Utopic, the service that lets you see what content is trending amongst your friends, has closed a $70k convertible note from a number of angels, including Ahti Heinla, one of the founding team of Skype and its chief technical architect.
We’ve also learned that Vitaly Rubstein has also participated. He is an ex-majority owner and the “product brain” behind Russia’s largest social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which was recently acquired by DST, as well as majority shareholder in Forticom.
A number of other private investors participated in Utopic’s angel round and the company is open to others, while Ross Mayfield, VP Business Development of Slideshare and founder of Socialtext, has joined Utopic’s advisory board.
Utopic, which is the latest project from the team behind Talentag, the “social CV” that we profiled last August, launched in early March as a visual way of seeing popular content amongst your friends on Facebook. Since then the service has fully opened up and added support for content from YouTube and links shared via Twitter.
However, it’s not just a UI play, says Jüri Kaljundi, co-founder and CEO of Talentag, who is keen to stress the machine learning technology behind Utopic – see our original coverage. This takes into account things like how much a user has clicked on content originating from a specific source so that more from that domain is shown in the future. The same applies for object types (e.g. more video, less images) or content from particular friends. There’s also an element of crowdsourcing based on more likes etc. from friends or even friends of friends or globally across all Utopic users or YouTube, Twitter and Facebok itself.