NumberFire Pockets $750...

Back in September , we wrote about numberFire , a New York City-based startup that’s attempting to bring a deep, scientific approach to your fantasy football picks. At the time, the startup was preparing to graduate (along with ten other stalwart companies ) from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator , a seed-funding, mentor-providing NYC-based startup accelerator, and we also reported that NumberFire was also on the way to closing a solid round of seed funding. Last night, numberFire officially closed its first round of funding, nabbing a $750,000 seed investment, led by RRE Ventures , with contributions from private investment firm, Penny Black , and TechStars Managing Director David Tisch , among others. As a result of the funding, Eliot Durbin , the Managing Director of Penny Black, will be joining the startup’s board of directors. NumberFire Founder and CEO Nik Bonaddio (who also won $100,000 from Regis Philbin on the one-and-only “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” back in 2010) tells us that, specifically, the startup closed a total of $650K yesterday, but the final $100K has been signed, and will be in-pocket once that pesky holiday paperwork clears. It’s not as easy as cashing a check from Regis Philbin, okay? And to that point, that’s something that you have to admire about Bonaddio. Most people probably would have taken the money they won on a gameshow and bought a new Porsche, but Bonaddio used it as capital to start numberFire in true entrepreneurial fashion. (Though he’s probably tired of hearing about the show by this point.) The founder first tested numberFire at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC 2010, and since then the Pittsburgh native has graduated from ER Accelerator, relaunched numberFire, has seen traffic steadily grow, and a number of big-name partners come calling. NumberFire is currently at about 20K registered users and has partnered with ESPN, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation, and has contributed to blog posts for Sports Illustrated. But what does numberFire do, you ask? You can read our most recent, in depth profile here , but, simply put, the team has created custom, proprietary algorithms that take all stat-crunching out of your hands when it comes to making predictions about your fantasy sports teams. This means that, as fantasy sports fans, you can import your existing teams from Yahoo or ESPN’s fantasy websites and quickly get started — or customize updates and activity feeds, following teams and players that they are interested in to receive news, updated projections, etc. And, as mentioned, beyond operating as a tool for fans and fantasy gamers, numberFire works with writers and bloggers from sports content sites like ESPN and Sports Illustrated to enable them to embed widgets and take advantage of their stat machine to create season long projections and more. The startup initially targeted football, but they’ve since expanded to basketball, and, in turn, recently launched their own statistical NERD category that measures NBA players’ efficiency and value. It seems they’re trying to bring Bill James-style Sabermetrics to the NBA and beyond. The startup will be going after some partnerships ahead of March Madness, so stay tuned for that. And while the mention of Bill James and stats might lead you to believe that baseball, the mother of all stat-driven sports, would be easy fodder for numberFire. But there’s also a lot more competition in baseball number crunching at this level, from FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus, etc., so numberFire is (for now) keeping to the sports where the demand is high and the market isn’t as saturated. Hopefully hockey is on the way, but I’m not crossing my fingers. Of course, the big question is, how well does it work? Well, take this snapshot of some of the Web’s predictions for Week 15 of the NFL season , for example. NumberFire is at the top of the list. What’s more, as BetaBeat reported yesterday , a couple of months ago, the site took some bad flack from the blogosphere for predicting that three teams from the AFC North would make the playoffs. Well, contrary to popular belief, they did. How ’bout dem apples? And the best part? NumberFire is free. For more, check out numberFire at home here .

Capital One Co-Founder ...

Braintree , an online payments provider, is announcing that Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris has joined the company’s board of directors and invested in the company following a $34 million investment from Accel Partners earlier this year. Braintree essentially powers and automates online payments for merchants and companies online. The company provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing, credit card storage, support for mobile and international payments, and PCI Compliance solutions. Morris, who is currently the managing partner of QED Investors, is best known as the co-founder of Capital One Financial Services. The amount of his investment in BrainTree has not been disclosed. BrainTree has become a one-stop-shop for all the services a business needs to receive payments from anywhere in the world. The company’s clients include Airbnb, LivingSocial, OpenTable, Animoto, Lookout, Shopify, Brightcove, Hotel Tonight, GoMobo, 37Signals, and GitHub. The company is now processing more than $4 billion in annual credit card volume. Braintree also recently brought on payments exec and former Accel EIR Bill Ready as CEO.

TechStars Launches Clou...

Exclusive - Startup accelerator TechStars , arguably one of the best of its genre in the world, is today announcing the launch of its first thematically focused business kickstarter. Dubbed TechStars Cloud , the sub-accelerator will focus exclusively on backing cloud computing and infrastructure startups, and companies that work with OpenStack . For its first thematically focused accelerator, TechStars has attracted some high-profile mentors, including Pat Condon (founder of Rackspace Hosting), Jeff Lawson (founder & CEO of Twilio), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), George Karidis (CSO of SoftLayer), Jud Valeski (co)founder & CEO of Gnip), Rajat Bhargava (founder & CEO of StillSecure, Interliant), and many others . The inaugural TechStars Cloud program will run from January to April 2012 in San Antonio, Texas, and will be co-organized with Rackspace Hosting. TechStars will select roughly ten companies – evidently focused on cloud computing and infrastructure – to participate. They will receive seed funding, mentorship from people like the aforementioned, and benefit from a number of perks available only to TechStars startups and alumni. Interested companies should apply by October 21st for priority consideration, with a final application deadline of November 9th, 2011. The program will be managed by Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost (acquired by RackSpace in 2008), and Nicole Glaros, currently the Managing Director of TechStars in Boulder (she’s temporarily relocating to San Antonio). In case you hadn’t heard, TechStars is also the subject of a documentary “reality TV” show on Bloomberg TV, which premiers tonight at 9 PM Eastern Time. In six episodes, viewers will receive an inside look of what the TechStars program is like for startups (more specifically, those who participated in the NYC program in early 2011) and mentors alike. Below is the new trailer for the show, which hasn’t yet been publicly released: Crunchbase TECHSTARS Company: TechStars Website: techstars.org Launch Date: January 10, 2006 Funding: $10M TechStars is a seed fund. It offers $6,000 per founder to companies that make its list for up to 3 founders. In return, TechStars takes 6% equity in the company in common/founders stock. Company founders spend their whole summer in Boulder, Colorado working in a common space and collaborating when appropriate. TechStars mentors everyone accepted into their program with business and other advice. Many times over the summer guest entrepreneurs will speak to... Learn more

Nico Pitney To Replace ...

Earlier tonight, Yahoo announced that they grabbed one from our side to be the new Editor in Chief of their Yahoo Media Network: Jai Singh. Singh had been the Executive Editor at Huffington Post (and more recently, AOL HuffPo) for the past two years, where he helped shaped the company into the news and information juggernaut that it has become. Now we know who his replacement will be: Nico Pitney . Pitney was previously the Executive Editor of The Huffington Post, having risen through the ranks after serving as the Politics Editor during the 2008 Presidential campaign (and eventually becoming the National Editor and Washington Bureau Chief). Below, find Arianna Huffington’s brief memo on the move (meeting place and time redacted in case of weirdos lurking around the NYT office): I’m delighted to announce that Nico will become the Managing Editor of The Huffington Post Media Group. Jai and I have been talking for some time about his desire to return home to California and his family. We are very grateful to him for his great work and wish him all the best in his next adventure. So please join me at XXXXX today in the XXXXXX to raise a glass to Nico and say farewell to Jai. Arianna In the release announcing the Singh hire, Yahoo made an even bigger deal about “its largest traffic numbers for a single event”. No, it wasn’t the Bin Laden death — it was the royal wedding. Says Yahoo: Preliminary internal data shows that Yahoo! sites serving Royal Wedding content drove 400 million page views on Friday, slightly higher than the traffic levels experienced following the Japan earthquake. Seems like that news and the major new hire should have had their own separate releases, no? CrunchBase Information Huffington Post Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase

Former Good Technology ...

Adrian Nicholls, former Deputy MD of Good Technology is joining the board of independent digital agency, Blue Barracuda as Managing Director.