MineKey raises $3 million for personalized news recommendations

By Vivek | August 2nd, 2007 at 08:35 am ET         

Sunnyvale, CA based Minekey today informed me that they have raised $3 million in Series A for their personalized news recommendation service. The funding round was led by led by NEA IndoUS Ventures, which had previously invested $600k in the angel round. NEA IndoUS Ventures, which is lead by Vinod Dham, had recently raised $189 million for investing in India-based businesses. Minekey is lead by Delip Andra, and the startup has it’s team spread out in US, New Delhi-India, and IIT Kharagpur.

From the product strategy standpoint, instead of focusing directly on the users, Minekey is currently talking with quite a few media publishing companies who have silos of content but not real way to deliver relevant recommendations based on the user tastes. Minekey’s publisher platform enables media companies to associate their select news feeds with each of the widget they want to place on their site. From the user perspective, as they browse through different pages on a particular site and also click on news links in the Minekey recommendation widget, it keeps storing their browsing tastes and history to recommend relevant articles.

Besides the funding announcement, Minekey has also launched a new version of their news recommendation widget that enables complete customization of the widget. With the customization, and existing analytics  delivering news recommendations and tracking the clickthroughs via Minekey is totally painless job as compared to installing half-cooked outdated wordpress extensions and likes, which makes it a must install widget for all the bloggers. Below is a snapshot from my blog.
Links:
Minekey