• LivingSocial Gets $5 Million From Grotech Ventures and Steve Case To Create Social Apps

    Erick Schonfeld

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Monday, July 21st, 2008

    LivingSocial, a company that started out as a Facebook developer and is now creating social app across many social networks, raised $5 million in a series A financing that was led by Grotech Ventures. Steve Case also personally invested. (LivingSocial’s CEO and co-founder, Tim O’Shaughnessy, is a former AOLer who also worked for Case at Revolution Health).

    The startup specializes in social apps that let people organize, review, and discover books, music, movies, restaurants, video games, and beer. (ReadingSocial, TuneSocial, ReelSocial, BrewSocial, etc). Since it launched in beta last February, the company claims to have attracted 6.4 million beta users, who have collectively reviewed nearly 80 million items.

    That catalog of reviews may become a valuable database, but the apps themselves are not exactly the most popular. On Facebook, for instance, ReelSocial has only 1882 daily active users, BrewSocial has 6,353 daily active users, and TuneSocial has 3,249 daily active users. Perhaps the company can use some of that money to buy more users.

    And what’s with the MySpace logo rip-off?

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