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]

AOL bought Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company in February 2007. The price was not disclosed, but rumor has it that they paid about $80 million. Third Screen Media was rolled into AOL’s Platform-A division, the same unit that runs Advertising.com and PubAccess. Now there is another rumor floating around that Third Screen Media is not making as much money as they had hoped so they’ll end up scaling back the service or shut it down completely.

Rather than focusing on brokering advertising on mobile devices, AOL has strength in building mobile content. According to Silicon Alley Insider, they have heard from mobile industry insiders that AOL is not renewing deals with publishers. AOL is losing customers and is focusing more on internal properties. Many Third Screen Media employees have also supposedly been applying to other jobs.

Before being acquired by AOL, Third Screen Media raised $8 million from TD Capital Ventures and Blue Chip Venture Company. During the time of the acquisition, Microsoft was rumored to be involved with bidding for Third Media also.

“I view our major competition as copy and paste,” stated Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis.

ShareThis is a tool for web browsers to share the web sites with social communities around the web.  The company is led by Tim Schigel as the CEO, who spent the last 10 years investing in technology companies through Blue Chip Venture Company.  ShareThis released their popular button on November 7, 2007.  Since then they have been generating over 100 million page views and 26 million unique users per month.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson announced yesterday that they have plugged in $15 million Series B in ShareThis.  ShareThis’ headquarters are located in Cincinnati, OH and has offices in San Francisco, Calif.  ShareThis’ Series A was $6 million provided by Illinois Ventures and Blue Chip Ventures. 

ShareThis allows users to submit stories to social networks like Reddit and Facebook.  And now that MySpace has recently opened up their APIs, users can now submit stories through ShareThis onto their MySpace profiles.

[Information Source: Wired]