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The Travel Ad Network (TAN) has raised $15 Million in a series A funding round led by Rho Ventures and Village Ventures. TAN is one of the web’s leading advertising networks, targeting users on top travel sites including Lonely Planet and Rand McNally.

The site was founded in 2003 and has risen to success with less than $1 million in outside funding prior to this round. It differentiates itself from other marketing networks by serving ads exclusively to ‘top-tier’ travel sites. According to their press release, TAN delivers 12.5 million uniques monthly to member sites.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274372355/

UserVoice offers a hosted way to harness the innovation and ideas of customers and potential customers that replaces email.

San Francisco based UserVoice improves the signal-to-noise of user opinion by allowing the moderation of the ideas of one person against the opinions of the many. UserVoice allows users to voice opinions, suggestions, and complaints. The video above demonstrates how it works (it’s difficult to pigeon hole) but think focus groups for companies that can’t afford focus groups, with elements of a forum and even Digg style voting thrown in for good measure.

For companies, UserVoice offers an open and transparent process for customer feedback to any company. The system also allows site owners to ask the community more directed questions (e.g. by a poll) about how users like a new feature or what they think of a specific idea.

I first saw UserVoice when I interviewed Guy King for CushyCMS (post here), King loves the service and although I didn’t video it, he spent 5 minutes showing me how they were using it. It’s always a good sign when people not involved with the company spontaneously evangelize a product. CushyCMS’s UserVoice page here and the official demo page for UserVoice can be viewed here.

The service is completely free during the public beta. UserVoice competes with SalesForce (IdeaExchange) and GetSatisfaction.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274364998/

Rentoid offers an eBay style variety of items, but with one distinct difference: the items are only available for rent.

The Melbourne, Australia based startup launched in beta last year and has slowly been growing its user base as it adds features and signs distribution agreements. Items for rent can be searched by type of item and location, and social tagging by members in encouraged.

Content comes from its user base and through agreements with rental companies; in Australia Rentoid has agreements with national rental providers including Coates, Kennards, and Radio Rentals.

Current rental listings on the site include private jets, Islands, Dogs, rubix cube, ladders, Ferraris, high end handbags, and more regular fare.

Rentoid currently has members in the United States, India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the UK (as well as its native Australia), and the platform supports dollars and pounds.

Zilok is a similar service we’ve covered before.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274345879/

Mollom is a new blog spam prevention tool that’s shaping up to be serious competition to Automattic’s Akismet, the current market leader.

Belgium based Mollom was founded earlier this year by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of the Drupal project and Benjamin Schrauwen, a Post-Doc researcher at Ghent University and Machine Learning expert. Mollom automatically blocks comment form spam, contact form spam and fake user accounts using a filtering technique based on the combination of content analysis and CAPTCHA challenges.

When new content is analyzed by Mollom’s intelligent text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is ham or spam, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge. This challenge-response procedure doesn’t block human users. If an unwanted message still makes it onto a website, users can help fight back by reporting to Mollom. The service learns from its mistakes.

According to statistics from Mollom (they publish a full scorecard here), the service is 99.94% accurate, making 6 mistakes per 10,000 comments, but one key to the service is its ability to learn as it goes along, so the team is aiming to improve those figures over time.

The business model will be similar to Akismet (they’re currently in beta testing only); the basic Mollom service will be free with commercial/ high-traffic websites paying but getting more advanced features, improved reliability and performance. They also plans to offer dedicated, managed Mollom servers for high-end users. Current Mollom users include Sony BMG, Adobe and FastCompany.

Buytaert told me that although offering the same features as the competition, Mollom’s goal goes further than spam-blocking alone.

We want to increase the overall quality of your site’s content. For example, Mollom’s CAPTCHA service already helps block fake user accounts, and we are experimenting with various automated content-quality assessments, including blocking obscene, violent and profane content.

The service is already getting a lot of positive buzz in the Drupal community and the statistics are impressive. They don’t currently have a WordPress version, but they did ask that I mention they’re looking for a WordPress developer to write one, contact details here if you’re interested.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274330136/

Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the investment company established by the four co-founding engineers of Skype has invested $235,000 USD in United Dogs and Cats Ltd, an Estonian startup that offers localized social networking sites for lovers of dogs and cats.

UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com offers traditional social networking tools such as blogs, profile pages and photo sharing to pet lovers, and is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Combined the sites have over 40,000 members, not enough for it to be counted by comScore, although the new Alexa notes that UnitedDogs is a top 1000 site in Luthiana and also scores well in Malaysia and Indonesia.

UnitedDogs.com compares well to competitor PawSpot (our review) in terms of traffic but still lags (or should that be wags…) well behind market leader Dogster.

This is the second investment in United Dogs and Cats by Ambient Sound Investments, having provided an undisclosed Angel Round in October 2007. See also ASI’s May 2007 investment in Freenzo. The additional investment takes ASI’s stake in the company to 18%.

The new money will be used to expand the reach of the UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com.

disclosure: Michael Arrington is an investor in Dogster

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274316720/

We’ve been analyzing historical TechMeme data to dig a little deeper than the leaderboard information on the site that shows top blogs over the trailing 30 days. Mark McGranaghan and I are slicing the data in a number of ways and will publish in shortly on CrunchBase.

For now we thought we’d show a teaser - below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 to today. The data isn’t 100% perfect as we’ve been grabbing it only once per hour, so a headline that was up for less than one hour may not be counted. But in terms of tracking the most popular bloggers, the data is meaningful. Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Full list is below:

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274253196/

Amazon and JibJab Alum Dave Schappell will launch his newest startup, TeachStreet, sometime tomorrow. They will also announce a first round of funding: $2.25 million from Madrona Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and a number of angel investors.

The company, a sort of Yelp for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), allows instructors to upload information about classes. Users can look for available classes, and read and write reviews on the course and the instructor.

For now the site will be advertising supported. in the future TeachStreet may charge instructors for premium services. They will become particularly good at promoting quality services to users over time, Schappell says, and they can charge for that. They will also be able to direct highly targeted advertising at users - a book on dog training, for example, to users looking for dog obediance classes.

The service is launching first in the Seattle area and has 25,000 courses in 8 primary categories and 70 subcategories. Most search and browsing, however, is done through tags, which allow for the creation of literally any category of classes.

Dutch startup Libersy,which is creating a distribubted booking system for real world services, is indirectly competitive. For now, Schappell says, TeachStreet will not directly provide booking and calendaring services, but it’s a feature they’ll add in the future.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274243423/