VentureBeat

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.

Azureus, a Palo Alto company that delivers a popular application to distribute video files, launched a new service named Zudeo, which it apparently hopes will become the next YouTube for high-quality video.

It has raised $12 million in a second round of capital, led by Redpoint Ventures, which also included Greycroft Partners and previous investors Jarl Mohn, chairman of CNET Networks, BV Capital, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

At Zudeo, users can upload, download and comment on videos in a manner similar to other video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Revver. However, we tried it, and it wasn’t as simple as those other sites. We downloading the software, a minor hassle. At Zudeo, you then have to click on a browsing tab to view content, and once we got there, we couldn’t play the content, for whatever reason. The problem may be on our end. (Update: Indeed, Nag suggests in comment that we may have misunderstood the purpose; we’re apparently not supposed to view the content, which is befuddling). YouTube succeeded because it was so simple. Perhaps Azureus will make this easier for regular users in future. The other question is why they are taking $12 million to, among other things, develop an embedded video player. We’re not certain how much Azureus has raised in total, but it is a lot given how many players are out there already. BitTorrent, the largest file-sharing distributor, just raised $20M. We’ll follow Azureus as it develops. Azureus does have a different strategy from some of the others, targeting publishers of high-end video. Meantime, we’d like to hear from readers what they think.

More details about Azureus here.