VentureBeat

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• TransEnterix gets $21M for minimally invasive GI surgery (release)
• Stem-cell developer Bioheart’s IPO postponed (Forbes.com)
• Medical-practice software provider AdvancedMD acquired by Francisco Partners (release)
• Peptimmune draws $8.2M for MS drug trials (release)
• Drug-delivery co. Talima Thera names Martin Babler CEO (release)
• Alimera Sciences aims for autumn IPO to fund diabetic eye-disease drug (VentureWire, sub req’d)

TransEnterix gets $21M for minimally invasive GI surgery — TransEnterix (no Web site), a Research Triangle Park, N.C., device maker developing tools for “natural orifice” gastrointestinal surgery, raised $21 million in a first funding round. Investors included SV Life Sciences, Parish Capital Advisers and Synergy Life Science Partners.

According to the Web site for Synecor, a North Carolina incubator that founded TransEnterix, the company is at work on tools and devices for minimally invasive “trans-oral” surgery using an endoscope passed through the mouth and down the esophagus. This procedure is designed to enable surgeries through the stomach wall and other unspecified “natural entry points,” potentially in a way that could supplant minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures that require entry through the abdominal wall. Patients would be consciously sedated during the procedure.

The funding will allow TransEnterix to “deliver” its first-generation tools, presumably for use in clinical trials, and to fund development of next-generation devices.

Stem-cell developer Bioheart’s IPO postponed — Bioheart, a Sunrise, Fla., developer of a stem-cell-based heart therapy, has postponed its troubled IPO. Although the company doesn’t seem to have officially yanked it yet, odds are now good that it will.

Bioheart’s woes started last October, when it abruptly slashed its offering price and fired its underwriters. The company’s IPO has lingered on life support ever since. We gave readers some good reasons to be skeptical about Bioheart — which, notably, is backed by former football great Dan Marino, among others — as long ago as last July.

Medical-practice software provider AdvancedMD acquired by Francisco Partners — AdvancedMD, a Salt Lake City provider of Web-based medical-practice management software — now there’s a mouthful — announced that it was acquired by the private-equity firm Francisco Partners. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

AdvancedMD, founded in 1999, sells a series of Web-based products designed to handle administration, billing and electronic medical records for physicians. The company had previously raised venture funding from Dominion Ventures, Windward Ventures and Hunter Capital. Francisco has already named a new CEO, and said that it intends to “leverage” the company’s success with “additional resources” to accelerate its growth.

Peptimmune draws $8.2M for MS drug trials — Cambridge, Mass.-based Peptimmune, a biotech at work on drugs for autoimmune and metabolic conditions, raised $8.2 million in the first stage of its fourth funding round. The company anticipates closing a second tranche in the second quarter. Investors included New Enterprise Associates, MPM Capital, Hunt Ventures, Boston Medical Investors and Silicon Valley Bank Capital.

Peptimmune is focused on using protein fragments known as peptides to disrupt or otherwise modulate immune-system reactions associated with disease. Its lead candidate, PI-2301, is a “random sequence” peptide similar in certain respects to the approved drug Copaxone, which Peptimmune is currently testing against multiple sclerosis in early-stage human tests.

Alimera Sciences aims for autumn IPO to fund diabetic eye-disease drug — Alimera Sciences, an Alpharetta, Ga., biotech focused on eye disease, is contemplating an IPO this fall, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The funds will ideally support the launch of the company’s first innovative product, a treatment for a blinding complication of diabetes known as diabetic macular edema.

Alimera, which started life as a specialty pharma that resold over-the-counter eye products, began development of its current candidate, Medidur, in 2005. The treatment, co-developed with the nanotech company pSvidia, is a tiny structure designed to be injected into the back of the eye, where it steadily emits a corticosteroid called fluocinolone acetonide. The idea is to provide the smallest possible quantity of the steroid directly to the back of the eye, where a fluid buildup in the retina steadily obscures vision. Many ophthalmologists currently treat the condition with steroid injections, although no drugs are approved for the disease.

Medidur is currently in late-stage, phase III human tests. Alimera expects data from that trial in late 2009 and could file for approval in 2010.

As social networks grow around the globe and across demographics, so to will the amount of user-generated pornographic images on those networks.

Keibi has a solution: It is launching power tools for porn-spotting and removal. It wants to help social networks enforce the decency standards they promise users and advertisers in their terms of service.  Early coverage of Keibi is here.

Most social networks employ customer service teams to manually moderate networks. Beyond that, some networks also allow users to report objectionable content, and even have their own rudimentary porn-detecting software in place.

However, the rude content continues to slip in. So Keibi goes further: It scans all images on a social network, analyzing factors such as skin tones, shapes and contours, then ranks each image within a cue, with the most scandalous images at the head and the most innocent at the tail.

The cue is then fed into an interface where customer service reps can pick and delete violators, or pass questionable images to more senior managers to make removal decisions. The software comes with reporting tools so managers can do things like track how quickly and accurately employees pull down problem images.

Certain images, such as revealing paparazzi photos of celebrities, tend to be uploaded by many different users. Keibi lets moderators blacklist or whitelist images for automatic rejection or approval.

One early customer is Piczo, a social network for teens built around sharing photos — and it has relatively strict standards of decency. That company claims that with Keibi, it reviews more than 200 times the images it used to, while spending 70 percent less on “related overhead.”

The service lets any network predetermine the sorts of images they want to filter for.

Myspace comes to mind for its ubiquitously racy images, no doubt a long-time contributing factor to its popularity; It could, if it wanted, choose to be less strict about the images it restricts.

Some sites may have even less use for such automated sanitation. Playboy’s college-student-only social network, PlayboyU, which claims to be free of porn, would presumably not want such software to detract from the anti-censorship rhetoric of its founder, Hugh Hefner.

Keibi says it has some of the largest social networks in trials now, but wouldn’t name names.

An obvious concern is that the market simply isn’t large enough to support a niche company like Keibi. Not so, chief executive Paul Remer tells us: He claims that “a couple hundred” social networks have enough scale to make use of this tool.

Keibi isn’t just eyeing popular social networks — it is aiming for other parts of the ecosystem, like widget-makers Slide and RockYou, Remer says.

Many widget companies, which span multiple social networks with applications like slideshows of images, have more users than social networks themselves.

Potential customers go beyond social networks. As large companies adopt social networking features to highlight their own brands, Remer adds, they too will want to to avoid the embarrassment of featuring user-generated porn.

The company is also working on video and text analysis — so soon no more amateur porn stories or videos, either.

Keibi’s service, currently web-based, is available for $5,000 to $20,000 per month; some customization may be necessary to ensure that Keibi’s software can access and delete problematic content.

The company has received more than $5 million in funding from Catamount Ventures and Hunt Ventures. It was founded in late 2006.

Keibi is a new San Francisco company that wants to help social networking sites mange the massive, chaotic flood of user-generated information they get.

Pierre Grenier, who worked briefly at fast-growing San Francisco social network Piczo, saw the pain it and other companies had dealing with the “unmanageable” wave of content being produced, including hairy security, copyright and general brand management challenges.

Grenier tells VentureBeat he joined Piczo while managing an investment in that company from Catamount Ventures. Since leaving to form Keibi, he has since hired others, including Piczo’s former general counsel Paul Remer, as chief executive.

The company remains secretive, he said, and more details will emerge later. But it is focused on user generated content “categorization” to help users discover content, among other things.

Catamount Ventures and Hunt Ventures have committed $6 million to Keibi, earlier reported by Thealarmclock.

Zenzui is a significant new spin-out out from Microsoft that delivers rich mobile applications — from Amazon, to Traffic.com and travel site Kayak — to your mobile phone.

Zenzui is still in closed testing mode, and will be distributed more widely beginning this summer.

So far, Zenzui has built the interface to handle 36 applications, and the ones being tested appear to be slick and easy-to-use. The apps sit on your screen as little “tiles” next to each other (see YouTube video below).

One, for example, is for Kayak’s travel service. You select the tile, and zoom in to use it. You can personalize the Kayak tile by selecting your city, and your destination cities, for example, and have Kayak forward cheap flight ticket info automatically. You’ll be able to do similar things for books with the Amazon tile, and photos at Flickr, for example. Other apps include things like traffic, sports, weather and Wired Magazine. The applications are updated dynamically in the background via your phone’s cellular network — Zenzui’s servers being the conduit between Kayak’s site and your phone.

A number of other companies have offered mobile applications in the form of tiles, for example Plusmo and Widsets. However, Zenzui is different in important areas. On a tile, you can hit “2″ to send it to a friend. Your friend can then choose to accept it or reject it, and where to put it on their screen. You can also “rate” the tile. Zenzui’s service will be an open interface, so that any developer can submit applications, and will share in revenue made from sponsors of the tile — or they can sponsor their own. Amazon, for example, has sponsored its tile, paying Zenzui every time someone “zooms” on its application. Amazon also pays anytime someone buys a book from Amazon.

Zenzui has thought carefully about how to make money from the get-go. Each tile, when zoomed in on, will have two banner ads at the bottom of the screen. Hopefully this money-making won’t dominate the experience. Again, we haven’t used this on our phone — we were limited to a couple of video demos about how it works.

Here’s Zenzui’s main challenge: It is dependent on carriers to allow it access to mobile phone decks, and to make money without getting charged to death. Zenzui’s chief executive, Eric Hertz, who has a wireless background, says he’s in “deep discussions” with the major carriers, though has not yet reached a deal with any of them. The carriers are all testing it, he said.

Zenzui works on Windows Mobile phones, and will be rolled out to other phones (J2ME this summer, and BREW by end of year). It’s compatible with any form of phone touch-screen/pad/keyboard, the company says.

Seattle-based ZenZui is a spin-off via Microsoft’s IP Ventures program, similar in structure to Wallop. Zenzui has raised a $12 million first round of capital from Oak Investment Partners and Hunt Ventures. Wireless entrepreneur Tom Huseby, of SeaPoint Ventures (a fund created by Oak, Sevin Rosen and Venrock) acts as chairman. He’s also a venture partner at Oak and Hunt.