October 31 , 2006

Inman News

Edgeio, a service for online classified listings that launched this year, has raised $5 million in financing led by Intel Capital, the company announced last week.

Since launching in March 2006, edgeio says it has amassed more than 100 million listings from 14,000 cities across the globe. The listings aggregator collects Web listings in various categories, including homes, jobs and cars, and also sends traffic back to the original publishers.

Edgeio constantly monitors RSS-enabled Web sites and pulls any item tagged "listing" and publishes the listing on the edgeio Web site and network. RSS, which stands for "Really Simple Syndication," is an XML-based protocol that allows for the automatic distribution of Internet content. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS feed.

A Realtor, for instance, could go to edgeio.com and enter some of his or her for-sale home listings, or the Realtor could enable an RSS feed from his or her Web site or blog where listings appear and edgeio will automatically pick them up.

The Silicon Valley, Calif., company was co-founded by Keith Teare, who formerly worked with EasyNet and RealNames, and Michael Arrington, who works as a business and marketing consultant and writes the technology blog TechCrunch.

The first round of financing also included an investment from Transcosmos Investments and Business Development Inc., a Japanese public company with a Silicon Valley investment arm focused on Internet-based U.S. technology companies expanding into the Japanese marketplace.

Edgeio says it has more than 3,000 publishers – including key players in the jobs, autos, real estate and leisure sectors -- who upload their listings via its edgedirect service. Many bloggers are publishing listings to their blogs and having them automatically entered into edgeio via the "listing tag," the company said in an announcement.

In addition, edgeio has become a distribution channel for sites offering to distribute listings, such as vFlyer, Postlets and the Point2 network.

Edgeio also announced today the launch of a Chinese language version of its Web site, named mulu100.com, which in Chinese means, "catalog of catalogs." The Chinese service has initially formed a partnership with edeng.cn, a China-based listings site that is similar to craigslist.org.

"Chinese listings began to appear on edgeio within a few days of us launching," Teare said in a statement. "We decided that the Chinese market would be our first localized site and we now have a significant number of listings from all over the country."

Edgeio has filed for patents covering its distributed marketplaces architecture and many of the Web site's features.