The New York Tech Blog

Visual Revenue has a very compelling offer. What if you could predict how a certain news article would perform 15 minutes in the future? That’s precisely the question they want to answer for you. Whether you’re a newsroom that wants to serve the most relevant article on your front page or a media company that wants its best foot forward always, there’s room for you in Visual Revenue’s long list of clients.

The New York-based web traffic prediction service was just funded by IA Ventures and Softbank in a $1.7 million Series B. The money will be used to hire more talent to build a “Bloomberg Terminal for news” and they’re seeking out excellent engineers, a designer and managers to round out their team.

The company is doing really well and counts as its clients prominent organizations like Forbes, CNN Money, Fast Company, among others. Not bad for a startup that’s less than a couple of years old.

Via: Betabeat

Timehop, a service that archives your past, present and future activity on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Instagram, just landed $1.1 million in funding, thanks to O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Spark Capital and Techstars. If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because the site was born out of a Foursquare hackathon last year at General Assembly as 4 Square & 7 Years Ago.

Other participants in the round include Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, and GroupMe founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.

Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong previously worked on a couple of other startups before focusing on Timehop. Wong was previously part of Gilt Groupe and Wegener did time as product manager for a host of NYC startups. They plan to use their influx of cash to add more engineers to their team.

Wegener recalls that, “it was only months later that we started to realized we had accidentally solved a really important thing that hadn’t been done before: we had made a compelling product that lets people reconnect and re-experience with their digital pasts. And there’s a big opportunity in that.”

Via Betabeat

Tumblr, that infamous microblogging site, is now visited by 120 million people every month. This was announced by none other than CEO and Founder David Karp in Munich earlier this week.

On top of that, the social network slash blogging site also grabs 15 billion page views monthly. Some other stats gathered in the site’s About Us page include 16 billion total posts and 42 million blogs hosted on the service.

In an interview during the Digital Life Design conference, Karp outlined how his company gathered steam during the initial months by both creating tools for content creators as well as avoiding social networking features like comments and tagging. The center of the ecosystem is the creator, while keeping the audience both engaged but in the periphery.

“The early growth that we saw was around creators… our first community was those creators. We didn’t set out to build a network… all we wanted to do was make novel tools,” Karp explained.

Going forward, Tumblr will be expanding to reach out to more international audiences. To date, 45 percent of its audience resides in the U.S. The coming months will also see  the company pursue revenue streams that fit its business model.

Via: VentureBeat

According to the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers, a total of 379 firms received a total of $2.72 billion dollars in investment. From the same report, the fourth quarter last year found 82 firms receiving $545.1 million in VC funding.

One of the more heavily invested sectors in the NY venture market is media and entertainment, with 18 firms grabbing $109.5 million. Some of the firms that received funding recently are dating idea website HowAboutWe.com with $15 million, Fab.com with $40 million and Lot 18 with $33.6 million.

“There’s a tremendous amount of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists melding together in New York, and we are seeing the results are taking off,” said David Silverstein, a managing partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ New York metro emerging company practice.

Via: Crain’s NY

Schoology Founders, left to right: Ryan Hwang, Jeremy Friedman and Tim Trinidad

Schoology, an NY-based startup which offers a SaaS solution for course management in K-12 and higher ed schools, recently partnered with the Palo Alto Unified School District to help manage its classroom work and schools communications. It’s another win for the growing influence of tech on education, as we’ve seen in previous coverage in NYTB.

But why did they opt to use a service that’s headquartered way over at the East Coast instead of a homegrown one right in the Valley? For starters, a lot of students and teachers in the district were already using Schoology because it was free to sign in and easy to use, being hooked into the social network everyone was already using: Facebook. Thus, they avoided the bureaucracy of having to request permission from IT to use the system which would likely have delayed adoption by months, if not years.

And it seems that the faculty is using the system often enough that the entire district will now be purchasing the enterprise level solution. While the free solution already offers a lot of perks such as course calendars, quiz and assignment creation, analytics and parent/guardian access, the enterprise version will give enable management of schools in a district level, priority support, advanced analytics and even creation of report cards.

“We want to be the operating system for education. You can add on as many modules as you need depending on how deeply you want to rely on our platform,” said Jeremy Friedman, founder and CEO of Schoology.

Via: Venturebeat

ShopKeep, a cloud-based iPad POS system, announced that it had closed a Series A round with New York’s Tribeca Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners, as well as with TTV Capital from Atlanta. The fresh influx of cash will help ShopKeep’s expansion efforts of converting POS into the tablet era.

For just $50 a month, small and large businesses alike will be able to use ShopKeep’s enterprise-level POS with a rich, iPad front-end. It supports inventory management, real-time reports and customer management on top of its regular point-of-sale functions.

Jason Richelson, CEO and Founder of ShopKeep, says that this funding will “bring superior customer service and affordable innovative technology to small business owners, who need it the most… We are excited to help small shops like mine run a better, more profitable business using just an iPad.” Richelson is a co-founder of The Greene Grape, a gourmet food and wine business in Brooklyn, so he knows the trials and travails of shop owners and has worked to make the platform as useful as possible.

Shopkeep’s iPad app lets shop owners print receipts, process credit cards and collect sales tax. It works even without internet and is also accessible through any web browser.

“ShopKeep solves the ‘last mile’ in local because they bring scalable technology to stores who desperately need it. The company delivers an amazing product, user experience, and innovative technology to a space ripe for disruption and void of economic efficiency,” says Brian Hirsch, the Managing Partner at Tribeca Venture Partners.

Via: CityBizList

One of the best VCs in New York tech is starting his own fund right at the heart of Brooklyn. Charlie O’Donnell, former founder and CEO of Path 101, is raising $7 to $10 million for his new firm Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, which they’ll use to help get early and seed stage tech companies get off the ground. O’Donnell says that his fund will have a Brooklyn focus, though he’s also open to investing in startups from other places.

Considering that O’Donnell was previously an Entrepreneur-in-Residence of Union Square Ventures and was also a principal at First Round Capital (which he left to start his own fund), we’re pretty sure that this new fund is in good hands. He was also the founder of nextNY and an original board member of the New York Tech Meetup. For the moment, he’ll be tackling all the fund’s deals himself and will invest in a modest one or two every month, though he might take on someone junior in a future date. He’ll also be announcing Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ first investment sometime in February.

“Charlie is pure Brooklyn hustle. It’s fantastic to see him focusing on the growing Brooklyn tech community. Startups are sprouting up in Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Dumbo, Downtown Brooklyn, and Red Hook and probably in other neighborhoods too. Nobody is better suited to catalyze the Brooklyn tech community and seed it with startup capital than Charlie O’Donnell,” says Fred Wilson.

Via: BusinessInsider, TC

On top of gathering steam on the tech university space, New York will also be getting a software engineering school soon. The Academy for Software Engineering will be the city’s first public high school especially geared towards teaching software development. Getting kids started with programming early was what gave rise to many of the most successful startup founders, from Bill Gates to Tumblr’s David Karp, so you can count on this being a popular school of choice once it’s up and running.

It’s the brainchild of Mike Zamansky (pictured at left), a computer science teacher at Stuyvesant High School, who has been pushing for better software training for student for nearly a decade now. Some of the most prominent players in the NYC tech scene are throwing their support behind this endeavor such as venture capitalist Fred Wilson, Joel Spolsky of Trello and StackOverflow fame, and of course Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself. In fact, Bloomberg LP will be one of the companies hiring interns from the Academy.

The school is going to be open to all students interested in learning software engineering and academics won’t play a major role in admissions. That’s a good thing since many future software engineers don’t perform well in subjects they don’t like (history comes to mind). It’s also a way of addressing the severe lack of software engineers these days, something that’s been hurting both the Alley and the Valley.

Once it’s been proven, the Department of Education will use the Academy as a template for programs in other schools. The Academy for Software Engineering will be opening its doors this September in Union Square, replacing Washington Irving High School with a freshman class of around 100 students strong.

Via: BetaBeat, JoelOnSoftware

TinyProj is a site where you can get your short projects done. Well, it was a site that did that, but it seems that its founder, Kyle Bragger, is closing it down. But fear not, your projects are in good hands since he’s passing the torch to GroupTalent, another great site for finding developers and designers to help you out with your project-based work.

If you’re a startup founder that has the chops to work on something part-time and won’t mind the extra cash, GroupTalent is the place for you. It’s actually a great place to bootstrap yourself or to earn some spending money while waiting for your funding.

The site also works for funded startups, since it only accepts the best into its pool of talent so projects will always get the skills that it deserve. There’s a lot of highly-skilled technical talent out there, according to GroupTalent CEO Manuel Medina. He adds, “Most companies think of talent in terms of full-time, but there is a large and growing demand from technical talent for project-based work.”

Bragger is now moving the userbase of TinyProj to GroupTalent so he can spend more time in growing his other community startup Forrst.

Via: TC

There is nothing else quite like Chartbeat. The Betaworks outgrowth is a unique real-time analytics engine that gathers all sorts of data about websites. At almost four years old, Chartbeat is itching to grow bigger, which explains their latest ‘inside round’ of $1 million dollars. This could eventually lead to a heftier funding round from its longstanding investors like SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, and several others.

There’s little else to go by on this development (the official blog hasn’t been updated since last year), but Chartbeat are also looking for fresh talent. According to the source link engineers, designers, and an exotic community evangelist are all up for grabs. Additionally, Chartbeat…

…has expanded to its own floor above betaworks main office in Chelsea and recently began highlighting some of the fun projects it team experiments on during their 20% time on a site called Chartbeat Labs.

Via: Betabeat