Montreal-based StandoutJobs, which is building a site to provide video job classifieds, has raised $1.5-million of venture capital in a deal lead by Garage Ventures in Montreal.
(via MapleLeaf 2.0)
What it means: congrats to the StandoutJobs guys! There is a lot of start-up activity right now in Montreal, Canada (see this list) and I’m sure this is just the beginning of many small companies being funded here.
Just received a message in the last few days from Raj Abhyanker, co-founder of FatDoor. He informs me that they just launched their alpha site at the Ignite session at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California. FatDoor is a new hyperlocal web site focused on discovering who and what’s in your neighborhood.
Highlights:
- Comes pre-loaded with residential and business data (based on zip code), mashed-up with Microsoft Virtual Earth
- You can claim your name and position your avatar on your house
- You can see your various neighbors and their interest via tags but it does not show their address or their phone number for privacy reasons
- You can contact your neighbors
- You can modify people’s profile (images, text) a la wiki
- You can create and join interest groups
- You can see deals and merchant reviews in your neighborhood (crawled content)
- You can see events in your neighborhood
- There is also a point system linked to the contributions you do
What it means: I like the effort as it is visually very beautiful but I’m not sure I completely get it. Although I’m a big fan of hyperlocal, I’m not sure tackling it from the residential side first will allow for more traction. Many people might be frightened to open up to their neighbors about their likes, association, and where they live. In any case, anyone running a residential search site should take a look at it. There are some interesting concepts in there.
(via BBC News)
CBS just picked up one of the darlings of the Web 2.0 world, Last.fm for $280M. The site “allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video-clips. The online network was founded in the UK five years ago and it now has more than 15 million active users. As part of the deal, Last.fm’s managing team will remain in place and the site will maintain its own separate identity. ”
What it means: great acquisition by CBS as Last.fm is a very interesting site and application. Interesting also: CBS will maintain Last.fm’s separate identity. It seems like this is happening more and more when large media corporations acquire smaller Web 2.0 start-ups. The Flickr example comes to mind. I think media companies are realizing that innovation happens in smaller, tightly-knit teams.
eMarketer reports today on online ad spending in Australia. Amongst interesting data points, online directory advertising grew 60% in 2006 (vs. 2005) and classifieds advertising grew by 49%.
Lots of things I want to blog about today (the Facebook f8 Platform announcement, Christer Pettersson’s presentation at the EADP conference) but, as I’m just coming back from Barcelona, I have a lot of catching up to do and am still jet-lagged. So, here’s a grab bag of noteworthy news that happened while I was away:
- Local Matters launched a beta version of LocalGuides.com, their Local-Social play (what I call Local 2.0). Perry Evans had shown me an alpha release a few weeks ago and I was very impressed with the concept and the site. They describe it as “a new approach to creating a “social-local” experience in the Local Search domain”. Perry adds: “The site empowers consumers with the tools to create, annotate, expand and share lists of local businesses
and places – publishing their own personal local guides.” You can read more on Perry’s blog. I’ll get back to it in a few days once I’ve had the chance to play with it.
- Publicar announced the re-launch of their local search engine for Latin America at www.PaginasAmarillas.com. The new site powered by i411 provides business and residential information for 14 countries in Latin America.
Via Le Joe’s blog, Local.ch has released an API to some of their data. Only cities are available for now.
What it means: very limited for now but a sure sign that local search sites all o
