The new investment brings the total amount of money that Business Insider has raised to $18.3 million. In the memo to staff, Business Insider CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget writes, “This capital will allow us to continue to invest aggressively in many areas of the business, including editorial, tech/product, sales and marketing, subscriptions, and events. As we mentioned last night, it will also allow us to expand our office.”

Blodget tells AllThingsD that “the new deal values the company above the $50 million valuation it earned during its last round in 2011.”

Business Insider reportedly lost about $3 million, or a quarter of its revenue, in 2012, though Blodget says the site turned a small profit in the first quarter of this year. Business Insider is known for its short news pieces and slideshows. According to the BI memo, Jeff Bezos said that he “sees some parallels with Amazon.” Blodget said the site will now include a disclosure statement whenever it writes about Amazon.

There had been a number of reports about Spotify seeking new financing in recent weeks, including some that pointed to a high likelihood of Coke being involved. The soda maker struck a first partnership with Spotify in April, which included Spotify powering Coke’s music sites and Coke adding Spotify to its Facebook presence. Coke also sponsored a Spotify music hackathon in New York earlier this year.

This isn’t the first time Coca-Cola is trying its luck at digital music: The company launched its own download store dubbed MyCokeMusic in the UK and other countries in 2004, but the endeavour was hampered by its use of Windows media DRM, and eventually closed down in June of 2006.

The new round of funding brings the total amount of money raised by Spotify to $288 million.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Erik Pitti.

Twitter is already integrated into most of Apple’s products, including the iPhone and iPad, and its OS X operating system for laptops and desktops — users can post to Twitter from within applications and apps with a single click because these devices are connected to the real-time network at fundamental level. When Apple originally announced the deal with Twitter last year, it marked the first time that the company had integrated any third-party service other than Google into its operating systems in such a way. And it has been incredibly powerful in driving usage for Twitter, as CEO Dick Costolo has described.

In effect, this arrangement outsourced the social aspect of almost all of Apple devices and software to Twitter, and was an admission of sorts that social elements and social software have been an Achilles heel for Apple for some time — as lackluster attempts such as Ping and Game Center have shown. The deal was also seen by many as a slap in the face to Facebook, which had discussions with Apple earlier about integration into Ping but dropped them; then-CEO Steve Jobs said Facebook’s demands were “onerous.”

Getting cozier could help both companies

Since then, Apple has started working with Facebook again, and some form of integration with the social network is expected to be included in the latest version of Apple’s iPhone and iPad operating system, as well as the new version of OS X, Mountain Lion. But Twitter still has the preferred spot inside Apple’s OS so far, and taking the iconic consumer electronics company on as an investor would cement that status. For Apple, meanwhile, becoming an owner would theoretically give it even more sway within Twitter — although it could be argued that the company already has a fairly significant relationship with the network.

Does Apple need to control Twitter completely in order to benefit from that integration? Not really, as I explained in a post after Barry Ritholz argued that Apple should acquire the company — but a sizeable investment would give it some sway in board meetings and in other ways that could give it more control, and if there’s one thing Apple likes to have, it’s control.

According to the NYT report, the investment from Apple would have given Twitter a market value of $10 billion, substantially higher than the $8 billion private valuation it had after its most recent venture-financing round — and some have speculated that Apple might even want to acquire the entire company, something it could easily do with the more than $100 billion it has in cash and marketable investments. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, meanwhile, has said that Twitter has no need of extra financing because it has “truckloads of money in the bank.” Whether Apple can change his mind on that score remains to be seen.

Update: The Wall Street Journal says that according to its sources, discussions between Apple and Twitter about an investment were held a year ago, and there are no current acquisition or investment talks going on between them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and George Kelly

The round was led by new investors New Enterprise Associates, Shea Ventures and Correlation Ventures and included participation from previous investors.

“The intersection of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley is really where we see the future of media and we are well-positioned to lead the publishing industry into a digital world,” Say CEO Matt Sanchez said in a statement.

Last week, Say appointed Time magazine publisher Kim Kelleher as its new president. She will start in September. The company now owns six properties and has exclusive partnerships with 13 others, including Fashionista and food52. Its ad network includes 500 sites and the company says it reaches a global audience of 400 million.

This is technically Say’s first round of funding. Its predecessor entities, ad network VideoEgg and blog platform Six Apart, each raised several rounds as separate companies, totaling $79 million.

The funding round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures.

Read It Later relaunched as Pocket in April and made its app completely free. The company says it has nearly six million users, up from about 4.5 million in April, saving a million pieces of content a day. It is integrated into over 350 third-party apps, including Flipboard and Twitter. Thirty percent of the content saved to Pocket is saved from news and reader apps.

According to the company, the funding comes from Anthem Venture Partners, Daher Capital, DFJ Frontier, LaunchPad LA, New World Ventures, The Media Farm and Social Starts, as well as angel investors Diego Berdakin, Dave Goldberg, Peter Gotcher, Clark Landry, Adam Lilling and Dan Murray.

Founded last July, Big Frame is part management company, specializing in helping emerging YouTube talents such as MysteryGuitarMan, Destorm Power and Mike Diva monetize their efforts.

In addition, the company functions as a production company. And it also specializes in branded content, working with a brand roster that includes 20th Century Fox, Levis, The Home Depot, Sony Electronics, THQ and Virgin Mobile. In April, capitalizing on Google’s premium content investment initiative, Big Frame launched its own YouTube channel, Bammo.

“We will use this round to continue investing in profitable models for content programming and marketing on YouTube,” said Big Frame CEO Steve Raymond.

DramaFever is an interesting service because it proves that niches are working online. The company has been bringing Korean dramas to U.S. and Canadian audiences, offering users the option to either watch ad-supported shows for free or subscribe to an ad-free version. DramaFever has also been supplying Korean dramas to sites like Hulu.com, and it’s been successful at bringing this type of content to new audiences. Seventy-five percent of the service’s viewers are not Asian, Bak told me during an earlier interview.

The company now wants to use the new influx of money to venture both into new types of content as well as new markets. On top of Bak’s list are telenovelas, which he sees as a natural fit for the company’s focus on TV dramas. And for that type of content, NALA is a great partner: the investment company is headed by Emilio Diez Barroso, whose family owns Televisa. But Bak told me that Bollywood, K-Pop and even TV shows from Turkey have a lot of potential as well.

Geographically, Europe is one of DramaFever’s next targets, with an expansion possibly coming before the end of this year. “Today, we are a North America-focused business,” explained Bak. “As we go into Europe, Bertelsmann is a great partner.”

DramaFever originally announced its Series B round of funding for $4.5 million in March. The round led by MK Capital also includes money from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Google product management director Benjamin Ling. Additional new investors include Machinima co-founder and CEO Allen DeBevoise and Lowermybills.com founder and CEO Matt Coffin. And if that wasn’t enough name-dropping already, former Fox Television Entertainment Group Chairman Sandy Grushow just joined the company as an advisor as well.

Check out my previous interview with DramaFever CEO Seung Bak below:

While Google has given what amounts to seed money to its video production partners in the past, this contribution marks the first time the company has offered major capital backing for one of them.

Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital also contributed to the Los Angeles-based production company’s fourth funding round. Through three previous rounds, all led by MK Capital, Machinima raised $14.6 million.

Machinima has emerged as Google-owned YouTube’s third most popular video channel, commanding 23.1 million unique viewers in April, according to research company comScore. Notably, Machinima offers better engagement than any other top YouTube channel, with viewers, on average, spending 65 minutes in April viewing it, comScore said.

Machinima said the funding will be invested into its “content and global sales operations, international expansion, distribution strategies, and product and technology initiatives, as the company strives to create a global video programming brand that transforms the way a new generation.”

According to The Next Web, the funding will be announced Friday, the same day as Facebook’s IPO.

Pinterest has raised $37.5 million in funding so far, with lead investor Andreessen Horowitz valuing the company at $200 million as of October 2011. Since then, the company, which is still invite-only, has grown quickly. It had 17.8 million monthly uniques in February 2012, according to comScore, up from 11.7 million in January 2012.

The “crowdsourced” question-and-answer site Quora raised more than a few eyebrows on Monday when it closed a new $50-million round of financing that values the fledgling company at $400 million, despite a conspicuous lack of scale when it comes to users. Is this just another example of the bubble-style funding rounds that have made Instagram and Pinterest the talk of the VC business, or a sign of how much power the “Facebook mafia” has in Silicon Valley? Or is Quora really onto something that could potentially turn into a multibillion-dollar idea?

Quora has more or less admitted that it doesn’t really need the $50 million it just finished raising, at least not yet. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo said (on Quora, of course) that more than half of the Series A funding round of $11 million the startup raised in 2010 is still sitting in the bank, unused. So why raise that much money at all? As Om has noted, one reason Quora did so is simply that it could — there was apparently plenty of interest, and the company wound up with financing from original Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others.

Raising money is easy for Quora, so why not do it?

This is the startup version of the old adage “make hay while the sun shines,” and when two of your co-founders are Facebook alumni — Adam D’Angelo was the chief technology officer of the social network, and Charlie Cheever oversaw the development of Facebook’s “open graph” platform — there is plenty of hay to be made, especially since both founders are likely to become extremely wealthy when Facebook goes public (more than a third of the $50 million that Quora raised reportedly came from D’Angelo himself). More than anything, VCs love to give money to people who don’t need it.

D’Angelo has said that one of the reasons Quora raised the funding is so that it would have more “runway,” or room to prove itself and its concept before it has to start making money. And it’s clear, based on interviews with the founders, that the company sees what it is building as a potentially world-changing idea. Both seem devoted to it not because they believe it will be easy to flip or sell for billions of dollars (which they don’t really need), but because they think there is an interesting problem worth solving. As Cheever told me in 2010:

We’re not really focused on making money right now. I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.

In a nutshell, that problem is how to aggregate or crowdsource expertise on a wide variety of topics efficiently, and it’s one that any number of startups and services have tried to tackle, all the way from Yahoo Answers and Ask.com to Formspring, Reddit and Stack Exchange. And most have failed: Yahoo Answers and others have degenerated into cesspools of uselessness and spam, while companies like Aardvark disappeared inside Google and other acquirers, never to be seen again. Facebook launched its own Questions service in 2010, but there’s no sign that many people are using it much.

Among those who have tried to attack the problem from a different angle are sites like Demand Media’s eHow, which pays writers to come up with articles that contain some kind of expertise about a topic. Interestingly enough, eHow was built by Josh Hannah — who bought it in 2004 and built it into a major player before selling it to Demand Media, and is also an investor in an open-source spinoff called WikiHow. Hannah, now a partner with the venture-capital fund Matrix Partners, is an investor in Quora’s latest financing round.

Wikipedia is the model, but can Quora mimic its success?

Despite all the failures, there is one obvious example of a successful crowdsourced knowledge base, used by hundreds of millions of web surfers daily: Wikipedia. More than a decade after it was originally launched, the site is one of the top 10 most-visited web destinations on the Internet with 15 billion pageviews per month. And even more unlikely, Wikipedia has accomplished this feat without raising any venture-capital funding whatsoever, relying solely on donations and charitable funding.

The two sites have somewhat different approaches: Wikipedia asks users to contribute links and verified facts to articles that are designed to be a one-stop source of information about a topic — contributors are explicitly not allowed to state opinions based on their personal knowledge. Quora, however, tries to get those with knowledge to answer questions about specific topics, and then the community gets to vote on which answer they like best. Both sites have strict rules about what kinds of content can be posted, to avoid the Yahoo Answers problem. As a user of the site, I’ve found the quality of the answers to be consistently pretty high.

One of the main things that has helped Wikipedia grow as quickly as it has is the fact that it ranks extremely highly in Google search results, since it is seen by the search giant as an unbiased source of factual information. Given that kind of traffic, Wikipedia could easily generate hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenues if it added some innocuous banner advertisements to its pages (something it refuses to consider). And some Quora supporters believe that results from the site could benefit from the same phenomenon, especially as Google looks for more social signals about information.

So the ingredients of a compelling story are there: founders who have their eye on a big vision, who aren’t motivated solely by a quick flip for cash, and who are trying to build a Wikipedia-style global knowledge database powered by individual input from experts. The fact that Quora’s usage numbers seem a little lackluster is the only fly in the ointment for believers — but then, there was a time when Wikipedia wasn’t really a household name either.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier