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Content Tagged with startups + business
Notable News: Bezos Invests in Kongregate
Normally I don’t get too excited about billionaires making investments in start-ups: I mean that’s what they do, but this news about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos investing $3 million in casual gaming company Kongregate, is worth noting. Is this a simple investment? Or is it sign of things to come from Amazon? I think it is the latter.
Kongregate is like YouTube of games, offering free, ad-supported Flash games and an online community. “This is a rainy-day recession fund,” CEO Jim Greer told Red Herring. The company still has more than $3 million of its previously raised cash. After this cash infusion, Kongregate has raised $9 million including $5 million from Greylock Partners. It was angel funded by Jeff Clavier (who apparently is too busy to call his friends) who introduced us to the company. We wrote about them, had them on The GigaOM show as well. Anyway the whole casual gaming sector is catching fire, and we are following it closely, and will be ramping up our coverage on the CGS.
Update: AOL Buying KickApps Too?
AOL, fresh off its $850 million purchase of social network Bebo, is now eyeing KickApps, a white-label social software company, reports Kara Swisher. Her sources peg the deal price at around $90 million. The deal hasn’t been inked just yet. KickApps, based in New York, has raised $17 million from Softbank Capital, Prism VentureWorks and Spark Capital. I contacted one of their investors but he wouldn’t comment on the rumor.
Update: As an aside, KickApps CEO Alex Blum is an ex-AOLer. I checked with my sources and it seems like AOL isn’t the only candidate looking at KickApps and the $90 million number isn’t even close to what company wants. Given that they have raised $17 million, KickApps must have a valuation of $40-50 million, and their investors must be looking for at least 3x return on their money.
When I asked AOL COO Ron Grant if AOL was going to be doing any more deals soon, he declined to comment but said the company will be “aggressive.” I have heard from multiple sources that AOL is kicking the tires at many Silicon Valley startups. From the looks of it, Time Warner is ready to spend to do a complete makeover of AOL. Call it dressing up before a spinoff, regardless of what happens with Yahoo.
Genius.com Raises $19M, But Does It Eat Its Own Dogfood?
Genius.com, the on-demand software startup that makes the email-based lead generator SalesGenius, said this week that it’s raised $19 million in its third round of funding, this one led by Accel Partners.
Genius.com also announced its largest-ever customer, BT Business, a retail arm of British Telecom, which has 3,000 sales reps and owns more that 40 percent of the markets for DSL and voice in the UK. Both events are big boosts to the four-year-old startup — it had just 400 clients before BT signed on, and the funding round brings total monies raised to $34 million.
SalesGenius is a “push” product that allows salespeople to closely track prospects’ responsiveness to email pitches by tracking when they click through to the web site, what product sites they mouse over, etc. Such data is “highly indicative of what a person might actually be interested in buying,” says Genius.com co-founder and CEO David Thompson. In other words, sales leads.
SalesGenius is a lift up from old-school CRM, says Accel’s Kevin Efrusy (think Siebel), which weren’t really ever designed to help sales people sell more, but rather, help upper management keep tabs on what reps were doing. “When did you last call on that client?” SalesGenius automates it all, including the live chat between a rep and a prospect.
But in an ironic twist, Thompson said he’ll use most of his new capital to hire more of his own live sales people. That’s a lot to spend on show-leather types for a startup, which is sort of odd if your whole business is about selling more, with less. Genius.com ought not to need tens of millions worth of reps — at least, not if the product works as well as he claims.
Kango Almost Beta for Vacation Planning
Travel review site Kango, which brings together traveler opinions from across the web, then analyzes them using natural language analysis and travel-specific term matching to help you find the perfect hotels and activities for your next vacation, said it entered “almost beta” today.
Kango’s “almost beta” state covers romantic and family-friendly lodging and activities in Hawaii and California. For example, you can search for a family-friendly resort in Wailea, Maui and specify your budget criteria. Kango ranks results in order of family-friendliness and displays ratings from web sites like Yahoo! Travel, Travelocity and TripAdvisor.
Earlier this year, Kango received a Series A round of funding of $4 million from Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel.
Kango could eliminate some of the multi-web site research that many vacationers undertake. For it to be generally useful, it will of course have to cover more geography and support terms beyond “before kids” (romantic) and “after” (family-friendly).
Ideeli Makes High Fashion Fun
What happens when you combine the concept of personal shopping, luxury goods such as Kotur and Etro at deep discounts with the web and SMS alerts? You get Ideeli, a web service from an eponomously named start-up based in New York City that has just raised $3.8 million dollars from Boston-based VC firm, Kodiak Ventures and some angel investors. The company that soft launched in May 2007 will announce it’s most recent round of funding on Monday.
“Ideeli is an invitation only shopping community,” says Paul Hurley, founder and chief executive officer of the company. “Think of it as an advertorial that combines mobile, e-commerce and community.” By keeping the service invitation only, Hurley says, Ideeli is an attractive option for designer labels who want to maintain exclusivity but want to tap the web for its commerce potential. “We have built this from a brand owner’s perspective.” Oscar De La Renta and Baccarat have already signed on as partners. Why not? The service has a precedent, and is inspired by super-successful French site, vente-privee.com.
The website offers luxury goods such as clutches and bags from high end designers at discounts of between 50-to-90 percent. Ideeli sends out the members an email every week letting them know what products are going to go on sale in the coming week.
Then, every day a single such product (or brand) goes on sale, and the date and time of the sale is kept a secret. The members of Ideeli are sent an SMS alert or an email when the products go on sale. In addition, the company also offers weekly giveaways, typically one exclusive item. In order to become a member of Ideeli, one needs to invited by a current member.
There are two tiers of service - the basic service called Second Row. The premium option that costs $7.95 a month is called First Row and entitles you to get SMS alerts and a one-hour head start over others as far as sales are concerned. The First-come first-serve nature of the service is one of the reasons Hurley believes people will sign-up for the premium SMS alert option. So far, they have seen about 10% conversion among their beta testers. (Warning: ideeli doesn’t work with T-Mobile for now.)
The company plans to expand into other verticals sometime in the future, but for now they are focusing on the Cosmopolitan-set. When I showed the service to some of my lady friends, they approved the selections on offer, though were quick to point out that some of the stuff wasn’t that au currant. Would they bid? Of course .
What’s my prognosis on Ideeli? If they manage to get the viral growth they are hoping for, they will have suitors in big fashion-oriented publishing houses: CondeNast, Hearst, Hatchette and even Time Warner.
Can Ribbit Finally Bring Web & Voice Together?
For a long time, I had this belief that the worlds of web and voice would converge, unleashing upon us a whole new class of voice-web mashups. Instead all we got were some marginal ideas and rarely-used widgets. Voice, in particular, remained too difficult for web developers. In the end the two turned out to be awkward roommates, never really comfortable with each other.
Lately, VoIP insiders have started talking about taking a platform approach -– a way to add voice to web applications easily while leaving complex tasks such as peering and billing in the background. Ribbit, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup, is the latest to join the fray, and it has perhaps the most audacious (and equally risky) strategy for bringing web and voice together.
If you strip away the hype (meaningless blather such as the company’s claim of being Silicon Valley’s first phone company), what they have done is built their own Class 5 softswitch and back-end infrastructure and married it to front-end technologies like Flash and Flex from Adobe Systems (ADBE).
Furthermore, the platform is able to take inputs from different communication tools — XMPP, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Flash Media Server –- and make them talk to their “switch.” The platform uses SIP protocol for all voice communication.
Accordingly, Ribbit is offering API (Application Protocol Interface) access to much of our switch today, allowing third party developers to create rich integrated telephony applications without previous knowledge of telephony. Currently, the Ribbit API is optimized for Flash / Flex developers because of the pervasiveness of the technology (Flash is resident on 98% of the world’s computers). This means that Ribbit communication applications written in Flash will run without the need of a client download.
“What we have done is made voice an object that you embed into your workflow (or software),” said Ted Griggs, chief executive officer of the company. “We didn’t want to change how people did things, like communicate via Skype, and wanted to integrate the platform to work with any phone.”
Developers just have to write apps, Griggs said, and worry about the back-end telephony stuff. In exchange, Ribbit will take between 5 percent and 15 percent of the revenues generated by an application.
Briggs showed off a few applications, including one specifically targeting subscribers of Salesforce.com. Built by an independent developer, it was quite impressive. Another application worth checking out is AIRphone, developed by Joe Johnson of Knoware, that acts like an iPhone on your desktop.
The technological approach the company has taken is sound and has merit. It is the strategy and execution part that raises doubts about Ribbit and its future. For instance, I have on good authority that Adobe will be making a big splash with its VoIP plans sometime next spring, and is working furiously to put finishing touches on its offerings. This would make Adobe Ribbit’s biggest competitor. And there are others, like Lypp, who are following a similar strategy. Meanwhile Google, which owns GrandCentral, could easily roll out its own version of a voice-web platform.
The biggest challenge for Ribbit will be building and nurturing a developer ecosystem. It needs patience and a lot of money. Ribbit claims it already has about 600 developers involved in its platform, but will the $13 million the company has raised from venture capitalists be enough? I don’t know.
Nevertheless, Ribbit seems to be rising to the challenge posed by Daniel Berninger, who in a column here wrote:
The death of the telecom business remains a standard prediction, but telephone bills continue to arrive…aside from price, the telecom business remains largely unchanged by VoIP…although improved performance and falling costs usually combine to produce new applications, this does not seem to be the case for VoIP and the voice business. If the infocom sector can move beyond cheap telephone calls, it might finally represent the threat to the status quo imagined by my AT&T colleagues.