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Skype is the name that immediately jumps to mind when thinking of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls. This is mostly due to its longevity and its easy-to-use software client. With over 300 million users worldwide, it would be nearly impossible for an up-and-comer to get close. That’s what partnerships are for.

Jajah, the online telephone service, has just announced a partnership with Yahoo to bring its service to the over 90 million worldwide Yahoo Messenger users. All Phone-to-PC and PC-to-phone calls now made via Yahoo Messenger will be on behalf of Jajah, which promises high quality and low-costs to users in over 200 countries.

This partnership comes alongside news that Jajah has just signed up its 10 millionth customer on the eve of its 2nd birthday. This represents impressive growth considering that just last year, JaJah only had 2 million customers. The company hopes that other partners, along with Yahoo, will soon get on board with its new Jajah Managed Services for business.

Jajah often gets confused with the other “J” online calling services, Jaxtr and Jangl. Jangl and Jajah actually formed a partnership back in November.

Jajah, is backed by Sequoia Capital, and raised $20 million in a third round led by Intel Capital last year.

SaysMe is another startup that’s trying to, in its words, democratize television advertising. It lets you purchase television ads that run in your city or other local area with your name on them, for a small fee. So, for example, anyone wanting to show support for a local sports team or a cause or charity, would have an easy and affordable TV platform.

You choose an ad from the company’s web site. The ads themselves are created by producers — either 25 second or 55 second spots that they can earn royalties on. Your name appears at the end of the ad, and you can choose your location and networks including ESPN, Comedy Central, MTV and others.

Los Angeles-based SaysMe has just raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Intel Capital, with Prime Capital, Katalyst Films (actor Ashton Kutcher’s company) and other angel investors.

While ads run on a variety of topics, the company is trying to take advantage of the 2008 presidential election. Its homepage currently offers a selection of ads for purchase that favor the various political candidates. Some ads cost as low as $25, depending on your location and the network you’re advertising on.

Besides letting producers directly submit video ads, the company also gets videos from sites like YouTube. Once you buy an ad, you can also embed it on other sites.

Obviously, these ads are not going to be seen by many millions of people — they’re short, and they only run in local areas. The appeal here is vanity: Joe Schmoe gets to endorse a candidate on television, ads that will maybe be seen by people he knows.

SaysMe is in some sense competing against heavily funded Spot Runner, which we’ve heard is getting hounded by yet more investors who want in. Spot Runner offers a more complex set of features, including voice-over text and more detailed ways for planning when and where your ad will run.

Retailers are starting to invest in interactive displays which can show dynamic ads inside stores to better target customers who are stuck waiting in store lines. From the gas station to the coffee store, these displays are popping up everywhere. Pretty soon, look for an ad display in your bathroom. (joke, for now).

One benefiiciary is Channel M, which announced today that Intel Capital has invested in it. Los Angeles-based Channel M is one of a number of companies in this space. Another is Ripple, whose president, Ali Diab, I met last week. (our past coverage) Channel M runs national brand ads on displays inside 20,000 retail locations such as Macy’s or Blockbuster. Ripple, by contrast, has about 1,500 displays in place at coffee shops and bookstores where local advertisers entice customers to get a bagel next door.

Other rivals include Danoo, a Kleiner Perkins-backed company with displays in stores such as Lee’s Deli; Premier Retail Networks, which has display at big chains such as Wal-Mart and Circuit City; Gannett’s Captivate Network, which puts displays in elevators; and Gas Station TV, which lets you watch at the pump. Reactrix, meanwhile, builds ads into interactive games that people can play in public places such as floors through laser projectors on ceilings.

According to market analysts eMarketer and PQ Media, the out-of-home video industry is expected to grow to $2.25 billion and $3.22 billion, respectively, by 2011.

To date, Channel M has raised $24 million in three rounds, said David Teichner, CEO of the “out of home video” company. (our past coverage) The company claims it reaches more than 100 million customers each month with its 20,000 displays. Besides Intel, investors include Ascend Venture Group and Vintage Capital.

“It’s all about reaching consumers in different ways, ” Teichner says. “It’s an exciting time, like the Wild West, for this industry.”

Channel M tries to create compelling video and audio that consumers will watch, such as movie trailers. Then it splices ads, usually custom ads for the specific retailer, into the video. The company has been around since 1997 and it has 60 employees.

Ripple, meanwhile, was founded in 2006 and it has 40 people in El Seguno, Calif. It has raised $15 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Trinity Ventures. It is focused on putting up 40-inch displays in community-gathering places, including Borders bookstores and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores.

Part of the key is finding people waiting in line because they’re a captive audience. Ripple also needs a high-speed Internet connect, such as DSL or Wi-Fi, to feed its video content to the screens. The company hones in on local ads, like people who want to send birthday messages to their friends through services dubbed ShoutOut.

“We don’t do 50 panels that show national ads,” Diab said. “Ours is more like a community bulletin board.”

But Ripple also has big national advertisers as well such as Ford, Wachovia Bank and Live Nation. Diab says the cost to advertisers is about $2 per CPM, or $150 a month for 30,000 impressions. Ripple, like others, validates its impressions through Nielsen Media Research audits. It checks with retailers to get transactional data to determine how effective its ads are. The displays also have webcams to determine how much people are actually watching them (but the video data isn’t stored). With the right connectivity, it takes maybe 45 minutes to set up the screens, at a cost of about $2,000, Diab said.

Asked about possible recession impact, Diab said he doesn’t believe ad spending drops during recessions. In any event, he said that ad dollars are shifting from traditional media to new media such as “out-of-home” advertising. He noted, “Our ad recall is over 50 percent.” (photos: Ripple)

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.

SpikeSource, a startup that helps companies build, test and integrate software, is partnering with Intel to launch the SpikeSource Solutions Factory Platform. For SpikeSource, it’s a big strategy change — instead of partnering with independent software vendors, the startup will now provide its technology to major players like Intel so they can certify products in their ISV networks.

The new platform could catapult SpikeSource into the big leagues. When SpikeSource launches a new product, it normally signs up around 30 ISV customers, says Dominic Sartorio, SpikeSource’s senior director of product management. With the Intel deal, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup hopes to reach 200 customers in the next few months, then hold a bigger launch and reach out to the full pool of 12,000 ISVs that’s already registered with Intel.

To help SpikeSource meet the increased demand, the company has raised a new round of funding. Intel’s investment branch Intel Capital contributed $10 million, while Kleiner Perkins, Fidelity Ventures, CMEA Ventures and DAG Ventures — who are all prior investors — also contributed undisclosed amounts.

Sartorio says SpikeSource’s platform allows ISVs (namely, companies making software, usually niche software) to assemble, test, package and update their products automatically. It combines the different offerings that SpikeSource has developed since it was founded in 2003, and creates a single package that Intel — and, eventually, other big vendors — can use to give its seal of approval to new software.

Each of the platform’s components (security, inventory, updating, etc.) faces real competition, but Sartorio says SpikeSource is the first company to bring everything together in a commercial product. The only real competitors are do-it-yourself, in-house solutions developed by big tech companies, he says.

The new approach should help software vendors to get their products to market, because the platform makes it easy for them to use Intel’s branding and distribution network. Sartorio hopes to eventually sell the platform to enterprise IT departments and to the developer community as well, although the company is still figuring out the details.

SpikeSource first made a name for itself as an open source company, but the new platform is compatible with proprietary and hybrid software, Sartorio says. At the same time, it still serves open source developers, and parts of the platform are open source too.

The startup has a high-profile chief executive — Kim Polese, who was the original product manager of Java, and who was declared “the web’s 1997 It Girl” by Time Magazine.

Read our previous coverage of the company here.

This new funding should be SpikeSource’s last before it becomes profitable or makes an exit, Sartorio says.

[This article is expanded from a VentureBeat Wire story posted earlier today.]

Lithium ion technology batteries have been on the market for over 16 years now, and like a human of the same age, the technology’s growth appears to be slowing. Improvements in the battery technology are lessening each year, and the power demand from electronics, fueled by chip advances, makes it feel as if time is standing still for lithium ions — phones and laptops don’t stay charged much longer than they ever did.

We’ve reported on a few companies trying to leap ahead in lithium ions technology, including Boston Power, Lion Cells and Nanoexa (coverage here, here and here). But ZPower, a battery startup based on an entirely different technology, says its time to chuck the lithium ions entirely and move to a next-generation technology that’s longer lasting and more easily recyclable.

ZPower makes use of decades-old silver zinc technology, which offers greater power density (essentially, how much electricity a battery can hold) than lithium ion, but allows far fewer recharges before becoming useless. ZPower’s breakthrough is raising the number of times a silver zinc battery can be recharged to be comparable to lithium ion, research which took the company over a decade.

The immediate improvement will provide about 40 percent more power, according to ZPower CEO Ross Dueber. And you may not have to wait long to get a laptop that can last all day unplugged; the company has partnered with one of the top manufacturers of laptops to roll out an ultra-thin notebook around this August, with further product launches coming afterward. The company is in the process of raising about $30 million to scale up manufacturing.

Dueber estimates that it could take three or four years less for silver zinc to capture a large part of the market than it did for lithium ion, which took about eight years, based on ZPower’s plans for licensing out the technology. The limiting factor in its potential growth is the incompatibility of silver zinc batteries with existing devices — new cellphones, laptops and other electronics have to be designed for the type of battery they use, so you can’t simply pop in a new silver zinc battery to replace your old lithium ion.

Once you do have a silver zinc battery, however, there’s more than one benefit. The material inside can be recycled for re-use in another battery, so you’d get money toward the purchase of a new battery in exchange for returning your old one — which also helps keep the landfills cleaner. (Lithium ions can also be recycled, but are generally just broken down for the various metals inside, a less lucrative proposition.)

ZPower has no immediate plans to move outside of the electronics market, which means that lithium ion applications in cars, power tools and elsewhere will be safe from it. However, lithium ion is also under attack in those quarters. Take for instance dark-horse candidate EEStor, a company that claims its ultracapacitor technology can outperform a battery in rapid discharge applications (like when you jam down the acceleration pedal of your Tesla Roadster). The latest reports have pegged the release of an EEStor-powered car in 2009, manufactured by Zenn.

However, lithium ion may also have an ace in the hole. Although it’s too early to tell if the technology can be easily commercialized, researchers at MIT report that using specialized nanowires in a lithium ion battery can triple its energy density. And a separate group of researchers at Stanford, also using nanowires, have increased density ten times over. Of course, similar improvements might also be possible for silver zinc.

ZPower received its last venture round in 2006, $7 million from Intel Capital, OnPoint Technologies and a private equity group. The company is based in Camarillo, Calif.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Boston Scientific spinout TriVascular2 takes in $65M (release)
• Inhaled-drug startup Transave raises $35M (release)
• Triage Wireless gets $20M for vital-signs monitors (release)
• Tryton Medical receives $14M for “bifurcation” stents (release)
  
• Synthetic bio startup Codon Devices adds $11M (release)
• Tracon Pharma takes in $4.5M against cancer and eye disease (VentureWire)
• Antibody maker f-star swaps in equity stake by TVM (PDF release)
• Drug packager MonoSol Rx withdraws IPO (IPOhome)
• GE Healthcare acquires portable-ventilator maker VersaMed (release)

Boston Scientific spinout TriVascular2 takes in $65M – In 2005, Boston Scientific acquired a Santa Rosa, Calif., medical-device startup called TriVascular. Today, it spun it out once again.

The newly private startup raised $65 million in a “first” funding round from the likes of MPM Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Delphi Ventures and Kearny Venture Partners. Thirty million dollars of that sum went straight to Boston Scientific, which also retains the right to take a minority stake in the company.

TriVascular’s original CEO, Michael Chobotov, will resume that position at the new company, joined by two other TriVascular founders. It’s not, however, entirely clear what TriVascular will be doing. The company was originally focused on repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms, which are unusual swellings of blood vessels that can rupture unexpectedly, often fatally. Boston Scientific, however, shut down its aneurysm-repair business in 2006, so it’s not immediately obvious that the reborn TriVascular will jump right back in.

Inhaled-drug startup Transave raises $35M – Transave, a Monmouth, N.J., biotech working on inhaled drugs for lung disease, raised $35 million in a fourth funding round. Investors included Quaker BioVentures, Bessemer Venture Partners, TVM Capital, Prospect Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, Forbion Capital Partners and Easton Capital.

The startup is working on inhalable drugs for cystic fibrosis — in particular, a long-lasting form of the antibiotic amikacin, which is currently in mid-stage, phase II human testing. Transave had previously raised $58 million in venture capital, including a “recently completed” $40 million round.

Triage Wireless gets $20M for vital-signs monitors – Triage Wireless, a San Diego medical-device maker, raised $20.3 million in a second funding round. Investors included Qualcomm Ventures, Sanderling Ventures, 3i Group and Intel Capital.

Triage is developing wireless vital-signs monitors for long-term or continuous use. Its first product is a blood-pressure sensor that doesn’t require the old familiar inflated cuff.

Wisair, an Israeli ultra-wideband firm, has raised a large round of funding and says it’s gearing up to deliver more wireless USB products to the market, a technology that could cut down on the clutter of wires on the average computer user’s desk.

USB is the standard connection for most electronics that you hook up to your computer, among them cameras and MP3 players, and some equipment like the keyboard and mouse. Wired USB hasn’t been replaced by a technology like Bluetooth because wired connections provide much higher data transfer rates than any wireless product currently on the market can support.

Wireless USB technology makes use of ultra-wideband, a radio standard that’s short range but has very high bandwidth, reaching speeds of nearly 500 megabytes per second in perfect conditions. That’s plenty for any regular data transfer.

However, there’s competition from every angle. Aside from other ultra-wideband startups like Artimi and Tzero (coverage here and here), companies making Bluetooth-capable electronics are using UWB to make it more competitive, and next-generation WiFi technologies are also catching up.

Wisair’s current product is a pair of dongles, one of which connects to a device and the other to your computer, which can then communicate with each other. To continue being competitive in the future, the company will likely have to miniaturize further and convince electronics companies to include WUSB in their products.

The $24 million funding was led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, a private equity fund. Also participating were new investors Advent Venture Partners, Bridge Capital Fund of Japan and Yasuda Ventures, and existing investors Apex Partners, Broadcom, Intel Capital, Vertex, and the Zisapel brothers.

1. KnockaTV a big lesson for start-ups
2. Nokia unveils handset made entirely of recycled pieces
3. Magnify.net, the DIY video platform, growing
4. Novell buys Sitescape, open source collaboration tool
5. MySpace rips-off another Facebook idea: Slingshot Labs
6. GumGum helps photographers make money on the web
7. Hollywood’s writers have voted to end strike
8. Microsoft exec calls Vista-capable machines “junk”
9. Internet phone company Vonage in financial trouble
10. Intel puts $3.5 million into bizarre idea: Bragster

KnockaTV a big lesson for start-ups — KnockaTV, a video site we’d reviewed positively (see here and here ), is blowing up after founders began fighting each other over the company’s burn-rate. Reports about the Israeli company’s saga (the Globes has the fullest account; the English translation is here, though truncated) suggest the founders are driving the company into receivership on purpose. The team is made of the creators of ICQ, the successful early instant messenger service, which sold for $407 million a decade ago. The company was backed last year with $3.5 million, led by Evergreen Venture Partners. Lesson: No matter how successful or high-profile your founding members are, teamwork is more important.

Nokia unveils handset made entirely of recycled pieces — Details here. The phone, called the “Remade,” is part of Nokia’s effort to go green.

Magnify.net, the do-it-yourself community video platform, growing — Details here.

Novell buys SiteScape, an open source collaboration tool – Details here.

MySpace rips off another idea from Facebook: A program to fund third-party applications — Slingshot Labs is MySpace’s way to match the fund created by Facebook and its backers to invest in third-party application companies that use Facebook’s platform. Details here in Business Week. It’s an incubator for developing Internet ventures, and it plans to back four or five ideas per year.

GumGum, trying to help photographers make money on the web — Let’s say you’re a member of the paparazzi, and you have a thousand photos of Britney Spears. You upload those photos into GumGum, then a web publisher — let’s say gossip blogger Perez Hilton — goes to GumGum and finds a Britney photo he wants to use. Hilton would make money for you one of two ways. One, Hilton pays you for the Britney photo on a cost-per-impression basis. If lots of people see the image on the publishers’ site, Hilton pays you, based on the CPM amount you set. Two, you run VideoEgg ads on on your photo that appears in Hilton’s site. Los Angeles-based GumGum has raised $125,000 in angel funding. See video, below Techcrunch has more.

Hollywood’s writers have voted to end strike — They ended after 100 days, probably because there was nothing decent anymore to watch on TV (it all went to the Internet).

Microsoft exec calls Vista-capable machines “junk” — Ouch.

Internet phone company Vonage in financial trouble — Details here.

Intel puts $3.5 million into bizarre idea — The chip giant’s investment arm is backing “Bragster,” a site where people can show off. Details here.

FlowPlay, a Seattle company developing a virtual world for teenagers and young adults around casual gaming, has raised $3.7 million in a first round of funding led by Intel Capital and Ambient Sound Investments.

John Cook, of Seattle PI has the news.

The company, run by former general manager of mobile games at RealNetworks, Derrick Morton, is still in testing mode, and apparently plans to launch in spring.

Morton said gaming integration with a social network took resources, and so the fundraising took a while because investors were concerned about the money it would take to launch, according to Cook. Flowplay plans to charge $5.99 per month, aiming for 80,000 users to break even.

That’s the same model ($5 per month) as Club Penguin, which sold to Walt Disney last year for as much as $700 million.

We covered Flowplay during the Techcrunch40 conference, and concluded that while the site looks clean, there wasn’t a whole lot new here (there are lots of games where you can play with Avatars). That doesn’t mean it won’t get users, however, as the sector in general has seen strong growth.

The funding included other investors Ben Feingold, former president of Worldwide Home Entertainment at Sony Pictures and Michael Schutzler, former SVP of Games at RealNetworks.

Users play games, and lead a virtual life by earning currency, clothing, pets, furniture and more.

Suppose a simple blood test were to tell you that you’ve got a better than 50 percent chance of developing “type 2″ diabetes — a form of the disease long associated with age and obesity — within the next five years. Would you make the recommended lifestyle changes, by eating right and exercising more? Would you even consider starting lifelong medication that might postone or prevent the disease entirely?

These are the sorts of choices that Tethys Bioscience, an Emeryville, Calif., biotech, would like to force on you before much longer. Tethys is preparing to launch a new diagnostic test — dubbed Diabetes PreDx (”dx” is a common medical abbreviation for “diagnostic” or “diagnosis,” although here it’s pronounced in a way that sounds like “predicts”) — that it says can accurately identify people who are most at risk of developing diabetes. The company plans to launch the test in a preliminary version later this month, with a full rollout planned for June.

The Tethys approach is conceptually simple, if still somewhat breathtaking on a practical level. Diabetes PreDx measures a patient’s blood sample for roughly 100 proteins that the company has linked to the progression of diabetes, then produces a numerical score that quantifies an individual’s diabetic risk. People with scores at the low end of the spectrum will actually have a substantially lower risk of diabetes — as much as five times lower — than conventional measures might suggest, while those at the other end may face an equally elevated risk.

This is obviously a pretty big deal if the test works the way Tethys says it does. The company says it refined and validated its test over the past five years — it was founded in 2002 — using tens of thousands of historical blood samples and matching them against whether the donors actually developed diabetes. Tethys says it’s already presented supporting data at various scientific meetings over the past year, although it doesn’t appear to have actually published any of it yet.

Tethys isn’t saying exactly which proteins it’s identified for the test, although the company’s CEO, Mickey Urdea, acknowledged that some are indicators of glucose metabolism, while others are related to liver function, inflammation and blood coagulation.

“This is why using a single marker, or a combination of two markers, has always been insufficient” to make accurate diabetes-risk predictions, Tethys chief scientific officer Mike Richey says. “There are multiple pathways by which people reach [a diabetic state of] glucose dysregulation.”

What, exactly, could a high-scoring individual do to alter his or her fate? Obviously, the first step would be to start paying closer attention to diet — specifically to the consumption of sugary or refined-carbohydrate foods that tend to trigger repeated surges of insulin production in the body — and to exercise more. In addition, Tethys officials suggest that some of the safer diabetes medications now in use, particularly the generic drug metformin and newer drugs such known as DPP-IV inhibitors such as Merck’s Januvia, might be able to prevent irreversible damage well before it occurs.

Diabetes PreDx is the result of years of stealthy work by a group of former employees at Chiron’s diagnostic unit, who came together at Tethys to find a way to make useful blood tests that could help patients and their doctors postpone or prevent the onset of serious chronic diseases. The company is also at work on a predictive test for osteoporosis, and has another diagnostic candidate in the pipeline. Tethys hasn’t said what it will charge for Diabetes PreDx, but says its models show that identifying and, presumably, postponing the onset of diabetes in a single individual can save the healthcare system $1,100. So don’t expect the test to be particularly cheap.

Tethys also just raised an undisclosed sum in a third round of funding, bringing its total financing so far to $54 million. Investors in the round included Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Teva acquires protein-therapeutic maker CoGenesys for $400M (release)
• ViewRay takes in $25M for MRI radiation-therapy guidance (release)
• NovaMed, Chinese clinical-research outfit, receives $14M (release)
• Progentix Ortho raises first funding round (release)
• Medical imaging co. Point Biomedical recaps with $25M (VentureWire)
• Lumidigm takes in $7M for optical-fingerprint ID systems (VW)
• Medical-software co. Compressus aims to close $14M round (VW)
• Channel Medical Partners aims for $150M med-tech fund (VW)
• Spinal-implant maker Scient’x names Michael Huggins as CEO (release)
• Specialty pharma Cardiokine names Manuel Worcel as CEO (release)
• Respiratory-disease co. Pulmatrix appoints Robert Connelly CEO (release)

Teva acquires protein-therapeutic maker CoGenesys for $400M — CoGenesys, a Rockville, Md., protein-drug biotech spun out of Human Genome Sciences in 2006, has been acquired by Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries for $400 million in cash. The companies’ joint release is here.

CoGenesys, like its former parent HGS, is focused on the development of protein and peptide drugs for a variety of conditions. The company’s two lead drug candidates aim to treat neutropenia, a depletion of white blood cells that puts people at risk of serious infection, and heart failure.

Teva said the acquisition advances its recently revised strategic goal of pursuing biotech drugs (”biopharmaceuticals”) and generic biologics (”biogenerics”). It’s not entirely clear whether Teva is interested in pursuing CoGenesys’ actual drug pipeline or simply putting its manufacturing technology to use in Teva’s existing international biogenerics business. No biogenerics have been approved for use in the U.S.

ViewRay takes in $25M for MRI radiation-therapy guidance — Gainesville, Fla.-based ViewRay, a developer of MRI-based cancer-radiation systems, raised $25 million in a second funding round. Investors included OrbiMed Advisors, Fidelity Biosciences, Aisling Capital and Kearny Venture Partners.

ViewRay claims its system will be the first to offer real-time “volumetric” imaging of tumors concurrent with radiation treatment, which ostensibly allows radiation oncologists to compensate for organ movement. The funding will go for additional staff and the manufacture and validation of advanced prototypes of the system. Our previous coverage of the company is here.

NovaMed, Chinese clinical-research outfit, receives $14M — NovaMed, a Chinese startup that performs outsourced commercial and clinical-trial management for Chinese and international drug companies, raised $13.8 million in a second funding round. Investors included Fidelity Asia Ventures, its US affiliate, Fidelity Biosciences, and Atlas Venture.

Founded in 2005 by a former AstraZeneca executive and a Chinese Internet entrepreneur, NovaMed essentially acts as a middleman for companies with drugs they’d like to sell or test in China. Depending on the client, NovaMed says it will do everything from running clinical trials and shepherding drugs through the Chinese regulatory process to manufacturing, distributing and selling pharmaceuticals.

The company had previously raised roughly $6 million. NovaMed said it will use the new funding to expand its operations and also to in-license new drugs for deveopment or sale in China.

Lumidigm takes in $7M for optical-fingerprint ID systems — Lumidigm, an Albuquerque, N.M., developer of multispectral fingerprint scanners, raised $7 million in a third funding round, VentureWire reports, citing a regulatory filing. Investors included Epic Ventures led the round, joined by new investor Sun Mountain Capital and existing investors Fort Washington Capital Partners, Motorola Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson New England and Intel Capital. Lumidigm’s technology aims to read fingerprint information both from the skin surface and from subsurface layers to improve accuracy and foil attempts to spoof the technology.

Medical-software co. Compressus aims to close $14M round — Compressus, a Washington, D.C., software maker whose products link hospitals and doctors to government agencies for public-health monitoring and emergency response, is looking for an additional $1.3 million to close out a $14.3 million third funding round, VentureWire reports. The company, which was founded by three lobbyists, has so far raised more than $27 million from angel investors.

Channel Medical Partners aims for $150M med-tech fund — Channel Medical Partners, a Skokie, Ill., VC firm focused on medical-device investments, aims to raise a $150 million second fund, VentureWire reports. The new fund would be more than triple the size of its $40 million initial fund, raised in 2001. Channel aims to fund 12 to 15 startups with the new cash, and will concentrate on device firms, although it is open to investing in diagnostics, drug delivery and “specialty supply” companies as well.