FatDoor, the well-funded social network based on the privacy-cringing aspects of crawling neighbor information, is going to remain “social” but is likely to change many of its initial directions, perhaps focusing on more personal features. This is the word from Jennifer Dulski, who has just left as head of Yahoo! Marketplaces to take the company’s helm. Dulski says the company is also likely to change its name.
My advice: keep the Fatdoor T-Shirts you may have picked up at various conference. They are going to be eBay-able.
Dulski was recruited by venture partners Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and KeyNote Ventures, who are committing $5.5 million to the company in a new round. She takes over from co-founder Raj Abhyanker, whose Facebook page notes that he is “working on new idea..stay tuned!” Chandu Thota, one of the tech whizzes behind Microsoft Virtual Earth, remains as CTO.
In other “local” personnel news — why not? — RhD business development person Chad Schott, recently joined Marchex as VP of Business Development. I’m working with Marchex CEO Russ Horowitz and CMO Bill Day to clearly explain what they do at the upcoming ILM show. They’ve got quite a compelling story. Chad had previously been at AOL.
And finally, Jeremy Woodlee has left LAtimes.com and The Recycler to join the Rubicon Project , a new online ad exchange that “intelligently” connects web site publishers with advertising networks. After Yahoo’s recent $680 million acquisition of Right Media, it seems like a good business to be in.
I can’t believe that Fatdoor got >$5 million in investor funding. Seriously, were that at all concerned about privacy? I’m involved with a startup – Neighborology (http://neighborology.com) where we also hope to connect people who live near one another. However, we have always ensured that a user’s privacy is fully maintained.
It’s a well done platform I think. And with these funds they will have a lot of possibilitis and I’m excited of the further development of fatdoor.
Besides that i found another site: TownKings (www.townkings.com) which is a mapbased social community from Germany and comparable with fatdoor.