Earlier today, Yahoo said it had acquired the trendy and decidedly stylish news reading app Summly, along with its telegenic and very young entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio.

Yahoo said it plans to close down the actual app and use the algorithmic summation technology that the 17-year-old D’Aloisio built with a small team of five, along with a major assist from Silicon Valley research institute SRI International, throughout its products.

While Yahoo did not disclose the price, several sources told me that the company paid $30 million — 90 percent in cash and 10 percent in stock — to buy the London-based Apple smartphone app.

And despite its elegant delivery, that’s a very high price, especially since Summly has been downloaded slightly less than one million times since launch — after a quick start amid much publicity over its founder — with about 90 million “summaries” read. Of course, like many such apps, it also had no monetization plan as yet.

What Yahoo is getting, though, is perhaps more valuable — the ability to put the fresh-faced D’Aloisio front and center of its noisy efforts to make consumers see Yahoo as a mobile-first company. That has been the goal of CEO Marissa Mayer, who has bought up a range of small mobile startups since she took over nine months ago and who has talked about the need for Yahoo to focus on the mobile arena above all.

Mayer met with D’Aloisio, said sources, although the deal was struck by voluble M&A head Jackie Reses.

Said one person close to the deal, about the founder: “Nick will be a great person to put in front of the media and consumers with Mayer to make Yahoo seem like it is a place that loves both entrepreneurs and mobile experiences, which in turn will presumably attract others like him.”

Having met the young man in question, who was in San Francisco in the fall on a fundraising trip, I can see the appeal. He’s both well-spoken and adorkable, as well as very adept at charming cranky media types like me by radiating with the kinetic energy of someone born in the mobile world (you can see that in full force in the video below with actor and Summly investor Stephen Fry).

Still, D’Aloisio is very young and presumably has a lot of other entrepreneurial goals and that’s why he agreed as part of the deal to only officially stay 18 months at Yahoo, multiple sources told me. In many cases, startup founders strike such short-term employment deals with big companies, agreeing to stay for a certain determined time period.

He will also remain in England, where he lives with his parents, said sources. In addition, only two of Summly’s employees will go to Yahoo with D’Aloisio.

That’s $10 million each, along with a nifty app Yahoo will not be using as is (too bad, as it would up the hip and fun factor of Yahoo’s apps by a factor of a gazillion if it were maintained).

“It works out on a lot of levels,” said another person close to the situation. “Nick is a founder that will make Mayer and Yahoo look cutting edge.”

Cue the parade of PR profiles of the young genius made millionaire, helping Yahoo become relevant again.

I have an email for comment into the always friendly D’Aloisio. But I don’t expect a reply, since he has apparently been specifically instructed by the martinets of Yahoo PR not to talk to me any longer — well, for 18 months at least! (Don’t worry, Nick, I don’t blame you and will still listen to whatever you are pitching next, since you are so dang compelling and I enjoyed using Summly!)

Until then, here’s the faboo Summly video, with the best chairs ever:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

The California tech mogul — who has been measured in his public embrace of politicians as his company plays an emerging role in politics — will host a fundraiser next month as part of Christie’s first out-of-state campaign trip.

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Today, AngelList announced that start-ups had raised $12 million on AngelList in the past 30 days. Actually, according to the brand-new tracking tool on the site’s homepage, the current number is $12.3 million.

So how does that relate to previous months? It’s not something that had been formally tracked before, but it’s likely on par, said AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant. In an average month, AngelList probably matches start-ups with at least $10 million in funding, and December is generally a bad month for fundraising.

Aggregate funding numbers are “hard to track and lumpy,” said Ravikant. Even when venture capitalists meet promising start-ups on AngelList, they tend to keep it quiet because “a lot of the VCs still cling to the idea of proprietary deal flow,” he said. Plus, funding found through AngelList is almost always accompanied by funding found elsewhere.

AngelList is going to try to better track these numbers through new self-reporting tools and its online investment tools, which launched last week to give start-ups free and standardized tools for raising money. The tools have already been used for $600,000 worth of investments.

Surprisingly, Ravikant said that these days, AngelList actually has a bigger impact on recruiting than fundraising — probably triple the volume and expected financial value, based on some very rough math.

In addition to introducing start-ups to investors, AngelList also matches entrepreneurs who try and fail to raise money on AngelList to companies that succeed in raising money. It makes more than 600 introductions per week on behalf of these candidates, resulting in 80 to 100 hires per month. People who try to start companies are excellent job candidates, Ravikant noted.

So why is AngelList suddenly more interested in talking up its role in these funding and hiring introductions, especially considering it doesn’t charge for them? Well, it’s known that the company is raising its first outside financing, at an expected valuation of $150 million or more, as TechCrunch first reported.

Ravikant said that he couldn’t elaborate on the fundraising process, but that he expects to “be in a position to talk about it more when the ban on general solicitation ends.”

What he means but cannot say is this: When the JOBS Act rules go into place early next year, AngelList will have more flexibility about disclosing that it is raising funding and making such a round available to a broad range of investors — as would be in keeping with the spirit of the site.

Here’s how it works: Anyone can already start a Crowdtilt group with a funding goal. Now they can select a 501(c)(3) organization from Crowdtilt’s index to receive that money. If the campaign “tilts” — a.k.a. reaches its goal — that money goes directly to the nonprofit, minus Crowdtilt’s regular 2.5 percent fee.

With the massive amounts of crowdfunding sites launching these days, it’s hard to believe that none of them have gone through the process to facilitate nonprofit donations. What’s particularly notable is that these Crowdtilt donations are tax-deductible, and the company takes a relatively small fee.

For comparison, Crowdtilt co-founder James Beshara pointed out that Kickstarter prohibits charity and cause fundraising, Indiegogo nonprofit donations are not tax-deductible, and Movember takes a 17.7 percent fee.

Supporting nonprofits was a personal mission for Beshara, who had initially envisioned them to be at the center of Crowdtilt. Instead, many users take to the site to raise money to rent a party bus or buy bottle service at a club. That’s fine, but it doesn’t have the same sort of gravitas.

Beshara said he personally spent much of the past three months and more than $20,000 to deal with all the regulatory issues around nonprofits.

Beshara said that 28 percent of Crowdtilt projects are already nonprofit. The site waived all fees for Hurricane Sandy projects, and users raised $180,000 for those campaigns over the past few weeks.

Crowdtilt is an all-or-nothing platform, a la Kickstarter, where groups must reach their goal for it to be funded. The secret sauce is that people who participate become advocates for a project because they want it to go through. Beshara noted that the average Crowdtilt project raises 188 percent of its goal.

Crowdtilt has itself raised $2.1 million in funding from investors including Y Combinator, SV Angel and CrunchFund.

When you think of online crowdfunding, it’s easy to let your mind jump straight to Kickstarter, which came into its own this year with projects such as the Pebble Watch and Double Fine Adventure.

But with an assist from the popular Web comic artist Matthew Inman, a.k.a. The Oatmeal, Kickstarter’s sometime rival Indiegogo has stepped into the spotlight. In August, Inman launched an Indiegogo campaign aimed at helping a nonprofit buy the land for a museum dedicated to the life and works of inventor Nikola Tesla.

Inman raised his funding target of $850,000 in under a week. And with less than a day until its funding window closes, “Operation Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum” has raked in over $1.35 million. Indiegogo co-founder Danae Ringelmann said that makes it the largest campaign in the site’s history.

However, Ringelmann said that even without The Oatmeal, Indiegogo already distributes “millions of dollars every single week” to its users. A site spokesperson said the company could not elaborate on those numbers. But by contrast, Kickstarter publicly reports that its users have pledged $350 million since April 28, 2009, which averages out to just under $2 million per week.

In any case, Indiegogo will make out nicely from the Tesla museum barnraiser, since it takes a four percent cut of successfully-funded campaigns (as compared to the five percent Kickstarter takes).

For charity projects such as Inman’s, though, the differences between the two sites are moot. While Indiegogo takes an anything-goes approach to crowdfunding, Kickstarter only selectively accepts projects, and they explicitly ban “charity or cause funding.”

A Kickstarter spokesperson confirmed to AllThingsD that the site has no plans to change that policy, noting that “nonprofits have always been able to use Kickstarter and will continue to be able to, but only for creative projects.”

Ringelmann counters that Indiegogo doesn’t want to have to decide who can fundraise and who can’t.

“That’s kind of the biggest differentiator about Indiegogo,” she said. “The role of gatekeeper is almost nonsensical.”

Inman himself did not respond to requests for comment. However, you can read his entertaining ode to Nikola Tesla here, and (at least for a few more hours) donate to the Indiegogo campaign here.

The experience can be analogous to watching a professional basketball or football game on TV, especially as videogames increasingly become a rival to other major forms of entertainment.

The $15 million round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners; Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates also participated. The capital will go toward hiring more engineers to continue building out its platform and improving quality.

The videos run on Twitch’s own platform, rather than on a third-party site like YouTube, allowing it to exclusively target the hardcore gamer. Twitch said it now has more than 20 million viewers, who tune in every month to watch different channels based on games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Starcraft and Borderlands 2. As part of the experience, commentators provide feedback in real time.

The San Francisco company announced Twitch a year ago at E3, saying it would be an independent brand from Justin.TV. Five years prior to that, it was trying to build out a live video platform on the Web. Now, Twitch has nearly taken over.

“We launched Twitch a little over a year ago, and already we have more than 20 million unique viewers per month,” said Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch. “Our current team has put us at the forefront of the live videogame streaming movement, and we can now invest aggressively to support our growing community with new ways to stream, watch, and chat.”

Similar to live sports on TV, Twitch makes money by playing advertisements during the game play. It has also experimented with a subscription model, where fans pay a monthly fee. Additionally, the game players get paid to broadcast their videos on the site.

Also meddling in the space is Los Angeles-based Machinima, which racks up millions of page views a month on other sites, including YouTube and Facebook.

The Atlanta-based company’s mobile app tries to be a resource to consumers who are looking for local merchants and events, sort of like the Web’s original CitySearch service from years ago — except that it’s on mobile. The app also distributes coupons to restaurants, but instead of charging consumers for the deals, like Groupon does, they are free, and merchants pay a flat rate to Scoutmob each time one is redeemed.

Investors in the company’s second round include AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, Capital Broadcasting, Cox Enterprises and Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. To date, Scoutmob has raised $5 million, which means that even if it wanted to, it doesn’t have the resources to go up against Groupon and LivingSocial.

In an interview, Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the company gets lumped into the daily deals category, but said that from day one, “we tried to differentiate ourselves and to be more of a mobile company.”

So far, the strategy has worked.

The app, which is available free on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, has 1.2 million users who have redeemed one million offers. To date, the company has launched in 10 cities, with varying success rates. Some markets, like Seattle, don’t have many deals yet, while other cities, like Atlanta or Washington, D.C., are used more.

Because of its emphasis on mobile, the company was also able to to score a partnership with payment processing company First Data Corporation.

“It’s crazy, we are a two-and-a-half year-old company, and every week we have the largest payment companies in the world contacting us,” Tavani said. ”They are worried that if they don’t have mobile engagement, then what do they have?”

First Data processes about 55 percent of all transactions in the U.S., and will help Scoutmob close the loop of offering a discount, making a purchase and earning loyalty points.

The new funding will be used to support the company’s next wave of product development, which will include building out a mobile rewards program with the help of First Data and other payment companies it signs up.

Tavani said it will work like this: When users make a purchase at a Scoutmob location using a credit card, they’ll accrue points automatically. Once enough points have been accumulated, they can be redeemed at any Scoutmob retail location.

Unlike traditional loyalty programs, which require consumers to go to the same coffee shop 10 times in order to earn a free coffee, Scoutmob will let consumers earn and redeem points by visiting any merchant in its network. It’s similar to frequent flyer programs, where miles can be earned at a variety of merchants and then redeemed at a handful of airlines.

“We want to be the equivalent of an airline reward program, but for local,” Tavani said. “That’s exactly what we want to be.”

Scoutmob has landed in a sector spanning local businesses and mobile payments, which is ripe from innovation and extremely crowded by well-funded start-ups and massively large incumbents. But Tavani argues that it’s a level playing field.

“There’s going to be multiple players and lots of winners,” he said. “Groupon and LivingSocial are two with a gigantic lead. But we can go out and visit merchants today — there’s no one preventing us from having those conversations.”

With the rise of so-called “crowdfunding,” game makers are finding fans online who are willing to pledge a few bucks toward a game they’d like to see produced.

The primary site where these connections are being made is Kickstarter, a three-year old company. Since Kickstarter got off the ground, the games category has garnered $29 million in pledges, according to the New York Times. Other popular categories include film/video, music and design.

Further, it was reported that 854 game developers successfully reached their fundraising goals, raising an average of $29,409 apiece.

Most impressively, three game companies have raised more than $1.5 million each since the beginning of this year: Double Fine raised $3.3 million from 87,000 backers; Wasteland 2 raised $2.9 million; and Shadowrun Returns secured $1.8 million.

Another site, Gambitious, which will be exclusively dedicated to helping game companies raise money, is preparing to launch on June 5 in Los Angeles as part of E3, the industry’s big annual conference.

The shift to nontraditional fundraising is now even catching the eye of megapublishers like Electronic Arts. Last week, EA said developers who crowdsourced funding will be able to sell their games on Origin at no cost for three months.

Origin is the company’s online game store, which allows users to download PC games electronically and counts up to 12 million users worldwide.

“The public support for crowdfunding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,” said David DeMartini, EA’s SVP of Origin, in a release. “It’s also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game.”

EA doesn’t disclose how much it charges because it says fees can vary, but through this program, developers will now receive 100 percent of sales during the 90-day window plus any pre-sales that are generated before the title officially launches, a spokesman confirmed.

It’s unclear whether crowdfunding is a fad and consumers will tire of it quickly, and to be clear, not every company that requests money is able to get it.

But it pairs nicely with a broader trend in the industry that AllThingsD’s Eric Johnson wrote about last week. He explained that game developers are increasingly finding it advantageous to stay small, rejecting the notion that productions need big budgets in order to create blockbusters.

The evolution has been aided by the rise of three new distribution platforms, Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Valve’s Steam Store (and to a lesser extent, EA’s Origin, which is catching up). With these digital platforms, developers can reach customers without having to package up their software and sell it at retail, saving thousands of dollars.

With the crowdfunding phenomenon completely under way, Videogame Analyst and Consultant Scott Steinberg saw the opportunity to write an e-book on the subject called “Crowdfunding Your Business: A How-To Guide.” In the recently released book, he argues that crowdfunding helps developers identify projects that consumers are willing to pay for, before they’ve wasted the money and time on developing them.

He writes that by “requesting feedback or recruiting help from public donors via open calls for assistance — you can gauge demand for and create bankable products from day one.”

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

Facebook has just announced that it will acquire Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service, for $1 billion in cash and shares.

The social networking giant posted on the acquisition, its biggest yet, on its site, as well as on CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline on Facebook.

Photos are critically important for Facebook, which has been slow to innovate in the fast-growing mobile arena in the important consumer space. By contrast, Instagram has taken the arena by storm, with its delightful and elegant app and the motto, “Fast beautiful photo sharing.”

Consumers have responded (including me — it is the only non-communications app I use many times a day). The San Francisco-based company — with only 13 employees — had 30 million Apple iPhone users before it came to Google’s Android last week, where it got more than a million new users in just 12 hours.

Still, despite all the usage, Instagram had not articulated a plan for, you know, making money. Now, that will presumably be Facebook’s problem to solve.

The Facebook acquisition has been kept very quiet, with its CEO Kevin Systrom working on it in conjunction with new fundraising efforts that would have valued the company at $500 million. Liz Gannes reported on this effort last week, which was poised to close, in fact, before the Facebook deal was struck over the weekend.

Until now, Instagram has received Series A funding of $7 million led by Benchmark Capital just over a year ago, when it only had 1.75 million registered users.

Seed investors include Andreessen Horowitz — which did not follow on later — and Baseline Ventures. Also in the Benchmark round: Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, former Facebooker Adam D’Angelo and Chris Sacca.

In a blog post titled “Instagram + Facebook,” Systrom promised no change, except for the $1 billion mountain of cash:

“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network … The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love.”

Zuckerberg also promised that Facebook would keep Instagram independent, and that such a large purchase would be rare for the company, which is set to go public soon.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” he wrote. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Here is the full press release from Facebook:

Facebook to Acquire Instagram

MENLO PARK, CALIF. — April 9, 2012 — Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Aileen Lee is founding a new seed fund — still unnamed — that is focused on backing and helping develop early-stage start-ups.

Lee, who has been at the famed Silicon Valley venture firm for a dozen years, will remain a partner at Kleiner Perkins, although her full focus will be on the fund. While she declined in an interview this morning to say what the size of the new fund will be, most such efforts range from $10 million to $70 million.

Along with Kleiner, there will be several other unnamed investors and strategic partners, said Lee, who is in a quiet period of fundraising and could not give more details. It will be separate from Kleiner.

“I read a book that said you should make a big change every seven years, and this was an area of investing that I really have wanted to be in,” said Lee, who at Kleiner has backed companies such as One King’s Lane, Rent the Runway and Dollar Shave Club. “I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.”

KP’s John Doerr said that while some VC firms are creating their own high-profile seed funds, he and Lee felt it was important for such an investment vehicle to be independent to be effective and also to work with other seed efforts that have exploded on the tech scene.

“But we wanted to invest in it, so it’s the best of both worlds,” he said. “It’s really important that start-ups at that stage get the kind of attention Aileen can give them.”

According to her bio on KP’s Web site, Lee worked at the Gap before her VC life, as well as Odwalla and the North Face. The MIT and Harvard Business School grad also worked at Morgan Stanley in technology mergers and acquisitions.

The end of the pledge drive also means the end of those fundraising banners on every page that highlighted editors who contributed to the site.

Against the site’s normal black-and-white page design and absence of ads, the contributors’ color photos popped from the page and certainly fulfilled the goal of pulling readers up to the plea.

And while their absence won’t exactly be mourned by readers, it will deprive us of some entertaining juxtapositions, such as the one at right, with the visage of an earnest volunteer looking like an illustration accompanying the Wikipedia entry for a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring Justin Timberlake called “Dick in a Box.”

Wikimedia said it will use the funds to buy hardware, develop new features on the site, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects and support volunteers.

The site now employs 97 people and plans to spend $28.3 million this year on expenses.

The remainder of funds will trickle in throughout the year in the form of grants and other donations, such as ones from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki’s Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which gave $500,000 as part of the campaign in November.

In a letter thanking donors, Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote: “We’re the #5 most-popular site in the world — we operate on a tiny fraction of the resources of any other top site. We will use your money carefully and well, I promise you.”

There’s an old maxim in fundraising: It’s better to get one dollar from 100 supporters than it is to get $100 from one supporter. Or you can just get Justin Bieber to tweet about you.

Assuming you can’t trap yourself a Bieber, a new online fundraising start-up called Rally is available to take advantage of the network effects of your real supporters.

Rally CEO Tom Seres was quick to point out that social online fundraising isn’t new, but says that “most organizations see the Red Cross’ success and think that putting a Twitter button on their site will make them more money.”

According to Seres, they are wrong.

“The reality is, those few campaigns that succeed in social do so because of huge networks,” he said. “[But] not everyone … has Will Smith tweeting about their fundraising.”

Rally’s recent growth got it a chunk of funding from a prominent string of investors, including Mike Maples, Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway. Seres would only describe it as a “fairly large seed round.”

The cash is being spent on turning an existing white-label product called Piryx, built by Seres and his co-founders, into the more consumer-focused Rally, which is both the name of the new platform and the pivoted company.

Why the consumer focus?

The most significant way Rally’s model differs from other fundraising sites such as Kickstarter, Seres said, is that Rally is the payment processor as well as the fundraising platform. Kickstarter farms its payments out to Amazon.

The four percent Rally charges on most transactions — which covers the credit card fees, as well as Rally’s profits — leaves a pretty slim margin. Therefore, massive profitability for Rally will only come at massive scale.

The reborn Rally’s main focus is to make online fundraising “more social” — or more annoying, depending on your take.

Its platform allows for two layers of supporters, Seres said: “One who just wants to donate … and another who can actually start [his or her] own fundraiser associated with an existing Rally campaign.”

This model isn’t new for fundraising, and Seres said it has been successful for events such as walks for charity, partially because “People respond better to requests from people they know. It is about leveraging that closer network connection.”

Just as interesting as Rally’s “better mousetrap” model for the online fundraising space is the type of data it will gather about what works with donors online.

If it can reach scale, Seres said, Rally would “be able to tell fundraisers what the value of a piece of content they post is, and on the larger scale, what people actually care about online and what makes them act.”

Here is a video interview of Seres talking about all that and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110715/start-up-rally-wants-your-cause-to-raise-money-online-even-if-justin-beiber-isnt-tweeting-about-it/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/machinimas-latest-5-million-round-doesnt-reflect-its-big-money-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/machinimas-latest-5-million-round-doesnt-reflect-its-big-money-valuation/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 02:18:15 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4822 Machinima, which is mixing the art of film-making and game development in an attempt to build a new media empire, is close to raising a round worth roughly $5 million.

But despite the round’s petite figure, especially in today’s healthy venture market, make no mistake that the Los Angeles-based company has blockbuster-sized ambitions and a valuation to match.

The round was revealed in a regulatory document filed today, but from what we are hearing from people close to the situation, it will put the company’s valuation in the low hundreds of millions. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

The financing is from existing investors, Redpoint and MK Capital, and brings the company’s total to about $20 million, including a small line of credit. It will give the company the cash it needs to fuel additional growth without requiring the executive team to lose focus by kicking off a gigantic fundraising effort. From what we are hearing, the latest round is not a reflection of the company’s growth, but it will help it stay on track.

Its YouTube channel is quickly becoming the destination for hardcore game fans to watch videos. Trust us when we say the demographic is as far from those playing FarmVille as you can get. It’s often adrenaline-pumping action filled with violence and profanity. In other words, it’s the top shelf of entertainment for most males aged 18 to 34.

While the niche sounds small, it isn’t.

In 2010, Machinima’s YouTube channel attracted 2.3 billion page views. Last month alone, it attracted 575 million page views and 67 million unique visitors. It’s seeing between 15 and 20 percent growth every month. The funding will allow it to keep growing and to expand to other platforms.

The growth is not that hard to understand. In fact, it’s probably the same trend that propelled Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Black Ops to hit $1 billion in sales after slightly more than one month–the equivalent of a blockbuster movie release.

According to the company’s Web site, the word “Machinima” is basically a mash-up of the words “machine” and “cinema,” which is used to describe the process of “creating real-time animation by manipulating a videogame’s engine and assets.”

The company is essentially building a destination for videogame fans to watch a ton of its own editorial content, but also allows players to upload their own videos. Often, the video is a recording of someone playing a video game and providing their own play-by-play soundtrack as they achieve some great accomplishment.

By creating content and attracting fans, Machinima can generate buzz for videogames long after their initial launch dates. Users who continue to play games may buy additional downloadable content, which leads to incremental revenues for the game maker. In essence, Machinima is an advertising network, and it has worked on projects with all of the major gaming companies and film studios.

In a recent example, Machinima teamed up with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution to produce an original online series to promote Mortal Kombat. The nine-episode series, which has the quality of a feature-length film, debuted on April 12. In the first five days, the first episode got more than 5.5 million views.

Here’s that video [for mature audiences only!]:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/machinimas-latest-5-million-round-doesnt-reflect-its-big-money-valuation/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/vc-fundraising-has-best-start-since-2001/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/vc-fundraising-has-best-start-since-2001/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:30:21 +0000 Alistair Barr http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38767 The U.S. venture-capital industry had its best fund-raising start since 2001 as three firms dominated, Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association said Monday.

Thirty-six U.S. venture-capital funds raised more than $7 billion in the first quarter of 2011. That’s up 76 percent, by dollar commitments, compared with the first quarter of 2010, which saw 44 funds raise $4 billion, according to Thomson Reuters and the NVCA.

Bessemer Venture Partners VIII raised $1.6 billion during the quarter, while Sequoia Capital 2010 raised $1.3 billion and J.P. Morgan’s (JPM 46.97, +0.13, +0.28%) Digital Growth Fund raised $1.2 billion.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110411/vc-fundraising-has-best-start-since-2001/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/exclusive-first-half-of-groupon-funding-done-dst-t-rowe-price-fidelity-capital-group-and-morgan-stanley/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/exclusive-first-half-of-groupon-funding-done-dst-t-rowe-price-fidelity-capital-group-and-morgan-stanley/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 08:01:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39260

Groupon has officially completed the raising of half of a $950 million funding, getting $500 million from a range of top-drawer investors, said sources close to the situation.

Those investors include Russia’s DST Global, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Capital Group and Morgan Stanley.

It’s unclear how much each investor has put in and who will make up the next tranche of funding, which will also close imminently.

The New York Times previously reported on the regulatory filing related to the funding, as well as investments from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley.

Now completed, the investments value the Chicago-based social buying service at $4.75 billion, which is less than the $6 billion Google offered to buy Groupon.

Those acquisition talks failed. But Groupon is still attracting interest from other possible buyers.

For now, though, it’s just talking a pile of money–probably the right strategy–to keep growing its explosive business. A big chunk will also go to some Groupon execs and early investors.

Groupon has competitors, of course, such as LivingSocial, but has established itself as the leader in the local online discounting space.

Allen & Co. is advising Groupon on the fundraising.

A Groupon spokeswoman declined to comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/exclusive-first-half-of-groupon-funding-done-dst-t-rowe-price-fidelity-capital-group-and-morgan-stanley/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/q-why-no-twitter-board-seat-for-kleiners-john-doerr-a-his-google-board-seat-plus-is-the-star-vc-looking-at-spotify-and-groupon-next/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/q-why-no-twitter-board-seat-for-kleiners-john-doerr-a-his-google-board-seat-plus-is-the-star-vc-looking-at-spotify-and-groupon-next/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:14:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38683

Yesterday, star venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins forked over $150 million in funding to Twitter.

At at $3.7 billion valuation, that got him a big chunk of the San Francisco microblogging site.

But what it didn’t get him was a seat on the board of Twitter, which many figured he would be given for after handing over so much moolah.

According to sources familiar with the situation, that’s due to Doerr’s being a director on another board: Google.

Several sources who BoomTown spoke to, after breaking news of the massive funding, said that his being on the board of the search giant was seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

A conflict because Google has plans to wade deeply into the social space. And also, of course, because it is the No. 1 potential acquirer of Twitter, as the Silicon Valley company seeks to gather more tools to fight its latest rival, Facebook.

Doerr has very deep ties at Google, having been on its board since mid-1999.

He got that seat, along with Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz, after he ponied up a critical $25 million equity round for Google in June of that year.

Interestingly, no other Kleiner partner was named to a Twitter board seat either.

But, some speculate, it might make sense for Mary Meeker–who just joined Kleiner to head up digital investing efforts, after a long-time stint as a Wall Street analyst for Morgan Stanley–to eventually become a Twitter director.

Meeker has, of course, deep IPO and M&A experience.

And, frankly, after adding Flipboard’s Mike McCue and former DoubleClick exec David Rosenblatt yesterday and former Netscape exec Peter Currie recently to its all-boy board band, a woman director might be a good idea to consider.

Other directors at Twitter include Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

I reached out to Doerr for a comment, but he has not yet replied; Twitter declined to comment.

Even more interesting to consider is what Kleiner will invest in next after this mega-funding, given how aggressively many sources said Doerr had pushed to lead the Twitter round.

And, in fact, sources said that Kleiner is looking closely at new funding rounds for both the Spotify music streaming service and Groupon, the social buying start-up that recently decided to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and an earlier $3 billion one from Yahoo.

Groupon is now seeking more funds to remain independent and hold onto its lead in the fast-growing local discounting market, sources said.

(Bloomberg also reported on Groupon’s new fundraising efforts, although it was written about after it turned down the Google offer.)

And Spotify, which is hugely popular outside the U.S., is trying to enter this market, but needs more funding to expand and perhaps strike better deals with music labels.

Both are the just the kind of companies Doerr has targeted in what looks like a serious effort to compete with other firms–especially Andreessen Horowitz and Russia’s DST Global.

They have garnered the heat Kleiner used to have, largely by backing more of the top entrepreneurs recently.

Doerr has already put money into social gaming phenom Zynga and also started an sFund for social-focused investments.

Add Twitter to the pile and you can see where this is headed: Except for the board seat, John Doerr will no longer be denied.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/q-why-no-twitter-board-seat-for-kleiners-john-doerr-a-his-google-board-seat-plus-is-the-star-vc-looking-at-spotify-and-groupon-next/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100712/latest-check-shows-insufficient-venture-funds/ http://allthingsd.com/20100712/latest-check-shows-insufficient-venture-funds/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:51:26 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=44547 The “Darwinian contraction” in the venture capital industry continues with no end in sight. A joint study released today by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters found that VC firms in the U.S. raised just $1.9 billion in the second quarter of 2010. That’s a nasty 49 percent decline from the $3.7 billion they raised in the first quarter. It’s also the weakest quarter for VC fundraising in nearly seven years. The last time the industry saw this low of a dollar commitment was the third quarter of 2003.

“Ongoing economic uncertainty has kept many limited partners and venture capital firms on the fundraising sidelines in 2010 and this hesitation is likely to continue for the remainder of the year,” NVCA President Mark Heesen said in a statement.

Certainly looks that way. Consider the chart below (click to enlarge).

Quite the downward trend, yeah? What is it that Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says? “The best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks.” Hmm. Something like that…

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100712/latest-check-shows-insufficient-venture-funds/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100712/after-some-flashy-investing-is-andreessen-horowitzs-next-move-a-big-new-fund/ http://allthingsd.com/20100712/after-some-flashy-investing-is-andreessen-horowitzs-next-move-a-big-new-fund/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:25:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30404

Since it launched almost exactly a year ago with a $300 million fund, the venture firm of Andreessen Horowitz has cut a rather high-profile path through the Silicon Valley investing community.

And it’s clear the firm has been aiming to make a big splash in the sector–from its involvement in the fractious fight over the spin-off of Skype to its funding of a series of high-profile start-ups (Zynga, Asana, Kno and Rockmelt) to its most recent aggressive moves to finally win the top spot in investing in hot social location site Foursquare.

Now, according to sources and after spending about half its kitty, Andreessen Horowitz is poised to begin another round of fundraising to further bolster its clout.

While it is unclear how much the VC firm will raise, sources expect it to be much more than its first fund.

In its last go-round, the firm had a quick completion of the fund raising, in the midst of a national econalypse. So many assume the next try will be a lot easier, especially given its knack for grabbing hot deals.

A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment on future fundraising plans.

The firm is going to need the money as it expands its partners and ambitions to change the venture landscape, as iconic entrepreneur Marc Andreessen noted when he founded the firm with his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz in July of 2009.

Andreessen said then that he was essentially professionalizing the active angel investing that he and Horowitz had been doing.

Over the last several years, either together or apart, the pair have invested in a large variety of innovative start-ups, such as Twitter, Aliph, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

Andreessen is on the board of Facebook and an adviser to Twitter too.

In an interview with me last year, Andreessen said that unlike many VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz will invest in companies at any stage of life–from early stage to late–and of any size and in any kind of digital sector and will focus on companies led by tech-savvy founders.

He also expressed a disdain for the way the venture business was run.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen at the time, in a joke about VCs being like Darth Vader.

At the time, he also noted that money talked. “It’s important to have more capital,” he said. “Sometimes having a huge checkbook is a great thing.”

Well, we’ll see if Andreessen Horowitz can make that checkbook even larger.

Until then, here is a tally of investments that Andreessen Horowitz has made so far, sourced from the firm, split up into categories and size of investment round the firm participated in with other investors. The firm declined to provide the exact amount of their participation in each investment.

It should be noted that Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s previous individual investments in some of these companies are not identified here:

Board

Kno: tablet device for students; $7.5 million
Nicira: cloud infrastructure software; $13 million
Okta: cloud app management; $750,000
Proferi: analytic applications; $2 million
Rockmelt; desktop browser for Facebook; unknown funding
Skype: Web telephony; $50 million

Passive

Apptio: IT cost transparency solutions; $14 million
Asana: enterprise collaboration; $9 million
Boku: mobile online payments; unknown funding
Digg: social media and content; unknown funding
Foursquare: social location; $20 million
Fusion I/O: enterprise I/O solutions; $45 million
Tiny Speck: social gaming; $5 million
Zynga: social gaming; $180 million

Seed

Burbn; social location; $500,000
Canvas Networks: image boards; $625,000
Factual: structured data; $1 million
GoodData: cloud-based collaborative analytics; $2.5 million
Quantifind; enterprise; unknown funding
RethinkDB: database storage; $1.2 million
Mixed Media Labs: photo sharing; $370,000
SnapLogic: open-source enterprise data integration; $2.3 million
TopProspect: social recruiting; unknown funding
Vikkii: user-generated subtitling; unknown funding
Ze Frank Games: online gaming; unknown funding

And here are video interviews BoomTown has done with both Andreessen and Horowitz in the last year on their investing theories:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100712/after-some-flashy-investing-is-andreessen-horowitzs-next-move-a-big-new-fund/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100420/tech-firms-turn-to-debt/ http://allthingsd.com/20100420/tech-firms-turn-to-debt/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:00:11 +0000 Ben Worthen http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=24134 A growing number of technology companies are turning to debt to raise capital, taking advantage of the thawing credit markets to build their war chests in anticipation of a wave of dealmaking.

Software companies including SAP AG (SAP), Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) have recently raised several billion dollars by selling debt for the first time in their histories. The moves follow similar offerings over the past year from cash-rich giants like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which had $25 billion in cash when it took on debt for the first time last May.

The decision to take on debt breaks from tradition in tech, where companies have typically preferred to raise money by selling stock. Debt has become a more attractive fundraising option largely because interest rates are low.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100420/tech-firms-turn-to-debt/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091119/norwest-venture-partners-goes-big/ http://allthingsd.com/20091119/norwest-venture-partners-goes-big/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:15 +0000 Pui-Wing Tam http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18082 Norwest Venture Partners on Wednesday announced that it had closed a new venture-capital fund sized at $1.2 billion. That’s nearly double the size of the Silicon Valley venture firm’s last fund in 2006, which closed at $650 million.

The new fund is unusual in this day and age amid a tough fundraising environment brought on by the recession. What’s more, many venture capitalists argue that funds need to be smaller to get back to the basics, especially since venture capital isn’t an industry that necessarily scales upwards.

Here’s what Promod Haque, NVP’s managing partner, had to say about all this:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091119/norwest-venture-partners-goes-big/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090413/jill-sobules-internet-funded-album-california-years-debuts-tomorrow/ http://allthingsd.com/20090413/jill-sobules-internet-funded-album-california-years-debuts-tomorrow/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:01:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12145

We consider Jill Sobule to be the musical muse of ATD–which we desperately need since we are obviously way, way too jacked into the matrix.

That’s precisely why we have the gifted singer-songwriter appear annually at our D: All Things Digital conference–to kick off each day’s sessions with one of her songs and, more to the point, add a lot of much-needed levity and nontechie soul to the proceedings.

And tomorrow, Sobule’s Internet-funded album, “California Years,” produced by the legendary Don Was, debuts. I urge everyone to click the link here and get a copy–online, of course.

And by Internet-funded, I mean that the $75,000 needed to produce the album was raised entirely through an innovative Web initiative Sobule ginned up in late 2007 via a site called Jill’s Next Record.

Sobule wrote about the effort several times in our Voices section, where you can read about her asking for ideas here, launching her fund-raising site here and, finally, talking about the result here.

Sobule (pictured here in cartoon form)–whose big mainstream hit a few years ago was a much-better-than-hopelessly-dopey-Katy-Perry “I Kissed a Girl”–had worked her way through four record labels (she was dropped by two and two went belly-up) with six CDs.

Sick and tired of the way musical artists had their work funded, she essentially asked her fans to become her record label, writing on her site: “It would be a sort of patronage thing, where you guys are the Medici family, except I give you prizes for donations of certain amounts.”

The $1,000 “platinum” level, for example, got the donor a theme song and the $5,000 “diamond” level got a house concert by Sobule.

And what her fans are getting now in the completed album is superb–a sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always moving work. (My young sons cannot stop singing her perfect song, “San Francisco,” for example.)

As Sobule writes:

“‘California Years’ was written over the last three years, following my move to the West Coast. It was influenced by the sights and sounds of the Golden State, especially the seductive, but not always sunny Los Angeles. Maybe the next record will be ‘The Utah Month’ or ‘Back to Brooklyn.’

“The whole thing was made possible by a small but mighty fan base. They gave me the love, encouragement and the dough to do this. I was truly surprised and so very grateful. This record is for them.”

Let’s cheer on efforts like Sobule’s and hope for a hit. Because hers is indeed a small but mighty effort, as all kinds of content creators try to figure out businesses in the new digital age, unafraid of the changes inevitably coming (AP might want to take notes about this).

Here is Sobule in a long interview on NPR last week (which you cannot embed, bad NPR!) and another video below on CNN about her digital project:

And here are two videos I did with her about the effort. The first has one of the songs on the new album, called “Nothing to Prove,” and the other an update on what she wants to do next, digitally and musically speaking:

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