Apple Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers has left the company to join Opus Capital as a general partner. Borchers worked at Apple since 2004. Borchers was in charge of marketing for the iPod and iPhone. He appeared in several videos discussing the products.
Borchers said that working at Apple was amazing, but Opus offered him the chance to make investments in mobile technologies. Opus has $1 billion in capital. Borchers will be part of the latest fund that Opus raised which was around $280 million.
Background checking company Intelius has bought Spock.com, a search engine that “tracks people.” The data is mainly grabbed from social network profiles (Friendster, MySpace, etc.) and search results for names.
Jaideep Singh confirmed the deal with VentureBeat and TechCrunch speculated the deal earlier. Spock raised $8 million around December 2006 from Clearstone and Opus. Spock receives about 10 million unique visitors per month according to Singh. Some buyers passed on Spock, but other offers were made too.
No word on the financial details about the transactions. Intelius, Inc. made about $55 million in revenue in 2006 and the company was considering going IPO last year to raise around $143.75 million.
Eye-Fi[1] is a company looking to solve a simple problem. In order to share pictures on the Internet, camera owners have to transfer the files to their computer and then upload it. Eye-Fi is developing technologies to eliminate the need to transfer pictures to the computer and to even be near a computer. This would be made possible by WiFi.
Eye-Fi raised $5.5 million in Series A funding by Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures. With the funding, Eye-Fi will enhance operations and product development. Opus Capital[2] has previously invested in people search engine Spock and Shasta[3] invested in Tumri Inc. about a week ago.
“Digital cameras have made it very easy to take pictures, but it’s a chore to get photos off the camera to a place where you can print or share them,” stated Robert Coneybeer, the managing director for Shasta Ventures “This is a very real problem affecting both consumers who own digital cameras, and companies in the digital photography industry looking to boost profits. We see a huge market opportunity for Eye-Fi because anyone with a Wi-Fi network and a digital camera is a potential customer.”
Eye-Fi has an interesting model because there are many cellphones that have built-in features to transfer pictures online. The way I see it is that they’ll be competing against such features so they need to find a way to “switch” users of such technology.
[1] eye.fi
[2] Pulse 2.0: Opus Capital coverage
[3] Pulse 2.0: Shasta Ventures coverage
Menlo Park search engine start-up, SPOCK has raised $7 million from Clearstone and Opus Capital Ventures. This is SPOCK’s first round of venture capital funding. Previously, SPOCK raised $1 million of incubation funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, thus placing SPOCK as an $8 million-backed company.
SPOCK is currently in private beta and is focused on the search of people. If you type in a name into the search, then SPOCK would be able to bring up a picture, address, occupation, and other information [CNET]. “When Spock launches, it will have 100 million profiles of people in its database” stated Matt Marshall. Through the new round of funding, William Quigly of Clearstone and Ken Elefant of Opus and Siva Kumar, a chief executive of TheFind.com will join the SPOCK board of directors.
Google, MSN, and Yahoo! will be competitors of SPOCK, but those search engines are not people-focused. Another potential competitor of SPOCK mentioned by CNET is ZoomInfo. Michael Kanellos of CNET writes “in my own personal tests of ZoomInfo’s deluxe service, I found more information about individuals on Google than through their service.” I wholeheartedly agree with that. I conducted a search on my own name on ZoomInfo and only result found was a Undersecretary-General of Pittsford Mendon High School.
Eye-Fi[
