UK-based Tweetdeck, probably the best desktop application to date for tracking your Twitter feeds, has completed the funding round hinted at recently. The funding will come it at just under $500,000. As expected, Betaworks is leading the investment into Tweetdeck.
The announcement caps a great story, whereby lone developer, Iain Dodsworth, came up with the Tweetdeck idea just a few months ago. He told me “It’s enough to turn this into something that generates revenue. Betaworks came to me, we spoke about where I wanted to take TweetDeck, discussed what level of funding it would take to get there. I was aware of Betaworks already via Summize and bit.ly and it is such a good fit working with them.”
The other participants are a mix of London and New-York based investors:
• The Accelerator Group, the most active early stage tech Angel in London.
• Taavet Hinrikus, one of the first Skype employees, now based in London.
• Gerry Campbell, an experienced Internet/media executive and former President of Reuters’ Search and Content Technologies group.
• Howard Lindzon. An entrepreneur, and creator of Wallstrip and Stocktwits.
• Roger Ehrenberg, early stage investor.
From an interview Iain did he said he will be introducing TweetDeck Pro as a premium product to assist businesses track their brand across all sorts of Social Networks as well as Twitter.
Looks like he is on to a winner if he carries on as he is.
Ollie
http://twitter.com/ollieparsley
“Tracking brands” is an incredibly competitive area that at the top end is handled well by incumbents like Onanalytica and at the bottom end is handled by 75% of the bedroom startups I’ve met. It’s also a space that’s littered with “good enough” solutions (google, pipes, rss, search.twitter), a hell of a lot of snake-oil salesmen and some pretty crap data (twitter).
TweetDeck is a great product and great brand of course – with impressive market penetration – but I’d hope Iain will be using this opportunity to achieve more than that. In fact, with a investor team like that I’d be sure of it… so the question is: what’s he really up to?
Hope to get some funding my self soon for mobile twitter http://m.mwd.com
Is still don’t see why it wouldn’t be *a lot* cheaper for investors to build their own Twitter apps.
Tweet deck is nice, but features that would alow me to keep up to date with both of my twitter feeds (http://twitter.com/worldometer and http://twitter.com/goodbaad) as TWHIRL can.
I really don’t understand the hype – nice tool but easily beaten, twitter apps are very easily built.