Crisp Media, a cross-platform rich media advertising company, today announced that it has raised a $6 million round of growth capital from Meritage Funds, Intel Capital, and EDBI. The round brings Crisp’s total investment to $17 million.
VP of Marketing Tom Limongello says that Crisp will use its new funding to expand into international markets, specifically Asia, and will be establishing a second headquarters in Singapore. The use of cell phones and tablets in Asia is exploding, Limongello said, so building a second home in Singapore, along with partnering with EDBI, one of Singapore’s leading investment firms, will assist the company in its plans to roll out its advertising solutions across Asia. → Read More
Flash sales site Ideeli, which was founded in 2007, has raised $41 million in Series C funding led by Next World Capital with Cue Ball Capital, StarVest Partners, Constellation Growth Capital and Kodiak Venture Partner participating in the round. This bring’s Ideeli’s total funding to nearly $70 million
With over 4 million members, ideeli offers 50 to 70 percent discounts on clothing and accessories over a several day period. The sales are private, available only to members, with upcoming sales from brands announced via emails. Products include clothing for men, women and children as well as jewelry, handbags and home accessories. → Read More
Even though I am living in Japan, I have never made it to Nagasaki. But the Huis Ten Bosch theme park might make me go one day: Sharp has created a kind of 360-degree video room inside the park, which surrounds visitors in the front, above, below, and on both sides (“5D”) with a total of 156 AQUOS 60-inch LCD displays. → Read More
Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, is announcing a significant change today.
In a move that represents less altruism and more capitalism, from May 1st onwards Flattr will no longer require new users to add credit to their accounts in order to run the Flattr button on their sites and start receiving payments. In other words, users won’t be required to give to receive. → Read More
Clarizen, provider of online work and project management software, has raised $12 million in venture funding led by Opus Capital Ventures with Benchmark Capital, Carmel Ventures and DAG Ventures participating. The total amount of venture capital invested in the company, which was founded in 2005, now totals $36 million.
The company provides collaborative project management software that allows businesses to easily manage all of their projects and resources. Work and project details for all employees are managed and maintained in one centralized, online platform. → Read More
Sedo will announce shortly that it has sold the most expensive domain name of this year so far in its third biggest public sale ever handled behind sex.com ($13 million) and vodka.com ($3 million). The company has brokered the sale of gambling.com for $2.5 million in cash.
UK-based Media Corpporation sold the domain to an unnamed company also based in the United Kingdom for £1.5 million in cash. According to the seller, the transaction formally completed on 27 April, with the receipt of funds and transfer of the domain name. → Read More
BMC Software this morning announced that it has acquired Coradiant, a privately-held provider of web application performance monitoring solutions.
BMC pitches the purchase as a way to enhance its ability to offer businesses a 360-degree view of service performance (‘from end-user experience and behavior to infrastructure’). The company says an ‘aggressive product integration plan’ is already underway. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → Read More
Om Malik got a tip from an unidentified source who told him that Apple purchased the domain name icloud.com from a Swedish company called Xcerion (which recently renamed its iCloud service to CloudMe) for about $4.5 million. This is most certainly a possibility.
Last week, we also received a tip that Apple purchased iCloud.com. I immediately followed up with Xcerion and asked the company whether they changed their name because Apple had purchased the domain name / trademark from them and why they changed their service’s name to CloudMe if that weren’t the case. → Read More
Social gaming developer the Casual Collective is rebranding today as Kixeye and debuting a new game, Battle Pirates, today on Facebook. Battle Pirates is a real time strategy game featuring base building, exploration, and player vs. player combat.
Kixeye’s games are targeted towards hardcore gamers and is betting that Facebook is a platform where these types of gamers will continue to flock to. Kixete games are all free-to-play and monetizes via virtual goods. In addition to Facebook, KIXEYE’s games are also published on the company’s own platform. → Read More
Spiceworks, a startup that develops Web-connected social IT management software, has raised a whopping $25 million in new funding from Adams Street Partners, Tenaya Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding up to $54 million.
Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is mainly used at small to medium businesses to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. → Read More
Be Your Own Souvenir Lets You 3D Scan Yourself And Take Home A Figurine Nintendo Can’t Sell The 3DS And It’s Your Fault The White iPhone Is Official, Available April 28 It’s A Nintendo Controller Messenger Bag! Apple (Finally) Responds To Location Data Tracking Kerfuffle, Says It’s Innocent → Read More
In February I wrote about new startup and luxury home rental service Inspirato. Think timeshare for the rich – members are able to stay at luxury homes around the world for a relatively inexpensive price that’s about 1/3 of market price.
It’s a twist on the Exclusive Resorts model, with the biggest difference being that members don’t have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to join. Instead they pay a relatively modest fee of $15,000 plus a couple of thousand dollars a year.
The company raised $5 million in late 2010 to get things started. Today they’re announcing another $11 million in funding. It’s not from venture firms, either. 50 or so wealthy individuals invested in the round. That’s an average of about $220,000 per person. Most of those investors, says cofounder Brad Handler, got a free membership as part of their investment. Funnily enough, a lot of the investors are venture capitalists acting as individual investors, not through their firms. → Read More
A little bird has told Reuters that Panasonic’s earnings call, due to start shortly, will bring news of huge layoffs in the works. The company is expected to announce 40,000 jobs will be cut from its 380,000-strong workforce. The cuts, which would take place over the next two years, would be the result of continuing “streamlining” in the face of tough competition. Just a little bad news to end the night! Update: The report was updated; Panasonic will be cutting 35,000 jobs over two years, as a result of restructuring, competition, and quake-related earnings drops. → Read More
This information was in the link I put earlier, but just so it’s clear: Sony states that all credit card information in their breached database was indeed encrypted, though the “personal data” wasn’t. What does that mean? → Read More
LetsLunch, the service that helps you network less-awkwardly, is expanding from its comfy Silicon Valley confines and launching in New York today. We first wrote about the service here, and it’s gotten a nice niche following since then. People have scheduled more than 1,000 lunches through the service, and about 70% of the time people take time to write a testimonial of the lunch afterwards.
I respect founder Syed Shuttari’s strict adherence to his vision. A lot of people have suggested he have the “commoners” bid for lunch spots with the more well-known investors and Valley personalities on the site. Shuttari is insistant that would create the wrong vibe, and that the key is the two people meeting on an equal footing. I couldn’t agree more. I want to lunch with people who are interesting, not people who can pay the most money. → Read More
Late last year we first mentioned Y Combinator startup Greplin – it’s a startup that indexes your social stuff in the cloud, making all your Facebook, Gmail. LinkedIn, Google Calendar, Evernote, Twitter, Dropbox and just about everything else searchable. The easiest way to describe it is “the other half of search.”
They opened their doors to customers in February. The company won’t talk about total user numbers yet, which isn’t surprising. But we have dug one interesting data point out of founder Daniel Gross – They’ve now indexed some 1.5 billion documents. And they’re indexing about 30 million new documents per day.
What this means – when you join Greplin you authorize it to index various social apps and services. A typical user may sign up and start off by authorizing Greplin to index Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, for example. Greplin then grabs everything in those services – all your Facebook messages and updates, all your Twitter updates and DMs, all your Gmail messages back and forth, etc. , and lets you search them. When you add up all those documents for all users, you get to that big number, 1.5 billion. → Read More
If you’ve picked up one of the sweet little compacts out there (like the Canon S95 or Olympus XZ-1), but find it a bit petite for your mitts to hold onto securely, you might want to check out these little things from Flipbac. They’re exactly what they look like: stick-on grips that add a little love handle to your point and shoot. [via PetaPixel] → Read More
Recent bug reports within the Chromium testing community have turned up a couple new devices running Chrome OS. There’s the expected netbook from Acer, different from the ZGA we saw a while back, and a mystery device referred to as Seaboard that may or may not be a Chrome OS tablet. → Read More
