VentureBeat

Comcast announced today it has invested an undisclosed sum in seed-round funding to mobile WiMax company Cartiza.

Founded in late 2006, the Boston, Mass. company has previously raised $12.6 million in funding, according to the Boston Business Journal. Cartiza is reportedly in stealth mode, working on infrastructure software for the next generation of mobile broadband. While the company website doesn’t say so, it is working with WiMax: Cartiza is listed in the WiMax Forum membership roster.

In April, Comcast was part of a group of industry giants, including Google, Time Warner, Intel, and Bright House Networks, that invested $3.2 billion in WiMax company Clearwire. Other WiMax start-ups are also getting money in anticipation of spending on WiMax infrastructure. One such start-up is BridgeWave Communications, which last week announced it had raised $10.3 million to create wireless transport infrastructure for WiMax and LTE (long-term evolution) cell phone networks.

Louis Toth, Managing Director at Comcast Interactive Capital, already had ties with Cartiza. According to his CIC profile page, he is “involved as a Director, Board Observer or adviser” for Cartiza and six other companies. However, it’s unclear if he took this role before funding Cartiza.

Zimbra, the open-source messaging software company that offers more modern features than Microsoft’s Outlook, has cut a major deal with Comcast, keeping it on an impressive trend of growth.

It benefits Comcast because it lets the cable giant give its customers a messaging platform — the idea being it will stem the defection of customers to services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Zimbra’s messaging system is in some ways more sophisticated that the email systems provided by Microsoft Outlook, MSN, Google or Yahoo Mail. It works both offline and online. Zimbra’s AJAX and other features make it easy to do things like scroll over an address and have a map pop up, and to switch seamlessly to your contacts and calendar without leaving your email. We covered it here. Zimbra’s chief executive Satish Dharmaraj tells VentureBeat a consumer version of Zimbra will be out sometime this summer (meaning, you’ll be able to get it directly from Zimbra, instead going through a service provider).

As part of the deal with Comcast, Zimbra will help it operate a so-called “SmartZone” communications center (see screenshot below). There, customers can get email, check voicemail online, send instant messages and manage their address book.

It will roll out later this year, and offer the following:

o “visual” voice mail — You can listen to your voicemails online and forward voice mail messages via email to anyone. Customers can also view, save and print call history. Customers can also manage calling features such as call forwarding, do not disturb and voice mail playback options.
o an address book that synchronizes with and is accessible from other Web-connected devices.
o instant messaging and video instant messages.
o other features like weather, news reports and video clips.

Plaxo, another company, will be offering components of the address book.

Zimbra has now signed deals with more than a hundred hosting providers.

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