Reunion.com connects with $25M
by Carolyn Murphy
July, 2006
TheDeal.com
"Reunion.com LLC has closed a $25 million round of venture funding, the latest social networking startup to secure a significant capital infusion in recent months.
The round from Westport, Conn.-based Oak Investment Partners builds on $1.4 million of
angel funding the Los Angeles-based startup has channeled since its 2002 inception. Existing
backers include: Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of one-time MySpace parent
Intermix Media; Steve Newman, the former president of GreatDomains.com; and Andy Mazzarella,
the previous chief financial officer of iMall Inc., which was sold to Excite@Home in 2001
for $425 million in stock."
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Reunion.com Raises $25M
April 16, 2007
SoCalTech.com
Los Angeles-based Reunion.com, an online service that connects adults with
friends and family, said today that it has raised $25M in a venture
capital round from Oak Investment Partners. Reunion.com said that the
company is profitable and has previously raised $1.4M in angel funding
from Jeffrey Tinsley, formerly of GreatDomains.com, Richard Rosenblatt of
Demand Media, and Andy Mazzarella of eForce Media. The new funding will go
towards growth plus strategic acquisitions. Reunion.com was represented by
Jeffries & Company in the deal.
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Reunion.com Raises Massive $25 Million Series A Round
By Nick Gonzalez
April 17, 2007
TechCrunch
"One can wonder how a service like this could charge in the face of network behemoths Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace, but Reunion makes it easy to collect basic data that can be used to lure other users into the network, and searches through a lot of personal data points.
Their strategy seems to be around getting as many people as possible to add their basic info into the database and then luring other users into the network by telling them how many people might be searching for them (15 for Nick Gonzalez). It's kind of like a huge internet Rolodex, the more people that buy in, the more useful it gets. They've also got an Outlook plugin and can search your email account for possible connections."
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Reunion, the un-glamorous social network that makes money
By Matt Marshall
April 15, 2007
VentureBeat
"Yet its new users � because they are older � are far more profitable than users at younger sites, such as MySpace, says chief executive Jeff Tinsley. Reunion brings in revenue of more than $30 million a year, though he wouldn't be more specific. Cyworld, the raging popular Korean site, has said it makes $2.10 revenue per users, and Reunion makes much more than that on its recent users, Tinsley said. "It's interesting, we don't get covered nearly as much as these other guys," Tinsley said."
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Reunion Banks Social Networking's Largest Series A
By Erica Owen
April 17, 2007
Dow Jones News Service
"Tinsley said Reunion targets adults over 25 years old, a key differentiator from other networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, which go after a markedly younger crowd. In addition, Tinsley said Reunion uses a dual-revenue model which relies not only on traditional advertising but also on for-pay upgrades to the site's free services."
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Reunion.com Raises $25M
Social networking site's windfall shows that VCs still like MySpace clones
By Alexandra Berzon
April 17, 2007
Red Herring
"With its original $1.4 million in seed funding and a business model that asks users to pay for certain premium features, Reunion has steadily added profits over its five-year existence. Mr. Tinsley said the site already has 28 million users, and it's adding around 1 million more users each month.
Reunion firmly targets people over 25. And it's not a place where teenagers you've never met ask to be your friend. You won't find bright colors and busy graphics. There's not a lot of flirting.
"We were capturing a huge audience and no one even knew it," said Mr. Tinsley. "Our goal is to own this market, the over-25 post-Facebook crowd."
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Reunion.com's $25 Million Success Factors
By Emily Crawford
American Venture Network
April 26, 2007
"We've been able to grow 100 percent a year by making smart decisions and building up this service. We could have continued to grow at that pace, without capital, but now we realized the time is now to take this great service out to the mass market," he said. "Growing the business 100 percent a year, though we could do it, was not our interest anymore. It's time to reach the mass market and create something really big here."
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Grads reunite after 80 years; Three who graduated from Dinuba High in the 1920s find their way back for a very special reunion that brings back plenty of memories.
By Erik Lacayo
The Fresno Bee
April 26, 2007
For most of her life, Lois Raubinger has lived across the street from Dinuba High School, watching generations of students pass by her window.
It is the same high school that Raubinger, 99, herself graduated from in 1926.
Reunions held every five years for the Dinuba High classes that graduated before 1977 aren't extraordinary to Raubinger.
Maybe because she has been attending the event for the past 50 years, she didn't realize she was celebrating a milestone this year.
When told it has been 81 years since she graduated, Raubinger pauses a moment, and all she can say is, "That's a long time."
Raubinger isn't alone in that milestone.
On May 26, Raubinger was joined at the Visalia Convention Center by classmate Avalyn Halls, 98, and Bessie Woo, 97, from the class of 1927.
They were among 700 alumni to attend the event.
"I haven't heard of anyone celebrate their 80-year reunion," said Neil Davis, president of marketing for the social-networking Web site reunion.com. "That's incredible."
Eighty years ago, Calvin Coolidge was commander in chief and Dinuba had a population of about 5,000 people.
Now, about 20,000 people live there.
Halls, who still lives in Dinuba, said she remembers driving to school in a Ford Model T and riding in a horse-drawn carriage.
Today, Halls drives a 1991 Buick around town that she says "keeps going and going."
Halls, who still volunteers at the the local Presbyterian church, attributes her own healthy motor to a lifetime of eating shredded wheat and bananas.
"I feel great," she said.
While Halls and Raubinger are ingrained in Dinuba, the third piece of this reunion puzzle wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been for a simple Internet search last month.
Russell Woo, son of Bessie Woo, was interested in visiting Fresno for the Memorial Day weekend and was searching for things to do when he discovered his mother's alma mater was having a reunion.
Russell Woo told his mother she was going home, and they drove from San Francisco.
"Bessie was lost to us," said Vicki Worthley, a member of the Dinuba High School alumni association.
On the morning of the reunion, the Woo family took a tour of the high school with other alums.
Walking through the halls, Bessie Woo stopped to stare at a black-and-white photo labeled "1921 Valley Champs."
At the center of the basketball team photo was her bother, Foon Kai Kee, who she said attended Yale on an athletic scholarship.
"I recognized him," Bessie Woo said with a wide grin.
Woo said she remembers bringing her lunch to school and playing second base in after-school softball games.
Apparently Dinuba wasn't the epicenter of the "roaring '20s," so Woo said she would travel north to Fresno, hoping to interact with other young Chinese people.
"At the time, there were no Chinese boys for me to go out with," Woo said.
Woo moved to the Bay Area after high school and eventually married, she said.
Halls said she remembers Woo because they attended church together. She also remembers Raubinger, but they weren't close because they hung out in different circles.
The two have grown closer during their twilight years, said Halls, who occasionally visits Raubinger at her home.
Davis, at reunion.com, said he expects to hear more stories similar to this in years to come. Almost a million people ages 65 to 70 used the Web site in May, he said.
While young people use the Internet to discover new people, older people are using it to rediscover people they lost touch with, Davis said.
"Our audience is getting older," he said.
John Uppendahl, a spokesman with the Web site classmates.com, agreed. About 28% of the people who use that site are 55 or older.
"It's reasonable to think as people are living longer you're going to see more of these reconnections," he said.
But for now, an 80-year reunion seems to be a rare feat.
"I doubt if it ever happened before," said Jim Stormont, president of the Dinuba High School alumni association. "Just nobody lives that long."
The reunion gave the three alums a chance to reflect on their high school days.
Raubinger said she remembers cutting class, and Halls said she remembers wearing a dress on special days when students got a break from their school uniforms.
Woo also said she has a lot of great high school memories and was slightly disappointed that she wasn't able to share them with anyone else from the class of 1927. "I was hoping to see some of my classmates."
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Google gets low privacy rating; A watchdog group criticizes the way the search engine handles personal data. The firm disputes the findings.
By Michael Lidtke
Los Angeles Times
June 11, 2007
Google Inc.'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.
In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."
None of the 22 other surveyed companies -- a group that included Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL -- sank to that level, according to the report.
Although a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to "achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy," Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.
In a statement from one of its lawyers, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google said that it aggressively protected user privacy and that it stood behind its track record.
In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.
"We are disappointed with Privacy International's report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services," said Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel.
"It's a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them."
Privacy International contacted Google this month but didn't receive a response, said Simon Davies, the group's director.
The scathing report is the latest strike aimed at Google's privacy practices.
An independent European panel recently opened an inquiry into whether Google's policies abide by Europe's privacy rules.
Meanwhile, three U.S. groups are pressuring the nation's regulators to ensure that Google changes some of its privacy policies as part of its proposed $3.1-billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc., which also tracks the behavior of Web surfers.
The Federal Trade Commission is looking into antitrust concerns raised by the DoubleClick deal but has not indicated whether privacy issues will be part of the inquiry.
Hoping to placate its critics, Google has pledged to begin erasing the information about users' search requests within 18 to 24 months.
The company says it stockpiles data to help its search engine better understand its users so it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements.
As Google becomes more knowledgeable about the people relying on its search engine and other free services, management hopes to develop more tools that recommend activities and other pursuits that might appeal to individual users.
Privacy International is particularly troubled by Google's ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps.
"Under the microscope, it turns out that Google is doing much more with our data than we ever imagined," Davies said.
Privacy International said it reached its initial findings after spending the last six months reviewing Internet privacy practices with the help of about 30 professors, mostly in the U.S. and Britain. An updated report will be released in September.
Seven of the Internet companies and websites included in the report received the second-lowest grade of "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." They were Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Apple Inc., Facebook.com, Hi5.com, Reunion.com, Microsoft's Windows Live Space and Yahoo.
No company or site received Privacy International's top grade, but five rated as "generally privacy-aware." They were BBC, EBay Inc., Last.fm, LiveJournal.com and Wikipedia.com.
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Reunion.com chooses BHI
By Randi Schmelzer
PR Week
May 28, 2007
LOS ANGELES: Reunion.com has hired Bender/Helper Impact (BHI) to handle consumer PR and brand-building efforts on behalf of its online people-connection network.
Reunion 'met with about a dozen firms' before partnering with BHI, said Teena Touch, LA-based Reunion.com's PR director.
The focus of BHI's efforts, she noted, would be to position the site as a leader in people search and reuniting, reconnecting family and friends, and 'finding people you've lost along the way in a way that other sites can't.'
The firm's emphasis is expected to be on consumer outreach via heavy print and broadcast media relations, as well as some 'cross-country PR stunts,' said Touch. Business, financial, and online media outreach will be handled internally.
BHI has also been tasked to expand Reunion.com's 28 million member network by targeting 'parts of the country that don't use the service, (in) places they don't know what Reunion.com is,' Touch noted. A key messaging component will be differentiating the company from other online social networks.
It selected the firm, also based in LA, because 'it understands the space and can bring results to the table,' Touch added.
Reunion.com had worked with CarryOn Communication.
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The top 10 sites
Paul Wardley
ComputerActive
17 May 2007
Based on membership, the top 10 sites worldwide are as follows:
- Myspace
- Windows Live Spaces
- Orkut
- Xanga
- Classmates.com
- Bebo
- Friendster
- Reunion.com
- Broadcaster.com
- Facebook
Of these, the first two have more members than the remaining eight put together and the picture is further distorted because some sites are very prominent in specific parts of the world but not in others. Google's Orkut, for example, is inordinately popular in Brazil.
Here in the UK, according to April's Hitwise statistics, the top sites are Bebo, Myspace, Facebook, Faceparty and Friends Reunited, and if you included sites that have some similar features, then Youtube and Piczo would be high up the list as well.
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Social network website reaches a hire level; LinkedIn uses its own who-knows-whom tools to recruit a CEO
Alex Pham
Los Angeles Times
May 7, 2007
Dan Nye landed a job as chief executive of a hot Silicon Valley company without even dusting off his resume.
Nye was an executive vice president at Advent Software Inc. when Reid Hoffman, chairman of social-networking company LinkedIn Corp., came calling. Hoffman hadn 't found him through a headhunter or a classifieds site but through LinkedIn 's vast who-knows-whom online network.
Through the whole process, Nye said, "I was never asked to produce a resume, and I was never asked for a reference."
Nye 's unusual route to the CEO suite started last fall.
Hoffman had been looking for someone to run the Palo Alto company he founded, which is like MySpace.com for professionals -- people can fill out profile pages, then connect for sales leads, expertise or job prospects. A venture capitalist he knew recommended Nye.
Turns out Nye had a detailed profile on LinkedIn, outlining his career with Advent, Intuit Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. Hoffman liked what he read and brought Nye in for an interview. Then another, then another -- about 10 over several months.
"It became increasingly apparent during each trip that he knew more and more about me," said Nye, 40.
Not until after he was hired did Nye discover that Hoffman had made dozens of reference checks -- without asking Nye for a single name. He found them through LinkedIn.
All Hoffman had needed were the names of the companies where Nye had worked and the years he was there. Hoffman ran that information through LinkedIn 's member profiles, finding dozens of people who had overlapped with the prospective hire (members can also search by college attended and by job title). He fired off e-mails and phone calls to numerous people and talked extensively with 27 of Nye 's former colleagues.
"I found out that really good people like working for Dan," Hoffman said. "It was important to me that A-plus talent would want to work with him."
As he weighed the job, Nye turned the tables on his recruiters. He studied up on LinkedIn through its own online tools.
"I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be part of this company," he said.
The LinkedIn approach carries some risks. For example, if a prospective employer calls a reference that isn 't carefully chosen by a job candidate, word could get back to the candidate 's boss that he 's seeking another job. And recruiters could get peeved if the candidate starts checking up on them.
But it 's worth doing to avoid taking the wrong job, said Guy Kawasaki, a managing director of venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures Inc. who frequently uses LinkedIn.
"The greater risk is in going to work for someone who is, shall I say, sub-optimal," Kawasaki said.
Now a CEO in a position to hire, Nye said the experience made him rethink the standard resume-reference combination.
For example, resumes generally aren 't verified and references aren 't contacted until a candidate is nearly hired. The references are provided by the candidates, which Nye likens to "a loaded deck."
In the days before the Internet, the most a recruiter could find out from previous employers were the dates a candidate had worked there. Now with searchable databases of millions of resumes and profiles such as those on LinkedIn, and search engines such as Wink and Reunion.com, so much more information is available, Nye said.
"We now live in a world where it 's just not hard to find out about people," he said.
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Siblings No Longer Lost To Each Other
By Valerie Kalfrin
26 June 2007
Tampa Tribune
Gamelie Rodriguez Arroyo sat next to her brother Monday, resting her head on his shoulder, passing him tissues and kissing his cheek.
He's not the 12-year-old boy she remembered from 26 long years ago. There are so many missed memories, even missed opportunities to see each other again that neither of them knew until now.
Today Manuel Rodriguez Arroyo, 38, boards a plane back to Los Angeles, his pregnant wife and his children. For now he is at his sister's home on North 48th Street, catching up on decades of being separated through the child protection system and thinking for a time that his sister was dead.
"It's like a hole was filled," he said, squeezing her hand at her dining room table.
"I keep staring at him," Gamelie Rodriguez, 44, said. "It's like a puzzle that was missing a piece and was put together."
Born in Puerto Rico, the siblings moved to Tampa in the 1970s after their father sought a fresh start following the deaths of their 8-year-old sister and mother. They settled in a house on West Louisiana Avenue. Their father, a psychologist in Puerto Rico, found a job in social services.
"We were always close," Manuel Rodriguez said, remembering how at 11 he grew taller than his sister and would tease her about all the clothes she had.
Cataracts attacked their father's eyesight, but in 1981 he suffered a debilitating blow. A massive heart attack at 49 left him unable to care for himself and in a nursing home.
At 17, Gamelie felt responsible for Manuel, but he chafed at obeying his older sister. One night, they fought because he wanted to play basketball after dark. Their shouting drew a curious neighbor, who must have called child protection workers, Gamelie Rodriguez said. The next day a detective took Manuel away.
"They just came and got him, and that was it," Gamelie Rodriguez said, wiping away tears. "I didn't know what to do."
Manuel Rodriguez remembered being scared. "They told me they had a home for me," he said. He was placed with a Seffner couple who had taken in other foster children.
Gamelie Rodriguez said no one gave her a phone number to reach Manuel. Confused, she didn't know there was a court hearing where she could explain her side of the situation.
"Nothing was disclosed to me," Gamelie Rodriguez said. "Nobody said, 'When you are 18, you can do this.' Give me a chance to get my brother back."
'We Nearly Missed Each Other'
Gamelie Rodriguez graduated from Hillsborough High School and found work as a driver for a bread company. On her rounds, she has learned, she passed the house where her brother lived. Sometimes she drove past Armwood High School, which her brother attended.
"We nearly missed each other," Manuel Rodriguez marveled. "It was God's timing."
Their father died. When Manuel was about 16, his foster father told him his sister had died too. He remembered rumors from the other foster children that the Seffner couple wanted to adopt him.
At the time, though, "life didn't have any meaning for me," he said. "I'd been through so much already. What more are you going to take from me?"
Finally Connecting
As time passed, Gamelie Rodriguez had a son, now 13. Manuel Rodriguez moved to Los Angeles and married; his family grew to five boys and three girls. Gamelie Rodriguez changed jobs, becoming an apartment-complex leasing agent. Manuel Rodriguez found work as a presentation manager for Petsmart.
At home, Manuel Rodriguez's wife fretted about how he had no family other than theirs. Sitting in traffic, he would wonder whether Gamelie his sister truly was dead.
"You know in your heart that she's not," he said.
"I would think about him all the time," she said.
She searched for him online, turning up dozens of men named "Manuel Rodriguez" and not knowing which one might be her brother. Last year she signed up on a site called Reunion.com -- the same site her brother's wife urged him to join about a month ago.
When he found her online profile, with her unique name, he knew he had found her.
He left her a detailed phone message about their childhood.
"When I heard his cry, I knew for sure it was my brother," she said. "When it's your family, you know."
When they at last connected, they talked for about five hours, then daily.
His sister hasn't changed, still stylish, still feisty, he said.
He's still mellow, she said.
On Thursday, Manuel Rodriguez and his 12-year-old son flew to Orlando International Airport to meet his sister and her son. The siblings have shopped and barbecued and talked till early in the morning. He installed an air conditioner in her living room window. On Sunday they went fishing and didn't catch a thing.
His wife is willing to move to Florida, so all of them can get to know each other. Gamelie Rodriguez can't wait. Manuel Rodriguez hugs her tight, still taller. Her head comes up to his cheek.
"Now we have a big family again," she said.
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Social Networking Slideshow
By EC Hoffman
June 18, 2007
View Slideshow
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L.A.-area Web firms getting more funding
Silicon Valley's lead in drawing venture capital is narrowing as media and technology get more interconnected.
By Michelle Quinn, Times Staff Writer
July 23, 2007
Los Angeles is gaining on Silicon Valley as ground zero for the current Internet boom.
Information services companies in Greater L.A. reaped $167 million in venture capital investment during the second quarter, according to a report scheduled for release today by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne.
The region, which includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, trailed only the high-tech hub to the north, which pulled in $262 million.
Los Angeles has emerged as a Silicon Valley south, said Teena Touch, a spokeswoman for L.A.-based Reunion.com. The company, whose website helps people find lost friends and family members, raised $25 million to fund its marketing activities.
"It's so crowded in Silicon Valley, it's hard to find an identity," she said. "In L.A., you're not competing with all the dot-coms."
Southern California continued to rank second nationally in overall venture funding, receiving $1 billion in 2006, up from $625 million a year before. The San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Silicon Valley, received $2.5 billion. The New England region, which ceded the No. 2 spot to Southern California late last year, received $795 million.
"We have a tremendous amount of growth so far, and we're only halfway through the year," said Michael Schoenfeld, Ernst & Young's director for the Pacific Southwest venture capital advisory group. "We're on a run to far exceed a terrific year for VC investing that was 2006."
Nationwide, VC firms invested $7.4 billion in the second quarter, up 8%. There were 717 rounds of financing in the quarter, also up 8%, marking the highest quarterly deal volume since 2001, according to the report.
Information technology firms, which include software, electronics and semiconductors, received the largest slice of the venture pie: $4.18 billion, up 12% from $3.74 billion.
Of that, software companies received the biggest chunk at $1.5 billion, up 1%.
The next-largest amount went to firms in the information services category, which covers a range of Internet businesses, such as social networks, blogs and online advertising. Funding in that category rose to $978 million from $644.7 million, or 52%.
Venture firms invested $2.35 billion in healthcare, up 7% from $2.2 billion. One of the biggest deals in the quarter was the $85-million first-round financing of Sientra Inc. of Santa Barbara, which produces devices used in plastic surgery.
Companies based in Los Angeles received $459 million, up from $182 million last year. About 35% went to Internet companies.
"A lot of companies here are at the convergence of media and technology," Schoenfeld said.
Gorilla Nation Media, a Los Angeles online advertising firm, received $50 million in late-stage funding. Co-founder and President Brian Fitzgerald said the company, which represents the Huffington Post and other sites, planned to use the money to expand internationally.
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Website Review of the Week
By Errol Pierre Louis
PC Magazine
July 23, 2007
I 've been out of high school for only five years, but every so often I wonder what my old classmates are up to. What ever happened to that weird kid in shop class? Where did the captain of the football team end up? Is that cute girl from homeroom still single? Reunion.com is the latest site aimed at helping you answer these and other burning questions. As befits a newer site, it has more of a social-networking feel than the older sites in the space. It 's got a bunch of nifty tools (it can tell you who 's looking for you, for example), But its search results are less reliable than Classmates.com 's, and the older site offers many more ways to network. Reunion.com makes up for these shortcomings, however, with its cool Outlook toolbar.
The first thing you do after signing up at Reunion.com is to import contact lists from one or more of your e-mail address books. Reunion makes this easy. Just fill in your e-mail log-in info for AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! and the app will retrieve and add your address-book contacts to your Reunion contacts list. You can also download Reunion for Outlook, an app that synchronizes your Reunion contacts with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. What 's more, it integrates much of the functionality of the site into a toolbar for Outlook and Internet Explorer.
Once you 've added your contacts, Reunion asks if you 'd like to alert all your contacts that you 're a Reunion.com member and check if you have their most recent contact information. Reunion will prompt you to alert your contact list of pretty much everything you do on the site. You 'll want to think hard before clicking the Share and Connect button that sends out mass e-mails to your contact list-there 's a real risk of spamming people. If you plan to use this feature, you 'll want to whittle your contact list down to people you know wouldn 't mind getting an e-mail every time you change your photo or make a blog post.
Once you add contacts, Reunion.com automatically lets you know which ones are members. A My Contacts table on the homepage tracks your contacts ' activities on the site and alerts you to upcoming birthdays. The Class List tab next to it tracks the activities for all Reunion members who went to your high school at the same time you did. According to Reunion.com, there are over 25 million registered members, with about a million more joining monthly. I was surprised at the number of people from my graduating class on the site. From your school page, you can also plan a class reunion by posting a reunion notice on your school 's message board, though you have to be a paying Reunion member.
Reunion offers two subscriptions plans: $36 for one year and $72 for three years. These prices are cheaper than Classmates.com 's, but Classmates also offers a three-month subscription for $15. Classmates beats Reunion in the networks department, letting you search people from elementary school, college, workplaces, and military networks, whereas Reunion lets you search people only from high school networks.
Like Classmates, Reunion provides a Dating Directory. Unlike Classmates.com, Reunion doesn 't attach a separate dating profile to your main profile. Being part of the Reunion Dating Directory means having a small heart graphic by your name and showing up in the search results when users browse class members looking for a date. Classmates.com also has a dating search and allows you to search former teachers and your former classmates ' parents.
Reunion.com offers better blogging and photo-sharing capabilities than Classmates.com. To start a blog on Classmates, you have to create one and attach it to your profile. With Reunion, you have nice-looking blogs already built into your profile. Reunion also provides you with writing prompts for blog posts, in case you 're having trouble getting started. Prompts range from normal personality-type queries like: If money were not an object, what would you do with your life?Then there are questions that make you wonder what the writers behind Reunion.com are smoking. Examples: If you could be any cookie, what kind would you be? What 's the one item in your kitchen that would best describe your personality? Who 's the funniest-looking historical figure? It 's a feature that could lead to some interesting posts. Reunion.com gives you many more photo-sharing options than Classmates.com does, with photo albums similar to what you 've seen on Flickr.com. Classmates.com, on the other hand, merely shows photos as a thumbnail gallery.
When you search for people by name, you get a list of Reunion members with the same or similar names, along with public records and Peoplefinder.com results. Your searches are all saved, and if you couldn 't find the person you were searching for, Reunion will log that search information and notify you if that person ever becomes a Reunion member. This is a simple but extremely useful feature. Paying members can also see who is searching for them. Reverse-searching is a nice feature that adds a whole new dimension to the rediscover process. It lets you know who 's been trying to get in touch with you, so you have hot leads to follow rather than searching blindly. E-mailing other members is also reserved for Premium members.
Reunion 's search features would have propelled it above the competition if I hadn 't found its results less reliable than Classmates.com 's. Here 's an example: When I searched for the names of people I 'd already seen on my class list, the results didn 't include some of them. Yet my class 's recent activity list showed them using Reunion within the preceding 24 hours! I had no such problem on Classmates. When I asked Reunion.com about this, CEO Jeffrey Tinsley told me that the company is in the process of updating the site and that search indexing may act strangely for a while. At press time, the problem still hadn 't been fixed.
My favorite aspect of Reunion is the Reunion.com for Outlook application I referred to earlier. The Outlook integration makes it easy to keep track of your contacts and add new ones. You can view contacts ' recent activity from the toolbar and see who 's posted photos, who 's updated his or her blog, and who 's got an upcoming birthday. You can also get a contact activity summary in your Outlook Today window listing your contacts activity with contact status information. It tells you which of your contacts have verified their recent info, which haven 't, and which you haven 't requested information from, yet.
Classmates offers more networks and more reliable searches. However, Reunion.com 's blogs and photo albums surpass those of Classmates.com, and the ability to save searches and see who 's searched for you is very useful. Additionally, Reunion 's Outlook toolbar integration is an excellent contact-management tool, one definitely worth trying out. Once Reunion irons out the kinks with its search indexing, I 'd rank the site over Classmates.com as it stands today. Until then, Reunion remains a close number two.
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L.A. Venture Funding Booming
By ALLEN P. ROBERTS Jr.
Los Angeles Business Journal
Southern California continued to gain ground on the Bay Area as California's venture capital hot spot in the second quarter, according to a report released Monday by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne.
The region, which includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, pulled in a combined $1 billion in investments through 158 financing rounds for the quarter - second only to Silicon Valley's $2.5 billion on 208 deals.
Companies based in Los Angeles received $459 million, up big from $182 million last year - with 35 percent of the money going to Internet-based companies.
Nationwide, firms invested $7.4 billion in the second quarter, an 8 percent jump from the same period a year earlier. In total, there were 717 rounds of financing, also up 8 percent, marking the highest deal volume since 2001, the report said.
The median deal size in the second quarter was $8 million, marking the highest median seen since 2000.
Santa Barbara-based Sientra Inc. got the biggest deal of the quarter, tallying an $85 million first-round financing deal, while L.A.-based Reunion.com raised $25 million and Gorilla Nation Media, also based in L.A., received $50 million in late-stage funding.
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SCOTT AUSTIN'S THE WEEK IN VENTURE CAPITAL: Move Over, Bay Area, Southern Cal Is Grabbing More VC Money
24 July 2007
Dow Jones Business News
By Scott Austin
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones) -- Maybe it's the sand and surf, or the proximity to Hollywood, but venture capitalists are waking up to Southern California.
While the amount of VC deals and dollars sloshing around the region is nowhere near that of Silicon Valley, the nation's top VC hub, it's growing at a far faster rate and seeing its best days since the dot-com boom.
According to newly released data from Ernst & Young and industry tracker VentureOne, venture capitalists invested $2.15 billion across 146 deals in Southern California in the first half of the year. Those numbers top the $1.52 billion raised in 122 deals in the year-ago period, and are on pace to soundly beat the total of $3.32 billion and 236 deals for all of 2006, meaning the most venture capital this region has seen since 2000, when the market exploded.
More significantly, Southern California -- which includes the Los Angeles region (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties), Orange County and San Diego -- is stealing away a much larger share of the venture pie these days.
In the first half of this year, 15% of the $14.48 billion invested in U.S. companies went to SoCal, compared with 8% in 2000 and 9% to 11% in recent years. That's important when you consider what's happening in the two biggest venture capital regions, as distinguished by VentureOne.
The San Francisco Bay Area, land of many of the nation's largest tech companies, hogged 35% of the money during the height of the dot-com boom in 2000 and in each of the past two years. But with $4.72 billion this year, that share has fallen a bit to 33%. And the Northeast corridor, which includes the tech-hungry Boston area, has seen its share drop from 23% in 2005 to 20% in 2006 and 19% this year, which would be the first time that percentage has dipped below 20% in this decade.
Los Angeles and even San Diego-area companies are catching dollars as if they're falling from palm trees. Already, venture capitalists have spent $887.4 million in L.A. proper, on pace to shatter last year's total of $1.37 billion, which was a big step up from the $854.8 million in 2005 and the most since 2000. San Diego, home to a healthy health-care industry, may come close to hitting the hefty $2.2 billion recorded in 2000 after picking up $994.4 million in the 2007 first half, much of that in the homegrown biotechnology space.
And why shouldn't SoCal be more than beauty and the beach? Many venture capitalists believe the region is underserved and possesses the tools needed for an innovation hub. It boasts several business incubators and a pool of academic talent, particularly at one of the largest research universities, the University of Southern California, which, like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a major tech-commercialization institute, thanks to a $22 million donation from Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital.
Experienced entrepreneurs are plentiful. According to the non-profit technology trade association AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association, SoCal last year employed nearly as many high-tech industry workers, 418,000, as the 439,000 in Northern California. And it avoids, for now, the intense competition and high company valuations found in Silicon Valley.
The opportunities have inspired several local entrepreneurs and executives to start their own seed and early-stage venture firms. Dave Gross and Rusty Reed this year opened a small fund called Great Pacific Ventures in Santa Barbara, Calif., after working at Fastclick Inc., an Internet advertising company that went public in 2005. Other new entrants include Spire Equity LLC, Los Angeles, launched by three entrepreneurs; Provenance Ventures LLC, Los Angeles, started by Bryan Biniak, the former executive in charge of AG Interactive's mobile operations; and Okapi Venture Capital LLC, Laguna Beach, which last year closed a $30 million fund after being founded by executives from Intel Corp. and SkinMedica Inc.
Home to MySpace, the most famous of social-networking sites, the Los Angeles area is cultivating a rich array of Silicon Valley-like dot-com start-ups. According to VentureOne, Los Angeles information-services companies, which include most Internet-related or so-called Web 2.0 start-ups, raised $282 million in the first half, already the most in several years and on pace to knock out the 2000 record of $513 million. This year, we've seen funding for L.A. area start-ups like online photo sharing company Buzznet Inc., women's online shopping site eStyle Inc., genealogy Web site Geni.com Inc., search engine Mahalo.com Inc., and social networking site Reunion.com.
Perhaps fueling the fervor: Geeks, previously the darlings of Silicon Valley, are now cool -- even in image-obsessed SoCal. If you're a teenager with a social life, you probably spend most of your time networking on MySpace or Facebook. Online dating has gone mainstream. The rock stars of today don't look like Jon Bon Jovi but instead pasty-faced string beans. An alienated teenager named Napoleon and a 40-year-old virgin have become wildly endearing. Even Curt Schilling, the strong-armed Boston Red Sox pitcher and the chief executive of his own gaming start-up, proclaimed himself a big-time computer geek and nobody blinked. The list goes on and on.
In the spirit of computer geekspeak, perhaps SoCal has released Silicon Valley 2.0 in beta.
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A millionaire idea
The desire of many to contact and to share with old friends
Yolanda Arenales, Businesses Reporter
Sunday, August 12, 2007
La Opinion
To find study companions, relatives and friends with whom you have lost contact with. Jeffrey Tinsley, executive director of Reunion.com knew this was a good business opportunity.
Although Tinsley and the other founders in Los Angeles did not invent the concept - its company was created from the purchase of other two already existing ones- HighSchoolAlumni.com and PlanetAlumni.com. The idea was to transform and to improve the existing sites.
The first change was the name. Tinsley explains that his maternal family originally from Mexico and Spain and because of the increasing demographic of Hispanics in the United States, he decided to use a word with almost identical meaning in English and in Spanish.
"It was a very good suggestion of my mother," says Tinsley. The term reflects an ample scope of the company that is not only centered in the search of study companions. Tinsley, defined as an industrialist, indicates that in spite of the fall of the companies "dot com" at the beginning of this decade, he creates firmly in the future of Internet like social forum and businesses.
In 2000, during the "earthquake" that devastated Valley Silicone, Tinsley received one hundred million dollars from its previous company, GreatDomains.com, that was acquired by VeriSign. Two years later Tinsley, and other industrialists including Andy Mazzarella, executive director of eForce Media and Richard Rosenblatt, previous president of MySpace, founded Reunion.com with 1.4 million dollars.
The model of business is based on the income through subscription - the basic services are gratuitous, but others, like sending electronic messages through the page to people to whom it is wanted to contact, require the payment of a tariff and the generated ones by the advertisers.
Presently, there are about 30 million members of which approximately a million pay subscription.
With a spectacular growth rate, that the company has not had problems at the time of obtaining for months the 25 million dollars that it looked for to impel his growth.
Tinsley explains that Reunion.com was based on the Angels for practical reasons, the being the city in which resides their partners founders, but also thinks that it is not coincidence that in the south of California is being generated a nucleus of companies "dot com".
According to recent reports, the region (including Luck and Santa Barbara) has attracted more than 260 million dollars in capital for this type of company.
"Much talent exists here, and of another one we are in favor in the world-wide capital of the entertainment, an industry that often is related of a way or another one to the contents of the companies in line", Tinsley says, predicting that the virtual technology and companies will continue reinforcing itself in the zone.
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