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Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Unveils iPad SDK And New Ad Formats

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:20:10 +0000

With the iPad officially in the hands of consumers, mobile ad networks and platforms are rushing to create iPad specific ad formats. Medialets, Mobclix, and Greystripe have all created ad formats for the device. And AdMob is said to be releasing its iPad-specific SDK in the next few weeks. Mobile ad network Millennial Media is releasing an iPad-specific SDK and a customized PadMedia Creative Suite that includes new creative ad formats built specifically for the iPad.

Millennial Media’s iPad SDK is code complete, and will be deployed after testing with beta publishers on-device is finalized this week. Developers will be able to download the SDK through Millennial’s developer portal. For advertisers, Millennial Media is releasing its PadMedia Creative Suite, which includes standard mobile ad units and new unique ad formats for the iPad.

These include floating canvas, where a rich media ad will expand upon click, attempting to leverage the canvas of the iPad; RTP (Return-to-Play), which is an ad unit that allows consumers to respond to an ad, pausing their application experience and resuming when they are ready; Motion Creative, which allows ad units to become interactive when the user turns or rotates the iPad in different ways; and full-page Interstitials, which are full-page ads that appear upon application launch or during transition in game play.

Millennial is now one of the largest mobile ad networks in and U.S. According to Nielsen, Millennial Media reaches 83 percent of 72 million mobile web users, across every mobile platform. And the Baltimore-based startup is growing; in February Millennial Media acquired mobile metrics and analytics firm TapMetrics. Additionally, the ad network raised $16 million in Series C funding last November.

Of course, like many of its fellow ad networks, Millennial finds itself in a perplexing situation in the space. It’s unclear how Google’s acquisition of AdMob (although this may be derailed) and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless will effect the other ad networks in the space. And Apple is announcing its mobile ad plans tomorrow. If anything, these networks will now have to compete with two of the largest companies in the world.

But Millennial Media is wise to being offering innovative ad formats for the iPad and should be able to stand on its own if these formats ends of producing high click through rates.

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Millennial Media

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Wix Raises $10 Million For Flash Website And Widget Builder

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:20:10 +0000

Startup Wix, which allows users to build flash websites and widgets, has just raised $10 million in Series C funding from Benchmark Capital existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners participating. This round of founding brings Wix’s total funding to $20 million. You can read our initial review of Wix here.

Founded in 2006, Wix provides a simple mechanism for anyone to create Flash-based websites and widgets without losing SEO juice. Users can customize their Wix websites with a drag and drop editing tool and pretty templates, making the site user-friendly for users who may not be tech savvy. The funding will be used for further product development.

The site makes its money from a freemium model where users pay for extra customization and design features. And Wix is partnering with other design and image sites to include compelling features for website building. For example, Wix has partnered with stock image site Fotolia to give users access to the site’s 5 million images. Wix is growing and currently has 3.5 million free users with 400,000 new users joining per month. The site faces competition from Weebly Sprout, Yola, and others.

Here’s an example of a website created using Wix.

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Wix

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Green E-Biller Transactis Raises $2.5 Million

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:20:12 +0000

Banks, cable companies, and utilities all want to get rid of their paper bills and get customers on their electronic billing systems. Just as there were back-office billing providers for the paper era, there are now back-office electronic billers. A company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Transactis is one of them, and it just raised a $2.5 million round led by New York City-based Metamorphic Ventures. CEO Joe Proto and other existing shareholders also participated in the round.

The round is an extension of a $3 million series C the company raised last year, and brings the total capital raised to $10.5 million.

Transactis works primarily with banks and payment processors to take over the whole e-billing process for them, from presenting the bills via email to collecting the cash. More and more consumers are opting to go paperless (it’s the green thing to do), and companies save on the paper, printing, and postage costs.

Email billing is a growth business, and Transactis is carving out a nice little niche for itself.

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Transactis

Metamorphic Ventures

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Tilera Grabs $25 Million From Chip Investors

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:20:17 +0000

Tilera, a company that develops multicore processors, has raised $25 million in series C funding from Broadcom Corporation, Quanta Computers and NTT Financing. This brings Tilera’s total funding to $64 million

Tilera says the funding will be used to expand sales operations and for product development. Founded in 2004, Tilera designs multicore embedded processors for networking, digital multimedia, and wireless infrastructure markets. The company offers multicore processors for processing and power requirements, multicore software development tools, and boards. Its products include TILEPro, a multicore processor, which delivers the performance computing for embedded applications.

Tilera investor and semiconductor giant Broadcom just closed the acquisition of chip developer Teknovus for $123 million.

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Idealab Spin-off Perfect Market Raises $6 Million From Tribune Company, Others

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:23:28 +0000

Perfect Market, which markets solutions aimed to assist publishers in growing revenue from their online content, has secured $6 million in a Series C funding round led by Tribune Company.

Just to be clear, that’s the media giant that owns newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune alongside a number of television and radio stations and a range of online properties.

Perfect Market says it will use the funds to expand its efforts to market and deploy its solution to publishers of newspapers, magazines and websites.

Existing investors Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and Idealab also participated in this round. The company’s initial financing round totaled $15.6 million and was closed in July 2008. I failed to find out when or how big the Series B round was.

Frankly, I’m also having a tough time figuring out what the company offers exactly, but here’s the pitch from their website:

Our proprietary technology solution better fulfills the needs of intent users – people who arrive at their sites through keyword searches seeking specific information – with exactly what they’re looking for in our customers’ online content. Optimized content with relevant ads generates higher click-through rates for advertisers, and dramatically more revenue for publishers and their ad network partners.

Sounds like they’re up against Google and a plethora of other companies in this field.

Tribune Company has apparently been using the solutions developed by Perfect Market, which was incubated by Idealab, on several of its web properties in 2009. Clearly, the media company appears to believe in the startup’s potential to compete in a crowded market: aside from the investment, Dan Kazan, Tribune’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, has joined the company’s Board of Directors.

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Perfect Market

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Social Shopping Site ThisNext Confirms Funding, Acquires Stylehive

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:20:08 +0000

Social e-commerce company ThisNext recently raised a Series C round of $1.2 million, which we reported based on an SEC filing. The Santa Monica, CA startup has now confirmed the financing round and also announced that it has acquired smaller rival Stylehive for an undisclosed amount.

ThisNext set up an entirely new parent company, Curatemedia, which will be the corporate brand that will operate both ThisNext and Stylehive henceforth.

ThisNext says its latest round comes from Clearstone Venture Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, which as far as we can tell were all prior investors in the company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. According to the CrunchBase profile for ThisNext, entrepreneur and angel investor (and TechCrunch50 partner) Jason Calacanis was an early backer of the company and serves on its board.

According to the startup, the capital will be used to develop additional shopping tools, facilitate commerce functionality and to fuel the growth of Curatemedia into new verticals and categories. Stylehive, its first acquisition, is a fashion and beauty community and claims over 600,000 registered users. Stylehive made an acquisition of its own back in 2007, scooping up fashion social media startup Stylediary for an undisclosed amount.

In related social shopping business news, Time Inc. last week acquired StyleFeeder for “well into eight figures.”