Kurani Nabs $1m for Opinionaided Q&A App

In the US, technology firm Kurani Interactive - developer of the Opinionaided iPhone market research app and Q&A community - has secured a further $1m in funding for expansion of its mobile real-time feedback service.

New York-based Kurani, which was founded in 2000, launched Opinionaided last year to enable users to voice their opinions and receive feedback from family and friends, over mobile devices in real-time.

Its mobile Q&A app - which is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad - enables users to post questions across more than 20 categories, and receive instant answers in real-time. Through the tool, users can connect via Facebook and post a question along with an associated image, select the age and sex of the users they want to query, or just ask questions to members of their immediate circle of friends.

Soon-to-be launched features include 'filter your vote stream' to enable users to hide anything which doesn't interest them, 'push notifications' so users can be notified when they receive new 'friend questions', and 'find more friends' which integrates with a user's Facebook and Twitter contacts.

In November, Kurani raised $275k in funding led by angel investor Chuck Chesler and former Greenfield Online President, Al Angrisani.

Its latest funding has been led by General Catalyst, SoftBank Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, along with angel investors Mark Wachen of DeamIt Ventures, Jonah Goodhart of Point Ventures Group, early Facebook advisor Karl Jacob, and Vince Monical, former head of Emerging Platforms at Google.

CEO Dan Kurani comments: 'We're filling a pain point out there that hasn't been solved by any other social media service, big or small. We're delivering super-fast opinions to virtually any question on-the-fly, which has so far generated around 40 million responses to about 500,000 questions.'

Web site: www.opinionaided.com .