SlideShare, the great web service for sharing presentations - dubbed YouTube for presentations - has received another $3 million additional funding from Venrock and some of the angel investors whom contributed its first major round of funding.
SlideShare will be using the money to relocate from Mountain View to San Francisco, move to a bigger office and grow its team from about 10 people to 18. In addition to the regular infrastructure and security boosts.
SlideShare - in case you haven’t tried it yet - is a very simple and to-the-point service that lets users upload their PowerPoint, Open Office and Keynote presentations and share them online using a simple YouTube-like interface.
Most of you have probably encountered their embeddable presentations on other people’s blogs, which is the key value behind this service.
In a remarkable marketing move, they announced the news in a form of a witty presentation, which you can see below:
via TechCrunch.
Posted in Cloud Apps, Media ~ No Comments
One of the earliest personalized Ajax homepage services; Pageflakes, has been acquired by Live Universe (stupid name might I add). No official announcement as of now.
Pageflakes, which is based in Germany has received the total of $4 million to this date from Benchmark Europe and Balderton. Back when it first launched, it was one of the most refined of its type but over time it got overshadowed by other competing services.
Live Universe, an online entertainment network; founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, seems to be going the route of acquisitions to grow its business, evident by this one and video site Revver back in February 2008.
It was a competitive deal, as Newsgator was reportedly bidding, which must’ve amounted to increasing the valuation of Pageflakes, especially since it exists in quite a saturated stale (once lucrative) market dominated by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Congrats to Pageflakes for their exit, and props to them for closing the deal in quite an unfavorable time for their business.
Posted in Other ~ 2 Comments
Amazon with its genius move to open its vast infrastructure to developers, has showed Google the huge potential of this new-found business, and it was only a matter of time before Google created its own implementation, and here it comes…
Called “Google App Engine“, it’s Google’s foray into the Cloud computing service, or in layman terms a way for developers to create and run their web apps using Google’s infrastructure.
The Engine comprises of the same building blocks which Google is using: Python application servers, Google File System and BigTable for database, all of which will compete directly with loosely-coupled Amazon offerings that include S3 for storage, EC2 for virtual servers and SimpleDB for database.
Google’s Engine is available as a whole instead of choose-what-you-use offering from Amazon, but the biggest limitation is the development environment which is limited to Python, so you’re out of luck of your a PHP/ASP/Rails developer
Google App Engine will be freely available for the first 10.000 developers who sign up (I got to be one of them) as a preview, though the resources will be limited for each app; 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day, which should be more than fine for experimental apps.
Developers will be charged per usage in the future, no details on the pricing yet, but they promise that a free treat will be always there, obviously to lower the entry-barrier.
It’s a good start from Google and I’m pretty sure that it will excel in terms of reliability and support, but until they decide to add other development platforms to the mix, they will have a hard time breaking into the mainstream of developers market, that are more interested in outsourcing their infrastructure than being on Google just for the coolness of it.
Amazon still wins in my book.
More Coverage: TechCrunch, GigaOM, O’Reilly Radar, Mashable, VentureBeat and TechBeat.
Posted in Cloud Apps, Google ~ No Comments
Unarguably Twitter is one of the best services in the past two years, and one of its greatest charms is its simplicity, which reflects badly when you’re trying to follow and keep track of the conversations that are going on between twitterers.
It has been really difficult to figure out what’s going on when you drop in the middle of conversations. Well.. not anymore, a new service Quotably reformats the tweets into threaded conversations, making it a lot easier to follow actual discussions that are occurring on Twitter.
Quotably is a breeze to use, just type the twitter ID and it will show you the recent conversations that involve that person in a threaded way that is very simple, clear and visually perceivable. And Quotably offers URLs for each threaded conversation, allowing you and other users to refer directly to them.
Posted in Other ~ No Comments
As much as I enjoyed and added to Wikimapia when it first came out, I always wished that Google Maps would actually become like that, and today my wish came true.
Google announced today that Google Maps can now be edited by anyone residing in the US, Australia, or New Zealand, just sign in with your Google account and you can add a new location, change the details or location of all listings on Google Maps, or even delete a location’s listing completely.
Recent edits could be monitored in real time using this link.
In case you didn’t get it yet, this is really big and signals a more crowd-friendly attitude from Google in a major and critical service such as maps.
But there are some relevant concerns around this wikifying effort such as how will the edits be validated and monitored? is there any kind of filtering against spam/defamation? will there be moderators that can lock certain locations/details?
More on TechCrunch and Read Write Web.
Posted in Google ~ 3 Comments
An interesting article over New York Times revealed that SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or PPC advertising (pay per click) is much overrated concerning the actual gain generated through them.
Reporter Alex Mindlin mentioned a study by Engine Ready, a San Diego-based search marketing software firm, that analyzed 18.7 million visits over two years to 500 or so Engine Ready client Web sites.
Study found that paid listings had a slight edge over “organic,” or unpaid, search results: visitors who clicked on paid links were 17 percent more likely to buy something, and they spent about 18 percent more on each order.
But neither of these is the most valuable kind of Web site visitor. That honor goes to the people who arrive at a site by typing its Web address directly into their browsers or clicking on a bookmark. Such visitors, who tend to be repeat customers, linger the longest, spend the most money, and are the most likely to “convert” to buyers, doing so on 3.3 percent of their visits. On average, their visits are worth $5.69 apiece.
It’s nothing new that SEO is better than PPC, but the results are really disappointing for an industry struggling with click-fraud and poor monetization.
Are these results influenced by the poor optimization of “landing pages” and “text Ads” that is prevalent in the industry? or is PPC really not that efficient afterall?
Posted in Search Engines ~ 4 Comments
Lifestreaming services are all the rage these days, everyone and their mother either released one or are working on it, and so when I read about socialthing on TechCrunch I wasn’t expecting much, but since I’m already a member in all of the other lifestreaming services, I felt obliged to have an account here as well.
Greeted by the cool funky Socialthing logo, I started to feel good about the service, a smile was gradually being drawn on my face as I went through the quick/painless registration page to the pleasant/effortless process of providing credentials to get your content from other services.
Ok, enough sweet talk, my reasons for preferring Socialthing over FriendFeed are:
1- Much better interface, although users seemed to fall in love with FriendFeed “bland” interface, I’ve always hated it and found it unable to deliver the right visual mix and cues, especially when having tons of items coming in ever hour.
2- Automatic friends detection, of course I would like my friends on other services to be my friends on socialthing “duh!….”
I’m really surprised that none of the other services thought of this nice little feature that solves a real pain-in-the-ass, it could’ve saved me a dozen tweets asking my twitter followers to add me on FriendFeed, and I didn’t even think of trying that on other services.
3- Sending feedback directly to the original services instead of adding yet another layer of content over them. I’ve always felt that it’s a waste of data/attention to post something over twitter and have someone on FriendFeed comment on it, rather than @-ing me on twitter, and that goes for other services as well.
People could argue that FriendFeed is about creating a community and maintaing conversations around your content and your friends’, but for me lifestreaming services are more about easily tracking my friends on existing services, without having to worry about yet another community/layer-of-data, as for the latter purpose I would rather use the better Tumblr.
Posted in Micro Blogging, Social Networking ~ 2 Comments
During the awaited Apple announcement of the iPhone SDK (software developer kit), John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins took the stage and announced a $100 million fund to invest in startups that create apps for the iPhone. [photo from TechCrunch]
KPCB’s iFund is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.
The highly anticipated release of the SDK alongside this great stunt orchestered by Steve Jobs will ignite a craze of iPhone Apps, in what I expect to see a giant wave that is times bigger than the previous Facebook apps wave.
We will definitely see startups being formed solely for the purpose of developing apps for the iPhone, and have a shot at fame and fortune.
History will remember the SDK announcement as the rebirth of the iPhone, making an extremely successful product into a phenomenal technology, think I’m exaggerating… wait and see.
More on TechCrunch and ValleyWag.
Posted in Apple, Software ~ 3 Comments
Mint, the web-based personal finance service and one of Silicon Valley’s rising starts, will announce a third round of funding today, $12.1 million from the previous investors, including Shasta Ventures, Sherpalo, Felicis Ventures, Hite Capital, First Round Capital and new investor Benchmark Capital.
Mint has grown to over 160.000 users in about six month after the launch, and they’re adding another 10.000 every week, Mint makes money through lead generations, and CEO Aaron Patzer claims that users are clicking on displayed Ads 12-15% of the time, which is an impressive rate for an online service.
With this round Mint has raised a total of $17 million, and this significant latest round proves that they have a great business going, and they’re gearing towards even more growth and improvements in the near future.
Congrats to Mint, I’m really happy for them and the fact that they’re able to successfully attract users and monetize what’s evident to be a great service.
If you haven’t checked out yet, you’re missing a lot.
Posted in Cloud Apps ~ 2 Comments
AllPeers, P2P file sharing service and one of the most hyped startup a few years ago, has announced that it is shutting down today.
We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.
The UK/Prague based startup launched in 2006 amidst massive hype and enthusiasm from the web, the idea was to use Firefox as a platform for sharing via an extension that allow anyone to create a BitTorrent-like file sharing network between friends.
Considering the popularity of both file-sharing (BitTorrent et al) and Firefox browser, this news comes to me as a surprise, as the idea has all the merit in the world to work, and the fact that they weren’t able to get an additional round of funding says something about what’s happening in the company.
They had a lead on a great idea, good product and a huge potential to create a business around it, and somehow they flopped!!!
I’m guessing that the main part of the story is not being disclosed to the public.
More on TechCrunch.
Posted in Cloud Apps, Software ~ 2 Comments
