Thumbplay raises money from NEA?

By Vivek | June 29th, 2007 at 03:52 pm ET         

Mobile content startup Thumbplay seems to have raised more money. This time from NEA. Again no official confirmation of the news. The startup had previously raised $22.5 million from 3 rounds of funding from Softbank Capital, I-Hatch Ventures, and Bain Capital.

Thumbplay was co-founded in year 2004 by Are Traasdahl, CEO, and Evan Schwartz, CMO. Are had previously worked on managing wireless entertainment campaigns for companies like NewsCorp, Disney, ABC, Univision while Evan was SVP of Online for Columbia House.

Startscriber to deliver the next billion mobile customers?

By Vivek | June 29th, 2007 at 03:36 pm ET         

Check this startup out - Starscriber.com. To less of details to comprehend what is going on out there. The Revolution Ventures funded startup is promising to deliver mobiles to next billion customers ‘low and no income’ users in a “highly profitable and sustainable manner”. Well, i don’t have much clue as to what those guys are up to, but if any of you have inside info, do post it here or email me at contact @at startupsquad dot. com .

While we are on mobile startups and stealth mode, Revolution Ventures has also invested in Nextivity. Again no site, no info on the startup.

Quantcast is another startup from Revolution Ventures that i have written about in the past.

URateStuff; Hictu Microblogging; Sportsvite Videos; Wishpot’s Social Shopping; Netflix gets cheaper; Intacct funded

By Vivek | June 29th, 2007 at 03:01 pm ET         

Sportsvite Videos: The sports social networking site that had raised $2 million in funding earlier this year, is putting the money to some use. Now you can upload your own video highlights to Sportsvite and share with your teammates and friends…..

Get social shopping with Wishpot: This service is similar to Kaboodle where you can browse online stores and websites, add items to your Wishpot, and easily share/suggest/recommend to your find in stores and online. In the days of content distribution it is difficult to become a content aggregator like Wishpot. Well, that is true for many other too.

More product ratings via URateStuff: Can we ever have enough product review sites. Team at URateStuff thinks - nooo. Launched earlier this month consumers can rate other consumer reviews, choose which products to write about… And the secret sauce is that the number of positive rankings by the URateStuff community determines the most popular reviews To hook in, sellers gain credibility by linking to URateStuff…. Good luck with building all that….

Hictu now microblogs: The online contact management app now has video-microblogging features. You get to publish your thoughts and ideas and share them with other Hictu! users, record and publish your videos on a public timeline,…….

Netflix acts like Blockbuster: Just as Blockbuster suddenly got hit by Netflix few years back, now it is the turn of Netflix. The video rental company has already started lowering it’s prices in face of competition from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon…. The new pricing for one of the plans is - 2 DVDs out at-a-time plan - is down to $13.99 a month plus applicable taxes. I think this was previously $17. Besides the 2 DVDs out at-a-time and you would also get 14 hours of movies and TV watching time via Netflix on your PC each month. Did I tell this part of the service totally and completely sucks? Couldn’t get it to work on my 2 laptops.

Intacct raises $14 million: Moving onto enterprise software space, earlier in the week, Sigma Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Emergence Capital Partners invested $14 million in San Jose, CA based startup Intacct. Previously the startup had raise $56 million. Intacct provides on-demand financial applications in the Business Accounting, ERP, and Financial software space.

Monitis does On-Demand monitoring

By Vivek | June 29th, 2007 at 02:46 pm ET     6 Comments »    

Pingdom, which has been trying to create some buzz by generating some not so relevant uptime stats, has some competition to keep them busy on the real work. Monitis is the new one one the block that claims to offers online service for monitoring IT infrastructure, measuring performance and early notifying about current and upcoming problems.

Features include checking of websites, firewalls, routers, network, email servers, VoIP, applications, databases and other online assets 24×7. Alerts are via email, IM, RSS or SMS.

This is the paid part of the service with the max plan coming for $40/month, which would get you complete history, 100 SMSes,…. Free and stripped down offering is located at Mon.itor.us.

If you are really serious about monitoring and want to host something on your own server - Hyperic, Zenoss, Nagios, and GroundWork are some of the best options.

Links:
Monitis
Mon.itor.us

Skaaz - Voki to get a new friend(competitor :( )

By Vivek | June 28th, 2007 at 04:00 pm ET         

Intelligent avatars are coming to town. Okay, no need to run away just now since the service is in private-beta and after all they are just avatars. So, who is the new one on the block after Gizmoz and Sitepal/Voki? It is Skaaz from France based company Virtuoz. Although I don’t have much details as to what all is going to be offered since the site in French, but what I could gather from other sources is that Skaaz will be a fully customizable avatar with auto reply kind of facilities when you are away from your machine or wherever the bot is embedded. As you might expect Skaaz will add bling to MySpace and likes including IM tools like MSN Messenger. The company will be looking to make money the old way - customize your avatar.