In a posting on their company website, OpenX says that Jon Miller the former CEO of AOL has joined them as Chairman. Miller brings with him a wealth of experience from working with advertisers and publishers. OpenX (formerly OpenAds) boasts a number of tier one investors including First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures and Accel Partners.
Accel Partners have closed a $15.5million series B financing round for Openads, the Open Source Ad Server people. Existing investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also participated. The company will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team to support its large publisher community, which is now using Openads to deliver billions of ads daily in over 100 countries around the world.
Openads lets publishers take control of their advertising, providing simple, powerful and independent tools to schedule, manage and track online campaigns. The software also supports a broad range of ad formats and advertiser types (including direct advertisers and ad networks such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! and Advertising.com). The new hosted version will make it even easier and faster for publishers to make more money from online advertising by eliminating the need to run the software on their own servers.
Jamendo has been awarded ‘Luxemburgish start-up of the year’ by iT-One ex-aequo with Conostix. Not exatly earth shattering I know, but it’s a start!
Jamendo is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music. The artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. In a nutshell, they allow you to download, remix and share their music freely. It’s a “Some rights reserved” agreement, perfectly suited for the new century. Jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation.
Founded May 2004. Shareholders are the Founders, Kratz, Gerard and Zimmer, and Mangrove Capital Partners.
,
