Loomia snags $1.5M to recommend news, products

October 3, 2009 | Camille Ricketts | Comments | |

Loomia, maker of a recommendation engine that tells people what news to read and which products to buy, has raised $1.5 million in debt and rights, according to a filing with the SEC. Asset Management, Peacock Equity Fund and Telefonica have contributed to the San Francisco-based company before. It has raised about $6.5 million to date.

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About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

With GreenBeat 2009, VentureBeat's all-star conference on all things Smart Grid, coming up in November, Camille will be expanding coverage of this exciting space. Stay up to date by following @greenbeat2009 on Twitter or by becoming a fan of the event on Facebook here.

  • Voodoo
    Loomia's biggest sales todate come from it's investors. The day it's EBITDA positive then put out a press release.

    This space is too crowded and an open source version is on the horizon. Site recommendations are a commodity now. The real value add is ad optimization and integration within SEM and site analytics. Umm and omniture has that locked. Again it's not about the sales lift at the page it's about the integration of all click stream and key word inputs both on and off site to optimize landing pages, SEM programs, email, affiliates, behavioral retargeting etc.

    The rec space a la Loomia and Baynote is dead as a doornail. Even top tier players like Rich Relevance an MyBuys are really barking up the wrong money tree. Players like ValueClick and Omniture and Efficient Frontier and Dotomi have the right models and technology. They recognize that it's about site behavioral analytics plus key word inputs. Blending the dashboards to provide power users the capabilities to run a variety of queries and augment online marketing campaigns in real time is the actual customer need. Not "site recommendations."

    Whoopee.