Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Marissa Mayer

Minted Raises $5.5 Million In Series B Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:17:42 +0000

Minted.com, an e-commerce service for stationery and cars, has raised $5.5 million in Series B funding in a round led by Benchmark Capital, IDG Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Marissa Mayer, and Jeremy Stoppelman. Minted connects independent graphic designers to consumers looking for prints such as holiday cards, notebooks, calendars, and wedding invitations. The designer makes a percentage of every sale of their design.

To provide designers with extra exposure, the company holds contests. One popular contest was the Art Print Challenge. The winning designer would be able to sell his or her prints on One Kings Lane. Minted CEO and founder Mariam Naficy said that revenue has grown several hundred percentage since 2008. The company plans on using the funding for recruiting and support growth opportunities. They will also look into new product lines.

Google Acquires Reviews Website Zagat

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:42:40 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has acquired Zagat, a recommendation and reviews website. The brand Zagat has started over 32 years ago by Tim and Nina Zagat.

“Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world,” said Google VP of Local, Maps, and Location Services Marissa Mayer.

The Zagat surveys may be one of the earliest forms of user-generated content. The company Zagat is known for developing pocket-sized guides with paragraphs that summarizes restaurants and venues. Zagat’s services will be rolled into Google search and Google Maps.

[Google Blog]

About 150 Million People Use Google Maps Mobile

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:55:22 +0000

At SXSW Google’s VP of location services Marissa Mayer reported some stats about Google Maps. Mayer noted that about 150 million people use the mobile version of Google Maps. Mayer also reported that Google Maps guided users about 12 billion miles per year and that it saves travelers 2 days of travel time each year. About 40% of all Google Maps usage is from mobile devices. On Christmas and New Years Day, mobile use of the service surpassed the Google Maps on desktop Internet. [BoyGeniusReport]

One Kings Lane Raises $23 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:07:20 +0000

One Kings Lane is a website that was co-founded by Alison Pincus, the wife of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. One Kings Lane raised a $23 million second round of funding led by Greylock Partners with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins is a previous investors and so is Greylock partner Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman, TriplePoint Capital, and Marissa Mayer also participated in this round of funding. One Kings Lane sales were up 500% over 2009 and over 75% came from repeat customers. One Kings Lane is very similar to Groupon as it is a daily deals website. [TechCrunch]

Google Launches Instant Search, Mobile Version Arriving This Fall

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:01:57 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has launched a new service called Google Instant. Google Instant predicts what you are searching for as you type and finds the results as your are typing. This will help people save a lot of time — about 2-5 seconds per search according to Google.

Even if you don’t know what exactly you are looking for, Google will try to help you predict it by finding commonly searched-for keywords. This is huge for the search engine company because Google.com services billions of queries every day. “Google Instant will save 350 million hours of user time, over a year,” stated Marissa Mayer. This is based on the 2-5 seconds of search query time savings.

Google Instant for Mobile will be launching later this Fall as announced by the company. The company demoed the service on an Android device today.

[Google Blog]

Confirmed: Google Has Acquired ITA Software [UPDATE]

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:26:03 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has confirmed that they have acquired Boston-based company ITA Software, just hours after we posted speculation that the deal was in discussions.

“While online flight search is rapidly evolving, we think there is room for more competition and greater innovation. Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data. Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket,” stated Google VP of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer. Kayak.com attempted to make a deal of their own with ITA before Google finalized the purchase. [Google Blog]

UPDATE: Google paid $700 million in cash for the deal. This is a substantial return for Sequoia, Battery Ventures, and General Catalyst — who invested $100 million into ITA in 2006. [TechCrunch]

Google Homepage Gets Backgrounds, Bing Knocks It On Twitter

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:55:04 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) added a new feature that lets people add your favorite photos to the background of Google.com. Google has set up collaborations with artists, photographers, and sculptors to create a background image gallery. You can also choose an image or photo from your own computer or Picasa Web Album. Marissa Mayer announced the new feature on the Google Blog.

Microsoft’s communication team in Europe used Twitter to knock on Google a bit for adding a feature that Bing had all along. “We’ve lost a background image, if found please return to bing.com ,” said the Microsoft PR team. Below are a couple other tweets sent out from Microsoft about the Google background feature.

We’ve lost a background image, if found please return to bing.com less than a minute ago via webMicrosoft Europe
MSEurope

Imitation (however pale) is the sincerest form of flattery: a certain search engine put up the same pic (tulip fields) used on Bing long agoless than a minute ago via webashley highfield
ashleyhi

How intriguing to see friends at Google borrowing the Bing homepage #photography idea. http://google.co.uk http://bing.co.ukless than a minute ago via TweetDeckPeterBale
PeterBale

Spelling Corrections Added To Google Suggest

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:15:31 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has added spelling corrections to Google Suggest. “This week we launched an update that makes Google Suggest even more intuitive and simple. If you’re typing a query for which there are no search completions to offer, and yet some of your search terms do seem to be misspelled, Google Suggest will now offer a “Did you mean” suggestion for your query—giving you an option to correct your spelling right away and get on with your search,” said Google VP of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer on the Google Blog. And if you’re a fan of Google Suggest, you may like our list: 130 of the strangest Google Suggestions [Link].

Google Working With Wireless Companies To Add Free WiFi To 47 Airports

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:14:39 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), Boingo Wireless, Airport Marketing Income, Advanced Wireless Group and several other wireless companies are partnering to set up free Wi-Fi in airports as a holiday gift. If and when this project does come into fruition, it will further enhance Google’s motto “Don’t Be Evil.” I know a lot of people that will appreciate this gift especially those who get stuck in long lay overs.

“We’re very happy to extend our Holiday Wi-Fi gift to the millions of people who will spend time in airports over the next few months,” stated Google VP of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer. “We know that this is a very hectic travel season for people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little bit easier.”

Below is a list of airports that are participating in the Google airport WiFi initiative:
* Austin (AUS)
* Baltimore (BWI)
* Billings (BIL)
* Boston (BOS)
* Bozeman (BZN)
* Buffalo (BUF)
* Burbank (BUR)
* Central Wisconsin (CWA)
* Charlotte (CLT)
* Des Moines (DSM)
* El Paso (ELP)
* Fort Lauderdale (FLL)
* Fort Myers/SW (RSW)
* Greensboro (GSO)
* Houston (HOU)
* Houston Bush (IAH)
* Indianapolis (IND)
* Jacksonville (JAX)
* Kalamazoo (AZO)
* Las Vegas (LAS)
* Louisville (SDF)
* Madison (MSN)
* Memphis (MEM)
* Miami (MIA)
* Milwaukee (MKE)
* Monterey (MRY)
* Nashville (BNA)
* Newport News (PHF)
* Norfolk (ORF)
* Oklahoma City (OKC)
* Omaha (OMA)
* Orlando (MCO)
* Panama City (PFN)
* Pittsburgh (PIT)
* Portland (PWM)
* Sacramento (SMF)
* San Antonio (SAT)
* San Diego (SAN)
* San Jose (SJC)
* Seattle (SEA) — rolling out this month
* South Bend (SBN)
* Spokane (GEG)
* St. Louis (STL)
* State College (SCE)
* Toledo (TOL)
* Traverse City (TVC)
* West Palm Beach (PBI)

Google Leaves Evidence Indicating Tweet Indexing

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:48:40 +0000

Google Operating System, an unofficial Google blog that tracks what the company is up to discovered a leaked image of a potential service that turned up on a localization service:

Notice what it says near “Translation help?” This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format.

Twitter has a search engine where users can find real-time tweets, but it is limited to only the Twitter service. The search engine is also only sorted by date and not by relevance. Other Twitter search engines that focus on relevance are Tweefind and Twingly.

The L.A. times reported back in May that Google VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer has an interest in being able to offer micro-blogging in the Google search engine. ”We are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don’t have any particular plans to announce,” stated Mayer.

[via Google System]