Jacksonville, Florida-based Cliqset is launching the second beta version of its online identity platform today with some nifty new features, and is also announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in financing from a single angel investor.
Cliqset is not exactly an easy concept to explain, but here goes. Essentially, the platform aims to stitch together the social web by allowing users and developers build, organize and share social information across a wide variety of services. As an end user, Cliqset can help you merge and share the social information (your status updates, location, photos, etc) currently scattered around the web with the people, applications and devices you already use and trust. Developers on the other hand get access to an extensive set of read/write social APIs they can use as an alternative to building and managing support for their own.
The second beta, launching today, comes with a new Location Services API that allows developers to build apps for web and mobile by using location info from users. With the API, developers can fetch and use address information using the latitude and longitude coordinates provided by mobile devices. The gathered location information can be tied to user activities but also be used to store more generic location information that’s relevant to the applications they build on top of the Cliqset platform.
A related new element is the integration of Cliqset location services with third-party services like BrightKite, FireEagle and Twitter, basically simplifying how a user can keep their social and location information in sync across the Web.
Also new is a fresh push/pull architecture for social information that travels to and from Cliqset, Cliqset-enabled applications and the supported third-party services. A mix of push/pull functionality is now possible with over 30 third-party services, including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, identica, laconica, Linkedin, FireEagle, and FriendFeed. It’s like the latter on steroids, actually.
Cliqset has recently closed its second seed round, $1.5 million coming from angel investor Derek Mercer, founder and former chairman and CEO of Vurv Technology, a provider of talent management software that was acquired in 2008 by Taleo for about $128.8 million. This comes in addition to an earlier early-stage capital injection of $500,000 by the man, bringing the total invested in the startup to $2 million.
Cliqset – Merge, Organize and Share Social Information from cliqset on Vimeo.