Breaking: RockYou announces funding; Throws back 150 million number at Slide

By Vivek | May 16th, 2007 at 09:12 am ET         

Widget based slideshow startup RockYou has just announced that it has closed Series B Round of funding. The investment was led by Partech International with participation from existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Ventures. Exact funding amount was not disclosed. RockYou had earlier raised $1.5 million in Series A, June last year.

Interesting part of the announcement is that RockYou is also claiming that it delivers 150M widget views per day. This number is exactly same was what Slide.com had quotes last week. According to VentureBeat earlier today, RockYou had claimed that “their numbers were stronger than Slide’s”. I guess RockYou team did a quick recount early morning today to discover they were neck-n-neck with Slide, if not ahead. It’s amazing to see how fast the discussion has turned out to be a Slide-RockYou duel, which had initially started off as an ClearSpring-Slide.com’s widget impression count comparison.

Either way, RockYou and Slide.com had been on their path to widget based stardom. Exit for both of them is still a buyout by one of the bigger media companies that can potentially happen within this hear. Not sure if the likes of Google and Yahoo would be interested in either of them, which would result in exit points being the platforms where these startups have learned to grow on, namely -  MySpace. But this is just the beginning in the world of widgets where the payouts are going to get  way bigger as some pretty solid business models start showing up on the scene. If you don’t believe that, you can watch StartupSquad.com transform in the next few months

Links:
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