Move Over Alexa – Quantcast is Coming to the Party!

Traffic levels are very important for any business that wants to measure how their competitors are doing and Quantcast has made it their business to count that traffic and display it in a meaningful fashion. They recently finished their round of funding for $5.7 million through a series A round, and investors included the Founders Fund and Revolution Capital. The San Francisco start-up, Quantcast will be in the running for the very lucrative traffic measurement niche. They currently have traffic ratings for over 20.1 million websites and are crawling new sites at a very fast rate.

MyUlist is Targeting the Lucrative College Classified Market

Think of the Facebook and Craigslist smashed together into a very lively mashup of classifies for college students. MyUlist is just that, featuring articles on their site have been submitted by college students across the country- giving the site a little “local flavor” – which I think is one of the key ingredients for any new site to stand out in a crowded web 2.0 world.

One drawback that MyUlist requires a .edu email address to participate, but unlike other social networks, this stipulation actually makes sense and, honestly, makes the environment much more smoothly run and friendly to doing business.

The company hasn’t launched across the nation yet, the main pilot test is at UNC, but it’s also testing Cal, Penn, Stanford and Drexel and they have plans to be nationwide very soon.

The companies founder, David Yu has funded the company thus far and is looking for more funding from interested parties.

Zopa backs up the truck with $12.9M in Financing

Lending is the name of the game and Zopa is trying to lead the pack.

Zopa is a marketplace where members can meet up and lend or borrow money from eachother for a small fee. $12.9M has been infused into the company to help it expand and try to dominate the market. The competition is stiff, Prosper already has a strong hold on the “community lending” market.

The company said it appointed a new chief executive, Douglas H. Dolton, formerly CEO of Chela Education Financing.

The financing was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, an existing investor. Benchmark Capital and Wellington Partners also invested in the latest round. Benchmark has also backed competitor Prosper.

Zopa is well on their way, they have already raised about $34 million.

Successfully Measure Venture Capitalist Contribution for a Portfolio Company

Investment for a portfolio company can be very tricky to measure when you want to figure out how much a private equity firm adds value to each portfolio company it invests in. A few ideas from Colin Blaydon, director, and Fred Wainwright were shared at The Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and some of the concepts may seem fairly simple, but they’re worth a look at.

There are 3 ways to measure how much value a private equity firm adds to each of its portfolio companies it invests in:

1) Buy Low, Sell High – By buying a large group of assets and breaking those up into smaller, more efficient and higher margin producing companies, you could buy low and sell high.
2) Financial Engineering – If you put a large amount of debt into the company before the value turns south, you will have effectively added assets with an unknown future value that can usually be depreciated in a somewhat inflated nature over time.
3) Improve Cash Flows – If it’s time to sell, growing your top line will yield a large increase in perceived value. Take out costs where you can and focus on high margin business units. If you can pull revenue streams from one area and achieve sales based on higher margin forward-looking multiples, you will have essentially improved cash flows without hurting your current and future bottom line.

If you can quantify any one of these tactics, you will have successfully measured the value that a private equity firm has added to their portfolio companies. Whether that means that the value is real or not, is an entirely different question.

Tower Records Web Site and Trademark sells for $4.2M

A British Virgin Islands company has bought the Tower Records trademark and Web site for $4.2 million, according to a published report.

Struggling Tower Records has been sold to Caiman Holdings Inc. in a fierce battle with 4 other potential buyers. Caiman has said that they may open Tower Records stores in the United States and across the world, but not immediately. The brand of Tower Records is older than most may think, it was started in 1960 and even though you may never have shopped at TR, you know who they are. They really do have great brand recognition. If Caiman can put together a nice collection of complimentary services such as movie and music downloading with other entertainment content, they could really bring Tower Records back to be a force in the web 2.0 market.

Google Buys Gapmider - Graphical Display Company

Google is snapping up smaller companies lately that provide a little extra touch for their different pieces of software. The Gapminder Company specializes in graphical display of facts, figures and statistics that can be used in presentations online and offline. Gapminder offers a chance for universities and other organizations to take the data that has been collecting dust over the last 15 years and put it into a pleasing graphical form. Gapminder is a non-profit organization that has had the goal of unlocking all this under-represented data, and now Google will have this opportunity.

Expresso Fitness - Interactive Fitness

I recently saw a really cool post about a company in California getting $9.3 million in funding for a product that allows fitness centers to install stationary bikes with real time video screens that take you down a road course while you ride. How cool is that!? I could see some great opportunities for “In-Fitness-Video” Ads to popup on billboards, etc.

The technology is significant because it brings interaction into the huge U.S. fitness services market, estimated by Expresso to be worth $14.39 billion last year. Of that, the majority comes from peoples’ payments to gyms in the form of dues/memberships. About $4.32 billion was made last year from “non-dues” services, i.e., the portion Expresso is targeting.
The whole system, including the bike and software, costs $4,995.

New FishSEO Look

I recently did some redesigning of Fishseo.com and thanks to Paul from SEOidot.com for helping me get a nicely tuned template for the blog. Speaking of the blog, we had a ton of old blog posts that I decided to Axe - probably not something that most people would do, but it’s actually something that I felt was needed. We’ll be archiving those posts for everyone and for the SEs.

The focus of FishSEO has changed in the last year and moving forward we’ll be discussing those changes right here on the blog. You’ll see a stronger focus on:

1. International optimization, including discussion on IDNS (Internationalized Domain Names), ccTLD development and localized international search marketing.
2. Mobile Marketing, including development of correctly formatted mobile sites, GPS mobile marketing opportunities and other mobile advertising techniques.
3. Venture Capitalism, including newly funded ideas and companies and strategies that businesses should use to attract venture capitalist funding.

I am very excited to share with everyone the latest news and ideas surrounding these topics, and even more excited to hear your views and ideas as well!

Scott Fish