Samsung’s latest strategy? Nabbing tiny stakes in companies it relies heavily on.

After grabbing a 5 percent stake in Wacom earlier this year, Samsung has now invested around $112 million in Sharp for a 3.08 percent stake.

Samsung relies heavily on Sharp for the displays in its big-screen televisions and mobile devices, so the deal will strengthen their relationship even further. Sharp also sorely needs the cash, after laying off 10,000 workers and selling three of its plants to Foxconn last year. It could also make Sharp less reliant on Apple, which uses its displays for iPhones and iPads, the Wall Street Journal points out.

The deal is scheduled to be completed on March 28, 2013. About two-thirds of the investment is slated to go towards “introduction of new technology for LCDs with high-definition features,” which likely means the development of higher-resolution LCDs for mobile devices. One third of the investment will go towards “rationalization of manufacturing facilities used in mobile devices,” including displays for tablets and notebooks.

Photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Add Intel Capital to the growing list of companies eager to work with Bluestacks.

Intel has invested an undisclosed amount in the startup, BlueStacks told VentureBeat today. BlueStacks “LayerCake” technology runs Android apps on any Windows PC and Mac, bridging a gap between mobile and the desktop that neither Google or Apple have tackled yet.

Primarily, Intel wants to make sure that BlueStacks’ software is optimized for its chips. The investment could also be a major help for Intel’s smartphones, like the Europe-only Motorola Razr i, which run its x86-based mobile processors instead of the ARM-based processors that power most other Android phones. Intel claims its mobile chips can run 95 percent of Android apps due to the chip architecture difference with its phones.

“Intel has an extremely powerful PC ecosystem, and they are looking to move into mobile in a big way,” said John Gargiulo, the vice president of marketing and business development at Bluestacks in an interview with VentureBeat. “There are more and more Intel chips on Android phones, so I think the alignment is clear.”

Intel just recently announced a new dual-core Atom mobile processor, but it’s at a severe disadvantage since it only started focusing on mobile chips a few years ago. Meanwhile, competitors like Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia have had years to hone their mobile chips.

BlueStacks forged a deal with AMD to power its AppZone back in September, so Intel likely felt the need to step up its relationship. The news also comes on the heels of BlueStacks’ largest deal yet with Lenovo, a similar partnership with Asus, and the launch of a Surface Pro-optmized app.

“Consumers expect to have similar experiences across all devices, and that includes having access to the same popular apps,” Dave Flanagan, a managing director at Intel Capital, said in a statement. “Bluestacks technology is a key catalyst for us in enabling mobile apps to run on any type of device.”

Intel also relies on Bluestacks for its AppUp app store. Twenty-three apps on AppUp, like the popular news reader Pulse and Talking Tom, are listed as coming “via BlueStack Systems,” according to a Google site search. BlueStacks’ client powers those apps when you download them to your PC. It’s a particularly helpful partnership for Intel, since it brings popular apps to its fairly barren app store.

The Campbell, Calif.-based BlueStacks has also raised $15 million so far from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Venture Management, Citrix Systems, and others.

In what would become a very expensive game of musical chairs, Google is interested in making a $50 million investment into music video service Vevo.

The investment would give Google a 10 percent stake in the company and boost Vevo’s estimated valuation to about $500 million, according to a Bloomberg report that cites anonymous sources familiar with the deal.

Vevo holds the rights to music videos for most major music artists and its library of content brings in a significant number of unique views to Google-owned YouTube. And while Vevo currently has a lucrative contract with Google to keep its content on YouTube, the music video service has hinted at making a deal with Facebook in the past.

The new investment from Google, according to Bloomberg’s sources, would prevent Vevo from jumping to another partner as well as extend its exclusive contract. (That contract is set to expire in April.)

If true, the news wouldn’t be a complete surprise. Last year, Google made several attempts to bring in content to YouTube, including its $200 million investment  premium channel partners and a $35 million round of funding for video game media company Machinima.

Hadley Harris is a general partner at ENIAC Ventures and Chief Business Development Officer at Thumb.

As a NYC based investor, it’s been pretty incredible to watch New York’s startup scene grow into a dynamic tech playground over the past few years. Even though Silicon Valley will continue to be the start up mecca for years to come, VCs, large tech companies and the technology press have recognized New York’s blossoming tech scene and quickly scrambled to get feet on the street. In fact, there has been so much action lately that the New York City Mayor’s Office created the Made in NY Map to showcase the growing tech community.

Based on investments alone, New York has seen a growth of 32 percent in VC deals from 2007 to 2011. New York’s tech scene has skyrocketed in the past 5 years, with tech related jobs increasing 28.7 percent since 2007. Tech publications have followed startups and investors in suit; VentureBeat opened its New York office in October and TechCrunch opened up NYC office hours last May as the startup scene continued to flourish.

As New York continues to carve out its place in the startup world, it’s interesting to take a look at how it has distinguished itself from Silicon Valley — its challenges and advantages, and how its companies differ from those of West Coast origin.

Funding is one area with significant differences. The ratio of investors to startups in New York’s ecosystem is relatively skewed, which brings about some limitations. While seed stage investment has grown over the last few years, there are still not enough mid-stage venture investors to fund NYC’s tech startups. From Q2 2011 to Q2 2012, the percentage of NY seed stage investments increased from 25 percent to 31 percent. In contrast, Series B investments shrunk from 25% to a mere 14%. New York startups grabbed $2.8 billion in funding last year, but this pales in comparison to the over 1,200 SV companies that raked in $12 billion.

As an active investor on both coasts, I’ve seen this imbalance play out in the valuations that startups garner from investors.  I’d estimate that the same company would get about a 25 percent higher valuation if it is based in the Bay Area as opposed to NYC. As the next wave of successful seed stage companies progress to raising series A and B rounds, look for more mid stage investment activity in NYC.  We’ve already seen investors such as Accel, First Round, NEA, Matrix and Bain Capital Ventures open offices here to address the city’s growing venture market.  As New York’s startup battlefield continues to grow, I expect to see even more investors and companies gravitate towards NYC.

Silicon Alley’s expansion is also rooted in certain characteristics particular to New York. As a long-established center of industries such as finance, fashion, advertising and media, New York has amassed a large pool of extremely talented people from those industries. While the Bay Area also has a high concentration of talent, New York’s broader talent mix has given those companies a particular edge and core philosophies. This is one of the main reasons why large West Coast tech companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook have opened significant offices here — to take advantage of this talent pool.

It’s also the melding of these industries with technology that makes the NYC tech scene special.  Take fashion and commerce startups such as Gilt, Etsy, Warby Parker and Birchbox, or adtech companies such as TapAd, LocalResponse, OnSwipe andAppNexus. Fashion and advertising have long been booming in New York, but in the past few years they have branched into the tech space, creating several successful companies at those industry intersections. As startups arise in New York, many of those brilliant people are joining emerging companies and strengthening them with influence from these creative industries.

A third difference between companies sprouting out of New York and those from the Valley is in the focus on growth over engagement, especially in social startups. Silicon Valley-based companies are often more concerned with quickly scaling huge user bases rather than staying true to the company’s core values and building a real business. For example, in 2012, Bay Area social companies such as Socialcam, Zynga and Google with Google+ have touted huge user bases, but haven’t been able to back metrics like users or views up with anything that resembles strong engagement.

There is a trend amongst Silicon Valley companies of stopping at nothing to grow user numbers, which isn’t always best for the company. In New York however, we’ve watched companies such as Thumb and Tumblr rock the engagement charts. Thumb has amassed a loyal and engaged following, with users spending over 5 hours per month sharing and requesting opinions, while Tumblr users spend an average of 89 minutes on the service’s website each month. This number might be lower than Thumbs, but it is still significant considering that Thumb is second only to Facebook in terms of monthly user engagement per monthly average user.

Much of this success can be attributed to these companies staying laser-focused on their missions – focusing on engagement with an eye towards monetization. Even Silicon Valley-based investors are starting to take notice — recently, Andreessen Horowitz came out against so-called “bullshit metrics” such as page views, and emphasized the importance of user engagement instead. With companies in NYC leading this movement, it will be interesting to watch as Silicon Alley continues to rise in the ranks in 2013. As we move into the new year, I think it’s a safe bet that startups in Silicon Valley will take a cue from NYC and start to focus more on engagement and building a brand that resonates with its users, over strictly honing in on user numbers.

Hadley Harris, a Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, has been actively working at the intersection of business and technology for more than 13 years. He is a noted expert in user acquisition, monetization and seed stage investing. In addition to serving as General Partner at ENIAC, Hadley is the Chief Business Development Officer at Thumb.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Steve Jobs is Ashton Kutcher’s hero. The actor portraying Apple’s late cofounder in the upcoming movie jOBS explained that while he didn’t know Jobs personally, his outlook on life has deeply affected him and the way he invests in Silicon Valley startups today.

“It’s not like you’re playing Lincoln. It’s not like people know how Lincoln walked and talked … but Steve is very fresh in the mind,” Kutcher said today at Macworld 2013. “He’s a person that we have a daily reminder of in our hands and at the tips of our fingers.”

Kutcher invests through his venture firm A-Grade investments and has put money into companies such as Smart Things, Dwolla, GetAround, and Fab. His movie, which was debuted at the Sundance film festival last week, comes out in April.

The Two and a Half Men star explained that when he first heard about the movie, his first instinct was to get involved to preserve the integrity of the story, the integrity of his hero. Josh Gad, who plays Steve Wozniak in the move, said Kutcher already had a wealth of knowledge about Jobs\ and was able to pick out pieces of the scenery and say, “Get rid of that. It wasn’t built for another year.”

In order to prepare for his role, Kutcher says he uploaded soundbites of Jobs speaking to Soundcloud and listened to then while walking around or doing errands — living life. He began to vocalize what Jobs was saying in his ear to the people around him. He was particularly inspired by an interview Jobs gave to the Silicon Valley Historical Society, in which Jobs said that people tend to tell others that the world was built the way it was built and that we should try to live within it as best we can. But the world as we know it, according to Jobs, was only built by people no smarter than you, so why can’t you bring new things into it?

Kutcher says it was Jobs’ focus, dedication to the consumer, and belief that anything can be made possible that he hopes to take into each meeting with entrepreneurs.

But would Kutcher invest in Apple if he was taking angel investing meetings in 1997?

“I would hope that I would have invested,” said Kutcher. “I hope I would have been intelligent enough, wise enough, intuitive enough to see the possibility.”

Ashton Kutcher image via Entertainment Weekly

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Dell’s not-so-secret attempt to go private is getting even more interesting. Microsoft will reportedly kick in between $1 billion and $3 billion to help make the deal happen, according to CNBC’s David Faber.

The software giant is in talks with Silver Lake, the leading investors behind Dell’s buyout, and founder Michael Dell. Faber notes that Microsoft’s stake would be a mezzanine investment. Mezzanine financing often takes the form of debt or preferred stock, and it would be a way for Microsoft to soften the blow of the deal for Silver Lake.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be convertible into a significant equity stake in Dell,” Faber said.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft and Dell for comment, but given the nature of this deal, we don’t expect much of a response. Rumors of Dell going private have been floating around for some time now, but earlier this month they also managed to jump Dell’s stock by 13 percent.

From the scant details about Microsoft’s investment, it’s likely that discussions are still ongoing. Faber notes that the “outlook is fairly positive” that Microsoft will reach a deal with Dell, and it could be finalized by the end of the week.

Given Microsoft’s significant investment in Nokia to help make Windows Phone a success, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company join forces with Dell. Windows 8 needs support from big players like Dell, and a (relatively) small investment like this could pay off for Microsoft down the line. Just look at how Microsoft’s $240 million investment in Facebook has helped it land significant deals like putting Bing searches within the social network.

Via Business Insider

Facing unstable global markets and an upcoming presidential election, venture capitalists took a more disciplined approach to their investments in 2012 than in previous years.

Results from a MoneyTree report in partnership with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) found that investments totaled $26.5 billion in 2012, with VCs closing 3,698 deals. This is a 10 percent decrease in dollars and a 6 percent decline in deals over the prior year.

Related: Check out the top investment deals from the fourth quarter.

Tracy Lefteroff, global managing partner of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s venture capital and private equity arm attributed the decrease to unstable markets and “taxes, government policy, the general environment in the stock and equity markets, troubles in life sciences, [and] the regulatory market” in a call with press and analysts.

However, investors and financial analysts agree that there is cause for optimism in 2013. For the fourth quarter, venture investment of $6.4 billion into 968 companies fell 3 percent in dollars but rose 5 percent in deal volume over Q3 2012. With the re-election of President Obama and burgeoning excitement about the JOBS Act, deals kicked into high gear.

Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, said there would be a decline in “me too” investments in 2013, meaning that VCs won’t just follow the herd. With the industry facing constriction, “more seasoned entrepreneurs” will get funding over 20-something Internet wunderkinds.

In addition, the experts anticipate a steady pipeline of high-profile IPOs in 2013, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) software sector. Research firm CB Insights predicts that 80 percent of the companies in a position to go public target their products at businesses rather than consumers.

Related: We predicted that SurveyMonkey, Dropbox, and Square would be among the companies to go public in 2013.

Indeed, software is the only sector to see a steady increase in venture capital dollars, while biotech and life sciences, clean-tech and consumer products and services, failed to capture VC attention in the final quarter of 2012. Investment dollars rose 10 percent over 2011 to $8.3 billion, which funded 1,266 software deals.

This represents the highest level of investment in the software sector in over a decade.

It seems the reports of a “series A crunch” have been exaggerated. For the fourth quarter, early stage investments increased 5 percent in dollars and 9 percent in deals over the previous quarter.

Investors on the call, including John Backus of New Atlantic Ventures, said there were a healthy number of companies receiving first-round financing. Seed deals are notoriously difficult to track as family and friends often privately invest. “I don’t believe we had a series A crunch,” said Backus, who said he witnessed an “angel feeding frenzy.”

With entrepreneur-friendly government regulation and high-quality late stage companies on the cusp of going public, VCs expect to see solid returns in the coming year. “It’s a terrific time to be investor,” said Jim Healy of Sofinnova Ventures. ”We expect to be highly active in 2013.”

The quarterly Moneytree report is issued by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA, with data collected by Thomson Reuters. The full report is available online at NVCA.org.

Image: igor.stevanovic |Shutterstock 

The nation’s largest cable service provider, Comcast, is investing $150 million in cable box manufacturer Arris, the companies announced today.

Last month, Arris purchased the Motorola Home division from Google for $2.35 billion. And since Motorola Home supplies a good chunk of cable boxes for Comcast subscribers, it makes sense that the cable giant would have an interest in Arris.

Under terms of the deal, Arris will sell 10.6 million shares of stock to Comcast for a 7.85 stake. Google, which previously owned about 15 percent of Arris, will get $150 million for a reduced stake equal to Comcast.

Comcast will also take a more active role in working with Arris on its cable/video box strategy going forward. Hopefully, that means many cable subscribers can look forward to better set-top boxes with more functionality than the current selection offers.

Wall Street took the news well, giving Arris’ stock a 3.55% percent increase at the time of this posting.

Photo by Tom Cheredar

Sometimes stolen money does come back to you. Facebook gave $250,000 to team of cyber security research students at the University of Alabama Birmingham today after the group helped track down hackers associated with the Koobface worm, which plagued the social network for some time.

The money Facebook invested in the researchers comes from “recovered money” taken from criminals associated with the Koobface virus.

The group is called the Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research (CIA/JFR — not to be confused with the CIA government agency), which studies data from a number of different organizations, as well as spam emails, to help the security industry understand more about the viruses that affect us today.

Koobface, a play on the word “Facebook”, attacked, what else, Facebook user accounts, as well as a number of other social networks. It infected a user’s computer and hooked it up to a botnet. Koobface spread through messages that might say something like, “LOL!” or “I can’t believe this is you!” with a link. When you click the link, Koobface asks you to update Adobe Flash, which actually downloads the worm onto your computer.

It then continues to use your Facebook to send out spammy messages to all your friends. Koobface is said to be created by a number of hackers out of Russia, who made money off of the botnet by hijacking Google searches, and stealing login credentials. The CIA/JFR focused its research on Koobface, helping Facebook track down anyone associated with the virus.

Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan looks at it as an investment in future security industry professionals.

“As a result of numerous collaborations over the years, Facebook recognizes the center as both a partner in fighting Internet abuse and as a critical player in developing future experts who will become dedicated cybersecurity professionals,” Sullivan said in a statement. “The center has earned this gift for their successes in fighting cybercrime and because of the need for formal cybersecurity education to better secure everyone’s data across the world.”

The Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research says it will use the money to build a new research facility, which will be located at the top of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s University Boulevard Office Building. CIA/JFR plans to call its “nerve center” The Facebook Suite.

Worm image via Shutterstock

On this day in history, the US took possession of Alaska from Russia. This far-flung state does not get a lot of attention in the technology media, but as an Alaskan adventure is on my bucket list and I want to rack up good karma on that front, I thought I would give the state a shout out today, and give my encouragement to any Alaskan entrepreneurs out there. Vancouver has a startup scene, so you can’t use the cold as an excuse.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

BloomReach pulls in $25M to bring ‘big data’ to search marketers

BloomReach, the “big data” tool for marketers that is used by the likes of Neiman Marcus and Williams- Sonoma, has raised $25 million in a round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). In a nutshell, the technology analyzes about a billion consumer interactions and web pages on a daily basis and automatically adapts its customers’ websites to capitalize on demand. This is the third round of venture funding for the Silicon Valley company. Existing investors, among them Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, also participated in the third round, bringing BloomReach’s total funding to $41 million. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Fingerprint recognition isn’t just for spies anymore

Validity Sensors manufactures biometric technology that authenticates PC and mobile device users by their unique human characteristics, like fingerprints, voice, and face. Today, the company announced closing the first $10 million tranche of a $20 million round, anticipated to close by the end of the year. This money will be funneled towards shifting the focus of the business to the mobile and tablet market. TeleSoft Partners took the lead on the investment, with full participation from previous investors Crosslink Capital, Panorama Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Venture Tech Associates. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Bill Gates opens checkbook to send students to college

Education startup Inigral has raised $3.25 million. Inigral is the creator of the Schools App on Facebook. It is a white-label platform that universities can use to engage students once they have been admitted in a college or university, and it monitors their progress throughout the enrollment process. Last year, the company raised $4 million and was the first venture capital investment made by the Gates postsecondary education fund. The Gates foundation followed on with additional funding, along with Retro Venture Partners and Founders Fund. Read more on VentureBeat. 

I can’t grok Grokr, but it has raised $2.4 million 

Mysterious startup Grokr has raised an additional $2.4 million for a service no-one, except presumably the team and their investors, know anything about. Grokr is the project of Srivats Sampath, an Executive-in-Residence at U.S. Venture Partners and former founder and CEO of McAfee.com. He raised $1.5 million in January for Grokr, which claimed it was “unleashing the cognitive web for a post-PC world”, although no other information or developments have been disclosed. While I do not know what his company does, I do appreciate the Stranger in a Strange Land reference. Read the filing.

Like vehicles, people can be rented by the hour    

One of the beauty of freelancing is you can do it from everywhere. PeoplePerHour is a global marketplace that connects people who require services with people who have services to offer. I do not intend for this to sound dirty. The company launched a new product in August called Hourlies that facilitates the buying-and-selling of “pre-packaged” services, meaning the price is fixed. Today, the team announced the release of its iPhone app and closing a $3.2 million round from Index Ventures. PeoplePerHour is based in the London, with offices in Athens and New York City.

It’s hard to say which is more important in fueling the tech scene’s entrepreneurs- venture capital or boutique coffee. The startup ecosystem could not survive without either. Fortunately, investors are funneling their money into coffee as well as the cloud to keep it all percolating smoothly.

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Blue Bottle takes a leaf out of its customer’s books

San Francisco artisanal coffee company Blue Bottle Coffee has raised $20 million from Index Ventures. Third-wave coffee and other hipster fetishes generally fall outside the scope of VentureBeat’s coverage, but this particular brand is beloved and consumed in mass quantities by techies. In true startup form, the company sought institutional funding which will most likely be used to expand into new markets. Read the filing.

The wheels on Message Bus go round and round for better email delivery

The wheels on startup Message Bus keep on turning, as it drives into $11 million in growth funding.

This company is building the Message Bus Global Delivery Network, which delivers communications across multiple channels without having to deploy multiple servers. Its service powers email and mobile messaging through a cloud-native app. This round brings its total funding to $14 million. It was led by North Bridge Venture Partners with participation from True Ventures, Ignition Partners, and angel investors. Read more on VentureBeat.

Lettuce unwraps $2.1 million seed funding

For small businesses, order management can be a cumbersome and expensive ordeal.  Venice-based startup Lettuce hopes to simplify the process with its new automated order-and-inventory-management-system. CrossCut Ventures led the seed round, which included investments from 500 Startups, Launchpad LA, Baroda Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Double M Capital and other angel investors, according to Mobrem. Read more on VentureBeat.

UrbanSitter finds you a babysitter through your social network

Nanny booking company UrbanSitter is nursing $6 million in its first round of funding. The service connects parents with caretakers, allowing them to search, vet, and book babysitters online.There are many online childcare booking services, but UrbanSitter distinguishes itself by leveraging social networks to add a layer of trust into the system.  The investment was led by Canaan Partners, with money also coming from First Round Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners, Menlo Ventures, and angels. This round brings the total fundraising to $7.75 million, following a seed round last November. Read more on VentureBeat.

Referly rewards consumers for referrals, gets $1M reward for itself

Y Combinator company Referly closed its seed round of $1 million from New Enterprise Associates, Ignition Partners, 500 Startups, Jeff Lawson (CEO of Twilio), Elliot Loh, Eileen Burbidge, Ullas Naik, Michael Liou, Damien Tanner, Matt Monahan, and Carter Rabasa.helps online businesses create referral programs to expand their markets. With Referly, companies can create incentives for customers to do things like like recruiting new customers, opting for upgrades, and offering recommendations. Businesses can dole out rewards to promote user acquisition and loyalty, and individuals can receive rewards for helping to drive sales. Read more on VentureBeat. 

North Carolina startup brings home more than the bacon

Durham-based Appia secured $1.5 million from Yankee VC firm The Social Internet Fund. Appia builds and powers stores where consumers can buy software apps for their smart phones. It has raised $30 million to date. The Social Internet Fund is a new, smaller fund that has made nine investments in total.

TTV Capital invests in global payment platform and the luck of the Irish

3V Transaction Services provides a global payment platform for mobile operators and online retailers. It integrates mobile, card, and web based technology to make issuing and acquiring payment easier for businesses. The technology has been used by companies like Telefonica, eBay, and PayPal. TTV Capital led the $6.5 million round to support global growth. 3V is based in Dublin and this is its second round of institutional financing. Existing investors include Balderton Capital and Atlas Ventures.

A Metacloud pushed along by a Storm

Metacloud emerged from stealth mode today and disclosed backing by Storm Ventures. Metacloud provides an enterprise cloud solution based on OpenStack. As companies increasingly run and conduct business online, operating on a private cloud that can manage and store large amounts of data is a growing demand. The founders have extensive experience managing large-scale infrastructure for Yahoo and Ticketmaster and founded this startup to address the problems they saw in IT. Read the press release.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Looks like Andreessen-Horowitz is building out its social investments side of the business. It came out today that the venture firm hired Twitter culture guru Elizabeth Weil to help expand its social know-how.

“Three years at Twitter have flown by. Honored to have worked alongside this amazing crew. Thrilled to be joining the Andreessen Horowitz team!” she tweeted today.

She reportedly joins Andreessen-Horowitz’s social team, fittingly, and will be working directly with Mark Cranney. He’s somewhat of an in-house coach for the firm’s startups, helping them launch, make money, and find talent. It is unknown whether Weil will be recruiting new companies or helping those that make it in to succeed.

At Twitter, Weil held a number of positions, but most recently she headed up the company’s culture — something that’s precious to Silicon Valley startups. In her spare time she runs a paper crafts business called Paperwheel. She’s married to Twitter’s director of products for revenue, Kevin Weil.

This is far from Weil’s first time working for a venture capital firm as well. She has held positions at Institutional Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, as a senior associate and analyst respectively.

hat tip All Things D; Bird image via Shutterstock; Elizabeth Weil image via LinkedIn

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Hedge fund managers — those masters of the universe — are a little less godlike than you might think.

“We printed out articles to keep in huge stacks of manila folders, we would save a million bookmarks to our browsers, and we dumped everything into a totally disorganized ‘share drive from hell,’” said former hedge fund manager Danny Donado. “I hated it – and I know my colleagues did too.”

Now Donado has left the hedge fund business and, as an MBA student at Stanford, is launching a company called BipSync that is aimed at taming those mountains of manila folders and bookmarks.

“You can think of us as ‘Evernote for Investors combined with Salesforce.com for investment opportunities,’” Donado said onstage at DEMO Fall 2012 today.

The tool is aimed at simplifying the process of gathering, retrieving, and analyzing information about investment opportunities. It’s also got tools for managers to track how efficiently market analysts’ research is turning into actionable investment decisions for the firm.

The company is very early-stage, having raised no outside money. The founders, including Donado as well as James Cameron and Dan Zamboni, are Stanford business school students. The team came to this week’s DEMO Fall conference as part of the “Student Alpha” program, which invites qualified student startups to apply for special demonstration slots in the two-day program.

BipSync is in early alpha-stage tests with professional investors in the Bay Area, and hopes to move to an invitation-only beta test shortly after DEMO. See below for screenshots from the current product.

BipSync is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, most of the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top photo: BipSync cofounder Danny Donado. Courtesy Danny Donado

Microsoft is buying a little influence for its number-two-ranked search engine.

Thursday, the company announced a strategic investment in Klout, and a two-way technical partnership that brings influence-scoring technology to Bing and search data to Klout.

“This is an alliance based on a shared belief that people are at the center of task completion,” Bing corporate vice president Derrick Connell wrote in a blog post. “To help you find the right person we need to determine who is influential and trusted on different topics on the web. Bing and Klout share this vision.”

With the partnership, Bing’s search sidebar, the social additive that includes Facebook, Twitter, and Quora data, has been enhanced with Klout scores to give searchers a better idea of the subject matter expertise of people that Bing suggests in the “People Who Know” box (pictured right).

Klout said that it would be incorporating search data from Bing in its scoring algorithm. The startup will use various search signals to more accurately reflect a person’s real-life influence in his or her overall score. Klout will reward a user (with a linked Wikipedia account) with additional points based on how often they are searched for on Bing, for instance.

Both companies, which have allocated resources to a joint development team, said Thursday’s announcements are just the initial start to making the connection between people, search, and influence.

The companies did not disclose the terms or amount of the investment.

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds/Flickr

After targeting financial planning for women for the past few years, New York City-based LearnVest is aiming big with its latest update, which transforms the startup from a niche financial planning service to something that anyone can use.

LearnVest announced today that it has upgraded its core Money Center tool and tied it together with its financial planning services, making it easier than ever for financial planners to help you manage your money. Additionally, the company is now a Registered Investment Advisor, allowing its planners to offer investment advice as well.

“I just want to make financial planning really consumable — right now it’s not a consumer product,” Aleva von Tobel, LearnVest’s founder and CEO, told VentureBeat in an interview last week. “Being able to get advice from an expert… it’s a total disorganized process…”

LearnVest previously targeted women for financial planning because it was simply easier to go after a specific segment of users. But after the launch of its initial financial planning tools last year, Von Tobel tells me, the company has attracted plenty of men as well. Now, Von Tobel believes (without getting too political) LearnVest can bring financial planning to the 99 percent.

“I kind of step back and look at the LegalZoom’s of the world … everyone needs legal documents … but can we all afford a personal lawyer? No.,” Von Tobel said. “What they did is make getting access to legal documents very easy and consumable, and now they have legal services where you ca actually pay to work with lawyers… So at the high level, there’s an expert intensive industry that users really need access to but can’t afford because barriers to entry have been too high, [we're] disrupting it by putting in technology and making it affordable and consumable.”

LearnVest’s Money Center tool originally let you hook in your financial accounts to track your spending, but with this latest update it has become a valuable financial planning companion. Now the Money Center lets you visualize your budget and financial goals, and it also offers up tips to help you maintain your financial plan. Unlike Mint, which also helps manage your financial accounts, LearnVest doesn’t push you towards third-party services and credit cards to make an extra buck.

LearnVest is also working on an iPhone app, which should be available in the next few weeks. The app offers pretty much all of the features in LearnVest’s desktop Money Center, and in many ways it’ll be even more convenient. In particular, the company has developed a quick and simple way to enter cash transactions — it’s almost as simple as a Foursquare check-in. Keeping track of cash transactions has been my biggest problem with using money management services, so I’m hoping LearnVest has finally cracked that nut.

The company has also revamped its premium service, which is powered by a team of Certified Financial Planners. Just like LearnVest’s previous offering, you’ll have your own CFP to work with, which could be particularly helpful for those of you with complex finances.

A new “Budget Starter” plan ($89) gives you a phone consultation with a Learnvest CFP and three months of e-mail support. The “5-Year Planner” plan ($349 for annual) lets you map out a longer financial plan with a CFP and it comes with a phone consultation, three quarterly check-ins, and a year of free e-mail support.

At the high end, there’s the “Portfolio Builder” package ($599 a year), which is geared at people who are ready to invest, but want to avoid the fees of traditional financial and investment planners. It includes everything from the 5-Year Planner package, along with additional help with their investment portfolio.

As part of the upgraded Money Center, LearnVest’s CFPs can also view your accounts live during consultations. This allows the CFP to keep track of your finances without constantly having to catch up on your paperwork. (Think of it like working on a shared Google Doc.) Co-browsing your accounts may seem like a minor feature, but Von Tobel says nobody else in the financial planning is offering anything similar. Currently, the feature is restricted to when you’re on the phone with a CFP.

LearnVest has raised around $25 million from Accel Partners, Rose Tech Ventures, Richmond Management, and others.

Front photo via Tracy O/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As if HTC’s hasty investment in Beats Audio wasn’t problematic enough, the Taiwanese phone maker announced today that it would lose $40 million from its stake in troubled cloud gaming firm OnLive.

But that’s not stopping HTC from making further curious deals: It also announced a $35.4 million investment in Magnet Systems, which has developed a platform for mobile enterprise app development and deployment.

HTC blamed OnLive’s controversial restructuring for its loss, which involved selling the company’s assets to new investors (and erasing any equity employees had in the company originally). HTC invested $40 million in OnLive early last year to get a foothold in the burgeoning cloud gaming market, which allows consumers to stream games over the Internet with no download or installation required.

With Magnet, HTC is clearly trying to make its phones palatable to businesses and potentially offer something comparable to Apple’s iCloud. The company says Magnet’s software will bring “social, mobile, and cloud capabilities to HTC’s portfolio of service offerings.” It’s an interesting move after HTC shut down its Sense cloud storage service earlier this year.

We’d have much more faith in HTC’s Magnet deal if the company didn’t already blow $300 million last year on the overhyped audio company Beats. Luckily for HTC, Beats rebought half of its shares for $150 million last month (though HTC expected a $4.8 million loss from the deal).

With a predicted slow quarter ahead, HTC probably needs to consider its investments more wisely. Once one of the most successful Android device makers, HTC was eventually toppled by Motorola and Samsung (although now even Motorola is struggling). HTC is changing its strategy up this year by focusing on a few key devices, like the One series, instead of several releases throughout the year. But as much as we liked the One S, HTC is still struggling to keep pace with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S II

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Investor Paul Kedrosky and StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon were supposed to debate each other Thursday at the International Startup Festival but instead ended up agreeing on almost everything, including that the world needs more “startups that matter.”

“On an annual basis, there are only eight companies that matter [in Silicon Valley],” Kedrosky said at the event in Montreal’s Old Port. “And really, if you think about it, it’s not just per year, it’s like every six years.”

While Lindzon and Kedrosky didn’t name which Valley companies are the ones that matter now, they said this is a serious problem. The two said many issues were contributing to the concentration of just a few companies dominating the conversation.

“We should be encouraging more radical thinking,” Kedrosky said. “Many of these people should take risks, but they’re not.”

One problem Kedrosky sees contributing to today’s marketplace are business school entrepreneur programs. He said that the number of these programs has increased while the results of capital infusion have declined.

“The fastest way to produce entrepreneurs is to kill these programs,” Kedrosky said. “It’s not obviously helpful. It has not stopped the bleed of capital creation.”

One problem Lindzon sees is the “misallocation of capital and talent.” Lindzon said that not only do more successful corporate-level problem solvers need to start their own companies, he also said we need more startups that tackle problems in health care and education.

Lindzon and Kedrosky also said there are issues with location and too much attention being focused on just a few cities like San Francisco and New York. They pointed to San Diego as a potential new hotbed for startups but said that Seattle had fallen out of favor.

But while location has become less important, the two also agreed that between staying in your hometown and going into to a prestigious accelerator like Y Combinator, there was no debate over which way to go.

“Getting an offer from YC is like getting an offer from Harvard,” Lindzon said. “You have to go.”

Photo credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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Sony, which is dealing with billions of dollars in losses and its worst fiscal year yet, is considering taking a $623 million stake in flailing camera company Olympus.

The Japanese camera company has been in a dark place ever since it announced it had been hiding losses from investors for nearly two decades. The scandal came to light soon after then-chief executive Michael Woodford was fired after asking questions about curious $1.5 billion dollar payments being made to investment fund advisors. Since then, the company has replaced much of its executive staff and plans to cut 2,700 jobs.

To keep its head above water, Olympus offered a 10 percent stake in the company, which Sony now appears to be snapping up. Reuters reports, however, that the deal is not finalized, and Olympus has nothing to announce yet, according to Olympus spokesperson Tsuyoshi Oshima.

Sony, however, hasn’t been in its best form either. The company sustained a $5.7 billion loss for 2011, completing its worst year to date. It blamed its struggling television department and natural disasters near some of its plants among other issues.

In an effort to jump-start its own business, however, the company announced yesterday that it will invest $997 million dollars into developing CMOS sensors, camera sensors that are thin and doesn’t take up valuable space within the camera. As VentureBeat contributor Ricardo Bilton pointed out, that investment is nearly half of Sony’s projected revenue for 2012 — a big risk.

via Reuters; Broken camera image via Shutterstock

With a $5.7 billion loss in 2011, Sony is coming off its worst year ever. Blame the Thailand floods or its collapsing TV business, but either way the result is the same: Sony needs more income.

It may have a plan to make that happen. The company is making a $997 million investment in the production of stacked CMOS sensors. That’s a major gamble, as $997 million represents nearly half of Sony’s projected revenue for its fiscal 2012.

With the cash, Sony plans to boost production of sensor wafers to up to 60,000 a month by September of next year. Some of the output will be used in Sony’s own products, but the more important segment will be sold to other smartphone and tablet makers.

A CMOS sensor is a camera sensor equipped with its own integrated circuit. This circuit in turn features an array of pixel sensors, which detect the light used to process photos. Stacked sensors shrink the real estate needed to do the job, allowing for greater performance in less space. Sony announced the new sensors in January, promising faster speeds and lower energy consumption.

The appeal of this should be clear: As the recent nanoSIM ordeal has shown, space is a prime consideration for smartphone manufacturers. With limited space in increasingly small phones, making individual components as small as possible has now become a key mission.

With the investment, Sony is making a big play to have its sensors in just about every mobile device with a camera. Sony’s sensor technology is already in the iPhone 4S, and the company clearly wants that relationship to continue for a long time to come.

Follow us on Twitter, @venturebeat, and you’ll get updates throughout the day when funding news breaks on VentureBeat.

Coding newbie site Codecademy gets $10M

Codecademy is a drop-dead simple site that teaches you how to code. The company snapped up $10 million from Virgin’s Richard Branson, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Russian entrepreneur/investor Yuri Milner. Read more on VentureBeat: Codecademy gets new money from Index, Kleiner Perkins, & Richard Freaking Branson.

Near Infinity raises $17M for U.S. intelligence software development

Near Infinity, a software development and big data company that caters to the U.S. government, has raised $17 million in a new round of funding from Columbia Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures. The company builds applications for the U.S. intelligence community for personal communication, search, analysis, and security. Read more on VentureBeat: Near Infinity gets $17M to build apps for U.S. intelligence agencies.

Shapeways gets $6.2M for 3-D printing

Shapeways announced the close of a $6.2 million second round of funding on Tuesday. The company will print anything you can dream of in 3-D. You can either upload your design or create one with Shapeway’s software. Read more on VentureBeat: One million 3-D printing projects later, Shapeways grabs a new investment.

Dropcam raises $12M to watch your house when you’re away

Home surveillance camera maker Dropcam has just secured $12 million in a second round of funding led by Menlo Ventures and supported by Accel Partners and Bay Partners. Dropcam’s Wi-Fi-enabled video cameras make it easy for users to remotely monitor their kids, pets, and homes from a variety of devices. Read more on VentureBeat: Video surveillance startup Dropcam gets a fresh $12M, rolls out new Android app.

Panzura speeds up cloud storage with $15M investment

Cloud storage company Panzura has closed a $15 million third round of funding. The San José, Calif.- based company provides Web-connected cloud storage that is faster than storage devices attached directly to locally hosted servers. Read more on VentureBeat: Panzura raises $15M to make cloud storage faster and more secure.

Bluebox grabs $9.5M, won’t reveal its security plans quite yet

Still in stealth mode, enterprise security startup Bluebox is keeping all the most juicy details of its business close to its chest. But we do know that the startup is compelling enough that it’s attracted a $9.5 million first funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Also on board is early Google investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, who is joining Bluebox’s board of directors along with Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss. Read more on VentureBeat: Mystery enterprise security startup Bluebox gets $9.5M from Andreessen Horowitz.

Rethink Robotics announces $30M investment

Robot manufacturer Rethink Robotics, founded by iRobots co-founder, has raised $30 million in new funding. The company is building robots that might one day interact with humans and take tasks off our hands. Sigma Partners led the round, with participation from Draper Fisher Jurveston. Read the press release.

Onefinestay raises $12M to offer luxury vacation rentals

“Unhotel” Onefinestay raised $12 million, the company announced today. The company’s premise is very similar to personal vacation rental site Airbnb, but is fancier, according to Onefinestay. Only luxury apartments and homes need apply to list their homes on the service. Canaan Partners led the round. Read the press release.

Crushpath raises $2M in venture funding

“Sales platform for salespeople” Crushpath launched Tuesday with $2 million in funding. The company lets salespeople communicate with each other, Yammer-style, so they can track a sale from lead to close. Charles River Ventures led the round. Read the press release.

3D printed objects image via Flickr user fdecomite

China’s most valuable Internet company, Tencent, is continuing its invasion into the U.S. gaming market in a big way today. Epic Games, maker of popular titles like Gears of War, announced today that Tencent has made a strategic minority investment in the company.

Tencent already had a preexisting relationship with Epic as a licensee of its Unreal Engine, the most popular 3D gaming engine on the market.  The deal is expected to close within one month. Terms were not disclosed.

The investment follows Tencent’s $400 million investment in Riot Games last year, a U.S.-based online game company. With the Epic deal, it’s clear that Tencent is aiming to get its fingers into even more aspects of the gaming market. Epic recently showed off Unreal Engine 4, a stunning upgrade to its gaming engine meant for next-generation consoles and high-end PCs.

Epic says that it will continue to operate independently following the completion of the Tencent deal. At this point, it’s unclear how Tencent’s investment will help the U.S. gaming company, but I suspect we’ll hear more when the deal closes.

Two of the biggest companies in the tech industry, Facebook and Google, are interested in grabbing a piece of popular music video site Vevo.

The tech giants are competing for an equity stake in Vevo as well as a lucrative advertising deal with the site, according to a New York Post report that cites two unnamed sources.

Vevo is an independent music video company created in partnership with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Company. The video service is currently generating 45 billion video views a year, and it plans to expand beyond the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. to six additional countries in 2012.

Initially, Vevo grew in popularity thanks to its presence on YouTube and by having the rights to all the official music videos from popular artists. However, the music video service experienced a huge boost in traffic and engagement after integrating with Facebook’s Timeline — a detail Facebook is keenly aware of.

Now that both Google and Facebook see the potential in Vevo, they obviously want a stake. The real question here is what will be the more lucrative move for Vevo.

The New York Post’s report indicates that Vevo’s current deal with YouTube is set to expire later this year. And while Vevo wants to avoid distributing its licensed content through a single provider, it might be able to use the competition with Facebook to renegotiate a better agreement with Google.

We’re reaching out to Vevo for further comment, and will update the post with any new information we find out.

Image via Vevo

Vidyo president, chief executive, and co-founder Ofer Shapiro

Updated 5/22/2012: This funding is not Vidyo’s fifth round, but rather an extension of its fourth round. A few details about the company’s technology have also been corrected in the story below.

Video conferencing and telepresence company Vidyo has raised a new round of funding, an extension of the company’s fourth round.

Vidyo enables video conferencing at 1080p HD quality and 60 frames per second, with up to 100 participants and displaying video from up to nine people simultaneously. People can access these conferences through a wide variety of platforms, including multi-screen telepresence rooms, ordinary video conferencing rooms, desktop and laptop PCs, and iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets. It added support for the iPhone 4S in October, 2011.

It now claims more than 1,850 enterprise, healthcare, education, and government customers.

QuestMark Partners led the round, along with other existing investors: Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Additionally, Juniper Networks joined as a strategic partner, through its Junos Innovation Fund.

Vidyo did not disclose the amount of the investment, saying only that the company has raised $97 million to date. Since that’s the same total it boasted eight months ago after its $22.5 million fourth round, we can only assume that someone’s math is not adding up correctly, or the company is hiding the size of the round for its own reasons.

Vidyo says its pricing, from $20,000 and up for four screens at 720p HD quality, is lower than competing video conferencing products because it delivers HD video over ordinary broadband networks, at 384 Kbps and up, instead of requiring more expensive MPLS links. It dynamically adapts to the amount of bandwidth available.

Juniper is a company that makes high-speed networking equipment. The fact that it is investing in Vidyo is evidence of the growing importance of top-layer services like videoconferencing to network providers. A partnership like this works because it allows one company to sell the equipment needed to provide lots of bandwidth, while another company delivers the equipment to soak up that bandwidth.

On the low end, Vidyo competes with Microsoft’s Skype as well as Apple’s Facetime, though both products are much lower resolution and support a more limited array of hardware. On the high end, it competes with video conferencing systems from Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize, and others.

Vidyo was founded in 2005 and is based in Hackensack, N.J.

Photo of Vidyo president, chief executive, and co-founder Ofer Shapiro courtesy Vidyo.

Andreessen Horowitz realized a terrific return on its investment in Instagram, turning $500,000 into an estimated $100 million in about two years.

I’ve never made $100 million, let alone had $500,000 to invest, so I decided to turn that into terms that I can understand.

Imagine you went to the local tacqueria and ordered a burrito. Then you put the burrito aside while you went to get a glass of water. When you came back to the table, you discovered that the burrito had turned into a pair of first-class tickets to Hawaii. Now just multiply that by 50,000 burritos, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how profitable this venture capital business can be.

Nice return on investment. Too bad Andreessen Horowitz missed a shot at more than doubling its payout.

The company made an initial $500,000 investment in 2010 in Burbn, the parent company of Instagram.

But later that year, shortly before Instagram picked up its first institutional funding round, Andreessen Horowitz switched horses and poured $5 million into Instagram competitor PicPlz.

Pic what now? That’s right, it’s an app for adding cute retro filters to your photos and then sharing them, just like Instagram. Only there’s one big difference: Instagram was recently sold to Facebook for $1 billion, while PicPlz is, well, it’s hard to say. The company hasn’t updated its blog in five months, which is not a good sign. Founder Dalton Caldwell isn’t actively involved in PicPlz anymore and is spending his time on App.net, a mobile app promotion service, instead. When I interviewed him at DEMO last year, he didn’t really even want to talk about the photo service he’d created.

You could make a strong argument that by refusing to invest in Instagram’s Series A, Andreessen Horowitz blew a chance at doubling its stake in the company. It also left an opening for competing VC firm Benchmark to move in. Benchmark holds an estimated 18 percent of the billion-dollar company, after leading the $7 million first round and participating in the Sequoia-led $50 million second round just prior to the acquisition.

Of course, there’s more than enough money and pre-IPO Facebook stock to go around in this deal, but the short version is that Andreessen Horowitz could have been sitting on a $280 million return now instead of a $100 million one.

At the time of the PicPlz investment, Marc Andreessen posted a comment on Quora, explaining his firm’s decision as a conflict of interest issue. When Andreessen Horowitz invested in Burbn, it was a location-tracking service that didn’t compete with the firm’s prior investment in PicPlz. But when Burbn pivoted and turned its primary product into a photo-sharing app, that investment became a conflict, so Andreessen Horowitz dialed back its involvement. (The irony is that the conflict of interest went away anyway, since Caldwell’s company is no longer focused on image sharing.)

Of course, if it were truly a conflict of interest, the firm could have dialed back its involvement in Instagram entirely, maybe even divesting itself of its shares (I’m sure Benchmark would have been happy to buy them). Or it could have dumped its shares of PicPlz, which in 2010 was already looking like a pale also-ran compared to red-hot Instagram. Or the firm could have said, screw it, we’re betting on both horses as a way of ensuring that we win no matter what — and really, since when do conflicts of interest present an insurmountable barrier to VC investments?

Maybe I don’t understand VC ethics, but I do know one thing: Even though Andreessen Horowitz scored a swimming pool full of cash out of this deal, its partners are probably just a little bummed that it’s not two and a half swimming pools full of cash.

That’s a steep price to pay for doing the right thing.

Photo: Ian Munnings/Flickr

The firm released its second seed funding survey Thursday; the report tracked how much seed funding startups on the West Coast reported in 2010 and 2011. Data was gathered from 56 transactions in 2011 and 52 deals in 2010.

From 2010 to 2011, seeding funding transactions rose three percent, from 43 to 46 percent. However, of all companies surveyed by Fenwick and West in 2010 that received some sort of seed funding, only 45 percent went on to get venture capital funding. Only 12 percent received subsequent rounds of seed funding, while others were acquired, shut down, had no data available, or received no additional funding at all and are still up and running.

It’s great to see that funding is on the rise, but since less than half of the startups were able to secure venture capital, it shows that many startups aren’t moving forward and growing. On the flip side, the survey does point out that right now it is a “good environment for entrepreneurs” because investors are making faster decisions and startups that receive later rounds of funding are also receiving high valuations.

The survey also focused on the changes in convertible notes, the bonds that allow entrepreneurs to keep equity ownership, which grew in 2011. Startups rose a median $1 million in convertible note deals in 2011, up from $662,500 in 2010. In addition, the median valuation cap on convertible notes rose from $4.0 million in 2010 to $7.5 million in 2011.

Complete results of the survey can be found on Fenwick & West’s website.

HelloWallet, an online service that encourages you to spend your money more wisely, announced Thursday it has raised $12 million in its second round of funding.  Investment research company Morningstar, Inc. and TD Fund led the round.

“HelloWallet helps workers figure out how to spend money, focusing on savings and reducing spending. We give you financial advice to manage day to day expenses,” Matt Fellowes, HelloWallet chief executive and founder, told VentureBeat in an interview.

HelloWallet offers the average American worker comprehensive financial advice on topics such as paying off debt, increasing savings, setting and sticking to a budget, and boosting overall wealth through savings and investments. The company uses behavioral psychology and statistics to give members recommendations on spending and saving practices. With this new round of funding, Morningstar and HelloWallet will team up to offer financial advice with company-issued 401Ks, so employees can make the most of their retirement efforts.

Customers can manage their money through HelloWallet’s website, with its iPhone app, and through a text message system for feature phones. An Android application will be released in the next six weeks.

The company prides itself on never selling your data to anyone and never pushing any banking products on you. All of your personal and financial data stored with HelloWallet is protected by “bank level” security measures. A HelloWallet subscription will cost your about nine dollars per month and for every five paid subscriptions, the company will donate one memberships to a family who cannot afford the monthly subscription cost.

“Since we launched we’ve sold more than 350,00 subscriptions and we are now growing at a much faster rate. We’ll use the funding to build up our team,” said Fellowes.

HelloWallet will use the $12 million dollar funding to grow its customer base and help more Americans build wealth. It also has plans to expand its free subscription donations.

HelloWallet is based in Washinton D.C. and has 35 employees. So far the company has raised more than $20 million dollars of funding.

While the term “peer-to-peer” first hit the scene during the first dot-com boom and was associated with file-sharing sites like Napster and Kazaa, today’s peer-to-peer companies focus on making connections between individuals for a wide variety of purposes: Selling goods, finding a place to stay, exchanging advice or lending money. It’s part of a multi-industry trend towards more democratic ways of managing markets, where transactions and ideas are crowdsourced instead of going through a central hub or a small group of experts.

VCs are continuing to support peer-oriented companies, whose overall reach extends across a number of sectors. An initial public offering remains unlikely in the near future due to the relative immaturity of new entrants, with the possible exception of room rental marketplace Airbnb. Still, venture investors should be able to expect interesting M&A exits.



Recent History

2006 – 2007: A number of companies received funding for their applications, which were designed to enable “peer-to-peer” collaboration with online tools. An early entrant was handmade goods marketplace Etsy, which received $1.6 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures. Another company was Inigral, a San Francisco-based company intent on developing software for the educational sector. It received $580,000 in Series A funding from the Founders Fund for its software that enables collaboration between students, their peers and instructors. The company has since received another $6.5 million in follow-on funding.

SocialPicks, a “community where stock investors exchange ideas and track performance of financial bloggers,” raised half a million dollars from Bay Partners in its first round of funding. The company was later acquired by stock market data and syndication tools provider FinancialContent.

2010: Room-rental marketplace Airbnb exploded onto the scene with its peer-to-peer marketplace aimed at the global accommodations marketplace. The company closed a $7.2 million series A round in 2010 and followed it with a $112 million series B funding in 2011 and is backed by a syndicate of top-tier venture capital firms and international investor DST Global.

Today: A current trend is veering toward peer-to-peer financial services, such as money transfer and lending platforms sites like peerTransfer and SoMoLend. This is in part due to users becoming increasingly comfortable with conducting business online and the success of crowdsourced microfinance sites like Kiva and Kickstarter. peerTransfer calls itself the “pioneering low-cost online international money transfer and global payments” company. SoMoLend is developing a peer-to-peer lending platform for small businesses and was seeded with $310,000 by Cincinnati, Ohio-based public-private group CincyTech.

Charts

The number of companies funded in this sector peaked in 2007, but a healthy number of companies (10) received VC financing in the first three quarters of 2011.

Excluding Airbnb, aggregate funding amounts in the subsector have been relatively stable over the last five year period, with 2011 showing a material uptick.

This investment has a strong regional flavor: The California and the Northeast regions have accounted for nearly 80 percent of peer-focused technology fundings over the past five years.

As part of the larger consumer web spectrum, peer-to-peer applications are in high demand. The near future will no doubt see expansion of peer-to-peer models to other industry verticals. For example, consumers can now rent out their own parking spots at Park at My House. With social media becoming embedded into most avenues of the user experience, peer-focused technology companies can leverage social network access to drive user adoption rates.

Whether or not they can develop significant IPO offerings remains to be seen, but depending on market traction and strategic importance to acquirers, M&A exits seem the most likely outcome for smaller niche-market oriented companies.

VentureTrends is a research service of VentureDeal, a national venture capital database based in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Investing in private companies has depended on outdated technology for too long,” said CapLinked CEO Eric M. Jackson in a release this morning.

“Emails loaded with attachments, spreadsheets for tracking leads and clunky enterprise data rooms are straight out of the 1990s. CapLinked makes the process easier for companies, investors and their advisors by giving them social tools to connect and share information.”

The fresh money brings the startup’s total funding to $1.4 million. The company previously drew a seed round in mid-2010 and an angel round in March 2011.

Today’s newly announced investors include a few luminaries. Chris Yeh, a prominent blogger and investor who is also a vice president at PBworks, pitched in for the round, as did angel investor and onetime Paypal exec Jason Portnoy, TheGlobe.com founder Stephan Paternot, Althea Foundation chair Alexsis de Raadt-St. James and a couple others.

“Private companies are an important source of job creation and economic growth,” said Portnoy in a statement. “By streamlining the investment process and giving companies new tools to raise capital and sell assets, CapLinked is changing how private investments get made.”

CapLinked was founded in 2009 by former Paypal exec Jackson and finance pro Christopher Grey and claims it has almost 100,000 accounts of would-be investors as well as 10,000 profiles for cash-seeking companies. To date, CapLinked has seen $12 billion in transactions through its service.

Through the CapLinked site, privately held companies can better manage the fundraising process, including networking and investor relations. Investors can use the site for deal flow, due diligence and portfolio tracking. And both companies and investors can bring advisers, attorneys and consultants into the loop of information.

While CapLinked is steeped in tech provenance, it’s not just tech companies raising funds through this service. The company tells us it is also being used by private companies in such markets as energy, transportation, real estate, financial services and food and beverages.

Previous investors include Peter Thiel, Dave McClure, Yammer CEO David Sacks and a slew of other Silicon Valley luminaries.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Accellion helps companies and government agencies secure data and documents across the cloud and mobile devices, especially the iPad in workplaces. Some of its solutions include Secure Mobility, Secure Collaboration and Secure File Transfer. The company likes to think of itself as “Dropbox for the enterprise,” chief marketing officer Paula Skokowski told us.

“Dropbox is not appropriate for work,” she said. “We provide a solution for enterprises to safely use these devices to view corporate data.”

The $12 million round was raised by technology-focused private equity firm Riverwood Capital, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif. and New York. Skokowski said the company chose Riverwood because its investors were on the same page with Accellion’s in-place strategies.

“Accellion is a pioneer in enterprise-grade secure, cloud file sharing and collaboration offerings. Unlike consumer-based applications, Accellion solutions meet both the requirements of business users for easy anytime, anywhere access to enterprise content, as well as the requirements of IT to retain control over access and security of information,” said Jeffrey Parks, founding partner of Riverwood Capital, in a statement. “We are excited about the company’s prospects moving forward as it expands and grows in 2012.”

Palo Alto-based Accellion was founded in 1999 and has offices in North America, Asia and Europe. Including this round, the company has secured $45 million from prior investors including Baring Private Equity Partners and TiNSHED.

Zinio lets magazine publishers who don’t want to build their own mobile apps distribute their content on devices such as the iPad. The last known funding for Zinio was $7 million the company raised in  September 2005, according to PaidContent.

Zinio describes itself as the “world’s largest news stand.” The company has been around for nearly a decade, was partly dismantled in 2007, and pieces were sold to Gilvest.

Zinio is the chosen tablet partner for magazines such as TV Guide, Men’s Health, Black Enterprise and Penthouse.

While the print magazine industry continues to falter, Zinio raising a significant round of financing to digitize content suggests that its investors are bullish about the future of online content, and tablets in particular.