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If you ever wished for a central place to keep track of your online purchases and to store all those email receipts, MyThings might just be what you are looking for. The London-based company just announced a $5 million Series B round. Besides helping you to keep track of your purchases, MyThings also provides access to information about product recalls, manuals, and insurance, as well as an easy way to sell you things on eBay, donate them, or report them stolen. For art collectors, MyThings also provides a valuation service. This new round of financing was led by Dotcorp Asset Management and GP Bullhound Sidecar.

Today, Dopplr, the social network for business travelers, announced that it has secured a second round of financing. The lead investor for this round is Ester Dyson. Other investors include Tom Glocer from Reuters, Joshua Schachter from delicious, and magazine publisher Tyler Brule. Dopplr received its first seed investment from Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman, and Joichi Ito in September 2007. Dopplr expects to use this new round of financing to expand its business globally. Currently, Dopplr's user base is mostly in Europe and the U.S.

Lijit, which provides search services to bloggers and blog networks, announced today that it has closed a $7.1 Million series C round led by Foundry Group. Lijit had raised a small Series A round in January of 2007 and a larger $3.3 million Series B in July 2007. With this new round, Lijit is planning to use this new influx of money to finance the launch of its search-powered ad network.

Casual gaming on the web must look like quite an attractive market to VCs right now. Jeff Bezos already invested in two casual gaming companies this year, Kongregate and SGN, after SGN had already raised a $15 million Series A round in January. Now, Mark Pincus' Zynga, another online gaming site, announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins. Zynga also announced the acquisition of YooVille, a virtual world application for Facebook.

Umair Haque is a smart guy. He studied neuroscience at McGill, did an MBA and econ/strategy research with Gary Hamel at London Business School, and began working towards a PhD in strategy and innovation at Oxford in 2004. He also founded Bubblegeneration, a consultancy that studies the economics of consumer-facing industries. Haque is now the Director of the Havas Media Lab, which advises entrepreneurs, investors, and firms with "craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation." He also thinks Web 2.0 is full of crap.

Tomorrow a new breed of investment firm called Prototype Invest will officially launch, though the site is available now. Prototype Invest is a unique type of early stage investment firm. Rather than put money into startups, Prototype supplies technology in exchange for equity. This is an investment firm for anyone who has ever been told, "Ideas are a dime a dozen, kid. Come back when you have a working prototype."

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. Below is a list of 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.