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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

Various reports in the past couple of weeks have suggested that Twitter is in the process of raising a new round of money that is akin to a hot-and-heavy speed dating session. A couple of weeks ago, the rumor of the day put the company’s valuation in the $3 billion range.

But Techcrunch reports tonight that Twitter’s valuation is more like $4 billion, thanks to a bidding war of which Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is now the likely winner.

At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Kleiner Perkins managing director John Doerr said he regretted that his company didn’t invest in Twitter when the valuation was much smaller. He said it wasn’t clear at the time if Twitter’s popularity would last and if the startup would figure out how to make money. But Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, speaking at the same event, was quite confident that the company has found its business model in advertising.

Techcrunch says Doerr himself is leading the charge and doesn’t want to lose Twitter again. Doerr and his partner Bing Gordon have recently been saying they think there is a big tech boom coming, not a bubble.

Companies: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Twitter

People: Ev Williams, John Doerr

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Various reports in the past couple of weeks have suggested that Twitter is in the process of raising a new round of money that is akin to a hot-and-heavy speed dating session. A couple of weeks ago, the rumor of the day put the company’s valuation in the $3 billion range.

But Techcrunch reports tonight that Twitter’s valuation is more like $4 billion, thanks to a bidding war of which Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is now the likely winner.

At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Kleiner Perkins managing director John Doerr said he regretted that his company didn’t invest in Twitter when the valuation was much smaller. He said it wasn’t clear at the time if Twitter’s popularity would last and if the startup would figure out how to make money. But Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, speaking at the same event, was quite confident that the company has found its business model in advertising.

Techcrunch says Doerr himself is leading the charge and doesn’t want to lose Twitter again. Doerr and his partner Bing Gordon have recently been saying they think there is a big tech boom coming, not a bubble.

Companies: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Twitter

People: Ev Williams, John Doerr

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Social media tracker startup Tynt has launched a new application program interface (API) that allows developers to access their content through real-time data streams, as the rush to put more information in the hands of smartphone users heats up.

Tynt works with online publishers and websites to track and analyze data about the sharing activity of their users.

The new API is the first initiative of Tynt Labs, as the company debuts new data tracking tools through its Tynt Insight feature and makes them available to developers and users.

San Francisco-based Tynt also unveiled its new Content Discovery feature, where visitors can see top stories, popular search terms and images of in the sections of celebrity, how-to, New York, sports, technology and travel.

It simultaneously announced its new Geo-location service, which shows the specific areas, images, search terms and stories that people in New York are most closely following.

CEO and co-founder Derek Ball (pictured) told VentureBeat that Tynt’s new approach to interactive services is trying to find a way to harness the overall creativity flourishing in a lightning-fast developer environment.

“Our internal researchers are finding fascinating patterns in the aggregate data and we have so many ideas for what amazing applications could be built,” said Bell. “We simply can’t create them all, so it will be very interesting to see what kind of applications others choose to build on our data. I am confident that the best apps will result in positive traffic flow for our publisher partners and great insights for the end users of those applications. I think one of the most interesting possible areas is mobile.”

Tynt currently offers two APIs, a Category API, where developers see a real-time stream of content related to six popular categories, and a Keyword Search, where developers engage real-time information streams based on keyword searches to figure out how users are interacting with a website’s content.

Bell said he believed that targeting mobile apps will almost certainly be the next target for both developers and companies catering to businesses trying to quantify how their websites are engaging users.

“I think one of the most interesting possible areas is mobile. Steve Jobs recently said ‘Search hasn’t happened yet on mobile devices,’ and he indicated that apps would be where people would go for their data,” said Bell. “If you are building the ultimate app for any passion you might have, imagine being able to tap into a human curated set of the best content around that passion.”

Tags: advertising, API, developers, location based services, mobile apps, Social Media, social networking

Companies: tynt labs

People: derek bell, Steve Jobs

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

I’m going to throw something out there that probably shouldn’t come as too much of a shock, knowing what we know about Matt Taibbi, the boy who spent months of late nights hunched over at his typewriter, gnawing the skin off his knuckles trying to figure out how those crooks at Goldman Sachs do it, reportedly threw scalding hot coffee in the face of a reporter who’d offered him constructive criticism and, on at least on occasion, kept a thermos of horse semen in his fridge to later be baked into a pie and smashed into an unsuspecting victim’s face. And here’s what: Matt Taibbi is the kind of guy who will install surveillance cameras in your home and office, without your knowledge, if he is under the believe you’re screwing him over. Ex-girlfriends can probably attest to this fact and now, sort of embarrassingly, Wall Street and Washington can too. Because Matt Taibbi did it to them, and today, in his duty as an American citizen, reports back on what he saw. We’re lucky he did this and will merely describe the scene to us, sparing us the horror show of actually watching it go down ourselves, which would be a harrowing experience.

What happened next was a prime example of the basic con of congressional politics. Throughout the debate over finance reform, Democrats had sold the public on the idea that it was the Republicans who were killing progressive initiatives. In reality, Republican and Democratic leaders were working together with industry insiders and deep-pocketed lobbyists to prevent rogue members like Merkley and Levin from effecting real change. In public, the parties stage a show of bitter bipartisan stalemate. But when the cameras are off, they fuck like crazed weasels in heat.

In light of the fact that the figurative reach-arounds between Washington and Wall Street’s lobbyists/insiders etc isn’t exactly breaking news, and that Taibbi is a real live investigative journalist, I think we can only assume that this is completely literal reporting, in which case, holy hell, James. Wanna watch where you stick that thing?

Wall Street’s Big Win [Rolling Stone]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Ben Kaufman is known as the guy behind Mophie, the Burlington, Vermont-based iPhone accessory maker that claimed $1 million in revenue in 2006.

But as he learned more and more from firsthand visits to outsourced manufacturers in China, Kaufman realized that he didn’t have to design the products himself. Instead, he told Inc. magazine in 2007, he planned to “turn Mophie into a community-based product-development company” that let anyone submit a design. Winning designs would be built by Kaufman’s outsourced network.

Instead, Kaufman sold Mophie and founded Quirky. A few days ago, Quirky closed a $6 million A round of funding led by RRE Ventures. Village Ventures, Lowercase Capital and Contour Venture Partners also pitched in. That brings total funding to around $7.5 million.

Quirky, founded a year ago and headquartered in New York City, does what it calls social product development. Aspiring product designers pay $99 per idea to submit their product designs for group evaluation. Quirky maintains a community of people who are paid to influence product designs. Those who do get a cut of eventual sales. The $99 fee guarantees that “it’s either going to get your product developed, or you’ll get a 45-page stack from us explaining what type of people like your product.”

Once a week, Quirky chooses an unbuilt product to design and to offer for presale. They figure out how to get it built, and how much to sell it for. If enough people pre-order on Quirky’s website to turn a profit, the thing gets built and goes on sale.

If Quirky decides to build, say, your modular kitchen spatula, you must assign your intellectual property to the company. In exchange, you get a cut of revenue.

Eventually, if everything works out, your product goes on sale with Quirky as both a retailer and a distributor. Fixed portions of sales revenue are split among inventors, Quirky, and its community of influencers. One prolific influencer has earned $1,500 already.

The company has built and sold gadgets ranging from rain water collector, to a portable nightlight for children, to a luggage tag that weighs the suitcase to see if it fits carry-on restrictions. Because of the Mophie connection, Kaufman gets lots of submissions for Apple accessories. “The iPad case we launched last week is killing it,” he told me in a phone interview.

Some inventors might balk at paying to submit an idea, or at handing over their intellectual property to Quirky. “Mainly the reason behind the $99 is it’s a psychological barrier,” Kaufman told me. “You have to ask if you’re serious about building a time machine.”

Currently, he said, “1 in about 35 ideas right now gets designed. Of the 1 in 35, about 25 to 30 percent of them meet the presale threshold.”

The new funding will go toward hiring more staff, setting up model shops for new products, and getting international distribution for the finished products put into place.

Kaufman’s strength seems to be his willingness to let others be the star designers and inventors. “When you drill down to what this business is,” he said, “it’s an operational powerhouse.”

Companies: Quirky

People: Ben Kaufman

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

The Citi Chairman told Bloomberg today that his little CEO that could has done “a tremendous job” but “has not been given the credit that is due to him and his team. His team being all the people of Citi.” So take two today to figure out how to tell the Citi employee in your life you’re proud of the work they’ve done. Whether it involves jumping out of a cake naked or one of those mini desk Zen Gardens with card that says “One day you’ll get the life-sized version,” the thought alone would mean a lot to Dick.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker