The New York Jets are auctioning off 2,000 personal license seats (PSLs) through the eBay Inc.  (NASDAQ:EBAY) website.  These are the best seats at the Giants’ stadium.  This is the first time that a major U.S. sports team embraced the online auctioning of these seats.  Giants expect these seats to go for more than $25,000 each. 

A personal license seat will give the buyer a stadium-life ownership of the seat.  The buyer can always resell these seats if they desire to.  PSLs started in 1993 and help publicly finance new and upcoming stadiums.  The new $1.6 billion stadium will host games for the Jets and the Giants starting 2010.

eBay will be selling the licenses through StubHub between October 19-27.  The 2,000 lower level seats will be sold on StubHub near the 50 yard line.  Another website, Jetscoachesclub.com will be selling a floor price for the other PSLs.  All bidders will be screened and have to provide a credit card.  eBay will be making commission from this deal.

“These are the best seats in the house, so how do you set a price for
them?” stated Matt Higgins, EVP of Business Operations of the New York Jets. “Let the market decide.”

The Dallas Cowboys are also going to start playing in a new stadium.  The price set for the 1,000 PSLs in that new stadium was at $150,000 each.  The Giants CEO John Mara announced that he wanted to raise $370 million for the new stadium.  PSLs are a great way to gain capital seamlessly.  Tickets for the games in the new stadium are between $85 and $700.

eBay acquired StubHub for $310 million in January 2007.  Looks like it is already starting to show some sort of ROI.

Newsvine users were greeted today by an e-mail announced the relaunch. Some of the new, highlighted features include a smarter front page, local headlines & weather, group creation, a live news ticker, a photo gallery, and external RSS feeds.

The new front page has a clean look and users are able to customize their pages fully with their content of preference.  Selecting content is as easy as drag and dropping.  Another new feature on Newsvine is that you can enter your zip code and find local news and weather.

There are over 600,000 users active on Newsvine and now they can associate with and create groups.  Every user has the power to comment on any news story and Newsvine Live tracks the activity of commenting users.

Newsvine has also found a way to consolidate pictures from different news sources in the form of a slideshow.  Today’s big story is that England Prime Minister, Tony Blair is retiring and Newsvine consolidated 6 pictures in a slideshow of the PM.

Newsvine is based in Seattle and was launched in March 2006.  The company was founded by former employees of Disney and ESPN.  The company is funded by Second Avenue Partners.

Mike Slade is on the Newsvine Board of Directors.  Slade works as an advisor for Apple and started Second Avenue with a few other former Microsoft executives.  Slade is also a board member of StubHub which was acquired by eBay recently for $310 million.

Yesterday, TicketMaster announced that they will be suing eBay Inc. and StubHub, a property owned by eBay over interference of contractual rights.  Ticketmaster is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp. 

eBay had acquired StubHub on January 10 for $310 million and last month, TicketsNow another company with a similar service-line raised $34 million in funding. 

The lawsuit was filed at the Los Angeles County Superior Court and the case focuses on a specific music tour.  The lawsuit filed by Ticketmaster implies Ticketmaster does not approve of the secondary ticketing market.

[Information Source: Wall Street Journal]

Dollar Amount Involved: $1.9 Million
YouMail is a start up company that has brought on a verteran from America Online as their CEO and has raised $1.9 million in angel funding. The company is planning to offer a service that converts voice into text. Luis Villalobos was the lead investor in YouMail. Former AOL executive, Alex Quilici is now the YouMail CEO. YouMail is based in Irvine, CA.

One of the co-founders of YouMail, Ken Brickley mentioned that the funding will allow the company to attract more users. In regards to the market potential, Brickley stated, “In the U.S. alone, there are 150 billion voice mails a year.” Brickley plans to turn these voice mails into page views. YouMail is currently filing for several patents.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $17 Million
Mimosa Systems, an information management solutions company that offers services such as e-mail archiving and recovery in Santa Clara, CA has announced today that they have raised $17 million in Series C funding.The new round of funding was provided the $17 mill was led by Mayfield Fund and was joined by previous investors: Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital, and JAFCO Ventures.

“Mimosa is a rising star in the multi-billion dollar, white-hot live content archiving market for unstructured and semi- structured information management, a critical need that is being fueled by eDiscovery and regulatory compliance,” stated Navin Chaddha, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “With significant customer momentum and an experienced management team, Mimosa is poised to lead the email archiving market. We look forward to leveraging our global network of resources to propel Mimosa’s worldwide growth.”

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Dollar Amount Involved: $100 Million
New York based Dice Holdings, Inc. is preparing to file for an IPO soon. The amount will be worth $100 million in common stock and will trade under NYSE. Several major financial underwriters such as Credit Suisse Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley will underwrite the IPO.

Dice Holdings has several brands under its name including one of the most renown technology and engineering job board websites, Dice.com.The company also operates eFinancialCareers (acquired on October 31, 2006), JobsintheMoney (finance/accounting job board), ClearanceJobs (U.S. government security clearance job board), TargetedJobFairs (job fair/career event board), and CybermediaDice (Tech job board in India).

Dice has also previously worked on a project to help former Enron employees get back on their feet.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $2 Million
RIPL is an upcoming social network that is based in Seattle and will have advertisement supported music and photo sharing services. Currently the website is only accessible by those who have an invitation or attend the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida.RIPL will have a product called the RIPL Receiver (which I’m assuming is a widget) that will sample music, videos, photos, and people in one’s network on the website. RIPL’s marketing plan hopes to emulate a similar technique as the iPod. Start from the teenage generation and then move up/down the age spectrum.The site was founded in December 2005 and raised $1.1 million in Series A Preferred seed capital in July 2006. Now it is rumored that the company has raised an additional $2 million as a Series A funding according to a regulatory filing.

RIPL is led by CEO, Bill Messing who is a former VP of Production at Classmates Online and a former Director of MSN.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $10 Million

Cellfish Media, LLC is a New York based company that has a website where users can download games, ringtones, and share videos and photos with friends. Cellfish services are compatible with Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony phones.

Cellfish has announced yesterday that they have raised $10 million from Solidarity Fund QFL. It had previously raised $50 million in October from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund, and from a Desjardins Venture Capital affiliate. Cellfish is a subsidiary of French company, Lagardere Group.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Coming Soon

Zoodango is a social network for professionals that is looking to take LinkedIn head on. Currently, Zoodango receives about 30,000 page views per day and had close to 3,000 profiles. Zoodango focuses more on setting up face-to-face meetings for professionals.

Zoodango announced that within 30 days they will announce an investment from “big profile strategic investors.” Zoodango has received angel funding from a Seattle-based billionaire investor.

The founder of Zoodango is James Sun, who is also a contestant on Donald Trump/NBC’s The Apprentice-Los Angeles.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $6 Million
Reply!, a decision search engine has attained $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Debi Coleman (former CFO of Apple Inc.). Reply! is looked at as a competitor to Zillow.

Reply! was started in San Ramon, Calif. 6 years ago and used to be known as Next Phase Media.

Through this round of funding, Reply! intends on extending its services beyond real estate and automotive listings.

“We’d like to expand into other categories like insurance and home improvement,” stated founder and CEO, Payam Zamani. Randy Haykin, Managing Director of Outlook Ventures has stepped on the Reply! board of directors as a result of the funding.

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Dollar Amount Involved: Acquisition Speculations
Let’s just say that this digital advertising technology company is being eyed by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The company acquired Tangozebra last month to gain a stronger market prescence in Europe.

The company announced a couple days ago that it is setting up an auction-like bidding system for advertisements. DoubleClick is based in New York and has been priced at an amount north of $2 billion.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $18 Million
OZON.ru is Russia’s largest e-commerce website for video, audio, books, games, and other electronics. It is known as “the Amazon.com of Russia.” Investors in the company have announced that they have plugged $18 million in the company. The funding was led by Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Cisco Systems Inc.

“With the support of our controlling shareholder BVCP, we at OZON.ru are extremely proud to have attracted top tier European investors such as Index Ventures. This investment round will allow us to pursue our ambitious growth strategy and further strengthen our logistical operations, with a particular emphasis on the fast growing Russian regions. We also look forward to benefiting from the extensive knowledge pool, expertise and international networks of our new shareholders,” stated Bernard Lukey, CEO of OZON.ru.

OZON has more than 260,000 items in 12 product categories and 400 suppliers. OZON has a distribution center in Tver and is HQed in Moscow.

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Dollar Amount Involved: $20 Million
Finally some good news from the mitten-shaped state… Ann Arbor, Mich. based company ForeSee Results has raised $20 million from Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and CFI Group.

ForeSee Results is an online satisfaction measurement company that utilizes methodologies from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Compuware Corporation and CFI Group are both co-founders of ForeSee Results.

TicketsNow.com, a company of over 200 individuals created by Mike Domek will soon be moving to a 70,400 sq. foot Corporate Center and is also now backed with $34 million in funding. Not bad for a company that is about 15 years old and started with a $100 investment. This move is an indication that the company is intensely rivaling against StubHub, who was acquired by eBay for $310 million on January 10.

Adams Street Partners accounted for $8.2 million and some of the other investors include New World Ventures and DFJ Portage Venture Partners.

“If Ticketmaster wanted to get into the secondary market in a big way, we’d be a way to do it,” stated Christopher Girgenti, a managing partner for New World Ventures. TicketsNow is gunning for an IPO by the end of the year and is also looking to be acquired by a fat wallet on the web such as Yahoo! or Amazon.

What is the difference between StubHub and TicketsNow?  “While StubHub built a system designed to let individual ticketholders sell their unwanted seats on its site, TicketsNow works primarily with licensed ticket brokers, who list their inventory on the TicketsNow web site and many of whom use the company’s point-of-sale software to track inventory and accounting” writes Ken Schachter of Red Herring.  I believe what this means is that while StubHub sellers are more scalper-like, TicketsNow sellers are more bulk-buyer-like.

TicketsNow has an interesting future and Pulse 2.0 will make sure to stay up-to-date with them.

Today, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) has confirmed their acquisition of StubHub in a press release.  Earlier today, I wrote about how eBay could make the announcement as early as tomorrow, but eBay clearly wanted to announce it sooner.  eBay is going to buy StubHub for $285 million + $25 million (in StubHub books). 

“StubHub has been extremely successful in the online tickets segment, and it’s a perfect complement to eBay’s tickets business,” stated Bill Cobb the president of eBay North America Marketplaces. “Together we can strengthen both businesses and provide fans with more choice and better service.”

The acquisiton is expected to be fully completed by the end of the first quarter in 2007.  Whether eBay will keep StubHub independent or not is still yet to be known. 

San Jose, CA based eBay Inc., the online auction/shopping website created by Pierre Omidyar are getting close to acquiring StubHub for over $300 million. StubHub is one of the largest online ticket-sellers for concerts and sporting events. Last year, StubHub sold over $400 million worth of tickets. StubHub made $10 million EBIT last year.

Although the deal has not been officially confirmed by eBay representatives, people familiar with the matter reported the acquisition possibility to the Wall Street Journal. The acquisition announcement could happen as early as tomorrow.

eBay competes directly with StubHub for ticket-selling. eBay has been acquiring companies left and right for the past few years. eBay acquired Sweden-based online auction company Tradera for $48 million in April 2006. Also last April, eBay acquired social networking website, Meetup for $2 million. Two of eBay’s most well-known acquisitions was Skype for $2.6 billion and PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.