VentureBeat

You might think that by now, VCs would use business plans from new social network companies as kindling.

But Hollywood-based Buzznet, a network devoted to allowing indie music fans to bond over the bands they love, has raised $6 million in its second round of funding from Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners. It was valued at more than $20 million, post-investment.

The site is different than music networking sites such as Last.fm . Instead of focusing on online radio, it lets fans post boilerplate social network content like photos, videos, comments and blogs — on a bands’ actual Buzznet profile pages. In some cases, the band members respond. On MySpace, the content on a band’s page is entirely controlled by the band.

Buzznet is aware that it’s not the next MySpace or Facebook, but is taking a different approach, targeting what it calls a “passion group”–in this case indie music junkies–that will generate content itself and keep coming back for more. The company says it hooked over six million active users generating 100-150 million page views per month, a 300 percent increase since the beginning of this year. According to HitWise, in terms of percentage growth, this makes Buzznet the fastest growing social network on the web.

However, looking at the site, we don’t understand why. From the front page on, it’s chaos, with flashing banner ads on the right and shifting photographs on the left. The further down into the site you dig, the more chaotic it becomes. Profile pages are packed with inelegantly placed photos and videos, and a band’s bio is squeezed into a little scrollable text box.

We talked to Buzznet’s Chairman, Tyler Goldman, and he described the site as a “Wikipedia for music,” but with so much visual clutter on every profile page, actually gleaning anything meaningful about a band was a difficult task. Tyler said that the company expects to monetize with advertising, and they did manage to score a deal with Honda for the Honda Civic tour, but that involved creating a totally different site. The company is confident it will succeed where everyone else has failed and convince advertisers to hawk their wares amidst user-generated content. They raised this recent round to build out a top-notch ad sales team to do the job.

Pulse Mobile, a San Francisco company that lets you send mobile messages with an animated avatar, has raised $7 million in a second round of financing.

It is aimed for 14 to 24 year olds, but even old folks can have fun with this. There’s nothing your girlfriend or wife will like more than a “I dig you” message from a pig with a Japanese accent.

The service launched in December on Cingular in the U.S., and KDDI in Japan, but you can also use it via your Web browser.

Here’s how it works: You either choose an avatar provided by Pulse’s software — such as a monkey, frog or pig — or you select own avatar. You do this by uploading a picture, perhaps of yourself, which Pulse Mobile then turns into an image with three-dimensional, animated qualities. (On your mobile phone, you send your picture to an SMS code, and Pulse sends back a link with your avatar.) You can choose to make your avatar nod, shake or wink. You then send a message to your friend using MMS format (which is SMS for multimedia, and now supported by most phones), and choose what accent the avatar speaks in when it is delivered to your friend. You get a sense of how it works here (type in a message and hit “preview”).

Pulse has other applications worth noting. One uses text-to-voice technology to let you have an avatar read out your text messages on your phone, PC or other device — offered in partnership with a Comverse Technologies. Another is wallpaper that you can customize (see example) and having 3D qualities. More details here.

Investors included Anthem Venture Partners, Draper Associates, Shea Ventures, Hikari Tsushin Group in Japan, and several other Asian and European investors.