VentureBeat

Stardoll, a site where young girls can create and dress up celebrity dolls of themselves or others, is not your classic Silicon Valley high-tech sort of investment.

Yet Sequoia has invested $6 million in the Stokholm company, Stardoll told us yesterday. It is the latest example of how Sequoia is betting on niche consumer Web sites that don’t show any particularly amazing technology, but where their innovation is in market execution; they just do one thing really well. Stardoll says it attracts at least 1.2 million unique visitors weekly from over 200 countries. Zappos, Weatherbug and CafePress are other such Sequoia bets that come to mind.

It is the second round. Existing investor Index Ventures also participated.

VideoEgg continues to make strides with its web video publishing service. The company is releasing an integration kit tomorrow that will make it easy for web site owners to add VideoEgg’s video publisher and player into their sites. This will make it easy for publishers to begin accepting video submissions from people - without the associated storage and bandwidth costs, since the video files live on VideoEgg’s servers.

Until now, people could only use VideoEgg, which encodes all video into Flash, with a blogging account such as Typepad or Blogger, or through a special partnership with the San Francisco company.

The VideoEgg service is free for now, though an ad-supported model is in the offing.

VideoEgg also announced the acquisition of the assets of Popcast, a San Francisco start-up that made a downloadable video player. “Several” of Popcast’s top managers will join VideoEgg. Not sure if that will include David Weekly, who created the IM Smarter service we wrote about here and the PeanutButterWiki service.

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