What you need to know - Wednesday 01/12/11

Katie Gatto · January 12, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/15d8

Baynote raised $13M; Adknowledge $200M; Formspring $11.5M; M9 Defense $1.4M; Pose $1.6M

NetApp, a storage and data management solution company, will acquire Akorri Networks, the makers of data center management software.  The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but this is an all-cash transaction.

Baynote, a maker of link-generating software, raised $13 million in its second round of funding. The round was led by SingTel Innov8.

 

Adknowledge, an online advertising company, announced its second fundraising in as many days.  The company raised  $200 million in a combination of debt and equity financing.

Fashiolista.com, an online fashion site,  raised $500,000 in seed funding from Atomico Ventures.

 

Formspring, a social site centered around user questions, raised  $11.5 million of funding in a round led by Redpoint Ventures. Baseline Ventures was also involved in the round.

M9 Defense, a materials science company based in the Seattle area, raised $1.4 million in a series A round of funding. No word was given on how the funds will be used.

 

Google’s Chrome browser will no longer  support  the H.264 video codec. Google hopes to go in the direction of  open codec technologies.

 

MySpace laid off 500 employees. This amounts to about 47% of MySpace's staff.

 

The much awaited Verizon iPhone will be available in stores in February. The announcement was made at a live event in New York.

 

Bullpen launches a new fund aimed at making investments bigger than $1 million, and smaller then $5 million. The fund has raised some capital an made its first investment.

Pose, a makers of a social fashion app for smartphones, raised $1.6 million from True Ventures, GRP Partners, and Founder Collective. Dave Morin and Shawn Fanning both also participated in the round.

SmallRivers, the makers of the Paper.li service, raised $2.1 million in funding. Investors in the round included Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital and Endeavour Vision.

In Today's Entrepreneur, VatorNews profiled Mark Goldenson, the founder of Breakthrough.com, which won Vator Splash SF in September. Mark also founded PlayCafe, Woosh, Stanford Squash, and Stanford Bazaar.

Support VatorNews by Donating

Read more from our "Trends and news" series

More episodes

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

NetApp

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that help our customers accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve outstanding cost efficiency. Our dedication to principles of simplicity, innovation, and customer success has made us one of the fastest-growing storage and data management providers today.

Customers around the world choose us for our “go beyond” approach and broad portfolio of solutions for business applications, storage for virtual servers, disk-to-disk backup, and more. Our solutions provide nonstop availability of critical business data and simplify business processes so companies can deploy new capabilities with confidence and get to revenue faster than ever before.

Baynote

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Baynote provides real-time Product and Content Recommendations & Social Search to websites via an on-demand Web 2.0 service based on the collective wisdom of like-minded peers to increase conversions by 20-200%. It takes an average of six clicks on a Website for a user to find pertinent information through search or navigation. As a result, over 80% of visitors are abandoning these sites and taking millions in potential revenue with them. Utilizing proven research in the social sciences, Baynote combines social understanding with state-of-the-art Web 2.0 engineering to match site visitors with the best products and content available. Baynote’s revolutionary approach uses the Wisdom of Invisible Crowds™ — the implicit, emergent behaviors of website visitors who are unknown to each other and act as anonymous visitors — to guide like-minded website visitors to the most useful content and products. It is currently used by eCommerce sites to increase NET revenues by 20% or more, eMarketing sites to increase lead generation by over 200%, and eSupport sites to reduce the cost of support by as much as 50% while increasing customer satisfaction through self-service. Baynote is a winner of AO100 Top 100 private company award.
48048

Mark Goldenson

Joined Vator on