The Spool service is made for commuters, travelers and people with limited mobile data plans. It automatically downloads and syncs content between devices when possible. It’s still in limited beta testing, but Spool co-founder Avichal Garg said to expect broader availability in the next few months.

This isn’t just a storage service. Users can store links for their own private use, and also in the process send them to one or more of their Facebook friends.

While Spool might be most easily compared to services like Readability, Read It Later and Instapaper, Garg made other comparisons.

“We’ve built more network effects than Dropbox or Evernote,” Garg said. He added, “This is like a Path for content. It’s not about broadcasting.”

If users install a Spool plug-in for easier saving and sharing, they can also optionally see Spool buttons scattered throughout popular aggregators like Google Reader, Twitter, Quora and Hacker News.

Garg said he is prepared to fight for users’ rights to keep a personal copy of Web content for their personal use. Spool doesn’t work with content from services like Netflix that require a log-in, for instance, and it limits saved videos to 90 minutes in length.

Plus, the San Francisco-based company’s investors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and former YouTube VP Kevin Donahue, and the company is already working with attorney David Kramer, who led YouTube’s copyright defense against Viacom.

Founded in 2008, it was one of the first gaming companies to feed off of Facebook’s social graph, which allowed companies to endlessly post messages on players’ walls to get the word out about their games.

Flash forward to 2011 and the frothy days are over.

Facebook has scaled back the amount of viral activity allowed, due to all the complaints, and now the Burlingame, Calif.-based company has decided to raise $23 million in capital to fuel its next stage of growth.

The round is a big deal for the fifth largest game company on Facebook because it represents its first ever. That’s quite the accomplishment given its position compared to others.

For instance, CrowdStar registers roughly 29 million users a month vs. Zynga, which enjoys the top position by a wide margin with 248 million users. Electronic Arts, which purchased Playfish for $275 million in 2009, has 32.7 million monthly users, according to AppData.

As a YouWeb incubated company, CrowdStar previously had raised no formal capital. Contrast that to Zynga, which has raised somewhere around $1 billion if you count a nearly $500 million injection that has not yet been officially announced.

The company’s first round was led by Intel Capital and Time Warner, along with participation from China’s The9 and NVInvestments. Vivi Nevo, the largest individual shareholder in Time Warner with lots of ties to Hollywood, also invested.

“We’ve built six to seven substantial properties that have done well and we got the audience when customer acquisition was fairly easy,” said Peter Relan, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We were able to be profitable and fund the growth to 100 people organically.”

Relan declined to specify the company’s valuation or its revenues, which he said was in the “tens of millions.” No matter how much it is, it’s not enough to support his lofty ambitions for 2011.

By the end of the year, the company plans to double the number of employees it has to 200, hiring game developers, artists, producers and business analysts. It also wants to expand to mobile and other social networks around the world. Relan says the goal is to double the company’s revenues with only 50 percent coming from Facebook by year end.

“We are a Facebook social games company turning into a multi-platform global company,” he said. “It’s a very profitable business, but it can’t fund all that growth.”

CrowdStar said that it will launch four to five more games this year, two of which will be on mobile and the rest on Facebook. Additionally, it will launch two to three of its current game titles overseas this year in a few countries.

Relan said by pursuing both mobile and international growth, he’s confident that he’ll find audiences that are equivalent in size to Facebook. He’s targeting such social networks as Renren in China, The9, a game network in China, and OpenFeint’s social network on mobile phones.

Relan said he carefully picked the mix of investors.

Intel will be active in the tablet market, which may be a big market going forward for social gaming, and Time Warner will be able to contribute as social games increasingly integrate brands, such as GagaVille on FarmVille, and Playfish’s integration of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver in Restaurant City.

Last year, there were rumors that Microsoft was interested in purchasing CrowdStar.

Relan declined to comment on those rumors but said he’s thrilled to be an independent company. “We’ve been independent and historically we’ve never even had an investor to tell us what to do. We are a fiercely independent and motivated company that really enjoys the cultural freedom of creativity. We can do what we want, and that’s a rare luxury.”

By staying independent and by not raising money before, Relan also says he maintained lots of financial flexibility.

“With Zynga setting the trend, it’s a great thing to follow on. There will be people who think it is too inexpensive–I don’t know if it is–but it’s a great thing to be seen as inexpensive.”

On one of my many trips to Los Angeles (what can I say? I like to hang where LoRo* hangs), I dropped in to see Nick Grouf of Spot Runner.

As many might know, Spot Runner is an online-offline ad agency play that has gotten big funding and even bigger hype of late.

We’ll see how that goes. But Spot Runner actually seems to be tackling an underserved (and unexciting) market of local and national clients in need of cheap online ad solutions married to more traditional marketing venues to boost revenue.

Here’s my video interview with Grouf at Spot Runner’s offices on Wilshire Boulevard:

I met Grouf many years ago when he–along with Spot Runner partner David Waxman–founded PeoplePC and Firefly Networks.

Grouf sold the struggling PeoplePC–which hawked computers bundled with an online service–to Earthlink (ELNK) in 2002 for $10 million and assumption of $35 million in liabilities, in a Web 1.0 meltdown deal that followed a disastrous IPO.

He then started working for the Presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, helping figure out how to best and most cheaply place critical television ads–crunching all sorts of data about lots and lots of neighborhoods and towns and cities nationwide to figure it out.

What Grouf figured out, though, was that a system for doing so was nonexistent.

That experience turned into Spot Runner, which is essentially a do-it-yourself model that tries to iron out inefficiencies in the buying and selling of advertising and bridge the gap between the traditional and online ad markets.

Offering cheap ad templates, clients can make and place low-cost television and radio ads for small and national businesses, as well as political campaigns, and get analytics about the impact of the ads. Some ads cost as low as $500.

Spot Runner got a pile of cash to try to do that better, recently nabbing $51 million in funding to add to the $60 million already raised.

Investors include international media giants Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT.L) and Grupo Televisa (TV), investment company Legg Mason Capital Management (LM) and luxury conglomerate Groupe Arnault/LVMH (MC.PA).

Spot Runner’s previous investors are Allen & Company, Battery Ventures, Comerica Bank (CMA), Lachlan Murdoch, Vivi Nevo, Capital Research and Management, CBS (CBS), Index Ventures, Interpublic Group (IPG), Tudor Investment Corporation and WPP.

Its board includes Index’s Danny Rimer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

All that money has given Spot Runner an eye-popping valuation upwards of $500 million.

This is its biggest burden, I think, setting expectations very high for what is still a little start-up.

And while there are rumors of both Microsoft and Google, as well as Comcast, being interested in acquiring the company, Grouf dismisses the speculation.

He says Spot Runner is more intent on using the money raised to buy companies and improve its offerings.

For example, it recently bought Weblistic, a local search listings creator, and hired former Microsoft exec Joanne Bradford.

Bradford, who was a VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network, is executive vice president of National Marketing Services at Spot Runner, focusing on getting national advertisers to also think small and targeted.

Who knows whether the company will be able to overcome its hype, but time (and money) will tell.

(*And a free D6 bag for anyone who correctly identifies who I am referring to here, either by sending in a comment or an email to me at kara@allthingsd.com.)