Today Gnip announced they have raised a $3.5m round that follows their seed financing . We invested along with our friends at First Round Capital and SoftTech VC.
Gnip has made a ton of progress since we initially funded it at the beginning of the year. I wrote about the initial financing when Gnip launched in July in my post Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards. Since they launched, the founders (Eric Marcoullier and Jud Valeski) have build a great technical and product oriented team, launched v2.0 of Gnip, have continued to make great progress on fleshing out the initial idea into a business, and have made some important decisions about their near term product roadmap.
Gnip is part of our Glue investment theme and is one of my favorite places to invest – in the "software infrastructure layer" of the Internet. Other companies that we’ve invested before in this area include FeedBurner and Postini. Here’s hoping that Gnip can walk in their footsteps.
I’m still loving my iPhone. It’s been around two months now, so I think this thing is finally going to stick and I’ll use an Apple product regularly.
My regular iPhone app usage is increasing to include the new version of Brightkite (wow – I’m bfeld if you want to follow me), NetNewsWire (double wow), and the NY Times app. I’m fascinated with the NY Times app – I think it is an extremely well done specialized iPhone app.
The other day, NewsGator announced a private label version of NetNewsWire. This is aimed at any media company that wants to do a customized app that carries their own content (via RSS of course). NetNewsWire is battle tested – over 200,000 iPhone users and over 130 million marked items (each marked item is an "interaction effect from a user") since it was released.
When NetNewsWire for the iPhone came out, it hadn’t immediately occurred to me that it could be used / quickly repurposed by any major media company. Instead of building a NY Times-like app from scratch, you can simply private label NetNewsWire and be up and running in days.
If you are interested in taking a look at this, drop me an email and I’ll get you connected with the right folks at NewsGator.
Earlier this week, Gnip put v2.0 of their service into production. TechCrunch has a nice post up titled Gnip 2.0 Launches, With A Business Model.
Gnip 2.0 has four big new features.
If none of that means anything to you, that’s ok. Shane Pearson, Gnip’s new VP of Products translates it into "more English" in his post titled What we are up to at Gnip.
If you are a developer, wander over to the Gnip API v2.0 spec and take a look.
Congrats to Josh Hug and the gang at Shelfari for joining the Amazon.com family. I was an early angel investor in Shelfari and have been a long time avid user of the service. Amazon was an investor in the first round and the two companies fit naturally together.
I invested in three vertical social networks in 2006 – Shelfari (books), Dogster (dogs and cats), and Enthusiast Group (sports). So far I have one win (Shelfari) and one loss (Enthusiast Group). Dogster is doing great and looks like it’ll be a nice winner also. I made these as small angel investments to learn about the dynamics around vertical social networks. I’ve learned a bunch from Josh and from Ted Rheingold at Dogster. It also looks like I’ll have a nice "aggregate financial outcome" for my investments in this area.
Well done Shelfari!
Fred Wilson – my friend and co-investor in Zynga – titled his post on Zynga’s $29 million financing Raising The Stakes so I couldn’t resist titling my post Doubling Down. And I’ll echo what Fred said – I’m amazed with the hand that Mark Pincus (Zynga’s CEO and founder) has and am delighted to be sitting at the table playing it with him.
Zynga just announced that Kleiner Perkins has led a $29 million round that includes new investor Institutional Venture Partners and the old investors (Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.) Bing Gordon from KPCB has joined the board – Bing recently joined KPCB and was previously the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts where he had been a key executive since 1982. The TechCrunch article has some good info in it including the news that Zynga has acquired Yoville.
When we made our initial investment in Zynga last November, the idea of "social gaming" was just starting to emerge. Mark and the team at Zynga started with Texas HoldEm Poker (hence the poker theme in the first paragraph) but rapidly expanded into a number of other socially-oriented games on Facebook that you could play with your friends. When I wrote about some of these games in my post Wanna Play Zynga Games With Me? I was just starting to understand the potential power of social gaming. Over the past six months, I’ve become an incredible believer in the appeal of social gaming as a broad idea and see it as a disrupting force in the overall gaming industry. Oh – and as a user it’s also a ton of fun to play these games with people I know all over the world.
While gaming is nothing new (and continues to be a fantastic business), the science of social gaming – figuring out how it works, making the games compelling, and dealing with the broad platform issues that come with massive scale – is really hard. While the popularity of Facebook seeded the social gaming phenomenon, it is now rapidly evolving onto new platforms such as other social networks like MySpace as well as connected devices like the iPhone via the iPhone AppStore.
While I’ve had a bunch of fantastic experiences as an investor, the tempo, pacing, quality of the people, and success of Zynga has exceeded anything I’ve ever experienced. I attribute it all to the genius of Mark and the fantastic people that he’s surrounded himself with. And it’s cool to be doubling down with investors like Bing, IVP, my friends Fred Wilson and Rich Levandov, and the entire team at Zynga that are the real folks making this happen.
Who said the magic of Facebook is wearing thin? Nah. Cynics.
One of our investments – Zynga – helped a nice young couple (Tyler Richardson and his (now) fiancee Christine) get engaged via Scramble, one of my favorite Zynga games. Thanks to Inside Social Games for showing us the way with their post Suitor Pops the Question in Game of Facebook Scramble.
One of the questions I’ve been asked numerous times since Gnip launched a few weeks ago is "when is Gnip going to start working with Twitter?" The answer is: today. Gnip’s current partners now include Twitter.
Thanks Twitter guys! This happens to coincide with the end of my experiment of "a week without Twitter" (yes – I missed it) so to commemorate this I turned my Twitter client (Twhirl) back on and started tweeting again.
The Gnip data producer and data consumer universe is getting larger quickly; drop me an email if you want to come play and I’ll get you gnipped-up.
Wallstrip 2.0 is out. Fortunately, channeling the voice of the founder Howard Lindzon, they announce it very sarcastically on the homepage.
Welcome to Wallstrip 2.0, where everything is happy and bubbly so you don’t have to think about how much money you’re losing on the market. Sure, the site is blue, but don’t let that fool you: we laugh in the face of market woes.
Today’s episode is on a public online dating company – Spark Networks – owner of JDate, CatholicMingle, LDSMingle, and a whole bunch of other niche dating sites. I just got my final Wallstrip escrow payment from CBS from the acquisition. CBS (and – more importantly – Wallstrip and Howard) – I LOV you.
Last week, Me.dium released its Alpha version of Me.dium Social Search. This coincided with Yahoo!’s launch of BOSS – Me.dium was one of the initial launch partners. This was picked up by Techmeme and prominently talked about throughout the blogosphere, tech media, and even the mainstream media.
I’ve been involved with Me.dium since its first financing and the launch of Me.dium Social Search is a key pivot point as it starts to capitalize on the initial vision of the company. If you are familiar with Me.dium, you may know of it as a company that has a browser sidebar that enables real time browsing with friends. This concept started out as a "recommendation service" where the algorithms suggested alternative web sites and people based on how your browsing patterns matched the browsing patterns of your friends and the overall community.
This was – and is – a pretty neat idea, but it’s really hard to do effectively in a browser sidebar. Me.dium built out a lot of backend infrastructure to process a large amount of information in real time, which is necessary to make the algorithms useful across a large user base. In the process of doing this, it occurred to the team that the sidebar might not be the best way to surface the information and that search might be a better way to deliver its value to the user since Me.dium’s collaborative filtering algorithms are an entirely different search algorithm than the PageRank type ones we’ve gotten used to.
A group of folks at Me.dium went heads down and starting working on using the stream of data they were getting to turn out a real time social search engine. Along the way, Yahoo! decided to open up their search engine infrastructure through Yahoo! BOSS and a natural collaboration was born.
Rather than hold on tight, create a "closed beta", and limit the use and exploration of Me.dium Social Search, they did what I wish more companies would do and went "straight to Alpha". Even though it’s alpha and still evolving rapidly, Me.dium Social Search produces some really interesting search results that correspond to the web pages that people are looking at right now about specific topics.
The notion of the Me.dium Sidebar has morphed into a Social Toolbar which, in addition to providing a bevy of social features, also starts including your clickstream in the corpus of data that Me.dium is using for their social search algorithms. Me.dium is fanatical about your privacy and includes a simple one click way in your toolbar to turn Me.dium tracking on and off and never tracks information on secure (via HTTPS) sites.
Yahoo! has stirred the search pot in an interesting way with BOSS. Me.dium’s going after one particular vector – that of social search – by building on a lot of work they’ve been doing over the past eighteen months. I expect you’ll hear a lot about The Future of Search in the coming year – I think Me.dium will be one of the companies regularly mentioned in the mix of folks trying new approaches.
Give Me.dium Social Search a try (simply type your search term into the little box and hit the "I Feel Social" button) and tell us what you think. And – if you want to go deeper on the ideas, take a look at Robert Reich’s (one of Me.dium’s co-founders) blog titled Why to hear him riff on search.