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Source:CenterNetworks

Online document sharing service Docstoc has announced a new Series B round of funding in the amount of $3.25 million, bringing their total funding to $4 million. The funding round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners. Docstoc differentiates itself from the other document sharing services by focusing on professional documents.

The company is also announcing a new advertising program called the Content Partnership Program (CPP) which allows large content providers to own the advertising space on pages and generate new increemental revenue. Here’s an example of the CPP in action.

Check out our interview with Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar.

Online social shopping community Wishpot has announced the closing of a $1 million Series A investment round. The round was led by Monster Venture Partners. Other investors in the round include H-Farm, an Italian Internet development group, as well as existing investors including Adrian Hanauer. Wishpot has developed a hosted solution for tracking personal wish list entries across any website on the internet. Wishpot will launch outside the U.S. later in 2008. Wishpot was founded in 2006 in Seattle by veterans of Microsoft.

Enterprise real-time Web solutions provider Kaazing has announced a $1 million round of angel financing. The company hasn’t listed the investors but does note that they are "high-profile Silicon Valley private investors." Kaazing will use the funds to expand its development team and to increase marketing efforts.

Using Kaazing’s Java-based technology, they claim to make it easy to build robust rich Internet applications including online trading systems, online betting and games.

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Source:CenterNetworks

Picture this: you get up early on Saturday morning and head down to the local swap meet where 100 sellers are there, each one is selling the same items. Normally you need to walk around from seller to seller and attempt to discuss a deal with them. Eventually one seller will match your price and you purchase the item. This is what a company launching today is attempting to do online, only easier. Wigix is looking to line up sellers based on the products they are attempting to sell so you can easily see what’s available and then negotiate with the sellers directly if you aren’t happy with the price they are offering.

The company is calling themselves, "the world’s first online stock market for all non-financial goods." I see it more like Amazon’s third-party sales with negotiation. They are going directly after eBay which can be a mess when you are looking for an item. Wigix also has a different pricing structure than eBay which currently charges listing and final value fees. Wigix will charge a flat-rate fee per item. On Wigix the buyer will pay a fee along with the seller.

The idea of an organized eBay is one that I like. It’s a mess right now - especially with the spam listings. The one question I’d have is how they will deal with accessories. Let’s say you want to sell your iPhone plus 5 accessories. It’s easy to highlight those extras and charge accordingly on eBay - will it be that easy to differentiate the individual products and those with accessories online?

The bottom-line with Wigix is whether they will be able to get enough buyers and sellers to move over their inventories from ebay (and other auction sites) to Wigix. Many heavy sellers have enormous switching costs due to the feedback profiles on eBay and the easy Paypal integration. Also, calling this marketplace a "stock market" will scare away average buyers and sellers I believe. Not sure why they went with this marketing message but there appear to be others that would work better.

Stacey from GigaOm seems to agree with me that calling Wigix a "stock market" is a mistake. Mark Hendrickson suggests that Wigix will bring order to online trading.

Source:CenterNetworks

Social network hi5 is out today with some initial stats since the launch of their developer platform and OpenSocial integration. OpenSocial is the Google program to allow developers to create applications that can basically work anywhere with only minor tweaks. The platform officially launched on March 31 and so far there are over 400 new OpenSocial applications running on hi5. In the last two months, 6,000 developers have signed up to develop OpenSocial apps for hi5.

The other stats the company provided include:

• Top apps achieving unprecedented traction, with faster adoption rates than other social networks; hi5 Platform averaging 1M app installs daily
• Half of hi5’s active users engaged with three or more apps installed; most popular apps involve friend interactions, individual/cultural expression and fun  

OpenSocial has been quiet on the blog front lately but as the platforms grow that utilize OpenSocial, we will see more developer chatter and more services utilizing the OpenSocial framework. On a side note, somehow hi5 was left out of the SAI Top 25.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 2:43 pm and is filed under social networking, Insights, Hi5, opensocial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.