VentureBeat

HubSpot, a startup that offers a free “website grader” to promote its marketing software, just received the venture equivalent of an “A” — namely, a $12 million second round of funding led by Matrix Partners.

The Cambridge, Mass. startup specializes in what it calls “inbound marketing” — in other words, it focuses less on trying to grab people’s attention wherever possible, and more about drawing people to a company’s website and then converting those visitors into paying customers. HubSpot offers a package of software-as-a-service tools that help smaller businesses (up to around 1,000 employees) figure out the best keywords, create landing pages and conversion forms and analyze their marketing data.

We’ve written about how crowded the web analytics field has become, and also about a company called Coremetrics that raised a whopping $60 million last month to combine analytics with other marketing tools. But HubSpot’s product is broader than that, and chief executive Brian Halligan says the company occupies a unique niche. To get the full range of services that HubSpot provides, companies would have to either hire another company to handle their marketing or cobble together an in-house solution by purchasing a landing page product, a search engine optimization product and so on.

Halligan and his co-founder Dharmesh Shah say they plan to spend most of the new funding on research and development to make HubSpot’s service even simpler and easier to use. They raised $5 million last July; existing investor General Catalyst also participated in the new round.

Halligan and Shah add that they’re really betting the company’s future on the quality of their product, and not just in the way that’s true for all software companies — HubSpot’s website is built and analyzed using the company’s software. Apparently it’s working, since the company’s customer base has doubled since the beginning of the year.

As I mentioned above, HubSpot also offers a free SEO product called the Website Grader. In case you’re wondering, VentureBeat scored a 90 percent, meaning that we’re better than 90 percent of the sites that HubSpot has graded. Shah assures me that’s a really good score, although I have to admit I was hoping for something even higher. I did feel a little better when I saw that HubSpot’s site didn’t manage to hit 100 percent either, falling a few points short at 96.3.

update 2/12: The acquisition price has been confirmed at $160 million.

Yahoo is buying a broadband television distribution company called Maven Networks, for $150 million, according to Techcrunch and for between $160 million and $170 million according to NewTeeVee.

If true, Maven will be a promising new way for Yahoo to sell more online video ads that run on large media companies’ videos.

Maven hosts videos for large media companies, then offers ways to syndicate videos, including video ads, online to other web sites well as high-definition downloads — at a tenth of the cost of rival formats, it claims. There are many such companies, meaning the market was crowded and the company sold for a relatively low amount, as WatchMojo points out.

The Boston-based company’s services are already used by Fox News, Gannett, Hearst, Sony BMG, Univision, TV Guide, The Financial Times and a long list of other big clients. Maven is now another reason for these companies to work with Yahoo for online video distribution, and online video advertising, instead of buying their own technology or working with a rival (such as Google or Microsoft).

Large media companies like Maven’s clients are trying to figure out how to distribute and make money on their large stashes of videos, as their television audiences stagnate. The sentiment in the media industry, as we heard from several executives at yesterday’s OnMediaNYC closing panel, was that they don’t care whether revenue comes from their sales teams or outside parties — outside parties like Yahoo, that has its own ad network. “Do you join [the tech companies] or beat them? Beating them is not an option, ” said Alisa Bowen, SVP at Reuters.

Sample Maven ad-insertion screen below:

Meanwhile, Maven is growing at a “breakneck pace quarter to quarter,” co-founder Hilmi Ozguc told NewTeeVee last fall. “Media companies have needs but they don’t have technology experience. It is rocket science, it’s difficult, and that’s what we’re very good at.”

Maven’s content management system was “designed for millions of video assets, millions of video transactions happening simultaneously,” Ozguc told Broadcasting Cable last fall in reference to the company’s deal with Fox. “[Maven] can handle anything from a few sites to hundreds, if not thousands, of sites that are simultaneously pulling video from Fox News, distributing it to a very large audience — both Fox’s own, as well as their affiliates.”

Of course, Yahoo is also a content creator that in some sense competes with these large media companies. “Some of [our media] brands will say “our content is great,” said Caroline Little, CEO and Publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek Interactive, at the conference yesterday. “And I say, have you looked at Yahoo? It’s pretty good [content] too.” For more VentureBeat coverage of trends online advertising, see Julie Ruvolo’s post from yesterday.

Maven raised a total of $30 million in venture funding, from Accel Partners, General Catalyst, and Prism Ventures.

[Julie Ruvolo contributed reporting to this article.]

Visible Measures is the latest company trying to give publishers better knowledge of how users react to their videos — so that they can insert advertising in the right places.

The core of Visible Measures’ technology is a tracker that content owners attach to their videos. Once installed, they can see what viewers do with the video — how long they watch for, whether they use controls like the pause, whether they rewind or jump forward or even change the volume.

All of this is aimed at a few very simple objectives. Publishers want to put ads in their videos, and to do so, they need to know what their viewers will put up with. And, for the content itself, they want to see what viewers like in the first place.

For the moment, Visible Measures is aiming mainly at large media publishers — the network television companies of the world, who have the most to lose or gain from moving their content online. However, the company also recently acquired VidMeter, which helps smaller publishers put their content out onto video networks.

Mohr Davidow Ventures led the $13.5 million funding round, announced in conjunction with the product launch. General Catalyst, which provided Visible Measures’ first round of $5 million, also participated. The company is based in Boston, with offices in Palo Alto.

The company provides a video “demo,” but it’s vague and not very useful:

The days of the real estate boom are over, but nobody sent the memo to the internet companies.

Startups like Zillow and Trulia are still battling to become king of the listings market (see Trulia’s announcement about overtaking Zillow in popularity), while other sites like ActiveRain, which was just funded, seek to explore niches including real estate blogging and social networking.

The latest entrant: Roost, a real estate search engine that says its listings will be more complete than any other site, based on its partnerships with local realtor organizations.

Roost is opening today for 11 metropolitan areas, although some of the largest markets, like New York and San Francisco, are not included. To provide its listings, the company uses something called the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), which in fact refers to a number of different databases maintained by broker organizations around the country.

Other websites, like Zillow, rely on agents and home owners to post their own listings, which is only accurate as long as those two groups keep up with the website, putting up and removing their own listings as homes move on and off the market.

MLS data, on the other hand, has its own drawbacks. Although it’s generally complete and accurate, certain rules are required for its use, like presentation of data in specific formats and the inclusion of disclaimers; and, to complicate matters, each geographical MLS has its own rules.

Despite these difficulties, Roost’s engine looks very clean and, importantly, is very easy to navigate — a stark contrast to the clunky design of other sites that use the same data, like MLS.com. (Update: Redfin actually uses MLS data as well, and doesn’t look too shabby. It also serves a few markets that Roost doesn’t, and vice versa.)

Home listings are ranked by criteria like price and location, and the site makes it easy to visually compare different properties.

Its clean design and ease of use should establish Roost as a strong competitor to existing sites. However, it also doesn’t include any of the community features that help keep users browsing a Zillow or Trulia.

That’s part of the plan, for CEO Alex Chang. With two board members from Kayak, the travel search engine, and some visual similarities, Chang plans on sticking to the basics for the site, only adding more tools over time to perform custom real estate searches. Extra content, when it does come to the site, will only be in the form of links to outside content like local real estate blogs.

Another point of difference is Roost’s plan for monetizing. The site has no visual advertising, and probably never will, according to Chang. Instead, it will get referral fees for sending surfers to realtor sites, and will also provide white-label versions of its engine to agencies.

It should be interesting to see if Roost can compete in an already crowded market, jostling with big players like AOL Real Estate, HouseValues, and the two aforementioned sites, Zillow and Trulia.

Roost plans to launch in 25 markets by the end of the year. Here are the 11 it’s starting with now: Baltimore, Boise, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis, Orange County, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. The company itself is based in San Francisco, and has taken $5.5 million in funding from General Catalyst, Geolo Capital and the Cross Country Group.

Cambridge, Mass-based PodZinger, previously branded as a search engine for podcasts, has re-named itself EveryZing, and raised $10 million to expand its services.

EveryZing has a video and audio search engine for consumers, which we’ve covered before, but CEO Tom Wilde says that the company is using the money to change focus: EveryZing will use its speech-to-text technology to help publishers get their content into major search engines’ results and get related advertising.

Wilde claims that this technology, developed by military contractor and EveryZing’s original parent company, BBN (EveryZing has since spun off), is 85-90% accurate and has the capability to extract the meaning of a video’s content in ways that competitors like Adap.tv and Scanscout’s cannot. Specifically, he says, EveryZing has better speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities (We looked at Adap.tv and mentioned Scanscout here.)

EveryZing’s technology seeks to extract key terms from the transcripts it creates and auto-tag the content, making it searchable by Google and other search engines. Video search engine blinkx has similar capabilities, but confines usage to its site.

The other aspect of EveryZing’s new strategy is aimed at enabling contextual advertising in audio and video content. Large media producers find it difficult to mine their content for context, which hampers their ability to target ads. On top of this, advertisers don’t want to pitch their products next to objectionable content. EveryZing says its ability to create transcripts and determine their themes can solve these problems.

Getting computers to create accurate transcripts from video and then determine the meaning within them are terrifically hard problems, and EveryZing’s technology produces mixed results. For example: In a breakdown of a complicated TED talk from the author, Robert Wright, in which Wright asks whether or not biological and cultural evolution have direction and purpose, the transcript was impressively accurate — not perfect, but roughly in line with Wilde’s 85-90 percent accuracy claim. EveryZing’s thematic analysis also managed to determine that “biological evolution” was a key term. However, it decided that “histamine,” was a key term, as well. (See screenshot below) If you’re using a contextual advertising technology that relies on these key terms, you might take issue with EveryZing’s judgment.

That being said, it might be a little while before machines can scan transcripts and understand them, so early on, “good enough,” might have to do, even if that means a few ads for Benedryl or Claritin-D show up in a video about the meaning of life.

Fairhaven Capital led the round, with Accel and, strangely, General Catalyst — which invested in EveryZing competitor, Scanscout — participating as well. The company has now raised $15 million in total.