Ajax Girl

Austin, Texas based HomeAway, a vacation home rental service, has raised a $250 million round of financing. This comes on top of $209 million previously raised over two rounds.

The new financing was led by Technology Crossover Ventures, with existing investors IVP and Redpoint Ventures participating as well. The financing is the largest minority investment of a U.S. Internet company in the last eight years, according to Venture Source.

The pre-money valuation was around $1.15 billion, say a couple of sources, and at least $50 million of the round went off the table to earlier investors. The company was founded in 2005 and has grown primarily through acquisitions: They’ve acquired at least eleven vacation home rental sites, including VRBO, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr and OwnersDirect.co.uk.

The company has revenues of around $150 million and $50 million in ebitda. In addition to cashing out some of the investors, our guess is that the additional funding will likely be used for further acquisitions.

It’s also clear that the round was seriously overvalued. Ebay was rumored to have mulled over an acquisition earlier this year at $1.5 billion, but it never came through with a firm offer. It’s not clear who else could be a buyer at this valuation. Also, since HomeAway has acquired just about everyone in the market, there’s little room for additional growth via acquisitions. 20x ebitda is a public company valuation for a company with real growth potential. Our guess is these new investors may take a bath.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kypkqQOvcec/

John Resig has been a busy guy posting today not once but thrice! They all interesting too.

I really enjoyed the CSS3 Template Layout post that reminds us of the CSS 3 advanced layout that allows you to use ASCII to define it:

John has changed his stance from “oh man that is ugly” to “it has merit”. We sure do need help with layout. Can’t we have JGoodies give us a decent layout manager for JavaScript?

John also discussed:

• The new Element Traversal API and how his jQuery plugin uses the cleaner API and gives promising speed improvements: “With this addition .siblings() is 84% faster and .children() is 35% faster.”
• In Deadly Expandos he discusses the old bug that has the id to method madness of DOM0 stepping on functions to break your apps.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/449187491/css3-ascii-layouts-element-transversals-and-gotchas

IMVU, the 3D-avatar based site that is a strong believer in the phrase “sex sells“, has launched a new music store that allows users to act as virtual DJs with their friends. Users will be able to purchase music from all four major labels as well as a slew of independents, and the service will differentiate itself from other online music stores by allowing multiple users to listen to (and talk about) the same song simultaneously.

Unlike virtual worlds like Second Life where users can roam freely, IMVU is segmented into small rooms where groups of avatars interact with each other. Users will now be able to play their own music in these rooms, which will be broadcast to other participating avatars. Multiple users will be able to contribute to the room’s playlist, but the room will only play one song at a time.

IMVU is adopting a two-tiered pricing scheme that is similar to (but more expensive than) Lala’s, which we covered last month. The site will offer stream-only music that can be played only in IMVU rooms for around a dollar, and will also offer DRM-free downloads that can be played elsewhere for around two dollars. These songs will be purchased using IMVU’s virtual credit currency, which is available at a rate of $1 for 1000 credits. These credits are often exchanged in return for virtual goods created by users, so it’s conceivable that a productive virtual-good creator could acquire their music for free.

Given IMVU’s userbase (the site registers 10 million unique visitors monthly) and demographic, the new feature will likely do very well - there aren’t many places on the web where users can listen and chat with eachother about a song they’re listening to simultaneously (most music sites have social features restricted to song recommendations and news feeds). However, don’t be surprised if users tend to purchase the cheaper “streaming” versions of songs to share with friends and turn to tried-and-true stores like iTunes for songs they’d like to transfer to their iPods.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/AVGwai7zZk4/

Well, they took their time, but the popular music site Project Playlist will make two announcements tomorrow: They’ve hired former Facebook Chief Revenue Officer Owen Van Natta as CEO, and they’ve closed a new round of financing.

We’ve been digging on this story for weeks, but the company wouldn’t confirm the rumors and actually asked one of our writers to leave their office when we sent him over there to figure out what was going on. Apparently nothing was final then.

The size of the new financing isn’t being disclosed, although we’ve heard that it was just shy of $20 million. Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group led the round. The company had previously raised around $3 million.

What will Project Playlist use the money for? Litigation settlement, to start, is our guess. They were sued by the RIAA earlier this year, and the only way to clean up those situations is with cash and equity to the labels. We’ve also heard that they’re considering an acquisition of iMeem, which also lets users create and embed playlists. That litigation is also the probable reason why Playlist won’t disclose the size of the financing - it simply tells the RIAA how big the pie is.

Whatever happens, the site continues to grow rapidly. 9.3 million unique monthly visitors generate a whopping 822 million monthly page views according to Comscore, and the site claims nearly 40 million users.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5g2iGR5NzXs/

Google just made the world a slightly smaller place today. They’ve added a feature to their highly popular Google Reader that will auto-translate any site with a feed to your native tongue. Not only that, it’s very easy to use and it works really well.

Just subscribe to a blog or other feed like normal, then pull down the feed settings menu on the right and choose “Translate into my language.” The text is instantly translated.

We tested it with TechCrunch Japan, and the translations came through well enough to understand. Definite winner.

Tell us your favorite foreign language tech blogs in the comments so we can subscribe immediately!

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KHNZWrPxnfU/

Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor joined the Gillmor Gang this afternoon to discuss Friendfeed’s XMPP stream of its Home and Friends List feeds. I sat with Taylor at the Friendfeed offices and Marc Canter joined intermittently by phone. Canter took the opportunity to vent about Friendfeed’s responsibility to exert leadership in the XMPP space before his line unexpectedly went dead.

The video below joins the conversation just before that point, and continues with discussion of Friendfeed’s new direction and role with the release of the realtime technologies. While Taylor acknowledged the possible threat to some companies (read Twitter) of providing access to the full firehose of data, he indicated building confidence in allowing businesses on top of the Friendfeed APIs was more valuable for Friendfeed.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-smK5S83D_I/

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/nKDBcBBk6CA/

It seems that the tide of the App Store is finally starting to shift, as more developers look to tap into the iPhone’s online connectivity in an effort to separate their apps from competitors’. The latest app preparing to join the fray is Quick Draw, a Pictionary-like game that allows iPhone users to play eachother online using the phone’s WiFi or cellular networks. The app is similar to iSketch and XSketch (covered here), throwing a handful of players into a room and choosing one of them as the ‘drawer’ while the rest frantically try to guess a keyword. And if Quick Draw is half as addicting as those sites, it likely has a hit on its hands. The app is currently in beta testing, with plans to appear on the App Store within the next two weeks.

Last week we took a look at a pair of other iPhone applications that are leveraging the iPhone’s network effect to get a leg up on competitors: Chess With Friends is an asynchronous chess game looking to capture the addictiveness of Facebook’s mega-hit Scrabulous, and Smule’s Ocarina allows users to listen to music being played live around the world.

Here’s a video of QuickDraw in action:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/vj0Vikd0_Ck/

A lot of hopes are being pinned on video search these days as the only remaining source of strong advertising growth. One of the few publicly traded pure-play Web video companies is blinkx, which trades on the London stock exchange, and just announced its half-year earnings for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2008. The company’s revenues rose 115 percent to $6.4 million for the six month period (although the comparison is only partial—see income statement below). It’s gross profit doubled from $2.2 million to $4.5 million.

Although blinkx runs its own video search engine, which is showing a nice ramp in visitors, most of the video searches that blinkx powers are on about 20 partner sites such as Ask.com, Lycos, some Microsoft sites, and Viacom’s AddictingClips. Blinkx indexes more than 32 million hours worth of video from 420 content partners, including most recently People.com, CBS, and Getty Images. Its syndicated video search reached 64 million people and accounted for 668 million pageviews in September, according to comScore. Blinkx is serving up 7 million video searches a day across its network. Here are some stats for the past six months from the company:

• Total searches – 1.2 billion

• Total monetizable Searches – 831 million or 71%

• Blended average CPM is $16.25 (CPMs range from $8 to $48)

In addition to powering video search, blinkx also has its own AdHoc video ad network that can place contextual ads in videos triggered by the words spoken in them. The company is ramping up that effort by hiring ad sales people, which is one of the main reasons it is still losing money. It spent $6 million in sales and marketing during the six-month period, nearly as much as it generated in revenues.

As a result, Blinkx still showed a net loss of $4.3 million. At least that is better than the $13.7 million loss for the same period in 2007 (not including IPO costs of $11.5 million). But it is still a loss. The company has $32.4 million in cash, $11 million less than it did a year ago.

A couple weeks ago, blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake was on a Beet.TV panel I co-moderated. He speaks towards the end of the video below starting at the 2:45 mark about the speech-to-text technology blinkx uses to index and search the actual spoken content of videos, and how that helps avoid a situation where video creators are gaming the search engines by putting deceptive tags, titles, and descriptions on their videos so they rank higher in search results.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/1-eb_nC_t7U/

Thanks to reader tips we’ve had a chance to see IMVU’s racey new animated banner ads showing two women kissing as they fall downwards horizontally. The ad includes the message “live the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.” I signed up immediately.

The ad was spotted on Ustream, which prohibits content that is obscene or includes “pornography, erotica, child pornography or child erotica.” As far as I’m concerned this ad is none of that, but the Prop 8 supporters may disagree.

Watch the animated version:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/tK8ICgFLMXA/