Media marketing firm Simulmedia has raised another $5 million in funding in an inside round from existing investors, the company confirmed today. The money comes from Time Warner Investments, Avalon Ventures, and Union Square Ventures, which together have put a total of about $32 million into the company since it was founded in 2009.

Simulmedia has built a platform that is designed to bring Internet-like targeting to the TV ad market. The company uses set-top box and other viewing data to determine which shows advertisers should run their TV spots against. Rather than having its clients spend huge amounts of money buying ads seen by large audiences watching highly rated shows, Simulmedia helps its customers identify programming that will come more cheaply but have the same demographic user profile. In particular, Simulmedia can help TV content producers themselves find similar audiences to market their shows against. Or it can tell agencies how to position their ad spots to most efficiently reach a target demographic of viewers.

The New York City-based startup was founded by ad veteran Dave Morgan, who had previously had success with Tacoda, which was sold to AOL in 2007, and Real Media. This is the fifth bit of financing that Simulmedia has raised over the years, with none of those rounds bringing in more than $9 million.

In fact, since its third round, the amount the company has taken on in subsequent deals has decreased. Morgan said that he prefers to raise small inside rounds as the company continues to grow, instead of doing a large mezzanine round. According to Morgan, doing so makes it easier to price the round and gives the company more options as it decides on future courses of action.

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Cheezburger, the internet publisher responsible for LOLcats, FAIL Blog, and other memes, has raised $5 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the funding, in which existing incestors Foundry Group with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures, and SoftBank Capital all participated. No new board members were added.

Founded in 2007 by former journalist Ben Huh, Cheezburger has a network of fifty-plus sites that have brought internet memes and tech culture mainstream. Huh actually acquired I Can Has Cheezburger? and the FAIL Blog, and steadily built out its network back in 2009. The company has been profitable since its inception with revenue from three sources—advertising, traditional media publishing including books, and merchandising.

Last year, the company raised $30 million in funding. This recent round brings the total to $37.5 million.

More recently, Huh and Cheezburger hasvebeen the star in a Bravo reality TV show called LOLwork.

The new funds will be used to continue to build the company’s social humor platform, says a spokesperson.

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Video management startup Kaltura is growing fast, but it’s looking to expand even more, and has raised even more money to do so. The company has closed a $25 million Series D round of funding, which includes money from new investors Mitsui Global Investment and Orix Ventures. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Intel Capital,.406 Ventures, and Avalon Ventures also participated in the round. Mitsui’s participation is strategic, as Kaltura looks to expand more into the Asia-Pacific market.

Kaltura differentiates itself from online video platforms like Brightcove and Ooyala in a few ways: For one thing, it has an open-source platform that can be deployed by enterprises for free. It also has a modular structure, and allows its customers to purchase pieces of the platform based on their individual needs, rather than providing some kind of one-size-fits-all SaaS-based system. The product is designed so that customers can hook into Kaltura’s own hosted platform, or deploy it behind their own firewalls for maximum security.

Due to the flexibility of its offering, Kaltura has been adopted by a number of non-traditional organizations for video distribution — that includes enterprise customers, government agencies, and academic institutions. Those organizations can create internal video portals and integrate the platform with enterprise tools they use for training, communications, or collaboration, including Drupal, SharePoint, Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai.

Kaltura also has its own developer community, who can create their own plugins to integrate with the ultra-modular system. It’s got more than 40,000 developers signed up, who have created or implemented a number of third-party apps available through the Kaltura Exchange.

Since so much of its business is enterprise-focused, it sells both directly and through partners. Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel said that today, about 25 percent of its sales come through third-party resellers and distributors, like InterCall and Blackboard. That number is expected to grow, as the primary revenue driver for its Asia expansion will be distribution partners.

Kaltura was founded in 2007, and has raised nearly $70 million since then, including a $20 million funding round last February that included strategic investor Intel Capital. The company currently has about 200 employees, but plans to expand to about 300, with the opening of regional offices in Asia.

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Y Combinator startup Chartio has come out of quiet mode with its web-based service for connecting databases to create charts and graphs without ever needing to upload data.

Chartio competes in the business-intelligence market and supports MySQL, PostgresSQL, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Relational Database Services, Rackspace Cloud, Heroku, Google Analytics and Oracle. The update enhances the dashboard user interface and includes dashboard filters with new features, such as a slide-rule capability and automatic drill downs.

The Connectors are the key here. The drag and drop interface enables users to, for instance, pull data from Google Analytics and then compare it to sales data from an Oracle database. Data can be viewed in real time or set to be updated on a scheduled basis. Chartio also provides an interface to clean up the data. Once in place, customers may see the data in a variety of formats such as line charts, bar charts and area bar charts.

The Chartio team, with the help of Nate Agrin, an engineer who worked at Twitter and Splunk, has put a premium on ease of use. Data is visualized in HTML5. The UI optimizes the charts to fit according to the size of the browser window. The goal is to provide as much data density as possible with as many charts as can fit above the fold. It’s like any data presentation — get the information in front of people so they can see it.

Chartio competes in an emerging space with the likes of GoodData, RJMetrics and Birst. All are competing for a new market that has opened with the flood of data people now manage. Being able to visualize that data represents the best way to use it.

Fowler and Dan Levine, who now works at Accel Partners, founded the company in 2010. A year later, Chartio raised $3.15 million in a Series A round led by Avalon Ventures, with Bullpen Capital participating (which brought the company’s total funding to $4.38 million). Earlier in his career, Levine worked at TechCrunch as a research analyst. Alexia Tsotsis, who first covered the company when it called itself Chart.io, wrote that working on CrunchBase gave Levine the idea for starting the company.

Chartio will face a challenge with larger enterprise shops that put a premium on security. But it’s my guess that the main users will come from the business groups that seek fast and easy access to data for creating rich charts and graphs from Chartio’s growing charting library.

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When Shelby.tv shut down its online video discovery engine earlier this month, some viewed it as a sign that the New York City-based startup was in trouble. After all, while CEO Reece Pacheco assured users that Shelby.tv would be back, it’s not every day that a startup just pulls its product without having something new ready to show off. Well, breathe easy Shelby.tv fans: Investors have doubled down with a new round of funding, which will allow the team to continuing working on bringing the next version of its video discovery app to market.

Last summer, Shelby.tv raised $1.5 million from Avalon Ventures and a group of angels that included DFJ’s Tim Draper, Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow, Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan, and others, with Avalon’s Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann also joining the board. Now Avalon and other angels are back for more, putting an additional $2.2 million into Shelby.tv.

Pacheco announced the new round in a blog post published this morning, and gave the tiniest bit of an update on the company’s progress so far. “While much of what we have accomplished is not yet public-facing,” he wrote, “We have made a ton of technical progress in the past year and this round allows us to stay focused and continue to build upon our vision for video discovery.”

Previously, Shelby.tv had built a website and iOS app designed to make it easy to discover and watch interesting videos shared by your friends on social networks. But the first version of the Shelby.tv wasn’t quite where the team wanted it to be. And so, rather than continuing to support a product that it would later scrap, it decided to take the whole thing down — bookmarklets, Chrome extensions, iOS app and all — and start fresh, focusing 100 percent on the new product.

What’ll the new version look like? It’s too early to tell, but an earlier blog post gave some clues as to where Shelby.tv is going. It promises to be faster, with better processing power and more videos to choose from. The startup is also focused on improving community aspects of the platform, and providing new ways for its users to share videos with friends.

As for what the company plans to do with the funding, Pacheco wrote by email: “[The] funding allows us to stay focused on product for launch. We have all the skills we need on our team, but we may bring on a couple hires.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Memrise, an online community that attempts to teach people languages through crowdsourcing, is announcing its $1.1 million in seed financing today, from Matt Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital, Avalon Ventures, Balderton Capital, Lerer Ventures, Zynga Boston head Nabeel Hyatt, former Facebook data head Jeff Hammerbacher, Bill Warner,  Scott Heller, Walt Winshall and Ken Baumann.

Memrise incorporates a unique way of teaching and teaching foreign words; It crowdsources Mems, or Mneumonic devices from its community and then imparts them to users through online lessons involving animated gifs (below). The startup uses a gardening metaphor to represent a student’s journey — each Mem you learn is a plant, your total sum knowledge is a garden, etc.

I’m still sort of doubtful that any online education model works, but right now I have six Mandarin “plants” sprouting, which is a lot more Mandarin than I knew before Memrise.

Founder Ed Cooke swears by this five minutes a day of Mandarin, and has kept bugging me about how I should continue my Chinese language learning after this post. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Founded by Cooke, who happens to be US memory grandmaster, and Greg Detre, a Princeton Neuroscience PhD, the community attempts to position itself against pre-existing online education properties like Kahn Academy by its novel crowdsourcing model and testing process.

“We believe that learning and testing should not be separated but that both, are, forms of learning when done right,” Cooke tells me.

“The vast majority of people experience learning as an anxious boring thing that they’d rather not do,” Cooke continues, “With Memrise we’re trying to help people learn quickly and painlessly — Take all the pain out of learning and turn it into a recreational activity.”

Right now the service is focused on teaching Mandarin, French, Spanish and Italian, but Cooke says that SAT vocabulary will be coming in the next twelve months in addition to “phrase” learning instead of just words. Mobile apps and more languages are also in the pipeline.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Would you like some gamification with your french fries? Well, one San Diego-based startup is willing to bet you just might. Mogl, which describes itself as not only “a party in your wallet” but also a “four letter word you can say in front of your grandma,” wants to turn you into a loyal customer at your local restaurants. Said another way, Mogl is using gamification and a bit of charity to increase engagement and the enjoyability of customer loyalty program for restaurants — all while on the go.

While that may not sound thoroughly appetizing, there are several VC firms that like what Mogl is cooking. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $10 million in a series B round of financing, which brings its total to $12.4 million. The round was led by Sigma, with participation from Austin Ventures and Avalon Ventures. The startup will use the infusion of capital to aid its expansion into new markets, including San Francisco and New York, and ramp up hiring.

As much as both businesses and customers can get excited about the idea behind most loyalty programs, the truth is that not many of them are particularly enjoyable to use. This is the issue that Mogl co-founder Jon Carder says that the team wanted to tackle with Mogl: Making something that their family and friend would actually use without the requisite amount of grumbling.

As of now, Mogl is focused explicitly on the restaurant industry, leveraging game mechanics to offer incentives that encourage repeat visits to their eateries, including 10 percent cash back every time they eat out at participating restaurants, the ability to compete for top spots at each venue with monthly cash jackpots — to name two.

Perhaps the best, or most charitable part, of Mogl’s mission is that it automatically donates a meal to Feeding America through its Meal for a Meal program every time a user spends $20 at participating restaurants. To date, the startup has donated over 26,000 meals. Another aspect of Mogl’s value proposition is that users don’t have to present coupons, loyalty cards, or scan QR codes when they’re out on the town; instead, the startup’s platform tracks credit and debit card transactions and activity so that customers pay as they normally would (with plastic) and earn rewards.

Mogl’s location-based mobile apps are available for iPhone and Android and allow users to find participating restaurants nearby, track cash rewards and jackpots, as well as the number of meals they’ve donated. For restaurants, the startup offers customer analytics and ROI reporting.

Since its launch in April of 2011, MOGL has partnered with 350 restaurants in Southern California and its members have earned nearly $350,000 in rewards to date.

For more, check out Mogl at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For the past two years, we’ve been tracking the team behind Scoopler. Originally a Y Combinator company that was one of the first startups in the “realtime search” space, they eventually pivoted last year to become a realtime celebrity geo-stalking service

Just glancing at YouTube’s growth numbers, it doesn’t take a genius like me to figure out that people are spending more time watching video on the web — and that online video is going to increasingly eat away at the amount of time they spend watching cable. But while the web has plenty of benefits (like on-demand content), good old-fashioned television has some nice perks too, like the fact that you can sit down and watch and endless stream of content with almost no effort involved.

Shelby.tv is a startup that thinks you can have the best of both worlds — it creates a no-hassle stream of video content based on the links your friends have shared on Facebook and Twitter, resulting in content that’s both effortless and (probably) relevant to what you’re interested in.

The company was a member of the first TechStars NYC class and has just raised a $1.5 million funding round led by Avalon Ventures, with Avalon’s Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann joining the board. In addition to Avalon, the round included the following angel investors: Tim Draper [DFJ],  Mike Lazerow [Buddy Media], Dave Morgan [Simulmedia/Tacoda],  Jerry Colonna [formerly with Flatiron Partners], Mike Yavonditte [Hashable/Quigo], Charles Smith [extension.fm], Bobby Yazdani [Saba],  George Kliavkoff [Manilla/Hearst], Allen Morgan [formerly with Mayfield].

CEO Reece Pacheco says that the service is still in a private alpha so the company doesn’t have much product news at this point, but we’ll let you know once it does (he adds that the company is hiring with the new funding).

Shelby.tv will have plenty of competition, as there are a number of startups looking to offer personalized streams of online video, including Deja, Frequency, and Plitzy. And YouTube itself also has products like YouTube LeanBack — and integration with Google TV — that aim to make the viewing experience more like television. But just as the audience for television is massive, the audience for web-based video services will eventually be very large as well, which means that’s room for multiple winners.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zynga just filed for its much-awaited $1 billion IPO and now we know how much founder Mark Pincus and the company’s investors own in the company. Zynga’s investors include Reid Hoffman, DST, Google, Tiger Global, Kevin Rose, Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Foundry Group and IVP.

Pincus is the largest shareholder of Zynga, with 16 percent of the company. Kleiner Perkins owns 11 percent of the company; IVP owns 6.1 percent; Union Square Ventures owns 5.5 percent; Foundry owns 6.1 percent, Avalon Ventures owns 6.1 percent and DST owns 5.8 percent.

Pincus makes a salary of $300,000, and Van Natta earns a salary of $200,000.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch