VentureBeat

Spot Runner, which lets advertisers place to local TV stations via an online service, has raised a whopping $51 million in funding

The move confirms our earlier report that Spot Runner was in the midst of a big raise with a high valuation. The company can do so in a tough economic environment because it has good technology that allows it to automate the media-buying process and has relationships with a variety of media companies.

The business works like this. A local business owner visits the Spot Runner site, selects a business category and chooses from a lot of generic, pre-taped video ads. Each comes with voice-over text that can be customized. Then it tells Spot Runner how much it wants to spend on TV air time and which media markets it wants the ads to run in.

The investors include media companies Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) and Grupo Televisa, along with investment institutions Legg Mason Capital Management and Groupe Arnault/LVMH. Existing investors have also chipped in, bringing the total funding raised to date to $111 million.

Nick Grouf, CEO of Los Angeles-based Spot Runner, said in a statement that the company will expand into online and offline media, both domestically and abroad. Spot Runner’s previous investors include Allen & Company, Battery Ventures, Capital Research and Management, CBS, Index Ventures, The Interpublic Group, Tudor Investment Corporation and WPP.

Investors such as DMGT, with a big reach in Europe and the across the globe, and Grupo Televisa, which operates four broadcast channels in Mexico, could help the company with the overseas expansion. Groupe Arnault/LVMH is a luxury product company with 60 high-end brands, including Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Donna Karan, Sephora and TAG Heuer.

Spot Runner says it connects media companies with new categories of advertisers. The company can target ads more precisely and distribute multiple versions of ads to different audiences. It has thousands of clients and says its revenue is growing rapidly.

The startup just got some competition from search and online ad giant Google, which recently announced the general availability of its TV ad program.

Spot Runner competes with Jivox.

Zoho, a company that is providing one of the widest selection on online office applications, continues to impress.

The company has released a plugin for Microsoft Office, and opened its APIs. The plugin makes Zoho what Microsoft’s online applications (dubbed Live) should be. It allows Zoho documents to be opened and saved in MS Office with a click (Word and Excel, at least; PowerPoint doesn’t work yet with Zoho, but will come). If you’ve got Microsoft office documents on your local drive and want them available online, you can get them via Zoho with couple of clicks. We sat down with Raju Vegesna, product manager, at Zoho, recently, and he told us about the release last night. He said Zoho will follow it up with a Open Office plugin.

The APIs will allow other developers to use Zoho applications. For example, online storage companies will be able to let users open documents through Zoho and save them back to their service without having to download the documents locally.

We’ll follow up later with more about Zoho. This is a notable company in other ways. It is part of private AdventNet, that has headquarters in Pleasanton, but 500 employees in India, and much of its product development there. You might call this one of the India’s first real product companies — compared to the “service” companies that come to mind when you think of India.

Updated

The advertising revolution continues, in both the Internet and wireless worlds.

Spot Runner, the internet start-up that gives advertisers an easier, cheaper way to insert their ads into local TV programming, has raised $40 million more in backing.

And Rhythm NewMedia, meanwhile, has soaked up $18 million more in venture capital, to claim a stake in the other sexy ad area right now: inserting ads in wireless video clips.

This is a lot of money for both players. For SpotRunner, it is significant because backers include major buyers and sellers of advertising: WPP, CBS Corporation and the Interpublic Group. WPP says it manages about $50 billion in advertising budgets and Interpublic Group says its ad agencies serve 4,000 clients. Existing shareholder Allen & Co. led the third round of financing.

It suggests Spot Runner is getting traction. Its model is compelling: The complexities and cost of producing a video and buying air time are daunting for most small business owners. Spot Runner, which we first wrote about here, has developed a self-serve, web-based ad-buying system for TV.

The service works like this: The local business owner goes to the Spot Runner site, picks a business category and then chooses from among thousands of generic, pre-taped video ads. Each ad comes with pre-written voice-over text that can be customized. Once the business has picked an ad, it tells Spot Runner how much it wants to spend on air time and which media markets it wants the ad to run in.

Also among the latest investors are Tudor Investment and Capital Research and Management, and existing investors Battery and Index Ventures.

Meanwhile, Rhythm NewMedia’s technology, which is still in development, will use its new funding to work with carriers to insert relevant ads in video streamed to their users’ cellphones, the company told VentureBeat Friday. Carlyle Venture Partners led the investment, while existing investors also participated. These include Rembrandt Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures.

Separately, the company told VentureWire (sub required) it is about to launch with two carriers — one in the U.S. and one on the U.K — with one of those as early as this quarter, the second during the first quarter of next year.

YouTube will contribute to valley’s allure — Two years ago, Google’s buzz, even before its IPO, gave entrepreneurs like Tribe’s founder Mark Pincus inspiration to dream up the social networking revolution. YouTube’s grand sale will also inspire a new wave of entrepreneurs, no doubt. The WSJ has a timely piece — written before YouTube’s sale was announced — about the entrepreneurs still coming to Silicon Valley.

There’s Matt Sanchez, co-founder of video company VideoEgg, who found he was spending more time in Silicon Valley than his home in New Haven, so packed a 12-foot U-Haul van with his servers and other junk, and moved out here. It has paid off. His team of four have since landed venture money, hired 22 more people, and signed lots of deals with Web sites, most of them within an hour’s drive. “There’s a unique set of resources in Silicon Valley that don’t exist in other places,” Sanchez, 25, told the Journal. And then there’s Metacafe, the Israeli video site, which just opened a Palo Alto office, and plans to hire 12 people by the end of the year.

How things change. We still remember the NYT trying to compare Silicon Valley with Detroit, back when it was fashionable to bash this place — and th was as recent as early 2005!

MySpace cleared — The suit filed by Brad Greenspan, the former chief executive of MySpace, against the popular social networking site, has been dismissed.

MeeVee’s logo sign — Meevee, the personal TV and entertainment guide company, is going to some lengths to build branding, putting up a large logo on its building and filming it, reminding some of the bubble era. It has raised $20 million in venture capital.

Microsoft offers mobile ads too –Google and Yahoo offer sponsored ads besides search results on your mobile phone. Now Microsoft has joined them, but offering click-to-call technology too — which is where you see an ad, click on it, and your phone dials the advertiser.

Google and Zoho gunning for online office software leadership — We’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. We recently wrote about Zoho’s impressive product release schedule, apparently an effort to steal the thunder from Google. Zoho has now incorporated its array of software, including a new calendar and a new email feature, under one roof called Zoho Virtual Office. Meanwhile, Google does its own integration, linking up Writely and Spreadsheets with Docs & Spreadsheets.

Tellme Networks making headway in voice recognition — Speaking of the competition in mobile search, Tellme has been around a long time as a private company, based in Mountain View, and is getting a second wind. Back during the Internet bubble days, it was laying off workers. Now that voice recognition has become hot, it has just signed a deal with Cingular Wireless to offer a 411 information service that will allow Internet searches too. It is now handling more than two billion directory calls a year, 74 percent of which are done without human intervention, according to the NYT.

Netflix’s recommendation technology beat within a week — Netflix, the popular DVD site, offered a prize to anyone who beat its recommendation algorithm. Within a week, a team from WXYZConsulting.com in Los Gatos beat Netflix. The team is led by data mining engineering professor named Yi Zhang, of UC Santa Cruz (pictured here).

Sequoia Capital is almost out of Google — We’ve mentioned venture firm Sequoia’s various conflicts and interests related to its backing of Google. But lately, the venture capital firm’s holdings in Google have dwindled to about 0.1%, according to a filing in April by the SEC. That leaves it with 412,823 shares, worth less than $200 million.

Zoho is a notable company because it keeps offering new, cheap office software at a breakneck pace. Owned by AdventNet, of Pleasanton, the company keeps firing off software updates, at a stubbornness that suggests this company is going somewhere.

Like Techcrunch, VentureBeat finds it challenging to cover this company’s machine gun-like bursts (coming every two weeks or so) of releases. See Zoho blog.

This is not a Web 2.0 era company. The company started in 1996, before the first bubble, and bootstrapped itself, as we’ve mentioned.

To begin with, there is Zoho Show, which became the first AJAX-based office suite online, according to Zoho’s Arvind. It lets you create Powerpoint-like presentations online, and you can open up your Microsoft Powerpoint and Open Office documents with it. It has the latest Web 2.0 features, for example letting you pull in pictures from Flickr. There’s also Zoho Writer, a word processor (a competitor to Google’s Writely) and Zoho Sheet, an online spreadsheet, and many more (Zoho Planner, Zoho CRM, Zoho Chat, Zoho Projects, etc). Where relevant, they have tagging, export-to-blog and sharing features you’d expect with Web 2.0. Finally, they’ve just introduced a single sign-on for these products.

Speaking of online presentation products, we should mention a Mountain View start-up called Uzanto, which has released a similar product called Slideshare — that lets you upload PowerPoint or Open Office files, and play your slides in a YouTube-like interface. Techcrunch has a discussion of this, including of the challenges online services have with AJAX and Flash.

It mentions other services in this area, including Tonicpoint, by San Francisco’s Tonic Systems.