I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you, but Gnip is worth the trouble to understand. The company, which helps ease the transportation of social content between services (like getting Twitter data to Plaxo, for example), took a new $3.5 million round of financing. Investors include Foundry Group, First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, and the company has raised a total of $4.6 million, all this year.
The company acts as a clearing house for social content, easing the load on content distributors like Digg, Twitter, Delicious and Six Apart. Content consumers like Plaxo and MyBloglog benefit from a single endpoint and a standardized way of accessing data. In short, it unclogs the plumbing.
TechCrunchIT spoke with the Gnip founders on video immediately after launch. In September they launched version 2.0 of the service, and discussed their business model.









Oh yeah? the google killer. good luck.
http://www.nushio.com/
I don’t get it. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/1syfs8m4vI_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”I don’t get it. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/gpR485hKai”}}}
Hey Emperor dude mylocator needs you to weigh in on his Google Slayer.
GetLocator.com
I still dont get exactly what they do. Do they collect api data and host it?
They just store any new content created and their creator information and pass it on to search engines and users. and these end users have tocall less number of queries/apis to update their database. So GNIP help content provider by easing load on their server and search engines by providing them less data to crawl.
thanks
Can I say useless data?
Arrington, throw another party already. i want to mingle
not sure I understand what they do. I would advise the firm to hire a good PR firm to come up with a tag line so dumb people like me that have only been in the industry for 10 years can get educated. Is this Web 3.0?
I do like the VC’s participating though.
Eric is a dick who has an ego the size of his fat ass.
It’s a pretty good idea though to be fair, although monetizing I to for good returns on a $4.6 mill investment could be a tough task.
I’ll cop to that. But to be fair, I only have this fat ass in order to hold up my stupendous ego. It’s a vicious cycle.
According to crunchbase, your office is in the Starbucks across from CU. Maybe you can afford an office now?
Stan, I just miss the baristas at Yahoo.
Nice come back
Clavier’s involvement means IMMEDIATE FAIL. That is like saying Obama will lower your taxes. Nonstarter.
That’s mean
Hiring the PR man was a great suggestion. Seems like most of us are confused.
5 million dollars for this? I’d love to know how they intend to make all that back.
Just so I’m clear. After reviewing the video link in the story. Plaxo which is now part of Comcast a $53 Billion dollar company is working with Gnip. What does Gnip have 4 employees and a dog? Somebody called in a favor and got the Plaxo people to sit down with these guys.
If the idea was so great Comcast would have invested in the Series A. After all, as Arrington points out this is a plumbing play and not many companies know plumbing better than Comcast.
As somebody pointed out above. Why do you need nearly $5M for writing a layer into existing API standards.
p.s. I still really don’t know what they do. Maybe that’s the problem.
Is this like telephony peering
Eric,
We LOVE you. Keep on doing what you’re doing. “GNIP” continues to be my favorite name for a company to-date, because it’s contrarian to “PING” and that word is so overused and just totally sux. I know, I’m random!
Ahh STP hitting the web world
Congratulation! For some of the commenters above that are not clear about Gnip’s work, just go and read their blog. It explains very well what are they doing and also nicely reports about progress.
Keren
Met Eric and the gang of Gnip. Watch ‘em get a nice fat ROI on that $4.6M. Some friggin smart, hard working dudes. And if we’ve learned anything from this election, it’s that plumbers make enough to be in the highest tax bracket…get your snakes out.