Boo-box gets angel funded for contextual marketing app

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 09:48 pm ET         

Brazil based startup Boo-box is announcing today a US$300k seed funding round that they have just closed. The investment was lead by Monashees Capital, a Brazil based early-stage Venture Capital firm. Boo-box claims to be the first Brazilian Web2.0 startup with global ambitions to announce a seed round investment from a VC firm.

Boo-box is lead by founder and CTO Marco Gomes and CEO Marcos Tanaka. Marco Gomes is an experienced programmer and former interface programming team leader for a global player in the internet advertising industry. Marcos Tanaka is a strategist having worked as a business consultant for the executive teams of some of the largest companies in Brazil.

As for the actual product, Boo-box had launched the beta version of it’s contextual marketing app earlier this year in January. The app basically links websites content elements to marketing material and sales offers from affiliate partners(including Amazon and eBay) using natural intelligence in the contextualization process. Practically, Boo-box delivers contextually relevant virtual shopping windows to your users that can take the form of product and services offerings inside the shopping window or text ads on the borders of the shopping window or a customized boo-box. Best part of the app is that publishers get to keep the generated revenues.

I haven’t tried out the Boo-box, so cannot comment on the relevancy and related stuff. Will try posting an update on that at a later point of time.

DailyMotion has a new Executive Chairman

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 04:09 pm ET         

While it is going to be year in another couple of months that Google acquired the number 1 video sharing site, others have not really given up on the big exit dreams. In fact DailyMotion has been has been gradually gaining group and right now clocks the position 53 at ever unreliable Alexa. To increase the momentum, the France based startup today announced that they have added Mark Zaleski to it’s top management ranks. According to Fred Destin, Mark will be taking the role of Executive Chairman at DailyMotion. Previously Mark was the CEO of QXL Ricardo, Europe’s version of EBay.

Vringo - push video-ringer gets funded

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 12:02 pm ET         

Startups in the ringtone space are trying hard to reach the long tail customers like me who have never ever bought a ringtone. Earlier I had written about an innovative startup Emotive that had launched a innovative service called - ?Push Ringer?. Basically, whenever someone calls you, the ringtone on your phone will be the one the caller chooses and not the other way round. And don’t associate just audio with the ringtone. You can transmit video, animations, avatars or flash files as well. Emotive had raised $7.7 million in Series A for this smart idea.

According to the law of venture capital, there will always be multiple investments of the kind. And in the push-ringtone business, Jerusalem-based Vringo is another startup offering a similar service and also got funded for the same. Vringo today announced that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding. According to PEHub, the investment round was led by Warburg Pincus.

Vringo’s precise pitch is that “it is a video sharing community that allows you to share video ringtones with your buddies each time you call them. You choose the clips you’d like your buddies to see and they choose the clips they’d like you to see. Vringo clips can contain either licensed content from the best of movies, TV and music, or user generated clips that are created on your own mobile phone.”

So how do they make money? Well, the Vringo mobile app is free and you might be required to pay for premium clips that transmit. Premium clips will in fact be free during the beta period.

Webservices hit hardware @ BugLabs

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 10:10 am ET     1 Comment »    

Union Square Ventures is hitting the right spots for quite a few swings in the recent past. And the newest investment looks as promising. Today the VC company along with Spark Capital and Brad Feld disclosed their investment in Bug Labs. Not much information is available as to what exactly the startup will offer, but from the information disclosed the startup will eventually deliver webservices enabled hardware. To quote Fred Wilson -

it’s not anything like the iPhone. It’s closer to Ning. It’s all about what people will make with a Bug, not what a Bug is when it comes out of the box.

That certainly sounds a hackable thingy unlike closed loop iPhone.

Google Analytics struggles to stay alive

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 08:57 am ET     3 Comments »    

Google Analytics is having the time it’s life - down for 3+ days. Frankly I stopped checking too frequently on Google Analytics since their last outage which I had reported couple of months back. But this time around things are getting much worse. According to people who have been tracking and reporting on this outage, the service stopped delivering data since Saturday and today it is gradually limping back to normal. Couple of blog posts on the Google Analytics blog acknowledged the issue, but only on the day 3 of the outage.

You know what, had the same kind of un-announced outage happened at one of the financial institutions in NYC, the whole analytics team would have been long gone.

All aside, I just love the fact that when you search for the keyword “analytics” at Google, the first result is none other than Google Analytics. Ha!