Co-founder and general partner Ben Horowitz explains, “Fund III is all about extending our capabilities to more disruptors and pioneers. We’re remaking the modern venture capital firm, and entrepreneurs are responding to our unique approach.”

The firm has raised $2.7 billion since its founding in June 2009. Its portfolio consists of 90 tech companies. These include Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon, Digg, Instagram, Skype, Zynga, Pinterest, and Airbnb, to name a few.

The new funding should help aid some more future household names.

“Software is the catalyst that will remake entire industries during the next decade,” says co-founder and general partner Marc Andreessen. “We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets.”

Horowitz wrote a lengthy blog post about not only the funding, but really history of the firm and an essay about its philosophies. For example, he writes:

Marc and I share a simple belief that became the basis for our new venture capital firm: in general, founding CEOs perform better than professional CEOs over the long term, and a venture capital firm that enables founding CEOs to succeed would help build the best companies and yield superior investment returns.

The firm says Fund III is available to be deployed immediately.

In an exclusive interview with WebProNews, the company’s CEO tells us why he thinks another entrant into the Internet radio space matters.

On what Raditaz doing with social and location different than other products, CEO Tom Brophy tells WebProNews, “Raditaz enables users to discover music the way they want to discover music…we give them several options all tied to location, popularity, trending, friends and/or personal interests. Stations are anonymous so users have no inhibitions about sharing.”

“GPS coordinates are automatically assigned to each station that is created and it is posted onto the Raditaz Music Map for anyone to discover,” he explains. “Want to see what’s playing nearby or anywhere in the US or what your friend’s listen to, just peruse the Music Map, discover and listen to any station.”

“Filter the map to show trending, popular, new, my, other and/or all stations,” he says. “This makes it easy to pinpoint the type of station that you’re looking for.”

“We rate stations so users can discover music based on what’s trending or what’s popular in various regions around the US,” says Brophy. “Trending stations are part of the ‘Stations’ section of Raditaz and can also be found in Explore on the Raditaz Music Map.”

“Users can discover music by searching on tags,” he explains. “Users personalize their music by adding ‘tags’ to their stations in order to organize their music and to make them discoverable. For example, if you are going for a run, you can search tags for “running” and discover music for running.”

“We will soon be integrating with The Echo Nest’s Music Intelligence Platform giving us the ability to create a station with up to 5 artist and/or song and/or genre inputs,” he tells us. “We also will be able to display similar artists when users are creating a station and when they are listening.”

Here are the things Echo Nest is able to provide:

With quite a few services, such as Pandora and Spotify out, one might not feel a great need for another. On this note, Brophy tells us, “There are 241 million broadcast radio listeners in the U.S, 93% of whom listen weekly, they average 15 hours of listening per week, and this category represents 80% of all listening. The industry is huge and many people are now just beginning to actively listen to Internet radio. The majority of these listeners want a personal experience without a lot of effort, more of a lean back experience. Pandora was the first to make listening simple. Discovering and sharing also needs to be simple. That is where Raditaz comes in, we generate high quality stations with over 14 million songs, enable users to discover music by tags, trends, location (music map), and all these stations are available independent of the user’s personal information.”

On what the radio landscape will look like in 5 years (Internet or otherwise), he says: “There is a major transition underway in the music space, and in particular, in the way people listen to music, mostly driven by technology.”

“Services like Raditaz are able to stream music to smart phones, tablets, computers, Internet enabled TVs, autos and lots of other devices and equipment,” he adds. “As connectivity continues to improve over the next few years, the user experience will get better and better. The growth of smartphones is and will continue to drive the growth of Internet radio for the foreseeable future. Users can effectively walk around with 14 million songs in their pockets. We’re excited about the future of radio, and believe that lean back listening will dominate time spent listening for many years to come.”

And at this year’s Web 2.0 summit, Hammer announced the imminent launch of his own search engine – WireDoo.

Set to officially launch sometime in December, WireDoo is currently in pre-beta. WireDoo.com simply prompts visitors to sign up for email alerts when the service becomes ready to use. But Hammer gave Web 2.0 a taste of what to expect.

Hammer explained that WireDoo is a “relationship-driven” deep search that he describes as “searches that go beyond the generalities, that give you more relative information in a consistent way, in one environment.”

For example, say you searched for a home. Along with the traditional results – the listings with real estate companies, the location – you will also see related content like information on surrounding schools, neighborhood activities, nearby restaurants, etc. Click on that related information and you will go even deeper. Say you clicked on nearby schools, you might see related information about GPA averages, teachers at the school, transportation and more.

He noted that “it’s about relationships, beyond the keywords.”

WireDoo is going to have to show up to the party with something incredibly special to take on the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo – but who knows? Maybe Hammer is hiding something awesome in those parachute pants.

Here’s Hammer discussing his new search engine:

And here’s this…because I absolutely tried and failed to resist it:

Unfortunately, this is exactly the scenario that our friend Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, found himself in not long ago. In 2007, the company received venture capital funding from investment firm Ignition, and earlier this year, was approached by a number of firms interested in investing further.

Fishkin told us that the company had not planned on raising funding but that it began to get excited about the potential opportunity. During the bidding process, there was clearly one firm that stood out. Fishkin said it made them a good offer and the companies signed a term sheet.

As he explained, this is “usually a done deal unless the investment firm finds fraud of some kind.” However, three weeks after the signing, the investment firm pulled out. Aside from the fact that SEOmoz did not receive the funding, he said it was also hard to understand why it happened since the firm did not give a clear reason for its action.

“That experience was new for us,” said Fishkin. “I think folks tend not to write about the fact that even after a term sheet is signed, the investor can still pull out.”

Because he has always been very open about all things SEOmoz, Fishkin wrote a very detailed post, within legal bounds of course, about the entire experience. WebProNews asked Fishkin about why he felt so compelled to be open since most companies would not go to the extreme to find out what they could actually disclose.

He told us that transparency has always been a core value of SEOmoz and always would be. He believes that this includes both the good times and the bad times.

“There’s nothing up my sleeve,” said Fishkin. “It’s all out there.”

Is it possible for a business to be too transparent? What do you think?

Fishkin and SEOmoz take transparency very seriously and believe in being upfront about all matters, even when they involve finances and legalities that aren’t flattering.

“It’s one of the qualities that consumers and business customers appreciate so tremendously much these days,” pointed out Fishkin. “We’re getting a culture, it’s particularly in the technology world, that anticipates, loves, and rewards transparency.”

With this transparency, there is also a risk since investors may avoid SEOmoz in the future out of fear of being the subject of a blog post. Fishkin admits that this is a very real concern but said it was one that he was willing to take.

“It’s a risk that we feel comfortable with,” he said. “I would rather say I’m going to commit to our core values, we’re going to do it 100%, we will be transparent no matter the costs, rather than say… we’re transparent but only when it’s convenient for us.”

Even though SEOmoz didn’t receive the funding, no one can say that the company doesn’t stick by its values. The experience, however, has made the company hesitant about raising capital in the future.

“We’re going to go back to our original mission of not raising capital,” said Fishkin. “Maybe we’ll think about it again next year, but I sort of hope we don’t.”

“I’d prefer not to go through that process,” he added. “It takes a lot of time and energy away from running the business.”

If the opportunity were to come up again, Fishkin told us that he would like his company to be in a position in which it doesn’t need the funding, so that it could walk away if it wanted. Since most startups that are covered by the Silicon Valley media receive funding, he also said that he would try to create buzz around his company before he attempted another VC round.

Although the experience was difficult, Fishkin and SEOmoz have received a lot of praise and support for being transparent. Fishkin told us the praise is a “good consolation prize” but that it was a little “bittersweet.”

Going forward, he hopes that startups will be more aware of potential issues and that investors will be more cautious.

Understanding this challenge, Pavan Katepalli came up with the idea to create a platform that would make these relationships much easier to build. His idea is called Bloggers Compete and is a platform where advertisers can encourage a crowd of bloggers to compete over a specific topic for a prize.

Through the service, advertisers create a contest for bloggers to write about a topic. Interested bloggers can then publish a post on their own blog and distribute it across social media sites. The advertiser then chooses a winner(s), and that blogger(s) gets the prize.

The benefit for the blogger is, obviously, the prize. The advertiser, on the other hand, not only gets the social exposure and increased search ranking, but it also gets targeted traffic from all these places.

“That targeted traffic – it’s kind of permanent cause it stays on Facebook, it stays on Twitter, [and] it stays on Google for a very long time,” said Katepalli.

Before a blogger is able to participate, it does have to meet certain qualifications. For instance, Bloggers Compete looks at their Google PageRank, their readership, their level of engagement, and a few other aspects to make sure that they are eligible.

Katepalli told us that he would like the platform to evolve into a community for bloggers. He wants to incentivize bloggers by offering perks to the ones that participate frequently.

He also pointed out that he sees this type of advertising working hand in hand with traditional advertising methods. He said that people are involved in a lot of different areas and that it is important for companies to be present in all these places as well.

Alyson Shontell reports, “We’re not at liberty to announce which startup just yet.  All we can tell you is that the Bieber-backed startup will be a good-natured Zynga, and it has other high-profile celebrity backers on board.”

Shontell points to the following video of Bieber playing basketball with NBA star Steve Nash, and points out that one of the other players in the video is a co-partner of Nash’s VC firm Consigliere Brand Capital.

You might say Bieber’s entire career is a product of technology and social media. You’re probably familiar with the story about how he got his start with YouTube. He is certainly no stranger to Twitter’s trending topics. Just last week, Guardian ran a piece about Instagram’s CEO who pointed out that Bieber is using his app.

There have even been legal issues arise from Bieber’s social media stardom.

Any startup investment from Bieber would also just be the latest from young popular celebrities, although he is much younger than his predecessors. Ashton Kutcher is an investor in such startups as Hipmunk, Fashism, Fab and Airbnb. Justin Timberlake is an investor in Myspace, as was announced shortly after that of the company’s sale this year.

Update 2: Peter Kafka at AllThingsD is reporting that Arrington is indeed an AOL employee, though he no longer works for AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group. He writes: “That’s consistent with what the company said yesterday, but contradicts what AOL HuffingtonPost spokesman Mario Ruiz told the Business Insider this morning. But since Sullivan reports directly to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, we’ll take her word on this.”

Here’s the TechCrunch post about the whole thing, finally. Written by Paul Carr.

Reports came out from Fortune and the New York Times that famed blogger and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is launching a new venture fund to invest in early-stage startups.

According to Fortune, his partner is Patrick Gallagher of VantagePoint Venture and the goal is to raise about $20 million.

While the NYT reported that Arrington “will take a backseat role at TechCrunch, which is hiring a new managing editor,” and that “He will continue to report to Arianna Huffington, who runs AOL’s media properties,” Henry Blodget is reporting that Huffington said in an email that Arrington isn’t being paid by TechCrunch, won’t report to TechCrunch editors and won’t export to Huffington or other AOL Huffington Post Media Group Personnel.

Arrington himself has been pretty quiet about his plans. His tweets since the news came out have consisted of:

There has been plenty of outside chatter, however. Here are some tweets from others:

Jeff Jarvis lists “a few things to keep in mind” regarding Arrington in a Google+ post:

• Arrington started as a VC who happened to write a blog to keep track of companies he was interested in for investment. It turned into a media property by accident (but with much hard and purposeful work).
• Arrington has long rejected the title “journalist.” At Disrupt, I tried to get him to take on the uniform. He adamantly would not.
• NYTimesCo also invests in startups (including one where I am a partner, Daylife) and the NYTimes covers startups. NYTimes lab also created a startup with Betaworks (News.me). It, too, is in the business of startups.
• One difference: Arrington’s fund accepted capital from other VCs’ funds. An added layer of complexity, to be sure.

Robert Scoble says, “One thing, entrepreneurs will have a tough time with: He can be tough to work with if you aren’t very adept at PR and don’t know how to handle his personality. Getting questioned by him isn’t something that will be fun, either in a board meeting, or in public on a blog.”

That personality has been on public display in past Tech Crunch posts and tweetrs, where he has had plenty of “blog wars” for lack of a better term with other AOL staff (namely Engadget).

Swisher also had a whole lot more to say about the whole thing.

Note: The screenshot with the broken image on Arrington’s bio is real. Note 2: It’s not broken anymore. Probably meaningless, but still seems appropriate enough for a screenshot.

Earlier this month, Stone posted an update on what the company is doing at the company, which originally incubated Twitter itself. At the time, he said they had signed up their first “Obvious Entrepreneur”.

Now, Stone writes,”It’s important never to delude ourselves into thinking that technology changes the world. People are responsible for change—technology just helps out. At Obvious, our goal is to foster systems that help people work together to improve the world. Our approach is threefold: Build, partner, and invest. We’ve started working on some ideas ourselves, we’re researching how best to create an investment vehicle, and today we’re thrilled to announce our first official partnership.”

“Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby have created an interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement,” he adds. “We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works. Our plan is to build something extraordinary together. The Obvious Corporation will assist the talented Lift team with strategy, design, funding, recruiting—in general, we’ll be helpful wherever possible. In exchange, Obvious will own some equity in Lift.”

Not much has been revealed about Lift so far, but Stone says that will change soon.

Unfortunately, the Lift site at lift.do isn’t much help in the details department either. It just indicates that it’s invite-only right now and you can give them your email to get updates as they become available.

Once you sign up, you’ll be send an email from Stubblebine, which says:

Hey there, thanks for signing up for the Lift Beta!

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb was able to dig up a little bit about Lift, in that it was previously called Mibbles, and at that point, he says, “users joined multiple groups with names like Happydog (as in “I want to keep my dog happy”), Love or Home. Then they gave themselves Awards when they achieved accomplishment leading towards the goals they were grouped around.”

“It sounds like Twitter in its simplicity and from what I’ve seen it looks a lot like Twitter too – but with more structure,” he writes.

Whatever Lift turns out to be in its usable form, there’s no indication of when it will actually be available.

Google has so many of its own projects going on at any given time, but the company maintains that the majority of its resources are still being put into the company’s core businesses – search and advertising. “That’s our core focus,” CEO Larry Page recently told investors, saying that they’re not betting the farm on things like self-driving cars.

But Google Ventures, Google’s investment arm, is putting its eggs in quite a few different baskets. “We look at companies in a wide variety of sectors and stages. Many of our investments are in the areas you might expect, such as consumer Internet, software, and mobile — but we’re also backing companies in areas that might surprise you — from human anti-body discovery to smart grid platforms,” Google Ventures says. “We aim to invest about $100 million a year, with deal sizes ranging from seed investments as small as a hundred thousand dollars to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars.”

So just what is Google Ventures investing in?

Antibody Discovery

Google Ventures invests in Adimab, a platform for yeast-based antibody discovery.

Social Learning Games for Kids

The firm invests in Airy Labs, which creates learning games for kids between the ages of 5 and 13.

Fuel

Google Ventures invests in CoolPlanetBioFuels, which works to develop these kinds of fuels using plant photosynthesis.

Language Learning

Google Ventures invests in English Central, which uses web videos to create language learning experiences. “Google Ventures has opened many doors for us into the wider Google ecosystem,” says Founder/CEO Alan Schwartz. “From YouTube through Android connections, we have benefited from Google Ventures’ unique status as a financial investor, with deep strategic tentacles. This has been much more than mere intros to potential partners or potentially useful technology complements; it has also included intros to experts on areas like user experience and conversion.”

Offline Information Discovery

Google Ventures invests in Hipster, which is described as “a fun way to help uncover the vast amount of information about real world locations that isn’t yet available online.”

Therapeutics

Google Ventures invests in iPierian, which works in cellular repogramming in creating therapeutics.

Legal Q&A

Google invests in LawPivot, a legal Q&A site that connects companies with crowdsourced legal answers from legal professionals.

Cars

Google Ventures invests in American car company Next Autoworks, which it says will introduce a safe, high-quality fuel-efficient car for the U.S. market.

Predicting the Future

Google invests in Recorded Future. We looked at this before. It’s essentially a tool that predicts the future when you enter the what, the who/where and the when.

Car Sharing

Google invests in Relay Rides, which the company says, “enables car owners to make money while providing those in need of a car with affordable access to one.”

Retail Price Tracking

Google invests in Shopobot, which tracks price changes at popular stores.

Weather Insurance

The firm invests in WeatherBill, which provides weather insurance products that are described as “technologically advanced.”

That’s not everything that Google Ventures invests in, but are some of the most outside the box companies and areas. You can see all of the companies Google Ventures invests in here.

Fortune’s Dan Primack brings up an interesting question, following Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility: “Will Google and Motorola ‘venture’ together?”

What photo sharing site do you use most often? Let us know.

For a quick history lesson, Photobucket was founded back in 2003 and really became a website for hosting image and video content on Myspace. News Corporation acquired it in 2007, and as Munro explained to us, even though Photobucket and Myspace were together under the same ownership, they, ironically, didn’t integrate.

What’s even more ironic is that Myspace built its own photo hosting solution. However, because of its association with Myspace, Photobucket wasn’t able to make any connections with Facebook. Since the service was declining, Fox wanted to sell it.

In December of 2009, Photobucket spun out from News Corp. and merged with mobile company Ontela. Munro says this move was “the beginning of the road for the turning point.”

This merger with Ontela brought Photobucket not only investors, which funded the spinout, but it also brought mobile technology and patents. In addition to this, Ontela brought 20 million online monthly unique visitors in the U.S.

“What we saw is, early on with Ontela, that photos were moving to mobile devices,” said Munro.

Previously, Photobucket was Web-focused, but with Ontela, the company began to target mobile. Through this focus, the company has developed apps such as the photo-filtering app Snapbucket and built up its mobile user base to nearly 6 million.

Now, the company wants to tie these goals together and provide a “ubiquitous experience between Web and mobile.”

Photobucket is also reinventing itself in other areas such as its recent partnership with Twitter. As part of the partnership, Photobucket will host the images that users upload to Twitter. Munro told us that the partnership would not only bring in revenue, but that it would also help drive awareness and traffic since every photo will have a caption that says, “Powered by Photobucket.”

“From a branding perspective, it really helps bring some of that mojo back that Photobucket had,” he said.

He went on to say that they were currently in talks with other companies in regards to more partnerships.

As for the future of Photobucket, Munro indicated that the service would make advances in video. He said they had noticed a 300 percent increase in video uploads in the last 3 months and that they believed this trend would continue. They are planning to add a video feature to Snapbucket soon as well.

“It a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a video has to be exponentially more,” he added.

It appears that Photobucket is on the right track to making a full comeback, but the road getting there was anything but easy. Munro said, “In some ways, I think a spin off is even more difficult than even a startup.”

He told us that the biggest challenge was changing the culture from a corporate one to one that was innovative and more aligned with a startup. To help encourage this new environment, Photobucket shuts down for a week every six months to concentrate only on innovative products. The company has seen new apps and services born as a result of this endeavor.

Do you think Photobucket is moving in the right direction?