San Diego-based Slacker , the online personalized radio service backed by Mission Ventures, Austin Ventures, Centennial Ventures, Rho Ventures, and Sevin Rosen Funds, said Thursday that it is adding ABC News to its Slacker personal radio service. The firm said that the firm's listeners will have access to a dedicated news station including ABC News content. Slacker said the new service will feature news segments from Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, Good Morning America, Nightline, and more. Financial details of the deal were

Los Angeles-based RotoHog , which develops fantasy sports games, announced Monday that the firm has signed on Sporting news, to create fantasy games for the brand. According to RotoHog, it will build free and paid online fantasy games for football, basketball, hockey, golf and motor sports for Sporting News, to be featured on the publication's web site. RotoHog is headed by Kelly Perdew, and is venture backed Financial terms of the multi-year agreement were not disclosed. RotoHog said it will begin providing the games, starting with football, in late summer 2009.

Los Angeles-based SodaHead.com , an online site focused on a combination of news discussion and questions and answers, announced today that the firm has connected the site to Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo. According to the site, it has added the ability for users to automatically distribute questions and news articles to their online friends and followers, by providing login information to their social ntweorking accounts. The new integration allows users to automatically post questions from the site to a Twitter feed and Facebook status updates, or distribute them to Yahoo's contact lists.

I spoke about this yesterday on Fox Business News.  I’ll I spotted my fellow VC Leo Spiegel (from Mission Ventures) who had spoken previously to the same group and asked about his experiences. My choices – talk about the VC industry and where it is heading (which is what the dean asked me to cover), talk about how to start companies (which is partly what Lada Rasochova , the director of the entrepreneurship program asked me to cover), talk about how to get into VC (which a few students asked Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s

VentureWire cited a regulatory filing in reporting the news. Slacker is venture backed by Austin Ventures, Centennial Ventures, Mission Ventures, and Sevin Rosen Funds, and had previously raised $53.5M Tags: personal radio slacker venture capita San Diego-based Slacker , which operates an Internet radio service, along with selling a music player linked to it service, has reportedly scored a $5M bridge financing round, according to industry publication VentureWire. in funding.

Los Angeles-based RotoHog , developer of online fantasy sports games headed by Kelly Perdew, has confirmed that the firm's recently $2M funding came from Mission Ventures. In an open letter to customers earlier this week, Perdew said the funding from Mission will help the company grow as a brand. RotoHog currently has deals to provide white-labeled fantasy football games to Sporting News, NBA.com, This publication had reported on the funding last Wednesday. READ MORE>> ...Tags:

Encino-based SodaHead.com , the venture backed, online questions-and-answers site, has swizzled its web site, saying this week that it has redesigned its site to make it easier for its users to find topics. Among updates to the site are new category links to make it easier to find questions and answers, and a way to link and share news articles on the site. The firm's SodaHead.com also provided details on its site traffic, saying that it now has over 1 million registered users, and is seeing around 2 million unique visitors per month. SodaHead.com is venture backed by Mission

GGL operates a video game social networking site, which provides news, communities, and online gaming tournaments and competitions. The firm is venture backed by Mission Ventures, Selby Ventures, and the Tech Coast Angels; the firm's technology is a result of CIA-funded research efforts at USC. Pasadena-based Big Stage Entertainment , which develops 3D avatar technology, said today that it has partnered with video game company GGL Global Gaming, to provide free game content on its web site. According to Big Stage, the deal will allow users on the site to insert

A study of the venture capital deal flow in Southern California conducted by socalTECH shows that venture capital deals dropped for Q3, to around $720M in deals, in a market dominated by clean technology firms. The numbers, which were drawn from venture deals tracked and reported in socalTECH's proprietary venture capital database, found that there was $719.7M in venture capital deals in the third quarter, down dramatically from $1.2B invested in Q3 of 2007, and down slightly from venture numbers in Q2, when there was approximately $966M in venture deals. The

The number of venture fundings and companies we cover on the public side (RSS feeds, news, etc.) is dwarfed by the number of non-announced venture funding, new companies, and other information you can mine from our database .  (yes, Once upon a long time ago, our main competition in covering Southern California technology news was the Digital Coast Reporter–run by Jason Calacanis, pre-bulldogs. There’s a new craze on Facebook, where people are tagging their friends and posting “25 Random Things About Me”. The idea is to share random facts about