VentureBeat

There are at least 41 companies that offer services to help you create your own social network. IntroNetworks differentiates itself by analyzing data about members of a network and telling each user which other users they have the most in common with — something that professional social network Visible Path and only half a dozen other competitors also do.

For example, Virgin Galactic, the commercial spaceship tour to be unveiled later this year, will use introNetworks to offer a social network for people who have signed up to one day to become tourist-astronauts. Each user will be able to create user profiles, add career information, interests, activities and more, then introNetworks will create a visualization graph showing other users and see what other future astronauts they are most like. Considering the price of space flight tickets is $200,000 a pop, one assumes the average user will be extremely well-heeled and have a fascination with space technology — so this could turn out to be a high-end geek niche social network.

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based introNetworks has been around since the early part of this decade. Maybe it has been flying under the radar (or above the stratosphere?) — among the many white-label social networks out there. I certainly haven’t heard much about it. Still, some white-label social networks claim to be growing fast. One, Ning, says it is adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and now has “up to” 315,000 of them in total.

Regardless of how successful introNetworks may be, it uses Adobe’s Flash technology. Perhaps because of this, Adobe Systems, along with the Arther J. Rice III Living Trust, has put a total of $4.5 million in the company, following up on a previous investment in it.

MobiTV, the Emeryville start-up that offers TV and other digital content to your mobile phone and other connected devices, is soaking up the cash.

It has just raised $30 million more in its third round of venture capital, GigaOm reports. This make for a total of $100 million since July — and its valuation reportedly already exceeds $400 million.

Is this company red hot, or is it getting bloated? It started out serving mobile phones. But it has since expanded to support any device with broadband — via any WiFi, or with provider AT&T.

Large investors like Oak need to put their money to work, and so are willing to pay a high price. It has invested the most so far. The latest investors in MobiTV are Hearst Corp. and Adobe Systems. Hearst, of course, has all kinds of media properties, and it would make sense to distribute it over mobile phones and other gadgets. Adobe, meanwhile, is also flush with cash for ventures, having created a new venture arm. And Adobe, too, is interested in digital media distribution. It wants to support Apollo, its new system for running applications written in Flash, HTML, and JavaScript from the desktop.