Kleiner Perkins And Seq...

When two of the biggest names in venture capital (arguably still the biggest) both invest in a startup, you know it’s probably time to take notice. So yes, take notice: A cross-device ad targeting startup called Drawbridge has raised a $6.5 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. The company was founded in November 2010 by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, a scientist at AdMob and then, after the acquisition, at Google. Sivaramakrishnan says she started the company because she saw the proliferation of ad targeting technology on the desktop web, while there was “no significant technology innovation” on the mobile side. So she decided to tackle the problem herself, “outside of the big G.” Since then, Sivaramakrishnan says her team has built “very heavy-duty technology” to link up ad targeting on desktop and mobile. Drawbridge looks at activity on the desktop Web, and on mobile Web and apps. Then it uses “probabilistic and statistical inference models” to suggest which PC and mobile users are likely to be the same person using two different devices. “Over time, we get enough confidence on the probability of these two activities belonging to the same user that deem it to be a ‘pair’,” she says. And once a pair has been made, mobile advertisers have access to user data that’s being collected on the desktop, and can target their ads with much more nuance. In addition to the technology disparity between desktop and mobile, Sivaramakrishnan notes that people are usually using their mobile devices for a relatively narrow range of activity, usually entertainment or content consumption, so it’s only by accessing to their desktop activity that advertisers can determine “commercial-grade intent.” The model also steers clear of any privacy concerns, Sivaramakrishnan says. There’s no personally identifiable information collected — no phone numbers, no email addresses, no Facebook accounts. In the meantime, Apple has started rejecting apps that access UDIDs to identify their users, which Sivaramakrishnan says makes Drawbridge “even more pertinent and significant now than when UDIDs were being lazily used as mobile cookies.” “You don’t need a device ID to do advertising,” she adds. Even though Drawbridge is only coming out of stealth today, Sivaramakrishnan says it has already been running campaigns with major advertisers and has significant revenue. The platform is still in beta testing, with plans for general availability in the second half of this year. Sivaramakrishnan also says the model could be expanded to other connected devices, not just desktop PCs and phones. Drawbridge previously raised a seed round of undisclosed size from Kleiner and Sequoia.

Quora Employee Answers ...

Here’s a heart-warming tale of why you can’t second-guess yourself. Robert Cezar Matei  had the chance to work for Instagram long-before it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, but followed his passion for knowledge and became the growth hacker  for question & answer site Quora instead. This is his answer on Quora (fittingly) for why he declined Instagram, and why he’s still smiling. “You make a gut call, then you walk into the future with serenity.” Question – Did anyone decline an offer to work at Instagram? Answer -  Robert Cezar Matei : “Yeah, I had an offer to be the second engineering hire. Kevin and Mike had grown the team really slowly for their entire history: they’d hired only one engineer,  Shayne , until just a few months prior to the acquisition, and they’d only made one other offer before me.  Some people didn’t take them seriously as a business – it was “just an app”, and apps are made by hobbyists. Some people didn’t take them seriously as an engineering team, because they did such a good job scaling that they made it look easy. Some people thought they were just a feature that Facebook or Twitter could co-opt. Some people had cofounder-level equity expectations because of the small size of the team. So they unveiled an API. They wrote about the engineering challenges they’d solved. They launched on Android. Growth kept up. Hiring picked up. People’s hindsight got sharper, and they got the respect they deserved. I knew  Mike  from Stanford, so a few days after they launched, I visited them at their rented desks at  Dogpatch . I found them huddled over a monitor, struggling to keep up with the traffic from their first Techcrunch coverage . We talked about scaling.  Kevin  made some overture. I was taking a sabbatical, and wanted to focus on other things. But I spent time with them over the following year, sometimes working late nights out of their office. When I was deciding where to work next, they made me build a follow recommendation algorithm using their API. I guess they liked it. We talked about their vision. We had sake in the Tenderloin at 1 in the morning. Kevin crafted a lovely letter, peppered with shared experiences and pictures, as he did for every offer. I was touched. I believed in Instagram – it’s an incredible product. It makes self-expression easy. It makes the world beautiful. I thought it had a real shot at disrupting Facebook. Apparently Facebook thought so as well. I ended up going to Quora, because I was more passionate about both the vision and the role. I had a chance to help build what could become the platform for all human knowledge, which I thought could be a revolution on the same level as Google. Little else mattered in the end. If you’re in the Valley for any amount of time, you’ll have missed opportunities. As a sprightly sophomore, I walked unannounced into Facebook’s first Palo Alto office, back when the company was a handful of people, and offered to help. I focused on school instead. I failed to be convinced by  Keith  and  Jack Dorsey  back when  Square  was in its infancy. Add Instagram to that list. Whatever. Opportunities were rarely as close as they seem in hindsight. And money doesn’t make much of a difference. A friend and I* made games on the Facebook platform in its early years. There were days we made five figures. I got high on the success. I bought a Mac and had a $17 martini at the Wynn. It didn’t do much except make me a little more aloof. The money went back into our company. Most of it’s gone. I’m kind of glad it is. The morning of the acquisition, I pulled out my offer letter and smiled. You can’t second-guess your decisions. You gather information, you think hard, you make a gut call, then you walk into the future with serenity. I made the decision I did for a hundred different reasons, most of which still hold. I still think Quora’s gonna be huge. And I’m still smiling.” * Animal Apps  with  Dave Pekar  (soon joined by  Randal ,  Bobby ,  Danny ,  Diana  and Evan ). We eventually got acquired by  Zynga . – If you’re already on Quora you can leave feedback on the original answer here . If you’re not, this is the kind of knowledge you can expect if you browse or join , which you probably should. And check out TechCrunch’s Quora coverage  for interviews with the founders (two former Facebook employees) about the how the Q&A site can do what Wikipedia can’t.

LinkedIn Acquires Profe...

LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock. We’ve pasted the release below. SlideShare is a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations.SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page. SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors. SlideShare has raised $3 million in funding from Jonathan Abrams, Mark Cuban, Dave McClure, and Venrock. The acquisition makes a lot of sense from a product point of view. SlideShare recently deepened its integration with LinkedIn, and the two companies have compares their relationship to Chocolate and peanut butter for professionals. We actually suggested at the time that LinkedIn should buy SlideShare. Perhaps they were listening to us? LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with 161 million members worldwide, today announced it agreed to acquire SlideShare, a leading professional content sharing community. The transaction is valued at approximately $118.75 million, subject to adjustment, in a combination of approximately 45 percent cash and approximately 55 percent stock. Subject to the completion of customary conditions, the acquisition is expected to close during the second quarter of 2012. Founded in October 2006, SlideShare helps professionals discover people through content, and content through people. SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors, ranking it among the most heavily trafficked sites for professional content. SlideShare is also enabling the sharing of presentations across the Web; nearly 7.4 million presentations hosted by SlideShare are embedded across more than 1.4 million unique domains. “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity,” said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. “These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members. We’re very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn.” Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare commented, “We built SlideShare to help professionals share presentations and connect people through content. What we can build with LinkedIn, the largest professional network on the Internet, is the most natural extension of this vision. I am excited about what we can build together.”

Zillow Reports Record Q...

Real estate listings site Zillow just reported strong Q1 earnings. The company reported record revenue of $22.8 million, up 103% over first quarter 2011. Net Income came in at $1.7 million, resulting in EPS of $0.06. Analysts expected earnings of $0.03 per share on revenue of $21.5 million. Zillow is also buying rental marketing software maker RentJuice, as we reported earlier this year. The transaction is all-cash, valued at $40 million. “Mobile usage and site traffic grew substantially during the first quarter, which led to record revenue and EBITDA levels exceeding our prior outlook, and our sixth consecutive quarter of triple-digit, year-over-year revenue growth,” said CEO Spencer Rascoff in a release. “We continue to expand our addressable market and competitive advantage as we extend our mobile leadership, launch more services for real estate professionals, and grow our mortgage and rentals marketplaces. In particular, we took a giant leap forward in growing our rentals marketplace with today’s announcement that Zillow is acquiring RentJuice. This acquisition will provide us with a comprehensive suite of business and marketing services for rental professionals, similar to what took us years to build and grow in our parallel marketplace for real estate agents.” The company says average monthly unique users grew 84% to 31.8 million in the first quarter of 2012 compared to 17.3 million average monthly unique users for the same period in 2011. And Zillow usage on mobile devices continues to grow. For the first time, more homes each month are now viewed via Zillow on mobile devices than on the Web. In March 2012, 155 million homes were viewed on Zillow Mobile, or 57 homes per second. Zillow recently launched its first dedicated rentals app, debuting on Android. Zillow’s revenue for the second quarter is also expected to reach record levels of $25.5 to $26.5 million.

IBM Acquires Tealeaf To...

Another week, another IBM acquisition . Big Blue has announced the purchase of Tealeaf Technology , which provides customer experience analytics software that helps organizations access information about consumer web experiences. Financial details were not disclosed. Basically, Tealeaf’s software captures and records what each customer is doing and seeing in real-time on every page and across all site visits, down to the page-by-page, browser-level experience. By capturing every single customer’s visit, as well as the reaction of the site in response to the customer’s requests, Tealeaf captures both the quantitative and qualitative details of every single interaction. This data is then used towards optimizing the customer experience. For example, Tealeaf can identify what campaigns or interactions triggered a customer session to end prematurely and result in a non-conversion. Another example of Tealeaf’s technology in action is an online travel agency finding that when visitors misspell a vacation package name and receive zero search results, nearly 100 percent of the visitors leave the site without completing a booking. IBM says the acquisition is part of enhancing its smarter commerce initiative. Tealeaf’s technology will add analytics for clients who want real-time and automated insights into online customer buying experiences across online and mobile devices. As a result, IBM says that organizations can gain actionable insight that allows them to improve customer support, transform site usability, tailor marketing campaigns and increase online conversion rates. Tealeaf has over 450 customers worldwide including 30 of the Fortune 100 companies, including Dell, Wells Fargo, Air Canada, GEICO, Orbitz, Crate & Barrel, Neiman Marcus, Expedia, Zappos, ING Direct, Best Buy, DirecTV, McKesson and StubHub. The company has raised $12 million from Bay Partners, Matrix Partners and Foundation Capital. Big Blue is betting on commerce software as a whole. IBM, which has invested more than $3 billion in building out its smarter commerce group of products, says Tealeaf will be integrated into IBM’s Enterprise Marketing and Management Group, which includes previously acquired assets from Coremetrics, Unica and DemandTec. IBM says its Smarter Commerce initiative, which aims to help companies respond to shifting customer buying patterns, is a $20 billion market opportunity, particularly in the software space.