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Posts Tagged ‘menlo-ventures’

TV ad startup Invidi has secured over $23 million in series D funding led by Google, with GroupM, Motorola Ventures, Menlo Ventures, InterWest, and EnerTech Capital, Westbury Equity Partners, BDC Capital participating in the round. The Business Insider broke the news yesterday evening.

Invidi provides software applications that track targeted advertising and offers a digital set-top box application that delivers targeted advertising and marketing messages to individual viewers. The technology also facilitates the sales of digital products, digital tiers, and digital services, such as VOD, PVR, and pay-per-view events; Internet, voice, and wireless services; and triple play offers.

In conjunction withe the funding, Shishir Mehrotra, Director of Product Management for Google TV Ads and YouTube Ads, has joined Invidi’s board of directors. In addition to its investment in Invidi, Google has committed to working with the startup on a number of products relating to TV advertising. Of course, it is expected that Invidi’s technology could be integrated with Google’s development of an Android-based software for TVs.

Founded in 2000, Invidi currently has distribution agreements with Dish Network and DirecTV. Invidi’s technology was recently tested in Comcast’s Baltimore, MD, system with Starcom MediaVest, and the trial showed addressable ads to be 65% more efficient and 32% more effective.

Google just shared updates on its venture arm, Google Ventures, and announced additional investments in mobile payments startup Corduro.

EdgeCast has secured $10 million in Series C funding from an investor group led by Menlo Ventures. The content delivery network has raised a total of $20 million since 2007, counting Steamboat Ventures, Mark Amin (Vice Chairman of CinemaNow) and Jon Feltheimer (CEO of Lionsgate) as investors. EdgeCast, which has been profitable since 2009, says the funding was necessary due to a surge in consumer demand and the need to scale up. Here’s an e-mail from a senior executive:

I’m pleased to let you know that on Monday we will formally announce a
Series C financing of $10 million, led by Menlo Ventures, one of
Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms.

As you know, we have been profitable since late last year, so this was
not a case of needing to raise money. But customer demand has been
exploding – faster than even we, in our entrepreneurial optimism,
expected. We wanted to be in a very strong position to take advantage
of it, so we felt it a wise strategic move to scale up more quickly.

This cash will help us do exactly that. We have a strong pipeline of
cool new products, services and features, and the additional resources
will help accelerate their development and launch. We are adding to
the team and expanding our sales and marketing programs. And perhaps
most important, we will also be able to grow the network faster.

Founded in 2006 by CEO Alex Kazerani and President James Segil, Edgecast competes with other CDNs (like Akamai, Limelight Networks) to help websites around the world deliver multimedia (i.e. music, video, live stream, etc) to the end user. Edgecast services over a thousand clients including IMAX, WordPress, ESPN, Kelloggs, LinkedIn and Lionsgate.

This post was written by 21 year old Cody Brown, the founder of kommons and NYU Local.

So much has been said in the past few weeks about how the iPad will change the book industry but in almost all of the tweets, posts, and articles I’ve come across a simple questions seems to be completely dropped. Why do we have books in the first place?

Paul Carr of TechCrunch published a post this morning that raised this question inadvertently. His argument went something like this:

A.) The iPad is a better buy then the Kindle because it lets you do more than just read books.

B.) Books can’t compete with other applications on the iPad. Partly because the screen is too bright but mostly because you will get distracted by games like Flight Control.

C.) Thus reading, as we know it, is dead.

Carr, in some senses, is right. Reading has changed. What’s not addressed is why this is a bad thing. Carr’s argument is rooted in a distinction between serious readers and non-serious readers. His example involves someone reading only a few paragraphs of a nytimes article, then posting it on Twitter. Carr defines this reading as, “reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex.”

His example is vivid but also flat out perverse. Carr is confusing length with quality, and more profoundly, he’s confusing the ends with the means.

The mission of an author isn’t to get you to ‘read all the words’, it’s to communicate in the rawest sense of the word. Whether you’re Jeff Jarvis or Dan Brown, you have an idea or a story and a book is a way to express it to the world.

If you, as an author, see the iPad as a place to ‘publish’ your next book, you are completely missing the point. What do you think would have happened if George Orwell had the iPad? Do you think he would have written for print then copy and pasted his story into the iBookstore? If this didn’t work out well, do you think he would have complained that there aren’t any serious-readers anymore? No. He would have looked at the medium, then blown our minds.

It’s not a problem that the experience of reading a book ‘cover to cover’ on an iPad isn’t that great as long as there are better ways to communicate on the device. On the iPad there are. What’s challenging for authors at this point is the iPad enables so many different types of expression that it’s literally overwhelming. Once you start thinking of your book as an app you run into all kinds of bizarre questions. Like, do I need to have all of my book accessible at any given time? Why not make it like a game so that in order to get to the next ‘chapter’ you need to pass a test? Does the content of the book even need to be created entirely by me? Can I leave some parts of it open to edit by those who buy it and read it? Do I need to charge $9.99, or can I charge $99.99? Start thinking about how each and everyone one of the iPad’s features can be a tool for an author to more lucidly express whatever it is they want to express and you’ll see that reading isn’t ‘dead’, it’s just getting more sophisticated.

There are literary techniques, there will be iPad techniques.

I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print. This is great.

Vidyo, which specializes in video conferencing technology, has closed a big round of financing. The company raised $25 million in a Series C round led by Four Rivers Group and joined by prior backers Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures.

This brings the total amount of capital invested in Vidyo to $63 million since its founding in 2005 – its last round totaled $15 million and was closed a little over a year ago.

Vidyo says it will use the additional capital to expand its sales and marketing efforts for its desktop and room-based HD multipoint video conferencing systems.

More on NewTeeVee.

Realtime streams are quickly moving from the consumer Web to the enterprise. The constant flow of status updates, links, and shared items people are becoming accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter is finding its way into enterprise apps like Socialcast, Yammer, and Salesforce Chatter.

Investors are betting on this trend. Socialcast is getting an $8 million cash infusion from Menlo Ventures and True Ventures in a Series B financing. In February, 2010, competitor Yammer raised a $10 million Series B.

Socialcast previously got $1.4 million from True Ventures and angels a year ago. Blogger Om Malik of GigaOm, who is also a VC partner at True, sits on Socialcast’s board. He will be joined by Menlo’s Sonja Hoel Perkins.

The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics. Co-workers can share knowledge and updates in a semi-private setting. Socialcast moved to a freemium model last summer, offering the basic service for free, and charging for upgrades and premium features. The company offers both hosted and behind-the-firewall options. It boasts 7,000 corporate customers, including Guitar Center, turner Broadcasting, and Avaya, and an 1,100 percent growth in users from a year ago (albeit off of a small base). Yammer, by comparison, claims to power 60,000 corporate networks. The realtime enterprise is obviously a growth industry.

Under the radar startup ReadyForce has raised $12.2 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Founder Collective and other investors.

The startup seems to still be under wraps according to its website, which is pretty bare. We do know that ReadyForce was founded by Bill Trenchard, former CEO of LiveOps, and is developing “applications that will create a virtual marketplace for on-demand labor.”

As the former CEO of LiveOps, serial entrepreneur Trenchard has considerable experience managing labor in the cloud. LiveOps allows businesses to outsource call centers and an on-demand workforce to the cloud. Prior to his time at LiveOps, Trenchard was co-founder and CEO of call routing technology company CallCast, which merged with LiveOps in 2003. Prior to CallCast, Bill was a managing director at Idealab and also founded and served as CEO of Jump Networks, Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft in April 1999. Trenchard is also a founding partner of Founder Collective.

PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $6.1 million in funding led by current investors Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million.

The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development. The company’s original products let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. Last year, PowerReviews launched two more social technologies for retailers to integrate: BrandConnect and Social Megaphone. BrandConnect tracks what consumers are saying about a company and/or brand on the social web and Social Megaphone allows customers to post their reviews to Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Last fall the company also brought on a new CEO, Pehr Luedtke.

PowerReviews, which launched in 2007, also powers a consumer-facing site, Buzzillions.com, that aggregates reviews from its partners retailers. The site includes over ten million product reviews. Customers include Staples, Drugstore.com, Walgreens, Diapers.com, Callaway and Jockey.

Boston-based DataXu, provider of a real-time online ad bidding and optimization system, has secured $11 million in Series B funding to add to the $7.8 million in financing it raised in an earlier round (April 2009).

The company, which was a finalist at last year’s edition of the TechCrunch50 conference and startup launchpad, raised the additional capital from Menlo Ventures and prior investors Atlas Venture and Flybridge Capital Partners.

The DataXu platform creates campaign-specific data models and algorithms that value, purchase and optimize ad placements across all major ad exchanges (including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s) and other ad inventory sources – all while taking into consideration media context, consumer profiles and choice of creative.

The startup launched its demand-side platform at TC50 in September 2009, and says it will now use the extra funds for new product development, sales and marketing, and international expansion.

Branders.com, an online-only promotional items store operator, raised another $5 million in venture funding, bringing the total invested in the company to $46 million. Participating in this round were Menlo Ventures, DCM, Venture Strategy Partners and Altos Ventures, all of whom backed the company in the past.

According to the Promotional Products Association International organization, the promotional items marketplace reached $18.1 billion in 2008, and saw growth even despite the recession. Branders.com is one of the leaders in this space, having launched over ten years ago and currently boasting more than 100,000 customers, including The White House and many Fortune 500 companies.

The San Mateo, CA-based dot-com survivor also claims profitability, but did not share revenue numbers.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Greetings from sunny Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong. I’ve spent some time in Asia - at least the tech centers - and have never found a place like this. It’s like Blade Runner meets 1990s Prague meets the end of the world. I’m here to report on what’s going on here in terms of electronics and how it’s changing the way we think about price, cost, and value. It’s pretty crazy.

Thirty years ago Shenzhen was a rice paddy, a town of about 50,000 souls. Today it is a hive, and a dirty one at that. Smog is a way of life. As the sun goes down over the city, the streets take on an amber cast and the darkness falls quickly. There are no picaresque sunsets here.