Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.

Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.

As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.

But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.

Sketches of Double Fine's new game

“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”

The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.

Indie streaming video startup Blip.tv announced today that it will ditch the “.tv” from its name in the first of many steps to refresh and improve the company. Blip has also secured a $12 million round of funding to help see those improvement efforts through.

“Our research actually showed that people didn’t really identify web series as associated with television, so dropping the ‘.tv’ from the brand just made sense,” said Blip COO Steve Brookstein in an interview with VentureBeat. “It also fits in line with what we’re doing with the site overall.

The majority of people familiar with Blip probably still view it as a much smaller competitor of YouTube and Vimeo. And while Blip certainly falls into the same streaming video category, it’s evolved into something more distinct. For instance, Blip doesn’t cater to uploading random user-generated videos that don’t have a common theme or purpose. In other words, there aren’t any “fat grandpa plays show tunes with his nose hairs”-type clips.

Instead, the site is focused on becoming the number one place people go to watch original, “episodic” web shows, such as Red vs. Blue, Red Letter Media, CBR TV, and Annoying Orange. By eliminating all of the viral video noise found on other video sites, the best produced content gets a chance to promote itself by emphasizing things like a backlog of episodes, official website links, social media accounts, online merchandise store, and more.

Web show producers also have more of an incentive to push their content through Blip. For example, using the site’s HTML5 video player, show producers can embed their content into other websites for playback on desktop computers and iOS and Android mobile devices. Blip videos also get distributed across a variety of platforms, including (but not limited to) Google TV, LG, Tivo, Boxee, YouTube, Roku, Vizio, and iTunes. This amounts to an average of 13 million unique domestic visitors per month (30 million global) and 330 million video views per month, Blip claims. About 70 million video views per month are monetized, which is far less than what YouTube is able to deliver. However, Blip does offers web show producers a much better advertising revenue split, so it’s possible they’ll make more money despite the lower number of monetized video views.

Brookstein said Blip intends to use the new funding to improve the tools and services available to web show producers, like making the Analytics dashboard more detailed. The startup also plans to use the new capital to further develop its content distribution and advertising platforms.

The new $12 million round includes investment from Bain Capital, Canaan Partners, and existing investors as well as debt from Silicon Valley Bank. This round also includes the $6 million investment reported in December. The New York City-based startup previously closed a $5.2 million round in 2008 and a $10.1 million round in 2010. Blip has raised a total $30.3 million in funding to date.

[Sword image via ShutterStock]

Battery Ventures led the round, which also saw participation from Qualcomm. Outside the Valley, New York’s Greycroft Ventures also joined in the financing.

Viddy, which lets users share 15-second video clips, will use the funding to bring its app to Android tablets and smartphones as well as to the iPad. BlackBerry and Windows Phone apps are also in the works.

Viddy also lets users edit unique audio tracks, visual effects, and transitions into their clips; it bills the app as a sort of Instagram for video. Videos can be shared automatically across most social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The company credits much of its success to celebrity users like Snoop Dogg and Internet savant iJustine.

The concept is similar to that of the recently pivoted social app Color, which lets users upload 30 seconds of video, sans editing, and other micro-video apps we’ve seen come and go over the years.

“We continue to be excited by the growth and engagement of the Viddy community and by the visually entertaining quality of videos created and shared around the world every day,” said Viddy co-founder Brett O’Brien in a release today.

“Given the incredible growth numbers that we have seen, we’re looking forward to making Viddy available on more platforms and to more users globally.”

To date, the startup has taken $8.2 million in funding. Viddy was first launched in April 2011.

Image courtesy of Goodluz, Shutterstock

Payments startup Dwolla has just announced a $5 million round of funding.

The round was led by Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures and saw participation from Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, and LA-area angel Paige Craig, among others.

Dwolla’s services let you send and receive money to and from other users. The startup’s maximum transaction cost is 25 cents per transaction — a distinct and very important competitive advantage in the crowded and cutthroat payments arena. Also, all transactions less than $10 are free of charge.

The startup says it now has more than 80,000 individual users and 7,500 businesses using the service. Also, the service has passed $1 million per day in transactions.

In a colorful interview with VentureBeat East Coast editor Benjamin Popper last week, Dwolla founder Ben Milne said that being a Midwestern startup has had distinct advantages for the startup.

“Being in Des Moines, we can work on really freaky stuff,” said Milne. “There is this amazing brain trust of people here with a focus on risk, payments, and insurance.”

The Dwolla team took a $1 million institutional round of funding in 2010 and had previously taken smaller rounds from angel investors and in grant money. But getting funding hasn’t been the startup’s biggest challenge; it’s also been busy navigating regulatory minefields.

“When we started, I was kind of naive,” said Milne. “I just called up the regulators and asked how we should do this. Luckily they didn’t shut us down. So yeah, we have a good dialogue going on with Federal Reserve.”

Milne said he wants to build the service into a billion dollar network.

The new cash infusion will allow Dwolla to flesh out its APIs and developer network — a huge part of gaining more users around the web — and “execute on the next phase of Dwolla’s long-term vision,” according to a release the company sent out this morning.

We’re guessing that’s corporate speak for even freakier stuff coming down the pipeline.

Also profitable is selling software to telemarketers that allows them to track the calls they make, the responses they get (or don’t get) from consumers, and the next follow-up actions they need to take to close a sale or get a meeting.

The Leads360 team has just closed a significant funding round for building exactly that kind of software.

It’s not a lead-gen company; rather, it makes tools that help telemarketers manage and convert the leads they get elsewhere. And it’s not a CRM product, either; its software is specifically for those tricky prospects who haven’t yet been converted into customers.

The company’s cash infusion of $15 million today will allow it to keep creating and selling that software to telemarketers and other salespeople in verticals like insurance sales, for-profit universities, mortgages and other loan products, and more.

Leads360 says its software is all about marketing automation combined with telephony. The company tells us it currently has more than 40 million prospects (potential customers) being managed by its software for more than 2,000 clients, some of them among the Fortune 1,000.

The most recent round of funding, which a team member describes as “validating,” comes from Boston-based Volition Capital with participation from existing investor Rustic Canyon Partners, a San Francisco VC firm.

As expected, the marketing startup will use the new funding to expand its software products and features, to gain new clients and other partners, and to grow its own sales and marketing efforts for the Leads360 software.

“The new funding validates Leads360’s vision for a combined sales and telephony software platform focused entirely on companies that sell to consumers,” said Leads360 chief executive Nick Hedges in a release today.

Image courtesy of Diego Cervo, Shutterstock

Mosoro, a startup that makes Bluetooth hardware with complimentary smartphone apps, has raised $1.5 million in its first round of funding.

Mosoro creates “appcessories,” or Bluetooth devices with dedicated companion apps for iOS and Android. The company has made two Bluetooth devices so far, 3-D Sport and Weather, and has two more in the works, Talk, and Bonsai. They all connect with smartphone apps to record motion, report weather conditions, play audio, stream video, and much more.

“We currently have apps in toys and entertainment, sports and business, and outdoor recreation. We’re also planning on expanding into other markets in the near future,” said chief executive Mike Stemple in a interview with VentureBeat.

Each device has several different sensors that record and relay information. For example, 3-D Sport is a lightweight device that can be tacked onto your golf club to record your swing and send data straight to your phone. Bonsai is a WiFi access point the size of a deck of cards with an embedded media server. It can stream video, audio, and applications directly to any WiFi enabled device.

Mosoro intends on using their new financing to expand merchandise development into multiple verticals, targeting products at the everyday consumer, rather than only gadget geeks.

Stemple is the founder of more than a dozen other startups including nReach, Skinit, and Original Wraps. Colorado-based Mosoro currently has five team members, but is planning on expanding dramatically in the coming weeks. This latest round of financing was led by Mike Beaudoin and Rodney Rice of ServiceMagic.com in addition to High Country Venture and Tango.

Startup classifieds service Rumgr has just received funding to be a sort of suped-up Craigslist. It’s a mobile and web location-based marketplace that lets you snap images of your unwanted stuff, browse pictures of other people’s unwanted stuff, sell, trade, barter, and buy to your heart’s content.

You can post items for sale with just a picture if you like, no description needed, then you field offers from would-be buyers. When you decide to accept an offer, the app has a private chat mode for you to arrange for payment and pickup.

The app also has an “Inside Your Garage” feature to track your items, your sales, and others’ items you’re watching.

And perhaps best of all, the location-based aspect means you stand a better chance of not having to drive an hour and a half across town to pick up that $50 vintage davenport from a sketchy dude’s garage. Yes, with Rumgr, you can do all that within a five-minute drive, instead.

The startup has just raised an initial $500,000 round of funding from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Resort Gaming Group founder Andrew Donner, and a handful of other Zappos executives.

The new funding will be used to expand Rumgr’s service to new markets across the U.S. and also to continue product development efforts.

Since Zappos and RGG both have strong roots in Las Vegas, it makes sense that both the investors and the startup founders are excited about putting time and effort into building a presence in the Vegas startup scene.

“What makes VegasTech so interesting is how organically it started and how fast-tracked it has been with Tony Hsieh’s efforts,” said Rumgr CEO Dylan Bathurst in an email to VentureBeat.

“It started with a group of tech and creative people based in Vegas who were sick of not having a community. We started gathering downtown at [the Last Vegas Jelly coworking space], and simply by twerd-out-mouth (Twitter word of mouth) our community grew quickly.”

Around that time, Zappos was making its move into downtown Las Vegas. “Tony, the Downtown Project, and Zappos were able to support a lot of efforts people were starting, such as Startup Weekend, Ignite Vegas, LaunchUp, etc.,” Bathurst said.

“We were some of the first people in this community,” the CEO continued. “Whether it’s getting user or more professional feedback about the product, we have it. We’re also very good about making sure we give that help right back to the community.

“It’s one thing to move away from Vegas to be completely immersed in the SF tech culture, but there’s also something very exciting about being involved in building your own tech community from the ground up.”

Image courtesy of webraconteur.

Domo, which is building a dashboard for real-time business intelligence, has landed another $20 million without even trying.

The funds come from Silicon Valley-based Institutional Venture Partners, which also invested in Domo founder Josh James’ previous startup, Omniture. It brings the company’s total funding to $63 million.

“There’s probably three people a week that I turn down, who want to put money into our company,” said James, in an interview with VentureBeat. He agreed to accept IVP’s investment because the venture firm has a good track record and James has worked with it before.

“We thought it made sense to take additional money,” James said, but added: “We’re always trying to build the company in a way that we won’t need more money.”

The company is calling this second round of investment its “Series A-1″ tranche, to indicate that it has the same terms as its $33 million Series A round (but at a higher valuation). Previous investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, and Hummer Winblad.

Domo hopes to give executives and managers a single, customizable, sharable view of the business metrics that matter to them, delivering its product as an online service, similar to the way Salesforce.com, Omniture, Microsoft’s Office 365, and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions work. It will aim at collecting a slice of the estimated $10 billion annual market for business intelligence services.

James’ previous gig was Omniture. After cofounding the web metrics company, he led it to its initial public offering in 2006 and subsequent $1.8 billion sale to Adobe in 2009. He left Omniture in July, 2010.

Domo is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and currently employs about 100 people, mostly engineers, James said. However, once the product is ready to go, he plans to kick the sales organization into high gear.

“We will definitely be a sales-driven organization,” James said. “Right now we’re in the process of making sure the product is absolutely right, and then we’re going to sell it to every man, woman, child and retired person I can find.”

Photo courtesy Domo.

AlienVault, developer of open source security software, announced an $8 million second round of funding after recently identifying Chinese Malware infecting the Department of Defense.

The round comes from Trident Capital, which was most interested in AlienVault’s SIEM (security information and event management) software. SIEM is, in essence, what watches your computer networks and alerts you to potentially harmful events within the system. AlienVault’s form of SIEM is unique because it packages open source tools with its OSSIM (open source security information and event managment) product for customers to use. OSSIM has been deployed to over 160,000 customers.

The company recently identified a strain of malware affecting US government access cards. The malware, called Sykipot, targeted the Department of Defense and was found to have Chinese origins. It is distributed through phishing e-mails; these in particular were tailored to DOD interests such as weapons. When an attachment was opened on a Windows computer, the malware would swim through the system to key-card-required access points. These access points are not only used for physical entry but also for entry to certain areas of the network. Sykipot would wait in the card readers until someone swiped their card, at which point their access credentials would be stolen and used to access the network.

AlienVault was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. The company’s previous investor Adara Venture Partners also participated in this round. Adara provided Alien Vault’s first funding round for $4 million in June 2010.

UFO image via Shutterstock

The round was led by GSV Capital, a firm that also has a stake in huge companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga. Also participating in the round is Tim Crown, Insight.com co-founder.

Training employees in information technology is a long, costly, and deadly dull proposition. StormWind says it cuts both the time and price of such trainings in half. Also, it promises to engage learners with “movie-quality” instruction in two-hour sessions and hands-on labs.

For standard topics like Cisco and VMWare, companies can sign their employees up for existing classes. StormWind also creates custom courses for companies that need more specific types of instruction.

“E-learning 1.0 has been a complete and utter failure. It’s boring and painful to take,” said co-founder Tom Graunke in a statement this morning.

“Our one simple goal is to bring back the one-on-one engagement of great classroom learning with the cost effective pricing of e-learning.”

The startup will use the funding to further develop its technology, expand its course offerings, and hire 150 new employees over the next year and a half.

“StormWind has more potential to dominate the stodgy and boring training industry than I’ve seen in the last 15 years,” said Crown of the startup. “I was drawn to StormWind because I think they have something every enterprise is desperate for in this economy… a faster, more effective training alternative that produces better results for significantly less cost.”

The Phoenix, Ariz.-based startup was founded in 2009 by a corporate training specialist and an IT veteran, both of whom thought most corporate training programs lacked any semblance of real engagement (read: they were really, really boring).

So far, StormWind’s clients include the U.S. Navy, Budweiser, Sony, PF Chang’s, and Cisco. Together, these companies bring more than 40,000 employee-students to the StormWind platform.

Image courtesy of holbox, Shutterstock

The $10 million round brings the startup’s total amount of venture capital raised to $12.4 million. The new funding round was led by Sigma Partners, with participation from Austin Ventures and Avalon Ventures.

Naturally, the new cash will be used for hiring and bringing more features to the platform. I know, we’re shocked, too.

“We’ve been tracking MOGL for months and have watched the company exceed our expectations again and again,” said Sigma’s Pete Solvik in a release.

“In less than nine months from launch time, the MOGL team has generated an explosive response from both consumers and restaurant partners, while effectively positioning itself as the most innovative loyalty platform of its kind. In fact, MOGL is the first loyalty program that we would actually use ourselves, and we are excited to be able to play a part in the company’s ongoing success.”

MOGL’s product is a bit complicated to understand, but here’s why VCs thought the startup deserved the $10 million: The app combines competition, cash-back incentives and prizes, and social good elements (the ultimate hook for the overprivileged).

MOGL automatically donates a meal to a person in need each time a MOGL user spends $20 through the app at a partner restaurant. So far, the company says more than 27,000 meals have been donated and more than $350,000 cash-back rewards earned by its users.

The app tracks credit and debit card transactions; users pay any restaurant bill with a MOGL-tracked card and the rewards (and donations) get tallied. The app can also find nearby participating restaurants. For restaurants that partner with MOGL, the startup also offers data on their customers and ROI.

The San Diego-based company launched in April 2011 and has partnered with nearly 350 SoCal restaurants so far.

Image courtesy of conrado, Shutterstock

Founder and chief executive John Borthwick used his letter to investors to lay out the four trends Betaworks believes will guide the future of the internet business:

1. Proliferation of devices that are connected to networks is accelerating the rate of innovation.
2. Connected devices are enabling real-time services and real-time networks.
3. Networks of people, ideas and participation matter more than networks of devices.
4. Great design has become increasingly vital as computing has gotten less expensive.

The tools that Betaworks is building are being employed by some of the masters of modern day media. Conservative radio host Glenn Beck, for example, relies on Chartbeat to understand what stories his audience is most engaged with as he talks to them.

The three in house companies that are being built at Betaworks (bit.ly, Chartbeat and SocialFlow) are all increasing their focus on generating real revenues. Bit.ly hired a new CEO, Peter Stern, built out an enterprise sales team and launched an enterprise reputation management tool. The company is aiming to put out its first consumer offering by March.

Newsbeat, the high-end real-time analytics tool from Chartbeat, hit a million dollar run rate. The company promoted Tony Haile to CEO and recently picked up an additional $1 million inside round of funding to maintain its rapid growth as it raises a big new round of capital. And SocialFlow is growing so fast, it needs a new office outside the Betaworks building.

Betaworks, based in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, lost co-founder Andy Weissman to Union Square Ventures, but has replaced him with Sam Mandel, formerly an EVP at Tweetdeck. It will be interesting to see where the company goes this year with a large part of the real-time social networking industry hitting the public markets. A big part of Betaworks’ winning year may have come from its sale of Groupon on the public markets and the majority of stake in Twitter on the private markets.

It’s tough to evaluate exactly how well Betaworks’ investors made out. The basic rule of thumb is that venture investors want a 3X return. But in this case, the investors got their capital back and then some; plus they maintained their original stake as shareholders in the company. So regardless of the return, this has to be seen as a validation and a win for Betaworks’ model.

The crazy kids at Igloo Software have signed a $5 million dollar funding deal; it’s the company’s second institutional round, with money coming in from RBC Venture Partners (the “RBC” stands for Royal Bank of Canada) and the Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund (OETF).

Igloo makes social intranets and extranets for businesses, so the company is elbow deep in some of the hottest verticals in technology, including mobile and cloud. The startup’s goal is “to radically transform communication and collaboration at work.”

The company’s software lets companies set up internal “Workplace Communities” for team collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and goal-tracking. It also makes “Marketplace Communities” for businesses to handle external relationships with clients and vendors.

During 2011, Igloo tells us that they achieved some good numbers — such as an 80 percent increase in software licensing revenue, a 60 percent increase in the number of enterprise customers, and 144 percent growth in monthly recurring revenue.

“It’s been a breakout year for IGLOO, fuelled by the tremendous growth from three converging forces in the marketplace — social, mobile and cloud computing,” said Igloo CEO Dan Latendre in a release.

“Businesses are seeking to accelerate their investment across each of these areas, and Igloo has become an onramp of sorts as one of the first steps in adopting this new modern IT infrastructure.”

The startup hasn’t taken funding since a 2008 round when it received $4 million from repeat investor RBC Venture Partners and BlackBerry maker RIM. Igloo Software was founded in February 2008.

The funding comes from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups and former TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington’s CrunchFund.

Also participating were UK mobile funding firm m8 Capital, Kapor Capital, and Felicis Ventures.

The iOS shop has been focusing their energies on two of the more fun and exciting disciplines available in the world as we know it: music and design. Evidently, that focus has paid off enough to attract the substantial attention of early-stage investors, too.

955 Dreams’ portfolio includes apps like the iPad interactive timelines The History of Jazz ($9.99) and On the Way to Woodstock ($4.99). Both feature scores of hours of narrative and video content.

The startup also publishes Band of the Day (pictured), a daily mobile magazine full of photos and music for iPhones. Starting today, BOTD will also be available on the iPad. Both versions are free.

“Our publishing platform has consistently produced high quality products that resonate with users all over the world, allowing us to achieve four App of the Weeks in one year,” said founder and CEO Kiran Bellubbi in a release.

“There is an absolute and unrelenting focus on maintaining a high level of quality throughout the product and ensuring that the experience for the user is not compromised in any way.”

Continuing the emphasis on design and user interface and experience, co-founder and CDO (we’re guessing that stands for “chief design officer,” although more juvenile guesses have been posited in the VentureBeat writers’ lounge) T.J. Zark said, “We were relentless in our design iterations for this publishing platform. We refined every speck of the experience, the UI, the backend, and the overall look of this product… This is the result of a thousand tiny iterative decisions.”

Yeah, we said trendy. Rather than taking checks from a slew of long-time angels in the area, Intercom has turned to newer investors, most of whom were relatively recently on founding teams, themselves. Participants in this angel round include Biz Stone, formerly of Twitter; Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin; Flowtown founder Dan Martell; and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund. Digital Garage, which started in 1995 and is a multiple-round investor in Twitter, also participated.

Intercom is the a customer relationship management tool (CRM) made specifically for web-based businesses. It includes a built-in messaging feature, analytics, interaction tracking, filtering by groups, and more. Clients can set up goals, such as converting a lead into a paying customer.

“As ‘software eats the world,’ in the words of Marc Andreessen, and all businesses become web businesses, genuinely personal and personalized customer service is the most effective, long-lasting way for companies to differentiate their offering and fight commodification,” said CEO and co-founder Eoghan McCabe in a release.

Intercom’s product is currently in a free beta period. So far, the private beta includes 1,500 individuals from 500 companies managing relationships with more than 1 million customers.

Joking that the beta had gotten “out of hand,” McCabe said that as of today, the company will make its product public. The Intercom offering will be free for anyone to use until the first full version of the product launches in summer 2012.

Beta users include GitHub, Guestlist, and a slew of other web startups. “Intercom has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with our users,” said Jonathan Hoyt, a recent Ordered List employee who now works at Github and oversees the Speaker Deck product.

Right now, all the Intercom co-founders (McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett) are based in Ireland, where they previously built and sold Exceptional, an error-tracking service. Although the team is in the middle of a San Francisco love-fest (in terms of users and investors), it sounds like they’ll be staying put for a while. “The network we’ve built in Ireland over the past few years has helped us get access to some incredible talent quickly,” McCabe said.

Here are some screenshots of Intercom’s app:

The New York Tech Meetup, a monthly gathering where startups can demo their products, is now more than 21,000 members strong and is the heart and soul of the Silicon Alley scene. It launched hometown heroes like Foursquare and Tumblr, and more recently brought the community together for a massive protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills.

For the last four years, Nate Westheimer has been the NYTM’s executive director and master of ceremonies, helping hundreds of companies to demo their products.

Now Venturebeat has learned that Mr. Westheimer will be stepping back into the role of full time tech entrepreneur, co-founding a new startup with Charles Forman of Omgpop and Jacob DeHart, the co-founder of Threadless. The company, an online photo-storage and synching service called Picturelife, has raised $600,000 from local angels.

The trio plans to keep things lean and build the product themselves for now. Westheimer put himself into self-imposed exile in a sweat lodge last year in order to learn how to code. “I’m excited to put my newfound programming prowess to work and get back in the game as a full time entrepreneur,” Mr. Westheimer told Venturebeat. He declined to say more about the about the project, or who had funded it.

Picturelife is still in beta, but a landing page describes it as, “the best way to keep all your photos backed up, synced, and organized so you can access them anywhere.” A local angel investor described it as a “picture aggregator and Flickr killer.” It aims to keep customer’s photos from across computers, phones, cameras,  and web apps synced and securely stored. Expect to hear a lot more about the project in a month or so when it officially launches to the public.

While Omgpop has raised over $16 million in venture funding, there is a full executive team in place that can run the business without Forman. And DeHart, who lives in Chicago, has stepped down from his day-to-day work at Threadless.

This is the semiconductor startup’s third round of institutional funding.

Previous investors Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Leader Ventures all participated in the round, which was led by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.

“This round of funding will enable Avalanche to deliver on the promises of magnetic random access memory,” said Avalanche co-founder and CEO said Petro Estakhri in a release today.

Explaining the significance of the funding, Estakhri continued, “Avalanche is moving quickly toward delivering this groundbreaking technology ideally suited for high-volume embedded as well as stand-alone applications targeting markets with a global [total addressable market] well above $30 billion.”

Longtime board member and Mezzanine Capital Partners managing director Will Stewart also said in a release, “Avalanche’s products will blur the gap between memory and storage, cost-effectively enabling radical changes in system architectures and performance across a number of major market segments… I have tremendous confidence in their ability to execute.”

Avalanche was founded in 2006 and is based in Fremont, California — just across San Francisco Bay from Silicon Valley.

The startup took a $7.5 million round of funding in February 2010; participants in that round included Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Thomvest Ventures.

SPMEM, the memory technology Avalanche is currently working on, is well suited, the company claims, to a gamut of applications across telecommunications, computing, mobile, and networking verticals. SPMEM uses Avalanche’s proprietary “spin current and voltage switching technology allowing for lower write current, smaller cell size, and excellent scalability to future technology nodes beyond 10nm,” the company says.

“It is the only true scalable new memory technology providing non-volatility, scalability, low power dissipation, unlimited-write-endurance, high-density, and high performance,” Avalanche says. “It is particularly well suited to applications requiring high data reliability and high performance and has the unique potential of becoming the next generation of universal embedded memory technology for SOC as well as stand-alone devices in a number of high availability storage and mobile applications.”

Additionally, Avalanche says its SPMEM technology requires fewer manufacturing steps than do competing technologies and integrates easily with standard CMOS processes found in wafer foundries globally.

“Investing in private companies has depended on outdated technology for too long,” said CapLinked CEO Eric M. Jackson in a release this morning.

“Emails loaded with attachments, spreadsheets for tracking leads and clunky enterprise data rooms are straight out of the 1990s. CapLinked makes the process easier for companies, investors and their advisors by giving them social tools to connect and share information.”

The fresh money brings the startup’s total funding to $1.4 million. The company previously drew a seed round in mid-2010 and an angel round in March 2011.

Today’s newly announced investors include a few luminaries. Chris Yeh, a prominent blogger and investor who is also a vice president at PBworks, pitched in for the round, as did angel investor and onetime Paypal exec Jason Portnoy, TheGlobe.com founder Stephan Paternot, Althea Foundation chair Alexsis de Raadt-St. James and a couple others.

“Private companies are an important source of job creation and economic growth,” said Portnoy in a statement. “By streamlining the investment process and giving companies new tools to raise capital and sell assets, CapLinked is changing how private investments get made.”

CapLinked was founded in 2009 by former Paypal exec Jackson and finance pro Christopher Grey and claims it has almost 100,000 accounts of would-be investors as well as 10,000 profiles for cash-seeking companies. To date, CapLinked has seen $12 billion in transactions through its service.

Through the CapLinked site, privately held companies can better manage the fundraising process, including networking and investor relations. Investors can use the site for deal flow, due diligence and portfolio tracking. And both companies and investors can bring advisers, attorneys and consultants into the loop of information.

While CapLinked is steeped in tech provenance, it’s not just tech companies raising funds through this service. The company tells us it is also being used by private companies in such markets as energy, transportation, real estate, financial services and food and beverages.

Previous investors include Peter Thiel, Dave McClure, Yammer CEO David Sacks and a slew of other Silicon Valley luminaries.

Buzzfeed’s aim is to feature fresh content that you’d want to pass along to friends, such as “an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame,” the site states.

The new funding, which was first reported this morning by TechCrunch, will go towards Buzzfeed’s goal of transforming itself into a site that does original reporting. Last month, the site announced that former Politico writer Ben Smith would be taking over the site as Editor-in-Chief. These two moves signify that Buzzfeed is definitely aiming to become more than just a place to find the 30 Most Important Cats of 2011.

Smith isn’t the only one taking up residence at Buzzfeed. Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer is assuming the position of the site’s Executive Chairman, and former Huff Post President Greg Coleman is joining Buzzfeed’s board as an adviser. Also worth noting is that former Huff Post CTO Jonah Peretti is a Buzzfeed co-founder.

The new round was led by New Enterprise Associates with participation by Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, Softbank and RRE Capital. Founded in 2008, the New York-based company now has a total of $27 million in funding to date. The site currently brings in 30 million unique visitors per month.

That might be a quote from cult classic The Big Lebowski, or it might be what Chartbeat recently told their current investors. Who’s to say?

While we don’t know the play-by-play of the conversations, we do know that hot-as-molten-gold analytics startup Chartbeat has taken an additional $1 million from existing investors only. This type of deal is called an inside round, and Chartbeat needed the extra cash to keep the lights on and sustain its growth between its $3 million seed round last year and the much larger round it plans to raise in 2012.

“We didn’t want to slow down, but we also didn’t want to take money from the wrong people,” Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile told Betabeat.

“So we got an inside note to keep things pumping while we go out and find backers for a much bigger round later this year.”

Chartbeat was incubated and accelerated at Betaworks, the same organization that got Bit.ly on its feet. Chartbeat provides real-time analytics to all kinds of websites and online publishers (disclosure: VentureBeat staffers are Chartbeat addicts; we use the service all the time to brag about how well our posts are doing).

Chartbeat’s visually friendly dashboard shows visitors, load times and referring sites on a minute-by-minute basis. The service also provides alerts for site crashes or unreasonable slowness.

Chartbeat’s investors include a long list of top-shelf names in the early-stage and angel funding universe, including Index Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Josh Felser’s Freestyle Capital, SoftTech VC, Jason Calacanis and a few others.

Following a successful rebranding effort, the team has just closed an oversubscribed seed round of funding — $325,000, to be exact.

The funding will be aimed squarely at new user acquisition as well as a couple key hires.

The round, which eschewed big-name Silicon Valley capital for firms and individuals based closer to Buyosphere’s Montreal headquarters, was led by Real Ventures, Canada’s largest seed venture fund.

Also participating were angel investors Jesse Kaplan of Seek Capital, John Granger of Grassfed Capital, David Chamandy of Machkor Holdings and Thomas Merlin.

Part of today’s news is Buyosphere’s pivot. Previously, the startup was focused on providing a shopping and fashion-focused community with links to purchase history but without invasive cookies.

The company’s pared-down mission is now providing a Q&A platform for shoppers. Hunt calls it “a Quora for shopping.”

“We’re demonstrating the power of peer to peer shopping search,” Hunt said in an email with VentureBeat. “Algorithms are a long way off from picking up nuances that a person can. And personal taste is full of nuance.”

Eventually, the Buyosphere team, which includes co-founders Cassandra Girard and Jerome Paradis, hopes to revolutionize online product search through a combination of social search and intelligent use of data.

“We invested in Buyosphere because they are tackling what is fast becoming a large problem in e-commerce,” said Real Ventures partner Mark MacLeod in a statement.

“Today’s online shopper is faced with almost limitless choices but severely limited time. Buyosphere offers customers a solution combining personalization, curation and social features to help connect consumers and brands.”

While the amounts might seem small to someone accustomed to the mega-rounds raised by San Francisco-based startups, Hunt says even a little money goes a long way in Montreal.

“There is considerable talent in the area and we are well-situated to retail and fashion hubs like New York,” she concluded. “It’s the best of both worlds.”

Moontoast gives musicians, celebrities, and brands a way to generate money from the often large followings they have on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The company primarily does this by letting its clients embed a “distributed store” into a social network status update or third-party website (Walmart, Target or an affiliate blog). Users can make purchases from those embedded stores seamlessly without having to navigate away from the site — thus enhancing impulse purchases and/or removing hassle that would prevent an online sale of things like merchandise, special deal coupons, digital music files and more.

The process has proved very successful so far – netting early clients (such as country artists Reba McEntire and Taylor Swift) upwards of $10,000 an hour after posting via Facebook, according to the company.

“We believe social commerce is a very new market with a lot of untapped potential,” Moontoast CEO Blair Heavey told VentureBeat in a recent interview.”The new funding will allow us to enhance the distributed store and analytics suites as well as grow new aspects of the services like game commerce.”

The new funding will allow Moontoast to grow two other aspects of its service: a set of analytical tools designed to identify and maximize sales and a new “gamification” feature that will maximize sales by engaging a client’s social media following through games, puzzles, quizzes and more, Heavey said.

The funding was led by Nashville-based venture capital firm The Martin Companies, with participation from prior investors. Moontoast has raised a total of $9 million to date.

Founded in 2008, Moontoast originally began as a social knowledge base that allowed “experts” within specialized fields to turn a profit by performing various services. The company, which has offices in Nashville, Tenn. and Boston, Mass., pivoted in 2010 and brought on interim CEO Stephen Collins, formerly of DoubleClick. Its early investors include country music artists such as co-founder Bucky Baxter, Wynona Judd, Vince Gill, Amy Grant and Kip Winger.

“This is a combined Series D financing of $18.5M from August Capital, Google Ventures and Investor Growth Capital plus the $10.7 M investment from the new investor, Industry Ventures, for a total of $29.2M,” a company representative told VentureBeat in an email statement.

Founded in August 2008, San Francisco-based Rocket Lawyer aims to make legal services accessible and affordable for all. The site supports common do-it-yourself small business and consumer legal needs such as wills, property titles and business contracts, and also offers legal advice from local attorneys for a fee.

The three year-old startup, according to a new Form D filed Tuesday by CEO Daniel Nye, closed $10.79 million in December 2011 from a single investor (Industry Ventures) in a $10.84 million equity round. The new money brings Rocket Lawyer’s total funding to roughly $40 million.

The fast-growing legal site doubled its visitor numbers between September 2010 and September 2011 and is said to be used by more than 15 million people and several thousand businesses each year. It competes with Legal Zoom and USLegalForms.

This post was updated with a statement from Rocket Lawyer confirming the additional funding.

[Image courtesy of Julia Manzerova/Flickr]

A five year-old company that seeks to deliver “awesome social video campaigns” finds itself embroiled in a hairy Internet pickle on a day that would have otherwise been ripe for celebration.

Unruly Media, a video promotion company, has announced that its raised $25 million in its first institutional round of funding. The news comes just one day after a fishy Google Chrome sponsored-post campaign, fielded by Unruly, came to the web’s attention and stained the company’s reputation.

Founded in 2006, Unruly Media makes a proprietary video platform for branded social video campaign management and distribution. The platform transcodes video content into a variety of formats, pipes out videos to more than 11,000 media partners, and then tracks performance and conversations generated on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social sites.

The company has been behind the distribution of some of the web’s most memorable viral video campaigns. Evian’s “Roller Babies” campaign, Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign and Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, for instance, all used Unruly for video placement. Unruly has anywhere from 100 to 120 content campaigns live at any one time, and is said to reach 725 million viewers per month.

“We don’t need to do a round,” Unruly CEO Scott Button told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “We’ve been profitable for three years … but we thought [raising money] would be useful to accelerate international expansion.”

Unruly currently has a revenue run-rate of $50 million, and employs 100 people in nine offices around the world, including London, New York, San Francisco and Paris. In 2012, Unruly plans to hire aggressively, open additional offices and double its size by year’s end.

As to the scathing allegation (dissected by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land) that Unruly helped Google buy links to increase the search ranking of Chrome — a practice Google frowns upon and penalizes — Button said that it all comes down to a misunderstanding of the company’s business.

“We’re about increasing brand awareness,” he said. “We don’t ask bloggers ever to link to advertisers … [brands] don’t come to use to improve search engine rankings.”

Unruly, he explained, has relationships with niche and influential bloggers. These bloggers get paid to embed videos and deliver views against a campaign, but they’re not told to write about the content (if they do, that’s of their own volition, Button said). And, he insisted, that the company has clear policies on sponsorship disclosures, and works to ensure that the sponsored posts do not (intentionally) distort search engine rankings. “It’s very, very virtuous,” he said.

In the Chrome instance, however, Google has said that it did not condone or request the sponsored-post campaign. “Google never agreed to anything more than online ads,” a spokesperson said Tuesday. “We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.”

Unruly, Button said, worked directly with digital media agency Essence Digital on the Chrome social video campaign. In a statement posted to Google+ Tuesday, Essence avoided taking full responsibility for the bungled sponsored-post campaign, but made it clear that Google was not to blame. “Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this,” the company said.

But the question of who’s to blame may not matter (Button admitted partial responsibility for “crossed wires” and miscommunication between the three parties). The incident has unquestionably put a damper on Unruly’s sizable funding announcement.

Unruly’s $25 million round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Van den Ende & Deitmers, and included participation from Business Growth Fund. Additional terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez confirmed the funding with All Things D, and said that the round was led by Kleiner Perkins. In October, the company was said to be raising around $30 million at a massive $200 million valuation with Kleiner at the head.

As VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar described it when word first hit about the funding, Klout works by measuring a person’s activity on a variety of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn Google+ and others. Based on that individual’s interaction within those social networks, Klout calculates the true reach of that person’s communications and issues them a 1 to 100 Klout score.

The funding is a good sign for Klout’s long-term viability, especially since the service has caught flack from the tech community over its seeming frivolity. It has been criticized as a mere popularity contest for the web, and the value of a Klout score is still unclear.

It seems the company is ready to tackle these common criticisms head on with the funding:

“We’ve already made significant investments in both engineering and infrastructure, and with this funding we’ll invest further in these areas so we can continue to provide the most accurate and transparent measurement of influence,” Fernandez wrote in a blog post today. “We’ll also help our community become better users of social media, expand Klout Perks so that all influencers are rewarded for their influence, and make it clear why it pays to have Klout.”

Fernandez also said that the service is now handling 10 billion API requests per month, up from just 100 million last January. There must have been a big jump in December for Klout, as the company announced it had hit 7.5 billion monthly API requests just last week.

In addition to this latest funding round, San Francisco, Calif.-based Klout has raised $11 million in funding over two previous rounds.

http://corp.klout.com/blog/2012/01/getting-ready-for-a-big-2012/

The round, which was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, may have been as large as $50 million, TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher reports. A SoundCloud rep confirmed all the details except the amount in an email exchange with VentureBeat this afternoon.

Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker will join the SoundCloud board. GGV Capital also participated in the round, which the startup hopes to use to aid in more rapid expansion.

SoundCloud’s service was first focused toward professional musicians who needed better options for sharing music online. Currently, SoundCloud is used to distribute podcasts, audiobooks and more. SoundCloud is free for most users and offers paid plans for more hardcore customers.

“SoundCloud has seen exponential growth this year in terms of users and greatly evolved our product offerings,” said SoundCloud founder and CEO Alexander Ljung in a blog post today.

“With Kleiner Perkins’ impeccable track record for recognizing and investing in companies with a long-term view, and their understanding and support for the potential of sound, we couldn’t be more excited about working together.”

SoundCloud was founded in late 2008 and has taken two previous rounds of funding totaling roughy $16 million. Previous funding came from Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Over the summer of 2011, SoundCloud reported it had reached the significant milestone of five million users, four million of whom joined the service within the past 12 months.

SoundCloud is headquartered in Berlin and opened a San Francisco office mid-2011.

This famous introduction by Charles Dickens sums up what entrepreneurs seeking startup capital are facing in 2012.

On the one hand, banks still aren’t lending. And with the debt crisis looming over Europe and political uncertainty here in the U.S., there’s an increased perception of risk for early-stage investors.

However, record low interest rates, stagnant public stock markets and real estate, and weakening commodities prices offer investors few alternatives to achieve decent returns. This creates an opportunity for entrepreneurs in spite of all the challenges.

What does this mean if you’re an entrepreneur hoping to raise money during the new year? It means there is hope, even if there isn’t a huge margin of error.

Here are six important tips to hit the ground running with your financing efforts.

Structure your raise right.

External financing for startups usually comes from friends and family, individual (non-institutional) angel investors, early-stage funds or some combination of these sources.

As you’re planning for your raise, make sure you’re structuring a deal that’s appropriate for your prospective investors. Terms you should be concerned about include how much you’re raising, whether the deal is equity or debt, what kind of rights the investors will be given, and the valuation.

Be sure you’re working with an experienced attorney, because mistakes in structuring a raise can have serious repercussions down the road. And don’t be too aggressive on valuation; it’s better to leave something on the table than price yourself out of a raise altogether.

Prepare key documents.

A brief slide deck summarizing your business is a must-have before starting due diligence. Make sure it describes the problem your company is solving, the addressable market, your progress, competitors, your team, and other relevant information. Slides are generally preferred over a written business plan for tech startups nowadays, but you should confirm if this is true for your industry.

Financial projections are important to demonstrate that you understand how key inputs impact your business model; it’s best to keep them simple and focus on the “big picture” rather than budgeting minutiae.

I’d also recommend including a capitalization table and a term sheet to provide to prospective investors who express interest.

Put your network to work.

Entrepreneurs often tell me they don’t know anyone who can help them with their capital raise. When I press them further, nine times out of 10 that turns out to be wrong.

Anyone who’s been in the business world for a few years has met investors, advisors, and other influencers who can play a role in syndicating a capital raise. But you can’t get what you don’t ask for.

Successful entrepreneurs make sure their contacts know what they’re working on and ask for help when they need it. Besides investors whom you know directly, ask your contacts for introductions; if they know you and respect you, they’ll generally be happy to make them.

Meet new people.

While four out of five leads will probably come from networking, it helps to meet new people as you look for investors.

Sign up for industry newsletters and read local blogs so you’re aware of networking events. Introduce yourself to speakers and panelists who might be a good fit; try asking for their advice and see if they’d be willing to meet you for coffee before giving them the “hard sale.”

Try meeting people through online sites, including LinkedIn (try out their groups and engage in discussions), Facebook (BranchOut lets you sort Facebook connections by profession), and CapLinked (my company, which lets you search for investment-related professionals by industry and role).

Don’t break the law.

There’s a lot of euphoria out there now about the potential for crowd-funding to ease restrictions on obtaining startup capital. But nothing has yet been signed into law yet.

For now, make sure you’re familiar with Regulation D, which governs who can invest in a private company. Reg D also puts strict limits on public advertising for private investment opportunities, so be sure that you’re not soliciting investments on a public medium such as Twitter or your blog.

Start the process now.

Raising capital generally takes longer than most new entrepreneurs think. Networking to get in front of investors is a lengthy process, and investors will often take a long time to give you a definitive answer.

So the sooner you get started, the better. Find a lawyer, dust off your Rolodex, and start working on that slide deck now.

Also consider setting up a deal room on CapLinked to make document management easier, and include your company’s advisors in the entire process.

Raising capital in 2012 is by no means a hopeless endeavor, but it will take hard work and persistence. Get started now—and good luck!

A serial entrepreneur, Eric M. Jackson is the CEO and co-founder of CapLinked, an online service that gives companies and investors tools to network, manage a capital raise or asset sale, and exchange updates. Eric previously served as PayPal’s first marketing director and is author of the award-winning book The PayPal Wars.

See that? Someone just gave that $2.7 million dollars.

The video is a promotional vehicle for stealth startup Just.Me. Yes, we’re in the kind of bubble where “stealth” companies make promo videos for tech conferences (Le Web, in this case) and post them to YouTube.

Just.Me has notified its friends at the SEC that it’s raised $2.7 million. We’re sure it had more to do with the team and the app than the promo video, but check out that sweet Boba Fett helmet and try to tell us you wouldn’t pitch in a couple thou just to see where they’re going with that.

This is the company’s first round of institutional funding, and according to the filing, a grand total of 15 investors participated. TechCrunch speculates that Khosla Ventures and True Ventures were among the participating firms.

The Palo Alto-based startup was founded in 2011 by Internet oldtimer Keith Teare, who says on his LinkedIn profile that he’s founded several digital companies over the past three decades and has been working in the Valley since the dotcom boom.

Teare is joined in this venture by Jay Borenstein, who has been teaching computer science at Stanford for the past three and a half years and who also took part in the dotcom heyday in Silicon Valley.

According to the video posted above, the startup’s app is an all-in-one social and contact management tool designed to let users share pictures, video clips and other media and to communicate with anyone else in the user’s phone’s address book, “even if you’re the only person in the whole world who is using it.”

The app will be available soon, likely in the spring of 2012, for iOS and Android devices. You can sign up now for early access to the app.

Cloudability, a company that helps people manage cloud services spending, has secured $1 million in its latest investment round. This seed investment round was led by Trinity Ventures and Walden Venture Capital, including $250,000 in funding from Portland-based angel investors.

In November, Cloudability launched its beta service to help companies become more efficient with their cloud spending.

“We are focused on three main tasks: preventing big overages, saving time, and identifying areas of [spending] waste,” chief operating officer J.R. Storment said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Cloudability’s beta service gives its customers a clean and simple dashboard that shows their daily cloud spending and gives advice on how to spend their money efficiently.

Customers also get daily emails (shown right) so they can track their spending on the go.

Cloudability will also alert you to overages or unusual account activity, which can prevent massive bills. In one case, Cloudability helped a video streaming service find a security flaw and avoid overage costs when spammers uploaded over 24 terabytes of video to its servers.

AttorneyFee, a website that compares lawyer’s fees, pulled recent numbers from Silicon Valley’s most prominent law firms. The digits reveal the average amount of money startups spend on legal fees, the annual increase in new businesses, and an boom in law firms’ digital presence.

Startups usually face several legal hurdles in the early phases of creating their businesses. Several law firms in Silicon Valley make their money by helping these startups get up and running, often for a hefty price. In 2011, Silicon Valley attorneys made an estimated $37 million in revenue from startups alone. Most of the money that startups raise in their first rounds of funding goes directly to legal fees; the average bill for series A financing is over $50,000.

One important statistic uncovered is that the annual growth of business formation is approaching pre dot-com bubble times. Startup growth for 2011 is close to 30 percent, the highest its been in over five years.

While law firms are making a lot of money off startups in Silicon Valley, they are also trying to get more tech savvy. AttorneyFee found growing Twitter presences, website views, and Klout scores among law firms and attorneys. See the infographic below for more stats about startups and the legal teams that help get them off the ground.