Online video site Viki has made a big business out of aggregating content from around the world, covering 150+ languages in all, and making it accessible to all by crowdsourcing translations from its community of users. Now that pool of viewers is set to get a little deeper with a new distribution deal with Renren, known as the Facebook of China, which will see Renren create a special channel called VikiZone on 56.com, its video sharing network. This is the first time that Viki has partnered with a third party to power its online TV service.

The deal not only promises a new swathe of Chinese viewers to the Viki — Renren has 160 million registered users in the country and will be promoting VikiZone heavily to them — but it is also a mark of how Chinese online video sites and consumers’ tastes are becoming more international, and are looking for more professional content to meet that demand. Coincidentally, today’s news follows just days after Youku — the biggest online video site, known as China’s YouTube, and competitor to 56.com – announced a deal covering blockbuster films from NBC Universal.

Renren has said as much, too. “In our continuous pursuit to enhance user experience, we wanted to give our users a wide range of high quality video contents from across the globe. Teaming with Viki, an innovative and resourceful player in video streaming, is an important step towards our goal,” said James Liu, Renren’s coo, in a statement.

While Viki has a large (and often eclectic) catalog of content accessible through its own portal, it looks like the Renren deal will be only for a selection of that. Examples of what will be included are “hundreds of hours” of Cartoon Network programs, TNT dramas — and, Viki CEO and co-founder Razmig Hovaghimian says, content from Japan and Korea, apparently quite popular on the Mainland.

Part of the reason for offering only a “cherry picked” selection rather than the full catalog may be down to making sure the content stays on the right side of China’s censors. They have been known to crack down on social media services when things go against approved editorial grain — and Viki, with its user-generated translations and recommendations bent, is a social site, as is Renren. For this service, Hovaghimian says that Viki will be serving the content from Renren itself, with servers located in China.

That’s in contrast to sites like the New York Times — which, when it launched its Chinese edition the other week, it made of point of noting its servers would not be in the country, likely to help the NY Times maintain editorial control. A video site, Hovaghimian says, has to make an exception to that ideal: “If we served the videos from outside China, the use times and access would be horrid.”

Like Viki’s main site, all content on VikiZone will be free to watch and ad-supported. Down the line, Hovaghimian says that the company wouldn’t rule out paid options as a way of securing the best content.

“We’ve considered a paywall because then it’s easier to get better and fresher content,” he said, referring to the returns just being that much higher on paid services. “It’s hard to do that on ad-based model.” (NBC’s deal with Youku will see the film content sit behind a paywall.)

While Viki and Renren are not disclosing the exact financial terms of this deal, it’s likely to be based around sharing resulting ad revenues. For now, most of the ad sales being done on the site will be through Renren, with a portion of the inventory reserved for Viki to sell itself. It would likely do that through its ad partnership with the BBC (which was also one of the investors in Viki’s most recent, a-list $20 million round).

The deal with Renren is not exclusive, meaning that Viki could be soon launching VikiZones on other video portals like Youku. But it may be a different kind of platform altogether that Viki will tackle next in China: Hovaghimian says it is deep in negotiations with another third party for a mobile-only service that will focus on short-form content and music videos.

And there are prospects to continue launching more of these third-party partnerships with local video portals in other countries, too. Not only is it working on licensing more Chinese content to take out of the country — one recent upload from Hunan TV now is available in 25 languages, he says — Hovaghimian points out that there is a big opportunity in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, which typically have very high CPMs compared to those in the west. “That gives us a high opportunity to monetize,” he says.

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Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.

According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story.”

Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between $500k and $725k. We’re hearing that Borthwick and co. will license from LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on what it chooses to do with those assets. I have no word on how the “single-digit millions equity deal” some are reporting fits in here exactly.

Pre-acquisition, social news vanguard Digg had raised $45 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and other Valley notables. Digg was an extremely influential site for anyone who worked in the early era of online publishing, so it being scrapped for parts is sort of weird, especially for those of us who used to beg friends to vote up Digg stories.

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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt offered some new insight into Google’s self-driving car program today at his annual press talk at Allen and Co.’s Sun Valley conference.

Schmidt revealed that Google had talked to “all” of the auto-manufacturers globally about the cars, which he called “not yet ready for productization” facing challenges including getting individual states to approve it (Nevada is the only one currently).

“The current biggest problem is that it runs at the speed limit and nobody drives at the speed limit,” Schmidt said. Apparently Google has proto-types that don’t run at the speed limit however; as Schmidt revealed that Google had a racecourse in an undisclosed location, where the car would race human-driven cars, and win.

Schmidt also went into how exactly the car worked, saying that a consumer will eventually type an address in what he called “Google maps on steriods.” “The deal here is that there’s a person in the driver’s seat, and a really big red button that says “Off.” He said the self-driving car would function much like a plane’s auto pilot, ultimately bolstered by a real human on standby.

When asked if the more technophobic mainstream would easily adopt the novel technology, Schmidt responded, “Depends on how drunk they are.” Schmidt brought up the sad statistic of 35k people killed each year in drunk driving accidents in the United States, and the even sadder fact that that is considered a good statistic because it’s remained constant over two to three decades.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Schmidt said, “The sooner we can get cars to drive for us the more lives we can … self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime.”

Image via: Zack Sheppard

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As promised, we have released another batch of August Capital Summer Party tickets. Tickets sell out quickly and if your buyer bot is too slow to snag passes for you and 400 of your closest friends, you can always purchase a ticket to the Facebook EcoSystem CrunchUp here which includes a ticket to the Facebook Ecosystem Conference and a fast track ticket to enter the August Capital Summer party!

About the Facebook Ecosystem Conference at the Fox Theater (capacity limited participants)

August 3, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
Fox Theater
2215 Broadway Street, Redwood City CA 94063, Map
12:00 – 1:00 Registration and lunch
1:00 – 5:00 Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp
Get Tickets @ Eventbrite: $180 based on availability. Tickets INCLUDE admission for one (1) to the August Capital party and expedited fast-pass door entry. You DO NOT need to purchase a separate August Capital Party ticket if you purchase a CrunchUp ticket. Tickets are non-transferable, based on availability. Limited seating for the CrunchUp. #crunchup

CrunchUps are highly participatory mini conferences hosted by TechCrunch where we focus in on important “now” themes in non-traditional formats.

About the 7th Annual Summer Party at August Capital
August 3, 5:30 – 9:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park CA 94025, Map
Get Tickets @ Eventbrite: $50 based on availability. Tickets to be released weekly in batches. Stay tuned to TechCrunch for releases as they sell out quickly. #tcaugustcapital

Join us for a great mix of start-up demos, networking, giveaways, drinks and fun on the best deck on all of Sand Hill Road.

Due to limited capacity and strong demand for tickets, we regret tickets are NOT TRANSFERABLE and NOT REFUNDABLE. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Attendee identification will be checked at the door against the guest list; paper tickets not necessary.

Parking will be extremely limited so we encourage you to leave plenty of time to find parking, or carpool with friends and co-workers.

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Updated

Electronic signature platform DocuSign has raised $47.5 million in Series D funding. The round was first revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company just sent me a few details.

DocuSign has also confirmed that Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner (and former Morgan Stanley analyst) who’s most famous for her reports on the mobile industry, is joining the DocuSign board. It looks likely that Kleiner led the new round, but neither DocuSign nor Kleiner has confirmed that. (For now, the company will only say that the funding comes from “premier investors, public funds, and strategic tech-industry leaders.”)

Founded in 2004, DocuSign describes itself as “the industry standard in electronic signature” — and that’s probably a fair description. The company says 18 million people have used its products to sign 120 million documents, and that more than 150,000 documents are “DocuSigned” every day.

DocuSign previously raised a total of $56.4 million from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Salesforce.com, and others, with its Series C announced in December 2010.

I’ll be speaking to CEO Keith Krach later today and will update this post with his comments.

Update: Krach confirms that Kleiner led the round. Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures, and “a large global institutional investor” also participated.

DocuSign will use the new funding to invest in three main areas, Krach says — research and development, expanding into new industries, and expanding internationally.

Apparently Krach and Meeker have known each other since Ariba (where he was CEO) went public more than a decade ago, when she was at Morgan Stanley. Asked whether Meeker is approaching this as a mobile investment primarily, Krach says the company’s mobile apps are “absolutely taking off.” At the same time, he says Meeker’s also just looking for disruptive technologies.

“By the second half of this decade, the vast majority of signatures are going to be electronic,” Krach says. “Every person is a potential customer.”

(Also, an earlier version of the story said the amount raised was $50 million, because that’s what DocuSign said initially, but the press release says $47.5 million, which was also the amount included in the SEC filing.)

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The future of customer service is less about the people than it is the sound of a person or the virtual image of an individual.

Humans are just so inefficient. But they can be improved, too, through interfaces that provide them more automated capabilities.

Salefsorce.com is on the edge of this trend. It continues to acquire companies that automates an agent’s tasks to become more efficient and customers to experience a less odious way of getting their issues answered. This week it acquired GoInstant, which makes it easier for anyone in a customer experience role to share a Web page. It requires no plug-in. It’s simply a URL that connects the agent and the customer .

Other examoples include Zendesk, which now provides customers with a new Facebook private messaging capability. And Twilio now says developers can create apps that send SMS messages to people in 150 countries. That also provides a a new level of automation that can be built into a customer experience environment.

“In the customer care and collaboration realm, this sort of infrastructure empowers users to designate when and how they want messages delivered to them as part of “unified communications,”said Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder at Opus Research.

What these companies are doing is just a warm up. We are entering an age of virtual agents, soothing Sir-style voice recognition and immediate verification through biometric data.

Here are three examples that Miller has been writing about on the Opus blog:

Virtual Personal Assistant: Meet Lola. She’s a Web-based virtual assistant created by the BBVA, the Spanish financial services provider. BBVA has a long history of providing customer-centric experiences. Lola is known for her human-like understanding of what customers are communicating either through typing or talking into their computers.  The idea is to create a personal experience that is conversational and comes with a high degree of understanding between Lola and the people she is helping.

Siri-Like Service: Dragon ID, also by Nuance,  is a voice authentication service that wakes up when it hears you talk. It can change accounts on a device based upon the voice of the person. That means a change from passwords we type to “passphrases.” The voice is the password. That has endless application in a customer centric environment. It means it make it easier to complete transactions. The voice can recognize you and complete a transaction with a mobile wallet application.

Customer experience is going through a rapid innovation cycle. It makes sense. Humans need lots of help.

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We’re hearing that mobile ad network InMobi has acquired MMTG Labs, a San Francisco startup that operates AppBistro, an application marketplace for Facebook pages, and AppGalleries, which is a white-label app store platform that is in use by the likes of Brit Media.

The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but we’re told that both the founders and investors at MMTG Labs are “very happy.” The entire five-person team, led by co-founders Ryan Merket and Nalin Mittal, are joining InMobi as part of the acquisition.

MMTG first came on the scene back in May 2010 when it launched AppBistro at TechCrunch Disrupt. They  were incubated in i/o Ventures and went on to secure some $550,000 in funding in August 2010. The launch of AppGalleries (then called AppStores) occurred earlier this year, in January.

It was that new platform that most caught the attention of InMobi, people close to the deal tell us — and the AppGalleries technology will likely be adopted by InMobi and added to its suite of products.

InMobi, meanwhile, certainly has the paycheck to pay for acquisitions. The company claims to be the largest independent mobile ad network int he world, and it just raised $200 million in a Series C led by Softbank this past fall. Nearly a year ago, InMobi snapped up HTML5 ad builder Sprout for an undisclosed sum.

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Shareaholic, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that makes browser extensions and other tools to facilitate the sharing and discovery of web content, tells TechCrunch that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Kepha Partners, and included participation from existing backers General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, 500 Startups and other angel investors, who all invested in Shareaholic’s previous seed rounds. This brings the total outside capital invested in Shareaholic to $5.5 million.

Shareaholic started four years ago as a “nights and weekends” project, but has since blossomed into a full-on company with a current staff of 10 employees. The company, which began with a simple web extension to let people share content to their social networks, first garnered attention in 2008 when it won the Grand Prize in Mozilla Foundation’s Extend Firefox contest for the best Firefox add-on. Now Shareaholic has a whole suite of tools including open platform APIs for blog publishers and analytics tools for tracking audience behavior. The company says it now reaches 270 million users per month.

The new funding will be put toward hiring more staff to further build out its technology and products, Shareaholic says. The company has big ambitions for the future — last week it announced it had brought on former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its advisory board. At that time, Shareaholic’s CEO Jay Meattle told the Boston Business Journal’s Kyle Alspach that Stata would be used to help Shareaholic build “an open interest, influence, and intent graph at scale that rivals that of Facebook.”

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Betaworks, the company behind bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat and a number of other successful products, has acquired the social news site Digg.com for an undisclosed amount. Betaworks’ founder John Borthwick will become the new CEO of Digg. The site’s current CEO Matt Williams will join Andreessen Horowitz as Entrepreneur in Residence after the Betaworks transition is complete. Digg’s founder Kevin Rose joined Google a few months ago after the search engine acquired his latest startup Milk.

Update: Rumor has it that the price was just $500k, but that number doesn’t really make a lot of sense, given that the site still gets enough traffic to make more than that in a year by just selling ads. Talking to AllThingsD, Digg CEO Matt Williams confirmed that “the overall consideration is significantly larger” and includes a combination of cash and equity. Another source close to the negotiations tells us that the price was indeed not $500k. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact price yet.

Betaworks promises to turn Digg “back into a startup,” with low budgets, a small team and fast update cycles. None of the remaining Digg employees, it seems, are moving to Betaworks. Instead, the News.me team will take over the management of the site. Betaworks, says Digg, will soon unveil a new “cloud-based version of Digg” that will complement News.me’s iPhone and iPad apps.

According to Digg’s outgoing CEO Matt Williams, his team “considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place — to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots.” Betaworks says it’s planning to “build Digg for 2012.”

Once a poster child of the Web 2.0 revolution, Digg slowly faded into the background over the last few years, especially after its 4.0 update alienated many of its users. After that, Digg never quite found a niche for itself as content sharing moved to social networks like Twitter and Facebook (and the competing social sharing site Reddit). It still has a sizable amount of users, but it’s really just a shadow of its former self today. While an announcement like today’s acquisition would once have received hundreds of “diggs” and comments within a few minutes, the fact that today’s announcement has only 16 diggs and four comments so far is rather telling.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post Company hired 15 of the site’s engineers to power its own social products. Ever since, it was pretty clear that the site was likely going to be acquired sooner or later.

In 2008, Google was reportedly interested in acquiring Digg for around $200 million, but walked away from the deal. That deal would have been a nice return for the service’s investors. In total, Digg raised $45 million from a number of SiliconValley most prominent investors since its launch. The last funding round – a $5 million Series D round – closed exactly a year ago. At that time, the site was still valued at around $35 million and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington reported that without that round, the company would have had only had about 6 months of runway left before it would have had to close its doors.

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This week, New York-based The Fancy, a Pinterest-like site with a focus on not just browsing, but buying from its collection of inspirational imagery, began encouraging users to share its content on social networks in exchange for cash rewards. But paid promotion via social sharing was only one part of the company’s larger plan. Today, the company is rolling out another piece of the puzzle and is introducing “Buy” buttons to power purchasing behaviors on any website.

The “Buy” button is targeted at bloggers and other publishers, not online merchants or e-commerce sites, of course. It should be especially appealing to the large and growing community of fashion bloggers, who frequently post images of clothing and accessories like those that you also find on The Fancy. And it gives them another way to monetize their sites beyond using text-based or banner advertisements.

The Fancy is working closely with the Independent Fashion Bloggers network at launch, which represents over 30,000 writers. According to editor Taylor Davies, the button could end up being “the next step in how we, as blog consumers, shop and purchase things we like and see,” she says. The advantage of this button, Davies thinks, is that it allows users to make purchases from the site without leaving the page. (Checkout pops up in a window on the site itself, similar to what 72Lux currently offers – see screenshot below for an example).

The connection to the fashion industry is one of The Fancy’s key strengths, in fact, as one of its big investors is PPR, the $25 billion firm run by Francois Henri-Pinault which owns major fashion brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. Because of that relationship, several high fashion sites now sport Fancy’s social commerce integrations, including Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and others. The company also partnered with Oscar de la Renta earlier this year to sell an item from the designer’s spring collection, and saw $10,000 worth of the shirts sold in the first week.

Working the e-commerce angle is a major differentiating factor for The Fancy, which offers merchants a way to sell via the site, and its rival Pinterest. In fact, Pinterest backer Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, recently alluded to The Fancy’s movements in this area with a thinly veiled hint of disdain, telling Forbes, “there are so many copycats of Pinterest already who are focusing just on shopping but they are not getting as much attraction as Pinterest because they are too commercial.” That may be true for some users, but success stories like Fab.com, for example, do prove there’s potential in social commerce. And on The Fancy, it’s growing. In May, its platform was seeing $50,000 a week in commerce. That number is now $75,000, Michael Silverman, Fancy COO tells me. The site also has a million users who “fancy” items over 500,000 times per day.

“Many people say they do social shopping, but nobody does it as extensively as we do,” The Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn told TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis yesterday at Allen & Co’s Sun Valley conference, where Einhorn, Pinault and the Fancy board member Jack Dorsey were all in attendence. Allen & Co is a major investor in The Fancy.

Publishers will be able to implement the button on their site using a single line of Javascript code. Once installed, Fancy pays the bloggers 2% of the purchase price to their Fancy account, 30 days after shipping – the same as with the affiliate links introduced earlier this week.

The new “Buy” button should be made available on the company’s website shortly, alongside the other widgets and buttons The Fancy currently offers.

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