Crenk

Back in early November of last year, I preempted the launch of Spottt. Spottt is a free link exchange between sites via a 125 x 125 widget. Spottt is developed by the guys over at Adbrite, so they have a product that needs to work and actually launch into something worthwhile. Since Adbrite has had a lot of VC Funding, they will be really expected to not just launch a product for the sake of it, and actually turn it into a commercial entity.

This brings me to the all important point, is Spottt actually going anywhere? Currently, the site is so simplistic and has a lot of competitors doing exactly the same thing. So where is it unique selling point? If I was the VC in Adbrite who put in a slice of the money, then I would expect an out strategy for Spottt and within a year or two at the most. Will this actually happen? and what features are really missing from Spottt or sites like Spottt?

In the last 6 to 12 months i have heard a lot of talk about the website, TheFunded.  I have seen the site all over the blogosphere and on the BBC, but i really dont understand why.

The site lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs. It has been reported by Venturebeat that TheFunded has been removing posted comments about VCs for more favourable ones.

This all being said after looking through TheFunded more indepth, it really doesnt seem to be a great deal of people actually using the site. It seems to have 6,000 or so members and crap all is actually happening in terms of activity. The site to me seems like an interesting place to go and read up on your possible VCs, however im sure if someone was going to take 10% of my company i would do a lot more research than just looking at this site. If that is the case what is the point of the site when it tells you all basic information about the VCs that can be found in other places and then gives you a rating of the VCs for only a very very limited amount of users who actually use the site?

It has been reported over at 901am that Adconion, an online advertising network, has secured the largest financial funding of an online media venture in European history. The investment of $80 million was led by Index Ventures, who were joined by existing investor Wellington Partners, and represents the first investment made from Index’s recently announced growth fund. Index partners’ Dominique Vidal, former CEO of Yahoo! Europe, and Giuseppe Zocco, the firm’s co-founder, will join Adconion’s board of directors.

It has been reported by the WSJ and Techcrunch that Glam Media has just taken $85 million in financing. To-date Glam has raised over $115 million over four rounds. Investors included Hubert Burda Media, GLG Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Accel, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Information Capital. The valuation, as expected, was in the half billion dollar range.

Glam Media are still yet to get into the profit range, in 2007 they lost around $3.7 million on $21 million in revenues and project for 2008 will be their first year in profit, $40 million profit on $150 million revenues. This seems to be to be quite a large jump for Glam and im not too sure if these figures for 2008 are too pessimistic.

Mixx has just announced that they have taken $2 million in Series B funding from InterSouth Partners. Mixx is a user generated content system, similar to Digg, Reddit and Propeller. Total funding to date is $3.5 million, in which they have high profile investors on board, such as the LA Times.

London-based family tree social network Kindo today announced a round of funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI). The Estonian investment company joins seed investors Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stafan Glanzer, the initial investor of Last.fm.

Users can build their own free family tree, invite whoever is a part of it, and stay in touch with their loved ones. Unlike a lot of English-only social networks these days, Kindo has a particular focus on the international landscape. The site currently supports 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The investment round was led by Eileen Broch, who stated in the press release, “In the short time since they’ve been live, Kindo has proven that they know how to build a product that can be embraced by young and old alike. It is already loved by families around the world, which is what appealed to us the most.“

Box.net has raised $6 million in a Series B financing led by venture capital firm U.S. Venture Partners, and includes Box.net Series A investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The capital will be used to continue company expansion, including the development and marketing of new services and products.

The New York Times reports that Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company. Many other have reported on this round of funding, so take a look at what has been said at GigaOM, RWW and Techcrunch.

The news of the day must be that Google has acquired Jaiku. Jaiku is a microblogging site similar to Pownce and Twitter. It is a bit of a surprise that Google has opted to purchase Jaiku (which hails from Finland) instead of Twitter (the market leader) or Pownce (the new kid on the block with the best user interface).

Have a look at what everyone else has been saying about the deal:

• Jaiku
• Techcrunch
• CenterNetworks
• Mashable
• Rev2
  

Twitter has not long got Series A Funding, so it would have been rare for them to be purchased. Pownce on the other hand seems to be on the downhill slide. Since their highly publicised launch Pownce has never lived up to expectations and with the recent news about Kevin Rose potentially moving Pownce features over to Digg, it has just never recovered. If you look at Alexa data on Pownce you will notice it wont be too long until it dies a death, on the quick slide down. Its seems that Jaiku was an important match with Google because it has more of a presence in activity streams and mobile presence and those are the markets Google is trying to gain more market share. It that last week Google also launched Adsense for mobile, so this will be a nice addition to boost the start of that new service.

I was read ShoeMoney yesterday and he reviewed a new advertising product that I had to mention on here.

Welcome to the Rubicon Project. The Rubicon Project is a new product that has already received $6 million in funding and is based around the very competitive market of online advertising. About a year ago I had an idea of starting an advertising network based around an open marketplace, since then this has been done several times over and it seems when someone comes up with a new idea it is only a month or so before there are 10 of them in the market.

The Rubicon Project however is a unique advertising model that actually has ties with over 300 ad networks, including the big boys like Google, Yahoo and ValueClick.

The Rubicon Project ensures your website is making as much money as possible by optimizing it for not only the highest paying advertising company but also for demographic/geographical data.

Now unlike a few selected people I am still waiting for my Invite to their private beta. However in the mean time make sure you head over to the Rubicon Project and have a look at their 3 min. video.

So far in the last week there seems to be a lot of companies receiving funding and here are a few:

• Revolution Money - Raised $50 million. Investment comes from Citi, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.
• Demand Media - Raised $100 million. Founded by the former CEO of Intermix Media, Richard Rosenblatt, Demand Media is in the business of buying domain names with organic traffic and adding social networking features to them. They also own domain registrars eNom and BulkRegister. Funding from Goldman Sachs, 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors.
• Project Playlist - Raised $3 million. Investment was from undisclosed partners.
• Huffington Post - Raised $5 million. Investors included Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners,Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and CEO and co-founder Ken Lerer.