More big news in the Twittersphere today. One of the co-founders of Omaha-based CrowdPicks.com, Jeff Murnane, announced: “CrowdPicks has officially secured their first investment. Not a huge amount, but enough for near term goals. Thanks Invest Nebraska!”

Following up by direct message, Jeff revealed that the amount is $25,000 and that Invest Nebraska will be releasing more details in the coming week.

We’re excited to cover this as over the past few weeks we’ve put out stories about new sources of funding in our region. Now we’re seeing it, and it’s sure going to be fun to watch.

CrowdPicks.com, founded by two former TD Ameritrade employees, Jeff Murnane and Cassius Almeida, is a sports prediction, social networking website where qualified users’ predictions are used to create accurate aggregate predictions on future games. Since CrowdPicks launched in August of 2007, there have been 1.3 million total game picks made by members.  CrowdPicks will be using this investment from Invest Nebraska to complete the build out of their subscription model (described below) which is planned for release in late August 2009.

CrowdPicks is a free website where users make predictions on sporting events.  The best performers have their predictions aggregated together to create the official CrowdPicks prediction, which will then be sold.  A portion of this subscription revenue will then be shared back with the members whose predictions are used.  CrowdPicks members can also share in the revenue generated by writing blogs or recruiting new members.

We’re looking forward to hearing more.