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RingCube, a Mountain View start-up has developed a product called MojoPac that lets you carry around your PC contents in a tiny storage device, and then access it on any PC you plug the device into.

MojoPac is still in testing mode, but you can sign up for it here. RingCube said today it has received $4 million from New Enterprise Associates, a Silicon Valley firm. We talked with Kittu Kolluri, a serial entrepreneur who recently joined NEA, and who made the investment in two tranches.

He said MojoPac lets you run on a PC “any application” stored in a removable storage device, such as a USB drive, a micro drive (an iPod, for example) or flash drive. It also would work with networked storage, such as with Google’s GDrive, if we understand GDrive’s plans correctly.

It is the latest attempt to redefine mobile computer. Laptops are state of the art, but they are bulky. Smart phones and PDAs are mobile, but their user interface is challenging or, as Kittu puts it, “terrible.” We’re looking forward to trying this. “The MojoPac lets you encapsulate your application environment, plug it into any computer, and you’ve got your PC,” Kittu said.

Chief Executive Shan Appajodu approached Kittu late last year. They’d worked together at Healtheon, the boom-era company backed by Netscape co-founder Jim Clark. Kittu later scored a hit with Neoteris, building it during the downturn after 2000 and selling the VPN company to Netscreen. Kittu is of chairman of RingCube.

Update: The company isn’t saying much until after its launch at DEMO Monday, which is why we can’t provide more details about how it works. News of the funding was first reported today by VentureWire.

Here is a shotgun of the latest stuff in raging Silicon Valley, leading of course with video:

VideoEgg gets easier — VideoEgg, a site that lets you download software so you can post video on any site, has partnered to make the process easier at key sites. Users at Bebo, Dogster, Hi5, AOL, Current.TV and Tagged can post video content from mobile or other devices to those sites, and VideoEgg’s small browser plug-in that makes it easy to get code for a video and upload it as easily as you can post photos, it says

Zillow.com sets homeowners free, allows them to enhance their home value — You could see this coming. Start-up Zillow infuriated some homeowners and agents by estimating the property values of homes across the nation, and listing them online. Some people felt they were being unfairly treated. Now the site is letting homeowners contribute information about their own homes, listing upgrades, remodeling and other notes (waterfront view, parking, roof composition) — showing ways the homes may be more valuable than simply historic or comparable home prices would indicate. Homeowners can then recalculate their home values, but Zillow insists it will keep showing its existing estimates too.

Fon, the WiFi company backed by Google and Sequoia, releases subsidized router — For $5 you can get a router from Fon that lets you participate in a WiFi scheme where you can let other people hop on to your router for Internet access in return for the right to hop on to theirs when you need it. See the demo here by Fon chief executive Martin Varsavskky, or click on the image, and then push play.

Gore partners with Yahoo on Current TV – A couple of days after we mention Google has hired an “astroturf” lobby firm in Washington that poked fun of politician Al Gore, we find that Gore is suddenly partnering with Google’s competitor, Yahoo, on the Current TV project. This, even though Gore started the project in partnership with Google. The partnership will combine professional and user-generated video clips, and will be the first time Yahoo has included commercials with user-generated content.

The eBay dead-company listings phenom is picking up — We first mentioned the eBay trend here. Several others have since listed, including Madhens, a way for publishers to auction of ad space. Now, here’s San Francisco’s Crispads, which has been listed several days with a starting price of $90,000 but no bidders.

Who Is Jonathan Ive? He’s Apple’s design guru, and has notable advice — With all the go-go tech-happy Web 2.0ers rushing out features, Apple’s Ive has a tip you might be able to use. Here’s Business Weeks’ summary:

The man who, after Jobs, is most responsible for Apple’s amazing ability to dazzle and delight with its famous products, chose instead to talk about process — what he called “the craft of design.” He spoke passionately about his small team and how they work together. He talked about focusing on only what is important and limiting the number of projects. He spoke about having a deep understanding of how a product is made: its materials, its tooling, its purpose. Mostly, he focused on the need to care deeply about the work.

India getting more bubbly by the day – Back in July, we wrote about angel investor Ram Shriram’s view on India’s boom, and how valuations are rising. We remarked on the escalating value being assigned to a high-tech park in India. Well, the value has just doubled again, this time to $20 billion. The Indian state of Haryana is developing a research and education “Nano City,” modeled after Silicon Valley, and it was first billed to cost something like $2 billion. Then we saw some reports inflate this to an unqualified “$10 billion.” Now, apparently there is going to be $20 billion invested. Of course, when you read the reports carefully, there are different definitions being used for these numbers (costs, investments, and so on), but they all seem to refer to how much money is being invested in this area — and it keeps growing. And when you consider it is supposed to generate a fourfold return, that means we’re looking an $80 billion jackpot. It all started with Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of the Hotmail e-mail service, who had planned to raise $550 million to start the project, modeled on Silicon Valley — without specifying a time frame.

Mr. Cheney picks the “right side” of Menlo Park — We were wondering why Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting with venture firm Sequoia. Turns out, he was raising money for the Republican Party at a reception at the big-name firm. The politics on Sand Hill road are delineated. The other big-name firm, Kleiner Perkins, which is just across the street, is led by John Doerr, and Democrat supporter and loud advocate for clean-tech. Even Vinod Khosla (still has offices at Kleiner, though has officially left the firm), an espouser of Republicanism in the past, is pushing an oil tax.

News site Topix sees growth improve by 24 percent over the past month — If you haven’t seen its time-line news feature, check it out. You can do a search of a term and see a line graph that shows how popular the term was in articles carried over the past year. So for “Hurricane Katrina,” for example, you can see where news spiked, click on that period and review events as they unfolded. It appears to have bolstered Topix’s growth.

Craigslist is rocking — About half of the growth in visits to online classified ads is going to San Francisco online classified site Craiglist, according to comScore Media Metrix. Craiglist is considered by many in Silicon Valley’s tech crowd to be clunky, a homely Web 1.0 site lacking the jazz of newer players, such as Oodle. But it is getting the job done. Web sites featuring classified ads drew 47 percent more unique visitors this July than the same month a year ago, while Craiglist’s visits about doubled, to 13.8 million unique visitors.

Intel’s new laser for chips could speed up communications 1000-fold — Intel’s new research has found a way to create a laser out of hybrid chip materials, and Dean Takahashi of the Merc has the details (registration required).

HP investigations deepen — Now we’re hearing that HP planted software on journalists’ computers, and the NYT is reporting that HP even considered planting moles within journalists’ offices.

Many of us knew that Cortina had acquired Intel’s optical business, because we were alerted to a briefing with Cortina, and news leaked out early last week.

There was no dollar figure, or other details. So now we have the skinny: Cortina, a Sunnyvale start-up, has acquired the assets of Intel’s optical network components business for $115 million, which “consists of a minority investment position and an undisclosed amount of cash.”

Cortina also announced the completion of a new $132 million funding round led by new investor Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) as well as existing investors Canaan Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures, the company said in a statement that is about to go on the news wires.

Additional investors include new investors Alloy Ventures, Bridgescale Partners, Doll Capital Management, and Sofinnova Ventures.

Norm Fogelsong, general partner at IVP, said the deal will create “the next major semiconductor supplier in the networking space.”

Cortina wants to be a leader in components for the infrastructure routing, transport, and enterprise markets — a provider of Ethernet Framers, Ethernet PHYs, Optical Transport FEC framers, Ethernet over SONET service framers, and T1/E1 Line Interface Units.

According to the release:

As part of the acquisition, Cortina will add key Intel employees in engineering, product testing/validation, operations, marketing and application engineering as well as new facilities in Folsom, California, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Asia.

“As the market for 10 gigabit communications becomes mainstream, makers of switches, routers, and other infrastructure gear need better and more cost-effective ways to deliver a higher level of throughput,” says Drew Lanza, general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of Cortina’s founding investors in 2001. “At the time we invested, we predicted the need to marry high-speed network interfaces, low-layer processing and high speed interfaces on a single chip. Cortina’s success in achieving this has made it one of the stars of our portfolio.”

This is a huge change for Cortina, which last time we checked, had raised only a total of $85M million in two rounds of funding since 2001