LinkedIn Receives $12.8 million

Although LinkedIn came before the 2.0 mania, its good to know that they recently raised $12.8 million dollars with the help of Bessemer. The company had more than 10 million in revenues for 2006 and has achieved profitability.

LinkedIn allows you to expand your professional network by tapping into your friends network. Once you join LinkedIn you do feel like you have to increase your network just to have bragging rights. They make money by charging for some of the connections you make.

Via techcrunch

Shiny Media secures $4.5 million

Shiny Media a blogging company received $4.5 million in funding from Bright Station ventures. Shiny Media is a family of blogs similar to Weblogs or Gawker media. They have more than 20 blogs currently. They claim to have more than a million unique users a month.

Via mashable

Farecast receives $12.1 million

Farecast recently got another round of funding worth $12.1 million. Sutter Hill Ventures was one of the investors. The total raised by Farecast is now $20.6 million.

Farecast has a very interesting service. They will predict the price of an airline ticket over the next 7 days. Farecast will give you a tip and let you know whether you should wait or buy. They will also tell you how confident they are in this prediction. On top of all this Farecast will also sell you a guarantee for $9.95. According to the site

if in the next 7 days Farecast’s predictive technology says that the current lowest price will stay about the same, Farecast will offer to consumers a Fare Guard product ($9.95). Fare Guard protects consumers when the price rises in the next 7 days. If the price does indeed increase, customers can provide proof of purchase to Farecast and redeem the difference in price.

Pretty cool. I would be really interested to know how many people are willing to pay for this guarantee.

Via techcrunch

MyYearBook gets $4.1 million

MyYearBook announced that they have secured $4.1 million with the help of U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and First Round Capital. MyYearBook claims to be an online yearbook for high schoolers. However it looks and feels like Facebook and MySpace. The target audience seems to be younger high school kids. They have 1.7 million members in the USA.

The site was started by two siblings in high school. The company is in New Hope, PA. Pretty decent for two youngsters. This deal seems to be much better than the wize deal.

Via mashable

Wetpaint Secure $9.5 million

On Jan 9th 2007, Wetpaint announced that they had secured 9.5 million dollars in Series B financing. Accel Partners led this round of financing. Wetpaint allows anybody to start a wiki styled site. However the Wetpaint offering seems to be more pleasant than a typical wiki. Competitors include Jotspot that got acquired by Google and Wikia that got funding by Amazon.

Wetpaint says that they have 150000 unique wikis with 2.5 million user contributions. They are monetizing by showing relevant ads on the wikis. Currently Google Adsense seem to be the only ads. $9.5 million seems a tad high to run a company whose sole product is easily recreated. But maybe thats why Im not getting any funding. Congrats to the 15 month old company.

Via SeattlePi

Piczo raises $11 million

Piczo announced that they raised $11 million dollars in series C funding. Piczo is an online social networking site for teens. U.S. Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners led this round of funding.

Piczo seems to be more focused on privacy than rivals MySpace and Bebo. It seems to be more popular in the UK.

Via SiliconTap

BuzzLogic hits a $9.6 million pay day

On 16th Jan 2007, BuzzLogic announced that they had secured $9.6 million series A funding. This round was led by Adams Capital Management, Ackerley Partners and Transcosmos Investments & Business Development.

BuzzLogic tries to make sense of the conversations going on in the social media sites (blogs). Their service is useful for Marketing and PR folks that want to understand who is driving conversations about their products or brands. Once the key influencers are identified the PR and marketing teams can concentrate on improving their brands, reputations, products and customer relationships.

This service is mainly useful for the fortune 500 companies. However they do have plans to engage the mom and pop bloggers through widgets.

Via venturebeat

Meebo solidifies its position

Meebo is an online IM service. Meebo allows you to chat on the aim, yahoo, google talk and msn platform without downloading anything. On Jan 18th 2007 Meebo announced a second round of funding worth $9 million. Draper Fisher Jurvetson lead this round of financing. Meebo is looking to monetize its service by showing ads, personalization and providing other services such as sending IMs over the SMS network.

Im sure Meebo is also hoping to sell itself to some big pocketed company. Whatever their intentions are Meebo is an extremely well designed and useful service that I have had the pleasure to use. Competitors include ebuddy, mabber and koolim.

Via mashable

Kiptronic receives $4 million

San Franciso based Kiptronic received $4 million in Series A funding. This round was led by Blueprint Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. Kiptronic has a platform to deliver ads for podcasts. They are trying to send ads to iPods, mobile phones, laptops via podcasts. The platform inserts ads at the start or end of a podcast. Kiptronic also helps in negotiating the ad rates. According to the press release they now have 47 million available downloads.

This company may have some staying potential. In fact Google may end up buying them if they demonstrate a growth curve.

Via techcrunch

Lijit gets $900K

Lijit raised $900K in funding from Colorado Fund I, Brad Feld and Seth Goldstein. Brad and Seth are part of the Board also. What is Lijit? Lijit allows you to search accross your personal network. Your personal network could include your blog, youtube videos, digg and your LinkedIn resume. Lijit also allows you to search other people in your network through a tool called wijit. The company is based in Colorado.

All this seems a tad too complicated for the general public and perhaps thats the reason they could not raise even a million.

Via Mashable

Wikio gets a nice chunk of change

European based Wikio announced a funding round of $5.3 million. More accurately they got 4 million Euro in funding. Wikio is a mixture of Digg and Google news. Wikio relies on user generated content as well as the automatic indexing of blogs and associated media. A nice feature is the ability to define your own tab based on different tags. Wikio has English, German and Spanish versions. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Gemini Israel Funds.

Other than displaying ads (which I dont see) Im not sure what the business plan is.

Via techcrunch

Wize Gets First Round of Funding

Wize is getting a first round of financing of $4 million from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Wize claims to make product research easier with the help of something called a Wize rank. Wize rank is a number from 0 to 100 based on user reviews, expert opinions and buzz. The company is based in Silicon Valley.

Some more info from the company site reveals that we should:
Use Wize Rank the same way you would use Wine Spectator or Zagats. We start by checking out the products with the best ratings, but often end up realizing that something else will better meet our needs or budget.

Our goal is to help you quickly find the products that are right for you. We think the best way to do that is to highlight the top performers in each category, and to allow you to dig into the detail.

Via techcrunch