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Meebo, a site where users can access all of their instant messaging applications in a single browser window, is announcing a $9 million Series B round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson this evening, adding to the $3.5 million they raised from Sequoia in December 2005. As part of the round, Tim Draper is joining Meebo’s board of directors.

Our first post on Meebo was written the day it launched in September 2005. Since then we’ve watched them grow significantly (see our coverage here).

Meebo competitors include eBuddy, KoolIM and others listed here.

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New Jersey based Shycast will be launching later this month and will put a new spin on brand promotion and paid contests. Like Bix, which was aquired by Yahoo in November 2006, Shycast will sponsor video-based contests with fairly large cash prizes.

Shycast will launch with a sponsored contest by Ikea called “Break the Rules BedMaking.” Users will be asked to create a video showing how crazy and creative they can be in decorating their bedroom. The videos will be rated by other users, and Ikea will choose a group of finalists based on user feedback and other (transparent) criteria. The winner will be chosen from the group of finalists based entirely on user voting and will receive a $5,000 prize.

Founder Drew Peloso says that he hopes to create a community where brands can reach out to receptive users and engage with them directly. Brands give back to the community by sponsoring contests. Users are encouraged to tag themselves with brands they like, and to recommend new contests involving any brand. Other users will comment and vote on those suggested contests, and Shycast will then propose these potential contests to brands.

The business model is solid, if Shycast can get brands to participate. Brands pay not only the contest prize, but a fee to ShyCast that is “many time the prize amount” says Peloso.

Bix showed that contests around user generated content can be very popular. If ShyCast can tweak this model and focus entirely on brands, it could be a winner.

Peloso and co-founder Chris Bryant think so, too. They’ve funded ShyCast to date out of their own pockets, and think that they can hit profitability based just on currently signed partners who will be launching contests in the near future. Their goal is to never raise outside capital.

Sign up to be notified by email of the Shycast launch on their home page.

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Tags: Bix

San Francisco based social networking site Piczo will announce a third round of financing later today - $11 million, led by new investors U.S. Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners (an early Skype investor). Existing investors Sierra Ventures and Catamount also participated. Piczo previously raised $7 million over two rounds.

Piczo is one of the larger social networks, with 10 million unique visitors generating 2 billion or so page views per month. Their niche is younger teens - 75% of Piczo’s members are between 13-16 years old. And Piczo focuses on security and privacy. Site visitors cannot search or browse user profiles (they must know the exact URL of the member profile), and and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members. The company’s largest single market is the UK, which accounts for 40% of their users and 50% of page views.

We compared Piczo to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Tagged, Friendster and others back in September. See here for other Piczo coverage.

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London-based Spinvox is a voice to text service that we wrote about last May (see MobileCrunch coverage as well). The key product takes voicemails, converts them to text and sends them via email and/or SMS to you to read. At the time they were only available outside of the U.S. Now, they are starting to take U.S. customers.

Spinvox mainly distributes their product through cell phone carriers, although they will set up customers directly as well. Pricing will be determined by carriers, but UK pricing is here, and it isn’t cheap.

I have been lucky enough to be using Spinvox to convert voicemails to SMS text messages since December, and it has been an incredible efficiency tool. If I miss a call while I’m in a meeting, I can see the SMS message a few seconds later and decide if I need to step out immediately and call the person back. In general, using Spinvox saves a ton of otherwise wasted time.

The company has set up a blog site to allow anyone to test the product - Go here, call the phone number on the site and leave a message. It will be converted to text and posted on the blog a few moments later.

Spinvox is currently negotiating carrier deals in the U.S., but has agreed to sign up 100 TechCrunch readers with free accounts, and there won’t be any charges for converted messages. If you live in the U.S. and would like to try Spinvox now, just leave a comment below and (this is important) leave your email address within the comment itself. Spinvox will contact you with the details.

See our coverage of Seattle based Jott, a company with similar technology but a slightly different product. SimulScribe is another company doing something similar to Spinvox, and charges $10/month for 40 voicemail conversions.

Spinvox has 150 employees and has raised a significant round of financing. The company says it should reach profitability by the end of 2007.

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I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the signals NBC is giving to the market around their IPTV and social networking plans. Most of the other players have fallen into place - Fox with MySpace, CBS is in bed with YouTube, Viacom looks to be partnering with Tagworld, etc. Everyone except NBC is at least experimenting with online TV in other ways, too.

NBC seems to be choking, frozen like a deer in headlights. They were close to acquiring Tribe but backed out. A VP wrote a blog post about their strategy, admitting they were late to the game, and then deleted it. I imagine execs at NBC meeting regularly and screaming a lot for someone to just figure this out and do something.

So I was surprised yesterday to see NBC working closely with Netflix on their new streaming television and movie product. At least they are experimenting. But their mindset was displayed perfectly in a quote in the NYT article on Netflix, where a (different) NBC VP was quoted:

Frances Manfredi, senior vice president for cable distribution at NBC Universal, said her company wanted to provide video content “where consumers want it, when they want it, how they want it.” But, she added, “we really recognize that the traditional distribution businesses of cable and syndication are our primary businesses, certainly with respect to revenue generation.”

And that, frankly, is what it comes down to. “Feel free to experiment with this Internet stuff, Manfredi, but don’t do anything to hurt our bread and butter revenue streams.”

It’s what paralyzes entrenched companies with familiar revenue streams from changing, afraid to lose their “primary business”. Meanwhile, nimble startups come by, eat their lunch, and sell for $1.65 billion. If NBC was thinking straight, they’d be doing a lot more than experimenting with online TV. They’d be doing something as broad and ambitious as what Netflix is doing in the face of the ultimate demise of their DVD mailing business - spending most of their operating profit placing a very big and very smart bet on tomorrow’s world.

I don’t want to pick on just NBC, either. Another example - This is what’s holding Yahoo and Microsoft back from offering an email product that is as good as Gmail. They both have lots of customers that pay for extra storage and things like POP access. Offering a product as good as Gmail means walking away from that revenue. And it would take a bold executive to recommend to his or her superiors to kill a nice existing revenue stream and replace it with a free product just to gain market share.

For startups, this is a terrific and ongoing opportunity. It’s why Jingle can eat away at the entrenched 411 market, for example. And there are countless other opportunities as well. Just find an entrenched business. Then eat their lunch as they watch, paralyzed.

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