DEMOfall Wallop, a company spun out of Microsoft and backed by veteran venture capital firms, today at DEMOfall launched its beta product, a breakthrough innovation in the social networking space with a unique business model. Wallop, an invitation-only network, for the first time combines a social computing site with a marketplace, enabling an entirely new way to self-express and enhance a persons increasingly important online image. Wallop also announced today that it has secured a $ 10 million series B round of funding led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). Previous investors, Bay Partners and Consor Capital, also participated in this round.
Now that social networking has become all the rage, we need to step back and examine whether current sites present the best images and practices for social networking, said Mark Levitt, IDC's VP for Collaborative Computing and the Enterprise Workplace. Wallop offers an innovative business model and user interface that is designed to attract select groups of users who will prefer to use their creative skills to express themselves on their sites without having to learn any programming and without advertising.
More than four years of research at Microsoft combined with Wallop founders Karl Jacob and Sean Uberoi Kellys vision for leapfrogging existing social networks, led Wallop to focus on the larger trend of self-expression online with the simplicity people experience in the real world. Wallop created an invitation-only, social experience that taps into the $ 3 trillion-a-year offline industry of self-expression as it moves online. A revolutionary new user interface evolved by the legendary Frog Design brings point-and-click simplicity to social networking and makes it dramatically easier to express a users individuality.
I am addicted to social networking, but like my friends, am sick of how hard everything is. I spend all my time browsing and searching and dealing with pop-ups on every page, said Katie Starkey, a 23-year-old private beta tester from Jacksonville, Illinois. The best thing about Wallop is that it really is easy, and I love that Im not interrupted by annoying ads. Im totally going to switch to Wallop!
Wallop unlocks the true potential for self-expression online with free, one-click customization versus the hassle of HTML coding necessary to personalize other social networking platforms. In addition, Wallops marketplace model empowers people to further enhance their online image by purchasing ready-made, interactive graphics and features, called Mods, from millions of the best Adobe
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