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Tuesday, September 26, 2006
$10 million in venture capital to help Wallop build social network
Wallop, the social networking startup that was spun out of Microsoft Research Labs earlier this year, has landed $10 million in venture capital that it will use to create a new competitor to MySpace, Friendster and Facebook.
Investors in the San Francisco company, which is presenting at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego this week, include Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Consor Capital. Microsoft also retains an equity stake in the company, which is led by former Microsoft Corp. employees Karl Jacob and Sean Kelly.
In an interview, Jacob said that Wallop is introducing a new way for 18- to 25-year-olds to "express themselves online."
"Wallop is a full-blown social network with even more features than what we have seen to date," Jacob said. "It completely integrates photo sharing, music sharing, blogging and all of the things we have become used to into one platform."
Unlike other social networking services, users of Wallop will be able to participate only if they are invited by another member. It also does not plan to make money from advertising. Instead, the Flash-based system allows people to buy games, animated backgrounds, slide shows and videos and then add them to their customized Web pages. Those materials -- known as "mods" -- will be sold for 99 cents to $4, Jacob said.
Wallop plans to split revenue from the content sales with its development partners, with Wallop taking about 30 percent.
"The big idea here is that self-expression has been driving a lot of Internet innovation, from Web pages to blogs to now social networks," said Jacob, who previously led Keen.com and Cloudmark. Jacob worked at Microsoft from 1997 to 1999 after selling Dimension X to Microsoft.
Kelly, who serves as chief technology officer at Wallop, previously worked as a software developer in the social computing group at Microsoft Research.
Wallop is one of a number of companies to be spun out of Microsoft Research in recent months. Others include Redmond-based Inrix and Dublin, Ireland-based Softedge-Systems
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