VentureBeat

Two Seattle-based VC firms, Maveron and Voyager Capital, have recently brought on new partners to extend their reach to the south.

Maveron, which hit a homerun with an early investment in eBay, but has yet to match that success, has expanded its San Francisco office by making Amy Errett (pictured above) a partner. Errett is the former CEO of lesbian lifestlye and travel company, Olivia, and Maveron recruited her six months into her stint as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures.

Meanwhile, Voyager Capital has made moves to the south, as well, bringing on a new partner, Diane Fraiman (right), to open an office in Portland, Oregon and adding another, Daniel Ahn, as a managing director of its franchise in Menlo Park, Calif. — home of the big Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Maveron’s Errett comes with a solid track record but a bit of baggage. From 2002 through 2007, Errett helped grow Olivia from $5-25 million in revenues, but she was forced out. She subsequently filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the company’s founder, which is still ongoing.

Voyager’s new partners have backgrounds that are a little less colorful. Diane Fraiman is a long time marketing executive, most recently at JanRain, which runs myOpenID. Daniel Ahn (below) has spent the last nine years at Woodside Fund, and made several investments that look like they’ll be bought or go public at some point. We’re hearing Analogix Semiconductor, where Ahn was the early investor, is about to announce something soon. He also invested in Berkeley Design Automation, which we’re also hearing may announce something shortly.

Ahn wouldn’t comment on why he left Woodside, but we talked with various folks about the firm, and it appears it is strugging with a generational shift. Another younger partner, Tom Shields, the a capella singer of “Here comes another Bubble” also left recently. It appears the father-son relationship of Vincent and Tom Occhipinti is a strong influence at the firm. We’ve put in a call to the firm find out more, and will update if we hear more.

Twitter isn’t the only company trying to build a big business off short messages. For text messages, or SMS, delivered via mobile phone, there’s Mozes, which says it’s ready to take the leading position in a growing marketing and communication business, and now has an $11.5 million funding (unearthed by peHUB ) to back up its claim.

Mozes is based off a simple idea, one that has barely changed since the company took seed funding two years ago. A mobile phone user sends a text message to MOZES (66937) involving the name of the person or entity they want information about. They get a response by text or voicemail, which will usually involve the option to sign up for further notifications. Mozes has applied this idea mainly to bands, who often tell their fans to send texts during concerts, while competitors like TextMarks and Waterfall Mobile have reached out to other audiences.

We’ve tracked Mozes’ progress over time, and it has been encouraging. By February of last year, it had raised $5 million and signed up 500 bands. It’s now got 4,000 bands, according to CEO Dorrian Porter, and sends out 10,000 to 190,000 messages per day. Almost 1.5 million unique phone numbers have messaged Mozes since it launched, and over 40 percent of its first-time users opt in for ongoing communications, which suggests over half a million “users” (assuming they don’t turn around and opt out).

But those numbers are just a start, says Porter. “Mobile marketing is going to be a huge opportunity, if you can believe that the world in the future will be centered around the mobile phone,” he told me earlier today. That means going after audiences other than musicians. Mozes has long been usable by small customers who sign up, but starting this summer, it will be turning its efforts to other defined markets, starting with sports and entertainment.

Signing up big customers is important, because Mozes makes its money primarily from charging its business users — people receiving the texts are charged only by their phone companies. Retailers and big brands are also on the roster, with one “major retailer” already testing out the service. Marketers have yet to fully grasp the concept, but mobile messaging likely has plenty of uses, like sending out information about sales in local stores.

Noise from competitors has always been a problem in Mozes’ space, because once you have a simple idea, it’s easy for others to try to copy. But as time goes on, Porter sees that being less of a problem than in the company’s early days. “We think we can take the music beach-head and use a scalable platform to reach further,’ he says. “We’ll build momentum and critical mass to show how the service is solving a real problem, and at that point, it becomes difficult for others to come in and expand as quickly as we can.”

The $11.5 million funding was led by Maveron, with participation from previous investors Norwest Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Mozes, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has taken $16.5 million to date.

(Update: The cash raised was $5.8 million, according to a regulatory filing at the SEC)

Terrapass, a Menlo Park, Calif. company that lets people calculate the greenhouse gas emissions caused by daily activities such as driving, and then pay to offset them, has raised another round of funding.

Despite no prior backing, the company is growing very quickly, now boasting 50,000 adherents. It has become a leader of the movement to go “carbon neutral,” a trend is gaining adherents elsewhere, including big companies. Both Google and Yahoo, for example want to be carbon neutral. Google is installing a solar power grid to reach that goal. Yahoo recently launched Yahoo Green as part of a similar initiative.

TerraPass charges individuals $29.95 per year or more for “Terrapasses,” depending on their lifestyle. Maveron, of Seattle, led the round, Nth Power, of San Francisco. It also brought on a new chief executive, Erik Blachford, the former CEO of Expedia, and who has also invested in TerrPass. John Cook, of the Seattle PI, has more on Blachford’s move. He is just the latest in a trickle of executives moving to clean-tech (See Amy Vernetti’s VentureBeat column today about this trend).

Terrapass is a six-person startup. The 50,000 number is up from 30,000 earlier this year, and 2,000 last year, when we first mentioned the company. It is making more than $1 million a year. Jay Parkhill most recently mentioned the company in a VentureBeat column about the sector.

Terrapass says it reduces emissions in a number of ways, such as helping with landfill capping and supporting wind power projects. It says that its audited to make sure its methods are sounds. Here’s more about how it works.

Competing services include NativeEnergy and Carbon Fund.

Some critics have emerged, however, saying that these services are essentially offering a license for people to pollute more. They cite examples of carbon neutral companies buying up emissions created by oil extraction projects, thus seemingly making more oil pumping more palatable — but ironically, justifying more of it.