VentureBeat

Livescribe, the maker of a high-tech pen that makes an audio recording of your conversation as you take notes, has added another $7 million to its funding, bringing its first round to a total of more than $30 million, VentureBeat has learned. Backers include VantagePoint Venture Partners and Gerlach & Co.

The company has confirmed the financing amount; I haven’t received a response confirming the names of the investors yet. Private Equity Hub reported the funding first, although we learned about it independently.

From what I’ve read, Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen seems very cool. The main feature is the audio recording, which journalists, students and others can use to make sense of their notes. For example, I might interview someone for a VentureBeat article, but discover later that my notes of the best quote don’t make a lot of sense. That’s okay, because with Pulse I can jump to that point in the recording and hear exactly what was said. The pen even includes an infrared camera (to record text) and a small display for playing short animations. The cheapest Pulse model costs $149, so the question is whether many people will pay that much for a pen, no matter how fancy. You can watch a video demo here.

Livescribe got a lot of positive press after demonstrating its project at the DEMO conference in January, where it also won a DEMO God Award. (We learned about Livescribe’s $23.2 million first round at the same time.) The Oakland, Calif. startup’s Pulse pen went on sale in June. In his write-up, Engadget columnist Ross Rubin called it “the most technologically advanced writing instrument not intended for killing a Bond villain,” and he pointed to not just the cool features, but also to the Pulse’s potential as platform for other pen-based applications.

Another smartpen maker called Adapx recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture firm that makes strategic investments for the intelligence community.

Here the latest action:

Social network Hi5 publicly launches its developer platform — San Francisco-based Hi5 may be a big opportunity for developers of third-party applications that live on social networks. It is popular in places like Portugal, Thailand and select countries of Latin America. Overall, it’s one of the largest social networks worldwide, with more than 35 million monthly active users — and the company claims that only 25 percent of them also have profiles on other social networks.

Many developers have been excited about MySpace’s developer launch a couple weeks ago, but the company has yet to release a way for users to easily send messages to each other — friend invites and updates from an application — and application growth has yet to happen. One big difference with Hi5, as Mashable points out, is that it specifically lets applications tap into communication channels on the site. These so-called “viral loops” can lead to exploding traffic for applications, as seen on Facebook’s formative platform launched last May. But abusive applications spam users with too many messages — also a problem that Facebook has been dealing with. It remains to be seen how Hi5 will both help applications grow and keep users happy. See our previous coverage of Hi5’s platform here and here.

Facebook does regular old targeted advertising — The social network is working with job site CareerBuilder.com on a non-exclusive ad campaign, where Facebook will run its ads on the side of pages and in news feeds. The specialized recruiting ads will be targeted based on information on a user’s profile, like what their major is in college, according to Reuters. Many had expected to see more such ad targeting done by Facebook itself last year, but it instead introduced Beacon, which automatically tells your friends about the purchases you make on other sites — and proved unpopular with users.

Silicon Valley start-ups are losing their sizzle — The slumping stock market has stalled potential IPOs (initial public offerings) and may slow the creation of new start-ups for the next year or two, the San Jose Mercury News reports. There have been only four IPOs nationwide so far this year and the Nasdaq being down almost 15 percent isn’t likely to create a rush of new ones.

Social news site Buzznet may have acquired music application maker Qloud – The deal went down for a little over Qloud’s last valuation, a source tells Mashable. Backed by former AOL head Steve Case, Qloud has had over 1.8 million Facebook users install its “My Music” application. Meanwhile, Buzznet is rumored to be raising a new round of $25 million, according to PaidContent.

For the first time in 38 years, a new type of memory chip is about to hit the market — A joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics called Numonyx has created a new type of memory chip known as phase charge memory (PCM), CNET reports. The chips uses a laser to hit a material, which can melt into two different kinds of crystals. Those crystals serve as the ones and zeroes of digital memory. Interestingly enough, Gordon Moore (the co-founder of Intel and of Moore’s Law fame), predicted such a type of memory in an issue of Electronics magazine in 1970.

Personal shopping recommendation site StyleFeeder has opened its API — Developers will now be able to create third-party applications and widgets centered around StyleFeeder to put on any e-commerce site. Personalized search, bookmarking, item recommendations, watchlists, and customizable images will all be accessible through this API. The Watertown, Massachusetts-based StyleFeeder recently received a $2 million Series A round from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital.

After months of delay, Livescribe finally releases its computer-in-a-pen device — We’ve seen several demos of the cool technology, which allows students to take lecture notes on a special paper. When tracing over those notes later, students can call up an audio recording of the words being spoken as those lines were written. The pen can also be used to do math calculations, translate words, and record conversations. Limited quantities of the pen have begun shipping, according to the company blog (currently down). We previously covered the company last year.

Livescribe, the company that has developed a computer pen that listens to what is said when you are using it, and which will let you post to your blog straight from your paper, has gotten $23.2 million in venture financing.

On Monday, at the DEMO conference, Oakland, Calif.-based Livescribe will share more details about its pen, and the tools that developers will be able to use to build applications on its open platform. The pen has not yet been made generally available, though you can pre-order it at Livescribe’s site for $200.

VentureBeat learned of the funding news separately. The round is led by VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Livescribe’s pen records audio and syncs it to what is written. So if you take notes with it during a lecture, and then stumble over your bad handwriting later when reviewing your notes, the pen can play the audio back to you at the part of the lecture where you stumbled. This lets you retrieve everything that was being said, even if you spaced out during the lecture admiring the birds and the bees outside.

That’s just the beginning of its capabilities. It does things like upload its stored information to your computer — text or audio — and so you can share it all with friends, or post your pen notes immediately to your MySpace page or blog with a few tap on your notebook. See our original coverage here.

1) LGC Wireless to be acquired by telecom components company
2) Rumors abound that News Corp. is buying RockYou for hundreds of millions of dollars
3) Myspace + Skype: newly-joined parts of the “Web 2.0 address book”
4) Apple finally decides to return developers’ love
5) Treemo, another mobile and online content sharing service, raises 2.5 million
6) LiveScribe, a near-magical pen for taking written and audio notes at the same time, raises $22 million

LGC Wireless to be acquired by telecom components company — LGC Wireless, which sells technology that improves spotty wireless coverage in garages or in thick-walled buildings, will announce the purchase by the end of the month, we’re told by sources. LGC’s offering always made a lot of sense, because coverage from the main carriers like Sprint, Verizon and others have been poor in many shielded areas. Problem is, the carriers balked at paying for the company’s services, seeing it as a needless expense: Most consumers seem to simply sigh and put up with crappy service. LGC kept plugging away though, and nine years and $93 million in venture backing later, it is finally getting bought by a large, unnamed telecom components company.

Rumors abound that News Corp. is buying RockYou for hundreds of millions of dollars – Last night, Valleywag posted an anonymous tip that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. will buy top widget-maker RockYou for the bubbly purchase price of $800 million — considering the company is still developing its revenue model. Today, an apparently different anonymous tipster told Facebook-focused blog AllFacebook a similar rumor but with a lower price: A mere “$300 and $500 million, with earnouts that could push the $600 to $650 million range.” We asked RockYou and the company flatly denied the rumors, saying only that the tipsters must “have us confused with a different company.” Murdoch will be presenting at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco later today. We’ll see what he has to say about any possible acquisitions, as well as any news about the rumored Myspace developer platform.

Myspace + Skype: newly-joined parts of the “Web 2.0 address book” – The social network subsidiary of News Corp. and the internet calling subsidiary of eBay will introduce a feature in November to let Myspace users make Skype calls through Myspace’s instant-messaging feature.

This pairing of social information and a popular communications service is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, according to Tim O’Reilly. He thinks that social networks will grow into a “social network operating system” that combines social information about you and your friends together with all of your contact information from across email, phone and IM.

This, remember, is also the original vision behind Facebook’s developer platform — the thousands of toy-like widgets on Facebook right now are just another small chunk of the iceberg’s tip.

Apple finally decides to return developers’ love — Since the iPhone release earlier this year, developers have hacked, cracked and otherwise abused the phone’s software platform in every way imaginable, despite repeated cautions from Apple that the phone’s firmware shouldn’t be tampered with. In many cases, the result of installing outside applications has been an unusable iPhone.

The company has finally decided to respond to strident pleas and threats from legions of unhappy developers by releasing a software developer’s kit (SDK) next February. The SDK, which will give developers easier access and more information to create new applications, should encourage innovation and even some startups based on the iPhone platform.

Now, to connect your social information on Facebook with your contact information in your iPhone.

Treemo, another mobile and online content sharing service, raises 2.5 million – PaidContent has more on the Seattle company.

LiveScribe, a near-magical pen for taking both written and audio notes at the same time, raises $22 million – The funding was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, reports PEHub. Our previous coverage of the company is here; check out the video, below, to see more.

Updated

LiveScribe, an Oakland, Calif. company, releases tomorrow one of the more wondrous communication features we’ve seen lately.

It has developed technology that lets you take handwritten notes from a lecture or interview with a high-tech pen. The pen will remember everything that was being said when you took the notes.

So if you’re looking for a portion of the conversation you didn’t quite understand or remember, you simply tap your paper notes, and the spoken interview will play back for you.

The technology is all stored in the pen, which has an audio recorder, but which also has sophisticated visual sensors that tracks tiny dots on the paper you’re using so that it remembers which spot in the lecture matches which notes you took.

More profoundly, the company’s software lets you build applications on the paper. So you can email your article directly from your notes, or even post an article to your blog from your notes! Without logging on to the computer.

LiveScribe requires special paper - the tiny dots spaced out at particular unique intervals — but otherwise the paper looks quite normal.

This is remarkable stuff, best understood by these animations: Here (about paper recording), here (about blogging) and here (about how the pen translates other languages for you). It unveils tomorrow at the D5: All Things Digital conference.

I got a personal demo of the technology from Jim Marggraff, chief executive of the company, and I was immediately sold. As someone who takes copious notes and would like to find the vocal version instantly, this is quite the journalist’s nirvana. Moreover, it lets you hook up to a computer, so that you can see the spoken version of your notes unfolding on your computer screen (it uses translation technology, to translate the voice into text). It shows you where you are in the lecture, and the parts that are still to come — in a different shade of color.

This is not snake oil. Marggraff is a leading visionary in the area of new ways of learning. His breakthrough was at the well-known children’s education company Leapfrog, where he helped build its paper-based popular multimedia products — books with paper that spoke — and which became the top-selling toys in the U.S. Leapfrog sold the technology in 60 million books, reaping $1 billion in five years. Marggraff later moved on to a Swedish company called Anoto, and continued his experimentation, but left last year, to build out what is effectively a mobile computer in a pen. His goal: To take the technology to adults.

In his demo for us, Marggraff showed how to create little applications on a page, letting us write on the paper, and then tap on them to do arithmetic. For example, tap on the figures “2″, “+”, and “2″ and “=” and then a speaker in the pen answers with “4″.

To be clear, it wasn’t completely bug-free. There were moments where we had to pause or press again in order for the pen to register what we were doing.

We weren’t able to test filing a blog post to our blog from the piece of paper, but Marggraff promises to let us do that soon.

That can work because the paper application sends a signal through the pen to an Internet connection — which allows you to file the post. The pen will be docked with the computer, for the first release. However, in a second release, the pen will carry WiFi, so you won’t need to have your computer with you.

A life-size version of the pen is seen below:

More on the technology: LiveScribe licensed the dot paper technology from Anoto, when that company decided to pass on investing in Marggraff’s ambitious portable computer-pen idea (Anoto has been focused on its own financial turnaround).

The micro-dots in the paper are part of a unique grid system developed by Anoto. The camera in the smartpen sees these dots and tracks the pen’s location to enable digital indexing of content. Dot paper may also be printed on certified home or business printers.

The Anoto technology licensing allowed Marggraff to start building LiveScribe beginning last year. He set out to raise $22 million in venture capital from investors. VantagePoint Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley firm, is a backer, and Marggraff is looking to close the round.

The note-taking feature is called “Paper Replay.” The pen records the conversation and digitizes the handwriting, automatically synching the ink and audio. By later tapping the ink (twice, just like you click twice on a mouse), the smartpen replays the conversation from the exact moment the note was written. Notes and audio can also be uploaded to a PC where they can be replayed, saved and searched. The search tool is pretty impressive — you can search through a lecture for a particular word.