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]

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As you give a goofy look at the camera pointing at you in a photo kiosk at an entertainment venue, you begin to wonder what captions and background you’ll use.  Now take this concept, slap it on the Internet in the form of a widget that can be Facebooked or MySpaced, and you’re ready to raise $50 million.

Business-savvy Internet entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder, Max Levchin did exactly that, as mentioned in BusinessWeek.  Slide raised $50 million and increased their valuation to $500 million.  This fourth round of investment was provided by Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price.

Photo widget companies is a proven model for acquisition targets, but is also a proven model for its vulnerability of mooching on other social networks’ user base.  For example, Photobucket was acquired by News Corp. in May 2007 at a price of $250 million in cash.  But before the acquisition, MySpace completely blocked Photobucket from accessing their users because of an advertising violation before making a truce. 

Altogether, Slide has raised over $75 million including investments from other PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel and venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla.  Thiel is an early investor of Facebook.  The other founders of Slide include Jared Kopf and Scott Banister, both also former PayPal employees.

Previous Slide coverage is available at: http://pulse2.com/category/slide/.

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“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].

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Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a verteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, “In the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.

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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.

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Intel Capital, Mayfield, Comcast, and Polaris Venture Partners has provided BlackArrow $14.75 in venture capital to promote the development of BlackArrow’s advertising technology ideas. The idea behind BlackArrow is to provide advertisements on the Internet and on television. The difference between BlackArrow’s insertion of advertisements into TV compared to other TV advertisement companies providing the same service is that BlackArrow will prevent TV watchers from skipping the advertisements even though the TV watches may have a fast-forward button on their digital video recorders (DVRs).

An example that VentureBeat provided about the BlackArrow service is that if someone attempts to forward a TV show playing on ABC, “The 30-second TV spots are removed and replaced with a group of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll ads, as well as companion ads” are displaying in these playback modes. I assume that they would be still images since it would be difficult to implement uninterrupted video advertisements on these playback modes, but you never know what is going on behind the scenes at BlackArrow.

BlackArrow is based in San Mateo, CA. BlackArrow’s origins date began in 2002. Tom Morgan and Pat Dunbar founded the Digital Media and Advertising (DiMA) Group. Through these investments in the Group, various lead programmers and advertising experts came together to solve problems in the on-demand TV market. BlackArrow was the result. Denny Wilkinson is the President and CEO of BlackArrow Inc.

[Source: VentureBeat]

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