A small Turkish startup called lunar technologies has raised $1 million for one of its ventures, Trend.ly, managing director Ercan Yaris tells me. The money comes from undisclosed angel investors, two of them partners in one of the biggest telecom companies in Turkey.
Trend.ly is a very basic site any way you look at it. Visitors can go to the site to enter any two-element poll (live examples: love vs. sex and Jessica Biel vs. Scarlett Johansson) and have the community vote on them by ‘liking’ one of the other.
Then again, the site has been live for less than 2 months now. Yes, that’s two months.
(I hope for their sake the Libyans have no objections to some of the polls on there).
Yaris tells me the freshly raised capital will be used to recruit more people to staff its brand new office, to expand the product with new features and to develop applications and tools for iOS, Facebook and WordPress.
Lunar hopes to eventually gather enough data via Trend.ly to sell as research findings to marketers in big companies such as Mercedes and Coca-Cola, Yaris adds.
Finally, Yaris tells me he expects to raise another $3 million for Trend.ly next year.
(On a sidenote, lunar technologies is also behind music search engine Fizy, which Yaris says currently boasts some 600,000 visitors on a daily basis).