ANGEL STREET CAPITAL INVESTS IN FUNDATION, INC.

Angel Street Capital recently closed on an investment in Fundation, Inc‘s convertible note round.  Fundation provides on-line commercial loans of $50,000 – $250,000.  Fundation has developed an automated credit decision engine and will use the Internet to target its offering to select industries and geographic areas.  This is not a peer-to-peer lending model but rather a fund that will deploy capital utilizing Fundation’s platform.  The platform will launch in the 4th quarter.

ANGEL STREET CAPITAL INVESTS IN iWEB

Angel Street Capital recently completed an investment in iWeb as part of a going private transaction.  iWeb had previously been traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange  (TSX-V: IWB).  iWeb has been providing hosting infrastructure with is shared web hosting, dedicated servers, managed hosting and colocation services for over a decade.

Founded by Martin Leclair and Eric Chouinard in October 1996 and headquartered in Montreal since 1998, the company has enjoyed steady growth since its inception, currently employing more that 170 hosting specialists and operating four data centers in the Montreal, Canada area.  Today iWeb is one of the largest web hosts and Internet hosting infrastructure providers in Canada. 

ANGEL STREET CAPITAL INVESTS IN GOLOCAL

Angel Street Capital recently completed an investment in Go Local, LLC, the parent of Go Local Providence, LLC.

GoLocal24 is creating the next model for local digital news and information .

By providing high value local content, GoLocal24 is creating a highly efficient, scalable and highly monetizable mid-sized market model for next generation media.

In GoLocal24’s first market Providence, RI, GoLocalProv.com http://GoLocalProv.com>  is the “go to” local Web experience that breaks the biggest local stories – sports, high school sports – GAME ON, weather, news, politics, arts, entertainment – and it allows users to go as deep as they wish. In less than ten months, the platform reached 30% market share.

Leveraging branded, credible, and respected contributors, GoLocal creates the content, social experience and advertising opportunity that is unmatched. Information is delivered through multimedia, written, and video platforms and, thus GoLocal24 is creating the model for local-content media.

ANGEL STREET INVESTS IN CMP.LY, INC.

Angel Street Capital has invested in CMP.LY’s Series Seed Preferred Stock offering.  Tech Crunch coverage of the CMP.LY  funding can be viewed at http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/cmply-raises-750k-seed-round/

CMP.LY’s patent-pending system of iconic compliance tools is the first, and only, commercial solution to address the unique challenges of disclosure in social media. CMP.LY codes and badges provide clear disclosure on their own and also link back to complete disclosures as required for regulatory needs and documented best practices. CMP.LY makes it easy for marketers to include the disclosures required by the FTC and the OFT in sponsored blog posts, Facebook updates, and even Tweets.  The company is developing similar tools to allow companies to comply with FDA, SEC/FINRA and other regulations. The company also provides tools to document and report on compliance and measure campaign-specific ROI.

Angel Street Capital Invests in DijiPOP, LLC

Today DiJiPOP announced that it has secured an additioanal round of equity financing in the amount of $1 Million.  Angel Street participated in this round which was led by a fellow angel investor William Cesare.  DiJiPOP is headquartered in Rhode Island and was launched out of the start up incubator program Betaspring in 2009.  Angel Street also had invested in Betaspring.   DiJiPOP helps e-commerce retailers better manage ad space on their site, by providing a highly targeted automated solution that easily embeds into the retailer’s site.  The new money raised will be used for sales and marketing expansion, technology development and creating of a client services division.

We were drawn to several positive aspects of DiJiPOP including its experienced management team and advertising technology platform that results in a recurring revenue model.  We are quite familiar with ad platforms having developed one for Internet radio while we owned Ando Media, LLC.

VIDEO – DAWN OF A NEW AGE

As the Wall Street Journal reported today (11/22) for the first time since the dawn of Cable TV, the number of U.S. households paying for TV subscriptions is falling.  Between the first and third quarter of this year 335,000 subscribers were lost.  The debate whether people are “cutting the cord” will continue until a trend is established.  Cable TV advertising revenue has been fairly healthy especially when compared to other media sectors.

We are going to see a number of turbulent years as the video model is reinvented.  Consumers now have a number of options for consuming video via the internet.  From my own experience when our family wants to watch a movie we no longer rely on Cable (we still do subscribe) but access Netflix through my son’s Xbox.  Cox is the cable provider for the State of Rhode Island and the lack of movie  titles on demand is startling.  Although we have a DVR box I just don’t have the time to figure out when a movie may be scheduled on a channel and record it.  It is easy to see how cable is losing out to other providers.

There are a number of competing services such as Hulu, Google TV, Netflix and Boxee that allow users to watch movies and TV shows.  There has been press surrounding content creators not allowing Google TV to distribute its programming.  In the end the content providers control which service will win out.  The same thing happened to audio with Apple getting the rights to sell most music titles (and now the Beatles too).  Consumers have spoken and they want to access content when and where they want whether is through their TV, computer or mobile device.

We are in the dawn of a new video era, one that has previously been envisioned but is now actually occurring.