VentureBeat

ReputationDefender, a company that helps people manage their reputations and privacy online, has raised around $2.6 million in a first round of institutional funding.

There are a number of businesses providing identity theft protection, such as Lifelock, TrustedID and Debix, but ReputationDefender is a bit different — it doesn’t focus on protecting your finances, and instead gives you control over the information about you that’s available online. Its earliest and best-known product, MyReputation, provides a monthly report on what people are saying about you on the web. Users can also pay ReputationDefender to help take negative mentions down.

But why do you need to pay for something like this — isn’t that what Google is for? Founder and chief executive Michael Fertik says the Redwood City, Calif. company culls through pages that aren’t indexed by Google or other search engines. It’s also easy to see why some people  want to pay someone else to handle the headache of contacting sites that say untrue or mean things about you, or post unwanted photos. (ReputationDefender says it doesn’t target news articles, and it isn’t a law firm.) In fact, Fertik says ReputationDefender’s subscription revenues quadrupled between April and July. The company, founded in 2006, earned $1.21 million in revenue in 2007, he adds.

ReputationDefender’s other services include privacy management, a tool for parents to manage their child’s reputation and MyEdge, which publishes and disseminates positive information about you. Most customers have been individuals so far, but the company is also privately testing a product for businesses.

ReputationDefender actually raised most of the new funding in January, Fertik says. Now it’s considering a second round, although it may also choose to forgo any more venture backing, at least for now. Investors include Maples Investments, RP/JA Investments and European Founders Fund. ReputationDefender raised less than $1 million in angel funding back in 2007.

iPhone games publisher Ngmoco has raised a first round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon, the former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, will join the San Francisco company’s board. The amount was not diclosed.

It isn’t too hard to connect the dots here. Neil Young (pictured left), a longtime EA veteran, recently quit to found Ngmoco (whose name means next-generation mobile company) to make iPhone games. In April, Gordon (pictured below) left EA after more than 26 years at the big game publisher to become a venture capitalist.

So it’s no surprise that Young has raised his first round from an old friend. Maples Investments, an early stage fund with expertise in games and social networks, also participated in the round. Ngmoco will use the investment to create, acquire and publish games built specifically for the iPhone.

The money comes from Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, a $100 million fund for iPhone and mobile computing investments. Since starting in June, Gordon has been actively joining boards of companies that Kleiner Perkins has funded.

It will be interesting to see whether Young can make Ngmoco into a mobile games player. There is stiff competition from the likes of Glu Mobile, Sega, Electronic Arts’ EA Mobile division, Gameloft and a variety of other companies. Those companies all have a head start making games for the iPhone.

On Apple’s new AppStore, games are the No. 1-downloaded application, as MG Siegler has reported. About 53 of the top 100 downloads are games. But Young stated previously that the current generation of iPhone games reflect early thinking and that he believes there is plenty of room for new innovation. He believes that there is a gap in the market between cheap mobile phone games and the Nintendo DS games that sell for $30. The average price paid for iPhone applications is $4.96.

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Sendori, a Silicon Valley based company that lets you bid for traffic from other Web sites, has raised an undisclosed first round of venture capital.

The site operates in an industry that has so far been quite shady, and it’s an improvement over some past practices. The funding news was first reported by Venturewire and SiliconTap (subscriptions required).

Here’s how it works. I might own Gamespot.com, but I’d also like to draw traffic from other sites, such as VideoGames.com, or Reviewsgames.com, which are domains that aren’t being used, but which may draw traffic from users not knowing any better. (The users typically get to one of those sites by typing in “VideoGames” in their browser, for example, without knowing if there’s anything there.) I can go to Sendori, and bid to get traffic from those sites. I must bid higher than anyone else to get it. By drawing the users to my site, I get more business.

Sendori sets the bids on a cost-per-visitor basis. The company claims that domain owners can see a 25 percent boost in revenues compared to other approaches, such as Google’s AdSense.

As mentioned, the domain name business has had a dicey reputation. It’s not uncommon to be redirected to a mal-ware infected site if you type in the wrong domain name (something that a separate Silicon Valley company, OpenDNS is trying to prevent). However, by creating a marketplace of quality advertisers, this should help minimize the problems.

On its face, the Sendori system doesn’t seem to require much technological sophistication. Yet, the company is trying to secure a patent on its process. Some of the technology elements include geotargeted redirects and click-fraud blocking.

Sendori is, however, targeting a crowded market segment. Take a look at public company Marchex, which is a leading domain name aggregator (with a portfolio of over 100,000 domains). In its latest quarterly report, the company posted revenues of $33.5 million.

Another major player is Demand Media, which recently raised $100 million from Goldman Sachs.

Sendori’s venture round included investors First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Maples Investments and Felicis Ventures.

Update from an interview with founder Ofer Ronen: Ronen got the idea for Sendori at the MBA program at Cornell . He teamed up with classmate Dave Weldon.

By December 2006, Ronen was able to raise some angel funding. It helped that he already had a start-up under his belt: Karanga (a B2B e-commerce site).

The old approach was to setup an intermediate landing page for when a user types in a domain name. Sendori’s approach is to send users directly to advertisers who want to get the traffic. This lowered costs and improved targeting, he said. To see an example of this, click the following: www.austrianstamp.com. As you can see, it takes you to a specific page on eBay.

Sendori’s platform aggregates about 33 million visitors per month, Ronen said, noting that national advertisers want “volume.”

Mesmo.tv, another site that wants to help you and your friends discover interesting videos, has raised $900,000.

The San Francisco company, which launched in July, lets you collect videos on its site from around the web. Then you can vote on videos and share videos with friends. This way, the company can figure out what type of videos you like so it can recommend new, related videos to you (our coverage).

It has also developed a successful Facebook application, a trivia game called TV Show Trivia. Launched in August, the application has over 1.3 million total users with around 125,000 users returning daily — making it one of the more popular television-focused applications on Facebook.

While there are many, many online video-sharing sites out there, another one that’s also focusing on social video recommendation is FFWD.com, previously known as Vadver (our coverage). The company began offering a private beta version earlier this week.

Pixsy is another company trying to help people find interesting online videos — by providing a white-label video search service (our coverage). Its bit of news today is that it will provide its video search service for Veoh, a more popular video site

Although Mesmo has not closed its round, investors include Felicis Ventures, Maples Investments, The Hit Forge and and angels.