What you need to know - Monday 01/10/2011

Katie Gatto · January 10, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/15b5

VillageVines raied $3M; Klout $8M; SoundCloud $10M; Verizon iPhone to launch on Tuesday

Klout, influence-measuring startup, raised $8.5 million. The round was led by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer sFund. Greycroft Partners also participated.

VillageVines, a discount service for fine dining, raised $3 million. This round of funding was led by Hearst Interactive Media.

Verizon announced it will have the iPhone’s on Tuesday. Specifics of the plan and coverage have yet to be announced.

 

Vator's own Faith Merino looks at the interest rates of Kiva microloans.

 

FlightCaster, a flight time prediction service,  is being bought out by Next Jump. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

 

About $7.8 billion was spent on clean tech in 2010, according to data released by the CleanTech group.  There were a total of 715, which represent a 28% increase when compared to 2009.


SoundCloud, a file-sharing service based in Germany, raised $10 million. The round was led by Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures.

MUBI, a site dedicated to film, raised a $2.4 million. The round was led by Eduardo Costantini. Other investors included  Martin Varsavsky, Alec Oxenford, Aydin Senkut, Georges Harik, Joel Peterson, Bart Decrem and Jose Marin.

CES 2011 finished over the weekend with a bevy of announcements. The tablet-based OS from Android, Honeycomb, made it debut, as did the Nintendo 3DS complete with a March launch date in the US.  We got a look at In-car GPS functionality, and texting-while-driving technology. Also, services like Vimeo, which increased video upload limits, made announcements about changes to their services. Several TV makers also made announcements about offering either Google TV or their own app.

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Named as one of the top ideas in 2006 by the New York Times Magazine, Kiva (www.kiva.org) is the world’s first person-to-person lending marketplace for the poor. Kiva's mission is to reduce global poverty by letting consumers lend to specific developing world entrepreneurs online. These loans help low income entrepreneurs create their own path towards economic self sufficiency. In a little over a year, Kiva has rapidly grown to become the most trafficked site in microfinance with over 70,000 internet lenders supporting thousands of entrepreneurs in 30 developing countries. Kiva has also received wide acclaim from the blogosphere (+10,000 blogs), mainstream media (NPR, BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, etc) and development experts (featured at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative and 2006 Global Microcredit Summit). Headquartered in San Francisco, Kiva is a 501(c)3 non-profit and aspires to be a major internet public good (like Wikipedia).