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.

As much as I like to see innovative startups succeed, I don’t quite see the game-changing abilities of Kosmix.  This is why it surprised me that they were able to raise $20 million in recent funding.  In total funding they have raised $55 million.  When a company raises that sort of money, you have to ask yourself, what does your product actually do?

Kosmix does metasearches and aggregates content from a bunch of other sources.  Top stories are pulled from Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, CNN, and Fark.  Popular videos are pulled from Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr.  Trending topics are from Twitter.  Lucky Dip is from People magazine.  Daily deals are pulled from DealNews, Amazon.com, and Orbitz.  And finally Images of the Day are pulled from Kodak, Flickr, and Picasa.

In my opinion, it appears that Kosmix is to search is what Alltop is to RSS feeds.  And the difference is that Guy Kawasaki spent $10,000 to create Alltop. I’m not the only one that questions Kosmix’s technology.  VentureBeat has a similar opinion.

But the numbers don’t like when it comes to VC dollars.  Kosmix had over 11 million monthly visitors recently.  Kosmix will also be rolling out an advertising strategy next year some time as well as a customizable homepage.

The investors in the $20 million round of funding includes Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures.  Former Motorola CEO/Chairman Ed Zander was also an investor.

Gigya is a widget tracking service company.  Gigya also provides widget distribution and monetization services.  As of last month, Gigya’s clients reached 150 million unique widget users worldwide.  Gigya has just announced that they have raised $11 million in Series C funding, led by DAG Ventures.  This is a preemptive round of funding as the terms may be subject to change.  Gigya raised it’s Series B round of funding about 7 months ago.

CNET made a great point about how Gigya may see some tough times ahead with the new Facebook redesign.  A majority of the applications got kicked to the curb when Facebook put all of them in a tab called Boxes.  With Facebook’s old design, the widgets had prominent online real estate space: the Facebook profile.

Some of Gigya’s top clients include Oh!, CNET, Eyeblaster, Sprint, Levi’s, Meebo, RockYou!, DoubleClick, MTV, FOX, Toyota, Sony, JibJab, Crackle, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Glogster, TinyPic, Disney, Gydget, Walmart, Sprout, and NewsGator.  Last year Gigya announced that they have released a new feature called Socialize.  Socialize allows publishers to add social graphs and features into websites. 

PopularMedia is a company that helps clients make content go viral.  It is a similar concept as ACS SEO.  However PopularMedia is a fully-funded social media company.  To date, PopularMedia has raised over $12 million in funding across three rounds. 

The latest round of funding was $8 million.  VentureBeat reported that the funding was provided by DAG Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Steamboat Ventures.  PopularMedia is run by CEO Jim Calhoun. 

PopularMedia also released a new product called SocialNotes.  SocialNotes is a widget that can be placed on blogs to get feedback.  SocialNotes looks like a floating sticky note.  The datasheet is available here.

Related Links:
1. PopularMedia.com

Mevio, a video website that was founded by Ron Bloom and Adam Curry started the company originally to podcast.  About 4 years later, the founders decided to rename their former company, Podshow to Mevio.  Mevio hosts original videos and will allow others to syndicate their content.

This idea impressed Crosslink Capital, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, DAG Ventures, and Sherpalo Ventures because these companies gave Mevio $15 million in Series C.  All of these VC firms were previous investors as well.  To date, Mevio has raised about $38 million. 

Some of Mevio’s clients include Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, and Hewlett Packard.  Mevio has over 1 million hours of video content.  Mevio also self-proclaims themselves as a leading site to discover new artists and free use licensing for original music. 

Related Links:
Mevio

Information Source:
Silicon Alley Insider 

Xoom is one of the biggest money transfer companies on the Internet today.   The $20.29 million Series E funding was sent to Xoom from Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Fidelity Ventures, and DAG Ventures.

Xoom is based in San Francisco, Calif. and previously raised $15 million in Series D in 2006.  Cumulatively, Xoom raised over $50 million to power its business operations.

Xoom makes money transfer easy in 4 steps:
1.) Enter your contact info, recipient’s info, and the amount of money to be sent.
2.) Select a delivery method.
3.) Select a payment method (Visa/MasterCard/eCheck, Discover, Paypal).
4.) Send your recipient a tracking method.

However, due to all the third parties involved, its rather difficult to support all of the developing countries for their operations.  This is why Xoom is limited to only Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Paraguay, Peru, Phillippines, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Vietnam.  I’m assuming that with this new round of funding, Xoom will be able to expand its operations to support other countries. 

Recipients of money transfers for Xoom do not necessarily require a bank account or Internet connection to receive funds because Xoom has money transfer partners to provide ways to send money to family and friends in other countries.

Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Dick Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates, Anne Mitchell of Fidelity Ventures, Keith Hartz of the founding team of Xoom, and Keith Rabois sit on the Board of Directors for Xoom.

Metacafe has over 25 million unique views per month. And yesterday the company officially announced that they have officially raised $30 million in Series C from Highland Capital, DAG Ventures, Accel Partners, and Benchmark Capital. While YouTube dominates traffic for online video, it seems that Metacafe has a more established business model since users are actually rewarded financially for their creativity.

“Metacafe is defining the next generation of online video, moving away from simple video sharing and hosting to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience for short-form content, said Richard de Silva, Partner, Highland Capital Partners. “Its sophisticated approach to audience-driven programming is unique in the industry.”

With this round of funding, Metacafe plans on supporting continuous operations and developing the Producer Rewards program further. The Producer Rewards program gives users a financial incentive to develop intriguing video content. For every thousand views a video gets on a site, the user will receive $5. The video has to reach a minimum of 20,000 views.

Highland Capital Partners’ Richard de Silva and DAG Ventures’ Tom Goodrich will join Metacafe’s Board of Directors. Metacafe is privately headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and NYC, NY.

References:
[1] alarm:clock: Video Site MetaCafe Hammers $30M Round