Instagram’s investors include Baseline Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Adam D’Angelo, Jack Dorsey, and Chris Sacca.

Below is the press release from Facebook:

Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Read It Later has 3.5 million registered users, but this number also includes users that are inactive. Read It Later is seeing about 10,000 downloads per day and over 250 applications have integrated Read It Later’s APIs.

“Bradley is somebody who has been steeped in next generation tech and has access to consumers,” stated Wordnik CEO Joe Hyrkin. “A lot it is having him dig under the hood of our technology and help us map out how to turn these things mainstream.”

Hyrkin and Horowitz worked together at video publishing company Virage. Horowitz oversaw Virage’s IPO and acquisition by Autonomy in 2003.

Wordnik raised a total of $12.8 million in funding from Lucas Venture Group, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Floodgate, Baseline Ventures, Roger McNamee. Wordnik was founded in 2008 and is based in San Mateo, California.

[VentureBeat]

“Developers have spent the better part of their careers writing code to change the shape of their data between object form and relational form. I recently heard one VP of Engineering refer to it as ‘our Vietnam’”, stated MongoLab CEO Will Shulman. “Since JSON is an object format, MongoDB makes a lot of these problems disappear. Developers have been waiting years for something like this.”

[TechCrunch]

TRUSTe Receives $12 Million in Series B Funding

Cash Infusion Rings in New Era of Leadership and Drives Product Focus for Online Privacy Innovator

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Jun 08, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — TRUSTe, provider of the leading online privacy trustmark, today announced that it closed a Series B funding round of $12 million, led by new investor Jafco Ventures. The round also included a new investment from DAG Ventures and follow-on investments from returning Series A investors Accel Partners and Baseline Ventures. TRUSTe will put the new funding toward enhancing sales and marketing in order to expand its existing enterprise foothold, while capitalizing on the booming small business market and new certification initiatives in social networking, mobile and advertising.

“The completion of our funding is perfectly timed to allow us to meet the ever-growing concern for online privacy and trust,” said Chris Babel, CEO of TRUSTe. “Recent events have shown that consumer privacy remains a hot button for usage of any online service — whether it is social tools or the purchasing of business goods. I am proud to lead the company as we raise the bar and broaden the scope of TRUSTe’s online privacy services to address new levels of transparency, accountability and control.”

“Building business credibility and gaining customer confidence are absolute requirements for the success of online businesses and we view trust and privacy as the next big wave of online security,” said Jeb Miller, General Partner at Jafco Ventures. “We invested in TRUSTe because it demonstrated a deep understanding of market requirements and had vision and execution to capitalize on this massive market need. In particular, Jafco sees tremendous growth potential for small and medium businesses and it is our belief that TRUSTe is the company best able to guide the industry for online privacy requirements across this and other key market segments.”

As a leader in enhancing online trust between consumers and businesses, TRUSTe certifies companies to its online privacy standards rewarding the companies with the leading trustmark thereby driving consumer confidence and better business results. According to a 2009 survey conducted by TNS, more than 82 percent of consumers who recognize TRUSTe’s privacy seal, use it to decide how and when to disclose personal information.

“Our initial Series A investment in TRUSTe and continued support through the Series B round proves the strong belief we have in the company’s success,” said Andrew Braccia, General Partner at Accel Partners. “We consider the TRUSTe executive management team the most experienced Internet authority on consumer privacy protection today and remain bullish in its unique ability to capitalize on the opportunity at hand and move the market forward to the next level.”

About TRUSTe Thousands of companies rely on TRUSTe’s leading privacy trustmark to enhance consumer trust, drive increased registrations and transactions, and comply with complex privacy requirements. Consumers know that when they see the TRUSTe seal they can “Click with Confidence” because the certified website is responsible with their personal information. TRUSTe has certified more than 40 percent of the top fifty websites including Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, AOL, Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, Disney, Weather.com, Apple, LinkedIn, Web MD, and Yelp. TRUSTe also certifies many of the top advertising and technology service providers for websites. For additional information on TRUSTe and its services, please visit http://www.truste.com.

[alarm:capital]

CoTweet is a startup that has built a Twitter platform for helping companies reach and engage customers.  CoTweet has several prominent companies using their platform such as Ford, Starbucks, Microsoft, Sports Illustrated, Zendesk, and Dish Network.

CoTweet announced earlier this week that they have raised $1.1 million in first round funding from Baseline, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments, and Freestyle Capital.

The company platform has the ability to manage multiple tools and accounts at once.  Several people also have the ability to post to a single account using the CoTweet platform.

CoTweet is available for free as of right now but the company will eventually charge for their services.  “CoTweet is an essential tool that allows us to manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard, or have a single account with multiple people managing it,” stated Scott Monty, the digital and multimedia communications manager at Ford Motor Company in a press release. “We can also identify who’s responsible for Tweets, which gives us the flexibility to pull experts into the discussion, and to keep a human face while doing so.”

Xobni’s Outlook software has been downloaded over 1.5 million times.  Xobni is currently doing product trials with Fortune 500 companies.  Some of the companies Xobni has partnered with includes LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo!  Cisco’s investment in Xobni is an indication that they are becoming serious about enterprise email.  In August 2008, Cisco acquired PostPath, an email and calendar company for $215 million.

Prior to the $7 million investment, Xobni raised $4.26 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Atomico, and First Round Capital.  The individuals that participated in Xobni’s first round of funding was Ariel Poler, Saar Gur, and Tom Pickney.