Facing Down Facebook’s Timeline, Memolane Adds Social Features And An Investment From Digital Garage

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/01/memolane-social-digital-garage/

“In this time of timelines, it is easy to forget that Facebook didn’t come up with the concept of a social timeline recording your life. But what do you do now if you are a startup like Memolane built around timelines that bring in people’s Tweets, Instagram photos, Last.fm songs, and many other social media from around the Web? Well, you get more social.

Memolane pushed out a significant update to its service today which adds a follow model. “When we created Memolane, people said it t was great, but it was like a museum,” says founder Eric Lagier. “Instead of a museum, we want it to be an amusement park.”

Now instead of just seeing your solitary lane, you can also add friends, see their lanes, and even contribute to them. You can make multiple lanes based on themes, hashtags, or events (With beginning and end dates). The website is also now optimized for touchscreen tablets (both iPad and Android)

The company added a new investor, Japan’s Digital Garage, which joins existing investors August Capital and Atomico (who put in $2 million last year). The investment was relatively small and considered an extension of last year’s A round. Japan is Memolane’s second-largest market after the U.S., with 17 percent of its users.

Crunchbase

MEMOLANE

DIGITAL GARAGE

Company:

Memolane

Website:

memolane.com

Funding:

$2.5M

Memolane is your digital memory – your tool to rediscover your social life on the Internet. Memolane is a digital platform collecting and connecting your thoughts, pictures, messages and music yesterday, today and tomorrow.

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Company:

Digital Garage

Website:

garage.co.jp

Launch Date:

November 2, 1995

Digital Garage, founded in 1995, has gone on to create a wide variety of business endeavors based on their core strengths: cutting-edge Internet technology, marketing technology with focus on usability, and financial technology that harnesses total solutions. The footsteps of Digital Garage -its path of creating new context as well as numerous business models- have been and will be a guidepost for Internet business in Japan in the 21st century.