Niall has the scoop: Joshua Schachter, after going pro two weeks ago, has closed a round of financing led by Fred Wilson's new fund, Union Square Ventures. Other co-investors were: Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Kopelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young round out the investment group. No mention of terms or amount yet, Om says that the raise was less than $2M.
It is interesting to see that Amazon.com and BV Capital took part of this round, alongside some of the "usual suspects" investing in consumer Internet and Social Media. Amazon.com already invested an undisclosed amount in 43Things, and BV Capital led the financing of Fotolog.net two weeks ago.
Since Fred is one of the most visible VC bloggers, we can expect a post from him explaining his investment thesis (like Brad did it last week with FeedBurner) and clarifying (hopefully) the intended business model. The release of de.lirio.us (an open source version of del.icio.us which I have not taken the time to review) shows that del.icio.us is one of the many tagging solutions - and defensibility/differentiation is not clear to me, besides the fact that I am very happily using it.
This document compares a number of social bookmarks, but I do not have time now to review the major differences, and what they mean. And this Slashdot post relates to del.icio.us vs. del.irio.us.
Any analysis or point of view will be appreciated.
also check out http://www.tecknik.net/scuttle/about.php for a second open-source bookmarking project.
Posted by: Scott Rafer | April 11, 2005 at 08:03 AM
I also did a bit of comparison of bookmarking services, while not as extensive as this on irox.de.
Posted by: Artem | April 13, 2005 at 07:31 PM