VentureBeat

Personal electronic devices with Internet connections are all the rage these days. A small, part touch-screen, part stuffed animal called Chumby is hands down the most endearing of these.

Chumby’s parent company, Chumby Industries, announced today a new round of financing to expand the reach of its cute device. Interestingly, the company is also looking to expand beyond the Chumby into other devices that use screen interaction such as digital picture frames and possibly even LCD TVs.

The Chumby uses widgets that are selected online and sent over the Internet to your device. Given that the device looks a bit like a stuffed alarm clock, it should probably be no surprise that clocks are among the most popular widgets. Yet, the Chumby can do so much more. You can check your Gmail from it, cycle through Flickr photos, and see hot items from the social news site Digg. There are dozens of widgets available across a wide range of categories, and the list is constantly growing.

As an early beta tester of the pre-release, I have grown particularly close with my Chumby. When I’m not using it to display the latest Twitter messages, I have the ‘Kane Approves‘ widget (a looped video of Orsen Welles clapping exuberantly, as in Citizen Kane) in constant rotation. Visitors who come into my apartment often remark that such widgets almost turn the device into a piece of art.

The $12.5 million round was led by JK&B Capital. Previous backers Avalon Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also contributed to this round. Marc Sokol of JK&B will join Chumby Industries’ Board of Directors.

Chumby Industries is based out of San Diego, CA.

[photo: flickr/parislemon]

VMIX, a company that once sought to be YouTube, but which changed direction to provide software to large web properties to share video, has raised $16.5 million in funding.

VMIX joins a host of companies doing much the same thing, including Brightcove, Reality Digital, Vsocial and VideoEgg, to name a few. These all serve third-party sites with video technology.

The San Diego VMIX offers a video player and a content management system that includes social networking features. Visitors to a company site using VMIX can do things like upload their own videos, share videos with other users and vote top videos. The site owner can customize the VMIX player to match the site’s overall design, control the sorts of videos appearing on the site, and upload their own videos.

It isn’t as sexy as viral user-generated video sharing sites like YouTube. VMIX had original planned to be such a site (the destination site is still at VMIX.com). But providing quality software to media organizations has turned out to be a bigger business for VMIX: Client companies don’t want to put the time and money into building their own online video software.

VMIX says it has 190 web sites using its software, including movie studios like Universal, Paramount, Lyon’s Gate, Fox Searchlight (see screenshot, below) MGM as well as newspapers like the Chicago Tribune. Through its partners, VMIX reaches over 60 million unique monthly visitors.

VMIX has done little marketing, it says, relying instead on customers recommending the software to others. New investors include JK&B Capital and ATA Ventures. They join existing investors Mission Ventures and Enterprise Partners.

Splunk, a San Francisco company that offers a search engine for IT data across corporate networks, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding.

Company IT professionals benefit from the search engine, because it scours technical data across a business operatings, from hardware to software, letting them track logs, messages and other data.

It comes at a time when competitors are entering this area, including Network Chemistry, which two months ago said it was throwing its resources into a new search engine that does something similar.

The funding was led by Ignition Partners, and included existing investors August Capital, JK&B Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds. Unconfirmed reports put the company’s valuation at $120 million.

Splunk offers a free download for its service, which has helped it grow. In 18 months since the formal launch of its first product, the company has added 450 customers, including Visa and the U.S. Department of Justice, it says. It claims more than 100,000 user downloads.

This funding round follows Series A investment of $5 million in December 2004 from August Capital and Sevin Rosen, and $10 million Series B in January 2006 led by JK&B Capital.