What’s particularly interesting here is the company that accounted for $10 million of the round — Conde Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications.

The money for the deal comes from a $500 million fund Advance set up a couple years ago, which is managed by former Yahoo M&A executive Andrew Siegel. Siegel will take a seat on Unified’s board.

The rest of the round comes via a debt deal with Silicon Valley Bank. The start-up had previously raised about $1.5 million in an angel round.

Unified will function as a media-buying service for advertisers, if that’s what their clients want. But the company is trying to emphasize its analytics/dashboard services, which is supposed to help advertisers figure out how their ad buys are performing across multiple platforms.

Like other social marketing start-ups, the bulk of its business comes from Facebook, but it will also work with Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Here’s an explainer/teaser video featuring a woman with a Madonna-like British accent:

But there’s another alternative, called SugarCRM, that has been gaining traction, and which positions itself as an alternative to Salesforce. It’s open source, runs both in the cloud and on-premise, and it has a million end users at 7,000 companies in 192 countries.

Today, SugarCRM announced that it had raised $33 million in equity and debt financing. New Enterprise Associates led the round, and Brooke Seawell, an NEA partner, joined Sugar’s board. Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital joined as new investors, while prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also participated.

The company saw sales increase by 67 percent last year and added 2,700 new customer companies, making SugarCRM, by its count, the third-most popular CRM product in the world.

In the same period, the mean angel round was $1.11 million, up from $840,000 the year before.

The same figures are more than twice as big when you count angel rounds that also included non-angel investors.

All these assessments come from analysis of 573 deals in 2011, worth a total of $873.3 million dollars, as compiled in the first “Halo Report,” a joint project of the Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights.

One important caveat, so as not to overstate the report’s findings: Median angel funding for Internet and healthcare companies, which are the two largest categories, was relatively steady year over year; the big growth came from other categories, which included mobile, software and energy.

It’s possible that part of the lift came from a move by top accelerator programs to give participating start-ups on the order of $100,000 in addition to their normal stipend, following the example set by Yuri Milner’s Start Fund and Y Combinator. However, the companies in those programs are mainly Internet start-ups.

Participants in the financing include a mix of strategic and financial investors, such as USAA, Capricorn Investment Group and GRP Partners, McCombs Family Partners and DealerTrack Holdings, GSV Capital, Passport Capital, International Investment House and Allen & Company. Debt capital was provided by Silicon Valley Bank.

The financing comes on the heels of two recent acquisitions made by TrueCar: Automotive Lease Guide (ALG), which tracks car values, and Carperks, which is a group-buying site that offers discounts on cars through programs offered to employees of major companies, like Coca Cola, Wells Fargo and Home Depot.

Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

In August, the company said it sold 20,000 vehicles, bringing the total number sold since inception to more than 350,000. It estimates that it saves consumers an average of $4,154 off of a car’s suggested retail price.

Reuters reports that the company is gearing up for an IPO in the first half of next year, and executives likened the company to the “Groupon for cars,” by offering group discounts and feeding off consumers’ desires to find the best deal possible using the Internet.

Photo Credit: futureatlas.com.

If social media today means sharing, what is media co-creation?

Really social media?

That’s the premise behind Collabracam, an app for Apple iOS that is attempting to offer a new way to create video collaboratively, in real time by using the iPhone as both the directing and recording platform.

To understand how Collabracam works, it’s useful to think of the traditional television production experience the app tries to recreate.

In a TV studio, a director stares at a bank of screens in one room, while talking through headsets to multiple camera operators in the studio. The director then gives orders to the camera operators, such as “pan right” or “zoom in,” and finally cuts between the various cameras.

Similarly, using Collabracam, up to five people sharing a WiFi connection can use their iPhones to become director and camera-persons for an instant video studio.

One iPhone in the group is designated “director” and the others are “cameras.” The cameras stream live video to the director, who makes the decisions about camera switching and shot selection.

The app then spits out a single movie file on the director’s iPhone with the cuts that were selected during filming.

The idea man behind Collabracam is Kyle Hilla, a designer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He’s the sole employee of Apptopus Inc., the company that officially makes the app.

The inspiration for the app came from Hilla’s previous work at a community TV station.

“I was hauling around hundreds of feet of big, heavy cables,” he said. “I knew there had to be a better way.”

This kind of synchronous, multi-camera collaboration isn’t yet common in the app store.

But Hilla sees more on the horizon: “Bringing people together for social media creation is going to be the next big thing.”

And Hilla isn’t alone in his thinking.

Venture firms Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank funded beleaguered app maker Color to the tune of $41 million, in an attempt to tackle similar questions.

And while Color has spent the last few months stabbing in the dark spaces of multi-user media and storytelling as well, Hilla explained that Collabracam is designed to be different.

“Collabracam is for deliberate creation — it’s not passive,” he said.

The team aspect of Collabracam’s user experience may hold part of the key to cracking the group-media creation nut.

But Collabracam has its barriers to adoption.

The app is useless without a group of users, of course. And users have to be able to think about recording video in parts and they have to work as a team.

Still, Hilla said some interesting use cases have popped up, giving some Brazilian videographers who used it as a pre-production tool to make a video storyboard before moving on to making the real thing with HD cameras as a good example.

That’s an outlying consumer audience, of course, but Hilla thinks it’s a good start — he chatted about this and more via Skype video from Michigan: