The latest from TechCrunch
- Really?
- Groupon Gets A Hefty $30 Million From Accel For Local Offers Service
- Inbox2: One InBox And Communications Stream To Rule Them All
- Genieo Raises $3 Million For Personalized Homepage Platform
| Really? | Top |
| Dana Hanna updates his Facebook at Twitter, at the altar. Without his bride Tracy knowing about it. I’m sure she was thrilled: I surprised not only my guests, but also Tracy by pulling out my phone and posting on Facebook and Twitter from the altar during out wedding. I had her phone ready in my pocket, so when she asked for it I could hand it to her. No one knew about this except the minister, and myself. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Groupon Gets A Hefty $30 Million From Accel For Local Offers Service | Top |
| Chicago based Groupon , which was formerly known as ThePoint , has raised a hefty Series B financing – $30 million – from new investor Accel Partners and existing investor New Enterprise Associates . Accel’s Kevin Efrusy joins Groupon’s board of directors. The company is going gangbusters. They offer users deep discounts on local deals – spas, sky diving lessons, hotels, restaurants, golf, whtaever. Discounts range from 40%-90% of the normal price. If enough people buy into the offer, everyone gets the deal. If there aren’t enough people, no one gets the deal. Groupon collects payment and passes it on, minus their fee, to the business. Example – 1,600 people in one day bought skydiving lessons in Chicago , says the company, getting a 44% discount on the $229 price. And the company making the offer normally sells just 6,000 lessons per year. They sacrificed some profit, but gos lots of new customers. What makes the service so compelling is that people have an incentive to get their friends involved to make sure the minimum is hit. And Groupon makes it easy to spread the word about offers via Facebook and Twitter. Their user acquisition costs? zero. Groupon generally takes 30% – 50% of the total price paid for the service, and they are on track, they say, to do $100 million in gross merchandise sales in 2010. They reached profitability in June 2009, just six months after launching the service. Chicago launched first but the site now covers 26 cities and is adding a new one every week. They have 126 employees, more than half of which are sales staff finding new deals for users. The company has now raised about $35 million in aggregate, including an early angel round. Think they deserve a Crunchie for best application or best new product in 2009? Vote for them here . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Inbox2: One InBox And Communications Stream To Rule Them All | Top |
| Mirror, mirror on the wall, which inbox is the fairest of them all? Inbox2 is betting on all of them with its online platform, which attempts to bring together all your message streams (email accounts, Twitter, Facebook) into a single master inbox. Today, recently launched Netherlands-based InBox2 is launching a host of new features to its offerings. InBox2 offers both a web application and a Facebook application that will integrate your email messages and Twitter stream into the social network. The web app can configure to multiple email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL) and presents various ways to see your streams broken down by service, contact, thread or within one powerful stream. You can send, reply and search in one place. One of the key features for Inbox2’s web app and Facebook app is the ability to send Facebook messages or Twitter DMs and replies from within the apps. When using the Facebook app, the service will notify users if they receive new email or status update from any of their configured accounts. InBox2 also allows the use of smart labels and stars for messages and attachments and you can import your existing labels from other services such as Gmail. The apps now allow users to share and attache email, documents and images directly from your Inbox2 stream or Facebook app. The app has also added realtime updates from Twitter, Facebook and now Yammer and LinkedIn. You can also create and save searches on Twitter. And the app now supports Microsoft Exchange 2007. InBox2 is best compared to TechCrunch 50 finalist Threadsy, which debuted its all-in-one, web-based communications client a few months ago and received positive reviews from the judges and audience. The main difference is that Threadsy doesn’t have a Facebook app. Inbox2 is planning to roll out an iPhone app soon and is also looking to launch offerings for other smartphones in the near future. Not only is Inbox2 a useful service for consolidating communications, but it is visually appealing and easy to filter out the stream. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Genieo Raises $3 Million For Personalized Homepage Platform | Top |
| Startup Genieo, which develops personalized home pages, has raised $3 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors. Genieo’s technology automatically discovers the user's topics of interest when they are browsing and generates a personal home-page with relevant content and personalized news widgets. A desktop application, Genieo maps and profiles user behavior on computers to determine what content to add to a user’s hompage. Content that is integrated into Genieo’s homepages include favorite websites,news/blog updates, Facebook status updates and Twitter Streams, a Google search bar, videos, and more. It’s a little scary for a program to be profiling a user’s behavior on private sites where you might not want a third party be viewing information, but Genieo assures users that it does not collect or share any private information. The startup faces competition from NetVibes and iGoogle. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment