Topix + TechMeme + Digg.

News Aggregation Site Daylife Gets $8.3 Million Second Round

By Rafat Ali - Thu 21 Jun 2007 05:58 PM PST

Daylife, the much-hyped online news aggregation site which launched for public consumption in January but hasn’t gained much traction as of yet, has raised $8 million in second round of funding, according to SEC filings, picked up by PEHub. Investors include previous investor the New York Times Co., and new investors Arts Alliance Digital Ventures and Balderton Capital (f.k.a. Benchmark Capital Europe). A good review of the service is here, though the site has changed its layout and functionalities since the launch. If you want to know what has happened with Daylife since, read this good recent story on Metropolismag.com, ”Dreaming in Code”, about Jonathan Harris, the now-in-sabbatical design director for Daylife.

News Start-up Daylife Raises First Round; NYTCO Leads Investors

By Staci D. Kramer - Wed 01 Nov 2006 01:15 AM PST

You’re reading it here first … After a year of mostly veiled references and speculation fueled by the involvement of Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, Daylife, the distributed news platform founded by Upendra Shardanand, is about to see the light of day—funded by roughly twice as many investors as it has employees. The New York Times Company is leading the round of more than two dozen investors and is putting up nearly half the amount; the company isn’t planning to release a number when the formal announcement is made in the next few days but it’s likely in the low-mid millions range.
Other investors include Doug Chertok and Rich LeFurgy through Archer Martin; Ken Lerer, the Huffington Post; Azeem Azhar; Andy Sack, Judy’s Book; Mike Yavonditte, Quigo; and Scott Heiferman, co-founder, Meetup. Several investors—among them Craig Newmark, Mike Arrington, Dave Winer, John Borthwick – have made their involvement public in recent months. A number of first-round participants also were angel investors including Newmark, Borthwick and Mika Salmi, CEO, Atom Entertainment.
I saw an early demo of Daylife last month but a number of changes have been made since then so I’m not sure what made the final cut. The mission is to gather and organize news in ways that are most relevant to the user. That could be by event, topic, author, geography or other factors. Source pages that show what a journalist writes about or who is quoted are part of the mix.  RSS plays an important role. In an interview, Shardanand said the distributed platform—designed for use across multiple sites—will be open “to a degree” with options for revenue sharing and licensing for those doing a heavy volume. “Anyone can take what we’re building and add it to their own site … Obviously, we have to make some revenue.” He also hopes to attract more media investors.
– Daylife is to some degree a relevancy engine, which fits in with Shardanand’s earlier work as co-founder of Firefly, an early recommendation system sold to Microsoft in 1998. Firefly became the base for Microsoft Passport. Shardanand has also been at AOL and Time Warner. He sees opportunities in news because it hasn’t evolved as much technologically as areas like e-commerce.
– Beyond the main page, the site is automated. No edit staff although Shardanand describes it as “not strictly engineering driven.” Photos are being licensed.
– The site is slated for a very soft launch Monday while Daylife seeks initial feedback from a relatively small group.

News is Still a Wide Open Game

Daylife raises $8.3M in round 2.  There was a round 1?  Wasn’t social news over?  And does that mean investors are twice as dumb?  Not quite.

I was trying to think of what would constitute the perfect news product of the 21st century and I think I can sum it up with three things:

Topix + TechMeme + Digg.

But, there’s something missing, or rather, all of those things have something to be desired.   Oddly, none of those are search engines, and maybe fittingly so, because search engine will forever be slightly or very late to index new sources… maybe that’s why Digg, TechMeme and Topix work well in their own right.

- Admittedly, Topix was great until newspapers invested in it… after that it’s almost useless… but the premise / theory is great.  You almost think that it’s become the poster boy for “don’t accept money from old, old media.”

- TechMeme is useful and in many ways never ceases to amaze me, but then on some occasions I find it makes some of the best minds braindead because it becomes a downward spiral.  People don’t want to start writing original things because they just want to continue the “discussion.”  By the way, that term (discussion) should also be in the most obnoxious terms.

As a side note, one thing that is great about TechMeme is that it encourages editors to go back to old stories and add links to new ones, keeping old articles fresh in that regard.  Only TechMeme encourages you to that as a publisher, and for that it deserves some credit.  Admittedly, few editors will admit they do that, because on the surface it seems like you’re chasing links back, but it does add context and relevancy to older posts so it’s worth doing it, even if TechMeme won’t index you all the time.  I’m curious if Gabe realized that or sought to do that.  Better yet, I’ll ask him.

- Digg is a waste of time in many ways, but it’s a fascinating concept.  If it wasn’t hijacked by a dozen 12 year olds, it would do wonders.

All to say, if I had, say $1M to venture into a social news arena, I’d do something along those lines.

For the record, we have a social bookmarking/news tool ready to go, but we’re so busy with WatchMojo.com, the blogs, the search, and of course StreetMojo.com that I have not yet even dove into social news, and probably won’t… but as I see it, news and the entire information challenge is still wide open.

What do you think is missing from that recipe?

Daylife Raises $8M in Second Round Funding

June 21, 2007 — 08:20 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole

Daylife, the online news aggregator site, has raised $8 million in a second round of funding. Investors include Arts Alliance Digital Ventures and Balderton Capital. Existing investor New York Times Co. returned for further investment in this round.

The service offers a way to search content that’s been chosen by Daylife to be included on the site, and bookmark it internally for later reference. Content is broken down into more searchable items such as quotes, images, and articles, and related content is provided for more browsing opportunities as well. Additional information such as time lines are also made available for a particular search. Daylife launched its public beta earlier this year, but has not gained much traction as of yet.

Unlike most aggregator sites, Daylife isn’t much of a community. Your profile consists of a list displaying those items you’ve starred, and there is no way to submit items you’d like to include in Daylife’s catalog, though you may suggest a publication. The purpose of its site is to offer all premium content to readers, from a range of sources, incorporating different perspectives. Having a way to make this content more shareable with other networks via widgets, or services such as Pageflakes, would provide more value as well.

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