Clupedia, currently in alpha, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.3 million in funding from a group of 270 investors called Tech Coast Angels, based in Orange County, CA.
Clupedia's founder David Saad has also put $2.3 million of his own money into Clupedia. Saad is the founder of Braintec, which was sold to Technisource. Cluepedia has also brought Johannes Larcher onto its board, which should be helpful considering his stints as VP of Friendster and Chief of Staff at Overture before Yahoo acquired it in 2003 for $2 billion.
Clupedia's flagship product is Clucast, a Firefox browser plugin that lets you highlight text on a web page and automatically get relevant search results, or "clues" including ratings, reviews and notes. Clues can be filtered and further searched through, and the Cluepedia community's submitted rankings become part of the aggregated "clues" offered to you. Unfortunately, Clupedia requires a download as well as .NET in order to function on your computer, which is a lot to ask of new users, especially when there is little information offered on the site (people need to know what they're downloading). There are also several aspects of Clupedia that could be used by site visitors without needing to register, including rankings for other websites.
Similar bookmarking and browsing informational services include Heeii and LineBuzz, to a certain extent.