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Contextual Content Aggregation Firm OneSpot Gets $4.2 Million Funding

OneSpot, an Austin, Texas-based online contextual content aggregation firm, has received $4.2 million in funding in its first round, led by Silver Creek Ventures, it said. The company, founded in 2006, previously raised about $1 million in its angel funding, including from Mike Maples (former EVP at Microsoft) and Pat Horner (co-founder and former COO of Perot Systems), both of whom participated in this round as well.

OneSpot’s white-label service allows publishers to show automatic related links from third-party sources next to their stories or pages (using widgets), much like, say, Techmeme does automatic content aggregation on tech/internet topics. Customers include WSJ.com, MarketWatch and SFGate.com. Some examples of its implementation are here. Competition is fierce in this category, with other startups such as AggregateKnowledge, Inform.com, Daylife, Outbrain and many others offering similar contextualized news aggregation services for publishers, though each with its own twists.

Founder and CEO Matt Cohen was previously a partner with Austin VC firm G-51 Capital, but more interestingly was SVP of ops and CTO for New Century Network, the newspaper online ad consortium of yore that closed down in 1998. He also co-founded HoustonChronicle.com in 1994.

Feb 9, 2009 4:23 AM ET
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Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital, onespot, silver creek ventures

  • Rafat, thanks for the coverage! 

    OneSpot as you say takes a different tack than the companies you mentioned - providing aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with an editor's layer that allows easy curation of the results. 

    OneSpot is meant to allow a much broader audience to practice sophisticated link journalism (of the style of your own post, I might add) - where OneSpot focuses on finding the content and the editor focuses on adding editorial voice: context and commentary.

    The idea was certainly informed by my experience starting chron.com (one of the first online newspaper websites) and New Century Network. early in my career, but equally so by 5 years in venture capital.  I'll be sure to write about that in a future post on the OneSpot blog at onespot.com….

  • jenkins

    sounds like a terrible "me-too" idea.

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