Streaming video site Ustream has just pulled in a massive new round of funding: $75 million. This second round was led by SoftBank, a Japanese telecom giant. Previously, the site had raised just below $13 million in funding, which came from its Series A in 2008 and its angel round in late 2007.

Perhaps even crazier is that the service is saying that additional funding commitments are pending from other investors in the U.S. and Asia, so the round may actually be larger than the $75 million, which is all from SoftBank. We’re hearing reports that there was quite a bit of competition to be involved in the round, and apparently all the dust hasn’t settled yet.

So why on Earth does Ustream need $75 million+? CEO John Ham says in the release that the money will be used to expand on the other side of the world, particularly Japan (obvious, given the SoftBank involvement), China, Korea, and India. Mobile video is particularly hot in some of the Asian countries where their faster wireless networks allow for more functionality than the comparatively slow ones in the U.S. Ustream will open offices and hire staff in all those countries, apparently.

Alongside this new round, we’re hearing reports that the founders of the company, Ham, Brad Hunstable, and Gyula Feher were able to sell some shares as a reward.

Just a few days ago, Ustream launched a new desktop client to help video producers give their work a more professional feel. Prior to that, in December, Ustream made headlines by being the first big video streaming site to offer that (recording) functionality on the iPhone.

Ustream says that its iPhone apps has been downloaded over 1.5 million times to date (it has had other apps before the live streaming one was available too) and notes that 3.8 million people tuned into the service to watch the inauguration of President Obama in January of last year.

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Sean Parker (Founders Fund, Facebook, Plaxo, Napster) and angel investor Ron Conway are doing a little smack talking over who’ll raise the most money for charity. Conway is raising for the UCSF Foundation, and Parker is fighting Malaria through Malaria No More.

So far Parker is in the lead, with more than $15,000 raised (he’s tying it to his 30th birthday party tonight). Conway, who started later, has nearly $7,500. They’re both using Causes on Facebook, one of Parker’s companies, to raise the money.

We’re not picking sides, and both are very worthy causes. Donate early and often. And consider asking friends to donate instead of giving holiday gifts.

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A big part of the debate about the lead gen scams plaguing Facebook and MySpace via social games is over how much money is being made on these “offers.” Zynga, by far the most successful at building and monetizing these games, is now telling us exactly how much – 1/3 of total revenues, according to Andrew Trader, a co-founder of Zynga:

Andrew Trader, co-founder of Zynga, said the company makes about a third of its revenue from advertising and another third from virtual goods transactions. The last third comes from companies that provide commercial offers, trading Netflix memberships and marketing surveys for in-game cash.

Zynga revenue guesses range all over the place, but are likely $250 million a year or more. That means $80+ million/year is being brought in from legitimate offers like Netflix subscriptions, as well as the really smelly stuff like recurring mobile phone and learning CD subscriptions that trick users into paying big dollars for little or no return value.

What percentage of offer revenue is scammy? We believe it varies over time, and is heading in the wrong direction. Legitimate advertisers like Netflix and Blockbuster, hit with countless laundered subscriptions from repeat subscripers, are said to be dramatically lowering bounty fees paid on signup. Far less scrupulous advertisers like Video Professor and Tatto take their place.

HotOrNot cofounder James Hong said it best in a comment to our post yesterday outlining the scams: “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users. Sure we had netflix ads show up, and clearly those do convert to some degree, but i’m pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.”

Offerpal and others, who provide these offers to game developers, try to downplay the percentage of revenue that comes from scams. Clearly they are obfuscating the truth, to put it kindly.

Facebook and MySpace must takes steps to address this.

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Since the early days of the Facebook Platform, Causes has been one of the most popular apps. It’s also big on MySpace, and the company behind it recently announced that they had raised some $10,000,000 for various causes in two years. It makes sense; it’s using the social aspect of these platforms to spread the word on good initiatives. A new startup, TwitCause, wants to extend that idea to Twitter.

And it’s possible that this idea could work even better on Twitter, given the built-in viral nature of the service. Basically, each week on Thursday, TwitCause has a new cause they support. They ask that you follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show your support for it. These tweets contain a link to go back to the site where you can find a place to donate money if you choose to, using PayPal. The number of retweets and the money raised so far are all shown in real-time on the page, as are the most recently tweets about the cause.

The service launched today with the The V Foundation as its launch partner. The V Foundation is a hugely successful cancer research organization named after the late, great basketball coach Jim Valvano. With his foundation attached, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from several official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. The hope is to get other high profile athletes like Shaq and Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting throughout the week too.

Going forward, followers of the TwitCause account will be able to nominate other nonprofits and causes that they want want to see supported by the service. Armstrong’s Livestrong is currently leading the pack for the next cause. TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.

As I said, the viral nature of the retweet seems to lend itself well to something like this. Plenty of other sites and services have used Twitter to help raise money or awareness for good causes, such as Blame Drew’s Cancer, which we covered a couple months ago. They are now also working with Livestrong and have seen over 20,000 tweets blame things on Drew’s cancer in support of the cause.

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