Roundup: The VC Carwash, Popsugar, Khosla's latest, Facebook opens, Decentral.TV, Blotter
PopSugar, a network of four blogs targeting young, hip woman, adds a social network component -- It says it is getting 13 million monthly page views and 1.5 million unique visitors. It is a San Francisco based company. (Techcrunch)
Kergy is the latest Silicon Valley start-up in alternative energy field -- It is a Menlo Park start-up, which has raised $3.3 million in a first round of funding from the great Silicon Valley clean energy proselytizer Vinod Khosla and his team at Khosla Ventures (No website; just a regulatory filing, cited by PE Week)
Decentral.tv, a stealthy start-up raises $2.3 million for social networking on television -- This is a four-month-old start-up, based in San Rafael, that founder Daniel Graf says will push something called "interactive broadcast broadband communities." Vague, but let's see what happens. The first round was led by DFJ, though BW may have mixed things up by calling board member Howard Hartenbaum a DFJ partner (he's actually with Draper Richards). It is true, though, that Hartenbaum was the first guy to get to Skype in the early days. (BW article here, which also has a few more details on Celiro, the quiet mobile company which we first mentioned here).
Facebook opens APIs -- The popular college social networking site, which long pursued a policy of closed order -- compared to the more open, experimental MySpace -- has taken on a new face. It has opened up its platform so that outside developers can build products that integrate with it easier. Its release of a so-called open application programming interface (API) already has a bunch of action happening. Details here.
The new Google Talk features -- file sharing, voicemail and music status -- are finally open to everyone. We reported about these a couple of weeks ago, when they were being tested. (Details here)
MuleSource, an open source software for "middleware", raises $4 million from Hummer and Morgenthaler -- The software, which specializes in integrating existing computer applications, and thus called "middleware," is the latest open source play. It launches in September, but does face competition.
http://www.siliconbeat.com/cgi-bin/mt331/mt-tb.cgi/1963
Links to blogs that reference this entry:
Create an API for any Site
Excerpt: I will have to play with this a little too see if I like it.
Tracked: August 18, 2006 10:00 PM
There is a rather unfortunate typo in your link to AlarmClock. Just a heads up!
EG on August 17, 2006 9:21 AMComment link
Uh, yes, that made me blush. Fixed within ten minutes, hopefully before anyone else noticed.
Matt Marshall on August 17, 2006 9:30 AMComment link
You should talk to the Sitelerwash founder Tom Yeh -- He pitched me on this in '99
Very persuasive guy. Pretty sharp, too.
I think you'd find his viison of what you can do with a relationship with a car's owner fascinating -- it's a bit of a long shot to get to world domination through washing cars, but evidently the VC was as impressed as I was at Tom's pitch.
Chris Tolles on August 17, 2006 2:48 PMComment link