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PE Hub is reporting that Demand Media, the Santa Monica based domain name aggregator and registrar, has raised $35 million in additional Series D funding. The company has now raised $355m in total.

Their marketing blurb says .. Demand Media^TM is a social media company that connects content creators and large audiences with advertisers through its network of vertical media web properties. By using its proprietary social media tools and the unique distribution platform of the world’s second largest domain registrar, Demand Media provides an interactive, personalized and vertically-focused media experience for users.

3i Group, Oak Investment Partners,  Spectrum Equity Investors.

Tags: 3i Group, Demand Media, Oak Investment Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors

Habbo, the largest virtual world for teens, has announced it has partnered with William Morris Agency, a talent and literary agency. Habbo is the first online virtual world the agency will represent in the rapidly growing digital entertainment industry.

So far, so good but at this point a crap of marketeers appear to have stepped in and written a few words …. [Read more]

Tags: 3i Group, Balderton Capital, Elisa Group, Group Partners, Habbo, Movida Group, Sulake Corporation, Taivas Group, William Morris Agency

Telcogames Limited, a leading European mobile games distributor, has announced that Juan Montes has been appointed as chairman of the board.

Montes joins Telcogames with a long and well established pedigree in console and mobile video games. His previous roles have included; Vice President of Software Development for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE), Vice President & CTO (EMEA) Mobile Content & Solutions for Motorola and MD Europe for Jamdat (acquired by Electronic Arts).

Montes extensive experience includes six years at SCEE where he was instrumental in the launch and establishment of the Sony PlayStation platform in Europe, the establishment of Motorolas’ mobile entertainment business unit followed by establishing the European arm of Jamdat Mobile.

Juan founded and operates the advisory company, Digital Content & Media Limited, where he provides strategic, operational and corporate advice to companies in the mobile entertainment sector and Venture Capital firms.

Montes is currently a non-executive director of Distinctive Developments. He was recently a non-executive director of Pocket Group, sold to WIN PLC on the 21st of January 2008. He is acknowledged as a key leader in the mobile gaming sector.

“I am delighted to be joining Telcogames at this exciting time for them and the industry at large. 2008 already feels like a year of change in the mobile industry and Telcogames are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this. It is for these reasons that I am joining Telcogames and I hope that with my experience and knowledge I will provide advice and direction to take the business forward”, Juan Montes said.

Headquartered in London, Telcogames is a global distributor of quality mobile games across all major formats including Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux, J2ME and Brew. Investors include 3i, Nexit Ventures and The Capital Fund.

The company distributes mobile games to tier 1-3 carriers globally and is regarded as the leader in «off-portal» distribution. Telcogames’ portfolio of games consists of the best mobile games from over 100 different companies.

Telcogames is privately owned, and has offices in London, Liverpool, Seoul, Norrkoping, Tel Aviv and Sydney through its recent acquisition of multiplay provider Viva La Mobile. Telcogames uses proprietary technologies to offer something different to carriers and non-carriers than other distributors are able to. These technologies include; a proprietary deployment and reporting system which currently manages all 100+ suppliers content distributed to over 150 channels (carriers and off-portals); 3G multiplayer platform (Redstar) and portfolio of games; Smartphone portfolio of games and associated toolsets; shop front technology to allow carriers and off-portals to have a dedicated Telcogames wap shop that links directly into the Telcogames deployment system so that the wap shop is automatically and rapidly updated with the latest games from all its suppliers.
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Tags: 3i Group, Digital Content & Media, Electronic Arts, Jamdat, Motorola, Nexit Ventures, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Telcogames, The Capital Fund

BSkyB the UK Satellite caster has reportedly increased its stake in Shine Group to 11.3% for an undisclosed sum. The deal has reportedly increased Sky’s shareholding from 2.88% to 11.3%.

Shine was founded by Elisabeth Murdoch shortly after she stepped down as MD of Sky Networks in 2000. It is thought that Sky, owned by Murdoch’s father Rupert, has held a stake for some time. Following acquisitive activity, Shine is now one of the largest UK indies and has been valued at up to £250m (US$500m).

Shine Ltd is an integrated media company that, through its subsidiaries, carries out film and television production, brand marketing and rights expoitation.

Shine TV and Films makes a range of programmes for UK, US and international broadcasters. The company conducts drama, entertainment, factual, features and format entertainment programming and has been involved in programmes such as Channel 4’s “100 Greatest…” series, BBC 2’s Masterchef Goes Large and Channel 4’s drama series Sugar Rush. The company aims to be a dynamic, creative and trustworthy supplier of franchise television to all buyers and strives to create television that will reach the audience in multiple ways, through interactive communcations, books, music or DVDs.

Shine’s brand marketing and venture programming company, Shine:M, is a joint venture between Shine and WPP. It is intended to bring together the TV and film activities of Shine and the media capabilities of WPP’s media investment management companies. Clients will be able to create, own and commercially exploit their own television formats through distribution, marketing, licensing and retailing.

Shine aims to benefit from and capitalise on its management team’s knowledge, expertise and contacts within the media industry.

Original Story 

Tags: 3i Group, BSkyB, Shine, Sony Corp, WPP

Audiotube Ltd., an online music video portal, has acquired industry leading video encoding and playback products and technologies from Editopia Inc (now known as CineFX), a UK based software development company that was backed by 3i and Benchmark Capital.

CineFX developed a range of consumer-based software products and solutions for mixing, editing, encoding, uploading and playback of video. Their easy-to-use applications, CinePlay, CineCode and CineMix, answered the needs of the thriving online video community.

CineFX also created NCode, a high end video transcoding platform that is at the forefront of server based encoding solutions. NCode is a commercial grade cross platform encoder that scales across multiple servers and future-proof’s the encoding pipeline through the use of plug-in-based codec’s.

Karsten Becker, Founder and CTO of Audiotube Ltd said, ‘We are very excited about the acquisition of CineFX as it gives us the technology we need to roll out our own tier 1, media streaming P2P network. This will allow us to take music videos to new places, increase our portal’s reach in the market, and create a better user experience.’

Audiotube will be open-sourcing all of CineFX’s products as part of the acquisition, bringing them in line with their core open source technology base, the openlibraries (www.openlibraries.org). All the products will be released under the GPL and community infrastructure will be put in place in order to open up the development process.

CineFX was also developing a hosted version of NCode called Vbox, which was to be rolled out as a white-labelled video hosting service. VBox was created using the ’software as a service’ model in order to give people easy access to the NCode engine. Audiotube intends to launch the Vbox portal as an end-to-end media management and distribution system tailored towards the needs of the Music Industry.

Scott DeMercado, Founder and CEO of Audiotube Ltd said, ‘The roll out of VBox as a audiotube service allows us to empower our providers with a full suite of content management tools that preserves their brands, and lays the infrastructure for us to build out a powerful online B2B portal for the music industry.’

Full Release

Tags: 3i Group, AudioTube, Benchmark Capital, CineFX, Editopia Inc