FeedBurner does $7 million B round
Jeff Clavier has an interesting piece on FeedBurner's $7 million second round. This is also written up by Matt Marshall of SiliconBeat who has the word on their competitors.
Mobius Venture Capital was the lead investor. Also participating were new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and existing investors Portage Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The FeedBurner team, based in Chicago, includes Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. They created the alert service Spyonit.com back in 1999.
FeedBurner is an RSS/Atom post-processing service that enables web publishers to enhance their feeds. They are also conducting trials in connection with monetizing content through syndicating feeds with advertisements. Besides the technology itself, it gets interesting when you start talking about differentiating between free services and ad-based and premium offerings.
Content syndication and ad sales representative arrangements are standard industry tools that could make sense assuming the medium accepts it. The FeedBurner blog notes in this regard: "It's important to us that we proceed carefully and in a manner that's extensible and considerate of the different ways in which the market may evolve."
Cathy Kirkman is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California. Her practice focuses on intellectual