Five Across For Cisco

Cisco has announced it is acquiring social network builder, Five Across. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2003, raised $2 million from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures in 2004 and have 11 staff.

Five Across has a social networking platform called the Connect Community Builder, which empowers companies to easily augment their websites with full-featured communities and user-generated content. In essence, they provide socnet functions to websites.

Dan Scheinman, Senior VP and GM of the Cisco Media Solutions Group sees this acquisition as an important step towards Cisco being positioned to assist its customers “evolve their website experience into something more relevant and valuable to the end-user.”

Cisco seems to have woken up to the fact that networking is not all pipes and plumbing. The people factor is the X-factor. In fact, check out their tagline: Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.

I suspect we’ll be hearing about more acquisitions in the social media space from these guys.

LinkedIn, ROO and Headsprout

In venture news this week, professional networking site, LinkedIn, has raised $12.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. The post money valuation placed on the Palo Alto company was a cool $250 million.

The funding will be used to allow them to experiment with new products. They’ve recently been trialling LinkedIn Answers – a user gets to ask her contacts business questions – and launched LinkedIn Experts earlier this month – users can submit requests to experts for advice.

Seattle-based kids online learning company, Headsprout, has raised $8 million from Kaplan, an educational company, to focus on putting an end to illiteracy. The company was set up in 1999 and initially raised funding from Sofinnova Ventures, the Raisin Fund and Roser Ventures.

On the acquisitive front, News Corp. is reported to be making a $12 million investment into ROO Networks, a listed company that provides digital video solutions. Michael Arrington has picked up on the fact that this is not through Fox Interactive – who, he says, have been having separate conversations with Brightcove, a competitor to ROO.

Former Fox Interactive head, Ross Levinsohn must be shaking with laughter.

Fox is also said to be in talks to acquire ad optimisation company, Strategic Data Corporation.

Wikio, Kiptronic and Sun

It’s shaping up to be another busy week in venture land:

* Kiptronic, a podcasting ad network company which has a marketplace of 47 million available downloads, has raised $4m in Series A funding from Blueprint Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. The existing angel investors who tipped in the seed round of  $400k, also contributed.

* Wikio has raised $5.3m in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Gemini Israel Funds. Wikio is best decribed as a mashup of Technorati, Digg and Google News and is based in Luxembourg.

* Private equity firm, Kohlberg Kravis Robert is reported to be investing $700m into Sun.

Wizen Up To Product Research

San Mateo start up, Wize, assists people find the best products in less time than if they were searching for them on generic search engines like Google.

How do they do this you may ask? They compile expert and user reviews and insert them into a scoring algorithm that outputs a Wize Rank – a single numerical score from 0 – 100 - that essentially uses the wisdom of crowds to alert consumers to products worthy of their attention.

Wize has raised $4million in  Series A financing from the Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners. Michael Arrington covered this news recently in a post that was headed “Four Month Old Wize Gets $4m” – a number of folk have reacted to this heading with the WOTF knee jerker that the world of venture has gone all crazy again. I mean, how could a company that’s only been going for four months get $4 million in funding. So we yoicked around a bit and soon placated ourselves that Mayfield and Bessemer hadn’t gone nuts.

Wize’s CEO, Tom Patterson, had been an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, so this start up has been cooking for a while – it’s only been on the plate for 4 months, but the recipe is a tried and tested one. I’m a big fan of EiR’s and have been successfully running such a program over at NICTA for a few years now.

According to Raj Kapoor, managing director at Mayfield, “We started working with Tom as our Entrepreneur in Residence a year ago to revolutionize the product research space and zeroed in on Wize, as they have the most compelling proposition – giving the mass market consumer the simple answer on what product to buy when confronted with dozens of reviews and guides on the Net. By bringing together a breadth of data in an intuitive interface and simplifying the decision process, Wize will funamentally change the way users research products on the Web.”

Talking with the folk at Wize, I agree with their premise that while expert reviews are ideal for letting you know how a product compares to others in its category, user reviews are better at letting you know how a product performs over the long term in the real world.

Competition includes ViewScore, Nextag, Thefind and Shopping. Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition. It will be interesting to see how the space pans out as consumers oscillate between the comfort zone of a generic search and honing in on the right products based on collective knowledge of what works in various product categories. More power to the consumer!

Buzzed about Venture Capital

It’s been a busy few days on the funding front — deals that entered the investment pipelines are popping up like flowers in a spring field at the moment. Here’s a snapshot:

* Buzzlogic, a social media influence software company based in San Francisco has not only been chosen by AlwaysOn Media as an AO Media 100 Top Private Companies, but they’ve also secured a Series A round of $9.6 million. The round was led by Adams Capital Management and included Ackerley Partners and Transcosmos.

* Boxxet, based in Burlingame, Ca this popular topic information site creator has raised $900k in seed funding from Ascend Venture Group.

* Music Nation, a New York company focused on independent music videos, has raised a first round of $5.5 million from Greylock Partners and Point Judith Capital.

* OKcupid, a dating site in New York has raised $6 million in angel funding, and a mobile dating service, Icebreaker, from Bellevue, Washington has secured funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners for Crush or Flush, its mobile version of Hot or Not.

* Brightcove has raised $59.5 million in a Series C round. The funding in this online video platform company which bills itself as an Internet TV company was led by AllianceBernstein, Brookside Capital and Maverick Capital and also included a bunch of others along with The New York Times Company.

* Millenial Media, a wireless advertising company based in Baltimore, MD has secured $6.3 million in a Series A round from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital and Acta Wireless.

Charles Moldow, a General Partner at Foundation Capital, has written a great piece of advice for entrpreneurs considering their route to market titled VC to aspiring entrepreneur: Are you sure you want out money? in which he outlines the equity dilution principle vis a vis exit opportunities and urges would be investees to think hard about the path they choose.

GPS software company NordNav acquired by Cambridge Silicon Radio

CSR has acquired Swedish GPS software developer, NordNav for a total of $75 million. In addition, CSR has acquired the assets of Cambridge Positioning Systems for $35 million.

Cambridge Silicon Radio expects to release product based on these acquisitions in the first half of 2007 – NordNav brings a proven software-based GPS solution and CPS a specialised location system technology.