AdaptiveBlue+LineBuzz = Clupedia gets $1.3 million

By Vivek | May 21st, 2007 at 12:49 am ET         

Santa Ana, CA, based startup Clupedia announced that it has raised $1.3 million in funding from Tech Coast Angels, a group of 270 investors in Orange County. Clupedia’s founder David Saad claims that he has put down $2.3 million of his own money into startup. David Saad is a serial entrepreneur who had previously founded Braintec that was sold to  Technisource. To add weight to the startup’s story, Johannes Larcher sits on Clupedia’s board. James had served as VP of Friendster and prior to that he was the chief of staff at Overture, which Yahoo bought in 2003 for nearly $2 billion.

Clupedia core product is a browser plugin called Clucast. After you get Clucast plugin installed and highlight a word of text on a web page,  the plugin automatically generates and retrieves “clues”—ratings, reviews, notes, links or blogs related to those words. These clues can be sorted and searched, and on the social side of things users can write their own “clues” and have them ranked by others. As the startup claims ““It’s a way to aggregate comments and opinions that people have placed wherever on the Web”. Well, these features sound similar to what AdaptiveBlue and LineBuzz have been trying to sell in the recent past. Still I would be interested to checkout the product twist in this case.

Right now the app is in alpha stage that depends on .NET Framework 3.0 or Vista. So, just like majority of the users, I will be skipping it for now.

Links:
Clupedia