
27. Michael Moritz - $1.3 billion
28. Marc Benioff - $1.2 billion
29. Steve Case - $1.2 billion
30. Peter Thiel - $1.2 billion
31. Sameer Gehlaut - $1.2 billion
32. J Joseph Ricketts - $1.2 billion
33. Jack Ma - $1.1 billion
34. William Ding - $1 billion

Raptr is a company that produces games for social networks. Raptr launched today and also disclosed that they have raised $12 million from Accel Partners and The Founders Fund this past February. Raptr is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Raptr tracks what games users on playing on PCs, Macs, and on social networks. Raptr alerts the user’s friends when they start playing a game and when a game is about to start.

Raptr was started by Dennis Fong. Fong sold Xfire, a social network for gamers to Viacom for $102 million two years ago.

“We could not be more pleased with the announcement we are making today. This funding is indicative of how SGN is poised to dramatically impact the future of gaming platforms on the social web, stated Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN). Our focus and drive is to develop a dynamic and flourishing ecosystem for gaming on the web and continue to be the obvious choice for game developers who want to create social games that engage millions of users on the social networks and beyond.”

Many of today’s companies are finding ways to create games to keep users appealed whether its on their own websites or powered by applications within top social networks. As there has been a slowdown in the development of pointless applications on these social networks, many companies are finding that games are the way to go. This is further evidenced by the funding that Social Gaming Network received today.

Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Capital, and Biddle Venture Partners have invested $15 million Series A into SGN. SGN is focusing on making it easy for developers to consolidate applications on top of gaming to create a way to interact with users and to monetize through the application’s popularity.

With this round of funding, SGN will add more features and functionalities to their current platform.

SGN’s claim to fame was the instant traction that was gained by Warbook, the company’s first Facebook game. Other popular applications that SGN has produced includes Jetman, Free Gifts, Fight Club, Superlatives, Nicknames, Street Race, and Text Twirl.

SGN’s userbase includes 1 million daily game players, 70 million virtual gifts sent, and 50 million application installations.

SGN is based in Palo Alto, Calif.  The SGN Blog is located at: http://blog.socialgn.com/.  For developers, SGN APIs are located at: http://developers.socialgn.com/.

Information Source:
[1] Press Release sent by theMIX Inc.

OLX is a classifieds site that has listings of vehicles, services, jobs, real estate, personals, and classes.  OLX makes it easy to quickly design HTML listings, send and accept PayPal payments, promote classifieds on social networks and blogs, search for items around various cities and view the site in different languages.

The company has raised $13.5 million Series B from DN Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.  OLX has raised a total of $23.5 million to date.  The same venture capitalists that provided OLX with the second round of funding were also a part of the 1st round.

About 11 months ago, OLX announced a partnership with Friendster.  This was around the same time that Facebook announced that they are launching a classifieds section as well.

OLX is a New York-based private company that launched in March 2006 by Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford.  Fabrice previously started a company called Zingy, a mobile ringtones company–which was acquired by For-Side for $80 million in 2004.

About 1 million new classifieds are added to OLX per month and the website receives over 200 million pageviews per month.   OLX solely depends on Google Ads to make money since adding classifieds are free.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Craigslist Competitor OLX Raises $13.5M by Mark Hendrickson

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

“The opportunity is to make it easier for marketers to spend money online,” stated Konrad Feldman, the CEO of Quantcast. “Panel-based research doesn’t work well in a fragmented media.”

Now backed with over $25 million in funding, Quantcast is the only free internet ratings service.  Quantcast can measure widgets and other Flash media to show how often they are viewed everywhere.  The investors in this round of funding include Polaris Venture Partners and Founders Fund.

With this round of funding, Quantcast will be ramping up their services and improve its accuracy.  Essetially, Quantcast is gearing up for taking on the bigger names of rating services like comScore and Nielsen.  Over 20,000 clients use Quantcast including Fox, CBS, Accuweather, and IDG.

Down the road, Quantcast will most likely act as a broker for pairing up target advertisements with web sites that have relevant audiences.  “There are going to be big changes to how the business operates,” added Feldman. “We aren’t going to be talking about GRPs anymore. It’s going to be audience segments. There’s going to be a massive transformation over the next five to 10 years.”

[Information Source: AdWeek]

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.