Wonderhill is a company that creates “wholesome” casual games.  Wonderhill recently raised $7 million from Shasta Ventures and Charles River Ventures.  Before that the company raised $750,000 from Ooga Labs.  Two wholesome games that Wonderhill developed include Dog World and Green Spot.  Wonderhill was founded by James Currier.

Currier created Emode which is now Tickle.com back in the 90’s.  Wonderhill’s CCO Nick Rush had a similar role at EA’s Pogo.com before joining the startup.  Charles River Ventures partner Saar Gur told VentureBeat that Wonderhill’s ability to create viral hits was one of the reasons why they received the major investment.

Wonderhill’s competition includes Zynga and Playfish.  Zynga recently raised $35 million and Playfish raised $21 million.

Scribd is a document sharing website that has about 50 million monthly users and has about 50,000 documents uploaded daily.  The company was rolled out of Y-Combinator and eventually raised funding from Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and The Kinsley Hills Group.  It was recently announced that Scribd signed an agreement with major publishing companies to host free e-books.

Through Scribd, users can upload PDFs, DOCs, and other text files.  Scribd then presents the document in a web Flash format.

Scribd signed agreements with Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Workman Publishing Co.  The terms of the agreement was undisclosed.  Scribd will provide a variety of book material at no cost.  This includes excerpts from books and even full books.  Full novels without much of an audience will be the ones made free.

[via Ars Technica]

What is Metaplace?  They are a startup company that creates custom virtual worlds.  Users can decorate virtual apartments, music stages, or even create space action games.  Metaplace has just raised $6.7 million from Charles River Ventures, Crescendo Ventures, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.  Marc and Ben both founded Opsware and sold it to HP. To date, Metaplace has raised $9.4 million.

Metaplace is building their virtual platform in Flash using a drag+drop interface.  Metaplace offers developers a full scripting engine, which is also used in Second Life.

The founders of Metaplace.com include Raph Koster and John Donham.  Koster was COO of Sony Online at one point and served as the lead designer for Ultima Online and Ultima Online: The Second Age.  Donham is a former VP of Sony where he saw the shipping of games such as EverQuest 2, Untold Legends, PlanetSide, etc.

“Building virtual worlds has always been the purview of large companies with deep pockets,” stated Raph Koster. “Our vision at Metaplace is to combine the ubiquity and ease of the Web with the immersive and addictive nature of video games to give everyday users the power to create a network of worlds based on their interests be it community, games, education or business. “In the coming years, as virtual places become a standard element of the Web, alongside text, audio, images, and video, Metaplace will be the engine that enables the transformation.”

Jason Hable is Metaplace’s VP of Business Ops.  Prior to joining Metaplace, he was a Principal at Crescendo Ventures to oversee the investment.  Hable worked at Wells Fargo to fund entrepreneurs.  Hable has an MBA from University of Minnesota and an undergrad degree from the University of St. Thomas.

The whole Metaplace team includes artists, programmers, Olympic contestants, and even symphony musicians.  Metaplace has about 25 employees and about 6 advisors.

On February 20, ODEO wrote on their blog that they were looking for a new home. ODEO was owned by Obvious.com, who are the same creators of Twitter. Since Obvious is focused on Twitter and that company is doing very well, letting go of ODEO was not a very hard decision.

ODEO was acquired by SonicMountain, a New York based startup company. TechCrunch reported that the price was not disclosed, but the amount is above $1 million in cash. The founder of ODEO and Obvious.com, Evan Williams will be working at SonicMountain as an advisor for 6 months.

ODEO has had a rocky past. The company previously raised $5 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and a few other angel investors. After that, Evan Williams didn’t like the idea of having investors, so they bought the company back. The amount that they paid back for the company is rumored to be above the $5 million. Sometimes you make decisions and can’t look back. Congratulations to Obvious.com and SonicMountain.

Skyrider, a Mountain View, CA based company has just announced that $12 million has just been added to the company bank account from investors such as ComVentures, Sequoia Capital, and Charles River Ventures.  Skyrider has also raised $8 million within the last two months. 

The way that Skyrider works essentially is by taking over certain search results for keywords in which there is an advertising opportunity.  An example given by the Skyrider website is below:

In the above screenshot, it displays how Skyrider will add a link to a website that sells pop artist, Shakira’s concert tickets if a user searches for Shakira in P2P software, Limewire.  Skyrider is aiming to make money from these ads similar to how Google is making money from search engine results.

The advertisement is part of the search results, but will be mainly depicted by all capital letters.  This helps the advertisement differentiate itself from spam.  The advertisement will be displayed in the top results and if a user clicks the ad, then the default Internet browser will open the ad.

Currently Skyrider is a first to market for P2P advertisements on a large scale.  Skyrider is pulling together millions of search queries and will soon be processing hundreds of millions of queries per day.  Statistics say that searches queries made on Yahoo! and Google are roughly the same number of searches made on P2P networks.

Skyrider was founded by Dr. Ori Cohen and Stas Khirman.  Both of these founders previously created Narus, which is a leader of software and technology in the telecommunications and government agency industry.