A8.com is an online digital music website that started in 2000 in China.  The company is planning to have an IPO on the Hongkong Exchange under HK:0800.  A8 hopes to raise around HKD 217 million ($27.82 million) through the IPO. 

Previous investors in A8 include JAFCO, Intel Capital, TDF Group, IDGVC.  A8 sells ringtones, ringback tones, and IVR music for mobile phone subscribers through China Mobile and China Unicom.  Music on A8 is available through local music labels and user-generated music uploaded by the artists.

Over 50,000 songs have been uploaded to A8.com so far.  The 10,000 artists that have contributed music on A8 receive roughly 15-50% of the revenue generated from their music.  A8’s revenue in 2007 was 286 million yuan ($41.22) and profit was 55 million yuan ($7.92 million).

Information Source:
[1] China Web2.0 Review: Chinese Digital Music Service A8 To Go Public in HongKong

Meebo, the online chat application that is powered by AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber has raised a Series C round of investment at $25 million. JAFCO Ventures was the lead investor. Other investors include Time Warner, KTB Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Meebo was started in September 2005 and is currently valuated at $200 million.

Meebo is a top 400 site within Alexa.  The online instant message company plans to utilize their partnership through Time Warner by working with its subsidiaries such as AOL, TMZ, New Line Cinema, People Magazine, and CNN.

Meebo will be expanding to Japan and Korea with this round of funding.  Meebo also has partnerships with VideoEgg, CBS, PUMA, and 4 record labels.  Meebo started in September 2005 and has over 29 million users sending over 150 million IMs daily.

The actual name of the company was written on a napkin by the three co-founders.   What is the deal with  coming up with business plans and Internet company names on napkins?

Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a verteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, “In the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.

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]