Israeli startup Wix, which allows users to build flash websites, has just raised $40 million in Series D funding led by Insight Venture Partners and DAG ventures, with Benchmark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners participating in the round. This brings Wix’s total
funding to $61 million.
Founded in 2006, Wix provides a simple mechanism for anyone to create Flash-based websites. Users can customize their Wix websites with a drag and drop editing tool and pretty templates, making the site user-friendly for users who may not be tech savvy. The site makes its money from a freemium model where users pay for extra customization and design features. → Read More
For the past two years I’ve been holding onto the belief that Israeli entrepreneurs should devote particular focus on the opportunities available to products and services that cater to Small & Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). Slowly but surely, more and more companies have indeed started targeting this space, the most notable being Kampyle, SohoOS, and Clarizen.
Today, Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple is announcing a $1.1M round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund, as well as angel investors. → Read More
Last time I was in Cape Town, I was hanging out with Vinny Lingham, founder of Yola, a service that allows small businesses to create a site in about five minutes. He was incredibly spazzy about some big deal he was about to close that would have a material effect on the company, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. That’s OK I think I found out anyway.
It’s HP, according to these screenshots below, and that’s a whale. → Read More
Some people, ahem, are predicting a big resurgence in business software. Given how outdated most tools are, that’s probably a safe bet – whether it happens now or in the next few years. While software as a service and open source have plugged many holes, most large companies still run themselves on one of two companies: Oracle or SAP. That can’t last forever.
But the amazing thing is, when it comes to small business software, the market is still pretty wide open, with most businesses still running themselves on pen-and-paper or Excel spreadsheets. There is a reason that Intuit has managed to keep a stranglehold on small business software—because it is hard to build and even harder to market to such a huge, fragmented market with so many different needs. Especially when the revenues per customer are necessarily puny.
So, it’s a huge market but, let’s face it, it’s not a sexy one. And that’s one reason a company like Yola doesn’t get more press. I hung out with Yola’s founder Vinny Lingham while I was in Cape Town last week and came away impressed for a few reasons. → Read More
Startup Wix, which allows users to build flash websites and widgets, has just raised $10 million in Series C funding from Benchmark Capital existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners participating. This round of founding brings Wix’s total funding to $20 million. You can read our initial review of Wix here.
Founded in 2006, Wix provides a simple mechanism for anyone to create Flash-based websites and widgets without losing SEO juice. Users can customize their Wix websites with a drag and drop editing tool and pretty templates, making the site user-friendly for users who may not be tech savvy. The funding will be used for further product development. → Read More
Today, Wix announced that it raised a $3.5 million series B round From Mangrove Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. The Israeli startup offers a Web-based Flash editor for making artful widgets and Websites, but without losing any SEO juice. (I’ve embedded two examples below).
The service has been showing some healthy growth since it launched in public beta last June. Co-CEO Allon Bloch tells me that Wix just crossed the 200,000-user mark, and is adding between 2,000 and 3,000 a day. These users are creating 2,000 new Web pages and widgets every day (the split is about 75/25 in favor of full-blown Web pages on MySpace and elsewhere).
In September, says Bloch, Wix content across the Web generated 20 million pageviews, up from 13 million in August. → Read More
Israel seems to be the country with the single biggest foreign contingent at TC50 with no less than 6 of the 50 companies presenting on stage. Some more Israeli startups can be found in the demo pit, the exhibition space and just walking around the venue floor shopping for investors, customers and partners.
Here is a round-up of the 6 Israeli companies that presented on stage: → Read More
Wix, the browser-based designer that lets users create Flash-based widgets and full-scale webpages, has launched in public beta. The site specializes in creating colorful Flash pages without requiring any coding, and seems to appeal most to “MySpacers” looking to add some flair to their sites (Wix does have some more professional templates for businesses). You can see our original review of the site here. One of the common concerns about Flash websites is that they don’t play nice with search engines, leading to lower page traffic. Wix says it can get around this by generating an XML map for each of their sites that is SEO friendly. Since the launch of its private beta, the company says that they’ve seen a surprisingly high number of users using the designer to create full-fledged sites rather than basic widgets, which makes this search optimization especially important. Wix sees general competition from a number of other browser-based website designers, which include Weebly and Synthasite, but is most similar to Sprout, another Flash-based widget designer. CrunchBase Information Wix Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We’ve got even more to give away today. Wix has set aside 1,000 spots for TechCrunch readers who want to give its website/widget creation tool a spin. When I reviewed Wix last week, I called it cluttered and candy-coated. The promotional video below shows a tamer, yet still very colorful, side of the service. Get your account here. CrunchBase Information Wix Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Cluttered and candy-coated are two ways to describe Wix, a new Flash-based website and widget creation tool that we’ve been anticipating for months. It’s also feature-rich, very well-designed, and – sorry – still in private beta. Wix joins a multitude of browser-based website creators such as Weebly, Synthasite, and Google Pages. But it reminds me the most of Sprout, a widget-creation tool that can also be used to make websites, since both provide fluid Flash interfaces that appeal to your inner designer. Both of these companies are blurring the line between content that’s meant to stand alone as distinct websites, and content that’s meant for syndication over blogs, social networks, and other destinations. It’s because of this obfuscation that they’ve opted to use the unspecific, yet self-referential, names “sprout” and “wix” when referring to their creations. Whereas Sprout is mainly marketed as a tool for spreading media content, Wix most certainly appeals to a younger population that’s obsessed with expressing themselves online (call them MySpacers, if you will). Wix does have a collection of tasteful business themes, but the vast majority of its templates are for fun and fall into categories like “street art”, “emo”, “playground”, and “sexy”. Once you pick a theme for your new website (or widget, just depending on your dimensions), you are taken to a popup Wix Editor that provides you with an overwhelming number of ways to spice up your creation. You can add shapes, clipart, photos, videos, songs and animations; you can tweak colors and set visual effects for user behavior; and you can add text paragraphs and headlines. Photos can be uploaded manually or pulled in from either Flickr or a royalty-free stock collection; videos can be embedded from YouTube; and there’s also a collection of free song clips that can be used in a range of skinnable music players. Each wix supports multiple pages with links between them. When you want to edit a particular object on a page, you click on it and options for rotating, resizing, and positioning are revealed. A Mac OS-looking doc at the bottom of the screen also provides icons for setting effects, behaviors, animations, and more. You really need to play around with Wix to fully appreciate how much flair and how many customization options it affords. As you work on your wix, you can hit a preview button to see what it will look like. → Read More
Glogster is a new service that lets users create web pages (they call them posters) using Flash elements. Upload photos, songs, text and other stuff, drag it around, and call it a day. You can embed the poster on another website, but its too big for most blogs or social networking sites at 960 pixels wide. You can also add friends, so technically its a social network. It reminds me a lot of Geocities back in the day (remember?), perhaps because of the colorful backgrounds and chaotic mess that results when you create a page. Lots of people created Geocities pages, added a picture, a little text, a guest book and a website counter, and that was their home page. No one visited more than once, though, since the page lacked fresh content. And that was waaaaay before the days of social networking and the explosion of blogs. Today people have a lot more to do on the web except read news, buy stuff at Amazon and send a few emails. Glogster either needs to find a way to widgetize this in a way that gets MySpacers and Facebookers excited (see Slide, RockYou, etc.), or they will likely stay a ghost town. Strike that, even with a reasonable widget strategy, I doubt Glogster has a very bright future. Frankly, it isn’t as good as Scrapblog, which targets the same niche and launched nearly a year ago. People remain enamored with Flash as an environment to create websites, though. Wix, an Israeli startup in private beta that is doing something in this area, is getting good reviews from people who’ve seen it (we still haven’t). We’ll see if they have a business model that breaks out of the Geocities ghetto. Glogster is giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters and satisfy a set of too-complicated-for-me-to-read rules. So if you’ve got some time and lack an iPod, there you go. See Download Squad and Go2Web2 for their take on Glogster. CrunchBase Information Wix Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We’ve seen a lot of site design tools that take the need for programming skills out of the picture: Synthasite, Weebly, Jimdo and Google Page Creator. All have limitations, ranging from ease of use to business models (some of them require fees, ads and/or links back to the service). And none of them allow for easy creation of Flash-based content. Israel-based Wix.com is a new entrant that is entering into private beta now. It claims to allow users to create Flash-based websites without any programing skills, and publish those sites anywhere on the web. The output can also be widgetized and published on social networks. We have not been able to test the service directly yet. But a source that did see it called it “awesome.” And if it helps people build flexible, useful Flash applications without any programming skills, someone here in California just may pick them up sooner or later. Sign up on their home page for the private beta. → Read More
