Zynga is a social network game-making machine.  The company has just raised $29 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Avalon Ventures, and Foundry Group.  Union, Avalon, and Foundry were all previous investors.  Zynga is based out of San Francisco, Calif.

Zynga was started by Mark Pincus.  Through this round of funding, Kleiner Perkins partner and former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts Bing Gordon will join Zynga’s board of directors.  Zynga’s last round of funding was $10 million in January 2008.  Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel of the PayPal mafia were a couple of investors involved in the last round of funding.

Zynga currently has about 18 million uniques per month.  Zynga’s revenue model is advertising and selling game add-ons.  Zynga’s top games on Facebook are Poker, Blackjack, Scramble, Word Twist, PathWords, Sudoku, Sea Wars, Mafia Wars, Dragon Wars, Triumph, Attack!, My Heroes Ability, Ghost Racer, Dope Wars, and YoVille.  Zynga recently acquired YoVille.

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In September 2006, the month that Pulse 2.0 was created, I pointed out that New York-based Quigo was beefing up their client list and that in terms of advertising, the company would be able to compete with Google AdWords.  Quigo Technologies is known for their AdSonar product.  AdSonar provides contextual advertisements based on keywords from any given website, similar to Google AdSense.

Currently, Quigo provides services to ABC News, Hollywood.com, ESPN.com, Forbes.com, FOXNews.com, CareerBuilder.com, and USAToday.com.  In June 2007, Time Inc. decided to choose AdSonar to power the advertising for their websites as well.  Time Inc. is a subsidiary of Time Warner Company.  Time Warner Company owns America Online.  Technically, its a situation where the client wants to become the owner.

America Online is currently putting together a deal to acquire the advertising company for $300 million.  Kara Swisher of AllThingsD broke the news.

Quigo raised a total of $45 million in funding from Steamboat Ventures, Highland Capital, Glenrock Ventures, IVP, and Meritech Capital Partners.  Time Inc. executives predict that Quigo will bring in $100 million in revenues over the next 3 years.

“We have taken traditional consumer research to the next level. For the first time ever marketers can understand all aspects of consumer activity, including critical links between online and offline behavior,” stated Gian Fulgoni, Co-Founder of comScore.  comScore is an Internet information provider that monitors consumer behaviors and trends online.  comScore has a plethora of lucrative clients such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Viacom, AOL, iVillage, CareerBuilder, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.  All of these clients benefit from the human-computer interactions monitored by comScore.  It will be comScore, Inc. will be listed under NASDAQ: SCOR.

comScore was created in 1999 and had acquired assets from NetRatings during the dot-com bust.  About 12% of comScore’s 2006 $66 million in sales came from Microsoft.  The company is often times cited in the press for its statistical information.  In a recent Bloomberg article, comScore statistics were used for reporting how many more visitors were attracted to YouTube this year compared to last.  YouTube had 133.5 million visitors this past January and 9.5 million the January before that.  comScore also reported that 94.8 million visitors visited the website this past January and 38.9 million the year before.

A number of financial companies have stake in comScore.  Investors include JPMorgan Partners, Accel Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Lehman Brothers, Adams Street Partners, Topspin Partners, Flatiron Partners, vSpring Capital, Devine InterVentures, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.  The number of shares expected to release during the IPO is not yet known.