VentureBeat

Skyfire has raised a $13 million second round of funding as it ramps up its campaign in the mobile browser wars.

The Mountain View, Calif. startup’s goal, says chief executive Nitin Bhandari, is to make a browser that makes the mobile web experience as close to the PC-browsing experience as possible, rather than settling for the simplified web presented on most mobile browsers like Opera Mini. Some of that comes down to the interface: Like the iPhone’s Safari browser, Skyfire lets you see a full web page, then zoom in by touching the screen. Even more significantly, Skyfire supports web formats like Flash and AJAX that don’t work on many mobile browsers. For example, Skyfire is the only one to support the latest version of Flash, Bhandari says. And even with formats that other browsers support, Skyfire is the fastest. Jake Seid of Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led the round, says the browser is normally five to 30 times faster than the competition.

Skyfire is currently in private testing mode for smartphones with the Windows Mobile operating system. Although Bhandari describes the initial response as very positive, he says it’s too early to release any numbers to back that up.

The company plans to add compatibility with other platforms soon, starting with the Symbian operating system, and Bhandari says he wants to leave testing mode in late summer. Apple’s iPhone has been credited with leading the way in popularizing mobile web surfing, but Bhandari says Skyfire doesn’t have any immediate plans for iPhone compatibility. That makes sense, since much of Skyfire’s promise is to bring a smooth browsing experience to mobile devices that aren’t as expensive as the iPhone.

As for making money, Bhandari will only say that there are players in different “layers in the [wireless] ecosystem” that are interested in partnerships.

Seid says one of the big reasons for Lightspeed’s investment is Skyfire’s vision of allowing phone users to access “the real web” rather than a watered-down mobile web. As an example, he points to Flash video site YouTube. Although the iPhone has a special YouTube application, and there’s also a YouTube mobile site, most mobile browsers can’t run videos from the real YouTube site.

Does that mean Lightspeed is essentially betting on the desire of users to access multimedia content on their phones? Not so, Seid says, because more and more web pages in general are moving onto Flash and AJAX: “It’s not a bet on [multimedia], it’s a bet that people want to access the web, period.”

Skyfire previously raised $4.8 million from Trinity Ventures and Matrix Partners, who also participated in this round.

HubSpot, a startup that offers a free “website grader” to promote its marketing software, just received the venture equivalent of an “A” — namely, a $12 million second round of funding led by Matrix Partners.

The Cambridge, Mass. startup specializes in what it calls “inbound marketing” — in other words, it focuses less on trying to grab people’s attention wherever possible, and more about drawing people to a company’s website and then converting those visitors into paying customers. HubSpot offers a package of software-as-a-service tools that help smaller businesses (up to around 1,000 employees) figure out the best keywords, create landing pages and conversion forms and analyze their marketing data.

We’ve written about how crowded the web analytics field has become, and also about a company called Coremetrics that raised a whopping $60 million last month to combine analytics with other marketing tools. But HubSpot’s product is broader than that, and chief executive Brian Halligan says the company occupies a unique niche. To get the full range of services that HubSpot provides, companies would have to either hire another company to handle their marketing or cobble together an in-house solution by purchasing a landing page product, a search engine optimization product and so on.

Halligan and his co-founder Dharmesh Shah say they plan to spend most of the new funding on research and development to make HubSpot’s service even simpler and easier to use. They raised $5 million last July; existing investor General Catalyst also participated in the new round.

Halligan and Shah add that they’re really betting the company’s future on the quality of their product, and not just in the way that’s true for all software companies — HubSpot’s website is built and analyzed using the company’s software. Apparently it’s working, since the company’s customer base has doubled since the beginning of the year.

As I mentioned above, HubSpot also offers a free SEO product called the Website Grader. In case you’re wondering, VentureBeat scored a 90 percent, meaning that we’re better than 90 percent of the sites that HubSpot has graded. Shah assures me that’s a really good score, although I have to admit I was hoping for something even higher. I did feel a little better when I saw that HubSpot’s site didn’t manage to hit 100 percent either, falling a few points short at 96.3.

Facebook remains an extremely popular destination site. But an increasing number of companies are trying to take elements of the popular social network and distribute them elsewhere on the web.

We’ve mentioned several, including most recently Deluux, which we called promising. Even Facebook is trying to extend itself elsewhere on the Web. Now there’s Ringside Networks, which allows Facebook applications to run (and stay synced) on any website.

The Marlton, NJ-based company launched in public testing mode earlier this week, and it was generating quite a bit of buzz at the just-completed InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference. With Ringside, companies can bring Facebook applications to their websites, and then add other social features like user profiles, comments, ratings and events. And because Ringside is open source, everything is completely customizable.

There are already plenty of other “white label” social networks, and even some, like Ning, that are also open source. Ringside’s approach is a little different. Rather than building a freestanding social network, it allows companies to integrate specific functions into their existing sites.

But what’s really exciting is Ringside’s ability to connect your site to Facebook, so that you can use Facebook apps to build a community at your site. For example,  founder Bob Bickel has already signed up Runlicious, an application for tracking your running and racing. Now Bickel’s running store can add the application to its website, and local customers can go to that site, not Facebook, to input and track their Runlicious stats. (The application can still draw information from their Facebook profiles, too; see diagram below.) Ringside also helps Runlicious developer Jonathan Otto reach a wider audience and make more money, since he plans to charge participating websites a subscription fee.

Facebook unveiled similar similar capabilities in January, but with Ringside, you can develop and deploy your application on Ringside’s server. Bickel said Ringside will soon be compatible with other networks too, including sites (like MySpace) that use Google’s OpenSocial platform.

Ringside was founded by Bickel, formerly the vice president of strategy and corporate development for JBoss. When I spoke to him at the OSBC (you can read his thoughts on the conference here), Bickel told me Ringside comes from a classic entrepreneurial instinct: He needed something done, couldn’t find a company serving that need and decided to build it himself.

Bickel said he was trying to build a website for his running store (hey, he wanted to take a break from tech) and couldn’t find a way to add customized social features, such as a page where people could share photos and times from their races. He tried to use existing products, such as Ning, but none of them meshed with his company site. Even though white label networks offer some customization, Bickel still complained, “Every Ning community looks the same.” That’s why adding features to your site, rather than building a fully-fledged network, is attractive.

Website owners and app developers can play with Ringside now, but unfortunately there aren’t any up-and-running sites to show off its capabilities. That should change in a week or so, Bickel said, and Ringside will link to the relevant sites.

The company has raised a seed round from Matrix Partners and is looking for another venture firm to partner with Matrix for a Series A. The company is also looking for a chief executive, with the hopes of establishing business operations on the west coast and allowing Bickel to scale back his involvement.

Here’s a summary of the latest action. See below for more:
1) In-Q-Tel invests in Forterra Systems, a private virtual world creator
2) Appfuel, another Facebook ad network, but with better ad targeting
3) AOL to spin out advertising arm?
4) Project Playlist, for sharing music playlists on other sites, raises $3 million
5) Four Interactive, a local business review site, gets $10 million from Valley VC’s

In-Q-Tel invests in Forterra Systems, a private virtual world creator – San Mateo-based Forterra’s software platform lets developers quickly create private, online virtual-world scenarios for organizations that can be used to simulate potential real world events, such as a government’s secret spy missions.

After running a scenario, the software lets its users get integrated reports that analyze participants’ actions to figure out what when right and what went wrong.

Besides government agencies, Forterra serves organizations in healthcare, education and other industries.

The amount of funding was undisclosed. The company said a “technology advancement agreement” was part of the deal, which sounds like customization for the needs of the US government. In-Q-Tel invests in technology companies that in some way further the interests of the US intelligence community.

Appfuel, another Facebook ad network, but with better ad targeting – RockYou, VideoEgg, Social Media and other Facebook ad networks have already been active for months. Today, San Francisco-based Appfuel is launching with the claim that it can more quickly and accurately serve targeted advertising within Facebook applications

In one example, if you state you’re a fan of the band the FooFighters on your Facebook profile page, then you might see an ad that shows you information about the band’s latest shows or where you can buy band t-shirts. GigaOm has more.

The company has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding.

In other Facebook news, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been spotted in Seattle, on his way to talk to Microsoft — possibly about selling them some Facebook shares (our previous coverage).

AOL to spin out advertising arm? – New Techrunch editor Erick Schonfeld has the potential scoop.

Project Playlist, for sharing music playlists on other sites, raises $3 million – Another social music site with a widget, the Beverly Hills company lets you create, embed and listen to playlists on MySpace, Facebook and other social networks; PEHub reported the funding, although no investors were named.

Four Interactive, a local business review site, gets $10 million from Valley VC’s — The Bangalore-based company owns AskLaila.com, a Yelp-like site in India where you can read others’ reviews about local businesses and add your own. It includes proximity search, SMS notifications and other services. More here.

Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and returning investor Matrix Partners.

(Update: Turns out, Care.com, a very similarly named site, has just raised $2M. More below.)

Caring.com, a Silicon Valley web site aimed to help people care for aging parents, plans to launch its Web site Friday, and has raised $6 million in a first round of venture funding.

Split Rock Partners led the round. DCM, which previously backed the Palo Alto, Calif. company with $750,000 in seed capital, also participated according to VentureWire (subscription required).

Founder Andy Cohen conceived the idea last year after he had trouble finding information about how to care for his mother, who was sick with lung cancer.

Since that time, several health-related start-ups have launched or raised funding, including DailyStrength (see coverage ) and PatientsLikeMe, many of them including offering information about diseases and the symptoms people are feeling — and ways for people and relatives to share information and experiences about these diseases. Separately, regulatory filings show that Care.com (note the name is slightly different from Carling.com), a company that helps you search for caregivers, has just raised $2 million in another round led by Matrix Partners (adding to $3.5M already raised; see our coverage).

Caring.com, however, will offer specific information for the caretakers of people suffering from diseases — including not only information about diseases but practical information about care housing and legal tips (how to draw up a will) and sharing features.

“This will allow us to make sure we have the best content available to be able to market the site,” Cohen said of the Series A round. “Everybody needs this, but we want to make sure they know about it when they need it.”

Updated

Vtap is a new mobile phone service that lets you search for Web videos and other useful Internet content with impressive speed.

The company will launch Sept. 10, but VentureBeat got an early look.

Most Web search technologies are excruciatingly slow, relying on plodding cellular networks or slightly better networks such as Edge. Many people have given up looking for good Web content on the go. But Vtap, run by two mobile software experts, provides a mobile phone download that searches a major index of video-related sites, and produces it a blazing speed. It it also lets you search for Wikipedia for quick answers.

It is fast because it uses predictive technology. Say you want to get a fix on old Gwyneth Paltrow movie in which she starred with Michael Douglas. You type in “Gwy”, and Vtap is already step ahead of you, offering a listing of Gwyneth Paltrow related content as its top result. Then, if you type in “Mic dou..”, even getting the spelling of his first name wrong, Vtap still divines you’re interested the movie in which they co-star: “A Perfect Murder.” Its index contains a copy of the movie. You can click on it to play.

This may not sound like much at first, but we played around with it a bit, after getting a demo from the company’s chief executive, Murali Aravamudan (left) — and it is handy. He says the trick to making it so quick is in indexing content by individual letters/characters, instead of words, like most search engines do.

Its ranking system helps. Instead of “page rank” to order results, as many search engines do, Vtap has used what can be called the “social graph” approach: Mining what people have selected as their favorite channels on sites like YouTube and elsewhere.

Its Wikipedia search finds answers instantly too. If you’re interested in Palo Alto, Calif.’s population, you type in “Palo Alto popul..” and it has already provided you the answer. If you type in “incipient,” it provides you a definition, and also a voice recording on how to pronounce it.

The trick will whether this company can rise above the noise. There are many mobile search engines on the market these days, offering everything from SMS-based search (4Info) to video search (MyWaves), all of them making their own rapid improvements. While Vtap is useful, the question is whether it will get traction before faster mobile technologies such as 3G and WiMax arrive and make regular Web search much easier. There are enough young people with mobile phones searching for video that it has a good shot.

The Vtap service is a product of Veveo, an Andover, Mass. company that has been working on the problem for two and a half years. It has raised $28 million, including $14 million of that in May, which until now has been undisclosed. The funding comes from Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix and North Bridge Venture Partners.

It launches Sept 10 with support for Windows Mobile, along with an Ajax application for the iPhone. A few weeks later, it will offer support for J2ME.

It is busy signing deals with mobile phone manufacturers and carriers, giving them a revenue share in any advertising or subscription fees it makes in the future. It has also quietly licensed the technology to a major (undisclosed) U.S. carrier, which recently started delivering the search technology for its Internet TV offerings. [Update: Aravamudan was mum, but we've done more digging, and have learned the undisclosed carrier is Verizon. Veveo's technology is being used for Verizon's fiber-to-the-home Internet television product, powering TV Guide. It replaced Microsoft's technology.]

Aravamudan was originally a researcher at Bell Labs, and helped build the first VoIP softswitch, which was deployed at Level3 and other companies. During the last boom, his first company, Winphoria, built a push-to-talk technology that competed with Nextel’s. It was adopted by Sprint and Verizon. The company raised $52 million, and was sold to Motorola for $190 million in 2003.

His co-founder at Veveo, Ajit Rajasekharan, also an engineer, was a top engineer at Audible, an early Internet audio delivery company. He also founded a little-known company called Readia, backed by Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Focused on education for young children, that company didn’t really go anywhere.

LucidEra offers a web-based service that helps companies collect and analyze data across their internal software systems to make them more efficient, and has just raised $15.6 million.

LucidEra is another company in the somewhat crowded “business intelligence” industry.

These companies try to help a company’s management get a more granular, immediate view of factors affecting their business. For example, they show a sales manager how quickly potential clients are being converted into paying customers, and which sales staffers are being the most successful.

LucidEra is notable because it is one of the early leaders among startups trying to offer web-based or “on demand” business intelligence services (previous coverage) — it is also competing with other startups including Seatab Software, Host Analytics, and Oco. It collects data from a company’s systems, automatically checking for errors like duplicate customer accounts, then runs its own analysis of the data and produces live, online reports about what is happening in the company.

Cognos, Business Objects SA, Microsoft and others currently provide on-site hardware, software and consultants to help companies analyze data generated by their software systems used in their various departments. These companies already work with most Fortune 1000 firms.

LucidEra is targeting firms with annual revenue of $20 million to $500 million and 100 to 1,000 employees, says chief executive Ken Rudin. These smaller companies face multiple problems. Not only do they have to pay a lot to get the on-site software installed, they also need to pay extra IT costs to keep the software running once it’s installed, as well as pay consultants to keep analyzing the data for them, he SAYS [tells us].

Rudin says he saw the problem first-hand, while running his own business intelligence consultancy. His staff would go to a company, install hardware and software, then discover six months later that the system had fallen apart. One client at the time told him it was like “trying to manage a nuclear reactor when I just want electricity,” he says.

LucidEra began offering a “forecast-to-billing” service last quarter, aimed at improving a company’s sale cycle. The company didn’t divulge further details on growth and revenue.

The company says it isn’t concerned about the dominant business intelligence companies moving down-market. Its larger competitors have a difficult time turning their on-site technology into a web-based service, according to Rudin. The chief executive of Business Objects appears to agree, suggesting on this blog that his company is looking to make acquisitions.

Besides competitors, the biggest risk for LucidEra is that people still won’t use it: The rap on business intelligence is that it costs precious resources while sometimes delivering “reports almost no one reads.”

The market for web-based business intelligence services is roughly equal to that of web-based CRM software, estimates Crosslink Capital investor Peter Rip, or around $600 million, and growing 30 percent compounded for the next five years, he says.

The round was led by Crosslink Capital, joined by existing investors Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Rip will join LucidEra’s board of directors with this investment. Last month, he wrote a poignant blog post about deciding to invest in the company, calling the deal “love at first sight.”

Buzzwire lets you stream video, audio, and live internet radio to your mobile phone — something other companies do.

But Buzzwire does this without requiring a download — setting it apart from the crowd.

The company, which has been in stealth mode, launches in public beta today. Mobile media, especially video, is taking off. Revenue from mobile video in Q1 2007 was $146 million, up nearly 200 percent from the same period last year, according to one industry report. More growth could come: As much as 15 percent of American cellphone subscribers have video-friendly 3G (high-speed) handsets, according to mobile analytics company M:Metrics.

Streaming media to mobile phones is not new, but Buzzwire’s main competitors, including MyWaves and MobiTV, focus exclusively on video and require downloads for the best experience. While MyWaves, which says it has just surpassed one million users, can be accessed from the mobile browser, the video-selection interface contains too much information and does not display it elegantly. Buzzwire is notable because it works within the browser alone, with a relatively clean look and feel, though it still needs work (more below).

Its technology also sets it apart — at a price. Buzzwire has built a back-end that enables wireless carriers to add streaming media, including video, podcasts and internet radio into their offerings with very little development effort on the carriers’ part. Buzzwire says that it is plug-and-play, and its team has experience working with mobile carriers here and abroad.

Buzzwire believes that working with these carriers is the only sustainable way to go and, after its beta, intends to charge a $2-$3 monthly subscription, with higher rates for those who don’t want ads. MyWaves, on the other hand, exists independent of the carriers, giving its service away for free. MobiTV charges $9.99 per month, and includes advertising.

To get started with Buzzwire, you visit its Web site and create an account. Once there, you browse through the video, audio, and internet radio content it offers and, with a click, add a channel to your subscriptions, which then appears on your Buzzwire mobile homepage. From this homepage, you can also browse through popular and featured channels, but there is no way to search through all of them and add one using your phone (Buzzwire says this capability is in the works).

The interface, while superior to MyWaves’, has some issues. For example, if the title of a channel is more than a couple of words, you can’t see its whole name, and it’s not always clear what’s what. Buzzwire’s regular website is also visually unappealing and not easy to use, and there is very little high-quality content. To be fair, this is the first iteration, and changes on both of these fronts are in the pipeline.

The big long-term threat is the iPhone, and the change it represents: After watching YouTube videos on that beautiful screen, in a real browser, it feels like applications based in normal mobile browsers are already obsolete. This is not yet the case, though, and with more than 33 million people using 3G phones, there is money to be made without the iPhone in the interim.

The Boston-based company raised $4 million from Spark Capital and Matrix Partners last fall, and is planning a second round later this year.

Qihoo, a fast-growing but controversial Chinese search engine for Web 2.0 content, has raised $25 million more in a second round of venture capital from credible U.S investors.

This is significant because Qihoo has launched a new kind of search engine, dedicated to Web 2.0 content — focused on blogs and forums, for example — that has seen its traffic spike in China. Page views have grown from tens of millions of page views a day, to a hundred million page views by the end of this year, the company says. If true, after a mere year’s operation, Qihoo is about a third the size of Chinese industry leader Baidu. The funding brings Qihoo’s total to a whopping $45 million, a significant amount of capital for a Chinese company.

This is a victory for Qihoo’s chief executive and founder, Hongyi Zhou (pictured left), who has come under fierce personal attack from Jack Ma (pictured below), chief executive of rival, Alibaba. We reported on the controversy here, and many people told us Zhou’s fight with the Ma would tarnish his reputation — because of Ma’s clout. Alibaba operates its own search property, Yahoo China, which has sued Qihoo, and has been readying a suit against Zhou directly.

However, U.S. venture capital firm Highland Capital Partners has braced itself and taken the lead to invest in the company. Also investing are Redpoint Ventures and existing investors Sequoia Capital China, CDH, Matrix Partners and IDG Ventures. Sequoia and Matrix have historically been among the best performing venture capital firms. As reported, Alibaba and Yahoo exerted pressure on investors, including Sequoia, to avoid backing Qihoo. VentureBeat reported that Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz were even forced to a meeting over the dispute.

VentureBeat just spoke with Dan Nova (below) of Highland, who will be joining Qihoo’s board. Nova is experienced in search, having co-founded Lycos and invested in Ask Jeeves. His firm has traveled frequently to China and met with more than a hundred companies there, Nova said.

He said ironically, the media attention generated by the Ma-Zhou fight has not hurt Qihoo, rather helped it.

“This is a classic David versus Goliath story,” he said. “The more press we continue to get, the more traffic we get — the traffic is through the roof.”

He hopes the legal disputes can be resolved, he said. “They didn’t serve the purpose they’d intended, which was to make investors nervous about investing in Qihoo,” he said of Alibaba’s legal moves and other threats.

Nova said he is not concerned about potential lawsuits. Zhou is not a liability, he said, noting that Zhou has demonstrated his prowess and integrity by founding search company 3721 (later bought by Yahoo), and by the fact that his backers at 3721 (IDG, for example) are backing him again at Qihoo. “He’s a rock-star among Chinese entrepreneurs,” Nova said.

He said Qihoo is pioneering a new kind of search, focused on unstructured, user-generated content of the type found on blogs and Chinese online bulletin boards, which is more dynamic, and something Google’s Blog Search has been patchy at, he said. He said Qihoo’s architecture is its secret sauce, but that it takes the best of Digg, Google and Technorati and rolls them up into one. He said Qihoo is not trying to duplicate Google’s main engine search, but that the Chinese users are interested in lighter subjects, such as lifestyle and entertainment — a strength of Qihoo, he said. (Politics is avoided for obvious reasons).

Facebook, the social networking site that used to take pride in being rigid and closed, tonight continues its enthusiastic embrace of the opposite: Being wide open to the rest of the world.

This time, the Palo Alto company has rolled out a way to let people on other sites to share video, photos and other content with their friends on Facebook — through a special “share” button. This is a logical move for Facebook; it ads flexibility for users, and it drives more traffic.

It works like this: Numerous sites, including the NYT, the WSJ and Photobucket have added a little blue button (with an “F” in it) beside content like video and articles. Users can click on the button, which lets them choose which Facebook friends they want to send it to. They can also send it to their own profile. Beside a NYT article, for example, the button will sit alongside the usual “email this article” or “print this article” buttons.

This lets users share content with friends without leaving the site they are on.

This follows Facebook’s move last week to launch the same “share” feature internally. That first move let users press on a little “share” button beside a piece of content — video, photo or article — and email it to friends within Facebook.