Del.icio.us tastes funding

Web bookmarks manager Del.icio.us has drawn its first investors, selling a minority stake of the company to Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, among others. Del.icio.us is a Web resource that lets people bookmark and tag pages to create their own personalized record of sites. The collective records of users are then available to anyone.

With the money, Joshua Schachter, founder of Del.icio.us, plans to work on the project full-time and hire a small staff. "My first priority is improving reliability and responsiveness, with new features following soon," Schachter wrote in a brief announcement. Additional investors include BV Capital, Esther Dyson and Tim O'Reilly.