Khosla And RRE Lead $16.2 Million Series C In Xobni
Last Updated on Thursday, 15 April 2010 02:58 Written by Daisy Harley Thursday, 15 April 2010 02:58
Xobni, a social Microsoft Outlook plugin, has just raised $16.2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and RRE, with Baseline Ventures, Atomico, and Cisco participating in the round. We confirmed this with the company. This brings Xobni’s total funding to over $30 million.
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter. The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. CEO Jeff Jeff Bonforte tells us the plugin has seen 5 million downloads to date.
The round was an insider round and Bonforte seemed pleased that inside investors were fighting over who would lead the round. He says he’s happy with the valuation but declined to give us a number. The funding will be used for further product development, more mobile apps, and expansion of the plugin into other email platforms besides Outlook.
Xobni, which took an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund last year, recently launched a Blackberry app that ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.
Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni also launched another product, Xobni One, that syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. Zobni is charging users for this service, which is just one of many revenue streams for the company.
Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/khosla-and-rre-lead-16-2-million-series-c-in-xobni/
Learn MoreSnacksquare: A Foursquare Directory Of Deals And Venues
Last Updated on Thursday, 15 April 2010 12:58 Written by Daisy Harley Thursday, 15 April 2010 12:58
The budding business model for Foursquare is local ads through geo-targeted offers. When you check into a bar or restaurant, you might get 10 percent off your meal, or maybe a free drink if you are the mayor (it’s good to be the mayor). But how do you find all of these venues on a map. On the the Foursquare iPhone app you get a list of nearby venues, but that is it. Not even a map.
Fortunately, Foursqaure makes all of its venue data available through its liberal APIs. Developers like James Gillmore can take that data and create their own products around Foursquare like he did with Snacksquare. The Website is a business directory for Foursquare. Select a city and it shows you all the venues currently offering deals on a Google map, as well as by badge. Try New York City, Chicago, or San Francisco. If you like a deal, you can send it to your phone to redeem later.
When you go beyond the big cities, there aren’t that many deals. In fact, according to Gillmore, there are only a total of 1,500 business venues (stores, restaurants, bars) running specials right now in all of Foursquare. (Tristan Walker from Foursquare says it is closer to 2,000). But that number will surely grow. Gillmore wants to turn Snacksquare into a way for local merchants to manage their Foursquare venues and contact loyal customers. Businesses can add their Foursquare venues to Snacksquare and create SMS advertising campaigns that target the people who come to their venues.
Now here is where Snacksquare’s business model enters questionable territory. Snacksquare basically harvests all the checkins for all the business venues on Foursquare. Then it helps businesses who sign up to scrape those lists of customers from Foursquare and try to add them as friends in order to get their phone numbers. (It makes them change their Foursquare names to the names of their business). Once they have their phone numbers they can send them marketing messages and offers via SMS (trust me, this can get annoying very quickly). But for local businesses, it’s another way to capture existing customers who walk in the store.
The big question is, would you become a friend of a business you frequent on Foursquare? If the answer is yes, Snacksquare might be onto something. It is certainly an aggressive approach, but it is also a taste of what’s to come with geo-advertising in general.
Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/snacksquare-foursquare-directory/
Learn MorePlank.ly Blends Social Q&A, Videos, And Voting
Last Updated on Wednesday, 14 April 2010 03:28 Written by Daisy Harley Wednesday, 14 April 2010 03:28
Formspring.me has quickly gained popularity as a social question and answer portal that allows anyone to ask you questions, and gives you a platform to answer them, simulating an interview format. Today, the co-founder of TinyChat is launching a similar question and answer platform, called Plank.ly, that includes a more social format and video integration.
Plank.ly’s free web service lets users and business’s create designated pages where they can receive input from others in a simple and easy format. The input they receive can be rated, sorted and responded to individually. Co-founder Dan Blake compares it to Seesmic mixed with Formspring, Digg and Twitter.
You or any visitor to your profile can rate unanswered questions up or down, with more popular questions surfacing to the top of the page. You can also make your pages completely private (similar in format to Twitter’s protected accounts), and you can post video questions and answers.The site also allows users to customize their profiles and features deep Facebook and Twitter integration. In fact, Plank.ly encourages users to sign in with their Facebook and Twitter usernames instead of creating a standalone log-in to the site.
Blake says that with the traction and success that Q&A startups like Formspring and Quora are seeing, he and his co-founders felt like there was an opportunity to create a similar platform. Blake co-founded the company with Cole Turner and Ryan Hileman.
The question is whether there is room for all of these Q&A startups in the space, or will some eventually drop-out of the race because they can’t build out enough of an audience. And Facebook just entered the space, announcing its plans to launch an Aardvark-like Q&A product within the social network. Plank.ly plans to monetize the site through advertising but hasn’t turned on any revenue streams yet.
Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/14/plank-ly-blends-social-qa-videos-and-voting/
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