Walmart’s Silicon Valley division @WalmartLabs has announced that they have acquired two startup companies, OneOps and Tasty Labs. OneOps is a cloud computing company and Tasty Labs is a software development company. Tasty Labs was co-founded by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. Tasty Labs’ two flagship services are Jig.com and Human.io, which are now being redirected to Walmart’s website. The terms of the deal are undisclosed.
Airbnb is growing at a rapid pace. Last year, they hit over 10 million total nights booked with over 200,000 active properties listed on their website. They are growing like crazy in London because of the Olympics too. About 20% of the company’s bookings happen through mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Android, and mobile web browsers. Airbnb has acquired DailyBooth and brought out on their CEO Brian Pokorny to head up the design and engineering team.
Canvas is a company that was founded by 4chan founder Christopher Poole (known as moot). Canvas has raised $3 million in Series A funding. Some of the previous angel investors that participated in this round include SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, and Joshua Schachter. Canvas’ previous round of funding was $625,000. Canvas allows users to easily edit images through the browser. Canvas added oEmbed support for several websites recently. Canvas currently has five employees including Poole. [TechCrunch]
Milk Inc. is a new company that was co-founded by Kevin Rose. Rose is the founder of Digg and co-founder of Revision3. Milk is essentially a company where several developers brainstorm technology and mobile ideas and works away at building them. If there isn’t any sudden traction, then the project gets shut down. Milk has raised $1.5 million in angel funding from well known investors. Investors include Mike Maples, Jr. (Floodgate), David Sze (Greylock Partners), Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Arrington, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Tony Hsieh, Gary Vaynerchuk, and several others. [VentureBeat]
On the Diggnation podcast, Digg founder Kevin Rose revealed that he had talks with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) about taking over Delicious. This was before an internal memo leaked where Yahoo! said they are planning to sunset Delicious.
Continue reading →
Joshua Schachter founded Delicious and sold it to Yahoo! in December 2005. Then he left Yahoo! in 2008 to join Google in 2009. This year he is involved in a stealth start-up company called Tasty Labs. According to the company’s homepage, Tasty Labs will put “the useful back into social software.” Tasty Labs has funding from Union Square and Andreessen Horowitz. [Union Square Ventures Blog]
Heyzap is a social gaming company that has raised $3 million from Union Square Ventures, Naval Ravikant, and Chris Dixon. Heyzap essentially helps Facebook game developers port their games to other platforms. Currently Heyzap has about 30,000 games distributed to over 220,000 websites. The games are monetized from ads or virtual goods purchased through Heyzap technology. Heyzap will use the funding to expand from 10 employees to about 15 to 20 employees. Heyzap previously raised $650,000 from Union Square Ventures, Ravikant, and Joshua Schachter. [VentureBeat]
A new group has been formed by Joshua Schachter (Delicious founder), Roy Rodenstein (Going founder/AOL exec), Gabriel Weinberg (Duck Duck Go), Jim Young (HotorNot), and Jeff Miller (Punchform) called Hacker Angels. The goal of Hacker Angels is to provide startups with advice and even some coding tips. It is not exactly an investment company, but more of an informal association. Hacker Angels may provide funding or serve as board members on an individual basis. [ReadWriteWeb]
