VentureBeat

Ruby on Rails, a programming language useful for making web applications, has gained a strong following in the development community because it is much easier to code and maintain than competitors like Java and PHP.

Initially adopted by small and independent developers, Rails is now getting some attention from corporations. Popular sites like 37signals, which is also the company that developed Rails, have used Rails for their Web 2.0 projects since its release three years ago.

FiveRuns CEO Olivier Thierry told us that tech departments in companies including Fidelity, Sony, Boeing and Nike have held conversations with FiveRuns about adding Rails to their websites. Also, Leopard, the new Mac OS that just shipped, includes Rails tools, making it simpler for developers unfamiliar with Rails to begin using it.

So while there are plenty of smaller companies using Rails, from Jobster to Twitter, the language may be ready to enter a much bigger market.

Explaining why companies might need help from FiveRuns, Thierry said that although Rails is easy and effective, there are still problems that pop up, like scaling its use to larger audiences — for instance, processing thousands of credit card transactions, which can become significantly slower than just processing one or two. In that case, the FiveRuns team would go through the code to streamline and correct errors.

Other pain points arise in different parts of the development cycle. FiveRuns, which employs a number of the original members of the Rails development community, can use its inside expertise to help developers, as well as provide some software to monitor Rails applications.

When we asked whether FiveRuns had any serious competition, Bruce Williams, one of those early developers who is on FiveRun’s board, told us he didn’t think so, because Rails has been going through its early adoption stages, and used mainly for smaller projects.

However, larger corporations like Borland (under a subsidiary called CodeGear) are likely to make more of an attempt to provide similar tools as the market grows larger.

FiveRuns, which is based in Austin, Texas, took its funding of $6.2 million from Austin Ventures. Its first round was for $3 million, from Austin Ventures and Silverton Partners.

Featured companies: 20/20 GeneSystems, Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, Cumbre Pharmaceuticals, Dara BioSciences, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Fermentas, International, Iasis Medical, New Leaf Venture Partners, Point Therapeutics, Power Medical Interventions, Rules-Based Medicine, Spinal Restoration, Still River Systems, Targanta Therapeutics

(UPDATED: See below.)

[NOTE: In the interests of getting items up as quickly as possible, I'm going to begin posting linked headlines, which I'll subsequently flesh out in many -- but not all -- cases. As the news gets heavier, the briefing is taking longer and longer to put together, to the point where I sometimes don't have much time to write about anything else. Feel free to let me know in comments how well this works for you.]

Spinal Restoration raises $16M for disc augmentation — Spinal Restoration, an Austin, Tex., developer of an implantable material designed to treat lower back pain, raised $16 million in a second funding round. Investors included Santé Health Ventures, MB Venture Partners, Austin Ventures and Path4 Ventures.

The startup is working on a filler biomaterial for ruptured spinal discs. This fibrin sealant, which is derived from human sources, is designed to be injected into ruptured discs in order to seal internal fissures and to prevent the leakage of the disc’s contents, potentially in a way that could encourage further healing. If it works, the process could potentially replace spinal fusion for patients whose injuries don’t respond to rest and physical therapy.

Antibiotic maker Targanta becomes latest disappointing biotech IPO — The Cambridge, Mass., developer of an in-licensed antibiotic for drug-resistant infections priced its IPO below its expected range, then saw its newly listed shared decline in early trading. Targanta priced as many as 5.8 million shares at $10 apiece, below its $12 to $14 range (see our coverage), raising the company a maximum of $57.5 million — down considerably from the $92.6 million it had hoped for.

Following the listing, Targanta’s shares dropped almost immediately, and by early afternoon were trading at $9.35, down 65 cents, or 6.5 percent.

I raised concerns about Targanta’s strategy here (capsule version: The company’s antibiotic Oritavancin faces a slew of competition and hasn’t even been tested in-house, as Targanta licensed it at a late stage from another company). Now it looks as though investors may have harbored similar reservations.

Power Medical sets IPO terms, aims to raise up to $62M for computer-assisted surgical instruments — Power Medical, a Langhorne, Pa., developer of computer-assisted surgical tools, said it would price up to 4.4 million shares at $12 to $14 apiece, which would allow it to raise as much as $61.6 million. Its SEC filing is here.

The company’s latest plans amount to a significantly smaller IPO than the $100 million offering it had initially contemplated. We last wrote about Power Medical’s IPO plans here.

Tularik spinoff Cumbre Pharma raises insider financing for anti-infective drugs — Dallas-based Cumbre Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharma developing new anti-infective drugs, raised a new funding round from individual investors. Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed.

Cumbre spun out of the former biotech Tularik (since acquired by Amgen) in 2001. It is focused on developing “hybrid” antibiotics formed by fusing together individual antibiotic compounds in hopes of producing more potent drugs that can take on microbes resistant to current antibiotics. Its lead compound, CBR-2092, has completed early-stage human trials, and is intended to attack drug-resistant staphylococcus infections.

Investors in the round included a number of prominent individuals in the life sciences. Among them were Tularik co-founder David Goeddel, Tularik and Cumbre co-founder Steven McKnight, Xenoport president William Rieflin, and former EDS president Morton Meyerson.

New Leaf Venture Partners raises $450M healthcare fund — New Leaf, a bicoastal VC firm with offices in New York and Menlo Park, Calif., raised $450 million for a new healthcare-technologies fund. The firm intends to target later-stage biotech and specialty pharma companies, early-stage medical-device developers, and new molecular diagnostics.

Bellicum Pharma draws in $3.8M for cancer vaccines — Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, a Houston biotech aiming to develop cancer vaccines, drew in $3.8 million in seed funding and a grant from the state of Texas. The company pulled in seed funding of $2.3 million from local angel investors; the $1.5 million grant was awarded by the state’s Emerging Technology Fund.

Bellicum is developing a therapeutic vaccine against prostate cancer that is designed to turn the body’s own immune-system defenses against tumors. (Dendreon, whose Provenge vaccine has been in the news over the past several months, is taking a similar approach.) The new wrinkle in Bellicum’s approach is that the company genetically modifies dendritic cells, which help direct immune responses against invaders in the body, so that they can be “activated” at a particular time and in a particular location in the body by applying a triggering chemical. There’s more here.

Other headlines of note:

• Dara BioSciences goes public with Point Therapeutics merger (release)
• Genetic Immunity raises $2M in bridge financing for HIV immunotherapy
• Rules-Based Medicine acquires EDI (release), wins $1.1M federal contract (release)
• 20/20 GeneSystems receives $2M NIST contract for tumor profiling (release)
• Summit Ventures invests in genomic-tools provider Fermentas (PDF release)
• Proton-therapy company Still River Systems raises $6.9M (PE Hub)
• Enterprise Partners suspends newest life-sciences fund (PE Hub)
• Iasis Medical raises $1.5M for undisclosed medical devices (PE Hub)

UPDATE: Expanded Targanta, Power Medical, Cumbre, New Leaf, and Bellicum items.
UPDATE REDUX: Corrected a typo in the Power Medical IPO data.

Featured companies: Aldagen, LDR, Lyten Endoscopy, MachLabs, Permatox, TeleMedicine Clinic, ThromboVision

Spinal-implant maker LDR raises $25M — Austin, Texas-based LDR, a maker of spinal implants, raised $25 million in a third funding round. Investors included Telegraph Hill Partners, Austin Ventures, Rothschild Private Equity and PTV Sciences.

LDR sells spinal-fusion devices, artificial disks and other spine-related devices in more than 30 countries, and plans to use the funds for further expansion.

Aldagen adds $9M for adult stem-cell work — Aldagen, a Durham, N.C., biotech developing regenerative therapies with “adult” stem cells, raised an additional $9 million (PDF link), bringing its third funding round to a total of $23 million. Investors in the additional financing include Tullis-Dickerson, CNF Investments, Harbert Venture Partners and Intersouth Partners.

The company’s most advanced experimental treatment uses stem cells derived from umbilical-cord blood to somehow improve the speed and effectiveness of cord-blood transplants in children, although the company doesn’t explain how. Nor has it revealed the results of an early-stage human test. Other treatments now entering clinical trials use stem or related progenitor cells isolated from a patient’s own bone marrow to treat heart failure or clot-related oxygen deprivation in the limbs.

The Triangle Business Journal has more.

ThromboVision raises $4M for personalized-medicine diagnostics — The Houston, Texas, biotech ThromboVision said it raised $4 million in a first funding round. Investors included the private-equity firm National Healthcare Services and private investors.

ThromboVision is developing new tests of platelet activity that may help doctors determine which patients are most likely to respond to low doses of blood thinners such as aspirin or Plavix, which are used to prevent clots that can cause heart attacks or strokes. This is similar — in concept, at least — to the FDA’s recent push to require the use of genomic tests to determine the proper dosing of warfarin, another blood thinner. (See our coverage here.)

MachLabs launches two device companies — MachLabs, a Redwood City, Calif., investor partnership founded by entrepreneurs Michael Laufer and John Lonergan, recently launched two medical-device startups, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Lyten is developing a minimally invasive treatment for obesity, while Permatox hopes to introduce a non-invasive alternative to Botox.

TeleMedicine Clinic receives €7M for radiology services — Barcelona-based TeleMedicine Clinic, a center for the outsourced analysis of medical images such as X-rays and MRIs, raised €7 million ($9.7 million), VentureWire reports. Investors included Kennet Partners, Active Capital Partners and an undisclosed European seed investor.

Advertising-supported Web sites serving consumers like you and me may be all the rage.

But rarely have other Web sites, those serving companies, tried to rely on ads — because there’s not enough people to look at the ads.

But Spiceworks, an Austin, Texas company, has raised $8 million more in venture capital to deliver on its model of serving ads to on its site that offers software to manage the information technology assets of medium sized companies.

The funding was led by Shasta Ventures, and included Austin Ventures. The company raised $5 million from Austin Ventures last year. We wrote about the company around that time.

The logic is that it can sell targeted ads to IT professionals. It has sold direct ads to Hewlett-Packard, Symantec, McAfee and Rackspace, according to Dow Jones.

(Updated at bottom with more discussion on differences from Digg, others)

Thoof is the latest company seeking to offer news readers articles that are relevant to them.

The Austin, Tex. company launched today, boasting an approach it says is more useful to the wider masses than competitors such as Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, NowPublic, Topix and others that seek to rank articles. Thoof’s trick is to latch on to information it finds about users’ news tastes, store this information in a place where it constantly updates its list about you, and then steadily improve its service.

It is founded by engineer Ian Clarke, who left the video-sharing site Revver last year, where he had been a co-founder and chief scientist. Two other Revver employees have joined him.

After an initial review of the site, we’re convinced this has great potential, and are keen to see it succeed — because most other efforts have failed to do this job well. By its nature, Thoof does better the more people use it. It depends on user-submitted articles, and so the volume of stories in its system is small at launch. We found no articles on “finance,” for example.

Here’s how it works, and why we endorse the concept.

Like Digg, Thoof provides a synopsis of articles on its home page — this includes headline, brief summary, and tags to designate topic matter. It then provides a link to the article, and sends the reader to the original source.

That’s where the similarities with Digg end. It doesn’t let other readers rank the articles for you. Rather, it offers articles to you based on what knows about you, such as IP address (which provides geographical location), the browser you use, your operating system and the site you were on when you clicked through to Thoof — all of which offer subtle clues about you. Then, additionally, as you search articles, it tracks the tags of the articles you read. Finally, it may soon begin asking you a random question from time to time, to gather more information.

Next, it lets you correct the article summaries. See screenshot below, where the arrows show the multiple ways you can correct a piece. You can propose a change, but it must first be approved vote a vote by members of Thoof’s community. Right now, that community consists of just three people, but Thoof hopes more members will participate as traffic grows. This correction process gives Thoof a leg-up on Digg, which has suffered notorious accuracy problems.

This project is way too early to know whether it will succeed or not. A long-shot? Yes. However, Clarke has put deeper thought into this than we’ve seen in some other throw-it-together jobs on personalized news attempts over the past couple of years.

Before Revver, Clarke built Freenet, a very early decentralized P2P technology designed to let people obtain information on the Internet while avoiding censorship — for use by people in China, for example. He attempted to commercialize the technology, forming Uprizer, but left in 2002 and dabbled in a number of projects.

At Revver, Clarke says he learned the limitations of collaborative filtering technologies used by companies like StumbleUpon and Amazon.com. These services offer you content — music, articles or whatever — based selections by others who have shown similar choices you’ve made in the past. However, the technology slows the more users are added to the system. It also doesn’t work well without the user first surfing for hours — so that the system can track selections.

Clarke also sought to avoid problems faced at other companies: Digg is dependent niche crowd of tech-savvy young males selecting stories, and can’t get out of its rut, he says. It offers no personalization for the rest of the world’s audience. Reddit meanwhile, tends to be politically slanted, and lacks corrective features, thus pointing to the need for editors. Finally, Wikipedia does a good job with editors, but breaks down when dealing with controversy. Some entries, on President George Bush for example, get “locked down” to avoid constant edits by fringe interests. A group of editors voting on changes deals with controversy, Clarke concluded.

Clarke wanted to build an algorithm that can store unlimited amount of information about a user’s interests. Thoof seeks to pinpoint personal tastes in more sophisticated ways, using Bayesian statistics. He points to a company called Cycorp, which is developing large knowledge base, feeding information into it like the “sky” is “blue.” He’s licensing information from a company doing something similar, but wouldn’t specify.

Thoof is built on a Java-based open-source framework called Wicket.

It has raised $1 million from Austin Ventures and angel investor Ron Conway.

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San Diego-based Slacker, the company that wants to take on the iPod with a new type of music recommendation service, has raised $40 million in a second round of funding.

The company, which we first covered in March, is launching in two stages. First, it launched its online player, which we’ve been listening to for several days now (image below), and have enjoyed. This part is similar to Last.fm, in that you can vote what music you like or dislike, and it will personalize a radio station for you based on those choices. It submits other music to you, based on what other people showing similar tastes have also selected.

The second phase will be the launch of a device, later this year, which will be always on through satellite and Wifi connections, and therefore it hopes to trump the iPod and its iTunes service — which are not so connected.

The round was led by Centennial Ventures and Rho Ventures, and go repeat investment from Austin Ventures, Mission Ventures and Sevin Rosen Funds.

This follows $13.5 million in a first round, as earlier reported.

Last.fm, of course was recently sold for $280 million to CBS last week, after raising a mere $5 million. Slacker, with its hardware, is much more ambitious.