Made by Many's summary of the weekly tech news

Following on from my post last week, here's what's been happening in the tech space this week. The companies being invested in are certainly those that are truly a) hot and happening and b) showing a lot of potential for growth. 

The Lance Armstrong Foundation made $3million last week when it sold its shares of Demand Media during the latter's IPO, which they received as stock options as part of a deal signed when livestrong.com was built. Interesting lesson for charities who have some money lying in their coffers, if they have the right platform and support. 

AOL has revamped their consumer programming strategy with video at its core and backed this up by acquiring Goviral, which distributes video content for brands, content producers and advertising agencies. Goviral's tagline is 'guaranteeing audiences and user initiated video plays for advertisers on a pay-for-performance basis'. 

 

Mobile is never far from investors' hearts: Canadian provider of mobile data intelligence Neuralitic Systems got $8million in funding from investors to aid its plan of expansion. It extracts 100% of data usage from its subscribers via a wireless network and provides this to mobile operators thanks to its in-house intelligence platform Seven Flow. 

 

Nokia recently led an investment round of $8m for Voddler, often called Scandiniavia's answer to Netflix, which plans to expand its offering into the mobile field. Voddler has 850,000 customers and served 5 million videos from a catalog of 3,500 movies in 2010. That's nothing compared to Netflix' 100,000+ titles, but it's all about potential - and obviously the US market is far bigger. 

 

Sometimes the sheer numbers of people who actively participate in niche communities on the web astonishes me. The Experience Project attracts 4.5 million members a month who visit the site to discuss their experiences around specific topics, and Peter Jackson, who amongst other things sits on the board of Eventbrite, last week raised $2 million for the cause marketing service. TechCrunch are rightly skeptical about the future of cause marketing, but for now, it seems to be smooth sailing for the Experience Project. 

 

Instagram is on a lot of people's minds at the moment - it has grown rapidly to over 1.75 million users in just a few months of launch. A couple of days ago, they attracted $7m in funding, with investors in Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Adam D'Angelo of Quora, amongst others. News has it that they're working on announcing something at SXSW in March, so stay tuned. 

 

Spotify hasn't yet been able to overcome the obstacles presented by the US market, but in the meantime social music startup Rdio, founded by the same people who started Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, just attracted $17.5 million in funding - that's a LOT of money! Time for Spotify to buck up!

 

Instagram or no Instagram, Path's star seems to continue to shine brightly: well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins led an investment round of $7.5 million for the company. This week, Path also said no to a crazy-sounding offer from Google, of over $100 million. Like us, not many people think that's a particularly smart move:  

 

Ah, well!