Condé Nast announced the acquisition of Reddit, a social news site, this morning for an undisclosed price. Reddit was founded in 2005 and has just four employees. This is a model company for young entrepreneurs looking to create a new startup with limited resources.
Marshall Kirkpatrick and I interviewed founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian today just hours after the acquisition was announced. While we couldn’t get them to disclose the acquisition price, they did talk about traffic and fundraising - Reddit is currently attracting around 70,000 unique visitors per day and 700,000 page views, and the company has raised just $100,000 in seed funding, all in the summer of 2005.
Time: 24:36 Minutes
Size: 5.63MB
Michael Arrington interviews Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman about today’s big financing news as well as the history and future of their free, ad supported 411 service called 1-800-Free-411. Key facts from the discussion: Jingle currently has costs of around $0.25 per call, and revenue of $0.20, although Garrick feels that potential revenue per call will approach $0.50 as the market matures. Garrick and Kopelman also discuss upcoming potential competition from Google and other search players, and how Jingle will compete in that market. The service, which is growing rapidly, now claims 3% of the total U.S. 411 calls, a roughly $8 billion market.
Time: 31:39 Minutes
Size: 7.24 MB
If you are looking for a hosting provider, you need to check out Media Temple’s new Grid Server product that launched this morning. For $20 per month (the same price as most low end shared hosting providers), they are offering a fully scalable hosting product that will grow (or spike) along with your site. See TechCrunch for more details, but there are aspects to this that are superior to shared, virtual dedicated, and even dedicated server hosting.
Michael Arrington spoke with Demian Sellfors (CEO), Chris Leah (Director of Technology), Alex Capehart (Director Marketing) and David Feinberg (Product Manager) for 30 minutes yesterday about the new product. The podcast is enclosed.
Time: 34:48 Minutes
Size: 7.96 MB
Ajax home page Pageflakes, headquartered in Germany, is just settling down after its recently announced venture financing from BenchMark Capital. In the next few days they’ll be launching Pageflakes 2.0, a “significant upgrade to the current offering” CEO and co-founder Christoph Janz tells Michael Arrington. Get the details at TechCrunch, and listen to Michael Arrington’s conversation with Christoph and Pageflakes designer Jeremy Baines here. Topics covered include the state of Pageflakes as well as some hints at the new product.
TechCrunch coverage of Pageflakes is here.
Time: 33 Minutes
Size: 7.5 MB
See TechCrunch for the details on PayPerPost’s announcement of its $3 million Series A round of financing by Inflexion Partners, Villiage Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Michael Arrington and Rob Hof (Silicon Valley Bureau Chief at Business Week) took a few minutes today to talk to Ted Murphy (founder and CEO of PayPerPost) and Josh Stein (a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson) about the funding and the controversial nature of PayPerPost’s business. It’s a somewhat heated discussion, but we managed to keep things fairly civilized.
See our previous coverage of the company in our post “PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul.” The company facilitates a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to write about the company’s product. Disclosure of payment is optional.
Time: 53 Minutes
Size: 24.2 MB
