Ceaseless Ad Startup Funding Orgy Goes On With Ooyala

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Count 'em 11 online ad startups funded just this week and two were bought: IMMI, Covario, EVO Landing (some might not count this as online advertising but part of the biz is in ads), Germany's Adscale, AdInfuse, GoldSpot Media, Smaato, Quantcast, IGA Worldwide, Adchemy, Plus AdOn Network and Prime Visibility were acquired.
The latest funding announced is Ooyala. We had previously reported on Ooyala when it was in stealth made. It was noteworthy as its founders are Bismarck Lepe and Sean Knapp, who came from Google. Google employees who leave the company enjoy a halo effect as it is assumed that they are smarter and better connected than some jerks who left Yahoo. It will interesting to see how many failures will go down before former Googlers lose their priveledged status.
Now that has disclosed that is has raised $8.5M in 2nd-round funding led by Sierra Ventures, the curtain over the company has been lifted a bit. (BTW - Ooyala says its total funding is now at $10M. Moreover Ooyala won first place in Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge last month, taking home $100K in cash and services as well as a golden hammer symbolic of the breaking of server boxes.
Ooyala has launched a product called Backlot which allows users to measure, manage, syndicate, and monetize videos across video players. It also tracks over 20 different viewing metrics that detail the performance of online videos and syndication channels. For this Ooyala charges $0.08/hour per video served.

Read on...

also:

While E*Trade Sucks Wind, Former CEO Raises $29.6M For SocNet MOLI
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Former E*Trade CEO Christos Cotsakos left the company under a cloud but he's living large in West Palm Beach, FL and his latest startup has raised $29.6M. Mainstream Holdings did the deal with Home Depot co-founders Bernard Marcus and Kenneth Langone, and Vantis Capital Management's Steven Holzman. A local paper reports that the startup raised an initial $20M from Cotsakos and $6M from other investors.
Opening the kimono today at the Demo event, Mainstream Holdings was launched in 2004 but is launching a social network called MOLI. MOLI is led by some E*Trade refugees including COO Judy Balint who was Chief International Officer at E*trade. At launch, the firm already employees 50 heads in Palm Beach, plus others off-shore.
GigaOm has a long, thoughtful review but in our summary judgment, Moli has whiffed at launch. Maybe they will get their act together later on. The site needs to be more clear about who should use it (creative types who want to make money) and why this would be time well spent (something about creating multiple profiles for your professional and personal selves.)

It's going to be painful for the E*Trade gang to justify their valuation to investors if they can't get a handful more people to check it out soon. Call us jaded, but this is an obvious failure in the making that the rich dudes think will work just by throwing money at a trend.