Entertainment Site Koowo Got Funding of $5.5 Million

Written by Tangos on January 19, 2007
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KoowoYeelion Inc., who runs an entertainment site Koowo recently raised USD 5.5 million from Qiming Ventures and Ignition Partners. (via ChinaVenture)

Koowo is an entertainment information sites which currently is focused on providing aggregated information on celebrities, such as movie and drama stars. The site builds a topic page for each star, for example, this is the page for famous Chinese actress Gong Li. The topic page aggregates the news, images and videos about the star. It also has a Google Trend style trend map to illustrate how many times the star has been mentioned by media, users are even allowed to bet the trend will be up or down. Though the topic page is built by Koowo, users can participate to enrich it by uploading images and videos about the celebrities they love. Users can also leave comments, vote for or against the star as well.

Koowo also generate a cool flash relationship map for any celebrity, you can browser it to know why they are connected, which piece of news mentioned them together. Now the front page of Koowo is auto directed to star.koowo.com, so we believe that Koowo will develop more features besides stars topic page.

Besides Koowo website, Yeelion also develop a Koowo software, which is a media player plug-in to auto search for matching lyrics, images and music videos when you listen to songs.

Yeelion was founded by Lei Ming, a former Baidu Chief Architect, in 2005. In 2006, Yeelion has raised fund from Qiming Ventures.

Screenshot of Koowo’s celebrities relationship map
Relationship Map

2 Responses to “Entertainment Site Koowo Got Funding of $5.5 Million”

  1. Yahoo China Launches People Search : China Web2.0 Review on August 31st, 2007 11:20 pm

    [...] In fact, the idea of a flash relationship map is not new, Koowo also has a people relationship map for entertainment stars. And I found there are many incorrect relationships found by Yahoo, it still has to put great efforts in improving it before it finally becomes useful. If comparing it with the real people search engine as Spock, I would prefer Spock, since it provide better aggregated results than Yahoo China. [...]

  2. VentureBeat » The rush to people search: Viadeo, ZoomInfo, Yahoo China, Spock on September 1st, 2007 3:10 am

    [...] – Yahoo China has just released a new version of its search, Yahoo.cn, that includes a people search, though it’s focused on celebrities. Yahoo uses information extraction technology and semantic analysis to create a Flash-based map of relationships, along with explanations of why they are related to and the sources of the information. China Web 2.0 provides an example of Jack Ma. Another Chinese company, Koowo, reportedly got $5.5 million for among other things, a similar mapping of Chinese stars. However, the downside is that these offerings often appear to be inaccurate. [...]

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