GigaOM Pro

I’ve linked to a handful of items about social media comanies raising money today. Three times is a trend, they say. Zynga may be close to filing its SEC papers to go public. The social gaming giant built on the back of Facebook has been valued higher than Electronic Arts, that’s not doing a bad job at social games itself. We’ll soon know if Zynga really had $850 million in sales last year. Two other social media ecosystem players raised some funds. Milyoni ($3 million) builds Facebook stores for merchants, many of which are in the entertainment or sports business. I’ve been skeptical about social networks’ ability to generate transactions, but there’s plenty of experimentation going on. And BuzzLogic raised $7.8 million to build out its social media marketing services and sales force. Meanwhile, business publisher Reed Elsevier’s investment arm led a $6 million round for GigaOM, and here at Pro we’ve published a new report on how big tech companies IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, HP and Cisco might spend some of their M&A dollars, including on social start-ups.