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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Dollar Amount Involved: $3 Million Today / Expected $19 Million
Adify was founded in 2005 and has worked with large media companies such as Time, the Washington Post, NBC, and Comcast as clients to provide advertising supply.

Larry Braitman, the CEO/founder of Adify stated “We envision thousands of niche or vertically-focused ad networks emerging to meet specific market needs, driven by entrepreneurs and enterprises who are members of the specific communities they serve. These network builders are in the position to assemble publishers and deliver value to advertisers” at a recent Web 2.0 conference.

The first $3 million portion of a $19 million first round fund came from NBC Universal and GE Media Communications & Entertainment. Other investors in this round includes U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, and Time Warner.

Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Sequoia Capital has partnered with Gary Sanchez Productions for a new comedy video website that will feature clips with multiple hit actor, Will Ferrell. The producer of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Adam McKay is also heavily involved in the project. The project is called Funny or Die.

The website has already attained over 1.5 million page views as of today. The first video to appear on the website features Will Ferrell arguing with his landlord which happens to be an infant.Any user will be able to upload their own videos, but if they are given a low score by Funny or Die visitors, the video will be banished. Outstandingly comedic clips will be noticed by adminstrators of the website and may potentially score further movie deals according to Gary Sanchez Productions. The FunnyOrDie and Sequoia deal was brokered by Jimmy Miller and Deborah Klein.

Dollar Amount Involved: $300,000
5min is a website with video tutorials such as ‘how to catch a flying disc’ and ‘Sushi: How To Make Pickled Ginger.’ The founder of the company is Ran Harnevo, who is based in Israel. The $300,000 was in seed funding and the investors are unknown.

Dollar Amount Involved: Undisclosed
Yardbarker is like a Digg for sports news only. Users submit links and news articles with the best sports content from all over the Internet. Yardbarker, Inc. is based in Berkeley, CA and was founded in 2006. “Welcome to Sports 2.0″ states the About Yardbarker page.Russell Siegelman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins was the investor in this round of seed funding.Some of the other investors include Ron Conway, Steve Anderson (Baseline Ventures), Ronald “Ronnie” Lott (former USC/San Francisco 49ers football player), Harris Barton (HRJ Capital), Labrador Ventures, and the Band of Angels.

[Information Source: alarm:clock]

Sunnyvale, CA based company, KnowNow has received $13 million in funding from a plethora of investors but is led by Cambridge, MA based RSS Investors. KnowNow was founded in 2000. There are a number of solutions and products that KnowNow offers.

The products that KnowNow offers are eLerts, Enterprise Syndication Solution (ESS), and LiveServer. The solutions that KnowNow offers are Market Intelligence, Corporation Communication, and Alternative Marketing Channel. The eLert product is a free toolbar that is only available for IE and Windows for now, but “provides real-time notification of new content posted to web. You select the publishers or sites to watch and then alerts will appear describing what’s new as soon as it is posted by the publisher. You can click the link to read the full post, pin to your desktop as a reminder, or simply ignore it and let it fade away [source].”

ESS is a back-office integration system that allows employees, partners, customers, and managers to syndicate business information. And LiveServer is an “event-management engine that controls the flow of events to and from systems, applications and people. It is specially designed to manage thousands of simultaneous connections for instantaneous delivery of business-critical data [source].”

The other participating investor for this deal is Presidio STX. Other current investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Levensohn Venture Partners, Palomar Ventures, TPG Ventures and Wachovia Strategic Ventures [source].

“Aside from an impressive list of enterprise clients, we were impressed by KnowNow’s ability to deliver solutions that fundamentally change the way enterprises act on information,” stated Richard Fishman, a managing partner of RSS Investors. “KnowNow is well positioned to capitalize on the burgeoning market for enterprise-class Web 2.0 solutions.”

The President and CEO of KnowNow is Todd Rulon-Miller, the founding General Partner of Apogee Venture Group. According to the KnowNow website, another major milestone for Mr. Rulon-Miller was that he “served on the Board of Directors at Active Software (NASDAQ), through its 1998 acquisition by WebMethods (NASDAQ) for $1.3 billion dollars.”

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