People expect the Mail Room Fund, a joint venture fund established by William Morris Agency, Accel Parners, Venrock and AT&T earlier this year, to make interesting investments. With deep connections in the entertainment, technology and communications industries, they can’t help but have great and varied deal flow.
So of course their first investment is a social network analytics startup called Sometrics, which raised an undisclosed round of financing (rumored to be around $1 million) from the fund. Sometrics is based in Los Angeles.
Sometrics provides metrics (think Google Analytics) to social network application developers. Built a Facebook application? Sometrics will tell you page views and unique visits, installs and uninstalls, age of users, gender of users, number of friends and location of users. The basic service is free. For more information: AllFacebook wrote about Somemetrics at launch, and InsideFacebook compared them to competing social application analytics providers. Currently, 500 developers are using Sometrics during its beta period.
This may have been a better investment for the funds established specifically to fund Facebook applications, rather than the new Mail Room Fund. But hey, this is the new new Internet. Anything can happen. And does.
cannot tell if the “so of course…” is sarcastic or not, guess facebook is on my list of things easy to ignore
I actually own http://www.sitespaces.net which gets a million+ visitors each month. I am very sorry about even using Google analytics. I would never give a startup my information and I’m working on my own software so I can stop giving it to Google.
That information is worth money and if you simply give it away, even to Google you are letting cash escape.
There are many tools to go through your apache logs, but I am making a new tool that will scan httpd logs optimized for my own social network to give me the best data.
Otherwise google cobbles the data with all the other sites to create a “god web” of tracking data, plus they have double click.
And that’s google though. Not a startup with only a million bucks. Heck, I’ll probably be up to 1M soon. A million isn’t sh1t in So Cal. The house I live in is worth a million bucks and it’s not anything special.
Sorry, I messed up. SiteSpaces.net gets 1M+ pageviews, not visitors. It does get a lot of visitors though, and it’s climbing.
Refresh Analytics currently has what seems to be the best tool for social network analytics.
In case people don’t know these companies turn around and resell your hard earned web data wholesale to 3rd parties for advert optimizations and you make nothing.
That is the “open web”. The nexus points are making mad cash off your hard work.
I just feel it right to let people know.
@ Chris - when you say “these companies turn around resell your hard earned web data…”, are you saying Google does that?
@6 Google doesn’t have to, though I have my doubts about their Double Click arm doing that. Google can actually self-cash in on the data.
A service that only operates to provide metrics however can not effectively do what Google does. They either have to be part of a larger puzzle, or they have to make money by selling data.
As superfluous as these web 2.0 companies that cross the front page at tech crunch seem I must say there are ruthless dictators sitting behind the curtain of oz that WILL make money with the data.
Money you could have made if you were smarter.
Shout out to LA Startups Member Sometrics!!
I’m in LA and just heard a huge POP!
Oh ladies, don’t you know flirting with mike will get you, everywhere.
LA thanks you for your support
@ Chris
I am one of the founders of Sometrics and wanted to let you know that our business model does not include any smoke and mirror tactics. Sometrics is very sensitive to client data and truly feel that it is their information. Our company is not in the business of selling client data to third parties. We may eventually add a few premium services, but our standard analytics product will always remain free of charge. I’m always available to answer any further questions that you might have… maybe over lunch if you are located in LA.
@SiliconCalley
Thanks for the love
@8 well you got Michael’s attention:
http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/811661071
I finally liked Seesmic comments
Thanks for the plug Michael. TMF has been extremely supportive and we’re fortunate to have them on our side. Hopefully, we’ll be among many other startups who will make LA their home-court-advantage!
For what it’s worth, some further color on Richard Wolpert’s strategy behind the Mailroom Fund:
http://www.socaltech.com/inter.....15116.html
Registration is kind of odd. I created account, but it does not let you setup a password. Anyone else is running into this issue?
Alex
Ian and Team - Congrats on the recent investment and best of luck moving forward. Tons of opportunities in this space — Social Networkers and application developers have egos, they love to know how people are interacting and using their applications and how many and what types of people are viewing their pages.
– Mike
Ian, Joe, and Matt are all great guys. Couldn’t have happened to a better team!
@Alex
Thanks for registering. You will be sent an email verification containing your temporary password. Please contact us our jump into our support chat (http://chat.sometrics.com/) for any additional help.
@Jesse
Thanks for your support the past 6 months. The whole team appreciates the kind words.
@WiredMike
Social apps developers are a great group to work with. We feel fortunate to be part of this rapidly growing and exciting world of social media. Social analytics is a new concept and we take pride in adding value for all of our users.
“maybe over lunch if you are located in LA.”
No thanks for right now Ian.
“We may eventually add a few premium services”
That doesn’t sound like a sound plan for revenue to me, and since the company is underwritten by AT&T I don’t see an obvious sell out plan.
Good luck though. Again, I am going to mod webalizer to spit out social specific data as an internal project. I am upset about even using Google’s 3rd party services.
I do understand about the excitement about LA tech startups as I own one, but I am still going to look at the details of a project, whether it’s in LA or China.
No obvious revenue streams + backed by AT&T = suspicious
I’m sure you can see why.
@Chris
““We may eventually add a few premium services”
That doesn’t sound like a sound plan for revenue to me, and since the company is underwritten by AT&T I don’t see an obvious sell out plan.”
Wisdom tells me to always listen to a person when they speak, it also tells me when to quit listening. When I read your above comment, It told me a lot about your knowledge in marketing. And no offense to your social network or even Facebook, but relying on a 1 trick pony, advertising, and only one form, in general, of adding value, ‘connecting with others’, won’t last and imo, is so granny panties. Social networks needs to push other streams of revenue other than advertising and give a more fulfilling value than just ‘connecting with your friends’ and I have solved that problem. web2.5 here I come and hopefully TechCrunch50.
Ian, keep up the good work, I’m going to have my team take a look at your new software.
@ Pete
Thanks for the support. Let me know if you have any questions about our product. My team is always around to help with any questions that you might have (http://chat.sometrics.com/).
Congrats Ian and Company! Kick ass and take coats.
@Chris — “That doesn’t sound like a sound plan for revenue to me, and since the company is underwritten by AT&T I don’t see an obvious sell out plan.”
It can also mean, and I’m willing to bet this is the case, that they just don’t want to announce what those premium features will be just yet. I’m guessing that in order to get some funding they would need to provide some potential source of revenue coming from their product/service down the road.
Mike Lennon