Curebit is an online customer referral platform company that utilizes “word-of-mouth” advertising. The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd, and several others. Curebit will use the funding for product development and expanding their team. This is great news for the company, but VentureBeat noticed that their homepage used to be a direct copy from 37signals.

Visual.ly is an infographics design company that has raised $2 million in seed funding. The investors in this round includes Crosslink Capital, SoftTech, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Giza Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Mark Goines, Josh James, etc. Visual.ly had about 26,000 users sign up as part of their beta. Over 300,000 infographics have been created and they receive about one million pageviews per month. Some of the companies that Visual.ly works with include BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, GOOD, NASDAQ, Skype, the Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic. Visual.ly plans on using the funding for building their development team and hire additional data visualization specialists.

New startup service Kibin, born of the most recent class from 500 Startups, is an online editing community. It works on a credits-per-word basis, where you pay credits to have your work edited and gain credits when you edit for other people. As TechCrunch notes, those who don’t want to edit for others can buy credits for 50 cents apiece. According to founder Travis Biziorek, the credits equal about a cent per word, so you pay about $10 (or earn $10 of credits) to have a 1,000 word essay edited by the community. Kibin currently has a turnaround time of about 24 hours but hopes to speed up the editing process as more users join.

LucidChart is a web based diagram application company that has raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, 2M Companies, K9 Ventures, and several angel investors. LucidChart plans on using the funding to create a desktop version of their application software.

Google bought G.Co as the official shortened domain for Google services. 500 Startups is also rebranding to 500.co in the fall, and co-founder Dave McClure recommends .co domains to all of his startups. The .co registry is about to turn 1 year old and already has more than 1 million registered domains. [TechCrunch]

Punchd, a service that provides digital loyalty cards, is now a Google property. The acquisition is confirmed on the Punchd site, which reports that the team will be moving to Google’s offices. TechCrunch reports that Google may have paid more than $10 million for the acquisition. Punchd’s team includes Reed Morse, Xander Pollock and Niket Desai, and is part of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

Inporia is a stealth e-commerce start-up company that has raised $1.25 million in funding. Inporia was founded by Ryan Junee, who is known for co-founding Omnisio (acquired by Google) and works as an advisor at 500 Startups. The investors in this round include New Enterprise Associates, SV Angel, 500 Startups, Clearstone Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Ignition Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners, and Start Fund. [TechCrunch]

Backyard launched this past December and was backed with $150,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups, Jason Calacanis, and Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures. PixelFish, a local video marketing solutions company, has acquired Backyard. Backyard is a local business guide that is available on the web and on mobile devices. PixelFish has no plans of shutting down Backyard as a result of the acquisition.