VentureBeat

Uber, an also-ran social network turned microblog platform, closes down — Investors included Universal Music Group and Sterling Stamos Co-Investors fund. The company claimed that it closed down due to economic issues, as you can read on its site. More on PaidContent.

Mobile payment company Transaction Wireless raises $2.25 million — Funding comes from Mission Ventures and Okapi Ventures.

House debates about how its members can use web video, devolves into childish squabbling — The Senate has already avoided such squabbling and worked out its own rules.

Avigo Capital Partners is raising a $300 million fund — The New Delhi, India-based private equity fund plans to close this third fund by the end of the year.

Teen virtual world Habbo may be making up to $38 million in revenue a year? — Jeremy Liew looks at various rumors about how much the company could be making.

Yahoo president Sue Decker defends “Yahoogle” deal — More on All Things D.

Immunotherapeutics company Macrogenics raises $25 million — Investors include Nextech Ventures, Arcus Ventures, Innovis Investments and Eli Lilly and Company.

Half a million sign up for EA’s Warhammer Online — This comes a week after launch.

SodaHead, a company that provides a polling widget for web publishers that it also uses to prompt discussions on its own site, is seeing some decent traction. It has gained more than 600,000 members total since launching last September, and has logged a total of more than four million comments on its site.

To use SodaHead, you create a poll widget on its site, then embed the widget code into your site, similar to competitors like Polldaddy and others. But SodaHead has its own community, unlike its poll-widget competitors, where members can see polls from across the site and comment on them. There’s also an “answers” section where users can ask questions and provide answers to each other.

When I used a SodaHead poll to ask VentureBeat readers if they thought Facebook should let them aggregate and export their Facebook friends’ email addresses, a discussion on the topic emerged on the SodaHead site. See below. This discussion would have driven additional traffic back to my article containing the poll — except that SodaHead doesn’t link back to the sites that use its polls, so it didn’t.

The company has recently raised an $8.4 million round from Mission Ventures, on top of a previous round of $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and angel investors. Mission Ventures managing partner Robert Kibble says that ”SodaHead’s community and upcoming initiatives are very exciting and I believe SodaHead will be one of the biggest sites on the Internet.”

That may be a bit optimistic, but I can at least say that SodaHead is useful.

Next month, personalized video-mashup site Big Stage will launch its public beta. The site lets you upload three high-resolution photos of yourself. It then stitches those photos into a 3-D avatar. You can accessorize your avatar and put your avatar into videos and amusing scenery. You can then share it with your friends.

The company got to show off its 3-D avatar technology to the world during Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January. During the keynote, Jonathan Streitzel, chief creative officer of Big Stage, scanned three digital images of himself into the Big Stage site, which constructed a lifelike 3-D avatar of Streitzel. Then Streitzel inserted his avatar, dubbed an @ctor, into a bunch of funny scenes for laughs. He showed how you can insert the avatar into emails, instant messages, and other digital communications.

Now, just ahead of its beta launch, the company is closing an extension to its first round of venture funding, Streitzel said in an interview. The South Pasadena, Calif. company previously raised $4.3 million, however further details on the new funding aren’t available.

The company hopes to make money through advertising, sponsorships, and technology licensing. Streitzel said he also hopes to make 3-D scanning technology a useful consumer tool. It is the result of nine years’ worth of research into stereoscopic reconstruction at the University of Southern California.  The research was aimed at security, but Big Stage owns the rights to the technology outside of that field. Streitzel said that his company is negotiating deals with portals, entertainment companies, social networks, movie studios, and other companies.

Big Stage has 25 employees and was founded in February, 2007. Its initial round of funding came from Mission Ventures, Selby Ventures and Tech Coast Angels.

We’ll see how far it can go with its gag videos and portraits. I always wondered how I would look with a mohawk hair-do. Now I can find out. (I already know what I look like with Jessica Simpson’s hair, thanks to a story I did on HairMixer, which only does hair-morphing).

Big Stage wants to popularize 3D avatars based on pictures of your own face, and it looks more likely to do a good job of it than any other startup we’ve seen so far, comparing favorably to JibJab, the most popular site yet to feature animated avatars.

On JibJab, you can paste a picture of your face into a video of, for example, a man who’s disco dancing. It’s silly and fun but has all the artistry of baby Ike in South Park — essentially, your face is just a still cut-out bobbing around the screen. If it were any less ridiculous it would stop being amusing and just be pathetic. (And, to be fair to JibJab, it’s more focused on creating amusing content than technology.)

For Big Stage, imagine much the same thing, but with a face that can move, change expressions and be shown at different angles. Game publishers have specialized methods to do just that, so that they can base their animations on live actors, but achieving the quality they need is prohibitively expensive. Big Stage says it can do the same thing for next to nothing.

For Big Stage to create a 3D model of your face, all it needs are three face shots taken by a standard digital camera, from three slightly different angles. From the pictures, the company’s software can extrapolate a working, moving animation of your face.

From there, it’s easy to imagine the possibilities. Your face could be placed in e-cards as JibJab does, or in longer videos, or in video games. Still shots could be used as avatars on social networks or for other applications yet to be dreamed up by developers. Marketers might also be interested — what better way to advertise than having your target audience inserting pictures of themselves into your ads?

Other startups like BeFunky have tried to make a business out of creating flat 2D avatars, and a competitor to JibJab called Gizmoz tries to make 3D avatars from a single photo, but their attempts generally fall short. “We blow them out of the water on two levels,” says CEO Chuck Huebner, speaking of his own company’s ability to build a full 3D model and make it perform in various scenarios. Huebner himself is obviously bullish on Big Stage’s prospects, having left his position in charge of all game development at Activision to work at the company.

Big Stage hasn’t yet shown its technology fully; it plans on launching in mid-March. It’s so far taken $4.3 million from Mission Ventures and is in the process of raising a second round with a target of $10 million. The company is based in Pasadena, Calif.

RotoHog, a site with an original approach to online fantasy sports, has raised $6 million in its first venture round.

There’s no revolutionary technology here; it’s just an effort to enhance an existing concept, and reflects the significant push to make money entertaining the masses who are spending ever more time online. For those who aren’t familiar, fantasy sports are like massively-multiplayer online role games, except for sports nuts instead of geeks. Fans spend multiple hours in front of their computers, building and managing teams.  The point is to win bragging rights, and, if you’re willing to pony up an entrance fee, some real cash.

In the standard fantasy sports scenario, like those you will find online at ESPN, CBS, or Fox Sports, you set up a league with 10-12 friends or internet strangers and spend a few hours drafting the teams. Throughout the season, trading players can be an irrational process, where people over-value players for emotional reasons. In cash games, it can even be corrupt, when a losing competitor trades high value players to potential winners in exchange for a piece of the pot.

RotoHog, however, is different in a number of ways. Its two main hooks are its drafting method and trading system. In most fantasy sports, the drafting order is arbitrary and therefore unfair. RotoHog seeks to change this by creating chaos: After a countdown, the draft begins for everyone at the same time; and people draft players by clicking on them before anyone else. It’s a mad rush that in theory gives everyone an equal shot. Each draft round lasts two minutes, and the whole thing is over in 25 minutes. This is significantly faster than the traditional method, which gives each player two to six minutes to make each pick.

The trading system also strays from the norm: Instead of inflated values set by an individual manager’s perceptions, the value of players is based on supply and demand. RotoHog has a “trading floor” that functions like a stock market, where prices for players rise and falling in real time. This eliminates the possibility of collusion, and gives everyone the chance to build a winning team.

The $100,000 cash prize “Marshall Faulk League,” which pits your team against every other team on the site, is free, setting RotoHog apart from companies like the Ultimate Fantasy Football League, where prices range from $40 to $300, depending on how many teams you want to manage at the same time.

RotoHog plans to make money through advertising, premium services, and small contests — the precise nature of which the company has yet to flesh out.

The funding was co-led by DFJ Dragon and Mission Ventures, with contributions from Allen & Co. and SCP Worldwide.

San Diego-based Slacker, the company that wants to take on the iPod with a new type of music recommendation service, has raised $40 million in a second round of funding.

The company, which we first covered in March, is launching in two stages. First, it launched its online player, which we’ve been listening to for several days now (image below), and have enjoyed. This part is similar to Last.fm, in that you can vote what music you like or dislike, and it will personalize a radio station for you based on those choices. It submits other music to you, based on what other people showing similar tastes have also selected.

The second phase will be the launch of a device, later this year, which will be always on through satellite and Wifi connections, and therefore it hopes to trump the iPod and its iTunes service — which are not so connected.

The round was led by Centennial Ventures and Rho Ventures, and go repeat investment from Austin Ventures, Mission Ventures and Sevin Rosen Funds.

This follows $13.5 million in a first round, as earlier reported.

Last.fm, of course was recently sold for $280 million to CBS last week, after raising a mere $5 million. Slacker, with its hardware, is much more ambitious.

Greenplum, a San Mateo company offering businesses an affordable way to sort though hundreds of terabytes of data to become more intelligent about their customers’ habits, has raised $19 million in financing.

Greenplum is significant because it says it provides a database for speedy data warehousing at a tenth of the cost of leading incumbent, Teradata. It does so by working with the new server built by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, billed internally as the “Web 2.0 server.”

Called the Sun Fire X4500, the server has 48 disk drives and 24TB of storage, a significant amount considering the server is the size of two telephone books. (See Bechtolsheim demo the server in YouTube video below). Tim O’Reilly, a publisher who has in recent years become obsessed with collecting and processing business data to make better business decisions, has used it (see here for more details and a video where O’Reilly speaks with the former Greenplum CEO). O’Reilly discusses how Amazon and other Internet companies will need this technology, because they want to measure clicks, and other customers actions — to understand trends and find ways to boost profits. Greenplum has 15 customers, and announces tomorrow (Tuesday) that it has signed up the largest Phillipines wireless service provider, SMART, which also serves the most SMS messages in the world (the Filipinos really like texting).

Sierra Ventures led a $15 million cash investment, and was joined by existing investors Mission Ventures, Dawntreader Ventures, and EDF Ventures. Comerica Bank provided $4 million in debt. Notably, Sierra was the investor in competitor Teradata. Greenplum sells 100 TB hardware and software for $1.8 million, a tenth of Teradata’s price, co-founder Luke Lonergan tells VentureBeat. Teradata had $1.5 billion in sales last year, and revenue growth of 7.5 percent.

The company named Sun executive Bill Cook as chief executive. Greenplum is built on the high-end open source database, PostgreSQL

Start-up Mochila has emerged with an intriguing idea: a marketplace for individual newspaper, magazine and other articles.

If VentureBeat wants to run AP stories, for example, we can go to Mochila and pick out individual Associated Press stories, run them on VentureBeat for free — and share any resulting revenue with Mochila and AP. It is a 40-30-30 percent revenue split, with AP getting the 40 percent. AP is a customer of Mochila’s, as are a number of other big publishers, including Hachette Filipacchi Media US, which owns Car and Driver and many others.

AP gets to dictate various terms, such as embargos, or geographies where the story may or may not run. If it doesn’t want to offer its content for free, then it can choose to sell it for a price to buyers.

This a la carte publishing model is new; we haven’t heard of anything like it. Until now, VentureBeat would have to wade through lots of paperwork to acquire rights to AP content, and typically buy for monthly periods or longer.

Mochila has raised $8 million in a second round of funding. Charles River Ventures, led the round, while Mochila’s previous investors, Mission Ventures, The Greenspun Corporation, and Jerry Colonna, also participated.

The only catch is that we’d have to run the advertising in a set, central spot within the AP story — a format dictated by Mochila’s platform (see screenshot below for example). Mochila chief executive, Keith McAllister, says the company will soon provide other advertising possibilities. It opens its free platform Thursday to the public for the first time. Mochila’s marketplace includes print, audio, video, and photo content.

Mochila did not provide VentureBeat with a full list of publications offering their content for free (via advertising). However, it claims it has more than 100 big publishing companies — operating more than 1,500 newspapers, magazines, wire services and websites — participating through either the paid or free model.

Ads are provided from Mochila’s ad network partners: 24/7, Quigo and Tacoda.

Mochila restarted last year after its previous incarnation failed to bear fruit. It was founded in 2001 in San Mateo, Calif., under the name Snapbridge, a publishing automation company. It has kept a team of 15 in San Mateo, but has moved HQ to New York, because that’s the center of the media world, says McAllister.