The deal will bring 50 NexGen employees into Fusion-io to help the company expand its products and market in the small and medium-sized business space with data storage solutions that provide the speed and reliability of all-flash solutions, while still participating in some of the cost efficiencies of tradition disk memory.

The two companies had already partnered on storage solutions.

“Many SME businesses have lean IT teams and budgets, making it critical to offer an integrated and affordable entry point for flash powered application acceleration that delivers consistent performance, even under demanding workloads,” David Flynn, Fusion-io chief executive said in a statement.  “The hybrid NexGen solution combines memory attached flash and disk on leading server platforms to provide a system tuned to deliver performance, price, and capacity.”

Fusion-io had just reported earnings earlier today, announcing $87.7 million in quarterly revenue with a net loss of $20 million, and a drop from last quarter of 27 percent and from the previous year’s quarter of seven percent.

But the company has plenty of coin on hand for the acquisition: $355 million in cash and equivalents.

With Fusion-io’s software and NexGen’s hardware, Fusion-io says that it will now provide:

• independently provisionable performance and capacity with a software-defined architecture
• dynamic real-time flash write caching, read caching, and tiering
• enterprise reliability with more than 250 times more data written over the system’s lifetime than SATA and SAS SSDs
• application performance three times faster than SSDs integrated behind legacy storage controllers
• transparent movement of data between high performance and low cost storage media as needed

As part of the deal, Fusion-io is covering all existing stock agreements and vested equity of NexGen employees.

photo credit: Leonardo Rizzi via photopin

Ostrovok

Ostrovok pulled in $25 million from General Catalyst Partners, Frontier Ventures, Accel Partners, Expedia CEO Eric Blachford, and Shervin Pishevar to improve online travel booking within and from Russia.

Moovweb

77-employee Moovweb raised $16 million to improve its technology and grow its business from Jafco Ventures and Trinity ventures, with participation from Andy Bechtolsheim.

Moovweb optimizes websites’ content and pages for mobile devices, so it essentially competes with mobile apps. The company says it has already transformed nearly 12 billion mobile pages, apps, and services for clients from Macy’s to 1-800-Flowers.com.

DemandBase

B2B marketing startup DemandBase brought in $15 million in new investment to grow its real-time targeting and B2B marketing personalization technology from Scale Venture Partners, with participation by existing investors Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Adobe Systems.

That takes DemandBase’s total investment to $44 million. The company plans to expand in both the U.S. and Europe.

Vantrix

Vantrix scored a $4.5 loan from NXT Capital today. It’s business is helping carriers prepare for the explosion of mobile traffic that is coming with the increase of mobile video. Previous investors include Summerhill Venture Partners, Tudor Growth Equity, BDC Capital and JK&B Capital.

photo credit: johanoomen via photopin cc

Dell has reached an agreement to go private, a move that marks the end an era for the world’s third-largest computer maker.

The Round Rock, Texas-based company was once the PC market leader, but it now trails Hewlett Packard and Lenovo. Sources say that going private will give it the space to remake itself as a provider of business technology.

The terms of the $24.4 billion buyout are that the company’s founder and CEO, Michael Dell, and private equity firm Silver Lake will pay $13.65 per share in cash. Microsoft will provide $2 billion in a loan, rather than equity, which is the only real surprise. The debt financing comes from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital Markets.

Sources familiar with the deal say it’s a highly strategic play for Microsoft to make an investment. And it should help ensure that the Windows operating system remains in Dell desktops and laptops. This may prevent the privatized from Dell straying to an alternative: Linux, ChromeOS, or Android.

Dell is already one of the biggest channels for Microsoft’s Windows software.

Sanu Desai, the managing director for investment banking firm Torch Partners, said this kind of privatization will become increasingly common in the tech industry.

“We’ve had huge shifts in the industry,” he said by phone, and he explained that the older titans like Dell, Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel will need to innovate or risk being wiped out by relative newcomers like Facebook and Google.

Desai explained, “The shift to tablets is killing them. Apple is killing them. And at that point you look around and say, ‘Who’s generating cash?’”

This move will let Dell’s board carve out a new strategy without needing to report its quarterly earnings to Wall Street analysts.

You can make interesting parallels with Seagate, a company that helped define the disk drive business. It went private in 2000 in a $20 billion deal also led by Silver Lake Partners. “When Seagate went back out into the public markets, they made a lot of money,” said Desai. “Hardware has always lent itself to going private.” Seagate is now a leading provider of data storage solutions.

Dell is best known for sourcing computer components cheaply and assembling them in an efficient way. But this is now a commodity market; Dell will need to determine what the next chapter of the business will be.

Amid rumors about the company’s new leadership, only one thing is for certain: Michael Dell will remain at the helm as the board enters the new world of cloud computing. A source at a private equity firm who asked to remain anonymous said we’ll likely see executive moves, business-unit closures, and layoffs in the coming months at Dell.

Dell has invested his personal wealth to take a majority stake in the company and already owns about 16 percent of the shares.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Not to be outdone by its competition, Uber has reached an agreement with the California authorities.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) struck its first deal with popular ride-sharing service Lyft. Twenty-four hours later, the state has also agreed to suspend its $20,000 fine and cease-and-desist action against Uber, the smartphone app that you can use to summon a car instead of hailing a traditional cab.

This agreement provides Uber with the breathing room to continue operating its hire-a-car service and expand into the ride-sharing market.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told the New York Times that the ride-sharing service will be unveiled in California in the coming weeks. In California, Uber operates in San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, and a few smaller cities.

As part of its official statement to the press, Uber said:

The agreement states that ride-sharing — or rides provided by drivers not specifically licensed to drive a limousine or taxi — is legal, too. This paves the way for Uber to begin offering ride-sharing services in California in the near future.

As we reported yesterday, California is taking six months to perform background checks and assess whether services like SideCar, Lyft, and Uber are in compliance.

The CPUC is also considering new regulations that could legalize ride-sharing. In December it issued a proposal for new rulemaking, which will evaluate how these new businesses are using “mobile communications and social networks to connect individuals wishing to offer and receive low cost and convenient, sometimes shared, transportation.”

Uber has faced similar regulatory battles in other cities as it expands. In a blog post, a company spokesperson stressed that California is “cutting edge” and appears set to lead a “steady drumbeat of progress.”

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alex Laats

In the early 1990’s, I attended a startup conference, where the speaker emphasized that a large percentage of entrepreneurs end up getting divorced. Forgetting what the rest of the presentation was about, I left with the idea that starting a company had the potential to ruin my marriage.

At the time, I was working for MIT, with dreams of starting a business. By 1996, I was ready to pull the trigger and start a company — but the alarming divorce statistics had left their mark. My wife, Laura, and I had a baby with visions of expanding the family, and an old home with a mortgage requiring extensive repair.

There’s never a perfect time to get married, have a baby, move in to a new home, and start a company. However, the dream of launching a tech startup had overtaken me, and I discussed the idea frequently with my wife. Laura had the patience and tolerance to listen. Shortly before starting my company, she gave me a coffee mug that said, ‘Carpe Diem,’ which changed to ‘Seize the Day’ when hot coffee was poured into the mug. I knew she was on board.

Because of the warnings from the presentation, I knew we had to start the company with the clear knowledge that our marriage would be put at risk, and we needed to be realistic about what it would require from both of us. An incredibly lopsided deal was made: I would work long hours out of the house. Work would come first, and Laura would bear the brunt of the taking care of our home, baby and finances. On top of that, she would continue working because we needed the income. My household responsibilities were minimal and manageable. We called it “The Deal.”

My startup “NBX” was one year old when we learned Laura was pregnant with our second child. When our son was born, it was clear the original arrangement wouldn’t work. There were plenty of moments when we didn’t have answers. We developed a new deal, and we made it work. It was a year later that 3Com bought NBX for $90 million.

This immediately and meaningfully changed our lives — money and personal time were suddenly in the equation. Happiest when working to build an exciting new business with a great team of dynamic and creative people, I immersed myself in another startup. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been involved with four start-ups, three of which were successful.

There have been plenty of rocky times along the way. At one particularly bad moment, I recall telling Laura to shoot me if I got involved with another startup. Thankfully, she understood my frustration but ignored my request.

I recently met a new company with a great business model, super-creative team and profitable growth, and couldn’t turn down the opportunity. It was time for another Deal, but this time it was with Laura, my two teenage boys and middle-school daughter. We’ve worked together to set expectations, and with everyone’s help we’ve found a comfortable balance.

When making these deals, it’s necessary to remember others are making sacrifices for your benefit. It’s important not to forget the little things. As cliché as it sounds, I remember my Dad starting my Mom’s car to warm it up before she headed to work. I make the morning coffee every day for Laura. I’m a bit obsessive about it, I confess.

Even when I’m up and out the door before anyone else is awake, Laura can turn on the coffee and know I’m thinking of her, and I appreciate the fact that she holds it all together.

Alex Laats brings 20 years of experience as a high-tech entrepreneur, business operator and team builder to ZeroTurnaround. Most recently, Alex created three businesses (Boomerang, RAMP, and AVOKE) and acquired one (Digital Force Technologies) while serving as president of BBN Technologies’ Delta Division. BBN is legendary in the geek world for many things including the development of the early Internet nodes and the invention of e-mail. BBN was successfully acquired by Raytheon.

Prior to BBN, Alex co-founded two business, including NBX, which was one of the first successful enterprise VoIP businesses. NBX was successfully acquired by 3Com.

Alex walks a fine line of geek and businessman; all the while still maintaining his title as four square (the schoolyard game) legend in the short-guy, over-40 category. 

Dad and child image via Shutterstock 

It was almost a year ago that Apple built native Twitter integration into iOS 5 – one of the factors that helped Twitter growth skyrocket. And just a couple of months ago, Mountain Lion’s first iteration brought Twitter integration to the desktop, allowing Mac users to tweet right from Apple’s notification center.

Where do you want to share today, iOS 6 asks. …

But Facebook is an entirely different matter.

Facebook’s last-announced userbase is 955 million, compared to Twitter’s 500 million. Those numbers are deceiving, however. Not only are Facebook’s numbers monthly active users, Facebook also has only a 5 percent to 7 percent fake user account problem. That compares unfavorably to Twitter’s easily 15 percent fake-account rate, but which is quite likely, based on what I’m hearing, a 30 percent fake rate.

Almost certainly, if it counted users the way Twitter counts users, Facebook would be over a billion already.

And now, Facebook is integrated into both the fastest-growing desktop platform (OK, that hardly matters) and the most lucrative mobile platform, both provided by Apple. This means that Apple’s iOS and OS X users can now natively share status updates, pictures, and videos from multiple apps without having to open up a browser and type in f-a-c-e-b-o-o-k-.-c-o-m.

In addition, all the authentication and social graph goodies that Facebook brings to the table are accessible to apps. It syncs Facebook contacts with phone contacts. Your Facebook events show up in your calendar.

The massive integration of iOS and OS X users in one fell swoop will not have the same steroids effect on Facebook that iOS integration had for Twitter. Facebook is already far too ubiquitous.

But it should increase shareability and sharing frequency and add huge new opportunities to the iOS ecosystem.

For the social-network giant, the long-rumored Facebook phone is never going to be a platform that can catch either iPhone or Android. And since Android with Google’s own Google+ social network is definitely not a deal that is in the realm of possibility for Facebook, if Facebook wanted to be not just on but in a significant mobile platform in a big way … iOS was the only real option.

The desktop is just a nice little bonus that helps Apple keep its platforms in sync.

Photo credit: Mike Baird/Flickr

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Tintri raises $25M for trippy-sounding infrastructure: virtualized flash storage

Tintri, a startup that produces flash storage appliances for virtual machines, announced today that it’s closed an oversubscribed $25 million round of funding. Tintri compresses information using solid state disks, rather than bulky hard drives, and makes use of flash technology so data storage is more compact and cost-effective.

This is the company’s fourth funding round. It was led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investors NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated, bringing the company’s total capital raised to over $60 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

Apigee raises another $20M to expand its powerful API platform

API management startup Apigee has raised $20 million in its fifth round of funding to help it expand into new markets, the company announced today. More than 100 billion API calls per month run through Apigee’s platform. Notable Apigee clients include Walgreens, Netflix, eBay, Pearson, Gilt Groupe, Bechtel, and Getty Images. The new round of funding was led by Focus Ventures, with participation by prior investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Third Point Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

StackSocial grabs $800K to bring stores to tech publications

Startup StackSocial has raised $800,000 to help take its tech deals platform public, the company announced today. StackSocial basically provides a white-label daily deals-like store for news publications to place within their website.

StackSocial is part of the first batch of companies from the LA-based startup accelerator Amplify. The new seed fund includes investments from 500 Startups, Tim Draper, Paige Craig, Siemer Ventures, EchoVC Partners, and others. Along with the funding news, StackSocial also announced partnerships to bring its platform to a number of other tech sites, such as TechRadar, MacLife, Maximum PC, and GamesRadar. Read more on VentureBeat.

Xamarin takes $12M to solve the mobile developer shortage

In order to address the mobile developer shortage of 2012, investors threw $12 million at Xamarin, the company that houses Mono, a project that allows for cross-platform development between multiple operating systems and code bases. Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Floodgate all contributed to the effort to solve this crisis. This is Xamarin’s first institutional round of funding. Read more on VentureBeat.

Nextdoor takes $18.6M to strengthen communities across America

Nextdoor, a private social network for the neighborhood, announced today that it has raised $18.6 million in funding. The site provides a trusted and protected online space for neighbors to engage with each other, with the overarching goal of making communities across America safer and stronger.

This recent round of funding is the first explicitly invested for Nextdoor and was led by Benchmark Capital as well as DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Shasta Ventures.

The money will be used to scale the network, which Nextdoor founder Nirav Tolia believes should (and will) be present in every one of the 20,000 communities across the US. Read more on VentureBeat.

Angel investor floats down from above (Canada) to bestow $15M on entrepreneurs  

Version One Ventures, the micro-VC fund spearheaded by angel investor Boris Wertz, established a new $15 million pool to provide seed and first round financing for startups. Wertz will use the capital to make $250K and $500K investments in consumer Internet, e-commerce, software-as-a-service, and mobile companies across America.

Version One began after Wertz met with notable success as an angel investor, making over 35 investments, including six exits and acquisitions by big players like Google, Twitter, Salesforce, and Groupon. This recent fundraising was led by former President and COO of Yahoo Jeff Mallett and has already gone to support five companies:  Top Hat Monocle (interactive learning platform), Julep (multi-channel beauty brand), Jobber (business management software for contractors), Instacanv.as (Instagram artist marketplace) and Sunnytrail (social intelligence platform). Read the press release.

Mitre Media packs $8.6M in heat, shows off significant assets

Mitre Media, a provider of financial content and tools for well-endowed investors (I am referring to net worth — get your mind out of the gutter) raised $8.6 million led by iNovia Capital. This financial media startup was founded by Tom Hendrickson, a former partner at Investopedia.com, and targets financial advisors and decision makers. As this segment of the population tends to have money under its belt (there you go again), Mitre Media has thousands of paying users who help bring in millions of dollars in revenue. In addition to raising capital, Mitre Media also announced its first two acquisitions: Dividend.com and ETFdb.com.

Chute reaches $2.7M rung on investment ladder

Chute, a startup that helps developers quickly and easily bring multimedia content into their apps, today sealed a $2.7 million funding deal led by Freestyle Capital with participation from Battery Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and a handful of corporations and individuals, including Salesforce.com, Klout co-founder Joe Fernandez.

The startup makes it simple for developers to get images into their apps with “a cloud-based backend for image uploading, processing, moderation, third-party API integrations, and user authentication,” all with a few lines of code. So far, the young company’s client base includes a wide range of big-name brands, from NBCNews.com and Lucky Magazine to Havaianas flip flops and House of Blues. Read more on VentureBeat.

I’m talking, of course, about PayPal, the “subsidiary” that now accounts for well over a third of eBay’s total revenue — and gaining.

Since the deal completed, PayPal has moved more than half a trillion dollars in payments and grown from 23 million regular users to over 110 million. VentureBeat spoke to PayPal’s senior director of global communications, Anuj Nayar, about the anniversary.

Source: eBay

PayPal revenue as a percentage of eBay revenue

“There’s very few of these acquisitions that are universally seen as a success story,” Nayar said. “But eBay buying PayPal was maybe the most successful acquisition in Silicon Valley history. PayPal now accounts for 38 percent of the total company’s revenue.”

The purchase price was $1.5 billion dollars, but not a penny was actually paid. Instead, the deal was a tax-free stock-for-stock exchange: .39 eBay shares for every PayPal share.

In return, PayPal has generated about $20 billion in revenue for eBay over the past decade. In fact, this year alone PayPal expects to process more than three times the initial purchase amount — $7 billion — in mobile payments alone.

There’s some irony there, as Nayar notes:

“In 1998 the original business model was to move money between two Palm Pilots … and the online payments was a side business.” Now, he says with a trace of humor, “the hot new thing is to use your mobile phone as a wallet.”

Source: Dipity.com

It all started on a Palm Pilot?

Money on a mobile device is essentially how PayPal began. And a recent re-organization by PayPal president David Marcus has refocused the company on mobile, putting former mobile chief Hill Ferguson in charge of all PayPal product groups.

It’s a needed change, says Nayar.

“The payments market is getting more and more competitive … every morning I check VentureBeat and there’s another digital wallet company starting up. We are definitely doubling down on accelerating innovation.”

Of course, it’s not just small startups challenging PayPal.

As we reported late in June, competitors include Facebook, Google, and Apple. None of those are competitors to be taken lightly. One owns the world’s largest social graph, and the other two have a stranglehold on the mobile devices that hundreds of millions of people currently  use … and billions more probably soon will.

Nayar knows PayPal is in for the fight of its life but likes the company’s chances.

“There’s a very different level of consumers buying in when you’re talking about your money. You need scale and you need trust.”

PayPal will need to grow both of these to have a future decade as successful as its past decade.

A brief history of PayPal:

• 1998: Peter Thiel and Max Levchin develop a service named PayPal as a secure way to beam money between Palm Pilots
• 1999: Nokia Ventures and Deutsche Bank “beam” Peter Thiel $4.5 million in venture funding from a Palm Pilot
• 2000: PayPal enables eBay payments
• 2001: PayPal goes public on the NASDAQ
• 2002: eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion and begins to integrate PayPal into eBay
• 2004: PayPal launches its first API and introduces Web Services
• 2005: PayPal introduces micropayments
• 2010: PayPal launches the new Send Money application for mobile devices, processes $750 million in mobile payments
• 2011: PayPal processes $4 billion in mobile payment volume for the year
• 2012: PayPal partners with Home depot: can be used for payments at 2000 stores

Image credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/ShutterStock

[ Updated with new comments as they come in ... most recently at 4:01 PM PST, June 27 ]

Note: we’ve added a full interview with NewsGator CEO JB Holston, a Microsoft partner in the enterprise social space, building its solutions on SharePoint. He’s got some great observations.

Yesterday, after half a month of speculation, Microsoft announced that it has purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion. According to Charles River Partners, the first venture capital firm to invest in Yammer, that’s the second largest all-cash deal for a VC-backed company, ever.

VentureBeat has been reaching out to industry sources — and the original Yammer investor, George Zachary — asking what this deal means for the enterprise social market. Here’s what we’re hearing:

Scott Raskin, chief executive of MindJet, a social collaboration platform that integrates with SharePoint:

“When Microsoft steps up to the plate with a deal this large, you know the category is gaining serious traction. The Yammer acquisition represents new validation for easy to use, integrated social collaboration: both for employees and across the enterprise value chain. This brings the market one step closer to adopting more effective and complete collaboration solutions for taking ideas and executing upon them.”

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and chief executive of eXo, an enterprise portal platform

The fact that Microsoft is purchasing Yammer clearly means three things:

First, that SharePoint has failed to deliver the enterprise social capabilities that organizations are increasingly demanding.

Second, that Yammer has been very successful at attracting individual users, but they’ve continued to struggle at the enterprise level, where IT organizations still have legitimate concerns about security, integration and manageability.

Third, that Microsoft is willing to spend 1.2 billion dollars to play catch-up in this space. Yammer may enable Microsoft to offer a freemium social service, but it’s going to have a hard time cost-effectively attaching SharePoint to that service because Yammer is multi-tenant and SharePoint is not. They’ll sort out the integration eventually, but probably not quickly.

Malcolm Ross, VP of product marketing at Appian, a business process management company

As the Twitter joke goes … Yammer to Microsoft is “SharePoint Cloud Server 2012 Mobile Enterprise Social Networking Edition.” It evolves SharePoint past the age of the Portal and into Enterprise Social Networking.

The companies that are truly threatened by this acquisition are companies like Teligent and NewsGator, who have created a lucrative business filling the social networking hole in Microsoft SharePoint.  As mentioned earlier, Yammer simply fills in the obvious cracks in SharePoint.  It fails to connect social collaboration and sharing with meaningful work context in an enterprise.

The end-user will ultimately have one platform for sharing and collaboration (SharePoint/Yammer) and another where real work gets done (ERP, CRM, BI, etc). Yammer in no way begins to bridge these worlds of structured enterprise processes with collaboration.

Tim Young, VP of social enterprise at VMware (which recently acquired Yammer competitor Socialcast)

It’s clear that across a variety of industries, social is here to stay. VMware recognized this trend early on and acquired Socialcast more than a year ago — since then, many other companies have followed our lead. Today’s news is yet another proof point that social is becoming a critical and core component in the way that employees work.

Vineet Jain, chief executive of Egnyte, a cloud file server

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is a clear indicator that cloud and collaboration solutions are an assumed part of the enterprise landscape.

With this complete embrace of the cloud, we can move on to the more important question of where enterprise files live, and what are the best deployment models for integrating the cloud into a larger data strategy.  It’s in this larger picture that we begin to understand that a hybrid cloud approach is the one that makes the most sense for the enterprise.

They are able to maintain the physical sensation of “touching” their data on premise, while leveraging the cloud for certain applications.  Over the coming months, the integration of Yammer and social collaboration tools with hybrid cloud data and file strategies will propel businesses into ever more efficient models of doing business.

Alastair Mitchell, cofounder and chief executive of Huddle (a Yammer competitor)

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer is the latest in a wave of high-profile acquisitions and consolidations in the social software space. We’ve already seen VMware acquire Socialcast, Jive Software snap up Offisync, Oracle scoop up Collective Intellect, and Yammer purchase OneDrum. And these represent just a small snapshot of activity over the last few years.

The Microsoft/Yammer deal provides further validation of the increasing importance of enterprise social software. Technology that supports the new ways in which people are sharing information and working together is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for businesses, it’s vital. Companies that fail to use innovative social and mobile tools to make the best use of information in today’s knowledge economy will simply get left behind their competitors.

By buying up social enterprise vendors, technology goliaths such as Microsoft and Oracle have obviously woken up to the fact that this really is the future of working. They are now racing to plug the gaps in their own social offerings so that they can respond to increasing demand from businesses and government organizations alike.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum

Many employees at the junior (and now senior) end of the workforce live aspects of their personal lives through Facebook and Twitter, so the idea of introducing similar kinds of tools into the workplace seems to make sense from a communication and collaboration point of view. It’s not just Microsoft eyeing-up the opportunities afforded by the Facebook-led social paradigm shift. Established enterprise IT vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP, are all busy bringing social capabilities to the workplace via a variety of ways and means.

Microsoft already has a product that touts social capabilities – SharePoint Server, but this was designed and built in the pre-Facebook, pre-cloud era. Launched in 2008, Yammer is a new breed of enterprise collaboration solution, designed from the ground up to exploit social, mobile, and cloud technologies, and would sit neatly alongside Skype, the communication product that Microsoft acquired this time last year for $8.5 billion.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer will undoubtedly have an opportunity impact at the commodity end of the enterprise social networking spectrum, but if Google and LinkedIn can address this aspect of the market with a compelling proposition, then all is still to play for.

Mark Eisenberg, director at Fino, a cloud and mobile application services firm

Yammer is a good addition to the Microsoft portfolio. Microsoft’s organic additions to the Office suite, such as MySites in SharePoint, have not gained the traction hoped for and are lacking in the robust features social networking users expect today.

SharePoint is the likely center of gravity for the Yammer platform. The mature integration to SharePoint has to be very appealing.  In addition, the reach into the broad spectrum of platforms supported by Yammer will be a huge boost to Microsoft’s social networking ambitions in the enterprise. SharePoint needs to grow beyond its repository roots, and Yammer can make that happen.

Microsoft’s enterprise social networking story has not been resonating to date.  And Salesforce has been making considerable hay in the social networking sun.  This should put them back on equal footing.

Avinoam Nowogrodski, co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, a cloud-based project management solution

As enterprises continue to become increasingly collaborative through new business processes, we only expect the concept of the social enterprise to rise in popularity.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer best exemplifies that the interest in the social enterprise will continue as business decision makers look to match the right tools with organizational needs. In fact, solutions are adapting to better serve employee needs, and we have seen our customers paying closer attention to which solutions are best suited for their employees, clients, and customers.

… As a result, you will see companies, including Clarizen, looking to fortify their leadership in the social enterprise space with continual innovation and resources put into rapidly updating software to fulfill customers’ requests and expectations. … In the end, this creates a more collaborative and efficient ecosystem.

Do you have a perspective you’d like to share?

Let us know – email me, or add it in the comments below!

Image credit: ShutterStock

Facebook has just filed an amended S1 form with the SEC, and in it, we learn just how the social network’s acquisition deal with Instagram went down. We’ve also learned how much of the $1 billion price tag was split between cash and company stock.

The filing reveals Facebook paid 23 million shares of Facebook common stock as well as $300 million in cash to acquire mobile photo-sharing app Instagram. Also, Facebook will pay out a $200 million breakup fee if regulators don’t green-light the acquisition.

Just days before the $1 billion deal, Instagram took a round of funding valuing it at around $500 million.

According to today’s S1 update, the deal is expected to fully close within the second quarter of 2012.

“Following the closing of this acquisition, we plan to maintain Instagram’s products as independent mobile applications to enhance our photos product offerings and to enable users to increase their levels of mobile engagement and photo sharing,” the filing reads.

“We believe that mobile usage of Facebook is critical to maintaining user growth and engagement over the long-term, and we are actively seeking to grow mobile usage, although such usage does not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue.”

In the filing, Facebook admits that large-scale acquisitions such as the Instagram deal are still fairly uncharted territory, and future acquisitions of similar scope might “require significant management attention, disrupt our business, result in dilution to our stockholders, and adversely affect our financial results… Our ability to acquire and integrate larger or more complex companies, products, or technologies in a successful manner is unproven.”

The SEC filing today still contains no details on where Facebook’s stock price will start, and it names no date for the IPO to take place. Stay tuned for those details over the next couple weeks.

Yahoo, which owns significant stakes in Chinese powerhouse Alibaba and Japan’s SoftBank (as well as Yahoo Japan, natch) was attempting to sell those shares back to the companies in order to focus on domestic products and get a load of extra cash to bolster its business.

The transaction was said to be worth around $17 billion if Yahoo, Alibaba, and SoftBank could pull it off. However, this morning, All Things D‘s Kara Swisher is reporting that, in fact, the companies cannot pull it off.

After Alibaba went through the trouble of raising $4 billion to buy back its 40 percent stake from Yahoo; after it hired legal counsel specializing in international M&A and similar deals; after the company even suspended the public sale of its stock on the Hong Kong public market, the talks with Yahoo broke down.

Swisher’s sources say that while Yahoo has not completely walked away from the deal, it has changed the terms to something Alibaba and SoftBank find unacceptable.

Last week, in a letter from outgoing Yahoo board chair Roy Bostock, Bostock referenced the ongoing talks, saying, “The complexity and unique nature of these transactions is significant. While we continue to devote significant resources to these discussions, we are not in a position at this time to provide further detail or to provide assurance that any transaction will be achieved.”

The deal discussions first came to light in December 2011, when the company sought to shore up U.S. operations and offset a 24 percent year-over-year revenue loss due to a search deal with Microsoft.

Timberlake will play a major role in developing the strategy and creative direction of Myspace, according to Specific Media. Both parties plan to unveil details of Myspace’s new direction later this summer.

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. Myspace has the potential to be that place,” Timberlake said in a statement from Specific Media.

Timberlake doesn’t have much experience on the business side of social sites beyond his portrayal of Napster founder Sean Parker in the film The Social Network. But he is a veteran of the music industry and an investor in startups Stipple and Miso.

Online advertising firm Specific Media acquired Myspace from News Corp. for $35 million in a deal announced earlier today. Irvine, California-based Specific Media was founded in 1999 by brothers Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook and operates offices all over the world.

The $35 million price tag might seem too high for a site rumored just months ago to be shutting down. Using the news of Myspace’s sale to leverage media attention about the partnership with Timberlake was a smart move on Specific Media’s part.

The Timberlake partnership underscores that Specific Media will focus on Myspace’s music features. VentureBeat has yet to hear back from the company regarding whether music licensing deals made under previous owner News Corp. would carry over. Considering that News Corp. is retaining a small stake in the social site, it’s likely that prior licensing deals will remain in place.

Justin Timberlake pictured above in a popular Saturday Night Live episode.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Troubled wholesale mobile broadband provider LightSquared has confirmed today that the company has entered a 15-year deal with Sprint to provide high-speed wireless service for the carrier’s 4G LTE network, reports Bloomberg.

The news comes on the heals of an announcement last week that government agencies had completed tests showing that LightSquared’s 4G LTE network interferes with GPS signals, affecting aircraft and automobile navigation systems and emergency response services like OnStar. Fixing the problems will likely take several years and will cost a significant amount of money.

Terms of the Sprint deal state that the companies will jointly develop, deploy and operate LightSquared’s 4G LTE network — making Sprint one of LightSquared’s largest customers along with Best Buy, Leap, Cellular South and SI Wireless.

It’s unknown if LightSquared’s GPS interference problems will affect how much money Sprint expects to receive from the deal, which has previously been reported to be as much as $20 billion over 15-years.

Sprint will soon become a distant third among the major wireless carriers below Verizon and AT&T, which is awaiting approval of its merger with T-Mobile by regulators. Sprint desperately needs to improve its high-speed network to remain competitive, which is likely the biggest incentive for closing a deal with LightSquared.

Sprint was also in talks with ClearWire, which powers Sprint’s 4G WiMax network, for a deal similar to the one its making with LightSquared, according to Bloomberg.

ClearWire’s network doesn’t have interference problems. However, the company could have decided it has a better chance of success with a broken 4G LTE network than it does with a much less impressive 4G WiMax network.

Reston, Virginia-based LightSquared expects to launch its wholesale mobile broadband services to customers in the first half 2012, according to the company’s website.

The Bing search engine has been steadily gaining market share — it currently holds 27 percent of the search engine market compared to Google’s 67 percent — and this deal comes as a major breakthrough.

In addition to RIM’s smartphone devices, Bing will also be serving as the default search and maps provider to PlayBook, RIM’s upcoming tablet competitor to Apple’s iPad.

According to The Register, the agreement may also include a clause to make Microsoft’s upcoming mobile browser IE10 the default browser on the BlackBerry. A deal like that would make for an interesting collision in the mobile browser market, with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android backing Webkit-based browsers, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and RIM’s BlackBerry backing Internet Explorer.

Microsoft also showed how some of its more advanced capabilities, such as search with optical character recognition cameras, voice, local restaurants, and deals will be integrated into the BlackBerry platform, as well as its Streetside block view and Photosynth panorama features for Maps.

GitHub is a central repository for code and has become a key source of reputation for coders in the open-source community.

Under the new partnership, GitHub actions will be introduced into LinkedIn’s network update stream and will be searchable through its Signal tool.

If a user has collaborated on open-source projects on GitHub in the past, the program then introduces a user to their co-contributors on LinkedIn.

The company said that by adding LinkedIn’s professional social graph on top of GitHub’s data, users will be able to add a significant social layer to the code.

You can see the company’s statement about the partnership in its blog post. Here’s part of it:

GitHub is a fantastic way to collaborate with others on software projects. It hosts code for many prominent open-source projects, including LinkedIn’s Voldemort and Kafka. With over 600,000 developers hosting over 1.7 million projects, the work hosted on GitHub is essential to professionals around the world.

Software developers know that the code they’ve written is one of the most important parts of their professional identity. It shows their involvement, interest, and dedication to their work. Now developers can showcase their projects on the world’s largest professional network.

After you’ve installed the application and added your GitHub account on LinkedIn, check your Profile – your GitHub projects should appear automatically. Your network will now be automatically updated whenever you create, follow, or update a GitHub project. …

With this new application, you can now leverage the power of your professional network to discover new and interesting projects. Discover which of your connections are on GitHub, and follow their projects right from LinkedIn. Even if you’re not a software developer, the new GitHub application will help you discover which of your connections are actively following and working on new software projects.”

The index polled 35 San Francisco Bay Area venture capitalists in December 2010 about how they viewed the high-growth venture entrepreneurial environment in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next 6-18 months.

It found that confidence had ticked up slightly to 3.75 from 3.70 a quarter earlier, as VCs continue to see promise in an improving exit environment and steadily rising public capital markets.

The survey respondents all agreed that the strength in confidence is clearly related to increasing exit opportunities through both acquisition and the long awaited return of the IPO market.

It also found that the increase in acquisitions provides a context of competitive bidders to drive demand for IPO exits. And new technology developments and social trends are creating fresh market opportunities for entrepreneurs and their venture backers.

Additionally, the report found that the strength in M&A exits is being driven by growing corporate cash balances that have decided it is now worth it to chase venture-backed innovation.

Such growing corporate curiosity is a good sign for a community that has long questioned whether a possible tech bubble has been scaring away VCs spooked by still-shaky markets.

This fourth quarter reading confirms an upward trend in confidence that is now at its highest point in two years.

Still, some VCs polled recommended caution until valuations have been clearly sorted out — a trend that could be helped by the types of high-profile IPOs like LinkedIn’s public debut yesterday and Nielsen’s $1.6 billion emergence Tuesday — and investors understand the space more clearly.

“Venture capital backed start-ups and financings are seeing a new renaissance and the reason is ‘Clomosol,’” said Venky Ganesan of Globespan Capital Partners. “No, it’s not a new drug but rather my coined term for the four major trends powering technology: Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Local. The wealth creation driven by Clomosol will dramatically impact both the local Bay Area economy as well as the overall technology sector.”

“However, Clomosol is not for everybody and side effects might include increased traffic, a shortage of engineers, and high valuations,” warned Ganesan. “Please talk to an experienced VC before embarking on this trend.”

An official Google spokeswoman refused to comment, saying, “We don’t comment on speculation, as you know.”

Fflick uses Twitter to show you what movies the people you follow are recommending as well as what movies they’ve commented on positively or negatively. It also lets you browse a pre-set list of top-ranked movies, helping you decide what movies you may want to rent or go see at a movie theater.

You can also buy movie tickets on Fflick, add certain films to your Netflix queue, and retweet anyone else’s tweets that you think are relevant to a particular film.

So far, neither company is commenting on whether Google will keep the service up and running or if it is primarily attracted to the “sentiment analysis” engine that spits out its recommendations.

Google may also be interested in acquiring the team’s talent. Fflick, launched in August 2010, is the work of four former Digg employees.

TechCrunch reports that the deal is expected to close later this week.

However, although the amount of successful exits was up, they are still lagging in size dollar-wise, as “blockbuster” events stayed largely out of the headlines because VCs are holding onto the companies they view to have the most potential.

That could make 2011 the “year of the IPO” if several well-known Silicon Valley stars decide to go public.

“Exit activity is staging a comeback but capital netted lagged as large M&As and IPOs were still uncommon in 2010,” said Jessica Canning, director of global research for Dow Jones VentureSource. “While it isn’t clear if companies with blockbuster potential – like Facebook and Groupon – will come to market in 2011, there is a healthy IPO pipeline. Currently, 44 companies are registered to go public, up from 25 at this time last year.”

The data also showed that for now, buyouts of venture-backed companies by private equity firms remained steady year-over-year. In 2010, private equity firms spent $1.9 billion to buy 23 venture-backed companies, roughly the same amount as the $1.1 billion PE firms spent to buy 23 venture-backed companies the year before.

That spike in valuation is a potential sign of health in the VC arena, with the $46 million median amount paid for a venture-backed company in 2010 booming to 70 percent more than the $27 million median paid in 2009.

There was also good news on the amount of time it took for a venture-backed company to exit via a merger or acquisition, with 2010 seeing companies successfully exit at 5.2 years, slightly less than the 5.5-year median in 2009.

Buyout size was also larger. During the fourth quarter, three buyouts grabbed $184 million, a jump from three buyouts that netted $76 million during the same period last year.

“After holding back on acquisitions the last couple of years, corporations found themselves with a significant amount of cash on hand and the need make strategic acquisitions to maintain a competitive edge,” said Scott Austin, editor of Dow Jones VentureWire. “Combined with rising valuations that made investors and entrepreneurs more inclined to sell, M&A picked up – a trend likely to continue into 2011.”

The survey polled 330 venture capitalists in the U.S. and 180 CEOs of U.S.-based venture-backed companies between Nov. 29 and Dec. 10, 2010, looking for their views on where they see VC investment headed in the coming year.

Still, despite the initial upbeat nature of the report, it is clear that many venture capitalists remain worried about a bubble developing in Silicon Valley and are divided about how fundraising will shape up over 2011.

Of those surveyed, more than half (51 percent) of VCs said they expect venture capital investment to pick up in 2011. But while about one-quarter expect investment to remain the same, the same amount, 24 percent, said they expect VC funding will intensify its already-documented decline.

There was more optimism about the end stages of development, with 51 percent of the VCs predicting increases in later-stage investment, 49 percent in expansion and seed investment, and 46 percent in early-stage investment.

Of VCs who said they would risk it and invest in companies in their earlier stages, 30 percent said they plan to co-invest more with angels.

CEOs said they are even more hopeful, with 58 percent predicting an increase in venture investing, and 64 percent saying they plan to raise a round of financing in the year ahead.

The venture capital world’s focus on new technology is also continuing to grow – VCs polled said they expect investments in information technology to increase more than in the life sciences and cleantech sectors.

Out of those investments, it was clear that current fads will still be fashionable into at least part of 2011, with as many as 82 percent of VCs pouring funding into consumer internet and digital media, 80 percent into cloud computing, and 66 percent into mobile/telecom.

These figures, however, were once again contradicted by venture capitalists saying they worried the latter two sectors could see a lot of investment “froth,” a term used among the venture community to suggest over-investment.

“At this time last year, the venture capital industry was optimistic, but cautiously so,” said Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA. “[But now] the improving exit market and a renewed excitement in the IT sector have engendered a confidence among VCs and the CEOs of the companies in which we invest that promises to propel the start-up community forward in 2011.”

DocuSign creates technology to let businesses to replace handwritten signatures with electronic ones, so contracts can be sent online.

The Seattle-based company had hired Roger Erickson, formerly senior vice president of technology solutions and services at Autonomy ZANTAZ, as vice president of customer success; and Dustin Grosse, formerly sales and marketing general manager for Microsoft’s Field Readiness team and the Microsoft Office Unified Communications Group, as senior vice president, chief marketing and business development officer. Steve King, who the company hired last January and who previously served as an executive at E-Trade, remains the company’s CEO.

DocuSign, which dubbed itself “the fastest way to get a signature”, now says it controls more than 70 percent of the electronic signature market.

DocuSign also conducts data collection, secure document/data storage and retrieval, and real-time negotiation and collaboration tools through its DocuSign for Salesforce, DocuSign Enterprise and DocuSign Realtor Edition products.

All of the company’s products are accessible from any Internet-connected device, including smartphones and iPads, support nearly any document and form, and offer broad user authentication options.

DocuSign also added more security through a partnership with Authentify in June, where users confirm their identify over the phone via a biometric voiceprint.

The company had previously raised a total of $38.9 million in funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Second Century Ventures, Sigma Partners and WestRiver Capital.

This investment round was led by Scale Venture Partners with continued participation from prior investors Sigma Partners, Ignition Partners, Frazier Technology Ventures and salesforce.com.

As part of the deal, Rory O’Driscoll, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, will join DocuSign’s board of directors.

The Channel Island-based company’s name comes from “the other three billion,” referring to the number of people in the world who currently do not have regular Internet access.

The three-year-old startup has thus far been focused on building easy-to-use global satellite-based Internet technology for Internet service providers and telecom companies attempting to push into rapidly emerging markets.

It will theoretically be able to reach these markets when others couldn’t because O3b’s satellites will be placed in orbit 8,000 kilometers from the Earth, four times closer to the planet than regular geostationary satellites.

Google has poured money into the company at every round—primarily because that satellite proximity should give provide low-latency, fiber-quality access to approximately 70 per cent of the world’s population with fiber quality Internet connectivity.

The company said it plans to launch its first commercial service during the first half of 2013, following the launch of the first eight satellites by Arianespace with a Soyuz launcher from French Guiana.

O3b already has around 10 customers who have signed deals valued at $500 million to $600 million to use its infrastructure, the company told the Wall Street Journal.

The statistics released by Dow Jones VentureSource showed that during the first three-quarters of 2010, angel and VC co-sponsored deals put $282 million into 68 separate deals.

That’s a significant uptick year-over-year, when the same period in 2009 saw only 59 co-investment deals garnering a total of $236 million.

Technology or online networking startups are seeing the bulk of this investment, said Dow Jones, as the white-hot environment for web-based social media continues to draw both investors’ interest and their infusions of money.

“As venture capitalists scout younger companies, especially in the consumer and Internet spaces, we are seeing them tap into and co-invest with angel groups,” said Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource.

The Dow Jones data showed that over the last quarter, investors been particularly keen on business and financial services, and put more than $1 billion dollars into software companies alone.

Renewable energy also has caught the eye of many VCs, as “renewable energy deals continue to drive investment in the energy industry,” said Dow Jones.

The recent stats showed that median size deal has grown slightly, weighing in at around $5 million since the beginning of 2009, as VCs choose where to put what cash where they think they are most likely to turn startups into powerhouses.

Still, angel investors continue to account for a relatively small part of over all investment across the market: Dow Jones’ statistics—which they’ve been compiling since 2007–said total co-investment rounds accounted for only $282 million of the $5.5 billion venture investors put to work in the third quarter.

Those numbers could likely skyrocket in the coming few quarters, however, with has many investors panting on the sidelines for many currently privately-held companies like Facebook and Twitter to take their businesses public.

[DJU4]The median deal size for angel/VC co-investment rounds through September 2010 is $1.93 million. This is slightly below the $1.99 million median in 2009.

Unlike the spate of online deal site fundings we’ve seen over the last two weeks, Offers.com focuses less on “deal of the day” social or luxury buying, and more on customer-specific coupons for Main Street-type retailers like JCPenney, Kmart and the Home Depot.

Offers.com does this by offering an onsite algorithm-driven search engine, the Locker, which asks users what kinds of stores they shop at, what sorts of interests they have, and where they would most like to see deals.

It also differentiates itself by having a staff of editors that verify, rate, categorize and update all offers on a daily basis—perhaps making it more user friendly for the average coupon-cutting consumer who might be accustomed to a variety of stores and offers listed all in one place.

Competitors include CouponMom.com, Coupons.com and RetailMeNot.

The funding comes in the form of a growth equity investment from private equity firm Susquehanna Growth Equity.

Offers.com was launched in 2009 and has been self-funded and in the black since its first year. It recently debuted sister sites in Canada and United Kingdom.

The Austin, Texas-based firm said it believes its main appeal lies in its deals being completely up to date, as opposed to other sites that may offer discounts that expire or are no longer relevant.

“Nothing is more frustrating to a consumer than trying to use out-of-date, inactive or useless coupons online, which is why we spend the time and money to validate every offer on our site, ensuring a high-quality user experience,” said Steve Schaffer, founder and CEO of Offers.com.

Its expansion into new markets is part of larger plan to target consumers who want deals from relevant, big-box retailers as the recession drags on, the company told VentureBeat.

“Since launching Offers.com we have focused on quality and growing organically,” said Schaffer. “The recent popularity of local deals sites and consumers increasing use of online coupons has greatly expanded the market. However, the market remains highly fragmented, and we think the time is right to accelerate our expansion and hiring plans. And we also plan to do some acquisitions.”

The company said its first infusion of outside capital will also be used for marketing, product management, product development and the hiring of 20 new full-time employees over the next year, a 50 percent increase.

Offers.com was advised on the transaction by Pharus Securities, a boutique investment bank for internet and digital media companies.

Philadelphia-based Susquehanna is a private equity group focused on investing in growth capital and buyout opportunities in information services, internet, software and financial technology.

Palo Alto-based CafeBots was founded by Stanford professor Yoav Shoham in an effort to create technology that gives online users tools that act on their behalf on Facebook.

Those tools will then help people interact more meaningfully with their friends online, although exactly how that will work remains under wraps for now, Shoham told VentureBeat. He did say, though, that the startup will be announcing a product by the end of the year.

The company did say it will be focused on building applications that are “useful, fun and scalable”  to let people make better use of their social information and demographics.

“We are the first ones to coin the term ‘friend relationship management’ … which for us means an experience that is more fun and more meaningful, but still brings the smart algorithms,” Shoham told VentureBeat.

CafeBot may not be geared specifically for Facebook, although that platform will be its natural first stop, Shoham said.

“While working in the social space, you can’t not work specifically with Facebook, but of course we look forward to creating partnerships and very much respect all the other players out there,” he said.

The $250 million sFund was itself just announced today at a Facebook event. Billed as a way to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services, its strategic partners include Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company.

The sFund was created by KPCB Partner Bing Gordon in collaboration with partners Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao and Ted Schlein.

As part of the CafeBot’s funding deal, Gordon will sit on the firm’s board of directors.

The private firms will offer Seagate $16 per share, a 26 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price and a 4 percent premium over its current share price, according to the Bloomberg report. Seagate’s shares jumped nearly 21 percent in extended trading yesterday when the rumors of a Seagate buyout first cropped up. That would put Seagate’s value on the stock market at about $7.4 billion — up from its current value of $7.14 billion — based on its market cap.

This is the second batch of rumors involving a large company that might be taken private just this week. Silver Lake Partners, which had taken Seagate private the first time in 2000, was reportedly in talks with AOL and Blackstone Group LP to acquire Yahoo, though sources subsequently told the New York Times that Blackstone was no longer actively considering a deal.

The outcome of the Seagate deal could have an impact on Yahoo talks, in that the private-equity groups involved may not want to deploy so much capital in large deals in the broader tech sector at once.

Old “spin-up” drives that use magnetic platters like Seagate’s have lost momentum since solid state drives, which are faster and lack moving parts, have become increasingly popular. Solid-state drives are still much more expensive, but are typically less power-hungry and boot more quickly. Solid-state drives are particularly popular in gadgets, as flash memory is now most often used in phones and MP3 players that once used hard drives.

While such shifts in the market are inevitable in technology, public-market investors don’t always take them well, and they may well be easier to weather as a private concern. Seagate has already gone private once, when Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital paid $20 billion for the company. It later went public again in 2002, listed at $12 per share.

After losing about $3.1 billion in its fiscal year ending July 2009, Seagate posted net income of about $1.6 billion for its 2010 fiscal year earlier this summer, according to its most recent 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange commission. Seagate’s revenue was up 16 percent from 2009 to 2010, but still down 10 percent from an all-time high of $12.7 billion in 2008.

The San Bruno company, which was founded in September 2009 by Noah Kindler and Arad Rostampour, searches through more than 50 databases to determine whether a child is engaging in harmful activity such a cyberbullying, comments that pertain to drug use or other out-of-bounds activities, or has accepted a friend request from someone suspicious.

The company initially raised $2 million in seed money in the fall of 2009. SocialShield told VentureBeat in August that it would use this fall season to focus on making its name known in the larger market, a push that has clearly netted it enough high-profile exposure to start another round of financing.

“Since launching this summer, we’ve proven the technology works. SocialShield has identified suspicious friends, including a sex offender who had connected with a child on a social network, as well as helping one family with a suicidal teen after keywords were flagged in the child’s stream,” Rostampour told VentureBeat Tuesday. “This new funding allows us to build out our technology even more and to market extensively so that we can help more and more families and kids.”

A cloud-based service, SocialShield has no software to download or install, and thus beams wherever Facebook, MySpace or other social networks are being used, including cell phones. It also allows the child being monitored to participate in the process, sending them an invite email first to ask for access to their networks.

The company said that after a free trial, the service costs between $5 and $10 per month for an entire family and a 20 percent discount for anyone who signed up for a full year.

The angel investors that have been named are well-known Silicon Valley players Adify chief executive officer Russell Fradin and Adify co-founder Larry Braitman, Offerpal CEO George Garrick, former Gaia Online CEO Craig Sherman, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson and and comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. SocialShield’s seed round came from the same group of investors previously.

Fradin, Garrick and Sherman all currently sit on the firm’s board of directors.

Another provider of online monitoring tool for parents, Media Chaperone, also made news today with the announcement of its Piggyback application for monitoring kids’ activities in Facebook games.

Blavatnik will partner his existing shareholdership in Access Industries with Irish investor Dermot Desmond’s International Investment and Underwriting, and private equity fund Atlantic Bridge, to underwrite the deal.

Privately held Acision currently offers a range of mobile services through its proprietary communications network, including mobile messaging, mobile internet browsing, voicemail, mobile broadband and close to a trillion text messages a year.

The company said that it will use the funding to shore up its position as a global leader in the current frenzy to capitalize on smartphone-ready mobile data. It is rumored to be going public sometime in the next two years–good timing considering its internal forecasts show that global mobile data traffic is set to increase 39 times between 2009 and 2014.

The $100 million shot in the arm will be needed. Acision recent coups in swooping up the business of companies including Pakistan’s Mobilink, MTS, Videocon Telecommunications, Telus, Tata Teleservices and VimpelCom will leave it needing as many resources as it can muster.

Photo via Ed Yourdon

Privalia, which already holds majority market share in Italy, Mexico, Brazil and Spain, says it intends to use the funding to tackle new markets after its sales jumped 158 percent over the first half of 2010.

The latest round of fund-raising far outpaces Privalia’s initial four rounds of funding, which had netted the company only $21 million over the last four years. The credit crunch and increasingly savvy fahionistas have given a boost to the site — as international shoppers turn to web retailers as a way to find the latest styles at the lowest prices.

Targeting the rapidly growing markets of Brazil, which ecommerce tracker eBit projects has 18 million online shoppers at the end of 2009, and Mexico, where Privalia saw sales leap 300 percent year-over-year, is a smart move for the 5-million member club.

Privalia said the money would now help it lock down its market leadership in Latin America, while simultaneously allowing it to grow through mergers and acquisition in the region. Founders Lucas Carné and José-Manuel Villanueva have long said they would be looking abroad when the group eventually expanded — presumably in Argentina and Colombia — and this considerable chunk of funding should certainly lend them the international cachet to do so.

Venture capital firms General Atlantic and Index Ventures joined current shareholders Highland Partners, Nauta Capital and Caixa Capital in backing the Barcelona-based fashion brand club. Highland currently has $3 billion invested in 200 companies and explained to VentureBeat earlier this week why VC in Europe is of particular interest right now.

Photo via Chris Willis

I’ve written about what Virgance does in the past, but the quick version is that they run word-of-mouth campaigns to get hundreds or thousands of people to sign up for solar evaluations of their homes. Those that are interested in installing panels are then formed into groups, allowing Virgance to use collective bargaining to cut the total price by up to 25 percent — often saving thousands of dollars.

But it still costs many thousands more to buy a solar system up front, even with government rebates. The recession isn’t the only thing that keeps regular people from adopting solar — it’s the consistently-high price. Outside of affluent neighborhoods in San Francisco, about 80 percent of prospective solar customers said they needed financing, according to Steve Newcomb, Virgance’s chief executive. “It’s that difference between paying about $10,000 and just a thousand up front,” he told me.

From Virgance’s anecdotal experiences, it sounds like there’s a huge market of middle class customers who haven’t yet found an attractive enough financing option to seriously consider solar. In hopes of testing that theory out, the company will have SunRun back up all of its financing with the $100 million credit line the latter has from US Bank — enough for over 2,000 full-size systems.

The plan is to use this year to expand the program, run by a Virgance division called One Block Off the Grid (1BOG), outside of California (the company’s multiple other divisions will be represented at its Equinox event in a week). The Bay Area and Los Angeles have had their own successful campaigns, signing up hundreds of customers in each area, and Newcomb claims grassroots demand for 1BOG in places like Denver and New Orleans has been strong.

But there’s still plenty of work to be done. Ed Fenster, SunRun’s chief executive, points to a number of factors that will determine whether rooftop solar can be successful in other states, including the strength of sunlight, power prices and rebate programs. Also problematic are some state regulations. Colorado, for example, will need to change laws that prevent a company like SunRun from owning small solar systems.

Unfortunately, that ownership is the basis for the company’s power purchase agreement model so that the consumer only pays for the power, not the panels. Fenster says new rules are under consideration in the state. But ultimately, spreading solar across the country will require the two companies to innovate in a more outlandish area: lobbying politicians. And that may be the best indication yet that solar has finally entered the mainstream.

The money was reported this morning by peHUB. SPP also took money less than six months ago, which at the time was enough to put it over the $100 million mark.

We’re hearing that some companies in the solar services business are having trouble securing financing, while others, well-padded with cash, are on cruise control. The recession, of course, is responsible for most of the current financing problems, but it’s also possible that companies like SPP are better able to demonstrate their long-term viability to investors. Some companies involved in solar panel installation are also doing well; just yesterday, Borrego Solar announced a $14 million financing.

The investors in the round all appear to be returning from previous investments: Globespan Capital Partners, Dry Creek Ventures, Silicon Valley Technology Group, Energy Investors Fund, United Commercial Bank and the Enlightened World Foundation.