Infotrade

Online ticketing company Eventbrite  has released  a number of new stats for 2012, including that the company hit $600 million in gross ticket sales for the year. To put that in perspective, in 2011, the company sold $400 million worth of tickets, which is double the $207 million it did in 2010. As announced earlier last year, Eventbrite also passed $1 billion in ticket sales total. In 2012 alone, 36 million tickets were sold via Eventbrite. Tickets were sold in 179 countries and the service now supports seven languages. The most popular events posted on the platform are conferences, followed by classes, fundraisers, concerts and social events. Last year, the company launched its  “At the Door” iPad app,  which lets people pay for events if they show up at the door without having previously paid. Also, it released a credit card reader that works with the app to let ticket sellers collect payments at the door. Last year, Eventbrite raised a $50 million rou...

“Smart parking” platform  Streetline  just announced that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by  True Ventures , with participation from new investors Qualcomm Ventures and Citi, as well as past backers Sutter Hill Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners, and Fontinalis Partners. The company has now raised a total of $40 million, and it says it recently obtained a $25 million credit facility from Citi, too. Streetline’s technology helps drivers find empty parking spaces, while also allowing cities, universities, and parking-lot owners to learn more about their parking occupancy “at every second of the day.” It uses sensors installed next to parking spaces to determine whether a space is empty, then delivers that data to apps, including  the free Parker app for consumers  and other products designed for city planners and parking facility operators. It’s a compelling idea, but also one that might be ambitious to a fault, e...

The median size of angel deals rose to $640,000 in the third quarter of last year — a five-quarter high — as startups looked for more runway amid a bottleneck for Series A rounds. Silicon Valley Bank  partnered with data company CB Insights and the Angel Resource Institute to survey different angel groups about activity in the fall of last year. The report didn’t provide any data on the overall volume on angel investments, but it did have information on average round sizes and valuations. Early-stage valuations remained stable with the average at around a $2.6 million pre-money valuation (or before investors put in capital). There are a couple reasons that angel round sizes got bumped up late last year, said Carrie Merritt, who heads public relations for Silicon Valley Bank. One is that there are more health care and enterprise deals, which are more capital intensive. Another reason is that founders and angels are realizing that they need more financial runway if there ...

Forget Big Brother (or at least tuck that paranoia away for now). It's Big Retailer you should be worried about watching you. And I'm not talking about those security cameras you pass on your way in and out of the big box store around the corner. That's kids' stuff to retailers in 2013. Today's retailers want to know you so well that they're investing in technology that will let them track your movements from one location to another -- and yet another -- so they can see what you're buying and where. The impetus behind their interest in your every move is to gain such deep understanding of consumer behavior that they can fine tune inventory, pricing, and merchandising to their most-optimized states. Think of Target, a poster child for retail analytics, and its Guest ID program I mentioned in my post from earlier this week,  Retailers Want Their Way With You . Enabling this technology is location analytics, which combines a consumer's credit card ...

Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer With eFuneral.com, Mike Belsito, front, and Bryan Chaikin hope to change the way we pick a funeral home. They're launching their Internet-based company from offices high above Cleveland's PlayhouseSquare. Mike Belsito first immersed himself in the business of death a year and a half ago, when a cousin died unexpectedly. As the family absorbed the news, Belsito's father asked him if he could go online and find out how best to make funeral arrangements in Parma. The Internet savvy 30-year-old, who rarely goes out to dinner without consulting Yelp.com, envisioned a web-based trove of information. Instead, he said, he came back to his family with little more than a general listing of area funeral homes. "As important of a life decision as it was, and for the money we spent, it bothered me that we just sort of picked one," Belsito said. From that sense of inadequacy emerged eFuneral, an online funeral planning service that ...

ROI stands for Return on Investment. Period. If we talk about Social Media ROI in this post, we mean the return on investment of the business (predominantly marketing) investments in social channels, networks, strategies and tactics made to achieve predefined goals. The micro-level, the macro-level, the integrated level, the campaign level, the program level, the whatnot level: anything goes. Let’s talk about social media ROI from the Marketing ROI perspective. Because, in fact  Marketing ROI or ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment), is not something new . It might be new to you soon because it’s increasingly used as execs want to know what is the output of your input. Return. And Investment, right? But there is more: the social media ROI question keeps people busy and it’s time to get to the bottom, the facts and the examples, also in our  LinkedIn Group . Not because we want to join the eternal debates. But because we see  more and more execs – finally – asking...