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Silicon Valley Users Guide
venture capital
$35 million round wasn't enough for RockYou
Online widgetmaker RockYou is still looking for another $5 million to $15 million in funding, even after it took $35 million last week, at a $300 million valuation. That money was for doubling its staff, moving to a larger office in Redwood City and acquiring more widgets — those annoying add-ons to social-network profiles — for its portfolio, RockYou CTO and founder Jia Shen told Silicon Alley Insider — but it's not clear what the extra cash is for. In March, rumor had it RockYou's lastest funding round would set its value near $400 million, but thanks in part to a sliding ad market and a developer-unfriendly Facebook redesign, investors are said to have turned skeptical, sending the startup's paper value down by $100 million to $150 million. More »
rumormonger
Blake Commagere, RockYou ready to start biting over Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves
Who owns the most annoying applications on Facebook? It seems incredible that anyone would want to take credit for Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves, three of the most useless and yet most used applications on Facebook. And yet Blake Commagere, their developer, and RockYou, the company which markets those apps, and is happy to take credit for them when raising venture capital, are getting ready to deploy lawyers to settle the question over their ownership, we hear. Adonomics, the Facebook-app measurement firm, somewhat questionably estimates the three applications' value at $6.5 million — but attributes their ownership to Commagere. More »
rockyou
Did Facebook's developer-unfriendly redesign cost RockYou $150 million?
Despite the rumors, we all know widgetmaker RockYou isn't really worth $400 million. Not with the way ad buyers feel about spending on social media. We hear RockYou's latest investor, Doll Capital Management — which funded the company with another $35 million today — didn't value the company at $400 million either. "I believe the round was priced at $250 MM, and definitely not higher than $300 million to $325 million," an executive familiar with the deal says. More »
venture capital
RockYou raises $35 million
Widgetmaker RockYou raised $35 million from venture firm Doll Capital Management and private investors. Rumor has the deal setting RockYou's value near $400 million. RockYou created Facebook widgets SuperWall, Vampires, Likeness, X Me and claims 87.5 million visitors a month and 2.7 billion pageviews. Paying advertisers on RockYou include Paramount, New Line Cinema, Sony, Microsoft, and CBS. But they're not paying much. More »
widgets
Bezos-backed Kongregate moves to Facebook platform
Kongregate, a sort of YouTube for Flash games backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos as well as Greylock Partners, will adapt some of its 4,500 games to Facebook's platform this week, Kongregate CEO Jim Greer told Inside Social Games. Kongregate makes money, or tries to, through advertising it shares with third-party game developers. Facebook doesn't need more gimmicky games, but with other widgetmakers like RockYou and Slide asking for (and getting) nine-figure valuations, don't expect the deluge to let up any time soon.
once you're lucky, twice you're good
R is for Rose, who made Digg his toy
Kevin Rose takes up 62 out of 294 pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, her new book about Web 2.0. That's less than I expected, since Rose was the coverboy for the BusinessWeek, co-written by Lacy, which launched her book. From the look of the index, not much time is spent on the women Rose is said to have "plowed through", as his friend Alex Albrecht once put it: More »
venture capital
Hyped widgetmaker explains the widgetmaker hype
Union Square Ventures funded Mark Pincus's casual games maker Zynga with $10 million not long after Max Levchin-founded widgetmaker Slide raised $50 million. Competitor RockYou wants a round of funding that would value it at $400 million. We like to scoff at these purveyors of online sheep-throwing tools, but that's serious scratch, people. In this excerpt from a longer interview with Kara Swisher, Zynga's Mark Pincus explains what widgetmakers see in our future — and shows us exactly what kind of pitch VCs are going for these days.
developers
How widgetmakers hijacked Zuckerberg's Facebook redesign
Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the original design, reflecting developer concerns." Below, screenshots of Zuckerberg's original plans for the redesign, annotated with the objections Facebook-application startups raised.More »
1:20 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,750 views,
7 comments
developers, developers, developers
Widgetmakers successfully gut Zuckerberg's Facebook redesign
When we ran screenshots of Facebook's new profile pages back in late February, what you saw was a classic Mark Zuckerberg production. A source close to Facebook tells us the profile redesign was Zuckerberg's pet project, his baby. Well, that baby is dead. More »
great moments in journalism
4 things BusinessWeek won't tell you about its under-30 entrepreneurs
The problem with lists like BusinessWeek's collection of 13 under-30 entrepreneurs: Inevitably, in an effort to fill a demographic quota, editors scrape the bottom of the barrel. And presenting a balanced picture of these business novices cuts against the goal of serving up fresh faces. (Whether they're supposed to make BusinessWeek's 50something readers feel either young again or even older, I'm not quite sure.) Here are some things that BusinessWeek would just as soon you not know about members of its boy band: More »
bubble 2.0
No one has any idea how much Facebook applications are worth
SuperPoke is worth $13 million according to Facebook application tracker Adonomics. The site awards applications like Slide's Top Friends and RockYou's SuperWall values in the tens of millions of dollars — which provides some of the basis for the 9-digit figures that Slide has commanded, and RockYou hopes to get, in venture capitalists' estimates of their worth. Adonomics' numbers are as sketchy as those valuations, however. Facebook's homegrown Video application only has 807 active users, according to Adonomics stats. Something's off here, and I don't think it's just Facebook's $15 billion value. More »
rumormonger
Morgan Stanley trying to get $400 million for RockYou
RockYou, the widget maker best known for Facebook's Super Wall application, has hired Morgan Stanley to raise a new financing round at a $400 million valuation, according to a hedge fund manager whom the investment bank solicited for the deal. Slide, a competitor, recently raised a round and is now worth $550 million, at least in its investors' fantasies, which sets a high bar for RockYou. Slide is the biggest reason why RockYou might actually get the financing. After it struck its deal, cofounders Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda could argue for a comparable value. But not all is rosy for Shen and Tokuda. More »
the chart
Facebook's coattails carry RockYou and Slide across the pond
Facebook widget makers RockYou and Slide account for two of the top three fastest-growing Web brands in the U.K., according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The third? Facebook. RockYou, the maker of
rumormonger
Could MySpace buy RockYou to mess with Facebook?
Shriveled-up megamogul Rupert Murdoch, the pint-sized force behind News Corp. and MySpace, is presenting the keynote at tomorrow's Web 2.0 conference. What big surprise does he have planned for the audience? As we mentioned last week, it's not going to be the rumored MySpace platform launch — that's still a ways away. In our inbox today landed a wild, juicy rumor which reeks of bullshit but is too hot to keep for ourselves. The email said that Murdoch will announce the acquisition of widget maker RockYou, a top Facebook-application developer, and the rumored price is a shocker — a cool $800 million. More »
acquisitions
Mark Zuckerberg's strategy of holding out for a Facebook valuation as high as $15 billion is contagious. Developers of the most popular Facebook applications have become mini-Zucks, unwilling to part with their astronomically self-valued creations. If Lance Tokuda, the chief executive of RockYou, sees any difference, it's only one of scale. Speaking about his companies popular Super Wall application, Tokuda, says "If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I'd say, 'Forget it.'" Why?
More »
Facebook applications chase Mark Zuckerberg's shadow
Mark Zuckerberg's strategy of holding out for a Facebook valuation as high as $15 billion is contagious. Developers of the most popular Facebook applications have become mini-Zucks, unwilling to part with their astronomically self-valued creations. If Lance Tokuda, the chief executive of RockYou, sees any difference, it's only one of scale. Speaking about his companies popular Super Wall application, Tokuda, says "If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I'd say, 'Forget it.'" Why?
More »
deals
The value of a Facebook application
Widget-maker RockYou may be willing to spend millions on Facebook applications, but bidders at eBay are a little more discerning. Michael Zhang was first to auction a Facebook application on eBay, and the bidding on his Logbook app closed yesterday. Logbook documents movies, music, and books and ties into Amazon's affiliate-marketing program as a source of revenue. It's less popular and viral than spraypainting your friends' walls — on the other hand, there is the potential for actual revenues — an unusual feature for Facebook's hangers-on. So how much was the winning bid for Logbook? More »
rumormonger
