Image via William Brawley

There’s time for one last tune before breaking up the band.

Village Ventures, where Bryan Birsic was a senior associate, wound down its operations last week. But Birsic isn’t taking any time off. He is president of SimpleReach, a startup that helps publishers to better engage their readers, which has just raised $1.5 million to build out its business in a new direction.

If you click over to the SimpleReach site right now, its product looks a lot like fellow New York company Outbrain, in that it serves up a recommendation for readers at the bottom of an article with a sliding bar that comes in from the side. But Birsic says that the funding is going into something completely new.

“It’s hard to let go of the slide because it was a success. It’s on hundreds of sites right now serving up millions of impressions. But we learned from that product and are going after a much bigger opportunity.”

The company is hiring data scientists and engineers with experience in the field of content discovery. “We don’t want to tip our hat just yet,” Birsic said. “It’s a really frothy space and we’ve got a unique approach.”

The co-founders of Village Ventures have headed off to Bain and Greycroft after finding that their investment thesis, “didn’t scale,”. SimpleReach is the final investment the firm made, although the fund does have follow on capital set aside. Mark Peter Davis from High Peaks Venture Partners also led the round.

SalesForce and other services like it have been around for several years to manage contacts, calendars, task, and invoicing. But, most services are aimed at business executives and startup companies, not smaller businesses. Jobber’s goal is to bring business management and customer relationship management tools to “field-services” providers, like handymen, painters, and landscapers.

“We provide field service business owners with a powerful modernization tool that is enabling growth and providing a competitive advantage,” co-founder and chief executive Sam Pillar said in a statement, “We’re making our customers happier business owners.”

Jobber realized that many small businesses in the field-services industry use either old software or pen and paper to manage their business, so it set out to bring these companies up to date. Jobber’s product includes a CRM tool, task management, job tracking, sceduling, invoicing, and QuickBooks integration for accounting, all of which are targeted specifically at small businesses. The company puts a lot of emphasis on easy to use software that anyone can start using with minimal training. The entire service is web-based and is available for all the major mobile platforms.

Service Auto Pilot and Click Software are among Jobber’s closest competitors, though Jobber told VentureBeat in a statement that its competition is ”split between web and desktop based software. The desktop offerings are dated, ill-supported and lack innovation but still have a relatively strong following despite their lack of sophistication.”

The company’s funding was led by Vancouver venture capitalists, entrepreneurs Boris Wertz, Vik Khanna, and Pankaj Agarwal, and venture capital firm Point Nine Capital. Jobber will use the seed funding to expand its team, develop new features, and improve its user experience.

Jobber is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and was founded in 2010 by two freelance programers, Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler.

Lawn mower image via Shutterstock

“ResearchGate is a full-blown network for scientists and researchers to connect, share and collaborate; they can login through their Facebook accounts as well, a representative for the company wrote in an email to VentureBeat, “Research/Science is moving to more openness, and with global mass adoption of the Internet and smartphones, people’s norms and expectations are changing in how they interact with each other online.”

Co-founder Dr. Ijad Madisch (pictured above) got the idea for ResearchGate while studying for his PhD. He wanted a way to connect with other science students to collaborate and share knowledge. Scientists can post information and reports, connect with their peers to exchange ideas, and collaborate on problems. The social network has been up and running for four years now, with 1.3 million members from the scientific community.

What’s a scientist to do when they want to connect with a colleague and share research? They can’t just go Facebook or Twitter to share their guarded secrets, right? Not so fast.

While ResearchGate boasts an ad-free way to connect with scientists and it prohibits members from disclosing information shared on the site with third parties, it’s not exactly more popular for scientists than mainstream social networks. As Microsoft’s Dr. Mark Drapeau points out in an Huffington Post opinion piece, “There have long been scientists on Facebook and LinkedIn and connecting via other websites like Scienceblogs.”

Drapeau makes a good point that scientific social networks like ResearchGate are just “add-ons” to how scientists do their work and don’t replace peer review processes. While these networks might give scientists an outlet to discuss ideas, many have come and gone, never catching on very well.

ResearchGate acts as part social network, part research sharing platform. Free research sharing isn’t new; sites like ArXiv and PLoS allow researchers to publish findings for free, without lengthy review processes from scientific journals. And of course, social networks Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are so widespread that many scientists already belong to them.

More scientific-specific competitors of ResearchGate include Scitable, UniPHY, and Labroots to name a few. ResearchGate may have one of the sleeker-looking websites, but it connects scientists together just like all the rest.

ResearchGate raised its first round of institutional funding in September 2010, though the company hasn’t disclosed how much money it has received. Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners, Michael Birch, and David O. Sacks participated in this latest round. The company is based in Berlin, Germany and has more than 40 employees.

Stitch Labs, a startup that helps small businesses manage inventory, orders, and shipping, announced today it has raised $1 million in seed funding from True Ventures.

Co-founder Jake Gasaway told VentureBeat in an interview that Stitch Labs really took off after it integrated with Etsy and Shopify. Many of the millions of Etsy users began making their way over to Stitch Labs and became paying customers, which helped the company gain attention from venture capital firms. Stitch Labs attributes its seed funding to showing VCs that they could build a business that generates revenue and could convert people into paying customers.

“Something that was pretty much consistent with our users, is that they loved our product. Once we integrated with Etsy and Shopify, we gained new customers — not just sign ups, but paying customers,” said Gasaway, “We spent time last summer talking to people, networking with small businesses to pave our way.”

Stitch Labs manages contacts, inventory, sales, invoicing, and shipping for online businesses. It displays all relevant information in a dashboard, so business owners can manage orders, payment, and many other aspects of their operations. The company also integrates with the shopping cart platforms from Etsy and Shopify and can manage data from several different business, both online and off, in one dashboard. Pricing starts at $12 per month for single-person businesses, up to a monthly fee of $80 for larger companies.

Co-founder and chief executive Brandon Levey began working on Stitch Labs in 2011 when he was running his own design and manufacturing company. He was frustrated with the lack of software available to small businesses to manage inventory and sales.

“We see a lot of changes going on the e-commerce world, we want to make it easier for them to succeed,” Levey told VentureBeat.  ”We take a more holistic approach to all the ways businesses sell their products, offline and off.”

Stitch Labs will use the funding for product development and customer growth. The company is also hiring new employees.

Stitch was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco, California. This is the first round of funding the company has received.

Everyone’s been frothing at the mouth over the past few weeks over Facebook’s imminent IPO, and we’ve never been more hungry for details. When will the shares be offered for public sale? How much will they cost?

While Facebook left a lot of mysterious blanks in its S-1 filing with the SEC, we can prepare for the blessed event by taking stock of Facebook’s financial performance, the state of the general economy, and recent tech IPOs on a similar scale.

To prepare you with a few key facts and a pinch of experience-based speculation, we got in touch with Dun & Bradstreet analyst and tech IPO specialist Lee Simmons.

Facebook’s IPO timing

The timing of the IPO, Simmons said, is now “entirely up to Facebook,” but he said the social network will likely be pricing its shares and making its public debut sometime over the summer. “Some analysts are saying May; I would say it won’t be after August, barring any unforeseen economic catastrophes.”

And speaking of economic catastrophies, remember last August when a record number of IPOs were delayed? Simmons said that kind of activity is well within Facebook’s purview as well. “You saw a couple companies last year pull in the reins and delay the IPO,” the analyst said. “Facebook can do the same thing.”

Simmons said we can expect to see amended S-1s, changed to reflect the number of shares and starting price, within the next few months. And Facebook’s road show should be happening soon, as well.

Mostly, though, Simmons said curious onlookers can keep their fingers on the pulse of the general economy to get a sense of when Facebook might go public. Stating that public markets will act as a bellweather for Facebook’s actions, Simmons noted that any market turbulence could make potential investors skittish.

“Thinking back to last May when LinkedIn priced, it seemed like the public markets were going to be really robust for the rest of the year,” Simmons recalled. “Then everything tanked.”

Last August’s market dive and subsequent IPO delays and disturbances are a model for what might happen if the spring brings any unexpected dips to public markets. Facebook and the cadre of banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO will be keeping an eye on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq as one factor for determining the best time to price.

Facebook’s IPO pricing

So, depending on the general market, we can expect a summer IPO for Facebook. What about its share prices; what can we expect the numbers to do on the first and subsequent days of trading?

“Facebook is being compared most often to Google,” said Simmons. Google went public in August 2004, starting shares at $85 each. The company offered just over 19 million shares, and Google closed the day with a market capitalization in excess of $23 billion. Today, GOOG shares are trading at $608.86.

“Analysts see a lot of similarities between both companies,” said Simmons. “Their revenue growth is very similar.” But Simmons continued, “The Facebook IPO will most likely dwarf Google’s.”

While Google’s shares rose to a high of $104 on the company’s first day of public trading, Facebook’s stock is more likely to mimic LinkedIn’s first day of trading, said Simmons. LinkedIn, which priced at $45 per share to open the day, quickly rose by more than 100 percent and stayed at around $103 for the majority of the first day of trading.

In short, said Simmons, “If the company wants to raise $5 billion on its opening day, that’s what it’s going to do. There is a lot of investor enthusiasm.”

This analyst (and just about every other analyst we’ve spoken to) has no doubt that Facebook will “enjoy a really big, explosive first day” of trading. “This is the one stock that tech investors have been waiting for for at least 2 years,” said Simmons. “It will garner towards the high end of its potential valuation, between $75 and $100 billion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it reached the $100 billion mark.”

However, whether Facebook stock will have a shelf life longer than a couple of years is something Simmons said only time will. He noted that LinkedIn, which was ostensibly the first American social media firm to go public, has seen “very volatile” trading activity since its debut (LNKD is currently trading at $91 per share).

“These stocks are not invulnerable to economic conditions,” Simmons concluded. “A lot of the hype around these web 2.0 companies tends to forget that one key factor: That the economy can make a dent in share price … Two years down the line, it could go either way.”

Stay tuned for more information on Facebook’s road show and initial public offering over the next couple of months.

Fab.com, the wildly popular design-focused e-commerce site, has just acquired Casacanda, a German startup offering “an online shopping club for daily design inspirations.”

If that mission statement sounds familiar, it’s not just you. The Fab.com team saw the similarities as well, and decided that snapping up Casacanda would make for a smoother transition into international waters than building a competing product from scratch.

Fab execs hinted last month that international operations would be coming soon. The startup’s CEO, Jason Goldberg, said in a recent email to VentureBeat, “We’re planning to grow from 2 million members to 5 million this year worldwide. We’re prepared to handle it.”

Goldberg also said today that Fab’s trademark design-first service would be coming to other parts of Europe soon.

Today, Casacanda will relaunch as Fab.de. The rebranded site will serve residents in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. All 45 of Casacanda’s employees will now be working for Fab.

Fab.de’s product listings will be sourced both locally and globally, Goldberg revealed. “We have a good amount of crossover as well as unique products. In terms of the first month of Fab.de products, it’s about 30 percent similar to the U.S. and 70 percent originally sourced by the Fab.de team,” the CEO said.

Casacanda brings 250,000 members with it into the Fab fold, 90,000 of whom joined in the last 30 days. In toto, Fab.com now includes 2.3 million member shoppers, all of whom signed up in the past eight months.

The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but the company has been on a fundraising tear to produce just this kind of growth. Fab.com took $8 million in funding in July 2011 and quickly continued to raise a gargantuan $40 million round just a few months later in December.

Eventually, Goldberg told us, he hopes to make Fab.com the better-designed competitor to Amazon.com — with all the latter’s size and commercial power. And Fab will be raising more money along the way to make that vision a reality.

“Our scale in mind is Amazon-size scale, so, yes, we’ll raise more money in the future,” Goldberg said in a recent VentureBeat interview. “Amazon raised billions to be what it is today. We have Amazon-size ambitions to deliver great design options to people everywhere across all categories at all price points.”

Casacanda was founded in August 2011, at which time it took an undisclosed amount of funding from three German angel investors.

Alibaba Group is raising $3 billion — not to buy back the 40 percent stake Yahoo holds in the parent company, as previously rumored, but to buy back the 27 percent of Alibaba.com stock currently floating around the public market.

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma (pictured above) is attempting to take the company private in order to strengthen his control of the company, Reuters reports today.

The company recently suspended public trading of its stock pending the release of a statement that a company spokesperson said would be price-sensitive.

Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ANZ, DBS Bank, and Mizuho Corporate Bank have each pledged $500 million in loans to facilitate the deal, totaling $3 billion for Alibaba.com to become a private company again.

Currently, parent company Alibaba Group owns 73 percent of Alibaba.com, and Yahoo owns 40 percent of Alibaba Group. Yahoo was reportedly attempting to sell back its stake in Alibaba Group and a couple other Asian web powerhouses, a deal that would have left Yahoo with much-needed focus on domestic products and around $17 billion in cash.

However, those talks fell apart last week. As Yahoo’s board chair Roy Bostock noted in an open letter on the negotiations, “The complexity and unique nature of these transactions is significant. While we continue to devote significant resources to these discussions, we are not in a position at this time to provide further detail or to provide assurance that any transaction will be achieved.”

The Alibaba.com stock buy-back is reportedly unrelated to the Yahoo deal, Reuters’ anonymous sources said.

Google has acquired what’s left of Cuil, a once-promising search startup that closed up shop about a year and a half ago.

The startup, which was founded by two former Googlers and an IBM employee, has relinquished control of its pending patents to Google.

As blogger Bill Slawski uncovered today in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database, Google has acquired seven of the patents of its onetime rival.

Most of the IP revolves around user interfaces and how to better present search results when multiple meanings are possible for a single keyword or phrase. The patents do not contain any intellectual property about search algorithms; rather, these innovations are about UI only, not what’s under the hood.

Google has been playing around quite a bit over the past few years with its KISS approach to search UI. After adding images, shopping results, and news results in with indexed web pages, the company recently unveiled the addition of people-powered social data via Google+.

Former Googler and Cuil founder Anna Patterson now works at Google again; she’s been a director at the search giant since Cuil shut its website down in September 2010.

Cuil raised a total of $33 million from prominent venture capital firms between its founding in 2008 and its shutdown. The startup claimed to have indexed 120 billion web pages, larger than Google’s index at the time.

Here’s a look at the Cuil navigation and tabs UI for which Google has acquired patents:

Update: As expected, Amazon has matched the Buy 2 Get 1 Free sale for Vita games. The Amazon offer ends on February 25.

Original story: In Target’s latest weekly ad the retail chain revealed a “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” promotion for PlayStation Vita games. The Vita hits store shelves next week, February 22, and the Target sale runs from today, February 19, to Friday, February 25.

However, forum-goers at cheapassgamer.com have been having mixed or negative results, saying some Targets are not honoring the deal, even when the customer has the ad in-hand.

Luckily, rival chain Best Buy is openly “price-matching” the ad and also has a wider selection of Vita games available (Target apparently isn’t carrying all launch titles).

Originally Posted by dagarcia2678

I got Best Buy to price match this with no fight. Didn’t even get a manager involved. Possibly the easiest PM I have done in a long time.

Amazon.com is expected to follow suit for those who prefer to do their shopping from the comfort of their own home.

Check back tomorrow for VentureBeat’s massive PlayStation Vita launch coverage.

The Hyperpublic team

In what could be the deal of the year, Groupon has snatched up a little-known startup to help it do the dirty work of targeting deals to subscribers.

The newly public deals behemoth has bought two-year-old, New York-based Hyperpublic for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Friday. Hyperpublic aggregates place and deal data and provides developers with a way to monetize their applications. More attractive to Groupon, however, is the company’s growing pool of data that connects people to places.

“We set out to change the way people interacted with the local environment, and are pumped to continue that mission as a part of one of the fastest growing and most disruptive companies in the world,” Hyperpublic said in a note posted to its website Friday.

Hyperpublic amasses publicly available local data, gathered from a variety of sources such as social networks, and spits that data back out to developers who want specialized local data. The startup’s Data on Demand product, for instance, purports to give developers access to whatever local data they desire.

“We have everything. Need Twitter handles of vegans in the East Village? Done. Millions of display ads referencing places in Chicago? Done,” the product description explains.

Hyperpublic co-founder Jordan Cooper insinuated in an interview with the New York Times Bits blog that this type of data is of especial interest to Groupon. While Cooper was unable to go into great detail about HyperPublic’s future, he did say that Groupon, like most companies these days, is trying to mine publicly available social data and relate that data to real-world commercial decisions.

“The better Groupon understands the people and local environment that they are trying to drive traffic to, the better they will do,” Cooper said.

Hyperpublic previously raised $1.15 million in seed funding.

Galley slave from Wikicommmons

Groupon employees have alleged abusive working conditions, breach of contract, and a boss (Groupon’s Eastern European CEO Daniel Glasner) whom they described as a “slavedriver”.

Before we dive into the specifics, it should be noted that these emails were excerpted, not printed in full, and translated from German on the Berlin-based tech blog Village Ventures.

The first email reads:

I must remain anonymous, otherwise I will face serious issues. Here I send you something that has bothered us for days, weeks, months, on a regular daily basis at Groupon. Strong pressure, breaches of contractually agreed bonuses with subsequent penalties. Now our titles are supposed to be changed — we will be degraded — if we do not acquire our Dreamlist partners.

“Dreamlist partners” refers to high-end restaurants and spas that Groupon is hoping to provide deals for. CEO Daniel Glaser responded with  a statement denying the accusation.

We don’t have any insight or connections in Berlin, so let’s leave the he said she said alone for now and examine the historical context.

In September 2011, Groupon employees in the U.S. filed a class action lawsuit. Like their German counterparts, they were owed money for unpaid overtime and bonuses, in that case reaching into the millions of dollars.

Leading up to that lawsuit, a series of increasingly negative testimonials appeared on the website Glass Door, where employees can post anonymously about their bosses and company.

• Immense pressure to hit unrealistic sales goals.
• Management out of touch with what’s going on during phone calls (it’s getting harder and harder to close deals as more and more people don’t want to work with Groupon)
• Used to be a fun culture. Now it’s all about the bottom line and feels like your typical call center
• Sales staff are worked to the bone
• Everyone is miserable and they treat the customers ( merchants) as well as employees with little respect. All they care about is how much money groupon makes. They also created a “boiler” room environment and micromange to the 100th degree. They suffocate you and you can barely breath or go to the bathroom with out feeling guilty.
• They make you feel guilty to take a Saturday off to go to a wedding.
• Sales staff cries all the time.

The issues of unrealistic sales goals, demanding hours, and brutal managment mirrors the complaints coming out of Berlin.

Groupon has been called the fastest growing company in history. It achieved an IPO that valued it in the billions of dollars. A brutal sales culture may be the obvious byproduct of that aggressive expansion.

Until now, advertisers have had to work with Twitter’s team. This has limited the number of advertisers Twitter could successfully scale to.

If done right, this partnership represents a significant threat to recommendations site Yelp, which is on its road to IPO. As I wrote earlier, Yelp charges some merchants a $600 CPM for advertising that is often lacking in any relevance to the business.

Yelp also requires a commitment of at least three months and charges early termination fees for businesses that don’t meet their commitment. These rates and conditions are so bad that I can’t recommend Yelp for any business.

On the other hand, I recommend that every small business create a Twitter account to connect with their existing customers.

While Yelp’s model most closely resembles a Yellow Pages model, early indications are that Twitter’s product will be more performance driven and accountable.

A number of startups have been pushing small businesses to use their services for new customer acquisition. But tools from companies like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Yelp are not cost effective.

Many small businesses will do just fine using Twitter’s free accounts to build loyalty. But Twitter’s self-service platform offers the promise of a cost-effective new customer acquisition vehicle. Businesses will be able to pay for each new follower and build an ongoing relationship with those consumers.

I would expect that, over time, consumers will be able to load electronic offers onto their American Express card directly from a tweet. This would open the door to redemption-based advertising, where advertisers are only billed when an ad delivers a new customer.

I would also like to see Twitter develop a localized version of its user recommendations; when someone is first signing up for a Twitter account, they can enter a location and get a list of recommended businesses to follow.

There are two important keys to success with small businesses:

• Simplicity of the user interface. Complex bidding and keyword management won’t work. An interface with a lot of form fields won’t work.
• Marketing. Small businesses need to be aware of the product offering. This is an area where American Express can help, with its large merchant base. American Express is also funding $100 in marketing credit for the first 10,000 eligible cardholders and merchants.

Without both of these in place, a self-serve product won’t work. A third important factor is scale — and only Twitter, Facebook, and Google have the scale that is necessary for success with self-serve in the highly fragmented local market.

The companies that have reached a reasonable degree of success with small businesses have mastered both. Groupon, LivingSocial, and Yelp all work with a very simple user interface — the telephone. You don’t have to use a computer to manage their ads. They also have an effective marketing program — someone calls you.

But because dialing for dollars is expensive and takes a large team, their marketing programs are also expensive with large commitments.

Twitter and American Express have the potential to deliver better targeted prospects for far less money.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social, and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

What this means is that Linden Lab is now able to diversify its gaming offerings, using LittleTextPeople to support that development effort.

“LittleTextPeople brings a depth and breadth of AI and interactive story development expertise that is a great fit for Linden Lab as we launch multiple new products,” said Rod Humble, Linden Lab’s relatively new CEO. “The result of this investment will be a new type of digital entertainment that modernizes the novel as a shared story-telling experience.”

The plans, according to the press release, include several new stand-alone projects to be released this year. This is in contrast to the company’s last few acquisitions, like Mark Interactive, XstreetSL, and OnRez, in which the technology was used to enhance Second Life itself.

Perhaps with the new acquisition, Linden Lab is looking for another Emmy Award? LittleTextPeople was founded to simulate and model social practices as well as specific personalities, so perhaps this does have application to an avatar-based gaming system, after all.

“Yes, Richard [Evans] and I now work for Linden Lab, putting our expertise towards new stand-alone products, said Emily Short, Chief Textual Officer of LittleTextPeople, in an email this afternoon. “It’s been a very exciting process, and I’m really looking forward to being able to share with the world what we’re working on.”

Only time will tell, of course, if this results in new games, new interactive fiction, new Second Life features, or an amalgamation of all three.

Linden Lab, based in San Francisco, Calif. Its investors include Globespan Capital Partners, Benchmark Capital, Catamount Ventures, and Jeff Bezos.

Yelp has amended its SEC S-1 filing to show a starting price of $12 to $14 per share of Yelp stock.

The shares will make their debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol YELP.

The most recent amendment to the S-1 form was filed today after the closing bell.

The company initially filed for its IPO back in November. In the deal, the company expects to raise $100 million.

The last time the venture-backed startup disclosed its earnings, net revenue for the first three quarters of 2011 sat at $58.4 million, up 80 percent year over year. That figure breaks down to around $40 million in from local advertising revenue, $12.6 million from brand advertising revenue, and $5.4 million from other revenue sources.

At that time, the company had $23 million in cash and saw losses of $7.6 million for the nine-month period in 2011, lower than the $8.5 million losses posted for the first three quarters of 2010.

Yelp has come under criticism in recent days for its practices with regard to small businesses. In a recent VentureBeat editorial post, contributor Rocky Agrawal blasted the company, calling Yelp advertising a “rip-off” for smaller businesses and saying that the company vastly overcharged its smaller customers by around 1,000 times more than the industry standard.

Agrawal also argued that Yelp’s advertising — a huge part of its revenue — is poorly targeted, meaning that not only are advertisers being overcharged in his opinion, but Yelp is also not delivering the promised results.

We’ll keep you updated with news on the Yelp IPO as the date draws nearer, so stay tuned.

Image courtesy of kaszeta, Flickr

VideoGameDesignSchools.org has crafted a slick infographic detailing Valve’s conquest of the digital distribution market.

It should come as no surprise that Steam is doing well, but this infographic puts in perspective just how much better Valve’s PC gaming digital storefront is doing than its competitors.

Note that some of the sales data dates back to June 2011, when Electronic Arts’ rival platform “Origin” was still known as the EA Store.

Created by: Video Game Design Schools

Networking technology giant Cisco has filed an appeal with the European Union today over the October approval of Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype.

Cisco, along with Italian VoIP provider Messagenet SpA, is challenging the decision to approve the merger because the European Commission failed to place important conditions on the deal regarding interoperability of video communication. The main worry from Cisco is that Microsoft will exclusively integrate Skype’s video communication into its enterprise-level Lync video and voice communication software. Thus, consumers and businesses using competing software (like those offered by Cisco) wouldn’t be able to communicate.

“Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others. Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications,” wrote Cisco SVP of Video and Collaboration Marthin De Beer in a letter posted on the company blog. “We believe standards-based interoperability will accelerate innovation, create economic value, and increase choice for users of video communications, entertainment, and services.”

And while Cisco may be sincere in its advocacy of open standards, the company was rumored to have been unsuccessful in forming an agreement with Microsoft to provide interoperability between Cisco video services and Skype, according to an AllThingsD report. This might explain why Cisco has waited until now to voice its concern over the EU’s decision in October.

Cisco is quick to point out that it doesn’t oppose the merger, but argues that tougher conditions are necessary to avoid any one company controlling all video communication standards.

You can read the full letter from De Beer about Cisco’s decision to file an appeal with the EU below.

In the past decade video communications has moved out of the realm of science fiction to become commonplace in our homes, at work, and on mobile devices. Yet we remain some distance from the goal of video calls being as easy and ubiquitous as phone calls are today – across any network and between all devices.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others.  Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications, and therefore today appealed the European Commission’s approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union.  Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined us in the appeal.

We did not take this action lightly. We respect the European Commission, and value Microsoft as a customer, supplier, partner, and competitor. Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability, to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications.

This appeal is about one thing only: securing standards-based interoperability in the video calling space. Our goal is to make video calling as easy and seamless as  email is today. Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number. Today, however, you can’t make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike.

Cisco believes that the right approach for the industry is to rally around open standards. We believe standards-based interoperability will accelerate innovation, create economic value, and increase choice for users of video communications, entertainment, and services.

The video communications industry is at a critical tipping point with far reaching consequences. Just three years from now the world will be home to nearly 3 billion Internet users, the average fixed broadband speed will be 28 Mbps, and 1 million video minutes (the equivalent of 674 days) will traverse the internet every second. As video collaboration becomes increasingly mainstream, multiple vendors will have to work together to enable global scale and broad customer choice.

For the sake of customers, the industry recognizes the need for ubiquitous unified communications interoperability, particularly between Microsoft/Skype and Cisco products, as well as products from other unified communications innovators. Microsoft’s plans to integrate Skype exclusively with its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform could lock-in businesses who want to reach Skype’s 700 million account holders to a Microsoft-only platform.

At the heart of this opportunity is a question about the model for interoperability. One approach allows each vendor to decide how they will interoperate. Another approach aligns the industry around open standards defined by non-partisan governing bodies. The answer will be critical to whether and how quickly video calls become “the next voice.”

When vendors implement their own protocols and selectively interoperate, they push the burden of interoperability to the customer.   We respectfully request that the General Court act on our concerns and for the European Commission to ensure the proper protections are put in place to encourage innovation and a competitive marketplace.

[Image illustration by Tom Cheredar via The Drill Down]

C3Nano, a company that makes the technology behind some of those transparent, flexible screens y’all are so crazy about, has just announced a $6.7 million round of funding.

The young company’s carbon hybrid-based ink and film is currently under evaluation with several Asian manufacturing companies.

“For a while it was difficult to talk to investors about OLED or flexible displays, but finally these products are reaching the market,” said C3Nano chief executive Cliff Morris in an email conversation with VentureBeat. “This creates downstream opportunities for novel materials companies such as C3Nano.”

C3Nano produces an interesting line of films and inks that act as transparent conductors. Other materials used in consumer electronics displays are based on carbon nanotubes, which the C3Nano team says have conductivity issues. They say  their own films and inks, however, are “a high-performance, low-cost solution [that is] remarkably robust, making it an attractive option for emerging flexible and stretchable electronics.”

The CEO revealed that the company, which was founded in 2010, currently has paying customers in Korea and Japan. “These are great gateway countries for launching new display technologies,” he said.

Morris said the company is particularly excited by “applications that further integrate the display and the touch sensor into one device. Solution-coated ink such as ours serves those markets well, because normally the device producer is trying to lower their overall cost by either reducing their material and process cost or reduce cost through simplicity of design.” C3Nano, he noted, is able to do both.

The new financing will give the startup the ability to quickly build out its technical staff, complete its initial product, and provide resources for production volumes.

Phoenix Venture Partners led this round of funding with participation from GSR Ventures, an existing investor. To date, the startup has raised more than $10 million. Phoenix Venture Partners’ Dr. Nobi Kambe will join the C3Nano board.

To see the kinds of technology C3Nano is developing in action, check out this CES demo from Samsung:

Image via DVICE.

Engagio founder William Mougayar

Engagio, a Toronto startup founded by William Mougayar that helps people keep track of the conversations they are having in comment threads across the web, has raised $540,000 in a seed round led by Rho Canada and New York investor Fred Wilson.

The unique thing about Engagio is that it was conceived in the comment section of Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC. And a number of the long time participants from the comment section pitched in to help Engagio with everything from securing a domain name to crafting their interface design. Even Fake Grimlock, everyone’s favorite giant robot startup dinosaur, lent a hand!

Wilson, through his investments with Union Square Ventures, has articulated a thesis about the power of highly networked online communities. But keeping up conversations across portfolio companies like Twitter, foursquare, and Tumblr meant that Wilson was missing a lot of what people were saying to him.

The first time Mougayar pitched Wilson a startup, a content curation platform called Eqentia, he was turned down. So he took a page out of Paul Graham’s play book and found a a problem that needed solving. It was Wilson’s problem of course, not his, but there was still a target market.

Engagio is a clean, inbox modeled after Gmail that allows all that discussion to happen in one place. With one click it can connect to Facebook or Disqus accounts and important the interactions. You can respond from inside Engagio and it will be posted to the appropriate site.

Mougayar told VentureBeat by phone that he is opening a satellite office in New York at General Assembly.

The Internet has opened up new doors for ambitious networkers. In the slang of A VC, Wilson is the “bartender” and Mougayar is an “instigator”, meaning he gets the conversation going in the comments. It’s a habit that seems to have paid dividends.

Yahoo, which owns significant stakes in Chinese powerhouse Alibaba and Japan’s SoftBank (as well as Yahoo Japan, natch) was attempting to sell those shares back to the companies in order to focus on domestic products and get a load of extra cash to bolster its business.

The transaction was said to be worth around $17 billion if Yahoo, Alibaba, and SoftBank could pull it off. However, this morning, All Things D‘s Kara Swisher is reporting that, in fact, the companies cannot pull it off.

After Alibaba went through the trouble of raising $4 billion to buy back its 40 percent stake from Yahoo; after it hired legal counsel specializing in international M&A and similar deals; after the company even suspended the public sale of its stock on the Hong Kong public market, the talks with Yahoo broke down.

Swisher’s sources say that while Yahoo has not completely walked away from the deal, it has changed the terms to something Alibaba and SoftBank find unacceptable.

Last week, in a letter from outgoing Yahoo board chair Roy Bostock, Bostock referenced the ongoing talks, saying, “The complexity and unique nature of these transactions is significant. While we continue to devote significant resources to these discussions, we are not in a position at this time to provide further detail or to provide assurance that any transaction will be achieved.”

The deal discussions first came to light in December 2011, when the company sought to shore up U.S. operations and offset a 24 percent year-over-year revenue loss due to a search deal with Microsoft.

ZigMail is a nifty new email service that gives you control over all those personal so-called “transactional” emails that clog up your inbox — you know, the ones from your bank, mortgage company, health insurance, retailers or any other ongoing vendors in your life.

These emails aren’t spam. But they’re annoying: They keep coming, but they’re too important to delete, and easily lost amid the flood. Is your bank account overdrawn? Has there been a raise in your mortgage rate? Given the email overload these days, we’re likely to miss some critical updates in these emails.

Here’s how ZigMail works to combat that problem: First, it identifies all of those important transactions emails — from your bank, retailers, etc. — and removes them from your inbox. It then puts them into a separate online account at ZigMail.com where you can access them whenever you want to.

It doesn’t mean you have to check the separate ZigMail account all the time. In fact, you can simply keep reading your regular email account. The ZigMail service sends you a daily digest — each morning — notifying you of the latest incoming transaction email. It’s a sort of reminder of what’s going on in your life. And it’s useful because it’s contained in a single place.

I just tried out the service — which is formally launching today — and found it works quite well.

Once I switched over to my ZigMail account, I could see all of my transaction email organized into categories (as seen in the image top left).  There’s a categories for things like “receipts & records,” “notices and alerts,” “shopping & catalogs,” and more. You can see them all in a single email view, or by these categories.

You can delete these emails, or click through and read them.

The great thing is, all of these emails are also stored in a “ZigMail” folder in your main email account, in my case Gmail. The two aren’t synced. So if you delete an email from you ZigMail account, the corresponding email over in your main email account remains intact. And vice versa. In that sense, Zigmail can also be considered a disaster recovery backup.

Finally, one useful feature is that you can give out your ZigMail email address — yes, ZigMail assigns you an email account for this — so that vendors send stuff to this email account to start with and they don’t clog your other email.

Here’s the big risk for ZigMail. It asks for your main email account and password so that it can do the filtering for you. That takes a lot of trust, and I’m wondering how this will play with the masses. I took the risk, simply because I trust the founders of the company. I met them last week, and CEO Richard Gerstein has a credible track-record, holding executive positions at HP, Sears and P&G. Notably, Gerstein says that 68 percent of users signing up with ZigMail went ahead and gave their email and password. Since the company’s soft-launch two weeks ago, the company says it has gotten more than 4,000 users.

The company is offering its service for free. It plans to make money by placing advertising on the margins of your ZigMail account (it’s not that intrusive, at least for now). It plans to start offering brands and other companies a way to customize the emails they send to you — but at least these will be only on emails from companies you already have relationships with.

Some 67 percent of emails in the average inbox are commercial, ZigMail says. If true, this suggests ZigMail is tackling a very real problem.

ZigMail, based in Chicago, and recently expanding to Silicon Valley, has spent $250,000 in funding so far, and is looking to raise its first round within the next three months.

Below is a video showing how the product works:

The past two years have seen a marked rebound in the number of venture-backed technology companies that are going public. After the depths of the “great recession” in 2009, it’s quite a relief for venture capitalists and those who invest in their funds.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however.

Over the 2010-2011 period, the IPO “window” has opened and closed several times due to market volatility. That’s the result of various economic and political aftershocks from the financial crisis.

While there have been many articles about how the venture capital firm investors fared, or the employees of the companies going public or even the investment bankers, VentureDeal has taken a look to see how venture-backed stocks have performed after the IPO date.

Why should you care? Institutional buyers of IPO stock drive the IPO market demand for technology companies. Demand for IPOs and the resultant valuations drive tech industry M&A valuations and to some extent financing valuations. These two exit paths determine financial returns for venture capital firms and their ultimate ability to raise new money to fund the creation and commercialization of the next world changing technologies. Post-IPO performance is the “top of the food chain” and if it isn’t working well, the food chain breaks down.  As Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners recently said, “There is still strong institutional memory of the dot-com bubble and broken trust.”

Unfortunately, post-IPO stock performance of venture-backed technology companies over the past two years in the aggregate has been poor, when compared to the standard benchmark of the S&P 500 Index.

The spreadsheet below tracks the 80 VC-backed technology companies that went public between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2011 and compares that to a baseline return for the S&P 500 during the same period. (We gave a 30 day grace period for the last IPO, which happened on December 15, 2011, so the actual end date was 1/15/2012.)

(You can also view this spreadsheet on Google Docs or Box.)

The data shows that the combined return for all offerings in the aggregate was a dismal -2.2 percent, compared to the S&P 500 index, which returned 15.5 percent for the same period.

Of the total of 80 IPOs, just 26 companies beat the S&P 500.

The chart above breaks down the returns to illustrate performance by industry.  The Software/IT industry grouping performed the best with a 39.9 percent aggregate return over the 2010-2011 period. The Financial Services sector came in a distant second at 16.3 percent and the Mobile/Wireless/Telecom industry grouping rounded out the positive performers (barely) with a 1.2 percent total return.

Notably, the industry grouping of Internet/Digital Media has produced a -7.7 percent return.

So, with a -2.2 percent aggregate return for all venture backed technology IPOs over the last two years when compared to the S&P 500 benchmark, perhaps someone can tell me why some are advocating that we need more IPOs?

Perhaps SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert is right when he said recently, “The IPO market is dying.”

Or, as Vivek Wadhwa recently argued, if you’re holding out for an IPO boom, you’re going to be disappointed.

VentureTrends is a research service of VentureDeal, a national venture capital database based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Much is being made in current social media circles of the “interest graph” concept, which is more about what you know than who you know, and which purportedly has strong connections to purchase intent and other matters of concern to online marketers.

Put differently, while social networks like Facebook focus on what you have in common with your friends and how you react to friends’ recommendations, interest graph-based models (like the ones behind Pinterest, GetGlue or Foodspotting) make social connections based on shared interests, not the other way around.

“Pearltrees has leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web,” said Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe in a release.

“As a consequence, Pearltrees harnesses the power of people to organize and discover the most valuable content on the web”, he said.

Pearltrees is, as the company puts it, a place for users to collect and organize everything on the web. While this task might seem like mundane cataloging at the outset, the Pearltrees team is seeing significant use of the product.

The startup launched at the very end of 2009 as a new, visually enhanced tool for bookmarking and organizing web-based content. Since its launch, Pearltrees says, it has grown at a rate of 15 percent each month.

The service has been used to organize around 15 million unique “pearls” of knowledge into two million “Pearltrees,” or larger categories. These trees include such areas of interest as news, the arts, entertainment, and sciences.

“The activities of Pearltrees’ contributors have already resulted in an interest graph with unparalleled richness and depth,” a company spokesperson stated in an email to VentureBeat. The intention is to create and publish an exhaustive, human-curated interest graph that covers every topic on the web. The interest graph is used in the startup’s “TreeRank” algorithm, which drives discovery of new parts of the graph for Pearltrees users.

Here’s a demo video describing the service in more detail:

This round of funding was let by The Group Accueil and will be devoted to scaling the product and solidifying the monetization plan, which revolves around freemium services.

Pearltrees last raised funding a year and a half ago in a €1.3 million round. To date, the startup has taken €8.8 million, around $11.6 million.

Image courtesy of andrea crisante, Shutterstock

Shape, the company behind online instant messenger service IM+, announced Monday it has raised $10 million from Russian brokerage firm Finam.

IM+ is an online instant messenger and mobile app that connects with multiple instant messaging services including Aol instant messenger, Jabber, Skype, Google Chat, and Facebook Chat. You can send instant messages from multiple accounts in one interface and save your chat history. The service has more than 17 million monthly users.

Shape also recently released a new instant messaging app called Beep (pictured above) to compliment IM+. The app sends push notifications to your phone when you receive an instant message. The company hopes the app will take the place of traditional text messages. There are similar products on the market, including web-based IM aggregator imo.im.

“With the new release of Beep in-app push messenger [it will] allow people to save on SMS and MMS while simultaneously chatting on Facebook, Skype, Google Talk and tweet,” said IM+ founder Igor Berezovsky in a statement.

The funding kicks off a partnership between Finam and Shape, which are teaming up to create an instant messenger service for the Russian market.

Shape was founded in 2002 and has grown to include more than 60 employees. The company has headquarters in Germany and also maintains offices in the U.S. and Asia.

“The division concluded that the specific transactions at issue are not likely to significantly change existing market dynamics,” the Department of Justice said in a press release today that concerned Google’s Motorola acquisition and its approval of the Nortel and Novell patent sales to other major tech companies.

The U.S. and EU had been looking closely at the Google acquisition of Motorola because of possible antitrust issues. There were apparent concerns that Motorola could be given unfair advantage when it came to Android mobile operating system that is developed by Google and embedded in Motorola phones and tablets.

Google deflected those concerns by saying that it is in the company’s best interest to maintain the Android ecosystem and not give Motorola advantages over mobile device manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC, and LG.

The primary reason Google said it wants Motorola is to own its patents, which will help Google better defend Android from lawsuits. Motorola Mobility has some 17,000 patents, and it has another several thousand patents pending approval. That will make for one heck of a shield when other companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle try to attack Android and its manufacturing partners.

In a related note, the Department of Justice’s press release about Google and Motorola also announced that it had approved a deal for a consortium including Microsoft, Apple, and RIM to buy Nortel’s patent portfolio. The release also states that Apple has won approval to buy some of Novell’s patents.

“After a thorough review of the proposed transactions, the Antitrust Division has determined that each acquisition is unlikely to substantially lessen competition and has closed these three investigations,” the DOJ said. “In all of the transactions, the division conducted an in-depth analysis into the potential ability and incentives of the acquiring firms to use the patents they proposed acquiring to foreclose competitors.”

Google logo: Flickr/Robert Scoble

“We want people to think about lightbulbs and the innovation behind them, we want you to throw away lightbulbs because ours are better and more energy-efficient,” Bill Watkins, Bridgelux chief executive and former Seagate CEO, told VentureBeat.

The company produces solid-state lighting, or light bulbs made of light emitting diodes (LEDs) that are more energy-efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs. LEDs are typically found in TVs, computers, and even car headlights, but the technology has previously been too expensive to be used in a simple consumer light bulb. Bridgelux changed that by releasing cheaper and more energy-efficient light bulbs that can be used in lamps and overhead light fixtures. The company backs up its products with a five-year warranty.

Bridgelux holds more than 600 patent filings worldwide and has developed many LED products including light bulbs that can be easily replaced when a diode burns out.

Bridgelux will use the fundraising to research and develop LED chips with silicon, which can be used in a larger LEDs for more light emission. Kaistar is teaming up with Bridgelux as a manufacturing partner for these new LEDs. The company also has several programs that the funding will go towards.

“We’ve recently rolled out a pilot program to give thousands of businesses and homes five free light bulbs that connect to a smart meter and be monitored by a utility company. The power company can then adjust the amount of energy flowing to the light bulb during peak and off-peak hours,” said Watkins.

Bridgelux is based in Livermore, California and has more than 130 employees. The company has been heavily funded in the past, with a $34 million investment in 2009 and $21 million in 2011 from Vantage Point Venture Partners, VC firm DCM, Chrysalix Energy, and El Dorado ventures.

Regulators had put the deal on hold in both the U.S. and EU pending investigation for possible antitrust issues.

“We’re happy that today the European Commission approved our proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which we announced in August,” wrote Google VP and deputy general counsel Don Harrison today on the company blog.

“This is an important milestone in the approval process and it moves us closer to closing the deal. We are now just waiting for decisions from a few other jurisdictions before we can close this transaction.”

The proposed deal put a $12.5 billion price tag on the Motorola property. Motorola also introduced a hefty $2.5 billion breakup fee, showing that company’s concern that the deal might not get through federal regulators.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Justice and other international governing bodies were initially given pause by Google claims that, even after the acquisition was complete, Motorola would not be given unfair advantages, such as early access to the Android codebase, over other Android handset and tablet manufacturers.

EU regulators halted the acquisition process in December 2011 when officials asked for more time to conduct a thorough review of the deal.

However, Google has proven — at least to EU officials — that it is in the company’s best interest to carefully skirt any antitrust activities in order to maintain the peace in the Android ecosystem while gathering the legal stockpile of patents necessary to protect Android manufacturers from the myriad lawsuits in which many are currently embroiled.

“The combination of Google and Motorola Mobility will help supercharge Android,” said Harrison in conclusion. “It will also enhance competition and offer consumers faster innovation, greater choice and wonderful user experiences.”

Rumors are swirling that the Justice Department may approve the acquisition as soon as this week, but for now, those rumors have yet to be confirmed.

Image courtesy of laihui

This is the company’s sixth round of funding in as many years.

Marin offers an all-in-one platform for managing display, search, social, and mobile marketing.

It mainly focuses on clients spending $100,000 or more monthly on online media buys. Altogether, this adds up to around 1,500 clients pumping $3.5 billion through Marin’s system each year.

The round was led by Asian firm Temasek along with SAP Ventures, with participation from Benchmark Capital, Crosslink Capital, DAG Ventures, and Triangle Peak Partners. Salesforce’s president of worldwide sales Frank van Veenendaal is also joining the Marin board.

“I am pleased to welcome Temasek and SAP Ventures as investors in Marin Software,” said Marin founder Christopher Lien in a release.

“Temasek brings unrivalled experience and capabilities in Asian and emerging markets, which will benefit Marin’s international development. Support from SAP Ventures and relationships with the SAP global ecosystem will further accelerate Marin’s growth around the world.”

Temasek’s $193 billion portfolio is currently concentrated in Singapore. Marin Software hopes its partnership with the firm will help its growth in Asian and other emerging markets.

To date, the startup has raised more than $80 million in venture capital since its 2006 founding. This $30 million round will be used on product development, customer service, and further global expansion.

Last year, the company took $16 million to grow its search ad tools, and it raised $11.2 million in 2010, funding which was instrumental in expanding its ad offerings to Facebook’s social advertising and marketing.

“Essentially, we’ve taken our favorite elements of crowdfunding platforms and provided them for groups of friends instead” Crowdtilt chief executive and co-founder James Beshara told VentureBeat in an email.

Crowdtilt’s focus is on smaller groups of people who are pooling their money for a common goal, such as friends who want to rent a beach house. The process is what you’d expect if you’ve ever used Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding site. The person who creates the campaign sets a “tilt” point at which the campaign will hit its funding goal and creates an expiration date. Right now the service is completely free, but that could change as the site grows.

Crowdtilt, while similar to Kickstarter, has a different setup and doesn’t cater to the same market. With Kickstarter, you are often investing a new product, company, or project and you reap some tangible benefit, be it a new gadget, a piece of art, or a screening of film. Kickstarter also has an application process to weed out certain projects. Crowdtilt lets you fund campaigns for whatever reason and at whatever amount your choose, no limits.

Group funding for charitable causes was Crowdtilt’s original purpose, but Beshara pivoted the company to what it is now. People have responded well and flocked to the site for their group funding needs. The site now has more than 3,000 users.

Crowdtilt originally started in Austin and launched a beta version of the service several months ago. The site is now available to the public and the company has moved its offices to Palo Alto, California.

Social daily deals and shopping website Sneakpeeq announced Friday is has raised $2.67 million in funding.

Sneakpeeq is attempting to replicate the shopping experience you’d have in a physical store. What type of experience? Well, think about walking into a fancy shop, picking an item off the shelf, turning it over, and checking the price tag. Sneakpeeq recreates that by, for example, making you click a “peeq” button to see a price rather than blatantly displaying them. The Peeq button brings to mind Amazon’s “add to cart to see the price” practice, which can be irritating. Sneakpeeq isn’t trying it to be annoying; every time you click the button, you can get a discount on your purchase. It still adds an extra step to the buying process, but at least it doesn’t feel like extra work. You get a specific amount of “peeqs” per day and can earn more by interacting with the site.

It wouldn’t be a social shopping site without some Facebook integration, and the company encourages you to share items you want to buy with your Facebook friends. Buy sharing, you get “badges” that you can redeem for discounts and more peeqs. Sneakpeeq also has a Facebook integration that can post to your timeline every time you “peeq” at a price.

Sneakpeeq joins the ranks of many other discount social shopping sites, such as Fab.com and LuxeYard. Most of these sites, Sneakpeeq included, focus on action-driven buying, which encourages shoppers to share products and interact with other shoppers to get better prices.

The new funding comes from Bain Capital Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta. It will be used for new site features, including gift buying, mobile apps, and video features.

Sneakpeeq is based in San Francisco, Calif.

[Title image (not pictured above) via Shutterstock.]

A source tells VentureBeat the buyer is Silver Lake, a U.S. private equity firm, which is paying between $200 and $250 million for the stake of the company. Globes describes the firm as a “large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars in assets under management.”

Yozma invested $1.5 million the company back in 2006 for a 9 percent stake. With this latest deal, Yozma will see a 200 percent return on investment. Ofer Holdings Group will reap the greatest beneft; it owns more than 30 percent of Yozma.

Conduit offers the following three services to increase publisher’s user engagement: a community toolbar that boosts traffic and grows website communities; a mobile service that creates apps; and the Wibaya Bar, which promotes social engagement.  The company says that more than 260,000 publishers and 250 million end users in 120 countries use its services, including Major League Baseball and Groupon.