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London-based family tree social network Kindo today announced a round of funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI). The Estonian investment company joins seed investors Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stafan Glanzer, the initial investor of Last.fm.

Users can build their own free family tree, invite whoever is a part of it, and stay in touch with their loved ones. Unlike a lot of English-only social networks these days, Kindo has a particular focus on the international landscape. The site currently supports 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The investment round was led by Eileen Broch, who stated in the press release, “In the short time since they’ve been live, Kindo has proven that they know how to build a product that can be embraced by young and old alike. It is already loved by families around the world, which is what appealed to us the most.“

Kindo’s main competitor in the family tree space is Geni, whose previously raised round gave it an astonishing $100 million valuation pre-launch. Having tried both products, I have to say Kindo and Geni square it off in a very tough fight when it comes to user interface, features, and the overall user experience. Being a long-time Geni user, I have no intentions of switching my family-tree of 1,000, but Kindo puts up a very compelling offer.

With the investment in Kindo and Geni’s 6 million user market lead, the family tree networking space is off to only a start and I think will be a rapidly growing space of 2008. It’s one of the ideas that we’ve yet to solve since the first family tree site from back in 1995, and with competition on the rise, the market seems more and more compelling to new users and families who would like to digitize their roots.

 Update: BigNews, what looks like a Digg/Techmeme/Newsvine combo, is revealed. See our followup post here.

Digg has been publicly on the lookout for a buyer for quite sometime now with a reported $300 million price tag. IAC, once rumoured to be acquiring Digg, is said to now be working together with the company on a white label solution with their search property Ask.com. Silicon Alley and ParisLemon reported on the rumour earlier.

“I’ve seen it, and it looks great,” Silicon Alley Insider quotes a correspondent. If IAC is working on a user generated content system with Digg, it would have to be in response to AOL’s Propeller, which, while not the market leader, stands as a second or third to Digg and must drive a fair amount of pageviews to AOL’s online empire.

IAC has a strong portfolio in acquiring and working on new web services, and the partnership with Digg — if true — would be a good test in their search for new markets to capitalize in the emergence of Web 2.0. Additionally, Digg has a pageview model which would fit nicely with Ask.com. The company has also once been a sponsor of the related online video podcast Diggnation, which leaves another floating point for rumorists to ponder.

For Digg, which has long been seeking a buyer, it could be that the partnership is a stepping stone of a future acquisition. That said, it might not make sense to be building a separate white-label property now when you’re planning to buy the company itself in a few months. Also, partnering with a competitor of other potential buyers — namely Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL — might not be the best idea at this stage since it may be the show-stopper of a possible acquisition.

We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the rumor.

AdBrite is the fourth-largest ad network in the US, ranked by page-views, according to comScore’s December 2007 MediaMetrix report. This is a huge step for the new media ad startup which just served over 25 billion page-views for December. Only the big guns — Yahoo!, Google and AOL’s Advertising.com — served more page views, an encouraging sign for the young startup.

    Advertising Networks        Pages Viewed (MM)
     1. Yahoo! Network          282,320
     2. Google Ad Network       221,476
     3. Advertising.com         58,343
     4. AdBrite                 25,446
     5. ValueClick Networks     23,111
     6. Traffic Marketplace     10,770
     7. Tribal Fusion           10,159
     8. 24/7 Real Media         9,749
     9. Specific Media          8,804
    10. Casale Media Network    7,329

Adbrite has received three rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital and Artis Capital Management totalling $35 million. Most of that money was earmarked to launch expand with new service offerings such as Spottt, their new ad sharing service which should be quite similar to Entrecard.

There have always been issues surrounding the quality of ads shown by Adbrite and most of the time this is substantiated. However, with all the new funding and the amount of publishers on board with the service already, they can improve in this area of the business and legitimately challenge the likes of Advertising.com.

Of course, this is no major breaking news to report on but seeing the number of bloggers and new media publishers that penetrate the network, it indicates a trend we’re likely to see over the coming years — and this marks a check-point right at the root of it.

Yahoo! announced today they have acquired Maven Networks, a Boston-based startup that provides video-hosting and advertising for big media sites such as Fox, CNET, and CBS Sports. NewTeeVee reports the price to be in between $160 - $170 million. TechCrunch broke the story earlier rumouring BrightCove to be the likely contender.

It’s possible Yahoo! has plans to integrate advertising inventory and technology from Maven with some of its other properties — its own video service and Jumpcut, an online video editing startup it bought shortly after the Google/YouTube deal, being two strong contenders. A demonstration of their ad network capabilities can be found on the foodnetwork.

While I can see Maven Networks fitting in nicely Yahoo!’s other properties, I must admit I am a little surprised that it’s not AOL that got away with the sale (thought, rumours say, it was a part of the bidding war.) With AOL trying to initiate their Platform-A idea, Maven would have been a great addition.

It’s safe to say that Yahoo!’s playing catchup in what seems to be their very dark days. They’ve missed the boat on almost everything that has taken place in the last few years — from search to online video to social networking — and their attempts seem half-hearted and simply unsuccessful. Though with a supposed restructuring in the works, you can’t say the same thing about their up and coming antics. Or can you?

Back in 2004 Google top three executives made a pledge to all work together for 20 years. This pact was made back in August 2004 just before the company’s initial public offering. The three men involved, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. All this information was stated in a joint interview for Fortune magazines 4th issue.

“We agreed the month before we went public that we should work together for 20 years,” said Schmidt, who added that he will be 69 years old by that time. Page would be 51 and Brin 50.

Each of the three gentleman are currently billionaires with Schmidt being Google CEO/Chairman, Page is President of Products and Brin President of Technology. This will eventually be a huge hit to Google is all three of these execs actually stick to their pact and leave at the end of 2024.

Google’s stocks are currently hovering around 548, and I don’t expect Wall Street to do any favours for the world’s most valuable Internet company in 2008. Google also has their Q4 2007 results coming out on Thursday so stay tuned for the analysis of those reports.