VentureBeat

Lotame, an Elk Ridge, Maryland-based advertising startup, has closed its second funding for its social media ad platform, Crowd Control. Motto, and I quote: “Every Party Needs Crowd Control!”

The company claims that its technology allows brands to tap into audiences that have proved they’re interested in certain subjects. It’s working with sites including Flixster, Fotolog, and The Huffington Post — in total, 53 million users, it claims. The company uses cookies to track anonymous user data like age and location, and what they looked at. Then, it lets an advertisers run ads to reach particular types of users through Lotame’s network.

It has only been six months since Lotame closed its first funding, a notably short period of time. Emergence Capital Partners led the $13 million investment. Also participating were previous investors Battery Ventures and Hillcrest Management.

Here’s more, from an interview by Wallstrip with founder, chief executive and Advertising.com veteran Andy Monfried.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

YouSendIt, a company that lets you send and receive large files through your email, has raised $14 million in a third round of funding.

The financing comes from new investor Emergence Capital Partners (the online services-focused firm best-known for backing Salesforce.com) and existing investors Sigma Partners, Alloy Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and Cambrian Ventures. YouSendIt raised a $10 million second round last year.

YouSendIt has a range of offerings, including a free version of its basic service that lets you send files of up to 100 megabytes, as well as plugins For Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Photoshop and more. The Campbell, Calif. startup targets both consumers and corporations, but its niche is small businesses and independent professionals who need to send large files. YouSendIt says it already has 7 million users, and is growing by 200,000 per month.

Competitors include Pando, which is more consumer-focused and, unlike YouSendIt, uses peer-to-peer technology.

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Lithium Technologies, which builds and operates social networks for enterprises, has raised $12 million in venture capital today.

The company’s clients include Dell, AT&T, Sony PlayStation, Univision, and PayPal — all businesses with large user communities and heavy customer service and product support needs. Lithium’s community sites are designed to help these clients streamline the interaction with their customers and improve brand loyalty. To get an idea of how the sites function, take a look at the one Lithium designed for Dell. With features such as Dell forums where customers can engage with each other to answer support questions and share tips, the main point is to build brand loyalty in a two-way conversation with consumers.

The idea is to use best practices to stir up people like Jeff Stenski, a Dell customer who has voluntarily spent the equivalent of 141 days of his time over the years and posted more than 22,000 answers to technical support questions on Dell’s community web site. Stenski’s answers have been viewed more than a million times, saving Dell more than $1 million, according to Lithium. That prompted Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff to call out Lithium in their social networking book, “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.”

A number of startups have moved to deliver similar social networking communities to the enterprise market. Marc Andreessen’s Ning social-networking platform can be used to build enterprise communities. Liveworld, Igloo, HiveLive and KickApps also promise companies that they can build thriving social networks. But Lithium has attempted to set itself apart by using game-like motivators such as leaderboards, rewards, reputations and profiles.

We mentioned the trend of using game-like features in non-game applications in our earlier story about Funware. In the Dell IdeaStorm voting, the most-frequent contributors can get “iSquared powers,” meaning they get ten times the voting power of other community members when it comes to selecting which of the IdeaStorm product ideas are the best.

“We’re managing sites for companies that collectively get a billion page views a month,” said chief executive Lyle Fong. “Our job is to get those one percent of users who are hardcore fans and turn them into the company’s biggest evangelists.”

Lyle Fong, by the way, is the brother of Dennis “Thresh” Fong, a professional video game player who won a Ferrari at age 20 when he was crowned the world’s best.

The boyish-looking Fong brothers of Los Altos are legendary in video games. Dennis dropped out of UC Berkeley to play video games for a living. He picked up honors as the world’s best “Doom” and “Quake” player. He was one of the first people to actually make video gaming a profession, winning big cash prizes and the Ferrari.

Dennis co-founded another company, GX Media, with Lyle. At first, they were selling gaming computers out of a dorm room. In 1997, they founded Gamers.com, a site that offered news and community forums for hardcore gamers, as well as game fan site FiringSquad.com, started with their other brother, Bryant. They raised $11 million in venture financing from CMGI in 1999 and lived the good life. Gamers.com even threw a party at the Playboy Mansion during an E3 show.

In 2001, Ziff-Davis bought Gamers.com and GX Media spun out Lithium Technologies under Lyle. Dennis went on to found Xfire, an instant-messenger service for gamers which was purchased by Viacom’s MTV for $102 million. Dennis is now head of the startup Raptr, a gamers social networking client.

Lithium is based in Emeryville, Calif. This second round of funding was led by Benchmark Capital. The cash will help the company expand its marketing and product development as it faces new kinds of competitors. The company previously raised a $9 million round from Shasta Ventures and Emergence Capital Partners in 2007.

Want to know what’s next in software-as-a-service? A good person to ask is Gordon Ritter, one of the founders of Emergence Capital Partners, a venture firm whose early investments include DoubleClick, Ask Jeeves and aQuantive (which each had successful IPOs). Ritter led the investment in one of Emergence’s most high-profile successes, Salesforce, a customer relationship management and enterprise platform company that recently teamed up with Google.

Dean Takahashi and I met with Ritter last week, and beginning with a discussion of Salesforce, he gave us a peek at his vision of where SaaS is going. In short: It’s all about SaaS companies that collect and make smart use of data about their customers, so don’t just look for the flashiest tools. He explains what he means, and how this approach is like shopping at Nordsrom’s, in this mobile post.

Nine months ago, we were nodding in agreement that Genius, a San Mateo company that lets Web site owners track every move of their customers, was spooky.

Pundit Rafe Needleman called the service scary. Here’s what we wrote at the time.

Now Genius has raised $10 million more in a second round of funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures. Also participating are Emergence Capital Partners and Walden International, who in 2005 invested $5.1 million.

We’ve moved on in our thinking. First, increased dependence of companies on the Web for their business justifies more sophisticated tracking tools. Second, most valley companies have engaged in the privacy debate — it helps if a company goes out of its way to explain its policy. Here, Genius has narrowed its focus, and makes clear it doesn’t track consumers. It sells its tracking software to companies doing business with other companies, i.e., their vendors. It’s just another marketing tool. Even consumer Web retails sites are tracking all kinds clicking data as their customers move around their site, which most people appear to be accepting — so Genius looks comparatively tame.

There are other companies that do this, including Eloqua.

Genius says it has more than 100 customers, helped by its integration into Salesforce.com — traction that Mohr Davidow partner Nancy Schoendorf cites as the reason for her firm’s investment. Last year, most of Genius’ sales were to companies wanting only one copy of the software, whereas recent deals have seen companies buying copies for 30 or more of their employees, says Felicity Wohltman, Genius.com’s VP of Marketing.

Ever gone online to make a big-dollar purchase — a phone, a computer for example — and gotten almost to the end, but then aborted because you still had questions?

We’ve been there. Often, we end up calling a live customer service person, to double-check things like the length of warranty, the credit plan, or number of free minutes.

InQ, a Los Angeles company, detects when a customer has neared the end of the shopping process, and pops up a screen and offers to engage the customer in live chat. The customer service person also picks up the phone, if requested, to answer the customer’s last-minute questions. InQ claims to have increased sales 25 percent for big customers like Sprint and Bellsouth. Really? “It’s mind-boggling,” says Jason Green, venture capitalist at Emergence Capital, “I didn’t believe it myself.”

Tomorrow, inQ will announce it has raised $7.75 million a third round of funding, led by Green of Emergence Capital, and Partech International. Existing backers, Dolphin Equity Partners and Hudson Ventures also participated.

The company says the e-commerce shopping cart abandonment rate is about 40 percent. That gives it a strong market, even if the real number is half that.

InQ only gets paid if customers use it. It serves clients with high-priced goods, though, so typically gets paid between $25 and $100 per deal it closes.

Emergence’s Green said it inQ is better than competing service LivePerson. Live Person, he says, forces companies to use their own employees to conduct the chat or calls, but they may not have the training to do that. inQ’s chats are all conducted by inQ’s representatives, 55 of them sitting in Los Angeles.

Notably, inQ reports that half of shoppers agree to the chat.