Among the many comments from the tech world mourning the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs, one of the more unusual comes from Vivek Wadhwa, the former Research Triangle entrepreneur and executive who is now a university academic who examines work force issues for Duke University and writes for the Washington Post Innovations section and other media.
Wadhwa issued this statement on Jobs’ death:
teve left a deeper mark on an entire generation than anyone in recent memory. He has changed the way we work and, in the tech world, the way we think. He taught us the importance of design, elegance, and quality. He defied the conventional wisdom about price being the key motivator for technology. He proved that people will pay premium prices for easy to use, elegant products.
With Spotify now in the U.S. and a host of other competing free music streaming services online, Pandora has eliminated its limit on free listening. Previously, free users who listened for 40 hours would have to either sign up for the firm’s premium, ad-free, service with better sound. I once paid .99 cents to finish out a month of the service after hitting its 40 hour limit.
I have to say, this is one move I applaud. I still like Pandora as much if not more than any of the other music streaming services, perhaps because I’ve used it longest. But it has an easy-to-use interface that has never given me the first bit of trouble, not something I can say for Spotify. I’m a fairly sophisticated user of digital media, but the first time I used Spotify, it felt like the first time I picked up a smartphone and pecked away at the buttons learning to navigate it.
We’re still not sure how Pandora’s business model is working out, but if they’re relying on add revenue and a piece of music sales via the site, making listening free without limits should increase its traffic. I know I would use it relatively sparingly to avoid going over that 40 hour limit, even though I can also access it on my Squeezebox Internet radio.
iPhone 4S sales begin
Will Apple fans line-up for the iPhone 4S the way they have for previous versions of the coveted smartphone?
The Internet has been critical of the iPhone 4S. It was expecting seas to part and other miracles from Apple, while the new iPhone 4S is not a completely new phone. It does boast the fast dual-core A5 processor and an 8-megapixil camera and run the iOS5 software that has 200 new features.
The new iPhone 4S is available for pre-order from Apple.com (it will run on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon).
So what do you think, Apple fanactics? Are you headed off to buy the new iPhone? If so you might want to review these tips first. Ten Tips for buying the Apple iPhone4S.
Xfire lights up with $4M round led by Intel Capital for gaming social service
Xfire , a social service for gamers with more than 19 million users, has received $4 million in funding led by Intel Capital and several prominent angel investors. The company is based in Los Angeles.
Xfire has also strengthened the executive team by adding Mark Donovan as president, Juston Brommel as chief marketing officer and Autumn Radtke as director of Business Development.
The new additions to the team and funding are the first of several major announcements expected this fall from the company. As part of this investment, Xfire has been split from Titan Gaming so both businesses can operate independently.
“Xfire is already the most advanced social service for gamers with group chat, group voice, and user generated content sharing tools like live game broadcasting. Think of Xfire as Facebook meets Skype for gamers,” says Mark Donovan, president of Xfire. “This round of capital is allowing us to make many enhancements starting with an entirely new look for the Xfire website and chat application.
He adds, ”Our users have already created tens of millions of game videos, screenshots and live broadcasts which they’re sharing every minute on Xfire. Soon they will be able to useXfire to share them to other social networks and numerous top-tier websites.
SAN FRANCISCO - Twilio Fund says it will launch a second $250,000 fund focused on companies using Twilio Connect, which was launched at the Twilio Conference.
The fund is appropriately named Twilio Fund CONNECT and is run by Dave McClure of 500 Startups, an early-stage seed fund and incubator, who will invest $125,000 in the winning startups. Each investment will be matched dollar-for-dollar by Ron Conway of SV Angel.
The Twilio Fund is a microfund created by 500 Startups and launched in September 2010 to provide seed capital to startups built on the Twilio cloud communications platform.
Twilio says it is merging the worlds of cloud computing, web services and telecommunications. Twilio hosts a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud, allowing web developers to integrate phone calls, text messages, and IP voice communications into their web, mobile, and traditional phone applications
“Twilio has always done a brilliant job empowering developers to build amazing products,” said McClure. “With Twilio Connect, Twilio helps developers keep their pricing simple. As an investor, I’ve witnessed firsthand how much entrepreneurs struggle with pricing, so I love that. I’m immensely excited to see what the next batch of Twilio Fund startups comes up with. We’re also thrilled to have SV Angel as a co-investor, and welcome their extensive experience in early-stage investing.”
“At SV Angel, we have a chart of ‘mega-trends’ that we follow closely,” said Conway. “The biggest mega-trend we see is social, which is exactly what Twilio Connect enables — connecting people through next generation communications. I see a huge opportunity to invest in entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of the scalable tools Twilio offers.”
The previous investment of $250,000 by Dave McClure for Twilio Fund has since gone on to fund 10 companies to date: Callyo, FastCall411, KnockKnock, Magnolia Prime, Order Mapper, Proven, Qwipd, Textaurant, Voicendo, and Volta.
The fund will open for submissions October 15th, 2011, and close January 1st, 2012, at www.twiliofund.com
Windows 8 is grabbing good press across the net for the features disclosed at the Windows Build Conference earlier this week. With the exception that it still doesn’t work right with the drivers for some of our equipment, Windows 7 was certainly an advance over Vista and XP. We particularly appreciate its fast loading time compared to Vista, which, it sometimes seemed, would grind on and on for interminable lengths.
Windows 8 will boot in about 8 seconds, due to a new method that puts the kernal session to sleep rather than shutting it down completely so that it needs to completely reboot. Eight seconds! Now that’s an improvement we like.
Here’s a video demo of the quick startup:
Other features in Windows 8: it provides an Android like touch and swipe method with a picture password for unlocking your PC, as opposed to the text password used now.
The lock screen will display your battery information, time, instant messages and email you missed while away, and upcoming calendar events. Here’s a slideshow Windowof all the changes.
UNC Chapel Hill launching Virtual Digital Humanities Lab
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will launch a new virtual Digital Innovations lab that will encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary and innovative digital humanities projects.
Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, will give a free public talk Oct. 10 to celebrate the kickoff of the Digital Innovation Lab, which will be affiliated with the American studies department in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Bobley will speak at 2 p.m. in the University Room of Hyde Hall, home of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, located off East Franklin Street.
The Digital Innovation Lab will encourage the production of digital “public goods”: projects and tools that are of social and cultural value; can be made publicly available; are scalable and reusable; and/or serve multiple audiences. One immediate focus will be the use of large-scale data sources – maps, newspapers, city directories, public records – by scholars and the public in understanding the history of communities. The lab, accessed at http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu,
was created with a startup grant from the college.
“Digital technologies have the potential to transform how our faculty in the humanities ask questions about the world, engage with local communities, create learning environments for our students and collaborate with partners within and beyond the University,” said William L. Andrews, Ph.D., senior associate dean for the fine arts and humanities in the College.
The lab will build on the nationally funded digital humanities work of its UNC co-directors and co-founders – Robert Allen, Ph.D, and Richard Marciano, Ph.D. Allen is the James Logan Godfrey Distinguished Professor of American studies, history and communication studies. Marciano is a professor in the School of Information and Library Science and affiliated professor in American studies and director of Sustainable Archives and Leveraging Technologies (SALT).
Cloud storage firm Zetta lands $9M round
Sunnyvale, CA-based Enterprise cloud storage provider Zetta today announced that it has raised $9 million in its third round of funding, bringing the total funding to $31.5 million. Both existing investors Foundation Capital and Sigma Partners participated. Funds from this new investment will be used for sales, marketing and product development that will help the company increase market share of its award-winning cloud backup services in the small-to-medium business (SMB) market.
SAN FRANCISCO – Swrve, which is launching a realtime feedback platform for game developers, has nabbed $2.7 million in seed money.
Investors include: Intel Capital, SV Angel, Mochi Media founders, Playfish founders, the AIB Seed Capital Fund Limited Partnership, the Bank of Ireland Start-up Accelerator Fund, the AIB Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Ireland and angel investors.
Swrve says its platform helps developers test, target and tune a game. The Swrve cloud-based platform works as a feedback loop providing content owners an opportunity to understand user behavior and then tune content. Swrve automatically pushes concepts the developer wants to test to targeted segments of players, so the effect on users can be analyzed in realtime and changes can immediately be made.ent to provide a better user experience.
Finding the right mobile app for your needs can be more of a pain in the nether regions than necessary. A West Coast startup just landed funding to help mobile device users find the apps that do what they want without jumping through a lot of search hoops. Palo Alto, CA-based Quixey — a search engine for apps – has raised $3.8 million in Series A funding. The $3.8 million investment will help fuel growth and partnership development.
Quixey invented a new type of search — functional search — specifically for apps. Quixey’s functional search scans blogs, review sites, forums and social media sites to learn exactly what each app can do. Quixey has hundreds of pieces of data about each app. Quixey searches apps across all platforms — including mobile, web, desktop and browser apps.
Quixey is fundamentally different from other search engines. Other search engines require users to know an app’s name or official description to find the right app. Since Quixey knows exactly what each app can do, users can search by answering the question, “What do you want to do?”
The investment was co-led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group with participation by Webb Investment Network in addition to a follow-up investment by Innovation Endeavors.
We’re seeing an uptick in venture funding rounds for Internet-centric companies in the third quarter, although it’s still too early to tell if it will continue in the face of an economy still in the doldrums. Investors are still looking favorably on deal-focused startups, with Google Ventures taking a stake in WhaleShark, and angels backing Choozon, which was started by former Yahoo execs.
WhaleShark Media, Inc., a marketplace for coupons and deals named Brian Sharples, CEO and co-founder of HomeAway, to the company’s board. In addition, the company announced an investment in an undisclosed amount from Google Ventures.
WhaleShark continues to demonstrate strong progress. The company’s websites worldwide, which include RetailMeNot.com in the United States, connect consumers with discounts from more than 100,000 top merchants, stores and retailers. More than 230 million visitors come to shop its sites every year.
ChoozOn closes on $3.2M funding for deal discovery
Bellevue, WA - ChoozOn, the world’s first personalized service for deal discovery and social shopping for deals, has closed a $3.2 million Series A round of funding.
Leading this round and joining ChoozOn Corp’s Board are Michael Orsak of Worldview Technology Partners and James Brown of AVG Ventures.
Founded by former Yahoo! executives and led by a team of digital marketing experts, ChoozOn will use the resources to ramp up the development of its innovative service, which allows consumers to create customized “personal deal networks” comprising their favorite stores, brands, product categories, loyalty programs, deal clubs, daily deal services, and shopping pals. The company also revealed that, in the three months since ChoozOn’s founding was announced, over 1,000 leading brands have signed on to be “chozen” by consumers for inclusion in their personal deal networks.
FirstRain grabs $6.4M for business monitoring engine
SAN MATEO, CA.- FirstRain, the innovative Business Monitoring Engine used by global business professionals to track the critical developments impacting their business has raised $6.4 Million in new funding led by global technology venture capital firm Oak Investment Partners.
FirstRain had previously raised a total of $41 Million since FirstRain President & CEO, Penny Herscher reset the product strategy in 2006 and brought in Oak Investment Partners as the new majority owner. “This new capital will be used to help maintain our growth trajectory, grow the sales team and invest in the product development that keeps us in the forefront of the B2B digital information industry.” www.firstrain.com
Charlotte-based Adaptivity nails half of planned $6M round
Los Angeles-based BetterWorks, a company focused on helping small and medium-sized businesses recognize, reward and engage employees, has raised an $8 million Series A round from Redpoint Ventures. Funding will be used for hiring, expansion and continued development of the BetterWorks Perks platform, a simple online solution for employers to create, manage and measure employee perks programs. Total raise, including an early angel-backed round, brings investments to $10 million. www.betterworks.com
Campusbookrentals.com shelves $20M 2nd round
Utah-based CampusBookRentals.com has raised $20 million in a second funding round led by Level Equity, Five Elms Capital, and Cherokee & Walker. The company serves college students on more than 5,600 U.S. campuses and also buys back textbooks.
Twitter gets “significant” funding
DST Global has invested a “significant” but undisclosed amount of funding in Twitter. The company said on its blog that several existing investors participated.
Twitter says it will use the funds – which some online sources say is worth at least $400 million and may also include $400 million in secondary funding.
The funding, which values the company at $8 billion, reports say, would be a record for a venture round, includes backing from Russia’s DST Global, which also made a large investment in Facebook.
Tracking downloads by 4 millions users across the country from January through June 2011, a Pando Networks’ study revealed that some states are averaging connectivity speeds as much as ten times faster than those in other cities (see interactive maps at bottom).
The most striking findings were the core differences between the average speeds on a state-by-state basis. The data indicates that the fastest state was Rhode Island at an average of 894 KBps, which was almost three times faster than the slowest, Idaho, which had a dismal 318KBps. Rhode Island and Idaho may stand out as the extremities, but the disparities they highlight reflect more expansive, regional trends. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region contained eight of the ten fastest states.
With California, Oregon, and Washington in the top 15, the West coast was also a remarkably a speedy region. On the other hand, the rural Midwest and Mountain-West states of which Idaho is a member comprise nine of the ten slowest states. Middle America’s slow connectivity could be representative of its more widespread populations and a lower demand for high-speed data infrastructure.
Generally, the slower downloading, rural states were also the least likely to complete a download once begun, with some notable exceptions. Users in Hawaii, dealing with a fairly sluggish average of 432KBps, still managed to complete 87% of their downloads. Colorado residents averaged a relatively slow 474KBps, but managed to complete 86% of their downloads.
Bucking the trend in the opposite direction, the District of Columbia enjoys an average of 759KBps but only completes 80% of downloads. Such findings suggest high-speed internet users may not necessarily hold the most stable connections (or be the most patient internet users). Culver City, CA, the headquarters of Pando Networks client Riot Games, had the highest average completion rate at 98%.
More interesting findings are visible when the data is broken down to the city level. The fastest download averages tend to be concentrated in fairly affluent, metropolitan suburbs. Topping the list is Andover, a suburb of Boston with a median income of $114,000 and average download speeds of 2,801KBps.
Other notable, high-average suburbs include Burke, VA (an average of 1,674 KBps) outside of DC and Santa Monica, CA outside of Los Angeles (1,428KBps, with an average completion rate of 96%).
Keeping with the statewide trends, the slowest downloading towns tend to be in rural areas with low incomes. Taking the bottom spot is Pocatello, a small community in Idaho with a median income of $34,000. Other notably slow communities include Yuma, AZ (290KBps) in the Mojave desert and Mission, TX (270KBps) near the Mexican border.
Also notable are the wide margins between the various major ISPs. Excluding business and private networks, the data puts Comcast Cable at the top spot, averaging download speeds of 890KBps. Other notables near the top of the list included Verizon (788KBps) and Cox (757KBps). At 673KBps, Road Runner was the slowest of the major broadband providers.
Such wide gaps also exist amongst the providers of wireless 3G and 4G data plans. Topping the list are AT&T with an average of 416KBps and Sprint with a respectable 391KBps. T-Mobile turned in an average of 364KBps, Verizon Wireless had an average of 216KBps and ALLTEL was the slowest with an average of 155KBps.
Ryan Allis of iContact, the email marketing firm based in the Research Triangle, NC, landed at number 6 on PeekYou’s PeekScore list of under 30 “Internet Hotshots.” Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook tops the list, followed by Pete Cashmore (Mashable founder), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), Andrew Mason (founder, CEO, Groupon), and David Karp (Tumblr, Senduit), Allis, Gurbaksh Chahal (gWallet.com), Naveen Selvadurai (co-founder, Foursquare), Justin Kan (justin.tv), and Matt Mickiewicz (flippa.com, 99designs.com).
As is obvious, most are founder/CEOs of the most used social networks.
PeekYou also did a list of tech and Internet luminaries 31 and older. Steve Balmer of Microsoft heads that one, followed by Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Evan Williams, Carol Bartz, Larry Ellison, Michael Arrington, Jeff Bezos, Paul Otellini, and John Donahoe.
Dropbox raising $200 to $300 million round at $5B valuation
TechCrunch reports that the cloud storage and sharing service Dropbox is raising a new round of $200 to $300 million in funding valued at $5 billion.
The service, which had a security glitch that exposed user passwords to all and sundry for several hours last month, currently has 25 million registered members (including us). Dropbox lets users place files in the cloud and access them from any device with Dropbox installed. Users can also create password protected shared folders, which make collaboration easy. It’s really handy for making documents available on different computers.
Based in San Francisco, the company was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. It has raised $7.1 million in venture backing from & Combinator, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and others.
Angry Birds ‘always looking foir funding”
GameBeat reports an exchange with Wibe Wagemans at the GameBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco that suggests that Rovio, maker of the popular Angry Birds game, may be seeking additional funding. Wageman, Rovio’s head of global brand advertising said on stage that the company “was always looking for new funding.”
The company closed a $42 million funding round in March. Based in Finland, the company has expanded rapidly on the success of Angry Birds.
Evernote jots down $50M in new funding
Evernote, maker of another program we use daily for note-taking online and in general, has raised $50 million in new venture backing in a round led by Sequoia Capital with Morgenthaler Ventures participating. The valuation, according to TechCrunch, is at least $1 billion. The company previously raised about $40 million from those two investors and DOCOMO Capital and Troika Dialog.
Like Dropbox, Evernote can be installed on multiple digital devices, making your notes available and searchable from wherever you work, if its installed. It is available in both a free and a premium edition with advance features. So far we haven’t needed to upgrade to premium, but we use it so often, we can see a time when we might.
Other fundings:
It looks like a red-letter day for the funding of Internet centric companies. San Francisco-based MoPub, a mobile ad startup, has raised $6.5 million in first round funding from Accel Partners. Badgeville, a Menlo Park, CA-based provider of a social loyalty platform raised $12 million in a B round from Norwest Venture Partners and El Dorado Ventures.
Palo Alto-based- Impermium has nabbed a $1 million seed financing round, which will enable the company to accelerate development of the world’s first service to deliver “anti-spam for the social web.”
Investors participating in the self-led funding round include Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund and Morado Ventures. Angel groups Archimedes Capital and Embarcadero Ventures also contributed to the round.
Impermium was founded by former Yahoo! “Spam Czar” Mark Risher, Vish Ramarao, and Naveen Jamal. Prior to Impermium, the co-founders led the anti-spam and security group at Yahoo! Mail, where they drastically reduced spam and fraud for Yahoo! customers through sophisticated detection algorithms and machine-learning technologies.
The Impermium social spam and abuse defense platform is now available in limited beta. The company is working with numerous publishers across the social web, defending against attacks in the areas of spammy user-generated content, fraudulent registrations, account hacking, stolen passwords, and related forms of abuse.
Grotech only sold a minority of LivingSocial Shares
Dan Primack reports in his Fortune.com Term Sheet that the shares of LivingSocial that Virginia-based Grotech sold are just a minority of its holdings in the daily local deals firm. LivingSocial, which just purchased three foreign local deals companies, is giving Chicago-based Groupon a run for its money in the highly competitive space.
Primack notes that VentureWire says buyers of the Grotech LivingSocial shares included Lightspeed Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price.
New York-based RealDirect grabs $2M for homeowner marketing platform
RealDirect. a company with an online marketing platform for homeowners selling their property has raised a $2 million first round led by GSA Venture Partenrs with participation from Bendigo Partners and High Peaks Venture Partners.
DisplayLink, a provider of networked display technology for multi-monitor and USB-connected computing, has announced that it will receive eight million dollars of new financing in a fourth round investment, with an option for an additional six million if needed. The Palo Alto-based company did not disclose the investors providing the new capital. DisplayLink has previously received financing from Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, DAG Ventures, DFJ Esprit and WTI. The company has raised a total of $68 million.
DisplayLink Corp develops hardware and software solutions to enable easy connectivity between computers and displays over standard interfaces such as USB, Ethernet and wireless networks. DisplayLink technology is used in dozens of globally branded PC accessories including monitors, universal docking stations, display adapters, projectors
SolarBridge nabs $19M third round funding
Austin, Texas-based SolarBridge Technologies (SolarBridge), a developer of module-integrated microinverters for the solar industry, announced it has secured $19 million in series C funding. The company has raised more than $46 million to date.
The funds, raised from current investors as well as new financial and strategic investors, will be used to ramp up production capacity, expand sales support and logistics organizations and scale up research and development teams.
ScaleXtre,e weighs in with $11M Series B round
Palo Alto, CA-based ScaleXtreme Inc. the first cloud-based systems management company, today announced it has closed an $11 million Series B led by Ignition Partners with participation from previous investor, Accel Partners.
The new financing will be used to accelerate the rollout of additional product capabilities, and expand marketing and sales for ScaleXtreme’s innovative new way of managing hybrid clouds. Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition, will join the board that includes Ping Li from Accel and Nand Mulchandani and Balaji Srinivasa from ScaleXtreme.
Urban Interactions gets $1.6M
Somerville, MA.-based Urban Interactions Inc. has closed a $1.6 million equity offering, raising the amount from six investors, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company raised $455,000 in 2010. Urban Interactions matches job hunters with positions that suit them best.
Ping Identity, cloud ID solutions firm, lands $21M fifth round
Denver-based Ping Identity, which sells cloud identity security software, has raised a $22 million fifth round. Triangle Peak Partners and Silicon Valley Bank were new investors. Return investors include Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital. Ping raised about $38 million in previous rounds.
“The e-commerce economy is thriving,” said Robert Cell, CEO, MyBuys. “We have seen 18 straight months of improved profitability and wellness in e-commerce.”
Redwood City, CA-based MyBuys,which provides cross-channel personalization for retailers, has released the May 2011 edition of the MyBuys E-commerce Wellness Index. The index measures the overall health of U.S. e-commerce and tracks key trends among retailers.
Total revenue for U.S. e-commerce increased 9.5 percent versus the same period last year, driven largely by a 24 percent increase in revenues on full-priced item sales and a 19 percent decline in the number of products sold with a discount, pushing the index up 21 percent compared to 2010. These results, in addition to April’s 3 percent growth, continue to show health and growth improvement trends with industry.
The May 2011 Index also demonstrates the power of personalization as retailers saw an 11 percent increase in average order values for personalized transactions compared to sales without personalization.
Key Stats: May 2011 vs. May 2010
MyBuys E-Commerce Wellness Index
↑ 21.5%
Total revenue year-over-year
↑9.5%
Total revenues from products sold at list price
↑24.2%
Total revenues from products sold with a discount
↓19.7%
Depth of discounts
↓ 1.3%
Average Order Value for personalized transactions
↑ 11%
About the MyBuys Ecommerce Wellness Index The MyBuys Composite Index aggregates total sales, non-promoted sales, discounted sales performance, depth of discounts, AOV and consumer impulse response from our more than 300 MyBuys clients.
FUNDINGS – Boulder, Colorado-basedRally Software, which has offices in Raleigh, has raised $20 million in new funding led by Meritech Capital Partners. Meritech also backs Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zipcar, Presidio, Broadsoft, and NetSuite, among other well known tech firms.
Rally sells Agile application lifestyle management. According to a study by QSM Associates, software-driven companies that rely on Rally’s Agile ALM products and services are 50 percent faster to market and 25 percent more productive than industry averages.
Rally acquired Raleigh, NC-based Sixth Sense Analytics in 2010 and is hiring to fill two engineering positions in the Raleigh office. It currently has 17 employees. Vice President of Products, Todd Olson is based in Raleigh.
Coupons.com nabs whopping $200M round
Mt. View, CA-based Coupons.com, which provides digital coupons, has raised $200 million in new equity backing. The company did not name investors, but they’ll show up sooner or later in an SEC filing. It says up to $100 million of the funding will facilitate liquidity for employees and early investors.
Obviously, with Groupon, LivingSocial and a hoard of daily discount deal sites raking in venture backing of well over $1 billion, investors love anything to do with online discounts.
CT-based AdmantX gets $2.8M for semantic page-level analysis
ADmantXhas closed a $2.8 millionin growth funding from Atlante Ventures Mezzogiorno, the venture capital Fund of Intesa Sanpaolo, an Italian bank. ADmantX sells cookieless tracking technology.
ADmantX offers an advanced semantic page-level analysis that surfaces reader emotions, behaviors, motivations and intentions in order to match ads with similar emotional appeal, without using tracking cookies. This is the first outside funding since ADmantX was spun off last year from Expert System, the leading global provider of semantic software.
ADmantX says it goes beyond relevant SEO and flat keyword-based terms, ensuring brand protection against questionable content for publishers, ad networks and various buy- and sell-platforms. It also incorporates emotional intelligence into the mix, increasing campaign segmentation and targeting for better ad reach and success.
Reston, VA-based App47 tallies $1M first round for mobile app development tools
App47 has raised $1 million in first round funding from Valhalla Partners. It closed the funding in January.
App47 says it delivers enterprise Mobile Application Management tools and intelligence to optimize the mobile user experience and provides a powerful, integrated, lifecycle view of mobile applications and the entire mobile user experience-without compromising the privacy of enterprise data.
Their cloud-based Mobile Application Management solution can be deployed in minutes, providing key analytics and performance data to assist in design, deployment, configuration, and security of mobile applications.
Founders are Chris Schroeder, CEO, and Sean McDemott, who earlier created RealOps, the pioneer in enterprise management Run Book Automation solutions, which was acquired by BMC Software in July 2007.
Schroeder saiys, “Our solution focuses on managing mobile applications, not devices, allowing enterprises to manage and automate highly complex, multi-tired mobility workflows. With App47′s powerful, context-aware tools and deep application intelligence, enterprises can ensure the best possible user experience for the mobile applications and unleash their true business value.”
The way mobile apps are thriving with only a third or so of cell phone users having smartphones bodes well for growth in the industry. One thing that sets mobile apart from the way the Internet developed is that people have been willing to pay for mobile apps from the start. The real question, of course, is how mobile app makers can develop ongoing revenue streams.
Still, we’re betting firms related to mobile apps will be coming out of the proverbial woodwork for the next several years. Any firm that helps developers figure out what works and what doesn’t and why is likely to do well, we suspect.
VirtuOZ gets $7M for intelligent virtual agents
VirtuOz Inc., s provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that it has raised $7 million in additional funding from existing investors Mohr Davidow, Inventures Group and Galileo Partners to finance growth in the U.S. and E.U.
The company says its intelligent virtual agents offer companies a new channel for contemporary online customer service that delivers the best possible customer experience at one-tenth the cost of traditional channels.
The company processed over 144 million conversations on behalf of our customers in 2010 and with the largest number of live enterprise intelligent virtual agents for Global 2000 companies including eBay, SFR, H&R Block and L’Oreal.
San Diego-based Skinit secures $12M debt financing for customized electronic devices tech
Skinitwhich sells on-demand personalization of electronic devices, and home and automobile products, has closed a $12 million in debt financing from BlueCrest Capital Finance. The funds will be used to expand Skinit’s current initiatives for delivering personalization capabilities to consumers and support the company’s continued growth.
Skinit’s online ordering and customization tools allow consumers to create branded, designed, and personalized electronic device covers.
The growth strategy includes expansion of Skinit’s fully branded ecommerce partner sites and promotional landing pages, as well as wholesale, retail and B2B solutions. It already features an extensive library of licensed artwork from some of the most prominent brands in sports and entertainment including NFL skins and MLB skins, major colleges and universities, Disney, as well as original Skinit designs and works from independent artists.
Virginia-based Three Pillar Global gets $10M for mobile software development services
Fairfax, VA-based Three Pillar Global has received a $10 million investment from Texas-based Nestors Financial.
The company said it will use fhte funds to sclae its operations, expand its global footprint and possibly pursue acquisitions.
Three Pillar Global offers a flexible approach for clients through its innovative Virtual Development Centers that deliver transformative levels of productivity. The company, founded in 2006, has respected and leading customers in media, healthcare, education and financial services
Updata Partners, a technology focused private equity firm, has agreed to acquire the Internet Security Business Unit (the “ISBU”) of CA Technologies. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
The ISBU has a 10-year history of providing endpoint security solutions — including anti-malware and anti-virus — to consumers and businesses worldwide. More than 60,000 businesses across a wide spectrum of industries have deployed the unit’s solutions. The new company, which will be called Total Defense, Inc., will be formed as the security software market is entering a period of rapid change.
This transaction does not affect CA Technologies enterprise security business, which is focused primarily on identity and access management software.
IDC estimates the corporate endpoint security market will grow from $7.1 billion in 2010 to $9.9 billion in 2014.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC - Have you ever purchased something from an online retailer such as Amazon to avoid paying sales taxes? A group called Alliance for Main Street Fairness (AMSF), argues that by failing to collect sales taxes, online retailers have an unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores that is costing jobs, killing businesses and contributing to state budget deficits.
AMSF says it is funded by and advocates on behalf of employers who believe there must be a fair and balanced approach concerning the sales tax collection system. The group distributes the increasing number of media editorials supporting collection of sales taxes from online retailers.
We have reported on North Carolina’s attempts to get Amazon and other online retailers to collect sales taxes. The state, which requires residents to pay sales taxes on online and catalog purchases whether the retailer collects them or not, lost the first round of a federal court battle in which it sought to collect information on its resident’s purchases from Amazon. It has threatened to bill residents for sales taxes on Amazon purchases going back to 2003.
Federal law currently requires retailers to collect sales taxes in states where they have a nexus (a physical presence such as a store, warehouse or other facilities). Since Internet-only retailers do not have a nexus in most states, they are not currently required to collect the taxes.
Other states wrestling with the problem include Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas. The National Conference of State Legislatures says states lost about $8.6 billion in 2010 in failing to collect sales tax from online and catalog sales. The number is projected to be approximately $37 billion from 2009 to 2012.
Personally, we can see how buying a big ticket item from an online retailer might save a significant pieces of change, but even there, we doubt that most people buy online just so they won’t have to pay sales taxes. We buy online because it is convenient. We can do our shopping from our desks, which has inherent advantages that will not disappear when online retailers collect sales taxes.
We shop online because we often find a much wider selection available at the lowest possible prices online, whether we are looking for a book, a camera, or a refrigerator. We save gas and wear and tear on our vehicles and ourselves. But we have never bought an item online to avoid paying a sales tax.
Sooner or later, we suspect, this problem will be resolved through legal means that require online retailers to collect state sales taxes. That’s fine with us, although we think states threatening to collect years of back taxes are certainly wrong-headed as well as on legally shaky ground.
In the meantime, the way states and the online retailers are going about dealing with the problem is just causing more problems: such as Amazon dismissing its associates in North Carolina and other states attempting to use their status to say the reatailer has the physical presence in the state to create a nexus.
That move causes grief for many online startup businesses. Some larger ones actually left North Carolina when Amazon fired its state associates, and others complain it makes it harder to get that early revenue necessary to achieve outside growth funding.
Amazon is not helping matters by negotiating not to pay sales taxes even in states such as Texas, Indiana, Nevada and Tennessee where they have distribution centers.
The whole mess will likely require action on the part of the US Congress. “The Main Street Fairness Act,” H.R. 5660 was introduced in the US House in July 2010, and it would behoove Congress to vote on the bill.
While requiring online businesses to pay sales taxes may indeed help ailing state budgets and possibly help some brick and mortar retailers of big ticket items, we do not think it will do much to save book stores large or small or most other on the ground businesses from their online rivals.
E-commerce gained remarkable ground during the 2010 holiday season and we doubt that is because shoppers could avoid sales taxes. Brick and mortar retailers would be better off focusing on how they can develop an online marketing program and an online sales presence than bemoaning the perceived sales tax advantage. The real advantage of selling online, 24/7, is far greater than saving a few cents on the dollar.
Just today, AMSF launched a new web page in response to online-only retailers like Amazon.com threatening to terminate relationships with in-state affiliates to avoid playing by the same rules as Main Street and collecting sales tax. AMSF says it is ready to help small businesses thrown under the bus by Amazon connect with other retailers who are interested in doing business with them and collect the sales tax at the point of purchase.
COLUMBIA, MD – Merkle Group Inc., one of the nation’s largest database marketing agencies, has closed on a $2.8 million equity round, according to a regulatory filing.
The customer relationship marketing firm raised a whopping $87.2 million in three equity offerings in 2010. Investors include Palo Alto, CA-based Technology Crossover Ventures.
Merkle provides customer strategy, business intelligence and analytics, data sourcing, media targeting and measurement, and marketing technology solutions to Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations. With over 800 employees, the privately held corporation is headquartered near Washington, D.C. in Columbia, Maryland with additional locations in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Little Rock, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Hagerstown, MD and Shanghai.
Company clients include such marquee names ad Bank of America, Dell, General Electric, Samsung and the Arthritis Foundation.
The company employs more than 1200 people. It disclosed the raise in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
–Allan Maurer
To contact TechJournal South Editor & Writer Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournalSouth dot com.
MENLO PARK, CA – “Social media” isn’t just a trend taking the world by storm; it’s also the term advertising and marketing executives ranked as the most annoying industry buzzword in a survey by The Creative Group. Also high on the list: “synergy” and “ROI,” which rankled respondents in a similar survey conducted in 2006.
The national study was developed by The Creative Group, a specialized staffing service providing creative, advertising, marketing and web professionals on a project and full-time basis, and conducted by an independent research firm.
Advertising and marketing executives were asked, “In your opinion, what is the most annoying or overused buzzword in the creative/marketing industry today?”
The top-ranked responses include:
“Social media/social networking”
“Synergy”
“Free”
“Innovative/innovation”
“ROI/return on investment”
“Extra value/value added”
“Model(s)”
“Telemarketing”
“Social media expert”
“Resolve”
“Moving forward”
“Branding”
“Multitasking”
“Going green”
“Proactive”
“Think out of the box”
“Culture change”
“End of the day”
“Interactive”
“24/7″
“Integrated/integration”
“Viral”
“The big idea”
“Leverage”
“Unique
We would be willing to bet that “wash, rinse, repeat,” applied to various types of business advice would appear on the list of many of our readers and those who have attended a digital media conference in the last six months.
“Certain terminology has become firmly ingrained in the way advertising and marketing professionals think and speak, and often helps colleagues communicate ideas more quickly,” said Donna Farrugia, executive director of The Creative Group. “But when professionals need to grab attention or have an important message to deliver, excessive use of buzzwords can cause people to lose interest and tune out.”
The Creative Group offers four tips for eliminating jargon in your communications:
Translate your thoughts. It’s typical to think in the lingo you use every day. But when putting your ideas to paper or in an e-mail, take the time to explain the concepts in terms that your audience will easily understand.
Edit, edit, edit. Many buzzwords are unnecessary. Think carefully: Does a phrase like “at the end of the day” really add to what you’re trying to say? Probably not.
Break bad habits. We all rely on certain phrases when we speak. If the ones you gravitate toward are on the list of annoying buzzwords, think of alternatives that convey the same meaning.
Show instead of tell. Rather than relying on buzzwords, use concrete examples to convey your thoughts. For instance, instead of discussing your fully “integrated” marketing strategy for a product rollout, describe the various elements and how they work together.
RALEIGH, NC – Raleigh-based Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a provider of open source solutions, has acquired Makara, a developer of deployment and management solutions for applications in the cloud. Makara’s technologies will accelerate the development of Red Hat’s comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Based in Redwood City, CA, Makara provides solutions to enable organizations to deploy, manage, monitor and scale their applications on both private or public clouds. Customers facing issues in moving applications to the cloud and managing them efficiently can benefit from Makara’s solutions for scaling, rightsizing, rollback and monitoring.
By integrating the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform, Red Hat can offer a more comprehensive PaaS solution that allows organizations to quickly transition their applications to both public and private clouds with minimal modifications.
“PaaS is becoming another market for software vendors looking to deliver compelling enterprise solutions in the cloud,” said Rachel Chalmers, research director at the 451 Group. “By acquiring the cloud technologies developed by Makara, Red Hat is now in a position to address this market by creating solutions for enterprises looking for deployment, management and auto-scaling capabilities to be baked into the core platform.”
PALO ALTO, CA – Facebook investor Accel Partners has sold 17 percent of its stake in the company for $516 million, which values the social networking phenomenon at $35 billion, according to Vator.tv. The Accel sale leaves Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies the major shareholder in the company.
A report from Experian Hitwise this week says that one of every four web pages viewed last week were on Facebook. The service accounted for 24.27 percent of all U.S. pageviews, while runner-up YouTube.com had 6.93 percent.
Security software seller BitDefender says statistics from its Safego Facebook app that monitors their vulnerbility to malware, says that 20 percent of Facebook users are exposed to malicious posts in their news feeds that lead to their accounts being hacked. The figures come from Safego’s analysis of news feed items seen by 14,000 Facebook users.
Facebook feeds may contain malware
More than 60 percent of the malcious attacks come from third-party applications using Facebook’s developer platform. Many offer to perform a task otherwise impossible on Facebook, such as see who has viewed your profile. Other malware offers bogus items for Facebook apps such as Farmville or offer allegedly free gifts such as games or cell phones, the report says.
Other attacks come from viruses such as Koobface or links to videos.
OWINGS MILL, MD- Nora Therapeutics Inc., which is developing therapeutics to address issues in womens’ reproductive health, has raised $14.8 million of a targeted $32.55 million round, the company disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
We reported in June that Nora had closed on about $3 million of the round, then aimed at $25 million, according to an SEC filing.
Investors so far include Burrill Life Sciences Capital Fund of San Francisco; Prospect Venture Partners III of Palo Alto, CA; Vivo Ventures Fund VI, Palo Alto.
Nora Therapeutics raised $25 million from Burrill, Prospect Venture Partners and Vivo Ventures in 2008.
Nora is developing products to help women who experience repeated assisted reproduction failure or recurrent miscarriage. It was housed at the Emerging Technology Center in Baltimore in 2004.
We mentioned previously that we like seeing West Coast VCs putting some money into East Coast firms.
We have also been impressed with biotech fund raising in Maryland in general this year. The state has driven development with a number of moves supporting the industry, from programs to provide some early stage funding to establishing a biotechnology center.
Maryland and North Carolina have now and then exchanged places among the top five US biotechnology hubs in annual rankings. Its proximity to the governments National Institutes of Health and the Potomac and Mid-Atlantic venture capital community are distinct advantages.
–Allan Maurer
To reach TJS editor Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournalSouth dot com.
With Spotify now in the U.S. and a host of other competing free music streaming services online, Pandora has eliminated its limit on free listening. Previously, free users who listened for 40 hours would have to either sign up for the firm’s premium, ad-free, service with better sound. I once paid .99 cents to finish out a month of the service after hitting its 40 hour limit.
Will Apple fans line-up for the iPhone 4S the way they have for previous versions of the coveted smartphone?
Xfire , a social service for gamers with more than 19 million users, has received $4 million in funding led by Intel Capital and several prominent angel investors. The company is based in Los Angeles.
Windows 8 is grabbing good press across the net for the features disclosed at the Windows Build Conference earlier this week. With the exception that it still doesn’t work right with the drivers for some of our equipment, Windows 7 was certainly an advance over Vista and XP. We particularly appreciate its fast loading time compared to Vista, which, it sometimes seemed, would grind on and on for interminable lengths.
SAN FRANCISCO – 
Finding the right mobile app for your needs can be more of a pain in the nether regions than necessary. A West Coast startup just landed funding to help mobile device users find the apps that do what they want without jumping through a lot of search hoops. Palo Alto, CA-based 
We’re seeing an uptick in venture funding rounds for Internet-centric companies in the third quarter, although it’s still too early to tell if it will continue in the face of an economy still in the doldrums. Investors are still looking favorably on deal-focused startups, with Google Ventures taking a stake in WhaleShark, and angels backing Choozon, which was started by former Yahoo execs.
Tracking downloads by 4 millions users across the country from January through June 2011, a Pando Networks’ study revealed that some states are averaging connectivity speeds as much as ten times faster than those in other cities (see interactive maps at bottom).
Ryan Allis of iContact, the email marketing firm based in the Research Triangle, NC, landed at number 6 on PeekYou’s
GameBeat reports
Palo Alto-based- 
DisplayLink, a provider of networked display technology for multi-monitor and USB-connected computing, has announced that it will receive eight million dollars of new financing in a fourth round investment, with an option for an additional six million if needed. The Palo Alto-based company did not disclose the investors providing the new capital. DisplayLink has previously received financing from Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, DAG Ventures, DFJ Esprit and WTI. The company has raised a total of $68 million.
“The e-commerce economy is thriving,” said Robert Cell, CEO, 
FUNDINGS – Boulder, Colorado-based 
ADmantX
By Allan Maurer
COLUMBIA, MD – 
MENLO PARK, CA – “Social media” isn’t just a trend taking the world by storm; it’s also the term advertising and marketing executives ranked as the most annoying industry buzzword in a survey by 
RALEIGH, NC – Raleigh-based Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a provider of open source solutions, has acquired Makara, a developer of deployment and management solutions for applications in the cloud. Makara’s technologies will accelerate the development of Red Hat’s comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
PALO ALTO, CA – Facebook investor Accel Partners has sold 17 percent of its stake in the company for $516 million, which values the social networking phenomenon at $35 billion, according to 
OWINGS MILL, MD- Nora Therapeutics Inc., which is developing therapeutics to address issues in womens’ reproductive health, has raised $14.8 million of a targeted $32.55 million round, the company disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
