Social news site Buzzfeed has raised $19.3 million in its third round of funding, a war chest that will likely help the company take its quirky content to a new level.

New York City-based Buzzfeed has made a name for itself online with its mix of breaking news, animal photos, clever one-page slideshows, and long-form politics and technology coverage. While it has attracted both love and scorn for its content, the company claims to have attracted 40 million unique visitors in December, a sign that its efforts are working well.

But Buzzfeed wants to do more. With its new cash on hand, it plans to hire new employees, improve its presence on mobile devices like phones and tablets, and likely launch international versions of its site.

“We have the senior management, board, and investors we need to build the next great media company: socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale,” Buzzfeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said in a statement. “We are all focused on that big goal and raised this capital to move even faster.”

Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post before Buzzfeed, and now Buzzfeed has raised more than the Huffington Post did before it was acquired by AOL for $315 million.

The new round was led by New Enterprise Associates, and prior investors RRE Ventures, Hearst Interactive Media, SoftBank, and Lerer Ventures all threw in more capital this time than they did during the last round. Michael and Kass Lazerow, co-founders of Buddy Media, jumped in as new investors. Buzzfeed has raised $46.3 million including today’s round.

Fat cat via Les Chatfield/Flickr

The online marketplace for pet food, pet toys, and everything but the pets themselves pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital in 1988, IPO’d in 2000, bought a Super Bowl ad in January of that year, and shuttered the company in November.

Perhaps the company was just 12 years early.

I’ve been seeing a lot of pitches for dog and cat product startups lately, including DoggyLoot, a daily deal site for chews, toys, and treats for dogs. The company says that 4 percent of pet products are sold online today, with a 12 percent annual growth rate.

With $2 million in venture funding from Sandbox Venture Fund, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and several million in revenue in just its first year (which is probably more than Pets.com in all its ill-fated history) the company may just be proving that now is finally the time for pet sales online.

It helps that DoggyLoot is not focused on food, which is heavy and costly to ship. According to data the company assembled, more than three-quarters of dog owners have made online purchases, mostly of toys, medicines, and accessories or toys. Those are higher value and higher margin products which ship easily and efficiently.

The company put together an infographic showing the state of the industry, at least so far as dogs are concerned:

photo credit: Sebastián-Dario via photo pin cc

Google X Lab, the search-engine giant’s supersecret laboratory for Reed Richards-style experiments, made an interesting discovery in its efforts to create a machine capable of learning on its own. The team created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning — aka a brain –  by connecting 16,000 computer processors with over a billion neural connections. It then exposed it to 10 million randomly selected YouTube video thumbnails over the course of three days. After feeding it a random sampling of 20,000 images, the brain began recognizing pictures of cats using a deep-learning algorithm that didn’t include any prior suggestions or information regarding felines and what they look like.

“We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat,’” Google Fellow Jeff Dean told the New York Times. “It basically invented the concept of a cat.”

The overly simplistic explanation here? Cats actually do power the Internet, and this is now a serious theory rather than a humorous observation.

The slightly more credible explanation for the results is due to the overwhelming number of cat videos uploaded to YouTube, thus making it easier for an artificial brain to recognize cats. The brain was able to correctly identify cat images with 74.8 percent accuracy. It fared better with identifying human faces (81.7 percent) and human body parts ( 76.7 percent). The brain’s performance is roughly twice as accurate than any previous machine learning test to date.

Google presents its findings at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland this week. The company said its machine-learning findings could help advance speech and image recognition software, as well as translation services. For now, the research project is moving from the Google X laboratory to other areas of the company.

NetworkClean, a new tool that scans your Facebook profile and flags anything it finds that could damage your reputation, thinks I should tone it down with the booze talk, aggressive and offensive lingo, and naughty adult-content on my Facebook profile. I admit, I was a bit surprised at the findings, but not so much that I had to put down my glass of pinot.

The free new reputation-monitoring service, launching at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. today, is like a watchful, literal adult protecting you from yourself. It is aimed at individuals worried about their online reputations, as well as companies that want to protect their brands. You log in with your Facebook information and NetworkClean does a full scan of your profile. After the initial check, the tool monitors your profile or page constantly, and can send you an alert as soon as it spots some potentially damaging content.

The main NetworkClean page is a dashboard with widgets for trends, flagged content, and custom alerts. There is a box showing you who your favorite friends are (my husband is No. 9, oops!), a pie chart that breaks down horrible things you’ve said into an enjoyable graphic, and a list of Facebook security and privacy concerns with links to fix them.

I took NetworkClean for a little test drive to see if it found anything worrisome in my profile. My overall tone is “partly positive” and, as with all humans on the Internet, cats and birthdays are popular topics for me. My profile had 89 alerts for flagged content, helpfully divided into categories such as Profanity/Derogatory, Adult Content, Alcohol/Drug, Aggressive, and the mysterious Slang.

Some of my more g-rated flagged words included beer, dumb, crap, attack, hell, wine, stupid, poo, poop, gun, chubby, rumor, and Uncle Tom (referring to an actual uncle, named Tom). One post had the triple threat of stressed, suicide, and banging, however I was just talking about adorable tarsirs, which have been known to off themselves in times of stress by banging their heads on something hard.

The service is easy to use and, perhaps accidentally, a very entertaining diversion. There are similar reputation monitoring services, such as Radian6 and BuddyMedia for companies, and Reputation.com for individuals, but NetworkClean claims its service is more real-time and individual-friendly.

At launch, the Culver City, Calif.-based NetworkClean only supports Facebook, but the company hopes to add support for other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn in the future.

“If you’re going to get on Facebook and other social networks, you’re just going to have to deal with it,” said Harshul Sanghi, a managing partner at American Express Ventures, on an investor panel after NetworkClean’s demonstration. He seemed skeptical of the need for a reputation-monitoring service. “The cat’s out of the bag, so just deal with it.”

Christine Herron, a director at Intel Capital, was more intrigued by the business possibilities. However, she said, “They’re going to need to make a call between, is it a consumer product or is it a brand product?”

The bootstrapped company was founded by Kishore Mamillapalli (pictured above) and Doug Haustein after the duo heard stories about people losing their jobs, getting bullied online, or not getting admitted to college because of poor social networking choices. I did some searching to see if I could find anything scandalous about two, but of course, their online reputations appear to be spotless.

NetworkClean is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

And now for something completely different: Here’s a video of a robot brushing a cat.

The bot, a Nao model hacked by clever software developer Taylor Veltrop, is controlled with a Nintendo Wiimote, a Microsoft Kinect, a head-mounted display and a treadmill. The setup is perfect for that special someone in your life who loves animals but is constantly stymied by crippling pet dander allergies.

Veltrop’s video shows three views: his, the view from the Kinect and the view of a third party watching the cat/bot exchange.

We’ve had a Nao bot in our offices before, and these guys are adorable and quite hackable, too.

In the recent past, Veltrop has hacked his non-Nao “Veltrobot” + Kinect setup to do pushups and wield a knife.

Nao robots were designed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French company. Each Nao unit costs around $15,000 and is just shy of two feet tall at 57 centimeters. The bots walk upright and have toddler-like ranges of motion. But being outfitted with an array of sensors, the Nao-bot can navigate a room, track objects and respond to people and faces.

The Nao robots can be loaded with applications, programmed to send status updates or hacked to do any number of tricks, such as pet-brushing.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cats. The iPhone haz them.

The Cheezburger Network, a group of websites highlighting silly picture, has launched its first iPhone application, porting thousands of ridiculous photos from its array of sites onto the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen.

The application lets iPhone owners quickly browse through images from sites on the Cheezburger network.  It does the job — that is, getting images of stupid cats and other animals to an iPhone user as quickly as possible — pretty well. But the app is a little dodgy at first (it crashed a few times), and sometimes the animations aren’t all that smooth. The buttons for the app also do not give any indication that the user is pressing the button, such as changing color or shape, which feels a bit weird.

As with the main site, users can share photos and videos they like over Twitter, email and Facebook with a few swipes and button presses. The app also delivers users to the LOLmart, an online store that features merchandise with LOLcat photos. There isn’t a native store for the app, so it just takes users to the main web page, not a version optimized for mobile devices.

The Cheezburger Network is known for bringing pictures of “LOLcats,” an Internet meme involving ridiculous captions for various cat photos, into mainstream popularity. The captions are usually intentionally misspelled and come across as some kind of pidgin. The meme was popular on image-hosting sites like 4chan before the Cheezburger network came into being.

The Cheezburger Network recently bought meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme from Rocketboom, the site’s original owner, to serve as a complement to its current meme repository called Memebase. That site is much more like I Can Has Cheezburger, the company’s flagship site, in that it simply hosts memes rather than documenting the creation and evolution of each meme. It was reportedly a seven-figure deal, though no exact financial details were disclosed.

Ben Huh started the company in September 2007. The Seattle-based startup has been profitable since them and now attracts 16.5 million monthly visitors adding up to 375 million pageviews and 110 million video views. The company recently raised $30 million from Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and SoftBank Capital.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.