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May 30, 2006

Benchmark Invests in Pageflakes: Ajax Desktop War Heats Up

Michael Arrington

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German startup Pageflakes, an Ajax-rich personalized home page (an early profile is here) will announce a Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital on Wednesday. The size of the round will not be disclosed, which suggests it was on the low side.

In late March, Paris-based competitor Netvibes announced a $1 million seed round. Both Netvibes and Pageflakes compete with Microsoft’s Live.com and other personalized start pages. And while they have nowhere near the traffic of Live.com, users routinely comment that they like the speed of the Pageflakes and Netvibes sites in comparision.

Benchmark is actively investing in European headquartered or focused new consumer web startups. They recently led a $15 million round in Bebo, formerly headquartered in the UK (and now in San Francisco).

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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  4. TechCrunch » Blog Archive » NetVibes gets an ecosystem

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  9. Netvibes secures a $15million investment at backwhack - tech news web 2.0 style

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  10. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Netvibes secures a $15 million investment

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  11. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Netvibes、1500万ドルの資金調達を完了

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  14. The Web VC Chart « Alex Iskold tech blog

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  15. Grandes esperanzas « La central de datos

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  16. TalkCrunch » Blog Archive » Episode 14: Interview With PageFlakes Founder

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  17. 阿童木 » 风险投资商互联网投资一览表

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  18. RazorSharp iPods & Raw Gadgets » Blog Archive » Preview of Pageflakes “Flurry” Release

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  19. techcrunch » Blog Archive » Preview of Pageflakes “Flurry” Release

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  20. Pageflakes Acquired By Live Universe

    April 13th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

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Comments

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  1. Ellis

    May 30th, 2006 at 3:37 pm

    I dont know why everyone are so excited about these AJAX homepages. After the intial love affair with netvibes i started to hate the slow loading website and my homepage is back to google.com.

  2. John

    May 30th, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    @Ellis, All I can say is that I’m glad Google hired Doug Bowman. True, they have server grunt, but their Home page UI is, in my opinion, crap.

  3. Roy

    May 30th, 2006 at 4:01 pm

    Actually the first was Octopus.com back in 2000 with customizable webpages. The flavors since are adding a bit here and there, but the best thing these guys can hope for is to be bought by a Google or Yahoo that wants some bit of technology that is harder to develop on their own than to buy.

    I was on the octopus team, so I feel for these guys and wish them luck, but it can be a long road from “hey that’s kinda cool” to “now how are we going to make money with this”.

  4. Ellis

    May 30th, 2006 at 4:13 pm

    John, The current google UI is clean and loads fast , thats all required for a functional webservice. I hope Doug is not going to screw it up :)

  5. RMX

    May 30th, 2006 at 4:18 pm

    Roy? Didn’t Excite do this back in the ’90s.

  6. RBA

    May 30th, 2006 at 7:01 pm

    A portal. Customizable and so on, call it sleek if you will, call it “social” if you dare, but a portal nonetheless: Customizable content, flavored looks…

    So who’s up against it? Netvibes? I’d probably be looking at Yahoo, Google, MS Live… Heck, even AOL. How’s that for a healthy competitive landscape?

    Serious investment or just love affair? Business or technology? Am I wrong by feeling deja-vu?

  7. Ian

    May 30th, 2006 at 7:16 pm

    I do see the virtual desktop/ personalised home pages, as a ever crowding market.
    Protopage also springs to mind, with the likes of Netvibes, Pageflakes, Microsoft Live.com and Google.

    I agree with RMX, excite, geocities, yahoo, angelfire and many others offer personalised homepages, but inbulit Content Management systems, that are free.

    Albeit I can see the ease of use with the new style of personalised homepages, its capturing a new type of audience that enjoy blogging, and it involves no needed knowledge of code.

    I would like to see an implementation of say protopage or pageflakes on an intranet, for internal staff use. i.e offer a installable package for use on an internal web server. External personalised pages that look like post-it notes make me uneasy as an administrator

  8. David

    May 30th, 2006 at 7:19 pm

    So what differentiates this offering? unique technology? better UI? performance? or just unexplained popularity like myspace/facebook?

  9. Ole Brandenburg

    May 30th, 2006 at 7:44 pm

    #8 - Unique features: Sharing/Publishing of Pages. Additional Features: More modules (content) than others.

  10. Cem Dalgic

    May 30th, 2006 at 10:56 pm

    Congratulations Guys. You made a good job.

    A Pageflakes fan!

  11. Dave Gener

    May 30th, 2006 at 10:57 pm

    If you want *fast*, then use http://www.protopage.com (and they’re coming out with a new version soon too)

    It’s way faster than Pageflakes and Netvibes.

  12. hombrelobo

    May 31st, 2006 at 12:39 am

    I miss a reference to eyeOS in all this references:

    http://eyeOS.org
    http://eyeOS.info

  13. chris

    May 31st, 2006 at 5:36 am

    Personally, I really enjoy netvibes — I don’t find it slow at all… but I definately think the service is blog-centric. I only use it for seeing blog updates and some torrent listings. Best UI out of the bunch imho.

  14. Christian J. Koch

    May 31st, 2006 at 11:20 am

    I’ve tried a bunch of these sites, and for some reason, they just don’t do it for me.

    I’m much happier seeing google appear when I launch firefox.

  15. JOJOFACE

    May 31st, 2006 at 11:37 am

    I’m in love with Netvibes. It’s so clean and fast, at least for me. Gives me what I need. ^_^

  16. in a topic aside from this

    May 31st, 2006 at 12:30 pm

    fold.com’s axel wolf has apparently let his domain name slip as of today and it of course must have been on backorder or something.

  17. Björn T. Lysnes

    June 1st, 2006 at 6:50 am

    Working in the web-industry and being a Netvibes-user + the fact that I have allready fallen in love with the new rich Ajax-pages. They are simply a revolution.

    If you are interested in these kind of sites your should have a look at this http://www.ba.no/fotball/live/ new norwegian live-soccerservice. Sorry about it all being in norwegian, but, I strongly recommend you all to look in on it when there are matches running. “Check” for a match in top left corner to get a peek at what the service has to offer. Next round of matches are 5th June (norwegian time).

    The solution is devolped for and by the A-pressen mediagroup in Norway - http://www.api.no. The projectowner is http://www.api.no. In addtion two small companies in Bergen, Norway has been part of the development: http://www.trippel.no and http://www.neco.no.

    This is their first version, and they allready have lots more in the pipes. “Behind the scenes” supplying soccer-statistics is the norwegian website for Norwegian and International Soccer-statistics - NIFS. Check out english version here: http://www.nifs.no/eng/ (nifs.no is btw co-owned by http://www.ba.no and http://www.neco.no)

    * The service http://www.ba.no/fotball/live/ - also available in lots of other A-presse-websites - is a textual live update from mostly norwegian soccermatches. Through the matches you are live-updated on topscorers, tables, bookings, profiles on players/teams, substitutions - and lots more.

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