Zannel is an online mobile instant messaging service with a focus on video.  The company announced that they have raised $10 million in Series B from Alloy Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and Palomar Ventures.  The mobile version of their site is available at http://wap.zannel.com.

Last month, Zannel won the 2008 Webby Award for Best Mobile Social Network.  This is impressive considering that they are competing directly with YouTube Mobile.  I tested videos on both Zannel mobile and YouTube mobile and found more success in playing videos with Zannel.

Zannel also has photo sharing and pic chat built in.  Videos can be sorted by most recent, most discussed, recently active, most favorited, and top rated.  Zannel’s mobile platform also looks sleek on an iPhone, but then again what doesn’t?

Zannel’s blog is available at: http://press.zannel.com/category/blog/.  The company has raised a total of $16 million in funding.

Information Source:
[1] SiliconTap.com: Zannel Raises $10M

“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).

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.”

Article Source: [PaidContent]