Comments(0) LinkedIn, Palo Alto based Networking site, raises $12.8 million in funding headed by Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. The valuation given to LinkedIn is said to be around $250 million (WOW! Really?).
LinkedIn is profitable and has around 9 million users and is signing up new members at ~100k a week.
Comments(0) IBM is donating idemix, a privacy tool to manage user information, to Higgins Open Source Project. Microsoft Infocard better get their act together. Higgins project has major backing from the open source community along with Novell and IBM.
Comments(0) Bitpass announced that it will cease all operation by February 28, 2007, all US buyer accounts will be shutdown by Jan. 26.. Bitpass, founded 2002 in Menlo Park, offered Micropayment solutions to merchants and buyers.
Comments(0) Venice project, online TV start up, is now known as Joost. They are trying to tie Internet and TV experience into one through programming, channels, and ads. I can’t comment on what Joost looks like/works because I haven’t tried their service, but I’ll do that later this week. But, what I can comment on is that Internet Video is and will be big. It’s at an infant stage here in the states, but within next few years, it will be one of the top things to do online.
Comments(1) Meebo closed a round for $9mm earlier this week (led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson). Meebo is a meta instant messaging service that works across Yahoo, Google, MSN, ICQ, Jabber, And AOL IM. Most of their users are students (according to some reports) and Meebo has around a million registered users. Meebo does offer couple other interesting products - Meebo Maps and Meebo Repeater. If you want to check them out, here’s the link to Meebo.
Comments(0) Brightcove, a company that gives media outlets, content creators and other businesses a platform to deliver online video, has closed a 3rd round funding of $59.5 million. Wow! What’s their valuation? I’m thinking $500 MM?!?
Comments(0) I was little disappointed with Apple TV when it was introduced last week. It’s cool that Apple TV is HD enabled, it’s expected that Apple TV would be tightly integrated with iTunes and iTunes services, and I knew the form factor would be clean and sleek. But, I wanted to see little more…like Tivo like feature on Apple TV. Apple TV sports 40 Gig drive - just to use that drive space sync’ing with iTunes is a waste. If Apple TV is going to be connected to my home entertainment system, it would have been cool to record TV and Movies directly on to Apple TV drive.
Comments(0) It’s coming folks! Steve Jobs introduced iPhone at the Macworld. Here’s what it looks like.
The interface is all touch-screen. Sweet! iPhone is scheduled to launch on Cingular in June. I am getting one for sure.
Comments(0) According to VentureBeat report, Digg, the website that lets users rank stories by voting, has raised $8.5 million in fresh financing from existing backers. $8.5 million is a big number and I think Digg will be okay for couple of years. But, Digg better start making money or I see them looking for a buyer soon. At the end of the day, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network, investors of Digg, will make their money back.