Swiss-based Dixero has announced that they have raised a new round of funding in the amount of 1.5 million Euros. This brings their total funding to 3 million Euros. Last week Dixero announced the opening of an office in Silicon Valley.

Dixero provides a way to take RSS feeds and convert them to audio so that you can listen to your favorite feeds instead of reading them in a "traditional" sense. Dixero offers three "audio personalities", Lois, Luke and Claire so that you can vary the voice that you hear for different feeds. It can help with differentiation from one feed to the next.

We’ve also reviewed BlogBard and PimpMyNews - two other feed-to-audio services. The key to these services is to make the voice as close to human as possible.

Here’s an example of the Dixero audio conversion - it sounds "computerized" (it looks like you need some sort of xml plugin - IE is asking me to install something for this to play):

Here’s the 20-second pitch Dixero provided earlier this month in Zurich:

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Source:CenterNetworks

Yakov is reporting that Digital Sky Technologies has obtained an additional 15% stake in Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management for $180-200 million. This moves Digital Sky Technologies’ into the majority stakeholder position with 50.6%. Yakov also notes, "It’s also reported that DST could be selling a controlling stake in itself to Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and owner of Kommersant publishing house. Kommersant recently merged its online newspaper Gazeta.ru into LiveJournal’s owner SUP."

Mail.ru has 6.2 million daily visitors and 14.7 million monthly visitors and one of the stakeholders reported income of $56 million for year 2007. DST’s assets range somewhere between $1.1 billion and $3 billion.

Mail.ru was voted one of the top Web sites in Russia earlier this year.

Sematic search engine Quintura has announced a new distribution partnership in which they will power the search for Maxim Digital’s Web properties which include Maxim.com and Blender.com.  Yakov Sadchikov, President & CEO of Quintura said, “Our strategic partnership with the online leader in men’s lifestyle, Maxim Digital, demonstrates Quintura’s ability to provide interactive site search solutions to consumer web publishers with millions of monthly users."

The search functionality is now live on Maxim’s site. Google Trends shows about 30k users a day to Maxim and about 15k to Blender.

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