NEWS: Facebook App-maker Loomia Raises $5M Series A

Michael Learmonth April 2, 2008

Social applications maker Loomia raised a $5 million series A round led by VC firm Asset Management Company and joined by strategic investors NBC Peacock Ventures and Telefonica. Loomia's main product is a Facebook app called SeenThis?, which allows users to see what their various friends are reading. The idea here is that a reader of the Wall Street Journal might want to know the stories their friends find interesting, in addition to links served up by behavioral and contextual targeting. 

Loomia launched the application in January with the WSJ, NBC Universal and CNET. The company shares revenue with publishers from the additional traffic from social networks generated by the application. CEO Dave McMurtry said Loomia would use the funds to build additional products and to expand the reach of SeenThis? on other social network platforms.

Ed: Custom canal for publishers. Publishers install tag, users install app, newsfeed to grow.

Attributor turns plagiarized content into money for publishers, raises $12 million

Attributor is showing online publishers how to use plagiarism of their content by other sites to their advantage. 

It offers a service that a publisher track how its articles, images and videos are being used on other sites, without its permission. Then, it offers ways for these publishers to contact the offending parties and request links back to their content (which, in turn, causes their pages to appear higher in search results, leading to more traffic). Or, it helps them contact the perpetrator and ask for a share of the ad revenue gained from the plagiarized content. Or, send a take-down request.

The Redwood City, Calif. company has been in a roll. It was in private beta with two of the largest publishers in the world, Reuters and the Associated Press, until the end of last year. It has since come out of private beta, and signed up some more big-name clients,including Conde Nast, The Canadian Press, Associated Content, and others.