Netvibes

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Netvibes mobile version provides a lighter version of their normal personalized home page offering. They also have an iPhone version that is still in private beta that is tailored for the iPhones unique touch screen and navigation.

Netvibes is a personalized home page service founded in 2005 by Tariq Krim. It is headquartered in Paris where until recently both Krim and Pierre Chappaz served as co-CEOs; Chappaz left Netvibes in early July 2007 to focus on Wikio and other projects.

So far, Netvibes has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Accel Partners in August 2006 and $1 million in seed round funding led by Index Ventures in March 2006. The site has stayed focused on building its user base and furthering developing its features; in April 2007 they introduced Universes, which allows users to share their pages just like Pageflakes Pagecasts. As of June 2007, they have over 10 million registered users and over 11,500 available feeds.

There has been some interesting speculating of how Netvibes makes money since they refuse to put advertising of any kind on their site, including banners ads and logos. Even more interesting, you can’t even find the Netvibes name on your personal startpage. In a recent interview, Tariq Krim halted all speculation by saying Netvibes primary revenue comes from content deals with third-party widgets and through fees taken for better-targeted information on Netvibes users.

The Netvibes startpage is similar to its competitors, iGoogle, My AOL, My Yahoo and Pageflakes, in function, but has much less advertising and white space and much more focus on the widgets. Users find that Netvibes runs faster than its big dog competitors, which might be attributed to its more streamlined startpage. One thing that Netvibes seems to be missing is a dedicated RSS reader feature.