Urbanspoon is a website that recommends local restaurants based on reviews and tastes.  In a way its a competitor of Yelp.  Urbanspoon was founded by three former employees at Jobster, Patrick O’Donnell, Ethan Lowry, and Adam Doppelt.  They built the service without the need of venture capital investments, something that Jobster heavily depended on.  InterActiveCorp (IAC) bought that self-funded company.

Although there isn’t an official figure, TechCrunch believes it is “something in the millions of dollars range” since the company is already fairly profitable.  Urbanspoon used IAC’s CitySearch reviews for customers looking for restaurants.  The acquisition talks have been taking place since the second half of last year.

Urbanspoon’s popularity had especially grown from their free iPhone application which finds out where you are located and recommends a random restaurant using a slot machine style.  Urbanspoon will remain based in Seattle and will update their iPhone application soon.  Now that Urbanspoon has access to IAC’s various other Internet properties, you never know what they will come up with next.

  
Jobster co-founder and former CTO, Phil Bogle left Jobster last year to start a company called MergeLab.  MergeLab is shutting down even though they were still in alpha mode so Bogle has joined iLike as an engineer. 

“Some of the things I like about iLike: the team combines smarts with personal integrity and minimal ego; they ship every week and iterate and learn rapidly; they have a small team and flat org structure without excessive overhead for meetings, process, or politics; they’ve built a valuable service with tens of millions of satisfied users (their FB app ranks among the top in terms of user ratings); each developer owns substantial feature areas; and they have interesting problems in scale, data mining, syndication, and user experience. (Several fine developers I’ve worked with in the past are here, including Mark Aiken, Scott Haug, and Ray Fortna.),” wrote Bogle on his blog. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook has often times cited iLike as a company that makes great use of the Facebook Application platform.  Ticketmaster is an investor in iLike.  And iLike advertisements often times appear at the back of tickets sold through the Ticketmaster.

What Bogle is working on at iLike right now is hush-hush, but he’ll post it on his blog when iLike ships it out.  In March, I wrote that Jobster lost $11 million in 2007 and is seeking additional funding.

Information Source:
[1] SeattlePi.com/John Cook’s Venture Blog: Jobster founder Phil Bogle joins iLike

Jobster is a social network and online recruitment web site that started in 2004.  Every time a user creates an account on Jobster, they add skill tags to their profile and show their availability which includes job hunting, happily employed, etc.  I was just looking through some of the profiles on Jobster and it seems like that this is a good way for recruiters to network with potential prospects.  However, one of the flaws with Jobster’s revenue model is that they made job postings free. 

Maintaining Jobster is not cheap.  Since 2005, the company had raised $48 million.  The company is burning $1 million per month.  The company had $11 million in losses in 2007.  And the company has $3 million left.  The founder and CEO of the company, Jason Goldberg left last year as well.  Now that the company is under new management, they are looking to raise more money and try to get the recruitment social network back on track.

Previous investors include Ignition Partners, Mayfield Fund, Trinity Partners, and Reed Elsevier Ventures.  A few months after the social network launched, Jobster acquired WorkZoo.  Jobster also acquired Jobby, a startup that matched candidates to jobs through the use of tags.

If the Seattle, Wash. does receive additional funding, then one of their first priorities on the agenda should be cost cutting and talent management.  The new management should be focusing on also making Jobster in a competitive position to be able to take on Monster or CareerBuilder.

[Information Source: ERE]

“It is actually interesting. Microsoft and Facebook, one thing that they have in common, is they both recruit using Jobster,”
-Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg.

Jobster Inc., the Seattle, Wash. based company focused on the recruiter-candidate relationship has some high hopes for their partnership with Facebook and Microsoft.  Microsoft and Facebook both recruit candidates with Jobster. 

As a matter of fact, in February 2007, Jobster announced that they will have an official deal with Facebook [Source: GigaOM].  Since the partnership between Jobster and Facebook happened 5 months ago, I have not heard of any major milestones for Jobster. 

According to CrunchBase, Jobster has raised $8 million Series A from Ignition and Trinity, $19.5 million Series B from Ignition/Mayfield/Trinity, and $18 million Series C from Ignition/Mayfield/Trinity and Reed Elsevier.  This brings Jobster’s total investment at $45 million. 

Jobster’s Silicon Valley competitor, Simply Hired has about one-third in funding.  Simply Hired has about $16.5 million in funding.

Goldberg showed his optimism for Jobster on the FOX Business Network.  [Note: the video is down for now, if I get a fixed link, I'll update this post].

Jobster has enormous potential and even had several enormous rounds of funding, but the company is constantly struggling to gain real traction.  This may be why two of their executives decided to leave and start their own company.  Phillip Bogle, former CTO and a co-founder of Jobster announced that he is working on MergeLab, a mobile consumer service company. 

Other members of the founding team includes Alan Steele, the former VP of Engineering at Jobster.  Alan worked at Openwave Systems and eRoom Technology previously.  Mark Aiken and Adam MacBeth have joined as well.  Aiken previously worked at Microsoft and Avogadro, a wireless instant messaging startup company.  MacBeth previously worked at Implicit Networks.

Bogle maintains a blog at: http://thebogles.com/blog/.  Bogle is known for creating Beyond411, a software built for the Blackberry that supports GPS, provides instant access to Yahoo! yellow pages, and makes searching the web easier.  The software was created using Yahoo! Local Search APIs, Ruby on Rails, and geonames.org.

MergeLab’s company name may change and the company is currently in early conversations with investors.