PlaceIQ is a mobile marketing company that takes photos of places shared on mobile phones and turn it into “unstructured disparate sources of geodata into actionable business intelligence.” The Boulder, Colorado based company has raised $1 million and was co-founded by Duncan McCall and Steve Milton. Investors in this round include IA Ventures, Social Leverage, Jim Pallota, Jerry Neumann, Stuart Davidson, and kbs+p Ventures. [AllThingsD]

eToro is a social investment network and online trading platform company that has raised $8.3 million in funding from Spark Capital, Social Leverage, and several other investors. eToro will be using the funding for international growth and enhancing their social trading platform. eToro lets people follow and copy actions of other investors in real-time. eToro has about 1.5 million users across 130 countries.

Assistly is a customer relationship management software company that has raised $3 million in a second round of funding. Assistly mashes up different forms of communication in one interface. These methods of communication include e-mail, phone calls, Twitter, and Facebook. Assistly started in 2009 and this is co-founder Alex Bard’s second customer service company. Bard previously sold a company to AOL called Goowy Media.

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]