Amazon has invested $1 million or so in Seattle based Shelfari, beating out at least one venture firm that competed for the deal.
Shelfari is a website where users input all of the books they own, and have an online visual representation of their library to share with others. Users can share their library through the Shelfari website or via a widget, and make money by linking to the books for sale at Amazon. They launched well after competitor LibraryThing, which was itself partially acquired last year by ABEbooks.
The company won’t comment on the financing, so this isn’t officially confirmed.
Got an idea? Willing to hustle for a summer to see it grow? Y Combinator just announced their summer application drive. Applications are due by April 2nd and by the 10th, a few will be selected to present in Mountain View on April 21-22nd. If selected, your team will relocate to work and learn in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For those of you unfamiliar with Y Combinator, it’s the seed financing fund guided by Paul Graham’s philosophies that helps young startups launch through mentoring and investing a base $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder. In exchange they take a 1-10% stake in the company. The teams are usually composed of young college grads with some programming skill. It’s not not a program meant for industry veterans. Some have criticized the program for taking too much ownership for such a small investment. Some readers have also called shenanigans on the operation. Here are some of the companies we’ve covered before. Kiko, Reddit, and Loopt are some notable Y Combinator companies. Exits, so far, have been through acquisition. Kiko died, and was then acquired by Elliot Noss. Conde Nast bought Reddit.
Some other programs such as TechStars have adopted the model. TechStars is another well backed program based in Boulder, Colorado also offering experienced mentors and cash to aspiring startups. While not the same ground floor financing as Y Combinator or TechStars, the venerable VC firm Charles River Ventures also adopted a smaller financing program (up to $250K debt) called Quick Start.
Adobe is pioneering a new way to deliver its industry leading creative software technologies online, with the launch of its web-based video remix and editing technology. Today, Adobe and Photobucket announced a partnership to integrate Adobe web-based video remix and editing technology directly into the Photobucket user experience, giving 35 million Photobucket users direct, free access to world-class digital video editing tools. The agreement marks a new stage in Adobe’s delivery of its renowned video software technologies that today underpin flagship products such as Adobe Premiere Elements and Adobe Premiere Pro.
The company expects to announce more partnerships with Internet companies and media properties over the coming months. These free services are expected to be driven by advertising revenue - and by offering customers simple upgrade paths to Adobe Premiere Elements and Adobe Photoshop Elements software, both market leaders in the home digital video and photo editing space.
“Making Photobucket ‘Adobe powered’ with web-based video remix and editing technology will radically change the user experience for millions of Photobucket devotees and also up-level the quality and variety of content being distributed by this passionate community,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. “We aim to simplify the powerful editing and compositing capabilities that make Adobe software the undisputed creative leader, so that anyone can post eye-catching compositions online.”
Today’s agreement with Photobucket points the way to the kind of future partnerships and breakthrough user experiences Adobe anticipates. Adobe’s web-based video remix and editing technology is an easy-to-use video editor that allows consumers the creative freedom to infuse personality and dramatic impact into their stories before releasing them to a broader online audience. Users can drag and drop music, effects, transitions and titles to videos, as well as reorder, trim and split clips.
Delivered as a lightweight Adobe Flash application and built using Adobe Flex software, Adobe web-based video remix and editing technology is accessible to the more than 700 million personal computers that today support Adobe Flash Player software. Adobe’s web-based video remix and editing technology launches directly in the browser on Photobucket’s web site, with no time-consuming downloads or platform compatibility questions to deter users from uploading and editing their videos. The new video editing capabilities in Photobucket are initially available via limited public beta to Photobucket Pro users, and will be available for free to Photobucket’s entire user base of 35 million members by early March 2007.
Atomic Moguls has reportedly raised nearly $1 million in first-round funding from VC firm Second Avenue Partners and Amazon.com. Atomic Moguls has launched FantasyMoguls.com, which is essentially a fantasy league for movies. You can draft movies and earn points based on how well they do at the box office, number of weeks in the top 5, per-theater average, and their IMDb review score (IMDb is Amazon.com owned). Traditional fantasy sports leagues allow you to draft players and earn points for how well they perform in games.
Fantasy sports leagues have about 15 million participants and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association predicted more than $1 billion is spent annually on publications, league fees and other services. Many companies are trying to get in on the fantasy league dollars — PicksPal has a fantasy league for sports betting (you use the lines on the games and pick your winners; earn points). FleaFlicker is your traditional fantasy sports league website, but is free and relies on advertising revenues.
Atomic Moguls has spoken of likely expansion into other entertainment areas such as music, television shows, and celebrities. Fafarazzi has already established a fantasy league for celebrities that awards points to users based on how many times a celebrity’s name is used in popular entertainment blogs, websites, and articles. There’s even a fantasy league for fashion.
Israeli Startup Aniboom has raise $4.5 million in an initial round of financing. The round was led by Israeli venture firm Evergreen.
The site has very good user generated animated videos presented in a Flash player and embeddable in other websites.
Aniboom is neck and neck with newcoming MyToons in the race to become the “YouTube of Cartoons.” Both sites are excellent, although MyToons is still in private beta.
Users of Yahoo! Mail, will be able to chat in real-time using a new instant messaging feature which is seamlessly integrated into the Yahoo! Mail beta (http://new.mail.yahoo.com/). The new feature, built on the Yahoo! Messenger platform, just began rolling out to Yahoo! Mail beta users worldwide, and will be available to all users in the coming months.
“Yahoo! is focused on making it easier for people to connect to those who matter most to them,” said John Kremer, vice president, Yahoo! Mail. “By bringing Yahoo!’s leading instant messaging capabilities to e-mail users, we’re transforming Yahoo! Mail into a tool that’s about communicating; regardless of the form that communication takes.”
This deep integration across Yahoo!’s e-mail and instant messaging services enables e-mail users to easily connect to contacts in Yahoo! Messenger’s thriving IM community, without leaving the Web mail experience. People can choose to let others know if they are online and available to exchange messages in real time, and users will be able to see the online status of everyone in their contact list as well. Each instant messaging dialogue will take place in a new conversation tab within Yahoo! Mail beta, allowing people to chat with multiple friends simultaneously, without leaving the e-mail experience. Users can also convert e-mails seamlessly into IMs when friends come online (or vice-versa).
The Yahoo! Mail beta is a true Web 2.0 experience, including a sleek, easy-to-use interface with the speed and responsiveness of a desktop application. In addition to instant messaging, the Yahoo! Mail beta also features enhanced functionality such as drag and drop e-mail organization, message preview, an integrated calendar and an RSS reader. Like the classic Yahoo! Mail experience, the new version is a free, browser-based service, accessible from virtually any computer connected to the Internet, without the need for a software download.
For more information, a screencast demonstrating the new instant messaging capabilities in the Yahoo! Mail beta is available at http://ymailupdates.com/.
Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish - a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. The New York Times broke the story. Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock; the three year old GoFish was the first video sharing site to go public last October. Though it has just begun to bring in revenue from licensing deals, GoFish stock closed Friday just under $6 per share with a market value of $134 million.
The settlement was for “several millions of dollars” in cash, stock and advertising credits - presumably much less than the original demand from Universal of $150,000 per infraction.
The acquiring company GoFish, not to be confused with the wildly successful singles’ site PlentyofFish, has recently seen a huge spike in traffic. It was at 1.4 million monthly unique visitors as of December but reports more than 6 million uniques last month. Bolt sees more than 5 million unique visitors monthly (according to Comscore) and turned that traffic into $7 million in revenue last year. GoFish has reported no revenue but has deeper pockets. It was given birth to by Palo Alto investment firm Global Asset Capital.
Starting today, millions of online photo service users will have an easier time uploading and sharing their pictures thanks to KODAK Gallery and Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser. The Firefox Companion for KODAK Gallery combines the award-winning Firefox browser with the world’s number one online photo service making it easier than ever to upload, share and print your digital photos and create amazing photo gifts like books, calendars, collages and more. The Firefox Companion is available today for free download at www.firefox.com/kodak.
Kodak and Mozilla’s release of the new companion will provide a seamless online experience for this growing group of photo enthusiasts making it easier to:
Drag and drop images from their computer directly to the companion
Easily create a new photo album or add to an existing one
Add captions in the browser that will be uploaded with their pictures to KODAK Gallery’s online site
“We want to provide consumers with easy and convenient ways to do more with their pictures and thanks to the Firefox Companion for KODAK, they can now upload and share faster than ever before,” said Madhav Mehra, general manager, KODAK Gallery.
“The Firefox Companion for KODAK Gallery makes uploading large numbers of photos fast, easy and reliable,” said Christopher Beard, vice president, marketing and product management, Mozilla. “We’re excited to offer an online photo solution that combines the ease of use of Firefox with the quality and convenience of the KODAK Gallery experience.”
By 2010, nearly 83 million people in the U.S. will use online photo services annually, according to market research firm InfoTrends.
Condé Nast can’t really be called a pure magazine publishing company any longer. They acquired Digg-clone Reddit last year, adding a user generated news site to their stable of offline and online magazines. And today they launched a social networking site aimed at teen girls called Flip.
The majority of Flip is content created by users, called Flipbooks. It consists of customizable, rich media blog/journals and include text, photos, music and videos. Users can also customize their Flipbooks with stickers, templates and other decorations available on the site. Flip also has four content channels: My Life; Entertainment; Style; and The World. Each channel highlights user content and also has professional editorial, presumably grabbed from other Condé Nast publications.
One thing Flip doesn’t seem particularly concerned with at this time is security of its users. Unlike Piczo, which also caters to a young teen audience, Flip profiles are freely browsable and searchable. This allows the site to create more networks and generates extra page views, but it also allows predators to browse profiles of young teenage girls. Given that Piczo has seen tremendous growth even with these precautions in place, I’m surprised Flip didn’t copy them.
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