Zumbox is a company that designed a system for converting postal letters into electronic format. The company announced today that they have raised $8 million in funding.
The funding was provided by Art Bilger (Shelter Capital Partners), Rick Braddock (Fresh Direct), Michael Eisner (former Disney CEO), Bill Guth (Guthy-Renker), and Donn Rappaport (CEO and founder of Zumbox).
Zumbox will be officially launching their service in Q4 of this year. Zumbox does not digitize postal mail, but allows people to select different templates that standard mail looks like.
Then you can send the mail to anyone in the world by entering their actual postal address and it gets sent to them in electronic format to Zumbox’s servers. Zumbox will allow the person residing at the postal address to check their Zumbox mail through their website.
The concept is a bit strange. I have my doubts that this service will really take off, but I won’t really know until the service goes public and I get the chance to try it out.
One of YouTube’s most critical flaws when the company first started was that the video quality was inferior. This is where companies such as Joost and Veoh wanted to hit YouTube where it counted. Both Joost and Veoh had higher quality videos than YouTube, but they lacked in quantity. Last week Joost decided to focus on video platforms for companies rather than making deals with companies to stream their content.
Now Veoh is reportedly giving up on being a streaming video start-up company. AllThingsD is reporting that the company is looking for a buyer for a price that is below the $70 million in funding that they have raised over the last four years. The $30 million Series D round of funding took place back in June 2008.
Some of the previous investors include former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Goldman Sachs. The company has not been profitable and last year alone they lost about $6 million. Veoh is also facing litigation from Universal Music Group which is accusing them of copyright vilations.
Currently there is no word on who a potential buyer may be, but considering how much traffic Veoh is receiving I would not be surprised if an acquisition takes place in the near future.
