Animoto, a new Web application that let users to create their own MTV-style videos from images or music they choose, is announcing a venture capital fund from Amazon. Although the sum of funding is not disclosed in their blog, but this funding mean that they’re just begun to fulfill their promise to collaborate, as Animoto was able to scale its service to meet the exponential growth with the help of Amazon Web Services.

As Brad Jefferson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Animoto said, “Before AWS (Amazon Web Services), we simply could not have launched Animoto.com and our professional video rendering platform at our current scale without massive CapEx and a lot of VC funding. The viral spike in Animoto video creations we experienced this week would have been disastrous without AWS.”

In fact, Animoto was founded in August 2007, headquartered in New York, and currently has 160,000 registered users. Upon sign-up, users are given the ability to create a 30-second videos, i.e. Animoto Shorts for free, but the videos are not downlaodable. However, to extend a longer length videos, they simply required to pay a premium rate that costs $3 each video and it includes the ability to download the video to their desktop computers. Videos created can be embedded onto any blogs, social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, or Websites such as YouTube, or shareable through emails. To create a video, it appears to have become an easy job for novice users, as they only need to follow three steps, that are 1) Get your images, 2) Get music, and 3) Finalize with details. Normally, to complete a video, users are require to wait for 8 minutes to half an hour, depending on the length of the video to be created. But bear in mind, the best browser to do the job is Safari browser.

Animoto is changing the way it competes, simple steps to create videos or slideshows, and the images browsing and uploading process is also simple. In the meantime, Animoto also support direct image retrieval from Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Picasa, and Photobucket. And for the music soundtrack selection, users can mix any of their MP3s to their videos. MP4 format will be expected on its way soon.

Nevertheless, users are recommended to pay an annual fee of $30 in order to get an All-Access Pass. This All-Access Pass will allow users to produce an unlimited number of full-length videos for one year. Additionally, they also can download any of their videos, whether they’re Video Shorts or Full-Length videos to their computers.

Buddy Media, a NY-based startup that well-known for a Facebook application called AceBucks has raised $6.5 million in a round B financing. This round of financing was led by Softbank, and joined by several other venture capital firms such as European Founders Fund, GreyCroft Partners, a Silicon Valley angel investor, i.e. Ron Conway with participation of fourteen (14) of the Buddy Media’s Series A investors. Prior to this round, they’ve also raised $1.5 million at the time of their official launch in September last year.

Meanwhile, Buddy Media also announced the official launch of its Buddy Media Ad Network. This Ad Network is an eagerly awaited products for the advertisers and social media developers. It represents the next major release of an advertising platform that built-in with some notable features which include pricing flexibility, powerful targeting, quality traffic, and etc.

Since Buddy Media’s first inception on the Web, it has been trying to position itself as a Facebook application provider. Other the aforesaid AceBucks, a virtual currency application, it also released some Skyworks games such as Sudoku, Air Hockey, Pub Darts, Mental Blocks, and Corn Hole. However, Buddy Media’s most significant move is that it has acquired two Facebook app companies, ChipIn in January this year for five of its Facebook app (Vampires vs. Werewolves, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Skiers vs. Snowboarders, Santa vs. The Grinch, Cops vs. Robbers) and Crushes in last November.

Source: Facebook Watcher

Vlingo, a startup that specialize in providing voice-powered user interface is announcing a whopping $20 million in a round B financing. This round was led by Yahoo!, joined by existing investors Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners. According to Vlingo (PDF), they’ll use the capital to fuel international expansion and continue its product research and development. As part of the deal, a Yahoo! nominee will join the company’s board. In December 2006, Vlingo also received $6.5 million in Series A financing from Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners.

Vlingo has a pre-existing relationship with Yahoo!, as they are the provider for the voice recognition for Yahoo!’s oneSearch mobile search service (PDF). Many startups are trying to invent new technology to improve the existing mobile technology arena in the face of disruptive technologies and trends. Vlingo has a distinctive mobile speech technology whereby users are allowed to speak their queries instead of writing text formats on their mobile phones. The integration of Vlingo into Yahoo!’s oneSearch will help to bolster mobile search services particularly when users can speak their queries into the search box prepared by Yahoo! oneSearch.

Vlingo, Ma.-based, was founded in 2006, having just launched a beta version of its voice-powered interface in August last year and was named as one of IDC’s “Ten Emerging Mobile Players to Watch” in this year.

You can visit the Vlingo-enable Yahoo! oneSearch at http://m.yahoo.com/voice.

An Israeli startup Gigya that best known as a provider that help advertisers boost the widget distribution as well as get online tracking has raised $9.5 million in a round B financing. This round of financing was led by Mayfield Fund, alongside with two existing investors, Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital. To date, Gigya’s wildfire technology, i.e. a technology that help advertisers to install the widgets in an easy way onto their blogs or Websites has an installation record of thousands per day, with the capabilities to track more than three billion widget impressions per month for its clients, that include Kimberly-Clark, MTV, Levis, Sprint and Toyota. In addition, an user can easily embed a Gigya widget to a succinct list of sites such as TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, just to name a few.

Gigya said it will use the fund raised to continue its expansion plans, particularly to improve its wildfire technology, pay-per-install widget distribution network, as well as research and development of the products in the lab.

Currently, Gigya has signed more than 500 partners, including seven of the top 10 widget makers, such as the famous RockYou. However, its core business is not to help companies make widgets, but help corporate clients like Toyota, Sprint and MTV spread the widgets across the Web and track their performance.

via [VentureBeat]

There are as many different reasons social networking platform providers will be considered as the hot targets in venture capital as social networking sites. HiveLive, an enterprise social software solution provider is announcing that it has raised $5.6 million in a Series A financing. In a press release, this round of financing was led by Grotech Capital Group and with participation of the current private investors. This bring HiveLive’s total funding to date is $7.8 million, which includes prior angel investments of $2.2 million. In addition, Grotech General Partner Joseph R. Zell will take a seat on HiveLive’s board of directors with immediate effective.

This news reminds me of another social networking platform provider that called Five Across, acquired by Cisco exactly one year ago. Both target on enterprise customers, with the offering of some social tools such as wiki, forum, blog, all with the core purpose to facilitate the online communication from one enterprise to its enterprise clients. Frankly, I never used or get involved with HiveLive software, but reading some other blogs on HiveLive, I know that HiveLive tend to become a Web software that is a highly customized, configurable, and scalability. Since HiveLive is an on-demand, companies that want to create social network on their sites will probably short-list HiveLive based on the aforesaid features. If you want to know more about the social networking functionality that offered by HiveLive, you can visit the review done by TechCrunch.

Finally, HiveLive is a Boulder-based startup that just launched in last year.

A tutoring platform that I profiled in last November called infiLearn, now changed name to GlobalScholar has raised $27 million in round B. As a Program Coordinator worked in the postgraduate sector, I always believed that Web 2.0 and education are two major trends in technology that are inextricably linked. I came across a lot of e-program specifically targeting the working adult, but the emerge of a technology platform such as GlobalScholar for the young students reflect that the Internet revolution in educational market are in place.

As widespread on the Web, GlobalScholar has raised $27 million in a new round and also purchased a Colorado-based Excelsior Software, which provides a range of education solutions software suites, featuring several set of student assessment technologies. However, financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition was announced as part of a venture capital round for GlobalScholar. Existing investors include Knowledge Universe Education and Ignition Partners, with several investors that have pumped into infiLearn $15.5 million in previous round, that makes the total amount of venture funding raised by infiLearn (now GlobalScholar) to a whopping $42.5 million.

From the infiLearn beta site to GlobalScholar, many new content have been added to the site. The columns such as Popular Teachers, Featured Classes, SAT Tutoring, College Finder and the lightweight mashup with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth in finding colleges’ location such as MIT’s map showed that this site has been a purely labor of love for the GlobalScholar team, not barely on the money. As educational markets continue to evolve, many new frontiers such as GlobalScholar will have an impact beyond their initial drafted markets. Regardless how much its acceptance by the public, I believed GlobalScholar will play an increasing role in shaping the innovation surrounding educational market.

via [alarm:clock]

Today Israeli news provider Globes online reported that PayPal has acquired an Israeli startup called FraudSciences for $169 million. Fraud Sciences has the emerging technologies that help users in detecting online frauds. In a press release to the public, they also announced that key personnel from FraudSciences, including Yossi Barak, Chief Operating Officer and founders Shvat Shaked and Saar Wilf, will join PayPal’s technology and fraud management teams. In the meantime, Gadi Maier, FraudSciences’ President and CEO, will provide strategic and operational support to PayPal during the integration period.

FraudSciences was founded in 2001 but in fact was officially launched to the market in 2006, previously raised $7 million in Series A and $11 million in round B financing from BRM Capital, Redpoint Ventures and other US and Israeli investors.

Fifth Generation, best known as the software provider that created Zude, today announced that it has raised $5.3 million in a Series B financing. Investors participated in this round include Irwin Lieber and Barry Rubenstein of Wheatley Partners, Persistency Capital, and Gund Investment, LLC., with additional funding by Bergstein, LLC. Fifth Generation will use this new round of financing to accelerate product development and expand its user base in Zude. On top of that, Fifth Generation has raised $5 million in round A at the time Zude’s private beta roll-out in last May, that makes the total amount raised by Fifth Generation to over $10 million.

Many are saying that Zude is a social networking site that represented the Web of the future. It offer a uniquely drag and drop features that help users in creating their own personal Web pages. Zude’s Web-based applications primarily use an advanced technologies to render its “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) functionality. The buzz generated by Zude is illustrative of trend that users no longer want to design their Web pages from scratch, more and more this type of Web 2.0 will likely to be found on the Web in 12 to 24 months. Imagine one can design her Web page by simply just drag and drop an object to the page and no template or any code to be written, this type of Web 2.0 sites potentially attract the funding from the venture capital firms.