Comedic web animation house and video sharing site JibJab has raised a second round of funding; this $3m B round from previous investors Polaris Venture Partners makes more than $6m total the company has banked from investors. Credit for breaking the specific amount of funding goes to Dan Primack at PeHub, who is the man when it comes to digging up financial information.
It might sound crazy, but today's JibJab B round is just the latest chapter in an evolving story. Professional content production companies are getting funded left and right.
ChoiceA is a new site for do it yourself, or For Sale By Owner, real estate listings. It's got a nice, simple interface that makes good use of new web technologies and it's quite pleasing to peruse the limited listings collected prelaunch. Those listings are free to post and so far are primarily based around the Pacific Northwest of the US.
Reators, though, may prove to be a case study of one of those industry roles that just can't be replaced by the internet.
As nice as the site is, real estate may not prove to be an industry that the internet is able to totally disintermediate. I asked Joel Burslem, founder of the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog, for his perspective on ChoiceA and its goals; he was dubious about both the large-scale viability of the For Sale by Owner market in general and the ability for any website to succeed in it.
In May 2006, eBay quietly acquired a microfinance company called MicroPlace, which it said was part of an "ongoing initiative ... focused on maximizing our corporate resources to continue to drive social good through a variety of innovative programs." A year and a half later, MicroPlace has finally officially opened its doors to investors.
MicroPlace is similar to Kiva.org (which we've written about twice this year), and allows investors in developed nations to support microloans for entrepreneurs in developing areas of the world. The difference between Kiva.org and MicroPlace, is that in eBay's version investors can make a return on their money.
The New York Post reports that Google is currently leading Microsoft in the quest to win a 5-10% stake in Facebook for $500 million to $1.5 billion (depending on what exorbitant pre-money valuation Facebook gets). According to the Post's source at Microsoft, however, Redmond is "willing to give any valuation possible" to keep Google from nabbing a stake in the hot social networking startup.
It's hard not to take the NY Post story with a grain a salt, though, given that Post reporter Peter Lauria has been quite wrong about this type of rumor before. Both Google's and Microsoft's interest in Facebook is based on the potential for a large amount of advertising dollars that can be made in social networking. Microsoft has often been presumed to be the front-runner, given their current advertising deal with Facebook. Either way, one of these companies seems like to invest a large amount of money in the social network.
There's been lots of coverage around the web today of the role that social media is playing in reporting about the wildfires in Southern California. Twitter and Google Maps have received the most coverage but there are probably infinite permutations of those two tools and others, as well. One tool that just happened to launch today is TwitterWhere, a service that makes tracking Tweets from any location easy to do. I couldn't help but think of San Diego when I saw it.
You provide the location, by city, state or postal code, then provide a proximity radius and TwitterWhere will create an RSS feed of all the Tweets from Twitter users within that area. Here on the right is the live feed of the most recent items from within 50 miles of San Diego.
TwitterWhere was built by Portland developer Matt King, co-founder of the happy-hour geo-locator Unthirsty, and first coverage of the service was on Silicon Florist - a blog that covers the tech community in the hotbed of innovation that I just happen to live in, Portland, Oregon.
Our thoughts go out to the people driven from their homes by wildfires in the area, the last report we heard that they were numbered more than 1 million. Some (including myself) believe that this sort of event is likely to occur with greater frequency in the future due to ecological imbalance; one thing that's not disputable though is that social media will play an increasingly important role in media coverage of events like this.
Jango is a social music site that's launching formally in the middle of next month, but has decided to reach out to blogs for coverage now. Apparently a company with an enlarged sense of proportion all along, Jango says its private beta has 300,000 users. Yet it's stayed off the radar of all the leading web 2.0 review blogs to date. Read/WriteWeb readers who click through this link can access the closed beta. You'll be prompted to create an account after you enter your first artist search.
It's a good looking service. Think Last.fm with more social features and more AJAX. Think Pandora with profiles brought to the front and more control over the playlist.
Read on for more info about the interesting founders, the interface and the recommendation engine.
There is renewed interest in bootstrapping, if only because lower costs now make this a bit easier and younger entrepreneurs can live more cheaply. Here then is my 10 point bootstrapping primer:
1. It does NOT mean self-funded. The real bootstrappers put in peanuts of their own money. Bootstrapping means funding with customer revenues.
2. Bootstrapping is NOT compatible with the “build traffic and worry about monetization later” idea. Get external capital to enable that. Bootstrapping is usually for selling to businesses, not to consumers. Just maybe, you can bootstrap a consumer advertising play using Amazon S3/EC2 infrastructure and Adsense (or an alternative for revenue). But has anybody done that, really?
3. It is very hard work, stressful and uncertain. Don’t start down this road unless you are really prepared for this.
4. It is messy. You get pulled by clients in different directions. Managed well, this is great and you get real world input. Managed badly, you end up without a coherent product or strategy. My rule is: 3 custom jobs to get to a product, iterating and abstracting each time. It's like sailing - you know the direction, but you tack left and right to catch the wind.
5. You need a sign over your desk to remind you about your 3 top priorities - cash flow, cash flow and cash flow.
Boston-based Kinset yesterday announced the launch of their flagship 3D virtual world shopping platform. The downloadable Kinset client loads up a virtual shopping mall that looks and feels rather similar to Second Life, sans the interaction with other humans (though I couldn't tell if that was part of the experience, or simply because no people were using the software yet).
During the public beta period, Kinset is operating two stores, BunchaBooks and 'LectricTown, both fed by Amazon. Browsing the virtual shelves was easy enough, if a bit clunky. Mousing over fuzzy product images brought up additional information in the sidebar, and pressing F7 adds a product to your shopping cart. I couldn't figure out how to actually purchase products, and Kinset froze up before I had a chance to try to figure it out. Needless to say, I wasn't very compelled to put much more effort into finding out.
One week after suffering a major blow to its infamous "1-Click" shopping patent, Amazon.com has been awarded what's sure to be seen as its latest bit of highly obnoxious IP. The company has been awarded a patent on the practice of "including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting."
According to the text of the patent, it covers a technology serving the following circumstances: "a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system."
There's smart conversation about the patent's flaws over at Slashdot, as usual, but the problems here are probably obvious. Filed in August of 2004, the practice no doubt touches on any number of "prior arts" and it's fairly obvious. Non-obviousness - which you can probably search for via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/non_obviousness (if you'll forgive me for saying so, Amazon) is a key criteria in the granting of patents.
Amazon may in the end be one of the leading factors in the eventual overhaul of the internet technology department at the US Patent office.
Google Operating System is reporting that Google has switched to its own in house translation system for all 25 available language pairs. Previously, the site used Systran for almost all of its translation processing, turning to its in house software only for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. AltaVista's Babelfish, one of the first and most well-known online translation services, still uses Systran for language processing.
I thought I would put the two head-to-head to see which produced better results. Unfortunately, my high school Spanish has grown a bit rusty, and English is the only language in which I am proficient (if you can call this proficient). So translating from English to another language would do me no good. For this test, I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded two versions of "Pierre et Jean" by Guy de Maupassant, one of my favorite writers, one in the original French and the other an English translation. I then fed the same passage, in French, through both translators.
