Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Rajeev Motwani

Disney Buys Out Tapulous

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:21:14 +0000

Disney has acquired Tapulous. Tapulous is the company behind the Tap Tap Revenge game series founded by Bart Decrem. Decrem and COO Andrew Lacy will join Disney as VPs. Tapulous raised a total of $1.8 million from angel investors Marc Benioff, Jeff Clavier, Andy Bechtolsheim, and the late Rajeev Motwani. It is likely that Tapulous will be rolled into Disney Interactive Studios, the subsidiary that creates Disney games for Xbox, the PS3, etc. [TechCrunch]

SimplyHired Raises $4.6 Million From IDG and Foundation

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:30:54 +0000

SimplyHired is a job search engine that aggregates listings from various websites. SimplyHired is based in Mountain View, California and has raised an additional round of funding at $4.6 million, led by IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital. This brings SimplyHired to a total funding amount of $22.3 million.

Previous investors include Gautam Godhwani, Peter Weck, Anil Godhwani, Jerry Crowley, the late Rajeev Motwani, Kanwal Rekhi, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, James Hong, Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Fox Interactive Media, IDG Ventures, and Foundation Capital.

Fox Interactive Media launched a classifieds website through MySpace since they made their investment in SimplyHired. SimplyHired stated that they have had positive operating cash flow over the past four quarters. The company had revenue growth for 16 consecutive quarters.

The additional funding will be used to hire additional employees and for international expansion. SimplyHired syndicates their technology to LinkedIn, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Plaxo, and CNNMoney.

[via paidContent]

Google Advisor and Silicon Valley Investor Rajeev Motwani Passes Away

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:55:55 +0000

This past Friday, a highly revered Silicon Valley investor Rajeev Motwani had passed away at the age of 47 in his Atherton, California home. The cause of death is currently unknown and he was found at the bottom of his backyard swimming pool.

Motwani is best known for being the advisor of Sergey Brin and Larry Page as they were founding Google. Motwani was an algorithms expert and mathematical theory professor while Brin and Page were students at Stanford University. Motwani helped Page and Brin discover the possibility of analyzing the web as an interconnected graph.

“When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. Even though I was just one of hundreds of graduate students in the department, he always made the time and effort to help. Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational,” wrote Sergey Brin on his blog.

Prof. Motwani had written and contributed to several books and received the Gödel Prize. Motwani had even invested in several companies such as Tapulous and TokBox.

He was born in Jammu, India and grew up in New Delhi. After that he received a Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. In 1988, he received a Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley and live around Silicon Valley since then. It is a tragic loss, but his contributions to the digital age will live on.

[via NYT]