Slide, Inc., the company created by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is taking some heat from The Sun U.K.  The Sun U.K. is blaming Slide for a violent epidemic happening in London because in the SuperPoke application, users can virtually “shank” friends.

Slide immediately removed the “Shank” feature from the application.  “Slide does not condone violence whatsoever, and our SuperPoke! application is meant to foster fun, virtual communications between friends. We have removed this particular action as it misrepresents the SuperPoke! brand” stated a Slide spokesperson.

I agree that “Shanking” friends on the virtual application is distasteful, but I disagree with the way that The Sun reported the whole thing.  The Sun U.K. interviewed the uncle of Rob Knox, an actor who played Marcus Belby in the Harry Potter movies.  Rob Knox was killed by former classmate , Karl Bishop with a knife in front of a bar when trying to protect his little brother.  Knox’s uncle was quoted by The Sun:

“Wait until one of their family members is a victim of knife crime and then see what they say.  The stupidity of having this on their site is unbelievable. And they deliberately use the street term ‘shanked’, which is even worse. They are targeting the kids who are on street corners carrying knives.”

The first sentence of that quote was very distasteful.  Violence happens everywhere.  When something bad happens, media sensationalists have a tendency to try and find scapegoats.  I believe that Slide is being wrongfully accused here.  Some of the SuperPoke features can easily be offensive, but at the end of the day we are all human and a majority of us have control of our own actions.

Related Links:
1. AllFacebook
2. The Sun UK article
3. Slide.com

As you give a goofy look at the camera pointing at you in a photo kiosk at an entertainment venue, you begin to wonder what captions and background you’ll use.  Now take this concept, slap it on the Internet in the form of a widget that can be Facebooked or MySpaced, and you’re ready to raise $50 million.

Business-savvy Internet entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder, Max Levchin did exactly that, as mentioned in BusinessWeek.  Slide raised $50 million and increased their valuation to $500 million.  This fourth round of investment was provided by Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price.

Photo widget companies is a proven model for acquisition targets, but is also a proven model for its vulnerability of mooching on other social networks’ user base.  For example, Photobucket was acquired by News Corp. in May 2007 at a price of $250 million in cash.  But before the acquisition, MySpace completely blocked Photobucket from accessing their users because of an advertising violation before making a truce. 

Altogether, Slide has raised over $75 million including investments from other PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel and venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla.  Thiel is an early investor of Facebook.  The other founders of Slide include Jared Kopf and Scott Banister, both also former PayPal employees.

Previous Slide coverage is available at: http://pulse2.com/category/slide/.

RockYou! is a company that designs widgets known for appearing all over MySpace.  The company was previously placed in the shadow of Photobucket because of the controversies that were happening between Photobucket and MySpace. 

But now RockYou! is boasting 150 million widgets served by 10 million registered users and now receiving Series B funding.  After Photobucket was acquired by MySpace, there are now talks of other widget company acquisitions which makes the funding of RockYou! seem a lot more promising. 

The  competition between RockYou! and Slide is heating up and what happens in the near future will definetely be interesting.

Photobucket isn’t the only on the block to be acquired by MySpace.  According to TechCrunch, there are talks of Flektor getting acquired as well.  Flektor allows users to create slideshows that include effects, transitions, photos, text, and video.  The amount rumored for Flektor is $10-$20 million.

Slide.com, the photo slideshow website has raised a third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund. According to VentureBeat, the amount of funding for the third round is undisclosed, but there are rumors circulating that it is over the second round of $8 million. Based on third round funding estimations, Slide is currently worth near or over $20 million.

Creating a slideshow with Slide is done in 3 simple steps from the arrange page. The three steps are: 1.) Create a Slide Show, 2.) Save Slide Show, and 3.) Share Slide Show. There are 4 presets to scroll pictures: Sliding, Stars, Collage, and Checker. Photos can be directly imported from your PC hard drive, Photobucket account, Flickr account, MySpace account, or direct URLs. There are also several themes and sizes to alter these slide shows.

One of the co-founders of Slide is Max Levchin, a co-founder and former CTO of PayPal. Levchin is from Kiev, Ukraine, then moved to Chicago to attend UIUC. After PayPal went public in 2002 and his 2.3% stake was converted into $34 million after the eBay acquired PayPal, Levchin started Slide in 2004.

Levchin had also created Yelp, a review-centric social network. Previous investors include Founders Fund, BlueRun Ventures, and Peter Theil, the other co-founder of PayPal. Levchin aims to make money by adding sponsored pictures in slide show image crawls. Currently, Slide and Yelp are based in San Francisco. SFGate.com has a detailed history of Levchin’s past.