Startup CloudShare, formerly known as IT Structures, has raised $10 million in series B financing from Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital, and Charles River Ventures. This brings CloudShare's total funding up to $16 million. That amount of funding isn't shabby for a company that has been in stealth for nearly two years. Cloudshare, which launched to the public, last week, has produced a service for demoing software in the cloud. Organizations can instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demos or training environments from CloudShare's platform.
Thursday afternoon we filed a lawsuit against Fusion Garage in the Northern District of California Federal court. The causes of action include Fraud and Deceit, Misappropriation of Business Ideas, Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Unfair Competitition and Violatioins of the Lanham Act. The complaint is embedded below, or you can view it here.This was the first time I've ever filed a lawsuit, and it was certainly not the way I thought the whole CrunchPad project would end when I first wrote about the idea in July 2008.I believe the lawsuit (and attached exhibits) speaks for itself. A timeline is provided as well as supporting evidence from the Fusion Garage blog (now deleted) and emails between our companies. But I do have a few additional thoughts:
Each Winter, the United States Congress adjourns through the end of the year. Before that recess occurs, there's usually a flurry of legislative activity happening to squeeze it in before the break, during which time nothing gets done. This week, there has been a curious amount of activity coming out of Google at a time when many companies are in holiday mode. And guess what? It's the same idea.Okay, not exactly the same, people at Google are still working, but apparently Google has a "code freeze" policy that goes in place sometime in December. If you don't get your product/service out the door by then, it gets pushed til when the freeze is lifted, likely sometime in the new year. A few Googlers confirmed this policy off-the-record, but all seemed concerned about publicly acknowledging it. Perhaps they're worried about the competition working overtime to take advantage of Google taking its foot off the gas.
Relaxed, a stealth startup centered around Apache CouchDB has raised $2 million from Redpoint Ventures according to an SEC filing which was confirmed by CEO Damien Katz. Three original authors of Apache CouchDB--Damien Katz, J. Chris Anderson, and Jan Lehnardt--are listed as Executive Officers of the company.For those who are unfamiliar, CouchDB is a free open source indexable document database server which uses Javascript as a query language. CouchDB is designed for the reporting and storage of large amounts of semi-structured, document oriented data, unlike SQL databases which store and report on very structured and correlated data.
Foodzie's artisan food marketplace just got some heavy duty engineering talent behind it. The company has hired Googler Adam Sah as its VP of Engineering. Sah is best known for helping invent Google Gadgets, which is used to power many widget-based services like iGoogle and Gmail Gadgets. He later served as a tech lead for Google research, and spent his time before Google at a number of startups.Foodzie helps speciality food vendors get exposure by giving them a central online marketplace to sell their goods. Foodzie takes a cut of each sale, but the vendors are still left with more than they'd get if they sold their goods through traditional speciality food sites. It's been a while since we last heard from the company, but CEO Rob LaFave says that things have been going very well. The site has grown from 25 vendors last December up to 250 this year. In the last 30 days it has seen around 85,000 unique visitors. And, perhaps most importantly, LaFave says that revenue for the site has grown by an order of magnitude in the last thirty days.
There's a lot to love about Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app. But as regular readers will know, one of them is not the price. At $50, it's just way too hard to justify the purchase when you can get all of the information online, for free. So just in time for the holidays, Wolfram Alpha is doing something about it: Slashing prices!The app will be on sale for a much-more reasonable $19.99 starting tomorrow and running through the end of the year. I'm still not sure that that isn't a little high ($9.99 seems more a bit more in-line with the current app economy, but obviously that's entirely up to Wolfram Alpha). The company also notes that despite the three-week discount, they absolutely plan to jack it back up to the regular $50 price after the first of the year.
Is there something about people who use Microsoft products that makes them more likely to click on an online ad? Some data from search advertising network Chitika suggests so. Earlier this week, we noted that people coming to Websites from Bing are about 75 percent more likely to click on an ad than those coming from Google. Following that post, Chitika ran some analysis on browsers and operating systems, and it found that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are about 40 percent more likely to click on an ad than Firefox users, about 50 percent more likely than Apple Safari users, and 80 percent more likely than Google Chrome users. The numbers are based on Chitika data from 134 million across 80,000 sites. When it cut the numbers by operating system, Chitika a similar trend. Windows users are about twice as likely as Linux or Mac users to click on ads.
Monetizing remnant advertising is not an easy task, but 5to1, a TC50 finalist, seems to be off to a good start, and they've added on another $1.81 million to their previous round of $4.5 million from existing investors Fuse Capital and Prism VentureWorks. The platform employed by 5to1 gives content owners the ability to place ads in relevant places at the right time, and to the correct audience. The company is run by former Fox Interactive executives Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn and this extension brings its total intake of funding to just over $6.3 million.
Cloud Engines, the company behind Pogoplug, the device that turns any USB hard drive into a network accessible drive, raised $3 million in funding according to an SEC filing. We've confirmed the investment with the company with existing investor Foundry Group and others participating in the round. According to the startup's CEO, Daniel Putterman, Cloud Engines will use the money to kick start their international plans for retail, specifically in Europe. The company will also expand retail operations in the U.S.
The tumultuous story of music search engine Seeqpod is finally coming to a close. Last June, we wrote that the company was looking to sell off its domain name, with evidence suggesting that it was about to be acquired by Microsoft. That didn't happen. We've just heard from CEO Kasian Franks that the technology assets of SeeqPod are now being sold to a "large Japanese media company" (he wouldn't divulge the name). And now the SeeqPod team is back building another company: the Mikojo music search engine.Before we get to that though, a recap of SeeqPod's difficult year. In February SeeqPod was slapped by lawsuits from EMI and Warner Music, as the record companies looked for billions of dollars in damages. In March, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy protection and put itself up for sale.
Playboy is a magazine that actually does have really good content, I swear. But yes, most people know it as the magazine that each month features nude pictures of their Playmates. And now the magazine has an iPhone app in the App Store. But those concerned that this might ruin Apple's prude stance with the store, fear not: There is no nudity.Instead, the app features easy access to some of the main articles in the magazine each month. And it does so in a very slick and sexy way, the app is among the fastest I've seen in terms of transition between the different areas. The app also shows you who the featured Playmate of the month is, but all you get is the introduction, the data sheet (which I'm actually kind of surprised Apple even let through), and a series of sexy, but clothed photos. Each Playmate also has a video about their shoot, but again, no nudity.
In case you are wondering, it's not just you. Facebook is down. Want to know more? Try checking Twitter (which is uncharacteristically up).Update: It looks to be back up now. Just a hiccup, everyone back to work, er, socializing.
Following the successful launches of Twitter in Spanish and Twitter in French, the service has announced native support for another new language today: Italian. This means that of the initial "FIGS" languages (that is French, Italian, German, and Spanish) that Twitter wanted to get done, only German remains. Given that Twitter is crowd-sourcing much of the work for these translations, the speed at which they're adding new ones is impressive.Prior to the Spanish and French roll-outs, Twitter was previously available in English and Japanese. As usual, Twitter has written the latest blog post on the matter in the native tongue, so we'll (roughly) translate it below.
