Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the investment company established by the four co-founding engineers of Skype has invested $235,000 USD in United Dogs and Cats Ltd, an Estonian startup that offers localized social networking sites for lovers of dogs and cats.
UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com offers traditional social networking tools such as blogs, profile pages and photo sharing to pet lovers, and is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Combined the sites have over 40,000 members, not enough for it to be counted by comScore, although the new Alexa notes that UnitedDogs is a top 1000 site in Luthiana and also scores well in Malaysia and Indonesia.
UnitedDogs.com compares well to competitor PawSpot (our review) in terms of traffic but still lags (or should that be wags…) well behind market leader Dogster.
This is the second investment in United Dogs and Cats by Ambient Sound Investments, having provided an undisclosed Angel Round in October 2007. See also ASI’s May 2007 investment in Freenzo. The additional investment takes ASI’s stake in the company to 18%.
The new money will be used to expand the reach of the UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com.
disclosure: Michael Arrington is an investor in Dogster
The question is, is the space big enough…
I think these sites appeal to woman more than men.
Sick.
Some people have waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands…
as a big big dog lover, there are a lot more of these sites out there…. Dogsey, Fuzzter, etc.
There was one that looks like it didn’t make it but sounded very interesting: SNIF (Social Networking in Fur)
(it had some sort of device in the collar that could send and receive info for the social status of your pet - found this old wired article about it: http://www.wired.com/culture/l.....5/04/67160
Talk about a niche!
whoof…!
Instead of poke it should be a sniff
all we need now is keyboards designed for dogs and cats.
As stupid as this sounds, I can see it as have good potential (not Facebook level, but still profitable). If you have friends with pets, you’ll know what I’m talking about. What is with our society that has given pets equal or greater rights than humans; some are just overly obsessed.
Dogs Rule
I’m starting to get sick of the Spam messages Jon inserted above.
Duncan: how do you normally stop spam?
Americans often think, that European web companies try to compete with US-based English-language services. Not always true. Europeans and most of the world still use local country-specific services. That also means Alexa and Comscore are almost irrelevant, at least they are very incorrect for these markets. And translation does not equal local. Success for these European companies also much more than in US is measured by local ad and SMS services revenues, break-even and profitability, not just traffic numbers.
So the competition for Dogs and Cats is what happens in each of the European countries on local level, not Dogster or PawSpot.
Hopefully Techcrunch will cover non-us and non-uk markets one day as well, with real local understanding outside those countries. Good luck with that!
Dallas 10
when we see them (and we don’t always) we edit them to the usable part, or delete them. See amended version above
I think this is a good move and it will surely generate a good revenue. As most of the social networks are busy targeting the corporates or youth, sns for pets will rock. There are millions of pet lovers who are waiting for such a platform to get connected with other pet lovers where they can also discuss and help out each other for pet related problems. But the main concern would be the services and the quality offered by such sites.
Congrats to the founders!
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O....._knows_you‘re_a_dog
Move forward 15 years later. Nowadays, pretending to be a dog is a dating strategy!
Hi Duncan, thanks for covering the industry, and we welcome Uniteddogs and all worldwide involvement.
This will clearly come as a surprise to most commenters, but U.S. spending on pets was a $41 billion in 2007 (a 100% increase from just a decade ago). That’s more than video games, movies and music *combined*.
There are 163 million dogs and cats in the U.S. and 63% of all U.S. households have a pet (a 10% increase from 2002).
Pets are huge and explains why we have 700,000 members, are a profitable company and only getting going.
http://blog.dogster.com/2007/0.....-combined/
The space and the potential is huge. Its one reason we are involved too. There is plenty of room for specialization - although Dogster is the ‘lead’ dog - they have only captured a small piece of a very large market.
http://www.MyDogSpace.com
This is a huge market with pets in general although I think
seperating pets by dog or cat is a mistake ,. like having myspace for only
blacks, whites, or asians.. For critical mass u need all pet owners
I think this one petloversnation has huge potential and
prob will grow the largest.
ah.. amazing, I just came across a social network for apartments in bangalore..