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For a superstitious company, taking the same office space formerly used by YouTube isn’t a bad omen.  Yesterday, Bluepulse, a provider of mobile social networking services from Australia stepped onto that four leaf clover and also announced it had closed a $6m financing. 

The company, which was founded in 2002 in Australia launched a beta version of its services last year in December.  They are now global.  Their social networking features are functional on most Internet enabled cell phones provided a customer has an appropriate data plan.

To date the company has reported more than 2million downloads of their application. In usage, they are generating more than a 100 million monthly page views.

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D2C Games, a San Mateo California publisher of downloadable games, appears to be the latest company to join the lists of recently funded. Appears is the key word as there  is some confusion as to the details.  Most reports are saying the company, which as its name suggests is focused on direct to consumer casual sports games for consoles , mobile and PC environments, closed a $6m Series A financing.  The confusion surrounds whether this was in fact an A or a B round, and when it actually closed.

Past reports noted on Paid Content and elsewhere have said the company previously took in a million dollars in seed money, and professional Series A round worth another $1.5m last year.  Click to Read More

There’s been a lot of activity on the financing front lately.  With big deals like Metacafe’s $30m round, and smaller deals with celebrity investors like,   Exabre (The Filter) some other smaller round deals haven’t gotten a lot of press.  Two that were almost overlooked are game company Conduit Labs and discovery-agent software company uPlayMe

Conduit Labs:
Conduit Labs has raised $5.5m in a first round for an internet gaming site.  Click to Read More

Eight figure funding rounds for net video companies are starting to become frighteningly familiar.  Joining Joost, Brightcove, and Veoh,  Palo Alto based Metacafe has become the latest winner of the high-valuation funding lottery.

It was announced today that the company closed a $30m 3rd Round of financing.  The deal was led by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures.  Previous investors Accel and Benchmark also participated (Accel has also invested in Brightcove).  The cumulative investment in the video portal now exceeds $50m. Click to Read More

While the theories of technology convergence lend themselves toward the marriage of the set-top box and the TV, the stand alone TV peripheral isn’t ready to go away.  Just the opposite, from Apple TV to efforts from Cisco and Motorola to Tivo, the set-top box continues to try and reinvent itself as its own model for a convergence device.

Entering the fray with a Hollywood caliber entrance (in the form of a substantial new financing) is Building B, a year old company founded by former semiconductor entrepreneur and Harvard professor Buno Pati and Chaired by Phil Wise, the former CTO of Sony of America.

Building B hasn’t gone far beyond cryptic descriptions and buzzwords in public description of their stealth startup and in-development hardware but they have convinced investors there’s substance behind their speech.  In a first round, just closed, the company has secured $17.5m

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Exabre, parent company of the U.K. based music discovery and recommendation service The Filter has closed a $5m investment round from Eden Ventures and music icon, Peter Gabriel via his company The Real World Group.

The Filter provides a content-recommendation software product that (once installed) indexes a user’s music library and recommends related titles that may be of interest.   In concept, though not necessarily method of recommendation, it’s similar to Pandora and Last.fm (which was acquired by CBS). 

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“It’s rough out there. Anyone who tries to say otherwise has never taken money from a venture capitalist or candy from a child” Anonymous.

Not long ago, out having a drink with some friends, I was treated to the unsolicited rants of a stranger at the bar. He was an entrepreneur and he was vocally unhappy with the direction his investors were trying to drive the company he helped found.  He was just making conversation but listening to his unsolicited rant inspired this unsolicited reply.

VC’s aren’t saints (and some are indeed sharks) but they sometimes get a bad rap because, like movie studio executives, talent agents, and publishers, they sit in a position where their job requires them to evaluate an idea’s odds of success, and the decision they come to in that evaluation effectively positions them as a toll collector on one dreamer’s bridge to success.  Click to Read More