RealMee, online ID tool for dummies, closes round A

The Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) is on a roll. After its recent €50,000 investment in VIDDIX, DCIF has now invested in online identity tool RealMee. The amount of funding is undisclosed, but the Dutch fund usually backs start-ups with a €20,000 to €40,000 money stack. RealMee helps people to manage their online identity by creating a profile which will show up in Google’s top results when searching for one’s name.

When I interviewed founders Roland Carpentier and Hans Helms in February, they assured me that no tricks like cloacking and linkfarming were used to push RealMee pages up in the search results. An important part of their strategy is urging users to link to their RealMee profile from social network profiles.

The service isn’t interesting for people who’ve already built a significant web presence. But ordinary people who haven’t created any web content, will gladly welcome RealMee. Moreover, the service will soon learn these folks how to take advantage of the upcoming open standards – since RealMee will start providing OpenID services. They will also suggest users new web applications (there’s your business model).

So far, RealMee has 3000 users. That isn’t impressive number, so it won’t be surprising to hear that Carpentier and Helms will use the financial injection to attract new users. I’m pretty sure they’ll ask DCIF partners Telegraaf Media Groep and Ilse Media – large media companies – to help them gaining some traction.