VentureBeat

Much more silently than it came into the world, music search and sharing site Social.FM has gone back out — leaving what users it had to retreat to Pandora, iLike or one of the other, more successful music sites on the Internet.

The news was discovered by GigaOm based on a tip, who went on to find that the company’s site and widgets have all gone down. Formerly known as Mercora, the company had taken about $5 million from Norwest Venture Partners.

Social.FM was started back in 2004 by the former CEO of McAfee.com, and initially attracted attention to itself by being one of the few music sites at the time to get funding. At one point, it was hosting dinners for press to point out the differences between itself and Grokster, which was embroiled in a legal battle with MGM.

Attention is a double-edged sword, though. Within a couple years, we were awash in music startups. Earlier this year, VentureBeat put together a list of 38 of those companies, although it certainly wasn’t comprehensive — in a fit of foresight, we even left out Social.FM.

On review, that list is already getting pared down: Ezmo has shut down, and RadioBlogClub’s site is on hiatus (although the software can be downloaded). The rest appear to be functioning, but something tells me the music won’t keep playing forever.

Teen social network myYearbook has raised $13 million, confirming rumors we were hearing last month. The company has managed to grow in the face of more established competitors, like MySpace, within the pre-college market, according to third-party web measurement firms. Hitwise says myYearbook had 1.54 percent of the overall US social network market share behind MySpace’s 71.92 percent and Facebook’s 16.91 percent in June. ComScore, meanwhile, says myYearbook had more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors in June, versus MySpace’s 70.5 million and Facebook’s nearly 49 million.

Sure, Hitwise and comScore have varying means of measuring and quantifying traffic, and neither are entirely accurate. But they are worth cross-examining. The positive story that sticks out for myYearbook is that, according to Hitwise, it has grown 384 over its market share in May of 2007, making it the third largest U.S. social network. ComScore numbers are also quite positive: The firm counts myYearbook as a “teen” site and not a “social network,” and ranks it as the number one teen site in the U.S. MyYearbook claims to be popular with its users, getting them to log on eight times per month and spend 30 minutes on the site per visit on average.

For more on myYearbook versus various other types of teen sites, including full-blown virtual worlds for younger teens and other random and relatively small sites, take a look at the Hitwise graph above. (Note the numbers discrepancy due to graph being based on weekly estimates through July, versus the Hitwise numbers from June).

Can myYearbook grow up?

So, New Hope, Pennsylvania-based MyYearbook is a fast-growing, well-used niche site for teens. But it has broader ambitions. As the company says about its founders’ vision, on its site (and I quote verbatim):

Let’s face it, friendster gets boring, myspace is creepy, and classmates is a rip off. myYearbook would be the only community of people worth going to. It would have every high school, every college, every graduate school, every summer program, every employer, everyone.

Sure, MySpace’s growth has slowed, according to both Hitwise and comScore, but let’s not forget the company that myYearbook seems to have forgotten in the line above: Facebook. That company grew 30 percent in June versus the previous June, from nearly 28 million users to more than 37 million, according to comScore. Granted, I’m not sure how much of Facebook’s growth is coming from U.S. teens versus other age groups, I just doubt myYearbook is going to see much growth from those college-age and up, even if it can take more of MySpace’s teenage users.

That’s the thing. Facebook owns US college campuses and it’s leading innovation in the industry through features like its news feeds, developer platform, mobile applications and Facebook Connect. Also, Facebook is growing fast around the world.

Lest I get too down on the company’s potential, it has also been monetizing relatively well for a social network, it claims, by selling advertising packages to brands that let them reach users in certain parts of the site. I’m looking forward to hearing more about that. It also has done a nice job of integrating ways for users to decorate their profiles through its “pimp.myyearbook” section (see below). That may be a strange name for a site that has a lot of teenage users (kids these days!), but free virtual possessions such as profile flair could be a good place for the company to incorporate virtual goods that cost money. Virtual goods appear to be gaining ground among social network users, or at least they are for Facebook application developers.

This investment round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with existing investors US Venture Partners and First Round Capital participating. The company says it will use the money to create new services and make more money.

DeCarta, the creator of a popular platform for managing location-based (LBS) data, has raised $20 million in additional funding. That includes financing from the Hotung Group and TransLink Capital, as well as existing investor Norwest Venture Partners and a previously announced $6 million from the T-Mobile Venture Fund.

The location-based market still looks like it’s heating up — for example, location-based social application companies like Loopt and Whrrl have been getting a lot of attention, especially with the release of the iPhone 3G with GPS support. Loopt even won the best application award at our MobileBeat 2008 conference last week. But at the same conference, Rich Wong of Accel Partners noted that it’s an extremely competitive market, and “there are a lot of bodies on the beach.”

DeCarta benefits from the excitement without competing with the application companies directly. Instead, it provides the layer between the geospatial data provided by companies like NAVTEQ and applications created by customers like Loopt and real estate search startup Zillow. The platform takes the raw data and translates it into something that’s easily searchable. The company also has deals with carriers including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. Chief executive J. Kim Fennell told me DeCarta’s biggest competition will probably come from companies like Apple and Nokia, who are rumored to be developing LBS platforms of their own.

The latest funding comes quite close to the $21 million goal that we previously reported, and brings deCarta’s total third round financing to $35 million.

Thanks to a startup called Sojern, customers of some of the nation’s biggest airlines will soon see ads on the boarding passes that they print at home.

Is this just another way for consumers to get spammed? Joshua Goldman, a venture partner at Norwest Venture Partners (one of Sojern’s investors), says it’s not, because the boarding pass allows the ads to be carefully targeted, so it should be relevant and useful. For example, your boarding pass will now include things like event and dining listings, weather information and coupons for local businesses. You can click on the ads when you check-in on the airline’s Web site, but they’ll also be included in the printed document that you carry around at the airport. And yes, there will be an option to print the boarding pass without ads, too.

Delta Airlines is launching the service today, starting with passengers flying to Las Vegas (there are some pretty obvious opportunities for travel-targeted advertising), and Continental Airlines, Northwest Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways have also agreed to add Sojern ads to their boarding passes later this year. [Update: American Airlines is one of the partners, too.]

Omaha-based Sojern has raised a $16 million first round of funding from Norwest and Trident Capital, bringing its total financing to $20 million. It’s no secret that the nation’s airlines have had a tough time recently, but Goldman says that didn’t deter Norwest from the investment — in fact, it makes Sojern looks even better, since airlines are looking for new revenue opportunities that don’t require any extra spending.

Sojern also announced the appointment of Jeffrey Katz to its board. Goldman notes that as the founding chief executive of Orbitz, Katz has plenty of experience working with different airlines.

You can watch a demo of the Sojern boarding pass here.

Unisfair is launching online virtual job fairs for businesses as an extension to its virtual trade show business. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has created an online recruiting tool that allows recruiters and job seekers to interact live.

The company says that, like its virtual trade shows, the job fairs can eliminate expensive travel and improve the productivity of searching and recruiting for jobs. Unisfair’s own survey of more than 100 human resources managers says 64 percent of HR people believe they could improve hiring through virtual job fairs.

Unisfair uses the 3-D rendering of virtual worlds to replicate a convention-center atmosphere with a main hall, exhibit floor, resource center and a job center. Managers can post jobs, screen applicants automatically, and track job seekers. Those job seekers can track positions they have applied for an communicate via chat, instant message and e-mail.

Unisfair’s backers are Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. It has staged more than 400 virtual events for the likes of Cisco, IBM, and Quest Software.

The battle of the brain games is underway. Nintendo set this trend in motion when it launched “BrainAge” for the Nintendo DS in 2006. Since then, a number of startups have sprung up and launched additional games aimed at improving the cognitive abilities of gamers with puzzles and brain teasers.

Research suggests that older adults in particular can benefit from playing games that improve memory, concentration and problem solving. Today, Lumos Labs is announcing it has raised $3 million in venture capital from Pequot Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and existing investors. The money will go to its brain game web site, Lumosity.com.

Michael Scanlon, CEO of Lumos Labs, says that gamers now play 50,000 games a day on the site. Each of the games (one pictured left) has been built in conjunction with scientists who study cognitive training. The site launched in its free beta form in January, 2007, and then it moved to $10-a-month paid subscriptions in July, 2007. When you play games on the site, you can compare your performance against everyone else’s with the “brain performance index.”

Lumos Labs has 10 employees and is based in San Francisco. Scanlon said that his company emphasizes the science, but he acknowledged that no one has yet done a conclusive study that brain-oriented games can ward off cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Scanlon said that subscriptions are growing about 25 percent each month. The company previously raised its first round of capital of $400,000 from angels in October, 2006.

Also, in a separate announcement, Vivity Labs will launch its Fit Brains site (pictured left) today. Back in March, Vivity raised $1 million in angel money. Vivity has nine casual games on the site now. You can follow a “brain circuit” by completing the games one after another or just play randomly. The site’s metrics tell you whether your performance is getting better or worse. You get trophies for certain achievements and can vy to be the best on 11 different leader boards. The site says the games are “guilt free” because they’re good for you.

The competition is heating up. Michael Cole, CEO of Vivity Labs in Vancouver, Canada, said that brain games got a huge boost from Nintendo, which sold 26 million copies of BrainAge and Big Brain Academy. The Fit Brains site has 10,000 beta testers. The average session is 25 minutes. About 125,000 games have been played to date since March. The company has nine employees.

Before running Vivity, Cole worked at Happy Neuron, another brain game company. Another competitor is Posit Science, which targets assisted-living residents with CD-ROM based games. All of these gaming companies try to strike a balance between entertainment and science-based education. Cole says his company has hired professional game developers so that it can ensure that its games are fun.

Having paid through the nose for school portraits over the years, I would love someone to do a Web 2.0-style disruption on that business. And it looks like that is happening with a company called Picateers.

School photos are a pretty big racket with an old-style approach to doing business. Parents have never been that happy paying exhorbitant prices to companies such as Lifetouch, which employs tens of thousands of photographers and other specialists across the country.

Larry Jacobs, a former manager at Oracle and IBM, thought the market was ripe for disruption. He saw that school photographers didn’t seem excited about their jobs and thought that parents with increasingly inexpensive digital SLR cameras could probably take better pictures.

In 2005, Jacobs founded Picateers in a San Mateo, Calif. to let parents to take over the school-picture program.

Jacobs (pictured left) finds volunteers among parents to shoot the pictures of kids. They then upload them to the Picateers site, where parents can view the shots and select the ones they want to buy. Then Picateers delivers the pictures to them for about the same cost as what Lifetouch charges. Prices on picture packages range from $10 to $90, with the average order about $38. Parents can order collage pictures or photo books.

But the powerful part of this Web 2.0 approach is that PIcateers gives back half the proceeds to the schools. Lifetouch also gives in-kind donations back to the schools, like free student IDs, but it often can’t give more than 15 percent because of its overhead.

Picateers can afford to kick back half of the fees charged to schools because it has low overhead. It has only 14 people and relies on parent volunteers, who can generate more money for the school with Picateers than with traditional fundraisers. The parents can also be creative, staging pictures outdoors or at scenic spots. For pictures of 100 kids, Picateers asks for a few parent volunteers.

Picateers got initial funding in May 2006. It raised a $5.5 million round from Norwest Venture Partners in June 2006. Jacobs expects to raise another round and he hopes to be profitable by the end of 2009.

The company launched a beta program last August and is doing a full rollout this coming August. Now there are more than 300 schools, from preschools to high schools, participating in the program. One school in Fresno uses Picateers eight times during the school year, for everything from dances to graduation ceremonies.

There is plenty of room for growth. The Photo Marketing Association estimated last year that 22.7 million households bought school portraits in 2006. The PMA said that school portraits were the most popular form of portraits in America, followed by sports and family portraits. Full told, Americans spent $2.2 billion on school-related portraits in the U.S., according to the PMA.

With Picateers, schools can find a significant new source of funding in an age of budget cuts. At a school of 400 kids, the average share for the school could be $4,500 to $5,000 per photo event. One such school is Berean Christian High School in Walnut Creek, Calif.

The private school with 430 students has tried out Picateers for a couple of different photo events. Gary Jung, the school’s information technology administrator, yearbook chief, and digital photography teacher says he is an enthusiastic fan of the program.

HIs school wasn’t happy with Lifetouch. It also wasn’t pleased with a local photographer. So at the beginning of the year, Jung started using Picateers. He organized the event himself and Picateers handled all of the chores that he didn’t want to undertake. Now he is expanding it to use it for senior portraits, school mug shots, and sports team photos. About a dozen of his own photography students will shoot. Jung anticipates thousands of dollars will come back into the school’s coffers.

“Most people who went to Picateers viewed it as a way to raise money,” he said. “I thought it was a way to solve my problem. The principal used to get complaints about the photos. That has ceased.”

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.

As the dot-com crash proved, the Internet doesn’t spell the end of the brick-and-mortar store. While shopping startups like Boo.com and Webvan went belly-up, the traditional mall continued to thrive, relatively untouched by the web phenomenon.

Getting data about the local mall on to the web is the point of NearbyNow, a search engine that tells us it has just raised a fresh $11.75 million round from Norwest Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company, now in its second year of existence, has gone from a single mall in its database in late 2006 to 202 malls today, and says it’s within range of half the population of the United States.

Instead of just searching within a geographical area, though, NearbyNow asks users to pick a specific mall. They then need to enter a search term, like “jeans”, with results showing for all the stores in the mall. The results can be narrowed by categories like “men’s apparel” or limited to specific stores.

While I was checking out NearbyNow, I decided to test out the company’s claim that it can tell you whether an item is available in a store within 10 minutes. It’s a simple process — just enter your desired size, color and quantity and either an email address or a mobile phone number.

True enough, I got a reply within about eight minutes on my first request. Unfortunately, the item I wanted wasn’t in stock, but it did offer a link to buy it online. A second request reported that there would be a delay before the store could check on the item, which ended up taking about 15 minutes more before I was told that item was also out of stock. Two failures would be enough to wear out the patience of many searchers — there’s some hard work to be done in keeping the site up to date with what’s actually in stores.

One the other hand, the engine provides a good way to look through the sorts of styles different stores carry. As readers pointed out in our first story about NearbyNow, the company’s challenge isn’t developing a useful product, but rather distinguishing itself amid the noise of competitors like Krillion and ShopLocal. None have yet captured the market.

NearbyNow is based in Los Altos, Calif. The company has raised $19.25 million to date, including a first round of capital from DFJ.

Evincii, a startup that brings search technology into brick-and-mortar stores, is launching publicly today.

The Mountain View, Calif. company was founded in 2005 and has been operating secretly — albeit less than the full “stealth mode” typical of some companies, since its Search Box (pictured at left) is already installed in 135 Longs Drugs stores.

The Search Box’s goal is simple: Help customers find what they need in the store as easily and quickly as possible. The company’s initial release focuses on over-the-counter medicines. You enter you symptoms, along with any allergies or other constraints, and the Search Box provides a list of relevant medicines. It also includes links to detailed information, video ads and diagrams showing exactly where in the store you can find each product.

Evincii chief executive Charles Koo say all relevant medicines are listed, and they’re sorted according to popularity and whether or not the companies paid Evincii for their listings. (To get a better sense of how the Search Box works, you can check out the Longs Drugs website, where Evincii’s technology powers a very similar tool called the “Over the Counter Medicine Buyer’s Guide”.)

Most of the information that Evincii provides is already available online. But the the Search Box isn’t aimed at people who are sitting at their computers doing research. Instead, it’s for those of us who show up at the store without having researched or chosen a product ahead of time. It also helps advertisers reach those customers right at the point of purchase.

When Koo first told me about the Search Box, I was surprised there isn’t a similar product out there already. But Evincii seems to be opening up fresh territory — there are a growing number of companies providing in-store television advertising, and other businesses (like bookstores) that offer in-store directories, but Evincii is the first to offer an interactive, in-store experience focused on over-the-counter medicine, Koo says.

Evincii’s Search Box has been available in some Longs stores since 2006. The company found that the Search Box increases a store’s over-the-counter drug sales by between 3 percent and 6 percent, while advertisers saw sales increase by between 7 percent and 18 percent, Koo says.

Over the next few months, Evincii will continue to roll out its first product. The company will also unveil in-store search services in other areas — Koo offered few details, but he pointed to vitamin supplements as another category where a Search Box would be useful.

Evincii has raised a $9.2 million first round of funding led by Norwest Venture Partners and is looking to raise a second.

Unisfair, a company providing virtual hosting for events with attendance running into the thousands of people, has raised a round of $10 million from Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, VentureBeat has learned.

Unlike most other virtual-world technologies, Unisfair runs entirely in the browser, and focuses only on events like global sales meetings and job fairs. Like real-world conferences, events on Unisfair typically run at set times for a day or two, and are sponsored by large companies or institutions.

Although it launched its product four years ago, Unisfair has only really seen significant demand in the past year and a half, according to CEO Guy Piekarz. Piekarz says they’ve hosted about 400 events in that time period, with an average attendance of 1,500 people.

Like another business-oriented virtual world we recently wrote about, Qwaq (coverage here), Unisfair has some very recognizable clients, including Cisco, Cognos and Nielsen. In general, the company running the event pays for it, but it’s also possible for event organizers to charge end users an attendance fee.

Although it’s had the advantage of being early to the game, Unisfair will likely pick up some competition in the near future. Corporations like IBM have already tried to hold meetings and conferences in Second Life, but those meetings have generally been failures — Second Life requires a large download and some prior knowledge to use, which is a turn-off for many potential users.

The advantage Unisfair has is ease of use and low computing requirements. When we tried a demo of the platform, it worked very smoothly with almost no learning curve required to navigate a virtual conference (screenshots below). However, other companies are quickly picking up on the need for an easy-to-use interface.

The $10 million funding was led by Norwest, with Sequoia participating. Unisfair’s first round, for $5 million, was provided solely by Sequoia. The company is based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Updated

Travel search engine Kayak has taken on $196 million in additional funding from a prominent group of investors.

It has separately purchased main rival SideStep for $180 million, as well as $20 million in the company’s bank account for a total of $200, Techcrunch first reported. [Update: We now hear from a source that the total sale was for slightly less: $175 million plus $18 million in cash, for a total of $193 million.]

Together, the companies will aim for a “tremendous” initial public offering next year, said Woody Marshall of Trident Capital, an early investor in SideStep, confirming the news.

[Update: The company itself is demure about the possibility of an IPO, saying instead that it wants to focus on being the number one travel site in the coming year.]

There has already been “strategic interest” in both companies — potential acquirers — Marshall said.

Both provide search-based travel sites where users can find travel information such airline flights, car rentals, hotel reservations, and discount travel deals. Search results may send you to other aggregators, like Orbitz, or online travel agencies. SideStep also offers travel guides, hotel reviews and downloadable toolbar, that will now be accessible by Kayak users.

Norwalk, Connecticut-based Kayak and Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sidestep are the two market leaders in this search vertical (see Hitwise graph below), and have mostly separate user bases, according to Marshall (note: He’s no relation to Matt Marshall, VentureBeat’s editor) .

Smaller travel search competitors include Farecast, Mobissimo, cFares, Tripit, niche travel products, off-the-beaten-path vacation search Tripology, and many others. The larger of these startups may now be acquisition bait, as leading travel sites like Expedia and Orbitz or large internet companies like Yahoo and Google look to expand their travel search services.

Kayak will be the main brand, and Sidestep will use Kayak’s search technology, although Sidestep will keep its brand, Marshall said. Key members of SideStep will join Kayak’s team. The companies say they will combine travel data, such as travel rates and availability, and other services. Affiliate partners of the companies include: About.com, Comcast, LonelyPlanet, Rand McNally and USA Today.

Both companies are generating large amounts of cash through CPM (where advertisers pay per thousand advertising views), CPA (where advertisers pay when a user actually buys a fare or ticket) and CPC advertising (where advertisers pay when a user clicks through to their site), according to Marshall. The Techcrunch article reports Kayak is doing roughly $50 million in annual revenues, while SideStep does $35 million.

The advantage of an IPO will be to boost the company’s brand awareness. Cash isn’t the paramount consideration, since the merged company already has ample funds for further expansion, Marshall says.

Both companies have racked up venture capital funding. Kayak took funding from General Catalyst, a Boston firm that first looked at Sidestep (see here), as well as Sequoia (Michael Moritz was the lead investor, and will now join Kayak’s board), Accel Partners, and AOL. Our previous coverage here.

Sidestep has taken a total of $27 million in funding from Trident Capital, Leader Ventures, Saints Capital, Norwest Venture Partners. Our previous coverage here.

Sequoia, Accel, General Catalyst, Trident and Norwest put money into this latest round, along with new investors Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, and debt lenders Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital.

Two-and-a-half year old startup TimeBridge is launching its flagship scheduling product today, and it’s a product that shines with simplicity.

Plenty of internet startups have made a business out of saving time for busy professionals. TimeBridge’s niche is cutting down the time it takes to schedule meetings. It’s product, Personal Scheduling Manager, works on reaching consensus through a straightforward visual interface, a clear improvement over the process of emailing back and forth between all a meeting’s participants that most organizers use.

Here’s how it works: The program, which is a small download for Microsoft Outlook users or a web app for Google adherents, syncs with the user’s calendar to show which time slots are open. The user, who we’ll assume is initiating the meeting, can then highlight blocks of time that would be acceptable for a meeting.

Invitations are then sent off to the other participants, who can see all the times the organizer has available and choose their own set of open time slots. Through a process of elimination, the times that other participants can’t make it to a meeting are ruled out, and a confirmation for the best time is sent out to everyone.

TimeBridge’s CEO, Yori Nelken, says it took two years to build the product, a claim that’s hard to believe in light of how quick and simple it is to use. But that’s what a good web app does — fits in seamlessly with a user’s life, then stays out of the way as much as possible.

One caution — we’ve been skeptical before that yet another scheduling company might have a chance to make it. TimeBridge is clearly an additional feature for calendars, not an entire stand-alone product. If anything it’s the fragmentation of the market, with different users going to Outlook, Google, or their PDA for their calendar, that provides an opening for another service to tie them together for users.

The company plans to make money by making deals with other business programs, for instance, suggesting a web conferencing program to users who plan on holding a remote meeting. It could also offer a white-label version of its Personal Scheduling Manager to interested companies.

TimeBridge is based in San Francisco, Calif. The company raised $6 million last year from Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners, and plans to start raising another round in January.

Turn, a San Mateo, Calif. company that delivers advertising tailored for Web sites, depending on their readership and other variables, said it has raised $8 million in second round financing.

Turn was launched by Jim Barnett, the former chief executive of once-popular search engine Altavista. We wrote about Turn last year after it rose $18 million. Since Turn launched, other ad network companies have emerged to bring about more targeted ads for Web sites, while others have been acquired. Turn uses numerous variables to select advertising for a site, such as a site’s subject matter, its design, and its owners’ preference for click-through versus impressions.

Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures are among the investors in the latest round, according the regulatory filing about the financing cited by PEHub. However, regulatory filings are notoriously unreliable. A lead investor hasn’t been named.

Featured companies: Bravo Health, InfraReDx, MedAssets, Prestwick Pharmaceuticals

Prestwick Pharma raises $20M for neuro drugs — Specialty pharma Prestwick Pharmaceuticals, a Washington, D.C., firm that acquires cast-off drug candidates to treat neurological conditions, raised $20 million from existing investors, VentureWire reports (subscription required). Among those participating in the funding were Atlas Venture, Sofinnova Ventures, Vivo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Warburg Pincus and Pequot Ventures.

Prestwick said it raised the funds to acquire additional drug candidates. The company filed to go public in 2005, but pulled its filing in December of that year.

InfraReDx aims for $40M to detect artery plaque — Burlington, Mass.-based InfraReDx aims to raise $40 million in a “mezzanine” financing to launch its artery-plaque diagnostic system, VentureWire reports. The company is talking to existing and potential new investors, including VC firms and hedge funds.

InfraReDx is developing a near-infrared spectroscopy system for the detection of arterial plaque, which can rupture and create blood clots that could lead to a heart attack. The company expects to complete a clinical trial in October that could lead to approval of the device.

Bravo Health raises undisclosed sum for acquisition — Bravo Health, a venture-backed provider in the Medicare prescription-drug coverage plan formerly known as Elder Health, raised an undisclosed sum in an eighth funding round, VentureWire reports. The funding covers the company’s recent acquisition of a Philadelphia Medicare provider called Senior Health.

Investors included all backers from the company’s previous funding round, a group that includes New Enterprise Associates, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, CCP Equity Partners, Salix Ventures, Alpha Partners, Coleman Swenson Hoffman Booth, Franklin Venture Capital, Frontenac Co., GE Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Riggs Capital Partners, Sprout Group, Wasatch Venture Fund and Woodbrook.

MedAssets, healthcare IT provider, aims for $230M IPO — MedAssets, an Alpharetta, Ga., provider of healthcare IT and consulting services, filed to raise up to $230 million in an initial offering. The company aims to help community hospitals increase “revenue capture” and “cash collections” and to manage “non-labor expense categories.”

Oddly, MedAsset doesn’t appear to have yet maximized its own revenue capture, as it posted a net loss of $23.8 million last year on revenues of $177.9 million.

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.