VentureBeat

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.

(Updated) end of week roundup:

Peoplesoft founder Dave Duffield launches new company, Workday — Some details have already leaked out, but the launch announcement coming is Monday. No surprise that it’s related to his former love, Peoplesoft, which got gobbled by nemesis Oracle — something he says he he took pretty hard. Duffield, who always loves to rally the troops, is back at it again: Workday is doing the sort of back-office software stuff that Peoplesoft was known for: It’s an “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) company, and will deliver its software online. It was founded in March 2005 by Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, a former Peoplesoft exec and partner at venture firm Greylock. Last time we checked, it was based in Nevada, and Duffield was being accused of evading taxes while jetting to the slopes. (Update: More details about the company in this Merc story: Duffield and and Greylock Partners invested $15 million into the company in 2005. They plan to kick in an additional $20 million next year.)

YouTube planning mobile phone version — You can already load videos to YouTube from your phone, but now YouTube apparently plans to bring YouTube to you, according to comments from CEO Chad Hurley. You’ve heard of YouTube to Go service, launched in May, which lets you send a video you’ve taken with your phone to a YouTube email address, which then uploads the video. These latest comments suggests they want to bring YouTube videos to your phone — and thus tricky streaming requirements.

Microsoft making big, some would say desperate moves lately — Microsoft has partnered with Novell to make the Windows operating system work with open-source Linux software, which is a significant move — it risks eating into Microsoft’s revenues if people start relying on the open-source version. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a partnership with Cupertino’s PHP software company, Zend, conceding that many developers aren’t using the .Net platform. And its Zune music player goes on sale Nov. 14 for $249.

Visto’s hard-headed chief — Wireless messaging company Visto has sued just about everybody, but is still losing money after ten years and after raising $267 million; the the Merc has a good summary of the company. Venture capitalist Stewart Alsop, once a backer of the Visto’s chief executive Brian Bogosian, but who ended up pulling his support, calls Bogosian a “hard-headed son of a gun.” We’ve heard he’s one a tough guy. Indeed, he’s just persuaded Oak Investment to pump in give him even more cash. Latest, though, is that competitor RIM is now fighting back, suing Visto. Meanwhile, Visto is announcing it has signed deals with carriers in…. Nigeria? And while Visto is still fighting its legal battles, Google’s out there, delivering email via an application you can download straight to your Java-enabled phone (which includes most new phones).

Venture Capitalist Peter Rip moves to SF for contacts — Venture capitalist at Leapfrog Ventures has joined Crosslink Capital in San Francisco as a General Partner. He writes he’s changing because of “relationships,” noting that SF-based Crosslink invests in everything from start-ups to buyouts, and he’ll have 15 people to help him out — instead of two guys. Yes, perhaps its a coincidence that Crosslink is in SF, but there are more and more companies up in SF these day, and more people telling us that’s the place to be. Sure, until the latest Web bubble bursts! ;)

Catching up:

YouTube is making $7.5 million a month –Everyone has been guessing whether YouTube is profitable, given the high costs it faces hosting all its videos. This guy says YouTube is doing $7.5 million a month in ads, and is profitable.

FON, the company that wants to encourage people to share their WiFi routers, having problems? — The general manager of US division has left. We’re beginning to think this Fon idea my be too clunky to fly. You buy a router to let other people use it, and it lets you tap into other peoples’ FON routers when you travel. It is a chicken and egg problem; Why buy it, unless you know lots of others have bought it too? Problem is, there are so many ways to get online these days. For starters, FON’s own backer, Google, is building out free networks. Google is using a WiFi router built by Mountain View’s Meraki.

Filmloop to launch online version — Filmloop, which let people create slideshows on their desktops and then have friends see updated versions automatically on their own computers, has created an online (browser) version too. It’s facing plenty of competition, but says more than 1 million users have uploaded 42 million photos.

Time for these podcasting services to make money — Evan Williams, of podcasting start-up Odeo, is making some public confessions about having trouble, and he is shutting Audioblogger, which allowed you to post on your blog via a telephone call. (Details here.) So eyes have turned to how these companies can make money. PodZinger, an audio and video search engine of Cambridge, Mass., has just launched a way for podcasters to insert advertising in both audio and video files. It says it has “content classification” technology which allows it to match ads to the podcaster’s content. It also says it has algorithms for analyzing a user’s “intent” and provides ad matches that way. The content creators, or podcasters, can decide whether or not they want the service, which can bring them extra revenue — which they share with PodZinger.

Ning’s video & photo move — The Silicon Valley start-up Ning, backed in part by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, gives you multiple tools you build your own web site, as we’ve mentioned. Now it has released more stuff, including letting you customize your own niche, YouTube-like video site, or Flickr-like photo site. The company took us through a demo last week, and it’s easy to use. The video site gives your own embedded player that you can brand as your own, which you can place in your blog or at MySpace — but which runs on Ning’s servers, and so you aren’t paying hosting costs. Ning bets it can cover the costs by taking a share of the advertising revenue. It says its advertising is lucrative compared to some other sites, because its users are creating content-focused sites, and so can be targeted by advertisers appropriately. The ads are generating $2 or more per 1,000 page views, the company said.

Rebtel raises $20 million for (complicated) online calls — Like Jajah, this Stokholm company (co-founder Greg Spector is here in Redwood City office, though) Rebtel lets you make calls cheaply by accessing its own system of low-cost Internet lines. But it gets complicated. It works when you dial a local number it has assigned for the person you are calling (yep, a different number than the one you already have for him or her). Once you call the other person, they have to hang up, and call you back. There’s logic to it: The system is trying to find the cheapest combination of Internet and local lines. It has raised $20 million in venture capital, including from Benchmark and Index. They charge $1 a week, and calls are otherwise free. We’re seeing a lot of these cheaply built phone services emerging; they’ll appeal to the frugal phone user, but not to those of us who want simplicity. (More here).

Asides:

Speaking of ads, there’s not enough place online to host them all — Here’s news that 100 million people watched online videos in July, and evidence that advertisers can’t find enough online inventory to put their ads.

New VC podcast — Levensohn Venture Partners, a venture firm in SF has started a podcast series called VC — Inside Out.

Bono’s direct connection with Apple, gone — Apple said Fred Anderson, who served as the company’s chief financial officer from 1996 until 2004, resigned from the board, because of the option scandal. Anderson remains a partner at the Silicon Valley buyout firm Elevation Partners, which as you’ll remember is where U2’s Bono hangs out, and who promoted the U2 iPod.

Google executive, Marissa Mayer, shows how to hold meetings efficiently — Meetings can be a waste of time. What if your company had the same discipline as Marrisa? You’d get a lot more done. This shows the Google trait of schizophrenia — creativity and discipline in one.

Google has a bunch of new products — No wonder Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently burst out, criticizing his developers for releasing too many products, and not focusing on making them work well. Here’s a recap of last week’s bombardment alone. One lets you restrict the sites you are searching (details here). Next, here’s the latest on the Google gadgets you can put on your Web site (choose from 1,200 of them). Google has also launched an experimental site, called Searchmash, tracking behavior of users off its main site. There’s a new initiative to allow you to build Web apps on top of Google search, whereby Google has opened its APIs to allow an AJAX search box for videos (click on one of the videos to see), for example. Finally, Google launched Code Search, a way to search for source code from around the Web.

Yahoo’s flip-flop– Yahoo has donated $1 million to Stanford University’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, seven months after handing over information about a professional journalist to Chinese authorities. You may view it cynically, but this is a good move, nevertheless — it is earmarked to support journalists from countries where there are restrictions on freedom of the press.

Two co-founders of Rapt have sued the company’s chief executive and venture capital backers, Accel Partners and Levensohn Venture Partners for breach of fiduciary duty and fraud.

Rapt is a San Francisco company that provides software to help companies find the right price for their goods to maximize profits.

It is another one of those stories we are getting familiar with in the valley — where start-up founders get washed out of their ownership holdings, while venture firms bolster their stake at more favorable terms. The case is similar to those of Epinions, Nishan Systems and Wine.com before it (you can search for stories about these cases here at VentureBeat). Rapt raised money during the boom times, but then struggled through hardships — and when the company was forced to raise more money, it did so in a way that pissed off guys who put in early sweat labor.

We’d heard about the suit a few days ago, but hadn’t gotten very far in confirming it. Now the team over at PE Week have gotten a copy of the complaint and spilled all the details. We’ve emailed Accel’s Jim Breyer again, and called Rapt, but nothing back so far.

Dan Primack of PE Wire has done a good job in summarizing it, so we won’t repeat it all here. We agree with his assessment that it is unlikely to go to trial. This is something that venture firms don’t like doing, because it can hurt their reputation as an entrepreneur friendly firm. At least in the Nishan and Epinions cases, settlements were reached. The Wine.com case rages on, however, that one concerns an East Coast firm, Baker capital, which presumably is less concerned about its reputation among entrepreneurs out here (it has also tended to invest in later stage companies). Regardless of the merits of all these suits, the cases are significant because entrepreneurs have until recently avoided suing VCs — once perceived a powerful clique that could gang together and blacklist a noisy entrepreneur.

There is also one other anecdote worth mentioning, since the two co-founders are blaming a third, Tom Chavez, who is now chief executive for effectively changing the rules of the game on them. Chavez not long ago became known for his Rapt presentation called: “It’s a whole new ballgame, and the winners are changing the rules,” adorned with pictures and references from Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, MoneyBall. Don’t mean for this to be a cheap shot; it’s just that he was giving this presentation around the same time the firm was negotiating its 2005 round of capital — the one where the two co-founders say shareholders weren’t solicited for their input on what would become a massive dilution of their shares.

Updated

Zend Technologies, the Cupertino start-up that sells software to develop Web sites based on the popular PHP scripting language, has raised $20 million in a fourth round of venture capital (release here).

By raising so much cash, the company must be aiming to produce a substantial return to make it worthwhile for its investors. It had already raised $16 million.

PHP is hot right now. Zend supports open source PHP initiatives, but it also offers commercial PHP products for software developers, and counts companies like gaming company Amp’d and social networking site Tagged among its customers. PHP does have is competitors. See our background on Zend and PHP here. Still, the company says PHP is the language of choice behind more than half of all Ajax-enabled site (Ajax being the highly interactive technology used, for example, in Google Maps).

This may also be a sign the company plans to go it alone for some time, at least if you believe the announcements by the company’s execs. Earlier this year, we reported that Oracle was in talks to acquire the company (scroll down). But now co-founder Andi Gutmans says he’s considering an IPO (Venturewire, sub required).

The round was led by Greylock Partners. Existing investors — Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital — also participated.

Correction: An earlier version of our post said Digg and Facebook were customers, something we’d seen referenced in the VentureWire piece cited above, and which do use PHP. However, turns out they are not Zend customers.