Formspring, the online question/answer service, has raised $11.5 million in Series A financing, bringing its total to $14 million. Now all the company has to do is figure out how to make money.

“$14 million is a ton of money, especially for a site that’s only a year old with no revenue,” notes Liz Gannes at All Things Digital.

It not only has no revenue, but no business model. CEO Ade Olonoh “has not yet figured that out,” reports CNET’s Caroline McCarthy.

Along with the financing, Formspring announced the creation of a “Respond” button that can be incorporated on outside Web sites, allowing the service to be distributed across the Web rather than centralized on Formspring’s own site. Sites such as Huffington Post and AskMen.com are already incorporating the button, which works somewhat like Facebook’s “like” button. Answers to questions are housed on the publishers’ own sites.

Again, there’s no indication on how this will yield returns for the company’s investors. Redpoint Partners and Baseline Ventures led the new round. In March, the company raised $2.5 million from a group of angels along with Polaris Ventures.

Most of the attention the company has drawn has been negative: The site, which allows people to ask each other questions anonymously, became a hive spam and nasty insults and bullying among its teen users.

Tags: Q&A

Companies: Formspring

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Factual, a startup that claims to host hundreds of thousands of data sets, has raised $25 million in its first round of institutional funding.

When I spoke to founder and chief executive Gil Elbaz more than a year ago, he had a big vision for the Los Angeles company — he wanted Factual to be the central repository for data on any subject you can think of. The company uses data mining tools to gather and structure public data from across the Web, and it also gets data from users and partners. (Developers get a discount on Factual’s data if they’re contributing data too.)

Today, Elbaz still sounded ambitious, but he acknowledged that Factual still has progress to make. Specifically, the company recently started to promote its location data to developers of mobile and Web-based location apps. Factual has already signed deals with large partners like Facebook (for its Places service in the United Kingdom and Japan) and location app-maker Booyah.

Factual raised the money from Andreessen Horowitz and Idealab, which already invested in the company’s $2 million angel funding. Making these deals helped convince investors that there’s a big opportunity here, Elbaz said — leading to the $25 million round (which is large for a Web startup’s first institutional round) and presumably to a large valuation as well.

Moving forward, Elbaz said he still wants to “go broad” and tackle lots of different data areas. At the same time, Factual needs to compete with startups that focus on specific types of data — on the location front that includes Localeze and SimpleGeo — so in the short-term, Elbaz said, ‘We’ll be picking off certain verticals where marketing dollars will prove effective.”

When I asked which areas he had in mind, he pointed to the Factual website, which highlights data in education, health, entertainment, and government.

Tags: data, Facebook Places, location based services, location data

Companies: Andreessen Horowitz, Booyah, Facebook, Factual, Idealab

People: Gil Elbaz

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Classifieds listing service Oodle has raised $1.5 million of an expected $3 million from Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, according to a filing with the SEC. The San Mateo, Calif. company operates its own online classifieds network and powers the marketplace on Facebook.

Oodle aggregates listings from across the Web and has more than 15 million unique monthly users. The company launched an iPhone marketplace app last month.

Oodle last raised $5.6 million in February 2009 and has raised more than $23 million to date.

Tags: classifieds

Companies: Facebook, Greylock Partners, Oodle, Redpoint Ventures

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Google just announced that it has acquired Slide, the social application maker headed by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin. The news confirms rumors from earlier this week.

TechCrunch first reported the deal at a $182 million price, later adding details like Levchin personally making $39 million. (Business Insider had a source saying the price was a bit higher, at $228 million.)

Google’s blog post doesn’t mention the price or any specific details about its plans for Slide. Instead, it confirms the (obvious) speculation that the Slide acquisition will expand its array of social tools:

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

Companies: Google, Slide

People: Max Levchin

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Livefyre, a startup preparing to launch its new system for managing comments across the Web, announced today that it has raised $800,000 in a first round of funding.

The San Francisco company says its goal is to break down the silos between the different conversations happening online. It offers an embeddable comment system featuring game mechanics, user reputation, and semantic technology to alert users to related conversations on other blogs.

Existing commenting services offer some similar features. For example, Disqus, which is used by VentureBeat, includes a reputation system across sites. But I haven’t heard of any company that combines all the elements that Livefyre says it does. In Livefyre’s press release, Chief Technology Officer Justin Karneges highlights one other difference — the speed that comes from the company’s XMPP architecture.

“While other comment platforms claim to be live, they are really just refreshing themselves every so often to pull in new comments, which means they can’t support actual live conversations,” Karneges said.

The round was led by Hillsven Capital with participation from Zelkova Ventures and ff Asset Management, as well as angel investors Travis Kalanick and Paige Craig.

Livefyre said it will offer a free version for individual bloggers and pay versions for larger publishers. It has signed up 200 bloggers and publishers so far, and plans to start embedding on sites on July 24.

[via TechCrunch]

Companies: Livefyre

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Google announced today that it has acquired LabPixies, an Israeli company that develops web-based gadgets and games for it’s iGoogle personalized homepage, Facebook, and other social sites. The company also develops mobile apps and games for Android and iPhone like Flood-It.

The price of the deal wasn’t disclosed, but it’s believed to be between $15 to $25 million, according to TechCrunch. The Marker, a Hebrew-language news site, also reports the price as $25 million.

LabPixies was one of the first companies to create gadgets for iGoogle, and has also worked with Google to develop OpenSocial based gadgets worldwide. OpenSocial is a collection of application programming interfaces  (APIs) created by Google and social networking sites — like MySpace, Hi5, and Ning –that allow web applications to run across a variety of social sites.

The company is particularly adept at bringing its popular applications like Flood-It!, Line Up, and Trio, across multiple platforms. The acquisition would give Google access to its current properties, but would also allow Google to develop apps and gadgets in the future that could easily spread across the web and mobile devices.

The LabPixies team will work out of Google’s Tel Aviv offices. The company previously raised $1 million in first round funding from Israeli angel investors.

Tags: Flood-It!, gadgets

Companies: Google, LabPixies

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More