KupiVIP is the largest online private members shopping club in Russia for purchasing designer brands. KupiVIP has raised $55 million in a third round of funding. The investors in this round include Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Russia Partners. Other investors in this round include Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners.

Rdio is a social music service start-up that has raised $17.5 million from new and existing investors. Mangrove Capital Partners has joined as a new investor along with previous investor Janus Friis through investment entities Atomico and Skype. The funding will be used to expand their platform and regions. Warner Brothers Records Chairman and Grammy-nominated producer Rob Cavallo is also joining the board of directors at Rdio.

Amuso is a trivia and online game company that is based in London, England. The company has recently raised £947,000 ($1.54 million). Amuso hosts trivia games on their servers and they make money by selling trivia games to MySpace, AOL, and MTV. Amuso currently has about 200,000 users.

The games are free and can be played for cash rewards. Amuso claims that their services are not gambling because the games are based on skill rather than random chances.

As part of the funding Amuso hired about 10 people. Amuso also hired Ned Walley and Rabin Yaghoubi. Ned and Rabin both worked as directors at Google. Bill Houghton, former AOL Entertainment director also joined the board of directors at Amuso.

Tariq Krim, the founder of Netvibes has been working on a new project for well over a year now called Jolicloud.  Jolicloud is an operating system intended for use on netbooks.  The company has raised $4.2 million in funding from Atomico and Mangrove. Niklas Zennström of Atomico, Gilles Samoun (fotopedia CEO), and Michael Jackson (Mangrove partner) have joined the Jolicloud Board of Directors as a result of the funding.

The Jolicloud operating system utilizes a web application and cloud service interface.  Krim sees Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS as a validation for what he is trying to achieve with Jolicloud.  Krim left Netvibes on a full-time basis this past May.  Netvibes is an RSS reader website built on a cloud that has built in web applications.  In a way Jolicloud and Netvibes complement each other.  Jolicloud wants to be your default OS on a netbook and Netvibes wants to be your default homepage.

The user interface of the Jolicloud OS is similar to the iPhone operating system.  The icons of applications are large and there is very little hardware needed to keep Jolicloud running smoothly.  Jolicloud will also support touchscreens.

[via TechCrunch]

Seatwave is a European startup that sells secondary tickets over the Internet.  Given that this is a huge market, the company has attracted $17 million in Series D funding.  This round of funding was led by Accel Partners and Atlas Venture.  Other investors in this round of funding Mangrove Capital Partners, Fidelity Ventures, and Adinvest.

GP Bullhound named Seatwave the fast growing digital media company.  Joe Cohen, a former employee of Atlas Venture founded Seatwave.  Through this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $53 million.

[via TechCrunch]

Quintura, the popular tag-based semantic search engine that offers search, analytics, and monetization services for web publishers and other content owners has received additional funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. This funding is part of a bridge funding round.

With this round of funding, Quintura will scale it’s site search platform from 8 million to 50 million by the end of 2009. Quintura also plans to bring in additional venture capital investors.

As part of the announcement, Quintura ave also hired Dennis Szerszen as the Chief Marketing Officer. Dennis used to be SVP of Marketing and Corporate Development at SecureWave.

Quintura currently powers the site search for ReadWriteWeb, Maxim.com, Cosmo.ru, Passio.ru, ComputerBild, Russian Newsweek, Hilary Magazine, and several others. Quintura Site Search is also being added to several other major U.S.-based major men’s lifestyle websites.

Mangrove Capital Partners also participated in Quintura’s first round of funding.

WooMe is a video dating social network that allows users to communicate on webcams. One of the features that makes WooMe popular is Woo Sessions. Woo Sessions are basically webcam video chatrooms. WooMe calls themselves an “introduction platform” according to VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison.

WooMe raised a second round of funding at $12.5 million led by Index Ventures, Atomico, and Mangrove Capital Partners. This brings WooMe’s total funding to $16.9 and now they are valuated at $41 million.

In terms of users, the company say that they have roughly 350,000 users and has 15,000 sessions per day. WooMe hopes to raise about another $500,000 in this round from “strategic angels.” WooMe started in December 2006.

“Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts’ estimates. That means the company’s success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search. There are no guarantees that its dominance will last.”
-David H. Freeman, Newsweek

Tui Stark, a photography stylist recently attempted to search for “snorkeling beaches blue water,” but searching for those keywords on Google turned out to be futile.  Results that Google found included web sites about real-estate companies, rafting apparel, and listings for scuba diving, slightly irrelevant from the searches keywords. [Source: NewsWeek]. 

In my opinion, is Google overvalued?  For the amount that their stock is trading today and how much their company is appealing competition to enter the market, they’re not too far away from becoming the next Yahoo! by becoming overshadowed by the next big thing.  And one of the most valiant efforts made by a company to take on Google today is Quintura. 

Quintura has stayed consistent in pushing their tag searching technology and have never strayed from it.  Quintura has a kid-friendly search engine that filters out inappropriate content and most recently added a Halloween themed search homepage:

I challenge Pulse 2.0 readers to test out Quintura and leave any feedback for the company.  I believe that users will find that the only problem that they have is that Quintura is not like Google.  Keep an open-mind because I’m sure Quintura is here to stay.  The company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners.