Scale Computing is a storage solutions company for small and medium businesses.  The company has raised $9 million led by Benchmark Capital.  Other companies involved include Blue Chip Venture Company, CID Equity, and Spring Mill Venture Partners.  Scale is based in Indianapolis, Indiana and is run by previous storage veterans that sold an anti-spam company called Corvigo Inc. to Tumbleweed Communications for $41.5 million in 2004. [VentureBeat]

GreenRoad has a device that starts each day with a green light. If the driver swerves a lot or has to brake hard, then the light turns yellow. If the driving gets worse, then the light turns red. The device uses a GPS chip, accelerometer, a CPU, and has Google Maps built in. GreenRoad has raised a total of of $40 million from Virgin Green Fund, Balderton Capital, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures. Today the company has raised $10 million from Generation Investment, owned by Al Gore and David Blood (former CEO of Goldman Sachs asset management). [TechCrunch]

Clicker.com is a website that collects TV shows from the web and consolidates them in one place.  Clicker launched about three months ago and they have raised $11 million in Series B from JAFCO Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Redpoint Ventures.

[GigaOM]

Google Buzz

Google is making GMail more interactive by integrating additional social media features into the service. Coined as Google Buzz, GMail will soon have the ability to share videos, photos, and websites with contacts within the e-mail service itself. Flickr and Twitter are both supported. [Google Blog]

Apple Aperture 3

Apple has upgraded Aperture to the 3rd version this morning. Aperture is a high-end photo editing software. New features include Faces, Places, and Brushes. [Apple.com]

LG GD800 Mini and GT350

LG has announced two new mobile devices: the LG GD880 Mini and the GT350. THe GD880 has a 3.2″ touchscreen, 5 megapixel cam, WiFi, AGPS, and 7.2Mbps HSDPA. The GT350 has a four line QWERTY sliding keyboard and a 3″ WQVA touchscreen. No details on pricing yet. The GD880 Mini will be available in Europe starting next month. [BGR]

Foursquare-Zagat Deal

Foursquare has announced a deal with Zagat. Foursquare will soon offer their users a “Foodie” badge that indicates how many times the user has rated restaurants on Zagat. [NYT]

Motorola Invests In TuneWiki

TuneWiki has raised $7 million in funding from several investors. This is TuneWiki’s second round of investment. Investors include Motorola Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital LLC, and Novel TMT. [Globes Israel]

Flixster Raises $12.5 Million

Flixster was recently acquired by Rotten Tomatoes, but that hasn’t stopped the company from raising additional funding. According to a filing with the SEC, Flixster has raised $12.5 million. The investors were undisclosed. Flixster currently receives 30 million unique visitors per month. [VentureBeat]

Yammer Raises $10 Million

Yammer, the micro-blogging enterprise service has raised $10 million in funding as part of a Series B. Yammer has about 60,000 companies registered as their clients. “We said that we would use our Series B financing to bolster engineering, sales, and marketing,” stated Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks in a press release. [PRWeb]

Seeking Alpha is a financial news website that competes with The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. The company has just raised $7 million in Series B. The investors include DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Accel Partners. Seeking Alpha has over 3,700 contributors and now their content will be syndicated on Nasdaq.com.

Seeking Alpha receives over 4 million unique visitors per month based on Google Analytics. Seeking Alpha started in 2004 and was founded by David Jackson. The company raised their Series A round of funding in September 2006 from Benchmark and Accel.

Seeking Alpha makes money through advertising and job listings for hedge funds. The company publishes about 250 articles every day.

There are only a certain number of start-ups that can walk around feeling like over a billion dollars or more.  Facebook and LinkedIn are both in that club.   And now Twitter will be joining the billionaire’s club in their next round of funding that will give them that valuation.  Twitter co-founder revealed a new round of potential funding that will put them at a $1 billion valuation at an all hands meeting according to a TechCrunch source.

Twitter will raised $50 million to receive the $1 billion valuation.  In the past Twitter had already raised $35 million from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.  The $35 million round gave them a valuation of $250 million.  Thus far Twitter has raised $55 million in funding.  That should keep them going for a while despite not having a revenue model.  The rumored investor in the upcoming round is expected to be New York based venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners.

In less than 2 years since launching, Mint.com is supposedly selling themselves to Intuit Inc. Mint.com is a financial tool that allows you to aggregate all of your bank and credit card information and find ways to save money. The deal is expected to close within the next few days.

Mint had launched at the TechCrunch50 conference two years ago and took the top prize giving them $50,000. Mint raised $31.8 million in total funding from First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, Hite Capital, DAG Ventures, and The Founders Fund. Angel investors in Mint include Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Geoff Ralston, and Dave McClure.

This acquisition is interesting because Intuit had previously sent Mint a letter demanding an explanation for how they jumped to 850,000 users within several months.

Riot Games is a social game development company that is best known for creating the League of Legends.  Earlier this week Riot Games announced that they have raised about $8 million in Series B.  The investors include Benchmark Capital, FirstMark Capital, and Tencent Holdings.  Rather than making revenue from advertising, Tencent and Riot games depend on the sales of virtual goods.

Riot Games is currently developing an online game platform which is what the funding will go towards.  Considering that Tencent is one of the largest virtual good dealers in China, they may even lend their expertise to Riot Games.  The company is licensing the League of Legends in China and will launch in the country by 2010.

Tencent is the parent company of Internet portal QQ.com.  They sell virtual goods through their portal, IM software, social networks, and games.  These virtual goods include pets, clothing, wallpapers, etc.  Tencent made about $700 million last year according to BusinessInsider.