Today I'm going to mention a couple of notable start-ups that have recently received funding. Congrats to them. It's tough out there. I'd love to hear your opinions on these start ups too.
Lijit Networks makes a search engine that works within your own social network. You add a Lijit search "wijit" to your web page or blog and give it some feeds from the social networking services that you use, from your blog, from your friends' blogs, or from blogs or other sources of information that you follow. So, when someone searches for something, it returns targeted search results from those selected sources.
Plus, if you do a search using Lijit from my site and then click on a link that takes you to the content on one of the sites in my social network, it does what's called a "research" from the "Lijit wijit" on the target site as well. This is basically an automatic search on the same keyword, but across the target site's social network.
It's sort of like asking a friend a question and having that friend tell you what they think and then point you to other friends who might have more information. And then you ask each of them the same question and you get their answers too. And so on...'
In addition to the nice functionality, the "wijit" itself is highly customizable and fits nicely into just about any website. Installation is also a breeze and they even automate most of the process for popular sites out there. Oh, and did I mention that there are analytics for both site visits and search already built in? Awesome.
Lijit recently received their series C financing of $7.1 million in funding led by the Foundry Group.
Linksify is an address book service that can synchronize multiple contact lists including those on some mobile devices (iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile device for now). It also has the ability to present different "faces" to different people. You can put people in your contact list into three catagories: acquaintances, personal contacts, and work contacts. These different faces are called "webcards". You can present different information about yourself as well as share different contact lists on each of these "webcards".
In addition to basic contact information, it also can provide links to your presence on to many of the popular social network sites and blogs.
One interesting feature of the service is the "passkey". It's a code that you can select and share with individuals or groups which provides a pre-authorization for that user to connect with you on the service.
Linksify recently received $500,000 in funding from an angel investor, Jon Fisher.
Check out these companies. Let me know what you think about them. What other up-and-coming start ups do you see out there?
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