funding

Billionaires donate to lots of causes for lots of reasons. Sometimes the donations are business related and sometimes they’re not.

Revolution Money is an online payment company owned by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

Friendster is a social network that almost never gets mentioned in the same breath as MySpace and Facebook.  Googlers living in Australia are also a little distance away from what's seen as the mainstream.  Add these two things together, though - and toss in $20 million - and you have an intriguing development.

Which would you research more: a seemingly safe purchase when you have lots of cash, or a risky one when the economy's bad?  It makes a great deal of sense, then, that real estate site Trulia has just raised $15 million in funding.

According to new data from Dow Jones VentureSource, Web 2.0 investments remained popular last year.  More deals took place (and more money was involved) than ever before.  Yet some of the details seem a little ominous.

The economy isn't too strong right now; a lot of people are more or less sitting on their money.  But this fact makes it all the more impressive that Mixx, a social news site, has received $2 million in funding.

In a series B round of funding, the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund showed its confidence in ChaCha by tossing in $2 million.  Morton Meyerson must really like ChaCha, though - he gave the human-powered search company $8 million.

For a video-sharing site known as 5min, there’s good news and bad news.  The good: it just brought in $5 million through a round of funding.  The bad: about half of it is now owned by investors.