DailyBooth is a real-time photo blogging website that launched out of Y-Combinator. The website launched this past August and has been receiving a good amount of traffic ever since. Now the company has raised $1 million from investors such as Sequoia Capital, SV Angel (Ron Conway), Betaworks, Kevin Rose, and Caterina Fake (Flickr founder). DailyBooth was co-founded by Ryan Amos and Jon Wheatley.

The service encourages users to send messages along with webcam photos. DailyBooth receives about 6 million monthly visitors and a majority of their visitors are 15-25 year old women. The company said that they plan to use the funding for developing a premium offering and photo-printing distribution platform. Below is a screenshot of the service.

In less than 2 years since launching, Mint.com is supposedly selling themselves to Intuit Inc. Mint.com is a financial tool that allows you to aggregate all of your bank and credit card information and find ways to save money. The deal is expected to close within the next few days.

Mint had launched at the TechCrunch50 conference two years ago and took the top prize giving them $50,000. Mint raised $31.8 million in total funding from First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Sherpalo Ventures, Hite Capital, DAG Ventures, and The Founders Fund. Angel investors in Mint include Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Geoff Ralston, and Dave McClure.

This acquisition is interesting because Intuit had previously sent Mint a letter demanding an explanation for how they jumped to 850,000 users within several months.

Thread is a dating application on Facebook that suggests potential matches that has just raised a new round of funding.  The company raised $1.2 million from Sequoia Capital, the Founders Fund, First Round Capital, and angel investor Ron Conway.

Thread was founded by several former PayPal product managers.  “The best people to date are friends of friends,” stated Thread CEO Brian Phillips. “Not all the best people are on dating sites. All the best people are on Facebook.”  Phillips recently went on his third date with someone he met on Thread.

Thread pulls in your contact information using Facebook Connect and pulls the public profiles of all your friends.  Through the website, you can find out which friends of your friends are single and ask you mutual friend to introduce you.  Stalking at its finest.

Thread was originally known as Frinto (friend+intro) but decided to change their name.  The Thread.com domain name was already taken and it took them two years to negotiate a deal over the ownership.  The owner was told that they would receive equity if the business was successful.  If it wasn’t successful, the owner would get the domain name back.

Vidly is a service that makes it simple to share videos through Twitter.  Recently the company announced that they have raised $500,000 from several investors, including Ron Conway.  Initially Vidly launched under the name TwitVid.io.  The service started this past May.

For the website to work, users visit the Vidly homepage.  On the Vidly homepage, users can login with their Twitter account and upload a video.  Users can e-mail a video clip to Vidly from their mobile phones too.

Chrys Bader, the CEO of Vidly said that the funding will be used to hire and pay for various costs.  Some of the costs will include domain names and legal fees.  The reason why Vidly changed their name from TwitVid.io is so that they can distinguish themselves from TwitVid.

Leo Laporte, who runs a show called TWiT.tv (This Week in Tech) also sent TwitVid.io a cease and desist letter.  “We wanted to open up our horizons and not get locked into Twitter,” said Bader. “We see a major opportunity to make video sharing easy for mobile.”

SimplyHired is a job search engine that aggregates listings from various websites.  SimplyHired is based in Mountain View, California and has raised an additional round of funding at $4.6 million, led by IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital.  This brings SimplyHired to a total funding amount of $22.3 million.

Previous investors include Gautam Godhwani, Peter Weck, Anil Godhwani, Jerry Crowley, the late Rajeev Motwani, Kanwal Rekhi, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, James Hong, Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Fox Interactive Media, IDG Ventures, and Foundation Capital.

Fox Interactive Media launched a classifieds website through MySpace since they made their investment in SimplyHired.  SimplyHired stated that they have had positive operating cash flow over the past four quarters.  The company had revenue growth for 16 consecutive quarters.

The additional funding will be used to hire additional employees and for international expansion.  SimplyHired syndicates their technology to LinkedIn, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Plaxo, and CNNMoney.

[via paidContent]

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]

Paul Graham has made the VCs open their wallets once again.  Y-Combinator has raised $2 million from Sequoia Capital and several other angel investors.  Up until now, only Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell were the sole investors in Y-Combinator companies.

Through this round of funding, Y-Combinator will open a new investment arm.  Y-Combinator will also be able to increase the number of companies that they invest in ever year.  They wil go from about 40 companies per year to 60.  Y-Combinator invests about $15,000 per startup.  Before Y-Combinator invested about $5,000 for 6% equity in the company and provided startups with office space and other resources.

Some of the companies to come out of Y-Combinator include Snipd, heysan!, Weebly, Addmired, Justin.TV, Tipjoy, Songkick, Disqus, Dropbox, Anywhere.FM, Loopt, Scribd, Xobni, Reddit, and Omnisio.

Greg McAdoo of Sequoia led the investment.  Some of the angels that joined in the investment include Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, and Aydin Senkut.

[via VentureBeat]