Posted by Tom Blue on May 15, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing | 
TimeBridge received $5M in funding earlier this week from Mayfield and Norwest. They provide free online scheduling software. I did a test run of it and it is very simple to use. I invite myself to a meeting and it seemed straight forward. There is also an option to share your calendar with your invitee and the ability to propose possible times. I believe the coolest feature is the integration with Outlook or Google Calendar.
It looks like a decent site, but I wonder what they plan to spend the whole $5M on. In addition, the biggest issue I have with a site like this is that it only solves one management problem. It seems it would work well with an entire CRM package or something. I feel like there are a ton of SaaS providers that provide just a few features. Where is the free service that handles all of it in one place?
Posted by Tom Blue on under Companies, Funding, Investing, Sales |
I Love Rewards received $6.9M in venture capital financing from GrandBanks Capital this week. They are an incentives and sales rewards solution provider. They have one numerous awards and have been in business since 1995. Their solution is ideal for small and medium sized businesses.
Posted by Tom Blue on under Companies, Funding, Investing, Uncategorized |
OptionEase received Series A venture financing from GADS Option Fund this week. OptionEase provides equity and stock option administration online. The site is built for public companies as well as private. They have more than 310 clients and were founded in 2006. The two co-founders were a previous CFO and a Managing Director of an Enterprise Software Company.
Posted by Tom Blue on May 5, 2009 under Companies, Investing |
23andme just got a 2nd round of venture capital financing. I have been fascinated by them since I first heard about the company 1.5 years ago. For $400, they take your DNA and analyze it for you. It can tell you what traits and diseases you should look out for. I didn’t know this before, but it also gives you more information about your ancestry which would be interesting. I plan on buying a kit one of these days, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The company has been extremely controversial. I don’t see why actually. I think it is important for people to know what they should look out for.
Posted by Tom Blue on March 12, 2009 under Companies, Investing, Technology |
Kaching is a site that allows its users to make virtual stock picks. It also allows you to follow the portfolios/trades of other investors. The idea behind it is for you to be able to follow those users that are consistently doing good(or maybe bad as well). At one point they want to charge users to follow certain people.
What I like about this concept is that you have a 3rd party that is verifying the user actually made the suggestion and/or virtual trade. I say this because I have personal experience with this. Awhile ago I was looking for investment advisors that have daily emails with specific stock picks. I found quite a few that looked really good and had impressive results, but I couldn’t verify that they indeed made these trades when they said they made them. With this site you can verify it. It is also a good way for the advisor to make some extra money.
There was a similar idea called Clearstation that was started during Web 1.0. The difference is that I don’t believe Clearstation ever planned to get people to sell their advice… It was later acquired by eTrade.
Usability: The setup and use of the site is quite simple. I knew exactly what do from the beginning. I was able to buy some stock and follow some users immediately. It is a clean and simple site.
Future: Although I really like the site and concept I think this is a tough time to be starting this site/service. I don’t think that many people are excited about investing in the market right now….
