VentureBeat

Mobile search and advertising company Jumptap has raised $26 million in a fourth round of funding led by AllianceBernstein, with all previous investors participating.

The company has positioned itself as an alternative to Google’s search and ad services for mobile devices. The largest carrier in the country, Verizon, is partnering with Google for these services. But Jumptap has business relationships with AT&T and 16 other carriers of various sizes, and has said it reaches around 150 million mobile subscribers.

Jumptap’s other partnerships include a deal with iPhone analytics firm PinchMedia. Startup competitors include Medio.

Previous investors have already put a total of $25 million $73 million into the company, and include: General Catalyst Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP.

In the solar cell market, there are three broad categories. Thin-film manufacturers produce cells that convert little of the sun’s energy to electricity, but are dirt cheap. Opposite thin-film, companies like Spectrolab and Emcore make highly efficient, but very expensive cells. Between are the standard solar photovoltaic makers, with average efficiencies, and average prices.

The result is a pricing balance that gives each group a slice of the overall market. But what if it were possible to have the low production costs of a thin-film maker like First Solar, plus the 30 percent-plus efficiencies of a Spectrolab? Most industry pundits would say such disruptive technology is a pipe dream, but Wakonda Technologies is claiming to be able to make it happen.

What makes Spectrolab’s technology so expensive is the necessity building its cells atop a single-crystal wafer, a sheet of material that is painstakingly manufactured as a flawless whole in order to precisely control its electrical properties. Wakonda, a newly-emergy Medford, Mass. startup, says it has the ability to “simulate” those wafers with a cheap metal foil, much as thin-film makers do. Think of it as a bit like replacing expensive real diamonds with cubic zirconium.

Unfortunately, Wakonda isn’t giving many real specifics on its technology. Its credibility instead relies on an all-star cast of backers. The venture firms helping supply its $9.5 million financing include Advanced Technology Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. Notably, Wakonda also has the financial support of Applied Ventures, the investing arm of Applied Materials, a large tech company that has some of the most advanced thin-film manufacturing technology around.

If Wakonda’s technology lives up to the early claims of thin-film manufacturing prices with over 30 percent cell efficiencies, it will not only leapfrog the existing solar industry, but will also be less expensive than any existing energy generation technology, including coal, natural gas and nuclear.

Still, talk is cheap, and Wakonda’s technology has yet to move out of the labs. And in case it does meet its targets and leapfrogs the existing solar industry, it still has some contenders, such as the ultra-cheap solar concentrating technology that Sunrgi claims to have. Here’s to both of them living up to their promises.

With oil past $120 a barrel and possibly headed to $200, cellulosic ethanol companies are looking like a smarter investment choice every day. Following the increase of Range Fuels’ second funding to $166 million, its competitor Mascoma has pulled the wraps off an $81 million funding of its own, with $10 million coming a major oil and gas producer, Marathon Oil Corporation.

Range, Mascoma, Coskata and others are all racing to raise huge amounts in an attempt to bring the world’s first full-scale cellulosic plant online. The stakes are high: If the process proves to be cheap enough, investors will be eager to pour money into new plants. On the other hand, waiting to see if competitors fail won’t be particularly helpful — each company has its own proprietary process.

Mascoma will begin production this year at a demonstration plant in Rome, New York, but is also planning facilities in Michigan and Tennessee. By comparison, its two largest competitors will build a single, big plant each, a bet that could presumably result in a more spectacular success, or failure.

Backing each company is a network of high-profile investors, some of whom overlap. General Motors has investments in both Coskata and Mascoma. Morgan Stanley is with Range Fuels, which also counts Khosla Ventures as an investor — and Khosla has invested in Mascoma, as well. Taking venture fundings and government grants together, Range Fuels is the most heavily funded, Mascoma coming second with just over $200 million now, and Coskata third.

It’s possibility none of the three emerge with a competitively priced product — something that also hinges on whether oil prices continue to climb, or fall back to somewhat saner levels. If all three find their methods too expensive, there is still a constellation of smaller cellulosic startups waiting for their own turn in the spotlight, like Zeachem.

Other investors in the round included Khosla, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Pinnacle Ventures and Vantage Point Venture Partners. Out of the total amount, $20 million was venture debt provided by Pinnacle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mascoma, an East Coast biofuel startup with a multi-pronged approach to commercializing cellulosic ethanol, has just become one of the most heavily funded companies of its kind with a $50 million funding reported by peHUB.

Based in Cambridge, Mass., Mascoma is in the process of building several demonstration-scale ethanol plants in three other states: Michigan, New York and Tennessee. It’s partnered with a variety of different corporations and universities at each location.

What that boils down to is hedging its bets — by experimenting with several different feedstocks and processes, Mascoma is making itself more likely to hit the jackpot, a cost-effective cellulosic ethanol facility. The feedstocks it’s using include wood, switchgrass, and in New York, mixed materials like paper sludge and corn stover.

The $50 million funding was broken into a $30 million venture round and $20 million in debt. Participating were one new investor, General Catalyst Partners, and previous investors Khosla Ventures, Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Pinnacle Ventures and VantagePoint Venture Partners. Including various government grants, the company has taken just over $100 million to date.

updated
1) Online advertising up 28 percent
2) Yahoo confirms $160M acquisition of Maven
3) AOL to launch mobile soc-net platform
4) Starbucks to offer somewhat-free WiFi
5) Topanga, next-gen lighting, funded by Khosla
6) Stealth division at EA making social games
7) Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million
8) DanceJam gets another $3.5 million
9) Uncomfortable ads from Facebook
10) Initial review of Android: Not ready yet
11) Motorola and Nortel consider unit merger
11) The long wait for cleantech permitting

Online advertising up 28 percent at end of year — The total US ad spend in the fourth quarter grew almost 28 percent over the same period last year, according to the latest numbers from IDC. The firm also found that Google’s market share declined toward the end of the year.

Yahoo has confirmed its acquisition of Maven Networks – We reported on the deal several days ago, but Yahoo announced this morning the specific price, which we’d only guessed at earlier: $160 million. That’s a big win for General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and Prism VentureWorks, which together had invested around $24 million, and apparently had invested most recently in 2006 at at a pre-money valuation of just $30 million (which means they’ve made very nice money). As Dan Primack notes, this is great for GC, which originally invested in 2003 at a $7.5 million pre-money, though interestingly, GC has also pumped a ton of money into Maven competitor Brightcove – including a recent round at around a $210 million post-value.

AOL to launch mobile social networking platform — AOL plans on releasing a mobile software platform for social networking, which will initially work across most of the major device operating systems. The platform will have its own XML-based markup language and server, and be open to developers.

Starbucks begins offering (somewhat) free WiFi — Starbucks will drop T-Mobile and take on AT&T as the partner for its 7,000 United States locations. The upshot: If you’re an AT&T broadband subscriber, WiFi at Starbucks is now free; if not, access is still cheaper. Prices for WiFi in all locations have been steadily dropping, which probably sounds like another nail tapping into the coffin to startups like Fon, which plan on creating large networks of WiFi hotspots.

Topanga high-intensity lighting funded by Khosla — Topanga Technologies is based in Topanga, California. If only everything in life were so simple. We don’t know much more than that it makes high-intensity, discharge lighting, as it’s currently in stealth mode. Khosla Ventures disclosed the investment this morning, alongside its announcement that it hired Ford Tamer.

Stealth division at Electronic Arts making social games — A division called EA Blueprint will make games for distribution on online platforms including social networks, according to a story on Gametap. Blueprint will work together with small developers to create games, some of which will be “brand extensions” of existing EA games. The company, however, declined further comment.

Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million — The domain name game is as flush as ever, with the sale of Bored.com having just brought in $4.5 million through auctioneer Moniker. No broken records here, though — Sex.com brought in $12.5 million two years ago. Fittingly enough, the sale price for Business.com fell somewhere in between sex and boredom. (Update: See comments below for more color on the various sale prices.)

DanceJam gets another $3.5 million for dance, jam — DanceJam, which hasn’t even launched yet, has gotten tons of publicity because its founder is MC Hammer, not to mention that Michael Arrington is an investor. That means the site, a community for dancers to upload clips of themselves dancing and rate others, had better be good when it finally does launch. The $3.5 million was provided by Softbank Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners and some new angel investors, according to TechCrunch.

Headhunting ad for Yahoo employees shows up on Yahoo profile – First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman placed an ad in Facebook, asking Yahoo employees if they might like to leave their increasingly troubled parent to found startups, and he showed evidence that suggested more employees are clicking through than several months ago — a sign of a potential mass exodus at hand. However, turns out the more recent ads — the ones drawing more clicks — were made more enticing because they showed photos of Yahoo employees. This distorted the entire experiment. The ads managed to find its way onto one satisfied Yahoo employee’s profile, occasioning an interesting exchange. “I don’t want my colleagues to think I’m leaving Yahoo, so … I’ve pulled my “Facebook fandom” for First Round Capital,” writes the disconcerted Yahooligan. The ad raises yet more questions about how Facebook can gracefully pipe ads through social network connections. More at Valleywag.

Hands-on review of Google Android in use in Barcelona — Gizmodo has a quick review of a mobile unit with Google Android installed from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. From the post: “While the Android platform is solid enough for development and testing, it seems we are far away from seeing actual products getting into the market.”

Motorola and Nortel consider merging wireless units — A combined wireless-infrastructure division between Motorola and Nortel would generate $10 billion in annual sales, part of a proposed restructuring of Motorola under consideration by new CEO Greg Brown. The two company’s units make networking equipment for wireless carriers. The broader plan involves breaking Motorola up into parts, and spinning off the struggling handset-making unit.

Setting up wind turbines? Be prepared for a wait — These lines make the Soviet Union look like child’s play: Developers applying for wind projects in Minnesota face a 612 year waiting list, according to EcoGeek. That’s an extreme example of the bureaucracy that come with issuing permits for new cleantech projects.

updated, to include response from Chao

Stephen Chao, the former president of Fox TV and USA Networks, has launched Wonderhowto.com, yet another “how-to” video site, claiming to have an edge over its rivals — with 90,000 instructional videos.

The NYT was given the scoop on the story, and doesn’t make Chao look too good. It calls him one of America’s “most spectacular flame-outs,” mentioning how he was fired from News Corp. after hiring a male stripper to disrobe at a company meeting, and separately, nearly drowning Rupert Murdoch’s dog at a party.

Yet he has received financial backing for this from General Catalyst Partners and has signed up Scripps Networks to run ads for the site.

This despite the fact that it faces stiff competition, and there’s absolutely nothing new in his approach. YouTube probably has more than 90,000 instructional videos, but we haven’t counted. There are whole bunch of sites that are already focused on “how to” vidoes and doing it exceptionally well. There’s Instructables, 5Min, VideoJug, ExpertVillage and DIY Network (see some of our coverage here). Finally, there’s emerging efforts such as those by Martha Stewart Living.

(Image of Chao is a thumbnail from the NYT story.)

Update: We’ve since talked with Chao. He says WonderHowTo is different because it seeks to point to only the best how-to videos. It doesn’t host any videos itself, it merely points to the servers where other videos are hosted. It uses multiple human curators to mine through the videos around the Web to make sure WonderHowTo points only to relevant videos. Then, when people search for certain types of how-to videos on WonderHowTo, they get ranked results, and WonderHowTo, can run advertising beside those results. The other players, 5Min, ExpertVillage, etc., host videos on their own sites, he said, and don’t do this sort of aggregation.

With the profusion of video sharing services on the internet, a number of startups are helping produce professional online content. Every Silicon Valley venture capital firm, it seems, wants to back one.

DECA, a Santa Monica, Calif., studio that calls itself “the best of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Silicon Valley,” is the latest to bring professional production values to computer screens and mobile phones.

The company’s initial funding round of $5 million would cover only a fraction of the production costs for a modern Hollywood blockbuster, but its a start. Backers are Mayfield Fund, General Catalyst Partners and Atomico Partners, the fund led by the Skype/Joost co-founder Niklas Zennström. The company is still bare on details, but it says it wants to scout for video ideas, and then develop them, finance them, and distribute them across the Web.

It also wants to use social networking, user generated content and other community features to drive the process. But the company itself will probably not appear in its productions, CEO Michael Wayne told us. “DECA is not consumer facing — consumers may never know what it is. When we fund a project, we bring in producers or production companies.”

In comparison to DECA’s operating model, most internet video companies (YouTube, MetaCafe, etc) have relied on users to submit their own home-made videos, which the companies hope will then go “viral” and spread around the internet. But lately, start-ups like National Banana, Funny or Die, Rockin Cat (see coverage), Crackle (see coverage) and others seeking to produce professional content, designed for viral Internet distribution from the beginning. The model has yet to prove itself.

The best example of someone making a successful viral video is lonelygirl15, a fictional character played by Jessica Rose. The videos became successful enough that the creators were able to parlay their fame into an ongoing series and a company called LG15.

Although DECA is vague on its current plans, Wayne says the company will be making further announcements about its projects in the coming weeks.