Peter Chun

NY-based CafeMom has announced a new round of funding in the amount of $12 million. The round was co-led by the company's original investors Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Including this new round, the company has raised $20.3 million to-date.

CafeMom is working with some of the largest CPG companies and retailers in the U.S. including: Walmart, Playskool, Disney, HP, Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, Unilever, JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy. I spoke with head of design Matt Zarzecki who explained that custom campaigns average between $200,000 and $500,000. 

The site is currently running over 120 million pageviews per month with 6 million visitors. CafeMom is an interesting startup for me to watch given my history in the CPG online business and having been involved in a similar site from inside a CPG company. Moms are one of the "richest" segments online and CafeMom has done an excellent job capitalizing on this demographic. I put them on acquisition watch last week.

Check out my interview with two of the executives from CafeMom.

The March 2008 episode of BigScreen LittleScreen will be taking place in the real world on Monday, March 24th at 6:30pm in the For Your Imagination studio. Tilzy.TV featured this opportunity for web video content creators in New York City in a recent article as a great place to promote your work. BigScreen LittleScreen, hosted by Matt Semel from 10ton.tv and Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination, is a unique forum for online video and interactive content creators and enthusiasts to show and share their work with their colleagues, potential customers and partners. Space is limited at this event so make sure you RSVP.

See Jeremiah’s coverage of the lunch here (his photo above)

One of my favorite things to is show off the best of Silicon Alley to people visiting Silicon Valley - especially influential folks.

Today, I did just that, by having folks converge on Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for lunch with Forrester Researcher Jeremiah Owyang who writes the influential Web-Strategist blog. I’ve known Jeremiah since Frank Gruber introduced us at Blog World Expo in November.

Anyway, those in attendance for lunch were (aside from Jeremiah and myself):

Kyle Bragger
James Gross - Federated Media
Matt Zarzecki - CafeMom
Dan Lurie
and Ryan Anderson from Fuel Industries

I was especially glad to introduce Jeremiah to Kyle, as he had been following BricaBox since back in November.

Also, it was great to have Matt there because their community stuff at CafeMom is of such interest to Jeremiah’s work. I hope they stay in touch going forward.

Overall, though, it was just a treat to show off Silicon Alley and show that with just a few Twitters you can have folks coming out of the woodwork to a nice lunch. Hopefully Jeremiah’s post finds it back through the Valley and they learn how great our community of tech people here are.

British startup Naked is fundamentally rethinking online communication. Email, IM, text messaging and social networking all fall short on points and don’t work together.

Naked proposes a cross-platform alternative they call Open Messaging. There’s already an international private beta. US mobile support will be added before the end of this month.

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