VentureBeat

If you get superstar athletes to invest in your youth-sports social network, does that mean you’re onto something big?

WePlay seems to think so. The company, which combines standard social network features with scheduling functionality to manage practices and games, hopes to attract young athletes and their parents and coaches, and has just raised $8.6 million in its second round of funding. While Deep Fork Capital led the round, previous investors Derek Jeter, LeBron James and Peyton Manning and FirstMark Capital came back as well.

If WePlay were any other kind of start-up, we’d wonder why it would raise money from athletes who know nothing about start-ups. While Curt Schilling has a minor reputation for knowing his way around the tech game, Derek and LeBron certainly do not. But in this case, it makes good sense. WePlay is competing in two competitive markets without any major differentiators in either one. On the youth-sports social network side, it is up against the more established Takkle. On the scheduling side, there is RosterBot and TeamSnap.

Having sports superstars behind it could give WePlay an edge. The company is not shy about it: The two most prominent features on the site right now are a big square banner offering a chance to meet Derek Jeter and a 15-day old “featured member” blog post from none other than LeBron James.

That’s the difference, right there.

Trulia, the real estate search startup backed by high-profile venture firms Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, has raised $15 million in additional funding, bringing its total financing to $33 million.

To be honest, a lot of real estate sites look pretty similar to me, and Trulia lacks a big attention-getting feature like Zillow, which will estimate the value of your home. But the funding should help Trulia stay competitive with the more heavily-financed Zillow, which has raised a total of $87 million.

Chief executive Peter Flint says the San Francisco-based company wasn’t in danger of running out of cash anytime soon, but taking on the additional financing gives Trulia some insurance in case the economic situation stays bad or gets even worse.

Interestingly, Flint says Trulia is still growing despite the general economic malaise, and the poor real estate market in particular. The company says it gets around 5 million unique monthly visitors. A spokesperson sent me comScore’s top 10 real estate sites for April, which shows it coming in at number seven — since the list is dominated by offerings from big companies like Yahoo Real Estate and MSN Real Estate, that’s quite good for a startup.

Compete also shows a pattern of healthy growth, albeit one that still leaves Trulia a little behind Zillow.

Trulia benefits from the general trend in which homebuyers are using the Web more and more in their real estate search, and advertising follows suit, Flint says. In the current climate, it makes sense that advertisers, have to be smart about where they spend their money.

Flint says one of Trulia’s biggest advantages is the emphasis it places on discussion and community. Not being in the market for a house myself, I haven’t taken a deep look at Trulia’s discussion forums, but I can say they seem well-designed and active. (Of course, Zillow and other sites have discussion forums, too.)

The current round was led by Deep Fork Capital, with participation from Sequoia, Accel and Fayez Sarofim and Co. The 70-person company’s revenue comes from advertising, including its vertical ad network and a create-your-own-ad offering called Trulia Pro.

One day soon, with the help of Moblyng, you’ll likely be able to stream music playlists from social networks to your phone.

In the meantime, though, you can use Moblyng to watch any number of things on your mobile device — a YouTube video or to put Slide slideshow widgets from MySpace or another social network.

First, you go to Moblyng’s site (going live later today), enter the social network profile URL, username and password.

Then, the Menlo Park, Calif. company’s technology scrapes profile on social networking sites and other applications of your choice and recreates Flash content as video or as JPEG-format images. Once you’ve used Moblyng to scrape content, you can send the scrapings to your friends via mobile text messages. See sample screenshot of a Snoop Dogg slideshow, above.

Incidentally, the company originally developed this technology when it was a direct competitor to social network slide show makers such as Slide. The company, until now known as Fliptrack, originally let you create advanced slideshows that matched music in time with slideshows — Animoto has more recently come out with a similar product. Facebook users can still use Moblyng’s slide show application here.

Moblyng realized the technology it had created for Slideshows could also be used to convert Flash to mobile. Personally, I’ll find the most use for Moblyng when I can use it to stream music playlists from MySpace, such as those offered by Imeem. Moblyng says legal issues need to be worked out before it can start streaming music — but it does have the technical ability to do so. Note: Moblyng already does license some music, so some slideshows with music will also play that music within its mobile renditions of applications.

The company has raised $5.7 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital.