What you need to know - Wednesday 11/17/10

Katie Gatto · November 17, 2010 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/13cf

GameGround raised $5.3M; Layar raised $14M; LivingSocial buys stake in Jump On it; Meebo raised $25M

LivingSocial, a social commerce startup that provides daily deals, has just bought the majority stake in Jump On It. The agreement involves an investment of $5 million. Between the two companies, deals are expected to reach 1.2 million Australians. 

VeriFone Systems just bought Hypercom for $485 million in stock. Hypercom makes products like counter top and mobile card payment terminals.

The Hulu Plus service is out of preview, and available to the public for $7.99 a month. The subscription service allows users to store and watch whole seasons of the sites shows.

Kayak, the travel search engine, is going public. With this initial public offering, Kayak is hoping to raise $50 million. The company is being taken public by Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank Securities. Kayak has  made $6.1 million in net income on $128 million in revenue during the first nine months of this year.

Meebo raised $25 million in its Series D round of funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures. Other investors in the round include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sequoia Capital. It also launched a new check in service.

GameGround, a social networking startup geared towards gamers, raised $5.3 million. Investors in the round include: Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Capital, Vodafone Ventures, and Novel TMT Ventures.

Layar, an augmented reality company focusing on smartphones, raised  $14 million in a B series of funding. The round was led by Intel Capital.

The founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, announced, at the Web 2.0 Summit, that more than 250 Million people are using Facebook every day. Zuckerberg argued that "Facebook immediately became the most engaging product on the Web with the most usage per user from the beginning...  because it was social."

Google launched boutiques.com, a shopping site. The site is, for now only available in the USA and only covers women's fashion, for now. The site is also available on the iTunes store and as an iPad app.

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Meebo

Startup/Business

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Palo Alto based Meebo is a Sequoia backed, web based instant messaging company. Meebo originally gave users the ability to access multiple chat clients from one place without the need for desktop software. This was great for users when they were away from their main computer and without AOL, ICQ, MSN or Yahoo software. However, in less than two years Meebo has launched so many new features that for many people it’s changed from an occasional solution to a frequently used web app.

Meebo has become quite popular, with users exchanging over 80 million instant messages daily. In addition, Meebo has been named to the following lists:

  • Time’s Top 50 Coolest Websites for 2006
  • PC World’s The 100 Best Products of 2006
  • PC World’s The 100 Best Products of 2007
  • Top 100 Webware sites for 2007