FameCast Raises $4.5M in Funding

FameCast , the online talent show , has raised $4.5 million in funding from Austin Ventures. FameCast hands out $10,000 in cash prizes to the winner of each of its twelve ’stage’ contests, spanning art genres such as spoken word, animation, and stand-up comedy, along with the expected music categories for Pop, Country , R&B, etc. Contestants submit videos of their work to their respected ’stage’. Users vote for who they like best, and the contests last for an entire ’season’. FameCast’s recent funding will go towards expanding its marketing efforts in the U.S. and around the world.

PeakStream Trail Leads To Google

Google’s acquisitions are usually pretty smooth deals; at most, a ‘welcome, Google!’ statement shows up on the lucky company’s homepage.Р’В  Now, a report indicates that PeakStream has been bought by Google, yet the company no longer even has a front page - the whole site is gone.

Scribd Banks $3.5 Million from Redpoint

Scribd , dubbed the ‘YouTube for Documents’, was the dark horse of their Y Combinator class, but the social document sharing site now gives its critics pause to think. Since launching, traffic to the site scaled quickly to 75-100,000 uniques per day with a little help from popular link aggregation sites like Digg. This past month they logged 1.73 million unique visitors. Today Kinsey Hills is back, investing another $210,000 alongside $3.5 million from Redpoint, with Geoffrey Yang joining the company’s board.

VCs re-up SocialText

SocialText, a startup that makes collaborative wiki platforms for enterprises, has raised $3 million toward a $6.5 million Series C venture financing , according to a regulatory filing. The company is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP and the Omidiyar Network, from which it has already raised $3 million in its Series B. Other backers include tech executives Mark Pincus, CEO of Tribe.net which sold the majority of its assets to Cisco earlier this year, Reid Hoffman, the Chairman of LinkedIn.