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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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.

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

Last week, the City Council revealed its new website after months of delay. But while most agree that it is a good step, the site has received mixed reviews from people dealing with the intersection of technology and government.

The Councils’ new site is meant to be more stable than the old site, which was notorious for crashing. It offers more details on committee hearings, including direct links and briefings. An RSS subscription is now available for the committee’s calendars, and there are plans to add RSS features throughout the site in the future. Council members also have the ability to update their own pages as they see fit, and can add such features as voting records, calendars and press releases if they choose. The Council’s communications office is training staffers and even Council members on how to do so.

Cathilea Robinett, the executive director of the Center for Digital Government, said the new web site is very sophisticated for a council site. “This is an excellent use of technology with several innovative features. Congratulations to the New York City Council for a citizen-centric and citizen-friendly site.” The center publishes a yearly survey ranking American cities on their use of technology to reach out to constituents. (New York City has not been in the top ten large cities since 2002, when it ranked fourth.)

Councilmember Gale Brewer, chair of the Technology in Government Committee, was happy about the new site as well. She says that it is now much easier to find legislation, and finds the additional information available for committee hearings useful. But her enthusiasm was tempered by what the site didn’t have.
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NY-based KickApps is announcing this morning a new partnership with Advertising.com to monetize video content built on the KickApps social networking platform. Social networks using KickApps can select advertisements as either pre- or post-roll messages. I assume this means videos that use the KickApps video player.

Revenue share percentages were not disclosed. I like this deal because it helps small publishers to earn more and provide better ads than with smaller advertising networks. In fact, most of the smaller ad networks can't even support video ads.

Since their $11 million funding round in August, KickApps has continued to make press-worthy announcements.