Recent investments...

Today we updated our website to reflect several new additions to the First Round Capital portfolio. Specifically, we announced our investments in:

Ambient Devices, Inc
You might have first seen Ambient through it's award-winning "Ambient Orb" - which was based on a technology spun out of the MIT Media lab. However, we are most excited by Ambient's proprietary and patent-pending wireless technology called "bit-trickling" to power embedded wireless display devices. In fact, we believe that Ambient possesses one of the largest, if not the largest, datacasting networks in the United States.  Ambient's vision is to provide the infrastructure to make embedded wireless affordable and ubiquitous.

Attributor, Inc.
Attributor is an early stage company that is enabling new landscape-shifting mechanisms for content publishing across the internet. It is led by seasoned Internet entrepreneurs and backed by some of the earliest investors in companies like Google, Skype and Overture.

Mashery, Inc
An increasing number of companies are exposing web services interfaces through the use of APIs and XML feeds - and an increasing number of developers are building "mashups" utilizing these new web services.  In fact, it seems like almost every new website is exposing an API.  (For example, our portfolio company, Riya, recently launched their API here).   Mashery is developing tools for API providers and users, providing a range of services that make it easier to develop, deploy and use web services.

RockYou
Personal customization is a multi-billion dollar market worldwide ($4B in ringtones alone). RockYou is a market leader in the creation of viral customization services for the web. Their first product (a web service that enables users to create photo slideshows and upload them to other Web sites such as MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, and Xanga) has experienced very strong consumer adoption.  Other investors include Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  More about RockYou can be found here and here.

Wikia, Inc.
Wikia, Inc. was founded by Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, a site that has become a top 20 web site in every country in the world.  Wikia's mission is to enable communities of users to organize around topics and build valuable guides for consumers. To date, Wikia has over 1200 topics started in over 40 languages, on subjects as diverse as: ancient coin collecting, caring for pets with diabetes, college hoops, and Lost the TV show. You can see the full list of topics at: http://wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Wikia. Much like eBay in the early days, the users are global, they're organizing in vertical communities and they're growing the content at 1,000% a year, despite a very rudimentary user experience. In fact, my good friend Gil Penchina, an eight-year veteran of eBay, has recently joined Wikia as CEO.  We invested in their Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture partners and  Omidyar Network.

Comments

[Andrew J. Borislow]

Interesting investments. Lots of geek stuff that is not necessarily mainstream. All goes back to prior conversation on who is the market? I like the niche-community building experience of WIKIA, assuming it can be monetized. The MASHUP technology of MASHERY is interesting, as is ROCKYOU (I like FILMLOOP.COM) The others are too high brow (meaningh I am not smart enough to care).