VentureBeat

OwnEnergy just brought in an undisclosed amount in first-round funding, but the 1-year-old wind and alternative energy company is already looking ahead to the full $100 million it needs to raise to develop its first project, a 51-megawatt wind farm in north Texas — and to have it up and running by the end of 2009.

It’s unclear how close the Brooklyn-based company is to this goal, and I haven’t been able to reach OwnEnergy executives yet. But they must be pretty confident, considering that they’ve already started negotiations with a major turbine manufacturer, and broadcasted their intentions to develop between 10 and 80 other wind farms of similar scale.

Clearly, this growth will require significant deals with local landowners. The strategy so far has been to agree to split energy sales revenue should the plants succeed. Landowners have been hungry to cash in on the cleantech boom while the gettings good, and OwnEnergy is along for the ride, forging 12 partnerships with communities and landowning groups across seven states in the last year.

The company’s leaders say communities benefit more from owning small-scale alternative energy plants themselves rather than leasing land to development companies for bigger projects. Chief executive Jacob Susman told VentureWire that the future of the business will be energy generation on a single community, and even home level. Even so, its competitors, like National Wind LLC, are going forward with large-scale plans. The Minneapolis-based company recently announced that it will build a 400 megawatt plant in Colorado.

After OwnEnergy’s wind operations have taken root, the company plans to expand into biomass power production. It has tapped new investor EnerTech Capital Partners and first-round investors Countour Venture Partners and the New York City Investment Fund to keep the ball rolling.

Punchbowl Software, the parent company of online event planning site MyPunchbowl has raised its second round of funding. The money comes as the site is growing quickly. The site claims its traffic has grown at least 20 percent each month over the past year and data from Compete seems to back this up.

MyPunchbowl offers a step-by-step way to easily create online invitations. It’s helpful in every aspect of an event from picking a date, to planning an after-party.

The Framingham, Mass.-based site raised a seed round in October of last year. In April of this year MyPunchbowl teamed up with the popular travel site Kayak to launch the MyPunchbowl Party Center to ease the planning for events in which travel is required. This new round will be used to pursue more partnerships such as that one as well as to expand the development team.

This $2.1 million round was led by Contour Venture Partners. Angel investors Intel Capital and eCoast Angels also participated.

Media6Degrees is the latest company to try to target ads for major brands using the “social graph” of your friend relationships on social networks and other sites. The New York company is in private beta judging by the lack of information on its site about the product itself. The company says it has “patent-pending algorithms and methods” that use demographic and “psychographic” data to target online ads for each individual advertiser.

So far, though, the beta says it is getting much higher response rates from audiences versus competitors. Those competitors, as far as I can tell, would include MySpace’s hyper-targeted ads, whatever Facebook is working on that it hasn’t disclosed too much about, and a range of other social networks and ad startup efforts. Among the startups, there’s Social Media, Lookery and others on Facebook alone. More generally, the majority of ad networks in the online ad industry at large seem to say they can target based on demographic factors, although not the “social graph.”

While I’m checking in to find out more, here’s a press release’s description:

Media6° audiences, sharing powerful demographic and psychographic traits, have been proven to respond to advertising messages at rates dramatically higher than other targeting alternatives. The firm’s offering has appeal for brand marketers seeking large audiences displaying the highest levels of response, engagement, word of mouth and collective behavior.

The company is careful about the ad-targeting issue, saying that it doesn’t use personal data. Instead, it says it relies on the “underlying data used by Media6° in the execution of its strategy has long been present in ad serving logs and has always been used by advertisers to monitor and audit their campaigns.” Cookies?

It has also just raised $9 million from U.S. Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Coriolis Ventures (we covered the Coriolis funding in April) and angel investors, and boasts a long list of advisers from media and technology. The startup hired Joe Doran away from his job as general manager at Microsoft Ad Center in April, to become chief executive. At Microsoft, Doran had been responsible for strategy, product and mergers and acquisitions for all of Microsoft’s ad-related businesses.