Tuesday, June 1, 2010

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FetchBack Fetches $40 Million From GSI Commerce Top
Let the ad retargeting acquisitions begin. This morning, GSI Commerce announced it purchased FetchBack , an advertising startup which specializes in retargeting. The size of the cash deal was not disclosed, but one source puts it in the $40 million range. FetchBack raised a single round of $1 million in January, 2008 led by Gersh Venture Partners, which later became Metamorphic Ventures . Angel investors Erik Matlick and Geoff Judge also invested. The company quickly became profitable and never needed to raise another round. CEO Chad Little will continue to run the business within GSI Commerce. The way it works is that if somebody visits an e-commerce site on the Web, FetchBack will show that same person related ads from that retailer or even the page they visited when they go elsewhere. The conversion rates are much higher than with standard display ads because they are being shown to people who have already shown an interest in the exact or similar products. GSI Commerce powers many online retailers. Adding a retargeting capability to its marketing services is a no-brainer, since retargeting is basically a way to drive customers back to your shopping site after they’ve left. One of the biggest problems e-commerce sites have is shopping cart abandonment. Retargeting also allows retailers to present the items in an abandoned shopping cart in the form of a display ad. Retargeting is a hot area right now in the ad world. French retargeter Criteo recently raised $7 million from Bessemer , and Google is getting into the game as well. CrunchBase Information FetchBack GSI Commerce Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Crowley, Founder Collective And Others Invest $2.5M In Realtime Data Startup Metamarkets Top
Realtime data startup Metamarkets has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The round included an all star team of investors: IA Ventures (who led the round), Village Ventures, True Ventures , Founder Collective , Mike Maples , Stan Shuman (Managing Director at Allen & Company), AOL Ventures , Jim Pallotta, Josh Stylman, Peter Hershberg , and Dennis Crowley . Metamarkets provides price data and predictive analytics to large-scale global media companies. Launched in late 2009, the company aims to solve the problem of ad price discovery on mobile and web platforms for media companies. Metamarkets aggregates billions of electronic media transactions to deliver dynamic price data, proprietary price and volume aggregations, and analytic media market views to sell-side media principals. The startup serves ad server data, order insertion data, targeting data, audience data, conversion data, and more, enabling media companies and publishers to shift strategy in realtime based on how web and mobile formats are monetizing. Founded by David Soloff, the former lead architect at ad startup Rapt (which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008), and Michael Driscoll, the founder of a data consultancy Dataspora, Metamarkets will use the new funding to build out the startup’s engineering team. While the company is currently serving its data to a number of media companies, Soloff declined to name which companies are using Metamarkets. CrunchBase Information Metamarkets Information provided by CrunchBase
 
GeeksOnAPlane In Korea: 12 Demos From Local Startups Top
After geeking out in Shanghai and Beijing for a week, the GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP) caravan moved on to South Korea’s tech hot spot Seoul . The group spent the weekend in the city; an extremely short window of time, but enough to get at least a rough overview of what’s going in the country’s tech scene. And perhaps more importantly, we had the chance to interact and exchange ideas with a number of web and mobile entrepreneurs from Korea around the Startup Weekend Seoul event (the country’s first ever). Overview of Korea’s tech scene During the stay, our “host” in Korea, Chang Kim (one of the biggest star web entrepreneurs in the country), delivered a great primer on how the web industry evolved over the years. There’s a number of interesting peculiarities in Korea, Asia’s fourth biggest online nation (37.5 million of the 48 million Koreans are online). For example, there’s the ubiquity of the Internet explorer (90%+ market share), the world’s highest broadband rate (which stands at a staggering 95% ), or how certain social patterns in the real world are reflected on the web (distinct group behavior of Koreans in the real world facilitating viral marketing). Here’s the presentation that Kim, now a product manager for Blogger.com at Google (the company that bought his startup two years ago), delivered: The presentation follows up on Kim’s Tedx talk Kim gave last year and which I embedded below (it’s in English and contains a wealth of valuable information on Korea’s tech scene): Demos from 12 Korean startups Kim also organized a startup demo pad (separate from the Startup Weekend Seoul event, just like his primer), which was put together just for the GOAP group. Some of the Korean web entrepreneurs we met deplored the relatively small size of the industry, but the 12 local startups that showed their wares are building awesome stuff. Here are thumbnail sketches on all of them. For more information, visit GOAP Seoul , the excellent mini blog Chang Kim thankfully put together just for the demo event (in English). Startup 1: SundayToz SundayToz is a four year old company that creates social games for Facebook, the iPhone, and NATE (the app platform of Cyworld , Korea’s leading social network that has 24 million users). The startup says it’s the country’s leading social game provider, currently seeing 500,000 daily visits daily. It now plans to expand to Asia, especially eying Mixi (Japan’s Facebook) as the first potential partner. Startup 2: Flyfan ( more info on the GOAP Seoul blog) Korea’s e-commerce market is worth $17 billion, making it the world’s sixth largest. Founded in 2009, Flyfan launched Korea’s first “Etsy” ( 1forME ) before officially launching their second product at the GOAP Seoul event. It combines a user-moderated group buying concept with heavy social elements. The idea is to let selected end users, for example “trusted” power mom bloggers, connect buyers (through giving product recommendations) with sellers (through finding customers for them) in a B2C2C model. Flyfan plans to launch the service in Korea this summer, with the US to follow later this year. Here’s the complete presentation: Startup 3: Fanatic.fm (more info here ) Fanatic.fm describes itself as a music branding platform, AdWords for music, and a “beyond-CD” music publishing tool for musicians. The service wants to answer the question how musicians get paid fairly online, especially when users listen to streaming music. Fanatic.fm enables fans and brands alike to financially support artists through ads that come “bundled” with the music whenever a song from those artists are being played. The startup is incorporated in California and has offices in Seoul. Startup 4: Showstreet (more info here ) Provided by Seoul-based Rain.D , Showstreet combines self-developed, Google Street View-like technology with business databases and mapping information. The idea is to let users “pre-visit” destinations virtually before actually going there in the real world. House buyers, for example, can use Showstreet to “walk” along the street the house is located in and zoom in and “look” around inside the rooms. Through a joint venture with New Zealand-based WebConcept , Showstreet is mainly used by tourism agencies, real estate agents and small businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Startup 5: TicketMonster TicketMonster is a Korean Groupon clone that tries to capitalize on the country’s penchant for online shopping: whereas Koreans spend $24 billion to buy products on the web, real-world retailers see only $24 billion in sales per year. Another potential plus for TicketMonster is that because of the strong social element (group behavior) in Korea’s web, viral and word-of-mouth marketing works better than in other countries. As a result, TicketMonster says it spends just an average $0.47 to acquire a customer. Startup 6: Kloseup (more info here ) Kloseup lets casual animators produce 3D animations, which can then be edited by other users from the community. Especially teenagers (the main customer base) are creating 3D movies centered around family and friends, parodies of popular TV programs, music videos, and even clips for school presentations. A mobile service called StoryMessage (built on top of Kloseup) makes it possible to send the movies to cell phones (as MMS) and customize the clips with text. Itonic , the startup behind the service, currently looks for new business partners in the US, Japan and other markets. Startup 7: Twitcooler Twitcooler is a Twitter-based social network for TV viewers. Users can tweet about a TV program while watching it on "three screens”, meaning on the cell phone (through a special iPhone app), on a PC site and their TVs (through an IPTV app). In the case of the IPTV app, relevant tweets will appear in a Twitter bar on the bottom of the screen. Twitcooler users can befriend each other and become fans of TV shows. The service is still in stealth mode. Startup 8: Zimly (more info here ) Zimly is an Android app that was pitched as the “social media player” of the future. The app is already available ( free download ) and sees a pretty good number of downloads already. But the Zimly team is currently working on creating the “iTunes for Android”, just more open and with more social features. The idea is to make it easier to find new music by getting recommendations from people in your social graph. Startup 9: Userstory Lab (more info here ) Userstory Lab is a quite international 10-man team based in Seoul whose mission is to “bring social search, recommendation engines and social layer to syndication channels in South Korea so it’s easier to discover, share, recommend web content, and purchase products and services online." The company builds social services around “objects”, which at some point in the future will be merged into one big network that users can access via a single account. At the moment, Userstory Lab is focusing on two objects, books and links, with Userstory Book (a social network for book lovers) and tweetmix (a Twitter-based last.fm for links). Startup 10: Paprika Lab Paprika Lab is a social game provider that distributes titles on Facebook, iTunes and other platforms. At the demo event, the company pitched a social RPG with what appeared to be rather high production values and “Final Fantasy-like” game mechanics. Dubbed Pirate Legacy , the title wants to offer something the vast majority of the social games out there don’t: actual playability and deepness. Pirate Legacy is currently in beta and attracted 10,000 players so far. Startup 11: Wetoku (more info here ) Wetoku is a completely browser-based service that lets users livestream video chats over the web. After the broadcast, recorded videos can be stored on the site or embedded in blogs and other places. The service is designed to be extra-easy to use, and it’s ideal for conducting video interviews, for example. Here ‘s a recent one between Wetoku co-founder David Lee and Robert Scoble about Korea’s web scene. Startup 12: Pixelberry Pixelberry is an in-browser 3D game engine whose Chrome demo at the event looked amazing, with the sample 3D avatar shown almost reaching photo-realistic quality. (The presenter asked not to take pictures or provide deeper information as it’s still work in progress). More pictures from the event can be found here . Startup Weekend Seoul The Startup Weekend Seoul , which was attended by a whopping 103 people, showed one clear trend in Korea: this country loves Apple. The majority of ideas the ten teams presented (thankfully mostly in English) at the final day (Sunday) centered on either the iPhone or the iPad – which currently isn’t even available in Korea. In the end, three services
 
BodogBrand Bought Slots.com For About $5.8 Million, Intends To License It Top
BodogBrand , a venture capital and licensing organization with its head office in the Caribbeans, is the entity that successfully bid for the Slots.com domain name, the company revealed this morning. We had earlier reported that the domain name went for $5.5 million in an online auction at Snapnames , but BodogBrand says it paid ‘over GBP4,000,000′, which currently converts to roughly $5.85 million. It’s the largest sum paid for a domain in 2010 and one of the top 10 ever. Calvin Ayre , founder of the Bodog brand, in a fairly amusing statement said he was bidding millions for the gaming domain name from a bar stool in London’s L’Atelier restaurant, and ultimately won the auction. Ayre says he considers Slots.com to be the second best gaming domain in the world, after Casino.com and way better than Poker.com “because there are no strong brands in this space”. He adds that Slots.com will serve to generate global traffic to Bodog branded properties but also to form a number of other targeted websites, including one that will be created by and for the female gambler. In essence, this means that BodogBrand will license Slots.com to selected online gaming operators in a fashion similar to the way the Bodog brand itself is currently licensed to gaming operators worldwide. The company holds the global rights to license the Bodog brand across a variety of sectors, and its mandate is to partner with and/or license the brand to licensees for an array of products and services including online gaming, music, and other entertainment properties.
 
Kudzu Interactive Raises $7M To Bolster Growth Of Digital Ordering Service Snapfinger Top
Kudzu Interactive , which ownes and operates online and mobile ordering and e-commerce service Snapfinger.com , has closed a $7 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with additional but undisclosed investors participating. The company, founded in 2004, has now raised $11 million total to date. The funding news was announced by the company this morning, but the New York Times profiled Kudzu Interactive extensively over the weekend, reporting that the Snapfinger.com owner is already profitable and growing revenues fast. Jim Garrett, founder and CEO of Kudzu Interactive, says revenues grew 420% in 2009 and that it has more mobile applications and more restaurants integrated into more point of sale systems than “all of its competitors combined”. Snapfinger enables users to access more than 28,000 restaurants in over 1,600 cities from chains like California Pizza Kitchen, Outback Steakhouse and Boston Market, as well as local independent restaurants currently in its network. The Series B funding round is aimed to support Kudzu Interactive’s sales and marketing initiatives and expand the business in a number of different areas, including mobile and iPad product development and real-time transaction based marketing features. Josh Goldman and Jeff Crowe, general partners at Norwest Venture Partners, will join Kudzu Interactive's board of directors. CrunchBase Information Kudzu Interactive Information provided by CrunchBase
 
StatCounter: IE6 Usage Falls Below 5% In The US, But IE8 Still On The Rise Top
Microsoft’s oft-lamented browser, Internet Explorer 6, may finally be put to rest . This will make many a Web developer happy – but also Microsoft itself . Web analytics company StatCounter claims its latest global data set shows IE6 usage in the US and Europe has fallen to 4.7 percent of the market from 11.5 percent a year ago. That said, IE8 usage in the US increased to 30.5 percent in May (up from 8.5 percent a year ago) while IE7 is currently at 16.6%, so it’s not all bad news for Redmond. Firefox 3.6 comes in second in terms of browser usage in the US, with almost 19.85%, while Google Chrome 4.0 only has some 6.5% of market share according to StatCounter. Undoubtedly, major Internet services dropping support for IE6 on an ongoing basis ( YouTube , Google Docs and Sites , Google Reader , etc.) are advancing its impending death. But the reason Internet Explorer 6 is still around in the first place is likely because of some large corporations still clinging on to it despite massive security issues with the ancient browser. StatCounter also adds that Africa and Asia, where IE6 still has 20.8% usage, are making it harder to kill support for the browser already. Hopefully, everyone will soon see the light . (StatCounter says the data is based on an analysis of 15 billion page views – 3.8 billion from the US and 4.3 billion from Europe – for May 2010 collected from a network of over three million websites.) CrunchBase Information Windows Internet Explorer Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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