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XYDO pivots to deliver auto-created email newsletters

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 8, 2012 | Comments

From consumer-focused to company-focused provider of emails and news

Often business models or products take shape over time, after many trial-and-error attempts to find something that really takes off with customers. In the case of XYDO, which launched as a challenger to Flipboard and news readers back in 2010, that Aha! moment came about two months ago when the start-up decided to send out daily briefs filled with relevant news ...

First Round leads $1.75M round in Schoolfeed

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 8, 2012 | Comments

Founder of RockYou's new start-up, with 7M members, announces funding; readies for new round

Like most people, every so often I get friend requests from people in my past. And, while I don't mind "friending" them, I'm not the type to reminisce. I didn't even go to my class reunions. It's not that I don't want to "friend" old friends. It's just I can't keep up with my ever-growing family, friends and colleagues. It's ...

Pivot3 lands $23M in funding to expand sales, marketing

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 7, 2012 | Comments

Samsung Ventures leads round for the provider of virtual servers and shared storage

Pivot3 announced early Wednesday that it's raised $23 million in funding, led by Samsung Ventures, with participation from past investors, including Focus Ventures, InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial, Northleaf Capital Partners and Silver Creek Ventures. The new funds brings Pivot3's total funding to more than $100 million. Austin, Texas-based Pivot3, which was founded in 2003 and has 500 customers, ...

Spreecast makes its video player embeddable

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 7, 2012 | Comments

The social video platform, founded by Stubhub founder Jeff Fluhr, now accessed across the Web

We already gave you an example of the Spreecast embedded player at Vator Splash SF last Thursday, when Jeff Fluhr, founder and CEO of Spreecast, gave a live demo of the player on VatorNews while giving his keynote presentation. Now the San Francisco-based start-up, which is a social video platform that lets people broadcast together, officially announced Tuesday that its ...

Adku acquired by Groupon for over $10M

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 6, 2012 | Comments

Big data start-up company Adku, founded by ex-Googlers, gets snapped up by Groupon

Groupon has acquired Adku, an one-year-old start-up focusing on providing data to big retailers to make recommendations, for over $10 million. Adku, which raised $1.5 million from investors in January of last year from Greylock Partners, True Ventures, Battery Ventures and AngelPad for a pre-money valuation of $5.25 million, has been in stealth mode ever since launching in early March 2011. The San ...

YC start-up Ridejoy gets mileage with $1.3M seed round

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 6, 2012 | Comments

Freestyle Capital, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and more back social riding start-up

Sometimes there's upside to meeting people when sharing rides. I met my husband while sharing a taxi cab out of Burbank, Calif. Little did I know that the 40-minute ride would lead to a new life for me as we have three sons and one more on the way. While getting married to people you share rides with isn't common, ...

David Hornik: Sh#%&t venture capitalists say

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 4, 2012 | Comments

	Venture capitalists vacation tons; have their assistants tweet for them, complain about their cereal As part of our Vator Splash SF event, David Hornik has become a regular "Late Night" host. As part of our February event, Hornik prepared a comical skit, as only Hornik could pull off, portraying venture capitalists in their true light.
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Facebook makes Sheryl Sandberg worth about $2.1 billion

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 1, 2012 | Comments

COO earned $31 million in 2011, making her the top paid executive at the social network

She already has a lot of power and influence in the tech world, now Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's 42-year-old chief operating officer, may have just solidified her ranking as one of the richest females in the world, and definitely one of the highest paid executives in technology. In Facebook's highly-anticipated IPO filing released Wednesday, in which it states it will raise $5 ...

Rumgr raises $500k from Tony Hsieh and other angels

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 1, 2012 | Comments

Social and mobile commerce site focuses on helping you discover items nearby

(Correction: to reflect the post-valuation) There's something to be said about the serendipitous nature of finding something. For instance, the other day my husband and I were passing by a museum, and two beautiful antique chairs caught our eyes. They happened be for sale at the museum and though we hadn't intended on buying anything that day, we did. In ...

Heidi Roizen joins DFJ as Venture Partner

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, February 1, 2012 | Comments

Roizen goes back to venture roots with VC firm that funded her company

After a few years away from venture capital as a partner at Mobius Ventures, Heidi Roizen re-enters the Silicon Valley elite group of VCs as she joins 27-year-old firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) as venture partner. In a way, she's come full circle as DFJ was one of the VCs that invested in Roizen's company she co-founded with ...

The dead zone in the venture landscape

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, January 30, 2012 | Comments

VCs at RRE Ventures, First Round, NEA, Genacast, Grotech on the opportunities and challenges

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that the traditional VC model has been turned on its head, mainly because it has become cheaper to create and scale consumer Web companies. How has this changed the landscape for traditional VCs? To answer this, we brought together mainly old-line, traditional VCs to our Venture Shift NY event, which we ...

Brand sentiment tool, Wise Window, unveils free service

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, January 27, 2012 | Comments

Provider of business intelligence tools launches MOBI for smaller companies

Monitoring what consumers are saying online to gauge demand and sentiment isn't new. But understanding the millions of voices across the Web and analyzing trends based off that information continues to be something companies are iterating on and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to perfect. Wise Window is one of those companies iterating on this service since 2007. ...

How Kaggle plans on making money

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, January 24, 2012 | Comments

Interview with founders Anthony Goldbloom and Jeremy Howard

Here's the second part of my interview with the founders of Kaggle, a recently-launched start-up with $11 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, as well as Stanford University's endownment, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Google's chief economist Hal Varian and now Google Adsense co-founder Gil Elbaz. Kaggle is solving real-world problems through competitions among the world's biggest brains. Kaggle brings together super smart ...

UrbanSitter lands $1.75M for babysitter-finder service

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, January 23, 2012 | Comments

Think OpenTable for sitters; First Round, Rustic Canyon, Menlo Ventures provides backing

As a mother of three with one on the way, i know the importance of babysitters. Even though I have one nanny and one regular sitter, every so often it's good to have backups. Apparently, these backups come in handy. Apparently, about 300 million sitters are booked each year in the U.S., according to UrbanSitter, which derived the figures from ...

Greylock invests $5M in social-gifting service, Wrapp

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, January 18, 2012 | Comments

Reid Hoffman, Niklas Zennstrom join board of start-up that's socializing and digitizing gift cards

(Correction: To reflect Spotify's founding CTO) The business of gift cards is significant. If most people who receive gift cards are like me (I pretty much stack them up without ever having time to use them), it's pretty lucrative for retailers who sell them. But gift cards can also be great for retailers because people who do end up using ...

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