Venture Capital Update

Zoosk is an online dating community, they state it is the world's largest. They launched two years ago. According to them they are using the money to expand even more. They state over 40 million users in 40 countries.

Square states on their site they are going to create a new payment method to debut in Q1 2010.

StockTwits is a community driven service for stock information.

Bizo is a business to business (B2B) online advertising network. They reach business individuals and target based on business demographics such as industry, functional area, seniority, size of company, education, sex, location and more.

Ansca Mobile's platform is named Corona. They have an SDK available for developers. This allows developers of all to create and share applications designed for the Apple iPhone. Average size of an application built with their SDK is 300KB.

Many think of Smaato as a mobile advertising network. However Smaato is to mobile advertising as Rubicon and Pubmatic are to site advertising. In other words they are advertising optimizers. They have an international reach into 215 countries.

Smaato pulls advertisements from 33 networks so you do not have to. They determine what is the best value for you and optimize accordingly to achieve the largest possible fulfillment rate which I believe is up to 99%.

Vizu has a platform for testing advertising effectiveness. They call their platform the Ad Catalyst. Brands use them to measure the effectiveness of their brand advertising.

Branders.com sells promotional products. They have a "see before you buy" policy allowing you to see what the item would look like before you buy it.

They provide access to merchandise from 80 of the leading promotional products suppliers such as Champion, Hanes, Swiss Army, and Waterman. They have thousands of products, colors, and designs covering more than 20 categories and brands.

Six Degrees Games received series B funding. They are a video game and virtual world publisher. They created and own Action AllStars which is a sports themed virtual world. The target age is 6 to 14 year olds.

Ooyala just raised a third round of funding. They are a video company delivering a high-quality interactive video experience with monetization and analytics tools for video publishers and advertisers.

You may recall that they won an Amazon competition for those using their AWS services. It was very competitive as over 900 business plan entries were submitted by developers using the AWS Platform. Ooyala won the challenge, three ex-Google employees founded the company.

If you need a platform for video, this is one you should take a look at.