Plano, TX native and retired bicyclist, Lance Armstrong and Demand Media have partnered to create LiveStrong.com, a health and wellness social network.  In return, Lance Armstrong and The Lance Armstrong Foundation took equity in Demand Media.  Demand Media will be investing up to $20 million over the next 4 years in LiveStrong.com.

LiveStrong has the following features:
Get Healthy - Information about Diseases/Conditions, Treatments, Drugs, Symptoms, Vitamins/Supplements, Poisons, Tests, Mental Health, Tools.
Be Active - Sports, Great Outdoors, Fitness, Injuries
Eat Well - Healthy Foods, Eating For Your Condition, Diet & Weight Loss, The Daily Plate (Personalized Weight Loss/Gain Plan)
Find Balance - Stress Management, Family, Career/Finance, Relationships
Stay Young - Appearance/Beauty, Senior Health, Senior Care
Groups - Ability to Create Groups
Forums
Dares - Dares to quit smoking, get more sleep, lose weight, exercise regularly, spend time with family, save money, drink more water, stay sober, etc.

LiveStrong has 600,000 pages of content, 15,000 articles, 350,000 nutritional food profiles, and 50,000 health Q&As.  The homepage has exercise videos powered by iTrain.

Information Source:
[1] paidContent: Armstrong’s Health Site LiveStrong Enters Crowded Field by Rafat Ali

Demand Media Inc. is a Santa Monica, Calif. based company that was founded by Richard Rosenblatt. Roseblatt was the former President of Intermix Media, parent company of MySpace. News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media became the part company of MySpace when they acquired Intermix.

The company has raised a 3rd round of funding at $100 million by investment banking company, Goldman-Sachs. The previous investors include 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners, and Spectrum Equity Partners [Source: alarm:clock]. Demand Media has raised a total of $320 million as of now.

So what does Demand Media actually do?

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Demand Media[1] is a company that was formed by the former chairman of MySpace, Richard Rosenblatt.  Demand Media has made 9 previous acquisitions according to paidcontent[2] and today they announced their 10th: ExpertVillage[3].

ExpertVillage features How-To video content channels.  “The acquisition significantly expands Demand Media’s social media platform with a growing library of diverse video content to be distributed across its network of niche social media web properties and available for users to integrate into their Channelme.tv video sites,” states the press release on Demand Media’s website[4].

Pulse 2.0 previously covered ExpertVillage at:
http://pulse2.com/2006/10/30/expertvillagecom-adds-tagging-bookmarking-and-embedding-features/[5]

The financial details were not disclosed.

[1] DemandMedia.com
[2] PaidContent.org: Demand Media Buys ‘How-To’ Video Site ExpertVillage
[3] ExpertVillage.com
[4] DemandMedia.com: News & Media
[5] Pulse 2.0: ExpertVillage.com adds Tagging, Bookmarking, and Embedding features