Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Startup Looks To Take On United Online's Classmates.com

A new startup emerged Tuesday with its target on United Online's Classmates.com service, hoping to connect people with their high school classmates. Silicon Valley-based SchoolFeed said it raised $1.75M to create a new service which helps people find their classmates via online "yearbooks", in conjunction with Facebook. The funding came from First Round Capital, Crosslink Capital, InterWest, and SK Telecom. The competition comes even as United Online appears to have been beating a quick retreat from that business, instead shifting users to Memory Lane, a new site which offers up actual, digitized high school yearbooks, nostalgic content, old magazine covers, and other products geared to a similar user base as Classmates.com. Last year, United Online's Classmates unit even went as far as completely redirecting users to Memory Lane, as social networking sites like Facebook had begun to erode its user base, although Classmates.com has since re-emerged as a tab on the Memory Lane site.