Shape Security, a company that wants to disrupt web security technology, has raised $20 million in a Series B financing round led by Venrock, with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Allegis Capital, Google Ventures, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem. The new funding brings Shape’s total amount raised to $26 million.

As we’ve written in the past, Shape Security wants to change the web security paradigm by shifting costs from defenders to hackers. The premise is that companies are forced to rely on identifying and classifying malware and botnets attack signatures that have occurred in the past, with the hopes of easily finding and shutting them down in the future. But sustaining this kind of security requires a lot of human and financial capital, so Shape has developed military-grade technology that doesn’t rely on past attack signatures, and instead forces hackers to spend more and more to achieve less and less.

There’s more big money going into video startups: Maker Studios, which ranks among the top networks of creators publishing on YouTube, announced today that it has closed a $36 million round of financing led by Time Warner Investments. The announcement confirms a previous report that Time Warner would be investing in the company.

Other investors participating include Greycroft Partners, GRP Partners, Robert Downey’s investment company Downey Ventures, Elisabeth Murdoch, FUEL, Jon Miller and Jimmy Yaffe’s investment firm M+C, Maker chairman Ynon Kreiz, Daher Capital, and Hollywood producer Jon Landau. Along with the investment, Time Warner’s Rachel Lam will join the company’s board of directors.

Maker has raised a total of $44 million to date, which has helped finance a fast-growing content production and distribution partnership of YouTube creators. Founded in 2009 by a group of independent YouTubers who decided to help each other out, the idea at the time was that by joining forces and cross-promoting each others’ content, the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. And indeed, the plan seems to be working. Maker now has more than 2 billion views per month and is regularly among the top three independent YouTube networks when it comes to unique viewers and video views.

For more information on Maker Studios, please visit their site or read the entire article on TechCrunch

With a high-stakes 2013 looming in which its first slate of in-house developed films will be released, Legendary Entertainment has raised $443 million in new equity financing, the company announced Tuesday.

The deal gives asset management and financial planning giant Waddell & Reed Financial, Inc. a stake of just under 20% in Legendary and values the production company at about $2.5 billion, according to a person familiar with the structure of the financing but not authorized to speak publicly. Chairman Thomas Tull retains majority control of the Burbank-based company.

The new financing comes on top of Legendary's deal in March that included $150 million of debt and $128 million of equity and the closing of a $700-million credit facility last year. Speaking at investor conferences this fall sponsored by Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, Tull added to growing speculation in Hollywood that he was looking to raise money or potentially preparing for an initial public offering.

For more information on Legendary Entertainment, please visit their site or read the entire article on the LA Times Site

Video syndication network News Distribution Network (NDN) jumped to No. 3 in comScore’s ranking of the top online video properties in October, with an audience of 53.2 million, up from 40.5 million in September.

NDN distributes video to more than 4,500 news sites on behalf of content partners, including Reuters, AP, CBS, Fox Sports and The Weather Channel. Coverage of the presidential debates, the election and developments surrounding Hurricane Sandy played a role in boosting NDN’s audience in October.

The growing appetite for video among newspaper and other sites generally has also helped propel NDN’s rapid rise. Its surge last month pushed it just ahead of video heavyweights Vevo and AOL, which both drew audiences of about 53 million. Facebook slipped a notch to No. 6, despite traffic increasing about 1 million to 47.8 million in October.

For more information on NDN, please visit their site or read the entire article on MediaPost

ROSEVILLE, Calif. & LOS ANGELES, Nov 05, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Revionics, Inc., the leading provider of End-to-End Merchandise Optimization solutions, and GIIV, Inc., owner of the SkuLoop business, the cutting edge provider of social commerce driven promotions for retailers and consumer brands, today announced that Revionics has acquired the SkuLoop business and assets from GIIV, Inc.

This acquisition extends Revionics' End-to-End Merchandise Optimization solutions with the addition of Revionics(R) Social Commerce, the first and only social marketing platform to deliver optimized, 1-1 incentives and rewards to targeted loyal advocates and fans, expanding loyalty and driving measurable ROI across an Omni-channel shopping episode – online, in-store, social and mobile. By infusing pre and post-transactional social demand signals into Revionics' proven science, optimization models will now have a more complete, robust and granular view of shopper behavior, driving more accurate recommendations across the merchandise continuum – product, price, promotion and place.

For more information on the acquisition, please visit SkuLoop's site, Revionic's site or read the entire press release on CNBC

Digital marketing technology firm BrightTag has sealed a partnership with Yahoo! Japan, the companies said Wednesday.

Chicago-based BrightTag makes software to help website owners manage "tags," or bits of code planted by outside marketers to collect users' data and track their preferences. The "strategic business alliance" with Yahoo! Japan means BrightTag's technology will underpin the Tokyo-based company's media services, streamlining its connection to advertisers and allowing for centralized data collection.

The partnership comes as BrightTag seeks to expand globally. In August, it acquired a London-based competitor to boost its presence in Europe. BrightTag's software platform is used on websites in more than 150 countries.

For more information on BrightTag, please visit their  website or read the entire article on the Chicago Tribune

Yahoo has acquired the company behind 1-year-old mobile recommendations app Stamped, its first since ex-Google exec Marissa Mayer became CEO of the company in July, Mashable has learned.

The acquisition was purely for talent: Stamped’s nine-person team — of which five are ex-Google employees — will be joining a new mobile product team to be established in New York under the leadership of Stamped’s three co-founders, I’m told. Stamped’s iPhone and web app will both be discontinued by the end of the year.

It makes sense that the startup was on Mayer’s radar. Mayer worked closely with Stamped co-founder Robby Stein while the pair were working at Google.

For more information on the acquisition, please visit Stamped's site or read the entire article on Mashable

Ness Computing, a startup that has developed a highly personalized, data-driven search engine, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by SingTel Innov8 with American Express Ventures participating in the round. Ness previously raised $5 million from Khosla Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners, TomorrowVentures, Bullpen Capital, a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, and angel investors.

The company, which CEO and co-founder Corey Reese compares to as a “Palantir for fun,” created a robust search engine that parses social data and produces more personalized results. Part of Ness is a recommendation engine that uses machine learning when looking at social data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and other places. The other component of Ness’ technology is the actual search engine that serves up useful results based on these signals. The combination results in what Reese calls a “Likeness Engine”.

The beauty of biNu is the simplicity with which they’ve solved the issues of bandwidth, and also how that has allowed them to roll out the application across developing nations. By including sites that have major draw, they’ve managed to quickly increase their user base across geographic regions. It’s the simple increase in connectivity that biNu gives feature phones in areas where Internet access – not to mention a 3G connection are sparse.