Aviary is a web-based software company that has designed applications such as Image Editor, Color Editor, Vector Editor, Effect Editor, Screen Capture, Image Markup, and Audio Editor. Aviary is based in Long Island, New York. And now the company has raised $7 million in Series B from Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon.com) and Spark Capital.

Bezos’ investment was made through his venture firm Bezos Expeditions. Aviary competes directly with Adobe Systems Inc. To access Aviary’s web based applications, the subscription cost is $24.99 for the Pro version. The Pro version gives more enhanced file privacy, full watermark control, higher quality thumbnails, and unlimited storage. The basic version gives access to the web base applications too.

“We are disrupting the status quo by eliminating the long-held barriers to digital creation and giving creators the tools they need to create, market and monetize their vision,” stated Aviary Inc. founder and CEO Avi Muchnick. “We are extremely excited to have Spark Capital on board. Their broad-ranging internet, software and consumer experience will be a tremendous asset to us in furthering our mission to make creation accessible to creators of all genres.”

Boxee is an open source software company that developed a platform that integrates your own personal media with social media.  This means that the service broadcasts what you are listening to or watching with other friends on social networks.

New York based Boxee raised $6 million in Series B funding, led by General Catalyst Partners.  Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures also participated in this round.  The company now has a total of $10 million in funding.

Avner Ronen said that he plans to use the capital to add more content and make the software more friendly for indie developers.  The company also takes Internet video from the web and makes it more presentable for watching on TV.  Boxee already works with Netflix, YouTube, and MLB.com but they had struggled to add Hulu.com to their service.

Ronen believes that content creators would have an easier time doing a deal with Boxee over other vidoe websites because of its unique applications and social features.  Boxee accumulates hundreds of video services in one.  Boxee claims to have about 600,000 users.

[via NYT]

5min is a website that features do-it-yourself videos that revolve around categories ranging from arts to pet care to health to video games.  5min has raised a $7.5 million second round of funding from Globespan Capital Partners and Spark Capital.  Globespan led the round.

5min receives about 200 million views per month and has a library of over 100,000 short videos.  5min also syndicates content to wikiHow, Wikia, and hundreds of other websites driving pageviews to their website.

This round of funding will be used to further developer 5min’s VideoSeed syndication platform.  This allows websites to scrape video content from their website, but with advertising built in.

5min raised $5 million in their first round of funding from Spark around November 2007.  Seven months before that, 5min raised $300,000 from angel investors.

[via VentureBeat]

Boxee is a startup whose flagship service is the ability to deliver online content to TVs and to Apple TV.  Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures have invested $4 million in the social media center platform company.  Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson will be joining Boxee’s Board through the rounds of funding as well.

Boxee has about 100,000 alpha testers using the service and funding was needed to expand their services.  By the end of 2009, Boxee plans on launching a “kick-ass beta,” building more functionality and content, improving the product based on user feedback, work with team-xbmc and additional developers for resources, and finish the year with over 1 million users.

Currently Boxee delivers content from Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and Flickr.

If you are watching a video on the Internet and you see an advertisement for Amazon.com, Netflix, eMusic, or Kayak.com, there is a pretty good chance that Adap.tv is behind them.  This week Adap.TV raised a $13 million round of funding in Series B.  Spark Capital led the round of funding and Dennis Miller joined the board.  Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel also participated in the second round.

Redpoint and Gemini provided Adap.tv with their first round of funding at $10 million.  Adap.tv plans on using this new round of funding to accelerate the development of their products.  Spark Capital are also investors in 5min.com, Covestor, Iminlikewithyou.com, KickApps, Me.dium, Tumblr, Twitter, and Veoh.

Adap.tv’s flagship product is called OneSource.  Through OneSource, Adap.tv can place product overlays, expanding overlays, video pre-rolls, animated overlays, banner overlays, and text overlays on top of videos.  One of the problems Google struggles with is making enough revenue on YouTube to help offset some of the bandwidth costs.  Adap.tv may be a good partner for the search engine company as it continues to find ways to embed ads subtly in the videos without pissing off users.

Moshe Koyfman has left IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) to join Boston, Mass.-based Spark Capital. Koyfman will stay back in New York after transferring to Spark.

Koyfman was formerly on the Board for Connected Ventures, subsidiary of IAC. Connected Ventures, LLC is the parent company of CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, Big Shocker, Defunker, Vimeo, and TodaysBigThing. Koyfman was the COO of Connected Ventures.

Spark Capital is also an investor in 5min, 8D World, Buzzwire, Covestor, EQAL, KickApps, Me.dium, Veoh, and Twitter.

Related Link:
1. AlleyInsider

Photo Credit:
1. VentureBeat

I often times write blog posts about companies that raise money and immediately think to myself, “how could a company with an idea that an elementary schooler can come up with raise this much?”  I’m In Like With You is no exception. 

The site even boasts how many hours have been wasted on the site on each game: over 2 million on Draw My Thing itself.  I have to admit that the design of the site is pretty sweet, but $1.5 million for a site with a few Flash games is pretty substantial. 

What are they doing with the money?  Founder Charles Forman will be expanding the I’m In Like With You team starting with Poojitha Preena from Skype as the company’s COO.

The funding was led by Spark Capital.  Baseline Ventures, Betaworks, Ron Conway, and Marc Andreessen also participated in this round.  This is I’m In Like With You’s first round, but they received seed funding last year too.  I’m In Like With You used to be a social network for flirting before they switched to online gaming.

I’ve tried a couple of the games and they were sort of fun, but I became bored pretty quickly.  Sometimes the experience can be unpleasant because chatroom bots and send mass messages that prevent you from being able to communicate with other users.

I think I’m In Like With You is an interesting idea, but how will it continue to make itself useful to society in the long-run?  That’s the 1.5 million dollar question.

The website is located at: www.iminlikewithyou.com/

 

Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) have announced that they have joined Twitter’s Board. It was not revealed before today that Jeff Bezos was an investor in Twitter’s rumored $15 million third round of funding [GigaOm].

“Existing partners Union Square Ventures in New York City and Tokyo-based Digital Garage exercised their pro rata rights to participate in this round as well,” wrote Twitter founder, Evan Williams on the Twitter blog.

Twitter chose Bijan because he is a man that understands the direction of Twitter.  Bijan is “super excited about the possibilities.”  Bezos was selected because he is a seasoned veteran and because he is a source of inspiration for Twitter.

“Jeff’s attention to business process details and distinctive, ‘honk-like laugh’ are similarly admirable traits as far as we’re concerned,” added Williams.

Veoh is a video sharing website based in San Diego, Calif.  Michael Eisner, former Disney chairman is on the Board of Veoh.  Eisner was one of the investors in Veoh’s $12.5 million in second round funding in April 2006.  Eisner also participated in the $25 million Series C round of funding in August 2007 as well.  And today Veoh raised $30 million in funding from Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, Shelter Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs, The Tornate Company, Time Warner, and several other investors.

Veoh has two viewing options for their site.  The first option is to allow users to stream videos from the web, but they provide full episodes of television shows giving them the leg-up on YouTube.  The second option is to watch high quality videos using VeohTV through p2p technology.  Like YouTube, Veoh compresses video using Adobe Flash.

Veoh claims that they receive 28 million unique visitors who spend 100 minutes per month on their site on average.  Veoh isn’t that far behind DailyMotion and Metacafe in terms of traffic.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Veoh Raises Another $30 Million From Intel Capital, Adobe, and Gordon Crawford by Erick Schonfeld

Twitter, the quick blogging tool that allows users to write what they are doing in 140 characters per less through messenger software, mobile phones, and on the web has supposedly raised $15 million.  The $15 million puts Twitter at a valuation at $80 million.  An unnamed investor led the round and participated with previous investor, Union Square Ventures.  With this round of funding, that puts Twitter at above $20 million in total funding.

The new investor is suspected to be Spark Capital.  Some of the hints that lead to Spark Capital being the new invesot is that Bijan Sabet was in San Francisco visiting “a very special company.”  Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter also “Tweeted” that he was “Walking down Newberry St.” in Boston, Mass. which is where Spark Capital is based.

Keep reading Pulse 2.0 as the story develops.

Information Sources:
[1] GigaOM: Twitter VC Funding Done. Raises $15 MM by Om Malik
[2] TechCrunch: Highly Likely Rumor: Twitter Closes Third Round Of Financing From Spark Capital by Michael Arrington

“In our first nine months we have demonstrated that there are tens of thousands of self-directed investors out there who are as good, if not better than the pros,” stated Covestor CEO, Rikki Tahta.

Covestor is a social network with a niche that focuses on investment managers. The company announced today that they have raised $6.5 million in investment from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, and Amadeus Capital Partners. Todd Dagres of Spark Capital along with Alberg Wenger of Union Square Ventures will be joining the Covestor Board of Directors.

Covestor launched in Beta over this past summer and the social network allows members to share and track stock portfolios.  If a portfolio does well, the owner can charge other members to follow them.  Current members are sharing data across $100 million in securities.  The company will be using the funds to advance the technology behind the site.

Covestor also has a widget that compares real time trades against other indexes such as the S&P 500.  An example of the widget is available on the sidebar of Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC.

Information Source:
[1] CNET: Investor social network pulls in financing of its own by Stefanie Olsen

KickApps is a user-generated video and social networking website that has gained popularity by the ease of use and creation of widgets.  These widgets have found themselves on MySpace pages, the BET Awards 07 website, Vibe.com, and Genesis-Space.

According to paidContent, KickApps has just raised $11 million in second round funding.  SoftBank Capital is a new investor and joins the returning investors, Prism VentureWorks and Spark Capital.  KickApps’ competitor, Ning recently raised $44 million.

Last year, KickApps reaised $6 million in funding for its first round.  KickApps hired Michael Chin as the Senior VP of Marketing from Bite Communications, a global communications consulting company.  KickApps is based in New York, New York.

Veoh is a video content website that serves home videos and internet TV content. As of earlier, the third round of funding was tentative, but has been finalized today. The investors that are plugging $25 million into Veoh includes Tom Freston (former CEO of Viacom), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS), Spark Capital, Shelter Capital Partners, Time Warner Investments, Michael Eisner’s The Tornante Company, Jonathan Dolgen (former Chairman/CEO of Viacom), and Ziffrin law firm.

In June, Veoh launched VeohTV, a special video browser and with DVR technology that has a patent-pending smart recommendation engine embedded in the service. The address for VeohTV is www.veoh.tv.

Steve Mitgang recently started as Veoh’s CEO. Mitgang came to Veoh from Yahoo!, where he served as the SVP of Yahoo!’s global team where he helped manage the Panama project. When Yahoo! bought Overture, a web analytics company, it also acquired Keylime Software, where Mitgang was CEO.

References:
[1] paidContent.org: Eisner-Backed Video Site Veoh Raises $25 Million; Tom Freston Invests

Me.dium[1], a Boulder, Colorado based company announced today that they have raised $15 million in funding. Me.dium utilizes chatting functionality with visualization effects combined with location tracking.

An example that the company gives for use their service is that Me.dium “lets you see where your friends are online right now. Like when you get together with your friends at the mall to do some shopping, now you can do that online. Only, for the first time, you don’t even have to be in the same store to do it[2] .”

The $15 million in Series B was led by several investors. Waltham, Massachusetts based firm, Commonwealth Capital Ventures[3] lead the investment. Spark Capital[4], Appian Ventures[5], and Brad Feld, a managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, also participated in the $15 million investment. Elon Musk, a founder of Paypal was a previous investor of Me.dium’s $5 million Series A funding.

Me.dium was founded in June 2006. “We believe Me.dium is pioneering the next phase of social interaction on the Web,” stated Elliott Katzman,a general partner at Commonwealth. “With a proven technology and a world-class management team, Me.dium is well-positioned to lead this exciting new category.” Katzman will join the Me.dium Board of Directors.

Every Me.dium user has the power to turn on and off the service for privacy. This way users can decide whether they want their information shared.

“Commonwealth Capital Ventures clearly shared our vision on the evolution of how people will interact online,” stated Kimbal Musk, the CEO of Me.dium. “We are excited to have them lead this round and join our existing investor team. Their proven understanding of the consumer was critical in our financing decision and was a clear value Commonwealth brought to the table.”

[1] me.dium.com
[2] me.dium.com/company
[3] ccvlp.com
[4] sparkcapital.com
[5] appianvc.com

Before departing from Disney, Michael Eisner has had quite a few tumultous encounters with Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios (now owned by Disney). Now Eisner has found a new way to occupy himself: the Internet. USA Today mentioned that Eisner’s investment company, The Tornante Company will announce that the company is launching a Web video studio called Vuguru. The website will feature a show called Prom Queen which will have a season that lasts 80 days and will have a new 90 second clip added each day.

“There’s a new distribution platform that’s going to be ubiquitous, and that’s clearly broadband,” stated Eisner. “Winning the marathon will be professionally produced, emotionally driven story content.”

Vuguru has also announced that the web videos will soon be available for streaming on mobile phones and other handhelds. The web videos will have advertisements running before-and-after the show along with product placements within the actual program. The Tornante Company believes that by running shows at 90 seconds a piece, users will still be engaged in every episode. Vuguru had also bought the rights to another program called Sam Has 7 Friends.

Eisner, Time Warner, and Spark Capital have previously invested in Veoh Networks, Inc. last April. The amount was for $12.5 million.