Presentes Criativos - Uzinga Design. Elo7 Inks Funding from Insight Venture Partners. InBed.me Picks Up A $1.2M Seed Round. (TechCrunch) March 15, 2012 – The success of Airbnb may have unleashed a wave of attention on companies using social media and the Internet to disrupt how travel is planned and booked: today, “social” hostel booking site inBed.me is announcing that it has raised a seed round of $1.2 million, from a list of investors including Ventech, Quotidian Ventures, CAP Ventures and founders Fabrice Grinda (OLX, Zingy) and Dave Lerner (Columbia Venture Labs, Venture Studio), among others.
While Airbnb’s main focus is on offering rooms in private houses, inBed.me has turned its attention to the budget/student travel market, specifically the hostels that are the mainstay accommodation in that sector. Users can use the site to book rooms, share their bookings with others, and see who else is staying in the same place to plan a meetup in advance. That will see the integration of Hostelworld’s database into inBed.me’s system to allow people to book beds in some 25,000 hostels. Sir Richard Branson & Flipboard Investor Jerry Murdock Put Nearly $1M Into MySocialCloud.
MySocialCloud is a new, and somewhat stealthy, startup that aims to organize your online life through bookmarking, stream consolidation, filtering and auto-login capabilities.
The service, which until now has only been available to users at a handful of colleges out in California, has some pretty impressive backers, too. The startup has raised “just shy of a million” from Sir Richard Branson and Jerry Murdock, also an investor in Flipboard and Twitter. The idea for the service was prompted by one of those awful moments in life: a hard drive crash. Explains MySocialCloud’s founder and CEO Scott Ferreira, after the event, he realized that the worst thing that he would lose off his MacBook was an Excel spreadsheet where he kept a list of his 500 usernames and passwords to various services. How The JOBS Act Could Change Startup Investing Forever. [Editor's note: The following article is by Ryan Caldbeck, the founder of CircleUp, an equity based crowdfunding website.
He clearly has something to gain from the topic -- but as an investor, he's also particularly well-informed. So we're running this guest post. But, for reference, check out these criticisms by the SEC and some politicians.] Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the JOBS Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at supporting small businesses by making it easier for them to access capital. While many people are debating the impact of the bill on investors, what seems lost in the debate is what types of businesses are likely to benefit, and how crowdfunding can change the way we all think about early stage investing. Today, startup investing is reserved for the 1%.
Crowdfunding will open up new funding possibilities for these neglected areas of the economy. Ashton Kutcher, Founders Fund Go In For $775K On ‘OpenTable For Stylists’ StyleSeat. OpenTable for hair stylists and other salon professionals StyleSeat is announcing a raise of $775K this morning, from enviable angel investors Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade, Founders Fund (!)
And actress Sophia Bush. The round will be added on to the company’s previous $700K from another Valley “Who’s Who?” Koding Raises $2 Million To Let Developers Program From Anywhere. Programers should spend their time crushing code, not on setting up domains and configuring editors.
San Francisco startup Koding has raised a $2 million Series A from RTP Ventures and Greycroft to eradicate friction for programmers with its browser-based cloud development platform and developer community. As of today Koding lets you program remotely in a wide variety of languages, quickly configure WordPress, Joomla, and web servers, and meet other developers who can be instantly authorized to work on your environment. Developers can even ditch localhost and get a free hosted server to work on. Koding was founded in mid-2011 when co-founder & CEO Devrim Yasar discovered how tedious it was to get a development project started. When he launched the first iteration of Koding that handled basic tasks like domain and FTP setup, 10,000 developers jumped on board in the first two weeks.
Social Monitoring Service Brandwatch Raises $6 Million To Expand In US. Social media monitoring platform Brandwatch has raised $6 million from Nauta Capital and current shareholders, including PR distribution company Gorkana Group.
Brandwatch’s system reads and summarizes what’s being said on the web about brands, people and products against defined keywords. The brands can then respond, but also analyze trends, campaigns and competitors. This is a space typically populated by the likes of Radian 6 and to some extent others such as Conversocial. Carles Ferrer of Nauta joins the board with colleague Al Sisto. Brandwatch now plans to expand further in the the US and EMEA, Latin America and South East Asia. Palmer says “we started as a small bunch of geeks that lived by the sea with a passion for technology and innovation… The funding means we can focus on leading the market with innovative products and hire more of the right people.”
Intel Capital Invests $21 Million In Swedish Eye-Tracking Tech Company Tobii. Identity Theft Protection Company LifeLock Raises $100M From Kleiner, Symantec; Acquires ID Analytics. Identity theft protection company LifeLock has raised $100 million in new equity funding from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Symantec Corporation and River Street Management.
Additional investors included Industry Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Keating Capital, Inc. and Wasatch Advisors’ venture capital arm CrossCreek Capital. This brings LifeLock’s total funding to $178 million. LifeLock says that the new funding has been used towards the acquisition of ID Analytics, which develops a technology that predicts the likelihood of identity risk associated with an application for credit.
Not only does the company evaluate for risk, but similar to LifeLock, also provides consumer protection services against identity theft. The company partners with financial organizations and telecommunications companies. Social Travel: InBed.me, An Airbnb For Hostel Hoppers, Picks Up A $1.2M Seed Round. The success of Airbnb may have unleashed a wave of attention on companies using social media and the Internet to disrupt how travel is planned and booked: today, “social” hostel booking site inBed.me is announcing that it has raised a seed round of $1.2 million, from a list of investors including Ventech, Quotidian Ventures, CAP Ventures and founders Fabrice Grinda (OLX, Zingy) and Dave Lerner (Columbia Venture Labs, Venture Studio), among others.
While Airbnb’s main focus is on offering rooms in private houses, inBed.me has turned its attention to the budget/student travel market, specifically the hostels that are the mainstay accommodation in that sector. Users can use the site to book rooms, share their bookings with others, and see who else is staying in the same place to plan a meetup in advance. That will see the integration of Hostelworld’s database into inBed.me’s system to allow people to book beds in some 25,000 hostels. Google Offers Partners With Signpost, The “AdSense For Local Commerce” Today, Google is announcing a partnership with a NY-based company called Signpost, which will now run deals on the Google Offers website and in subscriber emails.
Signpost, which has $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Spark Capital and other angels, has been flying under the radar in the local deals space. The company recently tripled its employee base and now claims revenue has been growing at a rate of 100% month-over-month. The company also recently announced a partnership with Nimble Commerce, and says it has other partnerships in the works as well. According to Signpost CEO Stuart Wall, the company has shifted its business model since we covered them back in fall 2010. 500Friends Raises $4.5M Series A For Its Social Loyalty Platform. 500Friends, the social loyalty solution for e-commerce retailers, is announcing it has completed a $4.5 million Series A round led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from Intel Capital as well as company CEO (and angel investor) Justin Yoshimura.
Founded in 2010, and launched in summer 2011, YC-backed 500Friends’ LoyaltyPlus service allows merchants to reward their loyal customers who are tweeting about their purchases, posting to Facebook, referring friends, writing reviews, signing up for rewards programs, and more, all through a white label offering that can be integrated onto the retailer’s own site, on either web or mobile. As a part of the new funding, Eric Chin, General Partner with Crosslink Capital, joins 500friends’ Board of Directors. 23-year old Yoshimura, a high school dropout, is the youngest founder that Crosslink and Intel have ever backed. Yoshimura still fondly recalls growing the lemonade stand he launched at age 12 to 25 locations by age 15. General Atlantic And Sequoia Put $60M In Enterprise Cloud Consultancy Appirio. Cloud solution provider and consultancy Appirio is announcing $60 million in new funding led by private equity firm General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.
This brings Appirio’s total investment to over $70 million. Previous investors include Salesforce. SEO Service BrightEdge Raises $12.6M. BrightEdge, a startup that offers tools for large companies to manage their search engine rankings, has raised $12.6 million in a Series C round of funding. The round was led by new investor Intel Capital, with participation from existing backers Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Illuminate Ventures.
CEO Jim Yu says that brings BrightEdge’s total funding to a little more than $21 million, of which it has only spent $3 million. With millions of dollars still in the bank, Yu says BrightEdge wasn’t really looking to raise another round, but this seemed like “a great opportunity” to support the company’s rapid growth — he wants to double its headcount (for the second year in a row) and open offices in London and New York. Mobile Payment Startup BOKU Raises A $35M Round. NEA, Telefonica Among The Investors. Another sign of the significant investment and attention going into the mobile payments market and the competition that is heating up among the bigger players: BOKU is today announcing a significant new round of funding totaling $35 million, to be used to continue building out its payments business.
Of that amount, TechCrunch understands that $30 million will be coming from VCs and angels led by new investor NEA, with participation also from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Dag Ventures, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. And $5 million will be coming from a new strategic investor, the carrier Telefonica. This brings the total amount invested in the company to $75 million. Previous rounds saw BOKU raise $13 million in June 2009 and $25 million in December 2009. The new funding will be used to help build out BOKU’s new products beyond the virtual goods business that has been its bread and butter up to now. Square Competitor? Cashier Live Launches POS App For iPhone. Axado: o caminho mais curto ao melhor frete. Interessante o serviço que o Marcelo Amorim me apresentou: um site interessante para quem vende produtos físicos pela Internet que cadastra transportadoras e oferece um simulador de fretes para que o cliente calcule e compare os preços de cada transporte.
O site deixa ainda o cliente dar nota para as transportadoras. O Axado é mais do que um comparador de serviços de frete e encomendas, é uma solução fundamental para se consultar antes da contração de um serviço prestado por uma transportadora. Além de comparar preços, prazos, formas de pagamento e qualificações de transportadoras, ao utilizar o Axado você paga um valor justo pelo serviço de frete optando pela oferta de transporte de mercadorias e encomendas mais adequada às necessidades dos clientes. A solução proposta pelo Axado possibilita que você não perca tempo ligando ou enviando e-mails para diversas transportadoras para obter informações sobre uma determinada necessidade de transporte. UK Researchers Plan Mobile Real-Time Sign Language Translation App. With real-time translation of text common on the web and instantaneous speech-to-text gaining popularity, it seems that transliteration is cool again. But less obvious, and more difficult, methods of input are yet to be implemented.
Case in point: sign language. The complicated and often contextual gestures form a vast visual vocabulary that isn’t easily captured or interpreted. ‘Social’ Investment Network eToro Is Picking Up Another $15 Million From Spark, Others. eToro, the investment network that uses real-time features to let users follow and trade based on other users’ activities, has raised another $15 million in funding in a venture round led by Spark Capital with participation from existing investors BRM, Guy Gamzu and Jonathan Kolber.
The new round takes the total amount of funding in the Israel-based company to $33.9 million. The Currency Cloud Secures $4m To Disrupt The Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange Market. Last year at GeeknRolla a little known startup appeared in the demo pit, but went on to win the admiration of judges in the startup competition. Startup Cloudwords attacks $30B translation market — Cloud Computing News. TxtRoo Launches A Yelp For The Feature Phone Market. Conheça o Fashionera Place, o Primeiro Shopping Online Brasileiro Focado em Moda. A Inter.net, multinacional de internet full service com sede nos Estados Unidos, anuncia o lançamento do Fashionera Place (ou F.Place), primeiro shopping online brasileiro focado no segmento de moda feminina, masculina e kids.
Instagram reaches 27 million registered users, shows off upcoming Android app. Instagram, the photo-sharing app that has taken a definitive lead on iOS, said it has surpassed 27 million registered users today at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Co-founder Kevin Systrom didn’t disclose daily active users during his fireside chat with TechCrunch editor Alexia Tsotsis.
But he did say of all the users who have been active in the last week, 67 percent of them used the app yesterday. “It’s Facebook-level engagement that we’re seeing,” Systrom said. Social Discovery Apps Like Highlight Are A Recruiter’s Wet Dream At SXSW. The history of location-based social discovery apps is a lot longer than the current hype surrounding Highlight and Glancee, currently darlings of the South by Southwest festival.