Categorie: Startups

And The First $1 Million Domain Name Sale Of 2012 Is … dudu.com?

DUDU, DUDU Communications, dudu.com, Fundings & Exits, Sedo, social, Startups, TC, WTF

duduDomain name marketplace operator Sedo this morning announced that it has brokered a big domain name sale before the first week of the new year is over. The company has negotiated a sale of the domain dudu.com to a Dubai-based social networking service provider called – you guessed it – DUDU Communications.

Amazingly, the domain name went for as much as $1 million, which is right up there with the sales of furniture.com, sky.com and domainname.com – heck, it even fetched double the purchase price of domains like 3D.com, logo.com and puzzle.com.

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IFTTT, A Glue Gun For Sticking The Web Together, Raises $1.5M Seed Round From Top Investors

apps, Fundings & Exits, social, Startups, TC

Screen Shot 2012-01-04 at 8.19.13 AMWant to instantly save all your Instagram photos to Dropbox when you take them? What about automatically updating your Twitter profile when you update your Facebook profile? Or, what about sharing any article you read in Read It Later to Twitter and Facebook, staggered by time via Buffer? A small bootstrapped startup called If This Then That has abstracted a simple set of tools to help you do each of these things, and many more.

And now it’s raising a big seed round of more than $1.5 million from some of the top angels and venture capitalists in tech.

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Spool Raises $1 Million To Let You Cache Content To Mobile And Push It To Friends

apps, Fundings & Exits, mobile, social, spool, Startups, TC

Spool LogoWhen Spool debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, the app and browser extension was focused on caching videos, articles, and other web content to your mobile device. It was like Instapaper on steroids. Today, Spool will announce $1 million in new funding and an expanded vision — allowing people to push that cached content directly to the devices of their friends. Investors include, SVAngel, Felicis Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund and YouTube founder Steve Chen. The funding will go towards scaling the complex back-end caching technology that makes Spool defensible.

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Virtual Currency and Pay Per View 2.0: World Series Of Beer Pong To Stream On Facebook

apps, ecommerce, facebook credits, social, Startups, TC, WTF

World Series Of Beer Pong Stream By MilyoniIn Facebook’s early days the company planned a national beer pong tournament, but then cancelled it out of fear it would promote underage drinking. Tomorrow, that dream will be revived in a new way when social video and ecommerce company Milyoni streams The World Series of Beer Pong through its Facebook app. For 50 Facebook Credits/$5 PayPal pre-sale or 70/$7 once the games begin, viewers can tune in to all the boozy action from doubles to rebuttals. The stream could demonstrate whether live sports could work as Facebook pay-per-view programming.

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Photo Organization Service Everpix Launches Public Beta

everpix, Photography, photos, social, Startups, TC

everpix-iconPhoto organization service (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Everpix has just launched into public beta, bringing with it a number of changes to its backend infrastructure, web interface and its desktop software.

The service, for those unaware, automatically organizes and combines all your photos, whether they’re stored on your computer or in the cloud. It then combines them into an online photo gallery where groups of photos are laid out into attractive albums called “Moments.”

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7moments Is A Beautiful New Way To Share Private Photos In A Group

Reviews, social, Startups, TC

Screen-Shot-2011-12-28-at-19.06.04We’re all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I’m not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I’m talking about moments that matter – the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that’s still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook’s now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the ‘Dropbox for photos’ where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.

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Fund.me: Mobile Social Network Startup Just.me Raises $2.7 Million

apps, archimedes labs, Fundings & Exits, just.me, mobile, social, Startups, TC

justmeJust.me, a stealth startup incubated by Palo Alto, California-based Archimedes Labs has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding according to an SEC filing. The company earlier secured $600,000 in seed financing from SV Angel, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, CrunchFund and a couple of other high-profile investors such as Don Dodge and Michael Parekh.

I reached out to Keith Teare, CEO and sole founder of just.me (and also technically also a co-founder of TechCrunch, for full disclosure), but he politely declined to comment on the funding round.

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Find Out Which Brands Are Winning On Google+ With ZoomSphere (Hint: Android is #1)

google plus, social, Startups, TC

ZoomSphere Launches Google Plus ChartsFacebook has AppData, Twitter has Twitaholic, and now Google+ has its own independent brand page rankings site: ZoomSphere. It shows which brands have the most followers, activity, +1s, shares, and comments, and slice the data by time, page category, and country. Oddly, the site doesn’t rank user profiles like SocialStatistics does — just brand pages. Still, by augmenting its existing charts for Facebook and Twitter, ZoomSphere could become a comprehensive resource for brands charting their own performance, assessing competitors, or scoping for potential partners.

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Exclusive: Groupon Acquires Stealth Silicon Valley Startup Campfire Labs

campfire labs, ecommerce, Editor's Picks, Fundings & Exits, groupon, social, Startups, TC

grouponGroupon has continued its (talent) acquisition spree with the recent purchase of a hot Silicon Valley startup before they even launched – and with extremely little fanfare.

We’ve learned that Campfire Labs, which was founded by ex-Googler Sakina Arsiwala (previously Head of International at YouTube) and her husband, social search technology expert Naveen Koorakula (previously at search companies like Inktomi, Yahoo and Picch), was quietly bought by Groupon.

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