VentureBeat

Updated

Dimdim, the free, open-source web meeting company, has raised $6 million in a second round of funding.

The concept is pretty simple — like WebEx, but free. Dimdim offers all the basic tools that you’d expect from a web meeting service, including a collaborative whiteboard, desktop sharing, audio and video. It doesn’t have too many bells and whistles, and some of the technical kinks still need to be worked out; I’ve run into a few display and usability glitches myself. But even if Dimdim isn’t perfect, it works. And since you don’t have to pay to use it, that counts for a lot.

Chief executive DD Ganguly says Dimdim has been used by more than 500,000 people in more than 180 companies since it launched in private testing mode in 2007. What’s particularly exciting is how, as Ganguly says, Dimdim “democratizes” web meetings. Sure, the phrase reeks of hype, but it’s also accurate — without WebEx’s cost, Dimdim can take web meetings out of just the corporate world and make them a broader tool for communication. (My favorite example is still the person in Florida using Dimdim to teach English to Mexican immigrants before they come to the United States.)

I’ve been doing my own small part to promote the company, too. Whenever a PR person or CEO suggests using WebEx, I point out WebEx’s lack of Mac compatibility (what’s up with that, anyway?), and immediately suggest Dimdim as a free alternative. People are even starting to take me up on it.

The funding comes from existing investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital and Draper Richards, and follows Dimdim’s $2.4 million first round last year.

Ganguly says most of the new funding will go toward marketing. The Boston start-up’s next moves will also involve taking its technology into different markets, starting with video later this year. That way, people can take advantage of Dimdim’s video or chat services on different Web sites, for example, without having to create a full web meeting.

Dimdim plans to make money by offering a premium service. Advertising in the free version is also a possibility.

Update: As a WebEx spokesperson notes in the comments, I let my whining get a little over-the-top. According to the WebEx system requirements, the service does support Macs, but without remote access. I’m not sure if it’s remote access or some other issue in my case, but I’ve never been able to get WebEx meetings to work on my Macbook, and other Mac-owning VentureBeat writers have reported similar problems. In my limited experience WebEx has not been Mac-friendly, but I definitely overstated the case.

WooMe, a video speed-dating site whose claim to fame is a speedy, no-frills interface and the ability to attract people who would never touch a traditional dating site (it calls itself an “introductions platform”), has raised a fresh round of capital to continue expanding.

NewTeeVee had the scoop on the funding news, however its report said the company was valued at $30 million after the money, and had a deal with MTV, both of which WooMe representative called “inaccurate”. WooMe says its post-valuation is significantly higher, at $41 million, and that there’s no deal at all with MTV.

By all appearances, WooMe has been growing rapidly. Three months after the site launched, co-founder Stephen Stokols told me that the site was running about 1,000 video sessions between users (read our past coverage for more on how WooMe works). Today, the company is claiming 15,000 sessions each day, with 350,000 registered users. It also says the average amount of time active users spend on the site is doubling each month.

One does get the impression, though, that WooMe hasn’t grown quite as quickly as its founders hoped. One whisper I’ve heard is that WooMe attracts new users easily, but has had trouble user retention, despite some high-profile media appearances, including the BBC and Fox’s Morning Show.

An ongoing “bridge round” that saw its initial funding extended to $7.5 million from $1.9 million may have indicated the site had trouble convincing investors it’s really rocket-fueled (bridge rounds are sometimes made on less favorable terms, though we don’t know the details here). But this is just speculation on my part. With the significant valuation of this round, it appears that any worries have probably been set aside, for now. [update: Stokols says the bridge round raised in December was actually done because the numbers were well beyond what was expected.]

The $12.5 million round was led by Index Ventures, with existing investors Atomico and Mangrove Capital Partners participating. The round has also been left open, with about $500,000 left to raise for “strategic angels” who may come in. WooMe has its offices split between San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.

Motorola announced that it’s investing in VirtualLogix, a maker of virtualization software for communications devices and infrastructure equipment. This shows that virtualization is still a hot investment trend, and not just in the core desktop and server markets.

Terms of the investment have not been disclosed. VirtualLogix’s technology does real-time virtualization, or the ability to split a computing platform into different partitions and shift from one partition to another quickly. While companies like VMware do this for corporate servers and desktops, VirtualLogix does it for communications devices (cell phones, other devices) and infrastructure.

In the mobile space, it allows users to move applications from desktops to devices easily. And it allows one device to run multiple operating systems. It also promises to improve the quality of service and security as well. That’s important in an increasingly open mobile world.

Motorola joins VirtualLogix’s current investors Atlas Venture, Cisco, DFJ Esprit, Index Ventures, Intel Capital and Texas Instruments.

Virtual pets are a tried and true market for those targeting young kids. Mind Candy is joining the fray against larger rivals with a kids offering of its own this week: Moshi Monsters.

That’s a big right turn for London-based Mind Candy, which started out in the adult games market.

Two years ago, Mind Candy debuted an innovative “alternate reality game” called “Perplex City.” It was the brainchild of Michael Smith, who loved a treasure hunt book dubbed “Masquerade” when he was young. His team created a game that was part fiction, part real world. It had online puzzles, collectible puzzle cards, and a $200,000 treasure hidden in the real world for the first person to solve all of the puzzles.

But Smith said in an interview that it was hard to monetize the innovative idea. Only about 50,000 people registered to play the game and collect all of the cards, while a much larger body was watching their progress online.  The company got a huge amount of buzz. Mind Candy started on a second season of the game but shifted to Moshi Monsters instead.

Moshi Monsters is aimed at ages 7 to 11. It is a virtual pet game where you adopt a cute monster and then socialize with other kids online. You can feed it, nurture it, and solve the puzzles it sends you every day. When you solve them, you earn more currency to feed your monster. As an educational title, it resembles Nintendo’s “Big Brain Academy” game for the Nintendo DS. It also has elements of “Tamagotchi” and Facebook. There are no collectible cards this time, but they may be possible in the future, along with plush toys, puzzle cards, and phone charms, Smith said.

The company has 22 employees and has raised $10 million from Accel and Index Ventures. Moshi Monsters will compete with a wide variety of kids online game sites. Those include Neopets, GoPets, Bellasara, Club Penguin, and start-ups such as Zookazoo (our coverage).

Here’s the latest action:
1) Wikileaks judge restores restores site, slaps self on wrist
2) AllPeers’ peer-to-peer scheme fails to capture users
3) Chevron, Weyerhaeuser join up for cellulosic ethanol
4) Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech
5) Akamai wins patent fight, but not happy with ruling
6) Woz points out flaws in Apple’s latest products
7) Global warming, now with double the lethality
8) LinkedIn’s new features look a little more like Facebook
9) Fastcompany.tv launches with Robert Scoble
10) Fortune tops “Most Admired” list with Valley companies

Wikileaks judge restores site, slaps self on wrist — A federal judge who ordered that whistle-blower site Wikileaks be scrubbed from the web not only reversed his own order, but has since released a statement suggesting that he overstepped his bounds and possibly violated the First Amendment, acknowledging that free speech on the Internet is a tricky issue.

AllPeers’ P2P sharing extension fails to capture users, closes — AllPeers, a clever Firefox extension that allowed the peer-to-peer sharing, is dead. The prognosis: Not enough users to satisfy the investors, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. There’s a brief obituary at TechCrunch.

Chevron and Weyerhaeuser join forces for cellulosic ethanol — Ain’t green great? Take Chevron and Weyerhaeuser, two giant companies known for environmental damage — the first for oil exploration, the latter for logging and creating Superfund sites — add an impending global crisis, and come up with Catchlight Energy, a new joint venture to research cellulosic ethanol. The company will employ up to 40 researchers, making it one of the larger cellulosic efforts.

Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech — Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is keeping up with the Joneses by setting up its own nanotech research lab, which will put most of its efforts toward solar energy. The Jones here, in case you missed it, is Abu Dhabi with its $15 billion Masdar City initiative.

Akamai prevails in patent fight, but unhappy with the winnings — Akamai won a patent battle with rival content distribution network Limelight, but the amount — $45 million — was less than half of the $100 million the company thought it deserved, according to Xconomy. Limelight, for its part, would prefer to multiply the amount by 0; it’s appealing the case.

Woz points out the flaws with latest Apple products — Acting as the super-ego to the ego of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak spent some time criticizing the Apple Air and iPhone to the Sydney Morning Herald. (The id, we’ll assume, is represented by Apple fanboys.) The brief version: He thinks that some fairly vital features were unnecessarily left out of the two devices.

Global warming, now with double the lethality — According to a study cited by the New Scientist: “A rise in CO₂ increases the temperature and water vapour content of the atmosphere, which in turn accelerate ozone production and encourage particulates to hang around in the air.” That means more lung damage, and ultimately, more deaths.

LinkedIn’s new features make it more like Facebook — Unfair perhaps, but the business networking site will inevitably be compared to Facebook. Web Worker Daily explains why new LinkedIn features like status updates make it more like its chattier rival.

FastCompany.tv launches entrepreneur-focused web shows — Robert Scoble has the first two shows on the new video portal, Fastcompany.tv.

Fortune ranks “Most Admired” companies, tech firms top list — Apple is number one and Google is number four on Fortune’s new list of the 20 most admired companies, which doubles as a clever way for Fortune to get 20 pageviews from a single article.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Getting stuff for free is always an attractive proposition from the consumer’s point of view, if not necessarily the greatest business model for the company doing the giving (go ahead and recall your favorite dot-com example here). Now TrialPay, a self-described arranger of “alternative payments” that just raised another $13 million, thinks it’s found a way to square that circle by updating an old department-store offer: Buy one, get one free.

TrialPay gets online vendors — many of them software makers who are painfully aware that few people really want to pay for their offerings anymore — to offer visitors a free product if they’ll sign into the TrialPay service and buy something from a list of selected, and presumably targeted, advertisers. Once the purchase is verified, TrialPay emails the consumer a coupon for their free swag. TrialPay has started to attract some well-known advertising merchants to its platform, ranging from brick-and-mortar stalwarts like Citibank, Geico, Comcast and Time Warner Cable to Web-centric businesses such as eBay, eBags and eMusic.

This is still one of those ideas that sounds kind of nutty until you dive into the business logic behind it. Essentially, the merchant who actually sells its product — the “buy one” side of the deal — is subsidizing its “get one free” counterpart in exchange for acquiring a new customer relatively cheaply. (The rationale is similar to that of merchants who pay bounties to blogs and other Web sites that deliver customers through affiliate programs.) That commission is often higher than the actual selling price of the free item, TrialPay says. And as long as the average customer buys more than an item or two, the selling company also makes money on the transaction. The New York Times explains it all in detail here.

TrialPay, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., makes money by taking a cut of the commission and supposedly also does some targeting to put the most relevant advertisers in front of would-be customers. The company told the NYT that roughly 2,500 merchants now show TrialPay offers to prospective customers and that its annual sales may top $20 million. (Presumably, TrialPay is referring to its own revenues and not the total sales volume moving through its network. I’ll run that down and update. UPDATE: A TrialPay spokesperson confirms that the company is expecting total revenue of more than $20 million in 2008.))

That said, TrialPay isn’t exactly intuitive the first time you come across it. Coincidentially enough, I ended up stumbling across a TrialPay site just yesterday while downloading a free version of the antispyware program Ad-Aware. First, TrialPay snags you as you’re about to launch the free download with an offer for a free copy of the paid version:

Next, you’re asked to sign into TrialPay with your name and email address. There’s a minimum of explanation here, and at the time, as someone who’d never heard of TrialPay before, some of the language here — especially, “Try it, it’s free” — struck me as a little on the hucksterish side. In fact, it was at this point that I bailed on TrialPay, particularly since I had no idea what I’d be signing up for and how much marketing spam I might inadvertently be opting into. (Yes, the signup box says your email address won’t be sold; I just didn’t believe it.) That screen is here:

Next, you’re presented with a variety of advertiser offers, which you can sort by category and even filter specifically for merchants who’ll give you instant credit for your purchases (some credits, particularly with big financial institutions, can take a few days). Here, for instance, is what the service offered me:

Whether such offers float your boat or not is a matter of personal preference. (I didn’t end up biting on any of them.) Overall, however, TrialPay offers a pretty intriguing model, and one that several of its participating merchants seem happy with. “You can reach out into the virtual space and find new customers you wouldn’t have otherwise reached,” Gap.com general manager Will Hunsinger told the NYT. “It’s a little different model, which is something we haven’t seen come out of the Valley in a little while.”

TrialPay just raised $12.7 million in a second funding round (the release is here), for a total of $15.8 million since its founding in 2006. Investors in the latest round included Index Ventures, Atomico Ventures and former PayPal executives.

Companies still releasing music and movies locked with digital rights management technology may have one more software application to worry about.

DoubleTwist, Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen’s (aka DVD Jon, pictured here) latest startup, yesterday launched a beta application that lets users “liberate” their media, be it music or video.

DoubleTwist’ free desktop application lets users transfer and sync their media, regardless of device, file format, or social network. For now it’s available for Windows XP and Vista, but the company plans to release a Mac OSX version by the end of the second quarter.

DoubleTwist also released a Facebook application, Twist Me, (see below) that allows users to share media directly from their profile pages.

Through DoubleTwist and Twist Me, users can share media with Facebook friends, as well as sync with a variety of portable devices including Sony’s PSP, Nokia’s N Series, Sony Ericsson phones, Windows Mobile phones, Amazon’s Kindle, and it also plans to release a version for iPhone users. DoubleTwist integrates with iTunes and lets its users sync to the above listed devices.

When users connect a device, such as a digital camera, mobile phone, or PSP, the media files are automatically displayed on the DoubleTwist desktop, from which point users select the media and transfer the media to the desired format.
Although DoubleTwist’s applications are free for now, it plans on adding premium features to monetize its product.

CEO Monique Farantzos compares DoubleTwist’s goal to email, which can be opened and viewed across the board by any device, regardless of platform. She compares the current media landscape to “The tower of Babel,” and says that DoubleTwist will bring the media world back to one language, so to speak.

DVD Jon is famous for his reverse engineering exploits, including one which decoded the content-scrambling system used to restrict DVDs. He was prosecuted in Norway, but was acquitted from charges of computer hacking.

According to Wikipedia, he’s created several programs to bypass both iTunes DRM music files, as well as Windows Media Player DRM technology, and in July of last year created a program that allowed users to activate their iPhone without AT&T service.

DoubleTwist, incubated in Oslo, Norway, was co-founded by Farantzos along with Johansen and is based in San Fransisco and funded for an undisclosed amount by Index Ventures.

A number of companies decided to compete with DEMO for media coverage today by announcing some rather large acquisitions:

Paypal ponied up $170 million for Fraud Sciences, which prevents online fraud;

Nokia paid $153 million for Trolltech, which helps developers build cross-platform applications;

GSI Commerce gave $157 million for E-Dialog, an e-commerce company;

Finally, Imeem bought Anywhere.fm, an internet radio service.

Here are a few notes on each:

Paypal’s acquisition of Fraud Sciences was an all-cash deal for $170 million. The company had taken less than $20 million in funding to date, from investors Redpoint Ventures and BRM Capital. Fraud Sciences tracks online buyers to pin-point suspicious behavior, and is supposed to be particularly good at detecting fraudulent overseas transactions, a particular pain point for Paypal. (Press release)

Nokia also paid cash for Trolltech, which was a publicly-listed company on the Oslo Stock Exchange, but also had investors including Index Ventures. Simply put, Trolltech’s application development framework, called Qt, makes it much easier for developers to build applications that work across both PCs and mobile phones, as well as on the web. That sets Nokia up nicely to compete with Google’s Android, which we’ve covered here. (Press release)

Neither GSI Commerce nor E-Dialog is well known locally, but the acquisition price should turn some heads for its investors, which include Flagship Ventures and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The company had taken about $20 million in funding, according to Xconomy. (Reuters)

Imeem likely didn’t pay that much for Anywhere.fm, at least in comparison to the price of the above three acquisitions. Then again, for a three-man startup that came out of Y Combinator less than a year ago, with no venture funding, even a few million is significant. Anywhere.fm, which only ever took angel funding, has about 60,000 users and will continue to operate as its own service. It will likely benefit greatly from the business deals Imeem has made with the major music labels, covered in more depth here. (Press release)

Index Ventures, one of Europe’s high-profile venture capital firms, had raised €400 million fund for investing in companies that are more mature than start-ups.

It is the London-based firm’s first so-called “growth fund,” and follows the move by several other investors, including Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Ignition Partners to focus on later stage opportunities. Index will use the money for both technology and life science companies, but retail and clean-tech companies will also be considered.

So far, Index has been known for backing companies such as Skype, MySQL and Last.FM very early in their development — all companies that yielded significant returns after being bought.

The new fund, which will complement the firm’s investments into seed companies, will earmark between €20 million and €50 million for each of the investments. The backed companies will be European, though could also be Eastern Europe orU.S. companies planning to expand in Europe.

In a statement the firm sent out over the weekend, Index said it has hired two new partners to help Index partner Guiseppe Zocco with the new effort: Dominique Vidal (pictured here), former chief executive of Yahoo Europe and co-founder of Kelkoo; and Guido Magni, former head of medical science in the pharma division of F. Hoffman-La Roche, who will work on health care deals.

The online advertising world continues to get shaken up.

OpenAds, a company based in London, is the latest to drive change, undercutting the old guard with a low-cost offering. It offers Web site owners something called an “ad server,” a device lets them take control of their online advertising management. It provides the technology needed by Web sites to control advertising creative, insert into the right place on a Web site at the right time, and then monitor how the advertising performs.

Today, OpenAds announced it is offering a free hosted version, letting Web companies avoid the need for their own server. It also announced it has raised $15.5 million more in financing to expand.

Ad servers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, they can note if you arrive at a site for the second time in an hour and be programmed to show you a different ad than the one you saw the first time — to improve efficiency (here’s a demo of how it works).

There’s also a huge and growing market for ad management, as more and more people go to the web to research and read.

OpenAds’ server is open source, and therefore so cheap that it is undercutting the incumbents, such as Microsoft’s aQuantive, and giant Doubleclick, the company Google is acquiring. While the basic version is free, OpenAds gets paid by offering support.

The second round of financing is led by Accel Partners, with previous investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. It follows a first $5 million round last year.

OpenAds says it is used by more than 30,000 publishers worldwide.

 Updated

WeatherBill, a company that lets you make money by betting on the weather, has raised $12.5 million.

The San Francisco-based company sells contracts that essentially let you put money down against bad weather hurting your business, so you can still get paid even if your business itself suffers.

You can choose your contract to be for hot, cold, rainy, snowy or dry days or seasons, and customize every specific aspect of your scenario, such as the temperature, precipitation or snow level. Choose a location with all of your weather specifications and how much you hope to earn from the contract, and the site will calculate its cost.

For example, VentureBeat could purchase a contract to bet that cold winter weather will hit the Bay Area all of next week — a way to make ourselves feel a bit warmer if this turns out to be the case (screenshot below). We’d get paid $100 from WeatherBill for every day that the minimum temperature dips below 65 F. The example below shows the contract would cost us $660. Question is: How likely is it that every day next week will be that cold? There’s a chance we won’t make our money back — and we’re not experts enough at predicting the weather to know.

But let’s say you’re a travel agency and you want to guarantee your customers that they will receive a full refund if their flights get cancelled due to heavy snows on New Year’s Day, 2008. Simply take out a contract with WeatherBill and it will pay you if there’s enough inches of snow on the ground to cancel flights — that’s what a Canadian travel agency called itravel2000.com has done, a contract that company chose to be worth up to $100 million.

WeatherBill bases its prices on accumulated weather statistics as well as computer-generated models of weather forecasts and longer-term trends.

Hundreds of businesses have bought contracts, typically worth less than a couple million dollars; the company earns between one and 20 percent revenue from its contracts, chief executive David Friedberg tells us.

Weatherbill is growing quickly he says, and is cash-flow positive — most likely because it makes money no matter what. Nephila Capital, a re-insurance fund that normally sells capital bonds, weather derivatives and financial instruments to large clients such as insurance companies, backs 100 percent of WeatherBill’s risk, paying the company in the event customers cash out on large contracts.

Because WeatherBill’s contracts are considered “over the counter financial instruments,” Friedberg says, they are regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission — meaning that businesses and individuals must have a net worth of over one million in order to purchase them.

Current clients include ski resorts, farms, restaurants, outdoor sports companies, and others.

New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures led the round, with Allen & Company, Atomico Investments and angel investors participating. Current investors include First Round Capital and angel investors.

Featured companies: BioVascular, Carefx, ClinResearch, Healthcare Management Directions, NanoCor, OxyPlus, Revitus, Spotlight Surgical, United BioSource

UPDATED: See below.

Healthcare IT provider Carefx pulls in $17.9M — Carefx, a Scottsdale, Ariz., provider of hardware and software that “aggregates” patient records, has raised $17.85 million in a third funding round, Private Equity Hub reports, citing a regulatory filing. Investors included Carlyle Venture Partners and UV Partners.

Carefx’s pitch is basically the same as that from any system integrator — a term guaranteed to glaze eyes in most circumstances — in that they offer to tie together hospital-patient information that’s currently scattered across disparate computer systems. As with all system-integration pitches, it sounds like a terrific idea, if it works. Of course, many systems-integration efforts often only work after creating a significant amount of chaos and disarray within their respective organizations, which would certainly be interesting in critical-care areas such as the emergency room or intensive care. None of which to say that efforts to make electronic medical records more comprehensive and easier to use aren’t worthy, of course.

Medical imager Spotlight Surgical pulls in $7.4M — San Francisco’s Spotlight Surgical, a maker of medical-visualization software, raised about $7.42 million in a second funding round, Private Equity Hub reports, citing a regulatory filing. Attractor Ventures led the round.

Secretive drug developer OxyPlus gets $8M — OxyPlus, a Boston biotech working on drugs for cancer and heart disease, raised $8 million in a first funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Index Ventures provided the funding, which follows an undisclosed amount of angel seed investment.

From the VentureWire story:

Based in Boston, OxyPlus is developing compounds discovered by Claude Nicolau, a professor at the Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, and Jean-Marie Lehn, a professor at the College de France. [President Conrad] Bletzer said the company is keeping the scientific details under wraps, but the company’s drugs are being targeted for several high-profile indications. “They’re small molecules for the treatment of cardiovascular issues and cancer,” he said.

Medtronic pumps up to $7.5M into heart treater NanoCor — Chapel Hill, N.C.-based NanoCor Therapeutics, a biotech working on gene therapy for heart failure, raised $3.75 million from Medtronic, with another $3.75 million dependent upon certain performance milestones.

For some reason, NanoCor doesn’t want to come right out and say it’s a gene therapy company — instead, it wants to create the first “intracellular genetic protein therapy” for heart failure. That amounts to the same thing, since the company plans to use some sort of nanoparticle to shuttle a “proprietary” and so-far unnamed gene to the heart, where it will be taken up by heart cells in order to begin producing some form of useful protein.

NanoCor plans to use nanoparticle technology from Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, or AskBio, from which NanoCor was spun out in 2005. Medtronic will have certain rights to license any resulting treatment.

Healthcare Management Directions gets almost $1.5M for “smart hospitals” — Brentwood, Tenn.-based Healthcare Management Directions, developer and would-be operator of “smart hospitals” with a heavy emphasis on IT systems and electronic records, raised just under $1.5 million in a first funding round following its 2004 recapitalization, VentureWire reports. Investors included Evergreen Investments and new and undisclosed individual and institutional investors. The funding will cover the firm’s investment in an Oklahoma facility it plans to manage.

Heart-drug developer BioVascular acquires Revitus for platelet drug — BioVascular, a San Diego biotech at work on anti-clotting drugs, acquired Revitus, another biotech working on similar drugs. Terms of the deal weren’t announced. Revitus was founded out of the Oregon Health & Science University in 2004.

United BioSource acquires controlling stake in ClinResearch — United BioSource, a Bethesda, Md., a provider of various services to the life-sciences industry, acquired a controlling stake in ClinResearch, a German firm with expertise in designing and conducting flexible, or “adaptive,” clinical trials. The companies didn’t announce financial terms.

UPDATE (1:00pm PT): Added items on NanoCor, Healthcare Management Directions, BioVascular/Revitus, and United BioSource/ClinResearch.

If there are three constants in life, the Internet’s arrival on your living room TV has probably claimed its rightful spot alongside death and taxes.

There have been numerous failed attempts to bring the Internet to television, and even the recent success of Apple comes with an asterisk. AppleTV, originally touted by Steve Jobs as “the missing piece” in Apple’s multimedia empire, took only two months of cool reception to become a “hobby” for Jobs and the company.

Building B, a new Silicon Valley (Belmont, Calif.) company is the latest to try to bring Internet to your TV, and has raised $17.5 million from Morgenthaler Ventures, Omni Capital, Index Ventures and undisclosed private investors.

It’s with past woes in mind that Building B’s president Phil Wiser points out that his service “enables access to some content available on the internet…fully integrated with the traditional television content.”

Building B hasn’t launched its product yet, but says it is creating a video entertainment service that offers broadcast, cable and film programming alongside Internet content without the need of a computer. If Building B can really offer such an all-inclusive set-up box, it should overcome the large hurdle that has hindered Internet video from being adopted in the living room.

Building B has partnered with Claria for use of their Axon service to customize content. By examining user web-browsing activity with Axon, Building B will be able to provide personalized recommendations for the consumer as well as extremely targeted ads for advertisers. Unfortunately, the Axon service appears reminiscent of the tracking found in Google History – a service that created an immediate privacy uproar.

With few specifics available on the service’s content, Building B’s video-on-demand will presumably face the same uphill battle to accumulate programming as Joost – a VOD service made for the Internet. Unlike Joost, Building B has brought aboard executives from numerous broadcasting backgrounds to provide in-roads for the task. Andy Lack, Sony BMG Music Entertainment chairman, is on the board.

Content withstanding, how Building B will distinguish itself from the entrenchment of existing cable and satellite VOD services has yet to be seen.