ANGEL STREET CAPITAL INVESTS IN PLACESTER

Angel Street Capital, LLC recently participated in Placester, Inc’s Series Seed Preferred equity raise.  Placester, located in Cambridge, MA, participated in the TechStars Boston 2011 program.  Placester is an Ad Network for the real estate industry and it’s platform provides value to both advertisers and publishers by enabling the ordering, serving, and fulfillment of ads in the real estate vertical.

For advertisers Placester’s platform serves as a hub to plan, purchase, and monitor advertising across multiple vertical-specific and traditional publishers offering increased ROI through access and analytics. For publishers the platform is a complete solution for order management and scheduling as well as ad serving. Placester’s technology allows publishers to reduce operation costs while improving pricing through data and access.

The founders of Placester are Frederick Townes, the CTO of Mashable, and Matt Barba, a real estate veteran.

INTERNET RADIO UPDATE

We just returned from the NAB Convention in Las Vegas having attended RAIN Summit and numerous meetings with industry leaders and firms involved in Internet radio.  2011 is shaping up to be the year of Internet radio especially given the IPO filing by Pandora. However there are some new partnerships and entries on the services side of the business which I have highlighted below:

• Liquid Compass has announced a partnership with ADSWIZZ where ADSWIZZ will provide ad insertion and impression measurement services for Liquid Compass customers.  ADSWIZZ is a Belgium based company that has been operating in Europe and has been eyeing entry into the U.S. market.
• ABACAST has secured new funding and has launched a new Ad insertion system, Abacast Clarity. Additional partnerships have been announced with firms to assist in monetizing station ad inventory including Citadel Media and AdLarge.  ABACAST also provides audience measurement services.
• A new company providing audience measurement has launched in the U.S., Touchcast.  Touchcast based in Belgium has launched it Casterstats product.
• Ando Media (now known as Triton Digital) has secured Media Rating Council (“MRC”) accreditation for its Internet radio measurement service, Webcast Metrics
• Arbitron has announced that it is going to provide audience measurement services for Internet Radio

These developments should lead to a very interesting year in the Internet Radio industry.  Given Arbitron’s dominance in measuring terrestrial radio it would be hard to bet against whatever platform they release not being the eventual winner.  Will they buy or build?

Ando Media (a company we founded in 2004) has been the dominant ad insertion and audience measurement company serving the Internet radio industry.  Triton faces heightened competition on the ad insertion side of their business and now audience measurement as well.  As in all industries, now that the market has grown competitors are emerging.

Angel Street Capital Invests in DijiPOP, LLC

Today DiJiPOP announced that it has secured an additioanal round of equity financing in the amount of $1 Million.  Angel Street participated in this round which was led by a fellow angel investor William Cesare.  DiJiPOP is headquartered in Rhode Island and was launched out of the start up incubator program Betaspring in 2009.  Angel Street also had invested in Betaspring.   DiJiPOP helps e-commerce retailers better manage ad space on their site, by providing a highly targeted automated solution that easily embeds into the retailer’s site.  The new money raised will be used for sales and marketing expansion, technology development and creating of a client services division.

We were drawn to several positive aspects of DiJiPOP including its experienced management team and advertising technology platform that results in a recurring revenue model.  We are quite familiar with ad platforms having developed one for Internet radio while we owned Ando Media, LLC.