Showing posts with label Tumblr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tumblr. Show all posts

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Tumblr Raises Between $25 Million and $30 Million in Funding




Last week, we reported that Tumblr scored a substantial amount of money from Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital — but we didn’t how much. Today, reports are surfacing that the blogging platform has raised between $25 million and $30 million, with a valuation around $135 million.

Fortune says that Sequoia Capital was the lead investor this round, and speculates that Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures (who in the past raised Tumblr $10 million) both contributed as well. It’s also being said that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha will be joining Tumblr’s board.
TechCrunch spoke with Founder David Karp today, and although he declined to comment on funding, he did share that Tumblr has some new digs in the form of a new New York office, and that they’ve made some hires. Right now they have 16 employees (up from 12), with a staff of 20 projected for the end of this year and a staff of 30 by the early 2011.
As we noted last week, Tumblr also recently hired Derek Gottfrid from The New York Times as director of product, and today TC reports that Rich Tong, a co-founder of Weardrobe, will be coming on as a community director in charge of the fashion community. Karp hopes to focus on the individual communities within Tumblr as a way of distinguishing the service from other platforms, like Facebook.
“[Tumblr wants to be] the best place in the world for the best creative communities,” Karp told TC.
We’ve reached out to Karp for more info on the funding round, as well as its new hires.
We think that hires like this could really further distinguish Tumblr as a unique blogging platform and community. As it stands, Tumblr is an extremely social platform — even serving as inspiration for giants likeWordPress, who recently added quick reblogging and the ability to “like” posts. In addition, it has an extremely creative community, having the distinction of seeing 14 of its blogs score book deals.
(via: mashable.com)

5 Beautiful Tumblr Themes for Small Businesses


1. Just Plain Theme

Tumblr’s own Peter Vidani has designed nearly twenty themes for the platform and all of them are clean and easy to customize.
With Just Plain Theme, Vidani offers exactly what is advertised, a very simple two column Tumblr theme with support for pages, advanced features and Disqus comments. Check out Kickstarter’s customization on its blog to get an idea of what you can do.
With a little bit of custom CSS editing, you could make Just Plain Theme a lot more unique!

2. Brand New Day

Brand New Day by Roy David Farber and Hunson is a great looking two-column theme. The theme includes support for people that you follow and you can really go nuts customizing the colors.
Check out The Travel Channel’s modification. The theme colors match the Travel Channel logo and the sidebar includes links to other social media properties.

3. Scaffold

Scaffold is a feature-rich premium Tumblr theme from Mark Harding. It’s $9 but packs a huge punch in terms of features, customization options and is frequently updated. We love the vertical navigation sidebar that moves as you scroll down the page, as well as the juxtaposition of how posts are displayed.
Tons of users are doing some amazing things with Scaffold, check out Diedrik Dijkstra’s modification. By adding some texture and a new background, the theme takes on a whole new look.

4. Headline

Headline is a great looking magazine theme for Tumblr. It has three columns and some really nice typography, plus support for pages and links to other sites.
As with all Tumblr themes, the real power comes with personal customizations. Check out MashableHQ, the Tumblr that chronicles office life at Mashable, to see what we did with the Headline theme.

5. Rank & File

Rank & File is another premium theme and it is also $49. What you get for $49 is a beautifully designed magazine-theme that could easily power an entire website.
The theme supports pages, includes links to your various social media profiles and supports comments via Disqus. You can even customize the header with your own logo or graphic.

Is Tumblr the New Twitter?



According to An article from earlier this week on NYTimes.com talked about the growth of Tumblr — 25,000 new accounts daily and 1.5 billion page views each month — and how it may be adding a new must-do activity for businesses who use social networks to market their products and services.
Tumblr is a blogging platform with a social media focus that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog with a customizable look. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. Imagine a Twitter, Facebook and blog hybrid.
According to the New York Times, big companies are starting to add Tumblr to their social media repertoire: 
Over the last few months, other media outlets have caught wind of Tumblr, which is free to use. The newest recruits include The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, BlackBook Media Corporation, The Paris Review, The Huffington Post, Life magazine and The New York Times.




I even revitalized my own Tumblr account this week for the first time since I registered it. But whether any of us are doing much more than adding in our RSS feeds and setting up standard automation is another story.
Not to say there aren’t reasons to get moving on Tumblr, including:
  • Ease of use
  • Call-in audio blog posts
  • Extensive photo options
  • Ability to use Google Analytics on your posts
  • Mobile device compatibility
  • Customizable themes
  • Ability to add community interaction, such as a Q&A section
But in the end, it all comes down to time. Do you have the time to add another social network to your mix?
I’m not sure I do, but I know I will definitely be keeping my eye on Tumblr and on companies using it to see how they are leveraging it to advance their social media presence.