Stack Overflow is a website where users can ask technical and programming languages. The website has just raised $6 million in their first round of funding led by Union Square Ventures. Other investors include Ron Conway, Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon, Bob Pasker, Micah Siegel, Naval Ravikant, Nirav Tolia, and Joshua Schachter.
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Incubator company idealab is launching a new startup company called Tweetup. The man behind Tweetup is Bill Gross. Gross is the original founder of GoTo.com. GoTo.com was renamed to Overture, a company that Yahoo! purchased. Yahoo! was able to leverage Overture patents by suing Google and settling for a settlement of 2.7 million shares.
Tweetup is a Twitter search engine that has an advertising platform. When you search for tweets using Tweetup, the search engine will use an algorithm to place important tweets at the top and contextual ads on the side.
If you integrate Tweetup into your own website, you can share 50-50 revenue with idealab. Tweetup already has an established partnership with Answers.com.
Investors have put in about $3.5 million into this idea. The investors include Index Ventures, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Betaworks, Jason Calacanis, Steve Case, and Jeff Jarvis. Danny Rimer of Index Ventures has a board seat at Tweetup. [TechCrunch]
Buddy Media is a social media company that runs campaigns for major brands. They can handle brand management, advertising, and relationships with PR agencies with social marketing tools. Some of their clients include Microsoft, Anheuser Busch, FedEx, and Time Inc.
Buddy Media has just raised $2 million in funding from SoftBank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Ron Conway, and Bay Partners. Some of Buddy Media’s newest tools include the abilities to create and track Facebook Fan pages to drive a campaign. There is also a Twitter Management System. [TechCrunch]
Hunch is a startup service that allows users to answer questions using crowd-sourcing techniques. Khosla Ventures is rumored to be leading a $10-$12 million round of funding in Hunch. Other investors include General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway. Hunch was started by Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr. Chris Dixon is also a co-founder in Hunch. Dixon started SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee in 2006. Hunch receives about 1.2 million uniques per month according to internal numbers. [AllThingsD]
Chomp.com is an iPhone application recommendation service that has about 300,000 users that left about 1.5 million reviews. Now Chomp has raised about $2 million in funding.
Chomp also has an iPhone application that allows users to click Like or Dislike for applications. Based on your reviews Chomp puts together a list of other apps you might like.
The $2 million in funding is from Bluerun Ventures, David Lee, and Brian Pokomy. Chomp previously raised $556,000 from Ron Conway, Auren Hoffman, Aydin Senkut. [VentureBeat]
URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]
Ron Conway is one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Some of his investments include Yammer, Gowalla, DailyBooth, Foursquare, Bit.ly, Y-Combinator, Seesmic, Twitter, Facebook, DanceJam, Mint.com, Digg, Google, Simply Hired, and Answers Corporation. Conway is now raising $10 million for his SV Angel investment company. Conway averages about 4 investments per month. [TechCrunch]
Vook is an Alameda, California based video book publishing service. Vook intends to connect text with video and social media. Vook has partnerships in place with HarperStudio, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette Filipacchi Media. Vook has just raised $2.5 million in seed capital from Ron Conway, Kenneth Lerer, Maples Investments, Baseline Ventures, and Founder Collective.
