VentureBeat

Gaming startup 8D World,  which is currently operating in stealth mode, has raised a first round of funding to create a new virtual world from Spark Capital. The amount is “meaningfully” more than $1 million, according to Alex Finkelstein, a principal at Spark, VentureWire reported.

There’s not much information available yet on the company, but from the art style on its site, it looks like a fantasy massively multiplayer online game, perhaps not unlike the existing casual MMO Runescape or the upcoming Meteor Games world that we wrote about yesterday. The fantasy gaming genre is a crowded one in which Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” reigns supreme with 10 million subscribers.

The most interesting thing about this company is that Rick Goodman is its executive vice president and chief product officer. Goodman cofounded Ensemble Studios in 1995 with his brother Tony, Bruce Shelley and Brian Sullivan. The team created the “Age of Empires” real-time strategy game franchise for Microsoft, which has sold millions of copies.

Rick Goodman broke away to start his own game studio, Stainless Steel Studios, in 1998. That studio created the hit game “Empire Earth”, a rival to Age of Empires. Stainless Steel Studios closed in late 2005 after troubles with its publisher at the time, Midway Games.

The story was first reported by the Boston Business Journal. Finkelstein declined to describe the 8D virtual world to VentureWire.  The company plans to launch in Asia and has offices in Boston and China. The chief executive is Alex Wang, cofounder of enterprise software company Emptoris.

It’s been in the works for several months, but Twitter has finally announced its new round of funding.

The new round was led by Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos of Bezos Expeditions (and also chief executive of Amazon). Existing partners Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage participated as well.

Sabet has also accepted a seat on Twitter’s board of directors.

In a post on the matter, co-founder Biz Stone writes:

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

After months of reliability issues, Twitter’s performance has improved in recent weeks after bringing in outside help from Pivotal Labs to work on its architectural issues. It also now has a rolling shutdown system in place that will cut off certain site functionality as needed to maintain stability.

Perhaps most importantly however, Twitter is now keeping its users in the loop when problems arise on its Twitter Status Blog.

While we’ve been quick to point out the difficulties Twitter has been having, I’ve remained excited about its possibilities as a mass communication platform. We’ve seen its power in action during recent ecological disasters and even in times of personal peril, such as when an American was imprisoned in Egypt.

That individual is now trying to work with Twitter to create a Twitter emergency broadcast system of sorts.

With the right pieces in place, I believe Twitter will continue its march towards the mainstream. Not that it really matters, it’s useful with or without mainstream usage. That is why I believe that the only thing that can kill Twitter, is Twitter itself. It has the right combination of users, simplicity and developers building apps on top of it, that no one is going to come along and replace it — that it unless it cannot in any way shape or form be relied upon.

It came close to that precipice, and some users left or were boycotting. But if Twitter is able to right the ship, which it appears to be doing, those users will come back — and many new ones will follow.

Terms of the round have not been disclosed yet, but we have inquiries out to all parties [updates below]. The round was previously rumored to be for $15 million.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

update: Existing investor Chris Sacca tells us that Twitter has decided not to disclose the amount of this round. He assures us however that the valuation is “very strong,” and that the existing investors are happy.

Naturally, we spoke about this over Twitter.

update 2: We also received word from Biz Stone that the specific numbers are being kept private between Twitter and its partners.

update 3: And as if on cue, Twitter has been down on and off much of this morning, users report. I see it is down right now. Let’s chalk it up to excitement over the funding.

Covestor, an investing community site, has raised $6.5 million in its second round of funding. The London and New York-based company plans to build out its asset management platform, which helps its users make investment decisions.

Covestor targets both average investors and professional fund managers. The site mines information from real portfolios on online stock brokerages, giving a holistic view of different risk levels and investment strategies. In all, it tracks 150 variables

The fund management platform is what Chief Executive Rikki Tahta believes can allow the average user to make better decisions than the pros. Tahta has compared Covestor.com to Facebook, in that it wants to bring a sense of trust and real-world verification to the online social investing community that is missing in other investment sites.

The site claims the number of ‘money managers’ it hosts is ten times the number of managers that work for any single professional firm in the world, including giants like UBS or Goldman Sachs, whose consumer investing divisions Tahta thinks are in direct competition with his company.

Covestor’s business model is a bit less certain: The company plans to let fund managers earn revenue by charging minimal fees to the investors who follow them, just as real fund and hedge fund managers do, while the company will keep a portion for itself.

Well known venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson, who happens to be an investor in Covestor through his firm Union Square Ventures, writes that social platforms such as Covestor “might be the best option for investors looking to generate outperformance in the market.” He shares his stock portfolio performance (not good; see left).

While Wilson has put his proverbial money where his mouth is, whether Covestor can separate from the growing field of social investment sites including Zecco and Cake Financial remains to be seen. Back in February, we made up a list of 11 contenders for the social investing market.

Union Square Ventures, New York-based Spark Capital, and European firm Amadeus Capital all participated in the round, which will place Todd Dagres of Spark and Albert Wenger of USV on the Covestor board. USV participated in the first company’s first $1 million round of funding. The company is based in New York City.

Updated with more information from the company

Online video startup Veoh is in the process of raising a $40 million round at a proposed $150 million valuation and has hired investment bank Bear Sterns to help with the effort, Silicon Alley Insider reports.

San Diego-based Veoh is a distant competitor to market leader YouTube, but still claims to be growing at a healthy rate. The site features user-created videos, clips from partners such as the Independent Comedy Network, as well as content from large companies like Viacom. From what we hear, the company is well respected in the media world, partially because it’s made a point of forging partnerships with entertainment companies.

However, Veoh’s traffic numbers are contested, as they have been at least since the company raised $26 million round last spring (our coverage).

Last December, third-party analytics firm Comscore showed Veoh bringing in nearly 16 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, with only 3.5 million of those in the US. That’s versus YouTube’s nearly 250 million. Meanwhile, rival analytics firm Nielsen says Veoh received more than 2 million unique US viewers in December (not visitors).

[Update: Veoh tells me it has more than 23 million monthly video viewers worldwide, defined as people who started playing a video on the Veoh home site or on a Veoh video embedded in another site. It says that Nielsen's panel may be missing large chunks of Veoh traffic, because the panel is comprised of the wrong demographic. It says that using a separate Nielsen tracking service, the web analytics firm obtained numbers much closer to Veoh's own.]

Today, Spark Capital investor Bijan Sabet, who sits on Veoh’s board, writes that Nielsen’s numbers are wrong, after SAI cited them in its article.

Sabet says that Veoh’s internal server logs show 21 million unique monthly viewers in December, up from 2.5 million at the beginning of the year. He also says that users are watching more than 30 million hours of Veoh videos per month, now.

So maybe Veoh is pretty big, but like every other video company, it is trying to figure out how to monetize. Many startup rivals have also raised large amounts of money. Two examples: Last year, DailyMotion raised $30 (our coverage) and MetaCafe raised $34 million (our coverage). Hosting and streaming lots of videos gets expensive, and right now there’s no way to cover costs.

[Update: I asked the company about monetization. Veoh says the average user spends more than 87 minutes on the site per month, with much of the viewing happening during evening prime time hours. It says its audience presents great opportunities for brand advertisers.]

Here’s the latest action:
1) Dan Farber takes the helm at CNET
2) Mozilla launches email-focused subsidiary
3) Scribd creates iPaper, an Acrobat competitor
4) Hewlett-Packard has great first quarter
5) Tesla Motors pulls in another $40M
6) Verizon, AT&T unveil new unlimited wireless plans
7) Oligarchs, proletariat run amok in Silicon Valley
8) Scientists suck up CO2 to make alternative fuel

Dan Farber takes the helm at CNET — One familiar figure is stepping aside for another at CNET, where long-time editor-in-chief Jai Singh is ending his long rule over the editorial arm of the media company. Farber, a veteran journalist and former EIC at some of the tech world’s most recognized publications, takes on the role at a time that CNET is struggling with activist investors including Spark Capital and Jana Partners. His own thoughts on the transition are here. (Image by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.)

Mozilla launches new subsidiary to improve email — The Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser, has launched a subsidiary called Mozilla Messaging that will work on improving the Thunderbird email client, another of the company’s products. In a painfully vague blog post, David Ascher, the CEO-to-be of Messaging, says that the new division will give Thunderbird the kind of attention Firefox has always gotten, adding new features and opening it to more contributions from outside developers. Despite the vagueness, as a major competitor to Microsoft Outlook, a next-generation version of Thunderbird may (eventually) be big news.

Scribd creates iPaper, an Acrobat competitor — Does clicking a link only to find it opening up a PDF file in a separate window bug the hell out of you? Scribd is hoping it can tap into that pain point to get a foothold over Adobe’s Acrobat, with a new document viewer called iPaper that will be embedded directly in web pages. The viewer will be able to display a variety of formats including normal text and Powerpoint presentations and, get this, advertisements powered by Google Adsense, without requiring a download. The app is quite similar to Macromedia’s FlashPaper, which Adobe effectively abandoned when it acquired that company. Ironically, iPaper is also made with Adobe Flash.

Hewlett-Packard has an excellent first quarter — Giant computer maker HP had an excellent first quarter, especially as compared to the recent earnings and stock performance of most of its compatriots on the NASDAQ. The company saw a small bump in North American revenue, accompanied by a jump in Asia and Europe. It’s often considered an indicator for the enterprise sector, so strong results coming now from HP suggest that the recession might not be so bad after all, at least for tech.

Tesla Motors pulls in another $40 million — Electric car maker Tesla has taken another $40 million, raising total investment in the company to date to $140 million, as we briefly mentioned yesterday. The lead investors were Valor Equity Partners and Elon Musk, the company’s chairman. Tesla is shooting for $250 million more over the next two years, and the launch of a new model; for more details, see yesterday’s article.

Two major carriers unveil new unlimited wireless plans — Verizon and AT&T now both offer unlimited-use wireless plans, starting at $99. Directed at the high-end market, the new packages are a significant step away from the set-minute “buckets” that the largest carriers have favored to date. They mark a further move toward using value-added services like applications and data as the major differentiator between wireless plans.

Oligarchs, proletariat run amok in Silicon Valley; middle class vanishing — Petit bourgeousie, where art thee? Recent employment figures for Silicon Valley show that overall employment levels are rising, but jobs in the $30,000 - $80,000 earning range are on the decline. Worse, the job growth for low-end earners  making less than $30,000 was at five percent, while growth for the $80,000-plus group was at only one percent. This might have something to do with an increasingly common business model: One well-paid CEO, one small army of interns.

Suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make fuel — A couple of new schemes hope to pull carbon dioxide from the air to create an alternative fuel. The idea reported here by the New York Times involves using a nuclear plant as the power source for the electrochemical reaction that would produce the fuel, though, so don’t plan on seeing it any time soon.

5Min is one of many sites that offers “instructional” videos created by users.

The videos are supposed to teach you how to do something, such as making a barking dog out of a square piece of paper (see below).

Its clean design includes options to help you in the learning process — you can zoom in on a part of the video, slow it down, watch it frame by frame, by video segment, and more.

The company claims to be the largest of its kind, with millions of monthly active users. But, third party web analytics firms Hitwise and Comscore tell a different story, at least in the United States — showing somewhere north of 100,000, but not much more.

A competing site, DIY Networks, owned by Scripps, is the clear leader in terms of U.S. user numbers. See graphs at the bottom of the article.

These instructional video sites may be relatively lucrative. 5min, based in Tel Aviv, Israel but moving to New York this month, has just received $5 million from Spark Capital. Alex Finkelstein, a principal at Spark, says the how-to videos displayed on these sites draw the most lucrative advertising for videos online. Why? Viewers are “a super-defined niche demographic and someone viewing a how-to [video] is typically in a purchasing mindset,” he believes.

5min aggregates amateur and professionally-produced videos from around the web and offers subtitles in different languages. Its international roots and exposure may give it a larger audience and lend some credit to the company’s claim that it is the largest site, but we can’t confirm that from the data we have. The Hitwise and Comscore data cover the U.S. only.

5min pointed us to the following Alexa graph, comparing it against competitors VideoJug, ExpertVillage, and DIY Networks, worldwide:

Alexa has shown itself, in many cases, to be unreliable. Other web analytics services have their own problems, however. See our article from earlier this fall that dug into each services’ pros and cons.

Comscore, considered by most to be the industry’s gold standard, shows DIY Networks is way bigger than its competitors in the U.S.

We asked Hitwise what it was seeing, and the company sent two graphs. DIY Networks dominates.

I’ve been watching the debate raging over the past five days about non-compete agreements, those clauses in employment contracts which forbid an employee to go work for a competing company.

It’s time to weigh in favor of getting rid of them.

Venture capitalist Bijan Sabet kicked off the debate, saying his venture firm Spark Capital is going to stop requiring them from the companies he invests in, and calls for other companies to drop non-competes too. He argues they do more harm than good. His statement grabbed attention, because Spark is based in Boston, where non-competes are legally enforceable. In California, they are not.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson disagreed, saying non-competes are good and necessary because they stop employees from fleeing with core intellectual knowledge and crippling a company by taking it all to a competitor. What followed was largely an anecdotal discussion, until Mike Masnick kicked in last night, saying he’d done the research, and it pointed to overwhelming evidence suggesting non-competes are the predominant factor for why Silicon Valley emerged as a more dynamic economic region than Boston. All things considered, non-competes are bad because they set up an artificial barrier that disrupt innovation, causing stagnation for the companies themselves and the region around them:

In order to understand how this makes sense, just think of noncompetes as the “DRM” of human capital. Just as DRM tries to restrict the spread of content, a noncompete seeks to restrict the spread of a human’s ideas for a particular industry within the labor arena. Both concepts are based on the faulty assumption that doing so “protects” the original creator or company — but in both cases this is incorrect. What it actually does is set up an artificial barrier, limiting the overall potential of a market. It may not be easy to see that from the position of the content creator or company management (or investors). It’s natural to want to “protect,” but it’s actually quite damaging.

Now, Masnick has consistently used his Web site, Techdirt, to tirade against barriers to free markets, and so is predictably critical of non-competes, just like he’s consistently scathing of the music industry’s embrace of DRM and of abuse of patent laws by companies seeking to shield themselves from competition. As in most cases, he’s right: A non-compete clause is another artificial barrier to free exchange of labor and ideas in the market place, and causes an employee to feel trapped, and to stagnate.

As other people have pointed out, maintaining strict non-disclosure agreements and confidentiality with regards to trade secrets and intellectual property is good enough. Those are also enforceable within California, and should be enough to do the job in protecting value that is rightfully the company’s. Dropping non-competes doesn’t mean employees are free to do as they please. Free movement is one thing, but the ideas you carry with you are another. See the very useful column, “How to leave a company and not get sued,” written for VentureBeat by lawyer Todd Rumberger about this. He provides an extensive discussion of what employees in California must consider before leaving a company. He makes clear that we’re still very far removed from any sort of “wild west” when it comes to intellectual property transfer — even without non-competes.

But do read Masnick’s piece, which winds from AnnaLee Saxenian’s 1994 book Regional Advantage which explains how Silicon Valley beat Boston’s Route 128, to Ronald Gilson’s work on the legal differences between the two places regarding non-competes, to research from the Federal Reserve and the National Bureau of Economic Research, that backs this up with Job Hopping in Silicon Valley, and finally the case-study of Michigan that also supports the findings.

Here’s the latest action:
1. Medio’s roar turning to a squeal?
2. Sprint changing WiMax plans?
3. AOL rumored to be considering buying ad targeting network Quigo for $300 million
4. Bug Labs, for open-sourced electronic devices
5. Semantic search engine Hakia releases social networking tool
6. The amazing $200 Ubuntu Linux “green” PC at Wal-Mart
7. Cisco does its 125th buyout
8. Facebook’s stock has appreciated 33-fold, and then some
9. Internet Brands going public with growing losses, declining sales?
10. Shopstyle signs deal with In Style Magazine

Medio’s roar turning to a squeal? — We’re wondering what will happen to Seattle’s Medio, the company that provides mobile search technology to telecom giant Verizon, now that Google is reportedly close to signing a deal with the giant carrier to offer customers a GPhone. This which would carry a Google operating system, based on Linux and offering a host of Google applications including search. The Mercury News carried a profile story on Medio Tuesday, in which chief executive Brian Lent (pictured top left) boasts Medio has a broader reach than Google, citing its partnership with Verizon. The article appeared the day before the deal negotiations between Google and Verizon leaked. Obviously, Medio won’t get kicked off of Verizon’s phones overnight. The GPhone hasn’t even arrived yet. Still, the Merc piece is a notable read, explaining how Lent knew the Google co-founders at Stanford, but initially shrugged of the promise of search; he even turned down the No. 1 employee position at Yahoo. Verizon, in turn, may be flirting with Google for the following obvious: Apple iPhone has become a raging success, after Verizon turned down the chance to be the iPhone carrier partner. As Techdirt points out, Verizon and Google have a tough history, including the standoff over the 700 MHz spectrum debate and network neutrality. But the GPhone, that might paper over the differences.

Sprint Nextel changing WiMax plans? — Sprint may be rethinking its plans to offer high-speed wireless Internet service using WiMax technology, possibly merging its wireless broadband unit with start-up Clearwire, according to the WSJ.

AOL rumored to be considering buying ad targeting network Quigo for $300 million – But its just a rumor. Details from Kara Swisher.

Bug Labs, for open-sourced electronic devices — You’ve heard about all the open-source software. Well, New York’s Bug Labs is offering open source for hardware, drawing on outside developers to help fashion the building blocks of these personalized devices that will be easy enough for non-techies to assemble. It is backed by Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Robert Young, founder of open source company Red Hat. More about BugLabs here. It has similarities with Ponoko.

Semantic search engine Hakia releases social networking tool — Called Meet Others, it lets you meet people who typed in the same search query. Now that is geeky.

The amazing $200 Ubuntu Linux “green” PC at Wal-Mart — The price of this computer is truly in the basement. It runs OpenOffice software and comes pre-configured with links to all of Google’s online applications. See Wired story for more details. It stands in stark contrast to Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop for the poor, began at a price of $100, but which now has crept upward to….$200. So apparently, there’s no need for the poor laptop any more. The developing world may as well order a Linux version straight from Wal-Mart.

Cisco does its 125th buyout –Cisco, the giant networking company, proves you can grow and prosper through non-stop acquisitions. It has paid $100M for Securent, a company that monitors access to a company’s data and communications regardless of vendor, platform, or operating system. Securent was founded in 2004 by Rajiv Gupta after raising capital from Greylock and Onset (via Alarmclock ).

Facebook’s stock has appreciated 33-fold, and then some – Many of us reported how the Microsoft deal to invest in Facebook at such a high value ($15 billion) makes Facebook’s private shares expensive. This, in turn, makes it tough to recruit motivated employees, because it means there’s little room for the stock to appreciate — at least for several years until Facebook starts making some money. NYT’s Miguel Helft has done a good job at exploring just how far the stock has risen.

Internet Brands going public with growing losses, declining sales? — We don’t get this one. The El Segundo, Calif., company has filed to raise $45 million in an IPO. But the company, whose sites include CarsDirect, WikiTravel, FlyerTalk.com among others, swung to a loss of $2.4 million in the first nine months of the year, and saw is revenues decline too. This, after buying 35 start-ups last year, enough to jolt any company. Buyer beware. It is backed by IdeaLab.

Shopstyle signs deal with In Style Magazine — ShopStyle, the fashion-focused shopping search engine that Sugar recently acquired, has announced a partnership with the popular In Style Magazine. Sugar has said its efforts to create a woman-centric network, a la Glam, was not working out, and has been looking into other means to generate revenue. Combining ShopStyle’s search with the editorial sensibilities of In Style’s fashionistas could prove lucrative for both companies. Under the terms of the deal, Sugar will receive a cut of revenues, as well as its CPCs.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Brightroll raises $5M for video ads
2) LGC Wireless acquired for $169M plus
3) InterviewUp, answers for job interviews
4) Alibaba.com to go public
5) Yahoo’s CMO leaves, without explanation
6) Tesla’s shocking $1M crash tests
7) Tumblr, Collective Media, Veeker, MobileEye, BioFuelBox, GameLayers, Shooner, all raise cash
8) Boston’s Entrepreneur site

Brightroll serves billionth video ad, raises $5 million – The mark comes less than six months after serving half that number. The San Francisco company, which helps large ad agencies and brands sell video ads across leading web sites, has also raised $5 million from new investor KPG Ventures,
True Ventures and Adams Streep Partners.

LGC Wireless acquired by ADC Telecommunications – As we reported last week, LGC Wireless has been bought. Now its official by who. ADC picks it up for $169 million plus about $20.5 million in debt. LGC’s technology strengthens cell signal coverage in buildings, airports and other indoor areas. LGC Wireless had sales of $83 million in year ending Sept. 30. The 11-year-old company had raised $93 million in funding. Investors included Rembrandt Venture Partners, the Mayfield Fund, Allegis Capital, Crystal Ventures, Intel Capital, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. and Dali Hook Partners.

InterviewUp is Q&A site for job interviews — The site is designed to help interviewers collect challenging questions and interviewees find good answers. We’re not sure the world needs another Q&A site, but a post discussing Google’s interview questions scored over 1500 diggs. If InterviewUp can deliver juicy tidbits like these, it has a shot. For more.

Yahoo’s chief marketing officer Cammie Dunaway leaves – She was head of the customer experience division, and there was no reason given for the departure (details here).

Alibaba Group, 39 percent owned by Yahoo, plans Alibaba.com IPO for Nov. 6th in Hong Kong – The IPO is expected to be the biggest ever by a Chinese Internet company, raising as much as $1.5 billion. Earlier story here from WSJ.

Collective Media, another online ad network, raises funds –The company says it reaches 120 million unique users per month. The round was led by Greycroft Partners, with iNovia Capital participating. More here.

Tumblr, offers you a lean Web site — The New York company offers you a personal site where can collect, share and discuss what headlines and other things found online. It lets you pull in your Twitter feeds, too. Other than that, its has few frills. It has raised $750,000 in a first round of funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Veeker, a mobile video and picture messaging startup, appears to be stuck — The San Francisco start-up raised $2.5 million from Labrador Ventures, but is struggling amid competition.

Tesla’s $1M crash tests — Ouch, at $1M each, no wonder executives at Tesla were gasping at the cost per crash for the testing of the anticipated all electric sports car. Apparently, though, the cost per crash is now a mere $300,000 (Earth2Tech).

Goldman Sachs invests $100M in Israel MobileEye, for driving tool — MobileEye’s technology calculates the speed and distance of a vehicle in front of a car, and alerts the driver when other vehicles are too close. The company raised the money at a pre-money valuation of $500M, reports Israel’s Globes. MobileEye, which has already raised $50M, plans an IPO for next year. The company says that it will have $10M in sales this year and that it will become profitable in 2008. Here’s its statement.

BioFuelBox, biofuel refining startup, raises $9.46M in first round — Backers of the a Hollister, Calif. start-up include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Element. PE Hub has the scoop, reporting that the company’s technology is a “bio-refinery in a box — a modular, containerized innovation that produces biofuel cost-effectively and easily.”

GameLayers, a passive multiplayer online game maker, raises $500,000 — The San Francisco company is backed by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Joi Ito and Richard Wolpert, reports PEHub.Schooner Information Technology, secretive finance company, raises $3.33 million — The company plans a $15 million total first round, according to regulatory filings cited by PE Week. The round was led by CMEA Ventures. The Oakland, Calif., company is led by Richard Busch, formerly with Sun Microsystems as research director of computer system architecture and analysis.

Social networking site for VCs launching next month in Boston – TheFunded lets entrepreneurs talk about VCs. Next month, the New England Venture Network will launch venturenetwork.vc, a place for VC’s to talk about deals. A deals section will feature a Craigslist-like listing of investment opportunities, including a place for VCs to post about companies that are looking for funding, that they chose not to invest in. A questions section will let analysts query VCs. A jobs section will let VCs advertise openings at portfolio companies. Via The Boston Globe.

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.

Buzzwire lets you stream video, audio, and live internet radio to your mobile phone — something other companies do.

But Buzzwire does this without requiring a download — setting it apart from the crowd.

The company, which has been in stealth mode, launches in public beta today. Mobile media, especially video, is taking off. Revenue from mobile video in Q1 2007 was $146 million, up nearly 200 percent from the same period last year, according to one industry report. More growth could come: As much as 15 percent of American cellphone subscribers have video-friendly 3G (high-speed) handsets, according to mobile analytics company M:Metrics.

Streaming media to mobile phones is not new, but Buzzwire’s main competitors, including MyWaves and MobiTV, focus exclusively on video and require downloads for the best experience. While MyWaves, which says it has just surpassed one million users, can be accessed from the mobile browser, the video-selection interface contains too much information and does not display it elegantly. Buzzwire is notable because it works within the browser alone, with a relatively clean look and feel, though it still needs work (more below).

Its technology also sets it apart — at a price. Buzzwire has built a back-end that enables wireless carriers to add streaming media, including video, podcasts and internet radio into their offerings with very little development effort on the carriers’ part. Buzzwire says that it is plug-and-play, and its team has experience working with mobile carriers here and abroad.

Buzzwire believes that working with these carriers is the only sustainable way to go and, after its beta, intends to charge a $2-$3 monthly subscription, with higher rates for those who don’t want ads. MyWaves, on the other hand, exists independent of the carriers, giving its service away for free. MobiTV charges $9.99 per month, and includes advertising.

To get started with Buzzwire, you visit its Web site and create an account. Once there, you browse through the video, audio, and internet radio content it offers and, with a click, add a channel to your subscriptions, which then appears on your Buzzwire mobile homepage. From this homepage, you can also browse through popular and featured channels, but there is no way to search through all of them and add one using your phone (Buzzwire says this capability is in the works).

The interface, while superior to MyWaves’, has some issues. For example, if the title of a channel is more than a couple of words, you can’t see its whole name, and it’s not always clear what’s what. Buzzwire’s regular website is also visually unappealing and not easy to use, and there is very little high-quality content. To be fair, this is the first iteration, and changes on both of these fronts are in the pipeline.

The big long-term threat is the iPhone, and the change it represents: After watching YouTube videos on that beautiful screen, in a real browser, it feels like applications based in normal mobile browsers are already obsolete. This is not yet the case, though, and with more than 33 million people using 3G phones, there is money to be made without the iPhone in the interim.

The Boston-based company raised $4 million from Spark Capital and Matrix Partners last fall, and is planning a second round later this year.

(Updated with Comscore and Hitwise stats, which show Veoh’s numbers lower than the company states; also updated with a fuller list of investors)

Veoh, the San Diego video-sharing site backed by former Disney exec Michael Eisner, has raised another $26 million in funding, giving it a massive war-chest exceeding $41 million.

PE Hub has the news.

The video sharing site came out of testing mode in February, and is different from most sites because it uses peer-to-peer technology (a technology that taps the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video.

However, it is not alone in using such technology. Joost, an IPTV company using P2P, recently raised $45 million in venture backing. And there’s a new player, Babelgum, launched by Fastweb founder Silvio Scaglia with $13.2 million of his own money.

With Veoh, people can upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. Joost is also trying to encourage such community activity, offering sharing, chat, IM and even blogging from within a show. Veoh lets producers make money through a revenue share or by charging a fee. Babelgum lags on the social front, and also is behind in pulling in content, and has evident advantage anywhere else, so it is a long-shot at this point.

Veoh says its “user base” is now 12.5 million, up from 4.4 million in February — we’re assuming that’s monthly uniques, but are trying to confirm. (Update: Comscore shows them much lower; see below.)

According to PEHub, Goldman Sachs led the round for Veoh at a rumored $60 to $70 million pre-investment valuation, with Goldman vice president, Pete Perrone, joining the Veoh board. Existing shareholders Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners also returned. Time Warner Investments, another previous investor, may also have invested. (Update II: Turns out, other new backers also include former Viacom and MTV Networks Chief Executive Tom Freston’s Firefly3, and Jonathan Dolgen, former Chairman and CEO of Viacom Entertainment Group.  Meanwhile, Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company invested in an earlier round.)

Veoh and Joost have now each raised far more cash than their predecessors did — more than YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion put together, for example.

Update: Here are Comscore stats for worldwide unique visitors (age 15+) for April 2007:

Youtube: 163.2 million
Dailymotion: 25.3 million
Metacafe: 23.2 million
Veoh: 5.5 million
Revver: 945,000

Update II: Here is Hitwise:

Next New Networks is the latest company to launch a niche content strategy — this time, online TV sites tailored to specific themes.

The New York company has received $8 million in a first round of funding from Spark Capital, an East Coast venture capital firm focused on media companies.

The logic is clear. Advertisers like niche sites. Nothing really new here, so this investment is not very surprising. The only question is, why does it need $8 million?

Next New Network is so early, that it has nothing really to show yet. Co-founders Fred Seibert and Emil Rensing started Frederator and VOD Cars, respectively, but those are nascent sites that will change significantly soon, the company tells us. Other co-founders include Herb Scannell, who is chief executive, Jed Simmons and Tim Shey. Scannell is former vice chairman of MTV Networks and president of Nickelodeon. The others are all experienced media execs too.

The business model is advertising tailored to the niche of the particular video site’s audience. Each show will run between three and 12 minutes long. It is similar to Revision3, the San Francisco company started by Digg co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose (which we wrote about here). That company raised only $1 million.