“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]

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI)’s Ticketmaster stated yesterday that they would acquire TicketsNow for $265 million.  TicketsNow is a website where consumers can buy tickets for events such as the NFL Playoffs, Hannah Montana, and musicals.

eBay also was rumored to be looking into the acquisition of TicketsNow.  But eBay also recently acquired StubHub for $310 million.  TicketsNow’s first round of funding was $8 million around the middle of 2006 from DFJ, Portage Venture Partners, and New World Ventures.  Then the $8 million turned into equity as the company raised $35 million last year, led by Adam Street Partners.

As Ticketmaster’s contract with concert promotion company, Live Nation Inc. ended recently, Ticketmaster wanted to seek additional revenue streams.  Live Nation is starting their own box office for ticket sales.  Live Nation was a previous subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications.

Socialtext[1] is a Palo Alto, Calif. based company that builds wiki enterprise products. This type of product is especially useful for those who do not have the time or knowledge to set-up their own wiki. It is also useful for those who have become fed up with sending attachments back-and-forth through e-mail. I know a couple of start-ups that interact via wikis to report daily progress.

Socialtext announced that they have raised $3 million towards a desired $6.5 million Series C funding amount. Some of the previous investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson[2], SAP[3], Omidyar Network[4], Mark Pincus (CEO of Tribe.net[5]), and Reid Hoffman (Chairman of LinkedIn[6]). Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia[7] serves as a Board member for Socialtext.

Ross Mayfield, Peter Kaminski, and Adina Levin are founders of the company. A product tour is available at: http://www.socialtext.com/products/tour[8]. The Socialtext blog is available at: http://www.socialtext.com/blog/[9].

In November 2006, Google acquired Jotspot, a similar wiki concept[9].  Wetpaint, a wiki-builder website raised $9.5 million in funding[10] around January 2007 as well.  Wikis are a strong market and millions of dollars are constantly being plugged in.

[1] Socialtext.com
[2] DFJ.com
[3] SAP.com
[4] Omidyar.net
[5] Tribe.net
[6] LinkedIn.com
[7] Wikipedia.org
[8] Socialtext.com Product Tour
[9] Pulse 2.0: Google’s Gone Wiki
[10] Pulse 2.0: Wiki-Builder Website, Wetpaint Welcomes $9.5M Funding

Blog search engine, Technorati is expected to have closed its Series funding today at an amount of $11.52 million. The Series C amount had three rounds itself. The first round of Series C was at $7.6 million and then a second round pushed the funding amount to $10.52 million. DG Incubation, the head of Technorati Japan invested the last million dollars into Technorati.

The previous investors of Technorati are Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. Technorati acquired PersonalBee last month. Technorati also recently announced a service called WTF (Where’s the Fire?). This service explains why things are a buzz.

As you know, you cannot always access your instant messaging software at every computer that you go to.  I especially noticed this when I was in India for 5 months this past year.  When I was walking around different computer labs in India, I noticed some of people around me using meebo.  meebo allows you to access your buddies on any computer with an Internet connection for the MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber IM clients.

meebo raised $3.5 million from Sequoia Capital in December 2005.  Roelof Botha of Sequoia led the funding.  And now meebo has raised $9 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ).  Through the funding, Tim Draper of DFJ has joined the meebo board of directors.  Draper Fisher Jurvetson has also previously invested in Hotmail and Skype.  Speaking of DFJ, about 9 days ago Pulse 2.0 also wrote about DFJ investing into companies, PayPerPost and Boxbe.

With this new round of investment, meebo hopes to find new ways to monetize the service without using the ‘punch the monkey’ ad banners.  meebo also hopes to get into the mobile market as well.

[Source: meebo blog and TechCrunch]

Boxbe, a San Francisco based company has a unique marketing concept. Users create an account with Boxbe for friends, people that do not know the user, and advertisers to view. The advertisers are asked to pay a user-decided price to e-mail them. If the advertisers pay, then the marketers would gain access to the user’s regular e-mail account. Boxbe walks away with 25% of the advertiser pay. Boxbe had suggested 15-25 cents per e-mail.

This round of funding for Boxbe came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), a Menlo Park, CA based venture capital firm that had also invested in PayPerPost, a website that allows advertisers to pay bloggers to rave about their products. PayPerPost bloggers are given the right to not disclose that are being paid.

Boxbe recommends to its users to apply their Boxbe e-mail addresses for social network or blogging accounts such as MySpace or Blogger. This way, spam would not reach the inboxes of their regular e-mail addresses unless it was paid for.

Through the round of funding, Managing Director of DFJ, Steve Jurvetson is joining the Boxbe Board of Directors. Jurvetson was a founding VC investor of Hotmail before it was acquired by Microsoft. Esther Dyson, founding chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is also joining the Boxbe Board.

“The idea is, if they have to pay, marketers will stop spamming. But this won’t keep marketers from spamming your regular box anyway” stated Matt Marshall of VentureBeat. I definitely agree. No matter what, spammers will continue to find out your e-mail addresses as soon as it hits the Net. In my GMail account, I average about 140 spam mails per day because I forwarded my Michigan State e-mail inbox to my GMail and my MSU address was written on an organization website. Paying spammers to stop indicates that the spammers are being heard, so why would that stop them?