VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Mashup companies take over Web 2.0 — InfoWorld profiles three companies making announcements at this week’s conference: Serena, which is launching an online marketplace for business mashups; JackBe, which has a new version of its enterprise mashup platform; and Kapow, which provides a hosted service to build mashups that provide web intelligence. We’ll also be writing more about Rearden Commerce and Zude in the next few days. And we just covered SnapLogic, which provides data integration for, you guessed it, enterprise mashups, and has launched version 2.0 and professional editions of its software.

Linden Lab names Mark Kingdon as new chief executive — Kingdon previously spent five years running digital ad agency Organic. The appointment of someone with a stronger business background than founder Philip Rosedale makes sense, particularly since Linden Lab board member Bill Gurley told me the company needs a chief executive who can help it grapple with rapid growth. Less charitably, the appointment can be seen as an attempt to help Linden get back on track after struggling to live up to the initial promise of its virtual world Second Life. Rosedale announced last month that he plans to step down.

IBM buys storage company Diligent Technologies for $200M — The terms of the deal were not disclosed officially, but Israeli newspaper Globes says it was for $200 million. Diligent is IBM’s third Israeli acquisition this year.

StumbleUpon approaches 5 billion stumbles – The website-discovery and rating service is about to get its 5 millionth user, and is also getting very close to nearly 5 billion “stumbles” (recommendations). Not only is that a number just plain impressive, but since each stumble should improve StumbleUpon’s “discovery” service, it also means the site is getting better and better. StumbleUpon is owned by eBay.

Solar plant builder Stirling Energy Systems gets $100M — The funding comes from NTR plc. Stirling is building solar energy projects in the Imperial Valley and the Mojave Desert.

Walter Bender resigns One Laptop Per Child — Apparently Bender , who served as the organization’s president, is more interested in incorporating open source methods into education.

Kapow Technologies, which sells software to companies that lets them assemble their own “mashup” applications by gathering data from around the web, has raised a $11.6 million third round of financing.

Mashup technologies have become increasingly important lately, now that data has proliferated around the Web and new technologies such as RSS allow people to pipe it directly to their computers, versus having to go get it themselves. A research analyst covering the retail sector, for example, no longer has to go visit the Victoria Secret web site to scour it for data and paste it into their spreadsheet. Now she can create a feed from Victoria Secret and all other major retailers, and have it all sync in a single spreadsheet within her Kapow dashboard.

Kapow, based in Palo Alto, Calif., lets her also configure a way to gather data from other places, such as internal enterprise resource planning (ERP) application or database that might be behind a corporate firewall. She can then mash it all up into whatever application format she wants.

Even if a site doesn’t provide an RSS feed, Kapow can create an RSS feed by using a robot to crawl the site. Kapow then relies on an application like Excel to allow you to pull it all together, or other receptor applications provided by companies like IBM and Serena. Kapow can even deliver it to your mobile phone.

Other companies doing something similar are Dapper, but that company has been less focused on serving large companies, more focused on consumers.

There are an array of other mashup companies, for example other mashup interface makers, such as Backface and Jackbe, but they too focus less on actually gathering data from other places, and more on helping you do the mashup application itself. Other companies, such as Connotate, provide a mashup service to automate the process for you, relying on outsourced help, and providing less customizable features.

Kapow says customers include Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Credit Suisse Boston, and that some 3,000 companies have installed the technology worldwide.

New investors include Steamboat Ventures, a venture capital firm affiliated with The Walt Disney Company, and Morgan Stanley’s Strategic Investments Group. Previous investors Kennet Partners and NorthCap Partners also participated in the round.