Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the investment company established by the four co-founding engineers of Skype has invested $235,000 USD in United Dogs and Cats Ltd, an Estonian startup that offers localized social networking sites for lovers of dogs and cats.

UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com offers traditional social networking tools such as blogs, profile pages and photo sharing to pet lovers, and is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Combined the sites have over 40,000 members, not enough for it to be counted by comScore, although the new Alexa notes that UnitedDogs is a top 1000 site in Luthiana and also scores well in Malaysia and Indonesia.

UnitedDogs.com compares well to competitor PawSpot (our review) in terms of traffic but still lags (or should that be wags…) well behind market leader Dogster.

This is the second investment in United Dogs and Cats by Ambient Sound Investments, having provided an undisclosed Angel Round in October 2007. See also ASI’s May 2007 investment in Freenzo. The additional investment takes ASI’s stake in the company to 18%.

The new money will be used to expand the reach of the UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com.

disclosure: Michael Arrington is an investor in Dogster

Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II.

Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k - $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.

Some readers may have noticed that Dogster, the social network for dogs (along with sister site Catster), closed a $1 million round of financing last week. See TechMeme to catch up on the discussion if you missed it.

I was one of the investors in the round (and I’ve updated my disclosure statement to reflect that). A few people have asked me why I invested in this company. After all the principal founder, Ted Rheingold, doesn’t even own a pet. And if anything there are simply too many social networks out there today. Most of them will not survive.

I think I made a good investment decision though. Dogster was started on table scraps from a few friends and family of founders Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading. These guys kept operations extremely lean from the start, and brought the company to profitability about a year ago, just shy of their two year birthday.

Growth in terms of users, page views and revenue continues to increase aggresively. And while Dogster is still small, the company continues to run on a very tight budget. No money is wasted. They even asked me for a free $200 job listing on Crunchboard. I declined, and they bought it anyway.

Big name advertisers have flocked to the site, including Disney, Target, PetSmart, Clorox/FreshStep, Gap/Old Navy, Warner Brothers, Nintendo and VPI Pet Insurance. The fact that they stay on after an initial test shows that they are getting value for their advertising dollars.

But what I like even more than the business model and growth metrics is the team. The founders are all solid, street-smart entrepreneurs. They recently brought on Jeff Clavier and Scott Rafer as advisers, two people I have a great deal of respect for. And as part of the round Michael Parekh agreed to join the board of directors of the company as well. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and that pretty much sealed the deal for me.

As with all companies where we have a conflict of interest, we’ll disclose that when and if we write about Dogster in the future, and we’ll most likely have another writer cover them as well. In the meantime, please visit my dog Laguna’s Dogster page, and consider throwing her a bone or two.

Dogster (and sister site Catster), which turned two last January, now has competition in the pet social network space from a newcomer - Massachusetts based PawSpot. The new company was founded by Mark Roberge.

The PawSpot site is still in beta and there aren’t many users yet (Dogster has 260,000 pets and gains about 700 new pets per day). However, it’s also taking a much different approach to serving pet owners than Dogster/Catster.

First, on PawSpot a human profile is included along with a pet profile, and users are encouraged to become “friends”. Dogster does not allow any personal information about a person to be included on their site - its for pets only. However, Dogster also encourages pets to become friends, linking them on the site.

Second, while Dogster focuses on being a showcase for featured pets, a place to show them off, PawSpot seems to be aiming to provide much needed services to pet owners. In particular, arranging for friends to take care of each other’s pets while away on vacation, and finding local dog parks.

For now I’m staying with Dogster. It’s too much trouble to move the page I have up for my dog Laguna over to a new site. Also, Dogster is a refreshing break from other social networks, which always seem to degenerate (by plan or otherwise) into dating sites (well, except for LinkedIn, I guess). The lack of any personal information ensures that.

Dogster, led by founder and CEO Ted Rheingold, turned two years old yesterday. The company is located in San Francisco.

Dogster is a home page site just for dogs. You can see the page for my dog, Laguna, here as an example. A key part of the site is social interaction among dogs, and Laguna has a number of “friends” that are linked on the page. Dogster also allows tagging of photos, and has just launched a Groups feature (there are already 239 Groups) In general, humans do not interact and you do not know who the dogs’ owners are. For a lot of dog-crazy owners, this is perfect.

Needless to say, Dogster has some pretty loyal users, and the site statistics reflect this:

• Total human members: 153,000+
• Total pet pages: 185,000 (130k dogs, 55k cats)
• Average new pet pages per day: 525
• Page serves December 2005: 10,100,000
• Total photos on the site: 750,000
• Distinct friend-to-friend connections: 5,030,000
• Virtual treats givens: 7,079,000
• Total forum postings: 232,000 (1,500 new posts a day)
• Total pet diaries: 28,000+

Dogster even has a search engine for dog friendly hotels.

The story of Dogster is great, too. Ted was out of work and taking odd jobs here and there, and decided to just follow a dream and create the site. Within 3 months the site was cash flow positive and by month 18 Dogster was profitable. The company never raised outside funds other than from friends and family

Dogster generates revenue from premium accounts ($20 per year), advertising, and sponsorships both on the side and for things like “The World’s Coolest Dog and Cat Show“, which was sponsored by Target, Nintendo and others. The show, by the way, had 20,000 entrants and over 1,000,000 total votes.

Catster (launched in June 2004) is Dogster’s sister site, but I hate cats and refuse to write about it.