Friday, March 24, 2006

Netvibes seeded


Netvibes announced on Wednesday that it had received undisclosed seed funding from Index Ventures; Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; PierreChappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio (and an EIR at Index)); and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon).
Netvibes provides a very cool AJAX powered webapp that aggregates email, RSS, price watch, and weather and more from a variety of content providers including most of the usual 'web2.0' (i hate that phrase) suspects including del.icio.us, yahoo, gmail, flickr, blogmarks etc.
The boys and girls that created Four11 (early webail provider acquired by Yahoo), tried this type of concept a few years back with desktop.com(domain now owned by Mr Gross's Idealab) but lack of business model ended in closure. Netvibes must have montesation plans, but I expect it will get acquired before it gets to squeezing out dollars through ads, subs or other.
I use netvibes and I love it, although my only gripe is the name. I bought the deskweb.com domain back in 2000 with a view to doing something similar, so although I'm clearly heavily biased, I think this name would suit the product much better (go on....sensible offers.....;-)

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