VentureBeat

Genomatica creates renewable chemical from sugar water — While most chemicals are petroleum-based, several startups are trying to create new alternatives. One of the first to succeed is Genomatica, which says it has a cheap process to make 1,4-butanediol, a component chemical of many common materials, from sugar and water, potentially disrupting a $4 billion industry. More on Genomatica’s process here.

Gaming becoming ubiquitous — A national survey showed that almost all teens play games.

MySpace Music may get another delay — The launch of MySpace’s online music store will likely be pushed back a week or more, yet again. For a laugh, check out our coverage from way back in April, when this launch was expected to happen within five days.

Windows 7 coming along — Microsoft, on the other hand, is shattering expectations by actually hitting its deadlines. Development of Windows 7, the replacement for the unfortunate affair known as Vista, is reportedly humming along, with a potential delivery date as soon as the end of 2009.

Lehman’s venture arm may live — Failed investment bank Lehman Brothers may not drag its venture unit to the grave with it, according to peHUB.

New game advertising startup launches — Worlds and Games, a stealth-mode San Francisco startup by two gaming veterans, is launching today with a focus on advertising in and around games. GameDaily has an interview.

Houses approves cleantech credits, offshore drilling — A bill allowing both offshore drilling and an extension of the Federal cleantech investment credit has passed the House of Representatives. However, it still has to pass muster in Senate, an undertaking similar bills have failed before.

Khosla talks down fashion-based cleantech — The cleantech investor disparaged some of today’s most popular alternative energy icons at a recent talk, including solar panels, the Pickens Plan, and the Prius.

Adobe profits down, but not out — The software giant’s quarterly profits fell seven percent, yet beat the Street’s expectations. Acrobat and LiveCycle drove profits, according to the company.

WebMD buys QualityHealth owner for $50M — Online health firm WebMD has shelled out $50 million for Marketing Technology Solutions, a venture-backed company that owns health information portal QualityHealth.com.

Palo Alto Networks is announcing today it has raised $27 million in a third round of funding for its firewall appliance business.

Lehman Brothers Venture Partners led the round while other investors included Globespan Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company will use the money to expand its sales, marketing and customer services functions in North America as well as extend its business into Europe and Asia.

The size of the round is large for a security company that is competing with some big rivals. But the company solves problems that the others don’t and it has some well-known backers. In security, a business built on trust, the clout of the backers and the company’s newly appointed CEO, who has a wealth of experience in security technology, should help Palo Alto Networks garner more momentum.

The firewalls of the past have been designed to stop threats coming in from emails and web sites. But as employees adopt new web-based services — instant messaging, Skype, and Salesforce.com — they open up the networks to new threats. That’s where Palo Alto Networks’ firewall appliances come in, said Lane Bess, chief executive of Palo Alto Networks.

“We can monitor what the employees are using on the web,” he said.

Instead of offering generic firewall protection, Palo Alto Networks’ PA-4000 family of products can set corporate firewall protocols on more granular levels so that each user has a distinct set of permissions on a network. As a tool, it gives network administrators more control of their networks by letting them see all applications on a network.

The hardware devices have enough speed to filter the traffic without slowing down a network. They range in price from $12,000 to $80,000. It lets IT managers detect which users are installing unauthorized or personal applications on their work machines. Competing products often don’t give detailed information that can help IT managers make quick decisions about what users are allowed or not allowed to do.

Bess joined the company at the end of June. He has 25 years of experience in sales and marketing roles and was mostly recently executive vice president for global sales at antivirus software vendor Trend Micro. During his years there, he helped the company cross a billion dollars in sales. Palo Alto Networks was was founded in 2005 and has raised about $55 million to date.

Competitors include Juniper Networks, CheckPoint Security Technologies and Cisco. These incumbents are well established in corporate networks. But Bess said that he doesn’t ask CIOs to rip out firewalls that they’ve invested millions of dollars into. The PA-4000 family sits alongside existing firewalls and provides added protection without requiring a company to build an entirely new network.

VideoIQ is one of the companies pursuing “intelligent video surveillance.” That means it is bringing security cameras and their accompanying equipment into the modern computer age. This includes cameras that transfer video over the Internet for storage on hard drives, where the video can be indexed and searched for events that trigger alarms. A security officer doesn’t have to scroll through hours of dull video to find a possible suspicious incident.

The Bedford, Mass., company has raised $10 million in a second round of funding for its video surveillance technology business.

Lehman Brothers Venture Partners led the round while existing investors Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture also participated.

Launched in spring of this year, the VideoIQ iCVR (intelligent camera with video recording) delivers video analytics, content-aware storage and intelligent networking into Internet-based security cameras. The analytics can warn of threats in real time and don’t require extensive calibration.

Users can search through records for a particular person or vehicle across all cameras with the click of the mouse. Security guards can use it to find a lost child in a crowd. And the storage is designed for good quality with a minimal need for network bandwidth.

The security camera market is going through a digital revolution and is crowded with competitors, not the least of which is Cisco, which recently launched a new IP security camera. Other rivals include Object Image and ioimage.

Scott Schnell, president and chief executive, said in a statement that the company will use the capital to enter into new markets, broaden alliances, and further build out its product line. The company has raised $18 million to date and was founded in 2007. It has 35 employees.

Jaxtr now has a buck for every one of its users. The company has raised $10 million in a second round of financing to expand its cheap overseas internet calling business.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company uses a voice-over-internet-protocol service to knock the costs out of overseas calls. It can charge as little as 1 cent a minute for calls to China because of its unique system. It lets users advertise to an online community how they can be contacted via a widget they place on a blog or a social networking page.

A user puts the widget on a page, and a would-be caller clicks on the widget. The caller then enters his or her phone number on the widget and then clicks the “call me” button. Jaxtr figures out the location of the caller. Then it finds a local phone number to call the caller back. It gets the caller on the line and then proceeds to make a call to the user. No one realizes it’s actually a three-way connection. The caller is connected via a local phone call, the call itself is routed over the Internet to Jaxtr’s servers, and then the servers complete the call through a local call to the user who is being callled. The call goes through as a local call for a fraction of the cost of an overseas call. Every time the caller and user want to make a call across the same country lines, they use that same local phone number.

Konstantine Guericke, chief executive of Jaxtr, was also a cofounder of LinkedIn, the social networking company that recently raised $53 million at a $1 billion valuation. While his company isn’t that valuable yet, Guericke said he’s excited at the opportunity because overseas calling is a $60 billion business.

“I like to do new things, and I see the same kind of change happening here as when LinkedIn started four years ago,” he said.

We’ve noted how fast Jaxtr is growing in past stories. In contrast to Skype (which is projected to hit $500 million in revenues about five years after its launch), most of Jaxtr’s calls are phone-to-phone rather than PC-to-PC. Read the rest of this entry »

Considering the number of competitors in the product review market and the difficulty of establishing a successful destination site, it seems somewhat staggering that Power Reviews, the company that runs the product review site Buzzillions, has raised $15 million.

We’ve covered Power Reviews before, and it stands out from the pack by offering more comprehensive reviews and an innovative means to browse them. The site lets you filter reviews according to your personal preferences, so, for example, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use camera, you can select reviews of cameras for lay people — and filter out those recommended for professional photographers — with a click.

The company, which aggregates reviews by powering product reviews on e-commerce sites for free, has been doing a solid job partnering with major retailers. Its partner sites include Staples, Toys ‘R Us, REI, and a number of specialty stores.

It has an inventory of about 400,000 reviews of 120,000 products from over 1,100 online stores.  Andrew Chen, the company’s chief, expects Buzzillions will become truly useful across multiple categories once it manages to rope in enough retailers to scale to around two million. He says that Power Reviews raised so much money in part to give it an aura of staying power and credibility. It also intends to build a self-service interface that will allow e-commerce sites to plug-in easily.

Lehman Brothers Venture Partners took the lead on the round, and previous investors Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards invested more, as well.