Facebook Job-Hunting App BranchOut Raises $6 Million From Accel And Super Angels. When you want to hang out with your friends online, you go to Facebook. When you want to look for a job, you go to LinkedIn. Well, maybe not for long. BranchOut, a startup that is essentially building a LinkedIn for Facebook, raised $6 million in a series A round. Several news sites reported the funding yesterday when the SEC filing came out, but other than Accel Partners, none of the investors were known.
Here they are: In addition to Accel, which led the round (partner Kevin Efrusy sits on the board), the other two VCs were Mike Maples of Floodgate and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners. Many of the angel investors are, appropriately enough, friends and former colleagues of BranchOut CEO Rick Marini, who was also a co-founder of Tickle. The basic idea of BranchOut is to find jobs through your real friends. Why is this better than LinkedIn?
Two Startups Point To Semantic Search’s Future. Your Life In 2020 - Forbes.com. The Next 10 Years - Forbes.com. IT - העתיד כבר כאן; המוח הוא המקלדת הבאה. State of the Art - Apps That Don’t Exist, but Should. Time To Meet Wavii, The Super Stealth, Super Awesome Startup Based In…Seattle? Get ready to start hearing a lot about a startup in Seattle called Wavii. There’s been some buzz building about them, mostly leaks from spurned venture capitalists who’ve desperately wanted to invest. And perhaps a spurned corporate dev exec or two from a variety of companies that have tried to acquire the little startup way before it was ready to launch. So what is Wavii? I don’t know because I haven’t seen it yet. But people who have seen the current alpha say it’s a stunningly original way to approach Natural Language Processing to an index of the web and retrieve highly useful pieces of information. and how that information relates to other information, current and historical.
The team was just a couple of people until just recently. When the tech is done, they aren’t going to launch a new search engine like Powerset or Fuil. It sounds exciting! The company has raised $2 million to date from high profile angel investors. Want to work at this super hot startup? Imaginatik - Innovation, Idea Management, Collective Intelligence Consulting & Software. Data Management Virtualization Startup Actifio Raises $8 Million. Actifio, a company that specializes in data management virtualization solutions, this morning announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding in a round led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. With the funds, Actifio intends to ramp up sales and marketing efforts.
Actifio isn’t giving much detail on how its technology works, or exactly what it does just yet, but here’s the formal pitch: Actifio delivers a next-generation data management solution with radical simplicity, unprecedented agility and up to an order of magnitude lower cost. Based on Data Management Virtualization (DMV) technology, Actifio transforms individual silos of point tools into a unified solution using efficient pipelined management across the data lifecycle.The company’s patent-pending DMV technology delivers unified data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity across the data lifecycle for virtual and physical IT environments.
טכנולוגי - רד בנד הישראלית רכשה את חברת וירטואל לוג'יקס. New startup uses Internet to predict the future. There’s no doubt that most people would like to know the future. It’s a desire that has kept palm readers, astrologists and tealeaf readers in business for hundreds of years. Now there’s a company called Recorded Future that says it can use information scoured from tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to predict the future. And before you laugh, it’s got some heavyweight backers including Google and the CIA. Recorded Future uses the term “temporal analytics” to describe what it does. Google with a difference In a white paper describing the underlying philosophy and overall system architecture of Recorded Future the company says that a comparison with traditional search engines is inevitable, but that search is only one aspect of its temporal analytics engine. Predicting the future So how is this type of analysis supposed to predict the future?
Big things predicted Via Wired. Crowdcast. Hunting the Killer App for Apple's iPad. After using the Apple iPad for few months, talking to users, and helping develop applications for it at Fjord—the London-based digital design agency where I am a managing partner—it is clear that we are still in search of killer apps. I don't think reading digital books and Web surfing on the couch will suffice to fill the bill and fire up the masses. I was surprised during the launch that Apple (AAPL) didn't provide a stronger sense of what it sees as the iPad's potential killer apps. (Knowing Apple, this was a conscious, perhaps wily decision.) Nor does the advertising for the iPad offer firm clues. Rather than trumpeting that the iPad is bound to be the next great computing platform—which Apple surely knows—the company invokes the sense that its device permits a new kind of casual computing.
This reminds me of early Kodak (EK) advertising through which George Eastman educated the public to create "Kodak moments" by taking photos. . It does not exist when the new platform is launched. Compass Labs Raises $5 Million To Pinpoint Purchase Intent On Twitter. Well, that was fast. Only two months after launching at TechCrunch Disrupt, startup Compass Labs has already raised a round of funding. Compass Labs, which aims to provide targeted advertising on social networks like Twitter and Facebook around what users intend to purchase, has raised $5 million from NEA, Triple Point Capital, Jim Clark, Mike Ramsay and others.
This brings the startup’s total funding to $6 million Compass Labs looks at Twitter streams and tries to determine when someone has an intent to purchase a product, then it serves up related ads either through direct messages or through banner ads on third-party Twitter clients. So if you Tweet, “I’m looking for a Canon camera” it will reply in stream or on a banner with an ad from a camera retailer for that camera. Compass Labs uses natural language processing to parse out the Tweets that have serious intent versus just talking about a product generally. Time To Meet Wavii, The Super Stealth, Super Awesome Startup Based In…Seattle? Spigit - innovation management, idea management , social networking software.