Fifth Generation, best known as the software provider that created Zude, today announced that it has raised $5.3 million in a Series B financing. Investors participated in this round include Irwin Lieber and Barry Rubenstein of Wheatley Partners, Persistency Capital, and Gund Investment, LLC., with additional funding by Bergstein, LLC. Fifth Generation will use this new round of financing to accelerate product development and expand its user base in Zude. On top of that, Fifth Generation has raised $5 million in round A at the time Zude’s private beta roll-out in last May, that makes the total amount raised by Fifth Generation to over $10 million.

Many are saying that Zude is a social networking site that represented the Web of the future. It offer a uniquely drag and drop features that help users in creating their own personal Web pages. Zude’s Web-based applications primarily use an advanced technologies to render its “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) functionality. The buzz generated by Zude is illustrative of trend that users no longer want to design their Web pages from scratch, more and more this type of Web 2.0 will likely to be found on the Web in 12 to 24 months. Imagine one can design her Web page by simply just drag and drop an object to the page and no template or any code to be written, this type of Web 2.0 sites potentially attract the funding from the venture capital firms.

Zude has finally goes public beta, as I revisited its home page just now. Indeed, they planned to released the beta version on April, however, as mentioned in my previous Zude post, they have postponed the public release to just few days ago. I think their founding product idea is sound, and they recognized the potential of their product that allowed users to create their own personal pages with myriads of design and edit controls, i.e. manage the objects along with several parameters pre-installed in the users’ pages. In matter of fact, when you visit Zude’s home page, you will find some Zude Superstars and some of those pages are designed in a quite interesting manner. Though it is an open community, which means unsavory people can view and poke around on the Zude users’ pages, but before a user can start in developing her own Web page, she must pass the “Compatibility Tests” such as the compatibility issues on browser, JavaScript, popup, screen, cookie, and installation of 5G/DropZone extension. What I dislike about this platform at this moment is whatever I right-click a link, a dialog box will popup in front of the Zude page.

Basically, Zude allowed users to create their own contents in an easy manner. As listed in their “Help” page, they’ve prepared the manual for the potential users on some of the common topics such as Zude object properties, File Manager, working with widgets and etc. There are four (4) types of Zude account one can sign-up for, i.e. Individual, Group, Family, and Business. Also, what I noticed the main feature of this platform is the drag and drop capability that tend to make the Web design job simple. Currently, users are not that many and most of them are living in the U.S., but I think they might have a promising commercial future.

To note Zude is new startup, owned by Fifth Generation Systems.

In fact, I’m waiting for several days to write a post on Zude, supposed to be launched on today, i.e. May 1st. Zude, owned by Fifth Generation Systems has previously announced the scheduled today’s global launch. However, as I visited Zude, only a short announcement found on the landing page. Massive incoming traffic at a spike caused the problem. By the way, for those who do not know what’s Zude is all about, Zude is a new social networking site and their biggest selling point is that they provide their registered users in create their own personalized social Web pages.

Stay tuned. I will report back on this Web 2.0 shortly.