VentureBeat

Buddy Media is a small player in the game of trying to build businesses on Facebook’s developer platform, and on other social network platforms, but it has big plans.

Today, it is rolling out an ad network of its own — meaning it is competing against fairly established companies like RockYou, Social Media, Lookery and others. It has also raised a $6.5 million round of funding led by Softbank Capital, with participation from European Founders Fund, GreyCroft Partners, and angel investors including Ron Conway.

New York-based Buddy Media, the maker of virtual Facebook currency “Acebucks,” bought a set of small applications built by ChipIn, last January, in a bid to grow bigger in the face of market leaders like Slide and Rockyou.

Adonomics, an analytics service for Facebook applications, says Buddy Media has the 33rd largest reach on Facebook, with 5,894,851 total installs and 63,985 daily active users. Adonomics has been criticized for overvaluing Facebook applications (it values Slide at $318 million, for example). But the only people upset about BuddyMedia’s valuation here will be the company itself and its investors: Adonomics pegs it at $964,469.

However, as one of Buddy’s investors says, the company has been approached to do strategic deals with larger companies and instead had its pick of term sheets. The market here is young, there’s still lots of opportunity, and maybe Buddy can yet carve a space out for itself.

updated
1) Online advertising up 28 percent
2) Yahoo confirms $160M acquisition of Maven
3) AOL to launch mobile soc-net platform
4) Starbucks to offer somewhat-free WiFi
5) Topanga, next-gen lighting, funded by Khosla
6) Stealth division at EA making social games
7) Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million
8) DanceJam gets another $3.5 million
9) Uncomfortable ads from Facebook
10) Initial review of Android: Not ready yet
11) Motorola and Nortel consider unit merger
11) The long wait for cleantech permitting

Online advertising up 28 percent at end of year — The total US ad spend in the fourth quarter grew almost 28 percent over the same period last year, according to the latest numbers from IDC. The firm also found that Google’s market share declined toward the end of the year.

Yahoo has confirmed its acquisition of Maven Networks – We reported on the deal several days ago, but Yahoo announced this morning the specific price, which we’d only guessed at earlier: $160 million. That’s a big win for General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and Prism VentureWorks, which together had invested around $24 million, and apparently had invested most recently in 2006 at at a pre-money valuation of just $30 million (which means they’ve made very nice money). As Dan Primack notes, this is great for GC, which originally invested in 2003 at a $7.5 million pre-money, though interestingly, GC has also pumped a ton of money into Maven competitor Brightcove – including a recent round at around a $210 million post-value.

AOL to launch mobile social networking platform — AOL plans on releasing a mobile software platform for social networking, which will initially work across most of the major device operating systems. The platform will have its own XML-based markup language and server, and be open to developers.

Starbucks begins offering (somewhat) free WiFi — Starbucks will drop T-Mobile and take on AT&T as the partner for its 7,000 United States locations. The upshot: If you’re an AT&T broadband subscriber, WiFi at Starbucks is now free; if not, access is still cheaper. Prices for WiFi in all locations have been steadily dropping, which probably sounds like another nail tapping into the coffin to startups like Fon, which plan on creating large networks of WiFi hotspots.

Topanga high-intensity lighting funded by Khosla — Topanga Technologies is based in Topanga, California. If only everything in life were so simple. We don’t know much more than that it makes high-intensity, discharge lighting, as it’s currently in stealth mode. Khosla Ventures disclosed the investment this morning, alongside its announcement that it hired Ford Tamer.

Stealth division at Electronic Arts making social games — A division called EA Blueprint will make games for distribution on online platforms including social networks, according to a story on Gametap. Blueprint will work together with small developers to create games, some of which will be “brand extensions” of existing EA games. The company, however, declined further comment.

Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million — The domain name game is as flush as ever, with the sale of Bored.com having just brought in $4.5 million through auctioneer Moniker. No broken records here, though — Sex.com brought in $12.5 million two years ago. Fittingly enough, the sale price for Business.com fell somewhere in between sex and boredom. (Update: See comments below for more color on the various sale prices.)

DanceJam gets another $3.5 million for dance, jam — DanceJam, which hasn’t even launched yet, has gotten tons of publicity because its founder is MC Hammer, not to mention that Michael Arrington is an investor. That means the site, a community for dancers to upload clips of themselves dancing and rate others, had better be good when it finally does launch. The $3.5 million was provided by Softbank Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners and some new angel investors, according to TechCrunch.

Headhunting ad for Yahoo employees shows up on Yahoo profile – First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman placed an ad in Facebook, asking Yahoo employees if they might like to leave their increasingly troubled parent to found startups, and he showed evidence that suggested more employees are clicking through than several months ago — a sign of a potential mass exodus at hand. However, turns out the more recent ads — the ones drawing more clicks — were made more enticing because they showed photos of Yahoo employees. This distorted the entire experiment. The ads managed to find its way onto one satisfied Yahoo employee’s profile, occasioning an interesting exchange. “I don’t want my colleagues to think I’m leaving Yahoo, so … I’ve pulled my “Facebook fandom” for First Round Capital,” writes the disconcerted Yahooligan. The ad raises yet more questions about how Facebook can gracefully pipe ads through social network connections. More at Valleywag.

Hands-on review of Google Android in use in Barcelona — Gizmodo has a quick review of a mobile unit with Google Android installed from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. From the post: “While the Android platform is solid enough for development and testing, it seems we are far away from seeing actual products getting into the market.”

Motorola and Nortel consider merging wireless units — A combined wireless-infrastructure division between Motorola and Nortel would generate $10 billion in annual sales, part of a proposed restructuring of Motorola under consideration by new CEO Greg Brown. The two company’s units make networking equipment for wireless carriers. The broader plan involves breaking Motorola up into parts, and spinning off the struggling handset-making unit.

Setting up wind turbines? Be prepared for a wait — These lines make the Soviet Union look like child’s play: Developers applying for wind projects in Minnesota face a 612 year waiting list, according to EcoGeek. That’s an extreme example of the bureaucracy that come with issuing permits for new cleantech projects.

This may well be the year that the leaders in the mobile advertising space emerge, and startup Ad Infuse has taken on another $12 million to try to ensure its place at the table.

As we reported in an October story, Ad Infuse is distinguished by its focus on targeted user data. Stats like age, gender and geographical location are used to determine the best ad to serve to any particular mobile user, a method the company says will greatly boost CPMs (the amount paid per thousand views of an ad).

That data had better prove to be a meaningful differentiator for Ad Infuse as the mobile ad space heats up. AdMob, which experienced excellent growth in 2007, gets by with barely any targeting, but has served up stunningly high volumes — over 15 billion impressions to date, according to the counter on its webpage.

Ad Infuse can’t compare in terms of raw numbers, but hopes it can sell highly targeted audiences to large advertisers like Unilever, which teamed up with the company to run ads for Axe Body Spray to young males late last year. Part of the latest round of funding will go to bulking up Ad Infuse’s sales team, who will help foster more such partnerships.

CEO Brian Cowley gave us some statistics during an interview: Ad Infuse roughly doubled the number of partnerships and advertisers it had during the fourth quarter of last year, as well as boosting revenues 325 percent and doubling average CPMs to $20, and appears to be continuing its growth in the current quarter.

Even with a positive growth story, the future is still looking uncertain for Ad Infuse — as well as AdMob, AOL Third Screen Media, Google, and newer startups like Smaato, which just took a $3.5 million round of its own. However, the dust should begin to clear by the end of this year, and let us see who the likely survivors are.

The $12 million funding was provided by SoftBank Capital, and previous investors ComVentures (now Velocity Interactive Group) and Storm Ventures also participated. Ad Infuse has taken a total of $17.5 million to date, including its seed round.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Cambridge, Mass.-based Sermo, an online social network with a twist, offers physicians the opportunity to ask for and offer advice free of charge. The catch: Well-heeled investors can pay to listen in.

Sermo, which just raised $26.7 million in a third funding round (details below), offers doctors the opportunity to share, discuss and vote on the importance of each others’ medical observations. The intriguing notion here is that doctors are likely to identify emerging trends in disease, treatment methods, drug side effects and so forth simply by sharing their local knowledge with one another. The company aims to maintain a high-quality conversation by restricting full membership to licensed doctors.

But what the company bills as a way to advance public health by harnessing this social knowledge is also an exercise in hard-edged capitalism. For $100,000 to $500,000 a year, Wall Street firms are also welcome to beam into the online discussion in order to discover fresh sources of medical intelligence. These outsiders won’t be able to identify the participating docs, but can pose questions to the community and of course will be free to base investment decisions on whatever they learn, such as whether a given drug seems safe and possibly even whether an experimental drug seems to be working in clinical trials.

Complicating matters is that doctors aren’t asked to disclose conflicts of interest that might call their judgments into question. The doctors themselves are also eligible for bonuses from Sermo for postings or votes that are deemed valuable, although only after the particular topic has been closed. The company does eventually plan to give government officials, academics and other healthcare companies — read, insurers, drug companies and hospitals — access to the network as well.

In May, the American Medical Association joined the party, announcing a partnership with Sermo under which the AMA can post questions to doctors in exchange for including “Discuss on Sermo” links in its print and Web publications. The move attracted a certain amount of criticism at the time — see, for instance, some comments in this AP story and this post from Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman, who in a rare departure from his usual equanimity denounced it as a “new way to exploit docs.”

Investors in the latest financing round include Legg Mason, Longworth Venture Partners and Softbank Capital. A spokeswoman for Sermo said Legg Mason contributed $25 million, while the other investors made up the $1.7 million difference.

There’s a description of how the service works here, and here’s a screenshot, too:

UPDATE: Added screenshot and a link to how Sermo works, slightly revised the description of the service and fixed the link to the AP story.

UPDATE REDUX: Sermo’s spokeswoman confirmed details of the funding round, so I’ve rewritten those sections and further refined a description of the service.

KickApps, which enables publishers to quickly add social network functions to their offerings, has just raised $11 million in its second round of financing.

Thanks to companies like Ning, PeopleAggregator, Me.com, and KickApps, the creation of new social networks has become a commodity, and people are seeing green. Ning recently secured $44 million at a lofty $170 million pre-money valuation. In this bubbly environment, it’s not surprising to see investors looking for more.

While KickApps and Ning are frequently compared, there are significant differences. Ning focuses on social network creation for the masses, where these masses, regardless of programming ability, can launch good-looking, stand-alone social networks of their own. KickApps, based in New York, is aimed at publishers who have developers and want to build “community” functions like profiles, blogs, video and photo sharing into their sites. This makes KickApps more like Five Across, which Cisco recently acquired.

KickApps uses a web-based front end that lets publishers blend the social networking functions into their sites in a matter of days or weeks. By comparison, Five Across’ system is not web-based, currently lacks support for video, and is more complicated to deploy.

KickApps is powering social networks on over 5,000 sites, ranging from major media brands like HBO and Cinemax to off-kilter niche sites like Dee Snyder’s House of Hair.

The company offers its applications and hosting services to publishers for free in exchange for a piece of the incremental ad revenue its services generate, and targets the ads itself. Conversely, companies can pay for a license and place the ads themselves.

Softbank Capital led the round, which included previous investors Spark Capital, Prism VentureWorks and Jarl Mohn. The company had previously raised $7 million.