VentureBeat

KaloBios, a Palo Alto, Calif., biotech antibody-therapeutic company, raised $20 million in a third funding round. The company is developing new drugs based on monoclonal antibodies, which target specific cells or proteins in the body. Its lead candidate, an antibody against granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor, or GM-CSF — a protein that helps regulate the white-blood-cell immune response — is intended to treat a variety of immune-related diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.

Lehman Brothers led the round, joined by MPM Capital, Sofinnova Ventures, Alloy Ventures, 5AM Ventures, Singapore Bioinnovations, and Lotus BioScience Ventures. The funding will allow KaloBios to support clinical testing of two antibodies and to move a third into human tests.

Living Microsystems, a Watertown, Mass., developer of new prenatal diagnostics, raised $19.6 million in a second funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The company is developing new blood tests designed to detect prenatal chromosomal and genetic defects that could complement or even one day replace amniocentesis and similar invasive tests.

The round was led by Alloy Ventures, joined by Mohr Davidow Ventures and angel funders. Living Microsystems had previously raised a total of $9 million in seed and angel funding, according to VentureWire.

We’ll call Seriosity the quirky company of the year.

The three-year old Palo Alto, Calif. company has been secretive, but now it has launched a new way for corporate employees to manage their email load.

It gives the employees a set amount of virtual currency, called Serio, and they have to spend it order to send email. The more they judge an email to be important, the more currency they use to send it, so that recipients are alerted to its value. Senders will spend zero if the email isn’t important at all. The recipient gets to keep the currency, adding it to their existing stash to send emails.

The idea is that the scarcity of currency will help instill the need to be efficient when sending email. This is somewhat odd, however, because it assumes we marshal our resources efficiently, and we’re not convinced this is the case. How do we know if a banal “cc” email is something the recipient doesn’t really want to see? How much time are we going to spend pondering whether to give 4 or 5 serios? This may slow us down, not speed us up, as it is supposed to do. Anyway, here’s a CNET story on the Seriosity and its currency concept, which borrows from the multi-player game World of Warcraft.

We wrote about Seriosity last year, after it raised $2 million from Alloy Ventures, while its concept was still vague. It has raised a total of $6 million from Alloy, and has 27 employees.

Hopefully, the company has got something more serio(u)s up its sleeve! It’ll need it if it is going to raise a second round of funding — which it is looking for right now.

YouSendIt and MyFabrik are two of the many companies that let you easily share large files, such as videos or photos. They’ve raised venture capital recently, to help them survive the throng of competitors.

Have you ever had an outgoing or incoming email bounce because you were trying to send a giant attachment?

One trick is to use YouSendIt, a Mountain View start-up. You upload your large file to its site, type in an email address, and YouSendIt sends it to your recipient. It is free for files of 100MB or smaller. You have to pay $4.99 per month for the right to send files of up to 2GB. The recipient gets your email, with your optional note, and sees a URL for downloading the file.

You can use YouSendIt for free without registering, but files will be stored for only a week, and you get maximum of 25 emails. If you register, you get inbox, sent, and contact folders. You pay more for other add-ons.

The company has just raised $4.7 million more in a second part of its first round of venture capital. Backers Alloy Ventures, Cambrian Fund and Sevin Rosen Funds invested the money, according to PE Week.

Next is MyFabrik, a San Mateo start-up that offers a Web service that you can reach from anywhere, to store, manage and share all your files. There are many companies now offering storage and sharing, including Phanfare, Sharpcast, Box.net and Omnidrive, to name just a few. They each have their quirks. Phanfare charges a minimum of $7 a month. Sharpcast additionally lets you store from any device, including mobile phones, and so on. MyFabrik’s advantage is that it has a relationship with Maxtor, which lets you integrate your storage with the high-powered secure $630 box, if you want to pay that. But its free service — up to 1GB — is easy to use, though it is ad-supported. After the 1GB, you pay 49 cents a month per additional GB, even with ads. Or you can pay more to avoid ads altogether. Chief executive Mike Cordano, who came from Maxtor, gave us a demo recently. He said he thinks the company can break even by first quarter of next year.

Today the company announced MyFabrik Lite, another free service that lets you upload your file and send them to others without having to send attachment. The recipient receives an email with a URL link allowing them to download it. It also lets you embed a widget into your blog, so that you can upload files there for people to download. You get 1GB of space. However, you can’t log into the account to edit the media after it is up.

The company has raised $12 million in financing, and close to 90 percent of that is still in the bank, Cardano says. The money came from ComVentures and others, and this hasn’t been reported before, to our knowledge.

There is a rolling thunder of new Silicon Valley Internet start-ups launching on funding of around $1 million or less.

The latest is Retrevo, a Sunnyvale search engine focused on research and other advice on consumer electronics. It has raised less than $1 million from Alloy Ventures.

You may try to call this a Web 2.0 bubble, but frankly, we don’t see any end to this. There is so much money around, these start-ups will keep coming.

Like other focused search engines, Retrevo has plausible survival odds if it manages to lodge itself in your brain as the place to go for a particular need. In Retrevo’s case, it wants to be the place you think of before your buy consumer electronics (TV, printer, DVD, iPod, etc), but also after you buy — to get help with troubleshooting, for example.

Retrevo is in a closed testing mode, but you can get to a trial page here until it goes live Wednesday at DEMO.

If you have say, a problem connecting your Sony camcorder to your TV, you can do this search, and Retrevo will give you search results that include a page directly from Sony’s guide book, in a preview section (see below for screen shot of another example)

It culls relevant information from manufacturer guide books, product reviews and forums/blogs. It filters out everything else.

It is a comparison shopping site, a lot like Shopping.com, Nextag, Become.com and Pricegrabber — but it aims to serve the full life-cycle of your needs, including eventually even recycling information.

The consumer shopping search engine industry is competitive, so this will be a tough road for Retrevo. But its backer Alloy Ventures says Retrevo has a good chance, given the huge consumer electronics market of some “$130 billion” in the U.S. alone, according to the firm.

Chief executive Vipin Jain has been working at this start-up with ten employees at his offices at the Plug & Play complex in Sunnyvale, with a “little less than a million” in backing from Alloy.

He’s now about to start looking for $5 million in venture backing, he says.

He wants to make money from advertising and from lead generation revenue from the device retailers.

(Update: Corrected name of company acquired by News Corp. It was Newroo)

Roundup of latest Silicon Valley action:

One of Digg’s top diggers, p9, has quit, and Netscape is grinning — When Kevin Rose, founder of the news-ranking site, Digg, said he wanted to make the voting process for stories more democratic, he apparently alienated some of the site’s top users. One top digger has left, and slammed the door loudly in protest. Here’s a good description of how Digg works, by the way, and a discussion about the changes underway. Of course, all this is giving Jason Calacanis (pictured above, with dog) fodder for saying he was right all along to offer to pay the top users at Digg and other news sites to leave join him at Netscape. Calacanis’ site competes with Digg. This has also sparked a debate about how long users can volunteer their time and energy digging sories for Digg without getting some reward or other form of recognition.

Now Calacanis is suggesting his parent company, AOL, consider stealing away top users from competitiors to AOL’s other sites, for example at Uncut Video, AOL’s clone of YouTube. He’s suggesting Uncut steal from YouTube’s best 1 percent of video posters: (Wow, this copying behavior is becoming quite a trend over at AOL):

So, I’m wondering if the folks on AIM pages or Uncut are seeing something similar and if similar strategies might work. Maybe Uncut should hire the top 20 video producers on YouTube to work for us? Maybe AIM Pages should hire the top 20 folks on MySpace to be part of our “leadership program” (or something like that). Have them train the user base and give feedback to the developers.

Video ads really that popular? — Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has produced rosy set of calculations for the revenue video-sharing site YouTube can bring in from advertising. He estimates 80 percent of YouTube’s 100 million vidoes being watched daily can be monetized, with advertisers paying an average of $12 per 1,000 times these video are shown. He assumes YouTube will give users a cut for sharing their content, and arrives at a total $153 million net revenue per year. He says this is just back-of-the-envelope, and not meant to be exact, but even then we find it hard to agree with the analysis. Let’s face it, ads become a turn off at a certain point. The joy of YouTube is sitting there gawking at vidoes run over and over again. Forcing forcing people to sit through ten-second ad will radically change the experience. Here’s a Business Week article about the topic which shows much more skepticism.

InterActive Corp (IAC) the latest to media giant to move into deal-making mode –The big media companies are upgrading their buyout strategies. Sumner Redstone, chairman of media giant Viacom Sumner M. Redstone last week fired Viacom’s chief executive, Tom E. Freston, and replaced him a Philippe P. Dauman,a deal-maker. As the NYT reported, investment bankers scrambled to make lists of possible acquisition targets to pitch, including folks like YouTube, FaceBook and Bebe. In fact, even Viacom itself showed up on the list — as a candidate to be taken private by all the hungry private equity companies out there. This is the era of the acquisition, baby, and it Silicon Valley is getting its fair share. The latest comes from IAC, which has hired Kara Norman, the young associate with Battery Ventures, as its “vice president, mergers and acquisitions.” We teased Kara for chasing entrepreneurs through the NY’s Central Park, and now she will be based in New York where she can chase full-time, though she promises to visit the valley often — where there are plenty of acquisition possibilities.

Kara’s hire comes on the heels of IAC’s hiring of Jason Rapp, who will be her boss at IAC. Rapp was VP of online development and associate GM at New York Times Digital. He has joined Barry Diller’s IAC as senior VP, mergers and acquisitions. IAC, which owns properties like Evite, Ask, Ticketmaster, is giving the new hires a pretty broad mandate Kara said. IAC, of course, is smaller than NewsCorp, where Ross Levinson head of NewsCorp’s Fox Interactive division is making all the waves buying up Web 2.0 companies, such as MySpace and Webaroo Newroo.

Mendel Biotechnology has new ethanol technology — The NYT has a good summary of the various approaches to cellulosic ethanol production, which is where the great expectations are right now. Instead of corn stalks, perennial plants like grasses that require far less energy-consuming irrigation and fertilization than corn are looking promising. On this blog, we’ve mentioned most Silicon Valley companies active in the clean-tech already, but not Mendel, a Hayward company. According to the NYT, it is:

…looking more at miscanthus, a perennial grass native to China, where Mendel has set up an operation.

The company said miscanthus could produce well over 20 tons an acre each year. “No planting, no fertilizing, no irrigation,” said its chief executive, Chris Somerville, who is also the director of plant biology at the Carnegie Institution and a Stanford University professor. “You can just cut it every year for 10 years.”

Silicon Valley green-tech Young Innovator, Christina Galitsky. Technology Review pays tribute to Christina Galitsky — The publication has made Galitsky, 33, “2006 Young Innovator.” She left a chemical engineering program UC Berkeley with her master’s in 1999, and found work testing California’s water quality. She recognized contamination was coming from the power industry and, eager to fight pollution, joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. There, she began diagnosing energy waste in nearly a dozen industries, from concrete to beer, and is helping companies like wineries to spot their energy waste more easily.

New life for the Segway? — The high-tech scooter company’s chief executive James Norrod is taking “a much more expansive view of what Segway is about.” Instead of limiting the Segway to the two-wheeled personal transporter we’ve all gotten comfortable with — and, frankly, tired of — Segway can put its technology “into anything that moves.” According to a BW story:

That means unmanned vehicles with potential military or industrial uses, or multiperson vehicles that use Segway’s computers and electric engines to glide smoothly over obstacles. And Norrod thinks Segway’s efficient electric motors could be central to a new generation of hybrid cars (yes, cars). Segway has already built a four-wheeled, multiperson prototype. “If people want four wheels,” says Norrod, “I should give ‘em four wheels.”

Second Life database gets hacked – There have been several major Internet privacy snafus lately, and this one at Second Life is just the latest. A hacker apparently accessed account names, real life names and contact info. Sadly, it seems there’s nowhere really safe to play online anymore, even in the ultimate escapist world of Second Life.