Internet Brands is establishing itself as the go-to site for big purchases.
The operator of CarsDirect.com has over the past year expanded into home finance, real estate and luxury cruises. Now, add one more big-ticket sale to its roster.
The El Segundo-based company, which brought in $84.8 million in revenues last year, has filed to go public. Internet Brands is the signature spinoff of tech company incubator Idealab, which also successfully launched Citysearch and Weddingchannel.com.
Internet Brands plans to raise $100 million through a listing on the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange and offer Class A shares in the IPO, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Credit Suisse and Thomas Weisel Partners LLC are underwriting the offering.
Internet Brands owns 45 sites in the automotive, home, travel and leisure sector, including ApartmentRatings.com and Wikitravel.org.
The company, then called CarsDirect, attempted to go public in 2000, but withdrew after a few months. Pasadena-based Idealab owns about 30 percent of the company, which is also backed by Foundation Capital and Clearstone Ventures.
Green Power on Set?
What if every film shot in L.A. had its electricity pumped by soybean-based biodiesel power generators?
“The air quality in L.A. would improve dramatically,” said Tromer DeVito, who recently co-founded Hollywood-based Green Power Generators.
The company has built 20 low-emission biodiesel generators that produce up to 2,800 amps of power and is in the process of building 10 more.
If they replace the giant diesel generators that often idle for hours at a time on film sets and concerts, Green Power’s generators would show an 80 percent improvement in carbon monoxide emissions and a 50 percent improvement in nitrogen oxide emissions, the company said.
The film industry is the second greatest pollution producer in California, behind the aerospace sector, according to a recent report by the UCLA Institute of the Environment.
Clean air comes at a price, though. Film production companies would have to pay at least 8 percent more to rent the biodiesel fuel generators on a weekly and daily basis. An average daily rental of a Green Power generator costs $850 compared to $750 for diesel fuel generators, according to the company.
DeVito is partnering on the venture with co-founder Alton Butler, president of Line 204 Studios, a rental business that provides sets and generators for production companies.
Bloggers Go NowLive
Anyone with a blog and a telephone line can now host a digital talk show, thanks to NowLive.com.
The company has come up with a downloadable widget enabling a blogger to pick up the phone, dial a number and broadcast live. The audience can call into the show, text chat and share videos.
“We’ve figured out user-generated content, combining social networking with Internet radio,” said Kevin Bromber, founder of Now Live. “In the near future, NowLive.com will have hundreds of simultaneous broadcasting of sports, politics and health shows.”
For now, there are about 150 shows a day, about topics ranging from dating and cooking to psychic readings. Broadcasters can download NowLive’s software onto their own blogs or host a show on NowLive.com. The software is free.
The Calabasas-based company has seven full time employees and is backed by PFK Development Group.
Collecting Cash
Web companies in the greater Los Angeles area garnered $167 million in venture capital during the second quarter, up from $55 million the same period last year, according to a report by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne.
Gorilla Nation Media, an online advertising company, raised $50 million to expand its operations internationally and Reunion.com, a Web site that helps reunite family members and friends, received $25 million. The region, which includes Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties, trailed only Silicon Valley, which brought in $262 million.
Bye-Bye Amp’d
Amp’d Mobile Inc., a high-tech mobile operator, will close shop on July 31 after burning through more than $375 million in venture capital. The L.A.-based joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Britain’s Vodafone Group PLC filed bankruptcy two months ago after citing $33 million in debt to Verizon Wireless for using its networks and $16 million to Motorola Inc. for the cell phones.
Amp’d sought to be a media company, producing content from an in-house studio, while running a mobile carrier business.
Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
