According to TechCrunch:

Genealogy social network Verwandt has raised an undisclosed series B from Hasso Plattner Ventures (HPV), said to be in the “multi-million-dollars” but otherwise undisclosed. They closed their first round in July 2007 from Hamburg-based Neuhaus Partners.

I have been meaning to post on this for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it. TechCrunch recently featured a short video by Michael Wesch, about how information and our storage of it has changed dramatically.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM&rel=1&border=0]

The companies that don’t understand how this shift in information is / has occurred, will certainly falter (MSM anyone). We now contribute, create, police, monitor and utilize the information that is out there. In essence we are responsible for what we create and what others create as well. Whether by editing an entry on a wiki or by flagging content as SPAM.

There are a significant possibilities that this creates, but there are also huge concerns. Who is policing and monitoring? What are their motivations.

My belief is that you need to ensure that enough people are engaged to simply far outnumber those who would use these new tools in detrimental ways. Wikipedia is obviously an excellent example of that. Most contributors work to provide factual information and closely watch when spammers and others (jokesters, politicians, etc) attempt to manipulate information for their specific purpose.

Who will succeed and who will fail? That is entirely up to each company. A company that can create a system that facilitates, enables and rewards this type of engagement will win. Vitally, they will also need to create mechanisms to control (eliminate?) SPAM and malicious commentary. How they do that, I don’t know.

One company that has been successful is (obviously) Wikipedia. They have created a community that is continually creating, editing and watching the content. I had the chance to interview Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia quite some time ago. In the interview he speak to these same issues.

What does this mean for Startups?  I believe that one-way APIs (such as Facebooks) are going away and that information will be open.  That means that something you host / create will be available to others to manipulate, expand on, and monetize.  However, this means that you will be able to do the same…