Playdom is one of the biggest competitors of Playfish, a virtual application company that was acquired by EA for $400 million earlier this week. Given that Playdom is one of the very few remaining large virtual application companies, investors want to get in on their business model. Playdom raised $43 million based on a $260 million valuation.

In terms of revenue, TechCrunch speculates that they are making $60 million per year. The participants in the $43 million round of funding was Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Rick Thompson, and New Enterprise Associates.

While Zynga and Playfish focus on Facebook for selling virtual items within game applications, Playdom focuses more on MySpace. Mob Wars has about 14 million users on MySpace and the company as a whole has about 28 million monthly game players. About 60% of the traffic is from MySpace and 40% is from Facebook.

In terms of payments, Playdom makes 70% from direct payments, 10% from advertising, and 20% from third party offers. Playdom is based out of San Francisco and doubled their employee count over the last couple of months to 110 people.

Now that Playdom has a lot more money in the bank, they have decided to go on an acquisition binge. Playdom acquired Green Patch Inc., a Facebook application company and Trippert Labs, an iPhone application company. Green Patch made a garden simulation application on Facebook and has about 1.5 million monthly application users. Trippert Labs created several iPhone applications such as MobAir: Pilot Training and Blowfish.

Social network customization service Ning.com has raised $15 million in Series E funding.  This investment places Ning at a valuation of $750 million.  Last year Ning raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation.

Ning currently has about 29.3 million registered users and over 1 million social networks.  The company was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini.  Andreessen recently launched his own venture firm with former partner Ben Horowitz.  The venture firm that was started by Andreessen is called Andreessen Horowitz.

“The growth at Ning has been massive in the last year and, combined with the quality of the team and seeing that kind of momentum, it worked out well for us both,” stated Lightspeed Venture Partner Managing Director and co-founder Ravi Mhatre.

[via AllThingsD]

As much as I like to see innovative startups succeed, I don’t quite see the game-changing abilities of Kosmix.  This is why it surprised me that they were able to raise $20 million in recent funding.  In total funding they have raised $55 million.  When a company raises that sort of money, you have to ask yourself, what does your product actually do?

Kosmix does metasearches and aggregates content from a bunch of other sources.  Top stories are pulled from Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, CNN, and Fark.  Popular videos are pulled from Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr.  Trending topics are from Twitter.  Lucky Dip is from People magazine.  Daily deals are pulled from DealNews, Amazon.com, and Orbitz.  And finally Images of the Day are pulled from Kodak, Flickr, and Picasa.

In my opinion, it appears that Kosmix is to search is what Alltop is to RSS feeds.  And the difference is that Guy Kawasaki spent $10,000 to create Alltop. I’m not the only one that questions Kosmix’s technology.  VentureBeat has a similar opinion.

But the numbers don’t like when it comes to VC dollars.  Kosmix had over 11 million monthly visitors recently.  Kosmix will also be rolling out an advertising strategy next year some time as well as a customizable homepage.

The investors in the $20 million round of funding includes Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures.  Former Motorola CEO/Chairman Ed Zander was also an investor.

RockYou announced today that they have raised $35 million Series C in funding.  The firms that invested in RockYou includes DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, and Sequoia.  RockYou! created some of the more viral applications on Facebook including Vampires, Superwall, and Likeness.  RockYou! also created marketing campaigns for Microsoft, CBS, Sony, New Line, and Paramount. 

“DCM believes that RockYou will be the catalyst of this new global ecosystem that delivers next-generation advertisements through its innovative advertising network and social applications,” stated co-founder of DCM, David Chao. “With the current momentum, RockYou is positioned to become a top-10 Internet property in the world in the near future.”

RockYou! will use the funding to grow their team and to create more applications.  RockYou! receives roughly 87.5 million unique monthly visitors and 2.7 billion page views.  RockYou! uses Google OpenSocial to spread their applications across Hi5, MySpace, and Orkut. 

“RockYou is incredibly proud to announce our funding, and are very pleased to be able to work with DCM and be a part of their impressive portfolio. RockYou is entering into a very exciting time both with the applications we are developing, and also with the expansion of our social advertising platform,” stated Lance Tokuda, the CEO of RockYou!

Flixster, the movie review company with a popular Facebook application has raised $5 million out of a planned $8 million second round.  Flixster is essentially a movie review social network that started in January 2006.  Flixster receives roughly 20 million-50 million pageviews per day. 

This round of funding was provided by Pinnacle Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  In order to compete, Netflix introduced similar social networking and reviewing features within their DVD rental services.

Lightspeed Ventures previously invested around $2 million or less around January 2007.  Here are some of the statistics on the site as of January 2008 (via Wikipedia):

• User Homepages: 42,122,063
• Movie Ratings: 1,225,752,033
• Quiz Questions: 3,017,434
• Movies: 34,254
• Actors: 71,934
• Photos: 1,312,286
• Videos: 353,672

Information Source:
[1] PEHub: Flixster Raises Second Round

“They [Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari, founders of Flixster] have built an amazing user generated content site around movies, including ratings, reviews, actor pages, trivia quizes, movie compatability tests and tons of other stuff.”
-Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

San Francisco, Calif.-based movie and social network database, Flixster.com, has seen exponential growth since its January 2006 start. Flixster currently has 30 million-plus user homepages, has 870 million+ movie ratings, and 1.5 million+ quiz questions in user-generated content. The database currently also hosts over 30,000 movie profiles, 60,000 actor profiles, 1.1 million pictures, and 310,000 videos. Flixster’s Facebook Application is part of the reason why Flixster has seen enormouse growth as well.

Today TechCrunch reported that we may see a Flixster acquisition happen soon. TechCrunch sources have cited that a letter of intent was sent to Flixster from InterActivCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), parent company of Ask.com, LendingTree, Ticketmaster, HSN, and Match.com. The rumored valuation is worth $150 million.

Flixster is monitored by several administrators and the company has about 8 employees. Besides the Facebook Application, another reason for Flixster’s accelerated growth is because users are asked to provide GMail or Yahoo! Mail passwords and then the user is asked to invite friends and family from their contact lists.

Flixster is powered with $2 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Keep checking Pulse 2.0 to see whether the acquisition takes place.

“MyBuys can make your advertising spend much more efficient. By capturing the interest of consumers while they shop during ’seducible moments’ we ensure the ability not only to follow up, but to do so in a powerfully relevant way,” says the MyBuys Acquire page.

MyBuys points out that many website traffic controllers spend lots of money on banners and SEO, but many visitors look around then leave. MyBuys insists that they have just the right model to keep customers on your site and possibly see an increase in sales.

MyBuys announced recently that they have raised $10 million in Series B led by Palomar Ventures and joined by Lightspeed Venture Partners. MyBuys’ model is described as a 1:1 behavioral service that finds a way to target customers while shopping and follow up with emails and RSS feeds.

MyBuys is based in Redwood City, Calif. and is managed by Robert Cell (CEO), Mark Weiler (VP of Engineering), and Paul Rosenblum (VP of Marketing).

VoxPop Network Corporation is based in San Francisco, CA.  Voxpop is an online entertainment company which is short for Vox Populi (“voice of the people” in Latin).  Voxpop.tv is a contest website startup that has basketball conference contests and also publishes its games on third party websites such CBS Radio and Entertainment Weekly. The investor is David Shen and he is a former VP of User Experience and Design Team at Yahoo! for 8 years. Other companies that Shen has funded in include Outspark Inc. (see below)Meetro Inc., Search Physics Inc., and Fanlib Inc. 
Some of the featured games on Voxpop include:
- Logo Showdown, a game where you choose and vote for your favorite SEC /ACC/Big 12 sports team logos and create a bracket.
- Angelic Angelina, a game where you create a bracket of Angelina Jolie’s best acting movies.
- Several others that involve creating a bracket of your favorite type of sandals, handbags, Brad Pitt movie, etc.
Some of the prizes include cash and a copy of the movie that won the bracket.

 

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Another company that was angel funded by Yahoo! alumni, David Shen is OutSpark Inc. [website currently unavailable].  Other investors include Altos Ventures and Doll Capital Management.  Outspark is expected to develop casual Adobe Flash games of all types.  OutSpark Inc. is currently in “stealth mode.”

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Hypertext Solutions, LLC considers itself, “the first Internet application to tap the potential of ‘intelligent’ data on the Web.”  Steve Hall of Vulcan Capital is an investor.  The company is actively seeking computer engineers in the areas of A.I., data mining, and JavaScript.

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Rooftop Comedy is a San Francisco, CA based company that has recently raised angel funding.  The company won the the award for best investment idea at Investorfest 2006.  The company was created and run by Will Rogers, former Senior Vice President of Icon Medialab’s Web Development group.  RooptopComedy has been partnering with comedy clubs in different areas to put their skits online.  They include Funny Bone (St. Louis, MO), Go Bananas (Cincinnati, OH), Crackers Comedy Club (Indianapolis, IN), San Francisco Comedy Club (San Francisco, CA), and Chicago Underground Comedy (Chicago, IL).

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TheOnion.com is taking their parody news services to the world of video.  The company invested $1 million into the idea of the Onion News Network (ONN) and will be a parody of news program channel, CNN (The Cable News Network).  Below is a video teaser of the upcoming programming:
 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2C0ZZIKi3Y[/youtube]

 

 

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IceBreaker Inc.is a Seattle based mobile software company that outsources development to Beijing, China.  IceBreaker Inc. is the parent company of Crush or Flush which was launched on January 16, 2007 with the purpose of providing a way to flirt, chat, and meet people with similar interests in your area on mobile phones.  When browsing Crush or Flush on your mobile phone, you can click on “crush” if you think the profile picture is attractive or “flush” if you think that the profile picture is not very aesthetic.Investors of Crush or Flush are several angel investors and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The founders of Crush or Flush are Michael Robinson and Eric Hennings, both former Microsoft employees.  Robinson has previously created a website in China called renren Media.  renren Media has previous funding by News Corp.

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Glimpse.com is a website for centralizing fashion shopping offers.  The target audience of Glimpse.com is for women that shop at stores such as Banana Republic, eLuxury, Macy’s, DKNY, etc.  The company was founded by Frank Han (general manager of HSN.com), Jane Saltzman (Executive Vice President in Creative and Merchandising at Discovery Channel), and Steve Lemon (Vice President at Symantec).  The amount of funding is not disclosed, but is supposedly a large amount.  The funding was provided by Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

 

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[Information Source: alarm:clock]