Editor's note:
John Heggestuen johnh@businessinsider.com
AP
The news comes after weeks of speculation on how much funding the company was seeking as well as what investors would be involved in the round.
With this round, Snapchat has raised $123 million in funding so far.
The company is rumored to have recently rejected two buyout offers: a $4 billion offer from Google and a $3 billion offer from Facebook.
If these rumors are true, Google and Facebook may have been interested in the photo- and video-messaging startup because of its popularity with people under 25. Capturing this largely mobile audience has become a dilemma for Facebook in particular.
While Snapchat could have proved valuable to these companies because of the site's user base demographics and these users' considerable engagement, on its own Snapchat does not have any active revenue streams and exactly how the company plans to monetize is still in question. (Forbes)
In other news...
Mashable's Lance Ulanoff speculates that Facebook-owned Instagram may unveil a live communication feature similar to Snapchat at the company's event planned for today. (Mashable)
Extole, a referral marketing company raised $5 million to incentivize referrals. The idea behind Extole is for brands to use the platform to provide offers to people who are willing to promote the brand's products to their friends. (TechCrunch)
Accenture plans to recruit job candidates based on their LinkedIn activity. In particular, they are looking for top commenters in groups and people with strong connections. (Wall Street Journal)
Viber, a mobile app that lets users send text messages and make calls for free, just released Viber Out. Viber Out lets Viber users make calls to people who don't have the app. Viber competes with Skype and the new feature is similar to Skype's Skype Out feature. (Viber)
Unmetric, a social analytics company, has a new report out on the brands that were most successful on social media over the Black Friday weekend. (Unmetric)
TrackMaven has a new report out on the best practices for getting retweets on Twitter. (TrackMaven)
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