What you need to know - 05/17/11

Ronny Kerr · May 17, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1a82

A conversation with Demand Media co-founder Shawn Colo; LinkedIn raises the price of its IPO shares

Bee TV raised $1.5 million from Italian venture capital firm Innogest to fund its new social TV watching app on the iPad.

 

 

Dealfind, a local daily deals site based in Toronto, secured $31 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners, Georgian Partners and the Ontario Venture Capital Fund.

 

Vator Splash LA is coming up next week, and to get ready for it, VatorNews' Faith Merino struck up a chat with one of our keynote speakers, Demand Media co-founder and EVP of M&A Shawn Colo.

Local Q&A site Hipster raised $1 million in seed funding from several angel investors: Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Lightbank, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Max Ventilla, TechStars David Cohen and David Tisch, Google’s Don Dodge, Paige Craig, Ludlow Ventures, Lerer Ventures and others.

Sequoia Capital confirmed its latest early-stage Internet investment in the U.S: Humble Bundle, a distributor of digital games.

Jobvite, offering next-gen recruiting solutions, received $15 million in Series C funding led by Trident Capital and joined by CMEA Capital and ATA Ventures.

LinkedIn, which is set to debut on the NYSE on Thursday under the ticker "LNKD,"  raised the price of its 7.8 million shares to $42-$45 per share, from $32-$35. The change means the IPO could raise as much as $405.7 million.

Netflix has signed a multi-year agreement with Miramax to stream the studio’s titles digitally—which marks a first for both Miramax and Netflix.

 

SecondMarket completed $115.4 million in private company stock transactions in Q1 2011, bringing total transaction volume to over $600 million since the market launched in April 2009.

Tradeshift, the social network for business, announced new capital fundraising of up to $7 million from Notion Capital.

Pop music diva Lady Gaga is the first to ever reach 10 million followers on Twitter, as confirmed by the Lady’s account and by the official Twitter team.

 

uma, provider of semantic Web technology, closed an 800,000 Euro round ($1.1 million) of funding from TheMerger.com as well as private European investors.

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Demand Media

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Demand Media is building a different type of new media company. With a proprietary media platform that powers the company's highly-trafficked domains and wholly-owned content media properties, Demand Media leverages cutting edge, user-driven publishing, community and monetization tools in its quest to define the next generation of new media companies.

Twitter

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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Shawn Colo

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