HomeAway, Inc., the world’s leading online vacation rental marketplace, today announced it has completed a $250 million equity capital raise, a record investment that reinforces the company’s leadership position in travel’s fastest-growing segment.

Led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and with existing investors Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and Redpoint Ventures, this financing represents the largest minority investment of a U.S. Internet company in the last eight years, according to Venture Source.

HomeAway^(R) will use proceeds from the investment to fund additional strategic investments, eliminate all debt and provide working capital for increased marketing and promotions. The company will also introduce a share repurchase program for certain shareholders including tenured employees.

“We are very pleased to secure this major round of funding, particularly during the current financial crisis that is increasingly restricting access to capital for many companies. And we’re especially excited to join forces with TCV to help us execute our long-term growth strategy,” says Brian Sharples, chief executive officer and founder of HomeAway. “The TCV lead investment demonstrates their confidence in our business model, and the extraordinary potential in front of us. We expect to benefit tremendously from their experience and record in building leading consumer Internet and travel companies.”

The U.S. vacation rental marketplace is valued at more than $24 billion, according to a first-of-its-kind research study, PhoCusWright’s Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change and research conducted on behalf of HomeAway by Illuminas, an international research consultancy, estimates the combined UK, Germany and France marketplace at the same size.

“The success of HomeAway and the growth of the vacation rental industry are being driven by travelers who seek affordable accommodations, and by owners who have learned that they can earn significant income from their vacation home investments,” says Sharples. “However, there are nearly 14 million vacation home owners in the U.S. and Europe, and most are still not aware of how easy and profitable it can be to rent their homes, even if for just a few weeks each year. We plan to increase our marketing substantially over the next couple of years to further the awareness of the industry.”

“We look to invest in companies with market leadership positions, great management teams, and compelling growth opportunities. HomeAway is such an investment,” says Woody Marshall, TCV general partner. “We believe HomeAway will become a leading Internet brand just like TCV’s past investments in market leaders including Expedia, Netflix, eHarmony, CNET and Orbitz.”

“This financing gives HomeAway significant resources to accelerate both organic growth and growth through strategic acquisitions,” says Todd Chaffee, general partner, Institutional Venture Partners, one of the premier later stage venture capital firms.

HomeAway was founded in 2005 with $49 million in equity from Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. That initial investment funded the acquisition of five of the world’s leading vacation rental sites, including CyberRentals.com in the U.S., Holiday-Rentals.co.uk in the UK and FeWo-direkt.de in Germany. In 2006, IVP and Trident Capital led a $160 million financing round that funded the company’s purchase of VRBO.com. The acquisition meant that, along with its flagship site HomeAway.com, the company also operated the largest rent-by-owner site in the U.S.

HomeAway acquired VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr and OwnersDirect.co.uk in 2007 and now has 11 vacation rental sites in its portfolio, as well as EscapeHomes.com, which connects buyers and sellers of second homes and resort real estate.

Jeff Brody, founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, notes that HomeAway’s management team and business model have made HomeAway one of the most innovative and successful Internet travel companies of this decade.

About HomeAway, Inc.

HomeAway^(R) operates the world’s leading and most-established vacation rental sites including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, VacationRentals.com, Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, FeWo-direkt.de, Ownersdirect.co.uk and Abritel.fr. Featuring more than 309,000 vacation rentals in destinations ranging from big cities to remote countrysides, the sites make it easy for travelers who seek space, value and privacy on vacation to find the perfect alternative to hotels. HomeAway is committed to providing the safest and most-trusted marketplace in the industry, offering reviews by guests and the added protection of the HomeAway Rental Guarantee. HomeAway is funded by Austin Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Technology Crossover Ventures and Trident Capital. The company is based in Austin, Texas and has offices in London and Ashtead, Surrey in England; Kassel, Germany and Marseilles, France.

About Technology Crossover Ventures

Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), founded in 1995, is a leading provider of growth capital to technology companies, providing funds to later-stage private and public companies. With $7.7 billion in capital under management, TCV has made growth equity and recapitalization investments in over 160 companies leading to 45 initial public offerings and more than 30 strategic sales or mergers. Representative investments include Altiris, eHarmony, Expedia, Fandango, Liquidnet, Netflix, RealNetworks, Redback Networks, Solect Technology, TechTarget, Travelport, Webroot, and Zillow. TCV has nine partners and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information about TCV, visit www.tcv.com.

About Institutional Venture Partners (IVP)

With more than $2.2 billion of committed capital, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) is one of the premier later-stage venture capital firms in the United States. Founded in 1980, IVP has invested in over 200 companies with 85 IPOs and more than 50 strategic acquisitions of its portfolio companies. IVP has a 28-year IRR of 43.2% which is more than double the industry average. IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity, and select public market transactions. Since its inception, IVP has invested in such notable companies as ArcSight (ARST), Ask Jeeves (IACI), Aspect Communications (ASPT), At Road (ARDI), Business.com (RHD), Clarify (CLFY), ComScore (SCOR), Concur Technologies (CNQR), Danger (MSFT), Digital River (DRIV), Form Factor (FORM), Foundry Networks (FDRY), Juniper Networks (JNPR), LSI Logic (LSI), Mobile 365 (SY), MySQL (JAVA), Netflix (NFLX), Polycom (PLCM), Quigo (AOL), Seagate (STX), Synchronoss (SNCR), Tivo (TIVO), and Websense (WBSN). IVP has offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, California. For more information, visit www.ivp.com.

About Redpoint Ventures

Redpoint Ventures focuses on partnering with and funding innovative companies that have the potential to define, lead, and change industries. Redpoint partners have many decades of experience and success in technology investing; combined with this foundation, the firm is able to leverage a thriving network of entrepreneurs, partners, and industry experts to accelerate building market-leading companies. Redpoint (www.redpoint.com) was founded in 1999 by partners from two of the top firms in the venture capital industry and currently has over $2 billion under management. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA with offices in Los Angeles and Shanghai, China.

About Austin Ventures

Austin Ventures (“AV”) has worked with talented entrepreneurs to build valuable companies for nearly 25 years. With $3.9 billion under management, AV is the most active venture capital and growth equity firm in Texas and one of the most established in the nation. With a focus on business services, information services, integrated media, computer and communications hardware, and enterprise software, AV invests at all stages of company development, from $100,000 “planned experiments” in early stage ideas to $100+ million investments in expansion rounds, minority recapitalizations, and buyouts of middle market growth companies. Visit www.austinventures.com for more information.

About Trident Capital

Trident Capital is a leading venture capital and private equity firm with over $1.5 billion of capital under management, including $400 million raised in a recently closed Fund VI. Trident’s core investment focus has remained consistent since inception in 1993, focusing on investments in the business services, information services and software sectors across a variety of industries. Within the sector focus, the firm invests across multiple stages, including traditional venture capital investing as well as investments in micro-cap public companies, buyouts and consolidation platforms. Trident has made 120 investments since inception.

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LinkedIn takes your personal business network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful business network. Currently, over 27 million professionals are on LinkedIn, representing all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of household names in technology, financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, fashion, and numerous other industries. LinkedIn is backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, the European Founders Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures.

AdMob, the world’s largest and fastest growing mobile advertising marketplace, today announced it has achieved cash flow positive results and secured a new $15.7 million Series C investment round, led by Sequoia Capital’s Growth Fund with existing investor Accel Partners participating, to expand its global leadership position. The company has experienced strong growth over the past year, more than tripling the number of ads served on a monthly basis to 4.5 billion in September 2008.

Fueled by this funding, AdMob will make significant strategic investments to increase the company’s clear lead in mobile advertising, including:

* Accelerating the growth of worldwide operations by hiring local staff in key markets and adding new language interfaces, with an emphasis in Western Europe, India, South Africa and Japan
* Deepening the investment in the company’s mobile technology platform, including its targeting, optimization and ad serving algorithm
* Expanding the breadth of offerings for both publishers and advertisers
* Increasing leadership position in the U.S. by growing AdMob’s sales and business development teams

“Today AdMob reaches more consumers on their mobile phones through our publisher network than any of the major Internet portals or search services, and this is just the beginning,” said Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO, AdMob. “We chose to raise this new round of funding to continue to grow both the mobile advertising market and AdMob’s clear advantage in it by investing in the technology, operations and team that have set the bar for the mobile industry.”

AdMob also announced its publisher network now includes more than 6,000 partners worldwide, giving it an unmatched scale. New publishers in 2008 include MySpace and MovieTickets.com.

“AdMob has surpassed the largest names in digital advertising to become the world’s biggest mobile ad network in just two short years,” said Jim Goetz, Partner, Sequoia Capital. “AdMob has tapped into the exploding market of publishers creating great mobile content for consumers and the advertisers eager to interact with those engaged users. AdMob is well capitalized and has achieved cash flow positive results, giving them a unique opportunity in this difficult economic climate to aggressively capture market share. They have some of the same qualities that we saw in Google, Yahoo!, YouTube and Apple, including their exceptional team and powerful technology platform.”

AdMob also continues to see a steep increase in the number of brand and performance advertisers running campaigns on its network, with especially strong demand for iPhone inventory. In September 2008, AdMob ran more than 25 campaigns for brand advertisers including CoverGirl, Toshiba, and Comedy Central.

About AdMob

AdMob is the world’s largest and highest quality mobile advertising marketplace, serving more than 4.5 billion mobile banner and text ads per month. Incorporated in April 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile Web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob makes it easy for publishers to monetize their mobile traffic and for advertisers to target and reach customers on the mobile Web in more than 160 countries.

AdMob has been named a 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, one of Wired.com’s 2008 Companies to Watch, and VentureBeat’s Mobilebeat 2008 Best Overall Mobile Startup / Best Mobile Infrastructure Company. To learn more about AdMob, visit www.admob.com.

About Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital provides startup venture capital for very smart people who want to turn ideas into companies. As the “Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs,” Sequoia Capital’s Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, Steve Goldman and Sujal Patel of Isilon Systems and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.

We are announcing a major expansion effort – the largest we have undergone in our history. We’re accelerating many of the programs that we’ve been working on over the past several months, including investments in infrastructure, new feature development, and international expansion.

Of Digg’s over 30 million unique monthly users, almost half are from outside of the U.S., so this expansion will also include initiatives aimed at making Digg more relevant to local tastes, including local languages. We will begin laying the groundwork for that immediately with the beginning of our international growth strategy in early 2009.

Other initiatives will focus on expanding our community outreach programs and developing more sophisticated tools and interfaces for publishers.

To help support all of this, we will be significantly growing the size of the Digg team in the next year and moving to larger San Francisco offices that give us the room we need to do it. We’re hiring, so check out our jobs page. Fueling the acceleration of all of these programs is our revenue success to date, along with a new $28.7 million round in funding, led by Highland Capital Partners.


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Google Sites Maintains Dominant Position

In July, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with more than 5 billion videos viewed (representing a 44 percent share of the online video market), with YouTube.com accounting for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 446 million videos (3.9 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 282 million (2.5 percent) and Yahoo! Sites with 269 million (2.4 percent). Hulu ranked eighth with 119 million videos, representing 1 percent of all videos viewed.

More than 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 80 videos per viewer in July. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (92.1 million), who watched an average of 55 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (54.9 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (37.6 million) and Microsoft Sites (32.6 million).

Other notable findings from July 2008 include:

• 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• Americans spent a total of 558 million hours watching online video
  during the month.
• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
• 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos
  per viewer).
• 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8
  videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

Just had to add a number 21 - Use more Digg!

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Docstoc, the professional document network, has launched a pair of new features that help transition the site from primarily a document sharing platform to a personal document archive as well. The features, dubbed MyDocs and Sync, allow users to quickly upload their files to the web, where they can be quickly accessed from any computer that supports the ubiquitous Flash plugin.

MyDocs is essentially a dashboard for users’ documents, not unlike an online version of Windows’ My Documents folder. Users can skim through their files as thumbnails, search by keyword, sort each document into online folders, and modify each doc’s privacy settings. Most impressive is MyDoc’s Preview feature, which allows users to rapidly skim through full versions of their documents using Docstoc’s Flash-based Document viewer. In Preview mode, Docstoc displays a list of thumbnails down a sidebar and presents the document itself as part of the main window, allowing users to quickly browse through their documents. In practice this worked surprisingly well - documents opened within a few seconds (oftentimes faster than they would on the desktop), making MyDocs a viable alternative to the tradional My Documents Folder.
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McCain Palin 2008 Election - Get more Docstoc Buzz

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