The auction of Edgeio’s assets is complete, and Looksmart is the winning bidder. They’ve acquired most of the assets of the company for $280,000. I spoke to Patrick Chapman, LookSmart’s director of corporate development, briefly after the auction closed this morning. He says its too early to say what they’ll do with the assets, but they’ll likely issue a press release sometime soon. Chapman says he’ll be talking to Edgeio’s former employees and will hopefully offer some or all of them jobs with LookSmart. LookSmart is a small public company with a market cap of around $68 million. They’ve made some recent moves to build the business back to what it was in the 90′s, including a recent share repurchase announcement. This marks the end of this stage of Edgeio, a company I co-founded with Keith Teare in 2005 and which we put into the deadpool earlier this month. But I am happy to see the assets move to a company with the resources to move the ideas forward. CrunchBase Information Edgeio Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The assets of classified listing service Edgeio, a company co-founded by TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington that joined the Deadpool last week, are on the market. Interested parties can register to bid at Domain-Tools here. Bidding starts at $250,000 and bidders must pre-register to bid. The auction finishes Friday 21 December with payment to be paid via Escrow no later than the end of the year. Also on the auction block is the assets Adaptive Real Estate Services, a company purchased by Edgeio last year for $200,000. The reserve price for that sale is $150,000 and the same rules apply as for the Edgeio auction. Also at auction this week is the independent film focused video hosting site YouAre.TV. The founders of the 2 year old site are moving on to a new startup and a keen to sell. The traffic for the site isn’t spectacular but the value would appear to be with the IP which could easily be used on similar sites. The coding utilizes Amazon EC2 so running costs are low, and the site has a number of content deals in place with corporate clients including Verizon. The eBay auction for YouAre.TV can be found here. Bidding starts at $25,000. Update: all the relevant details on Edgeio for the sale can be found on a wiki here. As several commenter’s note, the wiki makes for interesting reading. Update 2 (Michael Arrington): One thing I want to make clear is that all of the proceeds, if any, from the sale of edgeio will go to the creditors and preferred stock holders. Common holders, like myself, will not be getting paid and my financial conflict of interest with this company is essentially over. CrunchBase Information Edgeio Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Edgeio, a company I co-founded in 2005, had a final board meeting this evening and made the decision to shut down operations of the company. We are putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool. Edgieo first launched in February 2006 after a beta period. The company raised a small angel round of financing, then in October 2006 closed a $5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos. The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company. For the last few months CEO Keith Teare has been working on a number of plans to keep the company going, but none of them panned out. So tonight the board decided, appropriately, to shut the company down. This will be orderly – employees will be let go but will be fully paid. In this job climate, all of them will hopefully find work very quickly. I’m obviously sad about this since I was one of the founders, although my involvement for the last two years has been as a board member only. But this is the way the startup world works. You win some, but you lose most. Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success. And now Keith and the rest of the team can start the fight over again, and hopefully next time they’ll come out winners. On a side note, our job site, which is run by Edgeio, will be transitioning over in the next day or two. → Read More
Random spam is never welcome. But when it comes from a company that I co-founded, I think it’s worth criticizing in writing. Edgeio’s classified listing platform has been doing well. We use it for our CrunchBoard job board, and many other blogs and websites have begun to use it, too. The company recently started reaching out to bloggers to discuss business development deals. Which is fine. But what isn’t fine is random mass emails out to top bloggers (including our own Duncan Riley) to pitch the product. I emailed Keith Teare, my co-founder and the company’s CEO, who says this was a simple mistake and was only meant to be sent to people they’ve already had direct contact with. That’s fine, but as I said I’m going to call them on this since I’m a stockholder and my name is associated with the company. Part of my promise to readers is to call things like I see them. Conflicts of interest are disclosed on our about page. And when a company I’m involved with does something I think is particularly smart or not so smart, I will point it out here on TechCrunch. File this one under “not so smart.” → Read More
Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II. Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital. He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet. Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete. → Read More
We covered Berkeley-based Hotswap last month during its pre-launch stage. Next week they launch officially and open up the site with full functionality. Hotswap is targeting the $370 billion/year U.S. used car market with a free, video-focused classifieds site. Listings are optimized to allow users to quickly upload video of the car with a camera phone or other low end video equipment. Both normal users and car dealers can upload listings. The company has inked a deal with Red McCombs Automotive, which will upload all of their used cars to the site. Other business development deals are being negotiated now. The company says sellers were very happy during the beta testing period and reported very high sell-through rates. They’ve raised around $1 million in capital from Kinsey Hills Group, the investors behine Scribd and others. Hotswap competes with Vast, eBay, Edgeio (a company that I co-founded) and many others. → Read More
Classified listing service Edgeio now lets you sell content through your listings. The new type of listing called “Paid content” consists of the same listing Edgeio already hosts, but comes with an embedded digital locker. Through the locker, users can securely sell text, file downloads, and streaming media through a widget hosted by Edgeio. It seems a good fit for selling podcasts or research reports. Affiliates can also grab the widget code to sell your product on their own sites as well for a revenue share determined by the content owner. Michael Arrington, the editor of this blog, is a founder and investor in the company. Digital lockers are nothing new. E-Junkie, Payloadz, Tradebit, and Bitpass (shutdown) have done it for a while. However, Edgeio has the added advantage of leveraging the paid listings through their existing listings network and providing a very straightforward product. It’s pretty simple to get started. You sign up to create a listing like any other through the “Paid Content” link. Next, select your content type, price (currency), affiliate percentage, and coupon code. Finally, Edgeio lets you make a teaser “preview” for the content to give buyers an idea about what they’re purchasing. Once completed, you get some embed code and the listing is placed in Edgeio’s index, linked to the page where the widget is embedded. An example of one of the widget embeds is included below. The other version of the widget initially shows visitors a teaser, until the content is purchased and unlocked. Use the coupon code “vgforfree” to unlock the content. To purchase the content, you need to sign into your Edgeio account and to pay by credit card or PayPal. The content is then unlocked for your Edgeio account. Edgeio splits revenue from sales through the widget 80/20 in favor of the content creator. The creator can then split that 80% for sales through affiliates at any percentage they like. Update (Arrington): This is a company that I co-founded in early 2005 with Keith Teare, months before I started TechCrunch. There is a clear conflict of interest, although I did not write, edit or give input on this post. For a balance of viewpoints, see Techmeme. → Read More
Scanning the classifieds in the paper is so last millennium, and even scanning online is last year’s news. Soon you’ll be able to search for used tennis rackets, sub-lets and other hard-to-find items via your mobile phone. Gumiyo and edgio announced a new partnership to bring online classifieds to the mobile space, and this will commence with edgeio’s real estate section, which Gumiyo will deliver via listings to interested people. Potential buyers will soon be able to review listings on their mobile phones, complete with photos. “Our partnership with edgeio is very complementary and it makes perfect sense,” says Shuki Lehavi, CEO and co-founder of Gumiyo. “edgeio is committed to innovation in the world of online classifieds, and has enabled a rich set of open APIs that we can use. This is a big reason why we’ve been syndicating Gumiyo listings to them since day one. Now, edgeio sellers can enter the mobile space with little to no effort.” Future possibilities for the partnership could see Gumiyo building applications utilizing MMS, SMS, WAP and widgets to enhance the search interface. Search on! Edgeio Gumiyo → Read More
Scottsdale, Arizona based iqzone has a solution for those seeking to sell items on the go: cell phone submitted classified listings. Iqzone’s “Snap Send Sell” feature allows users to take a photo or video clip of any product or service, text a description and send as a Multimedia (MMS) message to iqzone. Iqzone then categorizes and adds the listing on iqzone.com as well as 3rd party services including Edgeio. Buyers can connect with sellers in real-time by setting mobile or RSS alerts for items they are interested in. They can also share ads with their Facebook Friends and search iqzone using their mobile phone or the web. The company says that the product is the future of classified advertising. It’s certainly a different application and fits well into the “what will they think of next” category. Whilst the one-to-many distribution of classified listings has some appeal, I can’t help but think that it’s a solution looking for a problem. Others may think differently. → Read More
Edgeio, a classifieds listing company that I co-founded last year with Keith Teare, announced a $5 million Series A financing today. The round was led by Intel Capital and also included an investment from Transcosmos. Previous angel round investors (Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Frank Caufield Jr., RSS Investors, Millenium Technology Ventures, Michael Tanne, Auren Hoffman, Sam Perry, Bill McCabe and Louis Monier) also converted from debt to equity in this round. I won’t say much more here due to the conflict of interest (I remain on the board of directors of edgeio and am a stockholder). For other coverage, see BusinessWeek, VentureBeat, and Greg Sterling. I’ll add more links here as additional coverage comes in. Our coverage of the edgeio launch in February is here. Additional Coverage: Rex Dixon → Read More
After much anticipation and a period of being available to a private audience the team at Edgeio took the covers off of their creation tonight and launched to the general public. Edgeio takes listings (classifieds) from RSS-enabled sources and organizes them in a central location for users to be able to browse and search. The Edgeio ethos is that content belongs on the edges, and that is where the name originates from (Edge input/output). Content on the edges means the content on the millions of blogs and other sites out there which Edgeio does a good job of aggregating and organizing. From a seller’s perspective, to post an item you write about it on your blog and tag it ‘listing’ (along with any other keywords which are suitable to categorize the item for sale). Edgeio taps into the blog cloud via weblogs.com and other ping services (as well as its own ping server which is at http://www.edgeio.com/RPC2) to find new posts that have been tagged for listing. Once it finds your post, which usually happens very quickly, it will send a trackback to your post to make you aware that Edgeio has found it. Once you have posted, the first time you post an item you will need to go to Edgeio to claim your blog (a process that works similar to Technorati’s) from which point you can add additional metadata to your listing within Edgeio. The additional data you enter includes things like additional tags to categorize the item, your geographic location (which again you only enter once and is used when you search for items to buy as well) and the price of the item. It only takes moments from the time you post your listing to the time that it appears in Edgeio and is available for buyers to find. From a buyers perspective, you can go to Edgeio and then find items that are for sale a number of ways. The first and most obvious way is to enter terms into the search box. This will display results which are item summaries sorted in chronological order. The other way to find items is by browsing through the tag clusters that are located on the front page and working your way down to items that interest you. The last way in which you can find items is interesting, as Edgeio has lists of most popular items, the → Read More
Edgeio is a startup that I co-founded with Keith Teare last year. Because of the clear conflict of interest I won’t be writing about edgeio that much on TechCrunch. Instead, I recommend subscribing to the edgeio blog to get information about our vision, features and the upcoming launch. The service itself will open its doors in the next few weeks. Only a few people outside of the company have seen the product. A couple of days ago Keith gave a brief demo at a SDForum Search SIG event in Silicon Valley. Rob Hof from Business Week was in attendance and wrote his thoughts on his Business Week blog. To get a better understanding of what Edgeio will be, see his post here. To sign up to be notified of the launch, enter your email address at edgeio.com. → Read More
Edgeio is a company that Keith Teare, Vidar Hokstad, Matt Kaufman, Fred Oliveira and I have been working on for most of this year. It willl be launching in the near future. If you’d like to be notified of the launch, please give us your email on the temporary landing page. Edgeio will give you the ability to do new and (we think) really exciting things with your blog. If you have a weblog and you’d like to be part of early testing, there is a field for giving us your blog address as well. Edgeio will also have its own blog soon with more details. → Read More
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