Details On Imeem Founders Next Startup: Picplz (Updated)

There are two financing rumors buzzing through Silicon Valley this week. The first is the huge Groupon funding which we wrote about yesterday. The second, on the other end of the scale dollar-wise, is the new startup created by Imeem execs Dalton Caldwell, Bryan Berg and Ali Aydar. The corporate name of the company is Mixed Media Labs, but the go live service, we hear, is picplz. As in, Pictures, Please.

There’s not much on the site yet except for this picture of a router and a really out there blog (the site sorta reminds me of the random photo stealth search engine Blekko used to have up). But that website hasn’t stopped some top tier investors from putting some money into the company – Andreessen Horowitz, among others, are rumored to have invested already.

So what will picplz be? One person who has seen a demo says it’s a new photo site and sharing service, sort of a mixture between Flickr and Twitter. “But that doesn’t explain it because it sounds lame, and the service is really cool.” There is real room for a new kind of photo sharing service, says one source, if they get the user experience right. picplz, says the source, may have gotten it right.

Ok by us. We’re just looking forward to seeing it. Imeem, once a mighty music service, suffered an ignoble fate when it was scooped up by MySpace late last year for next to nothing. But Caldwell and his team showed a real warrior mentality over the years with Imeem, and kept adapting to try to find a model that worked. In the end they failed, but one thing is marketable above all else in Silicon Valley – failure, if it’s done on a grand and courageous scale. These guys have more of that than they can use.

We’ll continue to add data to the Mixed Media Labs and picplz CrunchBase pages as we gather it.

Update: A reader finds a live signup URL for the service. Screenshots: