Venture Capital Update

Factual is a platform where anyone can share and mash open data on any subject. Think of google docs using a spreadsheet and sharing it with the world. That is an over-simplification but you get the idea. It is quite impressive and a very interesting idea. You can find lists of data online such as restaurants but, as their working example, never in a spreadsheet format. You can modify and so can others. Take a look. Here is a list of their angels that they had in their press release.

* Andreessen Horowitz - Founders, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz
* Bill Gross - Founder/Chairman, Idealab
* Danny Rimer - Index Ventures
* Esther Dyson - Founder, EDventure Holdings
* Founder Collective
* Gunderson Dettmer
* Lee and June Stein
* Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL
* Miramar Venture Partners
* Richard Rosenblatt - CEO, Demand Media
* Scott Kurnit - Founder, About.com
* Thomas Lehrman - Founder, Gerson Lehrman Group
* Tom Unterman - Founder, Rustic Canyon Ventures

Scrapblog is online scrap booking. They created it to be easy to use and go beyond sharing photos and videos online. To that pont they made Scrapblog drag-and-drop-easy so anyone can tell their stories and create beautiful multimedia scrapbooks.

In their words "Our goal is to enable everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. We've been developing Scrapblog for over two years. However, what you see online today is only the beginning."

BrightRoll is a video advertising network. They serve to over 3/4's of the top 250 websites in the United States. If you are a video advertiser wanting to place ads within video or a video publisher wishing to monetize your video, give BrightRoll a look.

Imperative Health received $4 Million in funding. Previously they were named MiLife and gained life after being spun out of Unilever. MiLife was focused on personalized weight management. They have since rebranded to Imperative Health (both websites are up and running still).

As part of the new focus they have narrowed their scope. Since the growth of high risk health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and raised cholesterol, they have decided to zero in on these issues to create a solution. They provide a service which consists of a wireless activity monitor, a heart rate monitor, a scale, an online coaching system, and telephone and e-mail access to health experts.

Koofers is an academic community for information sharing. Through collaboration users can obtain instructor ratings, grade distributions, past exams, quizzes, study guides and more. Per the SEC filing they are looking to raise another $500,000.

Sway is a social media consulting company. They have created a service named Shoutlet. The funding is for Shoutlet. Essentially you create, with Shoutlet, widgets having media (such as podcasts), RSS subscriptions and sign-up forms. Then you distribute the widgets and as long you use these widgets they can track and provide statistics.

Shopkick creates iPhone and other mobile applications. Their most notable of which is CauseWorld. They received $2.5 MM to continue their growth.

Blippy allows you to share your shopping and purchases with others. In other words, if you spend $15 at Amazon others can see that much like they would view a tweet.

SocialGO is a platform for creating your own social network. Create your own community. SocialGO offers the sharing of blogs, photos, music and video, the ability to organize events, create special groups, introduce relevant news feeds and facilitate forums. It also offers instant messaging and video chat between members as well as allowing broadcasts and bulletins and profile sharing.

Impact Radius provides an advertising platform to link performance advertising to TV, radio, print and online distribution channels. Their solution provides the tools and technology to negotiate and manage relationships directly on a single platform. They want all the deals to be transparent, they call it the “clear box” philosophy. It will be interesting to watch how they progress.