Social bookmarking company, Digg.com announced today that they have raised $28.7 million.  The funding was led by Highland Capital Partners.  They plan to use this round of funding to invest in their infrastructure, accelerate new features, and expand internationally.  Of Digg’s 30 million monthly unique visitors, nearly half of them are from out of the country.  Digg wants to make it so that their website supports many languages. 

Digg will enhance the Recommendation engine and create additional deeper categories.  International growth will commence at the beginning of 2009.  The company will be moving to bigger offices in San Francisco, Calif. and increase the number of jobs.

This round of funding is announced 3 months after a rumor that Google was considering an acquisition of Digg.  Digg has been working with Allen and Company for seeking a new round of funding.  Digg now has about a total of $40 million in funding.  Revision3, the other company that is led by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson has $9 million in funding. 

If Digg is serious about being acquired, then they may have to ask for a higher price than the rumored $200-$300 million that they were rumored to be looking for.  Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg confirmed the round of funding on the Digg Blog.

“Television media represents the largest percentage of advertisers and agencies’ media budget today,” stated Brian McAndrews, SVP of Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group at Microsoft.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has opened up its wallet once again.  This time it’s not for the most trafficked search engine company.  Microsoft has acquired Navic Networks, a Waltham, Mass. -based company that designs & delivers advertisements to cable TV networks.  The price was undisclosed, but there is speculation about the price being $200-$300 million.

Previous investors in Navic include Himalaya Capital, Highland Capital Partners, FirstMark Capital, Pilot House Ventures, and Lauder Partners.  Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is also planning on entering the television advertisement foray through their AdWords program.

Clearly this is Microsoft’s way of becoming more competitive against Google.  Rather than building an TV advertising platform internally, just buy one.

Information Source:
[1] Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft Announces Acquisition of Navic Networks

CafeMom is a social networking site for moms and is also a site for parenting.  The New York-based social network company announced that they have raised additional funding at $12 million.  This round of funding was provided by Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  Since the site has launched, CafeMom raised $20.3 million total.

CafeMom has several sponsors that have created ad campaigns around their social network.  Clients include Nestle, Unilever, Kraft, Disney, J&J, and Best Buy.  According to CenterNetworks, ad campaigns run for about $200,000-$500,000 on average.

Recently CafeMom released a feature called Hot List.  Hot Lists encourages moms to submit parenting-related news and to “Bump” them.  The feature is a blatant Digg replica.

CafeMom receives about 6 million monthly visitors and 120 million page views [Source: Mashable].

Oodle is a startup that has over 20 million classified ads and features listings from all over the U.S. and the UK. Oodle has raised $11 million in a 2nd round from current investors, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures along with new investor, JAFCO Ventures. The first round was $5 million. Oodle has a partnership with The Washington Post (D.C.) and The Sun (British tabloid owned by News Corp).

This is Amp’d Mobile’s 5th round of funding and the amount is quite substantial. According to the SEC, Amp’d has raised $107 million. This round of funding was provided by Old Lane Management (hedge fund created by former Morgan Stanley execs) and joins previous venture backers: Columbia Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Intel Capital, MTV Networks, Tudor Investments and Universal Music. The CEO of Amp’d is Peter Adderton, who also founded Boost Mobile.

Gal Trifon and Ofer Zadikario founded Eyeblaster in 1999 and has established the company as a leader in digital marketing. The company had announced today that it has raised $30 million in funding from private investors. The company has been profitable every year since 2002. The company was founded in Israel and had previously raised $10 million ($8 of which came from Insight Venture Partners). The current investors are Eli Barkat (BRM Capital), Jonathan Kolber (Koor Industries, Ltd.), Shlomo Dovrat (Carmel Ventures), Harel Beit-On (Carmel Ventures), and Nir Barkat. Eyeblaster designs rich media and standard banners.

MyCoupons, a Pittsburgh-based company that was the first online coupon site launched in 1995 and took in $750,000 to re-launch its product… as a social network. “We have invested close to three quarters of a million dollars over the past year and we are proud to be able, today, to announce our re-birth” stated a company representative [Source: alarm:clock]. Jason Wolfe, the original founder of MyCoupons had bought back the domain name from Direct Response Technologies after the Save.com (who bought it for MyCoupons.com for $20M) went bankrupt after the dot-com bust.

Ludic Labs is a San Mateo-based company that is run by Dr. Brian Totty. According to alarm:clock, Totty was most recently a Venture Advisor at Foundation Capital and was a Founding VP of Research and Development and a General Manager of Inktomi. Inktomi was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. “Ludic Labs is creating a mass-scale, social-media service for internet and mobile devices” stated a Ludic Labs representative. The company says that they are well funded and are planning on hiring Python, Web UI, and Internet Service developers around Silicon Valley shortly.

Boorah, a retaurant review website based in New York has raised angel funding and is now looking for venture capitalist funding. The company was founded by Nagaraju Bandaru and Eric Moyer. Both of them were previous executives for wireless broadband provider, MetroFi. Moyer presented BooRah at the past DEMO conference.

[Information Source: PaidContent and alarm:clock]