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Scribd chalks up another $9 million

Document-sharing service Scribd has pulled in $9 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Friday. The round was led by Charles River Ventures with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.

With the new cash, Scribd plans to speed up its product development and hire new employees.

And the first of those hires was announced in conjunction with the funding announcement: George Consagra, who most recently served as chief operating officer of AOL's Bebo, has been hired as president. (Co-founder Trip Adler has the CEO post.)

Scribd's monthly user count is now … Read more

Working overtime for venture capital funding

Editor's note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.

Entrepreneur Treb Ryan remembers in vivid detail the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted nearly 700 points and dropped below 9,000 for the first time in years.

He was visiting a major computer maker on that day, October 9, waiting to meet with a potential investor about funding his start-up OpSource.

"I was about a half an hour early for the appointment and was sitting in the lobby, where they have a big screen TV," recalled … Read more

Oxynade picks up funding for events database

Belgium-based Oxynade announced Tuesday that it's picked up a 1 million Euro series A round of funding led by investment group Arkafund along with Vinnof.

The company's current consumer service is a search engine for events called Happenr. It crawls sites for names, dates, addresses any any other information, and puts it in an index that can be searched and sorted. This is connected to a ticket-purchasing service, so users are able to browse and buy tickets to these events right from the site.

Happenr also has an API and a new iPhone app, with the former being … Read more

More cash for Facebook?

Accel Partners, a longtime investor in social network Facebook, has created two new funds that add up to just over $1 billion, according to The New York Times.

One of the funds, totaling $525 million, will be used to invest in European start-ups.

But the interesting part, at least where juicy tech gossip is concerned, is the other $480 million, which is going toward a new late-stage venture fund. A few speculative bloggers have connected the dots and taken this to mean that Accel may be looking to pump more cash into Facebook.

The firm first invested in Facebook in … Read more

Search start-up Kosmix raises $20 million

Search start-up Kosmix announced Tuesday that it had raised $20 million in a funding round led by Time Warner.

Among the funding round's participants was former Motorola CEO Ed Zander, who will serve as an adviser to the company. The round, which also included existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Dag Ventures, brings the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's total funding to $55 million.

The company also announced the beta launch of its search site, which presents specialized topic-centric search results in a "dashboard-style page."

"The site offers a 360-degree view of any … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 867: Of peanut butter and shotguns

It is a tale told down throughout the ages. Google's Internet access is a large jar of peanut butter, and As Natali reminds us, you don't kill bugs with a shotgun. Even if it is fun. If you take nothing else away from this show, at least remember that. Listen now: Download today's podcast Episode 867

UK ISPs switch on mass Wikipedia censorship http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10009938o-2000331777b,00.htm http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10116543-93.html http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/07/how-the-great-firewa.html

Technology start-ups to be given £1B fund … Read more

Huffington Post closes $25 million round

Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post has announced its latest venture funding round. The upswing: It is $25 million, not $15 million as previously rumored.

The funding comes from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Oak Venture Partners. No valuation was provided, but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher suggests it's slightly under $100 million. The company has 46 employees.

Fred Harman of Oak Venture partners will join Huffington Post's board. Previous investors include Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners.

This is the company's Series C funding round. Traffic to its Web site skyrocketed amid the hotly contested presidential election this … Read more

KickApps raises $14 million for expansion

KickApps, a company that offers on-demand social networking and widget platforms, announced Tuesday that it raised $14 million in Series C funding. The round was led by North Atlantic Capital, Softbank, Spark Capital, and Prism Ventures.

The funding will be used for expansion into new markets, as well as product development, which the company believes, will help it spur growth in the market.

"KickApps is aggressively extending the scope of services we provide online publishers in a number of important ways," said Alex Blum, KickApps CEO in a statement. "As a next generation website operating system, our … Read more

PlaySpan lands $16.8 million in funding

PlaySpan, a company that specializes in digital microtransactions and payment services, announced on Tuesday that it raised $16.8 million in Series B funding from Easton Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, STIC Investments, and other undisclosed investors.

According to the company, the new funding will be used to expand its operation into Europe and Asia, which company executives believe are untapped markets that offer growth potential for PlaySpan.

"Online-game publishers and social-media application developers are looking for new sources of revenue beyond traditional advertising and subscriptions," Karl Mehta, founder and CEO of PlaySpan, said in a … Read more