Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) has closed an acquisition deal with Playfish. Playfish is a company that designs games for social networks such as Facebook. EA is spending $400 million to buy out Playfish. Of the $400 million, $300 million will be given upfront and the additional $100 million will be paid as an earn-out. Rumor has it that EA was considering buying out Playfish competitor Zynga Inc. too.

This past September about 250 million people played games on Facebook. One of Playfish’s most popular games called Pet Society has over 20 million active users. Playfish was started by Kristian Segerstrale and Sebastien de Halleux. Playfish raised venture capital from Accel Partners and Index Ventures.

Jim Breyer of Accel Partners had an amazing 24 hours yesterday.  Raytheon had acquired BBN Technologies and Disney bought out Marvel.  Breyer helped buy out BBN Technologies about five years ago which gave a nice return to Accel Partners.

Breyer was the third largest direct shareholder in Marvel Entertainment.  He made the investment from his own personal funds and not on behalf of Accel.  According to regulatory filings, Breyer will make $5 million personally from Disney’s acquisition of Marvel.

BBN was purchased by Bell Atlantic back in the day but ended up not gaining much traction after that.  BNN was started by three MIT professors that implemented ARPANET (the base for the founding of the Internet).  BBN was the first to create packet switching, the first router, and the first network e-mail using the @ symbol.

Former Google executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy was one of the candidates for replacing Tim Armstrong after he quit Google and became the AOL CEO.  Now Cassidy is a CEO-in-Residence at Accel Partners and has just been appointed to become a board member at retail company J. Crew.

When Cassidy was at Google, she was responsible fr the search engine company’s Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations.  Before Google Cassidy worked at Yodlee, Amazon.com and OpenTV.  Below is a full press release about the new position.

(more…)

Sony Ericsson has partnered with application store company GetJar.  The partnership gives Ericsson users access to 45,000 free applications.  The applications are part of the GetJar PlayNow arena.

“With its experience in delivering mobile applications to a wide consumer base, GetJar has demonstrated the value of choice, quality and performance when it comes to distributing mobile content,” stated Sony Ericsson Head of Developer & Partner Engagement Christopher David. “In the rapidly growing mobile content market, partnering with GetJar will allow us to complement the quality application offerings of our mobile content and entertainment service PlayNow arena.”

The GetJar app store has about 450 million downloads.  The company has about 45,000 mobile applications available for download.  GetJar is backed by Accel Partners.

[via MobileBurn]

Seatwave is a European startup that sells secondary tickets over the Internet.  Given that this is a huge market, the company has attracted $17 million in Series D funding.  This round of funding was led by Accel Partners and Atlas Venture.  Other investors in this round of funding Mangrove Capital Partners, Fidelity Ventures, and Adinvest.

GP Bullhound named Seatwave the fast growing digital media company.  Joe Cohen, a former employee of Atlas Venture founded Seatwave.  Through this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $53 million.

[via TechCrunch]

Cloudera is a custom enterprise software company that builds products around the Hadoop platform.  The company has raised $6 million in funding, bringing their total to about $11 million.

This round of funding was led by Greylock Partners and previous investor Accel participated.  Other Cloudera investors includes Diane Greene and Marten Mickos.  The company was founded in 2008 by Mike Olson, Christophe Bisciglia, Dr. Amr Awadallah, and Jeff Hammerbacher.

[via GigaOM]

Earlier this week, I read an interesting piece from GigaOM about my favorite homepage Netvibes.com.  I depend heavily on Netvibes so I personally hope that this company succeeds.

The company has about $16 million in funding from Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Neil Rimer, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz, and Martin Varsavsky.

Last week Netvibes unleashed a new feature that allows users to build their own custom start pages.  Netvibes is able to make money by offering white-label and corporate versions of their service.

“We are on our way to being breakeven this year,” stated Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini. “We are focused on profitability this year.” That’s not bad, considering he is up against Google’s iGoogle platform.”  Netvibes receives about 3 million active visitors per month.

The company has made about a couple of million dollars in revenue this year.  The company plans on tripling sales by signing up several large customers.  The reason I found GigaOM’s post so interesting is because I did not know much about Netvibes’ revenue until now.  Based on these figures, if you depend on Netvibes as much as I do, you can remain confident that this service will be here in the long run.

[via GigaOM]

As much as I like to see innovative startups succeed, I don’t quite see the game-changing abilities of Kosmix.  This is why it surprised me that they were able to raise $20 million in recent funding.  In total funding they have raised $55 million.  When a company raises that sort of money, you have to ask yourself, what does your product actually do?

Kosmix does metasearches and aggregates content from a bunch of other sources.  Top stories are pulled from Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, CNN, and Fark.  Popular videos are pulled from Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr.  Trending topics are from Twitter.  Lucky Dip is from People magazine.  Daily deals are pulled from DealNews, Amazon.com, and Orbitz.  And finally Images of the Day are pulled from Kodak, Flickr, and Picasa.

In my opinion, it appears that Kosmix is to search is what Alltop is to RSS feeds.  And the difference is that Guy Kawasaki spent $10,000 to create Alltop. I’m not the only one that questions Kosmix’s technology.  VentureBeat has a similar opinion.

But the numbers don’t like when it comes to VC dollars.  Kosmix had over 11 million monthly visitors recently.  Kosmix will also be rolling out an advertising strategy next year some time as well as a customizable homepage.

The investors in the $20 million round of funding includes Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures.  Former Motorola CEO/Chairman Ed Zander was also an investor.

SB Nation is a sports startup that was started by Jim Bankoff, former AOL EVP of Consumer and Publisher Services.  Bankoff is also a Senior Advisor with Providence Equity Partners.  Bankoff was one of the AOL execs that pushed for the development of TMZ.com.

Although it is not known exactly how much SB Nation has raised, TechCrunch pegs it at around the “mid-seven-figure sum.”  The funding was provided by Accel, Allen & Co., and several other angel investors.  The other angel investors include Ted Leonsis (former AOL Vice Chairman and Washington Capitals owner), Brent Jones (former San Francisco 49ers player and MD of Northgate Capital), Dan Rosenweig, Jeff Weiner, and other executives from Providence Equity Partners.

SB Nation is short for SportsBlogs Nation.  About 150 team sites are linked together by local writers within the SB Nation network.  All of these bloggers share in advertising revenue.  SB Nation sites combined receive about 2 million unique visitors per month.

SB Nation is based in Washington D.C.

Facebook has named the top 25 fbFund recipients.  Combined, all of them will receive $625K in funding.  The top 25 include PhD candidates, former NASA engineers, and one of the drivers of the World Solar Challenge. 

“Facebook started fbFund to help seed innovation among a global community of entrepreneurs and to help change the economics of starting a company,” stated Elliot Schrage, VP of Communications, public policy and platform marketing at Facebook. “By refusing to take an equity stake for our grants, we’re making it a little easier for talented entrepreneurs to maintain ownership over their ideas and focus on getting their business off the ground. Given the current caution in the market, we think fbFund is an even more attractive solution for innovative entrepreneurs to create the next great opportunities.”

The fbFund started in 2007 with a $10 million seed fund.  The fbFund is a joint venture between Accel, Facebook, and The Founders Fund.  Six hundred applications were sent within the first month of the fund’s release.  The top 25 created the following applications:

• BarTab
• BlackDrumm
• Bottle Rocket
• Check My Campus
• Daikon
• Faithfeed
• Good Call Sports
• GroupCard
• Kontagent
• Koofers
• Mousehunt
• Newsbrane
• PartyBuzz
• Pongr
• ProfessionalProfile
• RealGifts
• Social Arcade
• Socialfly
• Teach the People
• Thankster
• TrailBehind
• Twenty20 Cricket
• vDream Racing
• Weddingbook
• Wildfire

These applications will be presented in a second round.  The top 5 of these 25 will receive $225,000 in additional grants. 

Raptr is a company that produces games for social networks. Raptr launched today and also disclosed that they have raised $12 million from Accel Partners and The Founders Fund this past February. Raptr is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Raptr tracks what games users on playing on PCs, Macs, and on social networks. Raptr alerts the user’s friends when they start playing a game and when a game is about to start.

Raptr was started by Dennis Fong. Fong sold Xfire, a social network for gamers to Viacom for $102 million two years ago.

Amobee Media Systems, a mobile advertising company has raised $22 million.  The $22 million round was led by Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT) and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO).  Amobee raised a total of $52 million thus far.  Previous investors in Amobee includes Telefonica, Accel Partners, Vodafone, Sequoia Capital, and Globespan.

Amobee’s goal is to help fund telecommunication companies through advertising.  Vodafone Spain is using Amobee to insert advertisements into Vodafone’s mobile site. 

“We have built the first and only telco- grade ad-serving solution specifically designed to address the unique needs and requirements of the mobile operator across multiple channels and services,” states Amobee’s Operators page.

Amobee was founded in 2005 and launched in Feb. 2006.  Amobee’s headquarters are in Redwood City, Calif. and has research and development based in Herzliya, Israel.  Amobee is lead by CEO Zohar Levkovitz.

Related Links:
1. Amobee.com
2. alarm:clock

Yahoo! Inc. is rumored to acquire Maven Networks for over $150 million.  Yahoo! was also previously interested in acquiring Metacafe and previously acquired online video editing company, Jumpcut. 

Maven Networks is an Internet TV advertising platform.  Here is a sample of what they do:
http://www.mediamave.com/foodnetwork/

Maven Networks is based in Boston, Mass. Some of Maven’s clients include FOX, Scipps Networks, Sony, TV Guide, Gannett, Univision, USA Today, CBS, IBM, HGTV, Food Network, and CNET. 

Maven previously raised around $30 million in funding from Prism Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and General Catalyst Partners.  Maven Networks has a partnership with Comcast and had a former advisor that is now the CEO of Brightcove.

[Information Source: NewTeeVee and TechCrunch]

According to AllThingsDigital’s Kara Swisher, Facebook is considering raising additional funds for expansion or potential further acquisitions. Facebook’s first and only acquisition thus far is Parakey, a company created by two of Mozilla Firefox’s core programmers.

Considering the costs of maintaining Facebook between staffing, facilities, and server costs, I am not surprised that Facebook would be looking for more money. If I remember correctly, Facebook has roughly 40 million+ members, is expecting to make around $150 million this year in revenues (compared to $50 million in 2006), and is expecting to file for a possible IPO in the future. If Facebook decides to pursue an IPO, it would be around 2009 or beyond.

(more…)

Metacafe has over 25 million unique views per month. And yesterday the company officially announced that they have officially raised $30 million in Series C from Highland Capital, DAG Ventures, Accel Partners, and Benchmark Capital. While YouTube dominates traffic for online video, it seems that Metacafe has a more established business model since users are actually rewarded financially for their creativity.

“Metacafe is defining the next generation of online video, moving away from simple video sharing and hosting to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience for short-form content, said Richard de Silva, Partner, Highland Capital Partners. “Its sophisticated approach to audience-driven programming is unique in the industry.”

With this round of funding, Metacafe plans on supporting continuous operations and developing the Producer Rewards program further. The Producer Rewards program gives users a financial incentive to develop intriguing video content. For every thousand views a video gets on a site, the user will receive $5. The video has to reach a minimum of 20,000 views.

Highland Capital Partners’ Richard de Silva and DAG Ventures’ Tom Goodrich will join Metacafe’s Board of Directors. Metacafe is privately headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and NYC, NY.

References:
[1] alarm:clock: Video Site MetaCafe Hammers $30M Round