NewsCred has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital. Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures, Advancit Capital, FLOODGATE, and IA Ventures participated in this round of funding.

SocialFlow is a social media platform company that teaches brands how to use Twitter in effective ways. SocialFlow uses data analysis to help brands come up with what kind of tweets to send out. SocialFlow has some solid revenues and shows evidence of long-term growth. This is why investors have put $7 million into the company in a Series A round of funding.

Well, this is a first. In the same day I wrote about a start-up exiting beta mode, the same company announced that they have been acquired. AOL has acquired custom profile and personal analytics dashboard service About.me.

Popular URL shortening and analytics service Bit.ly has raised $8.9 million in Series B financing. This round of funding was led by AOL Ventures and RRE Ventures. Existing investors include Betaworks, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Founders Fund, and SV Angel. Every day about 200 million Bit.ly short links are clicked on through Twitter and other services. Even though Bit.ly is no longer the default URL shortening service for Twitter, the traffic continues to grow for the service.

Trazzler is a travel website that focuses on unique local places.  Trazzler employs several people in California, Florida, and Spain.  The company was co-founded by Adam Rugel and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Metamarkets is a real-time data startup company that provides price data and analytics to global media companies.  The company launched in late 2009 and is working towards solving the problem behind ad price discovery on mobile and web platforms.  The company has raised $2.5 million from IA Ventures, Village Ventures, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Mike Maples, Stan Shuman, AOL Ventures, Josh Stylman, Jim Pallotta, Peter Hershberg, and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley. IA Ventures led the round.

Gdgt.com has raised $3.165 million from several investors. Gdgt.com was founded by former Engadget writers Peter Rojas and Ryan Block. Their investors include Spark Capital, Jason Calacanis, True Ventures, Betaworks, AOL Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures, and several other angel investors.

Gdgt.com previously raised $500,000 from Betaworks and True Ventures. Gdgt currently has about 17,000 products in their database. [paidContent]

Betaworks is an incubator firm that is based in New York.  The incubator firm has raised $20 million in a second round of funding.  Betaworks primarily invests in web startup companies.  The firm was started by AOL veterans John Borthwick and Andrew Weisman.  So far Betaworks has made investments in about 24 companies including Bit.ly, TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, and Chartbeat.  The investment was led by Intel Capital.  RRE Ventures, Softbank, Founders Collective, AOL Ventures, DFJ Growth, and The New York Times also participated.  The last round of funding was $8 million. [GigaOm]