Color is a new (launched March 23) photo-sharing social network for the smartphone crowd. The network is novel in that it has no privacy settings or friending capabilities, but instead organizes and presents user photos based on relevancy, location and interests.

8thBridge operates a platform that allows its clients to integrate online shopping and advertising into social networks such as Facebook. In effect, 8thBridge specializes in monetizing social networks by delivering customized, branded shopping experiences.

A Bit Lucky is a social gaming developer best known for its Facebook game Lucky Train, which is a social town simulator that has nearly 1 million monthly active users.

Two weeks ago we wrote about Fiat 500 loves, a social media campaign underway in the UK that highlights the compact auto’s Congestion Charge-busting engine and plays on Britons love of group-buying deals. The effort is being run via Grape Digital, a London-based social media agency. Grape must have really impressed the Italian automaker as Grape Digital this week was named the social media agency for all of Fiat Automobiles UK.

In October, we noticed an interesting trend forming: social media, and in particular, Facebook, over the first half of 2010 was driving the UK’s resurgent online ad market. New numbers are in this morning and the story hasn’t changed: the social media ad spend grew at a staggering 200% rate last year to help the online display ad sector nearly crack the £1 billion mark.

SocialVibe creates and brokers ad deals between marketers and social sites to incorporate better-aimed social ads. For example, SocialVibe works closely with Zynga’s social games such as “Mafia Wars” by prompting users with an ad for more in-game cash when they interact with the sponsors ad.

CrowdFlower uses the crowdsourcing craze for project management, specifically data-heavy projects. The company’s crowdsource system works as a project manager for the smaller tasks, so users can observe multiple ongoing tasks and control for quality and coordination. It can tap an on-demand workforce of 1 million to get the job done.

Topsy provides a real-time search engine for social networking sites with particular focus on Twitter. It works through content and relevancy keywords, then it rates the discussion based on the influence and reach of the participating users. This, the company proclaims, is the forefront of Search 2.0.

StumbleUpon’s most pressing challenge will be to perfect a clever advertising system that will not bog-down the sense of random adventurousness its users come to expect. Whether or not clients buy it and web surfers feel unimpeded is yet to be seen.

A week ago, the VC community was abuzz over chatter that LivingSocial, the daily-deals purveyor, was on the brink of yet another mega-funding round. This week, Flipboard is the next up, in the process of raising capital that would value the i-reader at a $200 million valuation. In the meantime, we have six new freshly funded social startups from the commerce, gaming and analytics sector.