TechCrunch
Social Media Aggregator RebelMouse Raises $10.25M
RebelMouse, the startup that allows users (whether they’re companies or individuals) to combine updates from across social networks into what it calls a “social front page,” is announcing that it has raised $10.25 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Oak Investment Partners and SoftBank Capital, with participation from Sterling Investment Partners and Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow. Oak and SoftBank had both previously invested in RebelMouse — founder and CEO Eric Berry (formerly CTO of the Huffington Post) told me that he intentionally raised his initial funding from investors who “would have no problem doing the next round.”
The Series A, Berry added, “signals a little bit of a move from us being incredibly scrappy to beginning to focus on being scalable.”
I met with Berry a little more than a month ago to discuss the site’s growth and future plans. At the time, he said it was reaching 5 million unique monthly visitors, and he was planning to start running native advertising on the site. Now he says RebelMouse is up to 7 million uniques, up 900 percent since January, and it’s working with a growing group of advertising partners.
In addition to the funding, Berry is also announcing several recent hires. Jarrod Dicker, who previously led social and content ad products at Time Inc, has joined as managing director of commercial product and operations. Andrea Harrison, formerly digital brand director at Pepsi, will lead platform marketing. And Jake Beckman, who worked on content at Bloomberg TV, is RebelMouse’s new partner accelerator.
There are now 36 people on the RebelMouse team (which is largely geographically distributed, with an office in New York City), Berry said.
As part of the Series A, Oak’s Fred Harmon is officially joining Berry, SoftBank’s Jordan Levy, and Eric Hippeau on the RebelMouse board — though Berry noted that Harmon had been attending the meetings already.
India's Acid Burn Victims Crowdsource Treatment Costs After Attacks
Indians bears witness to an estimated 1,000 acid attacks a year, largely against women rejecting unwanted marriage proposals or defending themselves against male attackers. Now, these victims, often from impoverished backgrounds, are crowdfunding the thousands of dollars it costs to treat their wounds.
IndieGoGo is hosting two live campaigns to raise funds for women that have had acid thrown at them, including a successful bid to raise $2,000 for 22-year old married housemaid Nisha who was attacked for rejecting the marriage proposal of a fellow slum dweller in Ghaziabad, in India’s north. She sustained 50 percent burns to her body and was moved to the Emergency Care Unit of Delhi’s Safadarjang Hospital, where her two young children and rickshaw-puller husband await her recovery.
The treatment costs are almost double India’s average per-capita income, which stood at $1,420 in 2012, and is many multiples of the earning capacity of a slum-dwelling family.
About four months ago, donors contributed the $2,045 required for the treatment of Chanchal, who had acid tipped on her in October, 2012 by a group of men who had sexually harassed her. The men were retaliating after she tried to report their crimes.
Advocacy group Stop Acid Attacks, which estimates there are over 1,000 attacks a year in India, has helped organised six campaigns on behalf of victims, including for Chanchla and Nisha, and also to raise funds for its own operations.
The group said that $20 buys a round trip to Delhi for one of the family members for their treatment; $100 affords better legal aid; and $1,000 could sustain Chanchal till the time she can move around.
“Although $2,000 is a very humble amount, it can help Chanchal and her sister a lot with their treatment,” the group wrote.
There is also a campaign to raise a similar amount to pay the ongoing treatment costs for Laxmi, who was attacked by two youths at Khan market, New Delhi in 2005, when she was just 15 years old. She had refused to marry one of her attackers. Her face and body were left disfigured, and her campaign, about 20 percent to its $2,000 goal, hopes to use the funds for her final cosmetic surgeries — which has so far cost about $50,000 (3 million rupees) across seven reconstructive operations.
NetBeez Is An Enterprise Network Monitoring Startup Using Raspberry Pis To Simulate Users
Raspberry Pi has unsurprisingly been a smash hit with the maker community. But here’s an enterprise startup that is using the $35/$25 microcomputer — or rather hundreds of them at a time — as a network monitoring tool for corporate networks that bypasses the need for humans to report network outages to a help-desk.
U.S. startup NetBeez, which was founded in April and recently graduated from the Pittsburgh-based AlphaLab accelerator, is developing a tool that uses multiple Raspberry Pis to monitor network connectivity and notify administrators when a problem is detected. NetBeez received $25,000 from AlphaLab and is also backed by $100,000 in convertible note. It’s currently raising a seed round.
The basic idea is that the Pis simulate user activity on a network, enabling the system to pick up problems that affect end users without having to wait for actual humans to be annoyed by a sudden lack of connectivity. Being as each Pi is so (relatively) low cost, it’s possible for NetBeez to install hundreds per company to monitor uptime across an entire enterprise network footprint — such as every bank branch outlet, for instance — without the overall cost becoming prohibitively expensive to the customer.
“NetBeez is a tool to validate network changes and catches outages before they affect the end user,” explains co-founder, Panagiotis Vouzis. “A large percentage of network outages are caused after engineers make changes to their network. Current monitoring tools give a detailed view of the routers and switches, but they miss the information about the connectivity of the end user. So, when an engineer makes a change at 2:00 am (they work off hours to affect the least number of users in case something goes wrong) they don’t know if the end user has been affected or not.
“Often, the outages they cause are detected at 8:00 am when the first employees come in to work, and they can’t work until the problem gets resolved. Only on critical configuration changes people are sent office to office at 2:00 am to check if everything is up and running. This is cumbersome, costly, doesn’t scale, and cannot be applied to every change.”
This is where NetBeez steps in and installs Pis running its monitoring software (aka Beez) behind the switch — aka “exactly where the end-user connects” — thereby giving the network engineer visibility on whether configuration changes done in the middle of the night are going to affect all the local office workers in the morning.
“There are many types of outages that are detected by the end user only. They have to call the help desk, that then informs the IT department about the problem. The Beez acts as a proactive and distributed network monitoring tool that catches problems that remain undetected by the current state of the art. It bypasses the help-desk process,” adds Vouzis.
Vouzis says it intends to target the tool at large and medium companies that have complex networks and a need to minimise network outages and downtime. It’s been running a beta program since May, with three demo customers on board who have “a strong presence in Pennsylvania and West Virginia”.
Both Vouzis and his fellow co-founder, Stefano Gridelli, have a background in network engineering. The business model for NetBeez will either be an upfront cost or a monthly or yearly fee per Bee and for use of NetBeez’s server system, adds Vouzis.
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