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.

(more…)

Over the last couple of years, Google has been making a variety of changes to the quality score impacting paid search.  First it was more then CTR*Max CPC’s, then the “more” became a dynamic ad ranking model which included landing pages, then that was stretched further into min/max CPC’s as well as “content” on landing pages being valuable.

Effective April 1st, Google will be strictly enforcing a “new” policy that display URL’s must match Destination URL’s.  This will likely have a large impact on free-loading search publishers that aren’t adding much value through the “real-estate” model.  Here’s a list of changes that we should expect with some examples to help explain things better: (more…)

The rumor mill is hot with the latest word that Google has purchased the address book turned “social media” hub.

Plaxo has been in the press lately “shopping around” and LinkedIn has repeatedly stated that they are not interested in going public in the “near” term.

I’m a fan of plaxo - as it allows me to sync from device –> corporate email/calendar –> google calendar –> iCal. While it’s buggy, it gets the job done and IMO does it the best out there. I haven’t dabbled too much in the “pulse” features yet, but cmon make the “de-duper” free please!

If you know any folks at plaxo - you may want to keep an eye out for them here.

Knowledge is power. We all thrive on knowing what’s going on, who did what, with who/where, the obligatory “was he/she drunk?” and ending it with the all too common “wow!”

Michael Robertson (domain fame mp3.com) has recently launched a new site dealipedia. Prying off anonymity and silicon valley/alley buried secrets (and of course legitimate info from the SEC) users can now take the wikipedia model and show who has a bigger napoleon complex house and higher cholesterol.

Favorite section of the site for me is “Who Made The Money?”  but probably not for Joitchi Ito who (made “0″ million) on the deal with “Quincy’s House of Pain” (also known as CBS Interactive.)  While it recently has taken off, given where the market has been and continued direction of compression, this list will likely continue to grow.

My goal in life is to make this list and be angry (secretly stoked) because i found out through someone else.

Sources close to the deal reveal that the acquisition was ~150M USD.

Why this makes sense. . operating under the ad.com umbrella, you now have a strong reputable ad network that performs on various pricing modes (CPC, CPM, CPA) side by side with an affiliate network that will likely leverage alot from ad.com

There’s alot of operational leverage that buy.at can capitalize on. Merging the ad.com technology will also create scale and a “more” integrated platform for buy.at.

Lastly…uniting AOL’s properties puts them straight into the servicing game with an ad network, affiliate network, universal data feed utilities and an SEM agency.

CJ with VLCK, Performics with DCLK, LinkShare with Rakuten and now Buy.at with AOL creates a landgrab for premier retailers in the space. Expect AOL to go after Quigo/Ad.com clients aggressively over the next 9-15 months as well. If you thought price cuts were one of the challenges to the affiliate space, get ready for some more.

Wow.

Google misses earnings, stock plummets, people “freak” out - before some thoughts, here are some facts:

• Total paid clicks in the fourth quarter rose 30% compared to the same period in 2006, but slower than the 45-52% growth seen during the first three quarter of 2007
• Most disappointing probably was the number of aggregate paid clicks which increased just 9% during the quarter
• For the first time since its initial public offering three years ago, Google’s quarterly profit failed to climbed more than 25%
• Overall, Google reported fourth quarter net income of $1.21 billion, or $3.79 per diluted share, up nicely from $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per diluted share, in the same quarter last year but, the earnings per share number excluding items came in at $4.43, below the consensus analyst estimate of $4.47. Revenue also fell short by $60 million

Now for some Thoughts

• Google search market share is the largest it has ever been (through December of 2007)
• The online advertising market continues to grow with healthy projections into 2012 (with search leading the charge)
• Google adjusted clickable areas through the paid search (top listings) from the “shaded area” to the actual “advertisement” to reduce what they call “invalid” clicks (different from fraud clicks, as they cast a wider net of false positives to catch invalid activity before it needs to be accounted for)
• Google’s investments and entry into new markets/products/services will need to come together over the next few years - the dependency on the advertising business unit will continue to become an issue
• Google needs to diversify the revenue mix and need to manage the street’s/investors expectations - they’re growing…don’t forget that

I know, I know. More stuff coming….

However - some stuff to chow on in the interim.

1. The Facebook SmackDown - if you haven’t played this app yet, you should (and I’m not just saying that because my best friend created the application) - it’s really cool, in BETA - full review coming shortly
2. I’ll be in San Frizzle this week - I have a speaking session at our annual event Summit Event - it’s on “online-video” as a merchandising tactic for Advertisers - should go smooth
3. If you’re in the area, gimme a shout…

Till further updates - i’ll leave you with “a (2) letter” words to live by