Taboola is an up and coming video recommendation company.  The algorithm that Taboola uses to make recommendations takes into account a user’s video ratings, reviews, history, length of a video, and how much a video was watched by the user.  The Israeli startup company was officially announced their launch on NewTeeVee Live, San Francisco.

Some Taboola features are embedded on 5min [example].  Such a feature seems to be a proven model by looking at YouTube itself.  At the end of every YouTube video, an algorithm will determine what videos are related to the one that you are watching and use it as a suggestion.

Below is a screen shot of Taboola in action on 5min:

Taboola was founded by Adam Singolda.  Prior to putting Taboola together, Singolda was a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces, a unit of the Israeli National Security Agency (I-NSA).  Tomorrow Taboola will be announcing that they have raised $1.5 million in funding from Evergreen Venture Partners.  Taboola is already listed as one of Evergreen Portfolio Companies under Software on their website.  Other companies in the portfolio for Evergreen include aniBoom, Appstream, and eGlue.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Taboola Lands $1.5 Million, Powers Video Discovery written by Nick Gonzalez

“We are extremely pleased with the support from our existing and new investors. This large infusion of capital will allow us to accelerate our already explosive growth, while simultaneously making significant advances in Zecco Trading’s customer service and trading functionality. With the additional funding, we anticipate our current capital is sufficient to carry us to profitability.”
-Jeroen Veth, CEO of Zecco

Morten Lund, founder and managing partner of LundKenner, an early investor in Skype is also an investor of Zecco.com.  Zecco’s model was questioned by some of the media because of its aggressive zero commission trading platform.  This model is hyper-competitive against the E*Trades and Charles Schwabs of the world.

Zecco offers free trading, free blogging, free forums, and a social networking component that allows investors to interact with one another.  The social networking arm of Zecco is at Zeccoshare.com.

Zecco raised $10 million in Series A and $25 million in Series B.  Zecco Holdings Inc. is based in Burlingame, Calif.  Another investor in Zecco includes Marcel Boekhoorn, a Dutch private equity investor.

High school social network, Takkle.com took a niche and kept on strengthening upon it. Takkle lined up partnerships with major corporations that revolve around the purpose of their niche: showcase high school athletic abilities. Even Sports Illustrated, NYCIF, Greycroft, WMG Investments, IJ Smith Enterprises invested in Takkle previously.

In this round, Liberty Associated Partners, WMG Investments, and Greycroft participated.  Takkle allows athletes and coaches to upload photos/videos/blogs/profiles on the social network.  High school athlete statistics can also be added to profiles.

Takkle athletes can also create “Takkle Sheets.”  Takkle Sheets are like a sports resume that athletes can use to  promote themselves to be qualified for professional and college leagues.  Takkle is based in New York.

In September 2006, the month that Pulse 2.0 was created, I pointed out that New York-based Quigo was beefing up their client list and that in terms of advertising, the company would be able to compete with Google AdWords.  Quigo Technologies is known for their AdSonar product.  AdSonar provides contextual advertisements based on keywords from any given website, similar to Google AdSense.

Currently, Quigo provides services to ABC News, Hollywood.com, ESPN.com, Forbes.com, FOXNews.com, CareerBuilder.com, and USAToday.com.  In June 2007, Time Inc. decided to choose AdSonar to power the advertising for their websites as well.  Time Inc. is a subsidiary of Time Warner Company.  Time Warner Company owns America Online.  Technically, its a situation where the client wants to become the owner.

America Online is currently putting together a deal to acquire the advertising company for $300 million.  Kara Swisher of AllThingsD broke the news.

Quigo raised a total of $45 million in funding from Steamboat Ventures, Highland Capital, Glenrock Ventures, IVP, and Meritech Capital Partners.  Time Inc. executives predict that Quigo will bring in $100 million in revenues over the next 3 years.

“4INFO clearly fits Peacock Equity’s strategic funding objectives: it has a market-leading position within a high-growth sector and it has an exiting community of users accustomed to receiving customized, ad-supported content in text messages,”
-Peacock Equity’s Tom Byrne

Peacock Equity, created by GE Commercia Finance, GE Media Communications & Entertainment and NBC Universal is a $250 million global fund that invests in media and tech companies. The company recently announced that NBC Universal will take a stake in 4INFO, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that focuses on SMS advertising. 4INFO gives access to real-time sports, business, entertainment, travel, and local information. 4INFO also provides celebrity, weather, horoscopes, stock quotes, craigslist.com listings, and health tips. The investment made by Peacock will be used to help 4INFO build a solid ad platform. 4INFO will also become NBC’s preferred mobile ad provider.

“4INFO clearly fits Peacock Equity’s strategic funding objectives: it has a market-leading position within a high-growth sector and it has an exiting community of users accustomed to receiving customized, ad-supported content in text messages,” stated Peacock Equity’s Tom Byrne. “Mobile advertising will be a multi-billion dollar industry in the next few years as more progressive content providers and advertisers like NBC Universal realize its potential to engage audiences with targeted, measurable messages.”

Other investors in 4INFO include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, U.S. Venture Partners, and Gannett. 4INFO’s blog is available at: http://4info.typepad.com/blog/.

PicksPal is a website where users predict the winners of sporting events and win free prizes by doing so.  Essentially it is a fantasy football, baseball, basketball, and other sports website.  Except in this case, users have an incentive to participate here rather than other websites.

The company is based in Mountain View, Calif.  PicksPal was founded by Tom Jessiman, a former CBS SportsLine.com, Sports.com, and Ziff-Davis senior executive.  Since the company started in September 2005, they have raised $9 million.  The first round of investment at $2 million was provided by Canaan Partners.  The second round was $4 million and was provided by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners.  And the most recent funding at $3 million was provided by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners once again.

As this is the generation where the post World War II baby boomers are passing habits on to Generation X and Generation Y, more people are tuning into sports and want to compete with their peers.  There is a lot of room to grow in this market and with this new round of funding, PicksPal should redesign their web site as a first step to cater to the Web 2.0 enthusiasts.

Curbed is a New York, NY-based real estate network blog that focuses on local events and architecture.  The blog network raised $1.5 million recently from a plethora of investors including Nick Denton (founder of Gawker Media), Zach Nelson (CEO of NetSuite), Joanne Wilson (wife of Fred Wilson, author of A VC blog), and Brad Inman (founder/publisher of Inman News). 

Curbed was founded by Lockart Steele and he is a former managing editor of Gawker Media.  Steele founded Curbed before working for Gawker, but went back to working for Curbed after leaving Gawker.

“We’re not just about real estate,” stated Steele.  ”People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.”  Some of Curbed’s advertisers include American Express and Volkswagen.

The New York Times’ Dan Mitchell broke the news of the funding.

“With the growing popularity of video, fueled in part by social networking sites, we’ve actually seen an increase in customer demand for alternative video sharing solutions. Many customers, particularly families with children, don’t want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain nor do they want to share them in a cluttered environment that includes advertising,”
-Kevin Winneroski, VP of Best Buy

Richfield, Minn.-based specialty retailer company, Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) has made a minor equity investment in Mydeo recently.  Mydeo plans on using the funding for its video-sharing services.  The Best Buy-Mydeo partnership web site is already online at: mydeo.com.  Users are encouraged to upload personal videos for storage and then share them on blogs and web sites. 

This investment complements Best Buy’s market-share dominance in selling digital camera and video camera within the U.S.  The more that customers buy digital cameras from Best Buy, the more likely they are to use Mydeo to share video.  Mydeo is based in the U.K.

The base plans for 100 minutes of video hosting with lengths up to 30 minutes each starts at $6.97 per month.  Additional storage can also be purchased.  A premium user plan includes uploading videos that are 90 minutes in length and can store up to 250 minutes of video for $10.47 per month.  Videos can be made private and can be shared with family and friends.

Mydeo was started in 2005 by Cary Marsh and Iain Miller.  Mydeo partnered with Microsoft to become the software company’s first European Movie Maker Hosting Partner.

Information Source:
[1] Mydeo press release: Best Buy Launches Online Video Sharing Service

“JIB JAB!” This is what two animated men have been saying for the last 8 years; one man has a middle-parted comb-over that would make Donald Trump jealous and the other has frizzy hair and a thick moustache. I would say that JibJab.com is one of the first web sites that I saw that truly showed the power of Adobe (formely Macromedia) Flash.* The $3 million Series B funding was brought in by Polaris Venture Partners.

Polaris Venture Partners is also an investor in Automattic, the company behind blog platform, Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the most popular blog platforms and is used to power Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, GigaOM, and Mashable.

The first round of funding for JibJab was around $3.4 million. This brings the total amount for JibJab to be $6.4 million. What will JibJab do with this money? Most likely they’ll keep building the same funny and witty videos that we’ve been seeing for years. And also there are more eCards in the pipeline. There is also a social network being built around JibJab where users submit… user generated content.

If I was JibJab, I would take some of those new-found earnings, buy a big bottle of bubbly, and toast to another 8 years of fun times on the Internets. Here’s a sample video clip produced by “JIB JAB!” around 2004.

*Side note: The first web site that really showed me the power of Flash was Eye4u.com, which hasn’t changed the look of their site since the day I saw it for the first time almost 10 years ago. Consistency points!

[1] ReadWriteWeb: JibJab Raises $3m More For Video Content, Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick

“We are pleased to take our Microsoft partnership to the next level,” stated Owen Van Natta, the Chief Revenue Officer of Facebook. “We think this expanded relationship will allow Facebook to continue to innovate and grow as a technology leader and major player in social computing, as well as bring relevant advertising to nearly 50 million active users of Facebook.”

If Microsoft and Google was in a breakdance contest, Steve Ballmer would tell Eric Schmidt that he just got served. This is because Microsoft and Facebook signed a deal worth $240 million. Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6% equity ownership in Facebook and also received an exclusive advertisement partnership agreement until 2011. The investment gives Facebook a $15 billion valuation.

The first thought that comes up for me is whether Microsoft paid too much, especially because YouTube, the streaming video website that receives much more traffic than Facebook, was bought by Google for roughly $1.7 billion and they got 100% ownership. But then I remembered that YouTube was somewhat of a liability for Google since all sorts of copyright infringement cases were filed against Google after the acquisition.

Another reason why Microsoft may not have paid too much is because of the quality of users that the Redmond, Wash. based company has access to. Facebook’s core user demographic are college students and professionals that see value in networking. YouTube users are no better than MySpace-quality. Watch any YouTube video and you’ll find that most of the comments made are absolute garbage. When Facebook opened their platform for everyone, (which happens to be the first post ever written on Pulse 2.0), they were able to maintain a certain kind of elegance. I define elegance as being able to maintain high security standards and not receive friend invites from fake users that involve pornography. That problem is YouTube and MySpace’s Achilles’ heel.

“Making this investment and expanding this partnership will position Microsoft and Facebook to better take advantage of advertising opportunities around the world, and is a great win for not only for our two companies, but also our collective users and advertisers,” stated Kevin Johnson, the President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. “We have partnered well over the past year and look forward to doing some exciting things together in the future. The opportunity to further collaborate as advertising partners is a big reason we have decided to take an equity stake, and is a strong statement of our confidence in the long-term economics of this partnership.”

While it is easy to talk highly of Facebook after this investment, the social network is having its share of problems too. The problem that I’m most specifically talking about is applications. A lot of undesired applications (profile add-ons) are constantly being solicited. If this problem continues to persist, users may begin to look elsewhere. Personally, I’ve been receiving a lot more invitations to LinkedIn.

My opinion definetely differs from others because Facebook Applications are truly hot right now. As a matter of fact, various venture capital firms are allocating funds that are to be used strictly on Facebook Applications. But the problem is that unsolicited applications makes Facebook no better than spam being sent to users on YouTube and MySpace. And when Facebook was initially created, a core number of their users were Friendster and MySpace refugees.

Zuckerberg, you have a lot of money to play around with here. If you’re reading this, remember to always put the security and comfort of the users first or else you’ll face the wrath of entrepreneurs that will aspire to do nothing more but to steal your users. Those are my two cents, take it or leave it.

Information Source:
[1] Microsoft Press Release: Facebook and Microsoft Expand Strategic Alliance

Linkstorm is an interactive technology company that handles advertising and e-commerce marketing.  About 85 different individual investors provided $4.2 million in third round funding to the online advertising company.  Linkstorm’s current clients include McGraw Hill, Harvard Business School Publishing, and Cambridge University Press, Cisco, Microsoft, and HP.

The amount was $4.2 million.  Some of the investors include Jim Rutt (JPR Ventures), Jeff Bellowe (former Ziff-Davis President of Interactive Media), and Marty Kahn (Rho Capital).

One of Linkstorm’s achievements include the trademarked Portable Universal Profile.  David Sidman founded the company in August 2000.  The company has raised a total of $9 million.

The official announcement is available at the Linkstorm press releases page.

Zango, a Bellevue, Wash. based online advertisement distribution company announced earlier today that they would be acquiring SmartShopper for $9 million.  SmartShopper is a tool that helps consumers find accurate price totals, consumer reviews, find product specs, hotel star ratings, store ratings, auction listings, etc.  Zango has been under fire for quite some time about the methods they use for mining consumer behavior data.

Smart Shopper was a former subsidiary of HotBar.com Inc.  Zango also acquired HotBar.com in June 2006.  The company is especially known for some of the most annoying pop-up and audio advertisements.

“Formerly known as 180 Solutions, Zango has landed in hot water for installing its ad-serving software without computer users’ knowledge and making the uninstall process difficult to navigate,” wrote John Cook on the SeattlePi.com Venture Blog.  TechCrunch was the first to report the acquisition.

On March 26, 2007, Payoneer announced that Greylock Partners was going to invest $4 million in their company.  I believe that the investment had some sort of performance requirements associated with the agreement because TechCrunch reported that Payoneer received the rest of the $3 million today.

Payoneer is a company that allows companies and/or business partners teh ability to pay each other via MasterCard online.  I may try out the service since I recently activated a MasterCard after applying for a Citi® Dividend Platinum Select® MasterCard®.  Payoneer is a private company that works with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the First Bank of Delaware to process credit card transactions.

The company was founded in 2005 and has an R&D facility in Tel Aviv, Israel.  The company was founded in 2005 and has an R&D facility in Tel Aviv, Israel.  Current Payoneer partners include Metacafe, Amie Street, oDesk, and BitWine.  Payoneer recently announced that they have also partnered with iStockphoto.  If I end up testing out the service, I’ll ensure to write my experience with Payoneer in the near future.

Demand for the company’s platform solution is positioning Treemo to rapidly emerge as the leading provider of unique social media applications within a crowded space.”
-Tasha Seitz, Partner at JK&B Capital

Treemo is a Seattle, Wash. based company that focuses on the sharing of media on mobile phones.  Essentially, Treemo is a mobile social network.  The company announced today that they have raised $2.55 million in Series A-1 investment from Chicago, Ill. based venture capital firm, JK&B Capital.

“Demand for the company’s platform solution is positioning Treemo to rapidly emerge as the leading provider of unique social media applications within a crowded space,” stated Tasha Seitz, Partner at JK&B Capital. “The company’s seasoned executive team and proven strategy demonstrate a keen differentiation that aligns well with our portfolio companies. JK&B Capital’s financial support is a strong validation of the company’s pioneering vision and outstanding potential.”

With this round of funding, Treemo plans on expanding its platform and to attract a wider mobile carrier base.  Treemo plans on building communities around musicians and artists as well.  Evolution Capital Partners, a boutique investment banking company provided Treemo financial advice for the funding transaction.

Information Source:
[1] Earthtimes.org: Treemo Secures $2.55 Million in Series A-1 Funding Led by JK&B Capital

“Video communication has never really taken off, despite the fact that people talk about it as a part of the future.”
-Serge Faguet, TokBox CEO

TokBox is a San Francisco, Calif. based video company that focuses on the interaction of live chat through the use of a webcam. TokBox has raised $4 million in Series A from Sequoia Capital recently. The idea behind the site is for users to engage in a deeper interaction by chatting live with each other through embedding TokBox module into their MySpace and/or Facebook profile pages along with personal websites.

Positioning themselves in Silicon Valley, TokBox was able to attract several advisers. Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor and an early adviser for Google provided TokBox with some investment and is acting as a counselor. Co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, is also an investor in TokBox and now has a position on their Board of Directors. And Tony Bates, a Senior VP at Cisco is helping TokBox with technology support.

The company was co-founded by Serge Faguet, a former Google employee. TokBox’s new office space will be in the same location as where YouTube got its start.

Information Source:
[1] New York Times: Video Chat Service Aims to Follow YouTube’s Path