• February 17th, 2009

    SynthaSite Gets A $20 Million Boost For Simple Website Creation Software

    There have been simple, browser-based website creation tools available on the market ever since the WWW turned mainstream, but there’s clearly still a significant demand for this type of services, especially with the way the web is evolving.

    SynthaSite is one of the players in the DIY website / blog builder field, and they’ve just gotten a huge vote of confidence from their investors: the company has announced a $20 million Series B round from Luxembourg-based Reinet Fund and plans to use the money to grow both organically and through selected acquisitions (they made a first small one past December when they bought Clickpass).

    This is actually the same investor as the $5 million Series A round it raised in November 2007, but then then-called Columbus Venture Capital was recently restructured into Reinet, which is now a listed entity on the Luxembourg & Johannesburg Stock Exchange with over $2 billion in market cap. → Read More

    June 16th, 2008

    Webjam Introduces Portable Mini Feeds, Friends Lists

    http://www.webjam.com/techcrunch/~ShowBadge?title=markmhx%20on%20Webjam&location=true&activity=true&webjams=true&friends=true Widgets are the most consumer-friendly means toward data portability. Users who want to establish a “centralized me” – whether that be on a blog, personal website or favorite social network profile – often just need a simple way to highlight their identities as maintained elsewhere on the web. Webjam’s new profile badge is remarkable in how well it enables users to do this. Unlike other badges, which tend to show only basic information (names, headshots, birthdays, etc), Webjam’s badge streams your most recent activity, lists your networks, and displays your friends. Compare this widget to the profile badges found on other social networks, such as Facebook: Mark Hendrickson’s Facebook profile Ning: http://static.ning.com/athertonballers/widgets/index/swf/badge.swf?v=3.3.6%3A5526 Multiply: http://images.multiply.com/multiply/horizontal-headshot-badge.swf And LinkedIn: The Facebook and Multiply widgets can be set to point out recently contributed items like photos and posts, but beyond that they’re pretty static representations of one’s presence there. Surprisingly, MySpace doesn’t even have a profile widget, and it’s an empire built on widgets. The Data Availability initiative appears to be a way to provide widget-like functionality through APIs (see the mockup to the right). Why they’ve decided to skip over embed codes is beyond me. Other social network sites like Vox, KickApps and Grouply also lack profile badges. If the smaller social networks (and social networking platforms) are going to compete with the likes of Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect in the long run, they’ll need to beef up their data portability initiatives – and widgets are a good place to start. Perhaps they could look at the widgets provided by social media sites like Last.fm for inspiration: table.lfmWidgetchart_b30d36750713c11127e701b08c041e2f td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetchart_b30d36750713c11127e701b08c041e2f tr.lfmHead a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/header/chart/recenttracks_regular_red.png) no-repeat 0 0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetchart_b30d36750713c11127e701b08c041e2f tr.lfmEmbed object {float:left;}table.lfmWidgetchart_b30d36750713c11127e701b08c041e2f tr.lfmFoot td.lfmConfig a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/footer/red.png) no-repeat 0px 0 !important;;}table.lfmWidgetchart_b30d36750713c11127e701b08c041e2f tr.lfmFoot td.lfmView a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/footer/red.png) no-repeat -85px 0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetchart_b30d36750713c11127e701b08c041e2f tr.lfmFoot td.lfmPopup a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/footer/red.png) no-repeat -159px 0 !important;} http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/chart/friends_6.swf Of course, we here at TechCrunch love widgets. Just see below. CrunchBase Information Webjam Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

    January 28th, 2008

    Whither Webjam?

    What is Webjam? Last time I looked is was a highly customisable home page creator. Founded in 2006 in London by a talented team led by former Yahoo! exec Yann Motte, it bundles community features with a drag-and-drop interface in a modular format. But it has been hard to really put a finger on where it’s big USP is, despite it being called (somewhat inaccurately) an “alternative to Facebook” by the BBC and winning .NET magazine’s people’s choice award. Was it really a MySpace plus Netvibes on steroids? However, now Webjam says it has a new renewed vigor and focus. It has upgraded its platform and is positioning itself along the lines of Ning, where you create and collaborate on your own community, rather than just produce personal home pages. You can suck in feeds from Flickr, YouTube, Amazon search, Google Maps etc etc, you name it. Identity management and APIs and allowing community owners to monetise their sites is also in the plan. There are lots more privacy settings and customised profiles letting you show just what you want. A more granular Facebook, maybe. My question is, will all this be enough of a differentiator? And will Yahoo and Netvibes – also now concentrating on start pages and community fetaures – end up squashing Webjams efforts? There is also the problem of following down Ning’s path. It’s already been accused of becoming a Porn Web ring, unable or unwilling to control the spread of its communities. And if Google buys Ning to acquire a social network white label platform were does that leave Webjam? Google isn’t going to buy two companies in this space, surely? Then there is Flux, a new social network joint venture between Viacom and SocialProject, which is a full on Ning competitor. I really hope Webjam can re-position itself in the market with a strong, clear offering, and it looks like they are heading in the right direction. They raised a first round of £1 million in March 2007 from French early-stage VC I-source Gestion. They are now preparing for the 2nd round. But it looks like there is going to be a lot of competition on the horizon, some of it useful (confirming the market), some of it not so. (If you want to know more check out their London event on Wednesday January 30). → Read More

    March 28th, 2007

    WebJam Bags $2 Million for Community of Personalized Pages

    London-based WebJam, a community of openly editable personal pages, just raised $2 million from French early-stage VC I-Source Gestion. You can see our earlier coverage here. WebJam lets you create as many personal pages as you like by using their ajax editor to drop specialized modules onto your page. It’s a little Ning and a little Netvibes or Pageflakes without the open module standards. Default pages start you off with modules for blogs, personal profiles, or personalized start pages. WebJam makes creating or modifying your own page easier by letting you to copy modules or even entire layouts from other WebJam pages to your own page with just one click. Modules include personal publishing (blog), community (friend lists, bulletin boards…), media (photos, music, rss feeds…), and productivity tools (notepad, search, gmail…). Each of these modules can remain public, visible to friends and registered users, or kept private. Each of these pages also has a community attached to it, which you can invite other users to join. You can use this feature to emulate Ning to a degree by first creating a central group page with the community modules installed, and then inviting friends with profile page modules to join. → Read More

    December 9th, 2006

    Webjam Lets Users Be Copycats

    A European company called Webjam launches this weekend at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is a personal Web aggregation tool with a heavy social networking component. At first, I thought Webjam was like a fancier Spokeo in that it allows you to customize your profile page with RSS feeds and your personal content from sites like Flickr. On both sites users can share their pages within their network but Webjam takes that function one step further. With Webjam, users can replicate other pages they find within the Webjam network. They can create a new page with someone else’s content and change it however they like. For example, imagine you find a Webjam page promoting an upcoming movie. You decide you want to share it with your friends but think some of the content is offensive or lame or for some reason not worthy of sharing. If the page is public, you can duplicate that page and now the page becomes yours to change however you want. You can change the color, the layout, the content. You can add movie reviews from another site. It is a new page under your Webjam account with a new URL. If you create a site you don’t want anyone to edit or duplicate, you can set it as private but Webjam thinks that most people will keep their pages public. After all, imitation is the best form of flattery. For private use, Webjam is useful if you want to set your homepage to feed various social components such as your sister’s Flickr album or your friend’s recommended Web pages of the day in addition to the standard home page elements. You can easily duplicate those elements of others’ pages into your own home page. As soon as you push Edit, each component of the page becomes a module, or a widget, editable by drag and drop. The only component that is not movable or deletable is, of course, the advertising module. The pages within Webjam are organized by tags. The founders said that they anticipate people will start to build communities within each tag. “It’s very powerful because it’s bringing the power of communicating to the next level,” said Yann Motte, co-founder and managing director of Webjam. “Sharing is fine, but so what? We will make people better by allowing them to build on the communities of what Webjam is doing. If you → Read More

    Upcoming Events

    E3 2012

    Los Angeles, CA

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA

    Real-Time
    Crunchbase

    True&Co — Received $2M in Seed funding from First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, SoftBank Capital, Aileen Lee, and Ellen Levy
    5.1.2012
    True&Co — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Ellen Levy — Invested in True&Co.
    5.1.2012
    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
    5.29.2012
    ServerOrigin — Acquired by Black Lotus.
    5.29.2012
    True&Co — Received $2M in Seed funding from First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, SoftBank Capital, Aileen Lee, and Ellen Levy
    5.1.2012
    5.30.2012
    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
    Ellen Levy — Invested in True&Co.
    5.1.2012
    SoftTech VC — Invested in True&Co.
    5.1.2012
    Aileen Lee — Invested in True&Co.
    5.1.2012
    First Round Capital — Invested in True&Co.
    5.1.2012
    SoftBank Capital — Invested in True&Co.
    5.1.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    True&Co — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    InstaEDU — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Smotri.com — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Mail.ru Video — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    PayPal Media Network — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    Trivia Party — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    ACT for Lotus Notes CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    VMobile - Mobile CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    CrunchBase