Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Extole today announced that it has raised an additional $7.6 million in funding.

Extole, which bills itself as a “social advocacy platform,” helps brands and agencies promote engagement across the web, email and social networks like Facebook through apps meant to drive word of mouth. Last year the company released new products and updated existing ones to integrate Facebook’s Open Graph publishing features, which increase virality and earned media. One client found that for every one person who entered the sweepstakes after seeing a promotional message from the brand, 3.6 additional people entered as a result of social recommendations.

Extole says it has seen significant growth in revenue, bookings and customer acquisition over the past year, including winning new clients like eHarmony, Spotify, Cache, Seventh Generation and HSN Improvements. T-Mobile, Shutterfly, Redbox, SkyMall and Seamless are among Extole’s other customers.

This latest funding comes from Extole’s previous investors Shasta Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Trident Capital, who participated in a $10-million Series C in February 2012. Extole has raised a total of $29.6 million since September 2010. Extole says the funding will be used for product and platform investments, as well as company growth.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Love’em or hate’em, despite the best efforts of Bump and others, traditional business cards aren’t going away anytime soon. At least, though, some companies are trying to bridge the gap between paper cards and efforts like Bump. New York-based Vizibility first announced its NFC-enabled businesses cards during SXSW earlier this year. Now, the online identity management platform for professionals, is ready to take this project out of beta and is making it widely available as a standard feature for its paying subscribers and for a one-time fee of $15 for users with free accounts.

With these cards, Vizibility promises, users will be able to wirelessly exchange contact information and share “hand-picked profiles, video bios, verified Google results and more.” Given that many phones, including the current generation iPhone, don’t yet support NFC, Vizibility is also printing a QR code on the front of the card as well. Vizibility users can also buy additional QR stickers and business cards and allows users to track when and where their cards were scanned.

Once scanned, the user’s browser will open up a mobile-optimized microsite with the contact’s information. The site lets you download you contact’s vCard and will also show mutual LinkedIn and Facebook friends. According to Vizibility, its cards are “the first commercially available mobile business card using QR code and NFC technologies.”

Vizibility has raised about $2.6 million since it was founded in 2009. The company’s latest funding round was a $1.3 million round last August that was led by Launchpad Venture Group of Boston.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adzuna, a startup with something it calls the next-generation job search engine, has raised a round of funding from Index Ventures, The Accelerator Group and existing investors including Passion Capital. The latest funding follows a seed round last year. It’s landed £500,000, taking its total funding to £800,000 (£300,000 from Passion Capital in July).

Launched in July 2011, Adzuna is aiming to be a global search engine for classified job ads, effectively aggregating ads, then putting a social layer over them. Yes, I know similar things have been tried before but here’s how they’ll do it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Peer-to-peer lending sites are hot again among investors of all stripes. Lending Club today announced a new $25 million Series D financing, led by Union Square Ventures (with existing investors participating). The funding comes on the heels of a $17 million round Eric Schmidt and DFJ put into competitor Prosper in June.

The P2P lending industry has recovered from a few years ago when the SEC forced all the major players to shut down for a few months because they weren’t properly registered/. Lending Club was the first to go through that transition, and the first to come out of it.

Fast-forward to today, and Lending Club is originating more loans than its nearest competitor, Prosper. In July, Lending Club generated $20.6 million in new loans, compared to $6 million for Prosper. Both are growing rapidly, however. Lending Club has reached new record loan numbers in 7 of the past 8 months, according to Peter Renton of the Social Lending Network (see chart). P2P lending sites allow individuals to lend to each other. But institutional money has been flowing into these markets, attracted by the higher interest rates.

The latest funding, brings Lending Club’s total capital raised to $78 million, with the last round being at a similar $24.5 million in May of 2010.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile payments startup Billing Revolution has raised $6.6 million in Series B funding, led by DCM and SK Telecom Ventures. This latest funding round will be used to hire marketing, business development and product staff.

Launched in 2008, the startup startup that offers a single-click billing and payment service for transactions on mobile phones, including Android and iPhone devices. Once consumers are ready to buy a digital or physical product from the Web from a vendor that employs Billing Revolution’s service for payment, they are taken to Billing Revolution’s purchase page where they input credit card information from their phone.

When the purchase is complete, Billing Revolution automatically sends an SMS receipt to their phone, which contains a link. After clicking that link, authentication is complete and with all future purchases, consumers will need only to click ‘buy’ for a transaction to be completed. Billing Revolution says single-click checkout increases mobile checkout rates to 36% for first time users and 78% for second time users.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch