Los Angeles, Calif.-based SodaHead.com has raised $8.4 million Series B from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Mission Ventures.  SodaHead is a site that encourages users to create/vote on public polls and share knowledge.  There is a featured question on the homepage, top categories, in the news, video questions, and a feature called What’s Bubbling Now.  The What’s Bubbling Now feature is questions that are being asked on the site in real-time.

SodaHead will be using the funding for additional marketing initiatives.  The company recently signed a deal with R&B singer, Tamia to have her ask certain questions to the community.  Tamia’s question to the users was which song of hers did the community like the best.

SodaHead was founded by Jason Feffer and Michael Glazer.  Feffer used to be the former VP of Ops at MySpace.  This round of funding brings SodaHead’s total funding to $12.7 million.  SodaHead has over 600,000 members.

[Source: socalTECH]

PBwiki, the website that makes creating wikis simple and password-protection possible also has announced the acquisition of Schtuff, another easy-creation wiki website. PBwiki is a fairly young start-up, created in June 2005 and within 48 hours of launch, 1000 new wikis were made.

Schtuff.com was created by JanRain, a team of 11 people who have been actively working on OpenID protocol. Schtuff.com has about 1 million users and will add OpenID to PBwiki. The acquisition was made by means of customer revenue and not by the venture capital money.

Mohr Davidow Ventures are the ones who invested $2 million in PBwiki and Ron Conway and Chris Yeh plugged in $100K. PBwiki also competes with Wikia, a website created by Jimmy Wales who also founded the concept of the wiki.

[Source: StartupSquad / PBwiki Blog]

The management at Genius.com comprises of founders, David Thompson and Robert Seidl along with VP of Marketing, Felicity Wohltman and VP of Sales, Jean Tali. Genius.com is based out of San Mateo, CA. Genius.com had raised $5.1 million in 2005 from Emergence Capital Partners and Walden International. Today it was announced that Genius.com raised $10 million led by Mohr Davidow Ventures. Mohr Davidow Ventures has also previously invested in Shutterfly.

Genius.com sells software to clients that tracks what other pages that certain consumers of various demographics visit. For example, if Genius.com sold software to Pulse 2.0, we would be able to see easily where a person is coming from and whether they are more interested in Tech News or Startup Reviews.

Genius has over 100 customers and has integrated some software with Salesforce.com. Some customers only want 1 copy of the software whereas others want up to 30 copies. Monthly subscriptions are roughly $29 and there is a 15 day free trial with no credit card necessary. Genius.com software is called SalesGenius, SalesGenius Winter Release, SalesGenius for salesforce.com, Outlook Plug-in, and Genius Interactive. Some of Genius.com clients include Macromedia, NSite, WebEx, and All Covered, Inc.