Sustainable Venture Capital

VOLUME I, ISSUE 1 – 04-05-2001
NEWSLETTER

1) Warner Bros. to Acquire Rotten Tomatoes Owner Flixster
2) TaskRabbit Raises $5M for Nationwide Expansion
3) P2P Learning Startup Skillshare Gets $550,000 From Founder Collective and SV Angel
4)Enecysy raises 45 milion USD

1) Warner Bros. to Acquire Rotten Tomatoes Owner Flixster

The company says the deal will allow it to advance digital ownership of content.
NEW YORK — Time Warner’s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group on Wednesday said it has agreed to acquire Flixster, the movie discovery service with over 25 million worldwide users per month that also includes film review site Rotten Tomatoes.
Under its new owner, Flixster will expand its services beyond movie discovery to enable digital content ownership and delivery across connected digital devices.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the deal was expected to cost TW $60 million-$90 million.
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group said it will use the Flixster brand and its technical expertise to launch “a number of initiatives to grow digital content ownership,” including a recently announced consumer application called Digital Everywhere.
The studio-agnostic application “will be the ultimate destination for consumers to organize and access their entire digital library from anywhere on the device of their choice, as well as to share recommendations and discover new content,” the company said.
“Driving the growth of digital ownership is a central, strategic focus for Warner Bros.,” said Kevin Tsujihara, president, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group and office of the president, Warner Bros. Entertainment. “The acquisition of Flixster will allow us to advance that strategy and promote initiatives that will help grow digital ownership.”
Under the terms of the deal, Flixster will continue to operate independently.
The Flixster team will stay in San Francisco, and the Rotten Tomatoes team will continue to work independently from Los Angeles.
“We’re excited that Warner was willing to make this kind of commitment to a leading independent consumer platform,” said Joe Greenstein, co-founder and CEO of Flixster. “We look forward to working with Warner as well as each of the other studios to innovate and build products that users will love.”

2) TaskRabbit Raises $5M for Nationwide Expansion

Truth be told, the Horatio Alger connection breaks down pretty quickly from there. The food Busque needed was for her dog, Kobe, and she had plenty of money to pay for it. But it was a cold and dark winter night, and she just didn’t feel like leaving the house. Irritated, Busque thought about how other people in her neighborhood were probably already planning to go to the store that night. Wouldn’t it be cool if she could just outsource the dog food run to one of them, for a small fee?
In a “flash of inspiration,” Busque started sketching plans for an online marketplace where neighbors could arrange to do simple tasks for each other. Within a few months, she had quit her full-time job as a software engineer at IBM, and the company now known as TaskRabbit was officially born.
In the three years since then, Busque’s leap of faith has paid off. TaskRabbit announced Wednesday it has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Shasta Ventures. The startup, which currently brokers tasks in San Francisco and Boston, will use the money to expand its reach to other metro areas nationwide, Busque told me in an interview this week, parts of which you can watch in the video below.
TaskRabbit works essentially as a two-way marketplace: People who need help with tasks, or “senders,” negotiate prices on TaskRabbit with people who have free time to complete these tasks, or “runners.” TaskRabbit is set apart from part-time job finding services like Craigslist’s et cetera section by several layers designed to add security. TaskRabbit runners are vetted by a comprehensive background check and all TaskRabbit transactions are processed by the company’s proprietary payment system, which helps protect both senders and runners from scams.
Because users have grown to trust TaskRabbit’s platform, today the company’s purview extends well beyond dog food pickup. The price of the average TaskRabbit deal is now $45, Busque tells me, and the company currently facilitates thousands of tasks per month. TaskRabbit does not disclose its revenue, but Busque said the company collects an average commission of around 15 percent on each deal it brokers.
“We’re really empowering people to sell their free time and their special skills and services,” Busque said. “I feel like we’ve really only scratched the surface of what TaskRabbit can be used for.”
TaskRabbit has already become a household name in certain San Francisco circles. I know people who use it to outsource everything from picking up their dry cleaning to waiting in line for the latest iPhone. As it expands to more geographic locations, the company could well become an eBay-for-services, much like Etsy is an eBay-for-crafts.

3) P2P Learning Startup Skillshare Gets $550,000 From Founder Collective and SV Angel

Peer-to-peer education startup Skillshare, which just launched in April, raised a $550,000 angel round, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the New York City startup include Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, David Tisch, and Scott Heiferman.
Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding. People can charge for the classes. “Our business model is similar to Eventbrite,” says co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn. “We take 15% off each ticket purchase. We made revenue on the first day that we launched.” Karnjanaprakorn used to be head of product at Hot Potato (since acquired by Facebook), and co-founder Malcolm Ong was the product manager at OMGPOP.
The site is focussing on classes about tech startups, food and drink, and arts & crafts to start out. For instance, Chris Dixon of Founder Collective is going to teach a class on How To Raise Your First Round for $15 (with proceeds going to charity).
The founders are curating the classes to start out in order to attract the right kind of people and define the culture of the site. They are getting some advice from fellow New York startups. “The guys at Kickstarter have given a lot of advice on how to build our community, especially in the early days of the startup,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “Right now, we don’t allow private one-on-one classes, tutoring sessions, or test preparation services. While we think these classes are great, they don’t really fit into our community as we’re going after the ‘creative, unique, interesting and skill-based’ classes.”
The goal of Skillshare is to make education relevant and more current to what people need to learn. “While it’s great to learn multi-variable calculus or the economics of China during school,,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “What about the other 99% of skills that will never see the light of day? By the time a college starts teaching “Mastery in Online Community Management”, it will become so outdated and irrelevant. Traditional education will never catch up to the skills needed in the market today.”

4) Enecysy raises 45 milion USD

Enecsys, closed a £25 million ($41 million) series B round which the company plans to use to take its solar microinverter technology to more international markets including Canada and the U.S.
Solar microinverters convert the DC power that’s produced by solar panels into AC power, that can be either be used on-site, or sent back to the electrical grid. The Enecsys microinverters are designed for residential use and smaller, commercial solar installations instead of for huge, utility-scale solar farms.
Climate Change Capital led the round with an investment of £11 million ($18 million) in Enecsys. The remaining £14 million ($23 million) came from the company’s existing backers: Wellington Partners, NES Partners and Good Energies. To date, the company has raised about $55.3 million in venture capital.
According to a company press statement, Enecsys’ solar inverters are: “installed on the rail behind solar modules, either one inverter per solar module or one for every two modules.” The technology is meant to help the owners of installed, solar PV systems to: monitor and optimize the performance of their solar panels, remotely via web apps; and to harvest more power from the panels than alternative technologies like DC wiring around an installation would. The company claims it can harvest 5 to 20 percent more energy than a traditional set-up.
In a market that’s increasingly commoditized, a huge number of microinverter companies have attained significant venture funding, including: Enphase, Petra Solar, SolarBridge and DirectGrid. The startups also compete against incumbent, global players like SMA Solar, which makes inverters and software that help optimize the performance of both solar and wind systems, and Transform Solar, which makes and installs a wide range of solar technology. Only a few can lead the market, of course.

Prosumerzen Intelligence Team

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SWF at : http://prosumerzen.net/2011/05/03/swf-world-info-monitor/
Green World at : http://prosumerzen.net/2011/05/04/green-world-info-monitor-2/
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