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One of my favorite startups Kyte just announced it has raised $15 million in a second round of funding. The round was led by Telefónica, the world’s fourth largest global telecommunications firm, with Nokia Growth Partners, the global private equity and venture capital management arm of Nokia, and DoCoMo Capital, Inc., a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo, Inc., the leading mobile communication company based in Japan, also participating. Other investors in this round include Swisscom, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurveston.

Kyte presented an impressive live demo at the Mobile Launchpad at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October recently.

The interesting news for me is not the $15M, which seems rather small for a Series B in this area but the distribution channel opportunities Kyte.tv opens through this deal, as Robert Scoble mentioned earlier:

“Telefónica has 230 million users. DoCoMo has 52 million. Nokia has 39% of the cell phone market share. If the Kyte player is embedded on these three it brings a HUGE audience to Kyte.”

As a true promotor of his own technology, CEO Daniel Graf announced the news on a live video conference on Kyte.

If you haven’t tried Kyte Mobile, it’s definately worthwhile you start doing so. It’s one of the only apps I know with such a cool user experience, integrating live audio and video chat interaction with other social media. Congrats to Daniel and the Kyte team!

Really looking forward how Kyte will develop the coming months and launch new features.

MyStrands has secured $24 million in its Series B2 round of funding. Spanish bank BBVA led the funding along with existing investor Debaeque. The last round of funding closed in June at $25 million, bringing the total capital raised to date to $55 million. You can read the full details of the anouncement at MyStrands blog.

In the past four years, MyStrands has developed a scalable Personalized Discovery Platform and a Social Recommender Engine. The Social Recommender Engine provides real-time personalized recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-connected devices; and takes into account that taste is context-sensitive and evolves over time. These developments have already resulted in sales of $12 million during 2007. The company will use the new funds to go to the next level of product development. MyStrands recently launched MyStrands.tv, a personalised music tv channel and MyStrands Social Player was featured in the recent Nokia marketing campaign.

MyStrands recently hired some great new people and is busy building a great global team of developers. The company is headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon, and opened offices in San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Washington DC in the US; Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza in Spain; Helsinki in Finland or Sao Paulo in Brazil.