AOL has hired Allen & Company along with Morgan Stanley to try and find a buyer for ICQ. ICQ is an instant messaging software that competed with AOL Instant Messenger before being bought out. There are supposedly two non-U.S. based firms that already have an interest in buying out ICQ from AOL. The deal will most likely take place when AOL spins off from Time Warner in December.

AOL is seeking around $300 million for ICQ according to a source with AllThingsD. AOL bought ICQ for $287 million in 1998 with about $125 million in earnouts. Tel Aviv based firm Mirabilis was the company that originally developed ICQ.

ICQ has lost quite many users in the United States since they launched originally, but their service is still strong in countries such as Germany and Russia. AOL Instant Messenger still has a strong user base in the United States.

Analytics company Quantcast is seeking a $50 million round of funding which would put them at a $300 million valuation according to PEHub.

The company is rumored to have received several term sheets, but the identities of the investors is not yet known.  Quantcast monitors the traffic and demographics of about 10 million web sites and they are finding ways to monetize the service through a Media Program.  The Quantcast Media Program gives advertisers the ability to select the audience they want to reach by having access to demographic information.

So far Quantcast has raised $25 million in total funding.  Allen & Company invested $20 million Series B in 2007.  Other investors include the Founders Fund, Polaris Venture Partners, and Revolution Ventures.

Gather.com is a service focused on making new friends and forming new social circles.  The company is based in Boston, Mass. and has announced that they have raised $5.3 million in funding from Allen & Co., American Public Media, Jim Manzi (former CEO of Lotus), Jack Connors (former CEO of Hill Holiday), Kevin McClatchy, Andrew Tobias, and the Gerace family.

Gather had increase sales of about 49% in the first quarter over the same period about a year ago.  Gather raised VC funding because they needed additional capital to help fund operations.  Based on the current run rate, the company expects to be profitable by early 2010.

This round of funding puts the company’s total at about $25 million.  Most of the investors that participated in this round had participated in previous rounds as well.

[via NEVC Funding]

The Business Insider is a blog that recently relaunched under one brand.  The Business Insider was founded by Henry Blodget and this is the third round of funding.  Although Blodget never announced himself how much was raised, it is rumored to be around $5 million.

The participants in this round of funding is believed to be Allen & Co., Marc Andreessen, Jim Friedlich, and Matt Luckett.  Previous investors may have also participated.  The last round of funding was around July 2008.

It is not known what The Business Insider plans to do with this round of funding, but it is expected that they will be revamping their entertainment section.

[via paidContent]

Athena von Oech announced today that Ning has hit 850,000 registered social networks. Ning is a service that allows users to create social networks on-the-fly. The service is free for basic social networks, but premium social networks are charged. Ning was founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen and Gina Bianchini. Ning has over $104 million in funding and is valuated at about $500 million based on their investments. Legg Mason, Allen & Company, and Andreesen are the primary investors in the company.

“We just passed 850,000 social networks on Ning and we couldn’t be more excited,” stated Oech. “We love checking out the new and interesting social networks popping up – at the rate of over 3,000 each day, and about 100,000 in the past month alone. Wow!”

Ning plans on launching new features next week including improvements to chat and redesigned media players. Below is a video demo of the new features:

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators

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.

CityVoter.com is user-generated website that is driven by users voting and submitting items to be voted upon.  Such as what is the best restaurant in Detroit.  CityVoter has recently raised $2.6 million in Series B.  Allen & Company and Dace Ventures participated in this round of funding.  Through this round of funding, Curt Viebranz (former CEO of Tacoda), Bradley Wechsler (co-CEO of IMAX), and Vivi Nevo joined the Board of CityVoter.

CityVoter works with FOX, Gazette Communications, Hearst-Argyle, McGraw-Hill, and Post-Newsweek to integrate into social media.  CityVoter started in 2005 in Cambridge, MA. 

“We are thrilled to be working with Allen & Co and our other investors,” stated Joshua Walker, CityVoter.com founder/CEO. “This group brings rich media experience to CityVoter.com. With these trusted advisors, we are well positioned to accelerate our growth and realize our vision.”

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is rumored to be acquiring Powerset.  Powerset is a semantic search engine company that raised over $12.5 million in funding a couple of years ago with a valuation of $42.5 million.  Powerset at one point claimed that their technology had a few steps up on Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG): the ability to decipher the full meaning of phrases while searching.

Two years later, Powerset’s first product was a Wikipedia-search feature.   

I’m sure Powerset could have come up with a better way to show off their technology.  Powerset’s Wikipedia search just doesn’t seem exciting.  Especially since Wikipedia already has a built-in search engine and Google works even better for finding things on Wikipedia.

Powerset is now ready to flip though.  They’ve specifically hired Allen & Co. to help them find someone to buy them for a price that is about $100 million or more.   Is Microsoft actually going to pay that price?  We’ll find out next month.  VentureBeat broke the news of the acquisition rumor.

Related Links:
Powerset website
TechCrunch
VentureBeat

Reid Hoffman is part of the PayPal alumni club.  Former PayPal employees include:
1. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawad Karim – YouTube founders
2. Roelof Botha – Sequoia Capital Partner
3. Jeremy Stoppleman – CEO of Yelp
4. Max Levchin – CEO/Founder of Slide
5. Elon Musk – Founder of SpaceX
6. Peter Thiel – President of Clarium Capital and early Facebook investor

There seems to be a trend of former PayPal employees that go off and start their own successful ventures.  And LinkedIn is no different.

Dave Wehner, a Director at Allen & Company is working with LinkedIn to find venture capital for the professional network to be given a valuation at $1 billion.  This valuation is about 1/15th of rival, Facebook.  Wehner also supposedly helped Bebo sell to AOL for $850 million.  

LinkedIn has raised over $27.5 million thus far in the form of 3 rounds.  The company is expected to earn $100 million in revenue this year.

I have a LinkedIn account, but I rarely use it.  I really only login when another friend adds me.  I think that’s the social networks greatest flaw: retention.  I could be the only one, but I’ll let this poll decide.

[poll=7]

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch:  Allen & Co. Pitching LinkedIn At $1 Billion by Michael Arrington

 

“We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”
-Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning [quote source: VentureBeat]

I have to admit that when I started writing for Pulse 2.0 about a year and a half ago, I used to think that another bubble would happen again. So many companies were getting funding again like we were back in the late 90’s. Since then Facebook became valuated at $15 billion, Feedburner got bought for $100 million, YouTube got bought for $1.7 billion, and the list goes on. Just when we thought VC spending was slowing down again, Ning raised $60 million and is now valuated at a half-billion dollars.

Ning is a company that builds custom social networks for a large client-base. The company was started by a co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen. Allen & Company is investor that plugged in the $60 million. Ning’s third round was $44 million, provided by Legg Mason. Legg Mason also is a major shareholder in Yahoo!

Ning plans to use this funding to build it’s infrastructure for scaling purpose.

In an interview that Peter Thiel (early investor in Facebook) had with Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, he stated with confidence that there’s absolutely no bubble in technology.  At first I was a skeptic of this quote, but now I’m a full believer.

Information Source:
[1] VentureBeat: Social network creator Ning raises $60M at $500M valuation by Anthony Ha
[2] AllThingsD: Kara Visits Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel by Kara Swisher

The rumor mill for a Bebo acquisition is flooding again.  TechCrunch announced today that Bebo was acquired for a rumored $1 billion.  “A high level source has told us that Bebo has been in discussions via their investment bank, Allen & Co., with a number of potential buyers, and says that the company signed a deal on Monday to be acquired,” wrote TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington.

Arrington also followed up by saying that the second largest UK-based social network either actually signed the deal or sent out wrong messages about it.  But given the reputation of their investment bank, the latter seems unlikely.

The buyer is unknown, but there are a lot of guesses out there: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, CBS, Viacom, Comcast, etc.  Who is your guess?  My guess is that it wasn’t Microsoft wasn’t it since they already plugged $240 million into Facebook.  Google already has Orkut, but Bebo could be their way of penetrating the European market.  Viacom could use Bebo as a means of connecting MTV watchers.   I doubt Comcast would spend $1 billion when their market cap is about $52 billion.  Yahoo! is acquiring a few companies here and there, but judging by their layoffs from earlier today, they don’t want to spend such a large amount right now.

Google seems like the most likely buyer.  Google could somehow integrate Orkut, YouTube, and Bebo together.  And that would be interesting.

“Sermo’s state of the art technology has the potential to greatly improve our ability to provide physicians with timely and accurate information they want about our medicines and clinical data.”
-Michael Berelowitz, MD, Senior VP of Global Medical and New York Site Head of Worldwide Development for Pfizer

One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer Inc. announced today that they are partnering with Sermo Inc., a social network that has membership comprised primarily of licensed physicians.  Physicians on Sermo will have easier access to Pfizer’s clinical information to find data that they need. 

Sermo is Latin for conversation and joining Sermo isn’t easy.  Sermo validates whether all of the physicians that join the site are actually licensed.  Non-physicians are currently not permitted to join.  But Sermo has plans of opening the community eventually.  Physicians can make money on Sermo by writing or by voting for postings.  If physicians give opinions on a posting, there isn’t any malpractice liability because provinding opinions and information does not constitute the definition of malpractice.

Sermo is based in Cambridge, Mass. and raised $27 million in Series C funding last month.  Allen & Co. LLC and Legg Mason Investment Trust Inc. were the investors.  To date, Sermo raised a total of $39.5 million.  Daniel Palestrant, CEO of Stermo stated that they would use the funding to hire more employees and website capacity increase.  The company plans on hiring 25-50 more employees over 2008.

Sermo has about 26,000 licensed physicians participating on the social network.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health also has access to the social network.

Other investors in Sermo includes SoftBank Capital Technology Fund and Longworth Venture Partners.  Both companies invested a total of $9.5 million in Series B in January 2007.  Longworth invested $3 million in Series A for Sermo.

When TAKKLE first came out, I thought to myself, “would a high school sports social network really take off?” Every time I hear more news about TAKKLE, my question gets answered (which happens frequently these days). The answer is yes. High school sports is a national craze and I should have known this, especially after watching movies like Varsity Blues starring the guy from Dawson’s Creek.

I read an article tonight on alarm:clock^[1] about the social network receiving an investment from Sports Illustrated and as I investigated more, I found that were other investors in the company as well:

Investors in TAKKLE include:
1.) Sports Illustrated (SI.com): This publication is dubbed as the “biggest weekly American sports magazine” according to Wikipedia. The publication has over 3 million subscribers and 23 million adults read the magazine each week. The company is owned by Time Warner.
2.) New York City Investment Fund (NYCIF): is a company that was founded by Henry R. Kravis. Kravis is known as the 107th most richest person in the world and for founding Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR). KKR registered to go public on July 3rd according to Hoovers. Ironically, I was reading a book about KKR’s involvement with RJR Reynolds and Nabisco in the book, Barbarians at the Gate earlier today.
3.) WMG Investments: Finance arm of Wasserman Media Group, LLC (WMG). WMG is a sports marketing company that was started by Casey Wasserman. Wasserman graduated from UCLA with a major in Political Science and is now also an owner of the Los Angeles Avengers football team.
4.) Greycroft Partners, LLC: A $75 million powered company founded by Alan Patricof. Patricof completed a BA from Ohio State University and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon and is a board member of New York Small Business Venture Fund and New Jobs for New York Association. Greycroft has also invested in PaidContent (technology news blog), Pump Audio (hub for independent artists to sell music), and Ladies Who Launch (social network for entrepreneurial women).
5.) IJ Smith Enterprises LLC
6.) Jack Schneider, Managing Director, Allen & Company

Through the investment by Sports Illustrated, a partnership has been solidified. Sports Illustrated agreed to bring about sponsorship programs for TAKKLE endorsed by companies such as Gatorade and Finish Line. TAKKLE also made a deal with Spalding for a three-on-three basketball competition.

Previous Pulse 2.0 TAKKLE coverage is available at: http://pulse2.com/category/takkle-inc/

References:
[1] Alarm:Clock: Time Inc’s Sports Illustrated Takes Stake In TAKKLE
[2] MediaPost Publications: SI Makes A ‘Deeper Alliance’ With Takkle

The return on investment made on YouTube’s funding through the acquisition definitely has whetted the appetite of investors. YouTube took in two rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital for a total of $11.5 million. So how come Brightcove, a lesser known Internet TV website is receiving such substantial funding? Brightcove started with $5.5 million and then received $16.2 million. Today, it was announced that Brightcove raised $59.5 million. This comes to a total of $81.2 million of total funding. The investors include Maverick Capital, The New York Times Company, Transcosmos Investments, Accel Partners, Allen & Company, America Online, General Catalyst Partners, The Hearst Corporation, IAC (InterActivCorp), and Brookside Capital.

“We think there’s a lot of opportunity outside the United States for Internet TV,” stated Adam Berrey, the VP President of Marketing of Brightcove. “We think this market will consolidate. It’s time for the leaders to emerge. This puts us in a good position.” Berrey didn’t mention what Brightcove is planning on doing for future plans, but according to TechCrunch, Brightcove did acquire metaStories on March 20, 2006. metaStories is a Seattle based company that has the tools that creates Flash content.

“Brightcove’s early success in partnering with media companies that are driving the transition of television and video distribution to the Internet puts the company in the right position as Internet TV takes off on a broader scale,” stated Jamie Kiggen, senior VP President of AllianceBernstein. “We’ve looked at many opportunities in this area and believe that Brightcove is well positioned for success in creating solutions that both media companies and consumers will embrace.”

With this new funding, Brightcove plans on growing the company and to provide Internet TV tools to media creators so that it would help them monetize as well as distribute their own videos. Brightcove is planning on launching ad revenue sharing soon.