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Following on the heels of Cisco and Google, IVT is launching its own version of “YouTube for the enterprise.” Google launched its “video for business” application just a couple of weeks ago, while Cisco hit the market in June with “Enterprise TV.”

IVT will challenge those players as well as start-ups Veodia and Brightcove with a portal-like media center that can aggregate not just videos but all rich media, such as recorded WebEx meetings, iTunes podcasts, Cisco video conferences, webcasts, and Polycom conference calls.

IVT PrimeTime is a portal that corporations can use to manage content within their organization. Employees can upload video for corporate training into the portal and search for videos and other media within it. Users can set up channels for specialized content and access controls to determine who can view it.

IVT is based in Los Angeles and Palo Alto, Calif. Its clients include Cisco, AT&T, IBM, E&Y, Oracle, NEC, Rohm & Haas and EDS. It provides them with rich media video communication and webcasting software. Now it is adding PrimeTime to cash in on corporate video sharing. The company says it will make it as easy to share videos in a business context as can be done on consumer video sites such as YouTube. Rohm & Haas said it has been using IVT PrimeTime for months now and has archived hundreds of hours of video.

The company says it can easily transcode video from any format into Adobe’s Flash format for universal viewing. Each component of IVT’s product is installed as a web-based platform. For users, it has a PrimeTime Studio tool that makes it easy to stage webcasts and upload video.

The company has 20 employees and was founded in 2005. In 2007, it raised a $3 million first round from Monitor Ventures and Tudor Investments. IVT is thinking about raising a new round. It sounds like a “me-too” company. But the company says that founder Greg Pulier has been involved in developing content creation tools and online video applications for years. He foresaw the need to make a unified platform for all sorts of rich media, not just video.

Buzzd, a location-based mobile startup, has raised a first round of funding from Greycroft Partners and Monitor Ventures. The company isn’t disclosing the size of the round.

Buzzd and competing companies such as Loopt and Google’s Dodgeball allow mobile users to access information and contact friends based on their location. With Buzzd, you send out your address or zip code via SMS message, and the New York startup’s service connects you to listings for nearby events, clubs and restaurants. While you’re out, you can send out a review, and those reviews are featured prominently in the listings. Buzzd bills itself as a mobile social network, and it allows users to create profiles (or import them from Facebook) and send each other private messages.

The big tech companies also have offerings in this market, but Dodgeball, for example, is focused on messaging and doesn’t offer event listings. Silicon Valley’s Loopt has also been getting a lot of positive press, but it only works on GPS-enabled phones. Buzzd, on the other hand, can be used with GPS, but it’s not required — as I mentioned above, the service works with an address or zip code.

Buzzd also announced that it’s partnering with Hornitos Tequila in a deal that allows users to buy SMS coupons for their friends, which can be redeemed for free drinks. Other partners include Flavorpill Productions, CitySearch, Time Out Group and voice search company V-Enable.

Update: I just spoke to chief executive Nihal Mehta, and he emphasized that one of Buzzd’s big advantages is that you it’s free, and you can use it without having it pre-installed or downloading anything (unlike Loopt.)

The company has three offerings right now — platforms for Flavorpill and Time Out, and the Buzzd service itself, which launched in testing mode in February. Mehta declined to offer any exact user numbers, but he says that so far, the most adoption has come through Buzzd’s partnership with troubled mobile company Helio. With around 200,000 subscribers, Helio doesn’t provide a huge market, but there’s good overlap between Helio’s users and the Buzzd target demographic, Mehta says.

Buzzd plans to roll out some new features in the coming months, including photo and video posting, as well as integration with the iPhone and Google Android.

TeeBeeDee is the latest social network catering to a special demographic: those aged 40-plus.

MySpace has got the teens. Facebook has the 20-somethings. Friendster says it has bagged the 30-somethings. And on the other end, you have Eons, for the 50-plus generation.

So you knew this 40-plus angle was coming. The San Francisco company has just raised $4.8 million in a first round of funding led by Shasta Ventures, and joined by Monitor Ventures.

It’s a pretty straight-forward social network. It features discussions, and questions and answers about the usual topics, from sex to stress. People with top answers get ranked highly, along with their mug shots, and therefore there’s an incentive to play along. Member create profiles so they can network.

The company was started by Robin Wolaner, an entrepreneur who is the founder of Parenting Magazine, former executive of CNET Networks, and author of Naked in the Boardroom: A CEO Bares Her Secrets So You Can Transform Your Career.

The name TeeBeeDee comes from the acronym “to be determined,” which the company says reflects its view that the next phase of life is “full of opportunity.” The site says it plans a full launch in September.

The desire people to express themselves and feel belonged somewhere online continues to surprise us, so we’re not going to dismiss this company as an also-ran, despite its relatively late entry. However, this particular demographic of 40-something is a difficult nut to crack. People in their 40s don’t want to be reminded of their age. They’re having fun, and they want to feel part of the Facebook crowd, or at least be allowed to associate with groups that embrace those younger than they are. On the other hand, they’re the mid-life crisis bunch, and may be seeking counsel in areas they haven’t before.

Previously the company had been backed by individuals, including Ron Conway and David Nierenberg; Jan Brandt, former vice chair and chief marketing officer of AOL; Jim Hornthal, founder of Preview Travel and former vice chairman of Travelocity.com; Ruth Owades, founder of Calyx & Corolla and Gardener’s Eden; and Bill Sahlman, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School.

Coda Genomics, a Laguna Hills, Calif., biotechnology company founded in 2005, concentrates on a thorny but little-realized challenge in biotechnology: Genetic engineering is easy. Protein manufacture is hard.

The biotech industry was founded on the science of recombinant DNA, which is essentially the trick of taking a gene from one species (such as a human) and inserting it into the genome of another (say, the microbe E. coli). Since many genes are essentially templates for producing proteins, this has been a handy technique for making, or “expressing,” vast quantities of natural human proteins such as insulin by harnessing the production facilities already found inside cells.

Inserted genes, however, don’t always behave as expected. Among other things, their protein-production engines can stutter and sometimes stop when incompatible genetic signals encoded in the transplanted genes clash with the host cell’s own internal machinery. Coda aims to ameliorate such problems by smoothing out the effect of one particular set of crossed signals that control when and for how long cells “pause” the protein-producing activity of individual genes.

The company doesn’t go into a lot of detail as to how it accomplishes this, but it lists an impressive array of blue-chip customers including Genentech, Eli Lilly and Invitrogen, all of whom are keenly interested in ways to improve the manufacture of recombinant proteins as drugs or diagnostics. Coda also sells kits that allow customers to “optimize” synthetic genes — that is, stretches of artificially assembled DNA designed to produce particular proteins — to improve their output once inserted into host cells.

Now, however, it appears that Coda has higher ambitions. The company today announced that it raised $7 million in a third funding round, and hinted that the proceeds will allow it to shop for a drug candidate of its own. (The company’s release calls this “obtain[ing] new high value intellectual property positions, including a therapeutic development candidate.”) I doubt it’s going too far out on a limb to suppose that Coda plans to acquire a cast-off or otherwise “failed” protein drug that’s proven difficult to manufacture in order to make it more cost-effectively.

If so, it’s certainly hard to blame them; the lottery mentality of biotech investors — VCs most certainly included — tends to reward companies that pursue their own drugs while punishing those that might otherwise concentrate on offering useful but unexciting services to other drug manufacturers. I’m not convinced this is the most efficient use of the industry’s resources, but given how little economic logic actually underpins biotechnology in the first place, it seems pretty much par for the course.

There’s more detail on Coda’s early history in this March 2006 VentureWire story (subscription required). OVP Venture Partners led the round, joined by Monitor Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, and Life Science Angels.