The Mailroom Fund - the new VC firm created by Accel Partners, Venrock and the William Morris Agency (WMA) - is pinning its hopes on social network analytics for its first investment. The fund is investing an undisclosed sum in Sometrics, a startup that tracks and analyses traffic and application usage across Facebook, MySpace and other open social networks. AT&T, which is a limited partner of the fund also joined the seed round along with Greycroft Partners. Sometrics CEO and former AOL exec Ian Swanson will use the investment to hire more staff and expand the firm's infrastructure, says tech news blog socalTECH. The company, which launched in beta last fall, received seed funding round from Big Sky Ventures in Jan.
Some 500 developers are trialling Sometrics' service. It is free to use, with possible plans to introduce premium services in the future. The data it tracks includes page views, unique visits, applications installs and uninstalls and user profiles, which it organises into graphs and charts. Rivals include TubeMogul, which tracks video analytics, Adonomics and Social Media's Appsaholic.
Advertisers may be particularly keen on such services. The industry has been increasingly wary of social network advertising after Google singled out their ineffectiveness in its first quarter earnings.
Accel, Venrock and WMA launched the Mailroom Fund in Mar to target digital media startups.AT&T joined as a limited partner to invest in mobile content and ad-related services.
StrategyEye's related categories: Internet Services - Web Analytics, Advertising Delivery - Internet
StrategyEye's related companies: Venrock Associates, TubeMogul, Accel Partners, Social Media Networks, Adonomics, Google, Facebook, William Morris Agency, Mailroom Fund, Greycroft Partners, MySpace, AT&T
