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Posts Tagged ‘5m’

Scrapblog raises $2.5M for online scrapbooking

Scrapblog, a website where users can create and share scrapbooks, has received $2.5 million in funding firm Walt Disney’s firm Steamboat Ventures.

The San Francisco company touts the ease-of-use it offers for creating online scrapbooks. The scrapbooks combine user photos with themes, animations, and text of your choice into a slick-looking presentation built on Adobe’s Flash technology. Once you’ve created one, you can share the content on the site, on social networking sites like Facebook, and even print a physical copy (basically a photo album) — it’s the printing that costs money.

The funding was first revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but Scrapblog has confirmed the funding and identified Steamboat as the investor. Scrapblog has now raised a total of $10 million. The company’s competitors include travel-focused Everlater and Panraven, as well as Toufee.

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Cognitive Match Secures Another $2.5m For Realtime Matching

Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime?

The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit.

Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m

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In five days, Zynga raises $1.5M for Haiti via Facebook games

Zynga’s gamers have donated more than $1.5 million in the past five days for Haitian earthquake relief. They did so by making donations directly from within Zynga’s top four games on Facebook.

Zynga, the biggest maker of social games on Facebook, said that some 300,000 Zynga game players from 47 countries have purchased virtual goods inside the games, with all of the proceeds for the specific game item sales going to the U.N.’s World Food Programme. FarmVille users, including me, donated a total of $1 million. Users in FishVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker were also able to donate money. Donations were also promoted via all of Zynga’s games, which reach 227 million monthly active users.

The donations reinforce the notion that social networks such as Facebook are extremely well tuned for rallying people around causes. And Zynga’s integration of the donation into the actual game play makes it easy for players to do good while they’re having fun. In FarmVille, for instance, i bought some white corn seeds with real money for the benefit of Haitian relief. Meanwhile, I can now plant those sees in the game to grow crops and make virtual money faster than I could before. For more information, check out Zynga.org.

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Cloud storage app ZumoDrive gets $1.5M infusion

Online file storage startup Zecter, maker of ZumoDrive, has secured a $1.5 million round of lending.

ZumoDrive’s trick is to take a cloud-based storage system and present it as local hardware memory to iPhones and other gadgets. That way, customers’ data is automatically stored and backed up in an online location that will still be available should the gadget get lost, broken or stolen. Moreover, ZumoDrive’s storage space for each customer is unlimited, compared to a local disk or memory card that runs out of room in the middle of, say, taking vacation photos.

There are other companies, most notably Box.net, offering similar services, but no clear leader has emerged. And there’s always the threat that Amazon, Google or another much larger player could steal buzz and customers with a mass-marketed solution. For now, though, there’s still room for innovative startups.

The latest funding comes from new investor Ram Shriram, plus original investors Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron. The Burlingame, Calif.-based company was founded in 2007 with seed funding from Y Combinator.

Investor Shriram said in a prepared statement, “ZumoDrive has a rapidly growing user base that is already generating strong revenue, so this funding is simply a boost.”

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RichRelevance snags $12.5M for e-commerce recommendations

RichRelevance, a company that provides consumers with e-commerce recommendations tailored to their preferences and interests, has brought in $12.5 million in second-round funding from Greylock Partners, Tugboat Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Draper Richards.

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Bill.com racks up $8.5M to simplify payments

Bill.com, a startup specializing in software for online bill payment and management, added another $8.5 million to its coffers with investments from August Capital and DCM. The round brings total investment to $17 million and puts David Hornik, a partner at August, on Bill.com’s board.

The Palo Alto-based company automates paperless bill management and integrates it with accounting records. Bill.com says companies that pay bills digitally are more likely pay on time and avoid extra fees and penalties. They will also save time and money by avoiding paper checks and credit card processing fees. The company launched ePayments last month, which lets small and mid-sized businesses pay bills through direct-deposit money transfers.

The round also reunites some old partners: August was the first venture investor in Bill.com CEO Rene Lacerte’s last company, PayCycle, which sold to Intuit Inc. last month for $170 million. Lacerte worked for Intuit for nearly five years before starting PayCycle.

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Kontera Raises $15.5M For Annoying In-Text Advertising Technology

In-text advertising technology provider Kontera has raised $15.5 million from its current investors Sequoia Capital, Carmel Ventures and Tenaya Capital, the former venture capital arm of Lehman Brothers. This is the second Israeli startup to announce multi-million VC rounds today after 5min informed the public about its $7.5 million Series B round, and once again first reported by business news site Globes.

Kontera provides publishers with real-time semantic analysis technology that can enhance content and other information to dynamically link terms that most accurately represent and predict user-intent and engagement. This is known as in-text advertising, and you might recognize the double-underlined words on some sites that make display ads pop up when you hover your mouse over them. Other market players include Vibrant and Infolinks.

Personally, I find this type of contextual advertising annoying from a reader perspective, and I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on any ads launched by in-text advertisements, unless it was by accident. But I keep hearing from publishers and advertisers who have implemented campaigns using in-text advertising that it’s actually a highly effective way of pay-per-click promotion, and you wouldn’t be the first to tell they were skeptical at first but lauding the technology afterwards.

With the fresh injection, the total amount of capital pumped into the company has now reached $32.8 million. The $10.3 million Series B round now dates back nearly two years.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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