VentureBeat

UStream.TV, a live video-streaming application, has raised $11.1 million in a first round of funding from venture capital firm DCM, as well as previous investors Labrador Ventures and The Band of Angels.

Since its launch in March of last year, the broadcasting platform says it has had more than 260,000 broadcasters, 2 million viewer hours per month, 2.2 million unique visitors per month, and 400-600 streams at any given moment. It claims to have grown 325 percent over the course of the last six months

Users with a web-cam and an internet connection can stream via browser to any user across the web, including an embeddable widget for personal blogs, websites, and social networking accounts. Ustream, like some of its competitors, lets users download files in a variety of video formats, like .FLV, .WMV, .MP4 and .MOV. This way, users can upload syndicate their videos on the many video-sharing sites out there. Check out the sample, above.

The Los-Altos, Cali.-based company has had a wide range of celebrities and politicians use its services from Senators Obama and McCain, to artists Chris Brown and The Plain White T’s, and counts Bebo, Veoh, Digg, Meebo, Sun, and the Republication National Convention as past and current partners.

The video-streaming market is heating up, as competitor Qik’s parent company Visivo Communications raised $3 million to expand the mobile streaming app, and Yahoo announced its own video-streaming service.

And with more than 14 competitors ranging from Justin.tv to Kyte and Mogulus to Flixwagon, it is far from clear which company will emerge as the dominant leader in video-streaming, but UStream.Tv now has a significant cash advantage over its rivals.

In early February, rumors swirled that UStream.Tv was facing acquisition talks with Microsoft, but were never confirmed or denied as the company chose to raise money instead.

Here’s the latest action:

Rulings could make website owners more vulnerable to lawsuits — Decisions made by judges in two separate cases, against Friendfinder.com and Roommates.com, could expose websites to potentially harmful lawsuits, according to an article on CNET. Websites were previously immune to most lawsuits based on content added to their sites by others.

Video search firm Meevee wants to throw in the towel — “Combining with an established player will maximize the potential for the community, technology and content relationships the company has built,” in-video search company Meevee said in a press release yesterday. Translation: Despite some growth, 1.1 million unique users per month just isn’t cutting it for a company that took $27 million in funding. Investors included Bay Area Equity Fund, Defta Partners, FCPR Israel Discovery Fund, Labrador Ventures, Rothschild Ventures and WaldenVC, according to peHUB. We wrote more about the company’s business model here.

Scientists learn to map CO2 emissions — Researchers have found a way to do daily tracking of carbon dioxide emissions based on locality. Preliminary results show the Southeast is an even heavier emitter than previously realized (but California produces a lot, too). It seems likely that such maps could someday be used to help address problem areas, when attempting to scale back emissions.

EMC lays down $213M for storage firm Iomega — Iomega, the maker of the popular branded storage drives Zip and Rev, sold itself to information infrastructure company EMC for $213 million. EMC has three main divisions, in content management, information security and storage; the acquisition should help it expand further into the consumer market.

Nimsoft acquires Indicative Software — Nimsoft works in the information technology management field, competing with the “Big Four” made up of Hewlett-Packard, CA, IBM and BMC, while Indicative Software makes domain monitoring and end-user experience testing tools for IT departments. The acquisition price was not disclosed. Indicative had taken $19 million from Sequel Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and Vista Ventures. [Red Herring]

Search engines pressured to delete user info more quickly in Europe – Google and other search engines should delete info showing what users searched for within six months, says the European Commission, which is considering making the suggestion a commandment. Google global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer claims the data should be kept for up to 18 months in order to help protect user’s identities, but the argument may not sway the EU. Thanks to the global nature of the internet, any decision made overseas may well be reflected at home.

Mytopia raises part of first round for cross-platform gaming — We recently wrote about Mytopia, which is working on connecting games across platforms like Facebook and MySpace. It’s raised about half of a sub-$5 million first round of funding, according to VentureWire. Update: According to Mytopia itself, they’re simply “in the midst” of raising a first round, and have not disclosed the total amount they’re aiming for.

Floating solar balloons proposed to power remote regions — Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology has created a design for floating, thin-film solar cell-coated balloons capable of generating about a kilowatt of power each, aimed at powering remote regions. It plans to start selling them in spring 2009. One question: Don’t remote regions, almost by definition, have plenty of free space on the ground? [Reuters via Ecogeek]

Retailers are still in the dark ages when it comes to changing prices on items on store shelves. San Jose, Calif.-based Altierre allows them to join the 21st century by enabling retailers to change store-aisle prices on the fly.

The company sells product shelves lined with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags with liquid crystal displays. Store owners can use it to make pricing changes in just one store, regionally, or across a whole chain. The company said that of all the possible RFID applications, retailers considered this to be their No. 1 problem.

These so-called Class 4 RFID tags replace the 40,000 to 60,000 paper price tags in a typical store, which take considerable time to update or change. The retail industry spends an estimated $40 billion a year changing prices manually, according to Altierre. The tags are two-way tags with both active and passive communication.

This bright idea has enabled the company to raise a third funding round of $22 million. The Galleon Group led the round and returning investors included ATA Ventures, the D. E. Shaw group, Dupont Capital Management and Labrador Ventures. To date, the company has raised $52 million since the company was founded in 2003.

The company is co-developing its system with several of the nation’s top-10 grocery chains. The promise is big savings for retailers. With Altierre’s system in place, an executive at a retailer’s headquarters can change the price of any product in some or all stores via computer commands, which are transmitted to the tags through wireless radio signals. It gives retailers much more flexibility to change prices based on store traffic and season. The tags also let retailers instantly launch promotions such as “buy one, get one free.”

Companies such as NCR and others have tried similar approaches in the past but the concept never got off the ground. Some companies, such as Wal-Mart, are in the midst of rolling out RFID tags to keep track of goods in the supply chain and in distribution warehouses. But they haven’t used them much on store shelves.

Altierre has a test center where it has its chips and software in place. The company says it is getting good feedback so far. RFID has raised considerable privacy concerns, but mainly out of a fear that retailers will eventually use it to tag individual retail items, which could be tracked wirelessly. Altierre, however, is putting the tags in shelves, not on store items. Hence, tracking an item isn’t possible after a consumer buys it.

But shelf-tagging can raise concerns. Back in 2003, anti-RFID activist Catherine Albrecht raised alarm bells when she learned companies were testing shelf-tagging along with video surveillance technology. (Go to Spychips and search on “store shelves.”) Wal-Mart tested a kind of shelf-tagging in 2003 but ended the experiment because of privacy concerns. IBM has also talked about the concept for a number of years, which raises the question: If the idea has been around for a long time, why hasn’t anyone done much with it so far?

The company is run by Sunit Saxena, chairman and CEO. He said the company is now moving toward production but can’t talk about customers because of non-disclosure agreements.

RFID has been slow in rolling out in the retail supply chain because the system requires an investment in new technologies, such as the wireless tracking systems. But the benefits of RFID are that it can be much more useful than barcodes. If Altierre can piggyback on the RFID warehouse infrastructure and get its tags into store shelves and its readers into the hands of store employees, that is half the battle. Altierre might also be the application that gets RFID into the stores, Saxena says, and then the infrastructure “could be the gift that keeps on giving for the retailers.”

After that, the company says that it will be able to save retailers a lot of money and effort. But it has to steer clear of any privacy concerns as it does so.

Saxena says the company will disclose later the exact architecture of its technology and how much it costs. He says it will be priced so that retailers can get a return-on-investment in a year or so; meanwhile, the tags last five years.

ShotSpotter, a Santa Clara, CA, company that enables police departments and the military to locate the precise source of gunfire, has raised $12 million in its third round of financing.

The technology, which is deployed in neighborhoods throughout 15 American cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and DC, enabled the capture of a top-10 most wanted fugitive, provided the first physical evidence in the Ohio sniper case, and caused a decrease in gunfire by some 60 to 80 percent in the areas in which it has been used, according to the company.

When a gun goes off, wireless sensors spread throughout a neighborhood register the instant the sound wave reaches them, using GPS to pinpoint the moment to within 20 nanoseconds. The sensors then transmit the timing data to a server within the police department’s control. This server makes the calculations necessary to triangulate the source of the sound and, within 5-10 seconds of the shot being fired, specially-equipped police cars on patrol get both the precise origin of the shot and a playback of its audio signature, allowing the officers to determine how many shots were fired and make a tactical decision from there.

Considering that only approximately one in five instances of gunfire go reported, and that these reports usually come only 3-5 minutes after the fact, the usefulness of ShotSpotter’s technology, which registers every instance of gun fire and reports it in nearly real-time, is obvious.

This is also clear in military applications, where even five seconds is a long time. ShotSpotter’s Chief Executive Officer, James Beldock, said he can’t discuss much about its relationship with the Department of Defense, but did say that the marines are using the technology in Iraq, and that it works with unmanned aerial vehicles that can point a camera directly at the source of the gunfire almost the instant shots go off.

This gets us to thinking: Had ShotSpotter’s technology been deployed in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, maybe we’d know for sure if there had been a second gunner on the grassy knoll..

Levensohn Venture Partners led the round, and was joined by Labrador Ventures, Claremont Creek Ventures, City Light Capital and first-round leader Lauder Partners. We covered an earlier round of funding here.