Gizmoz to announce funding soon

By Vivek | February 28th, 2007 at 11:50 pm ET         

Gizmoz, the service that lets users create 3D avatars, will soon be announcing closing of another funding round. I am trying to get more details on who all participated in the funding round and the amount raised. Currently the Israel based startup has couple of products under works including Gizmoz HeadMaker and an avatar based personalization widget for bloggers and social networks.

I know we have Sitepal and couple of more options, but Gizmoz feels much more fun. Virtual life seems all set to expand beyond SLs and Habbos!

Links:
Gizmoz

Videosharing site Fliqz closes another funding round

By Vivek | February 28th, 2007 at 09:00 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Fliqz, the social video sharing site has raised $2.5 million in Series B round of funding, according to PEHub. Mohr, and Davidow Ventures participated in the investment. Last year Fliqz had raised $1 million in its Series A round. Fliqz, which has a pretty basic design claims to be focused on being longer media storage platform. Their plans aside, I am not able to play videos on Firefox. On whole can’t see where exactly Fliqz is headed a very tight market.

Links:
Fliqz

Izimi p2web; Obopay with Citibank; adManager bait

By Vivek | February 28th, 2007 at 05:17 pm ET     4 Comments »    

Izimi: is another peer-to-web application in making. Right now in private beta and launching early next month, Izimi will enable users to serve files, photos, videos right from their PC. The UK based startup is supposed to have raised a small amount of funding totaling £150k from Star Capital just under $3million. Earlier I had written about Boxcloud and PurpleNova operating in the same space.

Citibank+Obopay: The mobile payment startup has finally hit gold. Obopay is running a pilot program with Citibank to enable its credit and debit card customers to instantly send and receive money via any mobile phone. Besides this customers will be able to remotely track and manage their mobile payment accounts by checking balances, viewing payment histories, and adding funds directly from their mobile phone. Last time I had written about Obopay, the startup had raised $10 million in funding. Since than Obopay has acquired BillMonk and undergone major management additions.

Microsoft adManager: The software giant is throwing out a bait for existing and new Microsoft Office Live subscribers to get them hitched onto the Microsoft adManager. As part of a new offer all those users who activate Microsoft Office Live adManager beta between February 20, 2007 and July 31, 2007 will get a $50 Microsoft adCenter credit. As I have said before, I am completely lost in this Microsoft+Office+Live mumbo jumbo. I mean what has a word like “Office” got to do with a word like “adManager”? Does anyone ever listen over there? Anyway these offers fall far short of what Google has been doing to promote Adwords and Checkout.

Wiki leader Confluence finally gets hosted version

By Vivek | February 28th, 2007 at 04:12 pm ET     3 Comments »    

All along I had hoped that Atlassian will one day offer hosted version of Confluence, one of the best and most popular Wiki based collaboration platform. Given the fact that Google has been making aggressive moves in the hosted space with the recent Premier version release and buyout of JotSpot earlier last year, Atlassian has more than 1 reason to go online. Well today Atlassian announced that it has launched hosted version of Confluence. As expected Atlassian has not included a free plan in its offering although you are free to try out with a DEMO account for 30 days. Plans are priced from $49/month or $490/year for 15 users and go upto $449/month or $4,490/year for 500 users. Users get host of features along with the service including ability to create unlimited spaces and pages, upload files, create blogs, content and attachment search, robust ACL, and backups. Some important features that have been missed out in this release include Plugin support and LDAP integration. I am trying to get more details from the Atlassian team about the possibility of future addition of these features.

However the service is in DoA state right now. I think Atlassian didn’t plan for the rush it was going to get hit with. Once the site gets stable, I will try taking a deeper dive. As per Atlassian, only the hosted demo had issues due to application updates. The production paid version hosted on different set of servers is running fine.

Update: I finally got response from Atlassian team informing me that they do have plugin support some of the most request ones including IM Presence Plugin, Blogging RPC Plugin, Vote Macro, Google Calendar, RSVP Plugin, Excel Macro, Word macro, Chart macro, and will be adding the webdav plugin soon. Its just that they won’t allow users to be installing plugins themselves. They are also including SOAP / XML-RPC interfaces, and planning to add API access soon. Sounds great to me.

Links:
Confluence Hosted

Mabber relaunches; How about interacting with users now?

By Vivek | February 28th, 2007 at 03:26 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Yesterday Mabber launched a new release of its mobile and web based instant messaging platform. New features include a widget that you can place on your blog and enable people to connect with you while you are on Mabber web or mobile. Nothing new about this feature since it is already offered by few other startups including Wambo, and Meebo. Besides this Mabber has added support for getting alerts for RSS feeds through instant messages and also upgraded its mobile client. I am not sure what new the mobile client upgrade really offers since there are very few details on the site. Even this area is not without major competition that now includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fring, Nimbuzz, Jargong, and few more.

Earlier on I had tried creating an account at Mabber which failed ’cause of some dumb database reason. Emailed Mabber team, since I was not able to post that on their forum which in the first place requires a Mabber Id. Mabber team never cared to reply, but did get the signup part working. Checking now, besides other things I think RSS alerts feature needs some work as it totally lacks notification support of what it is doing when you try adding a new feed. Even otherwise Mabber site gives a feel of ghost town, with almost no real interaction between the product team and the users either on the blog or in the support forums. Would need much than a working product to get users to hop on.

Update: As it seems right now from Nico’s comment below that he did reply to my email, which I never got. Email charge dropped for now :)

Links:
Mabber