Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Paul Buchheit

Socialcam Raises Funding From 46 Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:38:13 +0000

Socialcam is an iPhone app that spun off of video sharing website Justin.tv last year as part of Y Combinators winter 2012 class. Socialcam has raised seed funding from 46 well known angel investors. Socialcam’s fiercest competitor is Viddy. They have been fighting back and forth as the top Photo & Video app recently. Socialcam has reportedly surpassed the 20 million user mark. Below is a list of all of the investors involved as compiled by TechCrunch.

Brian Chesky – CEO, Airbnb
Jonathan Abrams – Partner, Founders Den
Jason Johnson – Partner, Founders Den
Zachary Bogue – Partner, Founders Den
Michael Levit – Partner, Founders Den
Jeff Kapel – Assistant Coach, Duke Basketball
Ari Emmanuel & Jason Lublin – WME
Trajan Langdon – Retired NBA Basketball Player
Yuri Milner & Felix Shpilman – Startfund
Troy Carter & Allison Streuter – Atom Factory
SV Angel – Ron, David, Kevin, Topher, Robert
Crunchfund – Michael, MG, Patrick
Paul Buchheit – Inventor of Gmail, Founder FriendFeed, Partner Y-Combinator
Garry Tan – Partner Y-Combinator, Co-Founder Posterous
Alexis Ohanian – Partner Y-Combinator, Co-Founder Reddit
Harj Taggar – Partner Y-Combinator, Co-Founder Auctomatic
Paul Graham – Co-founder Y-Combinator
Jessica Livingston – Partner Y-Combinator
Tim Draper – Draper Associates
Stewart Alsop – Alsop Louie
Erik Moore – Angel investor in Zappos
Justin Kan – Co-Founder EXEC, Co-Founder Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Emmett Shear – CEO & Co-Founder Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Kyle Vogt – Co-Founder Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Matt Ocko – Angel Investor
A-Grade Investments – Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Chris Hollod
Ronny Conway – Andreessen Horowitz
Justin Caldbeck – Lightspeed
Shervin Pishevar – Menlo Ventures
Laurene Powell Jobs & Stacey Rubin – Emerson Collective
Ram Shiram – Sherpalo, Angel Investor in Google
Shane Battier – NBA Basketball player, Miami Heat
Michael Rapino & Michael Abrams – Live Nation

“YouTube For Businesses” Service Vidyard Raises $1.65 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:08:17 +0000

Vidyard is a company that is considered a “YouTube for Businesses.” The company has raised $1.65 million from SoftTech VC, Jawed Karim (YouTube co-founder), Y Combinator, SV Angel, iNovia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Paul Buchheit, Vivi Nevo, David Nizkad, Dennis Kavelman, and several others.

Vidyard launched in August and is intended for businesses to use as a marketing tool. Vidyard is similar to YouTube, but their video upload services links to the brand’s website rather than YouTube itself. Vidyard also has real-time analytics about embed performance and there is ad free video hosting. Video players can be branded and there is instant search technology.

Vidyard allows you to upload a video file or a video from YouTube. Then you can add a custom thumbnail and use 10 different player skins with different sizes and colors. You can also enable viral sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

Vidyard has also added the ability to push video content to YouTube channels, Facebook walls, and Twitter feeds today. You can also pull in YouTube analytics into your Vidyard Dashboard.

[TechCrunch]

MemSQL Raises $2.1 Million From Multiple Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:41:11 +0000

MemSQL has raised $2.1 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Start Fund, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Ashton Kutcher, Paul Bucheit, Sam Altman, Guy Oseary, and several others. MemSQL will be using the funding to move into a new office in downtown San Francisco. MemSQL is an in-memory database system that is 30 times faster than relational databases. MemSQL focuses on online transaction processing.

Grubwithus Raises $1.6 Million To Encourage Dinner Dates

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 08 May 2011 21:16:40 +0000

Grubwithus is a social dining service where you pick a restaurant in a city that you like and buy a ticket for a meal at a set price. To really make the service work, other people have to buy a meal at the same place and you can coordinate a time to meet at the restaurant.

Grubwithus spun out of Y Combinator last year and raised $1.6 million from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, New Enterprise Associations, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Vivi Nevo, Matt Cutts, Maynard Webb, Elad Gil, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, and Start Fund.

Grubwithus also highlights charity and raffle dinners on their website. Grubwithus is currently available in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, D.C., and L.A. They will soon be available in Boston and Seattle. Chicago is their biggest city as they started there. They plan to hire more people to their 8 person team as a result of the funding.

[TechCrunch]

MyLikes Raises $5.6 Million In Round Led By Khosla Ventures

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:51:09 +0000

MyLikes has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Lightspeed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures also participated in this round. Seed investor Paul Buchheit and Alex Kinnier is joining the MyLikes board of directors. MyLikes aims to connect social influencers with advertising companies to endorse products on social networks. [TechCrunch]

1000Memories Raises $2.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:49:39 +0000

1000Memories has raised $2.5 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners. Angel investors Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Paul Buchheit, Mike Maples, and Chris Sacca also participated in this round. David Thacker of Greylock will be joining the board of directors at 1000Memories. 1000Memories is a website where loved ones can express words about people in their lives that have passed away. The appeal of 1000Memories is that it does not have ads and the website design is stylish. [TechCrunch]

Y Combinator Hires Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar As Partners

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:26:33 +0000

Paul Buchheit (L) and Harj Taggar (R)
Y Combinator has hired Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar as partners of the investment company. Buchheit was responsible for Gmail, the original AdSense prototype, and even came up with Google’s catch phrase “Don’t be evil.” After leaving Google, he launched FriendFeed and sold it to Facebook. Harjeet founded Auctomatic and sold it to Live Current Media in 2008. [Y Combinator Blog]

Rapportive Raises $1 Million From Several Angel Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:28:44 +0000

Rapportive is a startup that created a plugin for making GMail work better. It provides contextual information about your GMail contacts. As a result, Rapportive has raised $1 million in seed funding from several angel investors.

The investors include Jason Calacanis, Scott Banister, Paul Buchheit, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, and Roy Rodenstein. Other investors include 500Startups (a fund created by Dave McClure), Nivi & Naval Ravikant’s VentureHackers angel fund, Charles River Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and BOLDstart Ventures. Rapportive is a Y-Combinator company.

The plugin that Rapportive created is a browser plugin that displays information about your contacts in the GMail sidebar. It replaces the ads in the sidebar. The information about the contact includes profile photos, occupations, and social network links. Rapportive was founded by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann, and Sam Stokes.

[TechCrunch]

Facebook Announces Agreement To Acquire FriendFeed

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:04:28 +0000

Facebook has announced today that they will be acquiring FriendFeed. This is not a shocker because Facebook previously made an attempt to buy out Twitter for $100 million in cash and the $400 million in stock. Over the last year, Facebook has rolled several FriendFeed-like features into the social network. One of the features they took from FriendFeed was the concept of “Like.”

One of FriendFeed’s popular features is that the more comments a story receives on the news feed, the more it floats up to the top. This concept is similar to the Reddit and Digg homepage. FriendFeed’s voting system is real-time, but Facebook’s news feed popular stories constantly has to be refreshed.

As part of the acquisition, FriendFeed’s team will be joining Facebook. This includes Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. Buchheit was responsible for early stage development of GMail over at Google.

Facebook sent out a press release regarding the acquisition. Check it out after the jump:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

[via TechCrunch]

ReMail iPhone App Has Text E-Mail Search

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:48:17 +0000

For those of you that own an iPhone and don’t like the fact that the e-mail function doesn’t have built-in search, a company called ReMail has fixed that issue by creating an application. ReMail started from the Y-Combinator incubation firm started by Paul Graham.

Currently the application is in Beta and is for free. While Apple’s iPhone Update 3.0 is expected to have a mail search feature built-in, it will not be as advanced as ReMail’s application. The iPhone will be able to search for keywords in the subject line of e-mails but not the body of the e-mails.

ReMail has a server that is optimized for e-mail search on the iPhone and offers suggestions as you type. For the most part you have to be connected to the Internet to use the search feature, but the application also has a caching system to pull messages stored from the last two weeks.

Gabor Cselle is the founder of ReMail. Gabor has done work on GMail and Xobni in the past. Recently he completed a Master’s thesis titled Organizing Email. FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh have also invested in ReMail.

The biggest drawback of ReMail is that they pull your e-mail and store it on their servers using IMAP. They do this to optimize rapid search. However messages are encrypted for your privacy and the company vows never to access or read any e-mails unless there is written permission by a larger authority.

The ReMail application is presently available for free when in Beta mode but after that there will be a $3.99 per month charge.

Below is a screenshot pulled from TechCrunch: