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You may be used to typing in top-level domains (TLDs) like .com, .net or .edu when heading to websites, but the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) hopes to change that with a decision to open new TLDs for registration, according to today’s Wall Street Journal.

Under the new rule, ICANN would let anyone with $50,000 to $100,000 register any TLD they want, so for example, our web address could become venture.beat, rather than venturebeat.com.

The WSJ has more on what the decision may mean for regular consumers and businesses, but there are also a couple ways it could change the Internet landscape for startups — most notably, domain speculators like Demand Media and Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX).

Those companies, and other speculators, have plowed billions of dollars into millions of hot domain names, sometimes backed by high-profile investors like Oak Investment Partners or, for Marchex, public shareholders. The idea is generally to buy up lots of obvious domain names, like business.com, which held an early sales record at $350 $7.5 million. Most good names that are auctioned get less, but still routinely receive six figures.

Those domains are worth so much because of a kind of traffic called type-in traffic, which is distinct from search traffic from Google or linked traffic. Right now, if a web surfer — especially an unsavvy one — wants to find, say, exchange rates, they might type exchangerates.com in hopes of finding an exchange calculator (they’d be disappointed).

Although the strategies of the two companies are different (Marchex, notably, wants to build out a locality-based content business), they both rely on one crucial assumption: that the dominant TLDs, primarily .com, continue to be the first thing people type in when they’re looking for something, whether it’s exchange rates or Disney.com. So what happens if ICANN manages to reeducate Internet users, and popularize sales of new TLDs?

The simple answer is that a lot of speculators will lose a lot of their own, and their investors’ money. While Demand and Marchex might be able to build up viable content portals around sites like chicagodoctors.com, the money they plowed into those names will be meaningless — as well spent on chicago.docs or chicago.dr, or any other name you can imagine. The game will become even more about search, type-ins traffic will wither.

There’s a strong counter-argument to ICANN’s action having any real affect on .com, though. There are already dozens of top-level domains, but they are thinly used, even purposed ones like .mobi (for mobile phones). The introduction of more TLDs over the years has not seen sales of hot domains diminish, which by extension probably means speculators are making as much as ever. In a recent post on his blog, legendary domainer Frank Schilling said he’s confident in .com:

“[T]his will do little to quell the desire for meaningful .com, net and CC TLD names. Corporate IT departments overwhelmed by the task of managing existing .com typos simply won’t be up to the challenge of managing a corporate GTLD such as .COKE or .IBM. … The failure of former would-be contenders such as .travel, .biz and .pro to satiate demand for coveted names, shows us that adding more skim milk to the mix will not stop the cream from rising, and that cream is .com.” (Schilling’s emphasis.)

That may hold true, or it may be that ICANN has finally found a way to shift attention from .com, with the possibility for new TLDs that are actually meaningful or logical.

And a final argument is that it does seem unreasonable that 10 or 15 years from now, we’ll still be typing .com in for every major website. The Internet is a place of rapid change, and at some point, .com will start seeming archaic and unnecessary. But any real change would require a massive re-engineering of the web’s user-interface, at the very least, so it’s hard to imagine what those changes might be from here.

By the way, if you’re interested in a good read about the domain name speculation industry, check out WSJ reporter David Kesmodel’s brand-new book on the subject, The Domain Game. He opens with a look at Schilling, and goes from there. Kesmodel’s a good reporter.

You can blame the popularity of YouTube for the success of Solarflare Communications. Because demand for internet video keeps on growing, the need for infrastructure to handle the growth is also on the rise.

Solarflare Communications has raised $26 million in venture capital for its high-speed networking chip business as part of an effort to create more energy-efficient data centers.

The Irvine, Calif.-based company is creating 10GBASE-T chips, which can transfer data at 10 gigabits a second over the Ethernet protocol. Such chips are used in servers and switches inside data centers to boost the transfer of data from one piece of hardware to another with the lowest power consumption.

The company is in a good spot because it is the first to capitalize on a generational shift in networking, as network speeds move from 1-gigabit-per-second to 10-gigabits, said Russell Stern, chief executive of Solarflare (pictured below).

The round includes previous investors such as Oak Investment Partners, Foundation Capital, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners. The round slightly exceeds the amount raised by rival chip company Aquantia, which raised $25 million in March.

Solarflare was started in 2001 as a chip design firm focused on 10-gigabit Ethernet networking. In 2006, it merged with Level 5 Networks in Cambridge, England. It started shipping a low-power 10GbE vNIC controller/MAC chip in February 2007.

Solarflare said it will use the new money to launch its next-generation products, including a low-power 10GBASE-T PHY. The company hopes to dominate 10-gigabit networking the way that Broadcom and Marvell have dominated 1-gigabit networking.

“The interesting thing about networking is that no player has dominated more than one generation of product,” Stern said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kilowatt hours, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.

With technologies such as Solarflare’s networking chips, it becomes easier to shift data to outlying sites with greener energy sources, such as solar or wind power. The computing of data can happen at those locations in a more energy-efficient manner than inside a power-hungry data center, said Andy Hopper, a fellow at Corpus Christi College and head of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

The latest investment brings the total amount raised by Solarflare (and its acquired entity, Level 5) to over $126 million in seven years. Solarflare’s partners include Accton, Citrix, Delta, Ixia, Panduit, SMC and VMware. The company has 125 employees.

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Rearden Commerce, a Silicon Valley company that wants to become your personal concierge everywhere, including on your mobile phone, has raised $100 million in funding from some financial powerhouses.

So far, the company has worked for years on a web-based personal assistant service, which lets you do everything from book travel arrangements to manage your calendar. But the company recently demoed its coming mobile service to VentureBeat. It is preparing for a major offensive in mobile, to be announced at the end of this month.

Investors include JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Oak Investment Partners and Foundation Capital. The latter three has also pumped in an earlier $100 million round. The company is now valued at more than $500 million, according to an anonymous source cited in a separate Dow Jones article (no link).

It comes at a time when there’s a big race on among companies to be able to offer advertisers a compelling mobile platform to reach consumers. Rearden says it can offer advertisers detailed information, about where people are located at any given time, what their travel plans are and all sorts of other information about them.

It is growing quickly. It has 300 employees, and wants to have 500 by the end of this year.

The Foster City, Calif.-based Rearden Commerce was created by Patrick Grady, who has worked on this since 1999, and who was previously an investor.

Notably, it also comes at a time when fast-growing social networks like Facebook are developing more robust mobile versions, which also contain useful applications that might compete with Rearden. However, Rearden says its product is more robust for transactions.

Indeed, the company’s user-friendly personal assistant helps you manage a variety of tasks, including dining, managing your address book and more. But it has focused on business-to-business applications, making sure transactions can be conducted securely. But the company will eventually deliver the Rearden Personal Assistant for consumers. The company also plans to rapidly scale its on-demand platform, to allow new merchants and third-party applications providers to be integrated into its concierge service. A demo of the company’s initial technology is here.

The downside, however, is that its platform isn’t completely open. If you prefer Yelp as a restaurant review service, for example, you can’t sub it instead of Rearden’s default service, Zagat. While the service will open up more going forward, executives aren’t saying when that will happen.

The mobile version isn’t yet public, but the demo we saw shows that the mobile features use some of the cooler features of Yahoo Go, such as the ability to scroll through your services, carousel-like, via a menu on the left-hand side of your phone.

Rearden Commerce has also inked strategic partnerships with American Express and JPMorgan Chase. In the past 18 months, Rearden Commerce has added more than 1,700 new corporate customers representing more than one million contracted users. The customers include Fortune 500 companies such as ConAgra Foods and Thomson as well as small enterprises C-COR, Diagnostic Health, and Symplified Technologies.

It’s worth noting that the company raised the big pile of cash during a weak environment for start-ups to raise venture capital.

The company came out secrecy in 2005. Its Rearden Personal Assistant helps users find and book the range of services they need based on company policies, their personal preferences, location and the context of what they’re doing.

Just like a seasoned executive assistant, the Rearden Personal Assistant automatically inserts details into the user’s calendar and proactively notifies them of schedule changes via phone, email or text message — whether they’re in the office or on the road. Chase said it plans to use the assistants as the basis for a program to manage a new credit-card service for millions of consumers.

The company is not yet profitable but says it has growing revenue streams from some 137,000 merchants that are hoping to gain distribution through the assistant.

In the rapid rise of solar thermal power, a small handful of companies have grabbed the lion’s share of attention and funding: Ausra, Brightsource and Solel are the three most oft-heard names. Another company, eSolar, can now add its name to that shortlist, with one of the biggest cleantech venture fundings to date.

Notably, eSolar has plans to immediately funnel the money into construction projects that may see its plants going online ahead of its competitors’.

The solar thermal designs of all these companies involve using fields of mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight on contained water, which then boils and powers turbines. From that starting point everything can differ, from the size and shape of the mirrors to the type of receptacle containing the water and the location of the power plant.

ESolar’s trick is a minimalist design that uses small, flat mirrors in relatively modest deployments — the company is planning to build a series of plants producing 33 megawatts each, which is enough to power from 15,000 - 25,000 average Californian homes. Ausra, by contrast, is planning a 177MW plant in San Luis Obispo County, while Brightsource has a deal for five of about the same size.

Going smaller has several benefits for eSolar. The biggest is that the bureaucratic stumbling block of permitting is smoothed for plants under 50MW. Having smaller plants — they fit on about 160 acres of land — could also benefit eSolar by allowing it to nestle plants into areas that are closer to the regular transmission grid.

The size and speed with which they can be built means that eSolar could potentially have a plant up by the end of this year or early next. Most of its competitor’s earliest installations are scheduled for a year or so beyond that.

How far the $130 million investment will carry eSolar is another question. While the company boasts that it has a cheap manufacturing process and efficient designs, aided by software that intelligently aims the mirrors, building even small plants is still an expensive proposition. Despite the scale of Google.org (the search giant’s philanthropic arm) and Oak Investment Partners, eSolar will probably soon be shopping around for even larger amounts from banks and private equity.

Idealab, the third funder in the round, is also headed by eSolar’s chairman, Bill Gross. The company is based in Pasadena, Calif., and also took $10 million from Google.org in January.

This story will be very familiar to VentureBeat readers. Federated Media, a company that sells and runs ads on more than 200 blogs and other web sites, including this one, has raised $50 million from private equity firm Oak Investment Partners.

We’ve been reporting the gist of this story since last month, when a source told us that Sausalito, Calif.-based FM was closing a round with the pre-money valuation of $200 million. A second source confirmed the valuation just the other week, although FM wouldn’t confirm it when they briefed me on the funding news last Friday. Note: My second source incorrectly but understandably heard the investor to be Oak Hill Capital Partners, another private equity firm.

FM says it has been profitable since last year. Our first source told us that it made revenue up to $23 million last year (to be clear, that’s revenue, not profit), and was on target to make up to $60 million this year.

The paradigm for making money on the web has been direct-response advertising, led by Google and its click-based ads, but Federated Media envisions bringing brand advertisers online. As large media companies already know, brand advertisers care just as much about what content their names are associated with as they care about click-based conversation rates. To this end, Federated Media’s core strategy since its founding in 2005 has been to work with high-quality sites that have a clear relevance to certain, niche audiences — say, sites that write for investors and entrepreneurs. I has also more recently started helping large companies like Dell and BMW integrate marketing campaigns inside of third-party applications on Facebook.

It’s “insanity” to think that brand advertisers won’t move more of their advertising dollars from traditional media to the web, Chas Edwards, FM’s chief revenue officer tells me, despite the skepticism sometimes expressed by others about this potential.

Edwards says that even with a recession and a corresponding dip in adveritising spending, the migration to the web is unavoidable. “It’s not a matter of whether or not we’ll do more revenue in 2008 than 2007,” he says, “the question is, will we double, triple or quadruple it.”

Federated Media will use the money to expand its services for publishers, to flesh out its efforts on social networks and on other social web properties, and to work more closely with large advertisers.

Oak Investment Partner’s Fred Harmon, who led the round, will join FM’s board of directors.

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Babystyle, the Los Angeles retailer of baby and maternity products, has filed for bankruptcy after raising more than $146 million from investors.

Two years ago we were pointing to the worrying burn rate of the company, which also goes by Estyle. The company was losing money on its brick-and-mortar stores, but was still opening them up at a rapid rate — a time when more growth was happening online, not offline. The company kept raising money, including $6 million two years ago, and $11 million more last year.

Indeed, now criticism is pouring out from a former board member Frank Creer, an early investor, who says the later investors such as Oak Investment Partners and Global Retail Partners pumped ever more money into the company and forced it to open more stories, including three last year — leaving the company seriously overextended now that the economy has started to slow. VentureWire (subscription only) first reported the story this morning.

The story just raises more questions about the health of the investment community. Oak is a good example. Despite very mediocre results from investing in early-stage companies, the firm somehow managed to get investors to give it more money to embark on a strategy of investing into later-stage companies, even though this wasn’t Oak’s specialty. Firms have an incentive to raise more money, because they earn fees based on the size of the fund. So then, having raised a whopping, record sized $2.56 billion venture capital fund (also, see coverage here), Oak was forced to put that money to work — even as it was more difficult to find good companies to invest in. An abundance of private equity and hedge funds were already scouring to find the best companies. Beginning two years ago, I made numerous attempts to contact Oak and Washington State, one of the public investors in Oak to ask about their investment strategy, but we never did get a return phone call or email.

To be fair, investing in companies, and having them fail, is par for the course — it is going to happen to any investor. But the sad thing about this BabyStyle case is that it seemed so obviously misguided.

The company has laid off 14 employees and plans to close six of its 23 stores.

BabyStyle’s previous investors also include Arts Alliance, Digital Ventures, Goldman Sachs Group, Maveron, Mousse Partners Ltd., Primedia, Saints Capital, VSP Capital, Vulcan Capital and Zone Ventures.

When requested for comment, Gerald Gallagher, general partner at Oak Investment Partners, declined to talk this morning [Update: Gallagher has since gotten back to me and said he can't comment]. Yves Sisteron, managing partner at GRP Partners, was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

In a statement, chief executive Bob Kelleher blamed the company’s woes on “recent weakness in the economy, combined with poor performance from a number of unprofitable stores.”

Creer, a board member until last year, and a managing director of Zone Ventures, told VentureWire that the company almost reached profitability in 2004, before it started to focus on offline building:

According to Creer, other board members wanted to roll out more and more stores in a “ridiculously aggressive store rollout plan,” even though the ones that were already open were not profitable. When that didn’t work, he said, investors pumped more money into the company to open more stores…. “There was the same type of phenomenon in 1999-2000, where lots of companies were so dramatically over-funded that they never had the business model to be able to catch up with the funding,” Creer said.

Money has been pouring into battery and fuel cell startups of late, with companies like A123 Systems, Lilliputian Systems, and M2E Power (coverage here, here and here) raising funding ranging from single- to triple-digit millions.

Now another company has taken on a heavy round of funding: Boston Power, a firm that plans to concentrate its efforts on the laptop market with a battery that ages better than competing products.

One of the most annoying things about laptop batteries (besides when they catch on fire) is their short lifespan. Standard lithium-ions lose their ability to recharge over time, and typically have to be replaced every year or so by mobile workers.

The battery that Boston Power just began producing, the Sonata, will continue to charge just as well as they did when brand new for up to several years, depending on the usage habits of owners.

The Sonata averages a four to five time longer lifespan than current battery technology, according to the company. That, in turn, will lead to fewer discarded batteries from the millions of laptop users around the world.

“I have a system that’s a few years old, but I still get 4 hours battery life. I’m often the only person in the room that’s not plugged in,” founder and CEO Chrstine Lampe-Onnerund told us in an interview.

Unlike companies like A123, which has a proprietary doping technology, Onnerund tells us that Boston Power’s secret is just in overall good engineering, and solving production problems ranging from battery chemistry to the manufacturing process.

The Sonata will, at least initially, be sold through laptop manufacturers who will choose what to charge for it. The company plans on scaling its production, which is handled by outside firms, to one million batteries per month by the end of 2008.

The $45 million investment is the company’s third. Oak Investment Partners led the round, while Venrock Associates, Granite Global Ventures and Gabriel Venture Partners also participated. The Boston-area company has raised over $68 million total to date.

Featured companies: Biolipox, Cellpoint Diagnostics, Corum Medical, MediKeeper, Mendel Biotechnology, NanoMed, Orexo, Rules-Based Medicine, Tengion

UPDATED: Expanded the Tengion item, and that’s about it.

Tengion raises $33M for bladder regrowth — Tengion, a Norriton, Pa., biotech focused on regenerating diseased or damaged organs, raised $33 million in a third funding round. Investors included Deerfield Partners, Bain Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development, HealthCap, Quaker BioVentures, Oak Investment Partners, L Capital Partners, Horizon Technology Finance and Oxford Finance.

Tengion is working on growing new bladders for adults and children with spinal bifida or spinal-cord injuries based on cells biopsied from the patients’ own bladders. We mentioned the company briefly here.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Biomarker lab Rules-Based Medicine gets $25M from private equity (release)
• Cancer-diagnostics firm CellPoint Diagnostics pulls in $11.2M (VentureWire, sub req’d)
• Swedish specialty pharma Orexo to acquire Biolipox for $133M (release)
• Cancer drug, diagnostic maker NanoMed gets $1.5M (VentureWire)
• Biocontrol raises £500 against antibiotic-resistant infections (release>
• Satoris reports potential blood test for Alzheimer’s disease (release)
• Corum Medical raises $225K, seeks $3.5M for anemia test (VentureWire)
• Mendel Biotech completes financing round (release)
• Health, wellness Web-tool developer MediKeeper raises funds (release)

Demand Media, the 18 month old company founded by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt, has gulped another $100 million chunk of venture funding for its domain name purchases.

The latest funding, led by Goldman Sachs, is the company’s third. The previous two, for $120 million and $100 million respectively, bring the total to a whopping $320 million.

Companies like Demand buy up lists of Web site names that users are likely to accidentally type into their browsers. People looking for the popular photo site Flickr, for example, may instead type in Flicker.com.

These faux sites are then plastered with ads and information vaguely relevant to whatever the hapless surfer might have been searching for. Once the surfer lands on a site, Demand Media serves an ad from Google or some other ad network, allowing it to collect money. That  strategy made millionaires out of domain-grab pioneers like Frank Schilling and Yun Ye.

Prices for domain names have inflated vastly over the years, which is one reason why Demand needs so much money. The name Business.com sold earlier this year for $360 million, making Demand Media’s assets look like peanuts.

Although Demand could be buying more domains in hopes of eventually selling itself for a premium or passively collecting revenue, it’s more likely the company is developing its web properties into more full-fleshed destinations. Last year, Demand acquired HillClimb Media, which produces web sites.

Competitor Marchex, which owns more than 100,000 domain names, has also revealed more of its business plans. It wants to develop each page into a local, vertical portal with real information related to the domain name, many of them involving city names (for instance, a site might feature “New York” and “plumbers”).

Besides Goldman Sachs, investors in the latest round include 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. Sources that talked with PEHub, which broke the story, said that the recent funding would probably be the company’s last.

For our previous coverage on Demand fundings, look here.

Franklin & Seidelmann Subspecialty Radiology, a Cleveland startup focused on remote analysis of X-ray and other medical images, raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners, a Westport, Conn., venture-capital firm.

Founded in 2001, Franklin & Seidelmann provides outsourced reading of X-rays, MRI scans and other medical images — services known generally as “teleradiology” — for a variety of medical specialties via a network of 30 subspecialty radiologists. The company said the proceeds will allow it to accelerate its spending on “technology infrastructure.”

Reunion is a social networking company that looks decidedly old-fashioned, compared to glitzy (or garish, some would say) sites like MySpace.

And yet its simplicity, like that of Facebook, is apparently part of its success. It now has 28 million registered users, and is adding one million users a month — and by that measure, it ranks among the top five social networks (Facebook, by contrast has slightly more than 19 million registered users). That’s why Reunion has just scored $25 million in venture capital from Oak Investment Partners, in what is the largest first round of venture capital any social network has received to date.

So why have you never heard of it?

Launched in 2002, Los Angeles-based Reunion is far more retro than Facebook. It shrugs aside the sexy “widget” doodads popularized by companies in Silicon Valley — and has slogged away through the years quietly, without marketing hype or verve. Reunion targets the 25 and older crowd. When you register, it provides you a straight-forward profile page, and then lets you add a range of information about yourself (bio info, favorite movies, character descriptions, etc). At its simplest, you can add your friends, and then stay in touch with them — as the name “reunion” would suggest. No video sharing or anything. Plain-vanilla stuff. See screenshot below. Many of its 28 million users registered years ago, and aren’t that active. However, it has about eight million unique users a month, which comfortably places it among the top ten networks.

Yet its new users — because they are older — are far more profitable than users at younger sites, such as MySpace, says chief executive Jeff Tinsley. Reunion brings in revenue of more than $30 million a year, though he wouldn’t be more specific. Cyworld, the raging popular Korean site, has said it makes $2.10 revenue per users, and Reunion makes much more than that on its recent users, Tinsley said. “It’s interesting, we don’t get covered nearly as much as these other guys,” Tinsley said.

One source of Reunion’s traffic is the “people search” technology it offers to other sites. It powers people search for AOL, Infospace, and Lycos, and will announce another big deal in two weeks, he said. People search is becoming more popular, and it will soon “bubble up” to become a staple feature at the top of most major sites, Tinsley said. Reunion powers 60 million people searches a month.

Reunion’s second largest outside investor is Richard Rosenblatt, former chief executive of Intermix, the parent company of Myspace. He joined the seed round, though invested less than Tinsley himself.

Reunion makes money from advertising. But it is more aggressive in pushing its premium services, charging between $3 and $5 a month to do things like contact people once you’ve located their profile pages, or to be able to see who is searching for you. You have to pay to see people’s full profiles, too.

We wonder how long it will be able to charge people for this sort of thing, given that sites like Spock (yet to launch, albeit), MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly giving you ways to reach people, and stay in touch with them, for free.

Reunion is using state of the art marketing tools: When we decided to leave the Reunion site, a box popped up and asked us to wait, and a woman named “Jenny” started IM’ing us in a chat box (see screenshot at bottom) asking us if we were sure we wanted to leave, and plugging Reunion’s premium services.