Houzz on Wednesday said it’s raised $165 million in a new funding round that the home design website plans to use for expanding into e-commerce and international markets. Early investor Sequoia Capital led the round of financing, which brought in new investors T. Rowe Price (TROW) and DST Global. Controlled by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, DST Global was also an early backer of Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR). The $165 million funding round
Buy now? Not so fast. Even though Twitter (TWTR)got a lot of splash with the rollout of its new in-tweet “buy” button early this month, eMarketer says a new survey shows that just 5% of adult U.S. Internet users have actually made purchases on social networks. Better security measures could motivate those users to buy through social platforms, according to results of the poll, conducted in August by Harris Poll for global marketing and technology
You may not be surprised to hear that Alibaba’s (BABA) chairman and founder Jack Ma is China’s richest man. But did you know he’s also one of that country’s top social media bloggers, with 15.8 million followers on Sina Weibo, the dominant microblogging website? Ma, who owns a stake in Sina Weibo, has more people checking out his blog posts than does China’s cinematic superstar and investor Jet Li, who boasts only 13.4 million on the rival Tencent Weibo microblogging platform. But kung fu artist Li is No. 1 on Tencent Weibo. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are Chinese versions of Twitter (TWTR) Sina Weibo is run by Chinese online media giant Sina (SINA). Ma’s social media ranking was included in a report by Shanghai-based magazine publisher Hurun Research Institute , which yesterday also anointed Ma as mainland China’s richest man with an estimated worth of $25 billion. The Hurun…