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KickApps was nominated as finalist in Streaming Media’s 2007 Readers’ Choice Awards for the work we did with VIBE Magazine on the Verses community. Ok, so it’s only a nomination, but we’re bullish.
Vote for the winner at the Streaming Media site.
As covered by our friends at Mashable, HBO recently launched a Social Media contest to promote their upcoming Justin Timberlake concert on 9/3. The KickApps-powered site invites anyone to upload a video about why they’re JT’s biggest fan. The winner will get a free 52″ HDTV, so do it yourself and tell a friend.
The site looks great, by the way. Check it out.
Update: KickApps’ founder, Eric Alterman, recently wrote about this on his blog. He brings up a great point: it’s a smart implementation in that it integrates a variety of Social Media elements in one: programmed video players, viral syndication through widgets, UGC, and social networking.
If you’ve visited our developer community KickDeveloper.com you’ll know Haylie, aka the DotcomCowgirl. Haylie is responsible for some very cool KickApps deployments, including Dee Snider’s House of Hair, Genesis Space, and the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association’s video site, RodeoUp.com, and has played an instrumental role in the success and growth of KickDeveloper.com as a resource for developers.
We invited Haylie to New York for a couple of days to share ideas and brainstorm about the direction we’re taking the platform in. While she was here she spent time with every part of the organization, a very valuable experience for all involved.
Also, we appointed Haylie as our very first POWER KICKER! [More to come on the Power Kicker program shortly.] Please join me in congratulating Haylie.
KickApps announced today that we’ve closed our Series B financing. This is a very significant milestone for the company, its employees, customers and partners. We’re in a great position to expand on our leadership in this rapidly growing market and to execute against our plans to deliver the best social media platform to publishers of all sizes, global brands, media and entertainment companies, and web developers around the world.
I want to thank everyone at KickApps, our customers, partners and investors for all their hard work and belief in our vision. I’m very excited about what the future holds for KickApps and look forward to delivering on the promise of Social Media to transform the way people engage and interact with publishers and each other.
Finally, I wanted to take a moment to clarify some confusion yesterday that was created around the amount of financing we raised due to incorrect and unconfirmed reporting by a financial publication. We raised $11 million in a round that was led by our newest investor, SoftBank Capital. Our existing investors Spark Capital, Prism VentureWorks and Jarl Mohn participated in the round as well. Santo, Woody, Jarl, Sara and now Jordan have been instrumental in our success and are a true A-Team in the boardroom. This new round will enable us to be even more aggressive in evolving our platform and also in making sure that everyone who is considering deploying social media on their sites uses KickApps.
Now, back to work…we’ve got some cool things coming around the corner.
VIBE has posted a slick compilation video on iTunes with the some of the finalists’ submissions. You can download it for free from the iTunes Store, or watch it via the embed at the bottom of this post. This is a great example of how publishers can leverage their community’s content across multiple platforms and channels. Good move, VIBE.
Note: Some of the videos are pretty explicit.
