Financial Trading Platform eToro Secures $6.3 Million In Series B Funding
Mar 31, 2009 General
Online financial trading platform eToro has secured $6.3 million in Series B financing from BRM Group, Cubit Investments and other unnamed investors. In 2007, the Cyprus-based startup raised $1.7 million in Series A funding from Cubit Investments, Chemi Peres, and other investors.
The financial trading company, which launched originally as an online foreign exchange trading platform, is small but growing with an average of 2,000 new accounts opened every month. eToro is also announcing the addition of commodities trading for its users as well as significant additions to its trading methods which will allow traders to conduct more long-term, lower-leveraged trades in both the forex and commodities markets. Jonathan Assia, eToro’s founder and CEO says that the funding will be used to hire additional staff to keep up with demand and it will allow the company to further extend its current platform into the commodities and stock index markets over the next two years.
As we noted in the past, eToro’s trading platform is attractive because it provides basic tools for less experienced traders to easily conduct online trading via a simple user interface. eToro’s interface provides six different “trading arenas” for traders ranging from beginners to experienced traders. It might not seem like the best time for financial startups, but remember: traders thrive in volatile markets. By making it easier to trade, eToro is hoping it will too.
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Popularity: 2% [?]
Make Your Firefox Browser Look Better With Mozilla Labs’ Latest Skins
Mar 31, 2009 General
Mozilla Labs is debuting new personas today – extensions that add lightweight themed skins to your Firefox browser – enabling you to personalize your user experience according to your mood without interrupting your browsing sessions. The Personas for Firefox add-on was first introduced in late 2007, but has now expanded to include hundreds of artist-created designs in a variety of categories, according to a blog post announcing the new sets.
I like custom skins / themes and the fact that Mozilla is taking steps to make it easier for people to adjust the look and feel of their browser according to their mood, but somehow the announcement made me cringe a little (much like this Labs experiment did). I would rather see Mozilla focus on improving the speed and usability of its browser than offering its users ways to add eye candy, particularly now that the browser wars are heating up again. Firefox needs more innovation, not decoration. But then that’s just me. Some people love eye candy more than speed.
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Popularity: 12% [?]
NextStart Gives South Carolina A Startup Incubator
Mar 31, 2009 General
NextStart is the latest Y Combinator-esque startup incubator to emerge to support young entrepreneurs and their ideas. The Greenville, South Carolina-based organization is offering a summer immersion entrepreneur development program to attract promising entrepreneurs to the Carolina region.
The program works similarly to other incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars in providing seed money, VC connections, and mentoring to company founders to develop their ideas, incorporate their companies, and then help find funding for their startups. NextStart will give startups $5,000 to $10,000 in return for “founders stock” of 5 to 10 percent. The twelve week program will run during the summer in Greenville and will give entrepreneurs office space, internet access and other professional services. Startup teams will be immersed in a business planning program, FastTrac by the Kauffman Foundation, to develop a solid business plan and will also work with the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Clemson University.
NextStart joins a constantly growing number of programs trying to appeal to young entrepreneurs. Aside from Y Combinator, which pioneered the idea, other incubators include TechStars (Boulder and now Boston), Start@Spark (Boston), LaunchBox Digital (Washington, D.C.), DreamIT Ventures (Philadelphia), and Shotput Ventures (Atlanta), and Capital Factory (Austin).
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Lunch Launches a Personal Recommendation Network (+Invites)
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
A new online community site called Lunch.com has just launched into private beta here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The site, essentially a recommendation network, aims to bring the sort of casual conversations you would have with friends over lunch to the online arena. Using a proprietary “Similarity Network Engine,” Lunch calculates what you have in common with other site members so you can share recommendations with those who have your same interests and perspectives.
Click through for an exclusive invite code to this new site!
Sponsor
In a way, Lunch is somewhat like a “Yelp 2.0.” But unlike Yelp and other sites like it, Lunch’s network aims to make user-generated reviews more of a personalized experience. By discovering your passions and interests, Lunch lets you connect with people who are more like you – and therefore, people who will be recommending and reviewing products and services in a way that you can trust (at least in theory). This idea has merit because it provides a personalized, filtered view of these online reviews.
What Why Need This
Sites like Yelp, Amazon, the iTunes store, and others have been coming under fire for not having trustworthy reviews. Thanks to anonymous user IDs on some sites, reviewers can be anyone with any agenda. Often they are. On Lunch, however, those drive-by reviews contributed by someone associated with the company or product being reviewed (or with an axe to grind) will not be prominently featured. The reason? Lunch.com’s Similarity Network.
The Similarity Network
The Similarity Network is probably the most important feature of this new community – without it, Lunch would just be just another Yelp. After signing up, you kick start the matching engine by playing “ExhilaRATE.” Although that name is somewhat unintuitive, clicking the link takes you to a section of the site where you can – guess what? – rate things like movies, books, food, sports, politics, animals…whatever. The experience of rating items here is a lot like that of Amazon’s recommendation engine. If you’ve ever killed a few minutes on Amazon training it to get to know you better, you’ll find Lunch.com’s engine fairly similar.
The difference is that Lunch.com’s engine groups things to rate into categories with titles that sound a lot like Facebook Apps (Top Movies of 2009, What’s your Favorite Wine?). The Facebook flavor to these “games” makes sense because in the future, Lunch.com will launch a Facebook connected-experience, perhaps even a standalone app. In the meantime, however, you must go to the site to rate items.
The more you rate on Lunch, the better your matches become. You can see your matches and the percentage of compatibility between you and those like you. There are also tag cloud displays that show what items you both like and which ones you don’t.
With Lunch, You Can Rate Anything
If you’re still wondering why you would migrate away from more mainstream sites to something like Lunch.com, there’s another reason this particular community holds appeal: it allows you to make anything ratable. Again unlike Yelp, ratings don’t have to focus on products, services, places, etc. They could also be opinion pieces – like what you thought of Michelle Obama’s new outfit for example. That opens the door for a much wider range of recommendations and – since you’re matched with those like you – those recommendations will be relevant to your interests.
Lunch.com is in private beta, but you can try it now with the invite code “ReadWriteWeb.” To use it, just click the link on the right-hand side of the screen that says “Have an invite code?”
Popularity: 1% [?]
MySpace Goes Local: Announces Partnership with Citysearch
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
MySpace today announced a partnership with Citysearch that will bring Citysearch’s database of local businesses to the social network’s new MySpace Local service. Users on MySpace can now review, rate, and share content about businesses on MySpace Local, and reviews and ratings will appear in users’ activity stream. MySpace will launch this service with support for restaurants and bars first, though it plans to include a wider range of businesses in the near future. MySpace Local will be available as a private beta today, and should become available to all users in the next few weeks.
Sponsor
The MySpace Local user interface represents a good mix of elements from Citysearch and MySpace, with a clear focus on local restaurants and businesses. Unlike Citysearch, however, the MySpace local site will also feature a separate section with updates from a user’s friends on the service. Indeed, during a press conference today, MySpace specifically stressed that its new service will always emphasize reviews from friends.
Revenue
MySpace stressed that it sees MySpace local as a new revenue stream, as it will share revenue with Citysearch. Neither MySpace nor Citysearch provided any details of this revenue sharing agreement however, though MySpace stressed that it sees this as an opportunity to provide advertisers with a new outlet for hyper-targeted ads.
Looking Ahead
In the near future, MySpace hopes to bring MySpace Local to its mobile apps, and the company also expects to expand it to markets outside of the U.S. soon.
Good for MySpace and Citysearch
Overall, this looks like a smart move by both MySpace and Citysearch. Citysearch, through this, gains access to a very large number of potential new users, while MySpace gains access to a large, pre-populated database of reviews. Users on Citysearch also don’t tend to be as social as users on other review sites like Yelp, so this cooperation will probably bring a whole new group of reviewers to Citysearch.
Other local review sites like Yelp, for example, feature support for Facebook Connect, though Facebook itself doesn’t have a ‘Facebook Local’ feature yet that is tightly integrated with a local review site (though some users hope they will do so soon).
Interestingly, even Citysearch itself already features support for Facebook Connect as well, which, according to Inside Facebook, is generating a constant stream of new traffic for Citysearch.
Adding this functionality seems like a natural evolution for social networking sites, and we expect that other social networks will follow in MySpace’s footsteps soon.
Popularity: -0% [?]
