Zillow.com co-founder Rich Barton has linked up with Second Avenue Partners and Curious Office Partners to back Fanzter, a Collinsville, Conn. startup that plans to launch a new consumer Web service called Coolspotters.com later this year.

No one is saying much about that service at this time, though one could derive something from the Coolspotters tagline: "If it's cool, we've seen it."

Kelly Smith of Curious Office, a Seattle investment firm, said that it is too early to discuss the product direction.

"The high level concept is to develop a database to discover 'cool stuff,'" he says in an e-mail. "That's a bit cryptic but ... the first beta version will be here soon enough."

Fanzter was founded last year by Aaron LaBerge and Eric Kirsten. Kirsten formerly worked at AT&T and Universal Pictures, while LaBerge is the former senior vice president of technology and product development at ESPN.

Though based on the East Coast, the startup has deep connections to Seattle through LaBerge's work at ESPN and the Walt Disney Internet Group.

That put him in touch with Second Avenue's Mike Slade, who I mentioned before has created a bit of an entrepreneurial mafia of former Starwave/Walt Disney people.

In addition to Fanzter, Second Avenue has backed Newsvine, Sports Technologies and Atomic Moguls, all of which were started by ex-Starwave/Walt Disney folks. Two of those companies -- Newsvine and Sports Technologies -- have already been sold.

Last October, I asked Slade about the "Starwave mafia."

"All of them have been instances where I liked the guys and the idea probably equally," he said. "Both Nick (Hanauer) and I, having been on the board of aQuantive, we saw a fairly long time ago that Internet advertising was going to be huge.... Once you knew that, you could say: 'Well, if it is a good idea, you can probably aggregate an audience.'"

He continued:

"These guys who left these companies, like the Newsvine guys, had already done stuff before. (Newsvine's) Mark Budos had built like his fourth advertising system or his third content management system. It is like a guy who is good at remodeling houses. You know the third or fourth one, they really know how to do it.... So my theory was that even though you would think the big (media companies) have all the advantages when it comes to consumer content -- they can aggregate audiences and have big brands that people trust -- they can't innovate very quickly.... The pace of change is somewhat glacial and because they have big audiences, they are afraid to break stuff. So for all of these reasons, it occurred to me that if I could fund these little guys who had done the stuff before and ... cut their teeth at a place like Starwave that taught them to recognize good ideas and think with their instincts that they might be able to create something of value. And then, whatever happens, happens."

UPDATE: Fanzter raised just under $2 million in this round, which also included some unnamed angel investors.