Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Viva Vision, a premier content and applications provider for mobile entertainment has raised an additional $2 million in funding

What Company Is Offering:
Viva Vision, a Santa Monica, CA based company, is the leading provider of entertainment applications and content for slide shows, video on demand, and live video for mobile phones. Viva Vision delivers programming to the broadest number of handsets through its suite of broadcast platforms, and also produces its own original consumer-driven content. Working with its world-class partners, Viva Vision is able to reach over 250 million wireless subscribers worldwide.

How Much They Got From VCs:
Viva Vision, a premier content and applications provider for mobile entertainment, announced that it raised an additional $2 million in funding from Medical Capital Corporation, a private equity company. Following a turn-around year for Viva Vision, the additional funding allows the company to scale its business, support its growing user base, and further grow distribution.

More at:www.vivavision.com

Become.com ,the Web’s fastest-growing site for comparison shopping got $17.5 million Series C

What Company Is Offering:
Become.com is a powerful search engine and comparison shopping service. Become.com helps people make better buying decisions and purchases online. Become.com searches over 5.6 billion web pages and uses its patent-pending AIR(Affinity Index Ranking) search technology to provide the Internet's most useful product reviews and guides, and then makes it easy to find and buy products from brand name retailers at the best prices. With over 25 million products from 5000 merchants, Become.com provides the Web's most robust and easy to use combination of relevant product research and comparison shopping. Founded by industry pioneers Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, creators of MySimon.

How Much They Got From VCs:
Become.com ,the Web’s fastest-growing site for comparison shopping, announced that TPG Growth has made a $17.5 million Series C investment in Become.com.

How Is Market Of That Kind Of Company:

A survey of shopping habits from Accenture found that 69 percent of respondents now research products online, 68 percent compare prices online before shopping in a physical store and 58 percent locate items online before going to a store to purchase.
· Independent firm comScore Media Metrix ranked Become.com the fourth-fastest-growing Website of any kind in October 2007. Become.com’s site traffic grew 260% from February 2007 to February 2008.

About VCs:
TPG Growth is the venture, growth and smaller buyout investment platform of TPG, the global private investment firm. With more than $2.5 billion under management, TPG Growth targets investments in technology, life science, biotechnology, renewables, and consumer companies utilizing venture capital, growth equity, public equity and leveraged buyout structures. The firm is backed by the resources of TPG with more than $50 billion of assets under management. TPG Growth has offices in the US, China and India. TPG also brings specific expertise in the retail industry, with a history of successful retail investment in leading companies such as J.Crew and Debenhams. For more information, please visit www.tpg.com.


More at: www.become.com.

OpenService, a Marlborough, Mass.-based provider of enterprise event management solutions, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series D funding

What Company Is Offering:
OpenService improves the reliability, performance and security of the world's most complex enterprise networks. The company specializes in Enterprise Event Management (EEM) software that scales to high volume, global implementations in use by hundreds of the world's best-known enterprises. OpenService's InfoCenter is comprised of NerveCenter, LogCenter and ThreatCenter providing event correlation, log management, compliance solutions and security for the entire enterprise.

How Much They Got From VCs:

OpenService, a Marlborough, Mass.-based provider of enterprise event management solutions, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series D funding. Return backers include Advent International and Hudson Ventures. The company had previously raised around $19 million.

Where They Will Use Fund:

CEO Schmitt said the new round of investments "will provide us with the resources we need to promote one of the industry's best-kept secrets." Schmitt added, "Bill and I also look forward to expanding the company's efforts to help companies keep their businesses running by reducing IT risk without giving up comprising business agility."

More at:http://www.openservice.com/

Broadcast LIVE video from your mobile phone onto your website

What Company Is Offering:
Broadcast LIVE video from your mobile phone
over 3G or WiFi onto your website. Or use your phone as a bluetooth webcam in Mac OS X. Free and Open Source.

How It Works:

Open the application manager within the installations folder, choose settings from the menu, and set it to allow installation of "all" applications. You might also need to disable online certificate check at the same place.

You will also get this error if the phone's clock is set to a date earlier than the application's certificate creation date. Make sure your phone is configured with proper date and time.

Any program that can handle both the file format, the codecs and the transport method, should be able to play the stream if you know the URL of your stream. One way of finding the URL is to check the XML feed provided by the video server you are streaming through.

More at:http://www.movino.org/

SkillsTM to find skilled people

What Company Is Offering:
SkillsTM offers an advanced feature called "Broadcasting." Broadcasting allows a person to connect with a group of specifically skilled people on a variety of topics. For example, a user can broadcast an opportunity. Once posted, he/she will be immediately be presented with a list of potential matches to peruse proactively.
Unlike standard social networks that connect people together by who they know, SkillsTM connects people by what they know and do. Use SkillsTM to find skilled people. Use SkillsTM to be discovered based on your skills.



How It Works:
Student entrepreneurs can use SkillsTM to network and build up their team within their School or University. Use SkillsTM.com to leverage a community of specifically skilled people to find exactly who or what you need. They have a fully implemented Facebook application, so people can proudly display their skills on their Facebook page.

Based on the proprietary Lanxer Database engine, SkillsTM introduces Wiki Style Parametric Search. The search is not keywords based, but is rather hierarchically structured. Members can “Search Within” any combination of skills to find people with the exact skill set they desire. If the skills you want to search on aren’t there you can simply add them without even leaving the search screen. We also have standard keyword search but it is enhanced by our hierarchical structure.

Users don’t have to rely only on search to connect with skilled people. One does not have to rely on people finding the opportunity as qualified people are automatically informed. Users can also broadcast a question or a discussion in a similar fashion and generate a rapport with skilled professionals in our community.

They also provide fully integrated chat and messaging to further facilitating the networking process.




Who Is Backing Them:
Robert Lancer - President, Founder and Developer
Robert was not satisfied with the outmoded ridged relational database solutions, so he developed a new database architecture with its own engine to power it: the Lanxer Database Engine (Xerbase). Then, he set out to build applications with his new database technology to demonstrate its power. Robert has had the idea for SkillsTM.com for a long time. He always thought the standard ways of finding and connecting with skilled people were inadequate, and that a community such as SkillsTM.com could greatly help many people connect and become better informed.

Dan Roberts - Technology Analyst / Physicist and Co-founder
Dan immediately recognized the potential in Robert's idea and set out to make himself part of Lanxer. His role at Lanxer is multifaceted, from guiding the development of our products, doing research, testing, creating product demos, writing white-papers, and more. Outside of Lanxer, Dan is a fulltime Physics and ECE major at Duke University, where he conducts physics research in the field of transformation optics (which includes designing invisibility cloaks). When he is not working on SkillsTM or making objects invisible, he plays bass guitar in his band, Rosedale.

More at:http://skillstm.com/