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Posts Tagged ‘mobius-venture’

Blog search engine (and more recently blog/social network advertising network) Technorati has raised a new round of financing – $2 million from existing investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital.

This is, the company says, an extension of their Series D round from June 2008, where they raised $7.5 million at a roughly $35 million valuation. The company has raise a total of just over $32 million to date (much of that at a much higher valuation).

The company is also in the process of raising additional capital via commercial debt, we’ve heard separately but haven’t confirmed.

This funding should get the company to profitability, says CEO Richard Jalichandra. He won’t say what revenues are, except that it has more than doubled each of the last two years. He also points out that Technorati’s network, with 25 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, is now the 5th largest social media property on the Internet.

In addition to its flagship site, Technorati supplies advertising to 450 or so websites – about half blogs, half niche social networks.

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Technorati has fully redesigned Blogcritics, a seven-year old blog network that the media company acquired last August, in an effort to drive more traffic to the site. We originally wrote about Blogcritics in 2005. Blogcritics currently is a community of 3,300 writers who have published more than 84,000 articles, providing bloggers an entry point to publish their content to a more widely-visited site. The content on the site hasn’t changed much; it’s will simply be packaged in a sleeker, more user-friendly interface. Currently, the site’s design and interface is bland and features very little in terms of images.

The new design, which will be rolled out at 1 AM PST tonight, features a new logo, a more colorful interface, and is well-organized. The site contains a new feature “ObamaNation,” that will analyze the impact President Obama is having on pop culture. It also allows users to follow their favorite writers by listing all of the content a writer has created both on and off the Blogcritics platform. All in all, it is a big improvement in terms of the way the site looks and feels.

Blogcritics, which is similar to Salon’s Open Salon, draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors, according to Google Analytics. The site hasn’t increased traffic since its acquisition last summer—the site had about 1 million monthly uniques at that point as well, so this is clearly an effort to spruce up the blog community to drive more traffic. The site currently runs ads completely through Technorati’s ad network.

Technorati Media has been through several acquisitions and redefining changes under CEO Richard Jalichandra, who joined the company in October 2007. Last June, the company launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network. Prior to launching the ad network, Technorati raised $7.3 million in a fourth round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation.

Last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network. And most recently, Technorati launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics.

Unfortunately, Technorati hasn’t been immune to layoffs during the current economic climate. A few weeks ago, the company let go 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees, and also suffered through an earlier round of layoffs last September and also implemented pay cuts for remaining staff.

But Jalichandra told us that that the blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Jalichandra has also said that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible.

Here’s a look at the old homepage:

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I’m here at Facebook’s office in downtown Palo Alto, where the company is holding a special Technology Tasting to announce and demonstrate its latest APIs and other features it is going to begin offering developers. In the last two days we’ve heard about some of the announcements, including its decision to grant developers access to full streams - a big step for a service that has previously been quite reserved about exporting its data. And earlier today we learned about its decision to fullly embrace of OpenID, which is a huge leap forward for the initiative.

I’ll be streaming the event live using Qik, during which we will be shown demos of some of the first implementations of the full Facebook streams and its integration with OpenID.

Update: Facebook is using Plaxo as an example of enabling two-way flow between Facebook Connect, so you can share activity between 3rd party sites and Facebook via linking accounts.

Showing Facebook desktop powered by Adobe Air. Loic Le Meur, creator of Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, is presenting how Seesmic Desktop is integrating Twitter and Facebook together into its desktop client. He says you should be able to post video to Facebook from the Seesmic Desktop. This pretty cool because they did this within 72 hours.

Luke Shepard is now talking OpenID and Facebook Connect are working together. See our earlier post.

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