Unity combines a development platform with a 3D game engine in a software package that enables high performance 3D interactive content for Web, Mac, PC, iPhone and Nintendo Wii games. The platform is currently used in games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online by ElA, the Quest for R2D2 by LEGO and FusionFall by Cartoon Networks.

Earlier this year, Unity for iPhone was released and the company says more than 325 games are using its engine to power their iPhone games today.

The company has recently moved its home base from Copenhagen, where it has been operating for years, to San Francisco, though its core development team is still in Copenhagen.

Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital, and Greene will be joining the board of directors.

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The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and individual investors.

Wall Street Journal blog Digits broke the news earlier this morning, and reported that DailyBooth has secured ‘roughly’ $1 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Betaworks, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

In an interview with DailyBooth co-founders Ryan Amos and Jon Wheatley, we learn that its users use the site like real-time poster child Twitter only with webcam-shot photos, which they say is in line with current trends of more personalization in short-form online communication means. The company says it’s currently receiving about six million monthly unique visitors, a number that’s reportedly still growing by about 35% a month. Talk about swift adoption and viralness.

The two men also went into the demographics a little, saying that the majority of its user base is located in the United Stated and other English-speaking countries such as the UK and Canada (which makes all the sense in the world, since the service isn’t multi-lingual yet). The majority of its users are 15-to-25 years old women, they add.

DailyBooth says it will use the extra cash to help them scale the service first and think about making money later on – currently they’re thinking in the direction of media-based businesses, premium offerings and offline distribution like photo-printing.

In conclusion: DailyBooth is growing fast, has gotten the attention and money from some of the nation’s most prolific and well-connected investors in real-time Internet startups and doesn’t appear to be all too worried with monetizing the service just yet.

Its co-founders were right: it is very much like Twitter.

Update: A couple more angels to announce: Former Googler and current Twitter advisor Chris Sacca and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia.

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As with the Series A round, this second round of funding remained undisclosed, although our contact person at the company ensures it that this was an “up-round” financing and that the valuation was “50% higher than the last time” it attracted outside capital.

The startup, based out of Tel Aviv but active worldwide, says it will use the funding to further fuel its expansion and explore new business opportunities in the search marketing space.

Kenshoo’s flagship product, Kenshoo Search, is billed as an end-to-end SEM platform and essentially automates most if not all of the work usually carried out by marketing consultants (who are of course much pricier than automation software). In that regard, Kenshoo also competes with bid-management software from all the online advertising giants (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture) but at the same time goes a step beyond that by taking a look at the quality of the campagns. Kenshoo is able to find relevant keywords across different search engines, and automatically changes campaign specifics to maximize their returns.

In the economic downturn we’re in, marketers should be focused on building or maintaining decent levels of Website traffic and drive better conversions. Search marketing is still the best customer acquisition tool in the online space, so it’s not a surprise that eMarketer predicted continued growth from 2008 to 2013 in a very recent report on the state of SEO spending in the U.S.

If Kenshoo can keep winning customers over by cutting out the middlemen and maximizing campaign ROIs, it definitely has potential to continue riding that wave and keep / make their investors happy.

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Yesterday, I reported a strong rumor that Sequoia Capital had invested in image-hosting site ImageShack. Today, I spoke with CEO and founder Jack Levin. He would not comment specifically on the funding rumor other than to say that over the past few months he’s been in discussions with a variety of VCs. So he may still be in the late stages of discussions, or he may have closed the round. He really wouldn’t say. But at the very least, he is definitely looking for funding.

He was, however, very forthcoming on other aspects of his business. And outlined a grand ambition befitting an early employee of Google (his claim to fame is the clustering architecture that Google is based on).

Levin did want to correct a few things from the original post, in which I said he has self-funded the startup until now. “I never put a single dime into the company,” he says. Unless you count the $80 for the first month of server hosting back in November, 2003 when he was still working at Google. But that month the company made $200, so it has been profitable from the start. His secret:

We were profitable for the last three years. The most different thing about our company is that it would take 7 to 8 million dollars in opex [operating expenses] per year to run a media hosting company like ours if you were using traditional non-off-the-shelf clustering technology, where we use a tiny fraction of that amount, which allows us to be profitable and take risks other companies can’t.

Because of the way he designed his back-end architecture, he can serve two terabytes of images from a single $1,000, Linux server. So he spends only about $200,000 a year on capital expenditures and now has about 500 servers. He was also able to leverage his industry connections to get really cheap bandwidth rates.

Also, subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenues. Most of the revenues come from advertising on the site. ImageShack serves about 10 million ads a day, mostly to people who go to the site to upload their images. Although the site also attracts 500,000 brand new visitors every single day. Levin also notes that it is “unlikely we will ever modify the image” with ads because “that would be like spamming the Internet.”

Rather than put ads in or around the images it hosts, Levin is working on harnessing all the data his service generates about content consumption (perhaps to better target advertising on ImageShack or to syndicate that targetting data to ad networks). Like Google and Yahoo, he is deploying the open-source Hadoop software to create a massive distributed supercomputer, but he is using it to analyze all the data he is collecting. Levin is vague about how he plans to make money from this data, but it is clear he is convinced the data is pretty valuable. He explains the opportunity in broad strokes:

We are like a broadcasting company that broadcasts in every country, in every language, on every topic. There are a lot of misconceptions in the Valley that the Internet is just two or three companies. But that is not true.

Don’t you think it is ridiculous to see business plans based on how many Facebook widget users you have? We have millions of Websites using our services. It doesn’t matter what Facebook does.

So I am still not sure if Sequoia funded his startup, but I can see why it would want to.

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Update: See follow-up post here with comments from ImageShack CEo Jack Levin.

If you had to name the top five image-hosting services on the Web, would ImageShack be one of them? It turns out that it is No. 5 in worldwide visitors, with nearly 28 million last March, according to comScore. (Ranked above it are Facebook Photos, Flickr, Picasa, and PhotoBucket). You might be more familiar with ImageShack’s familiar frog logo, which appears on many of the photos it hosts across the Web.

Sequoia Capital is familiar with ImageShack and its frog. Although it hasn’t been disclosed anywhere, a reliable source tells us that Sequoia recently invested in the company. Sequoia’s investment is believed to be in the $10 million range.

Up until now, ImageShack was entirely self-funded by founder Jack Levin, who built the service himself with his brother and a few part-time employees. The company claims it is already turning a profit (it charges an $8 a month subscription fee for unlimited image uploads). Levin was employee No. 25 or 26 at Google. He was the engineer who built Google’s early server clusters and self-healing architecture. At ImageShack, he has taken a similar approach to creating a site that serves 2.5 billion images a day.

Placing ads on just a fraction of those images could become a much more lucrative business than trying to upsell subscriptions, and that apparently is why Sequoia invested. Figuring out how to put ads in or around images on the Web is a big opportunity. It is a problem that Google (another company Sequoia invested in) is working on. Just earlier today at the Google Factory Tour, for instance, the company noted that hundreds of millions of image searches are done on Google every day and that it is experimenting with both display and text ads paired with image search results. But it is having a tough time.

Someone is going to figure out how to serve relevant ads on all those billions of images on the Web. Sequoia is betting that person will be a former Google employee rather than a current one.

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The Wall St. Journal (subscription required) was among several sources this morning who reported that an announcement between Google and YouTube could come later today. The WSJ also confirmed an estimate that Sequoia Capital holds roughly 30% of YouTube, something we had previousy speculated on.

One source close to YouTube tells us that founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim each stand to make between $100 and $200 million from the deal. How much will Sequoia take?

Sequoia was among YouTube’s first funders, providing $11.5 million in two rounds. When $25 million more was rumored to have come from parties unknown this April, Michael Arrington wrote that Sequoia likely did whatever it could to maintain it’s equity share in the company. He estimated that share was between 25% and 30%.

What does this mean? If Sequoia put in $11.5 million for 30% of the company, and if in fact YouTube is being acquired for $1.6 billion then Sequoia’s stake translates into approximately $480 million (subject to a slight adjustment upwards if Sequoia had what is known as participating preferred stock). That’s a multiple of more than 41 times what was invested in a company founded in February 2005. It may not upend the recent argument that the VC model is broken, that there are few huge exists available and not much else, but it’s certainly interesting to consider.

These numbers beg comparison with Sequoia’s investment in Google. According to Bill Burnham’s respected analysis last summer of Sequoia’s take from the Google IPO the fund turned a $12.5 million investment in 1999 for 10% equity into roughly $4.7 billion. That was at much lower stock price at IPO; the stock initially sold at $85 per share, today it’s up to $430 per share on a $131 billion market cap.

So Sequoia won’t make a Google-like return on their YouTube investment. But a 41x return on an investment made a year ago isn’t something to sneeze at, either.

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