Foursquare is an iPhone application that allows users to broadcast their location to friends. This service is pretty similar to Google Latitude. Foursquare raised about $1.3 million in seed funding according to an SEC filing. The money was provided by Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Albert Wenger joined the Foursquare Board of Directors as a result of the funding round.

Foursquare was founded by Dennis Crowley. Crowley founded Dodgeball and sold it to Google in the past. Google did nothing with Dodgeball so Crowley left the company. Foursquare just finished building a Google Android application and will soon be releasing a BlackBerry application.

After doing some searching, BusinessInsider found out what the approximate valuation of FourSquare is. It is roughly between $7-$14 million according to sources.

Bit.ly has been growing rapidly with the help of Twitter.  People are constantly using Bit.ly to shorten URLs of stories, images, and videos that people want to share with their Twitter followers.  Bit.ly was created under Betaworks, an incubation firm that helped sell Summize to Twitter last year.  Betaworks has taken Bit.ly and is spinning it out as a separate, well-funded company.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several other investors plugged $2 million into the URL shortening service.  Other investors include Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway.  Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly will join the Board of Directors at Bit.ly.

Just last week alone, about 20 million URLs have been shortened using Bit.ly.  That number is increasing by 10% every week.  The only source of revenue Bit.ly has is Google Ads that are scattered around their homepage.  This is a similar approach to their biggest competitor TinyURL.com.  TinyURL depends mainly on donations and Google Ads too.

[via MediaMemo]

A few days ago, Wesabe announced that they have raised $4 million in funding from Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech.  Wesabe is a website that promotes users to track financial goals.

Creating an account in Wesabe is very simple.  The website registration just asks for a user-name, public name, password, and a couple of security questions.  After that, users can upload accounts whether it is Brokerage, Cash, Checking, Credit Card, Credit Line, Money Market, and Savings. 

If a user wants to upload a Checking or Savings account for example, Wesabe asks for the bank name.  After a bank account is selected, the next step is to download account statements to the computer.  It doesn’t matter whether it is OFX, Microsoft Money, Quick, QFX, QIF, or OFC file types, Wesabe supports them all.

As users input information into Wesabe, tips are provided to help with achieving financial goals.  Some of the user-generated tips are quite obvious such as “pack you own lunch” as a means of saving money, but I’m sure more useful content will be added soon enough.

Jason Knight is the founder of Wesabe and Union Square Venture partner, Brad Burnham will join Wesabe’s board of directors.  The announcement is on Wesabe’s blog^[1].

[1] Wheaties for Your Wallet: Wesabe Raises $4M in Series A Funding