Mixx has just announced that they have taken $2 million in Series B funding from InterSouth Partners. Mixx is a user generated content system, similar to Digg, Reddit and Propeller. Total funding to date is $3.5 million, in which they have high profile investors on board, such as the LA Times.
London-based family tree social network Kindo today announced a round of funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI). The Estonian investment company joins seed investors Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stafan Glanzer, the initial investor of Last.fm.
Users can build their own free family tree, invite whoever is a part of it, and stay in touch with their loved ones. Unlike a lot of English-only social networks these days, Kindo has a particular focus on the international landscape. The site currently supports 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
The investment round was led by Eileen Broch, who stated in the press release, “In the short time since they’ve been live, Kindo has proven that they know how to build a product that can be embraced by young and old alike. It is already loved by families around the world, which is what appealed to us the most.“
Box.net has raised $6 million in a Series B financing led by venture capital firm U.S. Venture Partners, and includes Box.net Series A investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The capital will be used to continue company expansion, including the development and marketing of new services and products.
The New York Times reports that Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company. Many other have reported on this round of funding, so take a look at what has been said at GigaOM, RWW and Techcrunch.
The news of the day must be that Google has acquired Jaiku. Jaiku is a microblogging site similar to Pownce and Twitter. It is a bit of a surprise that Google has opted to purchase Jaiku (which hails from Finland) instead of Twitter (the market leader) or Pownce (the new kid on the block with the best user interface).
Have a look at what everyone else has been saying about the deal:
Twitter has not long got Series A Funding, so it would have been rare for them to be purchased. Pownce on the other hand seems to be on the downhill slide. Since their highly publicised launch Pownce has never lived up to expectations and with the recent news about Kevin Rose potentially moving Pownce features over to Digg, it has just never recovered. If you look at Alexa data on Pownce you will notice it wont be too long until it dies a death, on the quick slide down. Its seems that Jaiku was an important match with Google because it has more of a presence in activity streams and mobile presence and those are the markets Google is trying to gain more market share. It that last week Google also launched Adsense for mobile, so this will be a nice addition to boost the start of that new service.
I was read ShoeMoney yesterday and he reviewed a new advertising product that I had to mention on here.
Welcome to the Rubicon Project. The Rubicon Project is a new product that has already received $6 million in funding and is based around the very competitive market of online advertising. About a year ago I had an idea of starting an advertising network based around an open marketplace, since then this has been done several times over and it seems when someone comes up with a new idea it is only a month or so before there are 10 of them in the market.
The Rubicon Project however is a unique advertising model that actually has ties with over 300 ad networks, including the big boys like Google, Yahoo and ValueClick.
The Rubicon Project ensures your website is making as much money as possible by optimizing it for not only the highest paying advertising company but also for demographic/geographical data.
Now unlike a few selected people I am still waiting for my Invite to their private beta. However in the mean time make sure you head over to the Rubicon Project and have a look at their 3 min. video.
So far in the last week there seems to be a lot of companies receiving funding and here are a few:
Gamejump.com has reached 14 million downloads in just over 12 months. Gamejump’s model is based around providing mobile gaming content which is ad supported rather than the normal paid downloads. GreyStripe who ownes GameJump took $8.9 million in Series B funding in May.
Gamejump.com features 800 games by 70 publishers and includes a variety of genres to appeal to different users. Gamejump has seen users download an average of 3.4 games each and the number of females users downloading games has been fairly close to the number of male users.
The gaming market place has seen a interest rise in the past few months with the purchase of Club Penguin by Disney for $700 million.
