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Mobile and web content producer Booyah announced today that it received $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins. The two seem like a good match, considering the company’s job listings for iPhone engineers and the investor’s special iPhone developers fund.

The Silicon Valley-based startup remains in stealth mode, and KP is its only named backer so far. Still, there are reasons to believe they might come out with something special. Its founders — Sam Christiansen, Keith Lee and Brian Morrisoe — previously worked at Blizzard Entertainment, home of the World of Warcraft games, as well as Activision and Insomniac Games. Between them, the latter two are responsible for gems like Call of Duty, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Resistance and Ratchet & Clank.

If that doesn’t prime expectations, at least the founders have high hopes for themselves. Their stated goal? To “blow people away with a product that actually improves their life while simultaneously delighting them.” And if that wasn’t enough — “Do good, to help other people do good, to change the world.”

This just in:

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s more prominent venture capital firms, said Eric J. Keller (left) will join the firm as Chief Operating Officer.

John Denniston, who formerly had the COO role, now oversees the firm’s Green Growth Fund, along with Ben Kortlang.

From the release:

Keller brings more than 20 years of experience as a senior executive at a variety of technology companies. Most recently, he served as Chief Executive Officer at Movaris, a private enterprise software company that provided a suite of financial governance applications. During his tenure, Keller built the firm’s executive team and customer base, completed two private financings, and successfully merged Movaris with Trintech Group Plc in February 2008.

Previously, Keller served as Chief Financial Officer for medical device company Ventritex, application service provider Corio, business communications solution provider Aspect Communications, and scientific instrument firm Dionex. At these companies, he counseled CEOs regarding business strategy, organizational, and operational matters, and developed the teams and processes that enabled the companies to grow. Keller currently serves on the board of directors at Shutterfly and was previously a member of the board of directors for Marimba. He holds a B.S. degree from Cornell University and an M.B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley…

…”Eric has an exceptional track record of driving companies forward,” said Ted Schlein, KPCB Partner. “Having successfully led startups in diverse technology fields, including software, services, and medical devices, he has a deep understanding of entrepreneurs and how KPCB can help accelerate their innovations.”

Keller joins KPCB as the firm grows its capacity to help entrepreneurs succeed. New ventures partnering with KPCB benefit from the firm’s expanded presence in Asia-Pacific and Europe, and the increased investment opportunities of three new funds introduced in 2008. “I’m thrilled to apply my operating experience to helping Kleiner-backed entrepreneurs build better ventures,” said Keller, who was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Finance” by Treasury & Risk magazine in 2006.

It’s no secret that there are plenty of cowboy outfits in the venture capital world, including scores that were started before the tech bust. But in the weightier circles of late-stage venture investment, there’s supposed to be less risk, and therefore fewer seat-of-the-pants operations. Which makes Advanced Equities, a Chicago firm fingered by Forbes in a recent expose, all the more notable.

AE is run by a pair of former stock brokers, Keith Daubenspeck and Dwight Badger, who built it in 1999 to invest in tech. But unlike the flawless pedigrees of many VCs, Forbes notes that the two are, respectively, a community college grad and a college dropout. (Perhaps telling of certain prejudices in the financial community, Forbes also chose the title “Garbage In…” for the piece.)

Here’s the outline of AE’s business plan, according to Forbes: First, find a high-profile venture capital outfit like Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures or New Enterprise Associates to work with. Convince clients to give you money, based on the respectability of those firms. Then pour the money into hugely overvalued deals with later-stage firms in the portfolios of said VCs, afterward skimming hefty fees until the firms go public or, far more likely, collapse.

Valuations aside, it’s true that AE is an investor in plenty of high-profile names. In telecom, for instance, it has put money into Infinera and Turin Networks, both still operative. Somewhat less appetizing is the money it put into RFID company Alien Technology, which tried and failed to go public, and Agami, which folded recently, after taking $45 million only six months ago.

A possibly worse indictment against AE’s financial acumen is the money it poured into the early biofuels market, including Altra Biofuels, which raised $120 million in 2006, and Cilion, which got $200 million in what was at one point the biggest cleantech investment ever. Both were first generation ethanol companies at a time when that fuel was highly hyped, but most public companies in the same category have since lost half their value or more; one can only wonder if heavily funded private companies are doing much better.

But what Forbes is suggesting is not that Advanced Equities is simply a badly run firm. The tacit accusation is that AE is run by con-men who scam little old ladies and other clueless investors — in one example, a story is related of how 83 year old Constance Kamberos was toted out of AE’s building by security after trying to complain about her investment in the firm, while multiple other dissatisfied clients have filed suit.

Could it be that some of the most famous firms on Sand Hill, seeking to prop up previous investments, have made themselves complicit in Advanced Equities’ sketchy investing style to pump cash into risky firms like Agami? Perish the thought.

[Update: Lost in the press blitz about the Google.org investment was the fact that Altarock took $26.25 million in total. Advanced Technology Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Vulcan Capital all participated.] Here’s a fact: If you go outside, wherever you are, and start drilling a hole, once you get deep enough it will become very, very hot. Using that heat for electricity is the cornerstone of geothermal power, and it’s great if you can reach the hot spots — just ask Iceland. But much of that heat is difficult to reach or use, a detail that has inspired the latest investment by Google.org.

The type of geothermal power that has been used for over a century comes from underground reservoirs of water that are heated from below. Areas that are easy to access, like California’s Geysers geothermal development, are a valuable source of power. But in many other places, there are heated areas relatively close to the surface — in Google’s view, that means three to 10 kilometers down — that also don’t contain water.

To draw power from those locations, you’d need to not only drill down far enough, but also pump in water and retrieve it as steam to run turbines. That technology is called Enhanced Geothermal Systems. The Google.org funding, for $10.25 million, has been split two ways. Altarock Energy will get $6.25 million, and Potter Drilling will receive $4 million. Separately, the Southern Methodist University Geothermal Lab will get about half a million dollars for ongoing research.

Between the three, Google is tackling the various requirements for drilling and injecting water, as well as mapping out new resources. However, the amounts are small compared to other recent Google.org investments.

We speculated that Google.org would be making a geothermal bet back in May, right after it had helped plow over $200 million into solar thermal firms Brightsource and, separately, eSolar. Those amounts suggested that Google was ready to put serious weight behind any technology it thought could take off.

The investments announced today could indicate that EGS isn’t ready for prime-time, or that the companies Google funded are simply a bit earlier in the development cycle. Or it could mean that Google is nervous about some of the risk factors with EGS, like the possibility of losing large amounts of the water you pump in or destabilizing the ground beneath plants (not a small concern in California).

Another company we’ve written about, Australia’ Geodynamics, is planning thousands of megawatts of geothermal development using technology similar to Altarock’s, but has already had to abandon at least one well that it drilled. If successful, both it and the Google companies estimate that they can produce geothermal power for under 10 cents per kilowatt hour, the usual figure required for success.

We’ve also written about Altarock before, when it received at $4 million investment last year from Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures.

In most cases, when a 17 year old girl wants to attempt to galvanize her generation against global warming, the end product tends to be basically nothing. Things change a bit when that girl’s father is Kleiner Perkins’ chief rainmaker, John Doerr.

The VC, who led early investments in Google, Intuit and Sun Microsystems and lured Al Gore to join the firm, credits his daughter, Mary, with pushing him to go green. Now, with backing from her father and guidance from his friends, the incoming high school senior and heiress has just launched a non-profit called Inconvenient Youth. The organization’s goal is to use an online social network built on Ning and combine it  with occasional conferences and training sessions designed to teach teenagers to become effective activists and community leaders. The first of these training sessions, which brought together 80 teenagers from around the world, happened this weekend at Stanford.

The first push towards this project apparently came in mid-2007, when the non-profit group Climate Project trained Mary to give the “Inconvenient Truth” presentation from which her non-profit spins its name. She says that while she found the presentation compelling, she didn’t think it would speak to her peers. Inconvenient Youth wants to remedy the problem. Its site will include a teen-friendly version of the presentation and spice it up with multimedia educational content, including templates for letters to politicians, training videos and relevant news. Everyone who participates in the training programs gets at Flip camcorder to record their moments of activism.

The inconvenient thing about Inconvenient Youth is two-fold. First, it centers around its own social network, and convincing teenagers to visit another social network is a tough, tough game. Second, mobilizing teenagers to do anything political is far tougher. I wonder how many of today’s teenagers are going go be galvanized by the efforts of an incredibly well-off peer, no matter how sharp and focused she is?

In most cases, I would just write the whole thing off as an idealistic teenager’s dream. Mary is entering her senior year in high school, when the quest for college admission — to say nothing of standard high school concerns — could dominate her life. But in this case, it’s hard to know. It’s never a safe call to bet against a Doerr.

Are new platforms such as the Apple iPhone or Google’s upcoming Android being overhyped? That’s for certain. But the “Bang or Bust” panelists at MobileBeat 2008 offered their own nuanced takes about where the opportunities are and how fast they will come as closed mobile platforms open up.

Users are already flocking to the iPhone in part because it has many more choices of software available for download compared to your typical cell phone or smart phone. Sam Altman, CEO of location service Loopt, said that iPhone owners use his service 47 times more than other mobile users. Those kinds of results are the norm for companies that develop applications for the iPhone and other phones, he said. (Data shows that as many as 31 million applications have been downloaded from the App Store in just the past month).

Rich Miner, general manager of the Google Android platform, said that what’s different now is that software developers who understand consumer experiences are flocking to the new platforms. That’s forcing more changes to accommodate them, such as more open access to applications.

J. H. Kah, senior vice president at South Korea’s SK Telecom, warned that the iPhone will give consumers just a taste of what they want in terms of accessing applications over 3G data services. But the demand will be so great that those consumers will quickly find that the bandwidth available to them is underwhelming.

“The iPhone 3G is a wake-up call for American carriers to upgrade their networks,” Kah said, noting that Asian carriers have provided much faster connectivity for a while. “People will demand more from their networks.”

The slowness of the networks could hold back progress. In the meantime, the iPhone 3G is here and is clearly the focus of new investment in applications because the phones are selling out.

Matt Murphy, head of Kleiner Perkins‘ $100 million iFund, said that his fund has invested in five iPhone application companies so far. That includes iControl, which brings home automation to the iPhone so you can use it to control the lights in your home. He noted that, even with its more closed approach, Apple has opened new opportunities for app developers who were previously stuck dealing with carriers to get their software up on the “deck” of a phone where users could use it. Now, it’s much easier to get an application up on Apple’s App Store. Since the debut of the store, more than 1,000 applications are now available. Over time, Murphy predicted new business models would emerge beyond charging a fee for App Store software. Those include virtual goods sales and affiliate sales programs, where those who promote transactions can get a cut of the transaction amount.

That, in turn, should whet the appetite for getting applications on a broader array of phones using the Google Android platform. Miner said that the project is on schedule with four major handset makers engaged in making Android phones now. Carriers are also at work on carrier-branded Android phones, he said. The first will hit in the second half of 2008 and many more will come next year. There is still a wait-and-see attitude on Android, though.

Asked if the Android software development kit was delayed, Miner said that his company did roll out new updated kits to a small number of higher-profile developers. But he said more members of the developer community would get their kits soon, allowing them to get started on development.

“Android is getting attention because of its openness them, but people want to see volume sales before they develop for it in droves,” Murphy said.

He said that developers have the choice of either making an application that can run on a couple of hundred phones or a feature-rich application that exploits the uniqueness of the most popular smart phone, the iPhone. Trying to do both may stretch resources too thin.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of TechCrunch, moderated the panel. He asked whether the open versus closed models would play out between Android and the iPhone, much the same way that Microsoft’s more-open approach won out against Apple’s closed approach in the computer wars. That’s the big question.

John Riccitiello has been driving a lot of change at Electronic Arts. He was president and chief operating officer of the big independent video game publisher from 1997 to 2004. Then he left to co-found Elevation Partners. He engineered a deal to invest $400 million in acquiring a majority stake in the game development firms, BioWare and Pandemic. While he was gone, EA suffered lackluster financial performance and its games were often mocked as dull and uninspired. Riccitiello rejoined EA as CEO in May 2007, and reorganized EA so that it could operate its game studios as a bunch of city-states. EA acquired BioWare/Pandemic for $800 million. The aim is to get the game maker out of its funk and to produce original content that hardcore gamers won’t sneer at and nongamers will try out. EA’s games are indeed looking better; I put three of them on my list of the top 10 games of E3. But it may be some time before anyone can declare that Riccitiello has engineered a turnaround.

VB: It seems like your drive to higher quality is a tough thing to measure.
JR: I don’t think so. You’re a gamer. What do you think?

VB: The question is what these games will really look like when they come out.
JR: A lot of this stuff is close to coming out. You might not like cheesecake. There are different tastes. If you can’t see it, wait for it to sell. Then we can look at the results. I don’t think you can look at Mirror’s Edge and not think it’s innovative. The same with Dead Space (pictured left). Or look at Warhammer Online (our Q&A) and not think it’s a high quality game. Or look at Madden and not see massive innovation from a year ago. Or look at Hasbro and see how it’s great on the different platforms. We’ve got Tetris and Scrabble on the iPhone. Those are good executions. EA has had a couple of years where it’s been tough.

VB: If you come in as a new CEO, and you want to improve game development, how do people benchmark it? Do they just wait a couple of years to see if what comes out is good stuff? It’s a little squishy.
JR: For core games, there is the Metacritic rating. Go to the Miss Universe contest. There are pretty girls there. Somebody has to make the judgment. You do the best you can. You try to stay objective. The lion’s share of the people writing about our product and consumers playing our games are noticing there are better games here. Battlefield Bad Company is better than the title that preceded it. BoomBlox is a surprisingly good title. Nascar got a sizably better rating than a year ago. NCAA is getting better reviews. People look at NBA Live and say it’s really cool. People think Spore (below) is a candidate for game of the show. Or Warhammer. We could be wrong. But we did things on purpose to get those reactions. I’m fine if you remain a skeptic.

VB: No, I’m thinking more of investors and shareholders. Maybe they can’t tell as easily. The stock hasn’t moved in any great directions.
JR: I don’t think the investors give a shit about our quality. They care about our earnings per share. They wait for it to happen. We had three years where we didn’t make our expectations. If I were an investor, I would wait and see. That’s fine with me. Read the rest of this entry »

Representing a potential medical quantum leap similar to, but even more important than the commercialization of X-ray imaging, Pacific BioSciences has taken a whopping $100 million to make it possible to affordably map out an individual’s entire genome in a matter of minutes, and for under $1,000 dollars.

While several startups, including 23andMe and deCODEme, are already offering cheap genetic testing for individuals, the technology Pacific Bio is looking at is about as different from those as looking at a satellite image of a town is to walking through it. The company is working on a system to “read” each DNA letter in a person’s genetic makeup, providing an in-depth view of every factor affecting a given person’s health.

The idea sounds fairly simple: Individial DNA molecules are captured in tiny holes on a chip, where they are pulled apart and rebuilt with enzymes identical to those present in the body, but with the addition of chemical markers. A type of digital camera takes a picture of the process, identifying the specific fragment being looked at. We covered the technology in more depth when it was first revealed, and have mentioned various competitors, most notably Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix, who want to do sequencing for under $100.

In practice, of course, operating at such tiny scales is difficult, and accurately sequencing thousands of genes at once seems nearly impossible. But the company says it will be ready to commercialize by 2010, a Herculean feat if it can pull it off. The new funding indicates that it is at least gaining the confidence of venture capitalists.

If and when that happens, it will be time for early investors including Alloy Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Mohr Davidow Ventures — who collectively plowed more than $70 million into Pacific Bio over four previous rounds — to rake in the money.

However, it will just be the beginning for a whole new field of medical technology centered around finding uses for all the new information in individuals that becomes available. Preventative medicine is the obvious use, but others, like data mining for new cures and information on diseases, are also possible. Laws regulating the use (and misuse) of such information by insurers, employers and others will also have to be formulated.

A passel of new investors joined the funding, starting with co-leads Deerfield Management and Intel Capital. Also in were Morgan Stanley, Redmile Group, T. Rowe Price, and an unnamed “large financial institution.” Other previous investors Maverick Capital, AllianceBernstein, DAG Ventures and Teachers’ Private Capital also participated.

Update: Whrrl has not been snubbed by Apple. As of Friday morning, it’s now the 10th application from the top of the list on “featured” apps, if you go the AppStore from your iPhone. On the iTunes home page, Apple has put Whrrl in the first set of companies featured under “new”. (Whrrl is in the first tab, and in the fourth). So Apple so far appears to be trying to treat these companies fairly. Whrrl says it wasn’t snubbed by not being on stage during Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote last month, rather, it says it hadn’t completed its app fully to be ready for demo.

Mobile social network Whrrl will be available today on the just-launched App Store for the iPhone.

The attractive thing about the application, created by Seattle-based Pelago, is the way Whrrl combines a number of different services into a single package — microblogging, location-based updates and reviews. The service is already available on other mobile devices, but the iPhone launch is worth noting because Pelago was the first company to join the $100 million iFund created by Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers to spur the development of iPhone apps. (Pelago was already Kleiner-backed prior to the iFund.)

However, the launch is overshadowed a bit by a similar announcement from competitor Loopt, which is backed by Kleiner competitor Sequoia Capital. After all, Loopt actually got a chance to take the stage during Apple’s WWDC this year, and there are rumors that Whrrl was consciously snubbed. While the iPhone version of Whrrl appears to the same service that’s already available on other devices, Loopt gave its announcement extra juice by revealing that it will partner with other companies, most notably local review site Yelp.

Pelago has raised $22.4 million in venture funding.

Check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat’s conference on July 24.

These days, even Wall Street analysts are acknowledging that content is no longer king, but MEVIO, formerly known as Podshow, has just received funding from some of the biggest names in the VC world. The company has raised $15 million round in funding, led by Crosslink Capital, along with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Maybe online content is more of a wealthy prince.

MEVIO specializes in professionally produced content that it both creates itself and aggregates from around the web. Unlike most of its competitors in online video (most notably YouTube), it has managed to attract a wide range of brand advertisers.

These advertisers, which include Coca Cola, Toyota, HP and Microsoft, tend to shy away from user-generated content. They feel safer when they know their brand won’t show up next to user-created content like, say Sloppy Drunk LisaNova, whose slurry rant was recommended to me today on YouTube’s homepage.

The company says that its goal is to grow into a full-fledged network capable of competing with traditional TV broadcasters. With 9 million unique monthly visitors, it still has a ways to go — although the company says it has grown 800 percent over the last year. Its current lineup, stacked with somewhat mixed fare like “Women of YouTube,” “Eleventh Commandment,” and “Dr. Cockney,” (an international sex therapist show that attracts 3 million viewers a month), doesn’t stack all the way up against top TV shows like “Heroes” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” both readily available on Hulu.

The $15 million will be used to further build out the company’s stock of content and expand its distribution partnerships.

The iPhone’s remaking of the cell phone business is creating opportunities for new start-ups, particularly in the game field. That’s why one of the game industry’s leading executives left his job to create Ngmoco, an iPhone game start-up.

Neil Young was one of the rock star game development executives at Electronic Arts, responsible for games that sold millions of video games, from “The Lord of the Rings” titles to “The Sims 2.” He was the executive in charge of EA’s most important upcoming title, “Spore.” He gave it up a couple of weeks ago to start his own game company in San Francisco.

Today, the 38-year-old is announcing that Ngmoco will make and publish games for the iPhone. Young said the company will try to raise the bar on quality of mobile games.

“We are finally at the place where we can reinvent the experiences and the economics of the mobile games business. The industry has been stagnant for a few years. I feel the iPhone is a real opportunity to change that industry.”

I asked Young if he would tap Bing Gordon, the former chief creative officer at EA who recently left to become a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for venture funding. Kleiner Perkins has set up a $100 million iFund to finance applications for the iPhone. But Young declined to comment on the possibility.

In particular, Young thinks the 3G version of the iPhone will be a much better platform for showcasing high-quality games. Apple’s new Apps Store, a web site where users can go to cruise for new applications, will likely make it easier to discern the bad games from the good ones, Young said.

Young said he’s impressed that the data usage and web usage on iPhones is so high. The iPhone has all of the enabling technology to create new kinds of games that are tuned to the mobile experience. That includes global positioning system navigation, a camera, an accelerometer (which detects which way the iPhone is tilted), an instant-messenger system, email, and other functions that games can exploit.

Ngmoco will focus on creating a new type of game publisher, making its own games or hiring developers to make games under the Ngmoco brand. Young said he has backers and cofounders but he isn’t revealing them now. He remains an advisor to EA.

Young said that he made the decision to leave in April and EA executives tried to talk him out of it. They even asked him if he wanted to run such a group inside EA. But he decided to make a clean break. At the time he left, Young was running an EA division dubbed Blueprint Group. That group included EA’s Maxis division, the Spore franchise (which includes an iPhone game), the relationship with film director Steven Spielberg (whose inspiration led to Boomblox) and a couple of unannounced titles.

Maxis will now be headed by Lucy Bradshaw, and Blueprint will be run by longtime EA executive Louis Castle. Young said he’s been happy with the leadership of John Riccitiello, who became CEO of EA last year, and he believes Riccitiello’s reorganization of the company into stand-alone studio groups will lead to better games.

“It’s bittersweet,” Young said. “I’m so excited about what we are doing. On the other hand, I’m stepping away from 11 years of history and a whole bunch of friendships. Sometimes you have to step out.”

The games that Young worked on or managed while at EA beyond those mentioned above include “Ultima Online,” “Medal of Honor,” “Command & Conquer,” “Boomblox,” and “Majestic.” The latter was a novel X-Files style “alternate reality” game that ahead of its time. Majestic staged a mystery and enlisted gamers to communicate with each other and left clues via mobile phones, instant messages, and web video.

Before joining EA in 1997, Young was a vice president of product development at game publisher Virgin Interactive. Upon joining EA, he became the manager of EA’s now-defunct Origin Systems division in Austin, Texas.

EA’s own mobile group will now be competition for Young. He said that the current mobile game business consists of about 200 million downloads a year with an average revenue per user of $8. That’s a $1.5 billion annual industry. By comparison, games on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable generated at least $45 per user and billions of dollars a year in revenue. He thinks the iPhone could help mobile games bridge that gap. While iPhone is the big opportunity, Young is also intrigued by Google’s Android platform.

“This is the moment,” he said. “This next 24 months an industry will get revitalized and re-energized. You have to look at this opportunity on the iPhone and ask yourself, ‘What would a company like Nintendo do?’”

The iPhone games that have already shipped, such as “Tilt,” a free game where you tilt the iPhone back and forth to catch items being dropped, represent “first order thinking” and are fun initial distractions. Such games are just the starting point, Young said.

[Check out MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24. Be sure to vote for your favorite mobile application or service company.]

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backed companies like Genentech, Netscape, Amazon.com and Google, said it has hired well-known Sun scientist John Gage as partner.

Gage, an early employee at Sun Microsystems, who more recently had become that company’s chief scientist, will provide “counsel to the firms’ global network of entrepreneurs, scientists, academics and government leaders,” the firm said in a statement.

Gage becomes the latest in a string of Sun alumni at the firm. John Doerr, the firm’s leading partner, years ago walked the halls at Stanford, found the Sun co-founders and invested in them, in what became the first success that was to earn Doerr a reputation for solid investments. Sun co-founders Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy later became partners at Kleiner Perkins, though Khosla has since moved on start his own firm, Khosla Ventures.

Joy claims Gage was the first person to show him a web browser.

Gage was responsible for Sun’s relationships with world scientific and technical organizations, for international public policy and governmental relations in the areas of scientific and technical policy, and for alliances with the world’s leading research institutions, Kleiner said in a statement.

Gage catalyzed the company’s popular Java One conference, and created NetDay, a volunteer project by high-tech companies to connect schools and libraries to the Internet.

Social networks built around location are a hot item, and getting hotter.

It’s one thing to have a group of contacts which you can update with words from a mobile device (think the micro-messaging service Twitter). It’s another to be able to quickly update your exact location on a map and have others see it. Add to that the ability to review places (think: Yelp) as well as tag places you would like to go, and you have a general idea of Whrrl, a location-based social network.

Several other services including BrightKite and Yahoo’s FireEagle, are exploring similar usage of location for networks, but with this new round of funding, Whrrl gets an important ally: T-Mobile. Deutsche Telekom’s venture capital arm, T-Mobile Venture Fund led this latest Series B round.

T-Mobile’s support validates the service, said Jeff Holden, chief executive and co-founder of Pelago, Whrrl’s parent. T-Mobile and Indian venture fund Reliance Technology Ventures (RTVL), which also participated in the round, will be important in helping the service expand globally, Holden said.

This location-based network arena will only get hotter as newer technologies and newer phones come into the market. While Google’s Android is still a little ways off, Apple’s 3G iPhone is expected to be just around the corner, and is expected to add GPS technology. Whrrl has already spoken on its blog about its excitement about building a native application for the device with the software development kit (SDK).

Pelago was the first company in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers‘ portfolio to join Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, the $100 million fund which the firm set up to spur iPhone application development. Kleiner Perkins participated in both Pelago’s Series A round as well as this latest round. Other return investors include Trilogy Equity Partners and Bezos Expeditions. DAG Ventures is a new investor.

Loopt is yet another company doing something similar to whrrl, using GPS to update your friends’ location on a map. Loopt is backed by Kleiner rival, Sequoia.

As more and more phones add GPS capabilities, the ability to update Whrrl will get easier and easier. In fact, a user could use the service to send out updates of their location to friends without having to touch the device.

The Seattle, WA-based Pelago previously raised $7.4 million in 2006. We wrote about Whrrl in November.

updated
We’re hearing that Akimbo, the San Mateo, Calif. video set-top box company that raised millions of dollars in fresh funding less than three months ago to make a fresh start in a new direction, has just thrown in the towel anyway.

In February, Akimbo brought in a new management team, $8 million in fresh funding [Update: Apparently, the company only raised $4M; the original announcement of $8 million had been a targeted amount, but it only ever raised $4M] and refashioned its technology to help video publishers deliver their own video online. It also wanted to help publishers monetize the video, by offering them ways to charge for pay-per-minute content, run advertising and subscriptions.

I have no idea why the company closed its doors so fast on this second attempt. The latest batch of money came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Zone Ventures, Blueprint Ventures and AT&T. DFJ, Kleiner, Zone and Blueprint were original backers of the first incarnation of the company. The company had raised a total of $47 million.

From what we hear, the company shut its doors today, with the entire staff of more than a dozen being terminated except for three to stay on to help an orderly shutdown.

The company had initiated a round of layoffs recently. The company was apparently then trying to sell itself, but time ran out and the board finally decided to call it quits.

I’m trying to reach the company for comment. If there’s a lesson, it’s probably that this video industry is red hot, but also frenetic, and way saturated, and that a company is toast if it’s just a step behind.

updated

KnowNow, a startup that sought to deliver RSS services to large companies, is looking to sell after failing to build a viable business.

The San Francisco company started winding down about two weeks ago, VentureBeat has learned, after three different CEOs took turns a the helm but failed to build a business out of the new technology.

A source close to the company says the underlying technology is valuable, and he expects a sale.

RSS grabbed a lot of attention among businesses two years ago, when techies began proselytizing the wonders of the protocol. RSS could let you subscribe to almost any kind of data. While consumers can use it to track their favorite news sources, there’s so many other uses for businesses: If your sales person kept a log of their sales, you could subscribe to their logs via RSS. If your biz development person tracked their deal progress, you pull their logs by RSS too. If your IT department logged traffic spike data, you could get that, and so on. To top it off, you could pull it all into a spreadsheet on the fly and mix it all up, giving you — at least in theory — a more efficient, quicker way to get an overview of your business and make better decisions.

Two years ago, when KnowNow raised $13 million in fresh capital to sell RSS services for the enterprise, we expressed surprise at the large amount of capital. RSS platforms should be relatively cheap to build. At the time, chief executive Todd Rulon-Miller explained KnowNow needed the cash because it was building products for companies requiring robust, secure software, such as banks. Wells Fargo, for example, bought one of KnowNow’s $75,000 sever licenses, he said. He also said at the time that KnowNow had ten other large customers and that deals would be announced, but apparently the customers never coughed up real dough. The RSS strategy, however, was just the last in a series of turns by the seven year old KnowNow, which raised more than $50 million. It was backed by big-name valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, among others.

I’ve tried reaching KnowNow and Rulon-Miller, but have yet to hear back.

[Update: I'm told KnowNow made $7.5 million in revenue last year, though I haven't confirmed that with the company.]

NewsGator is another company seeking to serve businesses with RSS services, and appears to be doing somewhat better, having integrated with Microsoft’s Sharepoint to create an add-on product. We’re told large software company SAP recently replaced KnowNow’s product with NewsGator’s. Attensa is yet another company working in this area.

Call it Funware. That’s the name for applications with game-like mechanics and game-like behavior that really aren’t traditional video games. And Funware just might steal the thunder from video games, which may no longer have a monopoly on either interactivity or fun.

With new places to play — such as the iPhone, on Facebook, or even with Google mash-ups on personlized web sites — web-based social interaction is changing the way that many people entertain themselves.

While the term may be new to you, you can readily grasp it, particulary if you’ve heard the phrase, “Facebook is a game.” Tossing sheep at your friends on Facebook certainly qualifies as Funware. So does competing to get more followers on your Twitter account than your friends. And so does filling out your profile details on LinkedIn, the professional networking site that gives you a little reward if you fill out the otherwise tedious online form in full.

The name “Funware” was coined by that Gabe Zichermann, CEO of New York-based start-up rmbr, to classify his own company’s photo-based fun application. Funware examples are proliferating, giving Zichermann plenty to blog about. But he’s not the only proponent of this new kind of threat to traditional web sites and game companies alike. In a recent panel discussion of the subject at the Web 2.0 Expo, the panelists concluded that Funware is something every social media and gaming company should embrace.

“Unequivocably, for the first time, games have direct competition for user time,” Zichermann said in an interview. “Until now, we’ve been [like] Pac-Man eating the cherry of television and the printed word. Now, a new type of application has emerged that, in the long term, could be more engaging and sticky than what the game industry produces.”

Zichermann, who posted his first Funware title today at rmbr,  has a vested interest in espousing this view that game companies are lagging on Funware, as he plans to raise money soon for his own Funware company. But he has a decade of experience in games (he was founder of game downloading firm Trymedia, which Real Networks bought) and so he has some credibility in claiming to be ahead of the curve. And other industry veterans back him up.

Funware includes applications such as eBay, which made it fun to earn rewards as a competitive buyer or seller on its auction site. The term may also be applied to alternate-reality games such as “ilovebees.com,” where masses of players collectively solved a mystery about an invasion of earth. The site I’m in like with you uses game-like behavior to radically reshape a typical dating application.

The Google Image Labeler, created by Carnegie Mellon University researcher Luis von Ahn, is built around an “ESP” game where two people try to simultaneously label an image and, without being able to communicate, try to come up with the same label for the image as the other person. If they correctly identify a person in a picture as a man, they can get some points; but if they correctly identified the man as Bill Gates, they would get more. The game helps Google improve the accuracy of its image searches.

Flickr traces its origins to game industry veterans Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, whose team stumbled upon photo-sharing while they were trying to make a game. Bunchball has made a tool, dubbed Nitro, that makes web sites more engaging by instilling