VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

1. Search Wikia could go live by Christmas, to take on Google
2. Nick Denton, the nemesis of Silicon Valley, makes himself editor of Gawker
3. DocStoc, fresh with cash, gives away $50 Amazon gift certificate daily to user uploading best quality docs
4. AdReady, the Seattle advertising startup offering online banner ads, raises $10M more
5. Why Google is going after Wikipedia
6. EyeQ, tracks contributions of developers to projects
7. Ideeli, a invite-only Web retailer for high-end goods, gets $3.8M

Search Wikia could go live by Christmas — Just as Google starts to experiment more with social search, the open-source search engine called Search Wikia, backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, could go live as early as this week, according to New Scientist. Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor encroach on privacy by storing users’ search terms. A reported 500 volunteers are running web-crawlers to compile Search Wikia’s web index, which so far totals 100 million pages, according to the report. (See our earlier coverage here).

Nick Denton, the nemesis of Silicon Valley, makes himself editor of Gawker — His Valleywag blog has harassed the high-and-mighty in Silicon Valley with constant gossip. But Vallewag is just of many blogs in Denton’s empire, and now he wants to take the company to the next level.

DocStoc, fresh with cash, gives away $50 Amazon gift certificate daily to user uploading best quality docs — DocStoc, the new company which faces fierce competition with Scribd to become a destination for online documents, has finished raising its seed round of $750,000. The latest investor is Matt Coffin, of LowerMyBills.com. So now DocStoc can afford to give $50 certificates for users who upload the best quality content to the site each day.

AdReady, the Seattle advertising startup offering online banner ads, raises $10M more — The company builds ads for various categories of sites, from real estate to travel. Advertisers in these sectors get to customize these ads, and then insert them into large ad networks where they will be displayed on relevant Web sites. Bain Capital and Khosla Ventures led the investment, together with existing investor Madrona Venture Group. The company was founded last year by former Classmates.com executives. The company, which launched in October, says it has about 1,000 customers. It takes a 20 percent commission on the campaigns. (More in-depth coverage by John Cook)

Why Google is going after Wikipedia — Here’s why Google is going after Wikipedia, by creating Knol, a feature that lets people contribute entries about objects and things. Hitwise shows the phenomenal growth of Wikipedia, which is dependent on Google for just more than half of its traffic.

EyeQ, tracks contributions of developers to projects –SourceKibitzer, an Estonian company based out of St. Petersburg, Russia, has launched EyeQ — a tool for analyzing the contribution of developers to individual projects. Through proprietary algorithms this software computes each developer’s “know how,” contribution, and the complexity of every statement written. Mark Kofman, co-founder, saw the need for “multi-location software development team” analysis in his own experience as a developer for an outsourcing provider. The other co-founder, Anton Litvinenko, developed the basis for the algorithms EyeQ uses in his studies at the University of Tartu, located in Estonia. SourceKibitzer was angel funded and will be looking for venture capital in order to expand.

Ideeli, a invite-only Web retailer for high-end goods, gets $3.8 million — This new service has the feel of gimmickry too it, though its exclusivity might appeal to high-end consumers. Ideeli features luxury products typically valued at between $200 and $700, and it informs its members when products are about to go on sale the coming week. The New York company notifies its members both on the Web and with SMS alerts. Members, so far about 10,000 of them, get to see the sales prices, but only those members who pay a $7.95 monthly subscription see the sales early — and so have an advantage in the mad dash to buy while quantities last. The company launched in May. The funding comes from rs from Kodiak Venture Partners and angel investors. Oscar De La Renta and Baccarat have signed up as partners.

Updated

While Silicon Valley takes a breather this Thanksgiving weekend from a hectic year of deal-making, the action continues over in China.

1) Well-connected China video site gets $25 million more
2) More rumors of Facebook purchases in China
3) Qunar, a Chinese travel search engine, raises $10 million

Well-connected China video site gets $25 million more – Youku.com is a thriving Chinese YouTube-style video sharing site, and has just raised another round of funding, according to Chinese news organization Sohu. It is one of the larger Chinese video sites, with more than 70 million video plays a day according to Pacific Epoch. Youku also has a lot of big-time connections. Victor Koo, the chief executive of Youku, used to be the president of Sohu, and the two companies have a business relationship. Farallon Capital, the hedge fund, led an initial round of $3 million in March 2006. Bain Capital venture subsidiary Brookside Capital Partners led this latest round, with other investors including Chengwei Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. We haven’t gotten any comment from Farallon or Sutter Hill to learn more about the company, although well-known Sutter Hill partner Len Baker is on Youku’s board.

More Facebook-China rumors – Either Facebook is trying to buy its way into the Chinese social networking market or a lot of people in China wish it were. We reported on a rumor a couple of weeks ago that Facebook was trying to buy Zhanzuo, a Chinese Facebook-style social network that is backed by Sequoia.

The same — or at least very similar — rumor came around again this week. Facebook adamantly denied anything of the sort. Now, according to Interfax China, Facebook is trying to buy student-focused search engine Tianwang. We’re waiting to hear back from Facebook about this one.

Qunar, a Chinese travel search engine, raises $10 million — The round was led by Lehman Brothers Private Equity — yet another very large financial organization jumping into early-stage Chinese companies. Return investors include GSR Ventures and the Mayfield Fund. Alarm:Clock has more.

Featured companies: Biolipox, Cellpoint Diagnostics, Corum Medical, MediKeeper, Mendel Biotechnology, NanoMed, Orexo, Rules-Based Medicine, Tengion

UPDATED: Expanded the Tengion item, and that’s about it.

Tengion raises $33M for bladder regrowth — Tengion, a Norriton, Pa., biotech focused on regenerating diseased or damaged organs, raised $33 million in a third funding round. Investors included Deerfield Partners, Bain Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development, HealthCap, Quaker BioVentures, Oak Investment Partners, L Capital Partners, Horizon Technology Finance and Oxford Finance.

Tengion is working on growing new bladders for adults and children with spinal bifida or spinal-cord injuries based on cells biopsied from the patients’ own bladders. We mentioned the company briefly here.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Biomarker lab Rules-Based Medicine gets $25M from private equity (release)
• Cancer-diagnostics firm CellPoint Diagnostics pulls in $11.2M (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• Swedish specialty pharma Orexo to acquire Biolipox for $133M (release)
• Cancer drug, diagnostic maker NanoMed gets $1.5M (VentureWire)
• Biocontrol raises £500 against antibiotic-resistant infections (release>
• Satoris reports potential blood test for Alzheimer’s disease (release)
• Corum Medical raises $225K, seeks $3.5M for anemia test (VentureWire)
• Mendel Biotech completes financing round (release)
• Health, wellness Web-tool developer MediKeeper raises funds (release)

Skyhook Wireless, a Boston company seeking to become the first company to link GPS locations to Wifi hotspots nationwide to make it easier for advertisers to target mobile users, has gotten another $8.5 million in capital.

The four-year-old company has now raised $16.8 million. The financing, first reported by VentureWire (sub required), was led by RRE Ventures and included existing investors Bain Capital, Intel Capital and CommonAngels.

According to VentureWire:

Skyhook is creating a map to link GPS locations to Wi-Fi hotspots to improve efficiency for some location-based applications which use GPS for tracking, a technology that does not work well in densely populated or indoor areas. Skyhook, which has been mapping Wi-Fi networks in all of America’s most densely populated areas, has created a reference point that can help location-based applications orient themselves when GPS won’t work.

This lets advertisers serve customers with more geographically relevant information.

TheFind is a comparison shopping search engine that is unusually clean — it doesn’t ask merchants to pay for their products to show up in results. TheFind’s traffic is growing.

This purity is one reason it has just won $15 million in fresh backing from big-name investors Bain Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The investment, to be announced tomorrow (Thursday) makes TheFind one of the best-funded of the new shopping search engines. It wants to do to shopping what Google did to general search seven years ago — turn it upside-down by making results as relevant as possible to the user. Search for “Victoria Secret” for example, and TheFind will return plenty of results listing clothing made by that company. If you do that at Shopping.com, you’ll get nothing, because Victoria Secret refuses to pay it.

Shopping.com and a wave of other early players have matured and seen financial success — and yet all of them demand payment from retailers in return for showing their wares. With so many players, you’d think the game would be over: Nextag, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla.com — all are huge. Most recently, Nextag recently received a major investment that valued it at $1.2 billion. A slew of other start-ups, from Retrevo to Become.com, have launched too — but none of the smaller players have gotten major traction. None have received major amounts of funding.

Thefind seeks to crawl as much of the Web as possible to search for hard goods (electronics, cameras, etc) as well as soft goods (furniture, clothing, etc).

We should note that after our initial favorable review of TheFind back in March, we made several qualifications a week later when we came to realize that TheFind was not as pure as were initially led to believe. These were largely temporary issues. At the time, TheFind’s sponsored ads at the top of returned results were not clearly marked as such. TheFind has since marked its sponsored results clearly as “sponsored”. In addition, TheFind was paying for ads at search engines to attract traffic to its site, in an effort to market itself. So while it boasted a million unique users, we discovered that half of those users were directed there by an ad (suggesting its growth wasn’t as self-fueled as we’d believed). However, TheFind has since reduced its payments for such traffic. This month, 80 percent of its two million unique monthly users this month are be people going directly to the site, said chief executive Siva Kumar.

TheFind.com says it indexes 170 million products and 500,000 stores.

Accelecare Wound Centers (no link), a Seattle provider of specialized medical care for difficult-to-treat wounds such as diabetic ulcers, raised $10 million of an anticipated $35 million first funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). SV Life Sciences and Bain Capital each contributed $5 million, and have together committed another $25 million to the company.

Accelecare is a sort of specialty medical-services company that provides particular forms of treatment to hospitals under contract. According to VentureWire, the company was formed by the acquisition of Amicus Hyperbaric Group, a provider of hyperbaric oxygen therapy — essentially the use of high atmospheric pressures to boost oxygen levels in ways that promote the healing of wounds.

Reading between the lines of the VentureWire story, it looks like this $10 million was used primarily to acquire Amicus, rename the company Accelecare, and relocate its headquarters to Seattle. The Amicus Web site is still up and running, but offers no indication that the company has been sold. Its most recent news involves Lubbock, Tex.-based Amicus agreeing to acquire another hyperbaric-treatment center (PDF) in Houston. VentureWire describes Accelecare as holding 12 contracts to operate wound-care centers for hospitals across Texas.

Accelecare plans to continue expanding by acquiring other wound-care companies, particularly in Texas, Arizona and southern states. This seems sort of an odd business to be running from Seattle, but I guess the Accelecare folks want to think big, partly because there already seems to be a fair bit of consolidation among wound-care companies. From VentureWire:

Another venture-backed company also working with hospitals on wound care and hyerbaric medicine, National Healing Corp., said in March that it acquired Medical Multiplex Inc. The acquisition brought the company’s contracts to 113, the company said at that time. National Healing is backed by Morgan Stanley Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners, VentureWire records show. Another competitor, Diversified Clinical Services, was formed in April 2006 with the merger of Praxis Clinical Services and Diversified Therapy. That deal involved a $100 million equity commitment from Jordan Company LP, as well as backing from co-investors Bolder Capital and its Edgewater Funds. Diversified Clinical said it had 150 wound care centers at the time.

UPDATE: Out of curiosity, I checked back on the Amicus site a few weeks after this original item posted, and it still offers no indication that the company was bought out by Accelecare or anyone else. Accelecare, however, is now listed on the SV Life Sciences portfolio, and SVLS managing partner Eugene Hill is now listed as a director of the company. Accelecare itself still doesn’t seem to have a Web site, though.

Jott, the convenient voice-to-text service we reviewed favorably in March, has raised $5.4 million in its latest round of financing.

Jott, of Seattle, allows you to call a number, record a message, and then have that message translated into text and e-mailed to you or one of your contacts.

Bain Capital of Boston led the round with money from its new early-stage fund. The round included previous investors Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners and Atomico.

Founder and chief executive John Pollard won’t disclose numbers of users, but says response has been strong without a penny spent on marketing. People are using Jott to manage soccer teams, communicate with their families, and to send themselves book or movie ideas they’ve schemed up and don’t want to forget, he says.

Jott is still free, and doesn’t plan to be otherwise for at least the next few months, after which it will consider using advertising or an ad-free premium service to bring in cash. Among other reasons we detailed in our earlier post, this makes it more appealing than its competitors SimulScribe and Spinvox.