Klout is out, Google is cloudy, Xapo bulks up
Every week, The Chronicle’s Trisha Thadani talks with Alex Wilhelm of Crunchbase News about three startups that are making waves in your backyard. The Chronicle and Crunchbase select startups based on a score that includes funding, hiring and online interest.
It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Klout was a thing. A decade ago, the San Francisco startup promised to measure your online popularity by tracking interactions on every social network imaginable — and before Facebook took over everything, there were a lot of them to measure. (Last.fm and Foursquare, anyone?)
Now Klout is in the news because it’s going away Friday, the same day that new European privacy regulations known as GDPR kick in. Klout was sold to Lithium
Technologies for $200 million in 2014, but it’s not clear what the social media marketing company got for its money. Lithium said the GDPR regulations were one factor in Klout’s closure. Google acquired a Tel Aviv startup,
Velostrata, to help it compete with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon for clients moving their computer servers to the cloud. Velostrata helps with that migration, and Google wants to bolster its cloud business so it’s less dependent on ad dollars.
Meanwhile, crypto company Xapo, which has an office in Palo Alto, just raised $40 million in funding. Xapo offers a bitcoin wallet that makes it simpler to trade the popular cryptocurrency.