N3twork raises $12 million from Kleiner Perkins to make interest graph "channels" around "affinity areas".
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Interest Graph!
Stashed in: Pinterest, Kleiner Perkins, @lizgannes, @jkraus, @daniellemorrill
Liz Gannes interviewed Ngmoco co-founder Neil Young on his new startup N3twork:
Because of ngmoco's focus on “affinity areas,” it created paid products that players truly cared about and wanted — rather than [Zynga's] flimsy virtual coins and gifts they felt pressured into spending money on, and guilty about buying after.
...
“When I come to the Web, I express interests and that manifests itself in pages and domains,” Young said at the N3twork office in San Francisco Wednesday. “I do a search, and I end up with 20 browser tabs open. Is there a better way to reorganize the Internet around interests that makes sense for these devices we use?”
For now, Young only wants to talk at the highest of levels — rather than coming down to earth with a specific product.
What he would say is that he’s making apps — for the phone and tablet at first, possibly the TV — that help users tune into channels associated with their interests that mash up all sorts of different media and information elements. To do this, N3twork aims to to “reindex” the Web based on user activity. And Young is also especially focused on building for touch interfaces.
To my ear, it sounds like N3twork would be a sort of personalized content dashboard — a little Pinterest, a little Bloomberg Terminal, a little TweetDeck. But Young didn’t want to go into details, and would only say that the first apps are supposed to be ready later this year.
$12 million is a lot of money to raise for a product with no specific details.
No matter how much I love the Interest Graph, I'm skeptical they will build anything interesting.
Same market as Sulia?
http://allthingsd.com/20101220/twitter-list-service-tlists-becomes-sulia-raises-3-5-million/
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-sulia-2012-11
What is the customer need?
3:14 PM Jun 06 2013