VentureBeat

PixSense, a service that lets you automatically save and store your mobile phone photos — without the pain of syncing with a PC — has just raised $5.4 million in a first round of funding.

The company offers the free photo storage service from its Website. You sign up, giving PixSense your phone model, and it sends you an SMS, which you open and it triggers a download. That way you don’t have the hassle of saving stuff on your PC. See demo here.

However, there’s a cost, because you use your data plan minutes to use the service. The service is more likely to fly in Asia and Europe, where many young people carry phones but don’t have their own PC — and so they’d presumably be more willing to pay for the service. The company says it will announce deals with two carriers in Asia and Europe during the first quarter, whereby the carriers would use Pixsense’s compression technology to let customers store mobile media directly with the carriers.

PixSense is growing like a weed. We last mentioned Pixsense here, when it said planned to hire 150 by next year, up from 30 earlier this year.

Faraz Hoodbhoy, founder and chief executive, said most of his employees are in China, Japan and Pakistan.

ATA Ventures and Innovacom are the lead investors.

PixSense, latest start-up to offer video compression, is hiring! — This Santa Clara start-up claims no one has been able to compress a video by 85 percent to share it via mobile phone.

It is offering such a feature to consumers and carriers. Some 90 percent of cell-phone users don’t have a set data plan, meaning they pay for bandwidth they use while sending pictures. PixSense will lower costs. It will also sell its technology to carriers, a spokesman told us. It has angel funding of $1 million and is a raising a venture round. The start-up has 30 people, and here’s the kicker: It plans to employ 150 by next year.

Veeker buys Thumbdrive, to pursue mobile video messaging — Veeker, a San Francisco company building a mobile video-message sharing service targeting young users, told GigaOM that it has acquired San Francisco-based mobile software development company ThumbJive, which also has employees in China.

Mercora, that Santa Clara radio song-sharing service, launches service for smart-phones — Mercora says its wireless music service “beat Steve Jobs to the iPhone…And we’ve beat Microsoft to the Zune.” Dubbed “M,” the service allows smart-phone users to listen to music that sits on their PCs. Further, M subscribers can share music with each other — by accessing each other’s PCs.
We wrote about Mercora here.

Piczo, another sleeper social site? — The San Francisco social networking site, which focuses on teens and photo-sharing, is boasting 17 million registered users. It has raised a total of $7 million, according to GigaOM’s Liz Gannes, who brings us an update on the relatively closed, privacy-conscious site. (We’d reported earlier only $4 million raised). Sierra Ventures and Catamount Venture are the backers.

PayPal prepares a way for users to store files — Techcrunch has the skinny on the yet-to-be released service, called DropBox, which creates a secure storage area within a user’s account. We called PayPay, and there is no intent to create a digital distribution platform of any kind. It is merely offering what most mainstream payment providers do, including a way to batch-process payments instead of settling one payment at a time, said spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt. She declined to provide more details.

Cynical blog Dead20, which has covered the valley’s Web 2.0 companies with scorn, is down — It has an error message saying “Bandwidth limit exceeded,” after the author, who has been writing in anonymity, is all but outed.

Facebook founder puts Microsoft on hold — The WSJ, in its recent story about Facebook, reported how Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers “they couldn’t do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company’s 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.”

No surprise here. We, too, remember showing up for an interview at Facebook last year at 10am, and having Zuckerberg show up late. Only Facebook co-worker Matt Cohler was in the office, who told us some engineers had only just left after working through the night.

Remember Imeem, the company that lets you share your desktop contents directly with others? — It is raising money. It has also changed its business strategy. We’ll report more soon.

AdMob, a company that sells advertising on mobile devices, said it raised $3.6 million in its first round of venture funding — We reported earlier on the funding, but the SF Business Journal has the exact amount.