Smilebox, a site where you can create a variety of media presentations (such slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, photobooks, and postcards) by loading your own amateur photos and videos into designer templates, has raised $7M in Series B financing. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Frazier Technology Ventures.
The company says that it has garnered 1.8M users since its launch in June 2006, and that it experiences over 1.3M unique users monthly. Smilebox has recently been improved to allow for integration of music from media players like iTunes and automatic posting of creations to Facebook. The company has also partnered with several companies for distribution including Six Apart (creator of Vox) and Corel.
In unrelated news, European social network for young students Bahu has raised $1M in its first round of funding, led by theLightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab (LGiLab). The company says that Bahu differentiates itself from other social networks by focusing on users’ talents and helping to showcase them.
In addition to raising some money, Bahu has also appointed Ouriel Ohayon (editor of TechCrunch France) to its board of directors. Bahu was launched in July and claims to already have over 300,000 international users and to have experienced 15M page views in November.
sounds good, lotta money, i hope smile box lets users have the ability to integrate the applications into websites like blogs,myspace etc…
CAR - Yep, they can from what I understand (haven’t tried it myself).
OMG, these ideas are so original and groundbreaking. I can so easily see why they got multi million dollar funding. These will be the “youtube of tomorrow” and yesterday, and the day before that. What a godsend. Can we get some James Brown music dubbed over this blog post?
i think chris invested a lot of money in them lol.
I don’t think VCs necessarily care so much about the originality of the idea; they care about how many users/page visitors you get. That’s probably because they hope to get money from the companies they fund. I’m just saying.
The SmileBox stuff looks so juvenile that it is embarassing!
virb.com/balm/
I thought SmileBox sounded all right until I visited the website. My God. It’s like stepping back into the 90s.
this is a download? I tried to “get started” and it wants me to download something? as in, download onto my very own computer? that kind of download? weird
Exactly, do they actually get millions of people to install an executable looking like that? I think it’s a great idea, and I wish them the best of luck, but did they have to look so bad?