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Last week we covered Jawbone’s noise-cancelling bluetooth headset, but this week STEP Labs debuted a headset technology that STEP chief executive Robert Mitro says will blow the competition out of the water.

Mitro says STEP’s technology creates a virtual acoustic bubble six inches from your mouth, so that all the other noises are blocked away. He says its minimal processing power, instantaneous voice transmission and lack of voice distortion give STEP an edge over its competitors. It also doesn’t require a skin sensor.

The benefit is that bluetooth headsets enabled with STEP’s technology allow clear, consistent voice communications in severe, high-decibel noise environments, such as a rock concert or a trade show. But the technology goes beyond wireless headsets and cell phones. STEP aims to be the “Intel inside” of all things audible, including auto (voice recognition), medical (ultrasound), and military (sonar/radar). Watch the video here.

The company showed off its STEPware Headset Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It used a talking mannequin called Nadine to demonstrate clear voice reception even in a 92 to 95 decibel range. It’s in stealth partnership with three headset manufacturers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. to release a bluetooth headset “soon.”

“We think we have the story of 2008. We feel we’re superior — in every way — to anybody else,” says Mitro, who worked 17 years at IBM and has been involved in eight successful startups, seven of which had successful exits, he says. Mitro has registered a number of patents for its “voice separation” tool.

The company has just raised a $6.5 million in a second round of funding from Gabriel Venture Partners, which led the round, Individuals’ Venture Fund, Garage Technology Ventures, Garage Canada, North Coast and individuals.

The company, founded in 2003 by a host of engineers, has Dr Jon Taenzer on staff — one of the “top five” acousticians in the world, according to Mitro. STEP spent three years building intellectual property and then brought Mitro on board as Chairman and CEO. He also personally invested in the business, although he won’t say how much. After Mitro came on board the company decided to focus on the bluetooth headset market, because it was the easiest to get into. Now they’re expanding beyond headsets. The company installed the technology in a Cadillac XLR convertible, which was driven top-down at 70 mph and still produced clear voice reception, he said.

STEP Labs’ second financing round actually closed in October, but a chance encounter on an airplane with an investor — whose principal investment is in a headset manufacturing company — led to STEP opening the round back up. Another investor, Scott Chou, a partner at Gabriel Venture Partners, said he once threw a cellphone headset out his car window because the quality was so poor. He said headsets using STEP’s technology are better than any other he has used.

We haven’t tested the technology yet, but when we do, we’ll let you know if it lives up to the hype.

Money has been pouring into battery and fuel cell startups of late, with companies like A123 Systems, Lilliputian Systems, and M2E Power (coverage here, here and here) raising funding ranging from single- to triple-digit millions.

Now another company has taken on a heavy round of funding: Boston Power, a firm that plans to concentrate its efforts on the laptop market with a battery that ages better than competing products.

One of the most annoying things about laptop batteries (besides when they catch on fire) is their short lifespan. Standard lithium-ions lose their ability to recharge over time, and typically have to be replaced every year or so by mobile workers.

The battery that Boston Power just began producing, the Sonata, will continue to charge just as well as they did when brand new for up to several years, depending on the usage habits of owners.

The Sonata averages a four to five time longer lifespan than current battery technology, according to the company. That, in turn, will lead to fewer discarded batteries from the millions of laptop users around the world.

“I have a system that’s a few years old, but I still get 4 hours battery life. I’m often the only person in the room that’s not plugged in,” founder and CEO Chrstine Lampe-Onnerund told us in an interview.

Unlike companies like A123, which has a proprietary doping technology, Onnerund tells us that Boston Power’s secret is just in overall good engineering, and solving production problems ranging from battery chemistry to the manufacturing process.

The Sonata will, at least initially, be sold through laptop manufacturers who will choose what to charge for it. The company plans on scaling its production, which is handled by outside firms, to one million batteries per month by the end of 2008.

The $45 million investment is the company’s third. Oak Investment Partners led the round, while Venrock Associates, Granite Global Ventures and Gabriel Venture Partners also participated. The Boston-area company has raised over $68 million total to date.

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In a highly risky strategy of piggy-backing on other carriers’ networks, Kajeet has raised $36.8 million in a second round of financing to offer cellphone services to tweens and teens.

It offers a dashboard for parents to control when the phone can and can not be used, along with wallpaper, games, ringtones, applications and more.

The Bethesda, Maryland company is brushing aside the grim evidence provided by string of disasters at other companies trying something similar. Amp’d Mobile was the most high-profile recent case of a so-called MVNO (or Mobile Virtual Network Operator) for youth that saw its business fall part because of high costs. Firefly, a venture-backed company that served teens and younger kids with a phone, also struggled. It was forced to restart again when its original investors bailed on the company.

Founded in 2003, but launching nationally six months ago, Kajeet is a pay-as-you-go service. The company charges 35 cents a day, 10 cents a minute and 5 cents per text message. The phones are available at Best Buy, Limited Too and Longs Drugs Stores and at the company’s Web site. It is not saying anything about its sales traction so far.

It operates on the Sprint PCS network.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund (DFJ Growth Fund) led the financing. Existing investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity Ventures, Gabriel Venture Partners and InterWest Partners, also participated in this financing.

Here are the reasons that Firefly faced, but only some of them will haunt Kajeet:

The premise that kids need specialty phones is flawed. They only get a phone for a year or two until they want the real thing. So there’s a very short lifecycle, and correspondingly weak lifetime revenue — given the cost of acquisition. Kids tend to break phones quickly or lose them, at which point the parents are not too happy. Third, the carriers tend to add a cheap but good phone for kids for say, only $10 a month. Firefly managed to get traffic in the carrier store, but then suddenly salespeople in the stores started switched customers over to the carriers’ own cheaper phone. So then the only sales model is to sell through stories or its own site, which is what Kajeet is doing.

However, Kajeet isn’t selling special phones, like Firefly. It is using normal phones, said Daniel Neal, chief executive and founder, in an interview, and so its model is vastly different from Kajeet’s, he says. The company is targeting the “sweet spot” of 11 to 14 year olds, he said.

And Neal reminds us that the MVNO record isn’t all bad. TracFone and Virgin Mobile are examples of MVNO services that have done well in the US, he said.

Kajeet previously raised a $27 million first round.

Tapatap, a new online contest site, has launched, the latest in a slew of such sites. And Wis.dm has launched yet another Q&A site.

Tapatap, of San Mateo, is different, its team claims, in that it offers access to games from all places at once: Users can play via their mobile phone, from their PC over TapaTap’s web site, or via a widget embedded on someone’s blog. It also lets people create profiles and share with friends.

However, content-wise, it isn’t offering anything very new. Contests are as basic as voting on which model you think is hotter from two pictures provided. It wants to make money from sponsors of things like bikini competitions. It’s base stuff; on Tapatap’s front page when we looked was a contest for the more disgusting photo (see below).

Players win points and prizes by creating their contests, submitting photos in contests and by voting in contests.

Online contest sites are all over the place these days, from the array of bootstrapped efforts like Megabuzz (which also tries to tap into popular culture questions, offering prizes), to well-funded American Idol-inspired sites, and others, such as prize-bidding site Limbo 41414.

Tapatap is another well-funded company, before it even launches. We reported earlier the company had raised $2.5 million from Gabriel Venture Partners. It has a pedigreed team: Entrepreneurs Isaac Babbs, Andy Riedel, and Ken Scott previously founded Atlas Mobile, acquired by InfoSpace in 2004 for an undisclosed amount (see here, and here). Earlier, Babbs was president of Sorrent, which became Glu Mobile, and which recently went public; and he co-founded shockwave.com.

Wis.dm, meanwhile, is the latest “me too” company. It lets people ask questions, voice opinions, discuss topics and issues, and seek guidance from peers, again letting people tap into the “wisdom of crowds.” We already mentioned the similar Megabuzz above. There’s also Avanoo, which appears more ambitious (see our coverage).

An example of a Tapatap contest is below:

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Used textbook site, Chegg, has hit a nerve.

Chegg is undercutting the prices of textbooks at college bookstores, and a recent BusinessWeek article about the Santa Clara, Calif. company has climbed to second place on Digg’s “Top in 24 Hours” page (as of this writing). We’re not sure exactly why. One reason may be because the young audience at Digg is enjoying the story — seeing this as a way of indirectly sticking it to the publishers and Barnes & Nobles and other college bookstore owners who currently charge such high prices. We remember being unimpressed by the discounts of used books at college, so we can empathize.

Chegg provides an alternative for textbooks and other school supplies, such as computers. It has just raised $2.2 million from Gabriel Venture Partners and angel investor Mike Maples, who backed the company earlier. The company tells VentureBeat it made $100,000 in revenue in December, though is not profitable yet. It saw 44,000 unique visitors last month, and has seen a 200 percent increase in traffic each month since August.

Update: Corrected to “thousands” for unique number. Apologies.

Eyespot, a start-up that lets people make video mashups, said it has raised a first round of funding of $3.7 million.

The round, led by Silicon Valley firm Gabriel Venture Partners, is the latest sign of how hot video editing tools are — now that the user-generated video revolution, a la YouTube, is underway.

We’ve mentioned EyeSpot before, when writing about a competing company called Movie Masher, which itself has just launched and is looking for a strategic buyer. Another player in this area is Jumpcut (bought by Yahoo). As explained, these companies let people overlay images on other videos — which is basically flash animation on video. You can mix video, photos and music into a single, edited video, and customize various aspects of these, changing and inverting image color, for example.

Here and below you see still images of the sorts of “gooey” and “drippy” videos people are creating (go to Eyespot to see a real video highlighting this). Movie Masher also illustrates elements of this.

Other investors in Eyespot include Express Ventures and executives from MP3.com and DivX, the company said.

EyeSpot wants to provide the technology to major media companies. Since its “beta” testing launch in April, it has signed partnerships with Lions Gate, Blip.tv, Veoh Networks, Current TV and various artists, it said.