• March 8th, 2010

    The Secret Lives Of Objects: StickyBits Turn Barcodes Into Personal Message Boards

    Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app. Stickybits is that app. → Read More

    December 12th, 2009

    The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are

    We are witnessing a profound change in the media and advertising industries due to the emergence of social media.  Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, have captured significant share of the attention economy from traditional publishers.  Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million (plus assumption of debts) to Bloomberg, Foursquare’s pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake.

    Amidst this disruption, media companies are chasing after “their” audience in order to continue to broker the attention of that audience to marketers.  But just at the moment that media has mastered the art of blogging, search engine optimization and CPM yield management, they are now faced with a new set of consumer behaviors that elude their programming faculties: mobile devices, location-based services and the social graph. Driving this change in consumer behavior is the emergence of social media as a means of content production.

    Editor’s note:  This guest post is written by Seth Goldstein (@seth),  the Co-Founder of socialmedia.com, which is building the first ad server based on people not pages. Its platform provides authoring, serving and reporting across different types of social media. All of its ads are real messages from real people. Seth is also the Co-Chairman of the IAB’s Social Media Committee. → Read More

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    Optimizely — Received Series A funding from Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and InterWest Partners
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    InterWest Partners — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Bolt | Peters — Acquired by Facebook for $50M.
    6.21.2012
    Actual Systems — Acquired by Solera Holdings.
    5.29.2012
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    ServerOrigin — Acquired by Black Lotus.
    5.29.2012
    Optimizely — Received Series A funding from Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and InterWest Partners
    5.30.2012
    Draker — Received $475k in Debt funding
    5.30.2012
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Received $2.7M in Series A funding from Advantage Capital Partners
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Received Seed funding from High-Tech Gruenderfonds and Dr. Schumacher
    5.29.2012
    InterWest Partners — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Google Ventures — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Battery Ventures — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
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    Trinity Ventures — Invested in Badgeville.
    5.30.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Actual Systems — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Company added to CrunchBase
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