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

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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