Udorse, a New York-based startup currently in stealth, has raised a $500,000 round of seed funding from Founders Fund. Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel will be serving on the company’s board of directors.
At this point we know very little about the startup. It was founded by Trevor Austin and Geoffrey Lewis (pictured below), both of whom were previously employed at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital. The company plans to launch its service in private beta some time this summer. As for what it actually plans to do, Lewis provided us with the following (admittedly vague) description:
“We believe that recent trends are more than fads, and that they demand a
fundamentally new way for users to connect with brands across platforms.”
That’s not much to go on, but it sounds like Udorse will somehow play on the growing interaction between users and brands on Twitter and Facebook (given the name, users will probably be somehow endorsing their favorite brands). Whether or not Udorse is an entirely new service or one that builds on these existing platforms remains to be seen. We’ll be keeping an eye out for these guys over the next few months.
Startups in NY never succeed. I hope these guys do something awesome.
They got the money…was easy once they already know Thiel…
@McCswine, what a troll, very funny comment though
It reminded me of a little startup called DoubleClick, I think it was bought in cash by Google for the small amount of $3.1 billion, total lack of success
What about boston startups?
start ups in NY usually end up the dead pool. I hope these guys come up with something cool/awesome.
All startups usually end up in the deadpool… NYC no worse than anywhere else.
In fact, the failure rate is probably lower here, b/c there’s less VC financing, so we tend to try and make stuff that people want to buy right away. Maybe less big wins, but *way* less losers.
Goodluck.
Like hope that UDorse doesn’t go the way of UDonkey
Met one of the co-founders last week. They seem like a very sharp team with very solid backers.
I would bet on a personal brand endorsement platform that allow users to publicly endorse the brands they love and establish a real time 1:1 communication channel to obtain rewards…
I know a West Coast -based company that has the exact same concept.
Hmmm… distributed brand ownership… own what udorse?
Okay, here’s my guess…. use social networks such as Facebook to create weighted trust graphs between people, and then use these to provide recommendations based on endorsements in your trust network.
Yep, endorse your favorite brands. Didn’t Facebook try something like this with Beacon?? Hard to get a biz model working around users overtly endorsing brands (other than music). But could be something new that makes it work.
name cleverness implies that it’s user based endorsements of products. That works well if the user is a key influencer, but not so much if they’re a bunch of nobodys.
The classic model is that key influencers ( movie stars, rock stars, etc ) get a bunch of free shwag and *hopefully* they wear it to an event, there by creating buzz for whatever product they are wearing.
It could be interesting to be able to accurately determine to which demographic a specific twitter user is a key influencer and then broker schwag from companies to the twitter user.
If they were smart, they would implement some of the anti-payola techniques used by radio stations. (eg. I’m going to give you 10 pieces of schwag and for $N dollars, I want you to twitter about 7 of them, any 7 you want )
Interesting idea, but I don’t think that long term there will be nearly as large a number of key influencers to target, and/or that the unit price of products successfully shilled will be large enough to justify a large enough commission to keep them out of the dead pool.
where twitter marketing is really successful is food, or some other impulse shopping experience. at the SD twitter meetup it’s actually amusing how quickly people respond to sushi dinner tweets.
If someone gave me a free t-shirt, I would wear it in my facebook profile
Most people don’t care about brands. Most people have enough brain cells to realize that all these plans are aiming to separate them from their money.
Most people understand that the brands don’t give a crap about them and only care that stupid sheep sell the product for them and give them their hard-earned money.
@cats
naw man…you should be able to like…punch in numbers…into your mobile device…and like…be able to do real time voice chat. sort of like skype, but without the computer…
even better…maybe a real time embedded device that works the same way, but permanently installed at your home location…function specific devices are the future!!!
If the technology exists why not. It will be pretty hard to do realtime voice chat over mobile devices but harder things have been done.
Voice chat over the internet? weirdo…thats star trek stuff. I think there is potential for a simple text message, it shouldn’t be hard to do. Well the idea is out there for the grabbing, I’m just an idea person.
just in case noone got it, i was joking…what I described was making a cellphone call, and a landline…just using bizspeak to describe it.
i would think that this company would partner with facebook connect and its payment platform. so when you are buying something using the two facebook apps on another site, a udorse button will ask you if you would like to endorse the product to your social graph. you will get some reward for doing so or if your friends buys through the udorse link provided in their feed.
I’m pretty sure they will allow you to comment on the purchase or the product before you publish it to the social graph.
A cool NY startup would be a service that allows you to text a message to another phone and/or mobile device. Instead of having to call someone, you will be able to actually text a message.
What do you think?
Your idea shows promise. If there’s a way to charge users a 20X markup and disrupt every classroom in the country, we might be interested.
- AT&T
You the User Endorse these products and use our “platform” to tell your friends about it.
I just bought a classic Casio ((insert Udorse link in Casio)) watch… I love it. I endorse it.
is it me or is their logo phallic in nature?
uummm it was fine…..now I can’t see anything else
peter thiel is gay, so he may have approved the logo
“is it me or is their logo phallic in nature?”
BWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Logo kinda looks like “Odors”.
Also udorse could be:
u-worse
udorks
My guess is this:
You sign up to their service to stop advertising products for free on twitter and facebook. Wish I’d get paid a cut for all the traffic I give to Apple, Google and Yahoo every time one endorses their brands.
Maybe they figured out a way to pay back for the publicity people give to all the brands, U Endorse, U get paid for that.
Maybe the favicon is an indication? looks like a dialog sitting on top of a page.
these guys a re definitely a facebook connect/fb connect for iphone integrated type of service. they knew where Peter’s interests lie and they’re pushing forward towards that direction, and secured themselves a cool $500k seed.
If i had the cash to invest, I would. I used to work with the CEO he was a star on the fast track at P&G but scrappy and more driven than anyone i’ve met.