Skip to content

True Ventures

News

Monthly Archive for January 2008

GoodReads Ranked #5 According To TIME

January 31, 2008

In their 50 Top Ten Lists for 2007, TIME ranked GoodReads #5 for their Top Ten Websites of 2007. GoodReads provides a platform for members to share their love of books, write reviews, read others’ reviews, and share recommendations with friends. We agree with TIME; it is one of our favorites too.

Knighthood Is Highly Addictive

January 29, 2008

Hive7’s Knighthood game has taken Facebook by storm. Max and team have created a highly addictive game where you can become a knight and rule your own kingdom. The game is free, available to all via Facebook, and, the more players that you recruit, the higher the status you attain, which may explain the rapidly increasing flood of interest in this application.

SendMe Mobile Partners with EMI for Mobile Content

January 24, 2008

If you want your cell phone ring to be B52’s Love Shack, that dream can now come true thanks to SendMe Mobile’s strategic agreement with EMI Music. EMI is one of the world’s largest independent music companies, and their agreement with SendMe Mobile adds more than 4,000 ring tones to their already extensive library. The new selection options include songs from artists such as Lily Allen, Corinne Bailey Rae, Beastie Boys, Lenny Kravitz & K.T. Tunstall.

Automattic Raises $29M Series B Round

January 23, 2008

We are thrilled to announce Automattic’s Series B round of financing with co-investors Polaris Ventures and Radar Partners, as well as new strategic investor The New York Times Company. True seed funded the initial round of $1M with Polaris and Radar, and the Series B round will enable additional product development to build a more exciting platform for the WordPress global community.

With 2.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress and over 100 million global uniques, Toni notes that Automattic is now larger than Facebook and Wikipedia. We here at True believe Automattic to be one of the most exciting privately held companies on the internet, but, of course, we are a bit biased :) .

Om broke the news, but today’s WSJ and New York Times also discuss the transaction.

My favorite quote of all is from Matt’s Mullenweg’s blog, “That decision actually wasn’t hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunities, and it became clear that the road ahead was much longer than the road behind us.”

By far the most rewarding aspect of our business is watching a team of great entrepreneurs create. Toni, Matt, and the team are a tremendous inspiration for all of us at True.

Congratulations to Matt, Toni & the WordPress Team, and thank you for all of your hard work and dedication.

Sphere Is Always On

January 23, 2008

Always On recognized Sphere as one of the top 100 game-changing, digital media players in the Online Advertising Service Providers’ category.

Congratulations to Tony & the Sphere Team on their OnMedia Top 100 award!

WordPress Offers 3GB of Storage

January 21, 2008

WordPress now offers 3GB of storage per customer, which is significantly more than is offered by competitors TypePad (from Six Apart) & Blogger (from Google). This a 60x increase in free upload space. Automattic is passing along their savings from optimizing their use of Amazon’s S3 storage service to their end users. Thanks, Matt, Toni & Team!

And The Award Goes To . . .

January 19, 2008

Toni Schneider & Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, who received two awards at tonight’s Crunchies. The Crunchies were held tonight at Herbst Theatre in downtown San Francisco. The event was co-hosted by GigaOm, Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat. Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, was awarded a Crunchie for the Best Startup CEO. Founder Matt Mullenweg accepted the Most Likely to Succeed Crunchie on behalf of Automattic WordPress.

Congratulations to Matt, Toni & the whole WordPress team!

Thanks To The Academy

January 19, 2008

The Crunchies’ Academy, that is. Meebo took home the Crunchie award for Best Consumer Start-up at tonight’s ceremony. GigaOm, Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat co-hosted this award ceremony to honor the best of the web. The readers picked the winners, with over 100,000 votes cast.

Great job, Seth, Sandy, Elaine & Team!

scanR Pro Now Available

January 11, 2008

Starting today, scanR offers a new service, called scanR Pro, which is a premium version of its award-winning service enabling camera phones and digital cameras to scan, copy, and fax. scanR Pro provides unlimited uploads and removes all advertising from processed images. Additionally, scanR Pro supports high-quality digital copies in full-color.

Keep up the great work, scanR Team!

SendMe Mobile Offers Universal Music Group Content

January 10, 2008

Universal Music Group’s impressive array of hits is now available to SendMe Mobile customers thanks to their new licensing agreement. Universal Music Group owns the most extensive catalog of music in the industry, including superstars such as U2, Rihanna, Gwen Stefani & 50 Cent. Subscribers of SendMe Mobiles’s premier mobile media services now have access to Universal’s extensive library of chart-topping songs.

Next Page »