First day of a crazy week ahead. We'll start the week with looking at some news on latest venture funding for the last two weeks. Mobango received $5.7m for their mobile social network . I was seriously exploring this idea with Keith Liu three years back but it was a little early because we're looking at GPS network deployment.
Another social network recommendations start-up called Redux just raised $6.5 m in series A funding from DFJ and individual Alsop Louie. They had previously raide $1.65 million in seed funding from two individual investors. Redux has created a social network with recommendations based on their unique algorithm and is creating a social network that helps people navigate through people, events, and other social network features and it learns about you by analyzing your profile and asking you a few questions. The more you use the site the more it can learn about your interests and social behavior. The algorithm also creates a relevance score for people that it believes you would most likely want to get to know and meet. They do the same for events and literally suggesting to you which parties to go to.
This is one of my favorite. Sellaband received $5m from Prime Technology Ventures. It basically allows you to buy shares in unsigned bands and become a band investor (kinda like timeshare). They let you invest in the artist of your choice and they consider those that invest "believers". Each artist sells 5,000 $10 units. Once the $50,000 is achieved the artist receives professional studio time. After the studio time all the 5,000 believers will receive a Digi-Pack CD with the result of the artists professional studio-recordings. As a believer you will then receive commissions on future songs sold. It is a Dutch-based site and opened an office in New York late last year and since launch nearly two years ago has funded 18 recording artists from 11 countries. I love this concept. You can people you own a band.
Better World Books is a social venture to find literacy. They raised $4.5 m total in series A funding with $2.5m from the Social Enterprise Expansion Fund and $2m from 18 private individuals. The concept is simple, your purchases will be used to assist with literacy. On their site they discuss how three college friends formed this social venture, a business with the mission to promote literacy. They started with one book drive and have grown substantially since then.
Another one is TargetRX, a physicians and pharmaceutical community site that just received $9.6m aditional funding. They provides services allowing pharmaceutical clients to deploy better sales and marketing campaigns. TargetRX aims to determine the drivers of physician prescribing behavior which is obviously useful to the pharmaceutical customers. On the site it is stated that they have "developed a highly predictive, large-scale normative database of physician attitudes that it uses in combination with its patented proprietary analytic methods to provide pharmaceutical companies with powerful leading indicators of performance." The data is used to determine not only how they are doing but how they may perform in the future.
If you are planning to start a Web 2.0 video start-up, think twice. The online video category actually made up a smaller share of total U.S. Web visits year-over-year. According to new data from Hitwise, the Online Video category accounted for 1.09% of all U.S. Internet visits in March 2008, a decline of 7% compared to March 2007. I see more teenagers and teachers using it, but it is declining as a whole. Last month, YouTube accounted for 73.18 % of all U.S. visits to video sites, according to Hitwise. Still far behind, MySpaceTV received the second highest percentage of visits with 9.21% followed by Google Video with 4.06%. Hulu.com, which came out of beta the week ending March 15, 2008, was the 22nd most visited website in the category for March 2008. If you are thinking of video based start-idea, this is not the time yet.
