VentureBeat

Driverside, a consumer-focused website that aspires to be the one-stop destination for information on cars, has raised its first funding. The investment is for less than $5 million from Catamount Ventures.

Along with RepairPal, another recently-launched competitor, Driverside is aiming for a big win. Realizing that there are few websites that address car ownership — as opposed to buying or selling a vehicle — both sites are making content plays. They aim to supersede the only decent source of free auto information on the web right now, namely enthusiast-driven forums.

We covered both companies when they launched, but have since heard a few more details on Driverside’s model. While RepairPal is working to corner the information market for, you guessed it, repairs, Driverside hopes to quickly build a much larger site, covering every aspect of ownership.

For example, founder Trevor Traina says the company can out-do time-tested Kelly Blue Book valuations on cars by collecting thousands to millions of data points on each model of vehicle. By taking advantage of the data users provide, Driverside could then send out notices when their car had depreciated past a certain point. Notices could also be sent in case of a recall.

Traina has plenty of other plans for the site, including wikis, reviews, community features, and more data on the cars themselves. The team will soon “radically improve” the existing pricing details on parts and accessories, and update its repair costs, which could make it competitive with RepairPal’s more comprehensive repair data.

However, all the work is going to require another round of funding, and soon. This is where it should get interesting to watch Driverside and RepairPal duke it out. Both sites, despite raising relatively large seed investments, are ready to immediately move on to larger rounds; Traina says Driverside will likely settle for between $5 and $10 million, and RepairPal will probably go for something similar.

Social web browser Flock has garnered a lot of hype since its release in 2005. It’s also won a lot of fans. Both likely played a role in its new $15 million fourth round of funding announced today. The round was led by Fidelity Ventures, with all previous lead investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures and Shasta Ventures, participating.

Impressively, this round of funding actually surpasses all of Flock’s previous rounds combined.

This money will be used for the usual purposes such as research, development and marketing. An emphasis will be placed on global expansion as well as the company sets its sites on the 230 million members of social networks globally.

Flock is a browser just like Firefox or Internet Explorer except that it has built-in functionality for various social networks on the web. Say for example you sign in to your Flickr account, you can have Flock remember your info and keep it open in a sidebar tab and update you when your contacts post new photos. It also works with more traditional social networking sites as you might expect such as Facebook.

According to the company, since January of this year Flock’s user base has increased by more than 250 percent while its revenue has risen by more than 400 percent. As we’ve reported previously, Flock makes money thanks to a deal it has with Yahoo to use its search technology. This is similar to the deal Mozilla’s Firefox browser has with Google.

Flock is currently testing out its 1.2 Beta version of the software, which includes Digg integration. This is a pretty good idea and certainly hardcore Digg users will go crazy over it. While I don’t think anyone can accuse the browser of not looking nice, I still find it too slow for my tastes in what I use a web browser for: browsing the web.

Another service, Minggl, shares some similar social functionality of Flock but does it via a Firefox or Internet Explorer plug-in rather than an entirely different browser.

SignalDemand, a startup that delivers software-as-a-service to help manufacturers set their prices, has raised a hefty $20 million second round of funding.

Chief executive Michael Neal says the money will go toward international expansion and to continue SignalDemand’s “march across verticals.” The company focuses on “disassembly” markets — namely, companies who take raw materials and disassemble them into products like beef and lumber. Until they’re approached by SignalDemand , most of these companies rely on Microsoft Excel, which can hurt your responsiveness when you’re involved in often-volatile commodities markets, Neal says.

“We’re arming manufacturers with the same tools Wall Street has had for some time,” he says.

The San Francisco startup delivers heavy-duty computing that would have been impossible, or at least much less efficient, before the SaaS business model, because its staff is constantly feeding new data into the system, as well as refining the calculations.

SignalDemand’s growth strategy has been focused on adding markets one-at-a-time, rather than opportunistically going after any customer who might be interested, Neal says. Next on his list — chemicals and pulp and paper.

Neal and his co-founder, Stanford Prof. Hau Lee, previously found success by starting DemandTec, which provided services similar to SignalDemand’s, but to retailers, not manufacturers. DemandTec went public last year, offering 6 million shares at $11 pear share. Neal says both companies are part of the vision he and Lee share of optimizing demand “all the way from the consumer to raw materials.”

The new funding was led by Interwest Partners. Bruce Cleveland of Interwest, whose experience includes being one of the original executives at Siebel Systems, is joining SignalDemand’s board. Previous investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, General Catalyst Partners and Catamount Ventures also participated.

As social networks grow around the globe and across demographics, so to will the amount of user-generated pornographic images on those networks.

Keibi has a solution: It is launching power tools for porn-spotting and removal. It wants to help social networks enforce the decency standards they promise users and advertisers in their terms of service.  Early coverage of Keibi is here.

Most social networks employ customer service teams to manually moderate networks. Beyond that, some networks also allow users to report objectionable content, and even have their own rudimentary porn-detecting software in place.

However, the rude content continues to slip in. So Keibi goes further: It scans all images on a social network, analyzing factors such as skin tones, shapes and contours, then ranks each image within a cue, with the most scandalous images at the head and the most innocent at the tail.

The cue is then fed into an interface where customer service reps can pick and delete violators, or pass questionable images to more senior managers to make removal decisions. The software comes with reporting tools so managers can do things like track how quickly and accurately employees pull down problem images.

Certain images, such as revealing paparazzi photos of celebrities, tend to be uploaded by many different users. Keibi lets moderators blacklist or whitelist images for automatic rejection or approval.

One early customer is Piczo, a social network for teens built around sharing photos — and it has relatively strict standards of decency. That company claims that with Keibi, it reviews more than 200 times the images it used to, while spending 70 percent less on “related overhead.”

The service lets any network predetermine the sorts of images they want to filter for.

Myspace comes to mind for its ubiquitously racy images, no doubt a long-time contributing factor to its popularity; It could, if it wanted, choose to be less strict about the images it restricts.

Some sites may have even less use for such automated sanitation. Playboy’s college-student-only social network, PlayboyU, which claims to be free of porn, would presumably not want such software to detract from the anti-censorship rhetoric of its founder, Hugh Hefner.

Keibi says it has some of the largest social networks in trials now, but wouldn’t name names.

An obvious concern is that the market simply isn’t large enough to support a niche company like Keibi. Not so, chief executive Paul Remer tells us: He claims that “a couple hundred” social networks have enough scale to make use of this tool.

Keibi isn’t just eyeing popular social networks — it is aiming for other parts of the ecosystem, like widget-makers Slide and RockYou, Remer says.

Many widget companies, which span multiple social networks with applications like slideshows of images, have more users than social networks themselves.

Potential customers go beyond social networks. As large companies adopt social networking features to highlight their own brands, Remer adds, they too will want to to avoid the embarrassment of featuring user-generated porn.

The company is also working on video and text analysis — so soon no more amateur porn stories or videos, either.

Keibi’s service, currently web-based, is available for $5,000 to $20,000 per month; some customization may be necessary to ensure that Keibi’s software can access and delete problematic content.

The company has received more than $5 million in funding from Catamount Ventures and Hunt Ventures. It was founded in late 2006.

Verdiem, a growing Seattle company that makes computer networks use less energy, has raised $8.33 million from seven investors including big-name venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

It is one of many companies riding a wave of public commitments by cities, companies, universities and other organizations to make their IT operations more energy efficient. The City of Boston and the City University of New York are two of Verdiem’s clients.

The company has been “toiling way for four years under the radar,” chief executive Kevin Klustner told us, but has noticed a huge recent up-tick in interest from companies. As the debate about global warming heats up, corporations are giving their IT departments stronger mandates to be more environmentally friendly.

Verdiem says it saves an average of $20-$65 per computer per year by moving each machine into a lower power state — hibernate, sleep or shut down — when it is not being used. For some organizations this can mean a five percent to 15 percent reduction in consumption immediately. For example, CUNY expects to save $3 million over the next five years — or 26 million kilowatt hours and 22,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Over 300,000 licenses for its flagship product, Surveyor, have been sold in North America to a wide range of organizations. Here’s an example of what that might look like, provided by the company:

Boston said in late April that it had saved 44 percent on PC electricity consumption since February, when it had installed Verdiem.

We’ve covered the “Climate Savers Computing Initiative,” an effort by leading tech companies, from Google to IBM, to lower the energy usage in machines they produce and use in their workplace. The initiative wants to change consumer behavior by encouraging users to manually power down their computers when not in use. Verdiem is a charter member.

There are an increasing number of startups working on variations of this idea. For example, we’ve mentioned Snap’s CO2Saver, which offers a downloadable tool that automatically adjusts power consumption when your computer is idle, and shows you how much CO2 you’re saving.

Verdiem’s latest Surveyor 4.0 software targets organizations: It lets IT managers centrally control the power-state of a computer from a central location. It says the software solves a concern that this kind of technology will interfere with other regular updates that need to be made across local networks. The software also includes business-focused functionality, such as security, work-group management features, and Microsoft Vista support (a Seattle connection?)

Like many startups we cover, Verdiem is not profitable and is taking on money to finance growth. Klustner says it had little trouble raising money.

The company has received a total of $15 million in funding.

Others include the Westly Group, Phoenix Partners, Falcon Partners, Catamount Ventures, Angeleno Group and Trevor Traina

Bonus: an audio interview with Klustner in May.

Keibi is a new San Francisco company that wants to help social networking sites mange the massive, chaotic flood of user-generated information they get.

Pierre Grenier, who worked briefly at fast-growing San Francisco social network Piczo, saw the pain it and other companies had dealing with the “unmanageable” wave of content being produced, including hairy security, copyright and general brand management challenges.

Grenier tells VentureBeat he joined Piczo while managing an investment in that company from Catamount Ventures. Since leaving to form Keibi, he has since hired others, including Piczo’s former general counsel Paul Remer, as chief executive.

The company remains secretive, he said, and more details will emerge later. But it is focused on user generated content “categorization” to help users discover content, among other things.

Catamount Ventures and Hunt Ventures have committed $6 million to Keibi, earlier reported by Thealarmclock.

updated

Piczo, the social networking company that tries to distinguish itself as the safer place for teens, has raised $11 million in a third round of funding, it tells VentureBeat.

Piczo is one of handful of sites gunning for “second place” behind MySpace, the overwhelming leader with 65 million unique users a month. Facebook is around 17 million. Piczo boasts 10.5 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, mainly in Europe and the U.S. Bebo and Hi5 are around that. Like other networking sites, Piczo offers video, photo-sharing, and other communication tools. However, it doesn’t allow people to search profiles, creating more of a sense of security for young people. It’s also invite-only.

The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and Mangrove Capital Partners. Piczo’s existing investors, Sierra Ventures and Catamount Ventures, also participated in the third round of funding.

The company has now raised $18 million since 2005

Chief executive Jeremy Verba tells VentureBeat the company has hit saturation point in the UK, and Canada, but is growing rapidly in Germany, with a million uniques now, up from nothing last summer. Overall, Piczo is adding 30,000 registered users a day, he says.

Piczo is also seeing a lot of overlap with MySpace. MySpace, which is open to search, is like a wide-open “disco,” says Verba. Piczo is like a private party, in comparison — where many of the same people using MySpace go to link privately with their friends, typically ten or 15 people. Another difference is freedom of expression. MySpace keeps users to similarly structured profile templates. Piczo lets users play with their pages more creatively. Its target age group is 13 to 16. Girls make up 70 percent of users.

Verba says there’s no deadline to hit profitability, but there are multiple ways to make money — through advertising and other means. Piczo’s users don’t seem to mind pop-up notes, for example telling them about a Justin Timberlake Piczo page, where they can go and get wallpaper, links to Timberlake’s music videos and pictures and chat with fans. Piczo makes money because Timberlake’s label, Sony BMG sponsors it.