Last week saw the emergence of several interesting new startups like GravityEight and SearchReviews. But some 2010-vintage startups, including Crocodoc and 1000memories, also made news.
—Crocodoc introduced the world’s first embeddable HTML5 document viewer. The San Francisco startup, backed by Y Combinator and angel investors, says it wants to be “the new Adobe of the Web,” sans Flash, of course.
—GravityEight is a new startup in Marin County founded by Dave Wamsley, formerly of AdAuction and Campsix. I talked with Wamsley about the company’s aim to become the central hub where users store and compare quantitative data on their progress toward wellbeing in eight specific areas such as health, finances, career goals, relationships, and community.
—Y Combinator-backed 1000memories released news of a $2.5 million fundraising round, which brought in big-name investors like Greylock Partners, Ron Conway, and Mike Maples. In an interesting twist on its original mission, 1000memories has become the home of a page commemorating scores of people who died in the anti-government violence that preceded Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt.
—I profiled oDesk, the Redwood City, CA-based creator of a fast-growing distributed work platform that allows companies to more easily find, hire, and pay remote workers.
—After publishing our comprehensive guide to Bay Area coworking spaces hospitable to tech startups, I profiled one of the oldest coworking operations, pariSoma, which is about to move to beautiful new digs on 11th Street in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.
—SearchReviews, a new startup aggregating consumer reviews of gadgets, travel destinations, kitchenware, and everything else you can think of, came out of stealth mode. I talked with founder and CEO Ankesh Kumar.
—I started a two-part column on what I consider to be seven of the most important unanswered questions about the future of the mobile business. In Part 1, I asked who the new gatekeepers will be in the mobile-app world and what kinds of friction they’ll impose; whether the new world of mobile app development will be open or closed or something in between; and whether wireless operators will be able to provide affordable 4G connectivity. In Part 2, this Friday, I plan to delve into questions about mobile payments, enterprise adoption of mobile platforms, the role of context and location-based services, and what comes after the current smartphone and tablet era. It’s all part of my prep work for emceeing Mobile Madness, our big upcoming mobile event in Cambridge, MA.
—Hewlett-Packard bought Vertica, a Billerica, MA-based database management and analytics software company, as Greg reported.
—Accel Partners of Palo Alto, CA put $17.5 million into Pasadena, CA-based UberMedia, just in time for Twitter to impose a temporary ban on UberMedia’s Twitter apps Twidroyd and UberTwitter for policy violations; the ban was lifted today, according to CNET.
—In other deals news, Cooliris raised $9.6 million, Catch.com raised $7 million, GetJar raised $25 million, Brightsource Energy raised $89.6 million, Calisolar raised $8 million, Dynamic Signal raised $8 million, and TuneUp Media added $2 million to its recent C round.
