Shazam started in 2002 as a mobile music discovery company. The company first gained an immense amount of popularity when launching an iPhone application. The Shazam application has been downloaded about 50 million times on the iPhone, Google Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, etc. Shazam has a database of over 8 million songs on their database which goes back to the 1950’s. Shazam is a private company that is based in London, England.

When you hear a song on the radio or on your laptop, you can Tag it using the Shazam application. Shazam will tell you the name of the song, give you a link to buy the music on Amazon or iTunes, and allow you to tweet what you are listening to.

The latest news with the company is that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has invested in them. Kleiner Perkins made the investment through their iFund financial arm which is intended for iPhone application developers. Shazam previously raised $12.3 million in funding from DN Capital and Acacia Capital.

Shazam is planning to launch a service that will connect with concert tickets for artists that have been tagged by the app. So far Shazam has been cash-flow positive.

Sonico, an Argentina-based social network raised $4.3 million from private investors and DN Capital, a venture capital first based in London.  Sonico launched around August 2007 and quickly rose to the ranks of the top 300 on Alexa.  Currently Sonico has about 17 million users registered in the social network.

One of Sonico’s unique features is a directory listing of its members is available at the bottom of the homepage:

Hi5, Orkut, Wamba, Vostu.com, MiGente.com, Quepasa.com, MyGrito.com, and Latino.MySpace.com are also pretty established in the same demographic.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Latin American Social Network Sonico Raises $4.3 Million by Mark Hendrickson

OLX is a classifieds site that has listings of vehicles, services, jobs, real estate, personals, and classes.  OLX makes it easy to quickly design HTML listings, send and accept PayPal payments, promote classifieds on social networks and blogs, search for items around various cities and view the site in different languages.

The company has raised $13.5 million Series B from DN Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.  OLX has raised a total of $23.5 million to date.  The same venture capitalists that provided OLX with the second round of funding were also a part of the 1st round.

About 11 months ago, OLX announced a partnership with Friendster.  This was around the same time that Facebook announced that they are launching a classifieds section as well.

OLX is a New York-based private company that launched in March 2006 by Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford.  Fabrice previously started a company called Zingy, a mobile ringtones company–which was acquired by For-Side for $80 million in 2004.

About 1 million new classifieds are added to OLX per month and the website receives over 200 million pageviews per month.   OLX solely depends on Google Ads to make money since adding classifieds are free.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Craigslist Competitor OLX Raises $13.5M by Mark Hendrickson