“While Flash content is ubiquitous on the Web, the process of creating and distributing Flash content was time consuming and required specialized skills. And integrating Flash with third party Web services and components has been near impossible. With Sprout, anyone can quickly create rich, Flash-based content that incorporates advanced components and Web services, and distribute them on the Web,”stated Carnet Williams, co-founder/CEO of Sprout.
Sprout is a platform that makes it easy to create widgets. The company has recently raised $5 million in Series B to enhance features from Polaris Venture Partners and Mitch Kapor. Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris joined the Sprout board of directors as a result of the investment. Mitch Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3.
Creating widgets on Sprout utilizes drag+drop methods. Users can drag+drop video, audio, images, and other interactive services built in. Built-in interactive features include Twitter, PollDaddy, and Ribbit.
Sprout is based in San Francisco, Calif. and Honululu, Hawaii.
Information Source:
[1] Sprout Press Release: Sprout Closes $5 Million Series B Led by Polaris Venture Partners
“The opportunity is to make it easier for marketers to spend money online,” stated Konrad Feldman, the CEO of Quantcast. “Panel-based research doesn’t work well in a fragmented media.”
Now backed with over $25 million in funding, Quantcast is the only free internet ratings service. Quantcast can measure widgets and other Flash media to show how often they are viewed everywhere. The investors in this round of funding include Polaris Venture Partners and Founders Fund.
With this round of funding, Quantcast will be ramping up their services and improve its accuracy. Essetially, Quantcast is gearing up for taking on the bigger names of rating services like comScore and Nielsen. Over 20,000 clients use Quantcast including Fox, CBS, Accuweather, and IDG.
Down the road, Quantcast will most likely act as a broker for pairing up target advertisements with web sites that have relevant audiences. “There are going to be big changes to how the business operates,” added Feldman. “We aren’t going to be talking about GRPs anymore. It’s going to be audience segments. There’s going to be a massive transformation over the next five to 10 years.”
“JIB JAB!” This is what two animated men have been saying for the last 8 years; one man has a middle-parted comb-over that would make Donald Trump jealous and the other has frizzy hair and a thick moustache. I would say that JibJab.com is one of the first web sites that I saw that truly showed the power of Adobe (formely Macromedia) Flash.* The $3 million Series B funding was brought in by Polaris Venture Partners.
Polaris Venture Partners is also an investor in Automattic, the company behind blog platform, Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the most popular blog platforms and is used to power Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, GigaOM, and Mashable.
The first round of funding for JibJab was around $3.4 million. This brings the total amount for JibJab to be $6.4 million. What will JibJab do with this money? Most likely they’ll keep building the same funny and witty videos that we’ve been seeing for years. And also there are more eCards in the pipeline. There is also a social network being built around JibJab where users submit… user generated content.
If I was JibJab, I would take some of those new-found earnings, buy a big bottle of bubbly, and toast to another 8 years of fun times on the Internets. Here’s a sample video clip produced by “JIB JAB!” around 2004.
*Side note: The first web site that really showed me the power of Flash was Eye4u.com, which hasn’t changed the look of their site since the day I saw it for the first time almost 10 years ago. Consistency points!
[1] ReadWriteWeb: JibJab Raises $3m More For Video Content, Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Heavy.com was believed to have raised around $12 million in December, but instead, sources say that $20 million in funding has been confirmed. The $20 million in funding from Polaris Ventures is Heavy.com’s fifth round of investment. Last year, Polaris had invested $10 million in Heavy.com and with this new round of funding, Heavy.com plans on expanding internationally. Today, Heavy.com has a good Alexa rank at 1,166 and a PageRank at 7/10.
Heavy.com, the NYC based video company is known for its humorous video collection such as Superficial Friends, a news coverage program called Heavy News, Worst Music Videos, and a parody of VH1’s Behind the Music, Behind the Worst Music. Heavy.com had announced that their 2006 revenues had grown 350% from the previous year and by looking at the homepage, it appears that Cingular and Microsoft have been promoting products along with the movie, Snakes on a Plane.
While I believe that the website is fascinating and creative, I found myself not thoroughly impressed by the load time. Most of the website is built on Adobe Flash and Java Applets. The Flash loader seems to have some minor bugs. The first time I visited the website, Heavy.com worked completely fine for me, but when I visited the homepage again, the Flash pre-load scenes seemed to freeze up and then finally load up at a slow pace. When testing the load time speed, I was using a reliable, wireless T1 connection. I would blame part of the slow load time on the Applet that is being used.
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.
“JIB JAB!” This is what two animated men have been saying for the last 8 years; one man has a middle-parted comb-over that would make Donald Trump jealous and the other has frizzy hair and a thick moustache. I would say that 
